陽明交大學生創業團隊 RECTALE 首位 VTuber「牧野白 」將於今日正式出道
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台V+1 陽明交大學生團隊推出首位Vtuber「牧野白」
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圖：RECTALE 瑞塔創意
由陽明交大學生創業團隊「 RECTALE 瑞塔創意 」推出的首位 Vtuber「牧野白」（Makino Shiro）已在日前正式順利出道。
「牧野白」是 RECTALE 推出的中文組零期生 VTuber ，根據官方設定，她原在和風女僕喫茶店打工，在接觸到網路後，偶然間愛上了直播，於是一個平凡牛娘的直播日常開始了。
圖：RECTALE 瑞塔創意
關於創業的契機，社長李明謙表示，大概在三年前，他觀察到 VTuber 的趨勢以及相關技術在台灣 開始發展，當時在 2018 Digital Taipei 展覽中初次接觸Vtuber 這個產業，後來在 2021 年 1 月開始創業構想，呼朋引伴參加了交大育成中心的計畫，正式創立了 RECTALE 和交大 VTuber 社。
圖：RECTALE 瑞塔創意
他也期許從大學出發，未來能作為台灣、甚至國際 VTuber 的業界標竿，將這個產業持續的推廣和發展下去。
牧野白的初配信已在 7 月 5 日順利播出，有興趣的讀者可以前往觀賞。
Japanese war veteran speaks of atrocities in the Philippines
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Japanese war veteran speaks of atrocities in the Philippines
By Harumi Ozawa / AFP
More than 60 years had passed, but Akira Makino still suffered nightmares about Filipino hostages and the injections that rendered them unconscious. Then there was the one about the surgical knife gouging a human liver.
Every time he woke up to the flashbacks of horrific killing scenes, he shut his eyes tight and tried to turn his mind away from something he no longer wanted to think about.
But Makino, 84, also felt he had to speak out about his wartime experiences to as many people as possible during the final years of his life.
“These were nothing but living-body experiments,” Makino said as he sat on a bench wearing just his pajamas at a hospital in the western Japanese city of Osaka, making some of his last comments before he died earlier this year.
“My captain combat-surgeon often showed us human intestines, and said this was the liver and that was that and so on,” he said. “He did that to train us. The captain said if he died, we would have to take up a scalpel to conduct the operations instead of him.”
Makino, a low-ranked medic deployed to a Philippine island during the final years of World War II, began making his striking statements on Japanese war atrocities in public just last year.
He was regarded as the first former Japanese soldier to have been stationed in the Philippines to speak of experimenting on live hostages and his remarks caused some controversy as historical memory remains a point of simmering friction between Japan and the countries it invaded.
Nationalist Internet sites launched a campaign branding Makino a liar.
Makino said what he experienced was not systematic atrocity, but rather a glimpse of soldiers' desperation during the last-ditch struggle of a nation on the verge of defeat.
Deserted Frontline
It was one year before Japan’s surrender when Makino landed on the southern Philippine island of Mindanao in August 1944.
He was assigned as a medic in the 33rd coast guard squad of about 20 soldiers who were in charge of detecting enemy airplanes.
His squad joined a landing force of some 1,500 troops on the fabled Yamato, once the world’s largest battleship, which US bombers sank later in the war.
“The Yamato was such a huge ship that it could not easily find a suitable port,” he said. “So the ship anchored in the middle of Manila Bay and we dispersed to a variety of destinations in the Philippines.”
Soon after arriving at the Japanese military base at Zamboanga on the western tip of Mindanao, Makino found himself and his unit cut off from headquarters, with the situation growing worse by the day.
They received no military supplies or orders, let alone medical packages.
The main enemy facing the small Japanese squad were the guerrilla bands formed by local Muslim Moros, who constantly threatened their station, he said.
“We were told the Moros were such cruel people that they attacked enemies with spears and we actually rescued some people assaulted by them,” Makino said. “I was told many times I should not walk in the palm tree jungle after dark.”
Naturally, he said, almost all the hostages they captured were Moros. “We were supposed to keep them alive in captivity, but it was no problem if we `disposed' of them, in the beheadings the Japanese have become infamous for,” Makino said.
He remembered at least 50 hostages being killed, “including those who got this,” he said, moving his hand to imitate a sword cutting off a head.
The frail old man recalled that many others were kept alive as human guinea pigs for his superior combat doctor, who wanted to show young medics like himself how to conduct surgical operations.
“We first anesthetized them – we usually used injections or oxygen gas,” he said. “Then they passed out in a few seconds.”
The combat doctor would tell him to watch as he sliced open a hostage’s stomach, a scene that Makino says made him so ill he couldn’t eat or drink for days following the ordeals.
“When cooking chicken, the doctor would get amused and say, `Oh, this is just like human intestines,'” he said.
But Makino said he eventually became accustomed to what he had to do.
“I was desperate,” he said. “I didn’t want to do anything like that if possible. But I had to follow the orders of my superior as a military man, otherwise I’d have been beaten up.”
He was unable to put a definitive number on how many of the 50 people that the unit killed were vivisected or how many of the operations he took part in.
He did say he could never forget those days on the tropical island and even six decades later he could barely talk about his experiences without breaking down.
As he talked about his experiences and memories, he lowered his eyes and said he felt the most profound guilt over the way the bodies were handled afterwards.
The Japanese made Moros dig holes in the ground, he said, and then they hurled in the bodies with the stomachs still open.
“The mud got in all over the human stomach. My captain said there was no need to close the wounds because that would just be a waste of suture thread,” Makino said.
His voice suggesting the troops had some mercy, Makino added: “But we didn’t leave any of the bodies out on the ground.”
MANCHUKUO
Makino’s confession revives memories of Imperial Japan’s “mad scientist” Lieutenant General Shiro Ishii, who led the infamous Unit 731 in northeastern China, where the Japanese made their colonial base of Manchukuo and conducted germ warfare tests on prisoners.
Ishii is believed to have attempted the mass production of biological weapons by testing deadly germs such as anthrax, dysentery and cholera on prisoners of war, mainly Chinese, and dropping plague-carrying fleas and rats on their villages.
Makino said his unit in the Philippines did not have any organized plan and that it did not test plague germs.
“It was a one-off thing,” he said. “We didn’t take data or anything.”
Another veteran, one of only a handful surviving from the Philippine battlefield, said the final days of the war were so desperate that Japanese soldiers who were still alive did whatever they thought necessary just to survive.
Yoshihiko Terashima, 86, a former naval chief commander, said he did not commit any living-body experiments himself but added: “That could have easily happened.”
“It must have been natural for military doctors to come up with the idea of using whatever they had for tryouts in such destitute situations,” he said in a separate interview.
“They had no medicine and no supplies, so then of course they would have had to come up with ways with whatever they had. And they must have done the same thing to injured Japanese soldiers as well,” Terashima said.
He contrasted the situation in the Philippines with that in northeastern China, then known as Manchuria.
“There [in Manchuria] Japan was winning the war. During the time of Makino [in the Philippines] we were losing it,” Terashima said.
The Americans landed on the Philippines' main Luzon island in January 1945 and within six months declared victory.
An estimated 218,000 Japanese soldiers were killed in the battles on Luzon island alone.
Like many Japanese soldiers, Makino and Terashima each fled into the jungles.
At his home in a Tokyo suburb, with cabinets full of war documents and a rolled-up map of the world lying on the floor, Terashima recalled the destitute conditions that he faced while fleeing from US attacks.
“When you holed up in a cave at night, you see huge rats crawling up on the faces of dead bodies, eating the eyeballs,” Terashima said in a firm voice.
“So we took an iron helmet to catch them and ate them. Those dying just lay on the ground, living a few days by eating the maggots that were infesting their own faces,” he said.
In later years, both Makino and Terashima repeatedly returned separately to their former battlefields to collect the remains of Japanese soldiers.
Makino traveled back and forth between Japan and the Philippines more than 10 times, taking everyday supplies like rice, pencils and clothes to the needy residents of Mindanao.
“I’ve done it out of a quest for redemption,” Makino said.
Shame
Makino said the past haunted him for years, so much so that he hesitated to marry.
“I would tell people that I had reasons for not being able to marry,” he said.
It took him 10 years to make up his mind to marry the sister of one of his friends, but said he could not talk to her, or anybody, about the surgical killings committed by his unit in the Philippines.
“It was cruel, too cruel to talk about it to a woman,” he said. “My wife might have thought I was such a cruel person. That’s what was in my mind.”
“While she was with me, I just didn’t want her to know about it,” said Makino, who displayed a monochrome photo of her on his bedside at the hospital where he died in May.
The small, business-card size photo showed a young woman posing in a silk dress, a capeline and gloves.
Another photograph, in color and taken years later at an amusement park, showed two boys wearing baseball caps and his wife, all smiling.
SPEAKING OUT
“We were together by fate, so I didn’t want her to know anything bad. She grew up as the youngest of four children in her family and totally depended on me,” he said.
Makino said her death more than three years earlier freed him to talk publicly about the experiences that haunted him.
“You have to talk when you know you have done something guilty,” he said.
“We lost the war because we deserved it,” Makino said with bitterness. “We didn’t have enough soldiers, enough arms nor enough bullets. We didn’t have enough of anything.”
Makino, whose jobs after the war included laboratory assistant and salesman for a water pipe company, said his life has been one of ups and downs.
“My life was such a mess, not planned at all,” he said. “Maybe it was my fault because I had volunteered to join the navy. But I would have been drafted eventually anyway.”
“In those days people would have thought something was physically wrong with a man if he was not in the military. Born as a man during that era, I had to go to the war,” Makino said.
Dream of Korean student killed in Tokyo station tragedy lives on
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Lee Soo-hyun’s dream of bridging South Korea and Japan has been kept alive over the two decades since his tragic death despite bumpy bilateral relations.
Lee, a student at Korea University in Seoul, lost his life at Tokyo’s JR Shin-Okubo Station on Jan. 26, 2001, when he attempted to rescue a Japanese man who had fallen onto the tracks. Shiro Sekine, a Japanese photographer, and the man the two tried to save also died.
The 26-year-old, who came to Japan only a year earlier, was studying Japanese and English at Akamonkai Japanese Language School in Tokyo’s Arakawa Ward.
Lee once said his dream was to “connect people” by using Korean, Japanese and English. A teacher remembers him as “a serious and diligent student and a man of great activity.”
Oh Seung-hoon, an LSH Asia Scholarship student, attends a class at Akamonkai Japanese Language School in Tokyo, where Lee Soo-hyun studied, in January. (Toshiya Obu)
Oh Seung-hoon, a 24-year-old from South Korea, is studying at Akamonkai on a scholarship established in 2002 by donations from Lee’s parents and from Japanese volunteers.
“I am here because I like Japan,” he said. “I have talked to Japanese people, and none of them, as it turned out, speaks ill of South Koreans. I think I owe that to Lee’s courage.”
Oh, a fan of Japanese manga, applied for the scholarship to study design and other subjects and hopes to work for a Japanese video game company as a designer or illustrator.
The LSH Asia Scholarship, originally called the Lee Soo-hyun Memorial Scholarship Foundation, offered scholarships to 998 students from 18 countries and regions in Asia between 2002 and 2020. The number of beneficiaries is expected to reach the 1,000 mark this year.
WORN-OUT DICTIONARIES
Nobuko Tanaka beside a relief portrait of Lee Soo-hyun in a memorial park on the premises of Akamonkai Japanese Language School in Tokyo’s Arakawa Ward in January (Shinya Sugizaki)
Nobuko Tanaka, one of Lee’s teachers, retired from Akamonkai, her workplace of 30 years, last spring.
For 19 years on end, Tanaka, 74, made it a rule to take up an article about Lee as a discussion topic in English or Japanese during her class on or around the anniversary of his death.
“He took action solely for the sake of a human life without giving any thought to nationality,” she said. “I hope as many people as possible will draw some lessons from his action.”
Tanaka remembers Lee’s bashful response when she asked about his goals during an English language class in summer 2000.
Lee was good at sports, and the FIFA World Cup soccer tournament co-hosted by Japan and South Korea was only two years away.
“I want to study Japanese intensely and volunteer to be an interpreter during the World Cup,” he said. “I hope to land a job someday that links Korea and Japan.”
Lee started out at a beginner’s level in Japanese, but he made so much progress that an advanced level was well within his reach in only six months. He always had two thick, worn-out Japanese and English dictionaries spread open on his desk.
Shin Yoon-chan stands in front of the grave of Lee Soo-hyun and Lee Sung-dae, her husband, at a cemetery in Busan in 2019. (Yoshihiro Makino)
Shin Yoon-chan, Lee’s mother, could not travel to Japan on the anniversary of his death due to the novel coronavirus pandemic. She had paid tribute at a memorial ceremony at JR Shin-Okubo Station on Jan. 26 every year.
Shin, 70, recently presented a Japanese book about Lee’s life at the Busan cemetery where her son and her husband, Lee Sung-dae, were laid to rest.
In South Korea, a book, the first of its kind, that describes interactions with Japanese people prompted by Lee and his dream has also been published.
“The past 20 years went by so quickly,” Shin told The Asahi Shimbun in a telephone interview. “I feel much less distressed now thanks to many Japanese people, including those who wept with me at the site of the tragedy, those who gave donations for the scholarships and those who continue to write to me. I only have gratitude for them.”
However, ties between Japan and South Korea have only worsened over the two decades, and Lee’s dream will have to wait longer before being fully realized.
“Soo-hyun would grieve if he were to look at the current state of bilateral relations,” Shin said. “What he did is at odds with an ‘our country-versus-your country’ mentality. I want people of both nations to love each other.”
DREAM YET TO BE REALIZED
Junichiro Koizumi visited the controversial, war-related Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo six times during his stint as prime minister between 2001 and 2006, and South Korean President Lee Myung-bak in 2012 landed on one of the disputed Takeshima islets in the Sea of Japan, which Seoul calls Dokdo.
More recently, South Korean courts ordered Japanese companies and the Japanese government to pay damages to wartime Korean laborers and Korean “comfort women,” who were forced to provide sex for Japanese soldiers before and during World War II. Korea was under Japan’s colonial rule from 1910 until Japan’s defeat in 1945.
The Asahi Shimbun
In fiscal 2019, only 26.7 percent of Japanese said in a Cabinet Office survey that they have a sense of affinity toward South Korea, down from 50.3 percent in fiscal 2001, immediately after Lee’s death.
Some 71.5 percent of Japanese said in fiscal 2019 that they don’t have a sense of affinity toward South Korea, up from 45.5 percent 18 years earlier.
“Soo-hyun’s self-sacrifice generated mutual sympathy, but we have failed to foster that sentiment and ended up with bilateral relations hitting rock bottom,” said Lee Joon-gyu, who served as South Korea’s ambassador to Japan from 2016 to 2017. “I feel too ashamed before him.”
Still, cultural interactions have increased between the two countries. South Korean TV dramas and pop music remain popular in Japan, while Japan’s anime and manga have made their way into South Korea.
Another former South Korean ambassador to Japan suggested that citizens can put aside differences over political issues even if governments and other institutions remain apart.
“Most South Koreans have positive feelings toward Japan,” he said. “Boycott campaigns may arise temporarily when they are fanned by politicians and civil advocacy groups and when national sentiment is stirred by events that have to do with wartime laborers and comfort women, for example. But they seldom last long.”
(This article was written by Toshiya Obu and Senior Staff Writer Yoshihiro Makino.)
„Lentpjūvė iš pragaro“ – viena brutaliausių Antrojo pasaulinio karo paslapčių
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