Recently I was asked to translate into English a short story that the Taiwanese writer Chou Chin-bo wrote in Japanese back in 1941. I was happy with this request. I was born in Taipei in 1942, but ever since my family was forced out of the island upon Japan's defeat in the war, in 1945, I have never really had anything to do with Taiwan.
If there was one exception in the past 70 years, it occurred a dozen years ago when Sallie Huang got in touch with me to ask for my help with the Japanese-language part of the trilingual pamphlet she was writing (the two others were English and Chinese).
At the time China's insistence that Taiwan was part of its sovereignty was reaching another danger point, and Huang argued that China got its history all wrong. ("Grass-root case for independent Taiwan," JT, Dec 27, 2004).