If the locals you mean Kinkaseki residents, their grandparents saw the POWs. Many mined inside the same hills, maybe not side by side, with the POWs.
The KMT Chinese mainlanders elite government suppressed this memory when they were in power. The KMT brain washed Taiwanese to believe they were the liberator (the role played by the west should not be learned.)
When Taiwanese Li Denghui became the president, he unplugged the memory suppression for Japanese ruling era.