Written by Bryn Thomas.
Image credit: Provided by the author.
Almost every story in the “From Empire to Republic” docuseries I spearheaded for TaiwanPlus News begins with the year 1945 or the phrase “80 years ago.” This one starts in 2024 and “about a year ago.” At the time, I had an idea to report on Taiwan’s World War II history — not knowing that, in 2025, the war would make history in Taiwan once again.
On May 8, President Lai Ching-te marked the 80th year since the end of the war in Europe, VE Day, by urging democratic countries to unite against authoritarian expansion and defend peace, freedom and human rights.
In June and July, Taiwan’s presence at the Hiroshima and Nagasaki peace memorials was accepted for the first time. In August, local media hailed its representative’s attendance at both events as a sign of Taiwan’s growing diplomatic engagement.
On August 14, the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) announced a ban on Taiwanese government officials travelling to China for Beijing’s September 3 military parade, warning that attendance would support the Chinese Communist Party’s “united front” efforts. The following day, VJ Day, Lai commemorated the 80th anniversary of the end of the war in the Pacific, again drawing parallels between Taiwan’s contemporary situation and that of democracies confronting authoritarianism in the 1930s.
Later, on October 24, the MAC condemned Beijing’s decision to designate October 25 — the day marking Taiwan’s handover from Japan to the Republic of China (ROC) — as the “Commemoration Day of Taiwan’s Restoration,” calling it an attempt to fabricate the claim that Taiwan belongs to the People’s Republic of China. On October 25, Retrocession Day, Taiwan marked 80 years of ROC rule.
And there’s more: the Kuomintang and Democratic Progressive Party locked horns over the name of the war. Taiwan’s defence ministry spoke out against China’s use of parades to manipulate WWII narratives, while former KMT Chair Hung Hsiu-chu triggered backlash after travelling to China for its Victory Day parade. This list goes on.
If you were like me – a member of the press with an interest in Taiwan and WWII, you did not lack for toplines in 2025.
But none of this had happened when I began thinking about reporting on the Second World War in December 2024. At the time, I was focused instead on the limitations of my medium – television news.
Every instalment in From Empire to Republic needed to adhere to strict criteria.
They needed a dateline. A story on the firebombing of Tokyo would need to air on the raid’s anniversary. Likewise, these datelines only work if they end in 0 or 5. It’s highly unlikely that next year’s 81st anniversary of World War II will inspire the same number of contemporary headlines.
Time limits were another constraint. While ten-plus-minute documentaries are common on YouTube, they’re rare in television news. Any report would therefore need to stand alone for five minutes or be divided into shorter segments. Each segment would still have to include enough context for a general audience to follow. That’s a tall order, considering the complexity of the information that had to be conveyed.
It required assumptions about the audience’s background knowledge, and, really, who that audience is. It’s reasonable that a viewer interested in World War II knows who Hitler was, what happened in the Holocaust, or that the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Japan. But it’s unreasonable to assume they know Taiwan was once a Japanese colony — or that, unlike most of Japan’s other colonies, such as Korea, many Taiwanese hold romantic views of imperial rule. And, as demonstrated in 2025, World War II is simultaneously under-discussed and deeply controversial in Taiwan. Thus, any content on it would be subject to intense scrutiny.
Making matters worse was the scarcity of footage, a make-or-break variable in broadcast journalism.
While the U.S. and U.K. recorded hours of their own forces during World War II, film of Japanese forces is limited —and of Taiwan—almost nonexistent. Most of what does exist sits behind paywalls in Japanese archives.
Then were also language barriers – our stories contained Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, Taiwanese Hokkien and English.
And finally, as with all historical stories, there was the issue of time. Parts of this series would have been far easier if it had marked the 60th anniversary of World War II. Every survivor or veteran we interviewed was in their 90s, and many were not lucid. And for most, the war was a distant, often dark memory.
These constraints did have the advantage of containing the project’s scale — From Empire to Republic, and its companion pieces would not be an 18-hour Ken Burns–style historical epic. Instead, I aimed to create a crash course for an Asian studies or history survey class.
After producing a pilot on the March 1945 firebombing of Tokyo, I sat down with my editor to make a list of every major World War II anniversary in 2025, with particular attention to those related to Taiwan.
That list started in May with VE Day and the Raid on Taipei. In June, it covered the end of the Battle of Okinawa. In July, it marked the Trinity Test. The period from August 1 through September 3 proved to be the most intense stretch — with the atomic bombings, Japan’s surrender, the signing of the instrument of surrender, and contemporary military parades in China. In the series, I argue that for Taiwan, World War II ended on October 25, 1945, Retrocession Day. It was then that the epoch shifted firmly into the Cold War.
We also wanted to leave room for content that was not tied to a specific dateline if it came up: discussions of war crimes, the zeitgeist, or really anything extra.
Next, my producers and I immediately began newsgathering—scouring the internet for footage and arranging in-person and video interviews for our stories.
Along with veterans and survivors, we tried to find, along with leading experts in Taiwanese history, World War II, the post-war period, and early twentieth-century Japanese history.
Knowing that many of our veterans would be in their 90s, we wanted scholars who could provide context to their stories. Most notably, Rana Mitter, Mike Lan, and Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang proved essential in giving context to the ROC and Taiwanese experience. John C. McManus gave an excellent big-picture interview on the war. Multiple other interviews with multiple other researchers, advocates and veterans’ groups provided us with a wealth of information. However, it was a conversation with Cambridge historian Barak Kushner in late April 2025, about Taiwan’s Japanese colonial past, wartime experiences, and post-war memory that shaped its historical identity, that did the most to shape the final stories.
It strongly influenced the decision to focus the narrative on the role Taiwan played in World War II as a colony of Japan, hence the title From Empire to Republic. This also allowed the creation of something original—this may be the first English-language docuseries focused on this period of Taiwanese history. Compared with the roles of the ROC and China as part of the five Allies, the experiences of the Taiwanese under the Japanese Empire are far less studied. Likewise, while the ROC carefully recorded and memorialised its veterans’ World War II stories, the more uncomfortable reality—that some Taiwanese worked with the Japanese Empire—was largely overlooked until the 1990s. Indeed, even the act of explaining this reality provides insight into modern Taiwan society – and what history buff can resist the temptation to use the past to explain the present?
Focusing on Japanese colonialism had a practical benefit. From 1895 to 1945, the Empire left its mark on Taiwan’s architecture. Japanese-era buildings across Taipei provided excellent backdrops for pieces to camera and even worked well as a vehicle to discuss complex topics like Retrocession and the treatment of prisoners of war. When combined with modern news packages, map graphics, and archival footage, the B-roll of these buildings helped fill in missing pieces while connecting history to places people pass on their commute.
The final product combined archive footage, expert analysis, stories from those who lived through the events, period and modern newsreels, B-roll of the sites today, and animated graphics.
In the end, From Empire to Republic is a synthesis of myriad elements and putting them together took a village. While I led every instalment, the series was only possible thanks to my editors, videographers, producers, translators, and many others… all of whom broke their backs the better part of a year to bring it to life.
Looking back on a year’s work, I’m glad this story about Taiwan’s history is now part of my own history. As with anything one pours love into, it’s hard not to notice its limitations.
I hope writing this series for Taiwan Insight helps reconcile some of these limitations — mainly episode length and the tendency to compress complex history, such as the Cold War, into single sentences. It also allows me to add more depth to my thinking and restore a few elements that didn’t make the final cut. The following two articles — first on the Allied bombings of Taipei and second on the Battle of Okinawa — best exemplify this, while also providing examples of material we were forced to leave out of the original series, and the experience of everyday people and soldiers alike. Indeed, this article and the two that follow have given me a valuable chance to discuss what I view as the series’ flaws.
For example, without a more comprehensive look at the ROC role, From Empire to Republic ultimately falls short of providing a complete overview of Taiwan’s World War II history. It instead leans more toward surveying Taiwan’s experience as a colony of Japan.
In the end, I wish I could have started interviewing these veterans ten years earlier and approached the subject with the knowledge I have now. Multiple conversations with scholars in the field changed my perspective throughout the year and humanised an otherwise abstract topic. If I could redo some interviews, I might have asked different questions. Indeed, in January 2025, I approached some veterans expecting to hear war stories, but instead heard stories of trauma. A year later, the biggest takeaway is how those who lived through World War II endured a dark, transformative period in 1945 yet went on to lead full, often happy lives.
Bryn Thomas’s interest in World War II began as a child, marvelling at his Great-Uncle Bob’s prosthetic leg — the result of a landmine in the Battle of the Bulge. He is an avid reader of history, holds a master’s degree in Social Science from National Chengchi University, and currently works as a copy editor and reporter for TaiwanPlus News. Although the research and data collection that went into these articles also contributed to stories published for that outlet, the conclusions presented here are mine alone and do not reflect those of TaiwanPlus. Special thanks to Jeffrey Chen and Ed Moon.
This article was published as part of a special issue on ‘Between Empires and Allies: Documenting Taiwan’s WWII Experience‘. All articles of the special issue are written independently of TaiwanPlus News.
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