by Melissa J. Brown, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Stanford University

This brilliant documentary covers an amazingly untold story about WWII, one which reveals insights about the complexity of current relations between Taiwan, Japan, and China. Some 207,183 Taiwanese served the Japanese military during WWII. Most were porters and laborers (there were 126,750 civilian employees), but some (80,433) were soldiers, even in Japanese-occupied China. In 1943-44, over 8,400 Taiwanese boys between the ages of 13 and 20 were recruited for a purported work-study program in Japan and, later, the Philippines. The early recruits were told they would help to build military aircraft and earn degrees enabling them to become engineers after five years, but in fact they became laborers under increasingly difficult wartime conditions, as the US stepped up bombing in Japan and invaded the Philippines.

The extraordinary quality of the film brings out the difficulties faced by these boys. Director Liang-Yin Kuo intersperses interviews of surviving Shonenko and Japanese supervisors and teachers, now elderly men, with personal photographs and letters, official records, vintage film from the war era, and haunting music. The combination movingly documents the pull that the promise of education and high pay had for poor Taiwanese boys and the force of Japanese propaganda campaigns combined with brutal discipline to promote patriotic Japanese “spirit” among Taiwanese colonials. The presentation is in the style of – and as high a quality as – Ken Burns’ series on the US Civil War, but even more effective, since these interviews are with survivors of the war. Excerpts of an interview with one Japanese teacher, scattered throughout the film, are particularly effective, as the man moves from patriotic fervor to tearful shame for having “volunteered” 23 Taiwanese boys for the program, many of whom died.

We also learn what happened to the boys when the war ended. US forces treated them as Chinese allies, rather than Japanese, and repatriated most. In Taiwan, Mandarin was the new national language, and without it, finding a job was difficult. Interviews reveal how Shonenko were caught in the violence and political purges that went with Nationalist martial law rule. The film also tracks some Shonenko who stayed and tried to get by in the poverty of post-war Japan. Two went to China rather than Taiwan (by their choice) and suffered greatly in the Cultural Revolution because of their service in the Japanese military and their ties to Nationalist-held Taiwan. The comfortable current home surroundings of the elderly men interviewed make the grimness of their stories easier to bear.

This film beautifully documents Japan’s use of Taiwanese child labor during WWII. In doing so, the film indicates the complexity of Taiwanese identity. Shonenko were indoctrinated as Japanese, then suddenly became Chinese, but in both cases, their harsh treatment belied the propaganda. This culturally rich film will be appreciated by anyone with an interest in WWII, Taiwan, Japan, and human stories of coping and finding oneself in the midst of cataclysmic events. I strongly recommend it!

Melissa J. Brown
Assistant Professor of Anthropology
Stanford University

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1.Taiwan was a Japanese colony from 1895 until Chinese Nationalists took control of the island after Japan’s 1945 surrender to the US. The Nationalists retreated to Taiwan as they were losing the Chinese civil war to the Communists. The Nationalist government in Taiwan was recognized as China internationally until the 1970s, when diplomatic recognition shifted to the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Currently, Taiwan has an independent, democratically elected government, but the PRC claims it is part of China, and the international community acquiesces.

2.Many fewer Taiwanese than Korean women were forced to become “comfort women;” estimates range from 200 to 1,000.