Hardships of the Taiwanese Immigrants Who Pioneered the Yaeyama Islands
Mr. Nagamasa Shimada
Birth year：1944
Birth place：Ishigaki City
Immigrating from Taiwan with family
I was born in Ohara on Iriomote Island, raised in Takeda on Ishigaki Island, and have always lived in Takeda. My father, Ryo Kenpuku (Chien-Fu Liao), immigrated to Ishigaki Island from Taichung, Taiwan in 1937. He said he came to Ishigaki alone at first, but he was soon on his feet and sent for his family to join him on the island. When the war began they evacuated to Iriomote Island, and I was born. Then, right after the war, we returned to Ishigaki in Nagura where Ishigakijima Sugar Manufacturing Company is now. My father quickly increased his yield of sweet potatoes because, with the war over and everyone coming back, there would be a food shortage. My father said he earned a lot of money that way.
The pineapple industry in Ishigaki Island
He used that money to start cultivating pineapples and built a pineapple cannery. There were always several live-in workers in my house, and around twenty people would sit at a long table and all eat together. My father had a reason for building a pineapple cannery on Ishigaki Island. In 1935, a company called Daido Takushoku was built using Taiwanese funds. The person in charge of the company, Mr. Lin Patsu (Fa Lin), recruited laborers in Taiwan on the condition that they would work in agriculture and immigrated with them to Ishigaki. Most of those people were unable to read or write. My father had received a Japanese education in Taiwan, which he said was seen as useful at the pineapple cannery. He soon had an easy life and could send for his family to come from Taiwan.
Crisis in the pineapple industry
My father started working in the pineapple industry in 1935 and was already canning pineapples in 1938. But in 1941, pineapple production was banned by the Japanese military. People were told not to produce pineapples because they were a luxury item. After that, there wasn’t enough metal for canning, so the factory, unable to supply cans, was used as a barracks by the Imperial Japanese Army. That’s why the Taiwanese started producing bananas, peanuts, and tea. Because the Taiwanese leaders of agriculture would not give up their pineapples, seeds of the forbidden fruit were reportedly hidden in the mountains so they wouldn’t run out. My father returned to Ishigaki from Iriomote Island immediately after the war in order to cultivate those pineapples. Before my father evacuated to Iriomote Island, he was commissioned to improve the soil there to prepare it for agricultural production. To do that, he traveled throughout Iriomote with three water buffalo in tow. He wanted to take one of the water buffalo to Ishigaki at any cost soon after the war, so he handed over the other two to a ship owner in exchange for the first one’s passage on a ship. He used that water buffalo to start farming sweet potatoes in Nagura.
Taiwanese expulsion movement
Water buffalo were brought from Taiwan around 1935. My father said the people in Ishigaki were afraid the Taiwanese people using water buffalo to farm would take overall the island’s arable land if left alone. The boycott on water buffalo began around 1937. Water buffalo brought from Taiwan were not allowed on shore, with the cited reason being that they had not undergone quarantine. The water buffalo and pineapples were under attack by the people of the island, and there was also a movement to expel the Taiwanese. Because of that historical background, the government of the islands in Yaeyama District adopted a policy to remove the Taiwanese from the fertile land that was so well suited for farming when the Taiwanese were cut off as foreigners after Japan lost the war in 1945. A policy was adopted to confine the Taiwanese to an area afflicted by rampant malaria, and my father took the lead in participating in that policy and relocating. He did it because, although he had lived as a Japanese person up to that point, the Japanese loss in the war meant that his family had become foreigners, losing their citizenship and right to vote. If they worked in the land as tenant farmers, they would have neither citizenship nor property in the future. But the land in nearby Takeda belonged to Ishigaki City, so if they leased and could buy the city’s land, the property would be their own. Thinking that was preferable, my father took initiative to explain that to the Taiwanese, finding people who wanted to go, and moved to Takeda.
Winning against malaria
I don’t think I heard of any Taiwanese people who died of malaria. There is a sad history of people from Ishigaki being evacuated to cities near Takeda, like Shiramizu, for several months during the war, and so many people died. Almost no Taiwanese people died of malaria. I think it was a difference in food. The Taiwanese were especially good at getting sources of protein. They raised livestock like pigs and chickens while farming and used them for protein. They also caught eels and soft-shelled turtles in the rivers and set traps for wild boar. The island had plenty of these types of protein sources in those days, but the locals didn’t really seek them out. I believe the contrast in food culture made the Taiwanese people’s and island people’s resistance to malaria completely different. My family managed a pineapple farm and pineapple cannery, so there were always live-in workers. The people who came from Ishigaki or Miyako Island contracted malaria. Around that time, the authorities were promoting the eradication of malaria. Up until we were in junior high school, projects to eradicate the disease were being carried out in many forms with the help of the United States military. Medicine was given out, the pesticide DDT was sprayed, and the rivers where mosquitoes originated were sterilized. Red flags were raised in places that had malaria patients, letting people know that malaria patients were inside. The malaria flag was often raised at my house. After a certain period of no symptoms, the people with the disease would break out in shivers. No one died of malaria then, but people who came to the afflicted area from other places were more susceptible.
Post-war revival and colonists
Taiwanese people started cultivating new land in Nagura around 1935. It was the Taiwanese who created paddy fields and built the embankments in the neighborhood. Though they all toiled together to improve the land for agricultural production, they went back to Taiwan in 1944. In other words, the Taiwanese left the land they had prepared for farming for almost ten years. The Taiwanese were unable to return, so “immigrant” Japanese from elsewhere came to Nagura’s empty fields. Nagura was fine farmland cleared by the Taiwanese. People settled there because it had cash crops like pineapple and sugarcane. Most of the Nagura settlers were from Miyako, followed by people coming from Okinawa Island, then various places like Yonaguni Island. It was the same in our schools, and it felt like from early elementary school, transfer students arrived every day. Some transfer students stayed until graduation, but a great many of our classmates left along the way. There were people who, came to Nagura with their families, built shacks, and tried to start working, but ended up going elsewhere because the lifestyle here didn’t suit them. In those days, there were also children sold to Itoman.
The elementary school started up in Nagura (Takeda) at the end of the war, and within five to six years, the student body swelled to 300 students. There weren’t nearly enough textbooks or classrooms. And so once or twice a year, parents would gather to build shanties for schoolhouses and dig wells. The school we attended from late elementary school through junior high school had a big farm, so we spent several hours a week working in the sugarcane fields on the school plantation. We worked since we were told we were growing sugarcane so the school could buy a piano.
Many settlers came to the east and north of Ishigaki Island from the late 1940s to early 1950s. Those people wanted to grow pineapples, but they had no money for saplings. My father had increased his pineapple yield and had lots of saplings at the time. As a junior high school student, I didn’t go out to play during summer vacation. Instead, I counted saplings every day, from morning till night, and handed them to farmers. My father lent saplings to people who had no money, and if he got saplings back after the harvest, he lent them to the next grower. Because he did that sort of thing, no cash came into our house.
In 1950, integrating four pineapple canneries, including Mr. Fa Lin’s and ours, we built a large company called Ryukyu Canned Foods. With that plan in place, my father had people grow pineapples, and then promised to buy all produce. My father was the company’s factory manager and also grew pineapples himself. He built a 250-square-meter house, which cost 1.2 million yen (Type B military yen) at the time. He planned to rely on his pineapple money to build the house, but the factories couldn’t process the drastic increased yield of pineapples, and many were left to rot. From my father’s standpoint as a factory manager, he couldn’t buy his own pineapples first. So, he let his own pineapples rot and threw them all away. Since he had no money from his saplings or pineapples, my house ultimately fell into rapid ruin after that.
Time as a stateless person
Our citizenship was tossed about carelessly. My father immigrated to Ishigaki Island before the war as a Japanese national. Then Japan was defeated, and he became a foreigner and thus lost his citizenship. After that, we carried our little residence permit cards on us all the time. I entered high school, and as a first-year, I was often selected to make a presentation for the agricultural club outside of the prefecture. But I had no passport, so I was never sent. I was born in Yaeyama and was Japanese at birth, but the Treaty of San Francisco came into effect and made me non-Japanese. Even though I had graduated from the agriculture and forestry high school, I had to farm because my father’s property had been seized. I didn’t have Japanese citizenship, so I couldn’t borrow government funds, and I couldn’t use any public loans. Then there was the problem of marriage. If I married a Japanese woman, I was extremely worried and distressed that any child who was born would be illegitimate. My father had received a Japanese education before the war and was pro-Japanese. He thought his children would not be going back to Taiwan, so his number-one goal was to get them naturalized as soon as possible. There was a branch of the Ministry of Justice in Naha. My father argued back and forth with them about the naturalization documents, but it wasn’t until my second year in high school that they were accepted. And there were only five families who applied for naturalization. We were told that, we would have to get a certificate from Taiwan proving that we relinquished our citizenship, but we were bornin Yaeyama, so we had no Taiwanese family register and had no way to get the certificate. My father persisted saying, “We came to Japan as Japanese people before the war, then Japan lost and our citizenship was arbitrarily up in the air. So, accept this application as if we were stateless.” And our application for naturalization was accepted. However, my father told us,“I’m old, so I’ll die without naturalizing. But you all should get naturalized. He listed my oldest brother as head of the family and submitted the application for naturalization. He submitted applications for all of us, but the naturalization applications for me, my younger sister, and my three younger brothers were rejected. If my father had been listed as head of the family, all us would have been able to naturalize, but those of us who were minors couldn’t naturalize because my brother was head of the family. When I turned 20, I applied for naturalization right away and got it approved in a year. My child was born in September of that year, but my naturalization was recognized in July just before the approval. If my naturalization hadn’t been approved, my child would have been born illegitimate.
Post-war as a Taiwanese colonist
Anyway, there were a lot of issues. The Japanese were considered first-class citizens, Okinawans as second-class and Taiwanese as third-class. We struggled considerably before, during, and after the war. The Taiwanese people brought the pineapple industry to Japan, but both the pineapple industry and water buffalo were once boycotted. There was nothing good about living as a Taiwanese at the time. However, we still love this island and live here. This island provided satisfying work, had an asset in that alone, and laid the foundation for success. I think that we faced more hardships than the local people, but I’m very glad and grateful there was a reward for our pains.
A message for young people
After the war, we grew pineapples in Takeda and even grew mangoes. If we were to transplant the plentiful fruits of Taiwan to Ishigaki Island, we could create a land full of fruit trees. That is why the land in Yaeyama is an extremely valuable resource. I don’t feel any bit of appreciation from today’s government towards agriculture. Today’s society seems to be telling us having the power to deter attacks leads to peace. But I believe getting along with people is more important than threatening them to preserve peace. What the world needs now is an age of more sharing, not struggle. Can’t we make the world more peaceful not through deterrence but through a bit more harmonious diplomacy? That is what I would like young people to understand.
Mr. Nagamasa Shimada’s father, Ryo Kenpuku, immigrated to Yaeyama pre-war from Taichung in Taiwan and created the foundation for the pineapple industry. As a descendent of Taiwanese immigrants, born in Ishigaki Island, Mr. Shimada was able to receive Japanese citizenship after struggling through statelessness. Since then, Mr. Shimada has adopted advanced farming techniques through Taiwanese connections and worked towards the development of Yaeyama’s fruit cultivation.
Immigrating from Taiwan with family
I was born in Ohara on Iriomote Island, raised in Takeda on Ishigaki Island, and have always lived in Takeda. My father, Ryo Kenpuku (Chien-Fu Liao), immigrated to Ishigaki Island from Taichung, Taiwan in 1937. He said he came to Ishigaki alone at first, but he was soon on his feet and sent for his family to join him on the island. When the war began they evacuated to Iriomote Island, and I was born. Then, right after the war, we returned to Ishigaki in Nagura where Ishigakijima Sugar Manufacturing Company is now. My father quickly increased his yield of sweet potatoes because, with the war over and everyone coming back, there would be a food shortage. My father said he earned a lot of money that way.
The pineapple industry in Ishigaki Island
He used that money to start cultivating pineapples and built a pineapple cannery. There were always several live-in workers in my house, and around twenty people would sit at a long table and all eat together. My father had a reason for building a pineapple cannery on Ishigaki Island. In 1935, a company called Daido Takushoku was built using Taiwanese funds. The person in charge of the company, Mr. Lin Patsu (Fa Lin), recruited laborers in Taiwan on the condition that they would work in agriculture and immigrated with them to Ishigaki. Most of those people were unable to read or write. My father had received a Japanese education in Taiwan, which he said was seen as useful at the pineapple cannery. He soon had an easy life and could send for his family to come from Taiwan.
Crisis in the pineapple industry
My father started working in the pineapple industry in 1935 and was already canning pineapples in 1938. But in 1941, pineapple production was banned by the Japanese military. People were told not to produce pineapples because they were a luxury item. After that, there wasn’t enough metal for canning, so the factory, unable to supply cans, was used as a barracks by the Imperial Japanese Army. That’s why the Taiwanese started producing bananas, peanuts, and tea. Because the Taiwanese leaders of agriculture would not give up their pineapples, seeds of the forbidden fruit were reportedly hidden in the mountains so they wouldn’t run out. My father returned to Ishigaki from Iriomote Island immediately after the war in order to cultivate those pineapples. Before my father evacuated to Iriomote Island, he was commissioned to improve the soil there to prepare it for agricultural production. To do that, he traveled throughout Iriomote with three water buffalo in tow. He wanted to take one of the water buffalo to Ishigaki at any cost soon after the war, so he handed over the other two to a ship owner in exchange for the first one’s passage on a ship. He used that water buffalo to start farming sweet potatoes in Nagura.
Taiwanese expulsion movement
Water buffalo were brought from Taiwan around 1935. My father said the people in Ishigaki were afraid the Taiwanese people using water buffalo to farm would take overall the island’s arable land if left alone. The boycott on water buffalo began around 1937. Water buffalo brought from Taiwan were not allowed on shore, with the cited reason being that they had not undergone quarantine. The water buffalo and pineapples were under attack by the people of the island, and there was also a movement to expel the Taiwanese. Because of that historical background, the government of the islands in Yaeyama District adopted a policy to remove the Taiwanese from the fertile land that was so well suited for farming when the Taiwanese were cut off as foreigners after Japan lost the war in 1945. A policy was adopted to confine the Taiwanese to an area afflicted by rampant malaria, and my father took the lead in participating in that policy and relocating. He did it because, although he had lived as a Japanese person up to that point, the Japanese loss in the war meant that his family had become foreigners, losing their citizenship and right to vote. If they worked in the land as tenant farmers, they would have neither citizenship nor property in the future. But the land in nearby Takeda belonged to Ishigaki City, so if they leased and could buy the city’s land, the property would be their own. Thinking that was preferable, my father took initiative to explain that to the Taiwanese, finding people who wanted to go, and moved to Takeda.
Winning against malaria
I don’t think I heard of any Taiwanese people who died of malaria. There is a sad history of people from Ishigaki being evacuated to cities near Takeda, like Shiramizu, for several months during the war, and so many people died. Almost no Taiwanese people died of malaria. I think it was a difference in food. The Taiwanese were especially good at getting sources of protein. They raised livestock like pigs and chickens while farming and used them for protein. They also caught eels and soft-shelled turtles in the rivers and set traps for wild boar. The island had plenty of these types of protein sources in those days, but the locals didn’t really seek them out. I believe the contrast in food culture made the Taiwanese people’s and island people’s resistance to malaria completely different. My family managed a pineapple farm and pineapple cannery, so there were always live-in workers. The people who came from Ishigaki or Miyako Island contracted malaria. Around that time, the authorities were promoting the eradication of malaria. Up until we were in junior high school, projects to eradicate the disease were being carried out in many forms with the help of the United States military. Medicine was given out, the pesticide DDT was sprayed, and the rivers where mosquitoes originated were sterilized. Red flags were raised in places that had malaria patients, letting people know that malaria patients were inside. The malaria flag was often raised at my house. After a certain period of no symptoms, the people with the disease would break out in shivers. No one died of malaria then, but people who came to the afflicted area from other places were more susceptible.
Post-war revival and colonists
Taiwanese people started cultivating new land in Nagura around 1935. It was the Taiwanese who created paddy fields and built the embankments in the neighborhood. Though they all toiled together to improve the land for agricultural production, they went back to Taiwan in 1944. In other words, the Taiwanese left the land they had prepared for farming for almost ten years. The Taiwanese were unable to return, so “immigrant” Japanese from elsewhere came to Nagura’s empty fields. Nagura was fine farmland cleared by the Taiwanese. People settled there because it had cash crops like pineapple and sugarcane. Most of the Nagura settlers were from Miyako, followed by people coming from Okinawa Island, then various places like Yonaguni Island. It was the same in our schools, and it felt like from early elementary school, transfer students arrived every day. Some transfer students stayed until graduation, but a great many of our classmates left along the way. There were people who, came to Nagura with their families, built shacks, and tried to start working, but ended up going elsewhere because the lifestyle here didn’t suit them. In those days, there were also children sold to Itoman.
The elementary school started up in Nagura (Takeda) at the end of the war, and within five to six years, the student body swelled to 300 students. There weren’t nearly enough textbooks or classrooms. And so once or twice a year, parents would gather to build shanties for schoolhouses and dig wells. The school we attended from late elementary school through junior high school had a big farm, so we spent several hours a week working in the sugarcane fields on the school plantation. We worked since we were told we were growing sugarcane so the school could buy a piano.
Many settlers came to the east and north of Ishigaki Island from the late 1940s to early 1950s. Those people wanted to grow pineapples, but they had no money for saplings. My father had increased his pineapple yield and had lots of saplings at the time. As a junior high school student, I didn’t go out to play during summer vacation. Instead, I counted saplings every day, from morning till night, and handed them to farmers. My father lent saplings to people who had no money, and if he got saplings back after the harvest, he lent them to the next grower. Because he did that sort of thing, no cash came into our house.
In 1950, integrating four pineapple canneries, including Mr. Fa Lin’s and ours, we built a large company called Ryukyu Canned Foods. With that plan in place, my father had people grow pineapples, and then promised to buy all produce. My father was the company’s factory manager and also grew pineapples himself. He built a 250-square-meter house, which cost 1.2 million yen (Type B military yen) at the time. He planned to rely on his pineapple money to build the house, but the factories couldn’t process the drastic increased yield of pineapples, and many were left to rot. From my father’s standpoint as a factory manager, he couldn’t buy his own pineapples first. So, he let his own pineapples rot and threw them all away. Since he had no money from his saplings or pineapples, my house ultimately fell into rapid ruin after that.
Time as a stateless person
Our citizenship was tossed about carelessly. My father immigrated to Ishigaki Island before the war as a Japanese national. Then Japan was defeated, and he became a foreigner and thus lost his citizenship. After that, we carried our little residence permit cards on us all the time. I entered high school, and as a first-year, I was often selected to make a presentation for the agricultural club outside of the prefecture. But I had no passport, so I was never sent. I was born in Yaeyama and was Japanese at birth, but the Treaty of San Francisco came into effect and made me non-Japanese. Even though I had graduated from the agriculture and forestry high school, I had to farm because my father’s property had been seized. I didn’t have Japanese citizenship, so I couldn’t borrow government funds, and I couldn’t use any public loans. Then there was the problem of marriage. If I married a Japanese woman, I was extremely worried and distressed that any child who was born would be illegitimate. My father had received a Japanese education before the war and was pro-Japanese. He thought his children would not be going back to Taiwan, so his number-one goal was to get them naturalized as soon as possible. There was a branch of the Ministry of Justice in Naha. My father argued back and forth with them about the naturalization documents, but it wasn’t until my second year in high school that they were accepted. And there were only five families who applied for naturalization. We were told that, we would have to get a certificate from Taiwan proving that we relinquished our citizenship, but we were bornin Yaeyama, so we had no Taiwanese family register and had no way to get the certificate. My father persisted saying, “We came to Japan as Japanese people before the war, then Japan lost and our citizenship was arbitrarily up in the air. So, accept this application as if we were stateless.” And our application for naturalization was accepted. However, my father told us,“I’m old, so I’ll die without naturalizing. But you all should get naturalized. He listed my oldest brother as head of the family and submitted the application for naturalization. He submitted applications for all of us, but the naturalization applications for me, my younger sister, and my three younger brothers were rejected. If my father had been listed as head of the family, all us would have been able to naturalize, but those of us who were minors couldn’t naturalize because my brother was head of the family. When I turned 20, I applied for naturalization right away and got it approved in a year. My child was born in September of that year, but my naturalization was recognized in July just before the approval. If my naturalization hadn’t been approved, my child would have been born illegitimate.
Post-war as a Taiwanese colonist
Anyway, there were a lot of issues. The Japanese were considered first-class citizens, Okinawans as second-class and Taiwanese as third-class. We struggled considerably before, during, and after the war. The Taiwanese people brought the pineapple industry to Japan, but both the pineapple industry and water buffalo were once boycotted. There was nothing good about living as a Taiwanese at the time. However, we still love this island and live here. This island provided satisfying work, had an asset in that alone, and laid the foundation for success. I think that we faced more hardships than the local people, but I’m very glad and grateful there was a reward for our pains.
A message for young people
After the war, we grew pineapples in Takeda and even grew mangoes. If we were to transplant the plentiful fruits of Taiwan to Ishigaki Island, we could create a land full of fruit trees. That is why the land in Yaeyama is an extremely valuable resource. I don’t feel any bit of appreciation from today’s government towards agriculture. Today’s society seems to be telling us having the power to deter attacks leads to peace. But I believe getting along with people is more important than threatening them to preserve peace. What the world needs now is an age of more sharing, not struggle. Can’t we make the world more peaceful not through deterrence but through a bit more harmonious diplomacy? That is what I would like young people to understand.
Mr. Nagamasa Shimada’s father, Ryo Kenpuku, immigrated to Yaeyama pre-war from Taichung in Taiwan and created the foundation for the pineapple industry. As a descendent of Taiwanese immigrants, born in Ishigaki Island, Mr. Shimada was able to receive Japanese citizenship after struggling through statelessness. Since then, Mr. Shimada has adopted advanced farming techniques through Taiwanese connections and worked towards the development of Yaeyama’s fruit cultivation.