Taiwanese slam NHK's depiction of colonial era

When Japan Broadcasting Corp. (NHK) aired a documentary critical of Japan's colonization of Taiwan, it would almost surely have been prepared for a hair-trigger backlash by conservative political groups.

That complaints and claims of bias should come from members of Taiwan's aboriginal Paiwan tribe, however, was less predictable.

More than six months later, anger in both Japan and Taiwan over the public broadcaster's program, aired April 5, is as strong as ever.

"Japan Debut--Asia's 'first-rate' country," the first installment in a series about the country's path to World War II, was intended to cast light on discrimination against the Taiwanese population under Japan's rule, from 1895 to 1945.

The documentary examined the suppression of the anti-Japanese movement and the policy of forcing Japanese language and customs onto the local people.

Many Taiwanese reacted furiously to the program. An association of Taiwanese educated in Japanese and a group of Japanese tanka poem enthusiasts sent letters to NHK to denounce the content and demand a correction.

In Japan, members of the Liberal Democratic Party started a campaign to protest against the "anti-Japan" show.

Some 8,400 people, including the former chancellor of Takushoku University in Tokyo, Shiro Odamura, filed a lawsuit with the Tokyo District Court on June 25. They have demanded 10,000 yen each in damages for NHK's "biased" reporting. The number of plaintiffs has grown to about 10,000. The court hearings are expected to open shortly.

The Japan Congress of Journalists said the suit amounted to "intimidation and interference to freedom of expression." A civic group demanding greater transparency at NHK has also defended the broadcaster, which it said should "fulfill its responsibility as the keeper of freedom of broadcasting."

Arguably the most contentious aspect of the program was a segment called "human zoo," which examined how Japanese colonial authorities took Taiwan's aboriginal Paiwan tribe to the 1910 Japan-British Exhibition held in London.

Historians agree that there was a trend at the time in Europe to exhibit aboriginal people from colonized regions as primitive genetic curiosities.

However, descendants of the Paiwan tribespeople say NHK's criticism of Japanese authorities is implicitly demeaning toward their ancestors, because it suggests they regarded them as little more than savages.

NHK interviewed several residents in Gao Shi village, home to the Paiwan people who were taken to the exhibition. The villagers say their ancestors' role in the overseas tour was not a humiliation.

"That our ancestors contributed to spreading our culture overseas is something of which we have been proud in our village ever since," said Zhuang Lai Jin, the 50-year-old head of the village, who says his views were not reflected in the documentary.

Gao Xu Yue Mei, the 79-year-old daughter of a Paiwan man who participated in the exhibition, shed tears when shown her father's photo by the NHK interviewer.

"I am saddened," the subtitles quoted her as saying. "The gravity of this event, I cannot bring myself to talk about it."

But in an interview with The Asahi Shimbun, the woman said, "I wept because I missed my father."

According to an expert on the Paiwan language, the translation of her remarks should have been: "I don't know what to say. I don't know (about my father) well."

In the documentary, viewers can hear a man, who is her Japanese-speaking neighbor, speaking in Japanese. According to his account, the woman "cannot bring herself to talk about it" because of the seriousness of the matter.

The woman also complained that NHK did not explain the purpose of the interview. "They showed up all of a sudden and simply showed me the photo of my father."

But NHK maintains the subtitles matched her remarks, and says an NHK director had made it clear to her that her father had been an attraction in the exhibition.

Historians say that Japan took a carrot-and-stick approach toward Taiwan's aboriginal people--they treated them well as long as they were obedient, but were brutal if they resisted. This treatment sparked mixed emotions toward Japan.

According to Huang Chih-huei, a research assistant at the Institute of Ethnology of Academia Sinica, rebellion by some aboriginal tribes continued even after the Han Chinese ended their resistance to Japan's colonization.

In 1930, a Japanese police officer's assault on an Atayal tribal leader sparked the Wushe Incident, an uprising in which tribespeople killed 134 Japanese and the colonial authorities responded by massacring roughly 1,000 Atayal.

However, the Japanese rulers also took many steps to improve the welfare of the indigenous population.

Even today, many of the elderly tribespeople continue to speak Japanese and recall Japan's reign in favorable terms.

Still, there is also ambivalence toward Japan among Taiwanese who received a higher education.

Ko Teh-san, an 87-year-old former doctor who went to school with Japanese classmates, is one of them.

"In the interview, when I was asked my assessment of Japan's colonization, I said there were mixed results," said Ko, who sent a protest letter to NHK.

The documentary only showed him criticizing discrimination against Taiwanese in the education system.

He complained that NHK had edited out his comments crediting Japanese rulers with building important social infrastructure and improving educational opportunities.

The broadcaster countered that the program sufficiently reflected his answer.

Lin Man-houng, president of Academia Historica, a research institute in Taipei under the jurisdiction of the Office of the President, said that it was not appropriate to assess Japan's colonization as entirely positive or negative.

"Japan used Taiwan as a foothold for its foray into the rest of Asia, and Taiwanese were discriminated against as a second-rate people," she said.

"But it is also true that Japan invested energy into managing Taiwan and, as a result, Taiwan became a rich and stable society, compared with mainland China and other Asian countries."(IHT/Asahi: October 12,2009)