Green Jail | National 228 Memorial Museum
Films screened
Green Jail
The Iriomote coal mine, once known as the "green jail", is now overgrown and silent. Before the war, Iriomote Island on the edge of Okinawa was a notoriously harsh mining island under imperial Japan, where miners from Kyushu, Okinawa and the colonies of Taiwan and Korea lived under severe control on a tropical island. Hashima Yoshiko, born in Shiaokeelung (today's Sanzhi, New Taipei), was brought to the island at ten by an adoptive father who worked as a labour recruiter. Now past ninety, she keeps these secrets alone, and keeps her adoptive parents' graves. What happened inside the mine? Her adoptive father, Yang Tianfu, brought countless Taiwanese miners to the "green jail" — what part did he play in this murky history? Filming the last years of her life, in her solitude and her monologues, the film finds a memory from an age of collective madness that she does not wish to revisit, and a grief for a past that cannot be undone.