[Better write more honestly about this.]
I looked around for myself. Idwar is half-right.
It's said that 200,000 Taiwanese volunteered to serve with the Jap
overseas forces - from 1942 onwards - & 40,000 of them died.
Koreans were also inducted, but as conscripts, in 1944 (near the
WWII end).
I disagree, though, that it automatically translates into all of
them as war criminals (instead of being, ahem, occupation
army-associates) or adopting a "superior to Chinese/Singaporeans"
attitude. There were bad apples & opportunists, no doubt, but
many of them also expressed conflicts in historical records about
subjugating fellow Hakka's or Minnan's in SE Asia (something they
didn't consider before joining up).
The actual context was that the Jap half-century colonization of
the island underwent a series of top-down assimilation phases, with
the final "Kominka" one (huangminhua in Mandarin) promoting an
elevated imperial-subject identity circa 1937 onwards. Some of the
locals - like apparently Lee Teng-hui as a kid - bought into the
superficial patriotism; others saw the wartime mobilization as an
opportunity to better their own social standing. It doesn't mean,
however, that anti-Jap Taiwanese didn't exist, or that a lot of
them continued to be employed as forced labour or as comfort
women.
idwar, you've brought up an interesting talking point but there's
no need to dress it up as flame bait.
