Film about Taiwanese prisoners of war in the USSR screened in Tokyo
A screening of the documentary film Memories Frozen in Time about Taiwanese soldiers who were held in Soviet prisoner-of-war camps after Japan’s surrender in 1945 took place in Tokyo, Japan, last Saturday. The film was made by director Xu Mingchun, Taipei Times reports.
The story of Wu Zhengnan
For three years, the director researched documents, visited Taiwan, Japan and Russia, and spoke with former prisoners and their families. One of the film’s protagonists was 99-year-old Wu Zhengnan, who is considered the only living former Taiwanese prisoner of war who was held in the USSR.
Wu Zhengnan was born in 1927 in Tainan Prefecture. At the age of 14, he went to study in Japan, and at 17 he joined the Japanese military. At the end of the war, he served at Sondok Airport in Korea. While awaiting repatriation to Japan, he was captured by Soviet forces and taken to a camp in Kazakhstan, where he performed forced labor for two years.
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Memory of the dead
After Japan’s surrender, the Soviet Union transported Japanese prisoners of war to Siberia and other areas for forced labor; many of them died. Wu Zhengnan was repatriated in July 1947, but because of his Japanese name and the listed address of relatives in Japan, he was sent there rather than to Taiwan. He received secondary and higher education in Japan and later settled in the country.
According to the National Human Rights Museum, during World War II, when Taiwan was under Japanese colonial rule, more than 200,000 Taiwanese joined the Japanese military. About 30,000 of them were killed or went missing. After the screening, Wu Zhengnan and Xu Mingchun discussed war memory, Taiwanese identity and the need to pass family stories on to younger generations with the audience.
Wu Zhengnan also said that he had spent decades searching in Japan for a place to commemorate Taiwanese who died during the war. The memorial was opened last summer in Yokohama.
