Fireproof Moth: A Missionary in Taiwan's White Terror

by Milo Thornberry

  One person who might have known was Yén Yen Gen-ch’ang, head of the printer’s’ union and with whom Abe left the “gift” for us, but Yén had Yen died three years agobefore. As we talked, Peter suggested that one man might know: Munakata Takayuki. He was on the Japanese staff for WUFI (World United Formosans for Independence) staff who and worked with us to get Peter out of the country. Since I speak no Japanese and Munakata speaks no English, I had not considered asking him, even when I met him in Taiwan in 2003 and in 2008. Peter agreed that if the WUFI was involved in such a plan, Munakata would likely know. I made up a list of questions that Peter translated into Japanese and faxed to Munakata.

  Peter didn’t hear from Munakata until June 4. He translated Munakata’s letter and sent it to me. The words were on the screen in front of me, but my mind refused to process what Peter had written. Munakata wrote that he and Peter had hatched the plan. Munakata quoted a letter from Peter dated December 10, 1970, saying, “Please just say give the chemical to Tony through Japanese friend, the details I have already told you.” Concerned about moles in the WUFI, the project was known only to Peng and Munakata.

  Munakata confirmed details of sending the potassium chlorate by a courier named Abe. Abe arrived in Taiwan February 16, 1971, and met with Yen Mr. Yén at his home. According to Munakata, Abe had no idea what was in the cake, but he did knowknew that inside was a sealed letter on very thin paper. The letter had a short paragraph in English for me that read,

  “This package is for Tony from Peter’s Japanese friend; please keep it until Tony needs it.”

  The rest of the letter was in Japanese and addressed to Tony:

  “This is potassium chlorate, needs sulfuric acid to make explosives. Can you get sulfuric acid? If not, we can bring it in. We will tell you how to make it later. If you need anything else, tell us through Peter or contact us directly.

  ”

  The letter was signed, “Munakata.”

  Munakata said he had no idea who “Tony” was, only that he was someone who had Peter’s complete trust. Munakata told Abe that if he was in danger of being arrested, he should burn the letter or swallow it.

  Abe told Mr. Yén Yen that he had a gift for “Thornberry.” Yen tried to arrange a meeting with me, but because I was unavailable he invited Judith to have lunch and pick up the gift. Yen Mr. Yén had breakfast with Abe at his hotel on the morning of the February 18th and asked him to come for lunch with Judith. Abe was arrested at ten o’clock10:00 am that morning. When he was interrogated, the officer told him that both Yen Mr. Yén and I had been there and confessed. They gave Abe a knife and had him cut the cake. A substance that looked like sugar poured out. Abe said he didn’t know what the substance was. The officer asked him if he had read the letter that was with the cake. Abe said, “The letter was sealed, so I did not read it.,” to which theThe officer replied, “It is explosives.”

  Munakata confirmed that Abe was released on Wednesday, March 3 (while we were under house arrest) and sent back to Japan. The “explosives” was a chemical easily available at any drug store in Japan, so the Japanese authorities decided that Abe had not broken any Japanese law. They took his statement and filed it.

  At the end of the translation of Munakata’s letter, Peter added this note:

  Could you imagine my shock and surprise to discover that I myself was actually one of the culprits! I draw total blank and have not a faintest recollection of what Munakata is talking about. But since he said so, it must be so, and I owe you infinite apologies for what happened to you and Judy.

  There has been voluminous correspondence between me and Munakata before and after my escape in 1970. All of them are kept in Japan and in Portland. I will search through them when I get back to Portland.

  I am trying to recall what the thinking of mine and others who were involved in the independence movement was at that time. It is true at that time there was unanimous consensus that some kind of violent incidents must happen to shake up the Taiwanese people and KMT to prove that not everything is alright in Taiwan.

  Though unbelievable as it may sound, it is quite possible that I was involved in some kind of violent plot. It is hard to explain the mentality or feelings of those who were fighting, at risk of their freedom or life, against the KMT of that time and their hatred of the regime.

  As I said I have absolutely no recollection of this matter, but it must be the truth Munakata is telling. After I go through those correspondences of 40 years ago, I hope I can give you more details of the “plot”.

  Again please forgive me for all the trouble inflected on you and Judy.

  After receiving Munakata’s letter, Peter reviewed the correspondence and found that he had written as what Munakata said.

  The revelation in Munakata’s letter was a complete surprise to me, but and apparently no less of one to Peter. A voice within me, perhaps the voice of a child, cried out in hurt and anger that because I was had not been consulted about my willingness to participate in such a plan. That voice also cries out in protest that because Tony, who was also not consulted, suffered in ways that scarred his body and spirit for the rest of his life.

  Overshadowing the question of why I was not asked about my willingness to participate was a larger one. What would I have said had I been asked? Would I have been a willing to pass on materials that someone else could use to make explosives? I had always been clear that I would not be party to violence that would cause innocent people to suffer. But if Peter, the person I trusted more than any other about the reality in Taiwan, had asked me, it would be disingenuous for me to say that I know I would have refused. After all these years, there is no way to know what I would have said.

  But there was never a question about forgiving my old friend. Peter didn’t have to contact Munakata for me,; and he certainly could have edited Munakata’s response knowing I would never know the difference. But Peter did contacted him as I requested; he faithfully translated Munakata’s answers to my questions; he verified them by searching through his own letters; and after we learned what happened, he insisted that I write the truth. In advancing age, I find others’ memory lapses more understandable, and certainly forgivable. Peter’s acknowledgement of responsibility upon hearing from Munakata, whose account he trusted even before he verified the account in his own correspondence, was the responseevidence of the great man he is.

  On March 27, 1964, I was in Boston preparing to go to Taiwan. I had read the story of the murder of Catherine (“Kitty”) Genovese two weeks earlier outside her home in Queens, New York.[30] The reason a murder in New York was news in Boston was that she had been stabbed repeatedly over afor thirty minutes period while she, had screamed for help. and She had been heard by many of her neighbors, but only after the killer had left in his car and returned ten minutes later to finish the job, did one person call the police. It became a national story of shame for those who heard and did done nothing. The “bystander effect” or the “Genovese syndrome” became the names for the social psychological phenomenon where in which individuals do not offer help in an emergency situation when other people are present.

  New to the urban northeast, it was easy for me to blame the neighbors in Queens; but my own conscience warned, they could be me. I was haunted by the picture of Kitty Genovese’s face. Indeed, I wondered if I was the “they” by leaving the United States in the midst of the struggle for civil rights and the beginning of the anti-war movement. My course had been set and I didn’t change it, but I carried Kitty Genovese’s image with me. In the reality I encountered in Taiwan, I couldn’t understand how so many missionaries, American students, U. S. military, and embassy personnel who heard the cries of the Taiwanese people could rationalize their inaction in ways not so dissimilar from the neighbors of Kitty Genovese.

  When President Nixon and Henry Kissienger met with Chou En-lai in 1973, it wasn’t as if they didn’t know about the human rights abuses or the corruption of the government in Taiwan. Kissienger and Peng had been
in seminars together at Harvard. The pPresident and sSecretary of sState’s justification for disregarding the legitimate interests of the Taiwanese people was what they considered the “greater good” for the interests of the United States by establishing diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China. I had long supported establishing relations with China, but never at the expense of the Taiwanese people.

  The Shanghai Communiqué was a case study in Reinhold Niebuhr’s principle stating that institutions by their nature do not have the capacity to act morally—to do the right thing when it conflicts with self-interest.[31] In the United States and its allies’ desire to accommodate the People’s Republic, the de facto independence of Taiwan is once again threatened by self-interest masked as the “greater good.”

  Individuals, on the other hand, argued Niebuhr, do have the capability to act morally—to do the right thing even if it conflicts with their own self-interest. I might have relegated that principle to the bone -pile of idealistic but unrealistic theories had I not seen it lived out by my closest Taiwanese friends—Peng Ming-min, Wei T’ing-chao, and Hsieh Tsung-min. Although not ostensibly religious, their actions demonstrated the ideals of justice and mercy I associated with Christian life. They were living examples of the core Christian teaching I learned as a child as expressed in Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan (or the Good Neighbor).[32] What I had seen in the failure to act by the neighbors of Kitty Genovese was the antithesis of that teaching.

  “You are a guest in another country,” was the oft-quoted dictum to justify not getting involved in the political affairs of a country not your own. The principle has some merit in international relations, but it is a principle that serves the status quo. As desirable as that may be in the world of nations, the principle may also be an immoral rationalization. In Taiwan, a brutal and corrupt government was enabled to stay in power due in no small measure to the support it received from the United States. I love my country and I loved the work the church had sent me to Taiwan to do, but my conscience didn’t allow the luxury of being politically uninvolved. By doing nothing, I believed I was putting my stamp of approval on what the U.S. government was doing there. As an act of faith, I chose otherwise.

  * * *

  [1] Eleanor Munro, Through the Vermilion Gates (1971).

  [2] Ely Jacques Kahn Jr., The China Hands: America's Foreign Service Officers and What Befell Them (1971).

  [3] Eleanor Munro, On Glory Roads: A Pilgrim's Book About Pilgrimage (1987).

  [4] Courtney Anderson, To the Golden Shore: the Life of Adoniram Judson (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1956).

  [5] Christian Bible, Revelation, chapter 6.

  [6] http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/jfkhoustonministers.html

  [7] Spartacus Educational (http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAsitin.htm)

  [8] Milo L. Thornberry, American Missionaries and the Chinese Communists: A Study of Views Expressed by Methodist Episcopal Church Missionaries, 1921-1941 (Th.D. dissertation, Boston University, 1974), p. 264.

  [9] The story circulated for decades in many forms. With access to newly opened files, Laura Tyson Li tells the story in her biography, Madame Chiang Kai-shek: China’s Eternal First Lady (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2006) pp. 95-96.

  [10] Theodore H. White and Annalee Jacoby, Thunder out of China (1946) (re-issued by Da Capo Press: New York, 1980) p. xix.

  [11] Thunder Out of China, pp. 311-312.

  [12] Tillman Durdin, “Formosa Killings Are Put at 10,000,” New York Times, March 29, 1947; Peggy Durdin, “Terror in Taiwan,” The Nation, March 24, 1947 (http://www.taiwandc.org/hst-1947.htm).

  [13] George H. Kerr, Formosa Betrayed (New York: Houghton-Mifflin Company, 1965).

  [14] Lung-chu Chen, Harold D. Lasswell, Formosa, China, and the United Nations : Formosa in the world community (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1967).

  [15] Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1932) p. 172.

  [16] Cited in Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society, p. 31.

  [17] In A Taste of Freedom (1972) Peter wrote this: “Unfortunately since so many people were involved, I am still unable to explain how I escaped without endangering those brave and loyal friends. I can say, however, that I have received no help from any government except, of course, the Swedish government which gave me political asylum.” (p. 219)

  [18] Moral Man and Immoral Society, p. 131.

  [19] Colin Morris, Unyoung Uncolored Unpoor (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1969).

  [20] Morris, pp. 86-87.

  [21] Morris, p. 83

  [22] Morris, p. 102.

  [23] S. G. F. Brandon, Jesus and the Zealots: A Study of the Political Factor in Primitive Christianity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1967).

  [24] Before they could be tried in 1971, they disappeared, causing all the Taiwanese who had put up money and a number who had used their homes as collateral to be left holding the bag. Needless to say, Ng and Deh were not popular in the expatriate Taiwanese community. Deh fled to Sweden but was extradited back to the U.S. and served twenty-two months for his part in the crime. Ng disappeared for more than twenty years and only showed up in Taiwan in 2000 because his mother was dying. He was tried for illegal entry and spent a year in jail.

  [25] Rowland Van Es, “Repressed Memories: Soldiers Standing Every 10-20 Yards on the Route to the Airport,” in Lindai Gail Arrigo and Lynn Miles, A Borrowed Voice: Taiwan Human Rights Through International Networks, 1960-1980 (Hanyao Color Printing Co: Taipei, Taiwan, 2008) p. 197.

  [26] New York Times, March 27, 1964. See also A. M. Rosenthall, Thirty-Eight Witnesses: The Kitty Genovese Case (1964), Berkley: University of California Press, 1999.

  [27] Moral Man Immoral Society

  [28] Christian Bible, Luke 10:25-37.

  [29] Rowland Van Es, “Repressed Memories: Soldiers Standing Every 10-20 Yards on the Route to the Airport,” in Lindai Gail Arrigo and Lynn Miles, A Borrowed Voice: Taiwan Human Rights Through International Networks, 1960-1980 (Hanyao Color Printing Co: Taipei, Taiwan, 2008) p. 197.

  [30] New York Times, March 27, 1964. See also A. M. Rosenthall, Thirty-Eight Witnesses: The Kitty Genovese Case (1964), Berkley: University of California Press, 1999.

  [31] Moral Man Immoral Society

  [32] Christian Bible, Luke 10:25-37.