Published on May 12, 2019.
Drawing on an essay by Kadota Ryusho published in the March 2017 issue of Sound Argument, this piece traces Taiwan’s painful history and the extraordinary life of Sakai Teh-chang, who lived to defend the human rights of the Taiwanese people.
Through the life of a man who symbolized the bond between Japan and Taiwan, it asks what it truly means to protect Taiwan.

2019-05-12
However, what awaited Teh-chang when he returned to Tainan in order to carry through his original resolve was nothing less than the upheaval of Japan’s defeat, the advance of the Kuomintang army, and the tyranny of Chiang Kai-shek’s government.
The following is from an essay by Kadota Ryusho published in the March 2017 issue of the monthly magazine Sound Argument.
I wept in anguish.
I could not hold back my tears.
Even now, I strongly feel that the people at the reporting departments of the Asahi Shimbun and NHK, as well as the so-called cultural figures, ought to boil the dirt from the nails of Mr. Sakai Teh-chang and drink it.
Do not yield to the intimidation of the Chinese aircraft carrier.
The “justice and courage” of Sakai Teh-chang, the “bond between Japan and Taiwan”…
“A great upheaval will strike Taiwan in 2017”—since the beginning of the year, such an ominous prediction has been walking on its own.
In China, which lies behind this, developments that could even be called a miscalculation are underway, and a situation is arising in which “the waves in the Taiwan Strait are running high.”
On January 12, Mr. Trump suggested in an interview with The Wall Street Journal that he might “reconsider” the idea that both China and Taiwan belong to “One China.”
“With China, everything, including ‘One China,’ is subject to negotiation.”
This statement brought immeasurable shock and anger to China.
While there is also speculation that this was a typically calculated remark by Mr. Trump intended to gain an advantage in economic negotiations with China, it was made amid a series of developments that for China were “unthinkable,” beginning with the appointment of Peter Navarro, a University of California professor known both as the foremost expert on China issues and as a hardliner toward China, to head the newly established National Trade Council.
China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang immediately reacted fiercely, saying, “Taiwan is an inalienable part of Chinese territory, and the government of the People’s Republic of China is the only lawful government representing China. This is a fact recognized by the international community, and no one can change it.”
In step with President Tsai Ing-wen’s tour of Central America, China’s aircraft carrier Liaoning circled Taiwan as if to intimidate it, and since the beginning of the year an unsettling atmosphere has been hanging in the air.
At just such a time, Taiwan is marking the 70th anniversary of the 228 Incident on February 28.
The Tsai Ing-wen administration, which came into being last year, has positioned the 70th anniversary of the 228 Incident as a national undertaking.
This is also intended to show both at home and abroad how fundamentally incompatible the mainland and they themselves are.
Ahead of this 70th anniversary, I published the nonfiction work You Shall Die for Two Motherlands, which was released simultaneously in Japan and Taiwan.
In Japan it was published by Kadokawa Shoten, and in Taiwan by Book Republic Publishing Group.
I would like many Japanese people to know about the “228 Incident” and about the lawyer “Sakai Teh-chang (Taiwanese name: Yun Teh-chang),” who saved many Taiwanese lives in this incident and whose death anniversary has even been established as the “Day of Justice and Courage.”
That is because, if they come to know the history of suffering that Taiwan has walked through, I believe they will understand why Japan is always ranked overwhelmingly number one in favorability in Taiwan, and at the same time how, for Japan, protecting Taiwan is directly connected to protecting itself.
The “grand fiction” of international society.
When one goes to Taiwan, there is a “question” that anyone comes to hold.
To put it another way, should it perhaps be described as the “grand fiction” of international society?
In Taipei there is a stern-looking Presidential Office, the Legislative Yuan corresponding to Japan’s Diet, a Ministry of National Defense, a Ministry of Foreign Affairs… all the organs of government are there.
All of the institutions of governance as a state are fully in place, and they are in no way inferior to those of any country.
And rightly so, for until 1971 Taiwan, then the Republic of China, was one of the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council together with the United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union, now Russia.
Historically speaking, after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor brought the United States into the Second World War, the Declaration by United Nations was issued on January 1, 1942, by 26 countries.
Among them, the “Big Four” that exerted the greatest power and brought the war to completion were the United States, Britain, the Soviet Union, and the Republic of China.
In other words, the Republic of China was also one of the most important founding members of the UNITED NATIONS established after the war.
However, objecting to United Nations General Assembly Resolution 2758, the Albanian Resolution, which recognized the People’s Republic of China, hereafter “China,” as the member representing China in the UN, the Republic of China withdrew from the United Nations in 1971.
Even so, in the text of the UN Charter, the Republic of China is still listed as a “permanent member.”
That former “great power” is now called by the strange name “Chinese Taipei” even at international sporting events, and is in effect shut out from various international organizations and conferences.
In other words, in accordance with China’s claim and pressure regarding “One China,” Taiwan is not recognized as a “state.”
However, as noted earlier, Taiwan is a “state” no matter how one looks at it, and China’s rule has never once extended over it, even to this day.
One could say that Mr. Trump’s opening remark was the first time a “voice of doubt” had been raised against this “grand fiction” of international society.
It was in October 1949 that the Chinese Communist Party led by Mao Zedong declared the establishment of the People’s Republic of China.
And it was only twenty-two years later, in 1971, that it was finally able to join the United Nations.
Mao Zedong and Chiang Kai-shek—these two leaders, lifelong enemies, kept dreaming of annihilating each other, but both died one after another in the mid-1970s.
Yet that bitterness is still continuing even now.
But Mr. Trump, in his own way, raised questions about that strange “reality.”
What was the “228 Incident”?
Now let us return to the main subject, the “228 Incident.”
This incident, which broke out on February 28, 1947, was a case of repression and massacre of Taiwanese people by the Kuomintang government and military.
The total number of victims exceeded twenty thousand.
The Japanese military and Japanese people left Taiwan because of Japan’s defeat.
In their place, the Kuomintang government became Taiwan’s new ruler, and because a fierce civil war with the Communist forces had begun, Chiang Kai-shek dispatched Chen Yi to Taiwan as administrative governor to carry out rule there.
However, under half a century of Japanese rule, Taiwan had become a land boasting a level of education so high that there were hardly any comparable examples anywhere else in the world.
School attendance at 70 percent and literacy above 90 percent were both among the top levels in the international community at that time.
Yet into this came rulers from the mainland, where confusion had long continued and where school attendance and literacy were both extremely low.
When Taiwanese people saw the appearance of the Kuomintang army that entered various parts of Taiwan on Double Tenth Day, October 10, two months after the end of the war, they were astonished and disappointed.
The soldiers, wearing straw sandals or going barefoot, dressed in ragged uniforms, carrying luggage on shoulder poles, or even throwing pots and pans into nets and carrying them on their backs, appeared before the people.
Ignoring the dumbfounded Taiwanese, they mercilessly looted wealth from Taiwan, seizing food, industrial goods, agricultural products… and even machines essential for factory production, taking whatever they could and carrying it back to the mainland to sell off.
In Taiwan, which fell into a state of hunger, suicides followed one after another, and economic collapse and inflation tormented the people, until Taiwanese discontent finally exploded.
On February 27, 1947, the 228 Incident broke out after a widow selling cigarettes in Taipei was beaten by police.
Police fired on the protesting people, and on the following day, the 28th, the Monopoly Bureau in Taipei was attacked by the people, while police machine-gunned a public demonstration that had pressed toward the administrative governor’s official residence, resulting in many deaths.
Enraged people occupied Taipei Broadcasting Station and broadcast throughout the island, “Rise up. Drive out the Chinese,” and one after another popular uprisings demanding democratization spread to Taichung, Chiayi, Tainan, Kaohsiung… until all of Taiwan fell into great turmoil.
At the same time, 228 Incident Settlement Committees were formed in various places, and efforts were also made by Taiwanese themselves to maintain public order and calm the unrest.
The central figure of my book, the lawyer Sakai Teh-chang, was the person in Tainan who restrained the riots in order to avoid repression by the Kuomintang army.
Holding the position of council member, Teh-chang had already foreseen what kind of repression and persecution awaited the popular uprising.
Teh-chang became head of the security section of the Tainan 228 Incident Settlement Committee, threw himself into meetings of students who were about to rise up, and worked desperately to protect the people, even persuading them to abandon the uprising.
He also collected weapons from students who had already risen up, thereby saving their “lives.”
A life of hardship.
Teh-chang was born to a Japanese police officer father from Uto in Kumamoto Prefecture and a Taiwanese mother.
In other words, Teh-chang was both “Japanese” and at the same time “Taiwanese.”
It would be fair to say that he was a man who embodied the “bond” between Japan and Taiwan from birth.
Teh-chang grew up in Tainan Prefecture in southern Taiwan, but when he was eight years old his father Tokuzo lost his life in the police attack incident known as the “Seirai-an Incident.”
Raised by his Taiwanese mother alone, Teh-chang displayed outstanding intelligence even amid poverty.
After enduring many hardships, he became a police officer and rose steadily through the ranks.
However, he gradually became disillusioned with the reality of discrimination against Taiwanese, and although he had risen to the rank of assistant police inspector as the only islander, that is, Taiwanese, to do so, he resigned from the police.
“I will become a lawyer in order to eliminate discrimination and protect the human rights of Taiwanese people.”
Relying on Sakai Matazo, his father’s younger brother, Teh-chang went up to the imperial capital Tokyo with his wife and son and took on the Higher Civil Service Examination, then Japan’s most difficult national examination.
After becoming Matazo’s adopted son, Teh-chang, despite having only an elementary school education, pursued simultaneously the studies for three examinations: the special qualification examination, the preliminary examination, and the final examination.
Then, as an auditing student at Chuo University Faculty of Law, in October 1941 he finally passed the Higher Civil Service Judicial Examination, the equivalent of today’s bar examination.
The ferocity of his studies was so extreme, day and night, winter and summer alike, that it was almost a wonder he did not destroy his health.
What supported him was the fierce determination that, no matter what, human rights had to be established in Taiwan.
However, what awaited Teh-chang when he returned to Tainan in order to carry through his original resolve was nothing less than the upheaval of Japan’s defeat, the advance of the Kuomintang army, and the tyranny of Chiang Kai-shek’s government.
And it was the 228 Incident that Teh-chang, rushing about as a lawyer to protect the human rights of Taiwanese people, encountered.