Jordyn Haime is a freelance journalist who has been living in Taiwan since 2021. She received a graduate certificate in Chinese and American Studies from the Hopkins-Nanjing Center in June 2025 and recently started the newsletter Der Vayter Mizrekh on Substack, where she writes about China and the Jews. Today, she’s here to introduce Taiwan’s complicated relationship with its own World War II history.
On September 3rd, to mark the 80th anniversary of Japan’s surrender in World War II, China showcased its military might to the world with a massive parade in Tiananmen Square. Leaders from 26 countries — including Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un — were in attendance.
While Xi Jinping emphasized the importance of upholding a “correct historical perspective” (正确历史观) on the war, such anniversary displays often say more about a country’s current political goals, status aspirations, and self-image than they do about what happened 80 years ago. China’s message was clear: It will not be bullied again, and its leadership in the “World Anti-Fascist War” (世界反法西斯战争) entitles it to a leading role on the global stage. Importantly, Xi argues that respecting the postwar international order includes affirming the “restoration” of Taiwan to China.
Taiwan’s government, currently led by Lai Ching-te’s 賴清德 Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), took a noticeably “softer approach,” using the anniversary to promote Taiwan’s identity as a liberal democracy and defender of freedom. DPP officials have criticized China’s $5 billion military parade as “a waste of money and resources.” “Taiwan does not believe in commemorating peace while holding guns,” Lai said.
To commemorate the ROC’s role in the Allied victory, Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense organized photo exhibitions at bus stops, a military model show, and limited-edition military-themed snacks in partnership with the private sector. A televised concert in August featured a virtual display of its own military developments alongside performances by dancers and musicians in ROC military attire, encouraging the audience to “use the spirit of the war of resistance against Japanese aggression to defend the Republic of China, democracy, and freedom.”
But for more than a decade, Taiwan has been hosting another commemoration event, though this one is not officially affiliated with or endorsed by the central government. Held in the southern port city of Kaohsiung, this event tells the story of the Taiwanese colonial subjects who fought under the flag of Imperial Japan against the ROC — and remain unrecognized by the Taiwanese government.
While central governments engage in a cross-strait “memory war” over the CCP’s claimed role in China’s victory over Japan, the debate within Taiwan over how to remember its own complicated history has been raging since democratization. For those whose families were there before the ROC takeover in 1945, this history affirms Taiwanese identity as distinct and separate from China’s. But for those whose families arrived with the KMT, it looks more like a glorification of the Japanese empire, and a dismissal of the suffering Japan inflicted on their families, in which many Taiwanese were complicit.
Liau Siok-ha 廖淑霞, now 98 years old, was rolled up in her wheelchair before a crowd of about a hundred onlookers. The humid coastal wind that had been blowing across the park finally began to die down as Liau addressed the crowd in Japanese.
“During the war,” she said, “many Taiwanese who had received colonial education and embraced the spirit of patriotism responded to government calls for men to volunteer as soldiers, or for women to serve as military nurses.” In 1944, “I too answered the call of the nation and volunteered to become a military nurse.”
Liau was one of more than 200,000 native Taiwanese who served under Japan beginning in 1937. At that time, the Taiwanese had already experienced decades of imperial education under Japanese colonial rule (1895-1945), assuming the Japanese identity that had been imposed on them while living as second-class citizens to the Japanese. As it mobilized its colonies for war, Japan initiated the kominka movement — a word meaning “to make into imperial subjects” — in Taiwan, accelerating imperial education in order to attract more loyal recruits. Both Indigenous and Han Taiwanese joined the war effort for various reasons: while some volunteered, most were conscripted and forced to serve, or misled about what they were recruited to do. A vast majority worked in non-combatant roles as nurses, like Liau, or as technicians or translators; others were sent into combat or served as guards at POW camps across Taiwan and parts of Southeast Asia. In addition, 2,000 Taiwanese women, mostly from poor backgrounds, were forced into sexual slavery in Japan’s “comfort woman” system. By the end of the war, an estimated 30,000 Taiwanese had been killed or were missing, and 173 had been convicted as war criminals by the Allies.
“My father was only a teenager at the time, so he didn't participate in the fighting. The families of the Veterans’ Association today weren’t so lucky,” said Lee Wen-huan 李文環, director of the Kaohsiung Municipal History Museum, which manages the memorial. “So, was it because they wanted to go to war? Was it because they had a Japanese warmongering soul? No, they simply said, ‘This is my country. The country has called me to war. I have no choice.’”
The War and Peace Memorial Park’s 戰爭與和平紀念公園 one-room museum is billed as the only museum in Taiwan commemorating Taiwanese soldiers. Beyond just those who fought under Japan, it also tells the stories of Taiwanese who were sent into combat by the Nationalists to fight the Communists, and the few unlucky men who were then captured by the Communists and sent to fight in Korea. The tragedy the museum is determined to communicate is that of a people forced to fight under three foreign governments that cared little about them, only to deny them recognition or compensation in the aftermath of those decades of war.
The political tumult of the Chinese Civil War, the aftermath of the 228 Incident, and the White Terror that followed left little time for Taiwanese society to reflect on the world war that had just ended. When the ROC took over in 1945, it kicked off a process of “Sinicization” and aimed at removing symbols of “Japanese enslavement” from the public and “reeducating” Taiwanese, transforming their identity overnight. Mandarin Chinese became the official language in place of Japanese; street names were changed to reflect the names of Chinese cities or reverence for Chiang Kai-shek. It was in this context, writes Lan Shi-chi of National Chengchi University in a 2022 study, that the ruling KMT voluntarily “forgot” and “forgave” Taiwanese-native Japanese soldiers’ participation in the war against the Chinese, freeing these veterans from potential punishment as hànjiān (漢奸; Han traitors) and symbolically “readmitting” them to the Chinese identity. This allowed the KMT to gain much-needed positive rapport with the local Taiwanese population as their new rulers and recruit them as forces to fight the Communists.
Under martial law, Taiwanese veterans’ contributions to Japan’s war effort were “politically forgotten in public,” writes Lan, leaving only one official story: that of the Chinese victory over Japan. Their stories, and those of the “comfort women” enslaved by the Japanese, were not publicly known until the three-decade period of martial law was finally lifted in the late 1980s, ushering in Taiwan’s democratization.
The restoration of freedoms meant that Taiwanese, for the first time, were able to study their own history. According to Lee, “The reason Taiwan is so complicated right now is that after the war, for 38 years, Taiwanese people could not reflect on the Japanese period, they could not think about Taiwan, they could not have Taiwanese memories. My enlightenment about Taiwan first happened when I went to college: What is the history of my homeland?”
With the help of historians like Lee, Taiwan began rewriting its history, creating new textbooks and opening new museums that examined history from a nativist perspective, rather than solely from an ROC one. This effort included the publication of oral histories of Taiwanese veterans, a project that allowed them to speak about their experiences for the first time. They also began to advocate publicly for recognition by the ROC government, and for compensation from the Japanese government, which they say was unfairly denied to them.
“Those who barely survived and managed to return to Taiwan were then treated by the post-war Kuomintang regime as ‘traitors to the Han race’ and endured lives of hardship,” Liau said. “Even though we once fought as Japanese subjects, after the war, the Japanese government unconscionably excluded us from pensions and compensation on the grounds that we had lost our Japanese nationality. This caused immeasurable pain in both body and spirit.”
One veteran’s rights activist was Khou Chiau-eng 許昭榮, a Taiwanese independence advocate who fought under both the Japanese and later the Nationalists in the Chinese Civil War. In May 2008, he self-immolated in protest of the government’s neglect of its Taiwanese veterans.
“[My godfather] didn’t choose charcoal, which is less painful. He poured 20 liters of gasoline on himself to remind Taiwanese not to forget that our ancestors died in such numbers,” said Wu Juhrong 吳祝榮, Chairman of the Kaohsiung Cultural Association for the Care of Taiwanese Veterans. “That’s why he fought to build a memorial to Taiwan’s soldiers who died in battle. For 400 years, countless Taiwanese resisted and sacrificed for this land, from the French war in Keelung, to the Mudan Incident, to the Wushe Incident… If he hadn’t self-immolated, this park wouldn’t exist.”
A year after Khou’s death, the memorial park and museum in Kaohsiung were opened to the public. But advocates say their work is not done until the Taiwanese government recognizes these veterans on a national level, and until society overcomes its “indifference to Taiwan’s past.”
Official commemorations for the 80th anniversary of the war’s end, organized by the national government, mainly stuck to a standard ROC narrative. Native Taiwanese who fought under Japan did not appear in the Taipei photo exhibitions or at the concert in August. Lai offered only a subtle gesture toward the Taiwanese experience, writing in an August Facebook post about a forgotten incident in which Japanese, Indigenous, and Hakka groups died searching for a crash-landed Allied plane in the mountains of Taitung: “In that moment when the war was over, no one made a difference between themselves and the other as an Ally or an Axis,” he wrote.
Framing history in the context of today’s cross-strait and domestic power struggles, Lai added that “no regime has the right to invade and rob the people of another land of freedom.” In a first for a Taiwanese president, he commemorated Europe’s Victory Day in Taipei and sent his representative in Japan to the commemoration at Hiroshima.
“Essentially, [the DPP] is trying to ride two horses at once,” said Rana Mitter of the Harvard Kennedy School, who researches the history and memory of World War II in China and Taiwan. “The DPP has pushed quite hard in the direction of saying that the importance of the war is really about pushing back against dictatorship. That’s a helpful narrative politically, but it also sidesteps awkward questions of asking who was fighting whom at what time.”
Critics of this year’s events say the Lai government is engaging in historical revisionism and neglecting ROC history. Ho Chih-yung, a professor of general education at Taiwan’s National Tsing Hua University, told the South China Morning Post that the DPP wants to claim “the moral authority of the anti-Japanese legacy without acknowledging the ROC that fought the war.” Former President Ma Ying-jeou 馬英九 accused Lai of “deliberately downplaying the atrocities of Japan,” writing on social media that the Lai government “should not ignore the poor comfort women just to bow to the face of the Japanese government.”
It’s far from the first time a President’s handling of the anniversary has sparked outcry from the blue camp. In 2007, former President Lee Teng-hui 李登輝 paid a visit to the Yasukuni Shrine in Japan — the famously controversial site which honors Japan’s war dead, including over a thousand convicted war criminals — to honor his brother, who is enshrined there alongside thousands of other Taiwanese.
Lee, raised under the Japanese regime, had also fought for Japan. “Taiwanese back then were Japanese, and they fought for the motherland,” he said at the time, accusing Ma of harassing Japan to curry favor with China. In response, the KMT called Lee a “two-faced hypocrite utterly devoid of self-esteem” and “a hostage of history.” A year later, President Tsai Ing-wen inscribed her name on a monument dedicated to Taiwanese veterans at Okinawa, and became the first president to attend the commemoration at the Kaohsiung War and Peace Memorial, connecting her visit to her government’s pursuit of “transitional justice” 轉型正義. As recently as this year, KMT lawmakers named a drama series about Taiwanese POW camp guards — which was criticized for “evoking sympathy for Taiwanese war criminals” — as one of the many reasons they want to slash public television funding.
As the ruling party, the DPP has to walk the “fine line” of speaking to their party base, which includes “a generation of Taiwanese who saw themselves growing up under Chinese rule, and as complicit but not guilty in the Japanese imperial effort,” while also uniting the KMT base, said James Lin, a historian of Taiwan at the University of Washington. “Declaring that World War II was not just about the war against Japanese aggression but is also about commemorating Taiwanese soldiers who often fought to kill Chinese in mainland China — that would be a pretty divisive position to take.”
Efforts by other victimized groups, like the former “comfort women,” have been undermined by the issue’s politicization. Taiwanese are known for being far more sympathetic and friendly to the Japanese compared to their Chinese and Korean neighbors, despite Taiwan’s half-century of colonization, partially due to the more recent brutality of the KMT authoritarian period that immediately followed Japanese colonialism, in a phenomenon that Lin has called “colonial nostalgia.” The pursuit of warm ties with Japan as a crucial national security partner has also meant that the “comfort women” issue has received little attention from the DPP government. While Ma’s KMT government (2008-2016) unsuccessfully pursued compensation and apologies from the Japanese government on behalf of those women, Ma has continued to use their memory as a political cudgel against the DPP.
Although the last known Taiwanese “comfort woman” died in 2023, the Taiwan Women’s Rescue Foundation (TWRF) continues to advocate for justice for these women and to preserve their memory at a national level. The organization runs the small and independent Ama Museum (阿嬤家) in Taipei, dedicated to telling their stories, which has struggled to pay the bills and keep its doors open. In 2020, it had to close temporarily and move to a smaller location without a visible storefront due to funding issues. TWRF has asked both the KMT and DPP governments to fund a museum dedicated to women’s history in Taiwan, says CEO Du Ying-qiu, to no success.
“We want the government to preserve these relics,” she said. “Not civil society organizations. If the KMT could have provided a space when the amas were all still alive, then we wouldn’t have had to move, we wouldn’t always have to raise funds to run this museum.”
Throughout the memorial service, there was not a single mention of the carnage and pain imposed by the Japanese Imperial Army on the Chinese or the other peoples of Asia. Nor was the suffering of “comfort women” under Japanese rule acknowledged. I raised my discomfort with Director Lee after the ceremony. Shouldn’t the role of Taiwanese soldiers as both victims of colonization, as well as victimizers of others on behalf of the colonizer, be acknowledged here?
“The focus of today’s ceremony isn’t really about revisiting the question of what was right and wrong during World War II,” he responded. “Rather, it's about how, as we today look back on that war, many were inexplicably drawn into it for various reasons.”
His answer reflects the tone of the museum, too, which presents stories of Taiwanese soldiers rather uncritically, and says little about what those who went to combat actually did; it does not reflect on the harms those in combat helped perpetrate as a consequence of fighting under Imperial Japan. In the process of disentangling Taiwanese history from the histories of its rulers, a centering of Taiwanese identity that overlooks these inconvenient details represents another kind of forgetting.
It’s worth noting that the speakers at the memorial event didn’t commend soldiers for their bravery or thank them for their service. Most spoke of the importance of remembering the pain of war as its possibility looms again over society, and of expressing the Taiwanese identity that had been denied to them under centuries of foreign rule. We asked Mr. Wu, the board chairman, what it means to “remember” this history with white roses and moments of silence. The ceremony’s purpose, he said in a mix of Hokkien and Mandarin, was to “invite Taiwanese people, including young people, social groups, religious groups — everyone — to participate, awakening the memory of war. We hope people on this land don’t forget that our ancestors went through such fire.”
Other parts of society, though, are beginning to confront Taiwan’s role in Imperial Japan’s war effort more critically. This includes a growing body of academic literature as well as popular books and media. A critically acclaimed collection of short stories, titled Hunting Captive Women: Memories of a Special Volunteer Force, written by veteran Chen Chien-wu, embodies the contradictions of Taiwanese identity under Japan and the tension of being forced to fight for the colonizer while not even being seen as his equal. As Chu Yu-hsun writes in the book’s introduction, Chen “does not simply cast himself as a victim and dismiss the possibility of Taiwanese responsibility … Throughout, Hunting Captive Women constantly interrogates itself: Is it true? Do we really bear no responsibility?”
Lin says Taiwan will have to confront this tension in the presentation of the period in museums and public education as part of the decolonizing process.
“Dealing with the legacies of both the Japanese empire as well as the KMT authoritarian period, and what was perhaps suppressed during those times, and is now being discussed openly, is an important part of what decolonizing democratic societies are,” he said. “What historians are trying to show is that being a colonial subject is not like someone knocking at your door and saying, ‘We'd like to go kill other people. Please join us,’ and you say ‘yes.’ It's much more complicated, and it involves disparities of power; it involves education that goes quite deeply into psychological reasons that are formulated over decades and decades. Educating the public about this is a part of what public history is. It’s why museums about the Holocaust are so important [in explaining] how something like the Holocaust can occur.”
Lee acknowledged that the museum still has a lot of work to do in adequately portraying the complexities of Taiwan’s World War II history. “The significance of this museum is that it is a beginning,” Lee said. “It’s about the complex aspects of Taiwan, and among them, the history of a group of people who have been distorted and awkwardly portrayed. How should we discuss it? This is the mission of our museum.”
Taiwan emerged from martial law just 38 years ago and is still dealing with the legacy of its traumatic past. Now that it has the freedom to remember, its pursuit of “transitional justice” for all peoples will necessitate confronting history’s painful contradictions.
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This was incredibly reasonable, I enjoyed the historical perspective and very clear voice.
要承認台灣人日本兵的價值就請日本政府承認你是日本人吧！
台灣人在日本人眼中只是人間動物園的動物，戰爭期間軍餉也沒還，日本人把台灣人日本兵當動物拉去南洋殺人被殺，卻自以為是英雄。
真是非常好笑……