This weekend, the Commonwealth countries observe Remembrance Day, which falls every year on Nov. 11, to honor those who fought in World War II.
Here in Taiwan, there will also be a series of events to commemorate Allied soldiers who fought in Asia, particularly those imprisoned by the Japanese.
From 1942 to 1945, during its colonial rule, Japan brought more than 4,300 prisoners of war (POW) to Taiwan, interning them in camps across the island.
Photo courtesy of taiwan pow camps memorial society
The Taiwan POW Camps Memorial Society is holding its annual commemorative activities this week, which includes a Remembrance Day service on Sunday at the Taiwan Prisoner of War Memorial Park at New Taipei City’s Jinguashih (金瓜石), near Jiufen (九份). The event is being held in cooperation with the New Zealand Commerce and Industry Office.
The Society, founded and run by Canadian expat Michael Hurst, first brought attention to POW camps in Taiwan by successfully campaigning to build the country’s first POW memorial in Jinguashih in 1997.
Since then, Hurst and the society has established contact with more than 300 former POW survivors and their families, and identified and located all 14 of the Japanese-run camps in Taiwan.
Photo courtesy of taiwan pow camps memorial society
To date, the Society has built seven POW memorials, including a 17m-long memorial wall at Jingguashih, which was inaugurated last year and is inscribed with the names of all POWs who were imprisoned in Taiwan, often under dire conditions.
“That’s what this is all about, making sure their story is told and they’re remembered,” said Hurst, a businessman who has lived in Taiwan for 24 years and is considered the de facto expert on the history of allied POWs in Taiwan.
The event of note this year by the Society will be the unveiling of the Karenko POW Camp Memorial in Hualien on Monday.
Karenko, located at a present-day military base, was used by the Japanese to imprison high-level military officers and government officials representing Allied forces in the region, says Hurst.
Among those prisoners was Merton Beckwith-Smith, a Major-General with the British 18th Division. Members of Beckwith-Smith’s family will be at the ceremony in Hualien on Monday.
At the Karenko camp, the Japanese army subjected the POWs to hard labor and “delighted in humiliating the senior officers,” said Hurst.
And as Japan did not sign the Geneva Convention, those at Karenko were not protected by the treaty’s call for humane treatment of POWs.
“Working them to death, starving them to death, withholding medicine — it was all part of the generic way that the Japanese treated the Allied prisoners of war right from Thailand to Manchuria,” he said.
But healing is very much one of the central aims of the Taiwan POW Camps Memorial Society, says Hurst, who is also in regular contact with Taiwanese veterans who served under the Japanese.
Over the past decade, the Society has escorted POW survivors to the sites of their former imprisonment in Taiwan, but fewer are returning these days as many of the veterans are in their 90s, and are unable to travel.
Hurst has also established friendships with many POWs during his fifteen years of research and involvement with the Society.
“For me, the greatest honors or rewards that I have is having met these heroes, having met these men who overcame these horrific conditions of starvation and brutality, and illness and disease,” he said.
All are welcome to join the dedication ceremony for the Karenko POW Camp Memorial in Hualien on Monday. The ceremony, co-sponsored by the Ministry of Defense, takes place at 2pm at the Ministry of Defense Military Court East Coast Office (國防部北部地方軍事法院檢察署東部檢察官辦公室), located at 643 Jhongjheng Rd, Hualien City (花蓮市中正路643號).
Tomorrow’s Remembrance Day service at Jinguashih takes place at 11am. The event is open to the public, and visitors from Taipei can reach the site by taking the 1062 bus from the Zhongxiao Fuxing MRT Station (忠孝復興捷運站), Exit 1. Fare is NT$95 one-way and travel time is around 90 minutes.
More information on the events, as well as the history of Allied POWs in Taiwan, can be found at www.powtaiwan.org
The breakwater stretches out to sea from the sprawling Kaohsiung port in southern Taiwan. Normally, it’s crowded with massive tankers ferrying liquefied natural gas from Qatar to be stored in the bulbous white tanks that dot the shoreline. These are not normal times, though, and not a single shipment from Qatar has docked at the Yongan terminal since early March after the Strait of Hormuz was shuttered. The suspension has provided a realistic preview of a potential Chinese blockade, a move that would throttle an economy anchored by the world’s most advanced and power-hungry semiconductor industry. It is a stark reminder of
May 11 to May 17 Traversing the southern slopes of the Yushan Range in 1931, Japanese naturalist Tadao Kano knew he was approaching the last swath of Taiwan still beyond colonial control. The “vast, unknown territory,” protected by the “fierce” Bunun headman Dahu Ali, was “filled with an utterly endless jungle that choked the mountains and valleys,” Kano wrote. He noted how the group had “refused to submit to the measures of our authorities and entrenched themselves deep in these mountains … living a free existence spent chasing deer in the morning and seeking serow in the evening,” even describing them as
As a different column was being written, the big news dropped that Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅?萁) announced that negotiations within his caucus, with legislative speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) of the KMT, party Chair Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文), Taichung Mayor Lu Shiow-yen (盧秀燕) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) Chair Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) had produced a compromise special military budget proposal. On Thursday morning, prior to meeting with Cheng over a lunch of beef noodles, Lu reiterated her support for a budget of NT$800 or NT$900 billion — but refused to comment after the meeting. Right after Fu’s
What government project has expropriated the most land in Taiwan? According to local media reports, it is the Taoyuan Aerotropolis, eating 2,500 hectares of land in its first phase, with more to come. Forty thousand people are expected to be displaced by the project. Naturally that enormous land grab is generating powerful pushback. Last week Chen Chien-ho (陳健和), a local resident of Jhuwei Borough (竹圍) in Taoyuan City’s Dayuan District (大園) filed a petition for constitutional review of the project after losing his case at the Taipei Administrative Court. The Administrative Court found in favor of nine other local landowners, but
RSS