During World War II, Taiwanese living under Japanese colonial rule were inevitably drawn into Japan’s imperialist expansionism in Asia. In the past two decades, an increasing number of historians and writers came to excavate stories of former Japanese colonial subjects--including those from Taiwan and Korea--who served in the Imperial Army. Under Japan’s policies of kōminka (皇民化), a process of imperial subjectification, thousands of Taiwanese and Korean youths were mobilized to join the volunteer soldiers program. According to Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare, 207,138 Taiwanese youths had served in the army, most of whom were sent to southern China or Southeast Asia. Tân Í-bûn’s (陳以文, 1927-2012) story is an exceptional one: joining the army in 1944, he was sent to Manchuria. When the war concluded, Í-bûn and his comrades were captured by the Soviet army and imprisoned at an internment camp in Siberia. Seventy years after his survival from the camp, Í-bûn’s story was recollected in his grandson Chen Li-hang (陳力航)’s recently published book, Minus 68 Degree Celsius: Taiwanese POW in Post-World War II Siberia (《零下六十八度：二戰後臺灣人的西伯利亞戰俘經驗》。臺北：前衛出版, 2021).

In our first podcast episode, we are pleased to interview Li-hang who shared with us his grandfather’s story and his experiences of doing oral history interviews and writing his own family history. The podcast interview was processed in Mandarin Chinese. An English-language summary of the interview is also available for our readers.

Interviewee: Chen Li-hang (陳力航)
Interviewer: Yu-Han Huang
Podcast producer: Sabrina Teng-io Chung
Transcribed and edited by Yu-Han Huang and Sabrina Teng-io Chung

The exceptional story of Tân Í-bûn began in 1944 when he was a middle school student in Tokyo. The third son of a respected doctor in Yilan (宜蘭), Taiwan, Í-bûn was expected to follow the path of his father and two older brothers and attend medical school, eventually becoming a doctor. Instead, he decided to join the Japanese Imperial Army, hoping to bring honor to his family.

Li-hang told us that his grandfather’s experience reflected the complexity of Japanese colonial governance. Using his Japanese name Kageyama Masafumi (景山雅文) during his time in Tokyo and Manchuria, Í-bun seldom experienced discrimination or unfair treatement like he did as a colonial subject in Taiwan. A highly educated and Japanized Taiwanese youth like Í-bun would find more opportunities for social advancement in the Japanese mainland and its colonial territories such as Manchuria in the 1940s.

As an imperial soldier, Í-bûn received his training in Hachinohe (八戶) in northeastern Japan and was sent to an air base in Xingshu (杏樹), a village in northeastern Manchuria that was less affected by rampant U.S. air raids at that time. However, only a few months after his arrival, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan and invaded Manchuria. Í-bûn was captured along with other 630,000 Japanese soldiers. In November 1945, he was sent to Tayshet, the administrative center of labor camps Ozerlag and Angarstroy during the 1930s–1950s.

Having lost millions of lives during the war, the Soviet Union hoped to use POWs to supplement its insufficient labor force for postwar reconstruction. Í-bûn and other POWs were forced to work at a nearby forest farm and railway construction sites. The scarcity of food supply meant prolonged periods of starvation for Japanese POWs. “The ration we received in the camps was scarce. Food pieces dissolved in your mouth like soda drinks,” Í-bûn recalled.

According to statistics, one tenth of Japanese POWs died during their detention in Siberia. Í-bûn was a luckier one. In May 1948, he was repatriated to Japan via the Port of Maizuru where he was reclassified as a national subject of the Republic of China. No longer a Japanese subject, Í-bûn was sent to Shanghai, China in September. During the height of the Chinese Civil War, Í-bûn and other Taiwanese repatriates from the Soviet Union faced temporary detention both in Shanghai, China and Keelung, Taiwan. It was already October 1948 when he finally arrived home in Yilan.

From icicles gnawing, carcass stealing, bed bugs fighting, to endless laboring, Í-bûn’s Siberian experiences were always the most unforgettable childhood bedtime stories for Li-hang. Years later, when Li-hang was taking an oral history course at National Chengkung University, he decided to interview his grandfather. Those interview recordings would serve as the initial source materials for his future book project.

The remains of an internment camp in Siberia where Tân Í-bûn was detained. Photo taken by Í-bûn’s comrades during their visit to the site in 1991.

Japanese imperialism in Asia enabled Taiwanese emigration across the empire. As Japanese colonial subjects, the Taiwanese people had complicated relationships with other colonized populations. Their wartime and postwar experiences are seldom a matter of concern in the nationalist historiography of China, Taiwan, and Japan. However, the past two decades saw a rise of scholarship and publications about the Japanese empire and its colonial possessions, including Taiwan. The Taiwan-based historian Dr. Chung Shu-min’s (鍾淑敏) research on Taiwanese internees in India is a notable example. The Taiwan Gazette has previously introduced Dr. Chung’s tireless research on colonial and postwar Taiwanese experiences. Her research brings forward renewed reflections and understandings of Taiwanese subject formations then and now.

After finishing his MA studies under Dr. Chung’s supervision, Li-hang once wanted to pursue PhD studies. However, he soon realized that having a strong passion in storytelling is not enough to produce “meaningful” and “convincing” academic scholarship. This realization brought him to the world of popular history writing. During the interview, Li-hang told us that the balancing of different sorts of information--from stories, historical facts, to archival materials--is crucial to the writing of popular history.

August, 1984, the third gathering of the Kurikon-kai. “Kurikon” is the name of a collective farm in Siberia where Í-bûn and other POWs in Tayshet labored. The former leader of the Kurikon labor team was sitting in the middle of the image, holding a floor plan of the internment camp.

When asked about the methods of doing oral narrative, Li-hang however hinted at the unreliability of human memory. In addition to his grandfather’s recollections, Li-hang collected a considerable number of sources about internment camps and Japanese POWs. To reconstruct Í-bûn and his comrades’ lived experiences in the internment camp, he spent years researching and collecting sources at several libraries, databases, and archives in Taiwan and Japan. An important source for his research was the name list of members from former Siberian POWs associations. Another insightful body of source material is fictional works inspired by POWs’ experiences: novels, manga, movies, and even TV dramas.

Li-hang also provided useful suggestions to those who are interested in writing their own family history. “Timing matters,” he suggested. “We need to seize the chance to conduct interviews while our family members are still with us.”

Li-hang also pointed out that the ways of conducting interviews are different in journalism and oral history writing. While the former tends to be more “extractive,” the latter attends to the positionings and perspectives of the interviewees. Li-hang suggested that the success of an oral history interview is based upon the respect historians direct to the interviewees. Yet, historians should also bear in mind that oral narratives can only help validating certain aspects of historical knowledge production. “‘Humanness’ (人味) is what underlies the value of oral history,” Li-hang said.

For Li-hang, the writing of his grandfather’s story represents a major accomplishment. On the night he finished the first book draft, he dreamed of his grandfather:

Í-bûn was found sitting in his living room and smoking. Li-hang told him that he had already finished the book draft, to which Í-bûn replied in Japanese:

“You wrote a lot. Amazing.” (たくさん書いてくれた。すごいね。)

Tân Í-bûn and his grandson, Chen Li-hang.

Minus 68 Degree Celsius: Taiwanese POW in Post-World War II Siberia (《零下六十八度：二戰後臺灣人的西伯利亞戰俘經驗》) is now available on several Taiwan-based ebook platforms, including Readmoo, books.com.tw, and TAAZE.

Recommendation Readings:

On kōminka and soldiering

Sakai, Naoki. “Subject and Substratum: On Japanese Imperial Nationalism.” Cultural Studies, 14:3-4 (2000): 462-530.
Ching, Leo. Becoming “Japanese”: Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity Formation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.
Fujitani, T. Race for Empire: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Americans during World War II. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011.
Chatani, Sayaka. Nation-Empire: Ideology and Rural Youth Mobilization in Japan and Its Colonies. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018.
Dawley, Evan N. Becoming Taiwanese: Ethnogenesis in a Colonial City, 1880s to 1950s. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2019.
Gerien-Chen, James. “Between Empire and Nation: Taiwan Sekimin and the Making of Japanese Empire in South China, 1895–1937.” Diss. Columbia U. 2019.
Oguma Eiji (小熊英二),『生きて帰ってきた男――ある日本兵の戦争と戦後』（岩波新書、2015年)
一 Chinese version: 小熊英二著，黃耀進譯，《活著回來的男人：一個普通日本兵的二戰與戰後生活》（台北：聯經出版，2015）
Hamazaki Kōichi (浜崎紘一),『俺は日本兵ー台湾人．簡茂松の「祖国」』（潮流社、2000年）
一 Chinese version: 濱崎紘一著，邱瑞振譯，《我啊：一個台灣人日本兵簡茂松的人生》（台北：圓神出版，2001）
蔡慧玉，吳玲青，《走過兩個時代的人－台籍日本兵》（台北：中央研究院，2008）
周婉窈，〈日本在台軍事動員與台灣人的海外參戰經驗〉。《海行兮的年代：日本殖民統治末期台灣史論集》（台北：允晨文化，2003）
鍾淑敏，《日治時期在南洋的台灣人》（台北：中央研究院台灣史研究所，2020）
許雪姬，2016，〈臺灣人在滿洲的戰爭經驗〉，《歷史臺灣》，第11期，頁75-132。

On repatriation:

Watt, Lori. When Empire Comes Home: Repatriation and Reintegration in Postwar Japan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2009.
Barshay, Andrew E. The Gods Left First The Captivity and Repatriation of Japanese POWs in Northeast Asia, 1945–1956. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013.
Yoshikuni, Igarashi. Homecomings: The Belated Return of Japan's Lost Soldiers. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016.
Cook, Haruko Taya. Japan at War: An Oral History. New York: The New Press, 1992.

Fictional Works about Japanese POWs:

Saitō Kunio’s (斎藤邦雄) two manga works: 『陸軍步兵よもやま物語』 and『シベリヤ抑留兵よもやま物語極寒凍土を生きぬいた日本兵』.
Yamazaki Toyoko(山崎豊子), The Barren Zone. Translated by Jame T. Araki. Methuen Publishing Ltd., 1987. Originally published as 『不毛地帯』in 1976.

Chen Li-hang’s academic publications:

陳力航，〈陳以文先生訪談紀錄〉，《宜蘭文獻雜誌》87/88期（2011），頁137-168.
陳力航，〈日治時期在中國的臺灣醫師，1895-1945〉。臺北：國立政治大學碩士論文，2012。
Li-hang’s popular history works can be found in several Chinese-language platforms. His essay on the history of mask wearing in colonial Taiwan was translated into English and is now available in the Taiwan Gazette.