The Takasago Volunteers

When the Pacific War spread in 1942 into the dense jungles of the Philippines, New Guinea and the islands of the South Seas, the Japanese army — trained for temperate warfare — suddenly faced an enemy it could not overcome: not the Allies, but the tropical rainforest itself. Humidity, disease and trackless undergrowth paralysed supply lines and felled soldiers by the score. It was then that the army turned to an unlikely source of manpower — the Indigenous peoples of Taiwan's high mountains. Having lived for generations among steep ridges and deep forest, their skill at moving, hunting, finding paths and surviving in the wild was unmatched by any regular unit.

And so, from 1942 onward, wave after wave of recruitment began. Thousands of young Indigenous men were formed into the Takasago Volunteers and shipped across the sea to the front lines of the Philippines, New Guinea and the South Seas. The word "volunteer" implied free choice, yet behind that "voluntary" enlistment lay the accumulated pressure of decades of colonial rule. For years the Government-General had pursued its policies of "governing the savages" and imperial assimilation, teaching village youths to take pride in loyalty to the Emperor. In the atmosphere of total wartime mobilisation, enlistment was cast both as a path to prove one's loyalty and earn dignity and status, and as a social and administrative expectation that was hard to refuse. For many young men the line between "willing" and "compelled" was, in truth, deeply blurred.

Once they reached the battlefield, they were handed the hardest and most dangerous work. They cut roads and dug trenches, and through mud and rainforest that no truck or horse could cross they carried heavy ammunition, rations and the wounded on their own shoulders. When the fighting grew desperate, they too were pushed to the firing line, charging forward and grappling with Allied troops at close quarters. Their endurance, sense of direction and survival skills in the jungle were praised again and again by Japanese commanders, who believed that without these men much of the supply could never have reached the front at all.

Yet praise did not buy safety. Casualties in the South Seas were appalling: beyond the hail of gunfire, still more men fell to malaria, dysentery, hunger and the encirclements of the Allied counteroffensive. Many of those sent overseas never returned to the villages of their birth; and those who by fortune survived and made their way home were met by a world that had utterly changed beneath their feet.

When the war ended and a defeated Japan withdrew, Taiwan passed into the hands of the Republic of China. The Takasago men who had served the Emperor lost, overnight, both the object of their loyalty and the identity that came with it. The new authorities did not regard them as soldiers of merit, and there was no vanished empire left to which they could turn for redress. The blood they had shed, the burdens they had carried, and the comrades whose bones lay in foreign soil were swiftly forgotten amid the postwar changing of regimes, as if none of it had ever been.

The most haunting epilogue of this history belonged to a soldier who hid for years in the jungle of Morotai. Not knowing the war was long over, he survived alone in the dense forest until he was found in 1974. When at last he emerged, he discovered that the Japan he had served and the Taiwan he had left were both gone; even the language, home and kin he had known had changed beyond recognition across nearly three decades. Alone, he bore for an entire unit the loneliness of being left behind by his age.

The story of the Takasago Volunteers embodies the cruelest paradox of the colonial experience. They were conscripted by an empire that had conquered their grandparents only a generation before, sent to distant foreign jungles to kill and to die for that empire. With their lives they proved their courage and their loyalty, and in return they earned a double forgetting: a nation that had never truly counted them as its own left, in the end, no place for them. Today, as this buried history is opened again, the young Indigenous men who sleep forever in the South Seas remind us that beneath the grand narratives of empire there is always a group of people who were the most silent — and the least deserving to be forgotten.