Homecoming of the Overseas
During the Japanese colonial era, large numbers of Taiwanese were mobilized or voluntarily traveled throughout the Japanese Empire. After the war ended, Taiwanese scattered across mainland China, Southeast Asia, and Japan proper faced the question of repatriation. Some returned to the "motherland" filled with anticipation, only to find their homeland utterly transformed.
Ong Iok-tek — a linguist from Tainan and pioneer of the Taiwan independence movement — chose to remain in Japan after th…
Ong Iok-tek — a linguist from Tainan and pioneer of the Taiwan independence movement — chose to remain in Japan after the war, becoming a key figure in the overseas Taiwan independence movement. Su Ni-uo — a Taiwanese intellectual residing in mainland China — witnessed the upheaval of the Chinese Civil War and eventually returned to Taiwan only to face the White Terror.
This volume presents the diaspora experiences and identity struggles of overseas Taiwanese in the aftermath of empire through these personal stories.
The war sent more than 207,000 Taiwanese off the island: over 80,000 as soldiers and more than 126,000 as military employees and laborers, scattered across Hainan, the Philippines, Borneo, New Guinea, and the China theater, and more than 30,300 of them never came back. After August 1945 the survivors were gathered into holding camps to wait — for a ship, for a ruling on their status, for a queue whose order no one could explain. They wore Japanese uniforms and spoke Japanese, and they would board the boats home as Chinese. For some of them the wait ended not in a ship but in a courtroom. Taiwanese who had served as guards in prisoner-of-war camps were prosecuted in the British, Australian, and Dutch Class B and C war crimes trials; more than 170 were convicted and 26 were executed — men who had carried out the orders of the Japanese army and stood trial holding a different nationality. Those who reached the Keelung docks did not necessarily fare better: their years of service and their injuries were not recognized by the new government, Japanese pensions were unthinkable before a peace treaty, work had to be found again and a language learned again. In the February 28 Incident of 1947, a good number of the people on the streets who knew how to handle a rifle and organize a unit were veterans only recently off those boats.
Ong Iok-tek's Republic of China Resident Identity Card (June 1947). Photographed at the Ong Iok-tek Memorial Museum, where it is on display
Ong Iok-tek Memorial Museum
Isle of Time