大象传媒

This story was submitted to the peoples war site by Ainsley Jacobs (a voulunteer of CSV) on behalf of Kevin Liu and has been added to the site by his permission. The author fully understands the sites tems and conditions

This is a ww2 story from East Asia regarding Japan and Taiwanese resistance. The Japanese military had authority over Taiwan for around 50 years. During WW2 there was a separate ww2 resistance in Taiwan against the Japanese that lasted for 8 years from 1937 to 1945. During this the Japanese military authorities enforced that the Taiwanese families changed their names into Japanese. This led to the Japanese ordering that their new Japanese name was on a plaque hung on their doors. When the Japanese were defeated there was a flooding of people to the local registry offices in Taiwan to change the names back so that they would not be mistaken as Japanese by the Americans. This led to lots of confusion as the Taiwanese had to explain to the Americans that they had nothing to do with the Japanese army. Kevin Liu鈥檚 Grandmother Sun Shi Jun was one of these people and she was given lots of paper work to complete in order to get her real Chinese name back. The whole process could have taken months, however she amongst many of her neighbours actually took the plaques down to show defiance to Japanese rule. This created local tension as some people liked the Japanese ruling and some did not. Nevertheless, officially anything do with Japan was seen as a taboo including Japanese songs, literature, food and movies. She still lives in Taiwan in the same neighbourhood which still feels very anti Japanese.

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