Eighty-One Years On, a Taiwanese Veteran's Plea Not to Be Forgotten Is Fading

Eighty-one years after the war ended, a generation of men who fought as Japanese soldiers and then lived out their lives in Taiwan have left behind a quiet request: do not forget us. At a moment of unusually warm Japan-Taiwan relations, that memory is fading fast — and readers in Taiwan will read this differently from readers in Japan.

Place the history correctly first. When the war ended in 1945, some Taiwanese had served as Japanese soldiers. The Taiwan they returned to had changed government and official language, so their wartime experience fits awkwardly into either national narrative: in Japan they were not Japanese, and in Taiwan the experience belonged to another regime's war. They are forgotten less because of elapsed time than because no ready framework holds them.

What does that have to do with the relationship today? Current warmth rests on tourism, investment, supply chains and popular culture — all real, all efficient, and all replaceable. What lets two societies actually understand each other is usually the inconvenient part: what people on different sides carried out of the same history. Skip it and friendship stays at the level of consumption, with nothing to fall back on when disagreements arrive.

Two practical notes: families may still have such elders, and oral history has a hard deadline. And how Japan handles its own war memory will shape every future historical discussion between the two societies.