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Convenor Vienna Center for Taiwan Studies, University of Vienna
Institut für Ostasienwissenschaften/Sinologie
Wiener Zentrum für Taiwanstudien
https://ufind.univie.ac.at/en/person.html?id=33696
https://vcts.univie.ac.at/

This talk is based on numerous visits and interviews with the Ama Museum staff and discusses which picture of the former ‘comfort women’ the museum and the NGO behind the Ama Museum, the Taipei Women’s Rescue Foundation (TWRF), paint. Which primary aims does the Museum have, and do visitors agree and accept? After the last known Taiwanese ‘comfort woman’ passed away, former methods to memorize publicly like court proceedures in Japan, the visits of Japanese supporters to ‘comfort women’ in Taiwan, regular demonstrations with former ‘comfort women’ in front of the Japanese Representative Office in Taipei or a film with ‘comfort women’ (Song of the Reed, 2019) are no longer feasible. However, the issue has to be established as an eternal part of Taiwanese human rights debates.

Questionnaire(ODT, OpenDocument)
Questionnaire(DOCX)

School of History, Politics & International Relations, Leicester University
Chinese Urban History
PGR Director, College of Social Sciences Arts, Humanities
https://le.ac.uk/people/toby-lincoln

The history of the immediate post-war period in China is dominated by the linked narratives of the Communist Revolution and the Civil War. This means that the way China recovered from and began to come to terms with the trauma of WW2 remains unexplored. Here, I review briefly what the history of the post-war period from other societies in Europe, Japan, the USSR, and Taiwan may offer to scholars seeking to explore the legacies of WW2 in China. In doing so, I argue that despite diverging politically from many other parts of the world, the post-war experience in China should be written into the global story of how the world recovered from the most devastating war humanity has perpetrated on itself.

Handa Chair of Japanese-Chinese Relations
Asian Studies, The University of Edinburgh
Professor Aaron William Moore | The University of Edinburgh

Casual observers of life-writing from the war years, in particular, often create hierarchies of reliability according to time period and genre. Wartime diaries are more reliable than postwar memoirs, and memoirs are more reliable than later oral histories, but in my previous publications, I have tried to disrupt these assumptions and focus more attention to the possibilities and limitations presented by genre. Reflecting on my 2011 Modern Asian Studies publication, ‘The Problem of Changing Language Communities’, in this paper I will discuss some of the memoirs written by veterans of WWII, as well as summarising how they relate to wartime diary writing. In addition to this, I hope to show how historical memory continues to shape conversations about the war years, by setting topics and concerns for later writers. Diaries, memoirs, and oral histories do not exist in distinction with one another, but on a continuum of perspectives about the past that overall reveal the paucity of language when relating historical experience.

Ph.D. Museum Studies, Leicester University

I am Wen-Yi Liu, graduated as a PhD in the School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester in July 2022. My research focuses on dark/negative histories and heritage sites in Taiwan; the historical periods are mainly concentrated on Japanese colonial period (1895 – 1945 A.D.) and the White Terror (1949 – around 1987). In my thesis, I also discuss the difference between the terms ‘dark’ and ‘negative’ regarding heritage.

In this talk, two heritage sites in Taiwan are examined, revealing visitors’ reactions and the historical backgrounds that result in such expressions. The two heritage sites are Chia-Yi Old Prison, which was erected when Taiwan was colonised by the Japanese government, and Jing-Mei Memorial Park, which performed as a detention centre and prison in the White Terror period. These two historical periods cover the beginning, the end of WWII and great transitions of governments/policies/systems/ideologies and so on; the crash of different ideologies and the harsh situation of civil war in mainland China had caused various chaos and conflicts in Taiwan. The transition period and the profound legacies have largely influenced current Taiwanese people’s impressions on and attitudes to the past and different groups of people, and the repairing process is still in progress.