Sorry for the off-topic question, but do you really think there is much hatred to Japan in Taiwan? I can’t say I’ve seen it. If anything there is not the outrage I would expect when the “Comfort women” issue comes up. The attitude of most Taiwanese seems (to me) remarkably mild: “Sure, the Japanese raped our women, then Chiang murdered us by the thousand, but that’s history; I’m still going to vote KMT and buy that Sony laptop.”[/quote]
In terms of cruelty, the Taiwanese experience has been that the atrocities committed by KMT in the 228 purges far exceeded any of the acts committed by the Japanese. The objective behind the 228 masacres was not to quell the protests in Taiwan, but to humiliate, brutalize, and force into submission the native Taiwanese population. This was accomplished by:
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Murdering the leadership class: the doctors, judges, and civic leaders who had protested Chinese corruption and confiscation of Taiwanese properties and businesses [This was decribed in George Kerr’s Formosa Betrayed].
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Raping women who too were members of this class, the wives and daughters of the above [This was alluded to in Kerr’s Formosa Betrayed, and more explicitly described in Jack Belden’s China Shakes the World]. Rape of women by Chinese soldiers even prior to 228 was descibed in Allan Shackleton’s Formosa Calling, but they were not targeted for sexual assault for the purpose of degrading an entire nation until the aftermath of 228.
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Torture and mutilation of Taiwanese men, who were castrated before being put to death in the most excrutiating manner [Also described in Formosa Betrayed and China Shakes the World].
The issue of comfort women drafted into Japanese brothels is a delicate one, because even though the Japanese destroyed many individual lives, the intent was still not the same as those of the Chinese troops: namely to humiliate and brutalize the Taiwanese as a people. In Japan, the military abducted women from the Japanese countryside to force into prostitution and spared the women of established families. A similar practice was put into effect in Taiwan.
The upshot is that though the KMT exploits Taiwanese comfort women for their own ends, they too had set up their own version of ‘comfort women’ in Taiwan. The offshore islands near military bases were known as “military paradises” because they were the site of military brothels that the KMT had put into place; the women who served in those brothels were also recruited and forced into their circumstances from poor and indigent families. That the KMT would raise the spectre of Japan’s treatment of comfort women to deflect attention from their own rapacious behavior in 228, while overlooking their own culpability in enacting military brothels, testifies to the sophistry and bankruptcy that the KMT indulges in.
I don’t think the Taiwanese are cavalier about these historical memories, but there is only so much they can discuss with outsiders—and even with insiders.
[quote=“ludahai”]
I don’t sense a hatred of the Japanese among most of my friends here in Taichung (Taizhong), in fact, many of them admire the Japanese. Occasionally, I will meet an elderly Taiwanese who doesn’t speak Mandarin and I have to get by with them with my high school Japanese. Surprisingly, it works— a little — when I am trying to get something to eat in my wife’s hometown.[/quote]
It is not surprising that Taiwanese would speak relatively benevolently of the Japanese. The Japanese had settled upon Taiwan for the purpose of administering a colony, to build up its infrastructure, and develop the island. As Taiwanese subjects were nominally part of the Japanese Empire, they were never subject to the depredations that the Chinese in Nanjing experienced. And never did they experience under the Japanese the depredations of the ROC troops in 228.
