What happened to the Japanese population that lived in Taiwan after World War II? I’d imagine that the colonial administrators and big landowners got kicked out, but what happened to the rest of them?
Ethnic Yamato were deported illegally. This was prior to 4th Geneva Convention (1949) came into existence.
GHQ also deported ethic Korean and ethnic Formosan from Japanese mainland, prior to 4th Geneva Convention (1949). In today’s standard this action is illegal and borderline crime against humanity.
To give an answer more directly related to the OP’s question: They were asked to leave, but it was less of a request and more of an order. I believe the ROC government offered some compensation but not a lot of notice.
Nearly 30,000 Japanese nationals were allowed to stay in Taiwan to continue work in the public sector. They were called 留用日僑 – “Overseas Japanese being kept for employment.” Eventually they were all kicked out.
That’s my understanding at least.
It seems like if they hadn’t been ejected, the Japanese minority would be the fifth population group in Taiwan, wouldn’t they?
Yeah that would be interesting. Japanese as a language will be a lot more prevalent on Taiwan too. Possibly one of the recordings you will hear on the MRT and the HSR.
The movie Cape No.7 talks about the Japanese leaving.
Boohoo poor Japanese had to leave. They gave so much to Taiwan, i.e. forcing Yilan and Taitung girls into prostitution. Boohoo poor Japanese. Japanese were so gracious to Taiwan building the railway to exploit sugar cane and Taiwanese workers.
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Well, they did leave behind the only man-made structures that are not painful to look at.
Just substitute ‘Japanese’ for ‘Romans’.
Decolonization is a complicated thing. But I bet there were regular ol’ civilians who were just living there and not actively exploiting anyone. And who probably would be useful in building up the island further. Though I’ve read that one of the reasons that Taiwanese land reform was so successful was that the Nationalists were basically reclaiming land/industries abandoned by the exiled Japanese- when the existing landowner class disappears, it makes redistribution much easier.
didn’t land redistribution start to happen already under the Japanese?
although the Japanese did co-opt aboriginal lands, and then the KMT took over those lands, bunch of it still controlled by Taiwan sugar and the forestry commission.
doubt you’d have that same attitude if it’s the KMT refugees who gets kicked off the island, and they’ve exploited the island way more than the Japanese.
You know, the Czech Republic (err, Czechoslovakia) evicted about 3 million Germans after WWII, mostly from Bohemia, for largely the same reasons the ROC sent the Japanese packing (though AFAIK some of the German families had been there for generations already). The first democratically elected Czech president and widely loved statesman Václav Havel publicly apologized for this on behalf of the state in I think the 1990’s. Nobody said “those damn Germans rounded people up and sent them to concentration camps” because unlike their Asian counterparts, postwar European countries seem very good at separating the notion of government from people.
TL;DR: Japan wasn’t a democracy and it is fallacious to conflate atrocities committed by Japanese authorities and people who happen to come from that nation.
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These measures you refer to are known as the “Benes Decrees”. They have never been repealed and in 1999 the highest Czech court even upheld them…
Just because it’s found to be legal doesn’t mean it’s found to be morally right. You have to realize that the justice system isn’t always on the side of justice… don’t you?
My point is that neither Czech courts, nor Czech public opinion are against the Benes Decrees.
Any apology must be seen in the context of European integration and is worth nothing without actual real life consequences such as restitution.
Fair enough. But I didn’t call for restitution or even an apology. I’m just pointing out that for regular Japanese citizens, including those born and raised in Taiwan their whole lives, suddenly they were unceremoniously told to GTFO to a homeland they very likely had not visited in recent memory.
Admittedly, most of my knowledge of Taiwanese land reform comes from this article: cooperativeindividualism.org … -2005.html
In any case, it’s pretty interesting how multicultural Taiwan is, despite the small size of the place. If the Japanese had remained it’d be even more diverse. I wonder what would have happened if they did.
I imagine they’d have suffered quite a bit at the hands of the ROC/KMT, although Wikipedia does note that a number of Japanese orphans left behind in Manchuria were adopted by Chinese families and integrated well.
As my family is partially Japanese (and Holo and WSR . . .) I have mixed emotions on this. Certainly, it is a cruel thing to forcibly uplift people from their homes and “repatriate” them to their perceived ancestral homeland. But I’m simultaneously not sure how many of the Japanese colonials saw Taiwan as their home (did many of them want to stay?). No one should have been forced to go, but I conjecture that many of the Japanese would have voluntarily left anyway. I don’t have any evidence for this, just a hunch.
When I think that it took a few decades and generations for some Taiwanese WSR (not all or maybe even most) to view Taiwan as their home and think of themselves as Taiwanese, I wonder if the Japanese colonials had similar views. I can imagine a second generation Japanese person saying “We are all subjects of the Empire of Japan. I am from Taiwan but I am an Imperial Japanian, not a Taiwanese.”
Maybe if Taiwan became independent immediately after WW2, and kept a Japanese-style administration with a Taiwanese and Japanese language base it would have been more inviting. But with the KMT coming in and a whole new governance and language regime imposed (as well as many KMT soldiers, who were probably understandably not very inclined to be sympathetic to Japanese people, civilians or otherwise) it is hard for me to think that many Japanese colonials would have seen post-war Taiwan as particularly inviting.
They were the base for the KMT’s riches …
I’m pretty sure it was the gold that the Generalissimo brought over that did that. It allowed the Generalissimo to start printing money that was backed with gold instead of just paper.