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Taiwan Discourse

Japanese cartoon book rips open Taiwan’s wartime wounds

By William Foreman/AP

When Chinese or South Koreans are asked what they think of Japan’s treatment of their countries during World War II, they are likely to respond with angry accounts of Japanese soldiers raping women, bayoneting babies and killing thousands with germ warfare.

In Taiwan, a new cartoon book on the country’s history by a right-wing Japanese artist has exposed deep divisions bubbling beneath the surface of society. Cartoonist Yoshinori Kobayashi’s Taiwan Discourse has quickly become the island’s hottest topic.

Shi W.L., a Taiwanese business leader and presidential adviser, learned how deep the divisions are when in an interview for the 269-page comic book, he defended Japan’s World War II use of sex slaves. Advocates for the former “comfort women” were outraged.

Shi, chairman of a large plastics company, said working in a Japanese military brothel had been the “best possible thing’’ for many Taiwanese women. He said the women were often sold into prostitution by impoverished parents but worked in sanitary conditions and were able to save money.

Shi’s comments are illustrated with a drawing of Taiwanese women cheerfully lining up to be recruited by a seated Japanese officer. The book includes no testimony from any of the 200,000 Asian women who historians say were forced into sex slavery.

Also angry with Shi were many waisheng ren, people whose families were among the 2 million who fled to Taiwan when the communist party took over the mainland after World War II. Although in the minority, the mainlanders dominated Taiwan for decades and still are powerful.

Most native Taiwanese — the bensheng ren, whose families came from China centuries ago, have ignored the controversy. One of the most prominent native Taiwanese, President Chen Shui-bian, has refused demands to drop Shi as an adviser.

History explains the different reactions. Most mainlanders’ families experienced the brutal Japanese occupation of China from the 1930s until 1945. China accuses Japan of using germ warfare and conducting Nazi-like experiments on war prisoners. In the Korean peninsula, people deeply resent Japan’s 35-year occupation, marked by attempts to stamp out Korean culture and the forcing of tens of thousands of women into sex slavery.

In Taiwan, the experience was significantly different, in part because Japan did not forcibly occupy Taiwan as it did China and South Korea. China’s Qing Dynasty handed Taiwan over to Japan in 1895 as part of a war settlement, and the island became Japan’s first colony.

“Many Taiwanese felt that China had abandoned them, and they deeply resented that,” said Huang Fu-san, an expert on Taiwanese history at Academia Sinica, the island’s top state research institute.

Although the Japanese cracked down on dissent and forced the Taiwanese to adopt Japanese ways, they also built railroads, dams, roads and schools. By 1944, about 70 percent of Taiwanese children attended elementary school, a remarkable rate then even for developed nations, Huang said.

“The Japanese invested so much in Taiwan because they wanted to show Western powers that the yellow race, especially Japan, can have its own colonies and run them better than the Western powers,” Huang said.

Historian Chen Peng-jen said too many Taiwanese wrongly think that Japan’s investment in Taiwan meant they cared about the island and its people.

“Everything they did was just for their own economic and security interests, not Taiwan’s,” said Chen, a professor at the Japanese research institute at Chinese Culture University.

When Japan left Taiwan after World War II, China’s Nationalist Party government sent its troops to take over the island. Taiwanese welcomed the soldiers with celebratory fireworks, but relations quickly turned sour. The Nationalist troops were horrified to see that the Taiwanese had adopted the lifestyle of the enemy — speaking little Mandarin, living in houses with Japanese sliding doors and wearing Japanese-style wooden sandals.

The Taiwanese quickly came to despise the Nationalists’ soldiers as crude and corrupt. Growing animosities boiled over in 1947 when riots erupted after officials beat up an elderly woman illegally selling cigarettes. Reinforcements were sent in and killed thousands whom they accused of being communists or saboteurs.

For many Taiwanese, the massacre, called the “February 28 Incident,’’ created a barrier of distrust between mainlanders and native Taiwanese that still exists today.