Written by Charles R. Charrington
Image Credit: “ALLEGED JAPANESE ATROCITIES IN FORMOSA.” The Sydney Morning Herald. August 27, 1896. Scan in Trove (National Library of Australia and Partners).
The Japanese era in Taiwan is partly remembered for the socioeconomic modernisation that paved the way for the “miracle” of the island becoming one of the Four Asian Dragons or Tigers. However, behind the rising sun of development, there were atrocities in the invasions and colonisation, including, but not limited to, rape, torture, summary executions, and massacres carried out against Indigenous–, Hakka–, and Hoklo–Taiwanese, Qing Chinese, and other peoples by the Japanese military and police and island residents who worked for them. English-language correspondents and missionaries wrote about some of these, including the 1896 Yunlin Massacre. Atrocities during conquests are not unique to the Japanese, and the intention of this article is not to incite anti-Japanese sentiment, which the author condemns, but to shed light on the violence in Taiwan during that period that has largely remained in the shadows of public discourse despite a growing body of published scholarship and media coverage.
During the Meiji era (1868–1912), “the invasion of Formosa by the Japanese forces” occurred in 1874 in supposed response to the 1871 Mudan Incident, which involved the murder of Ryukyu Islands sailors by Indigenous Taiwanese. There were pre-existing tensions as various foreigners had committed violence and taken lands from these inhabitants in prior decades and centuries. During their first invasion, the Japanese made certain Indigenous peoples submit to them, as shown in period woodblock prints, and, at times, “slaughtered” those who would not. There was “loss of life on both sides,” and the mutilation of bodies occurred. The Japanese soldiers took heads as “prizes”, which some Japanese officers did not endorse, as well as burned homes and villages “suspected of giving aid” to the “enemy” (House, pp. 91, 102, 133-134). Having proved their martial prowess through killings as intended, the Japanese left the island following the Qing’s agreement to pay an indemnity.
Approximately two decades later, the Japanese defeated the Qing in the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895), which included their capture of the Penghu Islands, and Taiwan was ceded to the Empire of Japan in the Treaty of Shimonoseki. The island’s leadership, not wanting to yield, established the Republic of Formosa. Shortly thereafter, the Japanese launched a second and larger invasion in 1895 to assert their power and secure colonial treasures of land and resources, as the Western powers had done throughout the world. There were previous British, French, and others’ attacks and colonisation attempts, of varying sizes, in that century. The Japanese wanted to keep foreign militaries out of it and away from their southerly islands. They also regarded Taiwan as a “southern gateway” that could be used for territorial expansion as well as economic exploitation and settler colonisation (Matsuda, p. 9). Unsurprisingly, by the end of their rule, there were hundreds of thousands of Japanese on the island (Matsuda, p. 36).
The Taiwanese and remaining Qing who resisted the invasion were targeted, and killings by the Japanese resumed. Coastal and inland cities and villages that opposed were bombarded and, sometimes, near-mercilessly “cleared” by ground forces (Davidson, pp. 338–340). Throughout the invasion, both sides committed crimes against combatants and noncombatants, and fellow residents even harmed Taiwanese. The republic, which did not receive international support beyond certain Qing, was defeated by the empire and dissolved less than a year after its establishment. Thousands of Japanese died from disease and accidents and, to a lesser extent, combat, whilst larger numbers of Taiwanese and Qing perished that year.
Armed resistance did not stop following the 1895 conquest. There were “rebellions” that resulted in the deaths and mutilations of Japanese armed men and civilians, including women and children (Davidson, p. 367). The military and colonial police, in turn, continued punitive raids and reprisals that sometimes involved massacres. These massacres were amongst the largest atrocities committed by Japanese forces between their 1894 Port Arthur Massacre in Northeast China and prior to the 1931 Invasion of Manchuria. One Japanese leader wrote in May 1896, that “…misfortune might have been extended to the whole village during the process.” (Matsuzaki, p. 61). Some international newspaper coverage of the 1896 rapes and slayings included: The Hongkong Weekly Press’s “EPITOME OF THE WEEK” and “THE INSURRECTION IN FORMOSA: JAPANESE ATROCITIES” (July 22 1896); The Nebraska Advertiser’s “JAPANESE AS BUTCHERS” (July 24 1896); The Sydney Morning Herald’s “ALLEGED JAPANESE ATROCITIES IN FORMOSA” (August 27 1896); Lake Wakatip Mail’s “A TALE OF HORRORS: Japanese Atrocities in Formosa” (December 4 1896); and Launceston Examiner’s “JAPANESE IN FORMOSA: CRUELTY OF THE SOLDIERS” (January 26 1897). Later sources also discussed the carnage reported by witnesses (Davidson, p. 367; Kerr, p. 29).
The Japanese placed priority on maintaining control and did not cease to encroach upon Taiwanese lands and homes, and, thus, bloodshed remained a feature of their rule in the final years of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century as reported in The Daily News’s (Perth) “REBEL SAVAGERY IN FORMOSA” (February 25 1899) and “FORMOSA: JAPANESE LOSSES” (December 17 1902), the Evening Observer’s (Brisbane) “MARTIAL LAW IN FORMOSA” (April 28 1905), and The New York Times’s “SHOCKS FOR HEAD HUNTERS” (December 8 1907). Concurrently, Japanese sources recorded floggings and the hangings of so-called Taiwanese “bandits” (Botsman, pp. 206, 212).
Further back-and-forth killings and “pacifications” were carried out later in the Meiji era and into the Taisho era (1912–1926) in response to the 1907 Beipu, 1915 Tapani, and other “incidents”, as well as the War in the Camphor Zone (1895–1915), including the Truku War (1914) (Kerr, 263). There are oral testimonies of more massacres taking place, and a Taiwanese intellectual wrote a poem then, which read, “Corpses clog the streams, valleys turn blood red.” (Katz, pp. 2, 168-170) Arrests, forced labour, and executions continued as covered in The Bendigo Independent’s “FORMOSA CONSPIRACY: SEVERE PUNISHMENT INFLICTED” (December 9 1913). Authorities also paid Indigenous Taiwanese to kill resisters, and the Japanese posed for group commemorative photographs with their heads. Japanese men had individual photographs taken as well, with their swords and body parts for the purpose of displaying their “meritorious service.” Taiwanese deaths frequently exceeded Japanese deaths in the colonial conflicts (Barclay, p. 100; Kerr, p. 30).
As Taiwan was brought more firmly under the empire’s fold into the Showa era (1926–1989), the violence went on, such as in the 1930 Musha Incident, as reported in The New York Times’s “Formosa Savages Revolt, Kill 28 Japanese; Planes and Troops Go to Quell Head Hunters” (October 29 1930); The Age’s (Melbourne) “HORRORS OF WARFARE IN FORMOSA” (October 31 1930); and The Sydney Morning Herald’s “Revolt in Formosa. Tribesmen Weakening.” (November 4 1930). The Morning Bulletin (Rockhampton) stated in “FORMOSA UNDER JAPANESE RULE” (May 29 1945) that the Japanese “…failed to win the confidence of the natives, whose deep-seated embitterment towards all foreigners is the result of centuries of ill-treatment.” The article explained, however, that there were indications of “…considerable lowering of the death rate…” from diseases as well as some economic benefits.
After the Musha Incident, Japan embroiled China and, later, the United States and other Allied Powers in the Asia–Pacific War (1931-1945). Taiwanese sent overseas died from the fighting or disease, and comfort women and girls were sex-trafficked, raped, suffered additional ill‑treatment, or died. One Taiwanese comfort woman stated:
“I was forced to receive over twenty…every day, soldiers…and officers….Some Japanese soldiers were drunk and beat us. Filled with grief and hate, I cried every night. I contracted malaria in Indonesia, had appendicitis, and my right eye was blinded by shrapnel. My abdomen was injured, and my womb removed. It was a living hell.”
The Japanese employed propaganda to play down or conceal their immoral actions and engender compliance or loyalty. There were Taiwanese who committed atrocities outside the island as well as maltreated and murdered Allied prisoners of war on it. A fair share were forced to do so, whilst some were acting on their own accord. Others fought against Japan in the war (Shirane, p. 94).
By war’s end, unknown numbers of Taiwanese had died, including those from Allied air raids. Unexploded ordnance is still being found on the island to this day. Following Japan’s surrender in 1945, the Kuomintang filled the power vacuum and retained elements of the draconian Japanese administrative structure, and the terrorisations and killings recommenced. The new occupiers had experience in suppression from the 1927 Shanghai Massacre and other murders in China, including those of Taiwanese expats alleged to be aiding the Japanese (Shirane, p. 93).
The destabilising Japanese penetration created a climate that precipitated violence against different populations in the colonial era and later post-war Taiwan. However, not all Japanese inflicted harm, and some even saved civilians. A Japanese military surgeon in 1895, for example, treated “…a woman, wounded in the body yet tenderly embracing a little child also wounded…” (Davidson, p. 330). Japanese colonial actors, as with their Kuomintang successors, brought their individual personalities and moralities to the island and were motivated by differing personal, unit, and organisational interests. Consequently, complicity in atrocities varied. The coexistence of crimes with medical and public health initiatives, amongst others, that reduced disease mortality speaks to the seemingly paradoxical nature of the occupiers’ governance, which was far from unintentional. A subjugated but simultaneously healthier and richer Taiwan Colony, simply put, made for better exploitation. While the life-saving efforts and progress in certain areas have their merits, they do not compensate for or justify murderous invasions and colonisations.
Charles R. Charrington reads and writes about state violence, amongst other topics, in Taiwan.