Mika Tanaka, who produced the documentary Wansei Back Home (灣生回家), yesterday admitted to having fabricated her personal history, reversing months of defiance against her critics.
Tanaka, whose legal name is Chen Hsuan-ju (陳宣儒), was a major investor in the popular film released in 2015 that depicted the stories of Japanese born in Taiwan during the Japanese colonial era who returned to Taiwan and recalled their childhood memories.
Tanaka had claimed she was a wansei, the Japanese-language term used to describe people who were born or grew up in Taiwan and are the descendants of Japanese immigrants who came to Taiwan during the Japanese colonial era from 1895 to 1945.
Takeshi Yoshimura, former director of the Taiwan branch of the Japanese-language Sankei Shimbun, last year accused Tanaka of lying about being a wansei in a story published in Japan.
Yoshimura’s accusation was posted by a netizen on Professional Technology Temple, Taiwan’s largest online academic bulletin board system, which was followed by additional accusations that Tanaka had copied and modified paintings by established artists and claimed them as her own.
On Dec. 23 last year, social critic Kuang Jen-chien (管仁健), who in 2015 accused Chen of lying about being a wansei, wrote a story for Chinese-language social media site New Talk that criticized Tanaka for her deception.
“Taiwan is a magical place. Any liar using the slogan ‘love Taiwan’ can hoodwink the members of our vaunted erudite class, because they are, intellectually and critically, retarded and blind... Without speaking a lick of Japanese, [Tanaka] dared to pass herself off as Japanese and got away with selling others’ artworks that she photoshopped,” Kuang said.
At the time, Tanaka told the Chinese-language Liberty Times (sister newspaper of the Taipei Times) that the accusations were untrue, but she declined to issue a public rebuttal, citing her desire to protect her family’s privacy.
However, in a statement posted on Facebook by Wang Jung-wen (王榮文), CEO of Yuan-Liou Publishing Co, Tanaka’s publisher, she admitted that she is not a wansei, but rather a Taiwanese born and bred in Kaohsiung, saying that she wanted to apologize to the Taiwanese public and wansei for her dishonesty.
Tanaka visited the publishing house on Friday to apologize and asked to issue a statement through the company to apologize to the public, Wang said.
Stressing that Yuan-Liou Publishing was merely acting as an intermediary for Tanaka, Wang said he viewed Tanaka’s deception about her personal history and copying of others’ artworks with the utmost regret.
“After you lie once, you need to keep on lying to explain it away,” Wang quoted Tanaka as saying, when he asked her why she continued to lie after the media began to question her story.
In the statement, Tanaka said that when she was a high-school student, she met a wansei woman named Sayo Tanaka at a train station.
The woman told Mika Tanaka that she bore an uncanny resemblance to her daughter, who had died of complications from a difficult childbirth on the day of Mika Tanaka’s birth, the statement said.
The two became fast friends, and Mika Tanaka said she came to regard Sayo Tanaka as a grandmother, adding that the older woman later sponsored her education in Japan, the US and France, which she did not complete due to a “lack of effort.”
She said Sayo Tanaka’s story was the inspiration for her devotion to wansei history, adding that the documentary’s depiction of wansei and their love of Taiwan was genuine, and should not be discounted because of her personal failings.
Mika Tanaka said she was in talks with the original creators of the artworks in an attempt to reach a settlement for her mistakes, but denied that she had sold any photoshopped paintings for commercial gain.
UNDER WATCH: Taiwan will have to establish a standardized nucleic acid testing method to identify the virus and monitor its spread, the CDC said The Langya henipavirus, which can be transmitted from animals to humans, has been discovered in China, with 35 human infections reported so far, Taiwan’s Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said, adding that the nation would establish a nucleic acid testing method to identify the virus. A study titled “A Zoonotic Henipavirus in Febrile Patients in China” that was published in the New England Journal of Medicine on Thursday said that a new henipavirus associated with a fever-causing human illness was identified in China. The study said an investigation identified 35 patients with acute infection of the Langya henipavirus in China’s Shandong
MISSILE PATHS: Certain information on the Chinese missile fire was not disclosed to maintain secrecy over military intelligence-gathering capabilities, the MND said Military experts yesterday speculated on the implication of the government’s tight-lipped response and the lack of air-raid sirens during the first day of China’s military drills the previous day. On Thursday, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) launched 11 Dongfeng-series ballistic missiles into waters north, east and south of Taiwan, a day after US House of Representative Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s departure from the country, the Ministry of National Defense (MND) said. The Japanese Ministry of Defense said that China fired nine missiles toward Taiwan, including four that flew over Taiwan proper. However, China’s exhibition of force failed to terrorize the local populace, because
If any war were to break out between the US and China, one trigger might be the increasingly frequent fighter jet encounters near Taiwan. Almost every day, Taiwanese fighter pilots hop in their US-made F-16s to intercept Chinese warplanes screaming past their territory. The encounters probe the nation’s defenses and force the pilots on both sides to avoid mistakes that could lead to a crisis that spins out of control. “I didn’t know whether they would fire at me,” said retired colonel Mountain Wang, recounting a tense five-minute confrontation he had with Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) jets more than a decade
INCREASINGLY EMBOLDENED: China can no longer be dismissed as inexperienced, demonstrating an ability to coordinate land and sea missile systems, an expert said Beijing’s largest-ever exercises around Taiwan have offered essential clues into its plans for a grueling blockade in the event of an attack on Taiwan, and revealed an increasingly emboldened Chinese military, experts said. The visit to Taiwan by US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi — second in line to the presidency — sparked outrage from Beijing, which launched vast military maneuvers around the nation, even at the risk of partially exposing its plans to the US and its Asian allies. Mobilizing fighter planes, helicopters and warships, the drills aim to simulate a blockade of Taiwan and include practicing an “attack on
RSS