Permanently linked
Japanese people who were born in Taiwan during the Japanese colonial period and later returned to Japan after World War II came to be known in Japanese as wansei, the “Taiwan-born.” They may have gone back to Japan, but they identified strongly with Taiwan as the land where they had grown up, worked, dated, and married.
In 2015, a long-retired school teacher in Kyushu’s Kumamoto Prefecture named Namie Takagi wrote a letter to a student she had taught in Taiwan before the war. She was prompted to write the letter after Kano—a film about high-school baseball in Taiwan in the prewar period—hit theaters in Japan. The movie reminded the 106-year-old Takagi of the students she had once taught at Wuri Public School in Taichung Prefecture, so she mailed off a letter to Taiwan. The address no longer existed, but a determined postman tracked down the intended recipient, and the centenarian eventually had a videoconference chat with several of the students that she had taught 80 years before. They cherished the chance to address her as “sensei” again.
Pierre C.C. Chen, consul general at the TECO Fukuoka Branch, shared the story of the late Isaburou Kosuge, a business owner who led employees on a sightseeing trip to Taiwan in 1998. While touring on the east coast, Kosuge learned about the Takasago Volunteers—members of Taiwanese indigenous peoples who fought for Japan in Southeast Asia in WWII—and also happened across a Taiwanese man who had fought for Japan and was taken prisoner alongside Kosuge’s own father in the Philippines. Beginning from 1999, he redefined his company trips to Taiwan as “veterans’ memorial trips,” which he went on to organize annually for 20 years to pay respects to departed soldiers and visit their family members.
Another living link to Taiwan is 83-year-old Hiromitsu Nakaji, chairman of the Yamaguchi Prefecture Japan‡Taiwan Friendship Association and the grandson of Kikumoto Department Store founder Eiji Shigeta. Born in Taiwan, Nakaji returned to Japan at the age of ten. In Taipei, his family lived right next to Jian Cheng Elementary School (today’s Jian Cheng Junior High), and one day when he got lost on his way home from the department store, a kindhearted Taiwanese person made sure he got home okay. Another memory from those days was the sight of US bombing raids: he still vividly recalls walking along a street in Tianmu in northern Taipei and seeing the Governor-General’s Office (now the Presidential Office Building) erupt in flames downtown. “I still remember my time in Taiwan so clearly,” he says.
This past April, a Taiwanese expatriate organization in Fukuoka took advantage of a ceremony being held in an open square near the Kintai Bridge by showing up at the square and seeking signatures for a petition calling for Taiwan’s admission to the World Health Association. The Yamaguchi Prefecture Japan‡Taiwan Friendship Association rented a space there and set up a booth to show its support for the petition drive. Lee Chiehhung, a section chief at the TECO Fukuoka Branch, noted that three-quarters of the people who signed the petition that day were from Yamaguchi Prefecture, and added that it was very moving to see a bunch of old-timers in their 70s and 80s spending the day seeking petition signatures for Taiwan’s sake. But Nakaji downplays what he did: “I just wanted to do a little something to help Taiwan.”
Nakaji feels that his roots are in Taiwan, and says he’ll never forget the place. He once wrote to express his hope that “Taiwan will always be Taiwan.” Taiwan must always be Japan’s friend, he said, if it is to contribute to peace and prosperity in the Pacific region.
An exotic atmosphere permeates the Port of Moji, which was one of the first harbors in Japan to begin importing Taiwanese bananas over a century ago.