A Retrospective Perspective: On 'War Memories, Shifting Identities'

In 2024, director Lau Kek-huat completed the five-hour documentary From Island to Island, examining the Southeast Asian theatre of the Second World War. The film directly confronts the role of Taiwanese soldiers in the Japanese army as perpetrators of wartime violence, probing war memories long obscured within broader historical narratives. In contrast, Taiwan has often framed this past from a position of victimhood or colonial subjugation. The reflections prompted by From Island to Island became the catalyst for curating the 2026 TIDF programme 'Taiwan Spectrum｜War Memories, Shifting Identities'.

Historically, Taiwan underwent successive regimes under Japanese rule (1895–1945) and the Republic of China (since 1949). For Taiwanese who served in the Japanese military, the most contradictory and disorienting moment came with Japan's surrender, when they were abruptly transformed from subjects of a defeated empire into citizens of the victorious Republic of China. Soon after, some Taiwanese were recruited — or coerced — by the Nationalist government into the military and dispatched to mainland China to fight in the Chinese Civil War (1945–1950), all in the name of 'recovering the mainland and saving our compatriots'. These soldiers from Indigenous, Hoklo and Hakka communities moved 'from island to island'; as historical awareness has gradually taken shape, their stories are finally entering public view.

To understand this shift, the curatorial lens must first focus on archival images. Preserved by the Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute (TFAI), the propaganda films Leaving for the Front Line, Spiritual Mobilization (1937) and Military Drill for Student Soldiers, Shinto Matsuri (c. 1942–1945) capture the fervour of troop send-offs and student soldiers marching with rifles during the Japanese rule period. Kokumin Dojo (Civilian Training Centre) (c. 1942–1943), from the National Museum of Taiwan History, documents training rituals through which the Japanese government sought to assimilate Taiwanese subjects. This film later became a point of reference for contemporary artist Fujii Hikaru. In Mujō (The Heartless) (2019/2026), he stages young immigrants in Japan to re-enact the footage in synchrony with the original, examining, through split-screen imagery, how individuals were transformed from 'non-Japanese' into 'Japanese' within contexts of militarism and colonialism, thereby deconstructing the power structures and ideology of empire.

Another key example is the landmark work Asia Is One (1972), produced by the left-leaning, critically engaged Nihon Documentarist Union. Rather than adopting a Japan-centred imperialist perspective, the collective focused on migrant lives across island frontiers around the time of Okinawa's reversion. The journey ultimately reaches an Atayal village in Nan'ao, Taiwan, where former Takasago volunteers are encountered and Indigenous voices recount lives shaped by the three names they have been given.

Moving forward along the timeline of Taiwanese documentary, the programme reaches Hung Pei-ying’s short film A Taiwanese Teikoku Kunjin (1993). It presents invaluable first-hand testimonies from five conscripted Taiwanese soldiers who served in the Japanese military, accompanied by archival footage, and articulates a critical perspective on Japan and the war. In the 2000s, Kuo Liang-yin completed Shonenko (2006) and Suspended Duty: Taiwan Military Training Regiment (2010), exploring respectively the colonial period and the post-war Nationalist era. Through meticulous fieldwork and multilingual interviews — including Japanese, Hakka, Taiwanese Hokkien and Mandarin — these films grant participants the agency to recount their experiences in their own languages. Beyond questions of guilt or fate, the director adopts a measured, empathetic approach, subtly weaving together previously obscured narratives.

From the 2000s, the programme also includes Chen Chih-ho's Heat Sun (2008) and Tang Shiang-chu's How Long Is the Road (2009). Respectively, they focus on the reassessment of Taiwanese guards in prisoner-of-war camps once labelled as war criminals, and the fate of missing Indigenous youths sent to the Chinese mainland during the civil war. Both directors pursue long-term research and oral histories, engaging deeply with questions of identity, belonging and the helplessness of individuals in the face of historical forces. Futuru C. L. Tsai's Wings for Takasago Giyutai (2016) follows Amis artists back to the battlefields in Papua New Guinea from the Second World War, where they erect memorials to guide the spirits of fallen Takasago volunteers home, raising poignant and reflective questions about history.

Challenging dominant accounts while filling in their gaps, all these works attend to lives often omitted from grand historical narratives, becoming important records and testimonies. At the same time, documentary as a form inevitably conveys the perspectives and interpretative choices of its makers, reflecting how different eras reconsider and engage with this past.

Finally, among these works, the footage by Chang Chao-tang (1943–2024) is particularly precious. While working in television journalism, he intermittently recorded the final four years of Li Guang-hui's life (1919–1979; Amis name: Suniuo; Japanese name: Teruo Nakamura), an Amis former Japanese soldier who survived the war in isolation. These materials became a rough-cut archival assembly, Archive: Li Guang-hui (1975–1979).

Unaware of Japan's surrender at the end of the Second World War, Li held out alone in the jungles of Morotai Island in Indonesia for nearly three decades. Discovered in 1974 and returned to Taiwan the following year, he quickly became a media sensation, surrounded by a succession of official events and public receptions. The footage reveals visible imprints of political orchestration: banners carrying congratulatory slogans such as 'Li Guang-hui's self-reliance and perseverance are spiritual weapons against communism!', 'Carry forward Mr Li's indomitable spirit to eradicate the evil Communist bandits!', and 'Thirty years of unwavering endurance exemplify the finest traditions of the Chinese nation!' Reporters even noted that Li lit a Long Life brand cigarette from the 'motherland' for the first time. When the national anthem of the Republic of China was played and everyone stood to sing, it was highlighted that this was Li's first time hearing 'his own national anthem since returning to the motherland'.

Though geographically unchanged, Taiwan had become a vastly different place since Li went to war. Silent and impassive throughout, Li seemed caught in a fissure of history — an uneasy and contradictory presence. In one striking moment in 1977 footage, the legendary folk singer Chen Da improvised a song for him in Taipei's Scarecrow Restaurant, as if echoing the contours of a life shaped by displacement:

You were trapped by the hand of the state.

The investigators were serving the nation.

Now you returned to your child.

So that he no longer has to

care for his mother alone without his father.

Now your legacy remains, your fate finally known.

Returning home now

Wusu's scenery is quite charming.

Sent across the seas for the country.

Perhaps you will be

decorated with a medal by the President and the Premier.

Armed in the Hainan mountains, you survived on raw rice.

The mountain and earth gods watched over you.

Blessing you with bananas and wild boars to hunt.

We fought hard for the nation.

Thinking of his wife, he still had to go.

Through Archive: Li Guang-hui, one sees clearly how political power and ideological structures shape personal experience, identity and national consciousness. The film stands as a central metaphor within this programme. By systematically juxtaposing twelve works — from propaganda films of the Japanese rule period and observational documentaries of the 1970s, to portraits of marginalised individuals in the 1990s and 2000s, and more recent reflections on historiography — this year's Taiwan Spectrum weaves together a plural history of Taiwanese soldiers' lives, tracing a long and complex process of historical transformation.

Through this retrospective lens, contemporary viewers — equipped with greater knowledge, experience and agency — are invited to recognise the evolving and increasingly nuanced significance of this heritage for Taiwan today.

Translated by Gladys Tsa