In the spring of 1945 with Taihoku (Taipei) being heavily bombed by the Allies, the Japanese decided to use this as a pretext to send some of the POWs from Taihoku Camp # 6 up into the mountains southwest of the city near the town of Sanxia to begin work on a satellite POW camp so that the POWs could be transferred up there "for their safety from the bombings". In reality this was the place that was to be used to kill all the POWs according to the order set down by the Japanese High Command in 1944.
Basically Oka was an extermination camp opened in mid-June 1945, and the men who were sent there to build the camp were starved and beaten and worked like slaves. In the course of the two months that the camp was in operation ten men perished, and within a few days of their return to Taihoku Camp # 6 when the war was over, nine more men died. Most of the deaths - both in the camp and afterward, were from beri beri, which is a direct result of starvation
After the Japanese surrendered, the men from the Oka Camp were moved back to Taihoku Camp #6 on August 21st. They were evacuated from Keelung Harbour with the rest of the men from the camp on September 6th by the US and British navies.
The Taiwan POW Camps Memorial Society began searching for the site of the Oka Camp in 1999. The former prisoners had mentioned how they believed the camp was in the mountains north of the city of Taipei, so that is where our search began and was concentrated.
In 2000, in the Waishuangshi area in the mountains north of the city, a village which matched the description that the POWs gave was located. It was near a valley with a river that led up into the mountains. However, it took another year of searching to find a location that seemed to be the most likely place where the camp might have been. We accepted it as such, but could never really verify it for certain, because none of the local residents had lived there during World War II.
Then quite unexpectedly, early in 2019, I received an email from a Taiwanese military historian friend telling me that he had found some documents in the UK National Archives issued by the Japanese Army which revealed a branch of Taihoku Camp #6 that was located southwest of Taipei in the mountains near the town of Sanxia.
The documentation described in the Japanese records matched very closely that which the former POWs had previously shared and confirmed it as the general location of the Oka Camp.
Later I was contacted by a local professor who had been studying the aboriginal history of the Sanxia area and had been told by some of the elderly residents of a POW camp being located there for a few months at the end of the war. He contacted me to share the story, and then we knew we were finally on the right track.
In October 2019 after several exploration trips to the area, and with information and help provided by several of the older local folk, we discovered the route the men took to the camp, the river and the waterfall where the men said they washed, and finally the location of the former camp itself. We were also shown the location of the former POW burial ground further up the mountain from the camp. It took a lot of slogging through some pretty dense jungle to finally find the location of the camp, and this is the only one of the 16 Taiwan camps that we had to search for in this way.
There is nothing left from that former time, the whole area is overgrown with bamboo and is basically inaccessible, but at least it is good to know that after all these years we finally found the camp. It is also good to be able to attach a real location to the stories a number of the former POWs have told us about. They are all gone now, but they and what they suffered in this camp will not be forgotten.