Green Jail

There remains only silence in the “Green Jail,” the once-upon-a-time large-scale mining village located on Iriomote Island, Okinawa, Japan. Before World War II, under Greater East Asia Imperialism, Green Jail imprisoned thousands of miners. These miners were from Kyushu, and other places of Japan, as well as Japanese colonies: Taiwan and Korea. The 92-year-old Grandma Hashima is the adopted daughter of the Taiwanese head miner, YANG Tien-fu. With hardly any visitors, grandma lives alone in a shaggy wooden house where her family once lived. What happened in the coal mine? Grandma’s adoptive father, who recruited hundreds of Taiwanese miners to Green Jail, knowing they might never return home… Was he an oppressor or the oppressed victim of Japanese imperialism? Through her memories of guilt, pain, anger, and the miseries of the past 80 years, this film also portrays the last years of Grandma Hashima’s life.