'I was a Japanese soldier'
By Kakuya Ishida
Daily Yomiuri
August 12, 2000Why a Taiwanese war veteran feels let down by the country he served
For Shigematsu Kan, it all goes back to April 28, 1952, the day he and thousands of other colonial subjects who fought for Japan in World War II lost their Japanese nationalities. With the implementation of the San Francisco Peace Treaty, which stripped Japan of all territories seized since 1895, Taiwan-born Kan legally became a "foreigner," thus losing his right to a military pension. By that time, he had served 5-1/2 years in an Australia-run prison, in his view unfairly condemned as a Japanese war criminal.
Kan, who has scraped a living as a taxi driver in Tokyo for the last 30 years, feels let down and abandoned by the country he served. He feels Japan used him--and others like him from its former colonies--to help the military do its work during the war. Then when everything fell apart, it cast him aside, he said in a recent interview with The Daily Yomiuri.
Until he retired last year, 75-year-old Kan estimates he drove more than 20,000 passengers around the streets of the capital. Many customers, noticing the unusual kanji character for his name on his identification card, asked about his nationality. Learning that he was Taiwanese, they often said, "Why are you driving a taxi in Japan? Do you really know your way around?"
Patiently, Kan would sketch out his life story. Even cocky drunkards and gangsters would respond with sympathy, he said. But their expressions of surprise still came as cold comfort, confirming just how little most people know about Japan's colonial history.
Born in a village about 20 kilometers southeast of Taipei, Kan became a civilian employee at the Taipei headquarters of the Imperial Japanese Army at age 17. Taiwan was ceded to Japan from China in 1895, as a result of the Sino-Japan War, and many in the territory--Kan included--had grown up feeling essentially Japanese. "We took it for granted that we should take on Japanese names, sing 'Kimigayo' and worship at Shinto shrines," he said.
"At the time, it was quite natural for us to volunteer for military service, to fight for the Emperor against the Allies," he added. "This system of 'volunteering' was a virtual form of conscription. We were brainwashed into blind belief."
In 1943, Kan was assigned to work as a guard at a labor camp for Allied prisoners of war in Kuching, Kalimantan (now in Malaysia). There were 11 camps on the island, holding about 3,000 internees from Britain, Australia, the Netherlands, India and the United States.
"There were about 200 of us guards from Taiwan, under the direct command of about 10 senior Japanese officers," Kan said. "A handful of armed guards would escort 50 to 100 prisoners in trucks to the labor sites, and supervise the work: logging, expanding the airfields, building roads and ditches, weeding...."
Prof. Aiko Utsumi, an expert on war crimes issues at Keisen University, says the Japanese military routinely drafted civilians from Taiwan and Korea to guard POWs.
According to Kan, about 1,400 British and Australian officers and soldiers were interned in the Kuching camp during the course of the war. Of them, about 600 died of disease, malnutrition, overwork or accidents.
Tried and convicted
The way Kan tells it, he was no harder on the prisoners than any of the other guards. But he claims one unfortunate incident led to him being branded a war criminal after Japan's surrender in 1945.According to his account, Kan, who was 18 at the time, was on sentry duty at the camp's gate. Time and time again, a British captain would pass by without saluting, which was against the rules. One day, a Japanese sergeant noticed what was going on and ordered Kan to punish the captain. He says he reluctantly slapped the Briton twice on the cheeks.
In 1945, when full-fledged conscription was introduced in Taiwan, Kan was promoted from civilian status to private second class, and was transferred to Brunei. He recalls that he was "happy to be treated the same as the Japanese soldiers."
But his joy was short-lived. The war ended two months later with Japan's unconditional surrender.
Kan was detained by Australian forces and processed as a suspected war criminal. As bad luck would have it, he said, the man in charge of processing was the same British captain whom he had slapped. Kan was transferred to Labuan, an island near Brunei, but not before he had been severely beaten and kicked by Allied troops, in retaliation for the treatment of Allied POWs at the hands of the Japanese, he said. In Labuan, he was tried and convicted in January 1946 of low-level mistreatment of Allied POWs.
Kan claims he was sentenced to 5-1/2 years of hard labor in prisons on the Pacific islands of Morotai, Rabaul and Manus for his sole act of slapping the British captain. It was rumored that if he had punched him, he would have received 10 years, he said, adding that the harsh verdict seemed to be influenced by the fact that he was a Taiwanese working for the Japanese army.
According to Utsumi, of about 400,000 people from territories under Japanese rule (or ethnic Koreans and Taiwanese living in Japan) mobilized for Japan's war effort, 173 Taiwanese and 148 Koreans were found guilty of war crimes, accounting for 7 percent of all "Japanese" war criminals. Of those executed, 26 were Taiwanese and 23 Korean.
"During the trials, many Japanese officers denied their crimes, taking advantage of the fact that many executive officers had committed suicide (and therefore could not contradict their stories)," Kan said. "They passed on the blame to the Taiwanese. They even said the maltreatment of POWs was due to the brutal character of the Taiwanese.
"My trial was over in just two days. My Japanese lawyer did absolutely nothing for me."
'No longer Japanese'
After completing his sentence in March 1951, Kan was ordered by the Australian prison authorities in Manus to go to Japan, because he was a Japanese war criminal, he said.
Upon his arrival in Kure, Hiroshima Prefecture, Kan recalled that he could not believe his ears when an immigration officer said, "You're not Japanese. Why don't you go back to Taiwan?" In the end, he was granted permission to stay, and was taken to a former camp for foreign POWs in Innoshima, Hiroshima Prefecture.
In despair, Kan decided to leave the camp. He considered returning to Taiwan, but concluded it was too dangerous. The government of Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist Party had imposed martial law, and former Japanese collaborators were being arrested. His own relatives urged him to stay away.
Before long, he was living hand-to-mouth in Shimane and Hiroshima prefectures. Two years later, he made a new start in Tokyo, where he worked in a sushi shop and then as a tailor. He married a Japanese woman in 1954. The marriage did not work out, and by the time the couple divorced in 1968, Kan was working as a taxi driver.
He never stopped feeling that Japan had let him down, he said.
"The way the Japanese government treated us haunts me--especially their refusal to pay military pensions," Kan said. "They won't even pay salary owed to me from my time in the military... Japanese low-level B and C class war criminals do get these kinds of payments."
Kan has considered filing a lawsuit against the Japanese government to seek an apology and compensation.
"It would take a lot of time and money for lawyers to complete the trial. As long as there are no laws in Japan to provide compensation for non-Japanese, filing a lawsuit would be pointless," he said.
According to a lawyers' group set up to support postwar compensation claims for foreigners drafted into the Imperial Japanese Army, about 50 suits have so far been filed by former Korean and Taiwanese soldiers, forced laborers and low-level war criminals, as well as "comfort women."
The Supreme Court rejected the Korean war criminals' claim last year, saying that the matter should be up to the legislature. It did not touch on the rights and wrongs of the nationality clause.
In May 1998, Miki Hayashi, a former Taiwanese war criminal in Miyazaki who was naturalized after serving 11 years in prison, filed a compensation suit against the Japanese government. This was the first suit brought by a former Taiwanese war criminal.
Meanwhile, a new law will be introduced in April to compensate Taiwanese and Koreans who fought for Japan and have lived in Japan since the end of the war. Those eligible for compensation will be restricted to people who were injured or have suffered illness due to their wartime service, or the families of soldiers killed in action. Kan and Hayashi are not eligible.
The Japanese government basically maintains that it has already paid reparations to countries under Japan's rule during the war, and thus has no obligation to compensate individuals. Yasuaki Onuma, a professor of international law at Tokyo University, said, "So much damage was caused by World War II that it was almost impossible to specify each case and calculate individual reparations. So it was reasonable at the time to pay reparations through governments."
Onuma added, "But Japan should have considered how to solve the issue from a moral point of view when it became a member of the economic powers in the 1970s."
In the case of Taiwan, there was a complicated situation. Japan and Nationalist China (Taiwan) signed a peace treaty in 1952 in which they agreed to continue talks to conclude an agreement on post-war reparations. But everything came to a standstill when Japan resumed diplomatic relations with China and severed ties with Taiwan in 1972.
Kan's four children have become financially independent, and their families have become Japanese citizens. But Kan is not. He currently scrapes by on the 1 million yen a year he receives from the national old-age pension.
"I love Japan itself, but we want the government to think carefully about who it was we became war criminals for. There are 173 Taiwanese B and C class criminals, but more than one third of them have already died. There is a time limit," Kan said sadly.
* * * *
Kan's life story "Ore wa Nihonhei" (I Was a Japanese Soldier, Shinchosha) is written by Koichi Hamazaki, a journalist and professor at Yamanashi Eiwa College.
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