Taiwan in Time: Jan. 4 to Jan. 10
On Jan. 8, 1975, nearly 30 years after the end of World War II, former Imperial Japanese Army soldier Nakamura Teruo finally returned home.
It was a different place from what he had known. His native land was no longer part of Japan. His son, who was an infant when he left, was now a father of four children, and his wife had remarried. Everyone was calling him Lee Kuang-hui (李光輝) — a name he had never even heard of when he departed for Indonesia with the Takasago Volunteer Unit in 1944.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
A member of the Amis people, Western reports have his Aboriginal name as Attun Palalin, while local sources call him Suniuo, which is what this article will go with.
Even though the Takasago were a volunteer army in name, Suniuo says he was forced to enlist. Shortly after he landed on Morotai Island in Indonesia, the Allies arrived and secured it as a base. Suniuo lost contact with his group during this time.
Armed with an assault rifle, a helmet, knife, cooking pot and a mirror, Suniuo built a hut and remained in the jungle alone, surviving by hunting and farming. He did not know that the war had already ended, as the Japanese army declared him dead on Nov. 13, 1944.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Unsure of the situation outside of the jungle, Suniuo stayed hidden at all costs, cooking only in the dark so people wouldn’t see the smoke. In a first-hand account published shortly after his return titled Struggle in the Jungle for 30 Years (叢林掙扎三 十年), Suniuo recalls counting the days by the moon and recording each cycle by tying a knot in a rope. He says his upbringing in the mountains in relative poverty provided him the will and ability to survive for so long.
“I calmly stayed alive there,” he says. “Although I didn’t have anybody to talk to, buried deep in my heart seemed to be a glimmer of hope and expectation. The only trace of happiness during this time came from the fact that I was still alive and I hadn’t lost my sense of existence yet.”
As Suniuo’s only clothes deteriorated over time, he says he became used to being naked most of the time, only using a US Army jacket he found to cover himself at night.
Most of his time was devoted to finding food, he says. He grew sweet potatoes, beans, bananas and sugar cane in his garden, gathered roots and fruits and trapped boar, pheasant and other birds.
“Not to lose my life became my only goal, and that exhausted almost all of my time,” he says.
The only two forms of entertainment he had was fishing and fiddling with a home-made abacus. In order to keep himself from thinking of his family at home, he stayed busy exploring his surroundings and undertaking various improvement projects around his hut.
Suniuo says he made a grave error in assuming that war wasn’t over from the planes that flew by above him each day, only later to find out that it was because the jungle was near an Indonesian air force base. As aviation technology improved over time, planes became faster and sleeker, and Suniuo thought it was the result of an arms race between the two warring sides.
“I made one simple wrong judgment, and it cost me 30 years,” he says.
In November 1974, local reports surfaced of a “naked wild man” in the mountains, prompting the Indonesian army to send an expedition force, which, after 30 hours, found Suniuo chopping wood outside his hut.
This brought up the question of whether he should be repatriated to Japan or Taiwan. Suniuo was given the choice, and he chose his homeland.
According to this biography, his back pay as a soldier over 30 years only amounted to about NT$7,000. But after some commotion in the media, the Japanese government decided to give him over NT$380,000 instead. He later received various donations from Japanese, Indonesian and local sources.
Yet, a return after so long has to be bittersweet. His parents were dead, and only two siblings survived — all going by Chinese names now. Suniuo’s wife’s new husband (of more than 10 years) was originally willing to move out and let the couple reunite, but Suniuo decided not to disturb their life and bought an apartment nearby. Just four years after his return, he died of lung cancer.
Taiwan in Time, a column about Taiwan’s history that is published every Sunday, spotlights important or interesting events around the nation that have anniversaries this week.
May 23 to May 29 After holding out for seven years, more than 250 Yunlin-based resistance fighters were finally persuaded to surrender in six separate ceremonies on May 25, 1902. The Japanese had subdued most of the Han Taiwanese within six months of their arrival in 1895, but intermittent unrest continued — in Yunlin, the Tieguoshan (鐵國山) guerillas caused the new regime much headache through at least 1901. These surrender ceremonies were common and usually conducted peacefully, but the Japanese had different plans for these troublemakers. Once the event concluded, they gunned down every single attendee with machine guns. Only Chien Shui-shou
The toll rolls on. A gunman walks into a place where humans are peacefully gathering and slaughters them for a militantly-avowed racially-based nationalism, presented in a long manifesto. We are quickly told that the gunman was mentally ill. Obviously — who but a madman could do such a thing? The newspapers dust off one of their “education of a killer” pieces, change the names and run another 1,200 words useful only to those cultivating such killers. The latest of these attacks, on Taiwanese churchgoers in Laguna, California, has spurred much discussion of the long record of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) violence
In one of the most remote parts of Chiayi County, a hamlet shares the exact same name as a well-known center of tea production in New Taipei City. Pinglin (坪林) in Dapu Township (大埔) is around 550m above sea level. The road to it is good enough for any car or motorcycle, and so few people live there that it’s an ideal place for the virus-afraid to go sightseeing. I rode in from Yujing District (玉井) in Tainan, taking Provincial Highway 3 through Nansi (楠西) and above Zengwen Reservoir (曾文水庫). At the entrance to Chiayi Farm (嘉義農場), I halted briefly, curious if
I usually get lost in long documentaries that stitch together numerous storylines, characters and artistic elements without much of a direct plot, but Chen Hui-ling (陳慧齡) does it just right in Letter to A’ma (給阿媽的一封信), which took her 10 years to make. The editing is superb, melding everything into a poignant and layered composition that’s enjoyable and illuminating to watch without having to fully follow every subject and catch every bit of information. In place of a gripping narrative is a powerful emotional buildup that slowly draws the viewer in and hits hard later. It’s not difficult to see why