Wed 10 Sep 2008
SHONENKO: The Untold Story of Taiwanese Child Laborers in WWII
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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. (more…)
金穗獎影展場次表出爐，消息請以金穗獎官方網站（
溫哥華台灣電影節在一群熱情的學生參與下，創下許多不可能的記錄，期望未來能繼續持續下去，和溫哥華當地的台灣僑民與國際觀眾一同分享更多精心製作的台灣電影。
