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Foreign” Victims of Taiwan's 1947 February 28 Incident and Their Special Sessions -State Violence and Trauma “In the Shadow of Empires: “Foreign” Victims of Taiwan’s 1947 February 28 Incident and their Journey toward Justice and Reconciliation” Yoshihisa Amae1 [Japan, Chang Jung Christian University Associate Professor ] 1 The author is an associate professor at the Graduate Institute of Taiwan Studies at Chang Jung Christian University. Email: [email protected] 1 Introduction The February 28 Incident of 1947 (hereafter simply “2/28”) had long been taboo in Taiwan under martial law. However, following the lifting of martial law in 1987, it has gradually gained publicity. In 1995, President Lee Teng-hui offered an apology to the victims and their families for their losses, and his government made measures to bring justice to the victims, including reparation and restoration of the victims’ reputation. The literature on 2/28 is vast, especially in the Chinese language. Few, but important, works exist in the English and Japanese literature as well (Kerr 1965; Lai, Myers, and Wei 1991; He 2003). Yet almost all of them focus on the victimhood of the native Taiwanese and the brutality of the Chinese perpetrators. Little is mentioned of the foreign victims, namely the Japanese, Okinawans, and Koreans. This is understandable for their existence has been unknown until quite recently (in 2015 Aoyama Esaki became the first foreign victim to be recognized by the Taiwanese government) and the numbers are small. As of August 2020, there are only three foreigners (two Japanese and one Korean) who have been officially recognized as “victims” and consequently received reparations from the Taiwanese government. Three other families from Okinawa had applied for reparations but their attempt has been so far unsuccessful. A study by an Okinawan scholar suggests that the number of Okinawan victims may be as large as thirty people (Matayoshi 2018: 348). There were also Korean victims: three men killed and one woman injured. Moreover, among the 1,461 names in the latest lists of possible 2/28 victims released by the Memorial Foundation of 228 between October 2018 and February 2020, eight of them have Japanese names (The Memorial Foundation of 228 2020). These numbers are very small compared to the numbers of alleged Taiwanese dead, which varies from several hundreds to a hundred thousand.2 While the number of deaths, together with other figures such as the duration of the incident and the percentage of casualties among the total population, does speak of the magnitude of the political tragedy, human lives cannot be reduced to sheer numbers: every single life matters. Each victim—mostly men in the case of 2/28—is somebody’s son, father, husband and friend. Their absence has left a lasting impact in those people’s lives. This impact can be larger for the remaining family if the person was the head of the household and the breadwinner, and larger for aliens than nationals due to the former’s precarious social and political status. Having said that, I believe tragedies cannot be 2 It is widely believed that 18,000 to 28,000 people perished in the 2/28 Incident as a consequence of the government crackdown. This figure was presented by the task force set up by the government to investigate the truth of the 2/28 Incident in 1992. However, in more recent research, scholars suggest the number of dead was much smaller. They estimate the number to be between 1,304 and 1,512 (Tang 2017). 2 compared. The pain and trauma caused by any tragedy is purely subjective and it is not the purpose of this paper to make any generalization on suffering. The main purpose of the paper is twofold. First, it attempts to investigate the foreign victims of 2/28: Who are they? How did they get involved? How did the families suffer from the loss of a family member? How did they deal with the trauma? I will try to narrate their personal stories. Such narratives are important, not just as history, but in terms of taking the discussion on 2/28 beyond the hitherto dualism that fixates on native Taiwanese as victims and Mainlanders as perpetrators. I hope to show that among the so called “poor victims” there is a subtle hierarchy. For example, often times in the discussion on 2/28 victims, a great focus is given to the social and political elite, and not to ordinary citizens.3 Victims with a Mainland Chinese background are often overlooked, if not ignored, simply because they are equated with the state apparatus and its agents that exercised violence. And foreigners are neglected. The foreign victims of 2/28 are thus arguably marginalized within the narratives of 2/28. Unlike the native Taiwanese victims, who eventually had their voices heard due to the backing of the native Democratic Progressive Party, foreign victims remained voiceless and endured a subaltern-like status, even after political liberalization in the 1990s. Their marginality is most evident in the politics of remembering: non-ROC citizens were, until 2016, excluded from seeking retributive justice. The irony of this practice is that while the state apparatus and the violence it exercised did not discriminate, the government (a democratic one!) and the justice it is reattributing are. The second purpose of this paper is to contemplate the “Japanese factor” in the 2/28 Incident: that is to think of the suffering that Japanese imperialism had inflicted on the parties concerned, including those foreign subjects (Japanese, Okinawans, and Koreans) who were killed. One should be reminded, however, that less than two years prior to 2/28, they weren’t “foreign” to their Taiwanese counterparts; they were all subjects of the Japanese empire and one nation, in which Okinawans were seen as the elder brother, Koreans as the younger brother, and Taiwanese as the youngest brother (Matayoshi 2018: 111).4 Okinawans and Koreans were present in Taiwan as a result of political annexation and national integration orchestrated by the Japanese empire. Differently put, their presence, which was magnified through the tragic event of 2/28, reveals the issue that had long been submerged in face of the brutal state violence and the drama that unfolded in the confrontation between the native Taiwanese and the Mainlanders and the ensuing political and national trauma. To be sure, the Japanese state and its agents were not present in the Incident: the Japanese authorities in Taiwan surrendered to the Chinese Nationalists (KMT) on October 25, 1945, and by April 1946, most Japanese nationals had been 3 A good example of this is a work by Lee (1990). 4 The Yamato race or naichijin, extending this metaphor, is the father and mother figure. Japan annexed Okinawa in 1879, acquired Taiwan as a colony in 1895 as the result of its victory against Qing China, and annexed Korea in 1910 by imperial Japan. 3 repatriated to their homeland. Yet their influence lasted beyond their physical presence. Between the lines of the 2/28 narratives, be it the “pro-Chinese” or “pro-Taiwanese,” appear traces of Japanese imperialism, such as the KMT accusation that Taiwanese people being “poisoned with (or enslaved by) the Japanese education” or the fact that Japanese language was used by the Taiwanese rioters to distinguish themselves from the “enemy.”5 In sum, the presence of foreign 2/28 victims not only reminds one of the past Japanese imperial ambitions, but also invokes their colonial responsibility, which is often neglected in the dominant postwar narrative of Japan being a peace-loving nation. A Genealogy of Foreign 2/28 victims It is unknown to the Taiwanese that one of the first victims of 2/28 was a Japanese, Kimura Toshio, a staff of the Committee of Overseas Japanese6 who was shot dead in front of the Taiwan Provincial Administrative Executive Office on February 28 during the mass protest over police violence against an illicit cigarette vendor on the previous night. It is unclear as to why Kimura took the risk of being there. It may have been that he was on a mission to gather information on the situation, or he may have been at the site out of pure curiosity. What we know is that nobody had imagined that the security guards would have opened fire on peaceful protesters, killing several and wounding many (Kerr 1966: 256). The government wasted no time in offering an apology to the victim’s family and the Japanese community, as well as compensating 200,000 Old Taiwan dollars for the loss (Kawahara 1997: 44). However, that was not the case for several other Japanese nationals killed, arrested, or who remain missing in 2/28. There appear to be two other Japanese nationals involved in the 2/28 Incident, according to the official report sent by Chen Yi to Chiang Kai-shek on March 13, 1947: Horiuchi Kinjyo and Uesaki Torazaburo. Their names appear in the appendix of the report, together with 18 Taiwanese, including people like Chen Xin and Lin Mao-sheng (Institute of Modern History Academia Sinica 1992: 177). The report does not confirm their death but other materials confirmed that all the people on the list were later executed as “rebels.” According to the information given on the list, Horiuchi and Uesaki were both labelled as “underground agents” and accused of assisting the rebellion and the killing of Chinese Mainlanders (waishengren). Little is known about Uesaki’s whereabouts. However, materials remain regarding Horiuchi. 5 At times, the suspicious ones were asked to sing Kimigayo, the Japanese anthem. 6 This was a semi-official agency consisting of staffs of the former Office of the Governor-in-General to manage the affairs of the near 8,000 Japanese bureaucrats, engineers, and academics and their families who were retained by the KMT government (Wu 2005).
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