A history to remember
Hayashi called on Mrs. Nakamura the following day, and was given a manual from the "27th Field Operations Supply Depot" (which is where the 5th Volunteers were stationed on arrival in New Guinea). There were nine volumes in total, listing names of men already demobilized, or killed in action, or alive and back in Japan, along with the location where the casualties fell, manner of death, next of kin and address in Taiwan. The registers were also packed with closely written statements of the sums that the troops held on deposit with the military postal authority, along with each man's seal and fingerprint. (Due to the difficulty of distributing wages during wartime, the Japanese established army post offices throughout the region, and credited wages to the soldiers' accounts. During the period of inflation and fiscal constraint that followed the war, Japan stopped accepting applications for the refund of these monies, triggering a wave of litigation against the authorities.)
As he delved deeper, Hayashi located several senior officers of the 5th Volunteers and traveled to Taiwan to talk with war survivors, collecting their accounts in his book The 5th Takasago Volunteers: Register of Names, Military Savings, Japanese Testimonies. Subsequently he visited tribal communities around Taiwan and interviewed surviving members of the Volunteers, resulting in the publication of Testimonies, as well as a volume of photography entitled A History of the Rule of the Colony of Taiwan. Together, Hayashi's three volumes constitute the most comprehensive collection of resources on the history of the Takasago Volunteers.
Huang Chih-hui notes that there are still a number of unresolved matters regarding the Takasago Volunteers. To her knowledge there are no more than ten works on the topic available in Japan, largely comprising oral accounts given by surviving officers and men, and there is, as yet, no systematic approach to the subject. There is even less Chinese-language research on the Volunteers, however, with nothing available other than a handful of first-hand accounts by veterans.
The story of the Takasago Volunteers that has been pieced together from the accounts of survivors and other historical documents is that the Governor-General's Office recruited eight separate corps of Taiwan aborigines, after the attack on Pearl Harbor and during the intensification of the conflict in the Pacific, and they were sent to fight between March 1942 and 1945.
While the 1st Volunteers fought mainly in the Philippines, the following six corps saw service in various parts of the Pacific and Asia, including British New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Rabaul and Morotai. As for the 8th Volunteers, some say that they were demobilized before they could ever be sent to the front, while others claim that they did in fact sail to Borneo before returning to Taiwan. In addition to the eight corps of Takasago Volunteers, there were also other volunteers serving in the army and navy.
According to research by Huang Chih-hui, a total of 7,000-8,000 men, at a conservative estimate, were recruited for the eight corps of Takasago Volunteers and other special volunteer services, the great majority of whom died in action. (However, Hayashi Eidai and others put the combined total for the eight corps at around 4,000 men, 30% of whom survived the war.)
At present, there are no conclusive figures for the numbers of men who died, or who remain alive to this day, and much is conjecture. Huang Chih-hui believes that this most fundamental of matters should be urgently investigated and clarified by the relevant departments.
The Wushe Incident is considered one the main reasons that the Japanese decided to recruit the Takasago Volunteers. At the time of the Incident, the Japanese deployed Atayals in a punitive action against the their own tribesmen, a tragic episode which Hayashi Eidai considers a perpetual source of pain for Atayal people.