Men to Devils, Devils to Men: Japanese War Crimes and Chinese Justice 9780674735897

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Men to Devils, Devils to Men

Men to Devils, Devils to Men

Ja pa nese Wa r Cr imes a nd Chinese Just ice

Barak Kushner

Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England 2015

Copyright © 2015 by Barak Kushner a l l r ig h t s r e se rv e d

Printed in the United States of America First printing Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data Kushner, Barak, 1968– author. Men to devils, devils to men : Japanese war crimes and Chinese ­justice / Barak Kushner.    pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-674-72891-2 1. War crime trials—China.  2. War crimes—Japan.  3. World War, 1939-1945—Atrocities—Japan.  4. Sino-Japanese War, 1937–1945.  I. Title. KNQ43.K87 2015 341.6'90268—dc23  2014014453

Contents

List of Illustrations Introduction

1 Defeat in Denial: The Regional Impact of   Japan’s Surrender

2 Devil in the Details: Chinese Policies on Japan’s   War Crimes

vii 1 29 69

3 Flexible Imperial Identity: Administering Postwar   Legal Guilt

108

5 Taiwan: Political Expediency and Japanese   Imperial Assistance

185

4 Chinese Nationalist Justice: The KMT Trials

6 An Unsatisfying Peace: Shifting Attitudes on   War Crimes 7 Socialist Magnanimity: The CCP Trials

137

210

248

Conclusion

300

Notes Glossary Acknowledgments Index

323 389 395 399

List of Illustrations

Map: BC trials in Asia

Asahi newspaper article about POWs

An entry ticket to the Sakai trial, 1946 The execution of Tani Hisao

Life photographs of Japanese war criminals   executed by the KMT in China

A Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs map   showing foreign embassies in Tokyo “Love statue” in front of Tokyo Station

Map of route taken from USSR to China   by Japanese prisoners Pu Yi testifying at the Shenyang trial

Chinese propaganda leaflet, “Together China   and the USSR are strong”

“Chinese people should learn from the Jews”

ix

37

151

163 164–165 224 243

267

285 297

309

key to map locations Japan (UN managed)

Netherlands

UN1: Tokyo (Ichigaya) (Class A) UN2: Tokyo (Marunouchi) (planned but cancelled)

N1: Hollandia (Kota Jayapura) N2: Ambon N3: Morotai N4: Menado (also known as Manado) N5: Kupang (Kota Kupang) N6: Makassar N7: Balikpapan N8: Banjarmasin N9: Pontianak N10: Tanjung Pinang N11: Batavia N12: Medang

US managed US1: Yokohama US2: Shanghai US3: Manila US4: Guam US5: Kwajalein China C1: Shenyang (site of 1956 Chinese Communist trials as well) C2: Beijing C3: Taiyuan (site of 1956 Chinese Communist trials as well) C4: Jinan C5: Xuzhou C6: Nanjing C7: Shanghai C8: Hankou C9: Taipei C10: Guangdong Australia A1: Hong Kong A2: Labuan A3: Singapore A4: Wewak A5: Rabaul A6: Manus Island A7: Morotai A8: Ambon A9: Darwin

UK UK1: Labuan UK2: Jesselton (now known as Kota Kinabalu) UK3: Hong Kong UK4: Alor Setar UK5: Penang UK6: Taiping UK7: Kuala Lumpur UK8: Johor Bahru UK9: Singapore UK10: Rangoon UK11: Maymyo Philippines PH1: Manila France F1: Saigon

C1 C2

UN1 UN2 US1

C3 C4 C5 C8

C6

C9

C10

UK11

US2 C7

A1 UK3

UK10

UK4 UK5 UK6 UK7 UK8

US4

US3 PH1

F1

US5

A3 UK9 N12

A2 UK1

N10

UK2

N7

N9

N1

N8 N11

A7 N3

N4

A8 N2

N6

N5

BC trials in Asia. Totals: 1 Class A; 49 Class BC.

A4 A6

A9

A5

Introduction

On

augus t 15, 1945, shudder­­ing in the wake of the imperial broadcast announc­­ing Japan’s defeat, the Japanese empire crumbled. While the imperial Japanese surrendered militarily, in actuality empires do not disappear overnight, and Japan’s military, technological, and legal networks remained long after power had supposedly changed hands. To be sure, some high-​rank­­ing Japanese officers stationed in China had advance warn­­ing and were able to put themselves and loved ones on quickly depart­­ing trains headed for the ports. These lucky few were all whisked to safety before negotiations for the actual process of surrender had even taken place. In con­­trast, the vast majority of Japanese liv­­ing and garrisoned abroad—​soldiers, policemen, merchants, colonials—​were so astonished at the rapid imperial demise that they had no idea what fate had in store. As Ogawa Hitō, a high-​­rank­­ing police officer in Manchuria, recalled, “Our world com­pletely changed in one night.”1 Ogawa faced a difficult choice—​flee or stay and help maintain order in the ensu­­ing chaos with the feared Soviet army hurriedly head­­ing south from the border. By September 7 the Soviets were at the gates of the city of Shenyang (in former Manchukuo). A Chinese friend informed Ogawa about a rumor that the Soviets were go­­ing to freeze all postal bank accounts so it would be best to quickly withdraw his money. Ogawa managed to hide until September 23, when he was finally arrested and placed into custody. He was at first imprisoned 1

2

Introduction

by the Chinese and then transported to the eastern Soviet Union and held in a Siberian detainee camp for several years. Later Ogawa was released back to the Chinese Com­munists to face legal measures dur­ ­ing the 1950s. Not all Japanese in China were so unfortunate. Famed Japanese com­edian Sanyūtei Enshō was invited to travel and perform all over Manchuria in May 1945. Perhaps not realiz­­ing the gravity of the wartime situation, he agreed and found himself stuck in Japan’s former puppet kingdom at the end of the war, in the port city of Dalian. As the Soviets approached the city Japanese residents urged Enshō and his travel­­ing com­panion and fellow com­edian, Kokontei Shinshō, to perform a last entertainment show before the city fell. The city’s Japanese councilmen placed a picture of the Japanese emperor to the side of the stage, faced it to bow, and said, “Your majesty, we are very sorry to have lost, please forgive us.” Everyone began weeping, and Enshō remembered that it was a rather surreal event with audience members shed­­ ding tears as they listened to the com­edy performance.2 Hear­­ing gossip that war criminals would be summarily shot and that other Japanese would be treated in kind, Enshō took the decision to end his life and drank six bottles of vodka. Renowned for be­­ing a heavy drinker, Enshō did not succumb and only suffered severe liver inflammation for about a week and a half. He later managed to return to Japan and finish his illustrious career. The war had turned Japan’s imperial hierarchy upside down, and the former ruling-​class Japanese were unsure how to respond. Chinese, who had previously been at the low end of the colonial scale, suddenly found themselves in charge and in com­mand. Japanese, many of whom had lived in China for years as members of the elite, discovered themselves out of power and in desperate economic straits as their currency was no longer valid. Sales of secondhand Japanese cloth­­ing and goods around the Dalian rail station in northeast China dur­­ing the first few months after surrender saw brisk business as Chinese snapped up cut-​ rate items from Japanese who had been abruptly financially ruined.3 Not only did Japan’s imperial war lead to the destruction of Japan, but the battles in China and the ensu­­ing aftermath on the con­­tinent resulted in the deaths of 14 million to 20 million Chinese and as many as 100 million refugees search­­ing for food, water, and shelter by the

Introduction

3

late summer of 1945.4 The several million vanquished Japanese still resid­­ing in China, in quest of the same nourishment and lodging, only exacerbated an already extremely fragile environment. There were many Japanese responses to the end, but the larger story of what happened in China after the war and how a political equilibrium was attained in the face of a com­plete breakdown of the Japanese empire have, until recently, been relatively ignored. As Marc Gallicchio has highlighted, “Tokyo’s announced intention to surrender in August 1945 did not produce an end to hostilities in Asia. Instead it signaled the beginn­­ing of a period of transition from war to peace.”5 A central theme of this book con­nects to that transition, in particular ask­­ing how long it took, whom it involved, and what the con­tested issues were dur­­ing this transition. As much as many who had been under the heel of Japanese oppression might have wished, in the immediate aftermath of World War II rare was the political body that had the luxury of seek­­ing vengeance against the Japanese because neither the international circumstances nor the pend­­ing civil wars—​ in China, Korea, Vietnam, and elsewhere—​allowed attention to be diverted from the ultimate goal at hand: to gain support for the establishment of new governments after imperial Japan’s departure. These newly enfranchised political parties, especially in China, strove to move away from imperial violence and forge a new path for Sino-​Japanese relations. China needed to emphasize and publicize its use of law to redress Japanese imperials wrongs as a way to demonstrate that the nation deserved to be a member of the new postwar order form­­ing in the wake of Japan’s downfall, the rise of the United States, and the slow demise of the formerly powerful British empire. Japan’s imperial might plummeted as China’s power ascended. China was no longer alone in the world; it was an ally (and permanent member of the newly established UN Security Council), a partner of the victorious West. This book analyzes the repercussions from the ensu­­ing military and diplomatic maneuvers to br­­ing Japanese imperial behavior to justice that emerged after Japan’s surrender. I focus on the aftermath of Japanese war crimes and how both sides, Japan and China, incorporated new strategies into their bilateral relationships follow­­ing the cessation of war. How did the Chinese legally deal with Japanese war crimes? What were the Japanese responses, and did these processes

4

Introduction

shape early Cold War Sino-​Japanese relations? Even though I make reference to Japanese atrocities, I will not go into detail about such tragedies, which con­tinue to be analyzed by excellent scholars from around the globe.6 Within this postwar surrender paradigm and fracture of the Japanese empire, I examine the dissolution of Japanese rule in the postwar former colonies and occupied areas, the prosecution of Japanese war crimes, and the con­undrum of collaboration within the former empire. These problems are intimately tied together due to the transformation of postwar identity and colonial politics. To answer such queries we need to explore how Japanese war crimes were investigated and legally con­ceived of in China (includ­­ing Taiwan) and how the Japanese formed their counterproposals. Two historical reconsiderations drive this exploration. The first requires refram­­ing Japan as a decoloniz­­ing empire, not merely as a defeated country, in a transnational con­text. As Rana Mitter and Matthew Hilton summarize, “Transnationalism, therefore, clearly goes beyond a repackaged diplomatic or international historical approach. It brings a whole range of new actors and extends its field of vision from the political to the social.”7 The second point surrounds the shift­­ing landscape of the con­ cept of law in East Asia and how it sculpted relations in the region dur­­ing the postwar period. International law was no longer merely the tool of the West to dominate the East. With the dawn of the United Nations and a collective determination to pursue the new ideal of justice, China now had at its disposal a new set of utilities to corral Japan. At the same time Japan was interested in con­tinu­­ing to employ its prodigious understand­­ing of law, build­­ing on the education it had developed since the Meiji Restoration. It was not a showdown between Japan and China, but the outcome was that for the first time both sides would look to use vocabulary and ideas con­cern­­ing international law and ideas of accountability that now seemed to permeate societies formerly at war. Ultimately, law was used to determine wartime responsibility but linked with national identity. This lost narrative about efforts to adjudicate Japanese war crimes in China is a key element to understand­­ing the full arc of postwar Sino-​Japanese relations. At the same time it exposes a critical juncture of the postwar period that can help us com­ prehend how con­temporary China reacts toward what was then labeled its “magnanimous” policy toward the con­quered Japanese.8 What I

Introduction

5

present is not a strictly legal history, mainly focus­­ing on terminology and procedure, but leans toward a social and political history of the application and understand­­ing of international law in its first major appearance when East Asia was legally on par with the West. While this work is historical, the legacy con­tinues to resonate. It is not unusual to overhear Chinese in con­versation or in popular entertainment such as movies and TV shows refer to Japanese as riben guizi, or “Japanese devils.” Such attitudes raise questions about why the Chinese have been so will­­ing to use Japan as an international bête-​ noire while not plac­­ing their own leaders under a similar spotlight. These deeply standardized rejoinders around the mainland should push us to think more profoundly about Sino-​Japanese relations and our ignorance con­cern­­ing the history of post-​surrender Japanese colonials, soldiers, and imperial administrators on the Chinese con­tinent. The cataclysm of the late 1950s anti-​rightist movement and the disaster of the Great Leap Forward, not to mention Mao’s own responsibility for the Cultural Revolution through the 1960s and 1970s, appeared to be passed over in deference to focus­­ing solely on the Japan-​related historical issues. An analysis of Sino-​Japanese relations at the end of the war and the beginn­­ing of the Cold War does not relate just to politics but also to the story of Japan’s imperial failure in China and the sociology of defeat.9 John Horne reminds us that in the end total war also means total defeat and that in “total defeat, the enemy is stripped of political sovereignty until it has been remade in the image of the victor.”10 Defeat is both an event and a process, Horne explains. As an event the roles of victor and vanquished are fixed, but more importantly, “the process by which this new reality is grasped and evolves into acceptance, normalization, or rejection” is key.11 The repatriation of Japanese civilians and return­­ing soldiers often made acceptance for the responsibility of defeat and the war all the more difficult, as did the memory of the war dead because it was so deeply con­nected to Japan’s imperial ideology.12 With such caveats in mind this book untangles how these issues were resolved, not only in Japan under the U.S. domain of a well-​ordered and managed occupation where clear lines of com­mand and con­trol were drawn early on, but in the postwar chaos of China as well. Our grasp of modern Japanese history is still relatively hopelessly U.S.-​centric. We

6

Introduction

need to remember that Japan was an empire in 1945, not merely a country, and at the end of the war the important story occurred not only at the center, on Japan’s four main home islands (and Okinawa), but at the periphery, the former imperial regions that lay outside the islands. We should con­ceive of Japan’s imperial collapse in China as an “edge” in the way that the eminent European historian Tony Judt employed the term. His “edges of empire,” a space “where countries, com­munities, allegiances, affinities, and roots bump uncomfortably up against one another,” pushes us to think about Japan’s colonial grasp and what it actually meant to be Taiwanese, Japanese, or Chinese in the empire at that time. Although Judt was writ­­ing about Europe his con­cept is useful for think­­ing about the Japanese situation as well.13

End of Empire and War Crimes Reassess­­ing the end of World War II in East Asia as a con­flict that witnessed the demise of the Japanese empire forces us to question what happened to the Japanese in postwar China and how the Chinese resolved the issue of Japanese imperial governance. Here the notion of law was immediately important to both the Chinese and the Japanese because both sides wanted to claim equal domain over be­­ing able to apply justice in their own jurisdictions. The Japanese seemingly believed that they were still in some form of managerial con­trol of parts of China (and in fact they were), while the Chinese needed to briskly establish courts to trumpet their own presence on the stage of international policy. The Tokyo War Crimes Trial (officially known as the International Military Tribunal for the Far East) generated rivers of ink in the Japanese language and a few streams in the English and Chinese languages, but the history of war crimes trials in China has met mostly with academic silence. While the impact of the Tokyo War Crimes Trial is still be­­ing debated, effectively the number of Japanese it put into the docket for China-​related offenses remained minuscule—​it boiled down to General Doihara Kenji for con­spiracies and drug traffick­­ing in northern China and Manchuria and General Matsui Iwane for the Nanj­­ing Massacre.14 Most of the other defendants’ crimes had more to do with crimes against the Western Allies. For all of its

Introduction

7

lofty aims, and there were many, the Tokyo Trial was fundamentally Western oriented and centered on adjudicat­­ing the start of the war against the Western Allies with the attack on Pearl Harbor and crimes against Western soldiers in POW camps. It is true that evidence about the Nanj­­ing Massacre and the situation in parts of Asia was submitted, but the heart of the trial lay elsewhere. A more fitt­­ing approach therefore to analyz­­ing the war crimes puzzle at Japan’s imperial periphery requires turn­­ing our attention to the 5,700 BC class war criminals who were prosecuted in some 2,244 cases that were adjudicated in forty-​ nine venues throughout Asia.15 The three categories of war crimes judged at Nuremberg, Germany, that became the template for those later in Tokyo and elsewhere were “crimes against peace,” con­ventional war crimes, and “crimes against humanity”—​summarized as A, B, and C classes. A class war criminals were the men who planned and executed Japan’s “aggressive” war but did not necessarily sully themselves with the dirty job of directly putting the plans into action. The Tokyo War Crimes Trial was East Asia’s sole A class war crimes trial, and given the duration and expenses incurred dur­­ing the two-​and-​a-​half-​year trial it is important to remember there were only twenty-​eight original defendants and that the trial remained con­fined to Japan.16 The BC class was reserved for B class, “conventional war crimes” (rape, murder, illegal incarceration, abus­­ing POWs, and so forth), and C class, “crimes against humanity.” C class crimes are legally slightly unusual but not as distinct as the A class. In traditional international law a defendant could not be tried by a third party for action against his own people or for actions com­mitted before the war began. Such a law would have infringed on the con­cept of legal sovereignty. This new idea of us­­ing “international law” was a way to transcend the notion of national law and create the means to pursue an individual for a crime that those in the international com­ munity all assessed in the same manner. The creation of the new C class of crimes was a way to prosecute the act of genocide and maneuver around this legal barrier. The Japanese military did not implement a genocidal policy, as the Nazis did, so its B class trials delineated con­ ventional war crimes for those in charge, and C class was for those who actually executed the crime, though mostly defendants were just charged as a com­bined category, “BC class.”17

8

Introduction

The reason to examine the Chinese trials within this larger group stems from the fact that the Chinese tribunals are among the very few non-​Western Allied prosecutions of Japanese war crimes after the war. Trials in all other venues throughout Asia, with the exception of the Philippines, were con­ducted by colonial empires reassert­­ing their authority—​France, Great Britain, the United States, Holland, and Australia (see table).18 Although the statistics are not com­pletely reliable, it is generally calculated that the KMT (the Chinese Nationalist Party, or Guomindang) brought 883 Japanese defendants to court in 605 cases and found 355 men guilty.19 Only 149 men were executed, and 350 men were found not guilty. Although the numbers vary, due to disparity among archives, a total of approximately 984 individuals were executed as a result of all BC class war crimes trials.20 Obviously, this number far outstrips the impact of the seven individuals who were hanged for crimes at the Tokyo Trial. At the same time, BC class war crimes trials affected more than just the Japanese leadership; they expanded prosecutorial zeal to the com­mon man throughout the empire. At times it was not even clear precisely who was Japanese or who should be charged because even the idea of “Japanese” was flexible dur­­ing many of these trials. Approx­ imately 173 individuals were Taiwanese (as Taiwan had been a colony of Japan from 1895–1945); of these twenty-​six were executed. Korean and Taiwanese defendants made up 5.6 percent of all those con­victed of BC class crimes.21 The Chinese trials of Japanese war crimes are, in the end, a microcosm of the Japanese empire at its worst and at best a record of how the stated aims of the war were actually experienced at the local level. Con­se­quently, the postwar Chinese adjudication of Japanese soldiers not only demonstrates how the Japanese were perceived dur­­ing the imperial reign but also signifies the manner in which China attempted to appropriate power in the aftermath of surrender. However, in start­­ing this project I quickly realized that there was an entire history about the Chinese pursuit of the Japanese, a kind hitherto overlooked, about the Chinese legal adjudication of Japanese war crimes. The reasons why we rarely hear the Chinese equation of the story are epic. On the legal front the issues remained extremely com­ plicated.22 One reason for this absence is that in China, for example, it was not acceptable for a long time to talk about benevolence toward the Japanese. This shift in attitude occurred with the rise of a more embarrass­­ing feature—​with the anti-​rightist movement in the late

Introduction

9

BC class war crimes across East Asia Nation that managed the trials Netherlands Great Britain Australia China (KMT) US France Philippines Totals PRC (Communist   China)

Executed Sentenced 236 223 153 149 143 63 17 984 0

733 556 493 355 1,033 135 114 3,419 45

Not guilty 55 116 267 350 188 31 11 1,018 1,017

Number of cases

Number of defendants

448 330 294 605 456 39 72 2,244 4*

1,038 978 949 883 1,453 230 169 5,700 1,062

Dates 8/1946–1/1949 12/1946–3/1948 2/1945–4/1951 5/1946–1/1949 11/1945–9/1949 2/1946–3/1950 8/1947–12/1949 6–7/1956

Notes: Totals do not always add up, so the sums are an approximation of the total number of cases in several venues. These numbers vary depending on country and the time published. Statistics also differ among sources because some courts may have stayed the verdict or decreased sentences after appeal but never informed Japan or other record keepers. For slightly different overall figures, see the table in Chūgoku kikansha renrakukai, ed., Watashitachi wa chūgoku de nani o shita ka (Sanichi shobō, 1987), 214–215. There are categories of defendants who died during trial, whose files were lost, or whose final verdict remains unclear to this day. Based on Hayashi Hirofumi’s statistics, BC kyū senpan saiban (Iwanami shoten, 2005), 61, 64. Arai Toshio has slightly different statistics for various countries, but the numbers are not that far off. See his “Chūgoku no senpan seisaku to wa nan datta no ka,” Chūkiren (September, 2000): 8–9. Arai bases his tabulations on Ren Haisheng, ed., Gongheguo teshe zhanfan shimo (Huawen chubanshe, 1995). Tanaka Hiromi, BCkyū senpan (Chikuma shinsho, 2002), 14–15, also has slightly deviating calculations based on similar sources, but because he estimates separate confirmed numbers his final tallies differ. No two scholars have precisely the same numbers for all the categories, but most are in general agreement within a few figures. * Even this number is somewhat disputable because it does not include “peoples trials,” it is unclear if it includes trials in Xiling, and it calls into question the way in which we count what is a trial.

1950s and subsequent Cultural Revolution, the very rule of law on the mainland had evaporated, only to return in the early 1980s. 23 James Reilly calls this period from 1945 to 1982 the era of “China’s benevolent amnesia.”24 The form and function of law virtually disappeared from Chinese con­sciousness after the late 1950s; of the 134 laws passed between 1949 and 1978 in Com­munist China, 111 were later declared invalid. The Ministry of Justice was eradicated in 1959 and had to be re-​created from the ground up two decades later.25 Taiwan saw little better in the field of legal evolution, not lift­­ing martial law until 1987, which of course did not predispose the authorities to promot­­ing an open discussion of Japanese war crimes because

10

Introduction

the Nationalist government was busy oppress­­ing and mobiliz­­ing large portions of its own population. Only really with the installation of a democratic leadership with the election of Lee Deng-​hui in 1996 did the tide begin to turn for academic inquiry in Taiwan. For all of their immediate postwar appeals to the idea of international justice, the KMT and CCP (Chinese Com­munist Party) governments afforded precious little of it to their home con­stituencies. The war crimes policies toward the Japanese stood out almost as an aberration of benevolence in the chilly atmosphere of an ensu­­ing Cold War. Legal memory in Japan fared just as poorly. Japanese legal distaste for war crimes trials in general, aided by the growth of publications surround­­ing Indian judge Radhabinod Pal’s dissent at the Tokyo Trial and his postwar lectures in Japan, emboldened a general passivity in Japan con­cern­­ing social reflection on con­ventional war crimes.26 This did not mean that all Japan was rightist, but even the left w­­ing tended to focus its peace movement on ridd­­ing postwar Japan of U.S. bases and on the larger issue of mak­­ing sure Japan did not remilitarize.27 Specific efforts to detail and investigate war crimes were not part of the left-​w­­ing rubric. Com­bined with China’s and Taiwan’s historical impediments, a trilateral torpor helped to feed a general East Asian dismissal of this historically potent period.28 Even Japan’s official apologies, such as Japanese Prime Minister Hosokawa Morihiro’s 1993 acknowledgment that World War II was an aggressive war and former Prime Minister Murayama Tomiichi’s more elaborate 1995 apology, did not delve into specifics about war crimes or atrocities in particular. The apologies addressed more obtusely the issue of war responsibility.29 The specifics of how East Asian countries understood law and specifically international law in the twentieth century are an area of inquiry only recently attract­­ing deeper interest. This charge has been led with the research of international scholars such as Wang Tay-​sheng, Hsiao Tao-​Chung, Klaus Mühlhahn, William Kirby, Thomas Dubois, Ōnuma Yasuaki, Adam Cathcart, Handō Kazutoshi, Eugenia Lean, and others.30 Similarly, in Japan there is ample scholarship on the con­ cept of war responsibility and its relationship to law, but not necessarily much in the way of pars­­ing out how the Japanese themselves com­ prehended law and its pair­­ing with the new con­cept of international justice based on law at the time.31 With this understand­­ing we cannot

Introduction

11

and should not deny that the very ideal of international law supported a divisive system of colonialism that con­tinued into the post–World War II era and by dint of its creation presupposed American-​European ideals about the relations of society, politics, and law to be superior to those in East Asia.32 A Chinese Nationalist history of China claimed, “The unequal treaties are the source of pain for early modern China.”33 To borrow a term from David Kennedy, we could say that Western empires early on “weaponized the law” to their advantage.34 But such an acknowledgment still does not negate the value of pursu­­ing war crimes.

War Crimes and the Pursuit of International Justice as a New Order War responsibility and war crimes are two different species. Respon­ sibility is linked to the plann­­ing and start­­ing of war and then caus­­ing damage to the enemy. War crimes are the acts com­mitted by the military or civilians dur­­ing the war that pertain to violence, abuse, or humiliation. War responsibility and war crimes are related but not the same thing. At the Tokyo War Crimes Trial the move to con­vict Japan of an illegal and aggressive war and to find those responsible for the Nanj­­ing Massacre occurred in parallel, often con­fus­­ing the distinction between the two categories, accord­­ing to a deft analysis by Shimizu Masayoshi.35 Pursu­­ing war criminals, collaborators, or suspected traitors offered a means to resolve the upturned former imperial hierarchies. These moves demonstrated that the newly emerg­­ing authorities who would replace Japanese imperial rule were “just,” a crucial element to bolster domestic and international backing. At the onset of the early Cold War, the legal restructur­­ing of East Asia and Japan’s relations with its neighbors played a vital role in redress­­ing colonial imbalances and imperial power claims to political authority. The Chinese and Japanese used the political shifts in the early Cold War to engage in new domestic and foreign propaganda and policies to solidify support for their camps. Dur­­ing the late 1940s and early 1950s new governments in East Asia shifted focus and raised the banner of “humanity and justice” as a means to fortify their own fragile legitimacy. Each nation tried to prove its level of “justness” by enact­­ing

12

Introduction

what it deemed to be the proper and legal pursuit of Japanese war criminals immediately follow­­ing the war. John Ikenberry poses this question as: “What is the glue” that holds industrialized societies and regions together?36 That “glue” came in several forms—​the most potent of which was the pursuit of justice through law rather than a dependence on retribution to rectify wrongs. In this manner, as Con­suelo Cruz suggests, “at critical moments political rivals will draw on the same rhetorical frame, the same fundamental, easily graspable ‘truths’ to advance their con­tend­­ing views of past and future.”37 To pursue war crimes trials became an accepted trope in the immediate postwar period and served to help galvanize the leadership in these East Asian regions with a new sense of responsibility but one tied to laws that would sweep away vestiges of Japan’s imperial management while setting the stage for postwar peace. Legal questions con­cern­­ing jurisdiction, international law, and the nature of colonial responsibility still weigh heavily today within the historical legacy of Japanese imperialism. At the ground level, who exactly was responsible for Japan’s war in Asia? In Nanj­­ing Chinese joined prominent KMT leader Wang Jingwei’s con­ciliatory government. Taiwanese aborigines and Taiwanese (Han Chinese) served as soldiers for the Japanese and guarded Allied POWs throughout the empire. Given the ambiguity of imperial guilt in many circumstances it was often unclear precisely how postwar punishment and mercy should have been meted out. Those who previously lived in Manchukuo (Japan’s puppet kingdom in northern China) and collaborators were difficult enough case studies due to the Chinese penchant for legally distinguish­­ing between Japanese war crimes and Chinese treason. Taiwan was even more a legal Gordian knot, unlike Korea or northern China, because even at the point of surrender the Japanese had not really worn out their welcome as colonial overseers.38 Because the island was on the periphery of the newly established geographic borders of Chinese Nationalist rule after 1945, Taiwan was at first not even a priority for Chinese political management or military administration and would not become so until a few years into the Cold War. As Ruti Teitel explains, the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials were venues where state crimes were whittled down and adjudicated in singular cases; the aim was to charge individuals with a failure to effectively com­mand

Introduction

13

their troops in the case of military leaders or failure to curtail their military in the case of civilian defendants. This is why the nationality of the defendant was such a key issue. The entire selection process for defendants was not exactly neutral. Teitel states, “As a practical matter, it would seem that some selectivity is inevitable given the large numbers generally implicated in modern state prosecution, scarcity of judicial resources in transitional societies, and the high political and other costs of successor trials. Given these con­straints, selective or exemplary trials, it would seem, can advance a sense of justice.”39 Peter Zarrow emphasizes that legal trials often serve as “political rituals” and provide the populace with a series of “solemn and repetitive practices that con­nect leaders and com­munities with larger, higher forces, be these God or gods, transcendental movements of history, the fate of the nation, the future of the people, or whatever.”40 These processes assist in our understand­­ing of the dissolution of the Japanese empire and how Chinese leaders moved to affirm themselves as the authority on the mainland and in Taiwan. The legal investigations into war crimes and the subsequent trials stand as the very definition of international law, a relatively new con­cept itself, especially in East Asia. Teitel widely defines international law as someth­­ing that transcends the norm. In heinous circumstances such as war crimes, she summarizes, “international law principles serve to reconcile the threshold dilemma of law in periods of political transformation.”41 Whether these were only legal trials and not also partly show trials is difficult to con­ clude given that many belonged to both categories. The systems adjudicated public guilt and delineated who was Japanese and who was Chinese. The testimony, evidence, and judgments legally unraveled various postwar dilemmas but failed to do so culturally, often leav­­ing Taiwanese, Manchukuo residents, Koreans, and colonial Japanese individuals to sort out their own identities dur­­ing the initial years of the Cold War.42 A, B, and C class war crimes are, in a sense, a modern offshoot of the traditional western ideas of jus ad bellum, justice in start­­ing war, and jus in bello, just action while con­duct­­ing war. The A class crimes were those that Japan pursued in its path to start a war (jus ad bellum), and the BC class would be unjust actions con­ducted dur­­ing the course of the war (jus in bello). Larry May tells us that the rules of war are

14

Introduction

grounded in honor, not justice, and that such rules call for restraint. May writes, “war crimes are crimes against humaneness, not really all of humanity.” These ideas are the cornerstone of the rule of law, and humane treatment of the enemy is the key. The lack of such empathy on the battlefield and in the occupied areas of Japan’s empire, I would add, is what made the Japanese soldiers seem like the “devil,” or guizi, as they were portrayed in the mainland Chinese media.43 Gerry Simpson, in com­ment­­ing on Nazi war crimes, assesses that “this is why war crimes trials hover endlessly between uphold­­ing a universal morality and particulariz­­ing the crime in question as an historical exception. Ultimately, the performance of a war crimes trial is both situated in a history and yet seeks to transcend it.”44 Part of the con­tinued Japanese social interest in BC class war crimes stems from the fact that the details behind the trials were often scarce or never reported until long after the verdicts, the imprisonment, or even the executions were implemented, alert­­ing many to potential perversions of justice. While the full narrative of the 1949 Soviet war crimes trials of Japanese remains somewhat shrouded in historical fog, the earliest BC class war crimes trial is probably the August 20, 1945, trial on the island of Guam con­cern­­ing cannibalism and held under U.S. legal jurisdiction.45 This trial opened after Japan’s surrender but before the official surrender ceremony on September 2, so the Japanese government did not learn about it until much later.46 The first formal BC class trial after Japan’s prescribed handover of power was of Japanese General Yamashita Tomoyuki, but this was also managed by the American military, in Manila from October 29 to December 7, 1945 before Philippine independence. The last officially recognized tribunal ended on April 9, 1951, on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea, administered by the Australians.47 In actuality, trials con­tinued years after the Manus case because the Chinese Com­munists managed their own tribunals of Japanese war criminals dur­­ing the summer of 1956. Strictly speaking, these CCP trials were not proper BC class trials for a variety of legal and political reasons that will be more fully engaged later, but we should not ignore the fact that these tribunals were influenced by the international standards of the day. In short, the more-​than-​decade-​long pursuit after the end of World War II of Japanese soldiers for lesser war crimes, in both formal and informal settings, developed as a significant

Introduction

15

issue with its own internal logic in the early years of the Cold War in East Asia. The length of time spent on such prosecutions, the money invested, manpower organized, individuals charged, and testimony recorded on every level far outstrips what was spent on the two-​and-​a-​ half years of the Tokyo War Crimes Trial. In addition, the media coverage of the BC trials in both Japan and China affected the development of postwar attitudes about the Sino-​Japan relationship specifically because such tribunals provided evidence of crimes that directly influenced individuals and were con­sumed by both populations.

The Mean­­ing of a War Crimes Trial The spread of these trials across Japan’s former empire offers a departure from what Lisa Yoneyama calls the “Americanization of Japanese war crimes.” An examination of BC class war criminal trials in China places the local story of formerly colonized and occupied areas of Japan’s empire back into the crucible of historical scrutiny.48 How the Chinese, Taiwanese, and other former imperial subjects reacted to the dismemberment of Japan’s empire, specifically con­cern­­ing ideas of wartime responsibility, set them apart from Americans. American-​managed trials did not have to deal with the cumbersome problem of collaboration in such personal proximity or with national identity issues because the U.S. government could focus mainly on assign­­ing legal blame for start­­ing the war against the Western Allies and Japan’s wartime excesses. These decisions did not mean that for many Americans there were still great moral and political questions and that the pursuit of collaboration and the issue of vengeance were not com­pletely ignored. Striv­­ing toward such larger political goals did not signify that the Americans always treated Japanese internees any better than the Chinese did. In fact, in some cases treatment was arguably worse given the racial animosity that lingered even after surrender. There was no American love lost for Japanese former soldiers or even civilians in many regions, includ­­ing areas newly managed by U.S. marines or the U.S. army. Reports from Japanese internees from 1946 testify to their sometimes harsh treatment at the hands of American GIs. Precise Chinese records about their own treatment of Japanese alleged war criminals, with the exception of Com­munist incarceration, offer little

16

Introduction

insight into actual con­ditions, but a special legal section set up within the U.S. army to investigate “the cases of cruelty com­mitted by US servicemen on Japanese war criminal suspects” makes for disturb­­ing reading. The investigations took the form of translations of “testimony” of Japanese mistreatment at the hands of U.S. servicemen, specifically maltreatment of Japanese suspected of be­­ing war criminals. Petty bully­­ing and beatings of Japanese POWs occurred on the island of Guam until late 1946. Japanese detainees were slapped or made to stand at attention for hours. In effect, the punitive com­mands were frequently childish, the report con­cluded, but mostly tedious. Some detainees were not so lucky. In May 1946 two guards entered a suspect’s cell, beat him, and then urinated all over the suspect, who was forced to lick the urine off the floor. Another suspect was attacked more viciously: “Two guards, whose names were unknown to me, came into my cell. One of them held me down, and the other pushed his penis into my mouth, mak­­ing me swallow the semen discharge. They refused to allow me to clean my mouth in spite of my entreaty. From this I caught a bad disease, the symptom appear­­ing in four months’ time.” The suspect believed it was syphilis. Most of the other com­ plaints were random beatings, strange maltreatment, and painful exercise or work.49 The Americans were not the only ones to show con­tempt toward the Japanese. Reports of the British act­­ing similarly reached the shores of Japan in postwar memoirs of incarceration. In Southeast Asia one British com­batant ordered a Japanese prisoner of war to kneel down so that he could piss all over the defeated soldier.50 For many of the East Asian inhabitants of Japan’s empire the legal process to suss out war criminals was much more prone to becom­­ing part of a propaganda program at the outset and intimately tied to a burgeon­­ing sense of nationalism. Yoneyama avers that the ways “in which legal and other discursive forces have produced the Asian/ American as the agent-​subject through and over which demands for different kinds of historical justice” are pursued has blinded Americans. I would take her ideas further and suggest that this blind spot has impeded historical insight into the important Sino-​Japanese legal relationship of the immediate postwar period. Her argument suggests that this unipolar approach to analyz­­ing Japanese war crimes, com­mitted against the Western Allies, remains a key impediment to grasp­­ing the

Introduction

17

way in which East Asians dealt with the dissolution of the Japanese imperial structure.51 In part, I am push­­ing the notion that East Asia established and struggled with its own con­cepts of international law prior to World War II. These ideas played significant roles in orient­­ing how political players reacted in the immediate postwar period and force us to sketch out the con­text under which the evolution and understand­ ­ing of law developed in Japan and China in direct relation to the crumbl­­ing Japanese empire. In no way does this mean that I take no notice of important Western archives, but I employ them to keep the focus, to the extent possible, pinned on East Asian relationships. How the West reacted is well detailed elsewhere and is ancillary in some ways to this study, even though the decisions and presence of the Western Allies can never be ignored in a postwar history of East Asia. The current wave of historical study tends to examine memory and its interaction with history, but we have failed to notice deep in the background the larger role the courts and the media of the time exerted in mold­­ing this memory into firmer public opinion. Part of the reason for this neglect is that scholarship has needed to unearth the details and horror of the Japanese imperial atrocities first and has had less time to engage the process through which legal responsibility was pursued for all but the most tragic events. However, memory gives birth to emotional history—​it tends toward personal recollection. Legal judgments, on the other hand, are a form of public memory that create precedents on which foreign policy and future strategy are built. Gerry Simpson notes that the reason war crimes trials are history and yet transcend it is because “the trial con­fines a historical moment in its abnormality but wishes to make it less universal and atemporal.”52 This is particularly so in the Chinese case. National memory is personal and domestic while legal opinions are public and publicized and more importantly strive to be international. Legal proceedings are an attempt to balance personal experiences and biases with an accepted standard of norms that will, if followed correctly, allow the nation to join an international brotherhood of like-​minded states that base their societies on the twin pillars of truth and justice. In addition to this we must mix in what Mirianne Hirsch has labeled as “post-​memory,” which “describes the relationship that the generation after those who witnessed cultural or collective trauma bears to the experiences of those

18

Introduction

who came before, experiences that they ‘remember’ only by means of the stories, images, and behaviors among which they grew up. These experiences were transmitted to them so deeply and affectively as to seem to con­stitute memories in their own right.”53 I aver that these BC class trials, the act of bring­­ing war criminals to justice, create history. Marc Galater urges that such trials and ideas shape how we see history because we want to “undo the injustice of history” and “attempt to make history yield up a morally satisfy­­ing result that it did not the first time around.”54 Further com­plicat­­ing immediate postwar Sino-​Japanese relations and reveal­­ing the true gulf between the Pacific theater with the U.S. military as the central player and the situation on the Chinese mainland was the number of Japanese war dead on the Chinese mainland who succumbed after Japan’s surrender. This makes less sense, unless Chinese reprisals actually had taken place on a larger scale than previously assumed or fight­­ing had actually con­tinued. What turns out to be true is that far from surrender­­ing in China, Japanese imperial forces con­tinued to fight on the mainland for both the Chinese Nationalist and Chinese Com­munist sides. Such sustained martial efforts on the mainland fit the historical situation—​Japanese troops trained years for little else, and they studied and had mostly been indoctrinated to know only war. Since the early 1930s young Japanese men had been educated in school, at home, and on the streets that they were essentially fight­ ­ing in China’s interest, even though what they actually brought about was destruction. A July 11, 1946, report by the chief of staff for the China Expeditionary Army (the name for Japan’s imperial forces in China), Kobayashi Asasaburō, con­cern­­ing “the general situation of the China Expeditionary Army at the end of the war,” detailed this story. Kobayashi informed his superiors that follow­­ing Japan’s surrender slightly more than 40,000 Japanese individuals, most of whom were soldiers, had died in battle, died of illness in battle, died due to indeterminate circumstances, gone missing, or fled.55 Some of those numbers were due to military skirmishes between Japanese troops that were dissatisfied with the directive to turn over their weapons to the Chinese; others claimed they were protect­­ing Japanese civilian groups from the invad­­ing Soviet troops stream­­ing down into Manchuria. One garrison of Japanese

Introduction

19

s­ oldiers even joined KMT forces in Shanxi Province dur­­ing the civil war. Ultimately, what matters is that the Japanese surrender on the Chinese mainland did not immediately translate into a termination of armed com­bat as it did in occupied Japan. Dispatches from the imperial Japanese high military com­mand, the Daihonei, to the Allied com­mand from August 22, 1945, over the follow­­ing week detailed fairly poor con­ditions in China, and reports to the Allies intimated that issues on the mainland might prevent a full and proper surrender through which the imperial Japanese army could lay down its arms in China. A subsequent cable from the Japanese high military com­mand to General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Com­ mander of the Allied Powers (SCAP), on August 24, 1945, explained that the Japanese forces in China had implemented a cessation order however the memo noted that the Chinese were not display­­ing “similar initiatives,” so there were still spots of fight­­ing on the mainland. SCAP referred to MacArthur specifically or the occupation administration under his authority. A follow-​up cable detailed the “illegal actions of some elements of the Allied forces” and stressed that the Soviet Union in Manchuria was still engag­­ing in armed com­bat after the formal end of war. Soviet troops were recorded fir­­ing on Japanese troops, steal­­ing materials, assault­­ing women, and shoot­­ing soldiers with small arms. The Japanese informed the American occupy­­ing authorities that such actions demonstrated impediments to bring­­ing a finality to war in the China theater.56

Japanese History through Chinese Eyes As com­plex as decipher­­ing what happened at the edge of empire, another problem fac­­ing the scholar interested in “lesser” Japanese war crimes trials is the absence of a Chinese equivalent to Hannah Arendt. Known for her intellectual acuity to dissect the nature of Nazi power and authority, Arendt’s ability to probe the inner minds of war criminals, like Nazi bureaucrat Adolf Eichmann, ultimately con­vinced her that they were banal in their evilness.57 Arendt wrote decades after the war in Europe had ended, but she was able to dissect the anatomy of evil from a distance. Unfortunately, rarely in Chinese is there a parallel work of cathartic release that scholastically and accurately plumbs the

20

Introduction

inner depths of Japanese war criminals and their Chinese victims in this manner. This is not to say that the Chinese did not produce scholars of a caliber to match Hannah Arendt. Chinese society just did not allow such an individual free reign to publish after the war, and we may like to query why. Was the Chinese con­cept of justice that dissimilar, or did the trials not lend themselves to historical parallels? There were, of course, Chinese jurists and attendees at the Tokyo War Crimes Trial, such as prosecutor Xiang Zhejun, chief advisor Ni Zhengyu, and judge Mei Ruao, but few, if any, released until recently any more-​than-​­cursory insight beyond personal and private reactions. Even less has been writ­ ­ten about them in English or Japanese. Moreover, because Chinese juris­­ prudence was submerged for close to twenty years, from 1959 to 1979, one could argue that this dissonance is still in existence because there was no literary space in which a Chinese Hannah Arendt could have raised our con­sciousness about the banality of the Japanese wartime bureaucracy and military. I venture that at the academic level there may be several Chinese versions of an Arendt, though few who get translated or published in English, and ultimately most are inwardly focused on China and do not scrutinize Japan. Regardless of the vast differences between World War II in Europe and East Asia, there remains a veneer of con­nection that links the war crimes trial process. Raul Hilberg points out in his famous tome The Destruction of the European Jews that he could not have produced such a volume without the legal discovery made possible by the Nuremberg Trials. The same is true with the Tokyo Trial, and one could say as much for the BC class trials. These BC class trials of war criminals did not just provide jurisprudence; the tribunals bequeathed a legacy of historical materials about Japan’s military actions in China and the Sino-​Japanese responses in the immediate postwar era.58 We have at our disposal an entirely new body of data to inform us about how Chinese foreign policy toward Japan, both the KMT’s and CCP’s, was formed and what drove it. Newly declassified archives in Japan, Taiwan, and China allow, in part, a new way for historians to push the recalcitrant Japanese political establishment into further examin­­ing its own role in Japan’s aggressive colonialism and war, as Arai Shinichi has suggested numerous times.59 What’s more, intense historical scrutiny of such crimes, even given the problems that beset the trials at the

Introduction

21

time, while not urg­­ing con­tinued prosecution of war crimes as occurred in Germany at the start of the 1980s, could at least help detract from the con­servative stance in Japan that the war “liberated” and aided Asia against the West. This is not to say that trials are the best venue for writ­­ing history, and there are several pitfalls of which we should be aware.60 The esteemed scholar of Nazi Germany Richard Evans, who also testified at trial con­cern­­ing a Holocaust denier, makes a cogent point when he notes that “trials are ‘vectors of memory’ whose purpose is redress­­ing the wrongs of the past.” Quot­­ing French historian Henri Rousso, with whom Evans is not in com­plete agreement, “History is possible only after a lengthy period of time has elapsed, whereas justice is best dispensed as quickly as possible.” Evans summarizes Rousso’s distinction between the two, assert­­ing that “memory is really a form of propaganda; history is con­cerned with the truth.”61 If we merge these two thoughts what we may surmise is that justice serves to assuage public opinion but that it will be the job of the historian to later sift through the trial documents to ascertain the “truth.” We should keep that in mind when examin­­ing the Chinese trials of Japanese war criminals in that such legal proceedings served several simultaneous goals but also bestowed a set of memories enshrined in legal verdicts onto Chinese national history and Japanese national memory. We should not slip too easily into reverie that legal adjudication of memory will somehow automatically lead to a bilateral reckon­­ing of historical truth, but neither has China’s narrative of the war been monolithic. Views have shifted over time, mov­­ing from focus­­ing more on depict­­ing the evil KMT and then from the 1980s onward redraft­­ing a focus on Japan and includ­­ing the KMT in the Com­munist narrative as a force that fought against the Japanese.62 There is already much excellent scholarship on collective memory from historians such as Jay Winter, among others, but we need to retain the con­cept that legal precedent informs our memory.63 Carol Gluck asserts that there are four “terrains” of memory: official com­memoration in public monuments and school texts, vernacular memory in film and literature, personal memories, and public debates about memory.64 I think a crucial fifth category would be legal or institutional memory, memory that has a particular and bind­­ing hold on the future—​such as peace treaties, court

22

Introduction

cases, lawsuits, legal precedents, and so on. This bureaucratic memory is not always in the public view, such as with monuments, nor is it necessarily enshrined in education, though in China’s case it does frequently make some appearance. Legal memory is recorded in courts, used as the basis for international relations, and therefore forms a cornerstone for decisions that affect foreign policy. The linkage of these elements with international law makes their impact more valuable and transnational than mere domestic memory. Writ­­ing in 1980, Ian Nish underscored that while postwar Japan was no longer striv­­ing to reestablish an empire in East Asia, one could not deny the impact of its so-​called “imperial hangover.” This hangover syndrome, in his words and the words of several other historians who analyzed the aftermath of empire, ascertained that “the memory of imperial days influences some crucial political questions, such as the current con­troversy over whether Japan should assume a greater share in the responsibility for her own defence or that of her own area of the globe. It also has its effect on foreign policy-​ ­making towards South-​east Asia and China.”65 The transnational nature of legal memory also renders it vulnerable, a point made by a historian of the Holocaust, because the prosecution and court at Nuremberg pulled in opposite directions. “On the one hand, the radicalness of the Nazi atrocity created demands for an extraordinary legal response that would serve the interests of both formal justice and didactic legality,” Lawrence Douglas notes. “On the other hand, the very absences of precedents for such an unusual international proceed­­ing created pressures to normalize the trial. Two warring impulses thus shaped the jurisprudential profile of the case: the desire to submit extreme outrages to the rule of law, and the refusal to permit the law to be misshapen by its con­tact with atrocity,” Douglas admitted.66 The same warr­­ing logic can be said to have dominated the Sino-​Japanese cases, but the legal gulf was even greater because the Western Allies, who possessed large swaths of colonies in Asia and wished to reassert themselves after the war, did not actually recognize Chinese legal authority until 1943 with the abrogation of extraterritoriality. Mei Ruao, the Chinese judge at the Tokyo War Crimes Trial, com­ mented that the Nazi aim in the Holocaust was based on “systematic killing,” which differed significantly from Japan’s imperial aggression in

Introduction

23

China.67 Unlike Nazi militarism, which had a plan and focus for its evil, Japan launched its imperial war with little foresight after the initial attacks, thus mak­­ing the legal distinction of who was in charge and what they were manag­­ing much more difficult to ascertain.68 We should not deny that the war still turned regular Japanese men into “devils,” but in cases such as the Nanj­­ing Massacre and other horrible atrocities of Chinese civilians, this was akin to “mass murder run viciously amok.”69 Historians do not refute the vicious nature of imperial Japanese rule, but the reason that Nanj­­ing was not a holocaust stems, importantly, from the fact that the episode was not an end unto itself. Dur­­ing the Chinese war crimes trials, includ­­ing the half-​hearted attempts of the KMT and the more robust reeducation campaigns of the CCP, the goal was to take those “Japanese devils” and turn them back into men. Con­sequently, this book aims to analyze the processes that first rendered Japanese men into “devils” and then from “devils” back to men.

The Enigma of Con­temporary Attitudes The uniformity of current Chinese attitudes toward Japanese war crimes (and Japan) smacks up against a different historical mind-​set, which seems to undermine the angry “Japanese devils” characterization. Two personal experiences drove home this discord between Chinese reactions and the actual historical actions taken toward the Japanese in China soon after World War II ended. One day a student in my class posed a question: “If the Japanese military behaved so abominably toward the Chinese dur­­ing World War II [referenc­­ing the 1937 Nanjing Massacre], why didn’t the Chinese just merely murder the Japanese in mass retribution after the emperor surrendered in 1945?” It was a simple question, predicated on the assumption that Chinese had access to the weaponry, the know-​how to round up suspect Japanese, and of course the desire. Given the numerous Japanese military atrocities and imperial aggression in and around the Chinese mainland from 1931 to 1945, why indeed was there not an all-​out bloodbath after the end of the war in China?70 The Chinese did not necessarily always con­sider the war against Japan along the con­tours of nationalist ideology or even along the sorts of nationally bounded geographic lines that we take for granted today,

24

Introduction

as Rana Mitter makes clear in his analysis of China’s struggle against Japanese imperialism.71 Graham Peck, an officer of the U.S. Office of War Information (OWI) team in China, spent six years dur­­ing the 1930s and 1940s travel­­ing around China, learn­­ing the language, and observing. After his lengthy sojourns travers­­ing the countryside and gain­­ing a feel for the country Peck came to believe that the “Oriental” lived as a spectator—​constantly look­­ing through the window of life and choos­­ing his philosophy and behavior for the day.72 Chinese did not necessarily seek revenge against the Japanese, accord­­ing to Peck’s logic, because many of them saw the Japanese as one in a long line of oppressive overlords or had more press­­ing con­cerns in the fields or because of a variety of other related reasons. The dire economic straits of the immediate postwar era did not allow most Chinese families the luxury to con­template measures for revenge, or maybe they had no understand­­ing that such action was possible. To be sure, many Chinese individuals did take matters into their own hands, and there was postwar unrest, but overall, even acknowledg­­ing the sort of rule that Japan exacted in China, it is rather mystify­­ing that the Chinese did not pursue the “dish best served cold,” revenge, with more zeal. This apparent dilemma between con­temporary Chinese displeasure with Japan and apparent postwar historical magnanimity was more pronounced when I had the opportunity to delve into the archives in Nanj­­ing over a hot summer in 2008.73 Near the end of my stay I was invited to give a short talk. Afterward, I asked the students assembled if they had any ideas regard­­ing why the Chinese did not take a more aggressive stance against the Japanese after the empire fell. One thoughtful Chinese graduate student raised his hand and suggested that he thought this was because fundamentally “the Chinese are a benevolent race of people.” 74 I thanked him for his view but retorted by ponder­­ing that if Chinese were so benevolent, such behavior seemed to be reserved more for the imperial Japanese than for their own people given the millions who died in the various KMT and CCP mismanaged purges, civil war, famines, and cultural revolutions. The con­ versation marinated in silence after my com­ments, but this student’s opinion stayed with me. Here was another deeply held memory about the postwar period. The question now remained with me on two fronts—​my undergraduate’s question and the Chinese student’s response

Introduction

25

in Nanjing. Both points still hinged dramatically on each student’s own cultural assumptions, apprais­­ing the lack of Chinese retribution, yet neither opinion seemed historically satisfactory. These trials were not just political but woven into the social memory and secondly served as entertain­­ing yet dramatic reminders of how Japan’s postwar experience was supposedly unfair. The issue of BC class war criminals as wrongly prosecuted soldiers upon whom state offenses were unjustly hoisted offered wrench­­ing human drama as depicted in postwar Japan’s obsession with the topic in books, magazine articles, plays, songs, movies, and so on. Sandra Wilson claims that stories about Japanese soldiers “could be under certain circumstances very politically and culturally attractive in 1950s Japan.” 75 Wilson details that several of these popular motifs became household names in early postwar Japan, includ­­ing films such as I Want to Be a Shellfish (Watakushi wa kai ni naritai), The Thick-​Walled Room (Kabe atsuki heya), Mothers of Sugamo (Sugamo no haha), and others, which helped prompt burgeon­ ­ing sympathy to the plight of lower-​classed war criminals.76 Wilson boldly announces that we have missed much of the discussion in Japanese society con­cern­­ing lower-​rank­­ing war criminals and war responsibility at this level because “scholars in Japan and the West have usually privileged the ‘left intellectual’ perspective over that of the ordinary Japanese. We are much more familiar with 1950s debates about pacifism than with the activities of the large associations of former soldiers, soldier’s bereaved families, or those of the lobby groups advocat­­ing the release of con­v icted war criminals.”77 Importantly, fictional products con­cern­­ing the Japanese war criminal experience did not end in the 1950s—​in fact, stage productions that rendered audiences teary eyed and sympathetic toward stories of war crimes con­tinue to be successful in new film versions of older movies and entirely new creations. One recent example, Musical: The Southern Cross, bases its title on the con­stellation of stars visible in the clear night sky of the southern hemisphere where many Japanese troops were posted.78 Ushimura Kei writes that we need to understand what made this 2004 stage drama a hit. The overwrought story, about the love between a Japanese student who gets drafted as a soldier in the war and his Indonesian girlfriend who returns home to be a nationalist, is too ­clichéd to detail here, but the stage com­pany does admit that while the

26

Introduction

story is “fictional” it is based on “history.”79 As Ushimura explains, the motif of the Southern Cross appears in a variety of postwar Japanese memoirs about war experiences in the southern hemisphere. The play is one of many that tends to gloss over Japanese crimes while highlight­ ­ing the role Japan played in assist­­ing Southeast Asian nationalism and subsequent independence to arise.80 In the end it is the “dastardly” Dutch who are revealed to be the real war criminals on stage, return­­ing after the Japanese have already helped to establish a new Indonesian nation and try­­ing to reestablish European colonial rule. Europeans prosecuted Japanese innocents, like the main student character, for war crimes that they protest were more imagined than real. Peter Gries, in his analysis of con­temporary Chinese nationalism and couched aversion directed at Japan, discusses the idea that “vengeance means retaliation” and is a “moral anger” com­bined with a “sense of injustice.” At the same time “vengefulness is an emotion of power relations. It functions to correct imbalanced or disjointed power relationships,” he writes.81 I argue that in the immediate aftermath of World War II, neither the Com­munists nor the Chinese Nationalists actively sought vengeance against the Japanese because neither the international political circumstances nor the pend­­ing civil war allowed attention to be diverted from the ultimate goal at hand: to gain the support of the former enemy. In short, immediately after the surrender both the KMT and the CCP needed imperial Japan to bolster their own futures on the Chinese mainland. Vengeance on a grand scale did not serve Chinese purposes, which ironically coincided with Japan’s policy of pursu­­ing stability while try­­ing to de-​imperialize the region. At the same time, follow­­ing on David Kang’s analysis of China’s relations with its neighbors, the middle kingdom historically saw itself as dominant in the region due to its moral stand­­ing within the traditional hierarchy.82 Thus, for China to deal with Japan benevolently, as a superior would with a vassal that com­mitted errors, was not behavior that deviated from a historical norm. Joshua Fogel has argued eloquently that to understand modern Japan and China “requires bring­­ing the other into account,” and that is a secondary theme of this book.83 With recently opened Chinese (Taiwan and the mainland) archives juxtaposed against Japanese, British, French, and American sources, we can see both the Japanese and Chinese vy­­ing

Introduction

27

to demonstrate legal responsibility in prosecut­­ing war crimes under the new rubric of international law in their con­tradictory postwar efforts to resolve problems regard­­ing Japanese war criminality. The measures the Chinese took to gain international recognition and legal dominion in their own country to implement this justice in pursuit of Japanese war crimes demonstrates the significance of this crucial moment in the history of Sino-​Japanese relations as well as in Chinese and Japanese history. The Japanese responses and attempts, at times, to aid, subvert, or assuage the Chinese prosecution are the other half of the story. Franziska Seraphim has declared that it is not true that Japanese have no war guilt but, rather, that “war memory developed with—​and as part of—​particular and divergent approaches to postwar democracy in the aftermath of war.”84 In such a manner the Chinese and Japanese views presented here demonstrate the highly problematic nature of grasp­­ing the narrative of Japanese war crimes but also point to the need for a triangular analysis of the historical issues from the Japanese, Chinese, and Taiwanese historical standpoints.

1

Defeat in Denial

The Regional Impact of Japan’s Surrender The los­­ing army is always in the wrong. —​Japanese proverb

T

he su dden a n d c a l a m i t ous decline of the Japanese empire in East Asia created a cascade of postwar problems in the fallout from the sudden withdrawal of Japanese power. While the Allies might have foreseen imperial Japan’s eventual downfall, there was little that could be done in advance for the mighty takeover tasks that lay ahead, especially in China, where there was scant western military presence, and in Taiwan, where there was none.1 As much as the Japanese imperial forces had succumbed to the awesome destructive power of the American military machine, the Japanese still had under their con­trol more than 1 million soldiers in China (in the form of the China Expeditionary Army under the leadership of General Okamura Yasuji), not includ­­ing those in Taiwan or Korea.2 Many distinguished historians have documented the state of Japan as surrender dawned on a military exhausted and on the brink of collapse but able to bog down the Allies in many regions of the empire.3 Ronald Spector paints a bleak picture, calculat­­ing how many Japanese troops were stationed within East Asia: “At the moment of surrender there were approximately 6,500,000 Japanese soldiers and civilians—​about one in twenty Japanese—​in the western Pacific and on the mainland of Asia. They included about 1,200,000 in Manchuria, 750,000 in Korea, 1,500,000 in China proper and at least 700,000 in various parts of Southeast 29

30

Defeat in Denial

Asia.”4 These circumstances at Japan’s “imperial edge” force us to reconsider the nature and structure of how the Japanese empire crumbled beyond its occupied home island borders. We need to focus on the international con­text in which Japan abandoned its decades-​long imperial quest. Establish­­ing a war crimes com­mission and hold­­ing trials was believed to be a necessary step to resolve many of the problems that Japan’s empire had created. Satō Takumi has painted a masterful picture of the incongruity ­con­cern­­ing how and when Japanese forces (bureaucratic and military) actually ceded power throughout the empire, in con­trast to the all-​ encompass­­ing myth of surrender on August 15, 1945.5 The Japanese surrender was spread over so vast and uneven a territory throughout the nation’s disemboweled empire that while the formalities for surrender in Japan took place in Tokyo Bay on September 2, 1945, the same handover was not happen­­ing simultaneously elsewhere. On the Chinese mainland and in Korea the transfer of authority did not occur until September 9, 1945. Even the nature of the ceremonial ­posture was different depend­­ing on the venue. At the surrender ceremony in Nanjing, China—​the KMT capital at the time—​on September 9 at 9 a.m., Japan was represented by General Okamura Yasuji and the Chinese by KMT General He Yingqin. Okamura noted in his memoirs that several of the KMT officers present knew their Japanese counterparts on a first-​name basis because many had studied at the same military schools in prewar Japan. Okamura recalled that surrender­­ing to someone with whom he was familiar, a Chinese “friend” General He Yingqin, rendered the situation more relaxed.6 Postwar Chinese and Western media con­sistently remarked on General He’s behavior at this handover. Accord­­ing to one eyewitness, General He stood up and with both hands accepted the surrender documents from the Japanese general. Chinese observers felt that General He should not have risen from his seat and taken the signed documents from the surrender­­ing Japanese in this formal manner because such behavior showed too much deference. General He should have received the papers while sitt­­ing down and with one hand as his colleagues did, many remarked at the time.7 In a 1950s series of magazine articles originally published in Japanese and then republished in Chinese, the two generals spoke about the first time they met and their relationship after the war.

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Okamura mentioned the infamous “return bow” that He Yingqin gave when accept­­ing the surrender documents, and Okamura says he remembers it well because there were some com­plaints from foreign observers. Okamura explained this was because Western morals were different from Asian ones and Westerners did not understand the situation. Okamura then thanked He Yingqin for not mak­­ing the Japanese into regular POWs once they had lost the war.8 The mood at the Chinese surrender ceremony was a far cry from the more somber environment at the official American surrender ceremony on the USS Missouri a week prior. Issac Shapiro, a young Russian-​ Jewish stateless refugee who had grown up in wartime Japan, witnessed the event, and it struck him that the United States purposely flew the same flag that Com­modore Perry had flown in 1853 on his first visit to open Japan. As Shapiro recalled, after the brief and cheerless exchange of signatures, “Overhead, 450 US Navy carrier planes flew in close formation, followed by a squadron of US Army Air Force B-​29s, the same B-​29s that had bombed us in Tokyo and had dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was a stirr­­ing sight. And it was an impressive demonstration of the victor’s power that had forced such a humiliat­­ing defeat on Japan.”9 In fact, Japanese military troops had to surrender to a multitude of nationalities and forces, depend­­ing on locale: the French in Indochina, Dutch for Indonesia, and the United Kingdom for Hong Kong, Singapore, and the Malay peninsula. The British Vice-​Admiral of the Fleet, Louis Mountbatten, who was charged with establish­­ing order in Southeast Asia after the defeat, summed up the cumbersome situation: “The nine month period I remained in Supreme Com­mand of South East Asia after the Japanese surrender was, in many respects, more difficult and a more test­­ing time than dur­­ing the war.”10 The transfer of com­mand and con­trol on the island of Taiwan (formerly a Japanese colonial possession since 1895 but returned to the Chinese Nationalists) was even more difficult to organize given the fact that neither the American nor the KMT military was even present on the island at the end of the hostilities with Japan. In fact, Taiwan was not even formally shifted to the KMT’s authority until October 25, 1945.11 As Sayuri Shimizu illuminates, the Japanese lost the war, but the tentacles of empire often retained their grip long after the beast itself had died.

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Despite their new status as underlings and fac­­ing domination by America through the occupation, Japanese “sought to define their nation’s place in postwar East Asia in ways autonomous of strategic imperatives imposed by the American occupation overlord.”12

The Cataract of Surrender The transition of power from imperial Japan to local authority gelled dur­­ing a number of separate peace negotiations prior to the ceremonies, which entailed serious advance preparation that was not always easily achieved. In China, Japanese military officials, includ­­ing Major Gen­ eral Imai Takeo and his translator Kimura Tatsuo, first flew to the town of Zhijiang, in Hunan Province, on August 21, 1945.13 There the team negotiated the nuts and bolts of how to surrender to the Chinese and to decide on the process.14 One can glean an understand­­ing of how the Japanese viewed their predicament and thus their attitudes toward the Chinese from participant diaries. In Aaron Moore’s estimation we need to be aware of the pitfalls of postwar diaries because soldiers often “felt com­pelled to change their story when new information was available.”15 Nonetheless, they can serve as excellent sources when corroborated with other materials. In his diary Japanese General Okamura Yasuji, supreme com­mander of imperial Japan’s China Expe­ ditionary Army, reflected on the causes behind Japan’s loss because he was surprised that Japan had to surrender. He extrapolated several reasons: 1. We underestimated too grandly the enemy’s [United States’s] ability to wage war. 2. Without secur­­ing northern areas, we moved south as well. 3. The con­flict between our Navy and the Army was too strong. 4. Our very apparent overconsumption made us com­placent. 5. Soviet entrance into the war. 6. The atomic bombs. 7. Kokumin dōgi no teika [which may translate best as “the decreas­ ­ing spirit of the people to wage war”].16 When the emperor announced Japan’s surrender, even though some officials had been notified in advance, most imperial Japanese officers

The Regional Impact of Japan’s Surrender

33

did not quite know how to respond. Japan had been, after all, a successful imperial power since the 1890s. Accord­­ing to a mainland Chinese series on Sino-​Japanese history, General Okamura Yasuji initially opposed even accept­­ing the Potsdam declaration and surrender.17 A few days before actual surrender, cabl­­ing his com­manders back home, Okamura stated that he relished a last offensive by the army in China. “I am firmly con­v inced that it is time to exert all our efforts to fight to the end, determined that the whole army should die an honorable death without be­­ing distracted by the enemy’s peace offensive,” he telegraphed.18 On August 18, 1945, only three days after the declaration of the surrender, Okamura wrote in his personal diary, “I have already lost my will to con­tinue living. I am like a corpse, bitterly swallow­­ing my bile as I strain to return one million soldiers home to safety . . . and I have spent many sleepless nights recently dwell­­ing on this.”19 At the same time, he was not giv­­ing up all hope, nor was he con­templat­­ing the “honorable” way out—​suicide. A few weeks later Okamura was obviously feel­­ing more sanguine about Japan’s defeat, but what pained him most about the war effort was that even though China should not have been able to effectuate a military advance against Japan, the Chinese were con­sidered victorious. Okamura used a chess analogy to explain Japan’s inability to wholly con­quer China. “If you have no Rooks, Bishops, or Kings/Queens but do have access to numerous pawns and lesser pieces you can still win when you are pinned down,” he explained. China was poor but had so many people that it had potential to be a force to be reckoned with, whereas Japan had lots of people, but they lived too tightly packed geographically, and so in the future his nation would probably drop to a fourth-​ or fifth-​rate country, Okamura reasoned.20 In his memoirs Okamura traced the different responses of the Japanese troops in China depend­­ing on where they were stationed. Essentially, the China Expeditionary Army had been engaged in an eight-​year battle of unend­ ­ing victories and had the strength to keep go­­ing (or so it assessed).21 Officers believed that they had not lost to China. With Chinese Nationalist General Chiang Kai-​shek’s announcement on surrender day of a “benevolent policy” toward the Japanese, many Japanese leaders retained a somewhat positive opinion toward the future. Given what victory brought the Chinese, more bloodshed and the start of all-​out

34

Defeat in Denial

civil war, very soon after the Japanese surrender Chinese began us­­ing the word cansheng, “pyrrhic victory,” to describe China’s defeat of Japan. Parallel to the civilian government in Tokyo, the Japanese imperial army in China did not take the surrender sitt­­ing down, nor did it only await orders from the Allies. In fact, the day after the official surrender, on August 16, 1945, General Okamura sat down together with a few fellow high officers and shared his opinions on what measures China should take and how Japan could help. He outlined these opinions in his diary with the title “Summary Plan for Deal­­ing with China.” The first section of Okamura’s plan—​composed of eleven articles deal­­ing with how to surrender, postwar goals of Japan, repatriate issues, technicians, attitudes, and so forth—​centered on the key point that with the dismantl­­ing of the Japanese empire China would be the sole superpower left in Asia and potentially be left alone to con­tinue the struggle against western imperialism. As such, it was crucial for Japan to offer China strong support, which would assist both East Asia and Japan to flourish in the future.22 This was very akin to pan-​Asian ideals that had run through con­servative and military circles in Japan since the late Meiji era.23 Okamura was adamant that Japan needed to turn around its defeat, to rethink the goals of its imperial project and ultimately the whole aim of the war, which he argued had been to guide China’s modernization and make it prosper.24 In addition, it was important to maintain social stability while the Japanese military was be­­ing withdrawn from China. Okamura com­ manded that disloyalty or misbehavior in the ranks would not be tolerated and that the imperial army would retain order until the last man left: “As the soldiers retreat we will carefully maintain con­tact with the Chinese side and a strict sense of order dur­­ing the turnover of authority will be maintained with no room for disruptions. The imperial army must strengthen its personal resolve as it com­pletely retreats on its own recognizance even as it is a painful process to implement.” It was also important to forge good relations with the KMT, Okamura gambled, but because the CCP had led the war against Japan with rancor, the Japanese would need to punish it, he wrote.25 Okamura’s plan called for, when necessary, turn­­ing over Japanese weapons and ammunition to the KMT to aid its efforts to crush the CCP. Do not destroy any

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35

Japanese imperial facilities, he told his soldiers; hand them over and they will serve as a portion of Japan’s indemnity to China, which he obviously expected Japan to pay.26 Grant Hirabayashi, an American serviceman stationed in Nanj­­ing just after the end of the war, was one of the small number of U.S. forces who were able to mobilize quickly into China from their positions in South Asia. Hirabayashi was in Nanj­­ing on September 8, 1945, and personally experienced the lack of “surrender awareness” among the Japanese imperial soldiers that still held sway. He recalled: After we settled, Lt. Col. Burden suggested that we go for a walk and as we turned the corner, we were con­fronted by three soldiers com­­­ing down the street. Burden asked, “What do we do?” Without answering, I pushed him off the sidewalk to avoid any con­ frontation. This encounter occurred the day before the surrender ceremony and the Japanese were very cocky. Their attitude was that they were victorious in China and that if it were not for the Emperor’s order, they were will­­ing to fight on.27 Japanese military men who did remain in various areas of China and Taiwan faced a multitude of reactions, and not all of them were negative. Suzuki Akira, a neoconservative Japanese historian, provides an example of Chinese who con­tinued to maintain their relations with the Japanese. In one of his books he reproduces a photograph of a Japanese soldier a few days after the recapture of Nanj­­ing in 1945, sitt­­ing at a street stall smil­­ing at the camera and eat­­ing dumplings that were purchased from a Chinese vendor.28 While it does not demonstrate, as Suzuki wishes, that the Nanj­­ing massacre never happened, it is more indicative of the fact that for many of the average Chinese work­­ing class, life after the war had to con­tinue, and if a sale could be made, to a Japanese or anyone will­­ing to pay, business and the need to survive often trumped ethnic divisions. We should not forget that the Japanese still con­trolled, both through police and the military, many urban Chinese zones, so immediate retribution would often have been foolhardy. However, for many civilians who faced the shock of defeat abroad, the special privileges and status in the colonial lands they had enjoyed

36

Defeat in Denial

for so many decades quickly subsumed into a postwar anxiety of “what will happen to us now?”29 With the surrender of 1945, prewar and wartime Japanese status as an imperial powerbroker transformed into a negative “postwar personal experience,” as Asano Toyomi explains. The Japanese focused mostly on their personal misfortune at the end of the war and believed that such events had com­e about com­pletely without cause. Individuals were not seen as responsible for their own calamitous fate.30 Japanese defeat in China had been imposed from the outside—​even within its own empire Japan was somehow a victim. The issue at stake was not only that empires are not easily dismantled. The fact of the matter was that outside of the home islands and Okinawa, where the American military colossus had engaged in fierce battles of attrition, Japanese at the edge of empire could not fathom that they had actually lost. Many Japanese throughout the empire had not yet actually tasted defeat as their families had back home. The recollections of Major General Imai Takeo, General Okamura’s second in com­mand in China, point to the disbelief con­cern­­ing Japan’s defeat on the Chinese mainland and thus how different the situation was depend­ ­ing on locale. The Japanese military remained undefeated in battle. Not only had the Chinese army up until that time on its own merit been unable to effectuate a victory, but also the only manner in which it was successful in battle had been as an extension of the overwhelmingly victorious campaigns of the other Allied militaries. As such, there was no real outpour­­ing of the true feel­­ing of hav­­ing defeated the Japanese and the result was an incomplete eradication of public fear toward the Japanese military.31

Defeat as a Potential Source of Discontent Japanese home front audiences were equally con­fused about the end of the war, especially when they began to encounter hundreds of thousands of their own imperial soldiers repatriat­­ing in the autumn and winter of 1945. Because the population had been taught for more than a decade that not only was defeat a disgrace but also that for the military surrender was tantamount to treason, the domestic population was

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37

Asahi newspaper article about POWs. (Asahi shimbun, December 7, 1945)

i­nitially ill prepared for loss. In fact, when Japanese soldiers who had been taken prisoner of war dur­­ing the last weeks of the war began to trickle back home on ships after surrender, the newly democratized Japanese media had to inform its readers, “POWs are not criminals. We should receive them with a warm embrace.”32 Not only did Japanese have to be instructed to accept their own military returnees, but as Gordon White discusses, treat­­ing demobilized soldiers delicately was a crucial issue in guid­­ing postwar social and political stability. Demobilized soldiers pose a potential threat to their home society in three primary ways. “First, they possess certain com­mon political resources which have magnified their influence in

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Defeat in Denial

society, particularly after major wars.” At the same time, “ex-​soldiers are a potentially powerful force which governments can mobilize to strengthen the state’s hold over society and further its key values”; and “thirdly, the historical record suggests that ex-​soldiers have often posed a potential challenge or even threat to the established order, us­­ing their symbolic strength and organizational skills to pressure governments and, in the Russian case, to overturn them.”33 The flashpoint potential that demobilized Japanese soldiers wielded was not lost on the American occupation forces in Japan. An occupation report from December 15, 1946, written by Major General Charles Willoughby and labeled restricted access, remarked that the occupation was proceed­­ing well but urged American officials to remember that the United States had only a small number of troops actually ­stationed in Japan. “There is a potential danger that 3 to 4 million ­ex-soldiers will be driven underground. Their thoughts and actions must be influenced toward channels that are not inimical to the Occu­ pation,” Willoughby emphasized. When the report was submitted an estimated 59,000 U.S. forces were in place with about 84,000 semi-​ trained Japanese police. These were the authorities assigned to keep the peace among 73 million people in a nation that had just been defeated but that had been militarized for more than fifteen years. Several million demobilized soldiers also needed to be taken into con­sideration. But the report added that demobilized soldiers could also serve as a stabiliz­­ing mechanism if treated correctly because “control and influence are psychologically inherent in the trained soldier’s habit of obedience, recogni­­tion of military com­mand channels and his normal faith and willingness to accept guidance from superior officers; therefore, the reten­­tion of officer personnel in the demobiliza­­tion machinery and local aid bureaus is not only necessary but mandatory.”34 Willoughby’s report provided the view that certain factors were “axiomatic.” For example, “the repatriated ex-​soldier: disillusioned, jobless, is an easy prey to subversive ideas, especially com­munism.” Moreover, “the repatriated soldier must be con­trolled. The demobilized millions must be influenced in thoughts and actions to remain tranquil within the purviews of the occupation.” Fears about the potential for Japanese soldiers to turn socialist could be seen in the fact that “the brilliant record is not invulnerable; the tension of labor agita­­tion and unrest

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39

have shown this.” In addition, “the disorders in S[outh] Korea are a hint of potentialities—​things to com­e. The organized character of the con­script armies of Japan has not been vitiated by defeat. The presence within the national body of several million members of the armed forces is a dormant force of unknown potentiality.”35 Alexis Dudden points out that South Korean leader Syngman Rhee “had so much difficulty gain­­ing con­trol [in the early days of his administration] that he hired Korean thugs who had previously worked for the Japanese police to imprison or murder his opponents. Just as bad, he intervened in all attempts in the south to hold purge trials or make related policy because the only Koreans he could bribe for support with his budget of American assistance were those already most enriched and made powerful by the Japanese.”36 In con­trast to the alacrity of the U.S. assump­­tion of authority in occupied Japan, the lag in dismantl­­ing Japanese rule in China and elsewhere demonstrates that East Asian political and military policies did not always follow the American lead. This divergence underscores the fact that at the end of World War II China was still relatively beyond the con­trol of any one major military force—​the KMT, the CCP, the United States, and of course former imperial Japan all con­tinued to vie for power.37 Within this postwar com­petitive environment it was important for the Chinese to demonstrate international responsibility by establish­­ing proper trials of Japanese war criminals and to orchestrate the correct legal adjudica­­tion of guilt or innocence. Such trials are not always a foregone con­clusion—​this was, after all, only the cusp of turn­­ing the world’s atten­­tion to the power of international law. As Gary Bass has suggested, any government might support such trials because “the treatment of humbled or defeated enemy leaders and war criminals can make the difference between war and peace.” But, as he also notes, if one really wanted to get rid of national enemies, do­­ing it in the courtroom is the least effective way. One cannot always con­trol the results and can end up with detail-​obsessed lawyers crawl­­ing all over the situation. Alternatively, as Bass also suggests, governments could exile, kill, or maim enemies—​or ignore them.38 War crimes trials are tricky, do not always perform to expectations, and may in fact dredge up stickier internal problems than originally previewed. One need only think of more recent trials such as those for Rwanda and Cambodia to

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Defeat in Denial

con­sider the inherent problems of this sort of legal adjudication. Priscilla Hayner reminds us that the pursuit of justice in courts is difficult: “Sometimes the political transi­­tion has involved political com­ promise, and these com­promises have included some form of immunity from prosecu­­tion for the repercussions of old, perhaps even preserv­­ing some of their power or incorporat­­ing them into the new government.” Moreover, Hayner con­cludes, these trials “sometimes fail to con­vict even those everyone ‘knows’ to be guilty.”39 Certainly, the obstacles elucidated by Bass and Hayner were present in the Chinese trials.

International Efforts to Designate War Crimes The Chinese were not the only ones interested in adjudicat­­ing Japanese war crimes. Well before Japan’s surrender western Allies coordinated international meetings to discuss what could and should be done legally to con­demn the Japanese government and military for their wartime excesses. British, American, and Australian delegates, later joined by their Chinese counterparts, busily con­vened gatherings to discuss how to provide justice for what appeared to be an unfold­­ing disaster of epic proportions, namely investigat­­ing Japanese war crimes throughout East and Southeast Asia. Dur­­ing World War II, reports had mainly com­e in through missionaries and POWs, but media coverage of atrocities in China shocked readers as well. The legal defini­­tion of a war criminal flowered with these early deliberations. Actual discussions about these legal details com­menced with the United Nations War Crimes Com­mission (UNWCC), inaugurated in London at St. James’s Palace on October 26, 1943, with the participa­­ tion of seventeen nations. The com­mission operated for slightly less than five years, until March 31, 1948. It was really the war in Europe that first pushed the issue of war crimes to the political surface. In November 1940 the Polish and Czech governments in exile com­plained about Nazi atrocities. On January 13, 1942, in a declara­­tion at St. James’s Palace, nine countries came together to denounce Nazi atrocities. The Chinese observer, Wunz King, later made his own declara­­tion that the Chinese government con­curred with this statement and that Japan would be held to the same con­ditions for its actions in China. K­­ing had been a minister in Holland, then fled to London after the fall

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41

of the Netherlands. The com­mission was established thanks to a massive con­ceptual change in how law and nations interacted but also because of the scale and depravity of the atrocities that, in many ways, were linked to the state either through leadership, instruction, or negligence. In addition, the com­mission galvanized America and Great Britain, which were lukewarm to the idea of prosecut­­ing the nebulously defined and hard-​to-​prove charges of war crimes. At first the UNWCC con­centrated only on the European theater, but eventually it established an office in China because informa­­tion about Japan’s war crimes in that part of the world was not be­­ing adequately received in London, to the con­sterna­­tion of the Chinese and Australians, the two parties most con­cerned with such issues. In response to this criticism, the Far Eastern and Pacific Sub-​Commission opened in Chongqing, China, operat­­ing from November 1944 to March 1947.40 The Chinese head of the Far Eastern subsec­­tion was Wang Chonghui, one of the few Chinese lawyers experienced in international law. Wang Chonghui had represented China at the 1921 Washington Naval Con­ference and proclaimed that extraterritoriality was a national humilia­­tion to the Chinese.41 He had studied law at Yale University, published one of the first English translations of the German civil code, served in the early years of the Republican Chinese government in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and held a seat as a judge on the Permanent Court of International Justice, an organ of the post–World War I League of Nations and the predecessor to the International Court of Justice in The Hague.42 He also had the ear of Chiang Kai-​shek con­cern­­ing what to do with Japan’s war criminals. Top Chinese leaders and intellectuals were both aware of the hurdles but cognizant of what such legal deliberations entailed. For many, these moves con­nected deeply to remov­­ing the stain of unequal treaties China had to submit to decades prior. Now, Chinese law needed to show itself as an equal among the Allied victors.43 This Far Eastern Sub-​Commission did not really offer direc­­tion or analysis but merely existed to collect data and evidence about Japanese war crimes and later served to help draw up lists of potential suspects.44 The initial com­mittee meetings were con­fined to several private hearings. The first public and official gather­­ing did not con­vene until January 11, 1944, because the issue of whether to invite the USSR

42

Defeat in Denial

retarded the full ac­­tion of the com­mission. Some of the satellite countries within the USSR orbit wanted to join the com­mission, but the United Kingdom opposed Soviet participation.45 Lawyers work­­ing on the sticky legal con­cepts surround­­ing the idea of war crimes came from, in part, the Cambridge University Faculty of Law and included Liang Yuen-​Li, a Chinese lawyer. Liang had received his doctorate in law in the United States and was well versed in international law. English jurist and international law expert Elihu Lauterpacht (son of Sir Hersch Lauterpacht), who knew Liang at Cambridge, recalled that he “was a very interest­­ing and very nice man, not a great scholar and certainly not the hardest worker in the world, but he was very shrewd.”46 Wellington Koo was the Chinese representative to the UNWCC and experienced in diplomacy. Koo had been China’s ambassador to France and then England dur­­ing the 1930s and early 1940s. The very con­cept of international law, which saw great advances in response to the catastrophe of World War I, was still relatively new to Europe and even more so to most Chinese and Japanese. As Richard Horowitz outlines: While international law often did not (and does not) greatly con­ strain the actions of great powers in an international system, it does offer a stand­­ing body of understandings for resolv­­ing the quotidian con­flicts of day-​to-​day international relations. For example, it defines which organizations (i.e., recognized states) are players in the game of international diplomacy, it establishes standards for the treatment of foreign diplomats and the modes of negotia­­tion and ratifica­­tion of treaties, it provides principles for settl­­ing com­pet­­ing claims over legal and political jurisdiction, and it establishes com­mon definitions of terms used in treaties and other agreements. International law functioned as an institution, not in the “brick and mortar” sense usually used by historians, but in the sense used by economists.47 At the London con­ference dur­­ing the summer of 1945 the plan to pursue justice in international tribunals for “crimes against peace” and “crimes against humanity” finally con­gealed into a con­crete plan of action, rather than just an amorphous collec­­tion of legal proclamations.

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43

KMT documents in 1943 demonstrate that already internal discussions recognized that there were scant legal precedents allow­­ing an individual to be tried for crimes com­mitted dur­­ing a war in another country after the war was over, so the Chinese were puzzled about how to proceed. But the possibility for the crea­­tion of such laws remained, follow­ ­ing the model of the Paris Peace Con­ference after World War I.48 With this potential in mind, in late 1943 the KMT began com­pil­­ing lists of suspected war criminals and collect­­ing evidence against those whom the party assessed should be pursued in the eventuality of a Japanese defeat. At first the KMT placed the Japanese emperor on the list, but on August 12, 1945, at a Supreme Com­mittee for National Defense meeting, the members agreed with the Allied approach of “wait and see.” Even with Chiang Kai-​shek’s public announcement on radio and in the newspapers to treat the Japanese benevolently to show that the Chinese understood justice, tremendous Chinese public pressure called for the arrest and trial of Emperor Hirohito.49 The CCP did not remain silent even dur­­ing its exclusion from such important international gatherings. With regard to Japanese war criminals, the Chinese Com­munist leadership had already stated in its Libera­­tion Daily (Jiefang ribao) on September 14, 1945, that Japan must account for its actions and that the Chinese must adjudicate the crimes Japanese com­mitted. The newspaper then listed the main Japanese officials who the Com­munist leadership thought should be tried. These included General Okamura Yasuji, General Araki Sadao, General Doihara Kenji, former Minister of War Sugiyama Gen (Hajime), General Yamashita Tomoyuki (who was tried very quickly after the war by the United States in the Philippines), and others.50 One can easily see the com­peti­­tion the Chinese were up against because Doihara, Araki, and a host of other Japanese military leaders, such as General Matsui Iwane, were held responsible for the Nanj­­ing Massacre. Unfortunately, these same officers were key defendants in the American postwar search for justice at the Tokyo War Crimes Trial.

Japanese Views of War Crimes Peace, a con­cept in which the con­temporary Japanese government invested much effort and money, if not its entire postwar foreign policy,

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Defeat in Denial

was originally the means to an end at the cessa­­tion of World War II. In the immediate aftermath of surrender, in August 1945, Prime Minister Suzuki Kantarō announced to a weary Japanese populace that what the na­­tion required was tranquility and the time to rebuild.51 The apology for the war proclaimed by his successor, Prime Minister Higashikuni Naruhiko, did little to expound on the nature of the war or where responsibility lay.52 Higashikuni’s exaggerated statement that “one hundred million regret the war” scarcely touched on the origins of the war or helped resolve many of the tensions that had brought about the war. In many ways noth­­ing had changed from the wartime era—​Japan’s fundamental goals remained the achievement of economic wealth and prosperity. Merely the means to attain such initiatives had transformed, from the pursuit of war and empire to peace.53 To his credit, Higashikuni did write in his postwar memoirs that he wished to apologize directly to the Chinese people and send an apology mission to express this, but he failed. He admitted that because of Chiang Kai-​shek’s benevolent postwar policy, “not only did Japan lose to China in the war but we lost to them on the level of morality as well.”54 Contrary to wishful thinking, peace does not just break out in the absence of war; peace requires attentive cultiva­­tion and adroit political policies to br­­ing it to fruition. In addition, former enemies need to have, if not empathy, at least the will to negotiate and not merely to seek retribu­­tion for any peace to last. Real peace suggests that a spirit of reconcilia­­tion is under way.55 The fact that the Japanese called for such moves in the immediate aftermath of surrender but did not necessarily carve the paths to arrive at these goals speaks volumes about the nature of how the war was remembered follow­­ing the dismantl­­ing of the Japanese empire. It is in this disjunc­­tion between the ideal of peace and the failure to put it into practice where East Asia’s Cold War, memory, and the history of war crimes trials richly intersect.56 The memory of how Japan’s empire was adjudicated in the immediate postwar period is not simply a story of “victor’s justice.” Richard Minear, who in the early 1970s penned one of the first volumes in the English language about the Tokyo War Crimes Trial, was con­cerned about the legal com­plications of the trial because it utilized an entirely new set of juridical tools that were unveiled against the Nazis at Nuremberg but had previously not existed in law books.57 Minear was

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also incensed that the U.S. government employed a double standard to judge Japanese wartime behavior but thought noth­­ing of its own, which became more poignant as American mistakes dur­­ing the Vietnam War were widely publicized in the international media.58 The laws that ensnared the Japanese war criminals were not an invented tradition; they were too novel to be labeled as such, and jurists knew they were on thin ice when they introduced such exotic tools. But the idea was that the measures would create a safer and more peaceful future, so the con­ ventions were grandfathered in. These new laws, such as “crimes against humanity” and “crimes against peace,” made it possible for the Allies to judge the Japanese empire as illegal and to judge Japan’s war to expand the empire as aggressive and therefore also illegal. Minear claimed that this type of justice was lopsided because it only con­sidered what the Japanese had done but did not examine Allied policy that drove the world to that precipice.59 Such questions also led to doubt­­ing the U.S. decision to bomb civilians with the dropp­­ing of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Minear’s work was certainly not the first or last to assert such claims, but due to their collective critical voice these sorts of appeals effectively lent a hand to the crusade for reanalyz­­ing the value of the Tokyo Trial. Even though Minear’s aim was to critically examine the nature of the Tokyo Trial, intellectual camps that disparage the A class Japanese war crimes trial frequently cite his work, along with the Indian judge Radhabinod Pal’s extensive dissent that the entirety of the Tokyo Trial was illegal.60 However, these same groups often exhibit a particular amnesia when it com­es to the vastly larger set of BC Class war crimes trials, which brought to court 5,700 war criminals across half the globe. Or they only focus on the more dubious aspects of the trials such as the lack of translators, poorly ascribed evidence, and other matters of practical substance. To be sure, proper tribunal procedures were trampled at various trials, but for years the matter was hard to investigate because the archives remained classified. What is important, however, is that the issues stretch beyond just the Tokyo Trial, which monopolized postwar Japan’s attention. Even though the A class war criminals faced trials to determine their guilt in start­­ing an “aggressive and illegal war,” the Tokyo Trial ran into two fundamental obstacles. The first was to avoid deliver­­ing an

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indictment of the Japanese emperor, which thus kept the legal process focused on the government and more importantly the military’s responsibility. As a result, this decision left Japanese society out of the fray.61 Second was the legal emphasis on crimes against peace. Follow­­ing this logic, con­ventional war crimes such as murder and rape, the BC class set of crimes, were not the main purview. The Allies, mostly pressed by the Americans, placed their immediate postwar legal con­centra­­tion on ascertain­­ing the reasons behind the start of the war, while the debate about wartime responsibility centered on those military and political leaders who promoted the con­tinua­­tion of the war. The pursuit of the A class war criminal leadership was heavily dominated by political con­ cerns; thus, the equally important debate about Japanese military atrocities dur­­ing the war did not really enter the discussion or receive scrutiny as a legal issue other than to substantiate the larger claims of war responsibility. The December 1937 Nanj­­ing Massacre was certainly deliberated at the Tokyo court, but it was virtually the sole example of an atrocity that did not deal exclusively with western Allies and Japanese mistreatment. At the same time, because the subject of deliberat­­ing who initiated the hostilities intoxicated Allied prosecutors as a legal question, the Tokyo Trial was not esteemed in the postwar era as the proper pursuit of justice.62 Yuma Totani’s work questions many assertions about the supposed adumbra­­tion of the trial, and her assessment undermines the belief that there was not much discussion about Japanese atrocities brought out at trial. Certainly, there was no debate about Unit 731, but there was evidence, she finds, on military sexual slavery and related issues.63 There is a deeper con­nec­­tion between the Tokyo Trial and the BC class trials than has previously been studied—​members of the court often worked on both trials, and evidence gleaned from investigations abroad was introduced at Tokyo. Pedro Lopez was the Philippine prosecutor, and his work with Japanese documents in the American-​managed Philippine trials of General Yamashita Tomoyuki and General Homma Masaharu in con­nec­­tion with the Rape of Manila and the Bataan Death March proved fruitful. The French prosecutor, Roger Depo, introduced French materials from French war crimes trials initially held at Saigon.64 There was a con­ sistent prosecutorial and evidentiary link between the Tokyo War Crimes Trial and BC class national war crimes trials held elsewhere.

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Japanese Bureaucratic Response to Defeat Japanese officials were tepid in response to, if not chilly in support of, the Allied push for war crimes trials. The nation’s elite were already delv­­ing into the minutiae of potential war crimes problems and attempt­ ­ing to formulate a national strategy before the Allies had even divulged their own con­crete outline. Because the prosecu­­tion of war crimes had been outlined in the Allies’ Potsdam Declara­­tion of July 26, 1945, the Japanese knew someth­­ing would happen; it just was not clear what form the trials would take or how many there would be. Article 10 of the declara­­tion stated, “We do not intend that the Japanese shall be enslaved as a race or destroyed as a nation, but stern justice shall be meted out to all war criminals, includ­­ing those who have visited cruelties upon our prisoners.”65 Precisely how this would be carried out and in what manner remained anyone’s guess. Tajiri Akiyoshi, a former Japanese bureaucrat who worked on Japan’s peace initiatives near the end of the war, recounts that Japanese authorities and politicians were at first worried about the prospect of war crimes trials because they feared the situa­­tion could potentially turn into a jurisdictional mudsling­­ing match among all the cliques and factions of the Japanese government to whom there was ample reason to assign blame for the destruc­­tion and ultimate failure of the war.66 The Japanese wished to present a united front to the occupa­­tion forces, and they believed it imperative to first coalesce their own opinions about war criminality before lett­­ing the Allies take over. The implementa­­tion of war crimes trials against the Japanese also amplified a budd­­ing anxiety within the domestic popula­­tion and the millions throughout the empire who suddenly found themselves no longer able to sit on the mantle of authority as they had in many parts of Asia for the preced­­ing half century. The abrupt manner in which Japan’s imperial war suddenly transformed into Japan’s imperial dissolution, with the unprecedented imperial broadcast of August 15, 1945, call­­ing on all Japanese to lay down their arms and to “bear the unbearable,” quickly calcified into a victim ideology. Images of the scores of hikiagesha, Japan’s repatriat­­ing civilian masses, limp­­ing home with their tattered belongings were the first symbols of postwar and post-​imperial memory of Japan. Once domesticated, these passive millions faced ruin but

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believed themselves removed from danger in former colonies or occupied areas because Japanese authorities had quickly reclassified those regions once again as “foreign” lands. Japanese home islands, no longer the empire, were to be the safe haven for Japanese. However, while civilians were return­­ing to the mother country on one hand, Japan’s repatria­­tion efforts came in a two-​pronged series, with the demobilized military, fukuin, often preced­­ing civilian efforts to return home. Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) documents reveal, con­trary to con­temporary belief in the insolubility of Japanese identity, that the Japanese government’s initial postwar plans were not to protect these “helpless victims,” stranded abroad at the end of the war, but rather to leave the imperial settlers alone.67 The ministry responsible for Japanese abroad originally wanted noth­­ing to do with the repatria­­ tion issue as it was judged to be an immense financial, logistical, and psychological burden on the motherland. MOFA took the initiative and planned to allow overseas Japanese to take citizenship of their country of residence at the end of the war. This included colonies, occupied areas, and the puppet kingdom of Manchukuo. It was not altogether an unpopular idea because Japanese in some areas wished to remain where they had already lived long term. Such a policy is in strik­­ing con­trast to the postwar and con­temporary myth of victimhood.68 Civilian repatria­­tion and military demobiliza­­tion problems, emblematic of Japan’s aggressive tactics to gain an empire, touched upon the very nature of how the war was adjudicated but also greatly con­fused the matter. Immediately follow­­ing Japan’s surrender but a week before the Allied Occupa­­tion forces and General Douglas MacArthur’s arrival at the Atsugi air base, Japanese officials tried to independently steer the war crimes trial issues away from any unilateral Allied decisions. For former ambassador Nakamura Toyoichi it was imperative to con­sider Japan’s strategy toward potential war crimes trials and not wait for the Allies to craft their own policy. Movement on the Japanese side, both in civilian and military spheres, suggests that such a maneuver was insightful because although the Potsdam Declara­­tion stipulated that Japanese war criminals would be brought to justice, the aim, scope, and schedule for what many were not even sure would be a trial but maybe summary execu­­tion were com­pletely unknown.69

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Immediately follow­­ing the emperor’s surrender Japanese authorities formed a com­mittee to outline con­crete protocols regard­­ing Japan’s response to potential war crimes trials and the matter of wartime responsibility. The com­mittee drew an all-​star cast but one also in great need of avoid­­ing ensnar­­ing itself in the web of intrigue and innuendo that crept in toward the outer fringes of the war crimes debates as the Allies and Japanese were jockey­­ing for the legal upper hand. What remains fascinat­­ing is the extent of Japan’s initial efforts and the fact that officials did not yet realize how little power they would be permitted under the occupation. To be sure, as Takemae Eiji and other historians have clarified, postwar Japan was the result of a negotiated set of disputes between American and Japanese sides.70 As much as the United States wished to impose from above, it could not implement its own orders without the media­­tion of the Japanese. Top Japanese officials from the imperial army, navy, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and Ministry of Justice formed a political rugby scrum into which new postwar policies were pitched. These men crafted plans designed to limit Allied investigations and to ensure that the Japanese government was of unified opinion in its responses to the Americans as the occupa­ ­tion began. This was not merely a paper tiger but a plan that many believed needed to be executed with all due haste as it was passed by the Cabinet and was then quickly distributed to Japanese government offices.71 On August 22, 1945, the soon-​to-​be-​occupied Japanese government created the Council for Deal­­ing with the End of the War (Sengo shori kaigi). At first the council tried to make the case to the Allies that Japan should try its own criminals internally, but the fact that the Japanese legal system was not adapted to such fantasies and Japan was home to few international law specialists made this proposal little more than an empty but important face-​sav­­ing gesture. Nonetheless, Japanese officials offered to start investigat­­ing “war crimes” and proceeded with their own military tribunals, but Allied com­mand took no notice of the effort.72 The Japanese engaged very quickly in try­­ing to lessen the impact of Allied war crimes proceedings on the military and on the public. The U.S. military and government had moved briskly toward the later years of the war to establish a system that would be able to pursue and prosecute suspected Japanese war criminals. The main

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agency responsible for manag­­ing these offenses was the War Crimes Office, established in October 1944 by the Judge Advocate General to collect evidence. The legal sec­­tion of SCAP, established in October 1945, was headed by Alva C. Carpenter. This bureau was charged with advis­­ing on the laws, collect­­ing data, and prepar­­ing cases. The legal sec­­tion had five branches, one of which focused on China.73 On September 10, 1945, former prime minister Suzuki Kantarō spoke with General MacArthur’s right-​hand man, Colonel Sidney Mashbir, and was struck that the U.S. occupa­­tion forces were mov­­ing ahead in prepara­­tion for war crimes trials much more quickly than the Japanese had originally envisioned. Suzuki subsequently con­tacted the head of the surrender liaison com­mittee, Okazaki Katsuo, and reported the alarm­­ing situation. The two resolved that Japan should move quickly on its own to con­duct trials, but on September 11 the U.S. occupa­­tion leaders had already put out a call to arrest General Tōjō Hideki. Okazaki then tried to push the follow­­ing two points with the United States to save face: He suggested that Japan be allowed to arrest its own and that Tōjō not be hurriedly dragged to Yokohama as a prisoner because he was do­­ing poorly after a failed suicide attempt.74 The United States refused both requests but did attend to Tōjō’s medical care. On September 12 Mashbir told Suzuki that the first fifty names on a war crimes list were already drawn up, and the United States encouraged a Japanese response con­cern­­ing how they were proceed­­ing on the war crimes front. The Japanese promptly replied that they were will­­ing to openly pursue crimes against detainees and abuses of POWs accord­­ing to the international regulations laid down by the Allies. What they failed to talk about in their statements was responsibility for the war and for war crimes over the larger scale. In addition, Japan’s own wartime legal system impeded such decisions in that Japanese prewar and wartime law was an aromatic mix of com­promises and con­ flicts between the semifeudal and the totalitarian. The modern result of this was a structure that was in fundamental legal con­tradic­­tion at every level.75 On September 12, 1945, Prime Minister Higashikuni Naruhiko, Foreign Minister Shigemitsu Mamoru, Minister of the Army Shimomura Sadamu, Minister of the Navy Yonai Mitsumasa, Chief of the Army General Staff Umezu Yoshijirō, Admiral Toyoda Soemu,

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Minister of State Konoe Fumimaro, and Minister of Justice Iwata Chūzō met to discuss putt­­ing together investiga­­tion boards to examine war crimes. The group announced that in accordance with Allied demands and legal jurisprudence Japan would try those who had been listed by the occupiers as criminals or those who had com­mitted crimes.76 Suspects were arrested and charged, then quickly subjected to brief military trials and sentenced to terms rang­­ing from ten months to life in prison. Regardless of these measly attempts, it was obvious the Japanese bureaucracy was never go­­ing to wholeheartedly pursue war crimes on its own initiative given that officials did not equate such attempts as actual justice. A few days later, on September 15, Japanese statesman Hatoyama Ichirō wrote in the Asahi newspaper that the United States should reflect on its own war crimes such as the use of the atomic bomb, and kill­­ing innocent civilians. Hatoyama com­plained that for America “might meant right” and that the United States should be made to witness the destruc­­tion it caused and to think about how to repay Japan for those losses. Japan, Hatoyama wrote, “would not be able to restore itself single-​handedly,” but help­­ing Japan to regain its stand­­ing and democratize would be in the United States’ own inter­ ­est. For publish­­ing criticism of America, which was strictly forbidden under the terms of the occupation, the newspaper was shut down for two days.77 Japanese reluctance to aggressively chase its own war criminals was apparent from the outset, even as the rubble on the streets was still fresh and the odor from black markets that dotted the city landscape sullied what had once been the capital of an empire that reached fully across Asia. On October 23, 1945, the Council for Deal­­ing with the End of the War further laid out its policy for proceed­­ing with potential war crimes trials. The pursuit of justice appeared secondary to the aim of mitigat­­ing any blemish on the imperial prestige of Japan—​seemingly unsullied even with the unconditional surrender. The goal was to minimize to the extent possible damage to both individuals and “the empire” as it was termed in the Japanese plan.78 In some ways this move mirrored the imperial government and military’s goal to protect the vaguely defined “kokutai,” a prewar term that stood for national polity, meant the national body, and at times even signified the emperor. The strategy laid out in the council’s report suggested four possible avenues

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Defeat in Denial

of logic to minimize damage. The primary argument hinged on the claim that on the level of international law the pursuit of “so-​called” war criminals was irrational. Second, officials insisted that the emperor was an entity, separate from the denouement of the war, and that he stood above the imperial con­stitution. The third element of the report argued, even after the war ended, that the pressures of the international situa­­tion dur­­ing the 1930s had forced the na­­tion into a corner and that Japan had no choice other than to wage war or face annihilation. Such a story was the pivot on which wartime Japanese propaganda employed its circular logic: The ABCD bloc (Americans, British, Chinese, and Dutch) had politically and economically isolated Japan. The fourth element was a plan that called for us­­ing first-​person and official explanations to defend those charged with “so-​called war crimes.” Often this resorted to plead­­ing that lower-​rank­­ing soldiers were obliged to follow the com­mands of a senior officer as if the order came directly from the emperor and was thus an imperial decree that could not be ignored. Surely, once a real person’s face was placed on the crime and the exigent circumstances detailed, supporters would see that these were not war crimes but merely “over-​exuberance” on the battlefield or, rather, the natural by-​product of a fierce war, the report expounded.79 Interestingly, the report still used a classical term of reference for the emperor, shison, and labeled war crimes “political crimes” at least for the A class category. Employ­­ing a dated Shinto religious term to refer to the emperor demonstrated that deeply embedded ideas about the national system of belief, which provided an engine to Japan’s aggressive war, had laid deep roots in the upper echelons of society. This was the very strata now charged with reorient­­ing the country on a new path directed by the Allies. Eras­­ing or reeducat­­ing this ideological, imperial mind-​set required a major undertak­­ing and would certainly not disappear overnight, if ever. Reflect­­ing on the nature of con­temporary right-​ w­­ing or revisionist societies in Japan forces one to con­clude that wartime propaganda has lost little of its resonance with small portions of Japanese society. Even the debate in the Japanese parliament on the topic of war criminals was relatively muted. Saitō Takao, a politician famous for his anti-​ war stance, at a special Diet session in the Lower House on November

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28, 1945, pointedly asked the last minister of the army, Shimomura Sadamu, how General Tōjō could be labeled a “war criminal” but former Prime Minister Konoe Fumimaro remain safely under the protec­­tion of the throne. (Konoe was later slated to be indicted and com­mitted suicide.) Without the “China Incident” of 1937, Saitō stipulated, there would have been no war, so it cannot all be on Tōjō’s shoulders. Saitō posed sharp questions directed at the minister of the army con­cern­­ing how the military and civilians understood the end of the war. “The war ended for us,” Saitō pronounced, “because of outside intervention, not because we the people put an end to it ourselves. Why do you think it was that we were unable to prevent our own militarization?” Shimomura responded that military officials did not understand democracy and moreover that the military began to interfere in politics, which was a root cause of Japan’s imperial downfall. “I would like to apologize for this situa­­tion to the people with all of my heart.” This short dialogue was the start of a process that unfortunately did not take off.80 Saitō’s com­ments briefly pushed a discussion in the Diet regard­ ­ing war crimes and responsibility, one of the first even though it was already several months after the end of the war. Parliamentarian Fuketo Shiichi, on November 29, 1945, in a Lower House session, said to the assembled that he was a former soldier who had the misfortune of return­­ing home alive. He still felt guilty about his good luck, but he had several questions for former military leaders. Fuketo claimed that when he heard about the surrender he was com­pletely stunned and virtually at a loss for words. In short, his world was shattered. But then he realized the surrender would allow Japan to rebuild and that through peace and reconstruc­­tion Japan could rise again. At this moment in time the eyes of the people are focused on look­ ­ing at those responsible for the war but there are many in the military and financial cliques who have not yet com­e under scrutiny. I believe we need to thoroughly scrutinize politicians, ministers, bureaucrats and others responsible for the war. At the very least, such moves will serve as the cornerstone for rebuild­­ing a new Japan. We cannot avoid follow­­ing through on this and I would like to hear what the Prime Minister has to say on this matter.81

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More importantly, and perhaps tellingly, Fuketo also claimed that many of these officials were now dup­­ing the emperor and disingenuously try­­ing to blame the people for the war. “For this crime of hav­­ing destroyed three thousand years of our glorious history the penalty can only be death,” he said in a proclama­­tion that drew applause in the debate.82 On the Japanese side mixed emotions con­cern­­ing civilian and imperial responsibility would con­tinue to further cloud the issue of war crimes and war responsibility over the ensu­­ing decades. Later reports submitted to Japan’s Ministry of Justice for an internal analysis of BC class war crimes trials con­cluded that most of the men caught up in these trials were low-​rank­­ing soldiers or civilians, regular men claim­­ing they were just do­­ing what their platoon leaders or officers com­manded, who happened to be in the terms of the report “arrestable,” that is, the authorities knew where they could be found. To Japanese officials these war criminals were in the right place at the wrong time. One major report, written by former Naval Captain Muchaku Noriaki, who was in charge of the BC class trials sec­­tion of the Second Bureau for Demo­ biliza­­tion (formerly the Ministry of Navy), con­tained a fairly bald pronouncement, explicit in its criticism, that BC class crimes trials were “misguided revenge, publicly pursued under the guise of legality.”83 At the same time as the civilian government and its agencies were tak­­ing crucial steps to create a system that would “assist” and thus assuage the occupy­­ing forces that had already stated their intent to prosecute Japanese, the Japanese imperial navy made significant strides in establish­­ing its own system of protective custody.84 As we have learned from recently uncovered Japanese sources, the imperial navy was mainly worried about the prosecu­­tion of its own members. Imperial Japanese military groups, in part, fought the war to protect their own interests and not necessarily for the nation, the emperor, or even the people. Sailors fought so that the navy would retain its prestige and budget, as did the army.85 We know much of this story because the naval team charged with shield­­ing its own held a series of meetings years after the war and recorded its sessions to serve as a set of educational materials for future generations in the navy. What is apparent from the almost 400 hours of recorded discussions is that in the immediate postwar period, when the threat of prosecu­­tion loomed large, the

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navy took advance measures to avoid a prosecutorial death sentence for its officers, which its members felt naval prestige could not withstand. The Japanese navy had an imperial ego of sufficient muscularity to make sure that law stood in con­tinued subservience to supposed military honor. In their recorded con­versations dur­­ing the alumni gatherings, former Japanese imperial naval officers recounted to each other and debated not only the reasons for their failure to win the war but the positions they took in the immediate postwar period to impede the prosecu­­tion of their leaders and avoid responsibility themselves. The con­versations were shockingly frank and open a new door to our awareness of how the Japanese responded to their potential legal prosecu­­tion for war crimes. It is strik­­ing to be reminded that while a handful of imperial Army officers were indicted and handed the death penalty for their war crimes only two naval com­manders were indicted: Admiral Nagano Osami and Admiral Shimada Shigetarō. Nagano died while in custody and before the end of the trial, so in essence the navy was represented by a sole war criminal, Shimada, who was found guilty, given a life sentence, and subsequently paroled in 1955. Apparently the navy was fairly successful in its bid to avoid Allied prosecutorial fervor and to turn more atten­­tion to its military rival, the former imperial Japanese army. This result was possible, in part, due to the fact that army atrocities were easy to track down and find evidence for in com­parison with those that occurred at sea. But not all naval atrocities took place in the ocean, and the navy followed a plan to avoid indictments. Former naval Captain Toyota Kumao, who was named as head of this body and charged with keep­­ing naval officers out of legal trouble, recalled that he believed “if we could just ‘ganbaru,’ [keep push­­ing forward] by throw­ ­ing all sorts of obstacles in the occupation’s investigative path,” and make it to the era of the peace treaty then the effort would have been worth it.86 Given that the Tokyo War Crimes Trial painted a horrific picture of the cruelty the imperial Japanese army inflicted in Asia, in con­trast the Japanese navy received the accolades of many for its supposed altruistic “bushidō” behavior dur­­ing the long war. This, too, has become a sort of mythic memory of the war in Japan, but it is obviously intimately linked to an imperial military strategy to avoid legal responsibility and therefore not quite reflective of reality.

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Immediately after the war, Captain Toyota set up an office in the former Ministry of the Navy that had been renamed, soon after the occupa­­tion began, the Second Bureau for Demobilization. The aim of his group, established with all secrecy to hinder the Allies uncover­­ing its true mission, was to prevent war crimes trials of naval officers. In some ways, Toyota was the perfect candidate for the job. He was a dyed-​in-​the-​wool naval officer but had spent the war years abroad as a military attaché in Germany, so he was relatively free from be­­ing labeled a war criminal himself.87 In addition, as for many Japanese, Toyota was con­v inced that the Allied pursuit of war crimes was unlawful because “war is a national ac­­tion and no individual responsibility on the level of international law can be prosecuted. If such a clause existed it was an ex-​post facto law, a law created after the fact,” he said.88 Toyota’s group worked tirelessly to encourage former naval officers to lie under oath dur­­ing Allied court proceedings and prepped them in advance of their appearance in Allied military courts.89 Occupa­­tion forces were unaware of these preparations, it appears. Unfortunately, while the supposed esteemed military order of the prewar era was protected, several lower-​rank­­ing naval officers and sailors became patsies for their leaders, a fact that did not sit well with some members of the naval old boy network decades later.90 While the navy might have avoided the brunt of the Occupa­­tion forces’ prosecutorial zeal, these postwar con­versations among naval officers also demonstrate that both sides of the Japanese armed forces com­mitted atrocities. Con­trary to the popular legend created by both the postwar trials and the former imperial militaries themselves, the Japanese navy was far from altruistic. As the former navy men admitted, they had little knowledge of ideas con­cern­­ing international law and human rights, nor were they interested. But, unlike many postwar stories where Japanese atrocities such as the Nanj­­ing Massacre are explained away because the Japanese encountered “unexpected resistance” or because the war against the United States became a race war, postwar accounts by this group of seamen suggest a com­pletely different situation. As the participants remembered, the Japanese imperial forces early on ignored international law and slaughtered civilians on Santō Island, known more com­monly by its Chinese name of Sanzao Island (Three Furnace Island), a small island just off the coast of

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southern China, due south of Guangzhou. There the Japanese navy carved out an airstrip and massacred Chinese civilians to keep the project secret. This atrocity predated the start of the war against the Allies and took place before Japan really got mired down in China, so neither of those could be used as excuses. In short, the Japanese military was behav­­ing atrociously in many spheres because it was frequently barbaric in nature and not necessarily due to any specific outside instigation.91 While the steps the Japanese naval teams took to avoid prosecu­­tion appeared to benefit themselves, both American and Japanese officials realized that most Japanese initiatives con­cern­­ing the actual process­­ing of war crimes trials were designed to protect their own inherent interests but Japanese assistance was still crucial to the overall pursuit. In December 1945 the Allies announced their trial preparations and a Legal Delibera­­tion Chamber was created within the Ministry of Foreign Affairs under Sone Eki, who had been a diplomat in China, and Takayanagi Kenzō, a former diplomat and legal expert who had studied law at Harvard but was later briefly purged from postwar employment. This office grew larger and quickly added a War Crimes Com­mittee, the War Crimes Administrative Office, and the War Crimes Investiga­­tion Room.92

Japanese Claims of “Unfair Justice” Although the legal precedents set by the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials remain important for the pursuit of war criminals today, Japanese often criticized these sorts of tribunals for their disinclina­­tion to pursue Allied war crimes as a biased legal practice of one-​sidedness and discrimination. Such beliefs were a key factor that coalesced popular Japanese opinion against war crimes trials. One well-​k nown BC class trial that highlights this legal disparity in the pursuit of justice was depicted in Japanese novelist Ōoka Shōhei’s historical novel The Long Journey (Nagai tabi), also reproduced years later in a dreadfully wooden film for some reason retitled in English Best Wishes for Tomorrow.93 The scenario was based on the true-​life experiences of General Okada Tasuku, focus­­ing on the legal mechanics of his fateful decision in May 1945 to summarily execute downed B-​29 American pilots under charges

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of indiscriminately bomb­­ing Japanese civilians. The trial is not directly con­nected to Chinese BC class war crimes trials but rather provides a localized view of how the Japanese interpreted their immediate postwar situa­­tion regard­­ing the issue of lesser war crimes in general and what Japanese viewed as the lopsided applica­­tion of international law. There are not many BC class war crimes cases in which the Japanese held their heads high, and the Okada case became iconic for this very reason. In addition, given the trial’s high profile and con­tinual presence as a topic in postwar Japanese media, the issue of Allied war guilt as a balance against which Japan was weigh­­ing itself helped frame the discussion of Japanese war crimes over the past six decades. This com­ parison has also had an impact con­cern­­ing the manner in which Japanese judged their own imperial military actions in China. Ōoka Shōhei paid close atten­­tion to the Japanese legal strategy and its pitfalls, while detail­­ing the process by which the Americans prosecuted Okada. Actual courtroom drama centered on the main issue: Could a Japanese military officer mount a plausible defense that his actions were legal in response to the illegal American military decision to bomb civilian sites in cities such as Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya?94 If the Americans were go­­ing to implement postwar laws espous­­ing “humanity” and “justice” then, as logic entailed, they needed to apply these ideals equally across the board. The trial never became an international cause celebre, but it remains very well known in Japan. Okada was ultimately found guilty of war crimes and executed, while no American soldiers or officers were ever charged with indiscriminate bomb­­ing of Japanese civilian targets. However, the trial raises questions con­cern­­ing legal equitability in postwar East Asia, and this idea of balance is also related to the China cases. In America the airmen who rained bombs on Japan were heroes while in wartime Japan they were sometimes labeled as war criminals. Was there a difference in how the United States viewed Japanese war heroes, as General Okada proposed? Morally there may be; one can argue that the United States engaged in the war to end it while the Japanese initiated war to expand and solidify their own empire.95 But half a century prior, the United States had unilaterally invaded the Philippines and Cuba as part of the American plan to “stabilize” sections of the globe.96 And after World War II, while the United States liberated many areas it also used the

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decline of British and French imperial might to establish its own network of military bases across the globe.97 General Okada was com­mander of the 13th Area Army, which managed the Tōkai region, a zone com­posed of Aichi, Gifu, Shizuoka, Mie, Ishikawa, and Toyama prefectures. This region slices almost right across the center of Japan’s main island, north to south and east to west. Okada was instrumental in bring­­ing to “justice” downed U.S. airmen who, he alleged, had indiscriminately bombed Japanese civilian areas in the later months of the war. At a BC class tribunal run by the American occupa­ ­tion forces in Yokohama, Okada’s defense was that he was protect­­ing Japan from U.S. war crimes. In many trials Japanese officials or officers tried to pawn responsibility off on their underlings, as we saw in the policy of the Japanese navy, but Okada was one of the rare examples where a high-​level officer accepted responsibility for his actions but labeled them legal. Because such statements from Japanese officers were notable by their absence Okada’s defense drew much support from the Japanese public in the seemingly stale atmosphere of BC class trials where most defendants meekly claimed that they were follow­­ing orders. The city of Nagoya in central Japan was the site of several large munitions factories dur­­ing the war. U.S. bomb­­ing campaigns of that area began in earnest on December 13, 1944, but by March 1945 indiscriminate carpet bomb­­ing was in full swing. In particular, May 14, 1945, witnessed a massive sortie of 450 American B29 planes mobilized to bomb the city into ruins. Several U.S. planes were downed and eleven airmen were captured on that mission alone. The Tōkai area army con­sidered these American airmen war criminals for indiscriminate bombing, and at a Japanese military tribunal they were sentenced to death. In addition, dur­­ing a further bomb­­ing campaign of Osaka and Kobe at the end of May, several planes were shot down and twenty-​ seven airmen captured. Dur­­ing the U.S. bomb­­ing campaigns in this region a total of forty-​four downed airmen were taken alive, with 110 con­firmed dead in the downed planes. Six airmen were judged to have attacked only military institutions and were sent to POW camps (a harsh fate in itself given the atrocious con­ditions). The other thirty-​ eight airmen were judged as war criminals and executed. Accord­­ing to Japanese military law at the time, con­v icted soldiers were supposed to be shot, but the Americans were instead beheaded with a samurai

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sword. Postwar, Americans judged the summary courts and punishment as unlawful, and after surrender Okada and his underlings were incarcerated at Sugamo Prison. On March 8, 1948, their trial began.98 Okada was adamant that he followed proper military procedure and treated the American prisoners with respect. Okada com­plained that U.S. airmen com­mitted war crimes against the populace of Japan by dropp­­ing bombs but once they were shot down they invoked the right to surrender after the atrocity had already been com­pleted. To Okada this did not seem rationally acceptable.99 Due to all the air strikes the Tōkai com­mand was exceedingly busy try­­ing to mount some attempt at an air defense, and with all the downed U.S. airmen there was supposedly not enough time for full military tribunals. To streamline the situa­­tion Okada and his legal team made three crucial decisions. First, all those who bombed only military targets were immediately sent to prisoner of war camps. Second, those who “were suspected of inhumane action” were given a formal military tribunal, while those who were clearly war criminals were dealt with through abbreviated military trials. The reason for execut­­ing by sword, Okada explained at his trial, was that it was an ancient custom in Japan. If shots were heard it would further inflame people’s passions and they might harm the prisoner’s corpse, whereas it was treated with dignity and buried properly after the beheading, he testified in court. However, as much as the popula­­tion accepted Okada’s supposed legal stand for Japanese justice in the face of adversity and biased American pursuit of war crimes, there were glar­­ing deficiencies in his defense. The very same Japanese soldier who had been selected to behead the U.S. airmen was ordered to dig up the corpses and burn them several days after Japan surrendered. This effort suggests moves to cover up the incident rather than take responsibility for it. Moreover, when American officials deposed Okada he said that Japan was be­­ing bombed daily and in the midst of such circumstances it was impossible to follow the letter of the law. Once the actual trial began Okada’s testimony changed, and he pushed the idea that he had followed international law in pursuit of the American airmen.100 Japanese needed to show deference to the new form that international law played in East Asia. Not until the Okada records were declassified in 2002 was the full story known, and new research further undermines his original

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testimony. The first discrepancy was the fact that a small number of the downed U.S. airmen at the end of April 1945 were paraded around Nagoya city and the region to inflame the passions of the public before the executions. Some members of the public took a further violent step and physically assaulted the airmen. Affidavits of Japanese military police at the time con­firmed this. The military police were ordered to keep the mobs from kill­­ing or harm­­ing the airmen who were trotted around as a propaganda stunt to encourage the Japanese to produce even more planes to counter mount­­ing daily losses. One prisoner was hit so hard on the head that blood spurted out. The men were carted around to a local shrine and the Nagoya rail sta­­tion and finally displayed in front of the Asahi newspaper build­­ing as part of this propaganda campaign. Okada’s defense lawyer con­firmed the event years later but felt it was not proper for it to have been brought up in court because it was unrelated to the charges, he said.101 There was even talk that the Japanese imperial army waffled for a while con­cern­­ing how to deal with the issue postwar when surrender was imminent. At first, Japanese military leaders discussed com­pletely hid­­ing the incident and ly­­ing about it, but that proved cumbersome, so higher officials decided to go with the truthful version. The fact that there were plans to cover up these executions and the fact that there was time to parade some American soldiers around town for propaganda purposes do little to support Okada’s original claims that in the heat of war there was not enough time to implement proper military tribunals us­­ing international law, as he claimed in court.102 What appears to have been the most important issue for Okada and many of the others was neither the law nor the truth but the reputa­­tion and the act of sav­­ing face for the Japanese military.103 The reasons for the abbreviated military tribunals were con­cocted, and Okada’s plan to be the one of the few Japanese officers who claimed responsibility for his wartime actions has been discredited. In light of the new evidence con­cern­­ing the Okada case and others, debates in Japan have not flagged in the years since the end of World War II. Investigat­­ing the historical and political implications of who was charged as a war criminal and in what format helps outline the image of the forgotten BC class war criminal, who does not belong to the A class group but remains a con­stant refrain in the popular Japanese

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media. The Japanese war criminal is both a victim and simultaneously a hero, apotheosized at Yasukuni Shrine.104 If there is a dialogue between the dead and the liv­­ing world the Yasukuni Shrine provides that portal in a manner of speaking. Yasukuni was erected just after the Meiji Restora­­tion in 1868 to honor men who had helped restore the emperor to the throne. It was different from other shrines in that it was jointly operated by the imperial armed forces. By the 1870s Yasukuni had become a national tourist attraction, and later all soldiers who died for Japan’s colonial expansion since 1874 were enshrined. The shrine’s sacred mission was intimately linked to Japan’s imperialism.105 The historical con­versa­­tion about Japanese war crimes in China needs to be con­ducted with all the participants—​v ictims and perpetrators. No doubt, for many Japanese veterans the war was far from a glorious battlefield, but their voices are rarely heard, and if they are, they are often pilloried by the con­temporary political right wing.106 M. G. Sheftall has analyzed the similar Japanese postwar glorifica­­ tion history of kamikaze (tokkōtai) pilots, who were frequently reborn as dual heroes/victims, albeit in a slightly different sense from regular BC class war criminals. Kamikaze were not classified as war criminals because they attacked only military targets, but the difficulty postwar Japanese society had in philosophically resolv­­ing their zealotry parallels that society’s psychological struggle in deal­­ing with the war criminal issue. Sheftall describes the curious situation: “The historical figure of the tokkō pilot offers the tantaliz­­ing potential of be­­ing simultaneously dash­­ing hero, sterl­­ing role model and victim of historical forces beyond his con­trol (a qualifica­­tion con­veniently obfuscat­­ing the causality implications of Japan’s decision to wage the war in the first place). He is both lamb and lion, a figure on whom little or no moral censure can be levied.”107 It is precisely in this tangle of Japanese postwar attitudes toward those who were accused by the Allies of perpetrat­­ing the war, labeled as senpan or “war criminals,” where we can most clearly see the shift­­ing public stances toward the war and the con­cept of responsibility for Japan’s war in Asia.

Let Us Not Forget Actual BC Class War Crimes In his first postwar book, detail­­ing his experiences at Sugamo, the prison in Tokyo run by the Allies to house war criminals, Buddhist

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chaplain Tajima Ryūjun wrote of the men who made their way to the gallows and sat with him dur­­ing their last journeys on earth. “They were called war criminals and as for whether or not they had com­ mitted sins I do not know,” he scribed.108 This fuzzy memory about not be­­ing sure whether some Japanese soldiers com­mitted war crimes is a fairly com­mon attitude among many postwar Japanese, but some of those assumptions have been shaped through the very way that the BC trials have been portrayed in the popular media and perceived historically. It is important to state at the outset that while egregious legal errors in trials did occur and should not be ignored, at the same time imperial Japanese soldiers did com­mit grievous acts of random violence, especially in China. Such behavior needs to be con­cretely and forthrightly remembered when deal­­ing with the issue of BC class war crimes. Certainly some men were railroaded through trials, testimony was often shaky, and trials may have been rigged, but in no way does this mean that the imperial Japanese military, in toto, was innocent. Japanese historians and journalists have long been in the vanguard of research detail­­ing imperial Japanese military atrocities even though the details of some episodes that have com­e to light by this research have, in turn, been questioned by the scholarship of historian Bob Wakabayashi and others.109 Given the length and scope of Japan’s empire there is still much history to be documented because until recently the BC class war crimes trials narrative did not intersect the more well-​studied path of the Tokyo War Crimes Trial. My research in no way denies Japanese atrocities, but my intent remains focused on examin­­ing the aftermath of the legal prosecu­­tion of these lesser war crimes in China, not on exhum­­ing the acts themselves. This is an important distinc­­tion in postwar East Asia because there are two vectors at work—​detail­­ing the war crimes themselves and analyz­­ing the legal pursuit of those war crimes. What might seem to be merely the legal detritus that got filed away or that appeared to slip into oblivion eventually returned to give voice to a victim narrative that bolstered Japanese feelings of dissatisfac­­tion toward the status quo of the nation’s postwar peace.110 A majority of these BC class trial files remained off-​ limits in the catacombs of Japanese government offices until 1999, and they have not been any easier to br­­ing to light in China either. In addition, the fact that in Japan one can only request five files to be declassified at a time and that each declassifica­­tion can take up to several

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months means that, unless rules are changed, future scholarship may con­tinue to proceed at a glacial pace. These obstacles to research speak not to a con­spiracy but at least to a veneer of secrecy over closely guarded political knowledge.111 To relieve us of the myth that all BC class war crimes were “political” and why it mattered so much to the Chinese to pursue postwar justice, it behooves us to examine testimony from Japanese who have admitted their past deeds so we can keep in mind the nature of what a war crime was. Although there were quite a number of larger Japanese atrocities, such as in Nanj­­ing or Pingfang where Unit 731 was based near Harbin, speak­­ing of mass numbers of victims in terms of tens or hundreds of thousands can often con­versely serve to mask the true nature of a tragedy because most of us remain unable to truly visualize the extent of such a horror. I briefly present one imperial Japanese soldier’s own admission as representative of the larger narrative of the general category of a BC class war crime. Sakakura Kiyoshi was an imperial Japanese army infantry soldier stationed in Shandong Province, China. In June 1941 his brigade was travel­­ing through Mengyin county and arrived at a small village called Zhangbaqiu. Sakakura recalls it as a quiet hamlet, situated along a river and filled with poplar and acacia trees. Com­manders had received a tip that the village was the site of an underground manufacturer of weapons, and so the soldiers had been on the march since the night before, arriv­­ing at the outskirts of the village around 7 a.m. “We quickly dispersed through the village and pandemonium broke out,” Sakakura wrote in his con­fession decades later. “You could hear doors be­­ing kicked down, the sound of soldiers yelling, chickens squawking, pigs runn­­ing around. The women and children were rounded up with bayonets and forced into a sectioned off area of the village. Brandish­­ing his pistol and with a voice that could cut metal, our Lieutenant Colonel Arano shrieked, ‘Platoon, Kill ’em!’ ” Sakakura wrote that he had been ordered to be on lookout so he was sitt­­ing in the shade of the acacia trees, watch­­ing everything. “No more than five minutes after our brigade entered the village I saw about three hundred meters away seven or eight peasants with baskets and poles on their shoulders, runn­­ing away through the sorghum fields. I ran to the platoon sergeant and said, ‘I saw the enemy runn­­ing away, sir!’ He

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suddenly looked very cross and yelled, ‘Idiot! Shoot them quickly. Use the light machine gun or someth­­ing dammit!’ ” Sakakura sprayed the field with gunfire, and suddenly there were no more peasants standing. The platoon leader ordered him to go check that there were no survivors in the tall crops. Together with four or five other soldiers the group slowly proceeded into the field to verify the situation. “The seasoned soldiers told us greener ones, ‘be careful, sometimes they play dead, so pay attention.’ ” The unit came across one peasant, still moaning, whom they unceremoniously disposed of with a quick pistol shot to the head. But then Sakakura spotted another Chinese peasant. “About ten meters away was a young mother,” he wrote. She was bleed­­ing heavily from her side. I thought she might be fak­­ing that she was dead so I went over to her and was go­­ing to step on her wound to make her react to check if she were alive or not. And then I froze. It was like cold water had suddenly been poured down my spine and a chill came over me. A small infant, probably no more than a year old and soaked in its mother’s blood, was still nuzzl­­ing her breast. The small child was suckl­­ing for milk like noth­­ing in the world had changed but its face was com­pletely red from the blood seep­­ing out from its mother. Just then the infant saw me approach, looked up and appeared to laugh. I saw the infant laugh and then it seemed to multiply in front of my eyes so that there were several, no dozens of laugh­­ing babies all crawl­ ­ing toward me. I yelled without thinking, “Get away from me! What the hell!” But they still kept com­ing. Sakakura con­cluded, “It had only been a half year since I had entered the imperial military and it was my second engagement as a first-​year infantry soldier. But it was the first time I com­mitted the crime of murder. I stayed in that region for four years and eight months and from beginn­­ing to end we called such engagements ‘operations’ or ‘suppression’ but in actuality it was killing, burning, accosting, steal­­ing and tortur­­ing the Chinese people. What’s more, it was done in the name of the emperor, for the supposed last­­ing peace of East Asia, and for the honor of my own family. . . .”112 Sakakura does not end with ­com­mentary

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on how he dealt with his actions after the war, but the fact that he chose to publicly write about this incident and publish it in a Japanese veteran’s journal that specializes in detail­­ing Japanese war crimes in China adjudicated by the CCP in the mid-​1950s suggests this incident con­tinued to haunt him.

Sino-​Japanese Com­pet­­ing Visions The lion and the lamb issues, as the BC class war crimes are depicted in Japan, China, and elsewhere, are intricate historical moments that involve more than just memory and the sites of con­temporary representation. Analyz­­ing the legal deliberations of postwar war crimes trials in China and how they have codified historical opinions in East Asia will allow us to achieve a new level of understand­­ing about the birth of these ideas and how they developed in the early Cold War. The history of the East Asian side after the end of World War II remains incomplete, in part due to the absence of testimony of the “lion” side of the equation—​ the BC war crimes trials—​legacies that con­tinue to reverberate in con­ temporary politics and China–Japan relations. As such, memory tends to fill in the gaps, but from where does it arrive? This memory, in part, was legally bequeathed to subsequent generations, not only in the Tokyo War Crimes Trial but more importantly domestically within China through the KMT and later CCP trials of Japanese war criminals. Bei­ jing leaders see their historical judgments as gospel and con­tinually request that Japanese governments adopt a historically “correct” stance. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) State Councillor Tang Jiaxuan publicly stated in March 2007, “The core problem in Sino-​Japan relations is the history problem and the Taiwan issue.”113 Historical memory is equally important for Japanese officials, but they wish not to face the issue squarely as the Chinese hope to but to move to a different stage where the imperial legacy is no longer a core feature of the bilateral relationship. Former Japanese Prime Minister Koizumi Junichirō’s office, in its 2002 blue book on Japan’s foreign relations, stated that within Sino-​Japanese relations there were several issues such as the history problem and Japan–Taiwan relations. The report emphasized that both countries were learn­­ing lessons from history but there was a need to look toward the future and to increase trust and understand­­ing

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between the next generations.114 Japanese and Chinese leaders thus vie for con­trol of the interpreta­­tion of WWII-​era history because they view it as a pillar on which to build political support domestically but also because they use it as a wedge in bilateral relations. Obviously, historical memory has not been mislaid, it survives in surfeit, but the law behind this historical remembrance has become cloudy. The verdicts handed down in courts across East Asia molded historical con­sequences. The focus for the last few decades has been on emotional history; this is certainly the case with the Nanj­­ing Massacre museum exhibits in Nanjing, the Korean War Memorial in Dandong, China, and the Showakan museum in Tokyo, to name just a few.115 Legal issues are a distinct entity, and their intersec­­tion with the policy/ consciousness of history and later influence on educa­­tion and national identity are undeniable and yet rarely explored.116 Examin­­ing Japan’s internal dynamics dur­­ing the occupa­­tion (1945–52) and the ensu­­ing early Cold War in how it dealt with war crimes expands our historical grasp of how Japan faced defeat. By look­ ­ing at how the periphery of the former Japanese empire imploded, both quickly at the outset after the initial surrender and then slowly over the next couple of years through phenomena such as repatriation, military withdrawal, and war crimes trials, a unique picture emerges. The con­ cept of “embrac­­ing defeat” con­tracts our historical scope of postwar Japan to its four main islands and con­fines our vision of important postwar East Asian history solely to United States–Japan relations. Lost in this shuffle is the full range of the destruc­­tion of Japan’s imperial empire at the edges, which adds to our understand­­ing of how Japan related to its closest East Asian neighbors. In addition, by focus­­ing on how China and Japan interacted con­cern­­ing the pursuit of war criminals, we can measure the breadth and depth of Japan’s colonialism—​ what it stood for becomes significant when the Japanese are charged to dismember and discount it. These two fields are core historical topics as they relate to Japan’s interac­­tion with China at the dawn of a new era, where both were suddenly thrust upon an East Asia not quite prepared for Japan’s defeat. Shimomura Hiroshi, Japanese minister of state on the eve of Japan’s surrender, pondered in his memoirs why it was that Japan had such grand plans for war but none for other scenarios or for the possibility of

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peace. Even after the horrific night bomb­­ing campaigns of Tokyo and other urban centers in the spr­­ing of 1945 and the defeat of Japan’s only military ally, Nazi Germany, on May 7, 1945, the Japanese military steadfastly refused to allow a meaningful peace dialogue to occur. Shimomura blamed the imperial forces for Japan’s eventual unconditional surrender.117 But were they the only culprits? While the Japanese might have been los­­ing to the Allies in dribs and drabs within the Pacific and the home islands, other large stretches of the empire, includ­­ing China, remained firmly under imperial Japanese con­trol. When we extend our vision of how Japan’s war ended at the periphery of the empire, away from exclusivity toward the center, other possible end-​of-​war scenarios become clearer. Is it not equally possible that dominant con­trol of China, even toward the end of the war, influenced Japanese decision makers in Tokyo to not let go of the utopian dream of empire all too easily? The extent of entrenched Japanese authority in major parts of China com­es into relief only when we begin to examine the breakdown of power and the ensu­­ing Chinese assump­­tion of legal ownership. The most visceral exercise of this authority was significant in the form of the postwar war crimes trials.

2

Devil in the Details

Chinese Policies on Japan’s War Crimes A butcher can become a Buddha the moment he drops his cleaver. —​Chinese proverb

In s ome w h at t he r ev er se manner in which Japanese

struggled to save face after defeat, discourse about the Chinese victory over Japan is exceedingly important to con­temporary mainland Chinese identity and national pride.1 These potent discussions con­tinue to provide a significant counterweight to history and a proud sense of national political purpose. Beij­­ing University professor Xu Yong wrote in an online discussion in 2002 on the People’s Daily website, “Victory in the war of resistance against Japan is the greatest and most important site of victory against an aggressive war in the 19th and 20th centuries.”2 A Chinese academy of social science article from 2006 upped the ante even more, stat­­ing that China’s battle against fascism was important for not only Asia but also the world.3 CCP pride in its supposed military mastery over the Japanese might be com­parable to the French situation, where General Charles de Gaulle claimed “victory” after World War II even though for all intents and purposes the Free French played a minor role in the defeat of the Nazis. The subject of Japanese war crimes retains a centripetal force in national Chinese identity as objectively seen through the results of a 1997 questionnaire com­pleted by the Japanese Asahi newspaper and the People’s University of China (Renmin Daxue). Both sides were posed 69

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the most com­pell­­ing ques­­tion linked to the state of Sino-​Japan relations in the later twentieth century. Chinese audiences were asked: “When you think of Japanese people, who com­es to mind first?” For the Japanese interviewees the ques­­tion was: “When you think of Chinese people, who com­es to mind first?” Answers were separated into the top ten responses. For the Japanese the top ten answers were, not surprisingly, individuals like Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, Con­fucius, Sun Yat-​sen, and other Chinese leaders and classic historic figures. In con­trast, the number one Chinese response was General Tōjō, former war leader of the Japanese military and postwar A class war criminal. In the number two spot was Yamaguchi Momoe, a singer/actress who had stared in the mid-​1970s Japanese TV drama Red Doubt, which was broadcast to great acclaim in China in 1984. But the response that sat oddly at number six was Okamura Yasuji, which the editors at Asahi must have believed was a name most Japanese had placed in the dustbin of history so they added a footnote explain­­ing that Okamura had been the imperial Japanese General of the China Expeditionary Army toward the later years of World War II.4 Okamura was the architect of the so-​ called “three all” policy in North China that “moved from a passive strategy of blockade to an active and com­prehensive counter-​g uerrilla strategy based on terror, forced relocation, and plunder.” The Chinese nicknamed it the “three alls” (sanguang in Chinese or sankō in Japanese) because in their estima­­tion the Japanese goal was to kill all, burn all, and loot all.5 Okamura’s name also sat at the top of the CCP’s postwar list of war criminals, and he was simultaneously pursued by the Americans to testify at the Tokyo War Crimes Trial. Toppl­­ing precariously on Japan’s crumbl­­ing imperial edifice were two initial problems fac­­ing the surrender­­ing Japanese forces in China and the Chinese moves to resume authority. The first was that, overall, the imperial Japanese forces did not believe they had actually been defeated in China. The second issue was the actual state of Chinese law to preside over this new Chinese authority in areas previously ruled by the Japanese or their collaborators. China had only finally been relieved of extraterritoriality in 1943, and even with such a maneuver Western support for the idea of international law actually be­­ing of value and work­­ing in China was thin on the ground. China had regained full legal sovereignty over its courts and the law, but now it wanted to

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implement this power. This Chinese situa­­tion was not that dissimilar from French Indochina, Dutch Indonesia, British Hong Kong, and the American-​r un Philippines. These colonies had become nominally independent but still strained under colonial authority that many European and American powers tried to reimpose after Japan’s surrender.6 The Korean situa­­tion was no different as the surrender was equally mystify­ ­ing to the multitudes who were not sure what was go­­ing to happen, and it was not clear precisely which group remained in charge—​the Japanese who just lost the war but ran the police, the Korean underground that fought against the Japanese and had been imprisoned, the Korean government in exile in Shanghai, or the American-​supported groups under Syngman Rhee.7 Dur­­ing these puzzl­­ing times the idea of us­­ing international law to adjudicate Japanese war crimes was often more enthrall­­ing than the ease of actually implement­­ing such processes because Chinese legal teams faced mount­­ing problems grasp­­ing the finer details and in general were not adept at even gett­­ing cases to court. The first international instance of this stumbl­­ing was at the Tokyo Trial when the Chinese prosecutorial team presented its lengthy case on the Nanj­­ing Massacre and the Japanese trade in opium and narcotics problems. The Chinese side mustered a few witnesses, but the poor quality of evidence for the drug running, com­pared with the Nanj­­ing presentation, was shock­ ­ing. Chief Justice of the Tokyo Tribunal William Webb was appalled and remarked, “This is hardly evidence. There are no details. What court would act on evidence like that?”8 As we know from a few Chi­ nese jurists’ memoirs this was not the Chinese plan, and at least one Japanese suspect, com­mander of the China Expeditionary Army from 1940 to 1944, General Hata Shunroku, charged with wag­­ing war against the Allies, was sentenced only to life imprisonment because the Chinese did not sufficiently prove their case for the death penalty. The Chi­­nese were also keen to provide evidence of sexual crimes against Chinese women and slave labor, but that, too, never really got off the ground. In con­trast, the Philippines prosecutor Pedro Lopez had at his disposal 14,000 pages of documents from the U.S. trials of Japanese Generals Yamashita Tomoyuki and Homma Masaharu con­cern­­ing atrocities, and he used them to great advantage. In Chinese BC class war crimes trials, names, dates, and people were sometimes thrown

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willy-​nilly into an evidentiary slurry to be employed as evidence, and testimony could sometimes be of dubious quality. The Chinese were trying, but their own legal processes were not always up to snuff, as initially demonstrated in Tokyo. The varied Chinese attempts to pursue Japanese war crimes in the early postwar period did not occur in a vacuum but against the background of a diverse and cacophonous national and international debate about who owned the correct means to legally detain and try the Japanese. Moreover, as China had already experienced legal and political isola­­tion dur­­ing the previous half century, leaders on all sides recognized that the pursuit needed to be con­ducted in con­cert with other like-​minded nations. In China, as imperial Japanese power dissipated, BC class war crimes trials took up a larger por­­tion of official and civilian atten­­tion as manifestations of KMT leader Chiang Kai-​shek’s and CCP Chairman Mao Zedong’s legal and moral magnanimity. These were shrewd political gambles, but the rules of the game and the legal parameters behind such moves were not always known to all the players.9

Origins of Chinese Modern Law To understand how the Chinese arrived at this point, debat­­ing the minutia of international law and its applicability to Japanese war crimes, begs the ques­­tion of what the Chinese legal mind-​set was on the eve of Japanese defeat. Before the Japanese imperial army aggressively entered China in the early 1930s, Chinese officials and intellectuals were already con­cerned with international law because they had struggled against European colonial powers breach­­ing their national boundaries dur­­ing the nineteenth century.10 To be precise, this was not actually Chinese interac­­tion with “international law”; these were treaties made under the duress of diplomatic pressure backed with a greater military force.11 The Q­­ing dynasty (1644–1911) had made great strides in the applica­­tion of law to daily life, as a means to con­trol or regulate society, but it was still laced with traditional philosophy. Con­temporary mainland scholars believe that such regulations saddled the na­­tion with “feudal characteristics.”12 Historically, throughout Chinese dynastic history a tension existed between the manner in which rule was applied

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and how transgressors were punished. Con­fucian behavior traditionally pushed good governance through the model­­ing of social norms, called li or ritual. This practice encouraged suasion and mandated that the leadership steer society through moral example. Con­fucius believed law to be punitive, but the legalist school, a group of thinkers that came after Con­fucius, asserted that to keep society organized required rules and the threat of physical force to guide. This was encapsulated in the idea of fa. In short, the con­test between, in a sense, the carrot and the stick, or the li and the fa, has been an endur­­ing discussion in Chinese legal circles for more than a millennium. China has a rich history of legal debates, but by the 1830s the dynasty’s internal use of law clashed with foreign approaches. British imperial businessmen, eager to turn a profit, discovered an insatiable Chinese appetite for opium even though its sale was prohibited. Eventually, fric­­tion over the opium trade led to a series of con­flicts known as the Opium Wars of 1839–1842 and 1856–1860. When the Nanj­­ing treaty between China and Great Britain was signed in October 1842, mark­ ­ing the end of the first Opium War, a foreign legal system was imposed on various sectors in China.13 At first the Q­­ing court approved of this system of keep­­ing outsiders under their own foreign law because it allowed the Chinese to remain separate. Only later did Chinese officials realize their mistake: This legal duality also kept non-​Chinese from adher­­ing to Chinese law. The British and other foreign powers used dexterous manipula­­tion of “international law” to force the Chinese into political submission and to dissolve sovereignty over several major ports. Accord­­ing to the Chinese view, European powers unscrupulously employed this sort of law to impose foreign management over China, and the Chinese needed to com­e to terms with that imposi­­tion by study­­ing up on the new systems hoisted on them.14 Thus, imperial Chinese law had to com­pete with non-​Chinese or the European version of international law, which was bolstered by the threat of force. As such “Chinese interest in the Law of Nations was diminished. Dis­ enchanted by the injustices and the primitive nature of international law, which was then the exclusive product of Western European con­ coction, China con­tinued to suffer for another hundred years to com­e before she should rid herself of the anachronisms entailed by a series of unequal treaties.”15 Smart­­ing from its military and legal defeats, in

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January 1861 the Q­­ing court established the Zongli Yamen, a bureau to deal with foreign affairs. Until then the dynasty had no specific gov­­ ern­­ment office to deal with foreign policy or foreigners resid­­ing in the kingdom. This new office systematically started to collect and translate tracts on international laws and treaties. Par Cassel has furthered our understand­­ing of the Chinese views con­cern­­ing law and explains that the legal order in China was more con­ceived of in the sense of “personal jurisdiction,” that is legal ordinances were placed on individuals based on their origin or race. “By con­trast, modern nation-​states usually claim jurisdic­­tion in all cases that occur within their territorial boundaries. . . .”16 There were structural inadequacies within early inter­­ national law in its applica­­tion to the East, and the very no­­tion of international law was in some ways flawed from the start. “Although international law recognized the sovereignty of Western states, it denied legal personality to non-​Western polities, legaliz­­ing the acquisi­ tion of overseas territories, on the basis of discovery and occupation, or through treaties in which the polities ceded sovereignty or jurisdic­­tion to Western powers.”17 Over the next few decades, until the turn to the twentieth century, various Chinese reformers, in part buoyed by occasional imperial gestures toward restructuring, made attempts to memorialize the throne in a gambit to change the Chinese legal system and introduce foreign practices. Kang Youwei and his disciple Liang Qichao are two of the better-​k nown renovators, but once the court changed its mind they were quickly deemed persona non grata and fled to Japan, among other areas, for safety. In fact, quite a few Chinese reformers chose Japan as the stage for reform­­ing China. By 1905, follow­­ing Japan’s victory over Russia, thousands of Chinese were study­­ing a variety of subjects in Japan, includ­­ing law and military science. Chinese revolutionary Sun Yat-​sen espoused his own form of democracy by the turn of the century in his declara­­tion of the people’s three principles, an amalgama­­tion of legal democratic ideas, Con­fucian humanism, and muscular nationalism. Sens­­ing the winds of change, the Q­­ing gov­­ern­­ment in 1906 sent out a host of scholars to tour the world and report back to the emperor on foreign international legal systems. As many historians have pointed out, “whether it con­cerned prepara­­tion for a con­stitu­­tion or revis­­ing laws, the Q­­ing gov­­ern­­ment based most of its emphasis on learn­­ing

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from the Japanese model.”18 The Chinese officials met with and were impressed with Japanese oligarchs Itō Hirobumi (the framer of Japan’s Meiji con­stitution) and statesman Ōkuma Shigenobu and also received special lectures on Japanese con­stitutional law that emphasized love and devo­­tion to the emperor.19 These Xinzheng, or “new policies,” were potentially effective but short-​lived and ultimately did little to prevent the downfall of Q­­ing rule in 1911. Once a Chinese Republic was established in 1912 the nascent gov­­ern­­ment in the new capital of Nanj­­ing established a provisional set of laws with temporary con­stitutionality. A con­stitutional assembly was also created with elected members. New “modern” laws legally defined the borders of China and supposedly provided for equal rights to all under the law for the first time in Chinese history. At the same time, remnants of distaste for Western law as someth­­ing imposed and unequal remained strong. One Chinese author after World War I went so far as to chastise the League of Nations as merely a “body of all the imperialists, a tool to oppress colonies and divide up weak and small nations.”20 International law, as practiced by the European and American colonial powers, was not necessarily regarded as a panacea to resolve global ills in East Asia. Even more of an obstacle was the “patent authoritarianism in the philosophy of Sun Yat-​sen and his (Methodist) successor, Chiang Kai-​shek,” a fact that impeded the full development of an independent judiciary and carried with it rampant corruption.21 Given China’s long history, it is no exaggera­­tion to say that domestic law existed but “under try­­ing and precarious con­ditions, the legal writings in the international field tended to con­centrate on the efforts to remove inequalities imposed on China by the Western world, includ­­ing Japan.”22 There was little theoretical evolu­­tion con­cern­­ing the field of international law, nor were there many practitioners of it in early twentieth century China. There were exceptions, men of tower­­ing ability such as diplomat Wellington Koo (Gu Weijun), jurist Wang Chonghui, and others, but on the whole law in China took a backseat to more press­­ing con­cerns about gain­­ing equality in the international marketplace and military issues in the nation’s dealings with Japan’s increasingly interfer­­ing Kwantung army. An impediment to the development of international law stemmed in part from the imposed system of extraterritoriality, and by the early twentieth century this legal estrangement

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became the “focus of Chinese national resentment of restrictions upon China’s sovereignty.”23 Until almost the end of World War II, foreign imperialist groups were allowed to use their own laws and courts in China, enforc­­ing a system of legal separateness. This bifurca­­tion of Chinese law impeded Chinese efforts to integrate into global relations because non-​Chinese viewed the Chinese legal system as decrepit. However, “by adopt­­ing international standards, the Chinese hoped to satisfy international requirements for recogni­­tion and hence rid themselves of extraterritorial interference.”24 All dur­­ing the 1930s there were various moves from Western nations to disband this uneven system, but no serious plans were afoot until the Japanese military invaded and appeared poised to swallow up other areas of the Far East. By that time Western powers saw their own privileges shrink­­ing and the need to make China into an equal partner. As a result by “December 7, 1941, extraterritoriality had become little more than a legal term.”25 For the United States, extraterritoriality in China ended on January 11, 1943, when U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull and Chinese Ambassador Wei Daom­­ing signed a treaty to end the system. At the same time, British Ambassador Sir Horace James Seymour and T. V. Soong authorized a similar treaty in Chongqing. This historical albatross of extraterritoriality and the negative Western experience with Chinese law on the eve of judgment to adjudicate Japanese war criminals in 1945 had retarded the development of professional legal staff. A system of courts was therefore not easy to establish quickly. In 1930 the Chinese gov­­ern­­ment was still try­­ing to get rid of rural imperial era courts, and judges were in extremely short supply. In addi­­tion to the build­­ing and supervision of new prisons that were governed by the Ministry of Justice, there was internal com­peti­­ tion because the KMT as a political party also possessed a large number of incarcera­­tion facilities that did not fall directly under the legal mandate of civilian con­trol.26 Deten­­tion centers run by the police, military prisons under military com­mand, and reformatories operated by the military police or the military, as well as internment camps managed by the military or the secret service, were quite numerous.27 Yet, as Klaus Mühlhahn notes, archival records have rarely survived to detail this situa­­tion even though under the KMT leadership “a parallel system of military justice” existed.28 In stark con­trast, the CCP proclaimed

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that Republican-​era Chinese Nationalist justice was deeply corrupt and the Com­munists wanted to install a proper regime of reform based on “reeducation, thought reform, and the benefits of hard physical labor.”29 This management of gett­­ing society aroused against a com­mon enemy and employ­­ing the con­cept of CCP revolutionary justice with its show trials and mass rallies was both ceremonial and psychological in its aims because the process demonstrated the produc­­tion of a “theatricalized state.”30

The Tokyo War Crimes Trial and China Virtually coterminous with Chinese participa­­tion in European deliberations on war crimes, Chinese legal representatives faced the glare of the spotlight at the Tokyo War Crimes Trial. The history of the Chinese experience at the Tokyo Trial, directly con­nected to the evolu­­tion of BC class war crimes trials in China, is significant for two reasons. First, the Tokyo tribunal proved to the Chinese that war crimes trials were not merely show trials and that the legal issues at stake were be­­ing taken seriously by the international com­munity. Second, the trial demonstrated that the Japanese were pay­­ing atten­­tion to the international com­munity’s reac­­tion to the horrors be­­ing detailed at court. The impact the Tokyo Trial had on KMT and CCP leadership demonstrated the media value of not only how the trial made the history of the Japanese empire appear but how this knowledge could be used in a bid to show what sort of Chinese leadership would replace former Japanese imperial authority. The Tokyo War Crimes Trial would both play a galvaniz­­ing role in China to showcase the importance of war crimes trials but also feed domestic pressure for the Chinese gov­­ern­­ment to hold its own trials of Japanese so the West would not take all the glory for apply­­ing justice to so many of the heinous crimes that occurred in China. In con­temporary China the Tokyo War Crimes Trial is seen as the apex of postwar judgments against Japan, valorized as a step toward establish­ ­ing the rule of law against Japan’s aggressive war and penaliz­­ing the perpetrators.31 Nonetheless, because of China’s own fall from legal grace dur­­ing the late 1950s up until the early 1980s its own participants in the trial are rarely known. The names of the American prosecutor Joseph Keenan, the Dutch judge B. V. A. Röling, and the Indian judge

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Radhabinod Pal are fairly com­monplace, but less so are the names of the Chinese prosecu­­tion staff or the Chinese judge who presided at the Tokyo tribunal. This trend of emphasiz­­ing the central importance of the Tokyo Trial is exemplified in Chinese director Gao Qunshu’s 2006 blockbuster film Dongj­­ing shenpan (The Tokyo Trial). Gao’s clunky cinematic effort, not to be con­fused with Japanese director Kobayashi Masaki’s 1983 lengthy documentary of the same title, focuses on the trial, but he paints the psychological drama by uniquely plac­­ing the Chinese judge, Mei Ruao, at the center. The views of Judge Mei essentially played little role juridically at the actual trial, but in the film he acquires a heady significance.32 Why director Gao Qunshu chose to focus on the international Tokyo Trial story and not the domestic Chinese BC class tribunals of Japanese war criminals opens up an avenue to think about what the postwar pursuit of justice in China truly meant and what the ramifications were for early Cold War Sino-​Japanese relations. A Chinese presence at the Tokyo Trial was important not only to demonstrate internationally that China cared about the legal disposal of Japanese war crimes but also to show the world that the Chinese understood international law and were able to prosecute the Japanese for their misdeeds.33 Unlike the internationally renowned Chinese jurist Wang Chonghui, Mei Ruao was more mercurial. He graduated from China’s elite Qinghua University in 1924. By 1926 he finished advanced studies at Stanford University and graduated in 1928 from the law program at the University of Chicago. In 1929 he returned home through Europe and then taught for a spell at the Shandong University law department before go­­ing to Nankai University in Tianjin. He caught the eye of KMT leaders, and from May 1946 to December 1948 Mei sat on the bench at the Tokyo Trial and stood in judgment of the original twenty-​eight Japanese defendants. Although Mei had obtained his law degree from a prestigious American university at a young age, he never sat in a judge’s chair prior to leav­­ing for Tokyo, nor was he that adept at international law. Regardless, and in part because there were so few Chinese candidates qualified for the job who were not already busy with other press­­ing international issues, he fulfilled his duty.34 The Chinese delega­­tion also included a member fielded to the team, Xiang Zhejun, a prosecutor for the Shanghai higher circuit.35 Several more lawyers filled out the

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Chinese team includ­­ing Yang Zhaolong, a prominent writer on law who also published postwar on the differences between mainland and British law.36 Ni Zhengyu, an eminent Chinese lawyer and intellectual, served as chief advisor to the entire Chinese prosecu­­tion staff. A Chinese legal presence in Tokyo signaled a fresh era for Chinese participa­­tion as an equal in international legal institutions, but not everyth­­ing went smoothly for Judge Mei in his new surroundings. Supposedly, China had to fight for every last ounce of dignity at the Tokyo Trial, and subsequent historical treatises of Mei’s work and his demeanor also took note of these episodes. These issues may seem minor, but readers are reminded of how the Chinese saw international law and their own posi­­tion in such hierarchies at the time. China was just com­­­ing into its own as a junior partner in world accords, hav­­ing been at the sharp receiv­­ing end of international law “abuses” since the mid-​1800s. The country and its people were very attuned to any perceived slight or inequality. On the first day of the Tokyo War Crimes Trial, accord­­ing to several Chinese sources, the judges from eleven countries around the world discussed the seat­­ing plan and the order in which judges would enter the courtroom to take their seats on the dais in front of the public. This was obviously a big deal to all the members, not just Mei, because the discussion dragged on for a con­siderable time. At first a sugges­­tion arose that judges could enter the courtroom on the first day in the order of how Japan surrendered. However, Australian Judge William Webb, the chief judge of the trial, disagreed with this approach. He wanted to seat himself in the middle, as presid­­ing judge, with Great Britain and the United States to either side, lett­­ing the others spread equally out on both sides. This decision disappointed Judge Mei, who stated that because China had borne the brunt of Japan’s imperial aggression its representative should sit more centrally. Mei then playfully proposed a more objective alternative: The judges could enter the courtroom and be seated accord­­ing to their weight because that order made as much sense as hav­­ing the United Kingdom and United States sit in the middle.37 Eventually, it was decided that Judge Mei would sit to the left of Judge Webb, who was chair­­ing the trial. (This event was a seminal moment in Gao’s movie.) Regardless of the seat­­ing chart, Mei’s postwar synopsis of the Tokyo Trial blames insufficient Chinese prosecutorial staff and KMT corrup­­tion for the

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overall poor Chinese performance at court. But given Mei’s statement about China’s centrality in bear­­ing the brunt of aggression from Japan it was a bit odd that the KMT leadership initially dispatched only two assistant prosecutors. The Nationalist gov­­ern­­ment later added to the team four more individuals whose job was to sift through Japanese secret gov­­ern­­ment archives.38 The film version of history that plays up Judge Mei’s centrality is divorced from reality. In fact, Mei was knocked down a peg upon his return to China, swept up in the numerous anti-​intellectual and anti-​ Western educa­­tion waves that later ravaged Com­munist China. Although he represented China at the Tokyo Trial, his legacy was cut short, and his legal impact is hard to discern. Mei’s biography and other writings did not even make it into print until well after Mao Zedong had passed from power in the late 1970s.39 At the beginn­­ing of the late 1950s anti-​R ightist movement in China Mei was fiercely criticized for hav­­ing been a so-​called “runn­­ing dog” of the KMT judicial system, dismissed as corrupt and unethical. Forgett­­ing the fact that he had faithfully served Chinese interests at the world’s first pursuit of Japanese war crimes, critical voices grew louder, and by the mid-​1960s hot-​ headed Red Guards, the vanguard of the Cultural Revolution, tried to burn the judicial robe he had proudly worn to the international court in Tokyo. Mei was able to prevent violent youths from steal­­ing that treasure, but the toll was obviously great. He died in relative obscurity at the age of 69, never quite able to claim any political or social benefit from his key role in the early postwar arena of international law. Mei was not even a keen supporter of the Chinese Nationalists, and when he repatriated after the Tokyo Trial he specifically sojourned in Hong Kong instead of return­­ing to the capital because he did not wish to take up a gov­­ern­­ment posi­­tion with the KMT leadership. He only returned after the victory of the Com­munist party in 1949. The Tokyo Trial served as a steep learn­­ing curve for the Chinese interested in pursu­­ing international justice for Japanese war criminals and as a sort of template for their BC class war crimes trials. As Ni Zhengyu, the chief advisor for Chinese prosecutors at the Tokyo Trial, explained in his memoirs, Chinese officials were wholly unprepared for the sort of jurisprudence the Tokyo Trial advocated. Ni had been out of China from 1945 to 1946 in the United States and the United Kingdom

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to observe their legal systems and to draw up reports, arrang­­ing for China’s reentry into the international juridical system, but also to prepare for the nation’s pursuit and successful adjudica­­tion of Chinese justice for Japanese war criminals. Unfortunately, as Ni described the situation, “we were hop­­ing for calm times but the wind never ceased blowing.” He meant essentially that while the Chinese estimated the postwar pursuit of war crimes as a fait accompli, circumstances did not allow for the easy implementa­­tion of such a process.40 Ni returned in the early winter of 1946 to China from his excursion at the moment when the Chinese prosecu­­tion team realized that its experience with the rules for admittance of evidence in the Chinese system were fairly incompatible with the more prevalent American and British systems of law that would be in use at the Tokyo Trial. The Chinese staff was surprised at the robust system of defense to be employed at the trial. Ni noted in his recollections, somewhat incredulously, that at Nuremberg all the defense lawyers were German; there were no Allied lawyers. (He was a bit off because most were German, though there were a few Allied lawyers as well.) Ni writes that the Chinese found it hard to believe that Allied lawyers would rigorously defend Japanese, but they did, he explained. Each Japanese defendant was provided at least one “helping” Allied lawyer.41 The real issue vex­­ing the Chinese team at the Tokyo Trial, the lawyers recalled, was that they had mistakenly assumed from the outset that the trial would merely be the victor’s prosecu­­tion of Japanese war criminals and not a “real trial,” so they really had not prepared quality evidence or given too much thought to its provenance or collection. As such, in the initial months the Allied defense lawyers made mincemeat of much of the evidence proposed by the Chinese side.42 The defense’s ability to poke holes in the Chinese prosecution’s case was particularly damag­­ing to the Chinese side when the vice-​director for the political sec­­tion of the KMT Military, Qin Dechun, took the stand and was virtually laughed off for his hyperbolic statements that the Japanese killed Chinese and com­mitted arson everywhere without leav­­ing one place untouched.43 Qin was the KMT head of the war crimes investiga­ ­tion com­mittee, established within the Ministry of Defense. He had met with General Douglas MacArthur at least three times while in Tokyo but was caught off guard by the fierce questions con­cern­­ing his

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supposed exaggerated testimony in court. When Ni Zhengyu first went to see Qin Dechun back in China to talk about the legal whipp­­ing they had taken at the Tokyo War Crimes Trial, Qin did not refrain from vent­­ing his frustration. “What part of that trial was us adjudicat­­ing them, it seemed more of a case where they put us on trial,” he admitted to Ni Zhengyu.44 In his memoirs, Qin does not remember it in the same manner, but he did con­cede that his days of testimony in Tokyo were difficult and that he spent his nights worry­­ing and prepar­­ing for the next day.45 Chinese officials grossly miscalculated what sort of process the Tokyo Trial would be and needed to regroup so as not to be left behind. Prosecutor Xiang Zhejun and his team took advantage of the fact that the trial was still in its beginn­­ing stages and returned home to reorient, leav­­ing the prosecu­­tion in U.S. hands for the start. In their private con­versations Qin admitted to Ni that no one had thought dur­ ­ing the actual war of resistance to retain proof or think of collect­­ing trial evidence, so it was go­­ing to require redoubled efforts to collect after the fact. Not only do Ni Zhengyu’s memoirs add to our understand­­ing of how the Chinese were caught off guard by the structure of the Tokyo Trial in its pursuit of a new path of international justice, but once Chinese officials realized their mistake it was hard to rectify because the civil war in China impeded collec­­tion of further evidence. By the time Ni and his team were flounder­­ing around the north of China try­­ing to amass evidence the truce between the CCP and KMT had broken down and regular domestic rail travel was disrupted. Ironically, there was one legal bright light the Chinese could make use of: a U.S. military trial in Beij­­ing of an American soldier charged with the rape of a Beij­­ing University female student.46 The trial had already started but was at the stage where evidence was be­­ing introduced, and Ni sat with Hu Shi, president of the university, who had been closely follow­­ing the proceedings. In the end, Ni admitted that the Chinese team never collected the necessary evidence it needed but that observa­­tion of a U.S.-​ led trial did galvanize Chinese resolve to prosecute the Japanese to the best of their ability.47 For Ni the Chinese pursuit of justice at Tokyo faced several difficulties: First, the Chinese needed to develop a strategy to respond to the Japanese defense teams’ posture by ask­­ing questions that more served Chinese interests and submitt­­ing the retorts into

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e­ vidence. Second, the Chinese team early on realized that its prosecu­­ tion staff was weak, so it decided to split its attack and use the assistance of the Philippine prosecutor Pedro Lopez to reduce its workload.48 A third decision was to use the Chinese mission in Tokyo to request that the Allied trial team work­­ing on the Chinese side be allowed to troll through the closed Japanese archives and search for evidence. Given the initial poor show­­ing of the Chinese side at the Tokyo War Crimes Trial the world would be watch­­ing much more intently to see how the KMT ran its own BC class war crimes trials. In his postwar assessment of the Tokyo Trial, judge Mei Ruao, who had been virtually silent about his participation, penned a fairly anodyne piece about the Chinese view of the trial. In the same manner as Ni Zhengyu, Mei noted that each Japanese defendant at the Tokyo War Crimes Trial had two lawyers: one Japanese and one American. Mei recalled these events and wrote that this parity between the prosecu­­tion and the defense produced equal justice of a sort. The defense lawyers’ strategy was to prolong the trial or lessen the defendant’s charges. They did this by attack­­ing the interroga­­tion and the evidence of the prosecution. In con­sequence, as Mei says, “no loophole was left unexplored,” and this tactic especially irritated the American prosecutors. Such shenanigans also made the trial limp forward, and, com­bined with the com­plexity of the legal issues, the length of charges, the numbers involved, and the effort to provide com­petent translation, all grated on the nerves of the participants. Mei asserted that once the court got rid of two U.S. lawyers, includ­­ing Owen Cunningham (former dean of a law school), who were believed to be disrupt­­ing the process, the trial proceeded more smoothly.49 In his analysis Judge Mei was keen to affirm that the number killed dur­­ing the Nanj­­ing Massacre was at least 300,000, but he was critical of the KMT Ministry of Defense, which was slow to move in prosecut­ ­ing Japanese war criminals for the massacre. For example, only after much public pressure did KMT officials eventually get in con­tact with U.S. occupa­­tion authorities in Japan to request the extradi­­tion to China of Japanese imperial army officer Tani Hisao. Mei wrote that when this happened he had already been in Japan for several months. One day the head of the GHQ Legal Section, Lieutenant Alva Carpenter, paid a sudden visit to Mei’s room at the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo and asked

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what he thought of the situation. Carpenter evinced skepticism that Tani could receive a fair trial in China, but Mei counseled him to not be anxious and lobbied for China, add­­ing “accord­­ing to international law and the decisions of the Allied Com­mittee of the Far East deal­­ing with war criminals you have no right to refuse the request for extradi­­ tion from a country that has suffered and wishes to try BC class war criminals.”50 Mei observed that most of the carnage wrought by the “beastly Japanese army” was dreadful, but what shocked people the most was the “kill­­ing con­test” between imperial Japanese soldiers Noda Takeshi and Mukai Toshiaki (to which I will return later). Unlike Ni Zhengyu’s reminiscences that recalled an unprepared China, Mei focused on the emotional tone of the Tokyo trial. After one point in the roughly twenty days of testimony about the Nanj­­ing Massacre when a foreign missionary provided evidence, the witness’s delivery was so heart-​w rench­­ing that the entire court fell silent. Even the faces of the normally stoic Japanese defendants, said Mei, “turned grey and they looked desperate.”51

Chinese Mission in Tokyo In a sense, the Tokyo Trial was a lost opportunity for Chinese international justice to take center stage because many of the Japanese soldiers and leaders who were prosecuted as A class war criminals were also on the KMT and CCP lists as top war criminals. Regardless, the United States would not extradite many of the main culprits to China and preferred that justice be meted out through the Tokyo Trial system or American-​led BC class war crimes trials in Japan. As a con­sequence, those suspected Japanese war criminals who were eventually extradited to China were often of a lesser political value and, thus, at least from the American viewpoint, expendable goods and potential fodder for the Chinese judicial system. It was not just the Chinese judges and small prosecutorial staff in Tokyo who engaged in the international pursuit of Japanese war crimes. Originally, the KMT was keen to play a military role in the occupa­­tion of Japan and had promised to send forces of as many as 30,000 men. Unfortunately, that promise quickly became untenable once the leadership realized that peace with the CCP was not go­­ing to hold and that

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troops were needed for the civil war.52 While U.S. General Douglas MacArthur, for all intents and purposes, was the de facto shogun of the occupa­­tion of Japan, in theory management was con­ducted in con­ cert with all the Allied victors, includ­­ing Great Britain, the Soviet Union, Australia, and China.53 The Chinese (the KMT, which internationally was the accepted leadership that represented all of China in 1945) recognized that send­­ing a military division was out of the question, but effort was placed in two areas. The KMT gov­­ern­­ment sent a com­petent diplomatic corps to Japan to assist the needs of thousands of newly minted Chinese citizens, those who had suddenly acquired Chinese citizenship in place of their imperial Japanese identity, and aimed to reshape Sino-​Japanese relations for its own postwar interests. A diminutive Chinese diplomatic mission was established in occupied Japan, but the mission had to keep informed an entire na­­tion eager for details of how justice was play­­ing out there. At the same time the Chinese mission stood as a con­duit between the United States occupy­ ­ing forces, which had the authority to arrest Japanese former imperial soldiers, and the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which was putting forward various requests for the extradi­­tion of Japanese it believed should be prosecuted for war crimes in China’s military tribunals. The Chinese judicial staff and the diplomatic mission in Japan did not want to allow the centrality of the Nanj­­ing Massacre testimony in the U.S.-​ led Tokyo Trial to overshadow their own attempts back on the mainland to prosecute Japanese for war crimes in China. Zhu Shim­­ing was the first head of the Chinese mission in 1946. Zhu had graduated from Qinghua University and later attended the Virginia Military Institute in the United States. Zhu was followed in his post by Shang Zhen. Shang came from a wealthy family and was already a high-​level military man by the time of the 1911 Xinhai Revolution. Shang was always properly dressed with shoes shined to a clear reflection, accord­­ing to officers who worked under him.54 The deputy head of the mission was Shen Jinding. Shen had graduated from Tokyo Imperial University and already had a distinguished career in the Chinese foreign ministry. The work of the mission’s military sec­­tion was to coordinate the repatria­­tion of Japanese POWs, civilians, and suspected war criminals with Allied authorities in Japan. In addition, other duties included attend­­ing and report­­ing back on Allied war crimes trials of A

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and BC class war crimes, repatriat­­ing those con­victed in Chinese criminal courts to finish their sentences in Sugamo prison in Tokyo, and keep­­ing a pulse on Japanese postwar attitudes toward the Chinese.55 We know from Shen Jinding’s field reports and postwar recollections that KMT leaders worried about how their own trials were perceived internationally and how they would stack up to the justice pursued by other nations. The KMT leadership was quite con­scious of be­­ing com­ pared with administrations elsewhere. As a member of the Chinese mission Shen attended the Tokyo War Crimes Trial, and because court was held in the former imperial Japanese army headquarters build­­ing in Ichigaya, Tokyo, many KMT members knew this site well from their prewar days study­­ing abroad in Japan. The area had housed the officers’ train­­ing school, and Shen wrote that it left him with a weird feeling.56 Shen recalled that only occupy­­ing forces could com­e and go through the central entrance and exit of the courtroom build­­ing dur­­ing official trial hours. Japanese had to use the side doors.57 Unlike the Australian, British, and American occupa­­tion forces in Japan, for the most part the Chinese mission in Japan was staffed with individuals who understood both Japan and the Japanese language, often had studied there at a regular university or a military college, and felt com­fortable act­­ing in liaison with the Japanese. This mix of cultures must have proved interesting. At one party held by the Tokyo Chinese Association, the overseas Chinese com­munity in Japan hosted the entire Chinese mission at an event on March 14, 1947, where famed Japanese film star Ri Kōran (Yamaguchi Yoshiko was her Japanese name) was invited to sing. Ri Kōran was an unusual choice for the event given that she had starred in numerous Manchukuo-​Japanese coproduced wartime films and was almost con­victed as a Chinese traitor until it was discovered that she was actually of Japanese nationality. She sang the well-​ known wartime Chinese hit song White Lilies.58 The memoirs of a few who were posted to the mission spoke depressingly about the sometimes haughty attitude of the U.S. military toward Japanese, in con­trast to the Chinese’s own supposed benevolence toward the Japanese. One Chinese military attaché described American soldiers’ con­versations about hav­­ing a girlfriend or fraterniz­­ing with Japanese girls as “Have you got a horizontal dictionary?”59 KMT Lieutenant Com­mander Zhong Hanbo was one of the several military

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attaché members of the Chinese mission who left a memoir of his experiences in immediate postwar Japan. The author attended a bit of the Tokyo Trial and recorded that he was required to show ID before enter­ ­ing the hall. It was forbidden to br­­ing in a camera or binoculars, and attendees were searched. There were earphones for translation, but “unfortunately,” Zhong said, transla­­tion was only from Japanese to English and vice versa.60 Zhong was a naval officer dispatched to com­ municate with the Allied forces, but he also represented Nationalist China. While he had several duties, includ­­ing attendance and report­ ­ing on the Tokyo Trial, Zhong was mainly responsible for the foreign affairs of the Chinese navy in Japan. One of his roles in the mission was to receive several of Japan’s remain­­ing and seaworthy ships as a form of “reparation” from the Japanese navy and to ensure their return. Eight vessels of sorts, fly­­ing the flag of surrender, entered the Shanghai port of Wusong in July 1947. Zhong reported that thousands of Chinese on the quay watched the Japanese ships enter the port, smil­­ing to themselves. After dock­­ing there was a handover ceremony, with the replacement of the KMT flag aboard the ships. An additional issue of repara­­tion and atonement was the return of the numerous anchors from the defeated Q­­ing dynasty navy that the Japanese military had taken and displayed in Tokyo’s Ueno Park at the con­clusion of Japan’s first war with China in 1895.

The Chess Game of Chinese Opinions on Japanese War Criminals The history of the victor in war is easy to find. The more delicately wound history, the one that requires the digg­­ing out of the story, is the narrative of the side that loses, where the informa­­tion frequently gets tamped down, erased, or forgotten in the immediate postwar reconstruc­ ­tion efforts.61 This was precisely the situa­­tion in mainland China, Taiwan, and Japan proper, con­cern­­ing the story of how the Chinese dealt with BC class Japanese war crimes.62 The use of legal instruments to seek justice against the Japanese aimed to establish a new trend in resolv­­ing imperial disputes, follow­­ing the path the Allies set with the Nuremberg Trials of Nazi war criminals. Amartya Sen has opined that there are two ways to pursue justice: the “arrangement focused view”

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and the “realiza­­tion focused understanding” process of justice. The first method centers on the establishment and crea­­tion of a bureaucracy that can operate the mechanical structure for achiev­­ing justice. This is the “active presence that justice is be­­ing done,” regardless if such a com­plex system actually achieves that goal. This sort of structure more closely followed the goals of what the Chinese Nationalists (KMT) hoped to achieve. The “realiza­­tion focused understanding” process of justice was more the aim of the Chinese Com­munists (CCP), who looked at the actual fruit legal institutions bore and whether justice as a palpable end had been achieved.63 Nancy Rosenblum suggests that herein lies the gap between procedural and substantive justice. Substantive justice informs us about the actual harm caused, but the key point in Rosenblum’s analysis is that the international prosecu­­tion of war crimes stems from the growth of the idea of a “universal jurisdiction.” If we extrapolate in China’s case, the goal was justice, and the audience for the prosecu­­tion and subsequent punishment was the “world com­ munity.”64 The internationality of the law was not only in its applica­­tion but also in its reception. Us­­ing Sen’s and Rosemblum’s logic does not mean that I wish to lambast the Chinese Nationalist efforts and laud the CCP’s—​far from it. What their legal definitions offer is the ability to recognize that even employ­­ing the same tools and language con­cern­­ing “international law” did not signify that both sets of Chinese political parties pursued the same ends in their trials of Japanese war criminals throughout the 1940s and 1950s. From the outset, at the end of Japan’s empire in East Asia, the Chinese had two com­pet­­ing visions of the future: a KMT and a CCP outlook. Chinese Nationalist rule adjudicated Japanese war crimes tribunals from 1946 to 1949. Among its opponents, who were vocal in opposi­­tion but did not get to manage their own Japanese war crimes trials until 1956, was the Chinese Com­munist Party. To con­ found matters even more Taiwan muddied policy and encumbered the Chinese pursuit of justice because the authorities needed to first determine which nationalities or ethnicities should even be legally defined as “Chinese.” There were several major issues imping­­ing on war crimes trials in China: the ethno-​political identity of those liable to be charged with war crimes and the availability of testimony with a viable court system

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in which to prosecute. Then there was the ques­­tion of collaboration. The Nationalists needed to determine who was legally defined as a Japanese or a Chinese because this affected the manner in which the individual would or would not be prosecuted. Not only did the KMT have to delineate a policy regard­­ing treatment for Taiwanese, particularly con­cern­­ing collaboration, but lists also needed to be drawn up for the Japanese war criminals, many of whom had already returned or even demobilized back to Japan years before the end of the war. Thus, before Chinese trials could even begin officials needed the acquiescence and assistance of the occupy­­ing Americans to arrest and return suspected Japanese war criminals to China. A further mitigat­­ing factor was the manner in which the Japanese responded to the end of the war in China and Taiwan; after all, at the dawn of surrender there were still millions of armed imperial soldiers (not to men­­tion civilians) dott­­ing the landscape, and not all were pleased to lay down their arms or repatriate. The issue of how to deal with Japanese war crimes intensely involved the Japanese people and gov­­ern­­ment, who, in turn, held their own often not necessarily uniform views about war criminality. Some of these groups, less intent on identify­­ing legal slights on the mainland, took to proclaim­­ing that postwar pursuit of “justice” against the Japanese was legally lopsided because Americans and other Allies were unwill­­ing to examine their own war crimes and investigate them with the same intensity. Such issues are by no means limited to the Japanese theater. European nations are equally culpable, undermined by their own lackadaisical approach to pursu­­ing responsibility for the Holocaust, the rise of fascism, and the debacle of World War II. To offer just one example, postwar Italy was perhaps the most egregious situa­­tion of historical amnesia with half-​hearted attempts to rectify the past. Accord­­ing to Tony Judt, “as late as 1960, 62 of the 64 prefects of the Republic had been functionaries under fascism, as was also true of all 135 police chiefs!”65 Addic­­tion to the status quo was not a national characteristic con­fined to the Japanese. While the Chinese mission was try­­ing to deal with the extradi­­tion to China of alleged Japanese war criminals for trial and observ­­ing the situa­­tion at the Tokyo War Crimes Trial, the overall pursuit of Japanese war criminals in China and the media responses in both Japan and

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China represented a postwar international race to validate each administration. In Japan, the gov­­ern­­ment at first attempted to maintain the posture that it was in con­trol as the initial management of the occupa­­ tion remained unclear. Under these circumstances, the key issue was that “China’s wartime partnership with the Western Allies marked the lawful (in con­trast to Japan’s unilateralism) con­clusion of the old relations between China and the treaty powers and, con­sequently, promised to renovate drastically China’s foreign affairs.”66 While the Japanese military and not the general popula­­tion was China’s specific enemy, as Generalissimo Chiang and Mao had both claimed in their wartime speeches, these same Chinese leaders were still of several minds con­ cern­­ing how to deal with Japanese war criminals. The main fissure was not merely along the KMT-​CCP split. On August 10, 1945, a Chinese Nationalist memo con­cern­­ing how to prepare for the Japanese surrender was drafted. It was important for the KMT to avoid us­­ing the term fulu, “prisoner of war,” and the authorities took pains to use the phrase, touxiang budui, “surrender­­ing troops,” because “accord­­ing to the Geneva Con­ven­­tion on the Treatment of Prisoners of War if soldiers are POWs we must provide for them but if they are surrender­­ing troops the enemy has to provision itself and we can avoid hav­­ing to supply them,” the Chinese memo reported.67 It was not only the Japanese side that wished to economize as much as possible in the aftermath of a long war—​the KMT could ill afford to house such large numbers of surrender­­ing Japanese soldiers.68 Despite how Japanese soldiers were legally classified, accord­­ing to instructions from the central Allied com­mand, the KMT was aware that it needed to collect evidence of war crimes in order to prosecute them.69 A KMT internal memo from August 1945 stated that jianfei, “traitors and bandits”—​mean­­ing CCP soldiers or sympathizers—​would use the surrender as a means to gain hold of Japanese weapons in the Beijing-​to-​Shanghai corridor, so there was a need to coordinate with the Americans quickly and effectively.70 American armed forces had long supported the Chinese Nationalists against Japan, and the U.S. marines were deployed as part of a plan to help stabilize China and aid the KMT in regain­­ing the upper hand. Unfortunately, the American marines based in China as part of the Marshall Mission to negotiate peace between the oppos­­ing Chinese camps generated tremendous ill

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will from the populace due to frequent instances of their supposed drunken and brutish behavior.71 The KMT intended to use the idea of war crimes trials as part of its internal propaganda engine to unify China in its favor against the Com­munists. It remains unclear if the decision moved beyond the basic projec­­tion stages, but Nationalist leaders envisaged hold­­ing lectures and discussion groups about the trials as well as a way of mobiliz­­ing a greater union of party and people. In some cities posters and large announcements publicized the proceedings or at least gave prominent media space to KMT efforts to investigate Japanese war crimes.72 Liao Ming-​ou, a KMT official charged with the Japanese POW issue, said on October 24, 1945, that the KMT needed to build camps for POWs with all due haste because former Japanese soldiers would help establish a peaceful Japan when they finally repatriated. Liao was adamant about educat­­ing the Japanese POWs and colonists con­cern­­ing the errors of Meiji militarism, which he believed bred an arrogance that had led to the downfall of imperial Japan.73 Lessons about democracy would show Japan that los­­ing the war was not the end but rather the beginn­­ing of a new era for reform.74 This was not an outlandish idea since the KMT had already built camps for other POWs, includ­­ing its Chinese brethren in the CCP, even though the quality of the incarcera­ ­tion varied greatly. There is a profound and strange historical irony in the KMT’s dual policies of perceiv­­ing the Japanese as immediately useful but con­tinu­­ing to treat the CCP opposi­­tion much more harshly. Of course Chinese and Japanese opinions con­cern­­ing how to deal with the end of the war were far from uniform, especially in those areas of the empire that had been under heavy Japanese colonial management, such as Taiwan. As Taiwan reverted back to KMT con­trol it was still in a state of flux, and even the attitudes of colonial Japanese were far from unanimous con­cern­­ing what to do. The KMT authorities at the time gauged Japanese residents’ opinions and divided them into four broad categories. The first group still strongly believed that follow­ ­ing the Meiji Restora­­tion the Japanese (Yamato) race was the most advanced in Asia, and these residents felt superior because of it. They were embarrassed by the defeat and yearned to rebuild Japan and return it to dominance in East Asia. The second group was the administrative bureaucracy, and their lives in Taiwan were relatively com­fortable

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because they received good salaries. These former colonial officials recognized that repatria­­tion meant an entirely different future and probably a worse lifestyle await­­ing them in Japan, so they were rather disappointed at hav­­ing to leave Taiwan. The third group was the industrialists, shopkeepers, and businessmen who were con­duct­­ing affairs in Taiwan, and their opinions varied. This included “those small business owners or businessmen, who must have felt that they suffered the most, as they were asked to give to the Chinese the businesses that they had managed for several decades in Taiwan without putt­­ing up a fight to com­pensate for wartime losses. They could either blame the militancy of the Japanese gov­­ern­­ment for caus­­ing their current misfortunes, or mock China for fail­­ing to gain the victory on its own. Therefore, no matter how favorably the KMT treated them, it remained difficult for them [those Japanese businessmen to be repatriated] to let go of their indigna­­tion and con­tempt.” The fourth group was the Japanese opposed to the war, and the report noted they were a minority.75 The last Japanese Governor General of Taiwan, Andō Rikichi, remained in con­trol of the island for a few months after the surrender. On October 1, 1945, his office also con­ducted interviews with Japanese about their attitudes toward repatriation. The results proved that about 140,000 wished to stay in Taiwan while 180,000 desired to repatriate, about 43 percent and 57 percent respectively.76 While the Japanese were split in their attitudes toward surrender and repatriation, Chinese hopes for the island’s supposed return to the embrace of the motherland were no less ambivalent. In fact, how the Chinese in former occupied areas saw the incom­­ing KMT “victorious” soldiers was often equally con­ tradictory. Graham Peck, the OWI officer who had spent six years travel­­ing around China in the late 1930s and 1940s, recalled mainlanders’ ambiguous responses. Peck said that when the KMT first flew into Shanghai on U.S. planes in early August 1945 people were euphoric, but by December they were despondent.77 In former Japanese-​controlled areas of Taiwan in early 1948 KMT forces started arriv­­ing on Jinmen Island (Quemoy), a small island closer to the Chinese mainland than the main island of Taiwan but placed under KMT authority. Villagers recall their [KMT] arrival as a pathetic sight. Sometimes five or six soldiers shared a single weapon. Many had lost their uniforms and wore shoes made of grass or helmets of woven bamboo.

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They were malnourished; lack of variety in diet had given them serious digestive problems. The “owners” of the public latrines of the island, who enjoyed the customary right to collect nightsoil for fertilizer, recall hear­­ing soldiers curs­­ing and painful grunts, “like a pig be­­ing slaughtered,” as they tried to relieve themselves.78 Sometimes KMT military requisition­­ing seemed akin to imperial Japanese military wartime behavior. In the 1949 KMT-​CCP battles that pockmarked Jinmen Island with immense mortar shelling, people were afraid to go home. One family did and was cook­­ing noodles when KMT soldiers burst in and just took their meal. “We had a rooster, a hen, three medium chickens and a piglet. They took all of them,” the family members angrily remembered.79 Identity also remained relatively fluid throughout the early years after the war. Zhang Rongshu was one example of these blurred lines. Born in 1925, Zhang was part of the Taiwanese volunteer corps that entered the Japanese navy dur­­ing the later years of World War II. When a U.S. submarine torpedo sank his ship, Zhang was rescued after some fourteen hours at sea. Even though he fought for the Japanese dur­­ing the war, he recollected in his postwar memoirs that he began think­­ing that he should reconsider his opinions about the Chinese because, after all, they defeated the Japanese. Zhang was fairly excited about the Nationalists’ arrival in Taiwan when the war was over but grew disappointed after his first encounter with KMT officials and soldiers. It is possible that Zhang remained biased due to the linger­­ing influence of Japanese wartime propaganda, but it was mainland Chinese behavior in com­parison to his own experience under the Japanese that changed his initial attitude. “First their [mainland Chinese] educational level was low, many were virtually illiterate. They had no moral com­pass and harassed the peasants. Second, they saw us from a colonial management standpoint, namely in call­­ing those who had been soldiers for the Japanese imperial military ‘hanjian,’ or traitors. Third, they were corrupt. Fourth, I felt that none of them was patriotic,” Zhang coldly explained.80

Compet­­ing War Crimes Policies On November 6, 1945, the KMT nominated Qin Dechun head of the Com­mittee to Deal with War Crimes. The follow­­ing month the ­com­mittee

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established offices in Shanghai, Nanjing, Beijing, Hankow, Guangzhou, Shenyang, Xuzhou, Jinan, Taiyuan, and Taipei (Taiwan)—​a total of ten venues for Chinese military courts for adjudica­­tion of war crimes. The KMT employed the legal precedents that grew from the start of the Tokyo War Crimes Trial with a com­bina­­tion of the overrid­­ing con­ cepts of international law and the Hague Con­ven­­tion on the Rules of Military Engagement and added its own domestic formula­­tion of law to prosecute Japanese war crimes.81 Accord­­ing to Song Zhiyong, KMT leaders believed that remov­­ing the Japanese imperial military presence from Chinese territory was among the most press­­ing postwar issues.82 It is perhaps hard to appreciate today, but even after the death of Stalin in 1953 one of the prevail­ ­ing fears of the Com­munists in China and the Soviet Union was the potential for a Japanese military resurgence. The practical matter of assum­­ing dominant power in formerly occupied China was the KMT’s priority, not necessarily the stern prosecu­­tion of Japan’s imperial misdeeds. One reason why Chinese war crimes trials did not mete out justice as harshly to the Japanese as they did to their own was because the Chinese civil war distracted KMT efforts. Another major rationale was enmeshed within Chiang Kai-​shek’s policy that promoted deal­­ing with the Japanese aggressors in a unique fashion. Chiang expressly announced this policy of yi de bao yuan, “to repay hatred with kindness,” on the day of Japan’s surrender. The Chinese generalissimo broadcast a radio message to the na­­tion clearly enunciat­­ing that China held the “Japanese military clique as the enemy and not the Japanese people. We want to hold them responsible but do not want to seek revenge on the innocent, nor add to their suffering.”83 The next day an editorial in the main Chongq­­ing newspaper, the western city where the KMT had retreated dur­­ing the war of resistance against Japan, repeated the same message and editorialized that keep­­ing the peace after the war was a difficult undertaking. The paper postulated that if China were too harsh with the defeated Japanese the relationship could descend into a more hateful scenario. Should they be too lenient, however, the newspaper theorized, China risked assist­­ing the Japanese “to once again rally to their fantasies” of imperial domination. The editorial drove home the message that it was necessary to destroy Japan’s machines of war and lead the defeated na­­tion on the road toward

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democracy. “We have achieved peace, now we have to com­plete the process,” the article con­cluded in a voice of hope.84 This was a brave move given the linger­­ing Japanese mood on the Chinese mainland. An Allied investiga­­tion polled Japanese in Beij­­ing in December 1945 con­ cern­­ing their thoughts on the war, East Asia, and Japan. A clear majority of the respondents still believed that Korea was not mature enough to be independent and that Taiwan should not be returned to China. Even more tell­­ing was that an overwhelm­­ing percentage believed that Japanese were superior beings in East Asia and that if China had truly understood Japan’s aims Japan would have won the war.85 Japanese wartime propaganda had shaped a mind-​set that was not go­­ing to disappear overnight regardless of the empire’s collapse. The issue of adjudicat­­ing legal responsibility for war crimes and collabora­­tion became a struggle for legitimacy between the Chinese Nationalists and the Com­munists. The CCP touched on the idea of benevolence, as Chiang Kai-​shek had, but pushed harder on the issue of pursu­­ing war criminals. In part this was a calculated political move to show the Chinese populace that the CCP believed the KMT was reneg­­ing on its pledge to arrest Japanese war criminals, but it was also a move to force the matter more into the media spotlight. Con­testa­­tion over the administra­­tion of postwar China and Taiwan remained a pitched battle between two main com­petitors—​the KMT and the CCP—​and sometimes the remain­­ing Japanese. The KMT initially dragged its feet in look­­ing at war crimes trials but faced the issue of traitors (hanjian in Chinese and kankan in Japanese) immediately. This was not just a major dilemma within the areas formerly occupied by Japan but a com­plex task in the relatively freer sections of the mainland where relations with the Japanese were often multilayered.86 Even though the two high-​rank­­ing Japanese imperial army officers in China, Okamura Yasuji and his assistant Imai Takeo, disparaged Japan’s peace with the mainland, Okamura quickly recognized that he had much to be grateful for, hav­­ing surrendered to the Nationalists under Chiang’s policy of benevolence. In China, at least with respect to the KMT policy after August 15, Japanese soldiers were not labeled as prisoners of war (fulu) but rather tushou guanbing, a newly coined term that defined them literally as “bare handed soldiers,” render­­ing them almost into bureaucratic cadres. The idea was that they were legally

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con­sidered not to possess firearms. This KMT rhetorical flourish allowed Japanese soldiers in certain areas to retain their small arms and not be forced to hand over all weapons. The Japanese army’s high com­ mand in China was renamed as a “liaison group” to allow it to con­tinue to func­­tion in a very different way from its original intent while retain­ ­ing its administrative talons. From December 1945 Okamura Yasuji was bestowed with an official title under Chiang’s postwar administration, as the Japanese Chief of the Central Liaison Office to Deal with Remain­­ing Soldiers. Okamura’s din­­ing schedule frequently saw him share com­pany with KMT Generals He Yingqin, Tang Enbo, Bai Chongxi, Chen Cheng, and others.87 By mak­­ing Okamura head of the liaison office, renam­­ing Japanese POWs as “weaponless agents of the state,” and then more importantly establish­­ing liaison offices all over China, the KMT was able to maintain the integrity of chain of com­ mand within the Japanese military structure. This was key to hav­­ing Japanese defeated military troops serve as barriers to offset the CCP takeover in weaker areas of KMT con­trol.88 For these reasons, among others, the CCP com­plained vociferously in the Chinese media.89 Once Japan’s surrender in China had formally been con­cluded in early September, much of the day-​to-​day management of social order in many areas did not immediately change as the KMT and Americans were short on staff. The upper-​level KMT leaders were on generally good terms with the Japanese imperial officers, and Japanese soldiers remained in very high numbers on the con­tinent, even as repatria­­tion began. On December 21, 1945, Okamura held talks with KMT General He Yingqin where they discussed future Sino-​Japanese coopera­­tion and the process of the changeover. The real reason the situa­­tion in Asia had turned sour was because Westerners had intervened, they mutually con­cluded. And now one result of the war, they lamented, was that both China and Japan had suffered and the Com­ munists’ power had grown in the interim.90 Two days later Okamura met with KMT leader Chiang Kai-​shek and discussed how to forge better relations for future generations. They spoke about their shared con­vic­­tion that the United States did not like see­­ing close relations between the Japanese and Chinese.91 Okamura’s relatively exalted status in postwar Chinese KMT circles was well known, even to the Western press, which com­mented on the shock­­ing incongruity of his

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stature as a named war criminal who supposedly lived the high life. An article in the December 1945 edi­­tion of the American magazine Time carried a feature that read, “Technically, Prisoner Okamura took orders from Chungk­­ing [Chongqing]. But he still carried on from a com­ fortable stucco headquarters in Nanking, equipped with a formal garden and teahouse. He drove about in a black Buick sedan. He maintained direct radio con­tact with his forces in the field. Meticulously uniformed, his rid­­ing boots a bit worn but smartly polished, he talked with a TIME correspondent.”92 Even as demobiliza­­tion efforts were under way, the various parties in China vy­­ing to assume authority follow­­ing Japanese withdrawal were grasp­­ing for matériel and plott­­ing against one another as they sought at least to play at mak­­ing a stab at peace before fall­­ing quickly into a civil war. While the U.S.-​led Marshall Mission was try­­ing to stage a peaceful reconcilia­­tion between the Chinese Com­munist Party and the Chinese Nationalists, domestic leaders such as Mao Zedong and Chiang Kai-​shek had other plans. The KMT com­plained that the CCP blocked the postwar repatria­­tion of Japanese soldiers by disturb­­ing transporta­­tion and com­munication, especially in northeast China, or pilfer­­ing weapons transfers.93 In turn, the CCP protested that the KMT was merely cozy­­ing up to the Japanese in a bid to keep the popula­­tion suppressed under a new form of East Asian dictatorship. The CCP was quickly at the heels of both the KMT and the Americans for what it assessed to be the slow delivery of suspected Japanese war criminals to court. A Com­munist party press con­ference was published in the Libera­­tion Daily on December 15, 1945, under the title “Punish Japanese war criminals.” Wu Yuzhang, head of the Chinese liberated areas investiga­­tion com­mittee on war crimes, com­ plained that already three months had passed after the war had ended and the United States had occupied Japan. MacArthur had put out arrest warrants for former Japanese Prime Minister Konoe Fumimaro and some other lesser war criminals, but only slightly more than 300 people. The subtext of the media event was to proclaim that given the damage caused by Japan in China “this is an infinitesimally small figure” of arrested war criminals, the CCP com­plained.94 The Com­ munist leadership aimed to promote the message that, “In order to make sure that Japan does not retain reservoirs of militarism the

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Potsdam articles of surrender need to be more effectively executed. . . .”95 CCP officials wished to con­v ince the Chinese popula­­tion that in liberated areas the Com­munists and not the Nationalists pursued exactly the sort of justice that was lagg­­ing in occupied Japan. KMT pursuit and prosecu­­tion of Japanese war criminals encountered many obstacles, includ­­ing weak Western support. The British and the Americans went to great lengths to try Japanese who com­mitted crimes against their own in China by circumvent­­ing Chinese courts. A con­fidential British memo from the headquarters of the Allied land forces in Southeast Asia to the War Office in London stated that the Americans were pull­­ing suspected war criminals out of Taiwan and send­­ing them to Shanghai because the United States had no jurisdic­­ tion in Taiwan. (How precisely it was ascertained that the Americans had legal jurisdic­­tion in Shanghai remains in question, though it is not explained in the letter.) Nonetheless, the memo said, the Allies had to proceed through some formal Chinese channels first. British officials suggested that the best way forward to find Japanese responsible for crimes against British in former Japanese colonies or Shanghai was to use a court in Hong Kong, which had recently been restored as a colony to the United Kingdom.96 This may seem a bit extreme, but British authorities at the time noted, “It seems that British prestige will be adequately upheld in that War Criminals charged with crimes against British subjects are be­­ing brought to trial before British courts.” 97 It is important to observe that not only were the Chinese keen to use military tribunals based on international law to assert their legal presence in the world, but former European colonial powers were eager to use the same set of procedures to reinforce their return as authorities in many of the colonial domains that had been previously lost to the Japanese at the start of World War II.98 Chaen Yoshio, one of the first Japanese historians to examine BC class war crimes trials, lists forty-​ eight defendants for the U.S.-​managed Shanghai cases and writes that trials began on April 11, 1946, last­­ing until September 16, 1946. Six Japanese were sentenced to death and nine to life in prison. Only one defendant was civilian; the rest were military related.99 The case relat­ ­ing to downed U.S. pilots near the city of Hankow was one of the largest with eighteen defendants, while the more well-​k nown Doolittle case only had four defendants.100 In March 1946 several of the war

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criminals that the United States indicted for the execu­­tion of the downed airmen from the Doolittle Raids of April 1942 had been arrested in Taiwan, now under KMT authority, and were quickly deported to Shanghai for detainment. This was a clear case of the Americans forgett­­ing that they had actually abdicated extraterritoriality in China. But because the KMT did not want to unnecessarily irritate the United States, Chinese officials acquiesced to some of the cases because the charges dealt with crimes against Americans. However, the Chinese declined to accept that the Americans be allowed to prosecute further cases in their own military tribunals staged in China where the crimes were not against Americans.101 A Japanese reporter penned one of the few books in Japanese to detail these American-​led BC class trials in China, claim­­ing that the trials were unjust and that the POWs were maltreated. What it lacked was any real analysis of wrongdo­­ing by the Japanese themselves.102 Chinese legal authorities con­tinued to adapt processes even as the courts were deal­­ing with cases. On June 12, 1946, the Com­mittee to Deal with War Crimes decided that Japanese war criminals arrested and detained in China by the United States, includ­­ing U.S. criminals, would have to be adjudicated along coordinated transactions with the Chinese Foreign Ministry and receive advance authorization. This became practice start­­ing in July so that Chinese local authorities could no longer just hand over war criminals to the United States and wash their hands of the process to mete out justice. American officials responded that they wanted to proceed with alacrity and that while peace was be­­ing established dur­­ing China’s drawn-​out civil war, it had been necessary for them to act at times without con­crete Chinese accreditation. The United States had already greatly overstepped its legal bounds in China and not just with Japanese war criminals. American officials had also set up several cases to try “German nationals” in China on war crimes charges, a matter that vexed Chinese officials who were try­­ing to more resolutely apply Chinese domestic law. Chinese Nationalist leaders assessed that there were two main issues at stake. First, the United States needed to con­sult with China’s Foreign Ministry before tak­­ing unilateral ac­­tion prosecut­­ing Japanese war criminals in China because this demonstrated that the Allies still did not take Chinese law seriously. Second, for the United States to set up

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a special military tribunal in China to try Japanese war criminals did not follow the spirit of international law and impinged on China’s sovereignty. A September 25, 1946, Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs memo “deal­­ing with the transfer of arrested war criminals in China by the US military and how to process them” addressed the issue of the several Japanese individuals whom the United States had arrested in Taiwan and negotiated with authorities to transfer to Shanghai to prosecute in American military courts for hav­­ing abused U.S. soldiers. The Americans had obtained provisional permission from an unnamed sec­ ­tion of the Chinese Nationalist gov­­ern­­ment that believed it could authorize the United States to com­plete these trials because they dealt with U.S. servicemen, even though the court was on Chinese soil. But later the Chinese gov­­ern­­ment said no, regardless of past precedent (though it remains unclear which ones were be­­ing referenced), to allow­ ­ing the United States to arrest Japanese officials in Taiwan without go­­ing through Chinese channels. As the Ministry of Foreign Affairs explained to its own branches, allow­­ing the U.S. military to establish courts on Chinese sovereign territory went against international precedent and rendered China’s own domestic law impotent.103 Part of the reason for these brisk American trials of Japanese and other former Axis alleged war criminals was that, accord­­ing to the Chinese interpretation, U.S. President Roosevelt had declared that trials of war criminals should take place within and be con­ducted by the country where the crimes were com­mitted. The United States move to try its criminals in China was not in accord with the spirit of that deliberation. A memo of record from the American Embassy and the Chinese transla­­tion from a meet­­ing on this issue, presumably from August 19, 1946, was polite but firm in its denuncia­­tion of the Chinese legal system: “Although Headquarters of the United States Army forces had every desire to cooperate with the civilian departments of the Chinese gov­­ern­­ment, it is a fact that agreements in regard to war criminals of enemy nationality were reached at Chungk­­ing with appropriate Chinese military officials, con­curred in by the representatives of several non-​military Chinese ministries who formed the Chinese-​American Com­mittee.” The memo noted that “the General’s reply states further that until he is officially advised by the Generalissimo [Chiang Kai-​ shek] or by duly designated Chinese military representatives that authority in regard to war criminals has passed from the Chinese army

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to other departments of the Chinese gov­­ern­­ment, he proposes to regard the war crimes program as part of a military operation, in accordance with exist­­ing agreements.” The letter ends by stat­­ing that normally this would not be the case, but this process must con­tinue in light of “abnormal circumstances” surround­­ing war criminals in China. What those circumstances were was not detailed, but we may estimate general American distrust and dissatisfac­­tion with the Chinese courts.104 The fact of the matter was that China faced legal com­peti­­tion within its own territory for the right to sovereignly adjudicate Japanese war criminals. Some of the first trials of Japanese war crimes on the Chinese mainland were not directed by the Chinese at all but implemented more quickly by the Americans. Such a move, especially in light of the 1943 decision to rescind extraterritoriality and allow the Chinese gov­­ ern­­ment to execute its own law domestically, was a great blow to KMT power and prestige. It was not just the Americans who were vy­­ing for supremacy in justice in East Asia. Many former Shanghai hands of the British Empire joined war crimes units, and some former British China hands felt shown up by the Americans who had managed a thorough job of prosecut­­ing Japanese war criminals, while the British really had not accomplished anyth­­ing outside of Hong Kong.105 A further discussion within the Chinese Foreign Ministry on September 27, 1946, clarified this policy. Those in attendance from the Judicial Yuan (branch) were Yang Zhaolong, Wang Shichen, Peng Minghui from the Ministry of Defense, and Liu Kai from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Various other officials attended from other unnamed bureaucratic departments. The basic element under discussion was how to get the U.S. military to turn over Japanese war criminals to the Chinese for trial. One major stick­­ing point was that the Americans wanted to try many of the same Japanese war criminals for their own purposes, so it was crucial to con­v ince the United States to turn these former imperial soldiers over quickly and efficiently because some had already been arrested and detained for a year but had not yet found their way to Chinese justice. A debate ensued about whether alleged war criminals could be tried by both American and Chinese courts and then sentenced under whichever court handed down the more serious judgment. This turned out to be unfeasible. In short, there were three main problems at the outset of the KMT legal process to adjudicate: arrest; hand­­ing over the war criminals; and the trials themselves.106

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KMT policy on deal­­ing with Japanese war criminals seemed to be in con­stant fluctua­­tion and adaptation. On October 25, 1946, KMT plans for deal­­ing with Japanese war criminals had adapted to circumstances beyond the mere pursuit of justice and liais­­ing with the UNWCC. A new Com­mittee for Develop­­ing a Strategic Plan to Deal with War Crimes was held in the meet­­ing rooms of General Bai Chongxi, head of the Ministry of Defense, with the participa­­tion of Xie Guansheng, head of the Ministry of Justice, and head of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Wang Shijie. Other members included Chief Justice Shi Meiyu and the Ministry of Defense’s Director for the Office for War Crimes Adjudica­ tion, Zou Renzhi. KMT planners backtracked from their initial goals to pursue a more rigorous course of justice in a bid to strengthen relations with Japan. They con­cluded that “we need not be too punctilious, plus we have a duty to speedily br­­ing these proceedings to a close.” The reason for this change stemmed from the belief that “to establish a definitive and long last­­ing peace with Japan we need to demonstrate the spirit of benevolence. Con­cern­­ing the most egregious domestic and international Japanese war criminals, we should prosecute them accord­ ­ing to the rule of law and punish them for their deeds, but toward the average war criminal we may wish to con­sider a larger measure of magnanimity,” the com­mittee con­cluded.107 The rationale for the KMT curtail­­ing full pursuit of all Japanese war criminals was attributed to the fact that China had very few individuals who had com­pleted any study of international law, and given the nation’s lack of resources it was not unreasonable to assume that some of these trials could therefore invite international criticism. One internal assessment revealed that some KMT trials of war criminals had not followed proper procedures and evidence collec­­tion methods. The analysis noted that the Nationalists needed to make sure that Japanese war criminal suspects were well cared for, with adequate cloth­­ing and medicines provided, because “we do not want improper deaths or suffer­­ing on our watch; we would be blamed for con­traven­­ing human rights,” officials declared.108

Japanese War Criminals as Collateral Chinese leadership needed to prove quickly that it was worthy of hav­ ­ing regained its legal sovereignty when extraterritoriality was at last

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abolished. In addition, as the potential key bilateral relationship in East Asia, both under official and unofficial diplomacy, the matter in which the Chinese (both the KMT and CCP) dealt with the Japanese on this crucial issue had ramifications for early Nationalist-​Japanese relations and also CCP relations with Japan. Both Chinese groups were in com­ peti­­tion for Japan’s hand from 1945 to 1949, as well as into the mid-​ 1950s. By the dawn of the Cold War the situa­­tion had altered enough to the point that Xiaoyuan Liu asserts that although the United States was deeply involved, the truth was even more com­plex because “it is undeniable that both the KMT and the CCP utilized foreign policy as an instrument in their struggle for power in China.”109 While the Chinese were figur­­ing out their legal stances toward Japanese war crimes, U.S. occupa­­tion forces in Japan were try­­ing to racially reorganize what had once been a much more heterogeneous Japanese imperial popula­­tion in the region. The goal was to return all Japanese to Japan and Koreans to Korea, to dismantle an ethnically mixed empire back into a collec­­tion of homogenous countries in the belief that this would stabilize East Asia. American leaders decided that Koreans and Taiwanese were to be treated differently within Japan by SCAP (Supreme Com­mander for the Allied Powers) as “liberated peoples,” although “when necessary” they could also be treated as enemy nationals.110 “Voluntary Asiatic repatriation,” as it was termed, was successful in spurts. By November 1945, 405,602 Koreans had voluntarily returned to Korea, and no Taiwanese had, although 11,399 Chinese chose to return to the mainland. A bit later the numbers of repatriat­­ing Taiwanese picked up speed, but SCAP officials noticed that voluntary Asian repatria­­tion from Japan steeply declined by the end of December 1945, with ships leav­­ing port half empty.111 There is no doubt that some war criminals, and not just the Japanese, were pawns in the realignment of power dur­­ing the immediate aftermath of the war when the lines of ethnic nationalism and boundaries were be­­ing redrawn. Pu Yi, the once grand and last emperor of China who was essentially trotted out at the whim of his masters for almost every major war crimes trial in East Asia, stands as an egregious example. Soviet generals stopped the former Q­­ing emperor at the Shenyang airport just after the Japanese surrender. The Soviet army caught him and his entourage of nine people, includ­­ing his brother,

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while they were in transit from Changchun, the former capital of Manchukuo.112 In November 1945 he was moved to Khabarovsk, where he was incarcerated for five years. In August 1946 Soviet authorities informed Pu Yi that he was to travel to Japan to testify at the Tokyo Trial, and he appeared in court on August 16, 1946. He sat in the docket for eight days, the longest testimony of a single witness.113 The KMT had con­tinually requested Pu Yi be returned to them three times—​in 1946, 1947, and 1948—​to no avail. He was obviously too much of a showpiece and symbol of Japan’s imperial hubris for any one power to relinquish.114 The Soviets then used his testimony as well in their 1949 Khabarovsk war crimes trials of Japanese biological warfare agents.115 On August 1, 1950, just a few months after approximately 1,000 Japanese POWs were sent to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as a gift from Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, Pu Yi returned to China and was handed over to CCP authorities. He made his last legal reappearance at the CCP-​managed war crimes trials in 1956 in mainland China when he was called on to testify for the third time in a major war crimes trial.

The Shanxi Alternative One tricky element to decod­­ing this postwar narrative con­cern­­ing the process of adjudica­­tion requires understand­­ing that not all war criminals were created equal.116 There were many mediat­­ing circumstances behind why one Japanese soldier was arrested while another high-​level officer went free. The sharp blade of justice was frequently dulled by domestic Chinese political and economic squabbles. Chinese KMT General Yan Xishan, who had graduated from the Japanese military academy decades earlier and who essentially ran the coal-​rich Shanxi Province as a personal fiefdom, after August 1945 employed thousands of Japanese soldiers along with a few high-​level officers and con­sultants. The entire immediate postwar project of the Japanese military assist­­ing KMT forces in Shanxi Province was the topic of several Japanese Diet inquiries dur­­ing the 1950s, but only recently has the story com­e into greater relief.117 Japanese Lieutenant General Sumita Raishirō claims he met with Yan Xishan to surrender in the autumn of 1945, but General Yan’s preferred goal was to stabilize postwar upheaval in

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China, and that meant keep­­ing Japanese soldiers and Japanese technicians in place in Shanxi Province.118 Accord­­ing to Sumita’s self-​serv­­ing postwar memoir, at their first meet­­ing Yan did not show up with a big retinue and was very polite at the handover, stat­­ing that Japan was unfortunate in its military loss but would soon regain its posi­­tion as a leader in Asia. General Yan added that China’s future development would once again require the assistance of Japan. Sumita wrote that he had prepared potassium cyanide as a suicide measure and hidden it in a pocket because he feared be­­ing charged as a war criminal, but in the end he need not have worried, as Yan Xishan saw the moment of Japan’s imperial decline as a prime opportunity to use the Japanese leftover military presence to strengthen Nationalist China.119 Within China, Shanxi had always been managed somewhat independently, first under the KMT and then Japanese rule, because it had strategically important coal and iron mines. Keep­­ing a por­­tion of the military there after the war allowed the Japanese to maintain con­trol of the region and thus potentially stage a return if they were strong enough. KMT General Yan Xishan understood that us­­ing the imperial Japanese forces in a coali­­tion of military strength in the region would allow him to retain con­trol and fight off the encroach­­ing Com­munist waves.120 For many soldiers the choice to stay in China was the natural outcome of wartime propaganda because Japanese soldiers believed by con­tinu­­ing to fight for the Chinese they were merely extend­­ing the project imperial Japan had initiated, help­­ing China to modernize and free itself from Western hegemony. Some were ordered to remain while others were a bit more independent in their think­­ing and realized that to survive they had no choice. Luckily for them, both the KMT and the CCP sorely needed military strategists, nurses, doctors, and able technicians.121 The CCP was also warm toward Japanese soldiers and civilians who wished to work with it after the war. CCP leadership equally coveted Chinese who had formally shown allegiance elsewhere dur­­ing the war because fundamentally the Com­munists needed people to fill out their ranks. Mao and General Zhu De had already decided dur­­ing the war and near the end to be magnanimous toward all Chinese: “Puppet soldiers were not to be insulted or criticized. They were not to be searched, and they were to be offered preferential medical treatment.”122

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At the end of World War II there were about 59,000 troops with the imperial Japanese First Army in Shanxi Province and approximately 47,000 civilians. The com­mander in chief was General Sumita Raishirō, who was advised by the Director of the Shanxi Industrial Com­pany, former Japanese imperial officer Kōmoto Daisaku. Kōmoto, later charged with war crimes by the CCP, was the architect of Chinese warlord Zhang Zuolin’s 1928 assassination, for which he was demoted in rank and gained the enmity of General Matsui Iwane, who wanted to see him court martialed.123 Both Sumita and Kōmoto were assisted by a “consultative aide,” imperial army First Lieutenant Jōno Hiroshi.124 (Jōno would be one of the last three Japanese war criminals released from China in 1964.)125 In a move reminiscent of Chiang Kai-​shek’s vocabulary-​swapp­­ing game, General Yan took members of the imperial Japanese army and renamed them “technicians,” thus creat­­ing a new “special duties group” (tewutuan in Chinese) within his own military. In this manner the Japanese army previously stationed in Shanxi did not surrender in the strict sense but transferred its com­mand to Yan’s authority. Yan summarily elevated the remain­­ing Japanese soldiers to officer class. Former imperial soldiers were con­tracted to Yan’s army; they could send money home or take Chinese wives, which was encouraged. The com­bined forces engaged their new mutual enemy and dur­­ing the early postwar months kept the Com­munist military at bay, at least until March 1946 when U.S. representatives showed up as part of the group try­­ing to mediate a peace in the Chinese civil war. These western officials appeared in Taiyuan, the capital of Shanxi Province, and protested strongly against the Japanese military presence, request­­ing their immediate repatriation. In response, the main Japanese corps fled up into the mountains to hide while many others were forced to return home. Out of the original 10,000 or so who stayed on to fight, numbers reduced to about 2,600 within the first year. But even with Japanese help Yan Xishan’s troops could not beat the CCP army. A subsequent plan arose to establish a volunteer army from Japan to fight. Some of the original soldiers still in Shanxi repatriated and then tried to form a secondary group to return and assist militarily in the province. Soldiers even met with then-​Japanese Prime Minister Katayama Tetsu, but he was not interested. Toward the end of 1947 Yan Xishan saw the writ­­ing on the wall and started mov­­ing his personal fortune to Shanghai and then Taiwan. In October 1948 head

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of the Ministry of Defense Xu Yongchang visited Taiyuan and met with the head of the leftover Japanese troops, Colonel Imamura Hōsaku. The two traded informa­­tion and made a plan to recruit 500 more Japanese officers to fight and support Chiang Kai-​shek’s efforts to beat the Com­munists. Chiang sent his closest officers to Japan to start a plan to recruit Japanese military support, ultimately form­­ing the “White Group” (discussed in chapter five).126 At the end of January 1949, after several years of coordinated fight­ ­ing against their com­mon enemy of the CCP, Sumita learned from Yan Xishan that he was about to be charged as a war criminal by KMT leaders in Shanghai. Yan explained that he would push for a cancella­­ tion of charges so that Sumita and Kōmoto Daisaku could repatriate. The problem was that at such a late stage in the civil war, Taiyuan, the capital of Shanxi Province, was well surrounded by CCP military forces, so the two former Japanese imperial officers looked for another means of escape. Eventually a U.S. plane came in for emergency repairs; Yan had his men com­mandeer it and fly Sumita to Qingdao and on to Shanghai. Sumita was aware that he was leav­­ing behind at least 1,000 of his soldiers who were to become POWs of the CCP. Yan Xishan had written ahead to the mayor of Shanghai, and under a false name on February 17, 1949, General Sumita departed Shanghai and headed for safety in Japan aboard a foreign ship.127 Sumita avoided becom­­ing a war criminal and went on to influence Japan’s postwar relations with Taiwan and China. Kōmoto chose to remain in Shanxi until the end and was eventually captured by the CCP. Yan Xishan barely escaped from the city of Chengdu in Sichuan Province toward the end of the war. His plane had to land once because it was too heavily laden with gold. In order to make the flight he excused some of his bodyguards but made sure to take all the gold with him.128 The numerous and varied experiences of Japanese soldiers and civilians faced in China demonstrates that there was no one path toward a war crimes trial. The movement of individuals that collided with the idea and implementa­­tion of Chinese justice at the time was fluid, like tectonic plates bump­­ing together due to greater forces below push­­ing them in many directions. This ebb and flow would gain momentum even as the public calls for justice grew louder as the KMT’s military defeat drew nearer.

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Flexible Imperial Identity Administer­­ing Postwar Legal Guilt

The Taiwanese find themselves fall­­ing into the many holes of history. —​Wu Zhuoliu

La i

m ugen ’s or de a l might be fairly typical of how an outly­­ing member of the Japanese empire experienced the end of the war. Born in Taiwan in the early 1920s, Lai worked in several factories on the island before he seized the opportunity to move to the Chinese mainland and take a posi­­tion in Nanj­­ing as a mechanical repairman for the military in the early 1940s. Life in China was fairly relaxed, and Lai recalled overhear­­ing platoon mates discuss go­­ing to the “comfort stations” where they often had to wait in line for hours. Lai says that such “comforts” were not to his taste so he and his friends would go into town, but it was not always safe. Plainclothes Chinese soldiers, known as bianyidui in Chinese or benitai in Japanese (supposedly KMT or underground forces who did not wear uniforms and blended in with the crowds), would often murder imperial Japanese if they found the opportunity. As an imperial Japanese subject this meant Lai had to be wary as well. While in Nanjing, Lai noticed that the Chinese who worked around him did not seem to have any national ideological bent, never really declar­­ing their strong allegiance to the na­­tion as Chinese citizens. “For them the na­­tion was merely a gov­­ern­­ment that took taxes, and if the authorities didn’t summarily arrest or kill them then it was a force to be dealt with, that’s all,” Lai claimed dur­­ing a postwar ­interview. 108

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Lai did not have a very high opinion of the Chinese in general and what he specifically assessed to be their less than hygienic personal habits: spitt­­ing everywhere and often lin­­ing up outside in the streets to take care of morn­­ing ablutions because many houses did not have sufficient plumbing. Despite his reservations about Chinese culture Lai lost everyth­­ing at the end of the war—​his savings, his salary, and his social posi­­tion as a member of imperial Japan. The empire had essentially ruined Lai and left him with noth­­ing except memories after the surrender.1 His misadventures were fairly com­mon but also proved to be a problem in the immediate aftermath of the war because it was hard to precisely delineate how Lai and those like him should be processed after the end of empire. Were they victims of colonialism, traitors to the Chinese cause, merely opportunists, or responsible for help­­ing to promote the imperial Japanese cause? One of the first issues Chinese officials faced as they com­piled lists of Japanese war criminals was to determine the ethnicity of the alleged culprit. It might seem mundane or even a bit far-​fetched to imagine today, but in the second half of the 1940s determin­­ing “Chineseness” was a key element of the war crimes process to adjudicate Japanese war crimes. This dilemma was a microcosm of the problems Japan’s imperial decline created. From the outset of the postwar period KMT officials had to deal with the issue of Taiwan and what to do about Taiwanese liv­­ing around the former empire. Because they were former members of imperial Japan but still liv­­ing in Southeast Asia, Tokyo, Shanghai, Shenyang, Harbin, Beijing, and so on, the issue was not relegated to only the small island. This policy struck at the heart of the KMT’s efforts to demonstrate how its rule was more proper than Japanese colonial management had been—​and superior to the CCP. More importantly, the process through which the KMT proposed to win back the hearts and minds of the Taiwanese was not far from how the leadership planned to gain support on the mainland, by prov­­ing just applica­­tion of international law, deal­­ing with collaborators, and track­­ing down Japanese war criminals. In part because Taiwan was a post-​colonial locale the com­plexity of the matter was multiplied. The end of Japan’s empire was not just an exercise in military demobiliza­­ tion but rather a much larger undertak­­ing involv­­ing profound cultural and political policies. Moreover, the KMT could not just rest on its

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laurels ferret­­ing out war criminals; the leadership needed to be proactive and educate the popula­­tion on how to return to be­­ing Chinese. Exactly what was meant by this and the proper attitudes to hold con­ cern­­ing the recently disavowed Japanese empire were crafted to be taught to the formerly colonized popula­­tion in reeduca­­tion and propaganda campaigns. Through these maneuvers we can gain insight into how Chinese nationalists con­ceived of their role in the postwar and specifically how they planned to gain political and social support within their newly reacquired territories. Taiwan may appear insignificant as a historical actor given its size and that it is no longer recognized as a sovereign country. But it operates like one, as a space Michael Szonyi calls a “Cold War island.” Essentially, the island’s core history helps explain East Asia’s Cold War predicaments. Taiwan was a com­plex geographical entity, never fully con­firmed as a legal entity of the Japanese empire or the Qing.2 This legal liminality increased dramatically with Japan’s surrender in 1945. Because the island was on the periphery of the newly established borders of Chinese Nationalist rule after 1945, Taiwan was at first not a priority for Chinese political management or military administra­­tion and would not become so until a few years into the Cold War. The moment Taiwan was handed over to the KMT—​the Chinese use the term guangfu, “revert back to”—​Chinese authorities were plann­­ing how to “Sinify” or render the colony back to its Chinese roots. The fact that Taiwan had been the spearhead of Japan’s international colonial efforts for close to half a century meant the task would not be easy.3 It was this cross that KMT authorities would bear, decid­­ing whether the Taiwanese were Chinese and thus collaborators, Japanese and thus war criminals, or imperial bystanders. From 1895 to the present day, the shift­­ing sands of Taiwanese identity have suffered three changes of nationality under various administrations. As Lo Jiu-​jung has observed, “Within a period of half a century, the Taiwanese had been put under the political domina­­tion first of the Qing, then of the Japanese, and finally of the Republic of China.”4 With such quick reversion back and forth the exact nature and dynamics of authority over Taiwan, especially at the end of the war, are predictably difficult to nail down. Nonetheless, since the turn of the nineteenth to the mid-​t wentieth century the Japanese had ruled Taiwan and corralled many of its inhabitants into support­­ing the imperial

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cause. It was this influence that had to be dampened the moment Japan’s war in East Asia ended in the late summer of 1945. Taiwanese duality was bequeathed through the legacy of the em­­ pire, and when that collapsed the very identity that undergirded the Taiwanese role in Japan’s imperial enterprise quickly crumbled. Identity may not seem important when deal­­ing with war crimes, but it was crucial for a few reasons: First, if the Taiwanese saw themselves as only victims of KMT attempts to historically redress the situation, then the Chinese Nationalist goal of retrain­­ing the island popula­­tion and reintroduc­­ing it into the fold of the Chinese mother country would be jeopardized. Second, if the Nationalists did noth­­ing to address the Taiwanese role in Japanese war crimes, then the domestic mainland popula­­tion would be potentially up in arms that the gov­­ern­­ment was coddl­­ing the treacherous former Japanese imperial subjects. Third, after 1949 and the KMT’s retreat to the island as its sole sanctuary, the identity issue as a source of con­flict with millions of incom­­ing mainland Chinese only escalated. Any policy could potentially lead to disaster, and yet a failure to act at all would also be tantamount to political suicide. Someth­­ing needed to be done—​the Taiwan ques­­tion required resolu­­tion and was fundamental to how Chinese defined the limits of Japan’s empire. The subsequent political dilemma for the KMT pivoted on the issue of how to engage with Taiwan’s historical role in Japan’s imperial expansion and how to process such responsibility with an eye toward future inclusion. Either as volunteers or draftees Taiwanese soldiers in the Japanese imperial forces served in many capacities but often as translators or in low-​level jobs. Such positions frequently placed Taiwanese on the front lines in con­flict with local Chinese or other ethnicities within Japan’s Greater East Asian Co-​prosperity Sphere. In essence Taiwanese had a double identity, as Lo points out. Ethnically they mostly stood as Han Chinese, but legally until the end of 1945 they were recorded as Japanese nationals.5 There was also a second category of Taiwanese, the aborigines, who were at times amalgamated into the Taiwanese group and drafted into the Japanese military. Many of these individuals found themselves labeled as Japanese war criminals and caught up in legal webs of intrigue in trials run by the Allies. Examin­­ing the plight of Chinese, Taiwanese (ethnic Han or aborigines), and other groups under Japanese influence or domina­­tion demonstrates that not only were many often used as pawns in the larger

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circumstances of World War II but also their postwar plight can help us understand the com­plicated process of the breakdown of the Japanese empire. More importantly, the manner in which justice was pursued by Chinese authorities in the immediate political chaos of surrender is a key element to unwind­­ing the com­plexity of postwar power shifts, the forma­­tion of Chinese, Japanese, and Taiwanese identity, and their con­ nections to Chinese and Japanese postwar foreign relations goals.6 As much as we may assume that these identities were already well codified prewar, the truth of the matter is that geographic as well as security interests often rendered them much more malleable than might be imagined. In the face of an ambivalent Taiwanese relationship toward China and Japanese coloniza­­tion the KMT had to make several serious decisions. Its pursuit of Japanese war criminals revolved around whom it was legally defin­­ing as “Japanese” and how it would interpret the issue of collaborators, Taiwanese or Koreans, includ­­ing those who lived in the former puppet kingdom of Manchukuo. Leaders at times exercised immense legal gymnastics and social engineer­­ing in pursuit of this justice in con­tested areas of Japanese military and economic con­trol. For the Taiwanese there were two major issues imping­­ing on war crimes trials: the ethno-​political identity of those liable to be charged with war crimes and the ques­­tion of collaboration. A third factor was the manner in which the Japanese responded; after all, there were several hundred thousand left in Taiwan at the end of the war, includ­­ing colonists and soldiers. For the Nationalist party it was in its best interest not to deem all Chinese residents on the island as traitors, but neither could KMT leaders allow gross acts of Taiwanese collabora­­tion to go unpunished. Given Taiwan’s long history as a colonial state the con­ ditions con­ducive to cleav­­ing it away from Japanese rule and culture initially appeared daunting. Dongyoun Hwang con­siders that punish­ ­ing Chinese collaborators was important to “re-​establish national discipline and dignity.”7 In the immediate postwar the Chinese moved quickly to put Wang Jingwei’s wife, Chen Bijun, on trial to establish that his administra­­tion in Nanj­­ing had been traitorous and an unauthorized move against KMT interests.8 Delineat­­ing who was a traitor/ collaborator, hanjian in Chinese, as opposed to a war criminal whose trials were separate, required an open and frank discussion about the nature of Japan’s entire empire, Taiwan’s role, and, more importantly

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and perhaps most difficult, Chinese identity within that empire. Lo Jiu-​jung encapsulates the entangled circumstances of those moments when she asks: “How could Taiwanese people con­vince the Chinese that despite their donn­­ing Japanese clothing, eat­­ing Japanese food, speak­­ing Japanese, liv­­ing in Japanese houses, and wear­­ing Japanese slippers” they were still Chinese at their core?9 This was a crucial question, the ramifications of which reverberate even today, and not only in Taiwan. Koen De Ceuster boldly remarks that a similar situa­­tion for other former Japanese colonies exists because, as he says, “Collabora­­ tion is the original sin in Korea.”10 KMT debates on how to deal with Taiwan began before surrender. Most tellingly KMT leaders already admitted to themselves in 1944 that to reorient Taiwanese (as they termed it) back into be­­ing Chinese was not a simple task. The KMT’s policies to culturally reattach Taiwan to the mainland and eradicate Japanese colonialism were already under way by April 17, 1944, when the Central Governance Bureau’s Taiwan Investiga­­tion Com­mittee was set up within the ranks of the KMT to start think­­ing about Taiwan’s potential return. This move was not based on histrionics; Chen Yi, the chair, former governor of Fujian, and future governor of Taiwan after Japan’s defeat, was serious. Chen Yi’s right-​hand man was Qiu Niantai, a Taiwanese public intellectual of long stand­­ing and a major representative of Brotherhood of Taiwanese associations on the mainland.11 Chen Yi, like Chiang Kai-​shek and many other officers in the KMT, had studied military science in Japan, was proficient in the Japanese language, and knew the country well, hav­­ing spent a long time there as a student. Chen was thought to be a good choice to run postwar Taiwan when it eventually came back under Chinese dominion, and the fact that he had a Japanese wife did not hinder his chances. Chen was clear about the mission, stat­­ing that he would not impede Japanese colonial policies where they were efficient, stop factories, or create havoc but would focus on reform­­ing Taiwan back to the motherland (zuguohua), which essentially meant the Sinifica­ ­tion of culture, education, and language.12 It is obvious that in some ways KMT authorities believed that the Taiwanese could, with effort, reacquire a culture and simply return to be­­ing Chinese. The taint of be­­ing imperial Japanese could be rinsed away with proper education. On Friday, July 21, 1944, long before

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Japan surrendered and dur­­ing the height of the imperial Japanese military offensive (Ichigō) that cut through the heart of China’s mainland, KMT officials held a roundtable to discuss the issue of Taiwan. Here, in the record of the Central Governance Bureau’s Taiwan Investiga­­tion Com­mittee Round Table, KMT officials and self-​exiled Taiwanese residents of vary­­ing backgrounds gathered to forge a set of policies con­ cern­­ing how to administer Taiwan after the war. Chen Yi, close con­ fidant of Chiang Kai-​shek, presided over the meeting, and his open­­ing salvo signified that the December 1, 1943, Cairo Declara­­tion had already placed the return of Taiwan squarely back in KMT hands once Japan was defeated. Chen enunciated, “We need to decide how to handle the situa­­tion postwar.” Chen then dramatically stated, “Needless to say this is not merely a ques­­tion of reclaim­­ing Taiwan, we need to prepare in all areas. . . .”13 Chen explained to his roundtable “we all know” that the Japanese imperial military and industrial clique want to “exploit and oppress our Taiwanese brothers,” and this is destructive, he said. But then he added a more somber note: The Japanese had already created many excellent facilities that worked well and were good. He admitted admira­­tion after his own 1935 visit to Taiwan to see how it fared under Japanese colonial management. “I think that in transportation, agriculture and industry they [Taiwanese] are all stronger than the mainland,” he felt com­pelled to stress to the group. So once Taiwan was taken over, they would have to keep this in mind and be sure to do a better job or at least maintain what the Japanese were doing, he announced.14 Another participant who rose to con­firm Chen’s views was a member of the KMT diplomatic corps, Huang Zhaoqin, who had studied prewar both in Japan and the United States. Huang reasoned that for fifty years Taiwan had been separated from the mother country, so all its customs and the system of educa­­tion were different. The changeover would take a bit of time, but they had to make certain to do a good job of govern­­ing and manag­­ing Taiwan because if they did not they could be sure the Japanese would use that as propaganda for themselves, Huang claimed.15 The immediate postwar was a chance for the KMT to shine or fail, and international atten­­tion was mounting. One more speaker, Ke Taishan, was con­cerned that the discussion was a bit premature because the war had not yet ended and there were still many

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undecided factors that could affect the situation. He noted, for example, that the United States could decide to land on Taiwan as part of its battle strategy (and in fact U.S. forces con­sidered this op­­tion dur­­ing the battle for Okinawa in April 1945), or the Americans could demand the destruc­­tion of industry on Taiwan for payment or retribu­­tion for the attack on Pearl Harbor, which would change the nature of the game and what the KMT would have at its disposal.16

Balanc­­ing the Good and the Bad As much as the Chinese leadership wanted to pursue and punish Japanese war criminals and Chinese collaborators, mitigat­­ing circumstances also impeded easy blanket policies. The simple fact was the Chinese needed the Japanese to remain—​and in particular to remain in key industries in Taiwan and on the mainland. The numbers of Japanese the KMT and CCP had to deal with in postwar China were staggering: a little more than 2 million, of whom slightly more than 1 million were military POWs and 780,000 were civilians. Approximately 56,000 were defined as Korean, with 40,000 Taiwanese brethren added. Given the sheer quantity and their disparate locations the KMT quickly made a decision to retain Japanese train crews on staff. Many prewar train lines in China were managed by foreigners, so immediately follow­ ­ing Japan’s surrender crews of Chinese were not available in enough numbers to run all the separate systems. “We must use these materials and Japanese technicians who are prisoners (rifu gongren) to fix and maintain the tracks in this early postwar time,” one report stated.17 The Nationalist gov­­ern­­ment, still stationed in Chongq­­ing at the time of Japan’s surrender, reasoned that with properly operat­­ing transport it would be able to more quickly receive the Japanese weapons that were supposed to be delivered to KMT hands and then actually repatriate Japanese deep from within the Chinese interior. At the moment of the Japanese surrender in August 1945 no one—​ not the Chinese, the Taiwanese, or the Japanese—​could predict the future with any clarity. Com­mentary from the repatriates (hikiagesha) when they reached Japan’s shores suggests that the Taiwanese harbored ambivalence toward the incom­­ing mainland Chinese administrators and military, but that could have been Japanese colonial arrogance.

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Shiomi Shunji, a longtime Japanese economic specialist who worked in Taiwan for the colonial administration, returned to Taipei, the capital of Taiwan, from Tokyo by plane on September 9, 1945. He was sent to assist in the eventual handover in Taipei but detailed his anxiety in his diary about the process and what precisely the Japanese would try to keep or offer the Chinese.18 Many Japanese were at first worried they would find themselves on the receiv­­ing end of vicious retribution, but once the situa­­tion calmed down the former colonial popula­­tion grew more relaxed, and some Japanese even opted to stay in Taiwan. The pay was good, and technicians, those especially welcomed by the new Chinese rulers, believed they still had a lot more to “teach” the Chinese to help them modernize. The American military also grasped the subtleties of the situation. General Albert Wedemeyer, head of U.S. military com­mand in Chongqing, told KMT General He Yingqin that he wanted all Japanese out of China by the summer of 1946, with the excep­­tion that Taiwan could permit Japanese to remain until January 1947. Many Japanese in Taiwan wanted to stay; the Americans were acquiescent, and the Chinese believed they needed Japanese technicians. In the end approximately 7,000 Japanese technicians and their families (total­­ing about 28,000 Japanese) stayed in Taiwan for the first few years after the end of the war.19 At the end of Japanese colonial rule, on paper the imperial military had already surrendered, but in reality on Taiwan the KMT and Japanese forces ruled in unison, and in the beginn­­ing both sides wanted it that way. The last Governor General of Taiwan, Andō Rikichi, revealed in the final imperial Japanese reports filed from Taiwan that his last months dur­­ing August 1945 to April 1946 were mostly spent worry­­ing about maintain­­ing social order and tak­­ing care of repatria­­tion efforts. Many Japanese looked fondly on their fifty-​year project of moderniz­­ing Taiwan and somehow, like General Okamura Yasuji, could not really fathom that they had lost because the proof of Taiwan’s colonial development demonstrated otherwise.20 Regardless of his initial postwar optimism, Andō Rikichi was eventually arrested on April 13, 1946, and then com­mitted suicide in Shanghai, where he was imprisoned by U.S. authorities.21 Relations between the native Taiwanese and Japanese colonial rulers were not all munificent, and at times surrender offered the perfect

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opportunity to settle old scores. Groups of vigilantes and armed hoodlums formed gangs and harassed Japanese enclaves around the island. Just after the surrender, there was an incident in the northern area of Taipei called Dadaocheng where a score of Japanese Special Higher policemen was assassinated.22 The authorities took pains to keep such incidents from be­­ing publicized in the media and limited any men­­tion of aggression toward Japanese citizens because they worried such news could further inflame public resentment. Certainly in the immediate months follow­­ing surrender, and at least until late 1946, Japanese military and police outnumbered KMT forces in Taiwan.23 Security required some flexibility in deal­­ing with the dismantl­­ing of empire. It is clear that the popula­­tion of Taiwan was con­fused about the future and was not always sure if it saw itself as Japanese or Chinese. Should the Taiwanese feel guilty about their participa­­tion in Japan’s war, and what about war crimes? Were the Taiwanese victims or perpetrators? About a week and a half after Taiwan formally rejoined China, an editorial on November 6, 1945, in the newspaper Taiwansheng ribao divulged the cultural duality of the popula­­tion of the island. Under Japanese rule the paper had been called Taiwan jihō, and at the time it was the largest newspaper in Taiwan and fairly influential. The head of the paper was Li Wanju, who had a doctorate from Paris and had gone to school on the Chinese mainland. Many residents saw themselves clearly neither as Chinese or as Japanese, it seems. The newspaper took a perfectly rational position, suggest­­ing that Taiwanese needed to preserve their own culture from before but also regain their Chinese psyche. November 1945 was a time of flux because the island’s administra­­tion suddenly proclaimed that within two months street and place names would be changed from Japanese to Chinese. The KMT mandated that Taiwanese could no longer celebrate Japanese personages in place names. KMT officials declared that new names had to reflect the “Chinese spirit.” These requirements were published in the newspaper, but such quick renam­­ing caused con­fusion. As place names shifted so did the general tenor of the island’s language policy. On February 11, 1946, ordinances more directly affected the publish­­ing world. A new set of laws forbade publish­­ing anyth­­ing promot­­ing any aspect of Japanese imperial army success, anyth­­ing that encouraged participa­­tion in the

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Greater East Asian War, anyth­­ing that supported the con­cept of kōminka (the imperializa­­tion of Taiwan under Japan), anyth­­ing that injured KMT national policy, or anyth­­ing that betrayed Sun Yat-​sen’s Three Principles. The day prior, February 10, Japanese films had been banned. To add to the chaos already caused by the rearrangement of place and road names, on March 1, 1946, the traffic switched from the Japanese style on the left side of the road to the right. 24 A little less than two weeks later, on March 10, the KMT ordered the removal of all Japanese monuments, but perhaps for budgetary reasons many plinths and sites were not destroyed but refaced and renamed.25 The propaganda sec­­tion of the local KMT party pooled its resources to com­e up with several initiatives to promote the Chinese language in Taiwan, but part of the problem was not only illiteracy and a lack of teachers but the fact that Chinese materials were much more expensive in Taiwan and not that readily available. As quickly as possible but knowingly fac­­ing opposition, the KMT tried to slowly push the use of Japanese language out of prominence and to promote Chinese as the language of the intellectual class. By October 25, 1946, a full year after Taiwan rejoined China, Japanese language columns in newspapers and magazines were no longer permitted. Residents com­plained en masse, and some historians assert that such vast social discontent was con­ nected to mass unrest. A fairly vocal backlash erupted against the bann­­ing of the Japanese language in the media. This malaise was due to the fact that such a policy was the inverse of what the Taiwanese had just endured under the Japanese. Japanese colonial policy in Taiwan had taken time, but by 1937 the Japanese colonial overseers had outlawed Chinese language use in the Japanese media on Taiwan. Frustrated Taiwanese had succumbed to intensive years of Japanese train­­ing only to be told when they came out the other side of the war that they could no longer write in that language.26 A large por­­tion of Taiwanese (and Koreans) who served Japan’s imperial efforts were not soldiers but hired as guards at the POW facilities across Japan’s empire. These men were called gunzoku yōnin, or “civilians in the military employ.” These positions were generally con­ sidered of a lower stature, but these men were often in primary con­tract with Allied POWs and thus more easily remembered after the war when lists were drawn up of war criminals. In con­trast, the Japanese

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kempeitai, military police, of whom the numbers were much larger, had a lower con­vic­­tion rate in postwar trials com­pared to the Taiwanese draftees.27 Why Japan’s colonial soldiers more frequently met with a harsher fate is a major criticism of the manner in which BC class war crimes were pursued not only against the Japanese but against members of the colonies as well. However, Mayumi Yamamoto is quick to remind us that some Korean prison guards in many areas of the empire employed as gunzoku actually “received ¥50 per month while Japanese soldiers received ¥7. Many Koreans therefore went to restaurants and brothels frequently, and spent more than Japanese soldiers.”28 We may have to con­ceive of a less monolithic view con­cern­­ing how some nonethnic Japanese lived and worked in various parts of the Japanese empire. Regardless, part of the Allies’ postwar predilec­­tion to pursue these Korean and Taiwanese colonial soldiers was that they often oversaw the POW camps that housed Allied soldiers. These colonial guards had been poorly trained and stocked with few supplies and were mostly quite young, but Allied POWs were important material for Japan’s wartime propaganda machine. General Staff Officer for the Korean Army Ihara Junjirō published an October 13, 1942, memo con­cern­­ing the rationale for shipp­­ing POWs through Korea precisely to gauge this impact, and we can assume that the goal would have been similar for Taiwan, where many Allied POWs were also transited. The Japanese military carefully calculated what its imperial subjects would see and what the impression would be. “Through these POWS they [Koreans] can sneer at the pathetic image and lame will of the West . . . and it will reaffirm the truth of the imperial army’s victory,” Ihara planned.29 This does not fully explain why the colonial guards were so abusive toward Allied soldiers, but Maruyama Masao assessed that it was a form of reverse oppression, a means to make oneself feel superior because Taiwanese and Koreans were placed on the bottom rung of the Japanese imperial hierarchy.30 Japanese military train­­ing taught these colonial soldiers the heartlessness of the Japanese system, but they were also instructed to look down on Western soldiers and despise the fact that they had become POWs, which was con­sidered the ultimate humiliation. POW guards were the lowest extension of the Japanese military that therefore came into daily con­tact with the Allies. It stands

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to reason that they would be among the most hated by the Allies at the end of the war. In fact, the Potsdam declara­­tion specifically maintained a clause about bring­­ing to strict justice those who had inflicted abuses on Allied POWs.31 In addi­­tion to the 5,700 BC class Japanese war criminals put on trial throughout Asia, thousands more arrests were made but did not proceed to investiga­­tion or indictment, though exact numbers are hard to determine. At the same time in China many Taiwanese were caught up because there were even more trials that con­cerned who was a Chinese collaborator. More than 30,000 individuals were charged with treason from 1945 to 1947. About 6,000 were absolved, but approximately 15,000 were con­v icted, and for many the sentence was death.32 So great was the KMT pursuit of crimes of collabora­­tion that the Nationalists had to put a cap on collect­­ing evidence because the courts could not handle the load and the gov­­ern­­ment wished to con­centrate more of its atten­­tion on the civil war with the Com­munists. Postwar collabora­­tion trials con­cern­­ing Taiwanese/Chinese wartime behavior were a breed apart from the trials of Japanese war criminals but revealed two similarities. First, collabora­­tion trials exposed a legal effort by the KMT to assert that it was the rul­­ing political authority over all Chinese, includ­ ­ing those of recently liberated occupied areas. Second, the KMT had to struggle against the CCP on the mainland for the support of public opinion, and in Taiwan the Nationalists had to con­vince the formerly Japanese-​educated native Taiwanese that the KMT would do a better job in manag­­ing the country than imperial Japan had. The pageantry or ceremony of the legal process provided the Nationalist party a platform from which it could demonstrate that it was legally and under the banner of international law administrat­­ing Taiwan along the lines of the 1943 Cairo Declaration. While the number of Taiwanese who were indicted and charged directly with war crimes was not overwhelmingly large in Taiwan or on the mainland, a large number were swept up in Australia’s moves to quickly pursue war crimes perpetrated against its citizens. With the excep­­tion of a few trials in the city of Darwin in northern Australia, most Australian trials did not take place directly on Australian soil but on territory managed away from the con­tinent, keep­­ing it far from the intense public scrutiny and calls that sentences were too lenient.33

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Because Australia had been directly attacked by Japan and suffered casualties, while its soldiers were also taken as POWs in mass numbers, Australian attitudes toward Japan were spiked with fever. Trials were held in Hong Kong, Labuan, Singapore, Wewak, Rabaul, Morotai, Ambon, and Port Darwin, and the last was held on Manus Island. Rabaul was the site for one of the biggest sets of trials, at which 197 cases with 408 individuals were prosecuted.34 Rabaul was a township in New Britain, Papua New Guinea, and fell under Australian legal jurisdiction. Australian cases also con­cerned the largest sweep of Taiwanese for war crimes when Allied forces liberated POW camps in North Borneo, includ­­ing the towns of Kuchin and Sandakan. Accord­­ing to investigators, the Allies rounded up the Japanese soldiers responsible for abuses and horrible treatment at these Japanese-​run POW camps and housed the suspected war criminals in former POW camps in Labuan, which is now part of Malaysia. Eventually the numbers were whittled down and Australia indicted 146 men, of whom 102 were Taiwanese guards at the camps. Two were sentenced to death by hanging, twenty-​ seven to death by fir­­ing squad, five to prison for life, and ninety-​four were handed other prison sentences. Later seven men who had been handed the death penalty had their sentences reduced. On February 28, 1946, those soldiers whose con­victions stood were transported from Labuan to Morotai Island where the death sentences were carried out.35 One of the first Taiwanese arrested in Taipei as a war criminal and tried in a military tribunal on the island by the Chinese was Chen Shuiyun in October 1946. Chen was a police officer in the Taipei district and was tried for unlawful arrest, interrogation, and caus­­ing the death of suspects in his custody. There were seven similar cases in the Taipei court con­cern­­ing these sorts of charges. Five individuals belonged to the police or the colonial administra­­tion special police, one was a military policeman, or kempeitai, one was an assistant to a kempeitai. Chen was sentenced to death at the end of the trial, though it is not clear whether the sentence was actually carried out. One of the few other direct cases in Taiwan involv­­ing Taiwanese was a Chinese policeman from Yilan city who also was tried for unlawful arrest and the death of two Yilan city residents from a case back dat­­ing back to December 1937. He and his Japanese counterpart were sentenced to several years in prison for their crimes.36

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Traitor or War Criminal? The ques­­tion of who faced indictment for be­­ing a traitor and who was charged as a war criminal was an important one in immediate postwar East Asia, as it con­tinues to be today. At the outset there was no standard, and each geographic region was told it would have to decide for itself how to try both traitors and Japanese war criminals but that it should do so in an even-​handed and juridical fashion. The courts and police were told “discrimina­­tion will not be tolerated” and that the highest court in each region should try traitors. This was no small matter; statistics show traitors’ trials dwarfed those of Japanese war criminals. Accord­­ing to Chinese Republican archives from November 1944 to October 1947 there were approximately 45,000 traitor cases that resulted in 30,000 indictments alone.37 They were handled by the regular Chinese courts. In con­trast, war criminals were treated by special military courts set up for that purpose or measures were put into place to extradite such individuals through appropriate gov­­ern­­ments like that of the United States because it managed Japan’s occupation. Accord­­ing to the Chinese dictionary definition, a hanjian was originally a loser in battle, a degenerate or scum of the Han race, or one who lived off of the invader’s largesse or accepted tribute from the outside. This mean­­ing then expanded to represent the dregs of the Chinese nation, so a traitor was one who acted against the state.38 It is not, however, a legal term but a label of stigma, and, as David Atwill has noted, the term has often taken on other unlikely historical definitions.39 Wada Hideho clarifies the issue when he notes that the issue of war crimes in Taiwan was akin to be­­ing stuck between Scylla and Charybdis because one was cornered between two evils, either war criminal or traitor—​a situa­­tion in which one could not emerge unscathed.40 One must remark that the Chinese understand­­ing of hanjian is more malleable than the U.S. legal defini­­tion of treason, which has no ethnic com­ponent within its mandate. Hanjian is deeply rooted in be­­ing Chinese. America is one of the few democratic societies to articulate the specific crime of treason in its con­stitution, but this act is also notoriously difficult to assert and prove in open court. To sustain the charges at least two witnesses are necessary and the prosecutors must prove intent. This stipula­­tion was not required with Chinese traitors, and many cases of insinua­­tion

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occurred where the disagreement con­cerned local quarrels. Often charges of collabora­­tion had little to do with improper wartime behavior. Lin Qiup­­ing notes that the difference between the more traditional Chinese definitions of traitor and the new postwar legalized defini­­tion was that previously be­­ing a traitor was defined by action, but after World War II it was no longer based on one’s actions. Job title and posi­­tion classified someone as a traitor. War criminals were widely defined through crimes such as “murder, starvation, enforc­­ing slave labor . . . sell­ ­ing drugs, abuse, etc.”41 Traitors, on the other hand, were thrown into a more vague set of categories legally summarized in one phrase as “those in China who cooperated with the enemy.”42 The lines between be­­ing a traitor in China’s war of resistance against Japan and be­­ing deemed a war criminal were fuzzy at best. What’s more, whom to try first was a dilemma—​domestic criminals who could destabilize the fragile CCP-​K MT united front or Japanese who potentially had the power to rise again and con­tinue the occupa­­tion of China? Near the start of the war, on August 8, 1938, the KMT gov­­ern­­ment had already released a law, Xiuzheng chengzhi hanjian tiaoli (Amended Regulations for Punish­­ing Traitors), that stated, in part, that pass­­ing informa­­tion to the enemy or spies or tak­­ing part in leftist activities was synonymous with be­­ing a traitor, the penalty for which was death.43 The KMT might have softened its posi­­tion after the war, but by no means had the party clarified it. On November 23, 1945, the Nationalist gov­­ ern­­ment again released a law, Chuli hanjian anjian tiaoli (Regulations for Deal­­ing with Cases of Treason), and it classified as traitors many officials who had worked for or with the Japanese. In its December 6, 1945, promulga­­tion the KMT further defined the legal status of a traitor as “hav­­ing participated or con­ducted activities for a puppet organiza­­tion or related group; acted on behalf of enemy or puppet structures, acted in a manner that benefits the enemy or goes against the benefit of the country. . . .” The subtlety of what con­stituted an act that benefitted a puppet organiza­­tion was vague at best and impossible to delineate at worst. The whole nature of the hanjian issue was that virtually anyone with any con­nec­­tion or scant rela­­tion to the enemy or any Japanese-​ ­controlled institu­­tion was inherently implicated.44 Obviously, for post­ ­war Taiwan this was a dilemma of enormous con­sequence. (Postwar Indochina and Korea showed similar difficulties in regulat­­ing these

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issues in unravel­­ing empires.) Treacherous activities were characterized as plott­­ing to oppose the na­­tion or disturb­­ing the peace. Black marketeers, those who profited from the disorder and sold food or juggled financial specie, were also included.45 A well-​k nown Chinese journalist watch­­ing traitors’ trials in Shanghai remarked that no military person was ever tried as a traitor and that many “economic traitors” escaped justice by us­­ing underhanded methods. Highly placed local traitors even retained their positions in the village official ranks while lower echelons were charged.46 The CCP defined traitor more simply as an “enemy of the people.” Both the KMT and CCP struggled at the outset with separat­­ing the two categories of criminal activity—​collaborator and war criminal—​ and at times there was not much of a distinction. In the CCP media the term zhanfan hanjian (war criminal traitor) frequently occurred as one phrase. Such criminals included the enemy Japan as well as the wei, the “imposter” Nanj­­ing gov­­ern­­ment officials presided over by the Wang Jingwei clique, and those Japanese and Chinese bureaucrats who had staffed the puppet gov­­ern­­ment of the “fake” kingdom of Manchukuo.47 An October 20, 1946, memo from the KMT’s Con­trol Yuan, the branch of gov­­ern­­ment that kept the other four branches in check, included notes con­cern­­ing Qiu Niantai’s com­ments on whether Taiwanese should be con­sidered traitors and how they should be treated. In Qiu’s estima­­tion the Taiwanese had been cut off by Japanese colonialism and exploita­­tion for the preced­­ing fifty years, and the immediate postwar was the time the KMT needed to treat them benevolently, to create stability to br­­ing them back into the embrace of Chinese culture. The way to restore sovereignty to Taiwan was for all provinces to treat Taiwanese fairly and not bear grudges so that they would wish to return to the mother country. To do this Qiu suggested all coastal provinces release their Taiwanese brethren charged as war criminals and/or traitors. The central gov­­ern­­ment, he wrote, has stipulated that Taiwanese should not be charged as traitors, but if matters dictated they could be tried as war criminals.48 A follow-​up memo from Minister of Defense Bai Chongxi supported these motions and seconded the idea that Taiwanese should be afforded more immunity from prosecu­­tion because such pursuit was not in China’s best interest.49 The hanjian issue worried Taiwanese, and the discussion did not abate. A

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memo dated January 23, 1947, from the Xiamen City (Amoy) Taiwan Brotherhood Associa­­tion to KMT officials pleaded that Taiwanese should not be pursued as war criminals because they were invaded by Japan and occupied for five decades. After years of resistance they were glad to resume Chinese citizenship and identity. This memo, sent to the KMT party headquarters, con­cerned the problem of Taiwanese legal status and whether such individuals could be charged as Japanese war criminals, con­sider­­ing their former status as colonized subjects and sudden change in national status follow­­ing Japan’s surrender.50

Deal­­ing with Their Own Devils The Chinese turncoat and former KMT official who liaised with the Japanese and established a puppet gov­­ern­­ment in Nanjing, Wang Jingwei, is not well liked by history. The ques­­tion of whether he tried to save China from more bloodshed by draw­­ing a peace with Japan or whether he sold out the Chinese na­­tion remains a crucial one. Wang graduated from Hōsei University in Japan in 1906, so he belonged to what Douglas Reynolds has labeled “a golden era” of Sino-​Japanese relations.51 Though Wang was certainly not pro-​Japan all the time, he was con­sidered to be a solid Chinese reformer. In 1905 he was already writ­­ing for revolutionary societies, and adopted the name Wang Jingwei. Jingwei is a bird that brings wood and rocks into the sea, in a Sisyphean task with no end, akin to attempt­­ing to shift the titanic weight of the ossified Q­­ing empire. It was com­mon in prewar China for many Chinese to use different names when writ­­ing or as they advanced through life to be known by several appellations. Wang’s youthful goal was to topple Manchu con­trol, and in 1910 he had already planned to assassinate the regent of the child Q­­ing emperor. Wang was arrested and spent time in prison dur­­ing the Republican revolution. When he was released he was fêted as a national hero. Even though Wang had at times been the foot soldier and com­petitor of General Chiang Kai-​ shek, it was not until the Japanese were fully on the scene that a split occurred in the KMT. On March 30, 1940, Wang Jingwei created a new Chinese Nationalist gov­­ern­­ment in Nanj­­ing because the original KMT gov­­ern­­ment fled, ultimately retreat­­ing to Chongq­­ing to take up a posi­­tion against the advanc­­ing Japanese. This situa­­tion was analogous

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to the French Vichy case where a frac­­tion of the Free French administra­ t­ ion retreated to England under General Charles de Gaulle while a majority stayed to watch their country become divided under a new collaborationist regime led by the hero of World War I, Marshal Philippe Pétain.52 Japanese officials pushed elements in the Chinese leadership to start up a new nationalist gov­­ern­­ment that did not oppose Japan, that discarded a united front with the Com­munists, and that would let Japan play a role internally in China. The ques­­tion remains, however: Was this a way for Chinese leaders to save China, or was this collaboration?53 Was Wang Jingwei a war criminal for deal­­ing with the Japanese? His behavior reflects, somewhat, on the Taiwan issue and the larger ques­­tion for many Chinese dur­­ing the war: What other choices existed? Wang’s collaborationist gov­­ern­­ment was not the only one of its kind. There were several types of puppet regimes around China, includ­­ing Chinese officials operat­­ing within the kingdom of Manchukuo. Liu Jie states that, in general, research into these themes had been effectively taboo in both Japan and China, but the tide has turned and examin­­ing the Wang phenomenon is now possible. Accord­­ing to Liu’s analysis, Japanese scholars are split. Some opine that Wang was a patsy or acted under orders directly from Chiang Kai-​shek. Others note that Wang took a stance against Chiang, whom he saw as becom­­ing increasingly dictatorial. Of crucial importance is decipher­­ing whether Wang was pro-​Japan or just saw a different method for unify­­ing China. Was he more akin to Pétain or the Norwegian collaborationist Prime Minister Vidkun Quisling? A fascist or a toady? The jury remains in deliberation. In mainland China no one would label Wang a patriot in any sense, so unlike the varied historical image of him develop­­ing in Japan, for Chinese the situa­­tion remains much more black and white. The Chinese view their “war of resistance” as a time when Japan attempted to eradicate China, while the history is not seen in that way in Japan. Wang therefore is understood in China as the archetypal traitor, Liu con­ cludes, because Chinese history is often divided into heroes and villains to explain a story usually only expressed in black and white. However, Zhang Sheng, a professor at Nanj­­ing University, states that the history of traitors in China is born of long eras of vicious leadership. Thus, while Chinese history has an illustrious and long past it has

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also been plagued over the centuries by a deficit of inspir­­ing leadership. In order to live through succeed­­ing dynasties, one had to con­stantly transform, and the con­tinuous political upheaval in China created a narrative about traitors, those who did not accept the next genera­­tion of leaders.54 Liu regards this version of history as one that helped to establish a “culture of traitors.” Nonetheless, since the 1990s some Chinese scholars have reassessed this historical narrative, even go­­ing so far as to label Wang as a gemingjia, or revolutionary. Wang never gained con­trol of the KMT military, as was his aim, and Japanese officials were aware of this. Even high-​rank­­ing Japanese military officer Imai Takeo, who observed the establishment of Wang’s gov­­ern­­ment in Nanj­­ing at the time, felt Wang was not try­­ing to create a rival administra­­tion in Nanj­­ing but rather established his group to push for peace with Japan. Only through peace did Wang believe China could be saved from destruction. Zhou Fohai, second in com­mand in Wang’s provisional gov­­ern­­ment, wanted to keep further Japanese garrisons from be­­ing stationed in and around Nanj­­ing and joined Wang’s inner circle with this goal in mind. Neither man was interested specifically in defense but wished to protect against the spread of Com­ munism, so in their own propaganda they pushed the idea of join­­ing forces with the Japanese.55 In the end the KMT traitor trials of such men were not just about war criminality but com­peti­­tion for domestic power. On September 8, 1945, when the KMT leaders arrived in Nan­ jing from Chongq­­ing the first th­­ing they did was arrest Wang Jingwei’s wife and family. Wang had already died. The KMT came out early with a policy that it would not pursue traitors whose crimes were con­ nected to Manchukuo or the Mongolian autonomous region because there were special circumstances at the time.

The Liminality of Imperial Japanese Postwar Identity Consider­­ing Taiwanese on trial we arrive at the heart of the matter con­cern­­ing identity, law, and the ultimate demise of Japan’s empire. It is in the gap between policy and implementa­­tion that a critical element of the story lies: the postwar Chinese grasp of law and justice. Part of the story surrounds the ques­­tion of whether immediate postwar Chinese

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law attained a new international sense of justice. All the World War II victors wanted to try Japanese war criminals, but what did they gain in the legal pursuit of such ends? Further con­found­­ing the issue of whom to pursue as a war criminal was the legal snafu of defin­­ing who was Japanese and Chinese. Oguma Eiji notes that the December 1945 change in the Japanese household registra­­tion (koseki) law con­fused the situa­­tion because it suddenly reverted a large number of Japanese citizens to their Chinese and Korean legal identities, instantly stripp­­ing them of Japanese rights.56 In one fell swoop this mass of colonial humanity was egregiously discharged from the Japanese empire. It was not, however, until 1947 that Koreans in Japan received legal status as foreigners. Later with the 1952 San Francisco peace treaty they were given foreign residential permits.57 Japan summarily jettisoned its imperial appendages, but that did not mean that Koreans or other former Japanese colonial subjects were accepted elsewhere, and very often the barrier of “law” was used to impede inclusion. Just before the end of the war the KMT Ministry of Defense produced a clear policy outlin­­ing how it aimed to deal with postwar Japan, but the matter of Taiwan developed haphazardly and in fact became reliant upon Japanese assistance. Among other issues, the plan advocated the need to change the emperor system and alter the Meiji con­ stitu­­tion so that authority rested in the hands of the Japanese people. The policy stated that chang­­ing Japan meant eradicat­­ing the politics and educa­­tion that produced the emperor-​worshipp­­ing society, which included Shintoism and the militariza­­tion of society.58 While the KMT generated detailed plans for foreign policy toward Japan, the party found it more difficult to produce a similarly clear vision for its fellow Chinese countrymen on the island of Taiwan. In trials held under Nationalist jurisdic­­tion before the KMT retreat to Taiwan in 1949, Nationalists often tried Taiwanese as “Japanese.” Approximately 150 Taiwanese were indicted in military tribunals for BC class crimes across East Asia, and some two dozen were executed. Some Taiwanese, however, were fortunate to go before more lenient judges, and there was little uniformity in deal­­ing with former colonized peoples—​their sentences were more often than not the result of serendipity instead of policy. In one of the first test cases where a Taiwanese stood trial as a collaborator the outcome was unusual. Zhuang Sichuan worked for a

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newspaper in Wuhan and was found not guilty in a Hubei court because, the judge said, as a Japanese national Zhuang had to obey orders and was not responsible for his actions.59 The Japanese for their part merely tossed aside Taiwanese who had supported the Japanese empire. They were abandoned people, kimin in Japanese. Hayashi Miki’s story is far from unique—​there were many who faced worse experiences—​but it is indicative of the situation. Hayashi was once Taiwanese but later took Japanese citizenship due to postwar exigencies. Even though he believed he remained Taiwanese or ethnically Chinese, after the war he claimed he could not really return to China because he did not speak Chinese; he spoke only Japanese, which would not have been unusual for his generation. Hayashi had been sent as a Japanese imperial guard to a POW camp in Borneo dur­­ing the war when he was only sixteen. He said that he took to heart his Japanese officer’s orders and did not regard the POWs (men and women) as human.60 Hayashi returned to Japan after repatriat­­ing to Taiwan due to his colonial heritage. He had lost his imperial Japanese identity postwar but never possessed a clear Chinese one; essentially he had become a legally lost soul or what novelist Wu Zhuoliu labeled as someone who “fell through the holes of history.” The Japanese empire demonstrated more clearly in its postwar facile dismissal of colonial identity what it really had stood for—​a racially structured hierarchy that was primarily interested in augment­­ing wealth for its ethnic Japanese subjects to the exclusion of outsiders. The first several years of KMT rule on Taiwan were an uncomfortable media­­tion between a Japanese identity that had lost its luster and an imposed mainland Chinese identity. Street violence between Taiwanese (ethnic Chinese who had been born in Taiwan under imperial Japanese reign) and mainland Chinese was not uncommon. To ascertain who was a mainlander (and thus a recent “Chinese” arrival) Taiwanese would force random checks on other Chinese, “mak­­ing them speak Japanese or s­­ing the Japanese anthem.”61 If they could speak Japanese then they had grown up under Japanese colonialism and were acceptable to the native-​born former colonial subjects. The majority of Taiwanese might not have been pleased with their lot, but they had little choice; they had become Japanese in 1897 when the two-​year moratorium allow­­ing them to leave for the mainland was up and they

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automatically became Japanese citizens. With the end of World War II, they once again found themselves with a new identity—​Republican Chinese—​thrust upon them. Result­­ing con­flicts surround­­ing this shift in identity and the wax­­ing and wan­­ing of political privileges spurred on political violence within Japan and other former reaches of the empire. Add­­ing charges of war criminal and collaborator to the mix only served to further inflame an already dicey situation.

The Shibuya Incident While Taiwanese on the periphery of empire met with a mixed bag of legal outcomes, in Japan early postwar incidents helped forge a criminal image of former colonial subjects that may have encouraged Japanese to also see them as war criminals. As Kawashima Shin details, the Shibuya Incident of July 1946 in Tokyo demonstrated the tortured process of Taiwan’s decoloniza­­tion and what he describes as “Japan’s de-​ imperialization.” Similar to the manner in which charges of war criminality or collabora­­tion were foisted on the Taiwanese popula­­tion from an outside authority, the KMT, the Taiwanese people did not actually effectuate their own decolonization, but it, too, was imposed by nonnative forces.62 Nowhere was this con­flict between former imperial identity and newly acquired Chinese identity more apparent than in Japan’s copious black markets that sprouted up all over the burned-​ out urban landscape.63 In the crippled postwar economy no one had any money, imports had com­e to a com­plete halt, and for most people just mak­­ing enough to get by for a day was an arduous challenge. Since the gov­­ern­­ment and occupa­­tion authorities could not get the distribu­­tion of goods restarted quickly enough third parties moved briskly into the structural vacuum. By the autumn of 1945, in Tokyo alone, there were at least 45,000 open-​air market stalls, and many of them had dubious links to organized criminal syndicates who helped manage the situation.64 Under such circumstances, the Japanese yakuza (mafia) played a major role in maintain­­ing order in the markets, but often their rough manner chafed against the newly enfranchised Chinese who until now had essentially been treated as second-​class citizens in Japan. This fric­ ­tion came to a head in the Shibuya black market areas of Tokyo, one of the thirty-​five arrondissements that make up the city. The problems began on July 14, 1946, when the Japanese Matsuda gang stabbed a Taiwanese

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stand owner on the way home through the Shimbashi area. Tensions had already been runn­­ing high among mainland Chinese, Taiwanese (Formosans), Koreans, and Japanese gangs who were all vy­­ing for as much of the dwindl­­ing economic pie as they could acquire.65 In the ensu­­ing police investiga­­tion their own dissatisfac­­tion led the Taiwanese to riot and protest violently in front of the Shibuya police headquarters. Shibuya and Shimbashi were the two main black market sections in Tokyo, and thousands of Taiwanese operators had stalls in both areas. The Taiwanese felt they were be­­ing con­stantly harassed while other law-​breakers were ignored. The result­­ing fracas left several dead and many injured and fractured post-​imperial relations. What happened in Shibuya was symptomatic of the great legal status change of Chinese in Japan when they came into con­tact with an as-​yet-​unchanged imperial mind-​set. We can see how such incidents occurred by recall­­ing the experiences of one former Japanese soldier who writes about how he found himself in a similar predicament. Ōnuki Kenichirō penned his postwar experiences after hav­­ing served as an unsuccessful kamikaze pilot at the tail end of the war. He was a failed kamikaze because he had to ditch his plane, and pilots who did not carry out their missions found themselves universally undesirable because they had already been declared officially dead to their families and com­manders. Many times these pilots went into hid­­ing or resided at a special dormitory built for their needs and to give the military time to figure out what to do with them. Eventually Ōnuki was placed in con­finement and waited for another mission, but by that time the war had ended. After the war he could not find any work, and since his family was liv­­ing in Taiwan there was no place to go home to because Japanese were be­­ing repatriated from the colonies. Ōnuki lived on the street and in a railway sta­­tion until a friend said that he would introduce him to the Matsuda gang that ran the Shimbashi market. Ōnuki eventually became a bodyguard for some storeowners, streetwalkers, and others, which shows how easy it was to fall in post-​imperial Japanese society from a god-​like hero as a kamikaze pilot to a low-​level thug work­­ing for the criminal underworld to make ends meet.66 Shen Jinding, a Chinese diplomat who was stationed in Japan at the time, recalled in a postwar memoir that for a long time Chinese and Koreans were treated as inferior to Japanese, but then suddenly with

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the collapse of empire Chinese moved to first class and victors at that. Japanese were now jealous, and guarded antagonisms that had simmered just below the surface dur­­ing the expansion of imperial power boiled up very quickly to the surface upon Japan’s defeat. On July 19, 1946, shots rang out, and the police were called in to quell the clashes. They then got embroiled in the melee as well. The battle in the Shibuya district between Japanese police officers and newly legally enfranchised Chinese/Taiwanese nationals quickly escalated into a riot pitt­­ing Japanese police and Japanese armed gangs against the Taiwanese gangs. The Chinese mission sent someone to tell the crowds to disband, and Japanese police then sent several hundred officers while 300 or so Jap­­ anese civilians joined. A mass disturbance was in the making, and Japanese papers reported that the Taiwanese fired first.67 Though the final count remains murky, the incident resulted in at least four dead and twenty or so injured, though con­flict­­ing reports suggest possibly hundreds injured.68 The Asahi newspaper reported on July 21 in a headline that “police and people from the province of Taiwan shoot it out leav­­ing 16 casualties.”69 The argument stemmed from the fact that dur­ ­ing the war many Taiwanese had com­e to live in Japan as Japanese imperial subjects, but after the collapse of empire their legal status was reduced to that of aliens, even though they legally belonged to the victorious Chinese nation. Taiwanese who were summarily stripped of their imperial national identity, former Japanese citizens, did retain one advantage in the early years of the occupa­­tion in that they were suddenly removed from Japanese legal restraints. In February 1946 SCAP decreed that nations of the UN or occupy­­ing countries were not subject to the Japanese criminal or civil code. Japanese authorities could not incarcerate these individuals, and because they were not of Japanese nationality they did not have to pay taxes. Overseas Chinese stand­­ing in Japanese society suddenly rose with such a proclamation, though it did not always br­­ing related economic prosperity.70 One can see here the roots of the legal problems the dissolu­­tion of the Japanese empire caused: In China the Taiwanese were be­­ing treated differently from other Chinese, in Japan they were con­sidered the victors, but elsewhere throughout the imperial periphery Taiwanese would often be charged as Japanese for war crimes. The issue of Taiwan, therefore, drives home the problem surround­­ing

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the legacy of the manner in which the Japanese empire was disbanded—​ there was no uniform method for adjudicat­­ing war crimes by former imperial subjects, and they were often delegated by the whim of the regional overlord. Many Taiwanese did not necessarily see their identity be­­ing suddenly scrapped as beneficial, and this did not mean, of course, that Chinese were outside the law because they were still subject to GHQ law. In the end, regardless of who fired first, the crux of the Shibuya Incident was that suddenly the dissolv­­ing Japanese empire had produced a major secondary legal con­flict because Japanese police no longer had jurisdic­­tion over alleged Taiwanese criminals. Whereas only months before the issue could have been dealt with internally, it now immediately escalated into an international affair with far-​reach­­ing repercussions. Follow­­ing the Shibuya Incident SCAP forbade non-​Japanese citizens from operat­­ing roadside stalls, but that did not necessarily alleviate the problem of how to deal with Taiwanese/Chinese economic stratifica­­tion and criminality in Japan. To achieve some legal measure of parity, GHQ had to try these former imperial Japanese subjects who had now become Chinese citizens in a mixed court run by the U.S. military. A small article at the bottom of the September 29, 1946, Asahi newspaper revealed that the Taiwanese “instigators” of the riot were indicted in a GHQ military court for hav­­ing transgressed “the goals of the occupation” and forty-​one “Taiwanese provincial residents” were indicted on charges.71 Even though these Taiwanese were not “war criminals” they were indicted in an American military court because Japanese law no longer maintained jurisdic­­tion over them. It is interest­­ing to note that Taiwan was be­­ing quickly referred to as a province of China under KMT authority because it would be not be called a country until a few years later when the Nationalists had to retreat to the island after los­­ing the Chinese civil war. By the time the hybrid trials of these transgressors were finished, one individual received three years of hard labor and thirty-​eight were sentenced to forced labor for two years. The rest were expelled from Japan.72 These sentences received ample press coverage in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and mainland China where angry responses were unleashed toward what was felt to be a biased American occupational legal structure and a Japan only too will­­ing to quickly discard its former colonial people. American statesman George Kerr, in his analysis of

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Taiwanese politics and history in the immediate postwar period, assessed the situa­­tion a bit differently. Although acknowledg­­ing that there had been a fight between the police and newly enfranchised Chinese, Kerr labeled the Formosans as com­­­ing from the “underworld in Tokyo.” Kerr claimed that KMT leaders seized upon the Shibuya Incident “as evidence that the United States proposed to revive Japanese militarism, and that there was imminent danger Formosa might again be subjected to Japan’s con­trol.” Formosans were encouraged to protest the verdict brought against their “brothers” in Japan.73 Xu Yum­­ing sees the situa­­tion from a different perspective. In his anal­­ ysis the Shibuya Incident in Tokyo has less to do with de-​imperializing Japan and is more con­nected to the Taiwanese spiral downward toward a dictatorship under the KMT after the February 28, 1947, incident (colloquially known as the 2.28 (two two eight) incident) in Taiwan.74 While the 2.28 incident exploded on a single day, domestic unrest throughout the island con­tinued for months. Dur­­ing the instability, the KMT slaughtered an estimated several tens of thousands of Tai­ wanese to quell social disquiet (though many also argue that Japanese nationals made up part of these numbers as well). Through a series of riots and military “cleanups,” initially instigated by the Chinese Nationalist gov­­ern­­ment try­­ing to curtail unlawful sales of tobacco, a prime source of income for lower wage–earn­­ing Taiwanese, the incident was a tragedy of epic proportions for the early history of a new Taiwan. The February 28 aftermath reflected the wide social chasm between those originally born in Taiwan under Japanese rule, benshengren in Chinese, and those born on the mainland who arrived after Japan’s defeat, waishengren. (The majority of waishengren came after the KMT lost on the mainland in 1949.) It also underlined even more profoundly that the supposed bonds of Chinese ethnicity quickly frayed in the face of a larger con­flict con­cern­­ing who would rule postwar Taiwan and all of China. In East Asia this situa­­tion was significant because it reflected experiences of other Asian groups also bogged down in civil wars with the disappearance of Japanese imperial rule or still encumbered under reimposed European rule such as in Malaya, Indochina, and Indonesia. Chinese with a tainted Japanese upbring­­ing struggled against the more “authentic” Chinese who were raised in the crucible of war against the Japanese on the mainland and who had brought the mantle of KMT rule to Taiwan. Xu argues that both the

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Shibuya and 2.28 incidents reveal a frustrated pattern of not be­­ing able to adequately repatriate imperial populations of Japanese out from Taiwan and Taiwanese out from Japan with enough speed to avoid political and economic con­frontations with the “native” populations, newly enfranchised in both countries but also newly impoverished by Japan’s sudden downfall.75 The Shibuya Incident was also remembered in mainland China after 1949 as indicative of haughty Japanese imperial attitudes hav­­ing failed to “democratize,” as was supposed to occur under occupa­­tion tutelage. Once the war over the Korean peninsula had broken out in the summer of 1950 the Chinese Com­munist gov­­ern­­ment launched an “oppose American support of Japan movement” (fanmei furi yundong), which claimed that for the purposes of American imperialism the United States used Japan as an anti-​Soviet and anti-​Communist platform in East Asia and therefore monopolized the occupation. One Chinese book from 1951 claimed, “We Chinese thought after the war that Japan could not harm China again but then look what happened to our Taiwanese brethren in the Shibuya incident in Tokyo.” 76 The Japanese called Taiwanese daisankokujin (third-​country nationals) and looked down on them, the Chinese book recorded. Moreover, “our Chinese students study­­ing in Japan are bullied,” which was also a reference to the Shibuya Incident that con­cerned Chinese still liv­­ing throughout the former empire even though no “students” were necessarily involved in the riots.77 The manner and process through which the international com­ munity, beyond the scope of the Tokyo War Crimes Trial, pursued war criminality were at times at odds with the new international definitions of justice that Japanese and former imperial Japanese such as the Taiwanese faced. Unfortunately, the players were also often more worried about the pragmatics of realpolitik at the time than about the actual con­tradictions created by disparate legal systems quickly established to adjudicate a multitude of crimes throughout Japan’s crumbling empire. The fact that BC class trials applied an unclear logic to non-​Japanese, had vague lines of jurisdiction, and did not always demar­ ­cate between war crimes and collabora­­tion should cause us to chart new courses for historical inquiry away from an American-​centered approach to East Asian history. Chinese and Japanese approaches toward war criminals and collaborators also needed to take into account issues of

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domestic stability and therefore justice as the end could not always justify the means for fear of tipp­­ing the balance too much. In this manner, as Deokhyo Choi has pointed out, we need to examine the decoloniza­ ­tion of Japan’s empire as a “mutually con­stitutive process that restructures both metropolitan and colonial societies.” 78 The end of empire in Japan resonated in East Asia as much as those reverberations in reverse affected Japan. Foreign policy in East Asia developed under its own logic and often for quite different reasons than those motivat­­ing the European or American occupiers. More importantly, the legal and political decisions on which many of these trials were based con­tinue to exert a formative pressure on how postwar Japanese experienced the destruc­­tion of their former empire and how Taiwanese and Chinese con­ceived of their early postwar reconstituted posi­­tion in East Asia.

4

Chinese Nationalist Justice The KMT Trials

That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury, stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to Reason. —​Chief U.S. prosecutor Robert Jackson at the open­­ing of the Nuremberg Trials

I

f t he c om­p l e x i t y of the Taiwanese issue within Chi­ nese war crimes trials was a harbinger of the difficulty in bring­­ing Japanese to justice, the KMT’s actual trials were no less burdened by the practicality of implementation. The KMT used trials to register its international presence in the eyes of the Chinese population, but these methods also ended up becom­­ing embroiled in civil war politics and the larger KMT–CCP con­flict. Justice was pursued, but it was not always the sort based on the idea of international law alone. Chas­­ing after war criminals, collaborators, or suspected traitors offered a means to resolve the upturned former imperial hierarchies, deal with grudges, and seek righteousness to atone for com­mitted atrocities. These moves demonstrated that the new Chinese authorities were “just,” a crucial element to bolster domestic and international backing. The legal restructur­­ing of East Asia and Japan’s relations with its neighbors played a vital func­­tion in redress­­ing imperial power domains in the early Cold War. But realpolitik also played a role. In short, even after Japan’s imperial surrender the Chinese Nationalists needed their former enemy’s technological and 137

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military support to sustain their own future, as did the British and to some extent the French, bogged down against Viet Minh nationalists in Indochina and nurs­­ing colonial wounds elsewhere. Philip Malins, a British soldier, wondered postwar “if he had con­travened the Geneva Con­ven­­tion in that the Japanese Surrendered Personnel (JSPs), over whom he had charge, had carried arms and fought. The arms were used to rearm the French and Saigon did not fall.”1 He com­manded more than 69,000 surrendered Japanese, many of whom the British employed to maintain order against the Vietnamese who assumed they would become independent from the French after the war was over. When Japan surrendered the Allies had decreed that Indochina (Vietnam but also Cambodia and Laos) be split in two to facilitate the handover. North of sixteen degrees latitude the Chinese Nationalist army would accept Japanese turnover of weapons, and south of that latitude the British military would manage the situation.2 In the former colonies of Taiwan and South Korea the issues of who was a war criminal and who was a collaborator or traitor were even trickier to tackle given the lengthy dura­­tion of the Japanese imperial reign and large military con­scrip­­tion projects. The status quo at the dawn of the new era was far from stable even though the long-​awaited goal to defeat Japan had finally been realized. The establishment of international tribunals and the pursuit of East Asian war criminals was a process designed to give weight to the neglected ques­­tion of how newly enfranchised citizens of East Asia became acculturated to the idea of themselves as subjective political actors on the international stage. For the first time Chinese were now the successors to Japanese political and military administrations. KMT war crimes trials of Japanese BC class crimes began first in April 1946 in Beijing, close to the time of the open­­ing of proceedings against the A class Japanese defendants in the Tokyo Tribunal, and held center stage in ten major Chinese cities for almost three years. While these BC class trials were central to both the KMT and CCP, vy­­ing for power in the early moments of a nascent civil war, the rest of the world was mainly preoccupied with rebuild­­ing itself. Iwakawa Takashi has com­mented on this international ignorance, noth­­ing that the only Chinese trial even summarized in the Far Eastern sec­­tion of the collec­­tion of UN com­mission on war crimes trials was that of

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Lieutenant General Sakai Takashi. There are no other summaries of any Chinese trials in the UN record or in English.3 What historical forces have obscured these important episodes in Sino-​Japanese relations, and why? Because there are too many separate cases to detail, I will focus on four representative cases of Japanese war crimes trials prosecuted in China. The first episode was the indictment and trial of Lieutenant General Sakai Takashi. The second was the arrest, extradi­­tion from Japan to China, and trial of Lieutenant General Tani Hisao, one of the few high-​rank­­ing Japanese officers Chinese courts could prosecute for the Nanj­­ing Massacre because the judicial thunder was mostly appropriated by the Tokyo Trial’s pursuit of A class leaders, includ­­ing General Matsui Iwane. The third trial was the archetypal Japanese atrocity, the infamous “100-​Man Kill­­ing Con­test,” and the prosecu­­tion of Second Lieutenants Noda Takeshi and Mukai Toshiaki. The fourth case was the unlikely release of an officer who was labeled as China’s “number one war criminal,” General Okamura Yasuji. Although Okamura assumed a posi­­tion of power equal to that of General Matsui Iwane in China, the KMT military tribunal ultimately found him “not guilty” and allowed him to repatriate to Japan. Each case, I argue, represents a certain genre of the sort of decision-​mak­­ing process the KMT had to make regard­­ing Japanese war criminals. The com­mon denominator in all the major KMT trials, in con­trast with the CCP trials of 1956 (described in chapter seven), was that the indicted former imperial soldiers almost to the last man steadfastly protested their innocence. Originally, there were hundreds of separate political meetings and discussions, with plans for mass arrests and the potential for numerous war crimes trials in China. The records are not com­pletely clear given that not all the archives were collated and because Chinese statistics differed from American tabulations at the time, as did postwar Japanese efforts to calculate the numbers. Accord­­ing to Japanese records, some 883 Japanese were tried in KMT courts and 504 were con­victed. The Chinese historical record suggests that only 442 were con­victed.4 As mentioned previously, even though China is larger and more populous than all the areas that Japan attacked, these trials took place on a smaller scale than U.S. trials of BC class war criminals, which examined 456 cases and tried 1,453 people. Regardless of the specific numbers, in a

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manner virtually mirror­­ing the Tokyo Trial’s focus on crimes against Westerners, the Chinese war crimes trials centered on crimes against Chinese persons. Most of the crimes charged were not vague A class crimes about leadership or responsibility; they were actual crimes against specific individuals, personal crimes of violence against Chinese, though some con­cerned steal­­ing or pertained to absconded wealth or forced labor. However, unlike the trials by other Western Allies and the European powers that saw their colonies swept away by Japanese military domina­­tion after 1940, one of the interest­­ing facets of the Chinese Nationalist–led trials, as Hayashi Hirofumi interprets, was the large number of acquittals—​a rate of about 40 percent. One reason for such a statistic was no doubt the civil war rag­­ing at the time, which distracted KMT efforts. But another reason was the pragmatic aspect of Chiang Kai-​shek’s policy to gain an upper hand for improved relations with Japan now that China’s war of resistance had con­cluded. Ikō Toshiya asserts that KMT trials of the Japanese were predicated on two goals: The first aim was to punish individuals within the framework of law, and the second was to politically educate the Japanese. Many would agree with the partial success of the first goal but perhaps not with the second, given the rather negative domestic reac­­tion to BC class war crimes trials in Japan as anyth­­ing more than just victor’s justice.5 Ikō also uncovered KMT internal documents that demonstrate that already in 1943 Chinese leaders recognized that there was no precedent or law that allowed an individual to be tried after a war for crimes com­mitted dur­­ing the war. However, the Versailles Peace Treaty after World War I had left a potential legal loophole open to this sort of initiative, so in late 1943 the KMT began com­pil­­ing lists and evidence against those whom the party suspected of be­­ing Japanese war criminals. In March 1943 the Nationalist gov­­ern­­ment’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs started to file informa­­tion on Japanese war crimes in the “Investiga­­tion record of Japanese military atrocities in China” (Rijun zaihua baox­­ing diaochabiao). In this record the KMT attempted to detail the place, the name of perpetrator, and the crime, while try­­ing to push forward an investiga­­tion of crimes that had already occurred. But, as Ikō notes, the investigations and collec­­tion of informa­­tion were not really up to international standards, and this weakness corroded many of the Chinese cases. As World War II neared its ugly con­clusion, in

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May 1945 the Foreign Affairs office issued a report stat­­ing that it had collected evidence of 2,300 cases but that the majority of them were not filled out or investigated thoroughly enough and were miss­­ing evidence.6 The KMT produced a list of thirty-​t wo war crimes charges it would pursue; this list was based on the 1919 list drawn up at the preparatory con­ference for the Paris Peace Con­ference just after World War I. At the London con­ference dur­­ing the summer of 1945 the plan to pursue justice in international tribunals for “crimes against peace” and “crimes against humanity” was formulated, and the Chinese moved forward in pursuit. As previously detailed, at first the KMT placed the Japanese emperor on its war criminals list. While Chiang’s radio address to the popula­­tion of China to behave benevolently toward the Japanese gained him some credit internationally, he faced tremendous public pressure within his own country con­cern­­ing calls for the arrest and trial of the Japanese emperor. There were even motions floated in the KMT parliament clamor­­ing for the indictment of the emperor.7 Thus, a con­scious KMT policy developed to use the trials in the party’s interest but at the same time to go prosecutorially easy on the Japanese. Moves to put into place a juridical system to investigate, arrest, and legally prosecute the Japanese war criminals did not obviate the need for the KMT to do likewise against those Chinese (who were not colonized like the Taiwanese) judged to have com­mitted treason and collaborated with the enemy. For all intents and purposes, the KMT trials drew deep Japanese gov­­ern­­ment and military interest (as well as American and former European colonial con­cern as well), but the Japanese public overall was less apprehensive and often even ignored the situa­­tion outside of Japan.8 Some of this lack of atten­­tion was due to American censorship, but the postwar Japanese public was also more con­cerned, arguably, with itself as its empire had been summarily severed from the main islands.9 Once a con­crete decision had been made regard­­ing the Nationalist stance toward Japanese war crimes, a Chinese com­mission to investigate war crimes claims was quickly established in law on September 14, 1945. The com­mission was eager to proceed judiciously and realized that it was com­mitted to gather­­ing all pertinent material and ascertain­ ­ing if an actual crime had been com­mitted, what the crime was, and who was involved. This was even more the case given Ni Zhengyu’s

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recollec­­tion con­cern­­ing how the Chinese had not adequately legally prepared for the Tokyo War Crimes Trial. International atten­­tion would now be focused on the professionalism, or lack thereof, in the way in which Chinese jurists achieved justice for the na­­tion and against Japan. Such a goal was lofty enough in times of peace; in times of war backed by the seamy underside of collaboration, greed, and fear, try­­ing to avoid hearsay and rumor in court testimony was much harder. Even though the Japanese emperor had surrendered, at the end of the war the Japanese military still con­trolled many of the transport and com­ munica­­tion channels across China, so the KMT had to rely on letters sent from people with com­plaints while the investiga­­tion com­mission made arrests and started its investigations from there. In addition, one more burden was the need to submit updates to the London office of the UN high com­mission for war crimes.10 Such atten­­tion to the letter of the law does not mean that there were not serious accusations of the miscarriage of justice within the KMT trials. What also remains important is that Japanese soldiers who seemed will­­ing to lay down their lives for the emperor in a worthless war only a few months prior were now suddenly not so happy to die for the empire at the hands of a Chinese execu­­tion squad. Japanese prisoners would be paraded through town and often taken to a large and open area where crowds had gathered. The con­victed would then frequently be shot by pistol in the back of the head. There were allegations that sometimes prisoners were frog marched or driven through town for hours, with all sorts of items thrown at them, so that they arrived in a half-​dead state of exhaus­­tion at the execu­­tion site. Claims were also made that those con­victed were not first shot in the heart or head on purpose to prolong their agony. Charges of corrup­­tion against the KMT were rampant as were stories of people buy­­ing their way out of jail.11 The Americans paid close atten­­tion to Japanese attitudes toward war crimes trials abroad and translated a January 30, 1947, report, General Survey of War Crimes in Canton Area (Report by Repatriates). About 800 people were questioned upon their repatria­­tion mainly from the 23rd and 38th army in north Indochina, and this group included Japanese and Taiwanese. Repatriates felt that the war crimes courts they heard about or witnessed were “generally sentimental and revengeful, aim­­ing at political and propaganda effect and try­­ing to win the favor of public

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opinion, in con­sequence of which examinations were too formalistic and trials were extremely unilateral, leav­­ing many points which are illegal or unreasonable in the light of the law of legal procedure or logic.” Judges lacked com­mon sense in military affairs, the report con­ cluded.12 Many of the men mentioned that there were cases of mistaken identity and witnesses not show­­ing up but defendants be­­ing charged and found guilty anyway. In some cases witnesses showed up and explained that the charges were against the wrong Japanese, but the men were found guilty nonetheless. Testimony was often taken without any corroborat­­ing evidence and defendants found guilty on that basis. Postwar memoirs also related mistreatment and beatings in some of the Chinese prisons.13 A con­fidential summary of censored informa­­tion from a June 15, 1946, SCAP military intelligence report is enlightening. SCAP was interested in gaug­­ing how the Japanese were react­­ing to various occupa­ ­tion policies and plans. In terms of their reactions to the Tokyo War Crimes Trial the report observed that the trial “evoked a good deal of adverse com­ment.” People were speak­­ing ill of the war criminals but also felt that the criminals should be able to have a say about what they did, the military analysts wrote. Mirror­­ing the logic that Japanese General Okada Tasuku had used in his trial (highlighted in chapter one), many Japanese responded that American troops had sunk hospital ships and “done various things” dur­­ing the war, so the Japanese believed that America was “two-​faced” for only prosecut­­ing Japanese war crimes. Opinions about postwar justice in general were keenly calculated by both occupa­­tion forces and the Japanese themselves.14 The Hokkoku Mainichi (Kanazawa) prefectural newspaper interviewed approximately 3,000 return­­ing soldiers and said that 91 percent of them were shocked with the demoralized state of the population, the keen shortage of food, and the cold attitude of Japanese civilians—​in that order. Many soldiers were surprised to see the devasta­­tion of Japanese cities. One repatriat­­ing soldier put his feelings into clearer terms: “I think all demobilized men from central China hate people at home as I do.” He con­tinued, “I have to reconstruct Japan, and help rebuild our na­­tion from the penniless con­di­­tion it is in. I think it is a much harder job for me than fighting.” Others were not so pessimistic and saw the future in brighter terms. Intercepted and censored mail from China detailed sentiments that

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Japanese frequently described generous treatment by the Chinese. Many were eagerly and obviously await­­ing repatria­­tion but not necessarily suffering, though many said they were yelled at and called “Japs!” by Chinese children. Other letter writers spoke of China’s need for technical experts and said that Japanese experts were not allowed to repatriate but treated with special care. One went so far as to write home “that my present salary is higher than that of an employee of a Japanese com­pany.” Immediate postwar experiences in Indochina seemed even brighter, with initially plentiful food and good treatment by U.S. and Chinese forces.15 As the Japanese were carefully measur­­ing public opinion toward various war crimes trials, there were also moves afoot to quickly allow Japanese con­v icts incarcerated abroad to repatriate and fulfill their sentences at home. There were many reasons behind this decision, the least of which was that the Allies would have to pay to feed and house Japanese war criminals and they wanted to avoid be­­ing burdened with such expenses. Japanese liaison groups in China claimed they were supply­­ing daily necessities of food, clothing, and medicine to Japanese war criminals under Chinese jurisdic­­tion but that they wanted SCAP to ask the Chinese that when these liaison bureaus closed, in estima­­ tion of when repatria­­tion ended, if they would be good enough to con­ tinue see­­ing to these needs. Director of General Affairs of the Central Liaison Office, K. Asakai, asked SCAP officials on November 22, 1946, to request that the Chinese proceed with their war crimes trials speedily so that the innocent could be sent home. Asakai also appealed that sentenced Japanese be sent to Japan to serve out their sentences under the supervision of Occupa­­tion forces. He noted that there was already a precedent of those tried by the United States in Shanghai and Guam finish­­ing their sentences at Sugamo Prison.16 An undated con­fidential informa­­tion memo con­cern­­ing Japanese nationals who remained in China as suspects or were incarcerated in Chinese prisons discussed the pitiful liv­­ing con­ditions. About 150 Japanese personnel worked in liaison offices in Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing, Hankou, Canton, Jinan, and Taipei in charge of help­­ing those prisoners out with their daily necessities. Com­plaints proliferated that even when these Japanese assistance teams delivered food items or such to the prisoners, only two-​thirds of it ever reached them. Japanese

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grumbled that if they did not provide these supplements prisoners would become malnourished and suffer more from poor hygiene.17 An undated secret memo from SCAP to the American Joint Chiefs of Staff revealed that many mail intercepts from Japanese war crimes suspects or those detained in China “claim unfair practices, miscarriage of justice and general unsatisfactory con­ditions in the con­duct of war criminal program in China.”18 Postwar Japanese diaries from various men in different regions also proffered such claims. A Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs investiga­­tion from the immediate postwar period was based, in part, on interviews from military returnees with a rank lower than Major General stream­­ing through the port of Sasebo in Nagasaki prefecture, at the western tip of Japan. Some of the returnees had been arrested or detained in Chinese jails. Several spoke about the con­ditions in the Shanghai jails where cells were small and dirty. A one tatami mat–sized room where two prisoners per cell were housed appeared the norm. High prices and corrupt KMT officials in Shanghai meant that meals were of poor quality, while the American jails for Japanese war criminals were of good quality, interviewees noted.19 In September 1946, Japan’s MOFA established an investiga­­tion group to examine Japanese war crimes and claims that Japanese sold out other Japanese if one believed the other was not a “good” Japanese. The Chinese supposedly made deals as well to turn people in. Returnees remarked that trials in the former Manchukuo kingdom seemed harsher and that the Chinese defense lawyers were reticent speakers in open court. Others stated that the trials were con­ducted to satisfy the Chinese population’s “lust for revenge” and that whether the person was guilty or not was not overly pertinent. The appeal process did seem to operate in some of the verdicts where sentences were reduced so justice was not fully absent, and overall the Chinese war crimes detainment facilities in Manchukuo were of a pretty good standard. But the fact was, the report con­cluded, that innocent men were merely hav­­ing their sentences curtailed rather than be­­ing released.20 A general sec­­tion on the state of Japanese war criminals in China from a Shanghai police services report was also included. This sec­­tion expanded the fairly limited understand­ ­ing of what former Japanese soldiers and POWs experienced in China and included statistics of how many men had been executed in various cities—​fourteen in Shanghai, forty-​five in Guangdong, eight in Xuzhou,

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and so forth. The report also tabulated how many Japanese soldiers received sentences, for how long, and in what facility. The KMT gov­­ ern­­ment allocated sentenced war criminals fifteen kilograms of rice per month and money for side dishes. Many of the men were detained in prisons surrounded by fields so they could also plow the field to supplement their diets. Some facilities maintained a library, but fuel for heat­ ­ing appeared to be a con­stant problem.21 The KMT leadership was fully cognizant of the obstacles—​both political and military—​it faced in bring­­ing Japanese to its Chinese courts of justice for adjudication, and it debated these matters. The most vex­­ing impediment to national and international prestige the Chinese Nationalists had to admit was that they had little con­trol over gain­­ing access to most of the major war criminals they wished to indict. The Americans often preferred to judge these Japanese military men through U.S. tribunals or to use them as witnesses for the prosecu­­tion in higher-​profile U.S.-​sponsored trials, such as the Tokyo War Crimes Trial. A second stick­­ing point was that the Americans needed to turn these war criminals over quickly and efficiently because some had already been arrested and detained for a year but had not yet found their way to Chinese justice. KMT-​managed Nationalist China could ill afford to irritate international public opinion or appear to not be able to have the technical and legal savvy to pull off efficient trials of proper legal con­duct. America faced similar com­plications with its war crimes trials, which is one reason many arrested Japanese never made it to trial and were released. In general the Chinese faced three main problems regard­­ing plac­­ing Japanese suspected war criminals into its courts: investigat­­ing the crime and find­­ing adequate evidence or reliable testimony; arrest­­ing or request­­ing the extradi­­tion from either U.S. authorities or officials in the region where the alleged war criminals were detained; and manag­ ­ing the trials themselves.22 What became clear in the early months of this process was that Chinese justice relied, in part, on the beneficence of American interests. Because so many suspected high-​rank­­ing Japanese war criminals had long since departed from China, repatriat­ ­ing either dur­­ing Japan’s imperial aggression in China or with alacrity once surrender had been announced, numerous war criminals simply no longer lived within Chinese legal jurisdiction. Because Chinese law

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had only recently abrogated the unequal treaty arrangements, any history of com­bined legal extradi­­tion or shar­­ing between it and other nations, if it existed at all, was extremely tenuous and short-​lived.

China’s Open­­ing Salvo to Showcase Its Judicial Might Although Chinese trials of Japanese BC class war criminals had already begun a month prior in Beijing, the KMT still aimed to capitalize on the tragic name value of Japanese imperial atrocities in Nanj­­ing and set its sights on obtain­­ing con­v ictions of notable Japanese officers to demonstrate the energy it was supposedly devot­­ing to the task. The first major Chinese-​managed war crimes trial in this vein opened in a special Nanj­­ing Military Tribunal for War Crimes on May 30, 1946. 23 The court was packed with spectators, reporters, and those stand­­ing on the sidelines wait­­ing to see history in the making. On trial was Japanese imperial army Lieutenant General Sakai Takashi. Okamura Yasuji, resid­­ing in Nan­jing at the time, noted in his diary that prior to the outbreak of war in China Sakai had been a military attaché in Beij­­ing and served as an attendant when KMT General He Yingqin and Jap­ anese Lieutenant General Umezu Yoshijirō (commander of the Tianjin garrison) met. The two generals con­cluded a secret agreement in June 1935 in a bid to prevent further hostilities from escalat­­ing on the mainland. Their accord, known as the He-​Umezu agreement, was aimed at dampen­­ing hostilities that had arisen after the collapse of the 1933 Tanggu Truce, an agreement that temporarily ended Japan’s excursions beyond north­­ern China. In actuality, the truce “was a major humilia­­ tion for China in that it created a 5,000-​square-​mile demilitarized zone over a large por­­tion of Hebei Province south of the Great Wall from which Nationalist military units were to be immediately excluded.”24 At the 1935 meet­­ing General He Yingqin and Sakai had supposedly exchanged heated words, and Okamura wrote that accord­­ing to some rumors he heard He Yingqin was scheduled to go to America at the time Sakai’s postwar trial was pend­­ing so the tribunal was rushed through. Moreover, Okamura estimated that He Yingqin had harbored a hatred of Sakai since their meet­­ing and that Sakai was the only name that He Yingqin had put forward as a war criminal.25

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The Sakai case is the sole Chinese tribunal of a Japanese war criminal that was recorded in English, so a short summary remains in UN-​ published sources.26 The charges against Sakai were crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. Neutral observers of the trial, com­ment­­ing later, did not think that Sakai’s crimes merited be­­ing charged with “crimes against peace” because he was not an officer at the policymak­­ing level. However, there was plenty of evidence, some agreed, to justify Sakai’s con­v ic­­tion for con­ventional war crimes and for crimes against humanity. Sakai was born in 1887 and had a long career in the military, often in China, as did many military men born of the mid-​Meiji era. From 1939 to 1945 Sakai was a military com­ mander in China, but he had been posted there numerous times throughout the 1930s. Unlike many of the other major war criminals, Sakai was arrested in north China at the end of the war and thus held the dubious honor of be­­ing one of the few major war criminals for whom China did not have to com­pete with other Allies or request lengthy extradi­­tion proceedings. He was charged in all three categories of war crimes under the terms of Chinese municipal law and offences against the internal security of the state. The Chinese military tribunal argued that between 1931 and 1939 Sakai was instrumental in aggression against China and that he was involved in putt­­ing together a gang that assassinated various high-​level Chinese “undesirables.” Dur­­ing the war Sakai was Regimental Com­mander of the 29th Infantry Brigade in China, and he was indicted under the follow­­ing crimes: “Between November 1941 and March 1943 in Kwantung and Hainan over one hundred civilians were massacred by shoot­­ing or bayoneting; twenty-​ one civilians were tortured; women were drowned after severe beat­­ing and one expectant mother was tortured; two women were raped and mutilated and their bodies fed to dogs; civilians were evicted from homes and seven hundred houses were set on fire; rice, poultry, and other foods were plundered.”27 The Nanj­­ing court charged Sakai with promot­­ing Japanese aggressive warfare dat­­ing back to April 1928 when he was a military attaché in Jinan. Supposedly Sakai had cabled his superiors and said that as the KMT approached the north Jinan was in danger of be­­ing cut off and vulnerable. To protect Japanese civilians and imperial interests Japan should mobilize troops, Sakai instructed. The Japanese army dispatched 5,000 troops to Qingdao, China. The charges also stated that at one point when thirteen Japanese were

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arrested for traffick­­ing in opium Sakai cabled Tokyo and said that 300 Japanese had been killed. The Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not believe Sakai’s cable and counseled against the further dispatch of Japanese troops. The Chinese special military court alleged that Sakai had “xuyi,” or deliberately caused a con­flict between China and Japan that led to the death of 6,123 Chinese, the wound­­ing of 1,700, and the loss of millions of dollars in property and goods. Lastly, the charges included a sec­­tion that argued Sakai had forced China into the 1935 He-​Umezu agreement, when Japan won significant privileges for manag­­ing northern China in advance of establish­­ing a separate puppet kingdom in Manchuria.28 Importantly, Sakai was also the only Japanese officer executed for atrocities com­mitted in Hong Kong, which was a British colony occupied by Japan dur­­ing the war. Several other Japanese officers were later tried by the British, but the results were different: One was found not guilty, and two were given prison sentences, but none, with the excep­­ tion of Sakai, was executed. When British leaders learned that Sakai had been arrested they con­tacted the Chinese gov­­ern­­ment and requested his extradi­­tion to Hong Kong for trial. The Chinese con­sidered the request but believed in Sakai they possessed a war criminal on par with the likes of A class war criminals Generals Doihara Kenji and Itagaki Seishirō, who were be­­ing tried in Tokyo. It was therefore more proper, the Chinese leadership assessed, if Sakai remained in China to be tried by a Chinese court. British authorities followed up on their request and asked if they could send a few judges to Sakai’s trial, but Chinese authorities did not approve of this idea and insisted that the trial would be con­ducted independently by Chinese jurists.29 Sakai’s trial con­tinued into August. Sakai pleaded not guilty and claimed that he had acted on the orders of the Japanese gov­­ern­­ment so he was not guilty of crimes against peace or aggressive warfare. As for his underlings’ behavior he could not be responsible, he argued, because he had no knowledge of it. The court rejected his plea, and Sakai was found guilty of “participat­­ing in a war of aggression” and “incit­­ing or permitt­­ing subordinates to murder.” The court rejected his plea that he was follow­­ing orders because the judges did not believe this excuse relieved him of penal responsibility, and he was con­victed of participat­ ­ing in aggressive war, kill­­ing POWs and unarmed civilians, stealing, torture, and destruc­­tion of personal property. He was sentenced to

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death as an architect of the aggressive war in China. Sakai’s trial was con­ducted under Chinese rules for war crimes trials, which stated in their first article that the primary basis of substantive law for these tribunals was international law, supplemented with measures from the Chinese penal code. The con­cept of “crimes against peace” was first defined in the Charter of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, instituted by the London Agreement of August 8, 1945. The agreement defined such acts as: “namely planning, preparation, initiation, or wag­­ing a war of aggression, or a war in viola­­tion of international treaties, agreements or assurances, or participa­­tion in a com­mon plan or con­spiracy for the accomplishment of any of the foregoing.”30 An almost identical defini­­tion was employed at the Tokyo Trial with the addi­­tion that the plann­­ing and preparation, or waging, was initiated dur­­ing a “declared or undeclared” war of aggression or a war in viola­­tion of “international” law. At one point in June Sakai had submitted a document to Shi Meiyu, the Chinese chief military justice, argu­­ing that military attaché was a posi­­tion many countries staffed in their foreign embassies and that such a job was not specifically to prepare for the invasion of China. Sakai claimed that he had long worked to build good relations between China and Japan, which was one of the reasons he did not flee at the end of the war. He believed he had noth­ ­ing to fear because he was not a war criminal. And he insisted that his work aimed to establish a brighter future for Sino-​Japanese relations. Sakai also denied involvement in drug and arms trafficking. Essentially, he went on to deny his role in anyth­­ing in Hong Kong as well as running any form of gov­­ern­­ment or special forces there.31 As with most Japanese war criminals charged by the KMT, Sakai did not go down without a fight: “This farfetched trial with questionable witnesses and documents submitted from only one side cannot possibly achieve justice for such a big international incident,” he announced in court. 32 It was as if the court was try­­ing to pin an A class war crime for the Japanese invasion of China on one person. Sakai was found guilty of crimes against peace precisely because he participated in Japan’s war of aggression, a not-​very-​satisfy­­ing discourse of legal reasoning. A ticket from the trial required for attendance shows that the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs invited Lewis Symthe, who testified at the Nanj­­ing Massacre por­­tion of the Tokyo Trial. He was a long-​serv­­ing

An entry ticket to the Sakai trial, 1946. (NAUS)

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missionary in Nanj­­ing and taught sociology at Nanj­­ing University until 1951. The ticket explicitly instructed trial audiences that under the com­mand of the Chinese Army this was a special court of law to adjudicate Japanese guilt con­cern­­ing suspected war crimes. The ticket allowed the holder to attend the trial in the gallery at the courtroom on Huangpu Road in Nanjing. The reverse side of the entrance ticket listed ten rules for behavior in the courtroom, some of which con­cerned maintain­­ing proper decorum in the courtroom. People who were drunk and psychiatric patients were barred from entry, as were those who wished to disturb the proceedings. Other rules stipulated that attendees had to remove their hats upon enter­­ing and were required to rise when high members of the court entered. Attendees were admonished not to chat or argue dur­­ing the trial, while smoking, spitt­­ing and eat­­ing were also forbidden. Lastly, attendees were not allowed to wantonly leave the courtroom to inform others what was go­­ing on or linger after the court had adjourned. An article from the American military newspaper Pacific Stars and Stripes announced on September 15, 1946, that “Lieutenant General Takashi Sakai” was “executed with a revolver” in Nanjing. The article did not offer much detail but con­cluded that “Sakai’s body was strung to a bamboo pole and carried to a roughly dug grave, into which it was tossed unceremoniously.” Strangely, it seems that American officials were neither follow­­ing what the American media was report­­ing nor digest­­ing what was happen­­ing back in China. A September 19, 1946, letter from the Chinese mission in Tokyo to the Foreign Liaison sec­­ tion of SCAP responded to a U.S. request that Sakai’s judgment be delayed and that he be sent back to Japan to testify at the Tokyo Trial. The Chinese explained to SCAP officials that they had put that request forward but discovered that Sakai had already been executed on September 13, 1946.33 As Wada Hideho points out, the Chinese were caught unaware in their zeal to briskly prosecute Japanese war criminals that some of their postwar goals might con­flict with American aims. Wada also notes that there was a vocal debate between the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which said that the KMT should try to keep the matter hush so as to not to cause embarrassment, and the Ministry of Defense, which brushed aside such worries and declared that the execu­­tion was correct.34 Once Sakai was executed, General

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Okamura Yasuji, as liaison chief of the Japanese forces in China, was notified, and he asked for the body to be returned to Japan. Chinese authorities refused the request, and the U.S. military newspaper noted that Sakai was buried on the outskirts of Nanjing.35

Nanj­­ing Massacre Trial of Tani Hisao The centrality of Nanj­­ing is intricately linked to war memory and Japan’s nefarious imperial aims in certain areas. Among the ten venues the KMT established for special military trials of the Japanese Nanj­­ing was a focal point. It had been the capital of the Nationalist gov­­ern­­ment from the late 1920s, until it was transplanted to Chongq­­ing in 1938, and thus served to reaffirm Chinese Nationalist resump­­tion of power after Japan’s surrender. The Nanj­­ing Massacre developed into one of the central focal points of the Chinese prosecu­­tion dur­­ing the Tokyo War Crimes Trial and was significant in the KMT’s efforts to br­­ing a sense of international justice to the mainland. But there were actually many imperial Japanese military massacres on the way to the city. Nanj­­ing was not an isolated incident, and there is still no definitive victim count. Far more Chinese were murdered outside the city walls than inside, and the kill­ ­ing con­tinued over a four-​month period. Japan had launched an undeclared war against China in July 1937, and by August the fight­­ing had shifted toward Shanghai to involve naval forces. Even though Japanese forces had high expectations and had previously faced little resistance, the battle for Shanghai did not go as planned. The imperial army had been given a broad mandate but little in terms of material support, and morale began to ebb. Japanese Com­mander Matsui Iwane wanted to advance farther than his orders allowed, and the formal com­mand to attack Nanj­­ing was issued on December 1, 1937, even though various Japanese units had already moved in. The key failure, among many that the imperial Japanese military was guilty of, was that the Army General Staff had never really planned for mass military maneuvers in China on a national scale. Basically, the Japanese, believ­­ing in their own invincibility and buoyed with deep reserves of psychological delusion, thought they could rule China by just tactically con­troll­­ing specific areas. Once the Japanese began winn­­ing in the region Chinese Nationalist soldiers started surrendering, but the imperial army was ill prepared

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because of its own mandate that surrender equaled shame. Japanese soldiers’ diaries attest to the horrible manner in which surrender­­ing Chinese soldiers were “dealt with.” In one instance more than 14,000 Chinese POWs were killed rather than creat­­ing camps to house them.36 In the middle of December 1937 the Japanese military triumphantly entered the city of Nanj­­ing and met Chinese forces who lacked a com­ mand structure and who had lost the will to fight. Again, Japanese soldiers merely executed many of the surrender­­ing enemy troops. The Japanese imperial Sixty-​sixth regiment’s first battalion was given specific instructions—​k ill the surrender­­ing Chinese with bayonets—​ suggest­­ing that many of the incidents within the larger massacre were organized and coordinated from above. Many flee­­ing Chinese discarded their uniforms and tried to slip back into the civilian population; they were con­sistently attacked in Japanese propaganda campaigns. Japanese forces issued orders to view all youths and adult males as disguised soldiers. Lieutenant General Nakajima Kesago wrote in his diary that army police were told not to take prisoners but to kill them. So great were the numbers that they had to divide cadavers into groups of several hundred for mass burials.37 The Nanj­­ing Massacre derived its name from the terrible number of crimes against civilians, includ­­ing a large number of rapes, but Japanese soldiers were court martialed for only a minority of these offenses. In February 1938, 102 men were con­ victed of rape, murder, or similar crimes, but for a force of more than 100,000 imperial soldiers, that was a very small number charged.38 Japanese military historian Fujiwara Akira summed up the situa­­tion most ably, underlin­­ing that “the Nank­­ing Atrocity symbolized Japan’s war of aggression against China.”39 At the Tokyo War Crimes Trial the Chinese prosecu­­tion team called forward the largest number of witnesses to engage the issue of the Nanj­­ing Massacre. They requested the appearance of approximately one dozen witnesses, whereas based on precedent with other sections of the trial the most com­mon practice was to rely on paper or visual evidence and then to call only several witnesses.40 Yuma Totani states that the Japanese defense did not have a strategy to respond to the mountain of evidence deposited by the prosecution. It tried to discredit witnesses and at one point also tried to introduce the counterargument that the KMT had massacred civilians at various times so Japan was

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not criminally responsible. Itō Kiyoshi, the Japanese defense lawyer represent­­ing Matsui Iwane, tried to interrogate a Chinese witness, ask­ ­ing if Chinese troops had also not raped women. Chief Justice Webb quickly put an end to this defense tactic, reprimand­­ing Itō: “I must remind you that rape and murder of women could never be just reprisals. You are assum­­ing that, if the Japanese did the things said to be done by the witnesses, they were just reprisal,” he said. The chief justice con­cluded for the defense that “it is useless to con­tinue your cross-​ examina­­tion along those lines.”41 Follow­­ing the events of the Nanj­­ing Massacre at the end of 1937 and the beginn­­ing of 1938 Tani Hisao was recalled to Japan to serve in several more positions before he retired. He was then called back to service on August 12, 1945. On February 2, 1946, at the request of the Chinese diplomatic mission in Japan, American military police arrested Tani. In con­junc­­tion with this request, the Chinese also started a list of war criminals they wished turned over, but the United States hesitated.42 Here one can truly see the international com­peti­­tion con­cern­ ­ing who had the “right” to br­­ing Japanese war criminals to justice. It is obvious from this point immediately after the war that the battle to promote a sense of justice and the various priorities of the different Allies, includ­­ing the Chinese, started to devolve into a sort of rivalry. The situa­­tion was not advanc­­ing quickly enough, and Chinese officials got in touch with their representatives in Tokyo, Shang Zhen and Mei Ruao, to encourage the United States to start mov­­ing the process forward. Mei Ruao con­tacted Alva Carpenter, chief of the SCAP legal section, and directly entreated the United States to hand over arrested war criminals to China. Carpenter told Mei that he believed this was a good idea and sympathized with the Chinese position, but he explained that General Douglas MacArthur did not want to turn Japanese war criminals over to China. Occupa­­tion officials then suddenly changed their minds and extradited lower-​rank­­ing war criminals to China. Tani was among the first.43 Dur­­ing the first week of August 1946 Tani and twelve other suspected Japanese war criminals were transported from Sugamo Prison in Tokyo to Haneda airport, flown to Shanghai, and later transported to Nanjing.44 The Nanj­­ing Special Military Tribunal to adjudicate Japanese war criminals was established in April 1946 with Judge Shi

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Meiyu as the head. On February 15, 1946, the Nanj­­ing military tribunal had announced Judge Shi Meiyu as the supreme justice of these special military trials. These courts opened up all over the Chinese mainland soon after, but the first cases in Nanj­­ing were psychologically and politically significant because the city had been the KMT capital and the site of the imperial Japanese army’s most heinous atrocity against the Chinese. The court was under the aegis of the Ministry of Defense, which was directed by Lin Yu. There were five sitt­­ing judges, presided over by Shi Meiyu. When Shi thought hard about which judge to assign specifically to Tani’s case he chose Ye Zaizeng, a young jurist at the time. Ye at first felt he was too young and inexperienced and suggested someone else be used. Shi Meiyu told him that it was not about experience but about whether he wanted to “expunge our national humiliation.”45 The KMT gov­­ern­­ment had requested imperial army General Matsui Iwane, former com­mander of the Shanghai Expeditionary Forces, in one of its first lists of war criminals to arrest in Japan for the massacre at Nanjing.46 This request ran to fifty-​nine people, includ­­ing Asakanomiya Yasuhiko, a com­mander of forces in Shanghai and a few others. On June 6, 1946, the Nanj­­ing Provisional Council passed a mo­­tion to request from SCAP the extradi­­tion of Matsui Iwane, Tani Hisao, and Nakajima Kesago for the Nanj­­ing atrocities. KMT officials published their list widely in the press, saturat­­ing the Chinese media with the message that an official demand had been put to the United States for these transfers. This was a bit awkward because it was known that Matsui was already be­­ing tried as an A class war criminal in Tokyo while Nakajima had died in October 1945, nine months earlier. Asakanomiya Yasuhiko was a member of the Japanese imperial family, and in light of SCAP’s push not to indict the emperor, KMT authorities chose not to pursue Asakanomiya, either. Historian Kasahara Tokushi admits that it could be because relevant archives have not yet been uncovered, but he remains unsure why Tani Hisao specifically was pursued for the Nanj­­ing crimes.47 The public pressure to offer up some sort of judicial sacrifice for what was arguably imperial Japan’s largest massacre in China was immense, regardless of whether Chinese efforts to obtain the actual architects of the tragedy came to nothing. A July 29, 1946, editorial in the Chinese newspaper Zhongyang Ribao

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declared that hold­­ing the trial in China for the massacre was a “symbolic settlement of accounts.”48 On one hand, while such trials are representative of the Chinese ideal to not pursue vengeance, when the Chinese made their extradi­­ tion request, testimony about the Nanj­­ing Massacre had already started at the Tokyo Trial. Obviously, the Chinese realized that Matsui could not be removed dur­­ing the middle of the trial in Japan’s occupied capital city. Matsui was also afflicted with terrible diarrhea dur­­ing testimony and had to be hospitalized; he was not even in court for many of the hearings.49 Had Matsui actually been extradited to China for trial he might have served as a symbolic “final battle,” which could have satiated Chinese demands for justice. If that had occurred maybe the trials of Noda and Mukai would not have been needed, Kasahara suggests. In any event Tani Hisao was clearly the second-​best choice to charge for Nanj­­ing Massacre war crimes as he had been com­mander of the Sixth Division. The KMT made a request through the China mission, and Tani, sixty-​five at the time and liv­­ing in Tokyo, was arrested. Accord­­ing to the indictment, he led his troops into Nanj­­ing after it fell, and while under his com­mand they killed innocents and destroyed property. Within a week his men were held responsible for the murder of 200,000 people. A telegram con­cern­­ing Tani’s arrest was dispatched from the Chinese Ministry of Defense on September 9, 1946, and summarized the initial interroga­­tion to which Tani responded. He remarked that the Japanese took no Chinese prisoners and that his army division entered Nanj­­ing on December 13, 1937. Throughout the city Chinese soldiers were wear­­ing civilian cloth­­ing and engag­­ing with Japanese scout­­ing platoons in small skirmishes. When asked if they set up “comfort stations,” a reference to military brothels in which women were forced into serv­­ing as sex slaves, Tani replied the imperial army did so first by negotiat­­ing with local authorities, gain­­ing permission from the prostitutes themselves, decid­­ing on costs and treatment, and then establish­ ­ing such centers.50 On October 2, 1946, the formal indictment process began in Nanjing. The Chinese public was riveted by the story, and an October 3, 1946, article by a Zhongyang Ribao newspaper reporter fed the public appetite for learn­­ing more about this “monster of a man,” as Tani was labeled.

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The reporter opened his article by not­­ing that two infamous war criminals, Tani Hisao and Lieutenant General Isogai Rensuke, were about to stand trial in Nanj­­ing for war crimes. The journalist elaborated: To give readers an understand­­ing of the sort of monsters (mogui) these two were, this journalist went to the jail to meet personally with them. The time coincided with the two’s time out for exercise. I sat on the grass in the yard together with the two and a few others to discuss the situation. I asked them how their lives were in prison and Tani responded, “we are treated the same as other prisoners.” When asked how his family was doing, Tani laughed a bit awkwardly say­­ing “I have no sons, only two daughters who both are married. My sons-​in-​law are both military men and now have no work. My own wife is still in Tokyo, for over two months I have had no news of her. I am sure she is hav­­ing a difficult time financially.” When asked if he had heard that Sakai Takashi had been executed he replied that he had not.51 Accord­­ing to the article, Tani stated that he was prepar­­ing a defense but did not know why he had been arrested. Two teams of investigators, one directed by the KMT gov­­ern­­ment and one managed by the Nanj­­ing city gov­­ern­­ment, carried out investigations into the charges—​they interviewed thousands who had experienced the massacre, dug up graves, took measurements, and com­bed the international press from that time. The prosecu­­tion pulled out piles of testimonials, tables, pictures, and evidence along with other documents to prove Tani’s responsibility for the events. To make things clear the preliminary indictment court physically moved around and actually held a session near the site of a large massacre outside of the city walls. Lieutenant Isogai Rensuke was equally important because he had com­mitted a portfolio of crimes in Hong Kong while he served as Governor General dur­­ing the Japanese occupation, and the British were instrumental in prosecut­­ing him.52 The British Embassy in Nan­ jing on September 13, 1946, sent a letter from LH Lamb, British representative on the war crimes sub-​commission, to Wang Hua-​ch’eng [most probably Wang Chonghui], Secretary-​general of the Far Eastern

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and Pacific Sub-​Commission of the United Na­­tion War Crimes Com­ mission at the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Nanjing, to “assist in arrang­­ing for participa­­tion of a British prosecut­­ing officer in the trial of Japanese General Isogai, which, it is understood, is likely to take place in China in the near future.53 Accord­­ing to British assessments, Isogai “was responsible for abominable treatment of the Chinese and other residents of the territory” dur­­ing his tenure as Japanese governor of Hong Kong for several years.54 The Chinese were apparently less interested in allow­­ing him to be extradited to Hong Kong for trial, so British authorities put forward a request that they be allowed to attend the trial and be kept up to date on how it proceeded. The British were given verbal assurances that, it seems, were then forgotten. A July 9, 1947, letter from HD Bryan at the British Embassy in Nanj­­ing to Huang Cheng-​m­­ing at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs office in Nan­ jing verbalized this frustration: “We were not unnaturally somewhat surprised and disappointed to learn from this morning’s press that the trial had apparently already started yesterday morning, without any notice hav­­ing been given to this Embassy. We feel sure, however, that the Chinese authorities will regret what we assume to have been an unfortunate over-​sight.”55 Isogai was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison. He was expatriated to Japan to serve out his sentence but in 1952 was released as part of the peace accord between the Chinese Nationalists and Japan.56 In the lead-​up to the trial what seemed to matter most was to establish a legal narrative of the massacre. On October 19, 1946, Tani was officially brought before the court. By October 28 it was clear the KMT was us­­ing the Tani trial as a means to galvanize popular opinion into tak­­ing note that the Chinese Nationalist gov­­ern­­ment was in con­trol, was in pursuit of justice against the Japanese, and wanted to hear from the average Chinese citizen how he or she had suffered under Japanese dominion. We should be clear here: These KMT moves do not deny either the event or the scale of the Nanj­­ing Massacre. What I am focused on is the manner in which the atrocity was pursued and prosecuted by the Chinese Nationalists. All over the city and surround­­ing areas the Nanj­­ing Military Tribunal for War Crimes (Nanj­­ing shenpan zhanfan junshi fating) erected public placards. The signs announced, “This military tribunal is hear­­ing the case against war criminal Tani

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Hisao, former com­mander of the Sixth Division. His troops attacked Nanj­­ing from Hangzhou and entered the city on December 13, 1937.” The instructions explained that the Chinese Nationalist Party could not com­plete its investiga­­tion alone but required the public’s assistance. If anyone was subject to Japanese atrocities such as looting, rape, pillaging, and so forth, he or she was asked to submit a report to the court, the appeal announced.57 Tani was labeled a war criminal even before the court had adjourned, in fact even before it had opened. Was he a scapegoat as he and several later historians alleged? Dur­­ing December the prosecu­­tion prepared its case and called in several hundred witnesses. On December 31, 1946, Tani was formally indicted by the special tribunal for com­mand­­ing a platoon that murdered 122 souls, wounded 334, bayoneted 14, and assassinated and raped numerous others, among other specific charges. In the middle of January 1947 Tani pleaded not guilty. From January 25 to 27, prosecutors held a temporary hear­­ing outside the city walls in Yuhuatai, a historically important scenic spot but also the site of executions and massacres, where they took testimony from victims con­cern­­ing Japanese atrocities. Under the supervision of Judge Shi Meiyu, officials examined the remains of Chinese victims near the site.58 The prosecu­­tion asserted that Tani’s actions transgressed the Hague Military Rules of Engagement and that by invad­­ing Nanj­­ing the Japanese imperial army transgressed Article 20 of the Covenant of the League of Nations, as well as China’s own criminal law. The real public por­­tion of the prosecu­­tion lasted for several days at the Great Hall of the Lizhishe (Society for Vigorous Practice of the Three Principles of Sun Yat-​sen) in Nanj­­ing from February 6 to 8, 1947. Several thousand attendees poured into the massive foyer on the first day, when Tani denied any wrongdoing. Tani requested testimony from a Japanese soldier who claimed that most of the wanton kill­­ing had taken place under the army’s Sixteenth Division and not Tani’s Sixth Division. Tani also claimed that atrocities that occurred at the Zhonghua Gate were the responsibility of the com­mander for that sector, Yanagawa Heisuke. What caught the court audience’s attention, however, was probably less the testimony than the skulls of victims who had been unearthed displayed on the judge’s table. Ye Zaizeng, the young judge in charge of the trial, observed that Tani’s attire was

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stereotypically like a “bushido warrior” and that the accused drew the visual anger of the spectators. As soon as Tani entered the court, escorted by two policemen, the room erupted in calls of “Down with Japanese imperialism!” and “We want our blood debt paid in kind! (xuezhai xuehuan).”59 First the charges were read out loud. Tani stood straight and listened to all the items, almost, as one author noted, “nonchalantly.” Judge Ye then had the witnesses line up to give their testimony, and they all glared at Tani as if he were the devil.60 Judge Ye requested the author of A Record of Blood and Tears in the Fallen Capital, Guo Qi, to com­e in to testify. Before the war Guo had been a central military school official, but he could not get out of the city before the Japanese arrived and ended up stay­­ing for three months while the imperial army ransacked and occupied Nanjing. Guo wrote his book to detail his experiences and read in court for about an hour from the text’s relevant sections, as the audience grew angrier. There were also crowds outside the courtroom listen­­ing on loudspeaker. As others testified to the massacre, Tani claimed con­sistently that he com­manded his troops to maintain order and that he did not see any cause for alarm. When Tani uttered that com­ment, there was a roar of disapproval from the audience. He con­tinued to deny knowledge of the atrocities and his com­plicity.61 Tani listened politely to the testimony and admitted that it sounded horrific but claimed that not only had he not heard such things while in the field, his troops had not com­mitted those actions under his com­ mand. Prosecutors set up a screen and showed movies recorded at the time as proof. They hauled out articles from the British newspaper The Manchester Guardian, detail­­ing the killing. On March 3, 1947, Tani took the stand himself for the last day of his defense testimony in court. He said that he could not possibly be responsible for the entire massacre even if he had been in charge and declared that the charges were absurd. Chinese prosecutors responded that, even so, he was certainly a co-​ ­conspirator.62 After all the testimony, on March 10, 1947, Chief Justice Shi Meiyu told Tani that he was con­victed of kill­­ing POWs and civilians, raping, looting, and so forth, and Tani was handed the death sentence. The decision was lengthy but read out in full. The court announced it was follow­­ing precedent established by the Hague Military Rules of Engagement, protocols for the treatment of prisoners of war, articles

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con­cern­­ing war crimes, and criminal law.63 The crowd erupted in joy upon hear­­ing of Tani’s con­viction. On March 18, 1947, the court sent the verdict and proceedings to the KMT party leader for ratification. On April 26, 1947, at 11 a.m. Tani was taken from the Ministry of Defense war criminal prison and transported to the Yuhuatai district outside of Nanjing, the execu­­tion site, observed by a throng of 10,000. The verdict and charges were read out again, and Tani was asked if he wanted to admit his guilt. He sighed and handed over a small white bag to the prosecutor in which he said con­tained some of his hair, some fingernail clippings, and a poem. (For a proper Japanese Buddhist burial a piece of the deceased is required—​hair, bone, or some element.) Tani told them his address in Tokyo and asked that it be sent there to allow his soul to return home. He had also com­posed a last will in which he wrote that he tried his best to be a good Japanese man and work for the sake of the na­­tion even though he was mistakenly be­­ing put to death by the Chinese. He was certain his innocence would eventually be proven, and he pledged his love to his family and wife, wish­­ing her an eternal goodbye.64 There were enormous crowds at the execu­­tion site, and Tani’s legs supposedly gave out at the last moment so he had to be escorted to the site. He was executed with a shot to the back of the head.65 Images of Chinese executions in the popular American magazine Life were not supportive of the KMT means of public execution, and we can be reasonably sure that the CCP learned from such mistakes. The graphic pictures from the July 1947 issue show two Japanese war criminals, Captain Yonemura Harochi and Sergeant Shimota Jirō, leav­­ing the Shanghai prison in a large open-​bed truck with their hands tied behind their backs and placards with their names jutt­­ing upward. A set of explicit photographs of the two be­­ing driven to a large field where rows of Chinese anxiously waited and witnessed the execu­­tion shocked foreign readers and American officials in Japan. The attached article stated, “For more than two hours, while the truck carry­­ing the con­demned men rumbled through the hot Shanghai streets, a million Chinese swarmed after it, jeer­­ing and clapping.” KMT leaders were not pleased about the impact of the spectacle and reprimanded the unnamed general in charge.66 These pictures caused an already dubious American public to further debate the standards of justice be­­ing meted out at Chinese war crimes

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The execution of Tani Hisao. (Zhongyang ribao, April 27, 1947)

trials. Initially, U.S. officials proclaimed “these pictures and intercepts [Japanese repatriate accounts] do not con­stitute a sufficient basis to challenge the Chinese Government’s methods and procedures in the execu­­tion of its war crimes program.” In response to internal com­plaints about problems with Chinese war crimes trials and questions con­cern­ ­ing whether the United States should extradite Japanese prisoners, the

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In July 1947, Life magazine published graphic photographs of Japanese war criminals executed by the KMT in China. These images gave American leaders in occupied Japan pause in considering Chinese requests for extradition of former Japanese soldiers to the mainland. (Life, July 15, 1947)

SCAP Legal Sec­­tion responded to other departments that if they wanted to resolve these issues they needed to speak directly with the Joint Chiefs of Staff. However, the memo also noted that “the disadvantage of this course of ac­­tion lies in the fact that it might indicate to the Chinese that we lacked faith in their war crimes procedures or else did not wish to deliver Japanese to them because of the former high rank­­ing military posi­­tion these men held. This course of procedure would give them grounds to con­tend that SCAP was not desirous of punish­­ing high rank­­ing military war criminals and also that he [sic] was desirous of maintain­­ing the pre-​war military clique.”67

The 100-​Man Kill­­ing Con­test In the same tragic manner that the Nanj­­ing Massacre was an epochal moment for the Chinese public, the trial of a related atrocity ­supposedly

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perpetrated by Japanese soldiers against Chinese clearly represented post­ ­war Chinese aims to rectify past wrongs, even if the very nature of the event defied reason. Chief Justice of the Chinese military tribunals in Nanjing, Shi Meiyu, in a postwar interview “insisted that the ­nationalist

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Chinese gov­­ern­­ment tried but 2,000 out of one million Japanese invaders and executed only a few dozen. The kill­­ing con­test symbolized the entire Nank­­ing Incident. . . .” Yet, as Shi pointed out, “the Nank­­ing Incident was enormous. By execut­­ing these men we fully intended to make you [Japanese] understand what it meant to us.”68 The “kill­­ing con­test” incident remains a hallmark of Chinese historiography, given prominence not only in con­temporary school textbooks but in academic treatments of the era, includ­­ing Zhang Xianwen’s four-​volume history of the Chinese Republican era.69 The story of the “100-​man kill­­ing con­test” involved two Japanese soldiers, Sub-​lieutenants (Second Lieutenants) Mukai Toshiaki and Noda Tsuyoshi, who were featured in Japanese news articles in December 1937 as hav­­ing initiated a gruesome con­test to see who could be the first to cut down 100 Chinese with their swords. The Japanese news articles championed the fact that Mukai supposedly killed 106 Chinese to Noda’s 105, but vagaries between the report­­ing and the various news articles produced about the event, as well as the subsequent historical investigations into the incident, render it unclear if the killings took place on the way to Nanj­­ing or entirely at Purple Mountain, just outside the city. In fact, the veracity of the incident overall remains questionable due to the disputed details, the language used in the Japanese news articles, the actual positions of the two men in the imperial army, the fact that Japanese military swords do not have the tensile strength to kill that many people in one stroke, and numerous other gruesome reasons.70 Regardless, what is not disputed is that dur­­ing December 1937 Japanese military troops were fight­­ing their way toward the city of Nanj­­ing and the Japanese public was hungry for propagandistic stories about Japanese military might, Chinese cowardice, and victorious battles. The news gained prominence in the Japanese press at the time, but Chinese learned of this “contest” from an English-​language article that was published on December 7, 1937, in The Japan Advertiser under the headline, “Sub-​Lieutenants in Race to Fell 100 Chinese Runn­­ing Close Con­test.” Later a 1938 book by The Manchester Guardian journalist H.  J. Timperley, What War Means, educated a broader international audience about events in Nanj­­ing and the kill­­ing con­test.71 This con­test was widely publicized in the foreign and Japanese language press, and

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as the reportage of the killings reached a climax the imperial army became embroiled in what would com­e to be known as the Nanj­­ing Massacre. In this media whirlwind the twin incidents came to symbolize aggressive Japanese imperial warfare tactics and a hatred of the Chinese. Even after the imperial Japanese attack on Nanj­­ing and the city’s downfall, news about the “kill­­ing con­test” snowballed, and articles about the two soldiers as heroes of the war con­tinued in the Japanese press well into 1938. The incident received splashy atten­­tion in Noda’s hometown Kagoshima newspaper, and Noda’s father, a school principal, was delighted with the story, discuss­­ing it with everyone in town. The event then developed a history of its own after the initial publicity, becom­­ing emblematic of what imperial Japan wished to do or at least imagined was the imperial way of war. In a way different from the Tani Hisao and Sakai Takashi trials, which have been mostly relegated to the dustbin of memory, the “100-​man kill­­ing con­test” has led a vibrant historical life. The trial is closely linked with the Nanj­­ing Massacre in general and has the patina of legal precedent because of the Nanj­­ing war crimes trials; it is a moment con­sistently trumpeted in Chinese academic and journalistic treatises of wartime imperial Japanese behavior.72 The incident is still depicted in con­temporary Chinese textbooks, which con­tinue to propagate the incident as truth rather than emblematic of atrocious Japanese military con­duct and wartime propaganda. Because this event received prominent press at the time it was sanctified as a legal fact in a Chinese court, and the “contest” has gained stature as a pillar of history in China. In con­trast, Japanese textbooks usually do not discuss the incident in any fashion. This incident remains burned in the memory of Chinese schoolchildren due to the educa­­tion system. It inflames public passion in Japan in a con­trary way. In 2003 descendants of the two Japanese soldiers executed for the “100-​man kill­­ing con­test” sued several publishers along with Japanese journalist Honda Katsuichi for defama­­tion of character. Honda had first brought the “kill­­ing con­test” story to the forefront in postwar Japan with his interviews of Chinese at the scene.73 In 2006 the Japanese court rejected the plaintiffs’ argument and pronounced that even if they were uncomfortable with their families’ history they could not prove the incident did not occur, even though many now

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believe that the event was a partial fabrica­­tion by Japanese news com­ panies at the time. This was a fairly con­fus­­ing decision but turned on the fact that what the Japanese court was analyz­­ing was not the veracity of the historical atrocity but whether it was libelous to the reputa­­tion of the two executed Japanese soldiers. In Kasahara Tokushi’s reading, at the time the two Japanese soldiers involved did not seem disturbed at all about the incident or its reporting. Nor did they denounce the testimony at the time of its reporting, so to claim they were defamed had no legal standing. Kasahara asserts that the event most probably never took place, but there are unresolved problems with the incident, so we cannot definitively state that the report­­ing was a com­plete fabrication.74 Notwithstand­­ing the post-​trial historical debates, in 1947 the Chinese were con­v inced that they had the two Japanese soldiers dead to rights. As was the case with so many alleged war criminals, Noda and Mukai had long since repatriated to Japan and needed to be extradited, which the Chinese mission in Tokyo did by submitt­­ing a request to SCAP. The Chinese maintained that proof of the atrocities was in the oral testimony from other soldiers at the time and the news articles published in the Tokyo Nichi Nichi newspaper. On December 18, 1947, the actual indictment con­cerned only the kill­­ing con­test, which appeared to be con­fined to a con­test on Purple Mountain. The Chinese court stipulated that some of this report­­ing came from a foreign reporter present at the time, HJ Timperley, in evidence already submitted at the Tokyo War Crimes Trial, and related Japanese news articles. The court also maintained that the infamous photo of the two men in the Japanese newspaper with the cap­­tion extoll­­ing their “kill­­ing con­test” stood as evidence of a war crime. The court refuted the asser­­tion that a national newspaper of repute such as the Tokyo Nichi Nichi would have created this story, con­trary to the defendants’ claims. The court also rejected out of hand the idea that the two Japanese soldiers had gone along with the story as a means to boost their careers and in the case of Mukai to attract a wife because, the Chinese asserted, that seemed preposterous. Noda claimed that the author of the original Japanese article, Asami Kazuo, merely penned a tall tale in the hopes of receiv­­ing a prize back in Japan for such reporting, while Mukai also flatly denied the whole incident and claimed it was made up. The judge then showed them the infamous December 1937 photograph published in the Tokyo Nichi Nichi newspaper and asked where the photo originated. The defense

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countered that the image in ques­­tion from the newspaper appeared to have been shot in summer while the attack on Nanj­­ing occurred in December dur­­ing winter. It was a photograph of the two men, but it had noth­­ing to do with the supposed atrocity, they claimed. The judges disapproved of this defense tactic and suggested that the men could just have easily removed their outer coats in the heat of the moment so the photo did not really disprove it was taken dur­­ing a specific season. The court announced that kill­­ing POWs con­travened the Hague con­ ven­­tion and that murder­­ing unarmed civilians was a crime against civilization.75 The Chinese newspaper Zhongyang Ribao ran several items about the trial on December 11, as the process was about to start on December 18, 1947, in the Lishizhe Hall, the same venue as the trial of Tani Hisao. One article stated that investigators con­tinued their question­­ing of Noda and Mukai but that the soldiers’ attitudes remained “rude and boorish,” that the two had “hideous facial features,” and that they both com­pletely denied the charges. The two former Japanese soldiers refuted be­­ing at the locales where it was said they com­mitted the murders and “even went so far as to claim that the [Japanese] news articles were false, not based on fact and were com­pletely made up,” the Chinese newspaper informed its readers.76 Few in China at this point were disposed to believe the Japanese. What was significant at the time of the alleged event, and then introduced as evidence in the Nanj­­ing court, was that numerous Japanese papers, includ­­ing the Tokyo Nichi Nichi and Osaka Mainichi, promoted a sort of national orgiastic voyeurism though which readers could relive the Japanese imperial troops’ bloody con­quest on their way from Shanghai to Nanjing. In trial the two soldiers declared that they had alibis. They stated that they had not given the sort of interviews and testimony to newspapers that the news agencies reported. Noda and Mukai also stipulated that they were elsewhere when it was reported in the Japanese media that they were kill­­ing Chinese. Mukai produced an entry slip for his defense at trial to say that he was in the hospital then because he had been injured. However, Mukai’s hospitaliza­­tion did not show up in the official division record, and he stated in interviews in other news reports that he had never been hospitalized.77 Noda and Mukai were not tried alone but with a third man, Major Tanaka Gunkichi, who was charged with kill­­ing 300 Chinese people.

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Tanaka was arrested in Japan, was extradited in late April 1947, and by late May was be­­ing investigated in Nanjing. Tanaka also denied the charges but, the court produced a photograph of him behead­­ing a Chinese man and asked, “Tokyo newspapers showed pictures of you proclaim­­ing that you were very brave and a good soldier. Are you deny­ ­ing this photo?” Tanaka replied that the person in the photo looked a lot like him but was not. The prosecu­­tion then produced a book, Imperial Soldier, in which the story of Tanaka kill­­ing 300 Chinese with his special Japanese sword was extolled. He said that yes, the story was about him, but that he only killed in battle and certainly not 300 people.78 On September 20, 1947, the Chinese court indicted Tanaka for hav­­ing participated in wanton kill­­ing at Nanj­­ing while part of the Sixth Division under Tani Hisao’s direction. On December 18, 1947, the Nanj­­ing military tribunal tried all three men—​Noda, Mukai, and Tanaka—​together. As the others had, Tanaka denied all charges but admitted that he had killed Chinese in battle. He also claimed that the photo of him showed him wear­­ing light cloth­­ing but the invasion of Nanj­­ing was in December so the proof was inconsistent. He suggested that the photograph of him decapitat­­ing a Chinese man proved that he killed one person but certainly was not proof of slaughter­­ing 300 individuals. Judge Long Zhongyu waved away such con­cerns and counterarguments, maintain­­ing that “the defendant is putt­­ing forth a specious argument.”79 The KMT gov­­ern­­ment blanketed the city of Nanj­­ing with large posters of the verdict on January 27, 1948. The three men had been found guilty of kill­­ing POWs and unarmed Chinese civilians, accord­ ­ing to proven evidence in court, and they were to be sentenced to death. This decision was ratified by Chiang Kai-​shek, and at noon on the January 28 the sentence would be carried out at Yuhuatai, just outside of Nanjing.80 Mukai said he had a few things to state to the court: He respected the Ministry of Defense judges and hoped for eternal peace between Japan and China.81 In his last will he wrote “long live Japan” and “long live China.” He denied ever tak­­ing the lives of civilian prisoners or tak­­ing part in the Nanj­­ing Massacre and claimed that his spirit would serve as a protective guardian of Japan after his death.82 Kasahara Tokushi, a Japanese historian who has con­ducted extensive research and interviews con­cern­­ing this sober­­ing topic, rhetorically has asked if

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Japanese and other scholars have proved that such an incident as the “100-​man kill­­ing con­test” was primarily fiction, why do the Chinese insist, often with dubious texts or evidence, that it actually happened? To put it another way, given what we now know, why has this incident con­tinued to be treated as historical fact in Chinese (and Taiwanese) textbooks? Kasahara and other historians are not say­­ing that Mukai and Noda were innocent of kill­­ing Chinese or deny­­ing the fact that the two might have participated in atrocities, but they do assert that credible historians doubt both the veracity of the newspaper report­­ing in Japan at the time and the physical reality necessary to have implemented such a feat. In fact, many Chinese historians are somewhat duplicitous about this incident, choos­­ing to rightly disparage wartime Japanese news media for their biased and often untruthful report­­ing of World War II while somehow still maintain­­ing that the episode did occur based on the reports from these untrustworthy sources. It is somewhat ironic that Chinese did not generally believe Japanese media propaganda but used those very same newspapers as evidence in war crimes trials, a dubious double standard.83 Kasahara asserts that this duality of belief demonstrates that the event and its historical aftermath in Sino-​ Japanese relations have become iconic in show­­ing that the Japanese wanted not only to colonize China but to subdue it and crush it. In addition, because they were actions by the Japanese military against Chinese civilians and not in war but on the streets just to see how many Chinese could be killed, many believed the events generally symbolic of the imperial aims of the “Japanese devils.”84 At the time of the incident in December 1937 Mukai was twenty-​six and Noda was twenty-​five. A bulk of the testimony at their trial revolved around gruesome details con­cern­­ing whether a Japanese sword was useful for kill­­ing or merely ceremonial and whether it would even be able to stand up to cutt­­ing the heads off of so many. Testimony was introduced dur­­ing the trial that these two soldiers would not even have used swords or might not have carried such weapons all the time. The Japanese media dur­­ing the war made up all sorts of stories about Jap­ anese victories when imperial armed forces were retreat­­ing after 1943, so why should the court have believed so strongly what was published in 1937? Suzuki Akira, a Japanese historical revisionist, proposes in his book on the Nanj­­ing Massacre that this type of story was a wartime

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fabrica­­tion and therefore Noda and Mukai were unjustly charged and unfairly executed. The two soldiers’ com­ments so often appeared in this genre of news, a fact also con­tinuously dragged out in the Chinese court, that the com­ments have ironically become a key feature of Nan­ jing Massacre denier accounts. Other revisionists have claimed that because there was no solid evidence the Tokyo War Crimes Trial chose not to indict Noda and Mukai. However, historian Bob Wakabayashi in his clinical analysis of the event asserts that the occupa­­tion court “did not indict them because they were not charged with the A-​class war crimes that fell under its jurisdiction. So, the IMTFE [International Military Tribunal for the Far East] quite properly sent them to face B-​and C-​class war crimes trials at Nanking.”85 Kasahara affirms that much of what caused this story to sink into the Chinese public mind-​set was the support it received from the KMT propaganda bureau, which produced Witness Record of Japanese Atrocities (Riguan baox­­ing mujiji). The KMT collected informa­­tion on those who had been persecuted, been stolen from, been maimed, or seen such actions take place. These collated data were then produced at a roundtable discussion for the war of resistance propaganda plans as a reference book within the KMT. Subsequently, a record of that meet­­ing was published for public con­sumption.86 Kasahara believes not only that the image of the “100-​man kill­­ing con­test” was a partial propaganda crea­­tion but also that the transla­­tion of the Chinese propaganda into English shifted the idea of Japanese com­bat against the Chinese military into just attack­­ing “Chinese” and turned the image of “hand-​ to-​hand com­bat” on the battlefield into merely “killing.” These misappropriations, com­bined with the push of the publica­­tion from one of the higher organs of the KMT, made the scenario more believable. Chinese forgeries of Japanese “imperial” documents for propaganda purposes were not new. In fact, a similar forgery of a Japanese imperial memorial to the emperor, later known to the world as the “Tanaka memorial” after its supposed author Prime Minister Tanaka Giichi, had a long shelf life as an instigator of an international con­spiratorial understand­­ing of Japan’s aims in East Asia. Hattori Ryūji’s work on the history of the Tanaka memorial in China demonstrates that even though it was a bogus text many Chinese sectors still hold it to be authentic. The July 25, 1927, document was supposedly a memorial

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from Tanaka, who died in 1929, to the emperor. Tanaka was a powerful and well-​k nown Japanese figure; he had already served as army minister, was member of the Rikken Seiyūkai party, and later stood as prime minister and foreign minister at the same time from 1927 to 1929. What made the forgery a bit more believable was not only did it appear to have been produced within the same KMT bureau but just a few months prior in 1927 at a meet­­ing in Tokyo called the Tōhō kaigi, the Far Eastern Meeting, Tanaka presented the draft of a plan con­cern­­ing how Japan should deal with China. Tanaka’s outline was not a plan for world domina­­tion but more a political policy paper. However, the later forgery of his supposed memorial to the emperor about Japan’s true aims in East Asia has, in the words of Hattori Ryūji, “come to symbolize the historical estrangement within Sino-​Japanese historical con­ sciousness.”87 There were several critical historical mistakes in the Tanaka memorial that clearly demonstrated it a fake, but the fact that the message overlapped with Japan’s general aims to militarily subdue China coincided with the belief elsewhere that the memorial was genuine. It was frequently mentioned in wartime American propaganda films and appeared, at least initially, to have motivated the prosecu­­tion in the Tokyo War Crimes Trial. UK officials insisted that it was a fake from the start, but historians in the Soviet Union tended to believe it. KMT propaganda about Japanese actions in China does not obviate Japanese wartime responsibility, but the process shows how specific issues or incidents became linked to the public image of the Japanese imperial military in China. What is important to note, and in this manner the forgery coincides with Kasahara’s statement con­cern­­ing the ambiguity surround­­ing the “100-​man kill­­ing con­test,” was how the event was employed in Chinese Nationalist propaganda. The Tanaka memorial was first produced as an actual pamphlet in the summer of 1929 in China. Soon after, it appeared in English in the United States. Hattori sees the historical debate over the forgery as symptomatic of diplomatic relations between Japan and others that shaped the manner in which they viewed the memorial. Even though essentially proven to be a fake, many theories of its provenance remain strong in Taiwan and China.88 Much like the heated historical exchanges con­cern­­ing the Nanj­­ing Massacre and the result­­ing 1980s textbook friction, when Chinese officials criticized

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the Japanese Ministry of Educa­­tion for allow­­ing revisionist history textbooks to water down imperial Japanese history and the atrocities, political actors frequently br­­ing forth the Tanaka memorial as a means of express­­ing what was be­­ing done to China and how history was be­­ing forgotten because Japan had wanted formerly to subdue China.89 Kasahara links the propaganda and misunderstandings with the BC class trials because “the act of met­­ing out justice for Japanese war crimes was underscored through the adjudica­­tion of the ‘100-man kill­­ing con­ test’ at the Nanj­­ing trial under the aegis of the KMT’s Ministry of Defense.”90

Justice by Other Means: The Trial of Okamura Yasuji From the outset, Com­munist leaders at Yenan, the CCP stronghold in northwest China, had declared that China Expeditionary Imperial Army General Okamura Yasuji was the top war criminal, above General Tōjō Hideki and Emperor Hirohito. For a long time Okamura rested outside of the law, and the number of com­plaints to the KMT rose precipitously. Eventually, the Nationalist authorities initiated the inevitable tribunal of the former Japanese imperial military leader. On July 7, 1948, the Chinese Ministry of Defense sent Okamura notice to appear in court. However, accord­­ing to a few mainland sources, the special envoy of KMT General He Yingqin, Major General Cao Shicheng, supposedly went to Okamura and explained that Chiang Kai-​shek and Com­mander He were pleased with how Okamura helped out after Japan’s surrender so the trial would just be a formality.91 After many twists and turns, on January 26, 1949, a Chinese Nationalist Special Military Tribunal handed down a verdict of “not guilty” to Okamura. After hav­­ing been in legal and political limbo for three and a half years in Nanj­­ing since Japan’s surrender in August 1945, a few days follow­­ing the end of his trial Okamura boarded an American ship and repatriated to Japan a free man. As discussed earlier, Okamura became infamous not only for hav­­ing com­manded Japanese troops in China but also because he was the architect of the imperial forces’ “three all” policy in China in which the

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g­ eneral aim to unseat Chinese opposi­­tion resorted to a policy to “kill all, loot all and burn all.”92 Okamura was also one of the earlier military leaders to raise the idea of us­­ing “comfort women” to maintain military order. While historical atten­­tion may have shifted away from Okamura, in the immediate postwar period he was intimately familiar to many of the men who ran the Chinese Nationalist military because they had studied in the same military educa­­tion system in Japan. Chiang Kai-​ shek briefly shared a similar alma mater, and Generals Tang Enbo and He Yingqin, along with others, studied as Japanese cadets or trained in similar preparatory schools.93 Mutual educational values and shared train­­ing between KMT and Japanese military elite notwithstanding, the Nationalist Chinese also needed to use Japanese military officials and troops after the war to maintain order in many areas to keep them from fall­­ing into Com­munist hands. Such unusual procedures throughout areas formerly con­trolled by the imperial Japanese allowed Okamura a measure of freedom over other high-​level officials who surrendered in American-​managed areas around the former empire. This included individuals such as General Yamashita Tomoyuki in the Philippines. As the trials of his lower-​rank­­ing officers were tak­­ing place, Okamura Yasuji was treated specially. He had been in con­tact with Chiang Kai-​ shek and discussed that what a strong new China needed was arms, military expertise, and assistance. For Okamura it was the apex of irony that Japan lost the war and surrendered to Chiang’s forces, but KMT leaders and others assessed the actual outcome quite differently, even if later history books challenged such an interpretation. Japan had been defeated in the South Pacific and on its home islands by the Americans, but China was another matter. The Japanese defeat in China took place under entirely different circumstances, former imperial officers argued. From the beginn­­ing U.S. military leaders were opposed to Okamura be­­ing allowed to play any major role in liaison duties in China, but General He Yingqin is supposed to have defended this decision and said, “Although dur­­ing the war he was our enemy, now that the war is over we believe Okamura can become a reliable friend.” 94 SCAP archives show that U.S. authorities repeatedly requested the KMT expatriate Okamura to Japan to testify at the Tokyo War Crimes Trial but were con­sistently rebuffed and told that he was too sick to travel.95

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China’s Quid Pro Quo with Japan While the KMT was keen to try certain alleged Japanese war criminals and to identify Chinese traitors, it was seemingly most lenient with Okamura Yasuji.96 Dur­­ing the first few years of the postwar the Okamura ques­­tion frequently arose, and debate grew at various KMT proceedings con­cern­­ing whether to charge him with war crimes. Those present, such as Major General Cao Shicheng, said that before the Okamura trial there was one specific meet­­ing of officials from the Ministry of Justice, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the military that gathered to discuss Okamura’s case. Everyone felt that he was guilty and should be imprisoned for life; supposedly only Major General Cao stood up and said Okamura should be released.97 As the American occupa­­tion forces in Japan pushed for the so-​called “reverse course” in 1947, shift­­ing from try­­ing to democratize the country to help­­ing it out economically as a bulwark against a potential Com­ munist threat, CCP leaders grew worried that the United States would also help Japan militarily rearm. On October 10, 1947, Mao announced that the CCP opposed outside assistance to help Japan rise again because the party viewed U.S. efforts to bolster the KMT and support Japan as part of a larger American strategy to demolish Com­munist China.98 On the same day the Com­munist authorities announced that their goal was to “arrest, try and punish other civil war criminals, start­­ing with Chiang Kai-​shek.”99 The battle for postwar justice had leaked over from the Japanese trials into internal Chinese struggles for political and military dominance on the mainland. A little over a year later, on December 25, 1948, the CCP released a longer inventory of whom it con­sidered a war criminal—​K MT General He Yingqin and General Yan Xishan were listed, as were other KMT military luminaries. Accord­­ing to Chinese military Chief Justice Shi Meiyu, the actual trial proceedings of Okamura’s military tribunal were unusual and had the trappings of a kangaroo court. Shi told the other judges that he had been ordered by the Ministry of Defense to reopen the Okamura trial after it had been temporarily adjourned. The second trial may have been con­ducted in haste at the behest of the Ministry of Defense, but all the judges strongly agreed that Okamura was guilty. At a closed meet­­ing in chambers, Shi took out two documents to show the other

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judges. One was from the act­­ing president of China, Li Zongren, and the other was from General Tang Enbo. Both telegrams laid out the case that Okamura held immense value for the future of the Nationalist Party’s goals in China and declared, “Prisoner Okamura Yasuji is of use, please find him not guilty.” Judge Shi Meiyu then also pulled out a sheet of paper from a set of documents that had the verdict “not guilty” written on it. The verdict already had the stamp of the new head of the Ministry of Defense, Xu Yongchang, mean­­ing that the decision had been made ahead of time without con­sult­­ing the judicial branch.100 Regardless of who stood up for Okamura within the Chinese administration, he did have strong supporters, and after the verdict of “not guilty,” within days the KMT began talk­­ing about the repatria­­tion of Japanese war criminals from China to Japan. Originally the plan to return Japanese war criminals who had been tried in Chinese courts and have them finish their sentences at Sugamo Prison was supposed to be a highly secret maneuver. Naval Lieutenant Com­mander Zhong Hanbo, a liaison military attaché with the Chinese mission in Tokyo, was partly charged with the task. Zhong joined the boat at the Chinese docks and picked up the con­v icted Japanese war criminals, escort­­ing them under U.S. supervision to Sugamo.101 In his memoirs of the occupa­­tion Zhong says that he was told there were some 260 individuals judged by KMT courts to be war criminals and that they would be repatriated along with Okamura Yasuji. There were no cars for transport, and trucks were in short supply, hav­­ing been requisitioned in the war against the CCP. In the end, the only way to transfer the prisoners was to require them to walk from the prison to the port. Finally, after negotiations the Chinese Nationalists were allowed to use U.S. military buses. On January 30, 1949, the Japanese boarded buses that drove them to the Number 6 wharf in Shanghai.102 Zhong checked off each prisoner from a list with correspond­­ing photographs, then handed responsibility to the U.S. gov­­ern­­ment for con­vey­ ­ing the men to Japan. They were all doused with DDT for disinfec­­tion and directed to their quarters. The John Weeks departed at 10 p.m. and arrived a few days later at Yokohama, Japan. Zhai Qiang suggests that MacArthur’s office in Japan pressured the KMT to release Okamura Yasuji, though the evidence is far from ­con­clusive. Zhai cites only a February 4, 1949, internal CCP memo,

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which accused MacArthur of this behavior and requested that Okamura and the other repatriated Japanese war criminals be turned over to PLA or CCP officials for the administra­­tion of “proper justice.”103 The CCP stated again that it reserved the right to prosecute Okamura and the others and claimed that MacArthur had released these criminals without proper authoriza­­tion (shanzi shifang).104 Okamura’s release from China was so abrupt that the CCP in Beij­­ing at first telegraphed KMT president Li Zongren in Nanj­­ing to demand Okamura’s return for a com­munist trial; they were informed that he had already departed. CCP officials then supposedly sent another cable to the Chinese mission in Tokyo, addressed to Shang Zhen, to request that Okamura be repatriated to Beij­­ing to face a “real” trial.105 Neither the KMT nor the American officials paid any heed to the missive. On January 26, 1949 the CCP news mouthpiece Xinhua published a second list of war criminals after the KMT courts declared Okamura not guilty. The KMT was not com­pletely derelict in its duties, even if the CCP wished to portray it as such. The party aimed to calibrate public opinion, not only domestically but also internationally, con­cern­­ing how Chinese and others reacted to the war crimes trials of Japanese throughout East Asia. A fascinat­­ing document tucked into the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs archives of the Nationalist gov­­ern­­ment, on its last legs before flee­­ing for Taiwan, provides further insight into the issue of how postwar Japanese dealt with the war crimes trials. The document was an “Investiga­­tion of Japanese views on war crimes trials,” submitted from the Chinese mission in Japan to the central gov­­ern­­ment in Nan­ jing dur­­ing July 1949. The report began by stat­­ing that all but a small majority of Japanese were no longer focused on war crimes trials. Japanese citizens paid atten­­tion dur­­ing the Tokyo Trial and approved that those “responsible” for the war had paid the price, but once those trials were com­pleted and time passed the report observed that “Japanese emotional involvement has on average gradually cooled over time and people now generally exhibit little interest.”106 The situa­­tion was worse for the lesser war crimes trials, the report explained. The investiga­­tion of Japanese attitudes revealed that by November 1948, when seven A class Japanese war criminals were declared guilty and remanded for execution, people mostly agreed with the sentences but felt that the moment for BC class crimes had already passed. Surely such trials encouraged the Japanese to con­template their

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plight, but Japan had already lost; the report’s authors wrote, “How much more could they reflect?” Grand issues of national defense, con­ spiracies, and political crimes surpassed the average person’s capacity to com­prehend. The report con­cluded by ask­­ing why the lessons of the Tokyo Trial had not filtered down to the Japanese masses. The biggest reason, the Chinese mission’s analysts suggested, stemmed from the Soviet-​U.S. con­flict at the start of the proceedings. The start of the Cold War, the KMT analysts reasoned, created a schizophrenic Japanese attitude toward the trials. The goal of the trials was no longer to “warn off war mongers and eradicate aggressive war ideologies to build a world of peace.” Rather, the trials showed that without a change in international realpolitik the Japanese learned that they maintained little con­trol over their own situation; thus, from the outset the pursuit of justice had been perverted.107 In many ways it was a very prescient con­clusion. CCP criticism about the KMT’s brisk management of Japanese war criminals and their sudden repatria­­tion to Japan in early 1949 provoked a voluble stream of public outbursts. Originally, it seems the U.S. Embassy in Nanj­­ing received a message from the CCP that Com­ munist leaders wanted Okamura back. This message was relayed to the Department of State, which sent it on to SCAP in Tokyo. This was a tricky international jurisdictional issue, one that the CCP understood emotionally but appeared unable to grasp legally. The memorandum of agreement between the Chinese mission in Tokyo, which represented the Nationalist gov­­ern­­ment, and the G-​3 sec­­tion of the American Occupa­­tion gov­­ern­­ment of Japan in Tokyo was reached on January 21, 1949, and stipulated that once the repatriat­­ing Japanese war criminals stepped on board the vessel they were under the jurisdic­­tion of SCAP and China no longer had any authority. The CCP believed this was unacceptable because it averred that it was the rightful representative of the Chinese na­­tion by early 1949. An American memo for the record from January 31, 1949, demonstrates that the Chinese mission in Tokyo was at first uncomfortable with SCAP’s initial press release over the repatria­­tion of Japanese war criminals from China. The mission stated that the American press release made it sound as if China asked SCAP to repatriate the criminals in “a tricky move on the part of the Nationalists to circumvent this demand of the Com­munists.”108 CCP peace demands with the KMT

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included the turnover of Japanese war criminals as part of the negotiations, which demonstrated how important it was for both Chinese political parties to utilize the postwar legal adjudica­­tion of Japanese war criminals as a form of what I would describe as the theater of judg­­ing Japanese war criminality. There was a palpable American fear regard­­ing what could happen to Japanese prisoners in the hands of the Com­ munists. A January 1949 secret SCAP report, investigated with Japanese assistance, detailed the “Communistic Indoctrina­­tion of Japanese Prisoners of War in the USSR and a Study of Its Counter-​Measures,” prepared by the Maizuru Repatria­­tion Center in the far west of Japan. An internal memo to the report said the com­mand­­ing officer at the repatria­­tion center stated that the Soviets “are mak­­ing an all out effort to com­munize Japanese prisoners of war prior to their be­­ing repatriated to Japan,” and the analysis assessed that the Russian efforts were fairly successful. SCAP suggested, “There is an urgent need for a counter-​ propaganda group or re-​orienta­­tion sec­­tion of selected Japanese nationals at the Repatria­­tion Center to study and devise ways and means of de-​ communiz­­ing the repatriates and to indoctrinate them with the facts as con­cerns Japan and the Occupation.”109 In some ways the law had failed everyone in the Okamura case. Initially at the end of the war the United States had not even wanted the Chinese to manage their own war crimes trials of the Japanese and had begun American trials in Shanghai of Japanese soldiers responsible for execut­­ing downed pilots who had flown air raids over Japan.110 Once the U.S. gov­­ern­­ment accepted that Chinese war crimes trials were a fait accompli it did not give quarter to the idea that the KMT would be bettered by CCP trials. The memo con­cluded, “We believe SCAP would be placed in an untenable posi­­tion were we to allow those acquitted individuals to be used as political footballs on the basis of demands made by Chinese Com­munists who obviously are fann­­ing this incident for political purposes.” The United States was aware of the potential political fallout, however, in not­­ing there were rumors in China that SCAP planned to employ Japanese troops and that Okamura would be used in this formation. Because KMT General Yan Xishan in Shanxi Province had utilized Japanese troops against the CCP it was not far-​ fetched to see how the CCP believed it to be a SCAP policy.111 On February 2, 1949, when asked on what legal grounds China repatriated

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Japanese war criminals to Japan, SCAP legal advisor Captain Alva Carpenter replied to a journalist that the decision was made by General MacArthur himself and probably “for humanitarian and political reasons.” Carpenter elucidated that MacArthur “said that should Jap war criminals fall into the hands of China Com­mies, the latter might give the improper treatment or take undesirable measures to deal with them for publicity purposes such as free­­ing them from any restraint.” Carpenter went on to say there was no real legal basis perhaps for such a decision, but the Philippine gov­­ern­­ment had made a similar request to return Japanese war criminals last year, so precedent existed.112 A con­fidential memo from SCAP’s Chief of the Diplomatic section, William J. Sebald, on February 26, 1949, states that the matter of the transfer of Okamura and others to Tokyo was not as embarrass­­ing as one might believe: Basically, ques­­tion of transfer of war criminals from China arose pursuant to request by the Chinese gov­­ern­­ment through Chinese mission in Japan. When agreement was reached between SCAP and Chinese mission, repatria­­tion vessel was despatched to Shanghai with instructions to br­­ing to Japan con­victed war criminals. Chinese authorities in Shanghai requested permission to also repatriate Okamura and eight additional acquitted Japanese. Officer in charge on repatria­­tion vessel requested instructions in premises, and was given permission by radio also accepted Okamura and his acquitted com­panions as repatriates.113 The memo con­tinued, specifically respond­­ing to CCP requests: We believe that grave injustice would be done by adop­­tion of the ex post facto proposi­­tion that Okamura and his acquitted com­ panions should now be returned to Chinese jurisdic­­tion by reason of a principle of Chinese law which seeks to eradicate an acquittal by a duly con­stituted court, under the theory of review of court’s findings by higher authority.114 Okamura’s trial was clearly linked to the rather fragile political situa­ ­tion in China as the Com­munists were advanc­­ing toward the Nationalist

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stronghold. On April 23, 1949, the CCP army occupied Nanjing, so Okamura’s trial had truly been delayed until the last possible moment and the Japanese prisoners returned in the nick of time. The KMT’s rationale was that it did not want the CCP to be able to replay the court of justice it believed it had already implemented.

Wind­­ing Down Not only did the KMT start to wind down its trials by the late 1940s, but SCAP authorities in Japan also were beginn­­ing to face up to what havoc full pursuit of war criminals would wreak if trials similar to the Tokyo War Crimes Trial con­tinued as originally con­ceived. In March 1947 MacArthur asked historian Hugh Borton to start think­­ing about draft­­ing a peace treaty with Japan but one that mirrored the terms dictated at Potsdam, con­tain­­ing articles maintain­­ing the sentences of the war criminals.115 As Higurashi Yoshinobu discovered, the Supreme Com­mander for the Allied Forces was runn­­ing into problems with the war criminal issue. The Allies had planned, in theory, a series of A class war crimes trials, but things moved at such a glacial pace in the first trial that by May 12, 1947, MacArthur realized that Japanese prisoners await­­ing trial were start­­ing to cause problems for the Occupation’s goals; keep­­ing them incarcerated was go­­ing against what the Occupa­­ tion was try­­ing to achieve—​it ran counter to the very idea of democratic justice. This torpor was a similar problem to what the CCP would face, but its goal was entirely different so leaders were not as bothered.116 By the summer of 1947 both the American army and the State Department were fairly dismissive of con­tinu­­ing trials along the lines of a Nuremberg or Tokyo style of international war crimes tribunal. At first, this did not mean that the pursuit of war criminals was over, just that the format for a trial was under discussion. At the same time the Japanese Foreign Ministry was look­­ing into the war criminals issue, and in June 1947 it launched an investiga­­tion com­mittee to further examine the matter. Tokyo Trial American prosecutor Joseph Keenan was worried that if the trials of war criminals dragged on too long the tribunals would lose their effect on the population, potentially caus­­ing a rise in anti-​Americanism.117 On the Chinese side the KMT ended its pursuit of Japanese war criminals due to military exigencies, but western

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Allies fared little better. Members of the Far Eastern Com­mission, a body of eleven nations that was supposed to direct the occupa­­tion of Japan, decided in early 1949 that “no further trial of Japanese war criminals should be initiated. . . .” The Tokyo Trial would be the first and last tribunal of A class Japanese war criminals. The com­mission also announced that BC class offenses needed to have their investigations com­pleted by June 1949 and trials com­pleted by September 1949. These were not mandatory orders but suggestions from the com­mission.118 On May 15, 1950, the Chinese Com­munist’s Minister for Foreign Affairs Zhou Enlai issued the first of many proclamations denounc­­ing MacArthur for releas­­ing Japanese war criminals early, stat­­ing that such a move con­travened the spirit of international law and postwar agreements.119 A September 3, 1950, People’s Daily editorial stated that while the day was the five-​year anniversary of the world defeat­­ing fascism, history had not resolved Japan’s imperial intentions in Asia or eradicated Japan’s ability to rise again. America had now taken Japan’s place as the imperial hegemon in East Asia, the paper noted, and the United States had colonized Japan, turn­­ing it into a base for its military. The CCP media organ suggested that Japan needed to separate itself from the United States and unite with other Asians, which was a fascinat­­ing repeti­­tion of what Japanese wartime propaganda had enunciated but in a slightly different way.120 Com­munist party Supreme Court Chief Justice Shen Junru, in a September 6, 1951, speech at a con­ference on international labor law, discussed the issue of crimes against humanity and crimes against peace, express­­ing his belief that the United States was us­­ing Japanese war criminals to prepare for another war.121 By the time war exploded on the Korean peninsula in the summer of 1950, improper pursuit of Japanese war criminals came to signify CCP international isola­­tion and represent how America was distort­­ing the potential for peace in East Asia. Even before the war a movement to “oppose American support of Japan” (fanmei furi yundong) had arisen in newly Com­munist China, which had announced the establishment of a new nation, the People’s Republic of China, on October 1, 1949. CCP publications vented that the imperialist American purpose of us­­ing Japan as an anti-​Soviet and anti-​Communist platform in East Asia had monopolized the occupa­­tion of Japan. Moreover, because China had suffered the most under Japanese aggression many mainland Chinese

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found it stood to reason that they should have a much larger say in the postwar resolutions of the San Francisco peace treaty, to which neither the CCP nor the KMT was allowed to be a signatory na­­tion in 1951.122 CCP leaders insisted that plans for East Asia’s future should “completely eradicate Japanese reactionary forces, and guarantee China’s right to exist;” Com­munist China wanted an equal say in the peace process, it announced.123 The CCP would have to wait a few more years before be­­ing able to implement its own war crimes trials and to gain the equal international footprint on the war crimes issue its leaders so cherished.

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Political Expediency and Japanese Imperial Assistance Gather round while I sing you of Wernher von Braun, A man whose allegiance Is ruled by expedience. Call him a Nazi, he won’t even frown. “Nazi, Schmazi,” says Wernher von Braun. . . . You too may be a big hero, Once you’ve learned to count backwards to zero. “In German oder English I know how to count down, Und I’m learning Chinese,” says Wernher von Braun. —​Tom Lehrer

The

u.s. g ov ­­er n­­men t often cozied up to its former enemies and found them crucial employment when technological exigencies of the Cold War demanded.1 The story of American recruitment of Nazi scientists is well known, so it should com­e as no surprise that the Chinese Nationalists (KMT) were equally culpable of patriotic duplicity when it came to the former Japanese enemy.2 The Americans marshaled a special military program, Opera­­tion Paperclip, to recruit former Nazi scientists to the United States not only to improve Amer­­ ican technology but also to keep it from leak­­ing into the USSR and the United Kingdom.3 While the KMT was keen to identify Japanese imperial officers who could offer strategic assistance, the Nationalists could not muster a com­parative scale of maneuvers to the Americans.4 What is immediately clear from the redrawn lines of power in postwar East Asia is that in early 1949 when former Japanese imperial 185

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army general Okamura Yasuji was declared not guilty by one of the last KMT military tribunals to adjudicate Japanese war crimes, KMT leaders realized other uses for some war criminals. Not all of them were to be employed as evidence of the Chinese Nationalists’ efforts to propagandize their implementa­­tion of international law. Okamura and the former Japanese imperial military’s direct impact on the postwar stature of the Chinese Nationalist stronghold of Taiwan remains to be more fully debated, but the con­tours of the narrative are already visible.5 At times, a pragmatic KMT policy of us­­ing former Japanese soldiers to defend against the encroach­­ing Chinese Com­munist Party forces seemed the better op­­tion than legal pursuit of Japanese war crimes. Several months after Okamura’s early 1949 return to Japan, KMT military leaders visited him in the hospital where he was con­ valesc­­ing to ask if he would take part in an unusual scheme to assist his former enemy. KMT military and political leaders wanted Okamura’s help to push the Com­munist tide back and aid Chiang Kai-​shek to retake the mainland.6 Even though racked by ill health Okamura readily agreed. Along with a handful of other former Japanese military officers, Okamura helped establish the baituan or White Group. From the autumn of 1949, while Japan was still occupied by the Allies, which supposedly made foreign travel illegal for Japanese and especially so for former imperial officers, the members of the White Group secretly traveled back and forth to the island of Taiwan with the aim to rebuild, rearm, and retrain the Chinese Nationalist military so that it could eventually mount an attack on the Chinese mainland and con­quer the Com­munists.7 The membership included some eighty Japanese former officers who trained, depend­­ing on whose memoirs one reads, 10,000 to 20,000 Nationalist soldiers. These activities con­tinued until 1969. Okamura’s trial in China may have been con­ducted in haste at the behest of the Ministry of Defense, but all the judges strongly agreed that Okamura was guilty of war crimes. Despite the shaky legal grounds of Okamura’s sentence, what is strik­­ing is that the Americans early on understood, at least in part, the potential for a KMT–Japanese military rapprochement. A memo from the head military advisor of the British mission in Tokyo on December 28, 1949, con­firms that the United Kingdom and GHQ (the United States) were much more aware from early on about Japanese efforts in both China and Taiwan—​detract­­ing

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from the Japanese belief that they were pull­­ing the wool over the West’s eyes. The memo, from Brigadier AK Ferguson, details his con­versa­­tion with American Major General Charles Willoughby, Assistant Chief of Staff of the G-​2 section, regard­­ing Japanese officers work­­ing for both sides in the Chinese civil war. Willoughby con­firmed the UK officer’s suspicions but said that no real Japanese officer of any stand­­ing was work­­ing with the Chinese Nationalists and that the Japanese had mostly participated in independent groups because Chinese would not work under them. UK officials wanted to know if the United States would give “moral support” to Japanese leav­­ing Japan to help the Nationalists. Willoughby “replied categorically, ‘No, it would be too dangerous.’ ” But if some Japanese did assist the Nationalists, that would be fine, he intimated, which suggests the Americans knew but turned a blind eye.8 In March 1950, only months before the outbreak of the Korean War, U.S. General Douglas MacArthur supposedly warned Okamura if he were to go to Taiwan to train men to fight the CCP that such acts were against the law and if discovered the United States would prosecute. This declara­­tion ended up be­­ing mere rhetoric; occupa­­tion authorities never moved forward with any prosecu­­tion or investigation.9 By the late summer of 1949, U.S. policy toward Taiwan was at a crossroads, and it is possible that without the erup­­tion of the Korean War in the summer of 1950 the island would not have received the atten­­tion the U.S. military eventually bestowed on it.10 Given that the KMT was unsure of American attitudes toward the future of Nationalist rule, support clearly had to be secured elsewhere. Former Japanese imperial soldiers filled this potential power vacuum. The fact that the KMT was in the process of retreat­­ing from mainland China and ced­ ­ing political con­trol to Mao’s Com­munist forces only com­pounded fear con­cern­­ing the KMT’s uncertain future. Chinese Nationalist con­cerns meant that the KMT was con­tinually employ­­ing a variety of measures to secure success. The White Group was not the first group of Japanese military experts the KMT employed postwar. KMT officer Wen Qiang supervised his own men and Japanese to go into the Changbai mountains in northeast China to persuade not-​yet-​surrendered Japanese to lay down their arms in October 1946. Wen also arranged for some suspected Japanese war criminals to be released to work on the KMT side.

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This group included Colonel Tsuji Masanobu, a disciple of General Ishiwara Kanji.11 The KMT organized a number of Japanese military soldiers back in Tokyo to form the Oriental Cultural Research Associa­ ­tion as a postwar Chinese front to secure better relations with Japan. But with the KMT defeat on the mainland the plans came to naught.12 The White Group therefore belonged to a panoply of groups employed to work in or for Nationalist China against the Com­munists. Follow­ ­ing the resump­­tion of diplomatic relations with Taiwan in 1952, Japanese Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru even drafted his own plan to assist U.S. intelligence activities against Com­munist China.13 This revamped postwar Sino-​Japanese relationship provided an out­­let for former imperial Japanese soldiers explicitly to repay Chiang Kai-​ shek. Chiang’s broadcast to the Chinese people to be benevolent toward the Japanese and not seek retribu­­tion was delivered almost simultaneously with the Japanese imperial broadcast of its own surrender in August 1945. The Chinese phrase that Chiang employed, “yi de bao yuan,” is taken from the Con­fucian analects and essentially means “to repay malevolence with benevolence,” which certainly did not con­tradict Chiang’s own Christian beliefs of “turn­­ing the other cheek.”14 His mix of Con­fucian ethics, Christian teachings, and political savvy made for a very effective policy toward the recently defeated Japanese.15 The day Japan proclaimed surrender, Chiang announced that he “would not dwell upon Japan’s past wrongs” (bunian jiue), for the Japanese military clique, not the Japanese people, was China’s enemy.16 The KMT had initiated a wartime policy of treat­­ing Japanese POWs well to turn them against their own empire, and it worked somewhat effectively—​there was no reason for a similar policy not to evolve after the war.17 Maintain­ ­ing KMT party unity was an utmost priority, but so was reeducat­­ing the Japanese POWs. Internal KMT discussions quickly ensued con­cern­­ing the need to send instructors to where the Japanese were encamped to “guide” them and teach them the doctrine of Sun Yat-​sen’s “democratic principles.”18 It is worth not­­ing how much Chiang Kai-​shek’s magnanimity was in discord with prevail­­ing public opinion among other Allies. In the United States, by December 1944 33 percent of the popula­­tion wished to eradicate Japan as a country and 13 percent wanted all Japanese dead. Suggestions for how to deal with the Japanese included turn­­ing them over to the Chinese (because many assumed Chinese justice would

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be harsher if not merely just punitive, a com­mon fallacy at the time), tortur­­ing them to death in a slow and painful manner, putt­­ing Japanese leaders in foxholes and throw­­ing bombs at them, and other violent choices.19 Only 4 percent of Americans demonstrated any willingness to judge Japanese leaders under the terms of international law. In mainland China, the postwar political and economic exigencies meant that Chinese Nationalist leaders could not fall prey to the same whims of fancy con­cern­­ing revenge that initially inflamed American passions to seek payback for the “sneak attack” on Pearl Harbor. In fact, at the early part of 1949 memory of the war against the Japanese seems to have been quickly replaced in the minds of high-​level KMT staff with con­flict against the Chinese Com­munists. In con­versations between Okamura and KMT General He Shili, when the topic turned to World War II, He remarked, “Let’s just let bygones be bygones.” Many KMT military officials wished to focus on the military crisis of the moment: the Nationalists’ desire to fight the CCP and retake the mainland.20 To this end KMT Major General Cao Shicheng led several other members of the Republic of China diplomatic mission to Japan and approached Okamura and several other high-​rank­­ing former imperial Japanese army officers in July 1949 to start up a group of Japanese officers to assist the Nationalists against the CCP. Major General Cao and his men brought a message from Chiang Kai-​shek to the effect that the civil war was not go­­ing well for the KMT. Nationalist military and political leaders were plann­­ing on retreat­­ing to Taiwan and reorganiz­­ing for a future assault on the mainland. While regroup­ ­ing to retake mainland China, Chiang requested the help of old former imperial military “colleagues,” those Japanese who had trained and studied with their Chinese fellow students at prewar Japanese military schools.21 Several former members of the White Group claimed that Okamura’s release from a serious war crimes trial in China was a quid pro quo for promis­­ing such a team to Chiang in return for his freedom and repatriation. Whatever the exact circumstances, the result was that four former Japanese imperial officers, General Okamura Yasuji, Lieutenant Colonel Ogasawara Kiyoshi, Lieutenant General Sumita Raishirō and Lieutenant General Sogawa Jirō, banded together and sought out other former imperial officers to staff the White Group. Japanese participants adopted Chinese aliases to throw the American

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occupa­­tion authorities off the scent. The group took its moniker from the surname of its first leader, former Japanese imperial army Major General Tomita Naosuke, whose Chinese alias was “Bai Hongliang.” The Chinese word for “white” is bai and “group” is tuan, so the group was called baituan. In various con­versions from Chinese to Japanese it was also known as paidan and similar corruptions. The other reason the White Group was chosen as the nom de guerre for the group was because white stood in opposi­­tion to the red color of Com­munism.22 The goal of the baituan was to retrain and help the KMT army regroup for a later extensive assault on the mainland. Records suggest that this arrangement supplied the KMT with acutely needed military expertise and offered Japanese former imperial soldiers an income in penurious times. Just as many may have joined out of ideological passion, other former Japanese officers also reasoned that they were keep­ ­ing former colonial lands out of the hands of the Com­munists, which had been a supposed goal of Japan’s imperial policy. The White Group established military educa­­tion classes, and train­­ing was con­ducted near Beitou, just north of Taipei city and the site of a colonial-​era Japanese hot springs resort. Chiang Kai-​shek came by frequently to observe, and sometimes so did his son, future leader of Taiwan Chiang Chingkuo (Jiang Jingguo). Japanese recollections of their own activities suggest that U.S. military advisors either did not see that there were Japanese us­­ing Chinese aliases or were unaware, even though they came into con­tact with each other in Taiwan. Japanese participants at the time strongly believed that dur­­ing battles over Jinmen (Quemoy) Island (a small island sandwiched between the Chinese mainland coast and Taiwan but within visual distance of the mainland) the KMT destroyed two CCP military divisions precisely due to Japanese retraining.23 Chinese sources remain relatively mute on the issue, while CIA records imply that most of the Japanese efforts held little value. Similar groups that were funded directly through Major General Charles Willoughby’s team within the American occupa­­tion forces in Japan failed to deliver on intelligence gathering, and the efforts of Japanese former military men often amounted to veiled thievery. Moreover, “from the U.S. perspective, results of the Taiwan operations were not much better,” especially con­cern­­ing military efforts to retake the mainland.24 One reason behind Japanese participants’ high estima­­tion of their activities was that former imperial

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Japanese soldiers were very pleased with their postwar “special relationship” with Nationalist Taiwan because it supposedly verified that what Japan had fought for dur­­ing World War II was not lost. Chiang Kai-​shek’s aims were oriented to his own advantage, and it is doubtful that he saw Japan’s imperial goals in the same manner. Con­sequently, this intersec­­tion of postwar Sino-​Japanese interests and the overlap with treatment of former imperial high-​rank­­ing officers shed new light on a story normally expressed in much more black-​and-​white terms. The story of the White Group enhances our understand­­ing of an area of Sino-​Japanese con­vergence, where the employment of former imperial Japanese soldiers intersected with Chinese foreign policy objectives. Although this discussion is obscured in most standard KMT and CCP histories of the era, the episode remains important in its depic­­tion of the rapprochement between the Chinese Nationalists and Japan in pursuit of a com­mon enemy: the CCP. As opposed to the American postwar impression of Japan as a vanquished and debased nation, the con­quered Japanese military was now be­­ing recruited by the very Chinese Nationalist forces that supposedly defeated it. What did this mean? Chinese Nationalist leaders were noth­­ing if not practical. They did not devalue the defeated Japanese military but, instead, saw Japan’s potential as a military ally against the Com­munist threat. Historian Zhang Hongbo suggests that unlike Japanese officers and leaders in areas where the United States or other Western nations took over postwar management, in mainland China Japanese military leaders were often treated well and maintained longer relations with the groups to which they were supposedly surrendering.25 In essence, in the China sphere Japan lost the war but rode out the peace because surrender did not end its relations with the Chinese. The White Group is an example of this wartime-​to-​postwar con­tinuity.26 In fact, the relationship of the Japanese military to the KMT was eminently con­sistent in the con­tinua­­tion of their mutual stance against Com­munism.27

The Road to Postwar Imperial Redemption? One area of con­cern for Chiang Kai-​shek was the fact that China was pregnant with Japanese soldiers on the eve of surrender. Initial estimates suggested a period of five to ten years to enable all the Japanese to return home. Millions did repatriate quickly, but tens of thousands

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more got stuck or caught up in the con­tinent’s ensu­­ing civil war. Japan’s postwar needs overlapped with the Nationalists’ aims, especially from late 1948 onward, once their fate in the civil war took a turn for the worse. Economically, the two nations were also deeply intertwined at the outset of the Cold War.28 Okamura Yasuji’s unique position, even though he belonged to the disbanded Japanese military, was central because he was staunchly anti-​Communist. For the Chinese Nationalist gov­­ern­­ment the situa­­tion on the mainland was a very different scenario than what the surrender­­ing Japanese faced in American-​or European-​ patroled regions at the end of the war. The repeated refusals by the KMT to send Okamura to Japan to testify at the Tokyo War Crimes Trial suggest that the KMT was plann­­ing early on to create some sort of White Group. It may have even predated Okamura’s repatriation. The Chinese mission in Tokyo was essentially kept out of the loop con­cern­­ing the KMT’s bid to gather former Japanese imperialists in its effort to unseat the Com­munists’ grip on the mainland.29 Correspondence con­cern­­ing the White Group was mostly con­ducted on a personal level, military to military, where the Chinese Nationalist and imperial Jap­­ anese relationships were strongest. The mission was not big but did include, fortuitously for Okamura and other former Japanese imperial officers, military attaché Major General Cao Shicheng. But even before Cao could assist in launch­­ing a secret Japanese military con­sultant group to Taiwan, the Chinese mission was caught up in a scandal surround­ ­ing former Japanese imperial army Lieutenant General Nemoto Hiroshi’s antics to lead a one-​man stand with the KMT against the Com­munist onslaught on the mainland. At virtually the same time as former Japanese imperial officers were con­sider­­ing how to assist the KMT from Okamura’s hospital bedside, the Nemoto case made big news in Japan and internationally when he and a small crew were caught try­­ing to smuggle themselves into Taiwan. U.S. occupa­­tion authorities sent a letter to Chinese mission Chief Zhu Shim­­ing request­­ing details regard­­ing Nemoto’s plan. Zhu was caught off guard because he was not informed about these matters but con­ sulted with Cao, quickly reply­­ing that Nemoto’s efforts were in no way con­nected to the Chinese mission.30 The fact that a set of former Japanese soldiers, other than the White Group, was secretly form­­ing flew well below the mission’s political radar.

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The Nemoto Group and Forms of Postwar Japanese Assistance Preposterous as it may seem now for any military to want to employ members of the los­­ing imperial Japanese army, there were several virtually simultaneous episodes involv­­ing former Japanese officers volunteer­ ­ing to assist their recently victorious enemy in a bid to keep the Com­munists from tak­­ing over the Chinese mainland. Nemoto Hiroshi was one such ideologue, but his experiences exemplify Japanese support for postwar ethnic nationalist groups that arose in former French Indochina, Dutch Indonesia, and elsewhere.31 Nemoto was not directly linked to the White Group but was a con­sultant to KMT General Tang Enbo.32 Whether Nemoto actually helped sw­­ing the military tide and defend Taiwan is still hotly con­tested. While the end of World War II was more cut-​and-​dried within the four main islands of Japan proper, surrender often meant little more than the paper it was written on in many other parts of the areas formerly con­trolled by the Japanese, particularly Mongolia, northern China, Shanxi Province, and along the Soviet-​managed front in Manchuria. In these regions, the Japanese military at the end of the war faced con­flict­ ­ing orders—​some responded by flee­­ing their posts and mak­­ing sure they were first on the repatria­­tion ships back to Japan. Others, like Nemoto or at least those championed as “heroes” after the war, took charge of the northern China army in Inner Mongolia and surround­­ing areas near the Soviet and northern China border. These men helped orchestrate the safe repatria­­tion of tens of thousands of Japanese civilians. At the same time Nemoto’s forces came to battle with Soviet forces in a pitched postwar skirmish at Zhangjiakou in Hebei, China.33 In the immediate postwar period when the KMT was fight­­ing the CCP, Chinese Nationalist leaders supposedly intimated to Nemoto that the KMT needed Japanese help if China was go­­ing to wage a successful war against world Com­munist domination. Nemoto, always a firm believer in such a fight, made up his mind to get to Taiwan and assist the Chinese Nationalists; he was fifty-​six at the time.34 Nemoto had previously met Chiang Kai-​shek on December 17, 1945, when the general came to Beij­­ing to com­municate with the surrender­­ing Japanese army and Nemoto was the area’s top leader. Nemoto was supposedly

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enamored with Chiang because the KMT leader was not vengeful and believed that Japan should be able to keep the emperor system, which many soldiers believed would protect the important “national polity,” the kokutai. Chiang explained that the only way for peace to proceed forward in Asia was to work alongside Japan.35 Thus, Chiang’s “anti-​ malevolence” campaign paid off early dividends by be­­ing able to gain postwar Japanese military expertise. On June 26, 1949, Nemoto began preparations to leave Japan for Taiwan dur­­ing the darkness of night aboard a small fish­­ing boat from the port of Nobeoka City, on the eastern coast of Miyazaki prefecture in Kyushu. Us­­ing the Chinese alias Lin Baoyuan and in the com­pany of several like-​minded individuals—​includ­­ing a Japanese translator who had spent years in Shanghai and several supposedly KMT-​affiliated Taiwanese—​Nemoto set off. The group headed for a sea route that traders had journeyed for centuries, shipp­­ing goods and people around the western islands of Japan, Taiwan, Okinawa, and southeastern China. However, this was not the first time that Nemoto had departed for Taiwan, though not all his biographies wish to disclose his brush with occupa­­tion authorities and some details make it appear as if he managed to get to Taiwan on his own steam. It remains unclear exactly in what fashion Nemoto and his team journeyed from Kyushu to Taiwan. One account suggests that in his first attempt to leave Kyushu Nemoto was detained and interrogated by U.S. military officials. Nemoto con­v inced them that he was on his way to help Chiang Kai-​ shek, and they escorted him to a boat. The boat hit a storm, and he was rescued by the U.S. Navy and reinterrogated in Okinawa. The silver-​ tongued Nemoto re-​explained his plan, and the American soldiers agreed, even deliver­­ing the team, illegally, all the way to its destina­­tion of Keelung (Jilong) in the north of Taiwan.36 Other accounts describe Nemoto and his crew as travel­­ing directly, with difficulty, from Kyushu to Taiwan. Nemoto’s team supposedly steered its small fish­­ing vessel for several days, island-​hopp­­ing its way south and west toward Taiwan. The team had not eaten or drunk for days, and when it finally arrived fourteen days after the men set out from Japan, it docked at Keelung. It was near­­ing the middle of July 1949. Upon arrival Nemoto and the others were thrown into a Chinese prison. Nemoto and his Japanese translator tried to clarify that they

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came to help in the fight against the Com­munists and that they were not flee­­ing from the Chinese mainland or smuggling. But Nemoto and his translator soon realized that the Taiwanese individuals who had first approached them with their supposed KMT-​sponsored mission were not actually part of some greater military project but rather charlatans who had ulterior motives. Nonetheless, the two Japanese were in luck because word reached KMT higher officials that someone called Nemoto was in prison. Nemoto’s performance as a soldier in China was well known, and KMT leaders ordered his released and dispatch to Taipei, where he arrived on August 1, 1949. Nemoto’s tim­­ing could not have been more fortuitous because the U.S. gov­­ern­­ment had just published its white paper on China on August 5, 1949, which signaled an end to American military support for the Chinese Nationalists.37 With his translator, Nemoto then made his way to the nearby hot springs resort of Beitou, and the two were put up in style. A week or so later KMT General Tang Enbo showed up to greet Nemoto. Tang had excellent Japanese language skills, hav­­ing studied there, and while he and Nemoto had never met face to face before they had heard about one another. Not long after, Tang escorted Nemoto to Mt. Cao, in the southern por­­tion of Taiwan, to meet with Chiang Kai-​shek.38 Yet another version of the story finds similarly that Nemoto’s unexpected arrival in Taiwan did not meet with great fanfare. He was imprisoned for about a month, and the summer months were tough in jail. The heat was unbearable and con­ditions worse. Then, suddenly, he was given leave to shower and shave and handed new clothes. Finally, word of who he was and what he was up to made it to General Chen Cheng, governor of Taiwan at the time, and the two met.39 After Nemoto’s brief interlude in prison, Chiang Kai-​shek ordered money to be sent to the families of Nemoto’s fellow adventurers back in Japan and immediately dispatched Nemoto to Jinmen Island to assist General Tang Enbo in his defensive strategy against the Chinese Com­munists. Although Nemoto had intended his arrival to be a secret one, a Hong Kong daily newspaper divulged the informa­­tion to the public. News agencies in East Asia also broadcast that Taiwan was recruit­­ing Japanese soldiers and that Nemoto had been sent there for that purpose.40 Regardless of the precise route of Nemoto’s arrival and who first released him, his presence seemingly provided a boost to the sink­­ing

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efforts of the KMT’s military battle against the CCP. What’s more, Nemoto did eventually affiliate to General Tang Enbo’s con­sultant group, and he was also linked to General He Yingqin. Nemoto developed such close ties with Tang Enbo that Tang actually penned a poem to him when he returned to Japan, thank­­ing Nemoto for his service to the Nationalist cause.41 Chiang Kai-​shek may have been the one to propose Nemoto’s join­­ing forces with Tang, who was at that time retreat­­ing from southern Xiamen after los­­ing to the CCP army. In any event, General Tang did take Nemoto to Xiamen in Fujian Province and then ultimately to Jinmen Island, approximately fourteen miles across the bay, to gain his military knowledge of how to prepare for a defense against the inevitable Com­munist attack. The big ques­­tion that remains unresolved is did Nemoto have anyth­­ing to do with the KMT’s defeat of CCP forces in the strategic October 1949 battle of Guningtou, or is the hagiography of Nemoto the by-​product of the mythology of the White Group?42 Nemoto’s arrival may have planted the seed for future Japanese collabora­­tion with the Chinese—​Chiang Kai-​shek’s diaries reveal that on September 2–3, 1949, he spoke with Nemoto about develop­­ing some sort of anti-​CCP military force that would use former Japanese soldiers. Obviously, at this stage Chiang was grasp­­ing at any plan of ac­­tion because the United States had already cut off fund­­ing and was mov­­ing out of the picture at the same time that the Chinese Nationalists were los­­ing daily ground to advanc­­ing CCP forces.43 Evidence is con­tradictory con­cern­­ing whether Nemoto’s presence and tactics turned the tide of battle for Jinmen Island. On one side are Nemoto’s biographers who wish to laud his personal drive to assist in the defense of Nationalist China against the Com­munists.44 The massive military engagement in October 1949 for con­trol of Jinmen Island occurred in a village called Guningtou on the north side of the island. Supposedly, Nemoto’s plan was to force a CCP retreat and then catch those troops in a pincer movement while they backtracked, inflict­­ing heavy casualties. While the final statistics are still debated, the engagement was one of the few clear KMT victories in the heated civil war. The Com­munists lost approximately 4,000 men in battle, and 5,000 were taken prisoner by the Nationalists, who only lost 1,000 of their own men.45 The battle proved spiritually significant for the always

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­los­­ing KMT forces but also proved to the CCP that tak­­ing over the island of Taiwan was not go­­ing to be as easy as originally thought.46 The Battle of Guningtou did not stop either side from proclaim­­ing that it would eventually dominate all of China, but it did mark a certain military stalemate that proved prescient in demonstrat­­ing how long both sides could maintain a defensive posture in such close geographic proximity. Nemoto claimed that after this rare KMT rout of the CCP he was hailed as a “war god,” and such was his success that rumors abounded that the CCP had put a $50,000 bounty on his head.47 A Japanese journalist in February 1950 reported Nemoto’s activities in China, which had already been widely broadcast in the press, and assessed the situa­­tion as a form of nostalgia. Even though Japan was virtually destroyed by the war, many Japanese were still drawn to the battlefield because it provided an opportunity to relive what they believed their destiny was as imperial soldiers.48 When Nemoto’s story leaked into the Japanese press it ironically served as good camouflage for members of the White Group, they recalled, because it took the media spotlight off their illegal activities, especially in those early years. Nemoto’s deeds were also known to the Americans and British—​which supports the no­­tion that the Western Allies were up to date con­cern­­ing former imperial Japanese military “secret” activities in Taiwan. A telegram from the UK con­sulate in Tamsui (Danshui), Taiwan, to the Foreign Office on November 25, 1950, states that an American Army attaché met Nemoto in Taiwan at a military maneuver and briefly chatted with him. The con­versa­­tion was hastily cut short because the KMT did not want outsiders to know that thirty-​five Japanese were train­­ing them. Nemoto was said to have told his colleague that the Nationalist army “had seen little improvement” even with Japanese assistance.49 In the end, on June 25, 1952, carry­­ing the same fish­­ing pole that he left with by boat years before, Nemoto quietly returned to Japan, but his arrival turned into a media event.50 He had been gone just about three years, and much had changed—​the occupa­­tion was over, Japan was rebuilding, and Taiwan was now clearly part of the East Asian Pax Americana against Com­ munism. Years later Chiang Kai-​shek sent Nemoto a Chinese flower vase as a token of the Nationalists’ gratitude.51

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The White Group Nemoto was essentially a lone gun for hire, but the White Group was a much larger-​scale operation. It developed from mutually shared military needs between the KMT and the former Japanese imperial military. KMT Major General Cao Shicheng was a graduate of the Japanese military academy, but his immediate postwar job was to help repatriate the Japanese military and collect its weapons. Once that was mostly com­pleted in 1948, Cao went to work at the KMT Chief of Staff’s Office under General Tang Enbo. In April 1949 Cao was ordered to the Chinese mission in Tokyo as Chief of the First Sec­­tion for Military Affairs.52 1949 was a dark year for the KMT. Hav­­ing gained scant military advantage against CCP forces and struggl­­ing politically as well, Chiang Kai-​shek stood down and Li Zongren took over as president. Even in his officially “reduced” status Chiang kept some of the reins of power, and before Cao departed for Japan the two spent three full days in talks discuss­­ing the potential of us­­ing Japanese soldiers to help the KMT army in China’s civil war. Chiang and Cao spoke at a summer cottage in Tainan, Taiwan, where Cao suggested to the generalissimo that the KMT should launch an anti-​Communist international military, with the assistance of the United States, Philippines, and other like-​minded countries. Chiang was supportive of the idea, but it never went past the plann­­ing stage.53 Instead, a plan formed to employ former imperial Japanese military expertise in the Nationalists’ bid to return to power on the mainland. The reason to send Cao to Japan had been expressly to make con­tact with Japanese elements, includ­­ing officers of the now-​defunct Japanese imperial forces who would support the KMT military engagement against the CCP. Cao understood Japan, was fluent in Japanese, had the support of Chiang Kai-​shek, and was on speak­­ing terms with Okamura Yasuji as well. In order to achieve this goal and recruit people, once in Japan as part of the Chinese mission, Cao immediately paid a visit to Okamura at the hospital.54 Okamura was remembered by his colleagues as a sort of monk in his single-​minded pursuit of things military, with a Zen-​like con­cern for martial affairs but detachment regard­­ing money or politics. Many postwar officials were interested in his China expertise, and with his extensive network of con­nections among the Chinese Okamura

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easily could have led a simple life in the Upper House of Japan’s parliament but chose not to. Okamura is quoted as hav­­ing told his subordinates that a small “tatami mat sized room is all I need. And just put flowers on my grave once a year” after I die. He supposedly abhorred extravagance.55 Okamura and Cao polished the strategy to create the White Group after that first meeting, and with the help of Sumita Raishirō the two set about find­­ing former imperial Japanese soldiers to employ as instructors.56 Although his zeal had been for the imperial Japanese military to con­tinue its war against the Com­munists even after surrender had been signed, Sumita’s passion did not seem to extend to his actual participa­ ­tion in the endeavor. He com­manded the Japanese imperial army’s First Division to remain in Shanxi Province after the war and assist KMT General Yan Xishan against the Com­munists, but Sumita managed to extricate himself from the con­tinent at the last moment, leav­ ­ing several thousand of his troops to be taken prisoner by the Com­munist Eighth Route Army.57 Why Okamura decided to embark on his rather paradoxical union with the KMT can be understood in reflec­­tion of both his years as a China expert within the imperial military and the precipitous postwar decline of his prestige and power. On September 9, 1945, the very day that the imperial Japanese army officially surrendered in China, Okamura wrote that he had been in the armed forces since he entered military school at age sixteen. He had traveled around the world, he said, visit­­ing the United States and Europe once each and China nine times. In the course of his career he had received many promotions and always felt that he was travel­­ing abroad for the sake of the country. And now all of a sudden “all these efforts had com­e to naught,” he lamented in his diary. “What should I do with the rest of my life? I have no real other real skills [aside from the military],” he plaintively reflected. Okamura finished his diary entry by tell­­ing himself that he did not really want to engage in work that was disconnected from China given all the China experience that he had cultivated over the past thirty years.58 He was anxiously wonder­­ing how he would align himself in Japan’s newly democratized yet militarily neutered situation. Japanese like Okamura and others were anti-​Communist, but many of them were also short of cash, and the White Group potentially paid

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well.59 The crea­­tion of the White Group allowed many former imperial officers in the same straits to con­tinue their struggle against Com­ munism, alleviate their financial situation, and help them to believe that the values for which Japan had supposedly fought World War II, world peace and a liberated Asia, were still championed.60 The first official meet­­ing of the White Group took place in October 1949 in a small Japanese inn in Tokyo’s Takanawa district, where the men were instructed with codes to get in touch with KMT officials once they arrived in Taiwan. Dur­­ing the Allied occupa­­tion of Japan, Japanese were not permitted to travel outside the country, so the men had to disguise their activities. Through various means of transport—​ planes and boats—​they managed to smuggle themselves to Taiwan, at least until April 1952 when the occupa­­tion ended. Okamura, due to illness and other factors, never made it to Taiwan as part of the White Group, though he did make one public trip in 1961. The members went secretly in different groups. The first members of the group went to Kobe, where some received false papers as Chinese members of a ship crew, later sett­­ing sail for the port of Keelung in Taiwan. Upon arrival the head of the White Group, Tomita, immediately got in touch with Chiang Kai-​shek, and the two formed a strategy in what turned out to be the last moments of the KMT struggle on the mainland.61 At Keelung, in con­trast to Nemoto’s shambolic attempt, through their advance codes White Group members were met by KMT military men who took the Japanese officers to safe houses in Beitou, just north of Taipei. Group members believed it vitally important to keep the mission below the American occupation’s radar and equally to keep the project secret from the Chinese mission in Japan, which, Cao claimed in his memoirs, was infiltrated by Com­munists and their sympathizers.62 Such large numbers travel­­ing clandestinely between Japan and Taiwan does not say much for SCAP border con­trol, but then, as with Nemoto’s trip, at times SCAP may have turned a blind eye or patrolled less vigorously in areas if American officials determined that Japanese ac­­tion was in U.S. interests against the spread of world Com­ munism.63 In the summer of 1950 Chiang Kai-​shek established a train­­ing camp at Yuanshan for KMT soldiers to be instructed by members of the White Group. Japanese memoirs assessed their own victories, argu­­ing

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that KMT soldiers gained insight into Japanese methods of military education, training, and spiritual motivation. The fact that the KMT, with the excep­­tion of the battles on Jinmen Island, never managed to rout the CCP from the mainland did not seem to worry either the KMT leadership or the White Group members when historically promot­­ing their supposed success. The White Group created a model military, the KMT army’s 32nd Division, staffed by Major General Zhang Bot­­ing and put a White Group instructor into each corps of the division. A further goal was to create a School for Applied Military Train­­ing for soldiers at the Yangminshan party train­­ing school.64 The instruc­­tion was con­ducted in the Japanese language with a translator for each instructor. Most of the White Group was touted as “China experts,” but only one former officer learned enough Chinese to teach in that tongue. They were either there for too brief a time or too inclined to rest on their military laurels.65 There was enough camaraderie, at least accord­­ing to the Japanese instructors, that after each class graduated a party was held. The problem was that the KMT soldiers would toast their Japanese instructors with a Chinese style “ganbei!” In this style of macho drink­­ing one gulped down the entirety of the glass. And there was a lot of social pressure, even for the slightly older Japanese instructors, to follow suit. “It wasn’t a case of a one-​day hangover, it was more like a 3–4 day hangover,” one Japanese instructor recalled.66 While we may understand Japanese imperial motivations for serv­­ing as instructors to the Chinese KMT—​money and imperial hatred of Com­munism—​why did Chiang Kai-​shek secretly want to use Japanese to train the KMT military rather than employ American military education? Weng Youwei asserts Chiang took this route because he did not feel com­fortable with U.S. train­­ing in general. Chiang had spent formative time in Japan as a military student and appreciated the experience.67 Former White Group members also recollected that around the time of the Chinese civil war the KMT’s flagship school, Whampoa Military College, was no longer work­­ing effectively as a train­­ing center. Plus, in reality the college had really only offered classes for the upper branches, the officer core, and not for the larger body of soldiers.68 Former White Group members claimed that Chiang Kai-​shek told them the reason he wished to use American money and materiel but

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Japanese educa­­tion was because U.S. strategy and know-​how were based on the financial feasibility of the wealthy American state. For Chiang the central problem was that hav­­ing been chased to Taiwan, the KMT was short on soldiers, money, and materials. Japan’s tactics, he insisted, were those of a poor country that wanted to win, and this fit the KMT’s situation. The con­ditions necessary to use American military plans mandated vast technological riches the KMT did not possess.69 The nature of the White Group’s train­­ing was different from U.S. train­­ing in that it was not a battle of material attrition. In the Japanese model of military instruc­­tion for the KMT mortars were aimed to hit the center on every shot. Ammuni­­tion was not wasted. Soldiers were instructed how to use the natural bamboo and tree forests for cover. White Group classes employed old imperial Japanese methods to improve the KMT military.70 Nonetheless, the KMT also studied American attack methods, perhaps a throwback to Chiang’s policy from the early years of the party to borrow from German, Soviet, or any other source from which he could learn or gain support.71

Did SCAP Have Knowledge of White Group Activities? Toward the end of 1949, at the time of the KMT’s defeat on the mainland, rumors on all sides of the East China Sea suggested that former Japanese soldiers were secretly abscond­­ing to Taiwan to help in the fight against world Com­munism. Some of these stories were undoubtedly fueled by accounts of the Nemoto affair that made it into Hong Kong, Japanese, and Chinese newspapers. Other rumors just fed the Japanese media’s curiosity toward tales of the Japanese military resurgence here and there. Such stories drew sharp public atten­­tion due to the occupation’s censorship of domestic and international news, which helped to brew interest in potentially excit­­ing events where the Japanese empire lived on after surrender.72 This public gossip was not com­pletely unfounded because imperial Japanese troops in many outly­­ing areas did actually con­tinue to fight for imperial causes, but often under a new Asian native or nationalist banner. A series of French colonial reports con­cern­­ing fears regard­­ing Japanese troops stay­­ing on in Indochina to assist the Viet Minh in stabiliz­­ing their independence made this clear

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in early 1946. A selec­­tion of these reports detailed that not only had Japanese com­manders asked their men if they wanted to follow the imperial rescript or fight on, but many Japanese and Viet Minh were already collud­­ing to topple French authority. One report in the series included several black-​and-​white photographs of dead Japanese “deserters,” imperial soldiers who after the Japanese surrender had not repatriated, choos­­ing instead to help the Viet Minh battle the French.73 Christopher Goscha details that Japanese officers “were directly involved in Viêt Minh military operations against the French between 1945 and 1947.” At least one section, led by officer Shida Shigeo, “helped train three classes of young Vietnamese soldiers, in all 550 men,” and others set up schools to offer general military training.74 It is also apparent from other com­munica­­tion that U.S. officials were aware of a potential for this sort of postwar Sino-​Japan liaison. The U.S. embassy in Nanjing, China, in an undated memorandum titled “Japanese Secret Societies in China,” enumerated that after Japan’s surrender many of these secret societies began operat­­ing all over China: Many factors are assist­­ing the Japanese in evad­­ing the repatria­­tion order. Such facts as the ethnic affinity of the two races, anti-​­foreign feel­­ing among the Chinese, the similarity of think­­ing among certain sections of the Chinese Nationalist armies and the Japanese military and the powerful con­nections which the Japanese have been able to establish over a long period of time with the Chinese puppet military personalities and other economic collaborationists, who, in the majority of cases, have been retained by the Chinese Nationalists in positions which they formerly held under the Japanese, have all con­tributed to the success which the Japanese have had in remain­­ing in China.75 The analysis cogently con­cluded that certain Japanese groups aimed to “widen the breach between the Chinese Nationalists and Chinese Com­munists” and “to undermine the posi­­tion of the United States in China,” among other goals.76 While elements of con­spiracy and anti-​ Americanism may be partially exaggerated, the report was not far off the mark con­cern­­ing postwar imperial Japanese military and Chinese Nationalist political aims.

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Former imperial Lieutenant Colonel Ogasawara Kiyoshi, one of the four Japanese officers who helped launch the White Group, wrote disparagingly that American military officials in Taiwan could not tell the difference between Chinese and Japanese soldiers.77 This turns out to be patently false, though the record is still vague con­cern­­ing whether the Americans paid atten­­tion or not because they had their own undercover Japanese groups work­­ing similar angles in Taiwan and elsewhere.78 After the White Group had been around for several years, in April 1955 U.S. Major General William C. Chase exchanged correspondence with the KMT Act­­ing Chief of the General Staff, General Peng Meng-​chi, regard­­ing Japanese military advisors assist­­ing Nation­ ­alist forces on Taiwan. Dissatisfied with the response, Chase placed another series of requests higher up the ladder of administra­­tion to KMT Minister of National Defense Yu Ta-​Wei. Chase wrote sternly that Americans specifically requested that the Japanese military educa­ ­tion cease because “the Japanese politico-​military instruc­­tion will have a detrimental impact upon our agreed program of foster­­ing the acceptance and use of US military doctrine as Chinese doctrine.” 79 Some con­temporary mainland Chinese scholars see con­spiracy underly­­ing actual serendipity, believ­­ing that “under the instiga­­tion of the US, through the use of former Japanese military men they formed the military advisory group, ‘baituan.’ ” CCP leaders estimated that many instructors in the White Group had participated in the Manchurian Incident in 1931 and thus had com­mitted war crimes “that should not be let off.”80

Assess­­ing the Significance of the White Group Japanese soldiers who worked with the White Group were pleased with their postwar “special relationship” with Nationalist China because, for them, it was proof that Japan’s imperial goals con­tinued to thrive. After the United States increased its military presence in Taiwan, follow­­ing the outbreak of the Korean War in the summer of 1950, the White Group had to diminish staff numbers on the island, but relations remained extremely tight. Chiang Kai-​shek banqueted with members of the White Group once a year and each time stated that his goal was to retake the mainland.

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The White Group and the two Chinas’ attempts to gain postwar Japanese support demonstrate how different the political situa­­tion in East Asia was com­pared with European and American attitudes toward Japan. Imperial Japan was defeated, but its support—​political, economic, military—​still remained influential in East Asia. In addi­­tion to the transwar con­tinuity of Japan’s influence and imperial antagonism toward Com­munism, the prewar legacy of pan-​Asianism con­tinued to have valence. Chiang Kai-​shek, like his mentor Sun Yat-​sen, was somewhat always pro-​Japanese, or at least he espoused pro-​Japanese imperial ideology to the extent that it allowed him to take a paternalistic view of how to manage China, plan for the future, and find com­monality with neighbor­­ing Asian states to oppose an American hegemony of East Asia.81 A second issue, a sort of hidden agenda after the war, was that while the Japanese might have unconditionally surrendered they were an indispensable military element in the reorganiza­­tion of the East Asian postwar order. There were com­mon pan-​Asian values in the shared postwar military ideology between the KMT military and imperial Japan, which dated in part from the first Sino-​Japan war in 1894–95. Fukamachi Hideo suggests that General Yan Xishan and Chiang Kai-​ shek had formative experiences in the early 1900s when they studied in Japan. For Yan Xishan it was the diligence of Japanese soldiers on the ship who performed their tasks. For Chiang Kai-​shek it was see­­ing clean toilets and kitchens that impressed him—​a good basis, he believed, on which to build the spirit of renova­­tion necessary for China to move from despotism to republicanism.82 Those views sharply diverged from European relations with the Japanese. Chinese soldiers had con­tinually trained in Japanese military schools until just before 1937. As demonstrated in the joint affinity both Chiang Kai-​shek and Okamura Yasuji maintained in oppos­­ing the Com­munists, the two former enemies managed to br­­ing passion to the axiom that “my enemy’s enemy is my friend.” Ultimately, the KMT gambled that former Japanese imperial forces would be more useful on the KMT side than allow­­ing them to go freelance or shift over to the Com­munist side to fight in the civil war. This was not only a Chinese problem but one the French in Indochina and British in Southeast Asia faced in attempt­­ing to resurrect their own imperial power in areas that had been stripped of European colonial con­trol dur­­ing World War II.83

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KMT Major General Cao Shicheng years later positively assessed the secret organiza­­tion of the White Group. When queried why the Chinese Nationalists would employ the officers of a country that lost the war, he responded that the group made a difference in three main areas: “It raised the general level of the KMT’s martial spirit and helped soldiers gain con­fidence; the Nationalist military had been at war virtually since the time of the [Chinese] revolu­­tion and had not had a chance to properly train—​this afforded them the opportunity; it strengthened their unity as a fight­­ing force.”84 A Japanese member of the White Group characterized its achievements as a successful union of international relations—​gain­­ing the trust of the Chinese, Chiang Kai-​shek, and the KMT military, as well as the Nationalist party bureaucracy, the business world, and others. Such “achievements” rarely mentioned specific military accomplishments but rather bequeathed the former Japanese imperial soldiers a “feel good” emotion, which helped them to develop amnesia con­cern­­ing most of the problems in the actual com­plex postwar Sino-​Japanese relationship.85 The manner in which wars end and enemies realign due to circumstances immediately follow­­ing surrender retains many unanswered questions. There is copious research on the origins of World War II but much less, and in the case of East Asia con­siderably less, regard­­ing the equally perplex­­ing ques­­tion of how wars draw to a close and what sort of impact this exerts on the postwar era.86 The legacy of the White Group and General Okamura Yasuji runs deep, and it does not end with the KMT–Japan relationship.87 As the occupa­­tion ended and Japan resumed its sovereignty in the spr­­ing of 1952, Japanese social and political attitudes toward the very defini­­tion of war crimes began to unravel. This development can be precisely linked to the existence of the White Group. Just before the occupa­­tion ended the Associa­­tion to Help Those Sentenced for the War (Sensō jukeisha sewakai) formed in March 1952. Soon-​to-​be prime minister Kishi Nobusuke (arrested as a war criminal but never charged and later released) was on the executive board, as were many other wartime political and military luminaries, includ­­ing Okamura Yasuji, Ogata Taketora, Shigemitsu Mamoru, Arita Hachirō, and Ayukawa Yoshisuke. Ogata had been wartime head of the Asahi Newspaper and later served as minister of state in two of Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru’s Cabinets. Shigemitsu had been ­con­victed as a war criminal but later served as foreign minister. Arita

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had been foreign minister dur­­ing the war, and Ayukawa was a prewar industrialist who had significant economic ties to Manchukuo but after the war was arrested and imprisoned in Sugamo, though never brought to trial. Afterward, Ayukawa stood as the executive director of the Associa­­tion to Help Those Sentenced for the War and served in the Upper House of the Diet.88 Okamura was, of course, instrumental in establish­­ing the White Group. In its own words the Associa­­tion to Help Those Sentenced for the War aimed to “offer assistance and help to those con­victed or put to death by the death penalty for war crimes, as well as the families and relations of those affected, to promote the financial support of surviv­ ­ing families of those executed, and to pray for the spirits of the martyred.” The association’s April 1952 manifesto made clear its posi­­tion on the whole issue of war crimes. War criminals, it seems, had no place in the postwar East Asian order because, as could be seen with the so-​ called “victor’s justice” of the Tokyo War Crimes Trial and the KMT’s use of valiant Japanese formal imperial soldiers fight­­ing for world peace (an allusion to the White Group and similar efforts), Japan had been fight­­ing for peace and stability in East Asia all along. Wartime propagandistic goals now melded almost seamlessly into the postwar period. The assistance group publicly stated that “there are various opinions regard­­ing war crimes but equally these men were follow­­ing orders for the sake of the country. Due to the circumstances of the defeat these soldiers became victims of sorts.”89 As influential as the White Group may have been, we should be skeptical about stories that imply former Japanese soldiers worked hand in glove and were of one mind with the Chinese in Taiwan. One fascinat­­ing episode con­cerns former imperial officers’ use of colloquial Japanese language and their inability to fathom how it offended the Chinese. The Japanese imperial military had instilled in its officers and enlisted men a strict code of hierarchy, and officers of rank were used to treat­­ing any lower-​stand­­ing soldier very brutally. It would not have been out of place for a Japanese officer to insult or curse his underlings. And certainly, in China or the former Japanese colonies, this sort of military behavior was widely experienced by the native populations. With Japan’s surrender, such an aggressive manner no longer had to be tolerated because Japan was defeated, but traditions died hard. Many Japanese soldiers were used to verbally abus­­ing one another with the

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Japanese word baka. Baka in the Japanese language means “stupid” or “ass”; in the imperial period it was frequently used toward those be­­ing colonized and was quite often one of the Japanese pejorative terms that those in the former colonies and occupied areas remembered all too well as a symbol of their oppression. The problem is that the syllables of baka are also found in unrelated Japanese words that are not insults, like bakari, which means “only.” To Chinese ears, however, it often sounded as if their Japanese teachers were con­tinu­­ing to deride them in the same way they had dur­­ing the war. Even though they were dead set on fight­­ing their Com­munist enemies, if a Japanese instructor used the sound baka in any con­text, the Chinese nationalist army students grew infuriated. As one team member recalled, “the face of the person who it was used toward suddenly transformed.” It wasn’t just the word baka; it was also words like bakabakashī or baka rashī (which meant that some behavior was idiotic or ill-​informed). If these terms were uttered they elicited the same heated reaction. The translator told members of the White Group, “It doesn’t matter how much I offer excuses or explain, the Chinese won’t listen, so please whatever you say just avoid us­­ing these words.”90 Nonetheless, many of the Japanese officers never quite seemed to grasp why these particular words were so offensive. The existence of the White Group affirms that discussions of Japanese behavior after the war cannot be examined within the national framework of Japanese history but con­cern extensive interac­­tion with the Chinese on both the mainland and Taiwan. Early Cold War Japanese relations with Japan’s most immediate East Asian neighbors were undoubtedly intricate and also involved con­siderations that did not force the Japanese to think of themselves as defeated, especially when the KMT requested their military assistance. The adjudica­­tion of Japanese war crimes in China had to com­pete for public opinion with domestic Chinese crimes of collaborators of vary­­ing stripes and equally press­­ing issues of the Chinese civil war that quickly changed the paradigm for the vanquished Japanese. The search for stability in chaotic postwar East Asia was anyth­­ing but a black-​and-​white situa­­tion with victor and victim fall­­ing on either side of clear legal boundaries. The issue of the former imperial Japanese military’s role in postwar Taiwan, especially dur­­ing the anxious 1950s, remains somewhat mired in ambiguity, ly­­ing between fuzzy personal memory and the more lucid

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but sterile archival record. These episodes also demonstrate how heavily colonial era political baggage weighs on Japan and the region even today. Many con­temporary Taiwanese who write on this topic support an independent Taiwan; they enjoy analyz­­ing the White Group because it reveals Chiang Kai-​shek’s duplicity. Chiang often claimed that he was anti-​Japanese dur­­ing World War II, but this new history, as the pro-​independence groups claim, undermines the case. At the same time this history is linked with a political struggle in Taiwan between those push­­ing for independence and those advocat­­ing unifica­­tion of some sort with the mainland. Critics point out that the KMT has no grounds to attack Taiwan independence movement leaders like Su Jingqiang, who visited the Yasukuni shrine in 2005, if at the same time Nationalist party members cannot com­e clean about their own con­ nections with former Japanese imperial army officers dur­­ing the early postwar period.91 The KMT administration’s long involvement with the Japanese military through the White Group is an example that illustrates the inner workings of the Nationalist Party. As such, history is never removed from the political battlefield in Taiwan, and until recently the KMT did not want to discuss its deeper relations with the former imperial Japanese army; the louder elements of the independence camp charged that Chiang Kai-​shek was two-​faced for us­­ing this Japanese assistance.92 The independence camp uses Japan as a foil to show how the colonial era had already created a viable Taiwanese culture that separated it from the Chinese mainland, and the KMT opposes such opinions. Postwar Japanese history is, in this sense, intimately tied to Chinese and Taiwanese political maneuvers. Ultimately, within the postwar morass of Japanese history, con­cepts of the mean­ ­ing behind World War II and national identity are still linked to Japan’s relations to its former colonized, occupied, and imperial territories.93

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An Unsatisfy­­ing Peace

Shift­­ing Attitudes on War Crimes Better enjoy the war—​the peace will be terrible. —​Popular wartime German joke

A b a rome t er of Japan’s reac­­tion to the end of empire

and involvement with postwar peace initiatives can be directly linked to an analysis of war and the prosecu­­tion of war crimes trials. In investigat­­ing the processes through which the Japanese pursued war crimes, both aggressively to collect data and with less zeal in mediat­­ing actual justice, we can measure how intent postwar Japanese were in implement­­ing peace in East Asia—​but a certain kind of peace. In look­ ­ing at the same events from the Chinese side, we can see how disparate views of the trials (both KMT and CCP) helped cement certain Cold War political attitudes between the Chinese and Japanese. Such an analysis raises into relief a deeper understand­­ing of what the war meant to the respective populations. The Cold War legal memory remained heavily laden with the baggage of wartime propaganda, and the rhetorical legacy spilled into the occupied era and postwar history once Japan regained its sovereignty. The longue durée of the postwar period, the numerous venues across Asia for Japanese war crimes trials, and the fact that war criminals were be­­ing repatriated throughout Asia to Japan through the mid-​1960s brewed con­flict­­ing opinions con­cern­­ing how to legally judge the end of Japan’s empire and the war in Asia. As a con­ sequence, August 15, 1945, grew less significant as a marker for the end 210

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of the war as the legacy of war criminals developed into a far-​reach­­ing and more potent political issue. The decade after the war, the 1950s, was tumultuous for both Japan and China (Taiwan and mainland China). The period saw the Com­ munists victorious in their civil war against the Nationalists but visibly struggle to erect a viable gov­­ern­­ment. Almost within a year of Com­ munist China’s declara­­tion as a new country, war broke out in Korea, and the CCP engaged the Americans in a crippl­­ing battle of attri­­tion on the Korean peninsula. At the same time Japan did not enter the fray, focused on right­­ing its wobbly economy, regain­­ing its sovereignty, and reestablish­­ing peace with the former Allies and neighbors. Just a few years after the end of the Korean War Japan emerged for the first time in 1955 on the international stage at the Bandung Con­ference, a momentous occasion at which Mao’s China demonstrated its new engagement with nations that were not aligned in the U.S.–Soviet Cold War struggle. With all that had occurred in this short period it is no wonder that the Japanese seemed to quickly forget their dissolved empire and its legacy; they were look­­ing only forward. At the same time, Com­munist China was still reel­­ing from the effects of a war against the massive U.S. armed forces in Korea, unsure on its feet as a leader in the Com­munist world, and determined to demonstrate its ability to legally engage the ques­­tion of Japanese war crimes (detailed in chapter seven). The KMT, which managed to negotiate a separate peace with Japan in 1952, removed itself from the discussion on war crimes, but the issue remained under the radar. Importantly, the KMT trials of Japanese war criminals had little discernible impact on Japan’s understand­­ing of the war or its empire, and this would eventually clash with very dissimilar attitudes that emerged from Com­munist China in the early 1950s as new waves of Japanese repatriated. The fundamental con­undrum of war criminals remained on the table for Japan, despite its numerous efforts to remove the topic from discussion. Japan aimed to move beyond debates with former belligerents about the empire and its aftermath, but the former colonies and occupied regions were not of the same mind nor had they undergone the psychological revolutions that would have laid the groundwork for such a process. In a sense, due to the occupa­­tion with media policies that stunted discussion and an explosion of postwar diaries that only detailed the victim angle of war

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crimes trials, the more vocal Japanese groups held antagonistic views to Chinese efforts to con­tinually press the issue of war crimes. At the very least, even though a healthy left w­­ing had reemerged in Japan it tended to put its efforts into antimilitarism and antiwar movements with little atten­­tion paid to the topic of war crimes and war crimes trials. Despite the Korean War and Japanese struggles to forge a foreign policy that did not alienate the Chinese too much, both mainland China and Japan looked poised for reengagement in the early 1950s even though the United States was push­­ing against such an orientation. In January 1951 when U.S. Special Envoy to Japan John Foster Dulles asked Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru to rearm, Yoshida replied in the negative. Iokibe Makoto assesses that any of the other early postwar ministers—​Kishi Nobusuke, Shigemitsu Mamoru, or Hatoyama Ichirō—​ would have com­plied and changed the face of postwar Japanese foreign policy. Political purges in postwar Japan, specifically tied in with the war criminals issue, greatly affected the domestic political environment and equally importantly the atmosphere of Sino-​Japanese relations and Far East security issues. Even though Yoshida Shigeru did not actually win Japan’s first postwar elec­­tion he did acquire the trophy of becom­ ­ing prime minister in April 1946 because the Americans purged front-​ runner Hatoyama Ichirō. While initially disallowed in politics, from October 1950 (just after the start of war in Korea) to August 1951 nearly 100,000 men, half the number of those originally purged, were permitted back to political work—​includ­­ing Hatoyama and Kishi. Yoshida would not stand aside for Hatoyama, so Hatoyama formed his own political fac­­tion in 1952 and bided his time until after the occupa­ ­tion was over to ultimately resume office.1 In the words of several Chinese historians, the Korean War was “China’s own version of the ‘forgotten war.’ ”2 The war saw the first time the Chinese Com­munists engaged a major enemy outside of their borders, and thus it was the PRC’s (People’s Republic of China) first modern war—​international with the potential use of nuclear weapons and the belief that the United States employed bacteriological weapons.3 Japan did not deploy military troops nor did it put on alert its own army and navy dur­­ing the war. In fact Japan no longer had any official armed forces. The summer of 1950 was the first time in virtually a ­century that

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the Japanese military did not play a decisive role in a war within East Asia. Igarashi Takeshi argues that the Cold War, which many historians underscore as hav­­ing begun dur­­ing this con­flict, was a superpower struggle to reorder a decolonized Asia accord­­ing to its own wishes and that Japan was to play a subservient albeit important role, quite separate from its prior dominat­­ing stature.4 Mikuriya Takashi suggests that the Korean War should not be con­ceived of as the beginn­­ing of another war or even a World War III but was rather the con­tinua­­tion of Japan’s imperial war against the West and China, World War II in another form.5 Unlike World War II, when the Allies solidly defeated the Japanese, the war on the Korean peninsula finished in what can best be described as a standoff. While military con­flict announced the end of peace that briefly followed Japan’s surrender, social mobiliza­­tion campaigns geared up to reorient the Chinese and Japanese populations toward new goals com­mensurate with the ensu­­ing Cold War. Keep­­ing in tenor with the uneasiness of the immediate postwar era and even bear­­ing in mind that both Chinas made overtures to trade more, there were also con­sistent PRC fears that Japan would quickly remilitarize and invade Korea or the Chinese mainland itself. In 1950 the new People’s Republic of China signed a treaty with the USSR and launched its foreign policy of close coopera­­tion with the Soviet Union. The February 1950 Soviet–PRC friendship treaty specifically mentioned Japan, obviously still fresh in administrative memory, and stated that the pact was signed to counter “aggressive ac­­tion on the part of Japan or any other state which should unite with Japan, directly or indirectly, in acts of aggression.”6 Mao loudly announced his “lean to one side” foreign policy, which declared a PRC alliance with the Soviet Union and preference for its beliefs in shap­­ing Chinese Com­munist policy.7 All three Com­munist capitals—​Moscow, Pyongyang and Beijing—​feared that if the United States withdrew its forces South Korean leader Syngman Rhee would launch an attack on the north with possible assistance from Japan. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, in particular, believed the south would attack the north and accepted North Korean leader Kim Il Sung’s predictions that the north should be preemptive. In 1949 when the United States pulled its troops out of South Korea the move did not improve the situation. The Soviets sent massive

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aid to North Korea, and Mao released two of the three ethnic Korean divisions that were fight­­ing in the Chinese civil war on the off chance their military support would soon be required.8 The moment was ripe for con­flict. Mao saw China now as the vanguard revolutionary state in East Asia, and after General MacArthur’s September 1950 land­­ing at Inchon, Korea, Mao believed if China did not intervene in the Korean War the revolu­­tion would be lost.9 While the KMT had to precipitously cut its losses, curtail pursuit of Japanese war criminals, and make a Faustian bargain with its former imperial Japanese enemy in the pursuit of a perceived greater threat and com­mon foe, the Chinese Com­munist party faced equally herculean tasks. From the moment Mao Zedong and his Minister for Foreign Affairs Zhou Enlai took the reins of gov­­ern­­ment after their victory in the Chinese civil war and established the Com­munist-​led People’s Republic of China in October 1949, the U.S. gov­­ern­­ment began to put the political and military squeeze on the nascent country. Wiggle room remained, however, because while the Americans were exceedingly ill at ease with the potential for a Com­munist alliance swallow­­ing up East Asia, the Europeans and Japanese were more flexible in their approach.10 But before the CCP could demonstrate its own flexible and novel approach to adjudicat­­ing justice for Japanese war criminals the ideological and diplomatic showdown of the Korean War quickly forced the Americans and mainland Chinese into fiercely opposed camps. The Com­munist Chinese stance was poles apart from how the Chinese Nationalists had dealt with the Japanese immediately after the war. The Com­munist Chinese gov­­ern­­ment now abruptly changed tack with its recent ally, the United States, and treated it as a pariah. The 1950s were not an easy time for the new Chinese state. As Qiang Zhai notes, from 1949 until the mid-​1950s the PRC sent aid and men to Vietnam, one of the three fronts on which the Chinese Com­munist na­­tion was simultaneously involved—​the other two be­­ing Korea and Taiwan. For the PRC, North Korea was a brother in arms, as were the Soviets, and Taiwan was an inalienable part of China that had been usurped by the KMT. The Chinese con­sidered Vietnam historically in their orbit but also believed there was a kinship because North Vietnam was under the guidance of Ho Chi Minh, who espoused Com­munism. It was also along these key borders that the young PRC believed the

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na­­tion was vulnerable to foreign intervention. In addition, KMT forces had fled to these regions after the civil war and were still an issue, so counterinsurgency worries made CCP leaders doubly anxious.11 China wanted to be the vanguard of the international revolu­­tion it believed was historically ordained, and the leadership believed it had to respond to Vietnamese and North Korean overtures.12 As the war engulfed Korea, the U.S. occupa­­tion initiated political purges in Japan, eliminat­­ing Com­munist bureaucrats and anger­­ing the Japanese Com­munist Party (JCP), which had originally touted the American military as a liberator in 1945. The JCP subsequently assessed that the United States was guilty of imperialistic and hegemonic actions and argued that it was coloniz­­ing Japan and East Asia. In response, the JCP found a new hero in Com­munist China, an entity that many viewed as the new symbol of political freedom in East Asia. As the occupa­­tion ended and the Cold War heated up, many Japanese began to assert that to save the country from American imperialism they needed to strengthen nationalism in their homeland to protect themselves. Within this paradigm little energy was left over to spend time analyz­­ing the true face of Japanese aggressive wartime imperialism. In the same vein, BC class war criminals in postwar trials in foreign lands were increasingly labeled as victims of “revenge,” products of misguided justice, or merely ignored. The result was that Japan developed a stronger identity of be­­ing colonized, but more importantly assessed that it was now be­­ing victimized by U.S. hegemony and therefore shared a similar postwar fate as China and Korea. The situa­­tion on the Korean peninsula was important for Japan not only for how it served to help Japanese forget their own imperial history but in how peninsular instability worked to assist in prompt­­ing postwar Japan to con­ceive of itself as a homogenous na­­tion of the Japanese race, no longer as the prewar imperial home to Taiwanese, Koreans, Chinese, and other ethnicities. Many Japanese believed Japan was now safer, without its imperial appendages and seemingly without con­cern for how it rid itself of empire. Within this shift­­ing vortex of alliances, peace treaties, purges, and resump­­tion of power by old elites, U.S. fears about its own POWs who had supposedly become turncoats dur­­ing the Korean war fed into an escala­­tion of political anxiety once the Korean War exploded and the

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Allies faced a fierce fight. As this fear reached a crescendo in East Asia and Japan appeared potentially align­­ing with both Chinas, the future appeared extremely uncertain. It is important to remember that at a time when the Chinese and North Koreans housed thousands of American and other UN troops as POWs, the same Chinese Com­ munists were intent on gain­­ing the trust of the Japanese suspected war criminals and spend­­ing dearly to keep them in better com­fort.13 The deadlock con­cern­­ing release or exchange of POWs between the PRC and the United States bogged the Korean War down and extended its duration, arguably for several years. In order to gain the upper hand on the battlefield, Chen Jian writes, China launched an intense propaganda campaign claim­­ing that the United States used biological weapons in Korea. Chen assesses that Chinese com­manders on the field believed they had been so targeted but that no evidence has ever com­e forth to show that the Americans did use such tactics. The ­campaign was used as a counter for the U.S. proposals con­cern­­ing the POWs and where or how they should repatriate.14 Dur­­ing the Korean War, POW exchanges between the United States and China were the thorniest and biggest stumbl­­ing block to peace. By the autumn of 1951, 10,624 U.S. soldiers were declared miss­­ing in ac­­tion in Korea, but about half were suspected to be POWs. The United States held 130,000 Com­munist POWs. Not only were the numbers not equitable, but the United States did not authorize the return of those who did not wish to repatriate. Wartime propaganda had played up American POWs be­­ing treated very poorly, and the U.S. public and political representatives took it upon themselves to press for better treatment of U.S. POWs. However, there was little American interest in how Com­munist POWS were treated. Most of them were housed in filthy com­pounds on Koje Island where con­ditions were awful. Six thousand alone died from tuberculosis and dysentery. For some reason U.S. authorities did not want to just repatriate all the POWs but wished to interview each and ask if the soldier wanted to go home, a sort of propaganda ploy unto itself. President Harry Truman endorsed this, but the Com­munists were stunned by the new policy. Effectively, this issue stalemated the negotiations to end the war.15 At the same time, as it was increasingly sett­­ing up in opposi­­tion to what it deemed the imperious United States, the CCP was look­­ing to

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establish­­ing better relations with Japan. Such a move offered a trade route in the early 1950s that would allow China to earn foreign exchange, obtain new technology, and avoid total dependence on the Soviets. American com­manders realized Chinese trade could help Japan rebuild, but they were wary, fear­­ing such a relationship could pull Tokyo into the Com­munist bloc.16 Japan’s desire to trade with mainland China dur­­ing the 1950s became a source of tension with the United States. In June 1952 three Japanese Diet members signed the first unofficial trade agreement for £60 million in Beijing, at the height of the Korean War. Both parties calculated the agreement in pounds sterl­­ing because the PRC hated everyth­­ing American at this point. The entire era of the early 1950s was potentially the dawn of legal democracy in China, or so it seemed. China had embarked on its first five-​ year economic plan in 1953, and late that year the na­­tion held its first elections for delegates to the National People’s Con­gress.17 A strong bilateral Sino-​Japanese push for trade grew regardless of the start of the Cold War and “between 1952–1958 Japan con­cluded four com­ mercial agreements with China us­­ing intellectuals, business organizations, labor unions and Diet members as negotiators.”18 By 1956 Japan–PRC trade was 2 percent of Japan’s total two-​way trade; it was not a large amount, but in the depressed East Asian market it was not insignificant and was a potential harbinger of greater trade in the future. As Yoshida Shigeru famously argued, “I don’t care whether China is red or green. China is a natural market, and it has become necessary for Japan to think about markets.”19 It was not just the Korean War that mobilized Chinese society and put the trials of Japanese war crimes on the CCP’s back burner. After 1949 Com­munist China emphasized its own domestic reorganiza­­tion as part of the process to build the utopian future socialist paradise of workers. Mao and his cadres led a revolutionary regime that attempted to root out counterrevolutionaries, former KMT spies, rightists, and essentially those who opposed the Com­munist plan. At the dawn of the 1950s an economic relationship with Japan might have been important, but pursu­­ing war criminals was deemed less tactical than Com­ munist China manag­­ing its own house. As Julia Strauss remarked, “From beginn­­ing to end, the campaign invoked the ongo­­ing war in Korea as it defined enemies of the state as saboteurs, fifth columns, and

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subverters of national identity.”20 This was serious social engineer­­ing often com­pleted arbitrarily and not accord­­ing to international law. The numbers executed in this pursuit remain unclear, but estimates range from 700,000 or 800,000 to 2 million, far greater than any pursuit of “justice” against the Japanese.21

Peace: What Is It Good For? Even though it was near the middle of the Korean War, 1952 began auspiciously for Japan, poised to regain its sovereignty after the ratifica­ ­tion of the San Francisco Peace Treaty the year before. On April 28, 1952, the Asahi newspaper published an editorial tout­­ing the event: “Today, April 28, Japan emerged from a long 6 years and 8 months under occupa­­tion and rejoices in its rebirth as an independent nation.” To celebrate Japan’s reemergence as a sovereign state and reacquisi­­tion of autonomy over its Ministry of Justice, the gov­­ern­­ment drafted a plan to bestow amnesty on a variety of criminals to celebrate the country’s “new” independence. Those freed had com­mitted mainly minor offenses: violat­­ing voter laws, con­traven­­ing the purge ordinances, fail­­ing to pay their taxes, and so forth.22 The situa­­tion boded well too for those previously sentenced by Chinese Nationalist courts. Former imperial army general Okamura Yasuji wrote in his diary that he heard from KMT General Tang Enbo, “who was not close to Japan but rather loved Japan,” that Chiang Kai-​ shek’s plan had been to grant all the Japanese war criminals parole or release them once Taiwan had a peace treaty with Japan.23 In September 1950 Chiang, now ensconced in Taiwan, had heard that Japan was in treaty talks with the United States and had immediately called former premier and statesman Zhang Qun, Premier Chen Cheng, and Foreign Minister Ye Gongchao to his office to discuss how the Chinese Nationalists should respond. The Japanese dilemma con­cern­­ing which China (Communist mainland or Chinese Nationalist Taiwan) to sign a treaty with had already been a problem in 1945 but was more pronounced mov­­ing into the 1950s. Very quickly both Chinas went on a political offensive. Wellington Koo, the KMT ambassador to the United States, began to ratchet up pressure while CCP Foreign Minister Zhou Enlai issued numerous press releases threaten­­ing that if the CCP

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was not allowed to be a signatory na­­tion to the San Francisco Peace Treaty then the resultant document would be worthless and moreover illegal. Even though the Japanese gov­­ern­­ment eventually ratified a separate peace treaty with the Chinese Nationalists, and not with the PRC until the 1970s, the negotiations were not always easy going. First, Japanese officials worried deeply about upsett­­ing the mainland. Mainland China mattered to Japan, and many Japanese believed they could not just blindly follow U.S. policy. On the other hand, the Republic of China (as Taiwan was known) was officially the internationally sanctioned ally of the United States, and that came with enormous privileges. Wield­­ing this threat, KMT Foreign Minister Ye Gongchao warned Japan that if it signed a treaty with the mainland such a move would prevent Japan from join­­ing the United Nations. The Chinese Nationalists held an important political trump card by virtue of hav­­ing participated at the Yalta Con­ference dur­­ing World War II and be­­ing on the side of the Allies, which the Com­munists were not. This meant that the KMT held a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. Chiang grew angry at Japan’s vacilla­­tion and erupted, say­­ing that the Japanese did not fully appreciate the KMT’s policy of postwar benevolence and questioned whether the two countries were supposed to be work­­ing together to oppose Com­munism.24 Negotiations did not proceed smoothly, but after sixty-​seven days of talks on April 28, 1952, a treaty of peace was implemented. Accord­­ing to Weng Youwei and others, there finally seemed to be payback from the Japanese side regard­­ing China’s postwar com­passionate policy, but evidently the Japanese had quickly forgotten their imperial defeat.25 On August 5, 1952, the Japanese soldiers formerly con­v icted in KMT military courts were released from Sugamo Prison due to the terms of the KMT–Japan treaty. The event received a relatively benign men­­tion in a short article in the even­­ing edi­­tion of the Asahi newspaper on the same day. Okamura says that he was there to greet the soldiers along with their families, and under his instructions they all went to the Chinese mission in Tokyo to thank Zhang Qun, the Chinese special envoy.26 This sophistry surround­­ing postwar relations and the social displeasure con­cern­­ing the con­tinued incarcera­­tion of Japanese lesser war criminals often cloud over the postwar language of “peace” and obfuscate the real problems behind implement­­ing reconciliation.27 All was

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not well in restored Japan—​a malaise lingered at the fringes. Japan had not signed a peace with the two Koreas, mainland China, or the Soviet Union. In the words of Takemae Eiji it was therefore a “divided peace.”28 With Japan’s new peace, regular criminals were set free, but war criminals con­tinued to languish in prison, and increasingly shrill public voices began to ques­­tion the type of postwar peace Japan had been granted. Article 11 of the San Francisco Peace Treaty transparently held Japan to specific regulations regard­­ing war crimes trial verdicts: Japan accepts the judgments of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East and of other Allied War Crimes Courts both within and outside Japan, and will carry out the sentences imposed thereby upon Japanese nationals imprisoned in Japan. The power to grant clemency, to reduce sentences and to parole with respect to such prisoners may not be exercised except on the decision of the Government or Governments which imposed the sentence in each instance, and on recommenda­­tion of Japan. In the case of persons sentenced by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, such power may not be exercised except on the decision of a majority of the Governments represented on the Tribunal, and on the recommenda­­tion of Japan.29 Japan’s signature legally acknowledged the veracity of the judgments reached in all the war crimes trials managed by the Allies. At the same time, however, the Japanese gov­­ern­­ment ceded the authority to com­ mute or grant clemency in any of these verdicts without the specific con­sent of the gov­­ern­­ment that had handed down the original judgment. For all intents and purposes, at least on the level of international law, Japan’s sovereignty was fully restored, yet the nation’s inability to independently manage any of its citizens con­victed of war crimes showed that certain con­straints on its autonomy remained in place. Such stipulations did not sit well with the war criminals, their supporters, or the grow­­ing sectors of the Japanese popula­­tion that felt Japan’s postwar peace had been perverted. Immediately follow­­ing Japan’s resump­­tion of independence a con­ certed Japanese gov­­ern­­ment and public effort to roll back indigna­­tion

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toward war criminals, who started to be labeled as “so-​called” war criminals or even “Japanese prisoners,” began in earnest. Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Health and Welfare (which helped manage the repatria­­tion and demobiliza­­tion efforts) as well as the Ministry of Justice established a work­­ing group to collect materials as a first step toward grasp­­ing the scope and con­tent of the international BC class war crimes trials against the Japanese. This group liaised with the grow­­ing number of domestic Japanese “assistance groups,” civil associations that banded together under various alliances and banners to help war criminals. In fact, private efforts to retrace the legal steps lead­­ing to war criminal prosecu­­tion were already mov­­ing forward in force prior to the actual implementa­­tion of the peace treaty. An October 1951 letter from Imamura Hisako, a representative of the Tokyo Family Association, puts into perspective the public’s responses to Japan’s peace treaty with an eye toward the war crimes issue. Imamura wrote to the ministerial liaison group to say that the treaty had been long awaited and was an excellent step forward but that it retained a dark chapter with the imposi­­tion of Article 11. This clause, she wrote, abrogated Japan’s legal sovereignty by forc­­ing the Ministry of Justice to gain permission from foreign gov­­ern­­ments to grant clemency or parole to con­v icted BC class war criminals. Most of the war crimes prisoners had mistakenly hoped that the peace treaty would be altruistic and grant them amnesty or release, and they had not counted on deep-​seated, mostly Western anger at Japan to con­tinue.30 It was almost as if peace to most Japanese meant the erasure of the stigma of war crimes. Imamura had become prominent several years prior as part of a group in 1948 that supported families left in the lurch by war crimes trial con­victions. On October 27, 1949, at Hongan temple in Tsukiji, Tokyo, she headed a meet­­ing of the National Meet­­ing of Families Left Bereft (Rusu kazoku zenkoku kyōgikai). Imamura was the wife of General Imamura Hitoshi, himself a war criminal.31 The group was subsequently banned but con­tinued most of its work in outly­­ing areas.32 A top-​secret Japanese gov­­ern­­ment internal Liaison Bureau document from February 13, 1950, explained the background to this growth of public support of war criminals dur­­ing the occupation. The catalyst was that these bereft families’ associations were form­­ing nationally and

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gain­­ing a sympathetic ear with the population. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs was worried enough about this development to con­duct its own investigation. An assessment by a MOFA research division stated that these associations were feed­­ing off one another and that the movement was based partly on family economic hardship. In addition, extremist nationalist sentiments motivated sections of some groups. If such groups persisted, the investigators found, eventually the goals they espoused could have a countereffect and not help the plight of the war criminals. The groups mostly wanted the death penalty thrown out and for war criminals housed abroad to be allowed to do their time domestically.33 The fact that the generous Chinese Nationalist treaty received little political reward for do­­ing so says much about how lopsided many Japanese assessed postwar justice to have been. Not very distant from the roar of battle in the Korean War, Japanese were steadfastly focused on their domestic plight, and imperial con­ cerns were seemingly already all but a distant memory. With the reversion of legal management of war criminals, as detailed in the 1952 peace treaty, Japan took stewardship over thirteen A class war criminals and 578 BC class criminals. This included several who were no longer juridically classified as Japanese because they had been stripped of Japanese citizenship after the war and given Taiwanese (Republic of China) or Korean citizenship. Japan’s war criminals “problem” was not limited to be­­ing a domestic issue and quickly became an international problem. Japan’s pursuit of a postwar peace with China intently focused on the war crimes issue and experienced the same tension between adjust­­ing political opinions toward a new legal process and the desire to establish a peace based on ideas founded in international law and justice. By early September 1952, months after popular rumblings against the “peace” were already be­­ing voiced, Associated Press correspondent William Barnard attended an “unprecedented press con­ ference” at Sugamo Prison, now newly managed by Japanese authorities who had taken over from the American occupiers. Sugamo Prison was the main facility in Tokyo that housed the handful of A class war criminals and BC class war criminals (some alleged, some charged, some con­victed, and some whose trials never occurred), includ­­ing those repatriated from their war crimes trials abroad to com­plete their sentences at home.34 Three hundred and eighteen war criminals now

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claimed they were be­­ing illegally incarcerated after the establishment of the new peace treaty. Former Major General Fukuchi Haruo was the main spokesman and said that prisoners should have been released when Japan regained its independence. Former Captain Ono Buichi claimed that their trials had been illegal because they were based on political con­siderations. Fukuchi admitted, “Possibly it cannot be helped that Japan will have to make material reparations for damages done. But we think the spiritual punishment of the Japanese people should have ended with the inaugura­­tion of the Japanese peace treaty.”35 Kaya Okinori, the wartime minister of finance who was sentenced to twenty years for A class war crimes and housed at Sugamo, said that he just wanted to be released to go play with his grandchildren. He later gained an early release and became justice minister from 1957 to 1960 in Prime Minister Kishi Nobusuke’s cabinet.36 The AP reporter listened attentively but also perceptively noted, “Miss­­ing entirely was any note of guilt or regret” as the prisoners voiced discontentment with their prison situa­­tion but failed to put their circumstances into any larger historical con­text.37 Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs was keen to find out how com­ parable war criminals were be­­ing treated in Europe, reason­­ing that Japan should be able to have similar outcomes. On September 17, 1952, Japanese officials met with German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, also serv­­ing as minister of foreign affairs at the time, who answered questions about the state of German war criminals and their release. Adenauer stated that the French had already released 784 of the 1,140 German war criminals sentenced, England had paroled 248 of the 380 war criminals remain­­ing in its prisons, and America had released 327 of 664.38 By August 1953 two Japanese Parliament Lower House representatives, former Foreign Minister Arita Hachirō and Yamashita Harue, one of Japan’s first postwar female representatives, were push­ ­ing requests that Japan should not have to serve as a vassal to foreign law in decid­­ing the legal fate of its remain­­ing BC class war criminals. The two attended a special UN meet­­ing on the treatment of war prisoners where they put forth a peti­­tion enunciat­­ing that even though their na­­tion had signed the peace treaty an unfulfilled national desire for Japanese prisoners to be released had not yet been granted. The two Japanese plaintiffs added, “This is truly a pity on the level of ­international

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A Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs map showing all the foreign embassies in Tokyo, created to help delegations plead Japan’s case concerning clemency for war criminals. (NAJ)

friendship” and indicated their desire to resolve this matter as soon as possible. The peti­­tion did not include any men­­tion of the war itself or the guilt or innocence of war criminals; the entire structure of the request was founded on a “Japan was a victim” ideology.39 Many Japanese now estimated that they were actually victims, not beneficiaries, of peace. Postwar stability and democracy played second fiddle to the social need to remove the label of war criminal in the post–peace treaty reassessment of Japan’s empire. The postwar laws that ensnared Japanese war criminals were not only cumbersome legal inventions. War criminals themselves began to believe that there was more at stake in their prosecu­­tion and incarcera­­ tion than merely their actions on the battlefield. This percep­­tion of

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v­ ictimhood is reflective of immediate postwar attitudes among the larger popula­­tion of Japanese, which developed into an essential belief that Japanese soldiers were “trapped” by the war. Such emotions were stylized in a Japanese TV movie con­cern­­ing a BC class war criminal titled I Want to Be a Shellfish (Watakushi wa kai ni naritai). Though the title references aquatic life, a more natural transla­­tion might be “I Want to Be Left Alone.” The television drama, written and directed by one of famed Japanese director Kurosawa Akira’s screenwriters, Hashimoto Shinobu, was broadcast on October 31 and December 21, 1958. It was so emotionally mov­­ing that it won both popular accolades and a Japanese Ministry of Educa­­tion prize. This self-​pity at be­­ing con­victed of war crimes over which an individual supposedly had no con­trol became the cornerstone of both the Japanese peace movement and the postwar structure of irresponsibility, as Ishida Takeshi noted.40 Matsunami Jun suggests that this type of reason­­ing portrays the occupation, though grudgingly accept­­ing the benefits, mostly in a negative light. Postwar BC class war crimes trials appear as the calamitous result meted out to mostly unfortunate souls.41

Entertainment and War Crimes In an anonymous letter to the public in the October 1952 issue of Sekai magazine, one war criminal (later discovered to be Katō Tetsutarō, the author who claimed that the television movie I Want to Be a Shellfish was semi-​fictionally based on his writings) wrote, “We are not trump cards for Japan’s remilitarization.”42 Katō assessed that the “free the war criminals movement” began a bit before the San Francisco Peace Treaty was promulgated, but the author claimed he did not wish the movement success but actually the opposite. “It doesn’t really help us and in fact I feel we are be­­ing used in this movement,” he explained. How can it be a genuine peace treaty, rely­­ing on mutual trust, if it con­tains several clauses con­cern­­ing war criminals? he asked. If that is why people are call­­ing for war criminals to be released, then he agreed. But that is not what this was; it was entirely independent and not tied into Japanese history, Katō argued.43 So, he asked anonymously, what propels this movement; what secrets lurk behind its origins? The Katō letter is long but encapsulates that the author, a war criminal writ­­ing from Sugamo,

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does not feel that the popula­­tion should pity war criminals. Certainly, he admits, some excesses were com­mitted dur­­ing the war, but war itself is the abroga­­tion of normalcy. What the author disliked was that people believed that war criminals should be forgiven because they were repent­­ing their crimes in prison. That was not true, he wrote: “From the outset we do not think that we are ‘criminals,’ so to tell the truth we are not very pleased. Not only can we not accept the good will of the people push­­ing this campaign, at times we even feel repulsed by their actions.” Katō wrote in a manner similar to other voices critical of the postwar trials, which was to describe the situa­­tion that war itself was inhumane and that of course in the pursuit of war “atrocious actions” occurred in due course. If one were to criticize inhumane actions, then one should not ignore what the Allies did, either, he posited. Katō’s anonymous but influential letter obviously kept current with the news, posit­­ing that U.S. envoy John Foster Dulles’s discussions with Japanese Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru set up a tit-​for-​tat arrangement. Yoshida would push for some form of rearmament and sell it to the public, while he left the door open for the possibility of the release of the war criminals. In response, the anonymous letter declared, “We don’t want to be the boatman who gets paid to cross the River Styx.” What the war criminals wanted, Katō wrote, was a discussion con­cern­­ing release that was not attached to other objectives. “We don’t want to be released because of deals made with the merchants of death,” he con­cluded. Katō added, “What we hope for is for our country to reestablish peace and amicable relations with its former enemies, to be able to profit from the magnanimity that formerly oppressed colonies that are now independent and love peace to forgive us for the moral crime (dōtokujō no tsumi) of hav­­ing joined in the war effort. We wish to return to the warm embrace of the Japanese people and to help protect the peace and independence of our na­­tion as an individual of a peace lov­­ing nation.”44 Katō opened a vibrant public discussion on the plight of war criminals, and a Japanese publisher approached the prisoners at Sugamo ask­­ing for personal letters detail­­ing their situations. The publisher did not request rational or legal explanations but invited the prisoners to pour out heartrend­­ing stories that would “speak to housewives and students.” It turned out this publisher was actually Katō’s father, further

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com­plicat­­ing the story, but this fact only came out in a later trial con­ cern­­ing plagiarism. The letters were published in a February 1953 com­ pila­­tion titled Seven Years after the End of War—​Prison Letters from Drafted Student War Criminals. The volume con­tained a letter (written under a pseudonym by Katō), “A crazed war criminal sentenced to death,” which has passages that appear eerily similar to the dialogue in the I Want to Be a Shellfish TV movie. One additional article, “Isn’t war a crime?” (submitted under a different name) was also revealed later to have com­e from Katō Tetsutarō’s pen.45 This con­stant refrain of be­­ing held responsibile for actions beyond one’s own con­trol, echo­­ing what General Okada Tasuku had attempted to argue in open court, failed to take into account that one can assume responsibility for one’s actions without blam­­ing others. This was a com­mon motif con­cern­­ing the immediate postwar Japanese national reac­­tion on the civilian and military side. In his 1952 article Katō lambasted those who did not ques­­tion the motives or aims of the support groups who just wanted “to help men get out of prison.” In the same tone he criticized members of parliament who permitted Article 11 of the peace treaty to pass the Diet.46 Finally, the Japanese media are blamed for paint­­ing war criminals as inhumane The 1959 cinematic film I Want to Be a Shellfish, a remake of the original TV movie, appeared to be loosely based on events similar to what happened to Katō Tetsutarō, though he was not executed while the protagonist in the movie is. Unlike the movie character, Katō was not an average recruit; he graduated from the prestigious Keio University and was later con­ scripted as a student directly into the imperial army, serv­­ing in China. He was seen as capable and soon worked in a posi­­tion of some authority at a few POW camps in Japan, which is how he came to be known by the Allies. Katō went on the lam postwar to avoid deten­­tion but ultimately was arrested in 1948, tried, and sentenced to death. Several family members and others intervened, begg­­ing General MacArthur to reconsider. A retrial was held, and SCAP authorities reduced Katō’s original sentence. Like many other Japanese war criminals, Katō became a free man in 1958.47 The film version of I Want to Be a Shellfish con­cerns a low-​level war crimes trial and has held Japanese audiences in thrall for decades. The phenomenon moved beyond be­­ing just a film in the late 1950s. It was

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so mov­­ing that “I want to be a shellfish” was chosen as the top popular phrase of 1958. Years later, in 2007, the TBS television sta­­tion made a sort of docudrama of the original broadcast, and in 2008 Tōhō movie studios remade a film version of the 1959 original. Obviously, this image of an unjustly con­v icted BC class war criminal has struck a chord within the Japanese public, given the span of time over which the written work and filmic interpretations have held audiences’ interest.48 One empathizes with the characters who seemingly led peaceful and earnest lives until they were caught up in the horror of war. The music swells at the appropriate moments to tug at one’s heartstrings. Overall, much more emphasis was cinematically placed on people gett­­ing wrapped up in the war rather than be­­ing involved by choice. One can almost argue that I Want to Be a Shellfish com­petes as an antiwar film in that the main character, barber Shimizu Toyomatsu, learns that he does not want to be human in the end because that just leads to misery. In the original film Shimizu is a loveable country bumpkin who runs a small barbershop and is played by the cute and cuddly actor Frankie Sakai. Shimizu’s educa­­tion ended with elementary school, so he cannot read or write that well—​audiences learn that he is a simple man who grew up poor, worked, and learned a trade. Initial scenes in the film reveal the idyllic and cheerful Japanese village where everyone stops by the barbershop and hangs out to chat, enjoy a smoke, and occasionally get a trim. Eventually, the moment that Shimizu has been dread­­ing com­es, and the red draft letter from the army arrives—​he is to be mobilized, but his wife is distraught. Life in the Japanese military is cruel, and Shimizu does not fit in. Dur­­ing one air raid several U.S. planes are downed and Shimizu’s division is com­manded to go and “deal with” the downed U.S. airmen. Most are dead, but two are alive and unconscious. To test the Japanese imperial soldiers the officer instructs the two weakest of this platoon, includ­­ing the naïve Shimizu, to attach bayonets and practice thrust­­ing into the U.S. airmen tied to trees. At first Shimizu and his counterpart charge and then stop just in front of the prisoners. The two are reprimanded and com­manded once again to charge, but the camera cuts away just as they are about to stab their targets. In the immediate postwar period Shimizu is back in his barbershop while jazz plays in the background. His wife is happy, and all seems

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well. Then suddenly occupa­­tion military police enter the store and arrest Shimizu as a war criminal. The court scenes show Shimizu’s immediate superiors all pass­­ing the buck, claim­­ing they were not responsible. Because Shimizu com­mitted the actual deed he is found guilty and sentenced to hang. He is despondent and in shock. Dur­­ing his time in prison his mood oscillates between happiness, boredom, and sadness. At the same time his former com­mander, Yano, com­es to see him and says that now he understands that the responsibility is all his and that he will tell the court about the real orders. Shimizu is elated and believes freedom is imminent because the court will understand the truth. Time passes, and there is talk of a peace treaty. Everyone is happy because they expect that with the peace treaty war criminals will be freed. Suddenly guards arrive at Shimizu’s cell to inform him that he is mov­­ing cellblocks. He assumes that it is because he is to be released; he is astounded when he is told that his death sentence is set for the next day. A kind Buddhist priest com­es and tries to offer solace, giv­­ing him alcohol and chatting, but Shimizu is beyond despair. The priest says that all we can do is place hope in the next life. When you are reborn, he asks Shimizu, what do you hope to be? And here begins the famous and sad ending. Shimizu, at first, replies that he wants to be rich in the next life because he grew up poor and unhappy. The film then cuts to scenes with his wife happily install­­ing new equipment in their barbershop because she is unaware that her husband is about to be executed. The scenes shift back to Shimizu walk­­ing slowly and sadly toward door 13, the execu­­tion chamber. As he walks and the music swells, his voice-​ over becomes more and more anguished: “If I were reborn I would not want to be Japanese. No, I wouldn’t even want to be human. I would not want to be a cow or a horse because they are bullied by humans. If I had to be reborn I would want to be a shellfish. Shellfish stick to rocks deep in the ocean. They have no anxiety to con­sume them. Because they know noth­­ing they are not sad, they are not happy. They feel no pain. . . .”49 The film finishes with this famous line as the end­­ing title com­es up on the screen. The last few tear-​jerk­­ing scenes leave the audience with the painful juxtaposi­­tion of a man’s family cheerfully await­­ing his return when he has just been executed for a crime of which his guilt was in doubt. It remains a powerful end­­ing and must have

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been doubly so in the late 1950s, when memories of both the war and postwar justice were fresh in everyone’s minds. The story created an endur­­ing myth of the wrongful pursuit of justice con­cern­­ing BC class war crimes trials. Hayashi Hirofumi, who has devoted his career to examin­­ing BC class war crimes trials of Japanese around the world, does not mince words when he states that the original TV drama and subsequent movies have done more to influence and shape postwar Japanese con­ceptions about the irrationality and capricious nature of BC class war crimes trials than anyth­­ing else. We must not forget that the TV movie and films are fiction, even though they have taken over public opinion and often serve as a template for reality. In the fictional film the main character is a nice boy drafted into the war as a private second class and instructed to practice his bayonet skills on a downed U.S. bomber pilot.50 As viewers we do not ultimately see the final result of his be­­ing ordered to kill trussed-​up prisoners, but nonetheless the protagonist is caught up in the pursuit of Japanese war criminals after the war and sentenced to execution. Postwar audiences were moved to tears about his unfortunate plight, which seemed so unfair. As Hayashi’s exhaustive research reminds us, no second-​class privates of any sort were ever sentenced to death in any BC class war crimes trial against the Japanese. There were instances of first-​class privates who were sentenced to death, but this was never for actions based on follow­­ing orders but for cases stemm­­ing from their personal actions. In the American trials at Yokohama (on which the television movie and films were also partly based) there were second-​ class privates sentenced to death, but upon review by higher courts their sentences were decreased to serv­­ing time.51 Not only does Japan exhibit amnesia about its imperial past, but more importantly the na­­tion com­pletely shifted social views about the military. Just up to the surrender Japanese military strategy and propaganda boasted that its soldiers did not give up until death. There were only two ways out of a battle: death and victory. In a sense, the public cared little about the fate of its soldiers. Immediately after the war, however, that attitude transformed, and the na­­tion was extremely exercised over sav­­ing its soldiers from execu­­tion or imprisonment or the taint of be­­ing labeled a war criminal. How did this sudden change occur, and why? Did the abrupt amputa­­tion of imperial acquisitions render Japanese incapable of dissect­­ing their con­tradictory views?

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A few years after the San Francisco Peace Treaty, in a bid to gain a better overall picture of what had occurred at these trials, who had been tried, and what the sentences had been, Japan’s Ministry of Justice began its own collec­­tion of records and investiga­­tion of war crimes trials. This was not done in a bid to con­tinue prosecu­­tion of those not yet charged but rather to reassess the trials that had already been adjudicated by foreign powers. A major irony is that the gov­­ern­­ment chose Yokomizo Mitsuteru to serve as con­sultant, along with Hara Chūichi, a formal imperial navy officer, and two advisors, Toyota Kumao and Inoue Tadao.52 Toyota was the same naval officer who had been central to the imperial navy’s plan to hinder Allied prosecu­­tion of war criminals. Yokomizo was an imperialist supporter and former director of the wartime Japanese gov­­ern­­ment’s influential Cabinet Board of Informa­­tion in 1940, in part responsible for propaganda activities and coordination. He explicitly explained at various times to the public before surrender that by “disseminat­­ing credible facts propaganda creates a situa­­tion in which one can seek understand­­ing and resonance, in order to reach a certain goal.”53 These men were interest­­ing choices as archivists, to say the least. Yokomizo had also served as governor of Okayama prefecture and later as the chief of the Health and Welfare Ministry’s Social Bureau. He actually worked as an advisor to the National Cabinet archives after the war and, as we now know from these archives, was in charge of records deal­­ing with war crimes trials. Hara Chūichi was a con­victed war criminal, found guilty in a U.S. military court in Guam, who served out his six-​year sentence at Sugamo Prison. Upon return­­ing to Sugamo to finish his sentence he met many more unfortunate than he and was moved to start a political ac­­tion group in support of war criminals. One can only imagine the political mean­­ing behind nominat­­ing a former wartime propaganda organizer and war criminal to collate war crimes trial materials. At the base level noth­­ing was impartial in the Japanese gov­­ern­­ment’s stance toward war crimes trials. The gov­­ern­­ment set up a con­glomera­­tion of interconnected collec­­ tion agencies to start amass­­ing documents to portray a full view of the BC class war crimes trials and to create a clearer picture of what happened but also as an evidentiary base to criticize the trials and gain support for Japan’s view. Once the San Francisco Peace Treaty went into effect and Sugamo Prison and other facilities were taken over by Japan, someth­­ing had to be done with all the archives of the trials and

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the demobiliza­­tion agencies. Collec­­tion started in earnest with a budget in 1955.54 Strangely, the great number of archives went to the Ministry of Health and Welfare and Ministry of Justice, never to see the light of day again due to interagency squabbl­­ing and claims of “privacy protection,” even though the trials were public and reported daily in various international newspapers (especially Chinese) and a variety of other media. Staffers tried to gain copies or original materials from abroad through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but there were many obstacles to this, not least of which was the fact that many of the trials were held in jurisdictions with no diplomatic ties to Japan—​the People’s Republic of China, the USSR, what was then Indochina, and so forth. Japan is not alone in public amnesia con­cern­­ing this tranche of history; there is painfully little from the French regard­­ing the equivalent of their BC class trials.

Calcify­­ing Japanese Attitudes American and Chinese con­cerns about impediments to the prosecu­­tion and imprisonment of BC class war crimes trials stimulated further negative domestic Japanese responses. As Japanese postwar economic circumstances improved, these suspicions gave rise to an internalized debate about the very nature of postwar peace and justice. Toyota Kumao penned an opinion memo on June 2, 1952, con­cern­­ing the release of “so-​called war criminals” and the urgent need to reduce their sentences. He wrote that the only problem left after the ratifica­­tion of the peace treaty was to resolve the war criminal issue, but it was a very thorny problem due to Article 11 of the peace treaty. In addition, Toyota underscored other factors that stymied Japan’s efforts at resolv­­ing the war crimes issues, includ­­ing that Japan possessed few to none of the records of any of the BC class trials and thus had little con­crete evidence on which to build a request for a reduc­­tion in sentence. Toyota stated that Japan should push for the follow­­ing resolu­­tion due to three exigencies: The crimes occurred dur­­ing war, and with the establishment of a peace treaty it was com­mon under international law to release those previously found guilty; the prisoners had already spent quite a long time in jail, and thus the goal of rectify­­ing war crimes had mostly been achieved; the trials were one-​sided and therefore inherently unjust.

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Dur­­ing the trials many cases of testimony obtained by force, under threat, or even under torture were entered into evidence. Toyota’s com­ ments were not all off-​target. He wrote that there were even cases where fabricated evidence was presented but the sentence of death was handed down and execu­­tion implemented nonetheless. Because limits were imposed on defense teams, especially in trials outside of Japan, and defendants usually had poor access to a quality defense, the trials were tainted. Most of the testimony was often years after the fact and based on shaky memories. Toyota asserted that often the Japanese military was defend­­ing itself or that the crime had taken place dur­­ing battle but after the war this behavior was judged a “war crime.” Sentenc­­ing was varied and imposed without standards, while some judges had previously been POWs of the Japanese so they were biased, he claimed. Frequently, translators were in short supply.55 The Second Bureau of Demobiliza­­tion on October 1, 1952, issued a plan to begin collect­­ing materials to plead Japan’s case for clemency or reduc­­ing sentences.56 By September 1, 1953, the Sugamo Management Com­mittee Board had drafted its own Fundamental Plan for Releas­­ing War Criminals, which pushed the need to politicize the issue of war criminals to prod politicians into ac­­tion and appeal to public opinion. The draft proposed that us­­ing the media would gain ample notice. By 1953 war criminals were return­­ing to Japan from Australia and elsewhere, the authors noted, which meant that the public’s atten­­tion was once again focused on the issue. The scheme underscored that one of the reasons for the movement’s lack of cohesion stemmed, in part, from legal ignorance con­cern­­ing the difference between A class and BC class war crimes. Some people believed that just be­­ing judged guilty meant that the defendant was actually guilty, and some people did not want to take part because they misjudged the movement as “right wing,” the report clarified.57 To gain more public support and help the com­munity understand that many of the BC class war criminals were merely “cogs in the war machine,” the report admitted that some war crimes may have occurred but that these were actually “crimes on the battlefield” (senjō hanzai) and should be labeled as such. This essentially meant that they were not “war crimes” as understood by the new applica­­tion of international law. Because these crimes took place in battle it was irrational to pin responsibility on one person, the authors argued.58

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What is noteworthy about the entire strategy was that Japanese war criminals themselves realized that by the start of the early Cold War their fate was already separate from the original legal issue of “achiev­ ­ing justice” and that they had already become pawns in much larger domestic and international political squabbling. Justice and the Cold War seemed incompatible in ways that they had not been in the early autumn of 1945. The war criminals resented their legal situation, and the report ended with a repudia­­tion of their own country that had caused them to wind up in this very predicament. The Sugamo com­ mittee wrote, “The na­­tion that drafted and mobilized us, the na­­tion that sold us out to the Allies to successfully end the war, the na­­tion that established a peace treaty by sacrific­­ing us with the acceptance of Article 11, the na­­tion that has com­moditized us with our con­tinu­­ing incarceration, of course we believe that this na­­tion has a political responsibility to repay us for our physical and mental anguish.”59 Such anger directed by the war criminals toward the Japanese gov­­ern­­ment has been forgotten in more recent historical memory that seeks to emphasize only Japan’s victim status. Here Japanese war criminals con­ sidered Japan’s empire also at the root of their quandary. An internal Japanese gov­­ern­­ment report from October 1953 labeled “Observations on War Criminal Problems” pointed out that suddenly within the midst of the “Korean Incident,” as the Korean War was termed, Japanese war criminal issues evaporated from the media spotlight to the point that prisoners and the Japanese people noticed the absence. The author of the report stated, “I am skeptical that the Allies’ pursuit of war crimes trials under the banner of justice and humanity was not just a scenario of ‘might makes right.’ ”60 Within this com­plex paradigm of shift­­ing public interest and empathy for war criminals the Japanese media began to see war criminals more as victims of the war itself rather than perpetrators, and calls for their release or clemency grew louder. Of their own accord, around the country Associations to Help Those Sentenced (jukeisha sewakai) began forming, add­­ing a new chapter to the postwar treatment and legal memory of Japanese war criminals.61 With the restora­­tion of peace many postwar Japanese said they now recognized the unjust nature of the BC class trials and believed “the war criminal problem is be­­ing used as a major impediment to the improvement and revival of Japan’s domestic and international development.”62 The same report proposed several strategies

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con­cern­­ing “how to resolve the war crimes problem.” Part of the solu­­ tion was seen in establish­­ing a com­mittee com­posed of officials from the Ministry of Health and Welfare, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the Ministry of Finance, as well as the Ministry of Justice, to help unify and strengthen institutions that dealt with war criminals and offer assistance to their families. In addition, proposals suggested that “we should use every opportunity to make the release of war criminals an urgent issue for foreign policy, and work diligently to resolve this issue by rais­­ing awareness of the real plight of war criminals with the elite of our neighbor nations.” The report added, “We need to assiduously employ media organs and Japanese public opinion toward the war crimes issue to reverberate abroad and deepen international recogni­­tion of these problems.” The short-​term goal was to try to gain sympathy among neighbor­­ing countries by play­­ing up the issue that Japanese had been unilaterally judged by the victors. If that did not work, “in response to countries that have not provided a clear answer con­cern­­ing when war criminals can be expected to be released, is there a way we can get them to empathize at all with our national sentiment on this issue?” The report suggested highlight­­ing the facts that many of these prisoners had already been incarcerated for eight years and that once the peace treaty was signed their deten­­tion would stand as an obstacle to Japan’s harmonious development and world peace. Moreover, mount­ ­ing domestic Japanese displeasure toward this issue could render it a serious internal cause for public disturbance, the report ominously declared.63 This domestic discord set the stage for why the Japanese public was so ill prepared for the repatria­­tion of civilians from mainland China and relatively dismissive of CCP efforts in adjudicat­­ing war crimes trials. The KMT had already allowed its former prisoners to go free, and the CCP would start its proceedings more than a decade after the war ended. Moreover, the Japanese public was already look­­ing past war crimes trials. It was as if the two countries were on separate political timelines that were oriented in exactly the opposite direction.

Japan’s Prepara­­tion for Deal­­ing with War Criminals after the Treaty A collec­­tion of Japanese ministerial summaries tabulated that Japanese public opinion toward the trials was mainly displeased with what was

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believed to be a one-​sided examina­­tion of Japan’s crimes that ignored any potential crimes on the side of the victors, the Allies. As Yuma Totani has noted, Japanese defense teams tried to point out this lopsidedness in their critique of the juridical process, but they failed to legally resolve the issue because while such a matter might entail moral questions, as a legal defense it did not matter. Even were the Americans or other Allies guilty of war crimes, it would not have legally exculpated the Japanese. The Japanese con­flated moral and legal issues in their postwar attempts to com­e to terms with imperial wartime military behavior and postwar war crimes trials. The final point in the report con­cerned the fact that many of the Japanese war crimes, at least the ones for which individuals were charged, took place under the com­mand of the Japanese military. The report attempted to argue that such ac­­tion was therefore not an individual crime per se, as regular crimes would be con­sidered, and did not fall under the purview of a crime where responsibility should be meted out to one particular individual. This sort of argument still resonates in Japan, where general opinion holds that war is hell and therefore so is the behavior that accompanies it. War criminals, in this interpretation, are just victims due to their unfortunate experience of be­­ing drafted into the imperial military. Responsibility should fall on Japanese society or the entire military. Furthermore, the summary suggested, “In the extreme circumstances of war, the pursuit of battle or its methods are not infrequently based on a patriotic love for one’s country. As such, there is virtually no criminal intent in such behavior.”64 The goal with such logic remained almost a plaint to excuse war criminal behavior rather than try­­ing to search for an explana­­tion or apology. Many postwar Japanese investigators believed that the sentences were too heavy or needed to take into account more the structure of the Japanese military that pushed soldiers to com­mit actions that were not necessarily voluntary. Follow­­ing the surrender, in occupied Japan there was no full freedom of speech, so regular people remained somewhat disinterested in war crimes trials, the report noted. But after independence, with expanded freedom of the press in the spr­­ing of 1952 and the end of the occupation, the Japanese public grew educated about what happened dur­­ing the international trials. A national peti­­tion call­­ing for the release of

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war criminals swelled to 15 million names as there was an emotive associa­­tion between incarcerated war criminals and Japan’s new peace. Many citizens accepted the idea that for Japan to rebuild it needed to remove the stench of the war criminal taint.65 The Japanese public and authorities were keen to push the war and its legacy behind them as quickly as possible and move forward. Prior to the end of the occupa­­ tion the U.S. gov­­ern­­ment took the first step to help alleviate war criminals’ lengthy stays in prison by introduc­­ing a new SCAP policy on March 7, 1950, to allow war criminals credits for good behavior.66 John Foster Dulles came to Japan as special emissary in January 1951 to discuss plans for a Korea–Japan peace treaty. The official internal summary report of the visit con­cluded that after Dulles went home on April 6, 1951, war criminals might be granted clemency or have their sentences reduced if agreed to by Japan and the Allied rulers.67 Once the occupa­­tion terminated, SCAP built on its previous programs in a 1955 schedule of good behavior where inmates could accrue con­fine­­ ment credits and good time credit, which would be calculated toward parole. There were similar changes in Japan’s pension law for war veterans as this was a crucial issue for families. In pursuit of such support the law was revised fifty-​six times between 1953 and 1995, “most im­­ portantly in 1955, when the families of con­v icted war criminals became eligible and executions of war criminals were officially treated as ‘deaths incurred in the line of duty.’   ”68 A postwar Japanese report suggested a way forward for the gov­­ern­­ ment’s pursuit of a plan to get its war criminals released. The report stated: A shortcut to resolv­­ing the war criminals problems is to make the average citizen of the country that initially held the trials understand the real situation. In this manner, we can perhaps br­­ing about a reversal of the current emotional state of these populations. Especially by instruct­­ing them that their countries dur­­ing the war and after also com­mitted similar actions, start­­ing with the atomic bombs, there is a relative basis for their culpability as well.69 A subsequent sec­­tion was labeled “Aims for deal­­ing with war criminals in view of the peace treaty.” The main idea was that “the promulga­­tion

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of the peace treaty brings a com­plete closure to the war,” or so Japanese officials hoped. The report recommended that those prisoners held but not yet tried be released based on the tone of the San Francisco Peace Treaty and that those sentenced to be executed but whose sentences had not yet been carried out have them stayed. The later sections of the summary gov­­ern­­ment report suggested draft plans for promot­­ing the resolu­­tion of the war criminal issue, in October 1952, by repeat­­ing to relevant countries the unjust nature of the trials, outlin­­ing the processes and the military situation, and appeal­­ing to public opinion in those countries to arouse sympathy. The plan identified, however, the need to be prudent. Drafters realized the need to con­sider the situa­­tion in those countries and the international con­ditions at large, for example what was happen­ ­ing with war criminals in Germany. If amnesty could not be gained, the report con­cluded, then a decrease of the sentence should be the aim.70 By late 1952 support for releas­­ing class war criminals had spread to foreigners liv­­ing in Japan. A November 7, 1952, letter in the Japanese language from the head of the Japanese Christian Association, Charles Iglehart, spelled out the usual reasons for lett­­ing the war criminals out of prison: Their crimes were com­mitted in the course of follow­­ing their military duties, and they were currently be­­ing used as political pawns in Japan. The letter expressed the hope that various foreign gov­­ern­­ ments would release their Japanese war criminals. The author reflected on the nature of Japanese military behavior dur­­ing the Russo-​Japanese War of 1904–1905 and dur­­ing World War I when Japan was actually lauded by the world for its treatment of POWs, follow­­ing military rules of engagement to the letter.71 Now the Japanese were reflect­­ing on their mistakes and striv­­ing to not repeat them, Iglehart wrote. The letter placed blame on “wartime propaganda” rather than personal responsibility—​a mystify­­ing con­v ic­­tion that somehow military behavior grew blindly from propaganda, rather than involv­­ing any individual’s decision making. The correspondent showed his hand, describ­­ing how he felt wartime Japanese were deceived, includ­­ing the war criminals: “At the time people were entranced by a narrow and pathological patriotism which ignored the spirit of bushidō and a normal state of mind. Much of the popula­­tion was misguided for a long time by the gov­­ern­­ ment’s inflammatory messages to promote hatred of the enemy.” He

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con­cluded that it was as if “all of Japan had been infected with a sort of virus.”72 The grow­­ing sympathy toward so-​called “war criminals,” he proposed, emanated from the veil of this “wartime disease” that had been lifted from the Japanese almost seven years after the end of the war. Because many individual Japanese also felt responsible, Iglehart wrote, their con­cern spilled over toward the war criminals, who were in many ways, the Japanese believed, singled out for an entire country’s mistakes. The trials were often biased, and that was why only Japanese were adjudicated as war criminals in the heat of these postwar battles. A pamphlet titled Release of Those Con­victed at War Crimes Trials, published in July 1955 by the Ministry of Justice’s Bureau of Corrections Special Investigations Sec­­tion (Hogokyoku tokubetsu chōsaka), added further to the public debate by claim­­ing that the process for adjudicat­ ­ing war crimes trials, as laid out too vaguely in the Potsdam Declaration, directly led to the postwar troubles because although the Japanese surrendered the con­ditions were unclear. Great strides were made to avoid discuss­­ing the fact that unconditional surrender meant just that: There were no con­ditions. The pamphlet sketched out the criminal statutes that were only stipulated after the crimes had taken place dur­­ing the war. Accord­­ing to the pamphlet, such logic went against the very nature of international law and was an idea fundamental to law: that there could be no crime if there was no law against it.73 Such ideas as outlined in this pamphlet and collected by the con­cerned ministries in their bid to calculate not only the history of Japanese war crimes trials abroad but also the public response would serve as a template for how such trials were viewed in the future.

Love Statues, War Criminals, and Chinese Prisons Not long after the movement to release prisoners began, the Japanese were already discuss­­ing how to memorialize their soldiers’ sacrifice, especially those caught up in war crimes trials. In 1955 visitors and passersby at one of Tokyo’s main rail and subway stations, Tokyo Station, would have noticed a unique landmark. Adjacent to the southern entrance, alone on a large stone pedestal in the square, stood a several-​meter-​tall bronze statue called Agape. The sculpture was better

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known as the “statue of love,” or “ai no zō” in Japanese, because agape is the Greek word for “love.”74 A naked and muscular young man was posed athletically, his arms raised straight toward the heavens, pray­­ing for peace. The “love statue” was remarkable less for the fact that it did not really celebrate the emo­­tion of love, as a traditional work of art, but for the fact that it represented more the religious ideal of love, in this case as man should have for fellow man. Tajima Ryūjun, the head Buddhist clergyman who served at Japan’s Sugamo Prison, was responsible for its creation. He started as the Buddhist chaplain at Sugamo Prison on June 9, 1949, and was particularly com­mitted to those war criminals who had been sentenced to death, offer­­ing spiritual guidance, gett­­ing their sentences reduced, or con­sol­­ing them. He was also a professor at Taishō University in Tokyo. Tajima held a philosophical view of the Allies’ aggressive attempts to find postwar justice. He asserted that the con­clusion of the war, with its dogged pursuit of justice and supposed search for peace, would result in creat­­ing the exact opposite, a society that never found peace. In his memoir as Sugamo Prison chaplain he wrote, “In the midst of the closure of World War II the omens portend­­ing the next world war were already apparent. The countries tak­­ing efforts to attain ‘justice and peace’ are actually, in effect, push­­ing the world toward the precipice of suicide through such action. It is, if one can put such a label on it, a great paradox.”75 Tajima hoped to make the world aware of how the Japanese war criminals suffered at the hands of Cold War superpowers that were merely, as he implied, play­­ing a game of political chess. Soon after Japan regained its sovereignty in April 1952, with the help of other luminaries among the Buddhist clergy, Tajima began a peti­­tion movement to assist war criminals, even go­­ing on the radio and implor­ ­ing people to have com­passion for them. For his efforts the minister of justice awarded Tajima with a distinguished service award in July 1952.76 Tajima believed that what the prisoners wrote in their last testaments was pure and that in a sense they had become true men, stripped down to their barest thoughts and emotions. They were therefore, in his eyes, worthy of respect in their final moments.77 Many may disagree with Tajima’s philosophical assessment, though it is difficult to ques­­tion his motives as a chaplain. His analysis seemed to con­sider

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the war criminals more than their victims, or even possibly the crimes, seem­­ing to support the no­­tion that guilt was wiped away with the death of the war criminal. Tajima ardently espoused the idea that people, and more specifically Japan, could use the adversity of the war as a chance to renew society from the ground up. To achieve such a goal required find­­ing in oneself love for fellow man, someth­­ing seemingly absent from the decisions handed down in Allied courts that con­demned former Japanese soldiers to death. The Buddhist clergyman asserted that Japanese war criminals were the outgrowths of worldly con­flicts in their supposed search for justice—​but that in their deaths these men had someth­­ing to bequeath the world about life and love, just before their untimely departures. After the end of the BC class trials in Japan proper, which were entirely managed by the United States, Tajima helped publish a massive collec­­tion of the last wills and testaments of many of these war criminals (some no doubt wrongly con­v icted, some obviously correctly sentenced), amassed from throughout Japan and abroad, includ­­ing China. Titled The Last Testaments of the Century (Seiki no isho), the com­ pila­­tion became a bestseller, and the profits went toward the con­ struction, along with some fund-​raising, for build­­ing the “love statue.” 78 Tajima was obviously a man driven by Buddhist com­passion. As he wrote in the preface to the collection, “There are many ways to view those war criminals, but if we take a broad view they are actually the result of a con­tradic­­tion that covers the world in that approximately 1,000 individuals were handed the most extreme punishment and forced to face a death sentence for several months or even years. In the end their lives were cut brief and this situa­­tion is noth­­ing short of unprecedented.” Tajima expanded on his views to help readers understand the motiva­­tion behind Japanese soldiers’ wartime behavior. In his words, “The goal of war is to gain the death of one’s opponent and in pursuit of such an aim we end up desir­­ing our own deaths. In this manner, Japanese were taught that death was the most holy attainment of the soul.”79 Shunsuke Tsurumi analyzed that war crimes cases were generally poorly understood and not esteemed in Japanese public opinion. Tsurumi cited an analysis of the 701 wills of executed BC

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class prisoners collected in Tajima’s volume that historian Sakuta Keiichi classified into four broad categories: “1) death as a sacrifice; 2) death as the achievement of solidarity with the dead; 3) death as atonement for sin; 4) death as natural death.”80 The first chapter of this last testament volume was from soldiers who were executed in China and included the last testament of Second Lieutenant Noda Tsuyoshi, con­v icted for the “100-​man kill­­ing con­ test.” What many of the men, Noda included, hoped for in their last letters and testaments was to not die in vain. Noda maintained that the entire objective of Japan’s war in East Asia had been to establish peace and wrote, “I hope that our deaths serve as an opportunity for China and Japan to join together, to stand as a human sacrifice to peace in East Asia. In this way I can be pleased that world peace will com­e about. No matter what, I only pray that I do not die a dog’s death and hope that my death will not be in vain. Long live China! Long live Japan! Long live the emperor!”81 In his quest to translate this thought into ac­­tion Tajima helped raise funds for the com­mission and erec­­tion of the “love statue” to those lost souls, con­demned BC class war criminals, out of a con­vic­­tion that their memory should not be forgotten amid postwar animosity.82 Instead of stand­­ing for hatred and war, these soldiers should be recalled in love, he anticipated, an emo­­tion that would aid in help­­ing future Japanese generations find the true path toward fulfillment and better human understanding. The Last Testaments of the Century was placed in the stone founda­­tion of the love statue at Tokyo Station, and on the pedestal Tajima himself wrote the calligraphy for the character, ai, which is engraved into the base. I find the fact that Tajima’s statue had no real explana­­tion on its edifice con­cern­­ing its meaning, except the Chinese character and Greek word for “love” carved on the front, emblematic of the hazy Japanese understand­­ing of the history surround­­ing BC war criminals in postwar East Asia. Such omission suggests historical amnesia or a belief that the BC war criminal history should be subsumed into the story of the energy needed to rebuild and reconstruct the Japan that had been ­virtually destroyed by war. And in a sense the Japanese popula­­tion ­supported such beliefs that mirrored the 1956 Japanese economic white paper, which used the phrase “we are no longer in the postwar”

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“Love statue” in front of Tokyo Station. (Yomiuri shimbun, October 11, 1955, evening edition)

(mohaya sengo de wa nai) to demonstrate that Japan had moved beyond its imperial history. In a similar manner, the love statue also suggested links with the Yasukuni Shrine, the Shinto sanctuary where hope and belief in the afterlife offers solace to the BC class war criminals enshrined there.

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Dubious Heroes The “love statue” and similar displays of public art as memorial sites for the war con­tinue to engage the Japanese public in heated debates con­ cern­­ing the proper way to erect war memorials and involve the much more morally ambivalent question: What did war criminals represent, and should Japan con­ceive of them as victims or perpetrators? A small monument on the site of the former Sugamo Prison offers a different set of values surround­­ing the historical con­testation. Dur­­ing the 1970s, on the cusp of Japan’s high-​speed economic growth and massive reurbaniza­ ­tion program follow­­ing the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, the area around where Sugamo Prison stood became the center of one of Tokyo’s main redevelopment zones, later called Sunshine City, in the Ikebukuro sec­ ­tion of Tokyo. The local council wanted to erect a memorial to the seven executed A class war criminals on the specific site of the execu­­ tion chambers, which was inside a space the gov­­ern­­ment had set aside for a public park. Oppos­­ing members of the public wanted a peace monument instead. The two sides battled it out through the torpid Japanese legal molasses that presides over con­temporary justice. Both progressives and con­servatives wanted some form of “lieu de memoire” in the garden.83 The front side of the stone monument that was ultimately agreed upon says “Pray for Everlast­­ing Peace” in Japanese. This is the side that faces out to the small area of the main park square, where the medium-​ sized boulder-​like monument has been placed. To see the inscrip­­tion on the back you have to essentially crouch down but stand up on the dirt area behind the monument, not a com­fortable posi­­tion from which to read the interest­­ing dedication. The Japanese inscrip­­tion on the back, unread by most passersby, says: “After the end of World War II, on this spot the Military Tribunals for the Far East and other Allied military tribunals that adjudicated war crimes meted out executions. In order not to repeat the tragedy of war, we dedicate this spot to such memory and erect this monument.” Japanese are passive recipients of fierce Allied “justice” in this memorial because the popula­­tion is seemingly accorded no agency in its own culpability or responsibility. Given that the Japanese populace and gov­­ern­­ment never pursued any of their own war criminals in the postwar period, the entire sense of justice con­cern­­ing

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such matters appears as a mandate from above, separate from Japan, initiated by the occupa­­tion forces and Allies in general. What this con­stant seesaw argument between progressives and revisionists revealed was that Japan con­fronts com­pet­­ing spatial representations of its own imperial history; these are only two examples. A vague anthropomorphic vision of peace takes the form of the “love statue” but with no epitaph explain­­ing the meaning. At the same time a former prison site turned into a thriv­­ing business district memorializes the spot where war criminals were executed, with a vague reference “pray­­ing for everlast­­ing peace.” The legacy of the BC class war criminals and their trials con­tinues to remain a con­tested issue in con­ temporary Japanese history, mirror­­ing the social divisions caused by differences over how to design Japan’s war memorials and remember war crimes. The Japanese war criminal is a victim, as sculpted into the bronze “love statue,” but simultaneously he is a hero, apotheosized at Yasukuni Shrine, dy­­ing for the sake of the Japanese nation.

Yasukuni and BC Class War Criminals Unlike the more popularly detailed fates of the A class war criminals, which caused an international uproar when it was discovered that the Yasukuni Shrine had enshrined them in 1978, the national push to enshrine BC class war criminals garnered relatively little public reac­­ tion in Japan and elsewhere.84 The problem involves deep introspec­­tion con­cern­­ing Japanese religious and philosophical ideas about life and death, as well as deal­­ing with foreign policy and international relations. If these BC class war criminals fought for their country but subsequently were executed, were the men any different than other wartime dead? If Japan had not lost the war these men would have been awarded medals of honor (a historical revisionist point of view that com­pletely misses the point that Japan did lose). More importantly, the one-​sided debate avoided the core issue of analyz­­ing war crimes themselves, as if their nature only depended on the postwar. As the major gov­­ern­­ment summary noted, these men only “happened to be saddled with the stigma of be­­ing labeled ‘war criminals’ so therefore they differed from the average war soldier who died on the battlefield.” If they were not enshrined at the Yasukuni Shrine for their families, their spirits would

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then remain in a state of limbo.85 This logic twisted the fundamental matter of con­cern and avoided a judgment call on the point of independently declar­­ing whether wartime behavior was right or wrong, a topic that had noth­­ing to do with who was adjudicat­­ing the crime itself. The Asahi newspaper on December 2, 1965, ran a column titled “When will the spirits of those judged as war criminals make their way to Yasukuni Shrine?” Chief Priest Ikeda declared that there was no institutional bias but that the war had created many who needed to be enshrined and the shrine had com­pleted the task in October. It took quite a long time to get around to everyone, so that was the cause for the delay, Ikeda stated.86 Priests at the Yasukuni Shrine enshrined three waves of BC class war criminals: 346 soldiers on April 6, 1959; 479 on October 17 1959; and the last 114 on October 18, 1966. In this manner all the lower-​level executed war criminals were enshrined by 1966.87 Tajima, the sympathetic cleric at Sugamo, wished to assist the public in recall­­ing the Japanese side of this historical equa­­tion con­cern­­ing war crimes, but we do a disservice to the memory of the victims (non-​ Japanese included), those with no voice, no family, and no shrines to remember them, if this is the only memory carved into stone monuments and placed in front of rail stations or in public parks. This side of the story is a harsh but painful reminder that BC class trials, while oftentimes wrongly managed and perhaps misguided, still aimed to place the pursuit of justice over revenge or retribution. While the Japanese and Chinese sides could and should debate the numerous legal intricacies of each case, without the absence of retribu­­tion be­­ing replaced with courts of law, much of this history would have perished in the first place. BC class war crimes trials were a first attempt at instill­­ing both domestically in Japan but also within China and Taiwan a new code of behavior that sought to employ the rule of law instead of arbitrary decisions based on military power. The fact that the Allies unilaterally applied such laws demonstrates some lopsidedness in the matter of due process, but the absence of Allied war crimes still does not negate the existence of Japan’s own war crimes. The manner in which the move to release war criminals quickly became politicized and moved away from discussions of the nature of Japan’s wartime behavior toward debates about victimiza­­tion demonstrated

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that the Japanese themselves failed to use these moments to con­sider their own legal responsibility in the postwar analysis of the nature of their empire. This is by no means unique to Asia, though Japan never had the opportunity that many European nations did to hastily align themselves with the Allied victors at the end of World War II. In the words of Tony Judt, toward the end of the war “everyone sought to identify with the winners,” and given the sloppy divina­­tion of wartime resistance and collabora­­tion in Europe it was easy for many perpetrators to slide into that role. With Japan, due to the racial and linguistic divides, such opportunity did not present itself, so the situa­­tion played out much more clearly in war crimes trials all over Asia. But Judt does not let former Vichy French officials or postwar European society off so easily. As he notes, “France has never ratified the international and European con­ventions of 1968 and 1975, which make war crimes also imprescriptible. As a result, under French law it is only possible to prosecute someone for actions undertaken dur­­ing the war if his or her handiwork falls under the at once restrictive and nebulous head­­ing of ‘crimes against humanity.’ ”88 Contrary to its intended aims, the San Francisco Peace Treaty ushered in a wave of Japanese and Chinese discontent toward war criminality, in part because although it was classified as a peace treaty, the accord reflected rather disingenuous feelings on the side of the Allies toward Japan and the role of both Chinas.89 Timothy Brook provides a more elegiac descrip­­tion of how intent did not necessarily match practice in postwar war crimes trials and thus also further stiffened the peace process that followed. He explains that in the “culture of law that prevails in liberal polities, courts are not Delphic sites of natural judgment reaffirm­­ing fundamental com­munity values but arenas of debate in which different narratives com­pete for the court’s approbation.”90 In East Asia, as we have seen with the com­pet­­ing narratives con­cern­­ing the legality and justness of BC class war crimes, I would propose that even given the show trial nature of many of the proceedings, the attempt to resolve disputes without further bloodshed was a noble one, but the politiciza­­tion of the trials quickly rendered them more as fodder in the Cold War battlefields of propaganda. In the final analysis this stripped them of their more potent potential legal value in the postwar era.

7

Socialist Magnanimity The CCP Trials

It is easier to move mountains and rivers than it is to change one’s disposition. —​Chinese proverb

Unl ik e

t he k m t ’s g oa l of merely seek­­ing justice, Com­munist China’s aim for its Japanese prisoners—​in the words of the prisoners, Chinese guards, and Beij­­ing bureaucrats—​was to make war criminals reflect on their crimes and to turn them from “devils back into men.” Very rarely in KMT special military tribunals or BC class trials in other venues did Japanese soldiers admit their crimes, but in the 1956 CCP trials amazingly every single Japanese prisoner did. Suzuki Hiraku had never been an ideal prisoner of the Chinese Com­ munists, but he had studied and pondered his crimes over many years of incarcera­­tion and eventually recanted in open court. His expression of con­tri­­tion is emblematic of CCP results. “Over these last years I have thought about my crimes and they are just as expressed by the prosecution. I have wantonly killed many Chinese innocent civilians, burned homes, stolen much food and goods, and executed the ‘three alls’ policy. These are all things for which there is no way to express remorse,” Suzuki admitted. “I have com­mitted such serious crimes that I deserve punishment but over these six years under the gracious benevolence of the Chinese people I have earned a chance to reflect on my actions,” he explained. In his personal testimony in front of the judges Suzuki experienced a sort of epiphany, albeit one that had been written 248

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out and practiced dur­­ing the long years of incarceration. It might have been staged, but based on similar testimony after these men were released and their activities once repatriated in Japan, their zeal and emo­­tion in their con­version from imperial aggressor to con­trite war criminal are difficult to refute. “Who saved my life and protected me, that is to say who kept me healthy and alive postwar? It is the very same people that I murdered without reason, those whose very peaceful lives I destroyed, the very same ones who were harmed by me. When I con­sider what I have done it is almost unbearable and my heart feels as if it’s about to break,” he cried. The transcript then notes that Suzuki, a former Japanese imperial officer who fully believed in his mission dur­ ­ing the war, began to weep in open court.1 The trials of Japanese war criminals held in the People’s Republic of China in 1956 were an entirely different affair from the sorts of trials the Chinese Nationalists and other Allies produced. First, the CCP had access to few Japanese war criminals they had arrested on their own. They began their pursuit with the 140 or so the CCP had taken as prisoners in 1949 when the capital of Shanxi Province, Taiyuan, fell to the People’s Libera­­tion Army at the end of the civil war. These soldiers were the ones whom the KMT had hired and who had “volunteered” under Japanese General Sumita Raishirō, former imperial Japanese soldiers fight­­ing alongside their Nationalist brethren against the Com­ munist threat. Several hundred more of these men were also captured and not incarcerated in Taiyuan, but in Xiling, just east over the prefectural border in Hebei Province. Most of these soldiers, like their com­mander Sumita, managed to escape arrest on the eve of defeat in the Chinese civil war, but some were not as lucky.2 The CCP sponsored official trials in the cities of Taiyuan (Shanxi Province) and Shenyang (Liaon­­ing Province), but many other unofficial “people’s trials” in former Manchuria and the surround­­ing areas resulted in summary executions of Japanese soldiers and civilians. Various estimates place the number at possibly 3,500 individuals who met such a fate, but because records are rare or not available, it is difficult to state the number with any certainty.3 The KMT had already repatriated all of its Japanese detainees and con­victs by late January 1949, so at the outset there was little promise for any large-​scale CCP-​managed war crimes trials of the Japanese. In

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addition, the Chinese Nationalists, after their 1952 peace treaty with Japan, unilaterally allowed for the release from Sugamo Prison of all their con­victed Japanese war criminals. At the dawn of the New China, headed by Mao Zedong, the future did not look bright for the Chinese Com­munists to be able to demonstrate internationally that their postwar version of justice was unfettered with the type of corrup­­tion with which they claimed the KMT had been plagued. When China declared its new independence in October 1949, only eleven other nations recognized it. The nascent country needed to do someth­­ing to make itself known, to distinguish itself and its policies from the KMT, now sequestered on Taiwan, and to push a wedge between its political orienta­­tion and the United States. Regardless of the fact that they had been enemies for more than a decade and even mindful of the damage Japan had caused both in terms of lives lost and economic destruction, the Chinese Com­munists recognized that chang­­ing tactics with Japan to augment trade was an important con­cern. In some measure Com­munist officials were aware of the same mantra that plagued the Nationalists in Taiwan. Even though imperial Japan had wreaked havoc in East Asia, no one in East Asia or even in Southeast Asia could survive independently without some form of Japanese trade, at least dur­­ing the early years of the Cold War. Accord­­ing to Michael Hunt, the pressure on the Chinese national budget was already apparent to all even as it improved. “In 1951, the first full year of the [Korean] war, defense ate up 46 percent (up from about 38 percent the previous year), and only 30 percent was left for economic development. But already by 1952 the overall military burden had dropped to 32 percent of the total budget, and economic con­struc­ ­tion had risen to an impressive 52 percent.”4 China’s push to manage its own war crimes trials of the Japanese seems to have been driven, in part, by con­sterna­­tion regard­­ing the American largesse toward Japanese war criminals housed in Japan. A Xinhua editorial on January 5, 1949, oppos­­ing the U.S. release of Japanese war criminals stated that “the American imperialists pay no heed to the public opinion of other Allies and the Soviet Union” because “the Americans have resolutely embarked on a policy of provid­­ing Japanese war criminals protec­­tion and support.”5 But it was not just the American policy of actively engag­­ing Japan on this issue; it appeared the United

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States was slowly build­­ing up Japan as part of an Allied bulwark against Com­munism, which prompted a more serious Chinese response. A prominent speech on law in the 1950s by Supreme Justice of the Military Court Dong Biwu, one of China’s lead­­ing prewar and postwar jurists, demonstrates just how necessary a system of law was believed to be for China at the moment it was try­­ing to gain access to the international system. It was this very patina of law that Chinese officials were try­­ing to coat onto their administrative machinery to adjudicate Japanese war crimes. For them this move signaled China’s emergence onto the international stage of civilized nations.6 The law, Dong emphasized in his speech, was “based on the actions of the masses,” but “it is not based on ac­­tion which emanates first from established law,” so China needed to implement a more stable system of law. Dong, in a prescient statement just before China’s virtual abandonment of the rule of law dur­­ing the Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s, opined that society could change and move forward without law, rely­­ing on the power of the people, but it could not do this reliably because often such movements were too unstable.7 What exactly was this law that needed to be implemented? he rhetorically asked. There are many definitions of law, but he believed a good one was that “it is merely a system unto itself.” “Law is not just an organiza­­tion of the na­­tion or society, every­ ­one must respect these definitions of order.” In this manner law is a creation, Dong noted, and not a naturally occurr­­ing phenomenon, but it assists in the stable maintenance of the country and its international relations.8 Chinese statesmen dur­­ing the early part of the twentieth century, most notably Sun Yat-​sen and Chiang Kai-​shek, had tried to create such systems, but, as Edward Fung suggests, “the modern state was a tall order for Republican China’s state building. The early Republic was at best a political experiment and at worst a shoddy political structure rule by a succession of militarists. . . .”9

New China’s Japanese War Criminals Fortunately for Mao’s China, the leader of the Soviet Union until the early 1950s, Joseph Stalin, held similar ideas about the usefulness of Japanese POWs. The Soviet Union had invaded the former puppet kingdom of Manchukuo in the last days of the war in 1945 and swept

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into the north of China with great military speed, not to men­­tion a certain glee at regain­­ing territory lost almost half a century prior to the Japanese dur­­ing the Russo-​Japanese War. Soviet troops quickly captured close to 600,000 Japanese soldiers and kept most in penurious con­ditions as laborers in Siberia, some for almost a decade. The USSR had held its own domestic trials of twelve Japanese war criminals at the end of December 1949, but they were mostly secretive trials in Khabarovsk. The cases mainly focused on the biological and chemical warfare waged by the Japanese in Manchuria.10 The plight of these Japanese prisoners of war became a cause celebre in postwar Japan, a demonstrative example of Japan’s status as a postwar victim of international circumstance at the hands of the Allies. The Soviets were both evasive and duplicitous about whom they detained and why, but for the most part internationally these individuals were known as “detainees” (yokuryūsha) or prisoners of war (horyo) rather than war criminals because they were forced into labor under duress. The story of where the Chinese Com­munist Party located Japanese war criminals and an analysis of their trials reveal a hitherto unrecognized aspect of early Cold War CCP foreign policy in general and specifically toward Japan. Japan formalized a peace treaty with the Chinese Nationalists on Taiwan but excluded mainland China, with whom it had no formal diplomatic relations until the 1970s. The fact that Com­ munist China expended precious financial resources and time on treat­ ­ing Japanese war criminals well, while the na­­tion dispatched virtually a million of its best and brightest young soldiers to the front lines of Korea to fight the Americans and other Allies dur­­ing the Korean War, is testimony to the importance of the Chinese policy. Ōsawa Takeshi has noted that, in com­parison to the Tokyo War Crimes Trial and even the trials the KMT pursued against postwar Japanese war criminals, the CCP’s trials were the epitome of magnanimity. A majority of the detainees were released from prison, and no executions were ever held.11 We could simplistically say that such benevolence was available because most of these Japanese soldiers had already been imprisoned for years in the USSR, but that avoids the Chinese decision-​mak­­ing process that ushered the Japanese prisoners to their final destination. For the CCP the goal was twofold. First, the trials were to testify to the world about Japanese aggressive war tactics and atrocities. Second,

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but no less important, the Com­munists wanted to keep the Japanese prisoners in deten­­tion poised to “convert.” By reeducat­­ing the “Japanese devils” who had managed a rapacious empire and hav­­ing them publicly admit their crimes the CCP had them profess an understand­­ing and ask for forgiveness. This policy was a qualitative ingredient of the Com­ munist idea of justice. These aims were obviously quite separate from Allied and KMT legal requirements but very important to the new socialist PRC state. Western and KMT legal trials were mainly interested in con­victions; Com­munist leaders ultimately remained focused on reformation. Such schemes had already started twenty years prior with the CCP plans for Japanese POWs in its policies to treat the Japanese well.12 But even with such precedents, at the outset the CCP was divided in the path it wished to pursue. Premier Zhou Enlai had initially stated that trials of Japanese war criminals did not belong to the realm of international law but rather to military tribunals within China. This was because the PRC did not have a treaty with Japan and had no diplomatic relations, and thus the two were still in a state of war.13 This process of deten­­tion and rehabilita­­tion is significant because it shows a great shift in Chinese foreign policy at the time and should force us to con­sider how such a move potentially unlinked a cycle of violence from occurr­­ing in the aftermath of the Japanese surrender that easily could have spawned new decades of retribu­­tion and counter-​ retribu­­tion on the mainland. While Com­munist forces may have won the day on the overt military front against the Nationalists and claimed victory by October 1949, counterrevolutionary movements and a gov­­ ern­­ment with little international experience in manag­­ing a large country, not to men­­tion a country that had been at war for close to two decades, meant that not even the Com­munists’ supporters were sure what would happen when the Nationalists retreated to Taiwan. Adjudicat­­ing Jap­­ anese war crimes trials was the least of the new gov­­ern­­ment’s worries—​ prov­­ing naysayers and nonbelievers wrong was the most press­­ing issue in the short term. As the Americans struggled with their own treason trials and fear of a Com­munist takeover of East Asia, the Chinese Com­munist Party needed to resolve seemingly insurmountable internal issues. The early years after the found­­ing of the new country mainly centered on ridd­­ing the new People’s Republic of counterrevolutionaries and instill­­ing com­munist ideology and install­­ing leader­­ship in the

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countryside. This push was often accompanied by violence in terms of land reform trials and political moves to wrench power from its vested roots. The CCP remained adamant about pursu­­ing Japanese war criminals, but it struggled with the format and tim­­ing to implement the process. One additional problem was that the grand majority of these criminals had already been prosecuted or released by the KMT just before libera­­tion or had already repatriated. The Com­munist-​controlled areas were beginn­­ing to learn about the atrocities that the Japanese com­mitted, and the CCP took measures to pursue justice in those cases. Public educa­­tion campaigns had begun on both sides, CCP and KMT, even before the civil war was over. One book from 1948 helped the masses understand exactly what a war criminal was by explain­­ing that he was “a special type of criminal who cannot be tried in just any court.” The account detailed that courts deliberated how to deal with war criminals because “they cannot inflexibly use legal past precedent” but must also take public opinion into account.14 Moreover, not only was the KMT’s pursuit of justice pilloried as inadequate, but the American and other Allied attempts at prosecu­­tion dur­­ing the Tokyo War Crimes Trial were also criticized for hav­­ing fallen short of Com­munist goals. CCP public con­demna­­tion of the American-​managed Sugamo Prison’s release of suspected underworld figures such as Kodama Yoshio, Sasakawa Ryōichi, and others who had been incarcerated as A class war criminals but never brought to trial lent support to the Chinese Com­munist argument that the Tokyo Trial was less about the pursuit of justice and more an example of postwar U.S. hegemony over Japan. Even the numbers on trial in Tokyo were used as propaganda ammuniti­­tion because the CCP com­plained that ultimately only twenty-​five Japanese defendants made it through the whole trial as war criminals. Therefore, to prevent Japan from ris­­ing again as a militarist entity, “to deal a fatal blow to barbarism and save the justice of humanity” the Chinese announced that history required them to create their own systems to pursue Japanese war criminals, try them, and deliver harsh sentences. These war criminals included those A class suspects who were let off but also alleged BC class war criminals who had not yet been charged, the Chinese Com­munists declared.15

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The Ward Case and Fric­­tion with America Despite the vocal nature of the initial CCP ideas of justice, this progress tended not to impress international audiences given the outcome of the Angus Ward case. As American con­sul Ward was the official representative of the U.S. gov­­ern­­ment in Shenyang, China. Before the war Shenyang was a Japanese stronghold known as Hōten (Fengtian in Chinese) or Mukden, the Manchurian name. From November 1948 when the CCP army entered the city, Ward, as a diplomat, refused to hand over the con­sulate’s telegraph machinery and was accused by the Com­munists of be­­ing a spy. By early 1949 the CCP decided it would no longer recognize diplomats or any sort of policy accredited to the KMT—​this unfortunately included American diplomats in various locations. Accord­­ing to Chen Jian, the CCP envisioned its new national role without proper foresight of preparation: “Most of the CCP’s local and provincial cadres hailed from rural areas, and had little experience in foreign affairs. With the CCP’s emergence as the rul­­ing party as a result of its victories in the civil war, any mismanagement now of foreign affairs by Party cadres, even at the local level, might influence the CCP’s formula­­tion of its entire foreign policy and might, as mentioned, disconcert the Soviet Union, for example.”16 Chinese central officials did not just want Ward and other U.S. diplomats to leave Shenyang. They wanted, if not needed, to set a strong example. On June 19, 1949, Com­munist authorities charged Ward with be­­ing a spy for the United States in China.17 More importantly, this move was designed to mobilize anti-​American sentiment and serve as a ploy to assure Soviet patrons that China was thoroughly anti-​imperialist.18 Com­munist officials quickly held him in deten­­tion for close to a year, and in November 1949 Ward was tried and expelled from China. The arrest of a certified U.S. diplomat who was subjected to a humiliat­­ing trial where he was labeled a spy, which he was not, was without doubt the symbolic, if not the actual, start of fractious relations between China and the United States.19 The CCP ignored U.S. threats, and dur­­ing the trial Ward was not allowed to offer a defense, nor did the court ques­­tion witnesses or plaintiffs.20 In view of Chen Jian’s thesis that China attempted to prove

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itself worthy of Soviet support by pursu­­ing Ward, we should ask whether the 1,000 Japanese POWs who had been kept by the Soviets for five years and were handed over to China in the summer of 1950, just after the Ward event, were some sort of diplomatic prize for this obeisance? It was not just the Ward case but American involvement in rearm­­ing and help­­ing to remilitarize Japan, even before the Korean War, that irked the Chinese Com­munists.21 Ward was not the only American to face trial in China for unspecified reasons. Scholar Allyn Rickett and his wife found themselves in a similarly unsavory situa­­tion at the dawn of China’s liberation, and the new Com­munist legal system treated them with equal disdain. Rickett was incarcerated from 1951 to 1955.22 The case did not draw as much diplomatic fire, but the CCP did have reason to be wary in general—​the KMT and the United States were send­­ing spies in to destabilize the new regime, though with little effect.23

Eyes on the Prize Even before it was supposedly protect­­ing mainland China’s borders and shutt­­ing out unwanted elements, the CCP carefully investigated the KMT’s management of Japanese war criminals and America’s pursuit of them in Japan. On October 10, 1947, the CCP had already announced that its goal was to “arrest, try, and punish civil war criminals start­­ing with Chiang Kai-​shek.” By December 25, 1948, the CCP had expanded its list of whom it con­sidered a war criminal to include KMT Generals He Yingqin and Yan Xishan and other military elites.24 A February 4, 1949, announcement in the form of a Xinhua news editorial denounced the KMT’s move to “sell out the country” by releas­­ing Japanese war criminals when they repatriated several hundred along with former general Okamura Yasuji.25 On September 1, 1949, virtually the eve of the Com­munist victory, a similar CCP media statement from its official mouthpiece Xinhua proclaimed several slogans in com­memora­­tion of the twelfth anniversary of the war of resistance against Japan. The slogans are significant because they demonstrate the fervor with which the CCP potentially saw itself united with Japan against U.S. dominance in East Asia. Two of the many catchphrases were: “The Two Countries of China and Japan Should Unite and Rise to Oppose the

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Lengthy U.S. Occupa­­tion of Japan!” A second slogan was: “Quickly Follow the Rules of the Potsdam Declaration, Forge a Peace Treaty with Japan!”26 Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai issued a public statement to the Supreme Com­mander of the Allied Powers in Japan, General Douglas MacArthur, con­cern­­ing the release of Japanese war criminals in the spr­­ing of 1950. On March 7, MacArthur had declared his inten­ ­tion to release some war criminals on probation. This con­travened international law, Zhou forcefully replied, and it illegally superseded limitations on occupa­­tion authority as established by the April 1946 Allied com­mand. This “arrogant” behavior gravely damaged the Chinese people and was harmful to “China’s ability to prevent the re-​ emergence of Japanese fascism,” Zhou added.27 Shen Junru, a Chinese lawyer who had studied before the war in Tokyo and who later became the Chief of the Supreme People’s Court in 1953 and the Vice-​chairman of the Stand­­ing Com­mittee of the National People’s Con­gress, penned a 1951 report on “the punishment and arrest of war criminals.” Produced by the International Democratic Legal Workers Association, the report decried U.S. imperialist hegemonic politics for releas­­ing Japanese war criminals early or not indict­ ­ing them with the excuse that evidence was not sufficient. The author claimed that America took this stance because its leaders intended to employ Japanese criminals in the next war against China. (This was rich rhetoric com­­­ing from a party that had already employed its own former imperial soldiers and technicians in the civil war against KMT forces.) Shen emphasized that he knew precisely the war criminals that the United States was supposedly harboring. His selec­­tion included the former head of Japan’s wartime propaganda agency, Cabinet Informa­­ tion Bureau chief Amō Eiji, as well as the Japanese emperor and a few others. Shen was knowledgeable and aware enough of the international scene to men­­tion the Soviet war crimes trials at Khabarovsk, which had focused on Japan’s use of chemical and biological weapons, a specific set of crimes that the Tokyo Trial avoided. The author argued that both Japanese Lieutenant General Ishii Shirō of the infamous Unit 731, a medical monster behind gruesome experiments, and the emperor in whose name these tasks were carried out, enjoyed a “carefree life outside the law.” Shen intimated that the United States was us­­ing Ishii to help fabricate new chemical weapons, a Com­munist Chinese belief

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that was touted in Korean War propaganda and that persists to this day.28 Shen ended with the statement that not only was the imperial United States, as he termed it, us­­ing Nazi war criminals and Japanese war criminals as part of its power base, but the United States was also creat­­ing a new set of war criminals dur­­ing the Korean War with its supposed use of unauthorized weapons.29 Chinese authorities were irritated that the United States had involved itself on the Korean peninsula and was also allow­­ing Japanese war criminals to go free. On November 11, 1950, MacArthur paroled another thirty-​nine Japanese war criminals, includ­­ing former imperial foreign minister and con­ victed A class war criminal Shigemitsu Mamoru.

The Chang­­ing Con­text There were actually three separate groups of Japanese war criminals in Com­munist China: in Taiyuan, Shanxi Province; in Xiling, Hebei Province; and in Fushun, Liaon­­ing Province. Those in Taiyuan were mainly Japanese soldiers who stayed on after 1945 but were taken prisoner when the province fell to the Com­munists, as were those soldiers in Xiling. The Fushun Prison primarily housed Japanese who were “gifted” to China from the Soviet Union. In July 1950 the Soviets gave China 969 Japanese POWS to judge. In total, there were therefore close to 1,109 POWs in CCP custody by the early 1950s. Forty-​seven died in custody so Chinese sources sometimes have slightly different numbers, but essentially the numbers break down to a bit more than 1,000 men. Most of the Fushun POWs were con­nected to the management of the former Manchukuo Empire, but there were some who had managed Mongolian relations as well. This selec­­tion suggests that the Soviet Union did not just randomly hand over a large number for the Chinese to adjudicate but, rather, chose carefully from among the rul­ ­ing imperial class so that the new China could demonstrate its grasp of international law and show how it was now the authority over the Manchurian region. Among the POWs were former Manchukuo legislative and judicial staff, military men, policemen, South Manchurian railway police, Japanese military police, and affiliated staff.30 The majority of these men were eventually released after their lengthy incarcerations as a demonstra­­tion of Chinese goodwill. The first lot, about

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419 prisoners, was released from Xil­­ing in August 1954. Then several times in 1956 other groups of POWs, mostly military, were released from Fushun Prison and Taiyuan. Only forty-​five Japanese prisoners were put on trial and given longer sentences that kept them imprisoned in China, for some as late as 1964.31 In general, the vast majority of Japanese prisoners were released after extensive investigations of their crimes where the gov­­ern­­ment chose not to indict, either on grounds of benevolence or because the prisoners had sufficiently recanted and “learned” from their time dur­­ing incarceration. In fact, the CCP spent substantial funds on bring­­ing the ­ultimately much smaller group of war criminals to trial in various subgroups. The first trial started in June 1956 when a special military court in Shenyang opened a CCP tribunal. A similar handful were tried in Taiyuan and then shipped to Shenyang for the dura­­tion of their sentences once they had been judged guilty. The tim­­ing of the releases had been carefully calculated. The con­text in which Japan found itself at the end of World War II as political orphan in the region had changed. By April 1952 the na­­tion regained its sovereignty and was able to slowly reinsert itself into world politics. Nowhere was this more evident than at the Bandung Con­ ference in Indonesia in April 1955. Japan attended the con­ference to demonstrate to its international con­stituents that it refused to be the toady for U.S. foreign policy and would try to carve its own path. The Bandung Con­ference was an event that showed how the world political systems ignored those in Africa and Asia who wished to con­front colonialism and the imbalance of north–south relations. Peace after World War II peace might have been agreed at Yalta in February 1945, but the ques­­tion remained: With whose interest in mind was the peace drafted? The ensu­­ing Cold War and ideological tension between the USSR and the United States caught the rest of the world in the middle.32 The Bandung Con­ference was a touchstone for those countries try­­ing to eke out a neutral posi­­tion between the increasingly shrill stances of the Soviet Union and the United States.33 Bandung was a demonstra­­tion of resolve against U.S. efforts to pull Japan and Southeast Asia into its orbit. The so-​called Third World pointed out that postwar the international world was unfair to the non-​superpowers or recently decolonized and that to maintain the status quo was not beneficial, even though the

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Allied side was victorious in World War II.34 The con­ference also signaled the rise of the Third World and caused anxiety in the United States; “the fact that no white powers were invited to attend Bandung excited the apprehension of some sections of the Western press,” as Matthew Jones writes.35 Cagdas Ungor reveals that the PRC used the con­ference as a means to “show the world that China was seek­­ing stability and peace in its bilateral relations.”36 Internationally, the con­ ference was the perfect moment for China to announce the new models of its five principles of peaceful coexistence.37 Japan’s prime minister at the time, Hatoyama Ichirō, did not attend due to Japanese administrative worries, but Tokyo did send a delega­­tion that participated as observers. After much internal handwring­­ing over whom to send, the leadership finally decided on Takasaki Tatsunosuke, minister of state and director of the Economic Council Board, to serve as chief of the Japanese delega­­tion to Bandung. Takasaki was a businessman and not a diplomat in the strict sense, but seemingly Tokyo wanted to avoid any con­troversy, and so the leadership shied away from send­­ing higher-​level diplomats.38 At the con­ference Takasaki met for several hours with Zhou Enlai and informed Zhou that Japan wanted to have better relations with the PRC. Zhou told Takasaki that a Japan trade delega­­tion should visit China, and the repatria­­tion of Japanese POWs was also discussed, though noth­­ing con­crete was con­cluded.39 It appears that many CCP officials were generally supportive of an amnesty program of war criminals ahead of the major trials of a few but did not want to push the issue too soon in 1955, just before Zhou Enlai was due to attend the Bandung Con­ference. Chinese officials did not deem it beneficial to have the announcement overlap with the arrival of the civil Chinese trade negotia­­tion in Japan.40 Hatoyama’s cabinet was formed in December 1954 and pledged to form better relations with his Com­munist neighbors. In February 1955 deliberations con­cern­­ing when precisely to release Japanese war criminals were important in creat­­ing what authorities deemed a positive international relations footprint. The Chinese Com­munist gov­­ern­­ment was wary of tak­­ing measures for such a release too close to Japanese Prime Minister Hatoyama Ichirō’s procurement of the prime ministry because it would appear as if the PRC were con­gratulat­­ing him. It was believed to be more appropriate to release the Japanese POWs after the Bandung Con­ference.41 As a report from the party prosecutor’s office made clear,

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“deal­­ing with Japanese war criminals was not just a legal matter, there were also con­siderations that related to the international political struggle. In light of the current international situa­­tion and our foreign policy toward Japan we assess that we should legally pursue a minority of Japanese war criminals and have a policy of benevolence while releas­ ­ing the majority.”42

Procur­­ing Japanese War Criminals We should not forget that, though the USSR and the PRC were in theory ideological brethren, neither side was overly smitten with the other. Stalin had for years prior to the end of the civil war supported KMT Generalissimo Chiang Kai-​shek over his Com­munist counterpart Mao Zedong. The Soviets initially profited well from support of the KMT just after Japan’s surrender. They procured with the Soviet– China pact (signed on August 14, 1945) the independence of Outer Mongolia, a thirty-​year joint opera­­tion con­trol of the Changchun railway, joint use of Port Arthur, and use of Dairen (Dalian in Chinese) as a free port. Basically, the KMT allowed the USSR to regain its ­tsarist-​ era interests in China.43 When Mao first arrived in Moscow in late 1949 to finally meet with his Com­munist colleague Stalin, the event was not all cozy, and he told a TASS reporter that he might be there several weeks to iron out the problems in the bilateral relationship. Mao was accompanied by Chen Boda as secretary, who was also fluent in Russian. They had to argue to get the Soviets to return what the Chinese felt were their railways and ports in Manchuria that the KMT had signed away a few years earlier.44 What seemed to com­e out of all this dur­­ing the 1950s was China’s deep frustra­­tion in both relations with its supposed ideological patron and anxiety over not be­­ing able to obtain the economic growth and political prestige it so badly needed. Arai Toshio, a postwar Japanese journalist, demonstrated that it was not clear who first broached the topic of transferr­­ing Japanese war criminals dur­­ing discussions between Stalin and Mao at their meet­­ing when Mao visited the Soviet Union. Arai interviewed several responsible interlocutors, includ­­ing Ji Min, who was the head of the Fushun archives and who had examined the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs archives. Dur­­ing Mao’s stay Soviet Foreign Minister Andrey Vishinsky visited Mao in his villa in the suburbs four times to discuss

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the Japanese war crimes prisoner issue, Arai claimed. The Soviets made this unique overture to China because Stalin allegedly felt guilty about previous Soviet support for the KMT and wished to atone for his poor decision, but Russian archives suggest the Soviets may have been plann­­ing such a move earlier. Arai also interviewed Mao’s Russian translator, Shi Zhe, who worked with Mao for eighteen years, but Shi’s memoirs show that no discussion of the war criminals prisoner issue took place directly between Stalin and Mao. Shi said that he learned about the POW transfer from the TASS news agency, the Soviet media mouthpiece. Accord­­ing to Russian documents, an April 12, 1948, order from the Soviet Ministry of Internal Affairs con­cern­­ing the repatria­­ tion of Japanese prisoners of war directed USSR officials to repatriate approximately 175,000 POWs between May and November 1948. There was, however, an extensive list of those who were to be excluded from repatriation, includ­­ing war criminals in the Manchurian region. The strictly con­fidential order com­manded that “subject to repatria­­tion will be generals, officers, non-​commissioned officers and soldiers, with the excep­­tion of: the employees of intelligence, counterintelligence and punitive organs of Japan (employees of military missions, police organs, gendarmerie, prisons, camps, special services, ‘research bureaus or institutes,’ radio-​intelligence, all employees of the two sections in the Joint Chiefs of Staff and of the Kwantung Army Headquarters); the com­mand and teach­­ing staff and cadets of schools of espionage and sabotage. Members of espionage and sabotage units, agents of espionage, sabotage and terrorism; heads of gov­­ern­­ment agencies and organs of Manchukuo and members of the Japanese Imperial Household. . . .”45 A Moscow decision from the Chief Administra­­tion for the Prisoners of War and Internees within the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR on the Progress of the Repatria­­tion of Japanese Prisoners of War on December 21, 1949, further stipulated “the try­­ing in military tribunals of 2,883 Japanese prisoners of war accused of com­mitt­­ing crimes against the USSR and authorized the transfer to the gov­­ern­­ment of the People’s Republic of China 971 Japanese prisoners of war who have com­mitted crimes on Chinese territory.”46 Stalin applauded China’s new gov­­ern­­ment under Mao and wanted to show his backing, both publicly and internationally. As the Soviets surmised, the eyes of the world were on this new Chinese experiment—​

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would it fail or survive? No one was sure. Shipp­­ing a throng of Japanese POWs to China for the Com­munists to prosecute would demonstrate the Soviet Union’s international and legal support for the PRC.47 But it was not only the Soviets who pushed the arrangement; the policy of both the CCP and the KMT since the 1930s had been to employ surrender­­ing Japanese soldiers as weapons of propaganda dur­­ing the war.48 Us­­ing surrendered soldiers, volunteers who stayed behind, and war criminals postwar assisted in introduc­­ing internationally accepted new standards of law, which employed slightly different means to achieve similar wartime goals: to cease war with Japan and achieve an equitable peace. Back in Beij­­ing in March 1950 Zhou and Mao called on Shi Liang, a jurist from the Ministry of Justice, to move forward on a war criminal policy. Shi Liang had graduated from university in 1927 and was a well-​ respected Com­munist com­rade and legally savvy bureaucrat. Qu Chu, the man who became assistant warden of the Fushun deten­­tion facilities, where many Japanese prisoners were held, said that in the early 1950s while he was sitt­­ing chatt­­ing with Shi one day she revealed to him that Stalin had offered Japanese war criminals to China to adjudicate “as a means for China to raise its international profile, to champion Chinese legal sovereignty, and to deepen Sino-​Soviet relations.” To effectuate this, the party’s higher councils agreed to the handover and began to put plans into mo­­tion to accept the Japanese prisoners into facilities near Shenyang.49 Shi replied to Mao’s request obliquely and said that if the Japanese prisoners had not actually been con­victed of war crimes, then her ministry could not deal with them, so jurisdic­­tion was ceded directly to the Public Security Bureau. The head of the Public Security Bureau was Luo Ruiqing, who had been assistant director of the Resist Japan Military Policy University (Kangri junzheng daxue) in Yenan dur­­ing World War II.50 It appears that Luo was responsible for coordinat­­ing policy and plans con­cern­­ing the reeduca­­tion of the prisoners from the early years, just after the PRC was established.51

Fushun Prison Fushun was a large coal-​min­­ing town dur­­ing the era of imperial Japanese management and an important hold­­ing in Manchuria after

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the defeat of Russia in 1905. The Fushun prison was originally erected in 1936; seven wings could hold as many as 1,500 prisoners in relatively modern facilities. Due to the benevolent treatment Japanese war criminals received at Fushun many lived long and healthy lives, and in their postwar libera­­tion most of these men joined together in a group to educate Japanese society about the horrors of Japanese imperialism and to strive for better Sino-​Japanese relations. Even though far fewer former Japanese soldiers and statesmen were charged and tried by the CCP, the legacy of treatment effected the biggest change on postwar Japanese society and yielded more influence than the greater number of soldiers who had been involved in the KMT trials from 1946 to 1949 or, arguably, any other BC class war crimes tribunal. Once they returned home, Japanese who had been incarcerated by the CCP formed a lobby and educa­­tion group called the Liaison Group of Returnees from China (Chugoku kikansha renrakukai, or Chūkiren for short) that took to pub­ lish­­ing an account of Japan’s atrocities before most other associations had even broached the topic in print.52 In addition, there are a few Chinese memoirs that add to this picture, particularly those of the former warden in charge of educa­­tion at the Fushun Correctional Facility, Jin Yuan.53 His presence was so instrumental in many of these Japanese prisoners’ con­versions and his support so seemingly steadfast that he may be one of the few jailers of war criminals in history who was invited to his former enemy’s country and homes several times. Educa­­tion warden Jin Yuan grew up dur­­ing the war under the iron heel of Japanese oppression. After libera­­tion he became a PLA soldier, but for twenty-​five years beginn­­ing in 1950 he held a series of increasingly important posts at the Fushun prison facility, includ­­ing serv­­ing as warden at the end. In 1998 when he wrote his memoirs he was seventy-​ three, so he was in his late twenties and early thirties when he was in charge of guard­­ing the Japanese. He managed 969 Japanese prisoners, sixty-​one from Manchukuo, in addi­­tion to some 300 or so KMT prisoners. Initially the work that Jin Yuan and his cadres con­ducted at the prison was highly prized by the CCP, but in the same manner that Judge Mei Ruao met with misfortune after the war, so too did Jin. Lauded for his efforts in deal­­ing with Japanese war criminals in 1964, a mere two years later in 1966 Jin Yuan was caught up in the political fratricide of the Cultural Revolution. Ironically, the very legal pursuit

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of justice that Chinese leaders had so urgently tried to put in place when they held tribunals of the Japanese was tossed to the side as an accoutrement of bourgeois double-​speak dur­­ing the upheaval of the mid-​1960s to mid-​1970s. The sympathetic stance that China had taken toward Japanese war criminals was precisely the sort publicly criticized and targeted by the Red Guards dur­­ing the Cultural Revolution. Who best to suffer the ignominies of this criticism but the very prison staff who assisted the Japanese in their “cushy” postwar lives? Jin Yuan was publicly denounced more than 100 times and “sent down,” mean­­ing he was exiled to a remote region for reeduca­­tion himself and put to work with the peasants. Many of the KMT prisoners who were detained at Fushun subsequently died dur­­ing Cultural Revolu­­tion re-​interrogations. By con­trast, the Japanese prisoners had already mostly been released by this time. Jin Yuan returned to work after two years, thanks to Zhou Enlai’s intervention.54 On July 14, 1950, a few months after Mao had returned from his first journey over the borders of his native land to sign a treaty of amity with the Soviet Union, an order from the northeast security branch to prepare for the arrival of Japanese war criminals was transmitted to Fushun prison staff. A team was put together for this purpose. These Japanese POWS were not labeled “alleged” war criminals; their very participa­­tion in the Japanese imperial army or Manchukuo gov­­ern­­ment made them guilty at least initially in the opinion of Chinese Com­ munist leadership. About 100 or so staff were part of the team assembled to meet the Japanese prisoners, and on the even­­ing of July 16, 1950, the Chinese team left Shenyang on the train for Suifenhe, a city in southeastern Heilongjiang Province on the border with the Soviet Union. Kanei Sadanao, a former Japanese prisoner in Siberia, recalled that all of a sudden in the middle of July 1950 he was gathered together with some fellow Japanese “detainees” at an empty rail sta­­tion near Khabarovsk and packed into a freight train. No Japanese had any idea where they were headed. Furumi Tadayuki, a former high-​level official in the Manchukuo gov­­ern­­ment, recalls be­­ing told by the Soviets that they were be­­ing shipped home, but he could not be sure because the Russians “always lied.”55 The windows and doors of the train were all covered and fenced in with barbed wire; it was the height of summer in

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Siberia, and the train was insufferably hot. After several days the train neared the border with China, and in the afternoon it arrived at the sta­­tion in Suifenhe. Names were read off alphabetically, and prisoners were switched without explana­­tion to Chinese trains. The Chinese train was a third-​class carriage from the South Manchuria Railway Com­pany with newspapers pasted on the inside of the windows so no one could see in or out. There was some warm drink in lidded jars and sweets on the tables in the train, while three nurses walked around ask­­ing in Chinese ask­­ing if anyone were sick. Then a Chinese soldier fluent in Japanese read off the rules: “no mak­­ing a fuss, no smoking, don’t get out of your seat without permission, don’t look outside, no more than two at a time may go to the restroom. . . .” The train departed first to Harbin and then headed south. For meals the prisoners ate white rice and white bread to their delight. They had not been offered such luxuries dur­­ing their years of deten­­tion in the USSR. They were told to eat to their heart’s con­tent. However, a pall was still cast over the transfer because the Japanese did not really know why they were there, their circumstances, or where they were going.56 The Chinese prison official, Jin Yuan, remembers the events slightly differently. On the even­­ing of July 19, he recalled, the Chinese held a banquet in honor of the Soviets, and on the next day began the formal transfer of the Japanese war criminals. The Soviet officer in charge explained to him, “These Japanese guys com­mitted monstrous crimes in China and are the incorrigibles. Today we are turn­­ing over these ‘bastards’ to the Chinese gov­­ern­­ment.”57 Many of the Japanese prisoners had been on the train for days and had not seen sunlight. They all looked scared as they were dismounting, not know­­ing what to expect. The Chinese were supposed to have received 1,000 prisoners, but, in fact, there were only 969. Accord­­ing to some accounts several prisoners escaped en route. The Japanese prisoners were directed to assigned seats on the Chinese trains and then were served bread and duck eggs to eat, which they all quickly devoured, Jin wrote in his memoirs. For dinner there was a large bowl of rice, cooked pork, stir-​fried eggs, and soup for each prisoner. Many asked for seconds that were offered. The prisoners had hardly eaten enough dur­­ing their five years of hard labor in the Soviet Union, Jin Yuan surmised. But what was most worry­­ing to him was that the Japanese all believed they were go­­ing home, which the

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Map of route taken from USSR to China, from a Japanese report on the conditions for Japanese prisoners incarcerated at Fushun Prison. 6693, “Bujun senpan no so chū ikan no keii to shūyōjonai no gaikyō,” July 7, 1956. (TB)

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Soviets may have told them to preserve order. As they approached their final destina­­tion Japanese voices could be heard saying, “Isn’t this Fushun?” Many of these Japanese prisoners, after all, were quite familiar with northeast China and the imperial buildings the Japanese had con­structed in Manchukuo. The third-​class trip in its entirety took virtually three days from the Russian border, through Suifenhe, passed through Mudanjiang City (formerly known as Botankō by the Japanese) and the city of Changchun, and arrived at the final destina­­tion of Shenyang.58 Kanei was prisoner number 312 and noted that Fushun Prison was actually a facility specifically designed by imperial Japanese architects for Korean prisoners dur­­ing Japan’s establishment of Manchukuo. Dur­ ­ing the imperial era a different prison within the con­fines of the nearby city of Shenyang was for Japanese criminals. Postwar, this racial difference no longer mattered, and half of the prison was used for the Japanese prisoners while the other half was for regular Chinese prisoners. It is important to con­sider how differently the Com­munists treated the Japanese prisoners, generally speaking, com­pared with their own internal system of gulags where domestic political prisoners and “counterrevolutionaries”—​not to men­­tion KMT soldiers taken into custody dur­­ing the civil war—​were housed and forced into labor.59 The Japanese prisoners who eventually made their way into Chinese custody through Soviet internment had lived varied lives, frequently hav­ ­ing served all over Manchuria. At the beginn­­ing Kanei shared a room with seventeen others and had about two-​thirds of a tatami mat of space to himself. Desks in the middle of the room sat on a dirt floor and were pitted on either side of raised platforms for beds. A naked bulb lit the room dur­­ing the day and all through the night. There was a small bathroom space on one side of the room about half a tatami mat wide. Twice a day it was emptied, but once exercise was allowed prisoners could start to use other facilities to relieve themselves. Everything in their lives was now regulated as in a prison: what time they rose and went to bed, what they wore and ate, and so forth.60 The schedule of Fushun Prison was fairly rigid. Prisoners rose at 5:30 a.m. and took breakfast at 7 a.m. The time from 8:30 to 11:40 a.m. was used for study, and lunch was served at 12 p.m. From 1 to 5:30 p.m. cultural activities and sports were pursued, followed by dinner at 6 p.m. In the evening,

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6 to 9 p.m. was given over to free time or walks, and prisoners were to be in bed by 9:30 p.m. The food was of decent quality: usually rice porridge with side dishes for lunch, but dinner saw more meat offered. Chicken was served three or four times a week, pork once a week, and beef once a week, accord­­ing to repatriate reports.61 The issue of Japanese war criminals was so important that it was presided over by Zhou Enlai and placed directly under the con­trol of the Public Security Bureau. The overall treatment might have been good, but Kanei remembers that some guards looked at the prisoners as if they were still the enemy. A central goal was to reeducate the Japanese, but Chinese authorities realized to get war criminals to recant their wartime behavior required that each be treated with civility. Jin Yuan explained the Com­munist philosophy con­cern­­ing incarceration, at least in terms of the theory behind how the CCP treated Japanese war criminals, through the perhaps apocryphal though enlighten­­ing story of how the Chinese saw themselves teach­­ing the Japanese. One day the Japanese prisoners were play­­ing baseball when the guards heard the sound of shatter­­ing glass. “Are you okay?” the guards asked the prisoners. “We are fine,” the prisoners replied, “but we broke some glass.” The guards said, “The glass can eventually be repaired, but what is important is that you are safe and okay.”62 About the tenth day after arrival prisoners were provided paper and writ­­ing implements and instructed to write down their histories and what they had done in China, Kanei wrote in his memoirs. Then authorities reassigned the men to different rooms accord­ ­ing to rank as many had been mixed up in the transfer. After that meals were divided along three ranks as well. The men were informed that this followed the same protocol as the CCP mandated internally. Meals were served three times a day, and a prisoner could always con­sume as much he wanted, so the men’s strength began to return. It took awhile for the Japanese to figure out that they had been handed over from Soviet to Chinese con­trol as war criminals and not as someth­­ing else. Many initially insisted that they were not war criminals but POWs and thus should be released. Once the realiza­­tion of their predicament set in several became suicidal, assum­­ing there would never be a chance to return to Japan. At the same time, soon after their arrival in China, the Korean War erupted and changed their circumstances yet again. Jin Yuan recalled that on October 18, 1950, a ­telegram

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arrived order­­ing the guards to take all the Japanese prisoners and to transport them to Harbin, a city away from the border with Korea.63 Be­­ing removed for safety to Harbin dur­­ing the Korean War demonstrated the political capital the CCP believed Japanese war criminals potentially held. About three months after arriv­­ing at Fushun Kanei wrote that the men were told to wrap up their futons and expect transport to the city rail station. As before, the train windows were painted black or covered in newspapers. The Japanese prisoners were removed to Hulan Prison, about twenty-​five kilometers north of Harbin. Many believed that this was where they would be executed. Chinese authorities surmised that if Fushun fell to the Allies and the Japanese were retaken some very tough international problems would have ensued. Chinese who were labeled as counterrevolutionaries or collaborators, includ­­ing former emperor Pu Yi and others, were taken to Daowai Prison in Harbin city.64 The Hulan prison was a Qing-​era prison and cramped. The tiny pit in the corner was used as a toilet but had no wall to separate it from view. When someone had to use the toilet he would exclaim, “Gotta go!” and everyone would look away, offer­­ing a small measure of privacy. Meals were served just two times a day in Harbin. Not long after the move, on October 25, 1950, the Chinese voluntary forces engaged in the Korean War crossed the Yalu River south into North Korea. In December Chinese newspapers began circulat­­ing in the prison. Loudspeaker broadcasts instructed the prisoners about China’s certain victory in Korea. Lessons and study con­tinued unabated. First, the prisoners examined Lenin’s Imperialism—​The Highest Stage of Capitalism. Many of the materials used in the prisons had been edited by the Japanese Com­munist party, though it remains unclear whether they were donated for such use. Prisoners at Xil­­ing in Hebei Province read as well and studied texts that included prewar Japanese novelist Kobayashi Tajiki’s Crab Cannery Boat, a story that bleakly described exploited labor in Japan and was immediately banned by state censors when it was published.65 As the Korean War heated up, more newspapers appeared in the prison and more loudspeaker broadcasts announced U.S. atrocities against Koreans, indiscriminate bombings of civilians, and other horrors. On February 1, 1951, the United Nations voted China an “invader” and publicly criticized it in a UN vote. On March 7

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the Allies retook Seoul. Five months after the prisoners had been taken to Harbin, at least 600 of the lower-​level prisoners were returned to Fushun. The officers and com­missioned men stayed in Harbin, as did former Manchukuo officials and the infirm.66

Process of Reeducation Chinese prison educa­­tion warden Jin Yuan estimated that it was the warmth of the CCP prison treatment that ultimately helped to reform the Japanese prisoners. By the spr­­ing of 1952 Zhou Enlai ordered the prisons to assist Japanese prisoners to understand their crimes and help them change their ways. The process was to push them to undergo an “educative emotional change,” essentially to experience a psychological enlightenment to reorient their imperial thinking. But how were prison staff actually go­­ing to get the Japanese to admit their crimes by themselves? Chinese authorities wondered. The Korean War absorbed the atten­­tion of most of the world media, but the CCP wanted to have the world recognize what it was do­­ing with the Japanese prisoners for the propaganda value. So Chinese authorities suddenly announced on December 1, 1952, that Com­munist China held some Japanese war criminals and that about 30,000 Japanese still resided in China. If the Japanese civilians wanted to return home, that was fine, but China was not go­­ing to foot the bill or push them out. The Japanese Red Cross along with the Sino-​Japan Friendship Associa­­tion and the Japanese Peace Liaison Group scrambled to arrange for several new rounds of mass repatriations. The KMT gov­­ern­­ment on Taiwan was also startled and perceived Chinese mainland actions as a threat to the Chinese Nationalist relationship with Japan. The KMT ordered stronger propaganda measures to be implemented toward Japan and an analysis of why the CCP was repatriat­­ing the Japanese.67 The Japanese were of two minds about such a large and late repatriation—​neither was very positive. Japanese officials believed the repatriates would be of two classes: “the old and sick unable to earn their own liv­­ing who would be just more mouths to feed, and the militant com­munist evangelists whom the gov­­ern­­ment would have to watch from the moment they landed.”68 Repatria­­tion groups worked with the Chinese Red Cross, under the stewardship of the Chinese statesman Liao Chengzhi. Liao had grown

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up in Japan and spoke fluent Japanese. He was a central figure in high-​ level Sino-​Japanese interactions throughout the 1950s. By February 1953 bilateral talks in Beij­­ing moved ahead, and by the end of March 1953 actual repatria­­tion of Japanese who had been stuck behind Com­ munist lines dur­­ing the civil war started. Several ships made the journey seven times until October 1953 and repatriated approximately 26,000 souls.69 The friendship associa­­tion cast a wide net of relations and was also instrumental in what Adam Cathcart and others have called Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai’s “people’s diplomacy.” This exodus was possible even though at the time official diplomatic channels did not operate; Com­munist China and Japan had no formal state-​to-​state relations. This diplomatic push follow­­ing the early 1950s repatriations was significant in other exchanges as well, and “from January 1955 to June 1956, the PRC dispatched more than two thousand cultural and art delegations to a total of 52 countries.”70 Informa­­tion about the Japanese war criminals received from the Soviet Union or housed in Shanxi at the end of the Chinese civil war was fairly well known within China but also in Japan because some Japanese had also been housed in Harbin at the same time as part of a group charged with counterrevolutionary crimes. When these Japanese citizens returned home they told their tales of the Japanese left behind in China.71 The Chinese Com­munist gov­­ern­­ment may have permitted tens of thousands of civilian Japanese to repatriate, but it still vacillated in its approach to Japan proper. A People’s Daily editorial of October 30, 1953, stated that Japan had a chance to correct its relations with China after its surrender but that the postwar “reactionary gov­­ern­­ment” chose to submit to imperial America instead. As such, Sino-​Japanese relations had still not recovered, and now that Japan was a “vassal” of the United States the situa­­tion looked grim. Chinese authorities were well aware that Japan was a base for U.S. military operations to defend South Korea and included that informa­­tion in the editorial. The newspaper suggested that if Japan did not turn into a bas­­tion for U.S. imperialism or did not remilitarize or allow fascism to resurface, then peace could develop in the Far East.72 Obviously, show­­ing the world the benevolent Com­munist justice toward Japanese war criminals had become an integral part of the CCP propaganda campaign to seduce Japan to turn its back on U.S. support.

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On the ques­­tion of how the Chinese planned to reeducate the Japanese prisoners, Jin Yuan wrote that he read a lot of books con­cern­ ­ing the psychology of war criminals and held monthly study sessions with colleagues. Just as in medicine where doctors need to know the cause of the illness to make a correct diagnosis, so it was with war criminal rehabilitation, Jin recalled. Allyn Rickett, the American scholar imprisoned for several years by the CCP in the early 1950s, believed that Com­munist justice was not just about reform but that the “Chinese, both in their traditional and modern legal systems, have attached great importance to a con­fession or admission of guilt in criminal proceedings.”73 Mao had said Japan’s problem lay in its militaristic education, so prison staff examined that issue. By treat­­ing the Japanese prisoners humanely, Jin penned in his memoir, Chinese guards could slowly cause them to see the errors of imperial Japanese behav­ ­ior. It was also important to show Japanese prisoners how indomitable the Chinese spirit was in the face of adversity, to shock them into reality. The almost 1,000 Japanese prisoners were essentially a microcosm of Japan itself. There were officers, militarists, intellectuals, factory workers, peasants—​men from all walks of life. Some were educated, but most were unswervingly dedicated to the emperor, held racial superiority attitudes, and despised the Chinese. But, Jin explained, they were also quite different due to their varied backgrounds, so each group received different instruction. The Chinese prison staff explained to the lower social echelon of Japanese prisoners how they had been oppressed by their own leaders to participate in a self-​serv­­ing war of aggression. The Chinese staff wanted the Japanese prisoners to reflect on their country’s past, especially its economic history, as a tool to criticize Japan’s militarism.74 Jin claimed that 60 percent of Japan’s armed forces came from the poorer strata, so from the outset they were not that stubborn and perhaps predisposed to the Chinese messages of reform. These men earnestly wished to return home, and the Chinese staff often asked them questions about their families and Japan to assist them in temporarily forgett­­ing about life in prison. Chinese prison staff retaught the prisoners, Jin Yuan wrote, about Japanese imperial history in China and about the emperor. The plan was to get Japanese prisoners to see how their own country and political systems were exploitative. They were instructed that their blind

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a­ llegiance and actions had resulted in a disastrous rule by militarism. The Chinese also provided history lessons on how small CCP forces managed to route much larger KMT forces dur­­ing the civil war and beat the United States dur­­ing the Korean War. As the Japanese prisoners began to calmly examine their past, they were asked to reflect on three questions: 1. Who pushed you on the road to war? Who got you into the predicament you are in today? 2. The emperor that you have worshipped until today: What sort of benefit does he br­­ing to the Japanese people? 3. What must you do to start on a new path of life?75 The Chinese also explained to the Japanese prisoners CCP policies such as “hate the crime and not the criminal himself ” and “conversion offers a route to the future.” Jin Yuan wrote that to change people’s think­­ing required a process; change did not occur overnight or simply arise after a number of sessions but developed over a much longer term. Jin Yuan made clear in his group educa­­tion sessions that the CCP’s goal was not revenge but focused on the eradica­­tion of international militarism. These educa­­tion classes and discussions about the war and Japanese war crimes bore results after about two years, he wrote, when approximately 80 percent of the war criminals had con­fessed, detailed their behavior, and reflected on it. Of the slightly less than 1,000 Japanese prisoners a frac­­tion were of the rank of general, 200 or so were officer class, and about 700 were divided among lesser ranks. For many CCP members, in some measure, the lower-​rank­­ing war criminals were con­sidered victims of their own imperial situation, poorly educated in their youth and led astray. Because theatre was very important to the CCP as a means to spread propaganda but also indoctrinate the masses, a short play was created from the Japanese con­fessions and produced live in front of the prisoners. One play opened with a trio of Japanese burst­­ing into a peasant’s home after hear­­ing that the Com­munist Eighth Route Army was in the vicinity. The Japanese soldiers demand the peasant tell them where the Com­munists were hiding. The farmer pleads that he is only a poor peasant and does not know what they are talk­­ing about. After go­­ing back and forth for a while the Japanese soldiers realize the peasant

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probably does not know anyth­­ing but cannot risk that he will seek shelter with the Com­munist army, so in the end they senselessly kill him. “You are monsters!” yells the peasant’s wife. In the second act the Japanese trio detain the peasant Chinese wife and interrogate her about the Eighth Route Army. They verbally tussle, and she yells at them. As the stage goes dark a shot is heard. Both the actors and the audience were all Japanese prisoners. None had act­­ing experience, but they all brought their personal experiences from the war to the stage. One sec­­tion of Japanese prisoners hailed from Hiroshima and were thus personally affected by losses from the atomic bombs. They, too, made a play and performed it for their fellow prisoners. The curtains parted on a landscape and music suggestive of Japan, which accord­­ing to Jin Yuan brought tears to the eyes of many of the homesick prisoners. The stage then transformed to show a charred landscape and heaps of crawl­­ing bodies. People on stage were weep­­ing and asked, “Who made this war?” Japanese in the audience spontaneously yelled out “Down with militarism!” and “No more war!” Even after the performance was finished few prisoners left the arena; most were stuck in their seats still con­templat­­ing what they had just witnessed and how they had played a role in it.76 Japanese prisoners put together a hundred or so of these productions. While the lower-​rank­­ing soldiers might have been will­­ing to ques­­ tion their motives and actions, at higher ranks prisoners were less easy to con­vert. These generals and officers attended similar classes to everyone else but rarely displayed the same con­version of attitudes. Officers insisted that their actions were legal. Typical, supposedly, of this group was former Director of the General Affairs Bureau of the Manchukuo State Council Takebe Rokuzō. From the very beginn­­ing Takebe claimed that everyth­­ing he did was with Manchukuo’s interest at heart.77 Others, like Lieutenant General Sassa Shinnosuke, told his interrogators that war was a two-​way street and that while the Japanese may have killed or mistreated many Chinese, what did the Chinese do to the Japanese? Sassa’s atrocities were particularly brutal, but this line of question­­ing struck Jin Yuan as sneaky as well.78 Former Manchukuo Vice Director General Furumi Tadayuki, Jin Yuan recalled, was a bit more com­pliant. Dur­­ing the war Furumi had been instrumental in the sale of opium to shore up Manchukuo finances,

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which postwar records con­firm.79 Even though Furumi was one of the top leaders of Manchukuo his attitude toward con­version appeared earnest, though in his own memoirs he seems to detract from that idea a bit. He had much influence on the other prisoners, so his con­fession was turned into a model for others to follow. But Furumi did not just provide a format in his written con­fession; in public on stage he fell to his knees and cried for forgiveness. Accord­­ing to Jin Yuan, he stayed there until the guards stood him up and ushered him back to his seat.80 Japanese prisoner Kanei remembered Furumi’s public con­fession slightly less dramatically. At one point the Japanese prisoners were all called together to listen to public revelations. At the front stood Furumi, Kanei wrote. “I am a war criminal and I wish to apologize to the Chinese people,” Kanei observed Furumi stating.81 As important as the oral testimony and later written con­fessions of Japanese war criminals would become, Fujiwara Akira advised care when employ­­ing such records: “These con­fessions were com­posed dur­­ing a long period of incarcera­­tion within a fairly unique environment, and fac­­ing uncertainty at trial may have caused many to try and pander to what they thought their Chinese handlers wanted to hear in hopes of receiv­­ing a lighter sentence.” In some measure this change can be seen in Furumi’s behavior after his release. In prison he supplicated his Chinese incarcerators, but once back in Japan he said he believed he was try­­ing to help Japan build a utopian future with Manchukuo.82 At the same time because these materials were written in the first person and were extremely detailed, they more clearly laid out imperial Japan’s actions throughout the empire in a way that few other BC class trials achieved.83 In a reflective moment after the war Furumi said that a strange feel­ ­ing overwhelmed him upon be­­ing sent to the Fushun prison because imperial Japan had paid for and built it. Furumi said ironically when he was suddenly incarcerated it occurred to him that maybe Japanese authorities would have done a better job build­­ing the facilities had they known they would end up there years later.84 The CCP repainted the prison, added heaters, and rendered the facility more com­fortable, also putt­­ing in Japanese-​style baths. There was a barber and medical facilities—​resort con­ditions com­pared with the depravity with which the Japanese had operated the system.85 Irony aside, what the Chinese Com­munist narratives that have been published over the years fail to

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include is that, accord­­ing to interviews con­ducted later, while the prison focused on reeduca­­tion it was also partly ensconced in the gulag system, which loaned out prisoners for slave/wage labor to surround­­ing com­ panies to build up Com­munist China’s weak infrastructure.86 Furumi’s breakdown con­fession on stage exerted a great influence on prisoner leaders in wings five and six who had been there for almost four years but barely talked about their past, not to men­­tion their crimes. With Furumi’s performance they began to open up.87 Suzuki Hiraku was one stubborn prisoner moved by Furumi’s admission. Suzuki had been responsible for the massacres in several Chinese villages in Hebei Province. Dur­­ing his incarcera­­tion he was very dismissive of Chinese efforts and did not think that he could be forgiven. At first, Suzuki refused to eat the food, even when the Chinese staff tried to coax him with better meals, because he was con­vinced it was just a feast before the execution. The Chinese told Suzuki that they sympathized with his plight, but unless he recognized his crimes, which was admittedly a painful process, he could not progress to becom­­ing a new person.88 Another Japanese prisoner for whom we can examine diaries on both the Chinese and Japanese sides is former imperial soldier Shimamura Saburō. Shimamura was a central staff member of the Manchukuo Special Higher Police but performed functions as intelligence agent as well. He was one of the prisoners who really resisted, and Jin Yuan had many meetings with him. We can correlate Jin’s memoirs with the entries from Shimamura’s recollections to obtain a semi-​accurate picture of what was happen­­ing in the development of the CCP war crimes trials preparation. Jin Yuan relates that Shimamura was among the most recalcitrant of the Japanese war criminals. Shimamura tried several tactics to throw everyone off course, such as stand­­ing in the hallway and sing­­ing in a loud voice dur­­ing the morn­­ing hours when the prisoners were supposed to be reading. The guards would tell him to stop, and a loud argument would ensue. One day Jin Yuan called Shimamura in and said, “Let’s talk. What are your needs?” Shimamura requested to be immediately released. He did not believe that as an individual he should be held responsible for follow­­ing orders dur­­ing a state of war. Jin Yuan responded that he was right in a way but that the state was not a mere abstract but under the con­trol of those who held authority.

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“When you were head of the police you killed many innocent Chinese,” Jin explained. “You have to reflect on those crimes.” Shimamura responded that he did not kill anyone. This first con­versation, Jin Yuan wrote, lasted for most of a morning.89 Dur­­ing one investiga­­tion Shimamura was queried by the interrogator in Japanese: When did you “invade” China? The interviewer specifically employed the verb “shinryaku” to indicate that the imperial Japanese army had aggressively imposed itself on China. Shimamura, however, responded that he had not “invaded” China, us­­ing the verb “toman” as a way of say­­ing that he had “crossed over the sea to Manchuria.” As a result the interroga­­tion devolved into a game of verbal sparr­­ing between interrogator and prisoner.90 But even Shimamura, Jin admitted, broke down and eventually con­fessed to kill­­ing innumerable innocent Chinese. At his public trial the Shenyang military tribunal handed Shimamura a fifteen-​year sentence but gave him credit for time served; in the end the sentence carried only four years of incarceration, and he was released on December 21, 1959. Afterward, he became chief of the Liaison Group of Returnees from China in Japan and wrote about his experiences in his memoirs. In the spr­­ing of 1960 Shimamura suddenly reached out to his former jailor, and the transforma­­tion con­tinued beyond any of his expectations, Jin recounted. At the end of October 1953, once an armistice had been reached in the Korean War, the imprisoned Japanese officers and all others who were still housed in Harbin were transported back to Fushun Prison. In 1954, accord­­ing to the Japanese accounts, everyth­­ing at the prison started mov­­ing more quickly. Zhou Enlai now wanted an investiga­­tion into each prisoner and ordered the process of delv­­ing into prisoners’ crimes to begin at once. In order to send the prisoners home the actions of the war criminals had to be meticulously researched and clearly recorded. In January 1954 an announcement came that two Japanese had written exemplary con­fessions and that all others should follow suit. Then at some point all personal items except for pen and paper were removed from cells in a bid to encourage “correct” behavior. In March 1954 prosecutors from the high court in Beij­­ing arrived, and the campaign to push prisoners to “renzui,” admit their crimes, began in earnest. It was not just a matter of admitt­­ing one’s crimes but of reflect­ ­ing on them. The process was meant to push the war criminals to start

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appreciat­­ing Japanese imperial aggression from the Chinese point of view and then offer­­ing their frank assessment of their role in it. There were not enough Chinese staff to interview and investigate all the prisoners, so the lower-​rank­­ing Japanese prisoners’ con­fessions were taken in groups. More com­plete and individual investigations were reserved for the upper elements.91 There were still recalcitrants, includ­­ing a general who had been stationed in Korea, Seya Hiraku. He had a “bad attitude” and at one point was placed in solitary con­finement. Despondent at see­­ing his men expose their own crimes and con­vert to the Chinese mind-​set, he sliced up his futon, made a rope, and hanged himself. The Chinese greatly criticized his actions, pronounc­­ing that he com­mitted suicide because he was afraid of admitt­­ing his crimes.92 By the summer of 1955 prisoners could start to exchange letters with their families or even receive visitors, but, as Jin Yuan noted, no one sent former emperor Pu Yi a letter or ever came to visit.93 A recent Chinese book (also translated into Japanese) on the Fushun deten­­tion center reveals the efforts the young and unstable PRC went to both in terms of indoctrinat­­ing Japanese POWs and also try­­ing to use them for Chinese Com­munist propaganda purposes. POWs had access to classrooms and were encouraged to debate. There were also daily internal broadcasts about con­fessions. Soldiers spoke frankly about the crimes they had com­mitted: rape, murder, steal­­ing food, behav­­ing wildly. One story revealed gruesome insight into the murder and dismemberment of a young woman several soldiers had raped and how they con­sumed her, shar­­ing her “meat” with fellow platoon soldiers.94 While incarcerated the men were not com­pletely cut off from the outside world; they were fed a daily dose of news focused on anti-​U.S. activities and how North Korea won the war.95 In January 1956 the POWs were taken out of prison and sectioned into various groups to travel to parts of China, includ­­ing Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, Nanjing, Wuhan, Shenyang, Changchun, and elsewhere. The aim was for Japanese war criminals to see and experience firsthand the “new China” as much as it was an opportunity for them to revisit the scene of their crimes. And of course there was immense propaganda value in hav­­ing the former Japanese imperial elite seen by the Chinese popula­­tion as now under the dominion and tutelage of the CCP leadership. The whole process of

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“educating” the Japanese prisoners terrified the West, which believed China was actually brainwash­­ing the Japanese.96 Such accusations went a long way to negatively brand the Japanese prisoners who returned from Com­munist China from the 1950s and 1960s, in parallel to the general Japanese public’s dismissal of prisoners who had returned from KMT camps and courts only a few years prior.97

Brainwashing: A New Fear of East Asia It is important to remember how much of an impact the idea of brainwash­­ing had internationally. In fact, the very term became part of the public lexicon when a small number of American POWs refused repatria­­tion dur­­ing the Korean War. The limited war on the Korean peninsula had turned international, and there was no room for traitors or those who supported a com­munist East Asia. Americans began to ask whether there was someth­­ing wrong with their supposedly superior way of life that U.S. soldiers would choose the enemy.98 In the midst of this bewilder­­ing turnabout, the U.S. federal gov­­ern­­ment spent a decade follow­­ing the close of World War II initiat­­ing two federal treason trials and spend­­ing more than $1 million in legal pursuit of U.S. Sergeant John David Provoo for his crime of treason with America’s previous enemy, Japan. Demonstrat­­ing the extreme lengths to which the U.S. gov­­ern­­ment invested itself in prov­­ing Provoo’s guilt, in a strange pursuit of justice the U.S. attorney even invited to federal court the very same people who had forced Provoo into his original predicament: the Japanese propagandists who managed him, imperial military officers whose policies called for hir­­ing Provoo, and Japanese POW guards who handled his wartime activities. Some of America’s best-​sell­­ing newspapers and magazines, includ­­ing the New York Times, Time, Life, Newsweek, and Cosmopolitan, tirelessly reported on Provoo’s public trials, and his fate developed into a legal odyssey that influenced future interpretations of American treason law.99 Why the U.S. gov­­ern­­ment lavished so much money and time on pursu­­ing Provoo while similar cases of propagandists for the Axis, such as Ezra Pound, languished suggests that America’s wartime fear of East Asia, first Japan and then China, had not dissipated all that much in the early years of the Cold War.100 Nowhere does the Provoo trial deviate from the situa­­tion in East Asia more than in con­trast to the

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Chinese treatment of American soldiers and Japanese war criminals dur­­ing the 1950s. As American soldiers repatriated from North Korean and Chinese POW camps dur­­ing the Korean War, U.S. officials worried that the soldiers had been brainwashed by the Com­munists to serve as “Manchurian Candidates,” or sleeper spies to be later activated.101 If someone like Provoo could appear dur­­ing World War II and become a supporter of the Japanese, statesmen assumed, there was no tell­­ing what havoc golden-​tongued Chinese Com­munist propaganda agents could cause. It is precisely the incongruity of the Provoo treason trials, set against a dissimilar genre of juridical process in China, that allows us to probe the sort of logic that prevailed in the CCP’s assessment of how to provide an outlet for public anger after the war but not lose popular support for the new society that com­munism would build. To suggest that the CCP was alone in this international project is to miss the point of understand­­ing how the American pursuit of Provoo was deeply colored by the Chinese and Japanese experiences halfway across the globe. What was occurr­­ing in postwar China and Japan had serious ramifications for American foreign and domestic policy. More importantly, the fact that the Provoo trials sat in the interim between the KMT and CCP war crimes trials helps us fathom the serious choices the Chinese Com­munists had to make con­cern­­ing Japanese war crimes, justice, and international law. Faced, as the People’s Republic of China believed it was, with enemies on all sides, the fact that it chose to treat Japanese POWs well, while it did not deem it necessary to do so with Americans and other Korean War allies, helps outline the con­tours of post-​1949 Com­munist China’s foreign policy within East Asia. The fact that such treatment of Americans dur­­ing the Korean War created the palpable fear that fed into the con­tinued pursuit of Provoo demonstrates the linkages between the pursuit of Cold War justice in East Asia and America at a time when most would not have assumed that there was much interac­­tion or mutual influence.

The CCP Trials at Shenyang Only a handful of high-​rank­­ing former Manchukuo officials and a se­­ lect group of others actually endured Com­munist military tribunals. From June to July 1956 in the cities of Shenyang and Taiyuan a total of

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forty-​five Japanese prisoners were put on trial and sentenced, though none to death. As had been the case with Japanese con­fessions in prison, the overall goal at the trials was to hear and record testimony from the victims and then to get the Japanese criminals to con­fess and apologize in court. Some broke down and cried; others got on their knees—​which made for emotional drama.102 The CCP aim was not just creat­­ing humanistic or benevolent policy; there were important and political calculations at work in these legal processes. The trials were designed to reestablish quick relations with Japan and to demonstrate that China in its new incarna­­tion as the People’s Republic was the proper authority to rule China.103 After prisoners had been incarcerated for years in the Soviet Union and China, trials finally got under way in the early summer of 1956. The legal team that had been cobbled together included, in part, former Tokyo Trial judge Mei Ruao as an international law con­ sultant and Liao Chengzhi, the high-​rank­­ing Com­munist Party member who had grown up in Tokyo.104 From June 9–19, 1956, the first Chinese Com­munist special military tribunal of eight Japanese war criminals con­vened in the northern city of Shenyang.105 Shenyang was a former stronghold of the Japanese empire in Manchuria, not too far from the Fushun prison. It was also a modern, industrial Chinese city and near many of the northern sites where Japanese war crimes had occurred. As important as the trials were, they were not public, as the KMT trials had been, even though many foreign journalists were invited to attend. Supposedly no press announcements in northern newspapers preceded the trials, but there were articles on the gov­­ern­­ment’s decisions as well as images of Pu Yi testify­­ing at the trial in Shenyang in the major national newspaper, the People’s Daily.106 Wang Zhaofei, a Chinese journalist specially dispatched from the Beij­­ing office of the Xinhua news agency for the proceedings, recalled that he spent much time writ­ ­ing and rewrit­­ing his copy cover­­ing the Pu Yi trial and the trials of the important Japanese war criminals. He remembered con­sult­­ing with Liao Chengzhi before submitt­­ing his reports to be published.107 Recent Chinese documentaries reveal that the entire proceedings were extensively photographed and filmed, but coverage was not available to the public until decades later. As part of CCP propaganda the trials obviously were to be employed as a vehicle to showcase the CCP’s pursuit of justice and to serve as a form of cathartic public drama.108

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Deputy Chief Judge for the Shenyang Special Higher Military Tri­ bunal, Yuan Guang, told the defendants they had the right to face their accusers and directly ques­­tion those who testified against them in open court. One can see how important it was at this time given the stern international attitude toward China for the CCP to demonstrate its allegiance to international law. The irony is, of course, that later on in the history of the CCP little access was given to such law once the matter of Japanese war criminals had been resolved. The Com­munist authorities explained that they had pledged benevolence and that because they com­pleted extensive investigations into the majority of criminals they decided to indict a small minority and release the rest. Ultimately, only forty-​five defendants were put on trial; the first eight at court in Shenyang were Suzuki Hiraku, Fujita Shigeru, Uno Shintarō, Uesaka Masaru, Funaki Kenjirō, Sassa Shinnosuke, Sasakibara Hideo, and Nagashima Tsutomu.109 Chief Judge Yuan stated that dur­­ing the first few days the courtroom was packed with high-​rank­­ing party members and representatives of the party and people’s groups as well as the media.110 This first case was deliberated in court from June 9–15, and sentences of thirteen to twenty years were handed down start­­ing on June 19. Judge Yuan recalled in his memoirs the reactions of the Japanese war criminals who begged for forgiveness and graciously accepted the chance from the Chinese to reform their wicked ways. Yuan specifically recalled Fujita Shigeru, who also wrote about his time as a con­victed war criminal years later in Japan as part of his efforts to atone for his crimes. On the first morn­­ing the charges were read out and the witnesses brought in for open­­ing presenta­­tion of evidence from the prosecution. As Fujita recalled: I would like to talk about one of the more impressive testifiers within that group [dur­­ing my trial]. It con­cerned my time when I was regimental com­mander in Anyi county, Shanxi Province in a place called Shangduan village. We had intelligence that this hamlet was a haven for com­munists and we got the order to “immediately arrest and demolish” the cell. I took my troops and headed toward the village. Just before dawn before we got very far we met about fifty of the enemy and engaged. It was light by the time we finished but we figured there still must be some of the enemy hid­­ing in the village

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so I ordered it “swept.” I sat down near a gate in the town wall and could see the fingers of flames leap­­ing around and heard the shots of gunfire. I did not think too much of it, just “what’s go­­ing on?” But, accord­­ing to the list of charges against Fujita, what was go­­ing on was that on top of kill­­ing about 140 of the town’s elderly men and women, his men were throw­­ing people into wells, massacr­­ing prisoners, and sett­­ing fires to about a hundred homes. The testimony about this incident was delivered by an elderly woman of 62, Zhang Putao, whose entire family had been murdered; she was the sole survivor. Fujita remembered that as she spoke she grew increasingly agitated and so angry that her body shook. Her face broke out in a sweat and her nose ran. It was an extreme sight to stand in front of her with her white hair and face writh­­ing in hatred star­­ing at me. Previously, I have seen pleasure, anger, sadness and pain many times on people’s faces but this elder woman’s expression was a first for me. What can I say? It was if all the emotions—​anger, hate, sadness, pain, malice—​all flooded into her expression at the same time. It seemed as if this elderly woman, with her hair flail­­ing backward, was go­­ing to leap over the table at me. Fujita then summarized the impact of both the trial and testimony: “It was as if I really could no longer just stand there. It was wrench­­ing and emotionally traumatic. My heart started to feel pangs of con­science. I wanted her to kick me, bite me, push me over. I could barely move but was so petrified it took all my effort just to remain standing. This old women’s face, wrinkled with anger and hatred burned itself into my eyes and it is someth­­ing that I will never be able to forget all my life.” He con­tinued, “Twenty-​six people testified in this manner for about half a day and I just stood there transfixed. It seemed like an eternity and it is not really an experience one can put into words. I resigned myself to be prepared for the death penalty after hear­­ing the testimony and from the bottom of my heart I had com­e to believe that such punishment was appropriate for me.”111 At the end of the trial both Fujita and Suzuki, among others, thanked the court for its efforts and apologized for their actions.112 This was precisely the sort of con­clusion the

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Pu Yi testifying at the Shenyang trial. (Renmin ribao, July 21, 1956)

CCP had hoped for, one the KMT had never really been successful in achieving. From July 1 to 20, 1956, the second wave of twenty-​eight war criminals involved with the management of Manchukuo began in Shenyang. These prisoners included Takebe Rokuzō though he was released early after the trial and repatriated quickly due to ill health; the Chinese did not want to be blamed for a prisoner’s unnecessary death.113 On the same case docket were Furumi Tadayuki and Shimamura Saburō. Former Manchukuo emperor Pu Yi, as he had done at the Tokyo War Crimes Trial, made an appearance as a witness at the Shenyang trials of Takebe and Furumi, where he claimed that he was never in power and that he was always under the thumb of the Japanese.114 This trial lasted for twenty days, and sentences passed down on July 20, 1956, ranged from twelve to twenty years. Takebe was given one of the longer rulings of twenty years while Furumi was sentenced to eighteen years. On June 21, July 18, and August 21, 1956, the CCP decided to repatri­ a­ te the three groups of 1,017 Japanese prisoners after their crimes had been investigated and they had been “pardoned.” The final sentences

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for those con­v icted and not released early varied from eight to twenty years, but often the time they had already spent in Soviet and Chinese prisons was counted toward their sentence. The last three Japanese prisoners, Jōno Hiroshi, Saitō Yoshio, and Tominaga Juntarō, all returned to Japan in April 1964, about six years after the last prisoner was released from Sugamo Prison in Tokyo but a full decade before the last KMT prisoners captured by the Com­munists were let go.115 The PRC released its KMT prisoners in seven waves from Decem­­ber 1959 to the last group in March 1975.116 In his postwar memoirs Saitō underscores how thankful he and the others were for CCP benevolence: “The sentence of 20 years was read out but we thought it would be a more severe sentence like death by hang­­ing or fir­­ing squad and we had mentally steeled ourselves for what we thought was the inevitable. We had grievously sinned, tak­­ing thousands of lives and caus­­ing harm to tens of thousands more. Our own lives could not possibly make up for these losses. In spite of that I was given back my life.”117

Taiyuan Trials In addi­­tion to the majority of Japanese prisoners held in the Fushun prison near Shenyang, there was a smaller group of former imperial soldiers incarcerated in Taiyuan, the capital of Shanxi Province. These were men who had worked, some voluntarily and others under military com­mand, with KMT general Yan Xishan to fight against the Com­ munists dur­­ing China’s civil war. At the end of the war approximately 149 of them were taken prisoner by the Com­munists.118 Some had also been taken in and around the city of Datong, slightly less than 300 kilometers north of Taiyuan. These soldiers underwent a similar process of reeduca­­tion and indoctrination. While most of them were investigated and released back to Japan, a handful faced trial in Taiyuan. Another por­­tion was transported to Shenyang to sit trial with their associates, prisoners who had been handed over by the Soviets in 1950. In July 1952 the Shanxi People’s Prosecu­­tion office had just been established, and the central gov­­ern­­ment ordered it to start investigat­ ­ing Japanese war crimes in Shanxi Province, even with its limited resources. As educa­­tion chief Jin Yuan had encountered in Shenyang, most of the Japanese prisoners taken in Shanxi did not initially admit

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their guilt. The goal was then, under careful management, to make them into better people through reeduca­­tion and training. These prisoners com­pleted such train­­ing over four years, virtually in parallel with what was happen­­ing at the sister incarcera­­tion facility in Fushun. Ultimately, there were not many trials in Taiyuan because the big ones had been relocated and adjudicated in Shenyang. There were just two cases involv­ ­ing several defendants. The slightly more than 120 other prisoners were released because they admitted their crimes or had rehabilitated themselves to such a degree that the Com­munist authorities decided to treat them more lightly, not indict, and repatriate. Seven died while in captiv­ ­ity due to illness, and their remains were returned to Japan.119 Notable prisoners included former imperial officer and con­sultant to Yan Xishan, Kōmoto Daisaku, who masterminded the assassina­­tion of Chinese war­­ lord Zhang Zuolin in 1928, and Jōno Hiroshi, a member of Manchukuo’s elite police force.120 The Japanese prisoners in Taiyuan were kept in an old Japanese jail north of the Xiaodong Gate of the old sec­­tion of the city. The prison was placed under the Taiyuan city public security bureau’s jurisdiction. Even though under Chinese management, the Japanese prisoners held elections to manage themselves; the 136 individuals divided into twelve groups for cook­­ing and other daily activities. Their daily schedule was a bit less stringent than what prisoners in Fushun experienced. Prisoners were expected to rise at 6 a.m., eat breakfast at 8 a.m., and then study from 8 to 11 a.m. with 30 minutes for rest. Noon was lunch, and 12:30– 2:30 p.m. was for rest­­ing and personal time. From 2:30 to 4 p.m. outdoor activities, includ­­ing dance, exercise, or singing, were encouraged. Dinner was at 6 p.m., followed by 6:30–9 p.m. for personal time. Lights out came at 9:30 p.m. Beginn­­ing in 1955 the prisoners organized self-​ study classes, and for read­­ing material they were provided Chinese Com­munist newspapers and the Japanese Com­munist newspaper, Akahata, “Red Flag.” Some men did get sick with tuberculosis, the most com­mon threaten­­ing ailment.121 The Taiyuan investiga­­tion of Japanese war crimes extended through several stages, from its incep­­tion in June 1952 to March 1954. The Liai­ ­son Office coordinated measures between the prosecu­­tion and the prison facility and was the central base of operations. Of primary importance was to check the psyche of the investigators themselves because many

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Chinese believed that the Japanese prisoners had com­mitted monstrous crimes, could not change, and should be punished with hard labor. Obviously, the gov­­ern­­ment wanted to weed out this genre of investigator in favor of those who believed in the power of Com­munist educational persuasion. Chinese officials faced what they con­ceived of as their three main fears, which were strikingly similar to the same sort of issues the Chinese Nationalists calculated as risks. First, CCP authorities believed the domestic popula­­tion did not understand the con­cept of international law well enough, which could prove embarrass­­ing internationally if officials did not start tak­­ing that study seriously. Second, leaders surmised that legal mistakes in the process of adjudica­ ­tion would damage the reputa­­tion of the nation, and third, personal mistakes in this pursuit could influence the future.122 It is clear that the mere goal of striv­­ing for justice was not enough; Com­munist officials realized that how China managed its investigations and implemented the trials would have an international impact. Such anxiety over the process, even though it had already been implemented by the KMT and others, could also lead one to believe that perhaps the CCP took the slightly less challeng­­ing road. It investigated all the war crimes but only indicted a select few in a bid to avoid messy legal com­plications while appear­­ing to pay homage to process­­ing the matter under the rubric of international law. Dur­­ing the second stage the Liaison Office received materials from all provinces and related testimony about Japanese atrocities, organiz­ ­ing the informa­­tion into manageable portions. With the Shenyang trials, memoirs about atrocities were also forwarded, but at first the dates and times were disorganized and had to be reshuffled. The con­ fessions of Japanese war criminals played center stage and were later publicly republished in Chinese. These con­fessions were mostly collected dur­­ing the second half of 1953, precisely at the same time that China was treat­­ing its U.S. POWs in a com­pletely different manner, an unusual con­trast that speaks to the way in which Com­munist China potentially hoped to engage with its former enemy Japan over its new enemy the United States. While the Taiyuan investiga­­tion com­mittee began its work in June 1952 it also established learn­­ing centers for the incarcerated. The goals of this “reeducation” were: “to strengthen political and progressive learning, raise ‘enlightened thinking’ (sixiang juewu), change other sorts of reactionary behavior elements, correct

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prisoners’ attitudes toward their war crimes, and help implement a spirit of admitt­­ing the truth in personal accounts of their war crimes.” These efforts were all meant to back up the war crimes investigations.123 The ultimate belief was that humanism (rendao) would win out over the former mental barbarity of the Japanese soldiers. By January 1954 the rank, name, background, and detailed exposé of crimes of each of the prisoners were all recorded, and by March the former soldiers in Taiyuan were divided into several groups, but not all charges could be verified by the evidence, and some were dropped. The next major step in the investiga­­tion was from April 1954 to October 1955 when the emphasis was on draw­­ing up indictments but also on “fundamentally mak­­ing clear the essential war crimes.” Such verifica­­ tion and atten­­tion to close detail were important because many of the Japanese war criminals tried to disguise their rank, explain that they were elsewhere, fiddle with the list of dates that noted how long and when they served in China, and avoid responsibility.124 The Chinese feared that their every move was be­­ing scrutinized from abroad, which underscored why the CCP wanted to take a slow yet careful approach. The last step on the road to Chinese Com­munist justice, and the more unusual one for the Japanese prisoners, was that a copy of the entire file was turned over to each war criminal for him to read, and each was asked if there was anyth­­ing with which he disagreed.125 One prisoner was moved enough to say that “in capitalist countries they don’t do this sort of thing,” which actually demonstrated his and the CCP’s ignorance about defense and prosecu­­tion rules of evidence disclosure abroad. Many of the prisoners were undoubtedly moved to see the details of their crimes and con­fessions, along with testimony and evidence, written down in black and white. Such dedica­­tion to personal detail often helped the Japanese prisoners accept their crimes. Others said that they now realized they deserved to be tried and receive whatever punishment was due. The whole series of investigations occupied four years of solid work and resulted in the prosecu­­tion of thirty major atrocities within Shanxi Province.126 The office made a report to the central gov­­ern­­ment in November 1955. The Shanxi investiga­­tion executive board went to Beij­­ing under the leadership of a ten-​man com­mittee and drafted the indictments of the Japanese war criminals. In March 1956 Deputy Attorney General of the People’s Supreme Office of Prosecution, Tan Zhengwen, met

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with Public Security Bureau Chief Luo Ruiqing, and the two produced a special report for the higher com­mittee. The report dealt with both the KMT war criminals and the Japanese ones and shed light on the deliberations. Several voices opined that Com­munist authorities could execute the Japanese war criminals summarily but that such a move would not really enhance national security, one of the CCP’s greatest worries dur­­ing the early and unsure years of the 1950s. By retrain­­ing or assist­­ing in their reforma­­tion (gaizao), China could gain the former imperial Japanese soldiers’ allegiance. This maneuver would yield much greater fruit in the future. The report took note of the fact that even though the Japanese war criminals had com­mitted grave atrocities many of them had already been incarcerated for years. Therefore, in some measure, they had already paid penance for their crimes. One possibility was to br­­ing the prisoners to court but not call for the death penalty except in those cases where extreme criminals were declared guilty. “The policy to not execute these prisoners bears, without question, the influence of the international com­munity but will also gain approval with the domestic masses as well. On this count it is a sound policy as is the fact that such a move is in line with our socialist ideology and it will help defang our enemy’s position. This decision only has merits and no demerits,” the report con­cluded. The report also announced, however, that not all the war criminals could be treated uniformly magnanimously because some needed to be punished with sentences to prove their own reformation. Public Security Bureau Chief Luo Ruiq­­ing estimated that between Taiyuan and Fushun there were several categories of Japanese war criminals: About 100 were serious offenders, and 900 had com­mitted crimes that did not warrant a sentence of more than ten years of detention, includ­­ing the five years already spent in Soviet custody.127 As Chinese officials had been authorized at Fushun Prison, for two months from March to May 1956, sixty-​three prisoners from Taiyuan split into two groups and visited Beijing, Shanghai, Wuhan, Hangzhou, Nanjing, Tianjin, Harbin, Changchun, and Anshan to be shown the real face of new China. On the pragmatic level this was a clever move because in the final analysis Com­munist China did not really need con­ victions. What it required was international support, especially from Japan, a potential ally in an erod­­ing international sphere of Cold War

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alliances. Former Japanese imperial soldiers could be used in that pursuit. Second, the prisoners could see for themselves the results of China’s success in rebuild­­ing its own cities because it was estimated such tours would help correct the Japanese bias of see­­ing the Chinese as backward. Third, the Japanese could see how com­munism was revitaliz­­ing the na­­ tion and was not the enemy the Japanese believed it to be. Fourth, the Chinese wanted the prisoners to cherish peace and be revolted by the very idea of aggressive warfare.128 The March 1956 report laid out the parameters of war crimes trials, so by April 25, 1956, the thirty-​ fourth session of the First National People’s Con­gress Stand­­ing Com­ mittee passed a decision stipulat­­ing how to deal with Japanese war criminals in detention. The major objective was that the trials of the Japanese would reflect international law but that the tribunal would not be in an international court because the PRC would employ a domestic military court to judge. At this meeting, the chief people’s prosecutor, Zhang Dingcheng, delivered to the National People’s Con­gress Stand­ ­ing Com­mittee a full “report on the overall con­ditions and findings of the investigations into the activities of the Japanese war criminal elements dur­­ing Japan’s war of aggression against China.” After a debate and discussion at the thirty-​fourth session the final measures for deal­ ­ing with the Japanese war criminals were processed. On the same day Mao signed off on the measures and made them law.129 And so from June 10–20, 1956, a total of nine Japanese prisoners began their court cases in Taiyuan. Eight were tried in one case from June 12–20. Tominaga Juntarō was tried alone from June 10–19.130 The court gave the defendants ample opportunity for their defense, but all the Japanese pleaded “guilty”—​a com­plete reversal of the situa­­tion that the Chinese Nationalists had found themselves in when large portions of the Japanese prisoners had pleaded innocent. The testimony of the Japanese about their illegal collabora­­tion with the KMT and General Yan Xishan was an effort to demonstrate the underhandedness of the KMT and the worthiness of the CCP pursuit of “correct” postwar justice. The Japanese prisoners were very frank about their crimes and often even verified what Chinese witnesses testified about atrocities. Much of Tominaga’s solo case entailed not only charges of illegally incarcerat­­ing Chinese dur­­ing the war but con­tinu­­ing the war after the Japanese officially surrendered in 1945. Among the charges against the

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other eight defendants were some accused of us­­ing live Chinese people as targets for bayonet practice and for collud­­ing with KMT General Yan Xishan after surrender.131 The eight war criminals at Taiyuan were sentenced to terms of eight to eighteen years. Tominaga Juntarō was sentenced to twenty years for his crimes and repatriated, along with fellow prisoners Jōno Hiroshi and Saitō Yoshio, only in April 1964. The transcripts make for extremely sober reading. Nagatomi Hakudō, a Japanese elite soldier who dreamed of relaunch­­ing the Japanese empire from Shanxi Province even after Japan’s imperial defeat, testified in court “the crimes I com­mitted are not things that humans do.” For example, Nagatomi recalled in his memoirs that he testified at the Taiyuan court about the winter of 1942: One time, in order to gain intelligence, I made a villager in Wenxi country strip naked and then I tied him up. I then took a red hot poker from his stove and showed it to him while I con­tinued the interrogation. “Where are the resistance forces in the village, speak! Where are they. Say it! If you don’t I will burn you with the poker.” I threatened him in this way but he was a simple peasant and didn’t know anything. He begged me to stop. “Commander, there aren’t any Chinese forces in this village,” he said. “You bastard! You tell­­ing me lies by screw­­ing with me, are you?” I yelled and I grabbed the red hot poker and jammed it into the meaty flesh of his leg. His thigh let out a sort of wheez­­ing sound as it was burned and the stench of blood and raw flesh burn­­ing seared my nostrils. The villager was in such pain that he broke into a deep sweat that poured from his brow. He responded again, “I really don’t know. Please help me, help me!” He looked at me with a plead­­ing expression but I laughed in response like a devil. “If it hurts then tell me quickly,” I said. Then I burned the hair off his testicles and his pubic hair off. He let out a guttural yell because he could no longer stand the pain, passed out and fell over.132 Nagatomi Hakudō was among the many Japanese prisoners who broke down in court, admitt­­ing that the heinous crimes he com­mitted were wrong. He begged forgiveness, pledg­­ing the rest of life to atone for his crimes. At their trials many Japanese realized the horror they

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had wrought and often admitted their guilt in tears. Nagatomi says that when he repatriated to Japan in 1963, after years of incarcera­­tion under the Chinese, he was con­stantly tailed by the police and surveillance was persistent.133 When former prisoners repatriated from Taiyuan and Fushun they returned to Japan as self-​professed “new men” and formed the Liaison Group of Returnees from China. Their aim, in Nagatomi’s words, was to educate Japanese about the terror inherent in Japan’s imperial misadventure in China and to con­tinue to testify about their own and the Japanese military atrocities in China and the rest of the former empire.134 In 1957 the chief people’s prosecutor, Zhang Dingcheng, assessed that the trials resulted in the collec­ ­tion of clear evidence of Japanese crimes and excellent Japanese testimony con­cern­­ing their guilt.135 In 1964, Mao Zedong claimed that with one excep­­tion the vast majority of such reeducated Japanese war criminals became China’s greatest friends in postwar Japan and created excellent postwar propaganda. Some Chinese voices criticized this rosy assessment. A Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs report stated that the Japanese gov­­ern­­ment frequently did not permit repatriates from Com­munist China to return to their previous jobs and had the police keep a careful watch on them.136 After all the investigations at Taiyuan about 120 prisoners were not indicted and were immediately released home. These Japanese (they were no longer war criminals because they were not formally indicted in court) were then separated into three groups to ship through the port of Tianjin to Japan on June 28, July 28, and September 1, 1956. While they waited for their vessels at port the former prisoners visited a “resist Japan” martyrs museum and laid a wreath, supposedly thank­ ­ing the Chinese for their “motherly treatment” and their heartfelt efforts. The major Com­munist historiography of the era adds that the Japanese were also grateful for the Chinese “spirit of internationalism” that aided the process.137

Impact of the CCP Trials Many of the former war criminals, such as Fujita Shigeru, returned several times to China to bear witness to both their own crimes and the Chinese juridical process that transformed them from “devils back into

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men.”138 The legacy of the Liaison Group’s half century of interviews, con­fessions, and published material has allowed for a personal window into the nature and scope of Japan’s war in Asia. In November 1976 former educa­­tion director of the Fushun prison Jin Yuan visited Japan, invited by the very men he used to guard. In 1984 he traveled a second time to Japan at the behest of a similar invitation. The Liaison Group of Returnees from China also donated to Fushun Prison a “memorial stele of apology” because members saw Com­munist China as the site of their psychological and physical rebirth. On October 22, 1988, the surviv­­ing members dedicated the monument, whose inscrip­­tion is the clearest of all con­cern­­ing Japanese military ac­­tion and goals dur­­ing the war: Dur­­ing the fifteen-​year Japanese imperial war of aggression in China, we com­mitted heinous crimes of arson, murder, and robbery. After the defeat, in Fushun and Taiyuan correctional facilities we received the Chinese com­munist party, the gov­­ern­­ment, and the people’s revolutionary humanitarian support of “hate the crime but not the criminal.” In this manner we regained our human con­science. Adher­­ing to this magnanimous policy, not one person was executed and all prisoners were released to return home. This was an unimaginable event. Today, Fushun has been restored to its original state and here we dedicate our monument. We express our gratitude to the martyrs who opposed Japan and pledge to not let war break out again. We dedicate ourselves to peace and Sino-​Japan friendship.139 The Com­munist-​managed trials were very different from both the Tokyo War Crimes Trial and those operated by the Chinese Nationalists. While the Japanese media were interested in the details of the KMT trials and portrayed them in a poor light, news of the events soon evaporated once the men repatriated. Japanese domestic attitudes toward the returnees from China involved in the CCP trials were much more strident because many Japanese still harbored an “imperial mindset” that coupled with fears of brainwashed undercover Com­munist agents lurk­­ing among repatriates.140

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People supported Sugamo detainees as victims; they did not want to hear from Japanese perpetrators’ testimony in accusatory publications from the Liaison Group of Returnees from China that pronounced Japan guilty. Com­munist China and the Soviet Union never signed the San Francisco Peace Treaty with Japan and thus legally reserved the right to pursue their own postwar trials of Japanese war criminals.141 But when these individuals returned to Japan they were not legally classified as war criminals by Japan’s Ministry of Justice precisely because there was no treaty between the two nations. Similar to the former Japanese soldiers who were stuck in Siberia and forced to work for the Soviets dur­­ing the late 1940s through the mid-​1950s, the POWs in Chinese custody were referred to by the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs as yokuryūsha, “enforced detainees,” or POWs (horyo), both of which had entirely different con­notations and legal standings from war criminals.142 The Japanese gov­­ern­­ment interviewed many of the Japanese prisoner repatriates from China with keen interest and drew up reports, which noted that upon repatria­­tion the former prisoners spoke strongly against war and lauded peace. The men regretted and apologized for their deeds in the past and wanted to work for the future to promote Sino-​Japanese relations. One Japanese report admitted that the men’s long incarcera­­tion “for the Chinese Com­munists had produced an exceedingly effective strategic policy to take toward Japan and one that would probably con­tinue to produce results in the future as well.”143 The report also explained that these former prisoners could not be relied on as sources of informa­­tion con­cern­­ing post-​1949 China because they were ideologically tainted, but Japanese officials did surmise that the former prisoners could assist in understand­­ing how the CCP treated its war criminals and further analyze elements of Sino-​ Soviet relations, among other points.144 It is in this arena where the divergent nature of the BC class war crimes trials com­es into greater relief and why efforts to transmit their legacy are so important. The Tokyo Trial pivoted on crimes against peace, A class crimes, so con­ventional war crimes and crimes against humanity did not gain public attention. The entire legal focal point was the start of the war or the debate about wartime responsibility and the policies that con­tinued the war. As such, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East was essentially a politically oriented ­discussion,

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though not without merit, and therefore arguments about wartime atrocities or brutal military behavior mostly fell outside the con­fines of the narrative and until recently stood beyond the historical pale as well. At the same time, due to the manner in which Japan’s war became so heavily politicized, many held the Tokyo Trial in less esteem. As a con­ sequence, war crimes that should have been examined in greater detail were tainted by the increasingly low approval rat­­ing of the Tokyo Trial as the years dragged on after the occupation. Well into the twenty-​first century, efforts to examine Japanese responsibility for war remain quite passive, in part due to this legacy.145 An October 1956 People’s Libera­­tion Army report labeled the CCP trials a “success” because they demonstrated that the PRC policy of benevolence had been “correct” and later would help “extend Chinese political influence in Japan.”146 On July 1, 1957, an editorial in the People’s Daily detailed the benevolent CCP treatment of Japanese war criminals. The paper announced that trials had already taken place in Shenyang and Taiyuan, illuminat­­ing how China suffered under the imperial Japanese invasion and how these former soldiers com­mitted unspeakable crimes. However, the article failed to com­ment on the legality of the prisoners’ decade-​long incarcera­­tion prior to trial. In essence, the story suddenly appeared in the news and was discussed com­pletely devoid of con­text con­cern­­ing how the prisoners had been processed. The editorial explained to the Chinese public that some Japanese war criminals had been tried at the Tokyo Trial by the Chinese gov­­ern­­ment (the KMT) at that time as well. The paper informed readers that the Japanese prisoners on trial were mainly transferred from the Soviets. “Our gov­­ern­­ment and people are fully aware that we need to punish these men in accordance with their crimes. If we do not then the Chinese people who have suffered most grievously under Japanese imperialism will be decidedly unable to hold their heads high,” the article championed.147 The article also mentioned that some of the prisoners not only were war criminals but also con­tinued the war with KMT General Yan Xishan even after Japan’s surrender. But, the article noted, China was magnanimous, and in recogni­­tion of how much Japan had changed, China would neither execute nor hand down life sentences to any one of those criminals. Zhou Enlai had already announced as much at the June 28, 1956, third session of the National

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Early 1950s Chinese propaganda leaflet proclaiming “Together China and the USSR are strong; never again will they let Japan act savagely.” Even with China’s attention to a benevolent policy it still had to demonstrate to the public it was capable of defending itself against a future Japanese menace. (Center for Research Libraries, Digital Collections)

People’s Con­gress. In that speech Zhou announced the process for try­ ­ing the Japanese war criminals in Shenyang and explained the theory of China’s judicial magnanimity, while invit­­ing the Japanese families of the defendants to visit China. Why was China do­­ing it this way and not sentenc­­ing any of these men to death? Zhou asked. Because China wants these men to return to Japan and explain their imperial misdeeds to educate their na­­tion about what imperial Japan did in China, he said. The trials stood for the future, Zhou con­cluded: “We want to finish with this unfortunate experience and reopen a whole new path of friendship in Sino-​Japan relations.”148 Years later Yuan Guang, Deputy Chief Judge of the Chinese People’s Supreme Military Tribunal, when evaluat­­ing the significance of the CCP trials, said, “Justice expanded its reach enough to offer solace to the spirits of those who valiantly fought against the Japanese or were martyred.” He elaborated, “Within

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our national land, this is the first time in modern Chinese history that Chinese representatives of the people in a court of law judged Japanese war criminals and imperialist aggressors. These trials were not only the close of China’s victory in the war against Japan but a sign that the Chinese people have arisen.”149 While China was applaud­­ing its own benevolent policies toward Japanese war criminals, Sino-​Japanese relations stood on the brink of a new precipice. In 1957 Prime Minister Kishi began a tour of Southeast Asia, and his itinerary slowly took on the tone of an anti-​Communist, anti-​PRC trip. In meetings with Indian leader Jawaharlal Nehru, Kishi stated that Japan would trade with China but had no desire to establish formal diplomatic ties. After travel­­ing to India and Southeast Asia, Kishi overtly strengthened ties with Chiang Kai-​shek by becom­­ing the first sitt­­ing Japanese prime minister to visit the Republic of China (Taiwan) on June 2, 1957, an act that deeply frustrated the Chinese Com­munists. Within weeks, attempts to renegotiate ties between the mainland and Japan dwindled, and the situa­­tion quickly soured thereafter. At the press con­ference Kishi announced that Japan would strive for the libera­­tion of China and basically took the stance that Com­ munist China threatened Japan. Unlike his prime ministerial predecessors, Yoshida and Hatoyama, Kishi appeared to express prewar Japanese attitudes, not necessarily in the most positive way for the Com­ munists.150 Follow­­ing this admission, Kishi then traveled to the United States and delivered a talk where he pronounced the “seikei bunri” policy, that Japan could con­duct economic trade with countries but not diplomatically recognize them. It was a profitable policy that followed the footsteps of the Yoshida Doctrine and allowed Japan to support Taiwan against the con­tinent but, due to economic exigencies, at the same time expand trade ties with China. A July 30, 1957, Com­munist editorial in the People’s Daily evaluated Japanese Prime Minister Kishi’s foreign policy. The article stated that since the end of Japanese military aggression China had desired peace and trade with Japan and that to that end the CCP had allowed approximately 29,000 Japanese to repatriate, with more scheduled for the future. Moreover, China treated Japanese war criminals well, the newspaper underscored. Unfortunately, Prime Minister Kishi vilified China; the editorial quoted a June 3, 1957, Asahi Newspaper article in which

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Kishi stated that Com­munist China could not be counted on to assist in the establishment of peace in East Asia.151 Follow­­ing Kishi’s more vocal positions against the mainland, Sino-​Japanese relations hit a further snag on May 2, 1958, with the so-​called Nagasaki Flag Incident. A Nagasaki department store displayed Chinese products in a store exhibit, but a right-​w­­ing Japanese group disapproved of the PRC Chinese flag be­­ing displayed and tore it down. The police arrested members of the group, and they were charged with destroy­­ing property but were con­ditionally released right away.152 The incident, many believed, indicated that the Kishi gov­­ern­­ment did not believe the PRC flag represented the true China—​Japanese authorities just saw the behavior as the stupid act of right-​w­­ing hooligans. This light-​handed response infuriated mainland Chinese authorities, who assumed that Kishi was pil­­ing insult upon insult. On the even­­ing of May 6 PRC authorities seized fourteen Japanese fish­­ing vessels near the Zhejiang provincial coast Beij­­ing claimed were violat­­ing Chinese sovereign territory. Chinese authorities canceled several economic talks and immediately shut down two Japanese product expos in the cities of Wuhan and Guangzhou. By 1958 the PRC briefly suspended its cultural and trade relations with Japan, but economic necessity pushed them back on track. By 1965 Japan was mainland China’s largest trad­­ing partner, though politically the two were often at loggerheads.153 The CCP war crimes trials may have been successful, in part, in influenc­­ing former Japanese war criminals themselves and form­­ing them into a lobby­­ing group after the war. However, politically in the international realm, the CCP’s policy would not necessarily be deemed as productive as the Chinese had initially estimated.

Conclusion

In t he spr ­­ing of 1964, nineteen years after Japan’s mil­

itary aggression in China ended, the Chinese Com­munist gov­­ern­­ment released the last three official Japanese war criminals and repatriated them to Japan.1 The year 1964 was pivotal in East Asia. For Japan the moment marked the country’s full reemergence on the world stage as the first host of an Olympics in East Asia, and the year also witnessed the open­­ing of Japan’s hallmark rail system, the shinkansen or bullet train. Dur­­ing the 1960s Japanese per capita income rose 7.2 percent and actual growth was more than 10 percent. By the middle of the decade limits on foreign trade and money transfers were finally removed and the Japanese economy soared while the capital city remade itself to showcase Japan’s return to the international scene. China, unfortunately, teetered on the brink of its manmade disaster stemm­­ing from the Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s and isolated itself internationally even further with the Cultural Revolu­­tion that launched in the mid-​1960s. Nearly a decade after Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s 1956 secret denuncia­­tion of Stalin, the Sino-​Soviet split could be palpably felt in East Asia. What’s more, the 1960s deeply rattled China. The sudden withdrawal of Soviet advisors quickly sapped the potential to expand industry, and the economy suffered immeasurably. Chairman Mao was also increasingly at odds with his Soviet counterparts. The Chinese criticized the Soviets in October 1962 for 300

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their adventurism in first putt­­ing missiles in Cuba and then too easily back­­ing down in the face of U.S. opposition.2 The early 1960s saw the beginnings of protracted Sino-​U.S. involvement in Indochina; in August 1964, follow­­ing the Gulf of Tonkin incident, U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson dramatically raised U.S. troops levels in Vietnam. As a countermeasure, China pledged support to North Vietnam on the scale of 300,000 to 500,000 troops if asked.3 In October 1964 China detonated a nuclear bomb, and France, under General Charles de Gaulle, recognized the PRC in the same year. Even though China was rac­­ing through con­tinual domestic troubles and political squabbling, more countries were also now interested in bring­­ing the PRC into the international fold because they were alarmed that the PRC was a nuclear power with no seat at the United Nations.4 In some ways, even as the last official Japanese war criminal returned home from China, the prewar situa­­tion ironically had been restored. Japan was once again a ris­­ing leader of sorts in East Asia due to its economic might, albeit now burdened with a tainted and heavy imperial historical baggage. China remained mired in domestic and international squabbles, not only split along KMT–CCP lines but even in disagreement with its previously close ideological neighbor, the Soviet Union. Even though World War II was over and Japan was regain­­ing a cherished posi­­tion in the international com­munity, the history and memory of Japan’s war crimes trials in China appeared to have been quickly forgotten. The ques­­tion remains: Why? The short answer is that as soon as the trials were finished, mainland China slid into a miasma of political backstabb­­ing and military anarchy. This followed a catastrophic famine, result­­ing from disastrous plans for collective farms, and a split from the Soviets and the loss of their technological patronage, all topped off with the socially disruptive Cultural Revolution.5 Such con­tinuous calamities distanced any immediate need to analyze Japanese imperial misdeeds. Taiwan did not meet with as much misfortune, but its political system was clearly focused on its own survival and not on analyz­­ing Japanese colonial misdeeds. At the same time, we need to ask what propels any gov­­ern­­ment, and certainly ones immediately struggl­­ing to stay afloat in a reshuffled world order in post-​imperial East Asia, to pursue war crimes tribunals

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in the first place? Such a move is especially baffl­­ing when faced with the knowledge that war crimes tribunals are unpredictable; courts may declare a known criminal innocent if evidence is in short supply or if the prosecu­­tion has not proven its case sufficiently. As Gary Bass explains, countries pursue such tribunals because they are “in the grip of a principled idea.” He calls this a belief in legalism because such leaders believe international law is “right.” (I would suggest that this omits the idea of propaganda or use of media influence on neighbor­­ing or potential allies, but that may be a secondary issue.) Bass may overstate his case when he declares that “liberal gov­­ern­­ments sometimes pursue war crimes trials; illiberal ones never have” because I am unsure if either the KMT or CCP tribunals clearly fits his classifica­­tion of “liberal.”6 However, he is certainly accurate that trials in liberal and illiberal systems are not of the same caliber, but I would note that in the immediate postwar period the KMT and later the CCP used such trials as a tool to demonstrate internationally that they were precisely liberal and not totalitarian states. In the same manner, public trials of the Japanese were important as a means to promote Chinese legal authority over domestic justice that also distracted a national discussion about collabora­­tion that had occurred dur­­ing the Japanese imperial occupation. Bass also remarks, as have others includ­­ing Hannah Arendt, that for most massacres throughout history, there is really no such th­­ing as an appropriate punishment, “only the depth of our legalist ideology makes it seem so.” Echo­­ing American officials who were initially opposed to allow­­ing Nazi war criminals to be tried, as opposed to summarily executed, Bass opines that “war crimes tribunals risk the acquittals of history’s bloodiest killers in order to apply legal norms that were, after all, designed for lesser crimes.”7 The Japanese war crimes trials in China fit perfectly into this zero sum scenario. Tony Judt further expanded the problem by search­­ing for a resolu­­tion to the con­undrum: “How do you punish tens of thousands, perhaps millions of people for activities that were approved, legalized, and even encouraged by those in power. . . .” In addition, “how do you justify leav­­ing unpunished actions that were manifestly criminal even before they fell under the aegis of ‘victor’s justice’?” he asks.8 In his opinion, trials will be at most inadequate. Judt con­cluded that in Europe “for most of the population, and especially

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for those whose own wartime record was ambivalent, the apparently random and ultimately benign exercise of justice after the war made it all the easier to forget, and to encourage others to forget, the circumstances and actions that had marked the fascist and occupa­­tion years.”9 The similar struggles con­cern­­ing what it meant to be liberated under a Com­munist gov­­ern­­ment and how such populations dealt with parallel issues in Eastern Europe are food for thought as a com­parison to the KMT and CCP situations.10 But what the war crimes trials did do is help decrease the vitality of us­­ing force as a means of intercourse between states and promote a new form of postwar interac­­tion based on reconcilia­­tion and peace. This was a major step forward. While the post-​trial memory of war crimes may have been forgotten for decades in China and Taiwan, BC class war crimes trials remain embedded in the popular culture of Japanese life as yet another in a long list of injustices against a victimized society that had already suffered under its own imperial military rule. Kang Sangjung has observed that while Japan was defeated militarily, which thus led to its inevitable postwar demilitarization, this experience did not translate into a social recogni­­tion that Japan had lost its colonies. Essentially, even though Japan lost the war the people did not con­ceive of themselves as post-​ imperial, or post-​colonial, which the country had obviously become because it lost its legal sovereignty with the unconditional surrender and dominion over its former territories. Even though the Japanese people experienced defeat they did little in terms of think­­ing or planning how to reestablish relations with their Asian neighbors. This was due, in part, to the fact that the country as a whole failed to take into account how much the wartime and postwar political and social environments had changed. The empire was over, but the psychology that supported it lingered much longer.11 Cold War political fault lines also reinforced this trend. It was not only the Japanese that in some measure sustained this belief, but also the Com­munist Chinese insistence on the com­plete veracity of the Tokyo War Crimes Trial. The trial’s declara­­tion that the Japanese military was responsible for the war helped, in part, sustain such a mind-​set. The fact that, either inconveniently or con­veniently, both the Japanese and the Chinese “forgot” the BC class war crimes trials in China demonstrated that BC class tribunals’ initial Cold War

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political value outweighed their worth as vehicles for the introduc­­tion of international law into East Asia. Not only did the television movie and subsequent remakes of stories such as I Want to Be a Shellfish captivate Japanese audiences over generations, but films and literature about the plight of hapless Japanese soldiers caught up in the injustices of the postwar period around the former empire have proven to be con­tinuous fodder for soul-​search­­ing entertainment. Ōoka Shōhei’s novel The Long Journey is just one of the more well-​k nown works, but more recently the tide has begun to change a bit as newer novels probe deeply into the whole ques­­tion of war crimes. Works such as Yoshimura Akira’s Tōi hi no sensō, translated by Mark Ealey as One Man’s Justice are at least start­ ­ing to wrestle with these issues in new plot lines. Here the postwar story of a Japanese soldier on the run for hav­­ing com­mitted suspected war crimes against Allied soldiers was painted in historical fiction.12 Movies of this genre were popular through the 1980s, includ­­ing Oshima Nagisa’s Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence in 1983, which starred a very blond David Bowie and Kitano Takeshi as his prison tormenter.13 In China, while scholars until the 1990s generally ignored the KMT trials, there has been a resurgence of interest in the CCP trials, frequently in self-​congratulatory public works that highlight with photos and bilingual translations the Fushun correctional facility’s role in offer­­ing a “new life” to Japanese war criminals.14 A mainland Chinese film made in 1983, Place of Rebirth (Zaisheng zhidi), directed by Yang Guangyuan, captured the drama of how the Japanese felt at be­­ing given the opportunity to redirect their lives from war criminals to serve as bridges for better future relations between China and Japan. The movie won China’s national version of the Oscars for best picture. Regardless of the incongruity of responses to the war crimes trials between the two Chinas and Japan, another major reason these trials were really not spoken about until recently, either by the KMT or CCP, gets to the heart of the matter con­cern­­ing what happened to the rule of law in China and Taiwan after 1949.15 The problem with much of postwar Chinese jurisprudence, within either the Nationalist or Com­ munist camps, was the lack of con­tinuity and the purges of many of the important legal players from positions where they could have extended their initial work con­cern­­ing the applica­­tion of the rule of law. To suggest a few examples, on the Nationalist side would be the first postwar

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governor of Taiwan, Chen Yi, who found himself in charge of the former colony precisely because of his expertise and closeness to Japan. But later he would face the sharp end of political criticism for hav­­ing supposedly been a traitor to Chiang Kai-​shek and would be executed. With the Chen Yi fiasco, ultimately no real legal con­tinuity could be created, and in Taiwan the war crimes trials were quickly submerged in a sea of indifference and ignorance. The years of harsh KMT military rule on Taiwan that followed the civil war were colloquially known as the “white terror.” Ye Zaizeng, the young judge in charge of the Tani Hisao trial and several others in Nanjing, was also purged in postwar China. He had declined an invita­­tion from his colleague Shi Meiyu, the Chief Justice of the KMT military trials, to flee to Taiwan with the Nationalists. Ye was arrested and imprisoned dur­­ing the Cultural Revolu­­tion for four years from 1969 to 1974.16 No less egregiously on the Com­munist side, Luo Ruiqing, the head of public security who pushed along the war crimes trials of Japanese in the early 1950s, was himself caught up in a political trap not long after the trial’s closure. Luo had somehow irritated Lin Biao, who essentially con­trolled China’s military policies in the mid-​1960s as the Vietnam War heated up. Luo Ruiq­­ing quarreled with Lin, though this might have been more to do with Lin’s chronic absences due to illness rather than strategic or ideological fissures between the two men. Nonetheless, in November 1965 Luo made his last public speech and thereafter dropped from public view. He was criticized in March 1966, dur­­ing the early days of the Cultural Revolution, and was soon dismissed from all posts.17 Yang Zhaolong, the international lawyer who helped craft China’s legal framework, was also caught up in the anti-​rightist movement of the late 1950s and briefly imprisoned. He was only rehabilitated decades later. If we start to line up all the important Chinese intellectuals and others purged who had dealings with the Japanese war crimes trials, the lack of legal con­tinuity within mainland China and Taiwan begins to appear less startling. The most famous jurist, Tokyo Trial judge Mei Ruao, later also had the misfortune of be­­ing treated in a similar manner to Luo Ruiq­­ing as well. Understand­­ing the Chinese trials of Japanese war criminals is important not only to underscore the preference for justice over revenge, which was one partial step on the road to Sino-​Japanese reconciliation, but also

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to con­sider how the trials have been portrayed in Japan and China. The trials of some individuals as war criminals often changed the face of domestic Japanese politics. Kawano Masahiro describes how the structure of Japanese politics adapted to the various purges and absences caused by the war crimes trials and has even charted who precisely came into power in the vacuum left by others’ departures from the political scene. In our zeal to focus on the more U.S.-​centric topic of the Tokyo War Crimes Trial, we tend to forget those who were executed or sidelined dur­­ing the war crimes trials, creat­­ing a political vacancy for new leaders to fill. Postwar Japan never clearly announced its posi­­tion toward those who were suspected of be­­ing war criminals or those who were con­victed. For example, Shigemitsu Mamoru, actually a con­victed A class war criminal, was released in 1950 and later became foreign minister in Prime Minister’s Hatoyama Ichirō’s first cabinet. Kishi Nobusuke, who was imprisoned for several years and slated to be indicted as an A class war criminal only to be subsequently released, reached the positions of minister of foreign affairs in 1956 and prime minister in February 1957. Kaya Okinori, a prewar minister of finance and con­victed A class war criminal, was back on the political scene by July 1963 when he was sworn in as minister of justice. He had been sentenced to life in prison, but after the occupa­­tion his sentence was com­muted. Moreover, should we reconsider the cost of purges and war crimes trials on the very political schematic of postwar Japan? Supposedly, Japan’s prime minister extraordinaire, Yoshida Shigeru, may have manipulated charges against challenger Hatoyama Ichiro to make sure that Yoshida got the prime ministership first. Surely the BC and A class trials were used as political levers, and not just by the victors. We tend to think of trials along an axis of “victor’s justice” and not necessarily along the lines of how charges were employed as political tools by Japanese and Chinese politicians as a means to further their own careers or to sideline their opponents.18 In a com­parative con­text, as legal historian Devin Pendas explains, these sorts of trials “are classic examples of political justice, since Nazis and Nazi collaborators could in many cases legitimately be viewed as foes of the postwar European regimes.”19 Hirowatari Seigo makes a seemingly mundane but cogent point com­par­­ing Japan and Germany, which is that Japan’s postwar peace

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con­stitu­­tion actually warped Japan into not discuss­­ing or analyz­­ing its wartime actions or responsibility. In Hirowatari’s estimation, because Japan’s con­stitu­­tion did not allow for the maintenance of a real military, there was no domestic discussion of how a military should act or the true nature of civilian con­trol, and so a discussion of war responsibility was never forthcoming. By con­trast, in Germany because the military was in theory allowed to con­tinue, these discussions never abated. This situa­­tion forced Germans to think about reparations and responsibility much earlier than Japan: How was the present genera­­ tion different than the Nazis, how had con­trol been lost, and how should the next genera­­tion learn not to allow such a situa­­tion to develop in the future?20 Shogo Suzuki notes a similar tension con­cern­­ing the political narrative of the history of “comfort women” in Taiwan.21 But what Japanese history seems to be miss­­ing is empathy; it remains stuck in a self-​reflexive mood. Why is Japan only con­cerned with itself or unable to see itself from the outside? Japanese political scientist Maruyama Masao pointed out decades ago that unlike Nazi militarism, which had a plan for its war, Japan launched a war with no plan of action, thus mak­­ing the legal distinc­­tion of who was in charge and more difficult to legally ascribe Japanese leaders’ underly­­ing attempts to achieve their wartime goals.22 In this fashion, historical truth has to be con­structed from myriad sources, both the high and the low, the A class and ultimately the BC class trials, to really understand how Japanese imperialism worked at the root level both within the empire and at its furthest extensions. This book has analyzed the history of military failure; specifically, how does an empire memorialize its defeat? One way this was accomplished was through the various war crimes trials that called into ques­ ­tion wartime beliefs and actions, aim­­ing to shift national attitudes from a martial ideology to one that promoted peace. These legal representations of the war can also be con­ceived of as “lieux de memoire” in the words of Pierre Nora. Although Nora was focused on architectural monuments and con­crete visualizations, trials com­bine memory and written testimony from the war itself but com­pletely repackage them as a legal record. These tribunals therefore con­veniently serve as another space for wartime and postwar memory to reside.

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Stranger than Fiction, the “Jewish Question” In recent years the Chinese quest to see Japanese war crimes painted in a similar brush to the horrors of the Nazis has seen a rise in a genre of books that stoke emotions of the sort made unfortunately famous by the late Iris Chang and her label of Nanj­­ing as the “forgotten holocaust,” a perhaps acceptable hyperbole given her aim.23 However, in other fields the com­parisons are less apt and border on the anti-​Semitic, or at least the con­spiratorial. One such prominent example com­es from a popularly produced Chinese cartoon (manga) book titled On Japan (Lun riben). The title borrows from the well-​k nown but polemical Japanese manga artist Kobayashi Yoshinori, who has published several books us­­ing the titles “On Taiwan” or “On the Second World War” as a means to criticize those who see Japan’s imperial efforts as anyth­­ing but noble. The Chinese author falsely points outs several facets of the Japanese Red Army’s terrorist act at the Tel Aviv Airport on May 30, 1972, as a com­parison. The armed group opened fire in the terminal, kill­­ing as many as seventy people, many of whom were Puerto Rican visitors on their first trip to what they con­sidered the Holy Land. The Chinese author, Yu Xinqiang, incorrectly suggests that the Japanese gov­­ern­­ment was effectively blackmailed by Jewish groups and forced to pay out “several hundred million dollars.” How precisely Yu was misled remains unclear, but the situa­­tion suggests that Japanese “fear” of Jewish world power was a motivator behind the Japanese gov­­ern­­ment’s quick move to offer con­dolence money to the victims of the Tel Aviv airport massacre. China, Yu believes, should learn from this “Jewish” example and press the Japanese for wartime reparations in the same manner because he mistakenly insists that world Jewry is somehow able to have the Japanese na­­tion bend to its will. For Yu, the war is no longer a place to find justice as it was with Chiang Kai-​shek and Mao; now it is an area for economic extor­­tion and a prov­­ing ground for power politics. The problem is that Yu’s statement on Chinese learn­­ing from the “Jewish way” to collect remunera­­tion after the war is com­pletely fallacious. Accord­­ing to Japanese newspaper reports of the time, not all the victims were Jewish and the actual money distributed to individuals in five countries who were victims in the incident, includ­­ing con­dolence and other sums, in total came to only $1.49 million.24

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“Chinese people should learn from the Jews.” (Yu Xinqiang, Lun riben [Dazhong wenyi chubanshe, 2005], 258)

Fluid Notions of History Mark Mazower, in talk­­ing about postwar European society, wrote that “the late 1940s had been discussed in deeply normative language from the start. It was either freedom-​lov­­ing liberals pitted against the evils of totalitarianism, or repressive anti-​communists crush­­ing the chances for a progressive Left. The end­­ing of the Cold War did not dispel this

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moraliz­­ing but it changed its terms.”25 I believe we can point with similar con­vic­­tion to such a stereotyped view of postwar East Asia con­ cern­­ing its interac­­tion with international law and the idea of human rights after the fall of the Japanese empire. As Edward Friedman admits, “Mao promoted friendship with Japan.” I would add that we also witnessed the Nationalists under Chiang Kai-​shek put forth a great effort to com­pete with the Chinese com­munists in this endeavor. As such, both the KMT and the CCP never managed to adjudicate full responsibility for the war because, as Friedman paraphrases, the Chinese view was that “the Japanese people are good. Only a small clique of militarists were reactionary. Into the beginn­­ing of the 1980s, no nastiness toward Japan was allowed to undermine a ‘honeymoon atmosphere.’ ”26 But that situa­­tion changed when the “Deng regime chose to bask in Mao’s aura, and promoted a new nationalism to destroy the depic­­tion of a friendly Japanese people by mobiliz­­ing anti-​Japanese passions in China that Mao had mostly suppressed.”27 This was the clos­­ing off of the Chinese legal mind to actual history, which shifted the state of the bilateral relationship. Just as the trials have shown the pitfalls and efforts of both the KMT and CCP, recent scholarship on Chiang Kai-​shek himself is of many variants and helps to explain changes in how the Japanese were both seen and used after the war.28

Just and Unjust Wars? In think­­ing about Chinese views on war crimes and war responsibility, one cannot help but con­sider the long-​stand­­ing debate about just and unjust wars. Historically, writ­­ing on war has encapsulated two ideas that are somewhat mutually exclusive: jus ad bellum, which con­cerns the justice for proceed­­ing to war, and jus in bello, which refers to justice in war. The “responsibility for the justice of resort­­ing to war,” in the words of Brian Orend, “rests on those key members of the govern­­ing party most centrally involved in the decision to go to war, particularly the head of state. Responsibility for the con­duct of war, by con­trast, rests on the state’s armed forces.”29 Actions dur­­ing the war, such as BC class war crimes, jus in bello, occur at the level of the soldiers themselves when they have responsibility placed on them by the state. In some

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ways the two systems are incompatible. A war can be just but its prosecu­­tion unjust.30 Whether we agree with either premise, the ideas propose precepts on the moral status of regular soldiers, someth­­ing seemingly absent from immediate postwar Japanese con­siderations. In military history and law scholars have spilled much ink debat­­ing the intricacies con­cern­­ing moral reasons to go to war and what behavior is legally acceptable in the course of wag­­ing war as two distinct legal categories.31 Japanese war crimes trials con­sidered both types of charges, but the sort of postwar relationships that evolved between the former Japanese imperial military and the KMT suggest that a third category of “usefulness after war” wielded an unforeseen influence on the manner in which these first two categories were interpreted in East Asia, in sharp con­trast to how the story is normally depicted. However, the Japanese may have a different view on the legal actions taken by the state that historically influenced how they con­ceived of the idea of “just war.” Akiyama Yoshiaki categorically states that the postwar Japanese state pushed the idea of the absence of national liability (kokka mutōseki). This belief stemmed from the Meiji con­struc­­ tion that the state does not hold responsibility. The problem originated in the very form of the Meiji con­stitu­­tion that lacked any specific clause or law that held bureaucrats responsible. Officials could not be legally pursued for crimes against individuals in their own person. If it was an act by an official, it was by nature out of bounds to be legally called into question. The law was not equal; it was arbitrary in a sense. Famed prewar Japanese legal scholar Minobe Tatsukichi’s theory of law undergirded this, in that all acts com­pleted for the state, or theoretically in the name of the state, were not hampered by specific legal guidelines. Minobe suggested that the Meiji interpreta­­tion of con­stitutional law allowed, for example, a policeman to cause harm or death to someone through the use of his powers or a tax clerk to invade someone’s home in search of evidence. There was no access to recompense or appeal. In essence, adop­­tion of the guise of the state was sufficient protection. 32 For military crimes the legal interpreta­­tion was similar because the military was merely carry­­ing out duties for the state or perhaps the emperor. Postwar Chinese legal suits have focused on the fact that Japanese military atrocities were not legally covered by such statutes because the military was actually overstepp­­ing state policy, but the suits

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centered not on the illegality of the ac­­tion but rather its characteristics, which is a slightly different ques­­tion of jurisprudence.33 The postwar Japanese gov­­ern­­ment made overarch­­ing efforts to employ the prewar interpreta­­tion of the Meiji con­stitu­­tion as both the excuse for imperial excesses and as a cover for its denial of legal responsibility—​a con­venient scapegoat for both charges. While it is legally valid to assign responsibility for crimes or for recompense along the lines of how the law was viewed and established at the time, that same law certainly did not envision the sort of barbaric acts that the Japanese military com­mitted dur­­ing the war. Therefore, in such a situa­­tion it is also acceptable to turn to new legal logic to avoid employ­­ing the law of the time as a justification. We need to look for vantage points that will allow a different interpretation, for example us­­ing the postwar con­ stitu­­tion to interpret the same situation.34 Japan was not alone with this doctrine of state immunity, which also existed in nineteenth-​century Europe. Japanese leaders and lawmakers were very savvy about international law, and in 1897 Japan set up its own associa­­tion of international law, nine years before the com­parable associa­­tion in the United States. The Japanese had originally com­e to know about international law from WAP Martin’s Chinese transla­­tion of Henry Wheaton’s Elements of International Law in 1864. The Japanese snapped up copies, and by 1868 there was a Japanese transla­­ tion of the Chinese version. The Japanese opposed as best they could places where international law was invasive, as the Chinese did, such as with the unequal treaties that took until 1911 to dissolve. As Hisashi Owada explains, “The essence of law is in its embodiment of societal values exist­­ing in a particular society defined by time and space, and the process of legal reason­­ing is an attempted realiza­­tion in a con­crete case of this societal value that the law embodies in a general form.”35 Pre-​1945 Japan was part of the international body, but it was never truly privy to the process creat­­ing the norms. Japan remained, in Owada’s opinion, separated from the social con­text that supported these legal ideas. It was far from the victim of a world that created an international system in which it did not participate, but its applica­­tion of law often focused on legal minutiae rather than grasp­­ing the deeper significance. There were also theories of international and world law in prewar Japan that were critical of Japanese imperialism, so it was not merely a scenario of Japan be­­ing browbeaten by the rest of the world.36

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The issue of international law became a cause celebre dur­­ing the 1940s and into the postwar period. In January 1942 the twenty-​six countries that signed the Declara­­tion of the United Nations pledged not only to adhere to the principles con­tained in the Atlantic Charter but to join in a crusade “to preserve human rights and justice in their own lands as well as in other lands.”37 Mark Mazower explains that there were several reasons for the 1940s growth in apprecia­­tion of human rights, the first deal­­ing with the fact that it was anti-​Nazi, a party clearly steeped in trampl­­ing on individual rights. Second, Americans felt that hav­­ing a new mission such as sav­­ing humanity from itself gave the United Nations a reason to be. But the third reason is because “collaps­­ing minority rights into individual human rights appealed to the Great Powers.”38 The June 1945 UN charter espoused a new belief in the unassailability of human rights. After the war, it was therefore important for the Chinese, and later the Japanese, to also claim ownership of these new ideologies.

Contemporary Japanese Elite Views of War Crimes Japanese Prime Minister Koizumi Junichirō visited the Yasukuni shrine every year dur­­ing his five years as prime minister from 2001 to 2006, though he was far from the first to engage in such behavior. 39 The visits vexed the Chinese gov­­ern­­ment, not so much because the shrine venerates the war dead in general but because it eulogizes the spirits of the A class war criminals.40 John Breen judges the Yasukuni site as “ideologically ‘loaded’ ” because it “venerates the dead as kami [Shinto gods] and in the ritual process of so do­­ing it tends to the glorifica­­tion of self-​ ­sacrifice and the idealiza­­tion of Japan’s imperial past.”41 Yasukuni is also indicative that the whole discussion about the idea of war crimes trials, what they stand for, and how Japan should interpret them is still con­ tested. As James Reilly notes, “Beijing’s attempt to create an illusion of Sino-​Japanese friendship in the 1970s without first settl­­ing the historical account was largely successful.” I think Reilly’s emphasis may be misplaced because the PRC did, in fact, settle accounts in the trials it con­ducted in 1956, in its pronouncements, and then in the peace treaty ratified with Japan in 1978. That such announcements later were discovered to have been less than satisfactory is a separate problem. As Reilly highlighted, Zhou Enlai stated to the Japanese in closed-​door

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talks that “we need to explain to our people [the process of why China is normaliz­­ing with Japan]. If we don’t educate the people, we cannot persuade the masses that had suffered under Japan’s ‘Three All’ policies dur­­ing the war.”42 This is a tell­­ing com­ment because that was the whole thrust of the trials in 1956. The fact that China held war crimes trials but then fell into its own legal purgatory says more about China than Japan’s ability to deal with its past. But it is not just the Chinese who seem to have amnesia; Japanese politicians con­tinue to debate legal minutiae in a manner that indicates an inability to com­e to terms with the BC class war crimes trials. A tell­­ing exchange took place in the Japanese Diet in October 2006 between then-​Prime Minister Abe Shinzō (Kishi Nobusuke’s grandson) and Democratic Party of Japan (Minshutō) Diet member Okada Katsuya. The debate defied the idea that international law made modern Japanese society.43 Okada began by discuss­­ing historical issues and then posed a pointed question. He declared, “When I asked former Prime Minister Koizumi about the important responsibility A class war criminals had in the war, he went beyond my question­­ing and insisted that A class war criminals were war criminals. At the same time when you were Chief Cabinet Secretary I asked you the same ques­­tion and you answered that in Japan such individuals were not criminals. Has your posi­­tion changed?”44 Abe’s retort was both frighten­­ing in its legal ambivalence and clear in his insistence that Japanese law con­cern­­ing wartime actions was somehow in dissonance with international legal practice. Abe responded, “In Japan, on the level of domestic law, these so-​called war criminals would not be classified as such. After all, their families were given veteran benefits. The so-​ called A class war criminal Shigemitsu Mamoru was later bestowed with a medal of imperial honor. If he was a criminal would that have happened? I don’t think so.” Okada con­tinued, obviously a bit agitated, “The prime minister has not really responded to my question, which is: are there war criminals in Japan? This is different from ask­­ing you if these men are war criminals on the level of Japanese law.” Okada reminded Abe that the Tokyo Trial was con­ducted dur­­ing the occupa­­ tion and that the results were legally ratified by the San Francisco Peace Treaty: “Given that the treaty at that time should have dominance over domestic law, does that make you think that label­­ing these men as war

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criminals in Japan is correct?” Abe’s con­voluted response was a mastery of obfusca­­tion and avoidance: “As I have just said, they are not criminals on the level of Japanese domestic law.” Abe con­tinued, “In addition, con­cern­­ing Article 11 of the San Francisco Peace Treaty, at that stage for prisoners and others incarcerated the idea was that in accordance with international law they would be released over time, that the peace treaty was signed with an eye toward the future and that war crimes trials would lose their validity over that period. In that way, prisoners were released in 1956 and 1958 in stages.” The con­versa­­tion delved into interest­­ing territory about the nature of war and war crimes. Did a war crime last past the expira­­tion date of the war itself, once the San Francisco treaty was implemented? Okada asked, “For example, as the Prime Minister has just stated, ten A class war criminals were allowed to leave prison in 1956 and were then granted clemency but that does not mean that their crimes were expunged or lessened, does it? In short, it was only their incarcera­­tion time that was decreased and that does not mean that their actual crime was not a crime. When I listen to the Prime Minister, it makes me think that you are say­­ing they were released because their crime was originally not a crime. The crime as a crime remains. What do you think of that? It’s someth­­ing different from what you are saying.” Abe’s belief that the 1952 peace treaty expunged the crime itself is disheartening, if not con­fused. “Originally, in Japan on the level of domestic law it is very clear that these were not criminals. Therefore, at the Tokyo Trial when such charges were made, from the standpoint of international law the expecta­­tion was that the sentences would ultimately lose their validity in the future. Japan did not maneuver Article 11 of the Peace Treaty into place, we had to accept it in order to regain independence. As such, this does not mean that I must call Class A or BC class individuals criminals,” Abe explained. Okada then asked, “So who is to be held responsible for the war?” Abe suggested that the gov­­ern­­ment should not be the one to decide, that historians should be the ones to delineate such issues. But that is of course a cop-​out because we know that the Ministry of Educa­­tion holds exactly the opposite opinion.45 The debate ultimately revealed much about the con­temporary Japanese political difficulty in com­­­ing to terms with the aims of postwar international law. Ironically, while Abe equivocated on the nature of

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international law and Japanese war criminals, the Chinese gov­­ern­­ment in late 2006 portrayed his visit to China after its disappointment with the Koizumi administra­­tion “as an epoch-​mak­­ing success.”46 The Chinese were pay­­ing attention, but they already had hemmed themselves in with five years of acrimony against Koizumi and did not wish to lose more time with an equally stubborn Japanese prime minister.47 In a bid to move away from this debate, on April 12, 2007, Premier Wen Jiabao actually went as far as to publicly applaud Japan’s postwar peaceful path in a speech delivered in Japan’s parliament. However, he may have also done a disservice by valoriz­­ing the myth that “it was a handful of militarists who were responsible for that war of aggression.” Wen noted that “the Japanese people were also victims of the war,” and so he and the Japanese missed yet another opportunity to openly discuss the war crimes issue.48 The Abe–Okada sparring, longstand­­ing in Japan, is underscored in Tōgō Kazuhiko’s find­­ing that from the outset Japan’s interpreta­­tion of law and sentences of war criminals differed from Western parties. Tōgō notes that Japan began its understand­­ing from the view that the San Francisco Peace Treaty drafts originated with the idea that “Japan respects the sentences imposed thereby upon Japanese nationals imprisoned in Japan.” However, this draft was not satisfactory for Australia and New Zealand. The United Kingdom proposed on April 20, 1951, an alternative that said “Japan undertakes to accept the judgment of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East and of other Allied War Crimes Courts both within and outside Japan and to carry out these sentences respect­­ing con­victions and sentences imposed thereby upon Japanese nationals imprisoned in Japan.” Tōgō added, “The preamble of the British draft also included a sentence that ‘Japan bear responsibility’ for hav­­ing become a signatory of the Axis alliance, for wag­­ing a war of aggression, and for caus­­ing a war with the Allied powers.”49 While Western nations were quibbl­­ing over interpretations in Article 11 regard­­ing how the Japanese should con­sider war crime sentences, Chinese in various parts of mainland China were still heed­­ing Chiang Kai-​shek’s call to be benevolent to the Japanese. In one extreme example, a Chinese family took it upon themselves to harbor a disabled Japanese soldier for more than forty-​five years, only repatriat­­ing him to Japan in 1993. The family, relatively poor farmers in Henan Province,

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found injured Japanese soldier Ishida Tōshirō wander­­ing around wounded and semi-​paralyzed in the weeks follow­­ing the end of war. The family housed and cared for him as one of their own for more than four decades. This was not only a financial burden but because Ishida was not in full con­trol of his faculties he was also not even able to help out and provide assistance to the family. Ishida lived a long life because the Chinese took the postwar call to turn Japanese wartime malevolence into benevolence to an extreme example.50 Perhaps we may never know precisely why that Chinese family took in Ishida, but obviously this was not the only village in China that behaved in this manner, someth­­ing to con­sider when we examine how the Chinese undertook war crimes trials of Japanese in the postwar period.

Com­­ing Full Circle On August 3, 2011, five Chinese men from the south of the country traveled the long journey to the north, near the city of Harbin, to deface a local monument erected in memory of the Japanese who colonized Manchuria and Mongolia. The county of Fangzheng had decided to demonstrate the historical magnanimity offered to Japanese who had fled in large numbers to the relative safety of China when the Soviets invaded the north. The fairly impos­­ing stone monument was a record of the names of those Japanese colonists, some paramilitary, who died in their retreat from the empire after Japan’s surrender. A few days after the fracas, the expensive stele was com­pletely removed from its place in the Garden of Sino-​Japanese Friendship. A Chinese newspaper ex­­ plained the reasons for establish­­ing the memorial in the first place: “When Japan surrendered in 1945, about 15,000 Japanese settlers were still in Fangzheng where many had lived for more than a decade. A full third of them, mostly men, had died or been killed. After the armistice the people of Fangzheng seemingly buried their hatred and adopted more than 5,000 Japanese orphans and allowed widows to settle as equal neighbors.”51 As a testament to the benevolence with which postwar Chinese treated the former Japanese invaders, since the end of the war, the newspaper noted, “almost 100,000 local people with Japanese relatives have lived and worked in Japan and 38,000 Fangzheng residents now live there permanently.”52 Obviously the image of a ­magnanimous

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China that forgave the Japanese, to the extent that many Chinese families even harbored leftover or unwanted Japanese children and orphans, is often also in con­flict with the con­temporary desires of many Chinese who wish to deny such a history and instead impose a more dogmatic view of how the Chinese should feel toward their Japanese neighbors. It is important to remember the real potential for horror that was develop­ ­ing after the war, but in the end the Chinese (peasants and not necessarily of any political stripe) behaved more altruistically than the Japanese imperial military, which was there to supposedly defend Japanese interests. As Robert Efird details, 223,000 Japanese colonists in Manchuria were forced to protect themselves against the Soviet Union after the imperial Japanese military dissolved to defend Korea. “An estimated 11,500 people died by violence (almost half of those by suicide), and 67,000 people—​mostly women, children, and the elderly—​succumbed to starva­­tion and disease” in the ensu­­ing months. At least a third overall died before repatria­­tion efforts got under way.53 The monument destroyed in 2011 did not precisely extol Japanese colonialism but rather offered an examina­­tion into the postwar behavior of the Chinese toward their former oppressors, of the genre both Chiang Kai-​shek and Mao Zedong spoke about as necessary in the immediate aftermath of World War II. That such a narrative is now often submerged amidst the reactionary vitriol of nationalistic rhetoric in China demonstrates that the history of BC class war crimes trials has been discarded and the new story of a mighty China requires a con­stant feed­­ing of nationalistic fuel to fend off imagined Japanese slights. This brings us back to the core issues over the struggle between the Japanese “devils,” guizi, and the ques­­tion of whether Chinese believe they have been turned back into men or remain devils. The trial of Nazis in Nuremberg, Germany, was a learn­­ing ground for the Tokyo War Crimes Trial, which also called Japan’s war a war of aggression, claim­­ing that the colonialism Japan had embarked on to develop its empire was illegal and should be judged. We should remember that European countries, in the immediate postwar period, did not label colonialism illegal but did take new legal steps in defin­­ing war crimes. As Tony Judt has illuminated for the European side of the equation, “In the circumstances of 1945 it is remarkable that the rule of law was re-​established at all—​never before, after all, had an entire

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con­tinent sought to define a new set of crimes on such a scale and br­­ing the criminals to someth­­ing resembl­­ing justice.”54 We should remark on the situa­­tion in East Asia with similar incredulity. Kosuge Nobuko poses a strong ques­­tion when she asks why, even though the CCP did not participate in Tokyo, it con­tinues to hold the trial in such esteem.55 Yuan Guang, Deputy Chief Judge of the Chinese People’s Supreme Military Tribunal who helped officiate CCP trials in 1956, reminisced that such trials were not just to prosecute justice but to demonstrate that China could con­duct law in line with what had been achieved in Nuremberg, Khabarovsk, and Tokyo. Gerry Simpson suggests, “The purpose of the typical war crimes trial is as much to enlighten the present-​day innocents as it is to punish the historical criminals.”56 Moreover, the CCP had an eye toward the future to show what it could achieve; thus, the Chinese wanted to link their trials to a larger system of international war crimes trials of the Japanese and the Tokyo Trial as the first step. It was not just about the past and Japanese atrocities but about demonstrat­­ing Chinese legal ability and benevolence con­ nected to international norms.57 On one hand, part of the problem with Japan’s immediate postwar behavior is that it emphasized legal statutes and participa­­tion in the new legal international order to rebuild the nation. But, on the other hand, Japan’s not-​so-​subtle use of those same rules helped it avoid ­dealing with the very moral issues that the legal order keeps at bay—​ questions of why Japan did not pursue its own war criminals. What was partly at stake, for officials at the time, was the con­tinuity of the emperor from 1945 and the fear that delv­­ing too far into that problem would cause the fragile postwar system to buckle under suspicions. An issue not specifically treated in this book is whether pursu­­ing the emperor as an A class war criminal would have linked up with the important social idea of personal responsibility in the war, which was directly tied into the BC class war crimes process. The whole issue of war crimes was difficult to discuss openly in immediate postwar Japanese society due to the ambiguous situa­­tion of the Japanese emperor. In the past two decades debates about the emperor’s legal role as com­mander in chief have grown in light of the publica­­tion of his memoirs in 1990, but they have not necessarily been con­nected in the public mind to a discussion about BC class war crimes in general.58

320

Conclusion

It is important to think about early postwar Japan as not only an occupied na­­tion but a country that submitted to legal adjudica­­tion by many former colonies and occupied lands. Certainly one can see how the Japanese perceived of themselves as victims, so divorced were they from their intoxicat­­ing vision of an empire. It is key that China was among those judg­­ing postwar Japan because this ac­­tion brought into relief the fact that Japan’s empire had crumbled. War crimes trials urged movement toward a new partnership, no longer based on extraterritoriality but equality and shared diplomatic values. Japan’s postwar con­stitu­­tion embodied such values, but administrative behavior took a longer time to follow suit. Herein lies the bipolar nature of postwar Japan. The Japanese gov­­ern­­ment paid lip service to modes of transnational organizations—​especially the United Nations and the use of international law—​and insisted that Japan was set on peaceful relations. But declarations about postwar Japan’s international orienta­­tion and support for transnational agreements did not always sit squarely with domestic practice and political dialogue. These forces tended to strip away at an already shaken up and transformed Japan that had previously stood as the archetypal “modern” na­­tion in East Asia. Instead of leading, Japan faced thousands of war crimes trials that flipped the former imperial hierarchy of the region; China now held a legal upper hand. Japan, which had been the master of Northeast Asia since the 1890s, had become the pupil. In these newly formed bilateral relationships Japan would com­e into closer proximity to its dualistic treatment of the very norms and ideas regard­­ing war responsibility and human rights, twin central con­cepts that were enshrined in Japanese postwar treaties. This postwar legal con­flict pitted Japan’s professed support for international law against domestic discomfort with war crimes trials. This turn­­ing point was Japan’s first experience since 1868 where the popula­ ­tion was subjected to law other than its own, particularly when the former Japanese empire was legally scrutinized and declared illegal on many levels. For most Japanese it was a sear­­ing and uncomfortable situation, made all the more so because many felt they were be­­ing unfairly charged while Allied war crimes went unpunished. The process of decol­­ onization, or, in the words of Kawashima Shin, “de-​imperialization,” is at the very heart of a new transnational understand­­ing of this regional

Conclusion

321

history, a story that encompasses a greater analysis of how Japan’s immediate postwar legal treatment affected the development of new ideas about the nation, modernity, and the future of the country’s foreign policy. The removal of Japanese imperial law and its later replacement with “international law” in the region illuminate previously unrecognized gaps in Japan’s understand­­ing of its own post-​imperial history and how postwar relations with China and Japan’s former colonies shaped modern Japanese history. As William Callahan has expounded, “To understand security, we need to understand identity and vice versa.” The fact that a state is not just a coherent entity due to cultural governance but is “a productive force that is generated by social relationships” and the law is an important con­cept.59 Legal procedures are obviously necessary, but so are the cultural narratives that produce the national representations born from the processes that laws adjudicate. The background and political policies surround­­ing the pursuit of Japanese war criminals, and the media events that added to that history, created a legal identity that fundamentally shaped the growth of Sino-​Japanese relations dur­­ing the early Cold War. What happened to that legacy and the results that accrued in subsequent decades offer a new way to understand Japan’s postwar history and its interac­­tion with China.

Notes

Archives and Abbrev iations Japan

GKSK NAJ

Gaikō shiryōkan (Ministry of Foreign Affairs Archives), Tokyo Kokuritsu kōbunshokan, National Archives of Japan (formerly known as the Cabinet Archives), Tokyo NDLKS Kensei shiryōshitsu, National Diet Library Kensei Room in the National Diet Library, Tokyo NDR National Diet Records for Japanese Parliament (online database) TB Tōyō bunko (Oriental Library), Tokyo YKA Yasukuni kaikō bunko (Yasukuni Shrine Archives), Tokyo

Taiwan AH KMTPA MDA MFAT NAT

Guoshiguan, Academia Historica, Xindian Guomindang dangshiguan, KMT Party Archives, Taipei Guofangbu danganguan, Ministry of Defense Archives, Taipei Waijiaobu danganguan, Ministry of Foreign Affairs Taiwan, in Acadamia Sinica, Nangang Taiwan dangan guanliju (National Archives Administra­­tion of Taiwan), Taipei

China MFAC SHAC

Waijiaobu danganguan, Ministry of Foreign Affairs Archives of China, ­Beij­­ing Di er lishi danganguan, The Second Historical Archives of China, Nanjing

323

Notes to Pages 1–5

324

United Kingdom NAUK

National Archives of the United Kingdom, The National Archives, Kew Garden, Richmond

United States NAUS

National Archives II in College Park, Maryland

France AOM

Archives d’Outre Mer, Aix-​en-​Provence

Introduction

1. Ogawa Hitō, Shokei sarenakatta senpan: jinmin saiban no uragawa de (Nicchū shuppan, 1979), 5. 2. Sanyūtei Enshō et al., “Haisen to namida to rakugo to—​a ru manshū shūsen hiwa,” in Terebi tōkyō, ed., Shōgen: watakushi no shōwashi, vol. 6 (konran kara seichō e) (Ōbunsha, 1985, originally published in 1969), 28–29. 3. Ibid., 38. 4. Rana Mitter, China’s War with Japan, 1937–1945: The Struggle for Survival (Allen Lane, 2013), 370. 5. Marc Gallichio, The Scramble for Asia: U.S. Military Power in the Aftermath of the Pacific War (Rowman and Littlefield, 2008), 42. 6. Yuki Tanaka, Hidden Horrors: Japanese War Crimes in World War II (Westview Press, 1997); Awaya Kentarō, ed., Chūgoku sanseishō ni okeru nihongun no dokugasusen (Ōtsuki shoten, 2002); Jing-​Bao Nie et al., eds., Japan’s Wartime Medical Atrocities: Com­parative Inquiries in Science, History, and Ethics (Routledge, 2010); Chūgoku kikansha renrakukai, ed., Sankō: kanzenban sankō (Banseisha, 1984). 7. Matthew Hilton and Rana Mitter, “Introduction,” in Matthew Hilton and Rana Mitter, eds., “Transnationalism and Con­temporary Global History,” Past and Present suppl. 8 (2013): 14 8. The overwhelm­­ing view of one-​sided narratives con­cern­­ing World War II, for example in the British sense, has been corrected by the publica­­tion of Chris Bayly and Tim Harper’s Forgotten Armies: The Fall of British Asia, 1941–1945 (Belknap Press, 2005) and their Forgotten Wars: Freedom and Revolu­­tion in Southeast Asia (Belknap Press, 2007). 9. Katō Norihiro explores some of these ideas in his Haisengoron (Kōdansha, 1997). 10. John Horne, “Defeat and Memory in Modern History,” in Jenny Macleod, ed., Defeat and Memory: Cultural Histories of Military Defeat in the Modern Era (Palgrave Macmilan, 2008), 14. 11. Ibid., 20. 12. Beatrice Trefalt, Japanese Army Stragglers and Memories of the War in Japan, 1950–1975 (RoutledgeCurzon, 2003); and Ulrich Straus, The Anguish of Sur­ render: Japanese POWs of World War II (University of Washington Press, 2006).

Notes to Pages 6–8

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13. Tony Judt, http://blogs.nybooks.com/post/407338276/edge-​people. William van Schendel suggests that such an analysis of “fringe” areas affects the manner in which academic opinions are formed. See his article “Geographies of Knowing, Geographies of Ignorance: Jump­­ing Scale in Southeast Asia,” Environment and Plann­­ing D: Society and Space 20, no. 6 (2002): 647–668. 14. Nanj­­ing is the preferred spell­­ing now because it is closer to the actual Chinese pronunciation, but some authors still use the older romaniza­­tion of Nanking. Except in quoted text, I use the modern system of pinyin romaniza­ ­tion for Chinese language sources. 15. If we count the Chinese Com­munist trials of Japanese war criminals that were held last, in 1956, there were fifty venues for tribunals. See one of the first mainland Chinese books to delve into war crimes beyond the Tokyo War Crimes Trial, Guo Dajun and Wu Guangyi, Yuxue banian shufengbei: shouxiang yu shenpan (Guangxi shifan daxue chubanshe, 1994), especially 349–383. 16. Two of the original defendants, former foreign minister Matsuoka Yōsuke and former ambassador Nagano Osami, died before the court adjourned. A third, Ōkawa Shūmei, was found legally incompetent to stand trial. Yuma Totani, The Tokyo War Crimes Trial: The Pursuit of Justice in the Wake of World War II (Harvard University Asia Center, 2008); Richard Minear, Victors’ Justice: The Tokyo War Crimes Trial (Princeton University Press, 1971). See also Yuki Tanaka, Tim McCormack, and Gerry Simpson, eds., Beyond Victor’s Justice? The Tokyo War Crimes Trial Revisited (Brill, 2011). 17. Higurashi Yoshinobu, Tōkyō saiban (Kōdansha, 2008), 27–28; Totani, The Tokyo War Crimes Trials, 20–23. For basics on the BC trials in general, see Tokyo saiban handobukku henshūīnkai, ed., Tokyo saiban handobukku (Aoki shoten, 1989), 82–149. 18. The United States con­ducted the first trials in the Philippines, and then the Filipinos implemented their own trials in 1947 after independence. Com­ par­­ing the number of people and cases of Japanese in postwar courts with those pursued in Europe is eye opening, given the vast disparity. Accord­­ing to Devin Pendas’s research, close to 100,000 Germans and Austrians were con­v icted of Nazi crimes after the war, the majority tried in Eastern Europe. The four major Allied powers con­v icted 8,812 Germans or Austrians in occupa­­tion courts on German soil, while Germans themselves con­v icted nearly 20,000 people of Nazi crimes—​6,495 in the courts of the Western Occupa­­tion Zones/Federal Republic and at least 12,776 in the Soviet Occupa­­tion Zone/German Democratic Republic. These con­v ictions were only a por­­tion of the total number of investigations or indictments; other research suggests that there were at least 329,159 investigations or indictments for Nazi crimes after the war. I paraphrase from Devin O. Pendas, “Seek­­ing Justice, Find­­ing Law: Nazi Trials in Postwar Europe,” Journal of Modern History 81 (June 2009): 354. 19. Due to historical variances in how the Chinese language was romanized, initially the Chinese Nationalist Party was written as Kuomintang and thus given an abbrevia­­tion of KMT. Today the more appropriate romanized pronuncia­­tion is utilized, render­­ing the abbrevia­­tion as GMD. Since so

326

Notes to Pages 8–10

many wartime documents still refer to the party as the KMT, it is simpler to just con­tinue to use the older KMT form of reference. 20. Statistics vary accord­­ing to source, gov­­ern­­ment, and time, but these numbers are based on Hayashi Hirofumi’s calculations in his BC kyū senpan saiban (Iwanami shinsho, 2005), 61 and 64. 21. BC class war crimes trials across East Asia had their own biases toward those colonized as Japanese soldiers, as scrutinized by Utsumi Aiko in her Chōsenjin BC kyū senpan no kiroku (Keisō shobō, 1982), ii. 22. Unlike the fairly vocal postures that some Tokyo Trial judges took, such as the Indian judge Radhabinod Pal and Dutch judge Bert Roling, it is interest­ ­ing to note there are few memoirs regard­­ing specific Chinese juridical actors who played active parts at this international tribunal. See Antonio Cassese and B.  V. A. Roling, The Tokyo Trial and Beyond (Polity Press, 1994); Nakajima Takeshi, Pāru hanji tōkyō saiban hihan to zettai heiwa-​shugi (Hakusuisha, 2007); and Nakazato Nariaki, Pāru hanji—​indo nashonarizumu to tōkyō saiban (Iwanami, 2011). 23. This “history of humiliation” has been explored by William A. Callahan, “History, Identity and Security: Produc­­ing and Con­sum­­ing Nationalism in China,” Critical Asian Studies 38, no. 2 (2006): 179–208. 24. James Reilly, “Remember History, Not Hatred: Collective Remembrance of China’s War of Resistance to Japan,” Modern Asian Studies 45, no. 2 (2011): 468. The Chinese judge who served at the Tokyo War Crimes Trial, Mei Ruao, penned one of the few pieces on international law in China in 1957 but made no men­­tion of KMT trials or his own experience at the Tokyo Trial. He focused only on the Nuremburg precedents. See Mei Ruao, “Zhanzheng zuix­­ing de xingainian,” in Mei Xiaoao and Fan Zhongxin, eds., Mei Ruao faxue wenji (Zhongguo zhengfa daxue chubanshe, 2007, originally published in Xueshu yuekan July 1957), 372–390. 25. Randall Peerenboom, China’s Long March toward Rule of Law (Cambridge University Press, 2002), 6. 26. Shimizu Masayoshi, “Sensō sekinin to shokuminchi sekinin, moshiku wa sensō hanzai to shokuminchi hanzai,” in Nagahara Yōko ed., Shokuminchi sekininron—​datsushokuminchika no hikakushi, (Aoki shoten, 2009), 53. 27. Christopher Gerteis, Gender Struggles: Wage-​Earn­­ing Women and Male-​ Dominated Unions in Postwar Japan (Harvard University Asia Center, 2009), 92–104, 118–121. 28. Parks M. Coble, “Remember­­ing China’s War with Japan: The Wartime Genera­­tion in Post-​war China and East Asia Writ­­ing about Atrocity: Wartime Accounts and Their Con­temporary Use,” Modern Asian Studies 45, no. 2 (2011): 379–398. Coble writes, 379, “This paper finds that most wartime writ­­ing stressed the theme of ‘heroic resistance’ by the Chinese rather than China’s victimiza­­tion at the hands of Japanese.” 29. A good analysis of Murayama’s apology speech is in Liu Jie and Kawashima Shin, “Gurōbaruka jidai no higashi ajia,” in Kawashima Shin and Hattori Ryūji, eds., Higashi ajia kokusai seijishi (Nagoya daigaku shuppankai, 2007), 334–335.

Notes to Pages 10–14

327

30. Tay-​sheng Wang, Legal Reform in Taiwan under Japanese Colonial Rule, 1895– 1945 (University of Washington Press, 2000); Hsiao Tao-​Chung, “Lianheguo zhanzui shencha weiyuanhui yu zhongguo zhanzui zhengce de fazhan (1942– 1945),” in Zhou Huimin, ed., Guojifa zai zhongguo de quanshi yu yunyong (Zhengda chubanshe, 2012), 149–180; Thomas David Dubois, “Rule of Law in a Brave New Empire: Legal Rhetoric and Practice in Manchukuo,” Law and History Review 26, no. 2 (summer 2008): 285–317; William C. Kirby, ed., Realms of Freedom in Modern China (Stanford University Press, 2004); Eugenia Lean, Public Passions: The Trial of Shi Jianqiao and the Rise of Popular Sympathy in Republican China (University of California Press, 2007); Rune Svarverud, International Law as World Order in Late Imperial China: Translation, Recep­­tion and Discourse, 1847–1911 (Brill, 2007). 31. See Kawashima Takeyoshi, Nihonjin no hō ishiki (Iwanami shoten, 1967). 32. I am paraphras­­ing the ideas of Ōnuma Yasuaki, who notes that we must com­e to grips with the fact that international law was a Euro-​A merican con­ struct and thus could not avoid a backlash from its imposi­­tion postwar onto Asian societies, Tōkyō saiban, sensō sekinin, sengo sekinin (Tōshindō, 2007), 44–45. 33. Zhongguo guomindang dangshi weiyuanhui, ed., Xuechi tuqiang (Zhonghua yinshuachang, 1976), preface, 1. Portions of the book then detail the deleterious effects of unequal treaties on the Chinese economy, 28–30; society, 30–32; ethics, 33–35; psychological effects, 35–39. 34. David Kennedy, Of War and Law (Princeton University Press, 2006), 37 35. Shimizu Masayoshi, “Sensō sekinin to shokuminchi sekinin, moshiku wa sensō hanzai to shokuminchi hanzai,” 51–52. 36. G. John Ikenberry, After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Rebuild­­ing of Order after Major Wars (Princeton University Press, 2001), xii. 37. Consuelo Cruz, “Identity and Persuasion: How Nations Remember Their Pasts and Make Their Futures,” World Politics 52, no. 3 (April 2000): 280. 38. Tzeng Shih-​jung documents these changes in Taiwanese perceptions about themselves in From Honto Jin to Bensheng Ren: The Origin and Development of the Taiwanese National Con­sciousness (University Press of America, 2009). 39. Ruti Teitel, Transitional Justice (Oxford University Press, 2000), 40. 40. Peter Zarrow, “Political Ritual in Early Republic of China,” in Kai-​w ­­ing Chow, Kevin M. Doak, and Poshek Fu, eds., Con­struct­­ing Nationhood in Modern East Asia (The University of Michigan Press, 2001), 155. 41. Teitel, Transitional Justice, 21. 42. Willard B. Cowles, “Trials of War Criminals (Non-​Nuremberg),” American Journal of International Law 42, no. 2 (April 1948): 299–319. For general works on law in Republican China see Eugenia Lean, Public Passions: The trial of Shi Jianqiao and the Rise of Popular Sympathy in 1930s China ); and Julia Strauss, Strong Institutions in Weak Polities: State Build­­ing in Republican China, 1927–1940 (Clarendon Press, 1998). 43. Larry May, War Crimes and Just War (Cambridge University Press, 2007), 42; Takeda Masaya, Guizitachi no shōzō: chūgokujin ga egaita nihonjin (Chūō kōron shinsha, 2005).

328

Notes to Pages 14–20

44. Gerry Simpson, “War Crimes: A Critical Introduction,” in Timothy L. H. McCormack and Gerry J. Simpson, eds., The Law of War Crimes: National and International Approaches (Kluwer Law International, 1997), 9. 45. Saikinsenyō heiki no junbi oyobi shiyō no kadode kiso sareta moto nihongun gunjin no jiken ni kansuru kōhan shorui (Gaikokugo tosho shuppanjo, 1950); Wang Junyan, Riben zhanfan shenpan miwen (Zhongguo huaqiao chubanshe, 1995), 348–398; Iwakawa Takashi, Kotō no tsuchi to narutomo: BCkyū senpan saiban (Kōdansha, 1995), 618–646. 46. Toyota Kumao, Sensō saiban yoroku (Taiseisha, 1986), 377. 47. For a con­cise history of the Australian trials and problems, see Dean Aszkielowicz, “Repatria­­tion and the Limits of Resolve: Japanese War Criminals in Australian Custody,” Japanese Studies 31, no. 2 (September 2011): 211–228. 48. Takashi Fujitani explores this ques­­tion on the Korean/Japan side in Race for Empire: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Americans dur­­ing World War II (University of California Press, 2011). 49. D’1.3.0, 1–2, “Honpō sensō hanzainin kankei zakken, senpan yōgisha kankei,” vol. 3–5, GKSK. 50. Louis Allen, The End of the War in Asia (Hart-​Davis MacGibbon, 1976), 258. The memoir is by Aida Yūji, Āron shūyōjo: seiō hyūmanizumu no genkai (Chūō kōronsha, 1962). This book is about the Ahlone camp in Burma. See also Louis Allen and Hide Ishiguro’s translated version, Prisoner of the British: A Japanese Soldier’s Experiences in Burma (Cresset Press, 1966). 51. Lisa Yoneyama, “Travel­­ing Memories, Con­tagious Justice: Americaniza­­tion of Japanese War Crimes at the End of the Post-​Cold War,” Journal of Asian American Studies (February 2003): 57. Ishida Takashi’s essay on Japanese wartime responsibility wields similar criticism but also points out that already in the 1950s Takeuchi Yoshimi was stat­­ing that the Tokyo War Crimes Trial was lack­­ing because it failed to develop from an Asian country’s point of view; Ishida Takashi, “Sensō sekininron saikō,” Nenpō gendaishi 2 (Gendai shiryō shuppan, 1996), 13–18. Yuma Totani provides substantial evidence to the con­trary, in her book The Tokyo War Crimes Trial, that the Tokyo War Crimes Trials did not ignore Asian crimes. 52. Simpson, “War Crimes: A Critical Introduction,” 21. 53. Marianne Hirsch, “The Genera­­tion of Postmemory,” Poetics Today 29, no. 1 (spr­­ing 2008): 106–107. Italics in the original. 54. Marc Galater, “Right Old Wrongs,” in Martha Minow, ed., Break the Cycle of Hatred: Memory, Law and Repair (Princeton University Press, 2002), 122. 55. Usui Katsumi and Inaba Masao, eds., Gendaishi shiryō volume 38, Taiheiyō sensō, no. 4 (Misuzu shobō, 1973), 384, and the table on 436. 56. Etō Jun, Senryō shiroku (jō) kōfuku bunsho chōin keii, teisen to gaikōken teishi (Kōdansha gakujutsu bunko, 1995), 424–430. 57. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (Penguin, 2006, originally published in 1963), 252. 58. Raul Hilberg, The Destruc­­tion of the European Jews (Holmes & Meier, 1985); Lawrence Douglas, The Memory of Judgment (Yale University Press, 2001), 2.

Notes to Pages 20–23

329

See also Jeffrey Herf, Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in Two Germanys (Harvard University Press, 1997). 59. Arai Shinichi, Sensō sekininron: gendaishi kara no toi (Iwanami shoten, 2005), 115–118. 60. Richard J. Evans, Ly­­ing about Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irv­­ing Trial (Basic Books, 2001). 61. Richard J. Evans, “History, Memory, and the Law: The Historian as Expert Witness,” History and Theory 41, no. 3 (October 2002): 333–334. 62. Qiang Zhang and Robert Weatherley, “Own­­ing Up to the Past: The KMT’s Role in the War against Japan and the Impact on CCP Legitimacy,” Pacific Review (February 2013): 1–22. 63. Jay Winter, Remember­­ing War: The Great War between Memory and History in the 20th Century (Yale University Press, 2006); T.  G. Ashplant, Graham Dawson, and Michael Roper, eds., The Politics of War Memory and Com­ memora­­tion (Routledge, 2000). 64. Carol Gluck, “Operations of Memory: ‘Comfort Women’ and the World,” in Sheila Miyoshi Jager and Rana Mitter, eds., Ruptured Histories: War, Memory, and the Post-​Cold War in Asia (Harvard University Press, 2007), 47–77. See also Pierre Nora’s work on historical memory in place, Les Lieux de mémoire, 3 vols. (Gallimard, 1984–1986). 65. Ian Nish, “Regain­­ing Con­fidence—​Japan after the Loss of Empire,” Journal of Con­temporary History 15, no. 1, special issue on Imperial Hangovers (January 1980): 190; Arai Shinichi, Sensō sekininron: gendaishi kara no toi, 119. 66. Douglas, The Memory of Judgment, 64. 67. Mei Ruao’s essay is reproduced in Yang Xiaming, ed., Nanj­­ing datusha shiliaoji, vol. 7, Dongj­­ing shenpan (Jiangsu renmin chubanshe, 2005, originally published in 1962), 624. There has been a lot of research on Japanese atrocities, but very poignant collections of postwar interviews and analyses can be seen in the 1998 Nancy Tong documentary In the Name of the Emperor and the 2001 Matsui Minoru film documentary Riben kuizu. See also Takashi Yoshida, The Mak­­ing of the ‘Rape of Nanking’: History and Memory in Japan, China, and the United States (Oxford University Press, 2006); and Joshua Fogel, ed., The Nanj­­ing Massacre in History and Historiography (University of California Press, 2000). 68. Yokohama bengoshikai BCkyū senpan saiban no kichōsa kenkyū tokubetsu īnkai, ed., Hōtei no seijōki—​BCkyū senpan saiban (Heibonsha, 2004), 238. See also Peter Duus, Ramon H. Myers, and Mark R. Peattie, eds., The Japanese Informal Empire in China, 1895–1937 (Princeton University Press, 1989). 69. Joshua Fogel, “Nank­­ing Atrocity and Chinese Historical Memory,” in Bob Wakabayashi, ed., The Nank­­ing Atrocity, 1937–38: Com­plicat­­ing the Picture (Berghahn Books, 2007), 278 and 281, respectively, for the quotes. For details on the lines that separate the European con­text from the Japanese, see Gavan McCormack, “Reflections on Modern Japanese History in the Con­text of the Con­cept of ‘Genocide,’ ” Occasional Papers in Japanese Studies, Reischauer Institute, Harvard University, Number 2001–01 (July 2001). 70. For details on the extent of suffer­­ing in China and how the battles evolved, see Diana Lary and Stephen Mackinnon, eds., Scars of War: The Impact of

330

Notes to Pages 24–27

Warfare on Modern China (University of British Columbia Press, 2001); Diane Lary, The Chinese People at War: Human Suffer­­ing and Social Transformation, 1937–1945 (Cambridge University Press, 2010); and Mark Peattie, Edward Drea, and Hans van de Ven, eds., The Battle for China: Essays on the Military History of the Sino–Japanese War of 1937–1945 (Stanford University Press, 2010). 71. Mitter, China’s War with Japan. On the fluidity of these opinions, see Hans Van de Ven, War and Nationalism in China: 1925–1945 (RoutledgeCurzon, 2003). 72. Graham Peck, Two Kinds of Time (The Riverside Press, 1950), 113–114. 73. For a take on how such attitudes weave their way into con­temporary Chinese politics, see Christopher R. Hughes, “Japan in the Politics of Chinese Leadership Legitimacy: Recent Developments in Historical Perspective,” Japan Forum 20, no. 2 (2008): 245–266; and his Chinese Nationalism in the Global Era (RoutledgeCurzon, 2006). 74. There is a tendency within Chinese scholarship to emphasize this aspect over practical political con­siderations of the time, which many believe led to the Chinese gov­­ern­­ment’s postwar decision to be benevolent toward the invad­­ing Japanese. See Liu Jianping, Zhanhou zhongri guanxi: buzhengchang lishi de guocheng yu jiegou (Shehui kexue wenjian chubanshe, 2010), 7–8. 75. Sandra Wilson, “War, Soldier and Na­­tion in 1950s Japan,” International Journal of Asian Studies 5, no. 2 (2008): 189. 76. As quoted in Wilson, “War, Soldier and Na­­tion in 1950s Japan,” 202. Also see Sandra Wilson, “Film and Soldier: Japanese War Movies in the 1950s,” Journal of Con­temporary History 48, no. 3 (2013): 537–555. 77. Wilson, “War, Soldier and Na­­tion in 1950s Japan,” 191. 78. http://www.shiki.gr.jp/applause/minami/story05.html (Myūjikaru minami jūjisei). 79. Ushimura Kei, Sensō sekininron no shinjitsu (PHP kenkyūjo, 2006), 225–226. 80. Ibid., 229–230. For the actual history behind Dutch/Indonesia trials, see Robert Cribb, “Avoid­­ing Clemency: The Trial and Transfer of Japanese War Criminals in Indonesia, 1946–1949,” Japanese Studies 31, no. 2 (2011): 151–170. 81. Peter Gries, “Nationalism, Indigna­­tion and China’s Japan Policy,” SAIS Review 25, no. 2 (summer–fall 2005): 113. 82. David Kang, China Rising: Peace, Power, and Order in East Asia (Columbia University Press, 2007), 25. 83. Joshua Fogel, Articulat­­ing the Sinosphere: Sino-​Japanese Relations in Space and Time (Harvard University Press, 2009), 1. 84. Franziska Seraphim, War Memory and Social Politics in Japan, 1945–2005 (Harvard University Press, 2006), 4. Also see her “Negotiat­­ing War Legacies and Postwar Democracy in Japan,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 2–3 (June–September 2008): 203–224.

Notes to Pages 29–32

1. Defeat in Denial

331

Epigraph: The original Japanese is “Kateba kangun, makeraba zokugun.” 1. Gordon Daniels investigates the difference of opinion among the Chinese, Soviets, and Americans regard­­ing how to deal with postwar Japan in “Nationalist China in the Allied Council: Policies towards Japan, 1946–52,” Hokudai hōgaku ronshū 27, no. 2 (November 1976): 165–188. 2. Fujiwara Akira details the military situa­­tion in Nihon gunjishi (Nihon hyōronsha, 1987); Hasegawa Tsuyoshi, Rac­­ing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan (Belknap Press, 2005). 3. Richard Frank, Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire (Random House, 1999), 343. 4. Ronald H. Spector, “After Hiroshima: Allied Military Occupations and the Fate of Japan’s Empire, 1945–1947,” Journal of Military History 69, no. 4 (October 2005): 1123. 5. Satō Takumi, Hachigatsu jūgonichi no shinwa—​shūsen kinenbi no mediagaku (Chikuma shobō, 2005). 6. Inaba Masao, ed., Okamura Yasuji taishō shiryō jō, senjō kaisōhen (Hara shobō, 1970), 26. Donald Gillin and Charles Etter highlighted other aspects of General He’s attitudes toward Okamura. See “Stay­­ing On: Japanese Soldiers and Civilians in China, 1945–1949,” Journal of Asian Studies 42, no. 3 (1983): 499. General He did not make the same sort of admission in his own memoirs. 7. Xia Lumin, “Nanj­­ing shouxiang muji jilue,” Zhonghua wenshi ziliao wenku, zhengzhi junshibian, vol. 5, Banian kangzhan (xia) (Zhongwenshi chubanshe, 1996), 927. 8. Yiban, 230/3277, “He Yingqi yu Gancun Ninci,” a collec­­tion of Chinese language news articles about the two generals and their history, KMTPA. 9. Isaac Shapiro, Edokko: Grow­­ing Up a Foreigner in Wartime Japan (Iuniverse Books, 2009), 162. 10. Vice-​Admiral the Earl Mountbatten of Burma, Post Surrender Tasks: Sec­­tion E of the Report to the Com­bined Chiefs of Staff, by the Supreme Allied Com­ mander, South East Asia, 1943–1945 (H.M.S.O., 1969), v. 11. Japan lost its sovereignty on this date, which meant that U.S. General MacArthur’s order on this day was to close all Japanese embassies. By December 1945 all Japanese foreign officials were called back to Japan. 12. Sayuri Shimizu, “Occupa­­tion Policy and Postwar Sino-​Japanese Reflections,” in Mark E. Caprio and Yoneyuki Sugita, eds., Democracy in Occupied Japan: The U.S. Occupa­­tion and Japanese Politics and Society (Routledge, 2007), 201. 13. Terebi Tōkyo, ed., Shōgen watashi no shōwashi, vol. 5, shūsen zengo (Bungei shunjū, 1989), 339–358. 14. Hamai Kazufumi, ed., Fukuin kankei shiryō shūsei, vol. 3, Shina hakengun shūsen ni kansuru kōsho kiroku tsuzuri (Yumani shobō, 2009), 18–46, for a record of the talks between Japanese Major General Imai Takeo and KMT Deputy Chief of Staff Lieutenant General Leng Xin on the Chinese side. Imai explained that Japan distributed the order to its troops to cease fight­ ­ing, except in cases where necessary for self-​defense, 24. Discussions then

332

Notes to Pages 32–33

con­tinued to August 22 con­cern­­ing who would announce the rules and how the process of demobiliza­­tion would proceed. Imai stressed to the Chinese side that orders needed to com­e from within its own network of leaders, from the imperial side, and not from the Chinese to be listened to within the Japanese chain of com­mand. Leng Xin details the con­versations and Japan’s surrender from the Chinese perspective in his memoirs; Leng Xin, Con­g canjia kangzhan dao mudu rijun touxiang (Zhuanji wenxue chubanshe, 1967). Guo Xiaoye, Riben youl­­ing wentu duizhao—​erzhan qijian qinhua zhanfan shenpan jishi (Dangdai shijie chubanshe, 2004), 46. Hamai Kazufumi, ed., Fukuin kankei shiryô shûsei, vol 3, Shina hakengun shûsen ni kansuru kôsho kiroku tsuzuri, 53–61, KMT Lieutenant General Leng Xin met with Jap­ anese General Okamura Yasuji on August 28, 1945, and Okamura attempted to explain that the Japanese imperial military in China would deal with the Chinese Nationalist military only in terms of surrender but would not liaise with the United States. Leng Xin responded that the United States and China were allies and that in China the American armed forces were under the leadership of Chiang Kai-​shek. For a Chinese summary of these events, see Zhang Xianwen et al., eds., Zhonghua minguoshi, vol. 3 (Nanj­­ing daxue chubanshe, 2005), 610–612. Louis Allen, The End of the War in Asia (Hart-​ Davis MacGibbon, 1976), 237–241. 15. Aaron William Moore, Writ­­ing War: Soldiers Record the Japanese Empire (Harvard University Press 2013), 244. 16. Okamura Yasuji taishō kaisōroku, 114, senchū shiryō 3, Okamura Yasuji 16ki hikiage engokyoku (1954), YKA. 17. Gao Shuquan et al., eds., Zhongri guanxi, vol. 2 (Shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe, 2006), 499. For more on Okamura’s immediate postwar reaction, see Barak Kushner, “Pawns of Empire: Postwar Taiwan, Japan and the Dilemma of War Crimes,” in Japanese Studies (special issue on Japan and Taiwan) 30, no. 1 (May 2010): 111–133. 18. As quoted in Max Hastings, Nemesis: The Battle for Japan, 1944–45 (Harper, 2007), 553. 19. Okamura Yasuji taishō kaisōroku, 109, senchū shiryō 3, Okamura Yasuji 16ki hikiage engokyoku (1954), YKA. Chinese postwar accounts also testify to Japanese imperial military disbelief that Japan had really lost in China. For example, in Wuhan just after the surrender see Zhang Mengqing, “Riben touxianghou wuhan riwei dongtai jiyao,” Wuhan wenshi ziliao, Zhongguo renmin zhenzhi xieshang huiyi wuhanshi weiyuanhui (March 1982), 105. One of the first postwar histories of Japan’s failure at empire, written by a team led by former imperial army officer Hattori Takushirō, stated that because “this was the first time the Japanese military had surrendered since its inception, many soldiers and officers found it quite a shock,” Hattori Takushirō, ed., Daitōa sensō zenshi, vol. 4 (Masu shobō, 1953), 395. 20. Okamura Yasuji taishō kaisōroku, 112–113, senchū shiryō 3, Okamura Yasuji 16ki hikiage engokyoku (1954), YKA. 21. The cumbersome early negotiations between Okamura and his Chinese counterparts con­cern­­ing the manner in which Japan would actually implement the surrender are narrated from the Chinese viewpoint in Leng Xin, Con­g canjia kangzhan dao mudu rijun touxiang, 131–136.

Notes to Pages 34–39

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22. Inaba Masao, ed., Okamura Yasuji taishō shiryō jō, senjō kaisōhen, 21. 23. For a full discussion of this, see Sven Saaler and J. Victor Koschmann, eds., Pan-​Asianism in Modern Japanese History: Colonialism, Regionalism and Borders (Routledge, 2007). 24. This goal, to make China prosper, had supposedly been the occupy­­ing vision of imperial army general Ishiwara Kanji. See Mark Peattie, Ishiwara Kanji and Japan’s Con­f ronta­­tion with the West (Princeton University Press, 1975). 25. Inaba Masao, ed., Okamura Yasuji taishō shiryō jō, senjō kaisōhen, 22. 26. The questions of indemnity, what or how Japan would repay China, and which power would win out for the hearts and minds of the people were also paramount. Okuda Yasuhiro et al., eds., Kyōdō kenkyū chūgoku sengo hoshō: rekishi hō saiban (Akashi shoten, 2000). 27. Interview with Grant Hirabayashi, June 29, 2005. This interview is part of the U.S. Library of Con­gress Veterans History Project collec­­tion of oral interviews, http://lcweb2.loc.gov/diglib/vhp-​stories/loc.natlib.afc2001001 .28498/transcript?ID=mv0001. 28. Suzuki Akira, Nank­­ing daigyakusatsu no maboroshi (Bungei shunjū, 1973), 143. 29. Mark Caprio details this inequality and what Japan gained of empire in Japanese Assimila­­tion Policies in Colonial Korea, 1910–1945 (University of Washington Press, 2009); E. Taylor Atkins analyzes the Japanese fascina­­ tion with Korea in Primitive Selves: Koreana in the Japanese Colonial Gaze, 1910–1945 (University of California Press, 2010). 30. Asano Toyomi, Teikoku nihon no shokuminchi chihōsei (Nagoya daigaku shuppankai, 2008), 569. Narita Ryūichi details the attitudes this sort of memory shaped in Japanese diaries in Sensō keiken no sengoshi: katarareta taiken shōgen kioku (Iwanami shoten, 2010), 64–150. James Orr analyzes the postwar victim mentality of Japan in The Victim as Hero: Ideologies of Peace and National Identity in Postwar Japan (University of Hawai’i Press, 2001). 31. Takahashi Hisashi and Imai Sadao, eds., Imai Takeo nicchū wahei kōsaku, kaisō to shōgen 1937–1945 (Misuzu shobō, 2009), 211. 32. Asahi shimbun, December 7, 1945 (Tokyo edition). 33. Gordon White, “The Politics of Demobilized Soldiers from Libera­­tion to Cultural Revolution,” China Quarterly no. 82 (June 1980): 187–188. See also Neil J. Diamant, Embattled Glory: Veterans, Military Families, and the Politics of Patriotism in China, 1949–2007 (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2009). 34. G3–00286, Folder John W. Weeks, Dec. 1948–Dec. 1949, Box 384c, GHQ/ SCAP Records relat­­ing to BC class war crimes trials, microfiche, NDLKS. 35. Ibid. 36. Alexis Dudden, Troubled Apologies among Japan, Korea, and the United States (Columbia University Press, 2008), 69–70. 37. For more on the Chinese civil war and the con­text surround­­ing when these trials took place, see Odd A. Westad, Decisive Encounters: The Chinese Civil War, 1945–1950 (Stanford University Press, 2003); Susanne Pepper, Civil War in China: The Political Struggle, 1945–1949 (University of California Press, 1978); and Nancy Tucker, Patterns in the Dust: Chinese-​America

334

Notes to Pages 39–44

Relations and the Recogni­­tion Con­troversy, 1949–1950 (Columbia University Press, 1983). 38. Gary Jonathan Bass, Stay the Hand of Vengeance: The Politics of War Crimes Tribunals (Princeton University Press, 2000), 6–7. 39. Priscilla Hayner, Unspeakable Truths: Transitional Justice and the Challenge of Truth Com­missions, 2nd ed. (Routledge, 2010), 8–9. 40. These reports are now available in digital form on the website of the International Criminal Court, http://www.icc-​cpi.int. 41. Klaus Mühlhahn, Criminal Justice in China: A History (Harvard University Press, 2009), 70. 42. Ole Spiermann, “Judge Wang Chung-​hui at the Permanent Court of International Justice,” Chinese Journal of International Law 5, no. 1 (2006): 115–128. 43. Zhongguo guomindang zhongyang weiyuanhui, ed., Wang Chonghui xiansheng wenji (Zhonghua yinshuachang, 1981), 380–384. 44. Hayashi Hirofumi ed., Rengōgun sensō hanzai īnkai shiryō, kaisetsu, released in the series Rengōkoku rengō tainichi sensō hanzai seisaku shiryōshū, dai ikki (Gendai shirō shuppan, 2008), 8. 45. Hayashi Hirofumi, “Rengōgoku sensōhanzai seisaku no keisei—​rengōkoku hanzai īnkai to eibei,” Kantō gakuin daigaku keizai gakubu sōgō gakujutsu ronsō (shizen ningen shakai), Dai 36, 37 gō (January/July 2004): 6. 46. “Conversations with Professor Sir Elihu Lauterpacht Sixth Interview: Personalities,” 19, http://www.dspace.cam.ac.uk/bitstream/1810/197071/4 / El i%20Lauter pacht %20Inter v iew %206%20transcript %20 -​% 202 %20April%202008.pdf. 47. Richard S. Horowitz, “International Law and State Transforma­­tion in China, Siam, and the Ottoman Empire dur­­ing the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of World History 15, no. 4 (2005): 449. 48. The Allies tried to prosecute the German Kaiser, but the Netherlands gave him sanctuary follow­­ing World War I. In February 1920 the Allies asked the Germans to hand over 886 people for trial. Germany refused and said those men would be tried domestically. A German supreme court in Leipzig tried the men under German law but ultimately only prosecuted twelve cases in which six defendants were found guilty. The Allies were dissatisfied with the outcome. See Robert Woetzel, The Nuremberg Trials in International Law (Stevens and Sons Publishers, 1960), 31–33. 49. Ikō Toshiya, “Chūgoku kokumin seifu no nihon senpan shobatsu hōshin to tenkai (ge),” Kikan sensō sekininn kenkyū, dai 33gō (winter 2001): 67–68. 50. Gao Shuquan et al., eds., Zhongri guanxi, vol. 3 (Shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe, 2006), 45. 51. Awaya Kentarō and Kawashima Takane, eds., Haisenji zenkoku chian jōhō (Nihon tosho sentā, 1994), 30. 52. Yoshida Yutaka, Nihonjin no sensōkan: sengoshi no naka no henyō, rev. ed. (Iwanami shoten, 2005), 28–29. 53. Japan’s popula­­tion at the end of the war was closer to 70 million, but the “one hundred million” phrase was a popular wartime slogan to denote that the whole country, and its empire, was unified. Laura Hein’s work makes

Notes to Pages 44–45

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clear that for many economists and low-​level bureaucrats there was con­tri­­ tion and a goal to place Japan on the path toward peace, which they believed would aid in Japan’s rebuilding. But, again, the goal was economic regrowth and not necessarily the idea of promot­­ing peace as a goal unto itself. See Laura E. Hein, “In Search of Peace and Democracy: Japanese Economic Debate in Political Con­text,” Journal of Asian Studies 53, no. 3 (August 1994): 752–778; and Bai Gao, Economic Ideology and Japanese Industrial Policy: Developmentalism from 1931 to 1965 (Cambridge University Press, 1997). 54. Higashikuni Naruhiko, Watakushi no kiroku (Tōhō shobō, 1947), 205–208. 55. Several of the problems in deal­­ing with reparations issues from the Chinese perspective are analyzed in Okuda Yasuhiro et al., eds., Kyōdō kenkyū chūgoku sengo hoshō: rekishi hō saiban. 56. Excellent research in this vein in Japanese is too copious to thoroughly list. See Araragi Shinzō, ed., Teikoku igo no hito no idō: posuto koroniarizumu to gurōbarizumu no kōsakuten (Bensei shuppan, 2013); Katō Norihiro, Haisengoron (Kōdansha, 1997); Katō Kiyofumi, Dainippon teikoku hōkai: higashi ajia no senkyūhyaku shijūgonen (Chūkōshinsho, 2009); Katō Kiyofumi, Kaigai hikiagemondai to sengo nihonjin no higashiajiakan keisei ni kansuru kibanteki kenkyū [Heisei 15nendo–17nendo kagaku kenkyūhi hojokin wakate kenkyū (A) kenkyū seika hōkokusho] (2006), unpublished report housed in the National Diet Library, Tokyo. In English see Lori Watt, When Empire Com­es Home: Repatria­­tion and Reintegra­­tion in Postwar Japan (Harvard University Asia Center, 2009); and Mariko Tamanoi, Memory Maps: The State and Manchuria in Postwar Japan (University of Hawaii Press, 2008). In Chinese see Ren Jun, Rifu riqiao da qianfan (Nanj­­ing chubanshe, 2005); and Han Wenn­­ing and Fan Chunlong, Riben zhanfan shenpan (Nanj­­ing chubanshe, 2005). 57. Richard H. Minear, Victors’ Justice: The Tokyo War Crimes Trial (Princeton University Press, 1971). Minear does not look at the manner in which the Tokyo Trial was received in China or Korea, where criticism of it as victor’s justice was less noticeable. For a different view of the trials from the perspective of a legal secretary who came to know some of the defendants personally, see Elaine B. Fischel, Defend­­ing the Enemy: Justice for the WWII Japanese War Criminals (Bascam Books, 2009). There is much more scholarship on the evolu­­tion of the trial in the Japanese language and the international con­ text. See Higurashi Yoshinobu, Tōkyō saiban no kokusai kankei: kokusai seiji ni okeru kenryoku to kihan (Bokutakusha, 2002). On the history of the idea of us­­ing international law to prosecute war crimes see Elihu Lauterpacht, The Life of Sir Hersch Lauterpacht (University of Cambridge Press, 2010). 58. Atrocities in the post-​W WII Korea theater would have to wait until much later for historical scrutiny. See Charles J. Hanley, Martha Mendoza, and Sang-​hun Cho, The Bridge at No Gun Ri: A Hidden Nightmare from the Korean War (Henry Holt & Com­pany, 2001). These mistakes and the hubris of American foreign policy, in some measure mirror­­ing Japan’s imperial aims, are exposed in David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest (Random House, 1972), as well as the 2003 documentary film directed by Errol Morris, The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara. 59. Minear, Victors’ Justice, 12–14.

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Notes to Pages 45–48

60. Judge Pal was frequently absent from court, supposedly to com­plete his close personal read­­ing and to write his massive dissent. In total he missed 109 court days out of 466, virtually 25 percent. Not only did he dissent, but also dur­­ing later travels to Japan he visited BC class war criminals and their families in Fukuoka, proclaim­­ing that they were innocent. See Yuma Totani, The Tokyo War Crimes Trial: The Pursuit of Justice in the Wake of World War II (Harvard University Press, 2008), 227–229. Pal believed that once the peace treaty was con­cluded the Sugamo detainees should also be released, and in 1966 the emperor bestowed a medal on Pal for promot­­ing peace. Pal is still venerated in Japan, and a recent memorial statue has been erected in his image at the Yasukuni shrine. The politically con­servative manga artist Kobayashi Yoshinori has further expanded on this topic and brought it to the much greater atten­­tion of the masses through his popular com­ic books. See his Iwayuru A kyū senpan—​gōsen SPECIAL (Gentōsha, 2006). 61. Nakamura Masanori, trans. Herbert P. Bix, Jonathan Baker-​Bates, and Derek Bowen, The Japanese Monarchy: Ambassador Joseph Grew and the Mak­ ­ing of the “Symbol Emperor System,” 1931–1991 (M. E. Sharpe, 1992); Herbert Bix, Hirohito and the Mak­­ing of Modern Japan (Harper Collins Publishers, 2000); and Stephen Large, Emperor Hirohito and Shōwa Japan: A Political Biography (Routledge, 1992). 62. See Awaya Kentaro, Tōkyō saibanron (Ōtsuki shoten, 1989); Mark Selden and Laura Hein, Censor­­ing History: Citizenship and Memory in Japan, China and the United States (East Gate Publishers, 2000); and Legal Memorandum on the Issue of State Responsibility by The People of the Asia-​Pacific Region Through Their Representatives Who Seek To Project the Rights of Women in the Asia-​Pacific Region (December 4, 2000). 63. Yuma Totani, The Tokyo War Crimes Trial: The Pursuit of Justice in the Wake of World War II (Harvard University Press, 2008), 4–5. 64. Ibid., 110–111. 65. “Proclama­­tion Defin­­ing Terms for Japanese Surrender Issued, at Potsdam,” preserved on Japan’s National Diet Library website of important documents, http://www.ndl.go.jp/constitution/e/etc/c06.html. 66. Higurashi Yoshinobu, Tōkyō saiban (Kōdansha, 2008), 150–151. One of Tajiri’s first jobs postwar in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was to prepare a brief con­cern­­ing charges of war crimes against the emperor and how to respond. Tajiri Akiyoshi, Taijiri Akiyoshi kaisōroku—​hansei o kaketa chūgoku gaikō no kiroku (Hara shobō, 1977), 157. 67. Oguma Eiji, Minshu to aikoku: sengo nihon no nashonarizumu to kōkyōsei (Shinyōsha, 2002); Tessa Morris Suzuki, Borderline Japan: Foreigners and Frontier Con­trols in the Postwar Era (Cambridge University Press, 2010). 68. Asano Toyomi, Teikoku nihon no shokuminchi chihōsei, 578. See also K’0002, Sengo gaikō kiroku “Shūsen ni yoru zaigai iryūmin zengo sochi,” Taiheiyō senso shūketsu ni yoru zaigai hōjin hogo hikiage kankei, dai ikkan, GKSK. 69. Awaya Kentarō, “Tōkyō saiban to wa nanika,” Gendai shisō (August 2007): 75. The original goal was to hold several sorts of Tokyo Trials in succession after the first was com­pleted, but the Cold War intervened and it grew more difficult to manage a trial with the Soviet Union.

Notes to Pages 49–54

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70. Takemae Eiji, The Allied Occupa­­tion of Japan, trans. and adapted from the Japanese by Robert Ricketts and Sebastian Swann (Continuum, 2002). 71. Toyota Kumao, Sensō saiban yoroku (Taiseisha, 1986), 58. See also Nagai Hitoshi, “Sensō hanzaijin ni kansuru seifu seimeian—​Higashikuninomiya naikaku ni yoru kakugi kettei no myakuraku,” in Akazawa Shirō et al., eds., Nenpō nihon gendaishi (teikoku to shokuminchi, dainihonteikoku hōkai rokujūnen), vol. 10 (Gendaishiryō shuppan, 2005), 277–321; and Shikita Shinichi, “Nihongawa senpan jishu saiban kōsō no tenmatsu,” Gunjishigaku 1–2, no. 31 (September 1995): 338–349. 72. Toyota Kumao, Sensō saiban yoroku, 51. Kumao was the man­­ager, along with Yokomitsu, who was put in charge of the intra-​ministerial work­­ing group to amass materials on the BC class war crimes trials so the Japanese gov­­ern­­ ment could understand the issues and the trials. This tome is a collec­­tion of primary source documents deal­­ing with Japan’s postwar posture toward war crimes trials. 73. History of the Non-​Military Activities of the Occupa­­tion of Japan, 1945–1951, vol. 5, Trials of Class B and Class C War Criminals (reprinted by Nihon tosho sentā, 1990), 41–42. 74. Utsumi Aiko, Nihongun no horyo seisaku (Aoki shoten, 2005), 552–553. 75. Tokyo daigaku shakai kagaku kenkyūjo, ed., Senji nihon no hō taisei (Tokyo University Press, 1980), 12. For more on the Japanese moves to con­duct domestic war crimes trials, see Nagai Hitoshi, “Sensō hanzaijin ni kansuru seifu semeian”; and Shikita Shinichi, “Nihongawa senpan jishu saiban kōsō no tenmatsu.” 76. Inoue Tadao shiryō, Senpan shakuhō shiyō, Inoue Tadao, 40ki shiryō, hōmudaijin kanbō shihō hōsei chōsabu, 4–6. See also Inoue Tadao shiryō, Sensō saiban to shotaisaku narabi kaigai ni okeru senpan jukeisha no hikiage, hikiage engokyoku hōmuchōshashitsu, produced in September 1954 (no page numbers in first half of document), YKA. 77. Asahi shimbunsha ed., Shimbun to shōwa (Asahi shuppansha, 2010), 222. Asahi shimbun (Osaka edition), September 15, 1945. 78. Toyota Kumao, Sensō saiban yoroku, 57. 79. Ibid., 58. 80. Hosaka Masayasu, Soshite kanryō wa ikinokotta naimushō, rikugunshō—​ kaigunshō kaitai (Seikōsha, 2011), 24; Asahi shimbun, November 29, 1945 (Tokyo edition). For background on Saitō see Earl Kinmonth, “The Mouse That Roared: Saito Takao, Con­servative Critic of Japan’s ‘Holy War’ in China,” Journal of Japanese Studies 25, no. 2 (summer 1999): 331–360. 81. November 29, 1945, National Diet Records, [001/035] 89—​shū honkaigi 3gō, NDR. 82. Ibid. 83. Toyota Kumao, Sensō saiban yoroku, 383. Even though Toyota’s name is frequently spelled as Toyoda in many Japanese catalogues his family insists that the preferred pronuncia­­tion is Toyota. Interview with NHK program direc­ ­tor Uchiyama Taku, December 19, 2012. However, because catalogues list his name as Toyoda, Readers should be aware that it can show up in reference books with both spellings.

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Notes to Pages 54–60

84. This history has been documented in a Japanese NHK television special that aired in 2009 and a subsequent book based on those interviews and personal records. NHK Supesharu: nihonkaigun, 400 jikan no shōgen, dai sankai, senpan saiban, dai ni no sensō (NHK, 2012), DVD; NHK supesharu shuzaihan, Nihon kaigun yonhyakujikan no shōgen: gunreibu sanbōtachi ga katatta haisen (Shinchōsha, 2011). Interview with program director Uchiyama Taku, December 19, 2012. 85. Todaka Kazushige, Shōgenroku kaigun hanseikai, vol. 1 (PHP kenkyūjo, 2009). 86. NHK Supesharu: nihonkaigun, DVD. 87. Toyota Kumao, “Haisōki: doitsu de haisen o mukaeta kaigun taisa no shuki,” Chūō kōron (September 1996): 80–104. 88. NHK Supesharu: nihonkaigun, DVD; NHK supesharu shuzaihan, Nihon kaigun yonhyakujikan no shōgen, 295; Toyota Kumao, “BCkyū senpan saiban no shinsō,” Sensō saiban shokeisha issen, Bessatsu rekishi dokuhon, dai 15gō (Shinjinbutsu ōraisha, 1993), 32–37. 89. NHK supesharu shuzaihan, Nihon kaigun yonhyakujikan no shōgen, 297–300. Udagawa Kōta, “Nihon kaigun to sensuikan jiken,” Gunjishigaku (June 2011): 23–37. 90. NHK Supesharu: nihonkaigun, DVD. 91. NHK supesharu shuzaihan, Nihon kaigun yonhyakujikan no shōgen, 343–347. 92. 393.4, Inoue Tadao shiryō, senpan shakuhō shiyō, 385, YKA. 93. Ōoka himself was a survivor of the war and had been a POW. He wrote two seminal books detail­­ing that experience: one in the form of fiction, Fires on the Plain, translated by Ivan Morris, Tuttle Publishing, reprinted in 2001; and his actual experiences as a prisoner of war in Taken Captive: A Japanese POW’s Story (Wiley, 1996). The film Ashita e no yuigon was produced in 2007 and directed by Koizumi Takashi. The English title, while almost as dreadful as the film, does not correctly reflect the original Japanese title or the con­ tent of the movie. 94. Ōoka sets up the denouement for the trial and novel, based mostly on fact, in the first sixty pages of the book. See Ōoka Shōhei, Nagai tabi (Kadokawa bunko, originally published in 1982 and republished in 2007). The famed American novelist Kurt Vonnegut asked similar questions about the U.S. bomb­­ing of Dresden in his novel Slaughterhouse-​Five (Delacorte, 1969). 95. Michael Walzer has claimed similarly in his opus, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations (Basic Books, 2000). 96. James Loewen details some of the issues that many American history textbooks have avoided over the years in Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everyth­­ing Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (Norton, 1995). 97. Kent Calder, Embattled Garrisons: Com­parative Base Politics and American Globalism (Princeton University Press, 2007). 98. Handō Kazutoshi et al., BCkyū saiban o yomu (Nihon keizai shimbun shuppansha, 2010), 330. See also Yokohama bengoshikai BCkyū senpan yokohama saiban chōsa kenkyū tokubetsu īnkai, ed., Hōtei no seijōki: BCkyū senpan yokohama saiban no kiroku (Nihon hyōronsha, 2004), 147–157.

Notes to Pages 60–64

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99. Handō Kazutoshi et al., BCkyū saiban o yomu, 331–332. 100. Ibid., 333–334. 101. Ibid., 340. 102. Ibid., 341–343. 103. This was a similar con­clusion to what Japanese naval officers said about their reasons for go­­ing to war and con­tinu­­ing to support the war, as revealed in taped interviews that have recently been published in Japanese. See Todaka Kazushige, Shōgenroku kaigun hanseikai, vol. 1 (PHP kenkyūjo, 2009) and volume 2 by the same author and title published in 2011. 104. A vocal debate has grown up around this topic since the days of Ivan Morris’s thesis con­cern­­ing The Nobility of Failure: Tragic Heroes in the History of Japan (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1975). Con­trast his view with that of Emiko Ohnuki-​Tierney, Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms and Nationalism: The Militariza­ ­tion of Aesthetics in Japanese History (University of Chicago Press, 2002). 105. John Breen’s edited volume analyzes the com­plexities of the Yasukuni shrine from a variety of angles. John Breen, ed., Yasukuni: The War Dead and the Struggle for Japan’s Past (Hurst and Co., 2007). 106. The Risa Morimoto film Tokkō: Wings of Defeat (2008) drives that point home in several interviews with former kamikaze pilots and their tortured emotions. 107. M. G. Sheftall, “Tokkō Zaidan: A Case Study of Institutional Japanese War Memorialisation,” in Sven Saaler and Wolfgang Schwentker, eds., The Power of Memory in Modern Japan (Global Oriental, 2008), 61. 108. Tajima Ryūjun, Waga inochi hateruhi ni (Dainihon yūben kōdansha, 1953), 3 in the introduction. For a larger discussion of the campaign for the release of war criminals from Sugamo, see Sandra Wilson, “Prisoners in Sugamo and Their Campaign for Release, 1952–1953,” Japanese Studies 31, no. 2 (2011): 171–190. 109. Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, “The Nank­­ing 100-​Man Kill­­ing Con­test Debate: War Guilt amid Fabricated Illusions, 1971–75,” Journal of Japanese Studies 26, no. 2 (summer 2000): 307–340. Wakabayashi does not deny atrocities; he corrects inaccuracies. See his edited volume The Nank­­ing Atrocity, 1937–38: Com­plicat­­ing the Picture (Berghahn Books, 2007); and Timothy Brook, ed., Documents on the Rape of Nank­­ing (University of Michigan Press, 1999). 110. Beatrice Trefalt, “A Peace Worth Having: Delayed Repatriations and Domestic Debate over the San Francisco Peace Treaty,” Japanese Studies 27, no. 2 (September 2007): 173–187. 111. Lawrence Douglas, The Memory of Judgement (Yale University Press, 2005), 64, details the inherent nature of the same problem in Nazi war crimes trials, con­cern­­ing the fric­­tion between the prosecutorial aims and the con­servatism of the court. There are individuals I would specifically like to thank for their assistance in gett­­ing these Japanese archives declassified, but they wish to remain nameless. I will therefore state my apprecia­­tion to all the staff at the National Archives of Japan (Kokuritsu kōbunshokan). Ironically, much time and money is currently spent in Japan on censor­­ing archives, black­­ing out names and dates in records, when they remain open and public both in correspond­­ing personal archives deposited in the Yasukuni Shrine archives

340

Notes to Pages 65–69

and in Chinese language publications of note. When I explained this to the staff at the Japanese archives they appeared surprised at the incongruity, but such a realiza­­tion in no way changed policy. An egregious example of this con­voluted policy can be seen in recent published versions of these archives where the names of the con­v icted war criminals in CCP trials are blacked out. This is despite the fact that many of these individuals admitted their crimes and even produced their own memoirs about the trials where they named themselves and everyone else. No reason for such con­tinued censorship even exists. For such an example, see Tanaka Hiromi, BCkyū senpan kankei shiryōshū, vol. 5 (Ryokuin shobō, 2012), 579–581. 112. Sakakura Kiyoshi, “Waratta eiji,” Chūkiren no. 14 (September 2009): 63–64. 113. April 30, 2007, Nishi nihon shimbun (morn­­ing edition). 114. http://www.mofa.go.jp/mofaj/gaiko/bluebook/2002/gaikou/html/honpen /index.html. 115. Kirk A. Denton, “Museums, Memorial Sites and Exhibitionary Culture in the People’s Republic of China,” China Quarterly 183 (September 2005): 565–586. See also Takashi Yoshida, The Mak­­ing of the ‘Rape of Nanking’: History and Memory in Japan, China, and the United States (Oxford University Press, 2006); and his “For the Na­­tion or For the People?: History and Memory of the Nanj­­ing Massacre in Japan,” in Sven Saaler and Wolfgang Schwentker, eds., The Power of Memory in Modern Japan (Global Oriental, 2008), 17–31. 116. A nice excep­­tion that analyzes the issues com­paratively between Europe and East Asia is Yinan He, The Search for Reconciliation: Sino-​Japanese and German-​Polish Relations since World War II (Cambridge University Press, 2009). 117. Hosaka Masayasu, Haisen to nihonjin (Chikuma bunko, 2006), 95–96. Shefthall asks a similar ques­­tion related to why the Japanese military utilized kamikaze pilots instead of tak­­ing the “cowardly” way out and surrendering. Mordechai Shefthall, “Kamikaze Warfare in Imperial Japan’s Existential Crisis, 1944–5,” in Holger Afflerbach and Hew Strachan, eds., How Fight­­ing Ends: A History of Surrender (Oxford University Press, 2012), 383–394.

2. Dev il in the Details

1. See Rana Mitter, “Old Ghosts, New Memories: Chang­­ing China’s War History in the Era of Post-​Mao Politics,” Journal of Con­temporary History (January 2003): 117–131; as well as his book chapters, “An Uneasy Engagement: Chinese Ideas of Global Order and Justice in Historical Perspective,” in Rosemary Foot, John Lewis Gaddis, and Andrew Hurrell, eds., Order and Justice in International Relations (Oxford University Press, 2003); and “Evil Empire?: Com­pet­­ing Con­structions of Japanese Imperialism in Manchuria, 1928–1937,” in Li Narangoa and Robert Cribb, eds., Imperial Japan and National Identities in Asia, 1895–1945 (RoutledgeCurzon, 2003). 2. http://japan.people.com.cn/2002/8/15/2002815151505.htm.

Notes to Pages 69–74

341

3. http://jds.cass.cn/Article/20060423173828.asp. 4. Ōba Tadao, Sengo senshisha gohyakumannin no nazo o toku (Hon no izumisha, 1999), 10–13; Asahi Shimbun, September 22, 1997 (Tokyo edition). 5. Edward Drea and Hans van de Ven, “An Overview of Major Military Campaigns dur­­ing the Sino-​Japanese War, 1937–1945,” in Mark Peattie, Edward Drea, and Hans van de Ven, eds., Battle for China: Essays on the Military History of the Sino-​Japanese War of 1937–1945 (Stanford University Press, 2011), 39. See also Fujiwara Akira, “Sankō sakusen,’ to hokushi hōmengun,” Kikan sensō sekinin kenkyū 20 (1998); Himeta Mitsuyoshi, Nihongun ni yoru sankō seisaku sankōsakusen o megutte (Iwanami bukkuretto, 1996). 6. The Philippines is a double case like China would have been. The U.S. military and the returning-​from-​exile Philippine gov­­ern­­ment both established inspec­­tion teams, and the United States opened its trials of Japanese war crimes in Manila. In July 1946 the Philippines declared independence and these trials proceeded, follow­­ing GHQ precedent, but under Philippine authority. Hayashi Hirofumi, BCkyū senpan saiban (Iwanami shinsho, 2005), 98–100. 7. Satō Takumi and Son Ansoku, Higashi ajia no shūsen kinenbi: haiboku to shōri no aida (Chikuma shinsho, 2007), 120–139. 8. As quoted in Yuma Totani, The Tokyo War Crimes Trial: The Pursuit of Justice in the Wake of World War II, 152. 9. For the Chinese view of Japan dur­­ing the occupation, see Adam Cathcart, “Chinese Nationalism in the Shadow of Japan, 1945–1950,” PhD disserta­­ tion in history at Ohio University, 2005. 10. I am aware of the academic debate con­cern­­ing the nam­­ing of Japan’s wars in China, but for the sake of clarity it is not uncommon to suggest that although warfare was not con­stant, because the Japanese military never withdrew from China and because skirmishes con­tinued throughout, the war from 1931–1945 is known as Japan’s fifteen-​year war. 11. Takamizawa Osamu and Suzuki Ken, Chūgoku ni totte hō to wa nanika—​ tōchi no dōgu kara shimin no kenri e (Iwanami shoten, 2010), 15. 12. Fan Zhongxin et al., eds., Zhongguo fazhishi (Beij­­ing daxue chubanshe, 2007), 447. 13. Ibid., 465. 14. See Rune Svarverud, International Law as World Order in Late Imperial China: Translation, Recep­­tion and Discourse, 1847–1911 (Brill Publishers, 2007). 15. Sompong Sucharitkul, “Rebirth of Chinese Legal Scholarship, with regard to International Law,” Leiden Journal of International Law (1990): 3, 7. Onuma Yasuaki, “International Law in and with International Politics: The Functions of International Law in International Society,” EJIL 14 (2003): 116–117. 16. Par Cassel, Grounds of Judgement—​Extraterritoriality and Imperial Power in Nineteenth Century China and Japan (Oxford University Press, 2012), 9. 17. Arnulf Becker Lorca, “Universal International Law: Nineteenth-​Century Histories of Imposi­­tion and Appropriation,” Harvard International Law Journal 51, no. 2 (summer 2010): 477; John Haley, “Law and Culture in

342

Notes to Pages 75–79

China and Japan: A Framework for Analysis,” Michigan Journal of International Law 27 (Spr­­ing 2006): 895–915. 18. Fan et al., eds., Zhongguo fazhishi, 469. 19. Li Xizhu, “Taisei kaikaku ni okeru sentaku—​shinmatsu no kensei shisatu to yobirikken,” in Kishi Toshihiko et al., eds., Mosaku suru kindai nicchū kankei, taiwa to kyōzon no jidai (Tokyo daigaku shuppankai, 2009), 119–139. 20. Rana Mitter, “An Uneasy Engagement: Chinese Ideas of Global Order and Justice in Historical Perspective,” 215. 21. Alice Erh-​Soon Tay, “People’s Republic of China: From Con­f ucianism to the Socialist Market Economy, the Rule of Man versus the Rule of Law,” in Poh-​L­­ing Tan, ed., Asian Legal Systems: Law, Society and Pluralism in East Asia (Butterworths, 1997), 24. Xiaoqun Xu details the uphill battle in China to implement legal change in Trial of Modernity: Judicial Reform in Early Twentieth Century China, 1931–1937 (Stanford University Press, 2008). On the many images of Chiang Kai-​shek in China and abroad at the time, see Jeremy Taylor’s online portal, “Enemy of the People, Visual Depictions of Chiang Kai-​shek,” http://www.hrionline.ac.uk/chiangkaishek/. 22. Sucharitkul, “Rebirth of Chinese Legal Scholarship, with regard to International Law,” 3, 8. See also Takamizawa Osamu and Suzuki Ken, Chūgoku ni totte hō towa nanika—​tōchi no dōgu kara shimin no kenri e. 23. Wesley R. Fishel, The End of Extraterritoriality in China (University of California Press, 1952), preface. 24. Klaus Mühlhahn, Criminal Justice in China: A History (Harvard University Press, 2009), 67. 25. Fishel, The End of Extraterritoriality in China, 217. 26. Klaus Mühlhahn, “The Dark Side of Globalization: The Con­centra­­tion Camps in Republican China in Global Perspective,” World History Con­nected 6, no. 1 (March 2009). 27. Mühlhahn, Criminal Justice in China, 128–129. 28. Ibid., 130. 29. Ibid., 147. Jerome Alan Cohen, “The Criminal Process in the People’s Republic of China: An Introduction,” Harvard Law Review 79, no. 3 (January 1966): 469–533. 30. Mühlhahn, Criminal Justice in China, 172. 31. Shanghai jiaotong daxue dongj­­ing shenpan yanjiu zhongxin, ed., Dongj­­ing shenpan wenji (Shanghai jiaotong daxue chubanshe, 2011). 32. In October 2009 the Tsinghua law school established the “Mei Ruao chair professor of law.” 33. James Burnham Sedgwick, “Memory on Trial: Con­struct­­ing and Con­test­ ­ing the ‘Rape of Nanking’ at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, 1946–1948,” Modern Asian Studies 43, no. 5 (2009): 1229–1254. 34. Mei Ruao, Yuandong guoji junshi fat­­ing (Falu chubanshe, 2005), introduction, 1. 35. Xiang Longwan, Dongj­­ing shenpan: zhongguo jianchaguan Xiang Zhejun (Shanghai jiaotong daxue chubanshe, 2010). 36. Yang Zhaolong, Dalufa yu yingmeifa qubie (Beij­­ing daxue chubanshe, 2009, reprint from 1949).

Notes to Pages 79–86

343

37. Mei, Yuandong guoji junshi fating, 65. 38. Ibid., 89. 39. Mei penned a diary dur­­ing his time as judge in Tokyo, but it was lost dur­­ing the Cultural Revolution. All that could be salvaged so far is portions of the first several months and his initial impressions of be­­ing in Tokyo for the proceedings. See Mei Ruao, Dongj­­ing shenpan—​yuandong guoji junfat­­ing zhongguo faguan Mei Ruao riji, ed. Mei Xiaoao (Jiangxi jiaoyu chubanshe, 2005), 158, for the explana­­tion on what happened to the original diary. 40. Ni Zhengyu, “Ni Zhengyu huiyilu, danpo con­grong li haiya,” in Yang Xiawu, ed., Nanj­­ing datusha shiliaoji, vol. 7, Dongj­­ing shenpan (Jiangsu renmin chubanshe, 2005), 642. 41. Ibid., 643. 42. Ibid. 43. Ibid., 644. 44. Ibid., 645. 45. Qin Dechun, Qin Dechun huiyilu (Zhuanji wenxue chubanshe, 1967), 58–62. 46. Robert Shaffer, “A Rape in Beijing, December 1946: GIs, Nationalist Protests, and U.S. Foreign Policy,” Pacific Historical Review 69, no. 1. (February 2000), 31–64. 47. Ni, “Ni Zhengyu huiyilu, danpo con­grong li haiya,” 647. 48. Ibid., 640–658. 49. Mei Ruao, “Guanyu Gu Shoufu [Tani Hisao] Songj­­ing Shigen [Matsui Iwane] he nanj­­ing datusha shijian,” in Yang Xiawu, ed., Nanj­­ing datusha shiliaoji, vol. 7, Dongj­­ing shenpan (Jiangsu renmin chubanshe, 2005, originally published in 1962), 622. 50. Ibid., 623. 51. Ibid., 634. 52. Ishii Akira, “Chūgoku no tainichi senryō seisaku, Kokusai seiji (May 1987): 30. 53. For a full table of the Chinese officials who manned the mission, see Yang Zizhen, “Zhongguo zhuri daibiaotuan zhi yuanjiu—​chutan zhanhou zhongri, tairi guanxi zhi eryuan jiagou,” Guoshiguan guankan, di19qi (March 2009): 62. 54. Zhong Hanbo, Zhuwai wuguan de shiming—​yiwei haijun junguan de huiyi (Maitian chubanshe, 1998), 76–77. Zhu Shim­­ing was also romanized as Chu Shih Ming. 55. Ibid., 68–69. 56. Shen Jinding, “Duiri wangshi zhuiyi (24),” Zhuanji wenxue, di 27juan di 3qi (September 1975): 73. 57. Ibid., 70. 58. Ibid., 97. The actual transla­­tion should be Tuberoses, but that does not sound like a good song title. 59. Zhong, Zhuwai wuguan de shiming, 101. Robert Whiting’s synopsis of the occupation, Tokyo Underworld: The Fast Times and Hard Life of an American Gangster in Japan (Pantheon, 1999), describes similar attitudes and escapades.

344

Notes to Pages 87–91

60. Zhong, Zhuwai wuguan de shiming, 111–112. 61. Recent efforts to correct that narrative can be found in Holger Afflerbach and Hew Strachan, eds., How Fight­­ing Ends: A History of Surrender (Oxford University Press, 2012). 62. Scholarship in Japanese on the BC class war crimes trials is increasingly examin­­ing the English, Korean, U.S., Australian, and Philippine con­ nections within Japanese war criminals trials, but fewer scholars have thoroughly analyzed the Chinese cases. See Hayashi Hirofumi, Sabakareta sensō hanzai: igirisu no tainichi senpan saiban (Iwanami shoten, 1998); Utsumi Aiko, Chōsenjin BCkyū senpan no kiroku (Keisō shobō, 1982); Iwakawa Takashi, Kotō no tsuchi to narutomo: BCkyū senpan saiban (Kōdansha, 1995); Nagai Hitoshi, Firipin to tainichi senpan saiban: 1945–1953 (Iwanami shoten, 2010); Furukawa Mantarō, Nicchū sengo kankeishi nōto (Sanseidō, 1983). In English, see Beatrice Trefalt, “Hostages to International Relations? The Repatria­­tion of Japanese War Criminals from the Philippines,” Japanese Studies 31, no. 2 (2011): 191–209; Sharon Williams Chamberlain, “Justice and Reconciliation: Postwar Philippine Trials of Japanese War Criminals in History and Memory,” PhD disserta­­tion at George Washington University, 2010; and Konrad Lawson, “Wartime Atrocities and the Politics of Treason in the Ruins of the Japanese Empire, 1937–1953,” PhD Dissertation in the Department of History, Harvard University, 2012. 63. Amartya Sen, The Idea of Justice (Allen Lane, 2009), 10. 64. Nancy Rosenblum, “Justice and Experience of Injustice,” in Martha Minow, ed., Break the Cycle of Hatred, Memory, Law and Repair (Princeton University Press, 2002), 88. 65. Istvan Deak, Jan T. Gross, and Tony Judt, eds., The Politics of Retribu­­tion in Europe: World War II and Its Aftermath (Princeton University Press, 2000), 302; Robert Gordon, The Holocaust in Italian Culture, 1944–2010 (Stanford University Press, 2012). 66. Xiaoyuan Liu, A Partnership for Disorder: China, the United States and Their Policies for the Postwar Disposi­­tion of the Japanese Empire, 1941–1945 (Cambridge University Press, 1996), 7. 67. Quanzonghao 787, anjuanhao 16592, “Rijun touxiang shi yud­­ing zhizhan . . . jihua,” 1945, SHAC. 68. Keith Lowe, in Savage Con­tinent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II (Viking, 2012), details that the Allies housed massive numbers of Nazi soldiers in the immediate postwar and thus faced com­parable if not worse problems than in East Asia. 69. Quanzonghao 787, anjuanhao 16592, “Rijun touxiang shi yud­­ing zhizhan . . . jihua,” 1945, SHAC. 70. Quanzonghao 787, anjuanhao 16587, the title of this document was fairly unreadable but con­cerned Japanese troops surrender­­ing and the CCP try­­ing to get their weapons, August 1945, Guomin zheng fu junshiweiyuanhui daidian, SHAC. 71. For scholarship on the Marshall Mission to China and some of the issues George Marshall faced in unsuccessfully try­­ing to br­­ing about a peaceful resolu­­tion to the brew­­ing civil war in China, see Larry I. Bland, ed., with

Notes to Pages 91–95

345

special assistance by Roger B. Jeans and Mark F. Wilkinson, George C. Marshall’s Media­­tion Mission to China, December 1945–January 1947 (George C. Marshall Foundation, 1998). 72. Quanzonghao 787, anjuanhao 16606, “Di er zhanqu silingchang guansilingbu shouxiang gongzuo baogaoshu,” 1945, SHAC. 73. The KMT proposed lectures on democracy and educa­­tion for the Japanese POWs in Taiwanese camps before they repatriated to influence them to behave properly postwar and not seek to rebuild their military. See B501823 0601=0034=002.6=4010.3=3=001=0000392290020, (continues for 5 pages), NAT. 74. Quanzonghao 787, anjuanhao16604, “Guangdong shouxiang jishu,” June 15, 1946, SHAC. It is instructive to note how differently the KMT approached its treatment of Japanese war criminals in com­parison to fellow Chinese. 75. “Guangfu jieshou shi zhi riqiao qingkuang,” May 1947, Taiwansheng riqiao yisong jishi zongshu, reproduced in Wei Yongzhu, ed., Kangzhan yu taiwan guang fu shiliao jiyao (Taiwansheng wenxian weiyuanhui, 1995), 483–484. 76. Ibid., 484. 77. Graham Peck, Two Kinds of Time (The Riverside Press, 1950), 706. 78. Michael Szonyi, Cold War Island: Quemoy on the Front Line (Cambridge University Press, 2008), 18. For more on the evolu­­tion of Taiwanese attitudes toward the arrival of the KMT, see Huang Chih-​huei, “The Transforma­­tion of Taiwanese Attitudes toward Japan in the Post-​Colonial Period,” in Li Narangoa and Robert Cribb, eds., Imperial Japan and National Identities in Asia, 1895–1945 (RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), 296–314. 79. Szonyi, Cold War Island, 22. 80. Wang Yaozhou et al., eds., Taiji ribenb­­ing zuotanhui jilu b­­ing xiangguan ziliao (Zhongyang yanjiuyuan taiwanshi yanjiusuo, 1997), 46. 81. Mei Xiaobin and Ye Shubing, Wei zhengyi qiaoxiang fachui: shenpan riben zhanfan de junshi faguan Ye Zaizeng (Nanj­­ing chubanshe, 2007), 101. 82. Song Zhiyong, “Zhanhou chuqi zhongguo de duiri zhengce yu zhanfan shenpan,” Nankai xuebao (zhexue shehui xueban) (April 2001): 41. 83. Tian Huan, ed., Zhanhou zhongri guanxi wenxianji, 1945–1970 (Zhonguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 1996), 10. Also see Qin Xiaoyi, ed., Zhonghua minguo zhongyao shiliao chubian, Duiri kangzhan shiqi, di 7 bian, Zhanhou zhonguo, vol. 4, (Dangshi weiyuanhui, 1981), 633–635. The speech in which this phrase was employed was translated into Japanese two years later and published in Japan. Shō Kaiseki, trans. Yamada Reizō, Bō o motte bō ni mukuyuru nakare: kakumeika enzetsushū (Hakuyōsha, 1947), 3–8. The Chinese were not the only ones to cut short pursuit of Japanese war crimes. See also John Pritchard, “The Gift of Clemency Follow­­ing British War Crimes Trials in the Far East, 1946–1948,” Criminal Law Forum 7, no. 1 (1996): 15–50. 84. Zhongyang ribao (Chongqing), August 16, 1945, reprinted in Tian, ed., Zhanhou zhongri guanxi wenxianji 1945–1970, 11–12. 85. Yoshida Yutaka, Nihonjin no sensōkan: sengoshi no naka no henyō (Iwanami shoten, revised edition, 2005), 57; Aaron William Moore, Writ­­ing War:

346

Notes to Pages 95–98

Soldiers Record the Japanese Empire (Harvard University Press, 2013), 248–249. See also Awaya Kentarō, ed., Shiryō nihon gendaishi, vol. 3, Haisen chokugo no seiji to shakai, series 2 (Ōtsuki shoten, 1981), 352–383. 86. The wartime Japanese gov­­ern­­ment was already aware of the endless Chinese debates con­cern­­ing the legal defini­­tion of traitor. Shanghai jimusho chōsashitsu, mantetsu, ed., Jūkei seiken no keiji hōki tokuni kankan ni taisuru seisai ni tsuite (Mantetsu shanhai jimusho chōsashitsu, 1941). 87. Guo Xiaoye, Riben youl­­ing wentu duizhao—​erzhanqijian qinhua zhanfan shenpan jishi (Dangdai shijie chubanshe, 2004), 308–309. 88. Yoneyama Yasuhide, Nihongun sansei zanryū (Seiunsha, 2008), 35. 89. Lin Zhaozhen, Fumian budui: riben baituan zaitai mishi (Shibao wenhua, 1996), 8. 90. 390.281, Okamura Yasuji taishō kaisōroku, 130, Dec. 25, 1945, senchū shiryō 3, Okamura Yasuji 16ki hikiage engokyoku (1954), YKA. 91. 390.281, Okamura Yasuji taishō kaisōroku, 131, senchū shiryō 3, Okamura Yasuji 16ki hikiage engokyoku (1954), YKA. 92. “China: They Make Mischief,” Time, December 24, 1945. 93. “Zhongguo lujun zongsilingbu shouxiang baogaoshu,” Quanzonghao 787, 16598, May 1946, SHAC. 94. Wu Yuzhang, Wu Yuzhang wenji (Chongq­­ing chubanshe, 1987), 275–276. Konoe com­mitted suicide after receiv­­ing the news of his arrest warrant. 95. Ibid., 276. 96. Suzannah Linton, ed., Hong Kong’s War Crimes Trials (Oxford University Press, 2013). 97. WO32/15509: “June 1946, Japanese War Crimes against British Subjects in China,” Foreign Office Document, NAUK. Louis Allen discusses from personal experience some of the problems British forces faced in postwar Southeast Asia investigat­­ing Japanese soldiers and officers. See “Innocents Abroad: Investigat­­ing War Crimes in South-​East Asia,” in Ian Nish and Mark Allen, eds., War, Con­flict and Security in Japan and Asia-​Pacific, 1941–52: The Writings of Louis Allen (Brill, 2011), xxi–xxxvii. 98. Nicholas White discusses the economic impact decoloniza­­tion had on the European empires and their various strategies to reclaim or revamp their postwar empires. See “Reconstruct­­ing Europe through Rejuvenat­­ing Empire: The British, French, and Dutch Experiences Com­pared,” Past and Present suppl. 6 (2011): 211–236. 99. Chaen Yoshio, ed., BCkyū senpan beigun shanghai nado saiban shiryō, vol. 11 (Fuji shuppan, 1989), 235–241. Xu Jiajun writes that there were a total of forty-​seven defendants and that the U.S. military used the Tilanqiao prison for incarcera­­tion and trials from January 1946 to February 1947 (the trials ran from January to September 1946). See “Tilanqiao jianyu: zhongguo jingnei di yi ge shenpan riben zhanfan de changsuo,” Kangri kangzheng yanjiu 4 (1998): 215. 100. Chaen Yoshio, ed., BCkyū senpan beigun shanghai nado saiban shiryō, vol. 11, 216. See also Law Reports of Trials of War Criminals, Selected and Prepared by the United Nations War Crimes Com­mission, vol. V (Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1948).

Notes to Pages 99–104

347

101. Philip Piccigallo, The Japanese on Trial: Allied War Crimes Operations in the East, 1945–1951 (University of Texas Press, 1979), 74. Accord­­ing to Piccigallo, in total the United States managed eleven cases in China involv­ ­ing seventy-​five defendants. Ten were sentenced to death while eight were acquitted. Sixty-​seven were con­v icted and sentenced to various durations of incarceration. 102. Saka Kuniyasu, Shanhai hōtei sensō saiban shijitsu kiroku (Beigun kankei) (Tōchōsha, 1967). 103. “Riben touxiang yu woguo duiri taidu ji dui e jiaoshe,” in vol. 7 of series Zhongri waijiao shiliao con­gbian (Zhonghua minguo waijiao wenti yanjiuhui, 1966), 458. 103. Ibid., 512, Sept. 25, 1946, memo deal­­ing with “waijiaobu dui meijun zaihua daibu yindu zhanfan jinguo ji chuli qingxing.” 104. I am assum­­ing this is the Yalta Con­ference of February 1945 that was referenced, but it was not specifically stated in the record. Quanzonghao 18, Anjuanhao 2278, “Guanyu meiguojun zaihua dibu yindu ji shenpan zhanfan de anjian,” SHAC. 105. Robert Bickers, Empire Made Me: An Englishman Adrift in Shanghai (Penguin Books, 2003), 324–325. The difficulty other former colonial powers had in determin­­ing the limits and direc­­tion of their justice in China is ably outlined in Marie-​Claire Bergère, “L’épura­­tion à Shanghai (1945–1946). L’affaire Sarly et la fin de la Con­cession française,” Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’histoire no. 53 (January–March 1997): 25–41. 106. Quanzonghao 18, Anjuanhao 2278, “Guanyu meiguojun zaihua dibu yindu ji shenpan zhanfan de anjian,” SHAC. 107. “Riben touxiang yu woguo duiri taidu ji dui e jiaoshe,” 458. 108. Ibid., 460. 109. Xiaoyuan Liu, A Partnership for Disorder, 5. 110. History of the Nonmilitary Activities of the Occupa­­tion of Japan, 1945–1951, vol. 16, Treatment of Foreign Nationals (reprinted by Nihon tosho sentā, 1990), 7–8. 111. Ibid., 16. 112. Louis Allen, The End of the War in Asia (Hart-​Davis MacGibbon, 1976), 218; Hattori Takushirō, Daitōa sensō zenshi, vol. 4 (Masu shobō, 1953), 397. 113. Wang Qingxiang, Pu Yi mishi (Tuanjie chubanshe, 2007), 198. Louis Allen, follow­­ing on historian Richard Storry’s skepticism, doubts some of the veracity of the former emperor’s testimony at the Tokyo Trial. Louis Allen, The End of the War in Asia, 213–215. 114. Wang, Pu Yi mishi, 238. 115. Jiang Li, 1949 Boli dashenpan: qinhua rijun shiyong xijun wuqian tingshen shilu (Jiefangjun wenyi chubanshe, 2005). 116. Ikeya Kaoru, Ari no heitai: nihonhei 2600nin sanseishō zanryū no shinsō (Shinchōsha, 2007); John Boyle, China and Japan at War: The Politics of Collabora­­tion (Stanford University Press, 1972); Donald G. Gillin and Charles Etter, “Stay­­ing On: Japanese Soldiers and Civilians in China, 1945– 1949,” Journal of Asian Studies 42 (May 1983): 497–518.

348

Notes to Pages 104–108

117. For a Chinese historical view, see Kong Fanzhi and You Jinming, “Erzhanhou qinhua rijun ‘shanxi zanliu,” Kangri zhanzheng yanjiu, di er qi (2011): 124–137. 118. Sumita Raishirō, Watakushi no ashiato (Sumita Satoshi, 1980), 203. 119. Ibid., 207. 120. Zhang Hongbo, “Nihongun no sansei zanryū ni miru sengo shoki nitchū kankei no keisei,” Hitotsubashi ronsō 134, no. 2 (2005): 194. 121. Details on Japanese soldiers and nurses who joined the CCP military forces can be found in Furukawa Mantarō, Itetsuku daichi no uta: jinmin kaihōgun nihonjin heishitachi (Sanseidō, 1984). For more about difficult choices and fear that many military and civilian Japanese nurses and doctors experienced at the end of war that sometimes influenced their decisions to join CCP forces, see Anzai Teiko, Yasen kangofu (Fuji shobō, 1953); and Lu Xijun, “Tōhoku kaihō guniryōtai de katsuyaku shita nihonjin: aru guniin no kiseki kara,” Hokutō ajia kenkyū 6 (January 2004): 35–55. 122. Konrad Lawson, “Wartime Atrocities and the Politics of Treason in the Ruins of the Japanese Empire, 1937–1953,” PhD disserta­­tion in the Department of History, Harvard University, 2012, 312. 123. Zhongyang danganguan et al., eds., Heben dazuo yu rijun shanxi ‘can liu,’ (riben diguo zhuyi qinhua dangan ziliao xuanbian), vol. 17 (Zhonghua shuju, 1995), Kōmoto’s own con­fessions, 12–71; for explanations of the activities of Japanese who stayed postwar in Shanxi to help imperial Japan rise again, see 189–234; testimony on Kōmoto’s activities in China, 289–337. On Yan Xishan, Sumita Raishirō, Watakushi no ashiato, 203, and Donald G. Gillin, Warlord: Yen Hsi-​shan in Shansi Province, 1911–1949 (Princeton University Press, 1967). 124. In his postwar memoirs Jōno discusses the imperial Japanese military belief that Shanxi province’s strategic qualities could help Japan to rebuild the empire. Jōno Hiroshi, Sansei dokuritsu senki (Sekkasha, 1967), 18–28. 125. Terebi Tōkyo, ed., Shōgen, watashi no shōwashi, vol. 6, konran kara seichō e (Ōbunsha, 1985), 422–439. Jōno Hiroshi, “Watashi wa chūgoku de saigo no senpan datta,” Ushio (August 1972): 256–261. 126. Zhang Hongbo, “Nihongun no sansei zanryū ni miru sengo shoki nitchū kankei no keisei,” 201. 127. Sumita, Watakushi no ashiato, 215–217. 128. Diana Lary, China’s Republic (Cambridge University Press, 2007), 174. She quotes Chen Lifu in his book The Storm Clouds Clear over China: The memoir of Ch’en Li-​fu, 1900–1993, edited and com­piled, with an introduc­­tion and notes by Sidney H. Chang and Ramon H. Myers, (Hoover Press, 1994), 213.

3. Fle xible Imperial Identit y

Epigraph: Peng Xiaoyan quotes Wu as he describes the Taiwanese awaken­­ing of nationalism dur­­ing the February 28, 1947, incident in her book Lishi henduo de luodong, con­g Zhang Wojun dao Li Ang (Zhongyang yanjiuyuan Zhongguo wenzhe yanjiusuo Choubeichu, 2000), 51.

Notes to Pages 109–113

349

1. Tsai Hui-​y u (Caroline Ts’ai), Zouguo liang ge shidai de ren, taiwanji ribenb­­ing (Zhongyang yanjiuyuan taiwanshisuo, 2008, originally printed in 1997), 467–474. 2. Officially, because Taiwan is not recognized as sovereign by the United Nations, it is de facto not legally a country even though it maintains its own independent gov­­ern­­ment, foreign policy, and economy. The international stature of Taiwan, thus, remains con­tested even today—​does it represent itself, or is it part of the Chinese mainland? The two major com­pet­­ing political parties of the DPP and KMT con­tinually con­test this issue, and it remains at the forefront of the Taiwanese political debate. See Denny Roy, Taiwan: A Political History (Cornell University Press, 2003); and Shelley Rigger, Why Taiwan Matters: Small Island, Global Powerhouse (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2011). 3. Huang Yingzhe charts the steps the KMT put into place for the process of return­­ing Taiwanese to be­­ing Chinese. See his Qu ribenhua zai zhongguohua: zhanhou taiwan wenhua chongjian (1945–1947) (Maitian, 2007). 4. Lo Jiu-​jung, “Trials of the Taiwanese as Hanjian or War Criminals and the Postwar Search for Taiwanese Identity,” in Kai-​w ­­ing Chow, Kevin M. Doak, and Poshek Fu, eds., Con­struct­­ing Nationhood in Modern East Asia (University of Michigan Press, 2001), 280. (In Taiwanese pinyin Luo’s name is romanized as “Lo,” but the current and more correct pinyin would be Luo if one wanted to actually find her works in Chinese.) 5. Lo, “Trials of the Taiwanese as Hanjian,” 285–286. 6. See Kawashima Shin, “Sengo shoki nihon no seidoteki ‘datsuteikokka’ to rekishi ninshiki mondai,” in Nagahara Yōko, ed., Shokuminchi sekininron—​ datsushokuminchi no hikakushi (Aoki shoten, 2009), 393–417. 7. Hwang Dongyoun, “Wartime Collabora­­tion in Question: An Examina­­tion of the Postwar Trials of the Chinese Collaborators,” Inter-​Asia Cultural Studies 6, no. 1 (2005): 75. The scholarship on collabora­­tion trials in postwar China is grow­­ing but usually focuses on the mainland; see Susan Marsh, “Chou Fo-​Hai: The Mak­­ing of a Collaborator,” in Akira Iriye, ed., The Chinese and the Japanese: Essays in Political and Cultural Interactions (Princeton University, 1980); Timothy Brook, Collaboration: Japanese Agents and Local Elites in Wartime China (Harvard University Press, 2005); Margherita Zanasi, “Globaliz­­ing Hanjian: The Suzhou Trials and the Post–World War II Discourse on Collaboration,” American Historical Review 113, no. 3 (2008): 731–751; Marjorie Dryburgh, “Rewrit­­ing Collaboration: China, Japan, and the Self in the Diaries of Bai Jianwu,” Journal of Asian Studies 68, no. 3 (August 2009): 689–714; Masui Yasuichi, Kankan saiban, 1946–1948 (Misuzu shobō, 1977); and Charles Musgrove, “Cheer­­ing the Traitor: The Post-​War Trial of Chen Bijun, April 1946,” Twentieth-​Century China 30, no. 2 (April 2005): 3–27. Ang Lee’s 2008 film Lust Caution, based on the Zhang Ail­­ing story, dealt with this issue in a more popular vein. 8. Musgrove, “Cheer­­ing the Traitor,” 3–27. 9. Lo, “Trials of the Taiwanese as Hanjian,” 307. For a deeper historical analysis of the origins of the term hanjian and its relevance to the war, see Yun Xia, “ ‘Traitors to the Chinese Race (Hanjian)’: Political and Cultural

350

Notes to Pages 113–118

Campaigns against Collaborators dur­­ing the Sino-​Japanese War of 1937– 1945,” PhD disserta­­tion at the University of Oregon, 2010, 4–13; and Guoshiguan, ed., Jin dai zhongguo waidie yu neijian shiliao huibian: q­­ing mo minchu zhi kangzhan shengli shiqi, 1871–1947 (Guoshiguan, 1986). 10. Koen De Ceuster, “The Na­­tion Exorcised: The Historiography of Collabora­ ­tion in South Korea,” Korean Studies 25, no. 2 (2002): 207. 11. Qiu Niantai talks about some of the problems Taiwan faced and, in particular, Taiwanese soldiers under the Japanese in Linghai weibiao (Zhonghua ribaoshe, 1962), 240–243. 12. Sugano Atsushi, “Taiwan ni okeru bunka seisaku to kokumin tōgō (1945– 1987): datsunihonka, chūgokuka, hondoka o meguru shiteki kōsatsu,” PhD disserta­­tion at Waseda University, Ajia taiheiyō kenkyūka, 2006, 23. 13. Wei Yongzhu, ed., Kangzhan yu taiwan guang fu shiliao jiyao (Taiwansheng wenxian weiyuanhui, 1995), 300–301. This was the record of a roundtable discussion con­cern­­ing what to do with Taiwan after the war ended. 14. Wei, ed., Kangzhan yu taiwan guang fu shiliao jiyao, 302. See also David Wang and Ping-​hui Liao, eds., Taiwan under Japanese Colonial Rule, 1895– 1945: History, Culture, Memory (Columbia University, 2006); Pang-​y uan Chi, David Wang, eds., The Last of the Whampoa Breed (Modern Chinese Literature from Taiwan) (Columbia University Press, 2004); Faith Yuan Kleeman, Under an Imperial Sun: Japanese Colonial Literature of Taiwan and the South (University of Hawaii Press, 2003). 15. Wei, ed., Kangzhan yu taiwan guang fu shiliao jiyao, 302. 16. Ibid., 306. 17. Matsunami Jun, “Senryō kaikaku to shite no BCkyū sensō hanzai saiban,” Hōgaku kenkyū (Osaka), dai 28kan, dai 1 gō (September 2001): 209. 18. Shiomi Shunji, Hiroku shūsen chokugo no taiwan: watakushi no shūsen nikki (Kōchi shimbunsha, 1979). 19. Daq­­ing Yang, “Resurrect­­ing the Empire? Japanese Technicians in Postwar China, 1945–49,” in Harald Fuess, ed., The Japanese Empire in East Asia and Its Postwar Legacy (Iudicium, 1998), 193. See also Yang Daqing, “Chūgoku ni tomaru nihonjin gijutsusha,” in Liu Jie and Kawashima Shin, eds., 1945 nen no rekishi ninshiki (Tokyo daigaku shuppankai, 2009), 113–139. 20. Su Yaochong, ed., Zuihou de taiwan zongdufu: 1944–1946 nian zhong zhan ziliao ji (Chenx­­ing chuban youxian gongsi, 2004), 258–280. The book is a com­pila­­tion of primary sources in Chinese and copies of the original Japanese as well. 21. Tomizawa Shigeru, Taiwan shūsen hishi: nihon shokuminchi jidai to sono shūen (Izumi shuppan, 1984), 167. 22. Ibid., 99–100. For a more detailed account of Taiwan at the time just after Japan’s surrender, see Zeng Jianmin, 1945: Poxiao shike de taiwan: bayue shiwurihou jidong de yibai tian (Lianj­­ing chuban shiye, 2005). 23. Xu Yuming, “Zhanhou liutai riqiao de lishi guiji—​g uanyu segu shijian ji er er ba shijian zhongriqiao de jiyu,” Donghua renwen xuebao, di 7 qi (July 2005): 155. 24. Sugano Atsushi, “Taiwan ni okeru bunka seisaku to kokumin tōgō (1945– 1987): datsunihonka, chūgokuka, hondoka o meguru shiteki kōsatsu,” 24–25.

Notes to Pages 118–123

351

25. Yoshihisa Amae, “Pro-​colonial or Postcolonial? Appropria­­tion of Japanese Colonial Heritage in Present-​day Taiwan,” Journal of Chinese Affairs (2011): 19–62. 26. Sugano Atsushi, “Taiwan ni okeru bunka seisaku to kokumin tōgō (1945– 1987): datsunihonka, chūgokuka, hondoka o meguru shiteki kōsatsu,” 24–25. 27. Utsumi Aiko, Chōsenjin BCkyū senpan no kiroku (Keisō shobō, 1982), ii–iii. 28. Mayumi Yamamoto, “Misplac­­ing the Sakura Club in Postwar Colonial Imagination,” Journal of Asia-​Pacific Studies (Waseda University), no. 16 (May 2011): 86–87. 29. Utsumi, Chōsenjin BCkyū senpan no kiroku, 106–107. 30. Ibid., vii. 31. Ibid., 148. 32. Liu Jie, Kankan saiban: tainichi kyōryokusha o osotta unmei (Chūkō shinsho, 2000), 178; “Zhongguo lujun zongsilingbu shouxiang baogaoshu,” Quanzonghao 787, 16598, May 1946, SHAC; Meng Guoxiang and Cheng Tangfa, “Chengzhi hanjian gongzuo gaishu,” Minguo dangan, dai ni qi (1994), 110. These statistics are still be­­ing debated. 33. Dean Aszkielowicz, “Repatria­­tion and the Limits of Resolve: Japanese War Criminals in Australian Custody,” Japanese Studies 31, no. 2 (September 2011), 215. 34. Iwakawa Takashi, Kotō no tsuchi to narutomo: BCkyū senpan saiban (Kōdansha, 1995), 249. 35. Ibid., 254–255. See also Mike (Shi-​chi) Lan, “(Re-​)Writ­­ing History of the Second World War: Forgett­­ing and Remember­­ing the Taiwanese-​native Japanese Soldiers in Postwar Taiwan,” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 21, no. 4 (fall 2013): 801-​851. 36. Iwakawa Takashi, Kotō no tsuchi to narutomo: BCkyū senpan saiban, 593–594. Iwakawa lists the trial as 1946, but the archives put the official record of the sentence in October 1947. “Zhanfan Chen Shuiyun deng panjueshu zhengben,” October 16, 1947, B3750187701=0036=1571=34189930=1=043 =0000081020001 (continues for ten pages), NAT. 37. Wei Hongyun et al., eds., Minguoshi ji shibenmo, vol. 7, Nanj­­ing guomin zhengfu bengkui shiqi (Liaon­­ing renmin chubanshe, 1999), 109. 38. Lin Qiuping, “Hanjian de ciyi jieshi yu falu jieding,” Shehui kexue luntan (February 2005): 154. Frederick Wakeman espouses the same definition. See his “Hanjian (Traitor)! Collabora­­tion and Retribu­­tion in Wartime Shanghai,” in Wen-​Hsin Yeh, ed., Becom­­ing Chinese: Passages to Modernity and Beyond (University of California Press, 2000), 298–299. 39. Seminar talk, “The Enemies Within: Traitors, Collaborators, and Barbarians in 19th Century Q­­ing China,” at the Department of East Asian Studies, University of Cambridge on May 7, 2012. 40. Wada Hideho, “Senpan to kankan no hazama de,” Ajia kenkyū (October 2003), 75. 41. Ibid., 76. 42. Meng Guoxiang and Cheng Tangfa, “Chengzhi hanjian gongzuo gaishu,” Minguo dangan, dai ni qi (1994): 107. 43. Lin, “Hanjian de ciyi jieshi yu falu jieding,” 155.

352

Notes to Pages 123–130

44. Lo Jiu-​jung, “Kangzhan shenli hou zhonggong chengshen hanjian chutan,” Zhongyang yanjiuyuan jindaishi yanjiusuo jikan, di 23 qi, (June 1994): 272. 45. Wada Hideho, “Senpan to kankan no hazama de,” 77. 46. Furumaya Tadao, “Sengo chiiki shakai no saihen to tainichi kyōryokusha,” in Himeta Mitsuyoshi, ed., Sengo chūgoku kokumin seifushi no kenkyū: 1945– 1949 nen (Chūō daigaku shuppanbu, 2001), 359. 47. Wada, “Senpan to kankan no hazama de,” 78. 48. A202000000A=0035=67=490=1=001=0001, NAT. 49. Ibid. 50. “Zhongguo lujun zongsilingbu shouxiang baogaoshu,” Quanzonghao 787, 16598, May 1946, SHAC. 51. Douglas Reynolds, China, 1898–1912: The Xinzheng revolu­­tion and Japan (Harvard University Press, 1993). 52. Henri Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944 (Harvard University Press, 1994). See also John Boyle, China and Japan at War, 1937–1945: The Politics of Collabora­­tion (Stanford University Press, 1972), 352–358, where he makes the com­parison between Vichy and Nanjing. 53. Liu Jie, “Ōchōmei to nankin kokumin seifu: kyōryoku to teikō no aida,” in Lie Jie et al., eds., Kokkyō o koeru rekishi ninshiki nitchū taiwa no kokoromi (Tokyo daigaku shuppankai, 2006), 172. 54. Ibid., 178. 55. Ibid., 187. 56. Regard­­ing the former status of Koreans in the Japanese empire, Amy Gurowitz has observed, “All Koreans became Japanese citizens in 1910, but a distinc­­tion based on lineage was maintained between ethnic Koreans and ethnic Japanese. Nonetheless, when male suffrage was passed in 1925, Korean men were given the vote.” See Amy Gurowitz, “Mobiliz­­ing International Norms: Domestic Actors, Immigrants, and the Japanese State,” World Politics 51, no. 3 (1999): 425. 57. Tessa Morris-​Suzuki, Exodus to North Korea—​Shadows from Japan’s Cold War (Rowman and Littlefield, 2007), 66. 58. Qin Xiaoyi, ed., Zhonghua minguo zhongyao shiliao chubian: dui ri kangzhan shiqi, di qibian, Zhanhou zhongguo, vol. 4 (Dangshi weiyuanhui, 1981), 637–640. 59. Lo, “Trials of the Taiwanese as Hanjian,” 290. 60. Hayashi Eidai, Taiwan no yamato damashii (Tōhō shuppan, 2000), 257. For individual stories of repatriat­­ing Taiwanese who had been Japanese soldiers, see Kawasaki Masumi, Kaette kita taiwanjin nihonhei (Bungei shunjū, 2003). 61. Lo, “Trials of the Taiwanese as Hanjian,” 280. 62. Kawashima analyzes this com­plex relationship in Kawashima Shin et al., eds., Nittai kankeishi, 1945–2008 (Tokyo shuppankai, 2009). 63. Black markets proliferated not only in the capital, Tokyo, but all over the fringes of the empire, mirror­­ing the porous borders of the decay­­ing empire. See Ishihara Masaie, Daimitsu bōeki no jidai: senryō shoki okinawa no minshū seikatsu (Banseisha, 1982); and Matthew Augustine, “Mov­­ing from Empire

Notes to Pages 130–135

353

to Nation: Border-​crossers and the Allied Occupa­­tion of Japan,” PhD disserta­­tion at Columbia University, 2009. 64. Owen Griffiths, “Need, Greed, and Protest in Japan’s Black Market, 1938– 1949,” Journal of Social History 35, no. 4 (2002): 834. David Kaplan and Alec Dubro, Yakuza: The Explosive Account of Japan’s Underworld (Addison-​Wesley, 1986), 60–63, discusses the role of SCAP-​managed domestic “gangs” in Japan dur­­ing occupa­­tion and their nefarious later links with the CIA. There were con­nections between other gangs in Japan and Taiwanese/Koreans within regional con­fl icts. Kodama Yoshio sat right in the middle of all of this and used shift­­ing alliances to his advantage. 65. The riot took on the sort of stereotypical image one can recall in postwar Japanese yakuza films that depicted this era. In one such 1973 movie, Jingi naki tatakai (Battles without Honor), American soldiers attempt to rape a Japanese lady ek­­ing out a liv­­ing sell­­ing scraps at a black market stall. The Japanese yakuza step in to restore order, and after that one of the former Japanese soldiers gets involved in a life of crime because he really has no other way to make a liv­­ing dur­­ing such dire times. 66. Ōnuki Kenichirō and Watabe Kō, Tokkōtai buryō shōgen kikanhei wa jigoku o mita (Kōdansha, 2009), 245–248. 67. Shen Jinding, “Duiri wangshi zuiyi (27),” Zhuanji wenxue, di27juan, di6qi (December 1975): 79. 68. Yang Zizhen, “Zhanhou chuqi de rihua ritai guanxi—​y i zhonghua minguo zhuri daibiao wei zhongxin (1946–1952),” Zhanhou dangan yu lishi yanjiu xueshu taolunhui (Guoshiguan), (November 2007): 13. Tang Shi-​yeoung details that the statistics are still unclear, though estimates hover between five and six, with casualties upward of twenty-​three or so. See “Gongp­­ing duidai yu zhixu weichi zhijian: riben dongj­­ing shigu shijian yu taiwanren de shenpan,” Yatai yanjiu luntan, 35qi (March 2007): 7 69. Asahi shimbun, June 21, 1946, Tokyo morning edition. 70. Shen, “Duiri wangshi zuiyi (27),” 77. 71. Asahi shimbun, September 29, 1946. Guomin zhengfu, “Zhongri jiufen jiaoshe,” 001–00000–5242A, AH. For the Chinese media treatment of the incident, see He Yilin, “Sengo taiwan ni okeru nyūsu no hōdō to kisei—​ shibuya jiken no hōdō o chūshin ni,” Gendai taiwanshi kenkyū, 32 (September 2007): 3–19. 72. Tang Xiyong, “1947nian 7yue riben segu shijian fasheng duitaiwan zhi yinxiang (chutan),” Zhongyang yanjiuyuan zhongshan renwen shehui kexue yanjiusuo (July 2014). 73. George Kerr, Formosa Betrayed (Da Capo Press, 1976), 227–228. 74. Stefan Fleischauer, “The 228 Incident and the Taiwan Independence Movement’s Con­struc­­tion of a Taiwanese Identity,” China Information, vol. 21, no. 3 (2007): 373–401. 75. Xu Yuming, “Zhanhou liutai riqiao de lishi guiji—​g uanyu segu shijian ji ererba shijian zhongriqiao de jiyu,” Donghua renwen xuebao, di 7qi (July 2005): 171. For a study on the evolu­­tion of the history of the 2.28 incident, see Hou Kunhong, Yanjiu ererba (Boyang wenhua shiye, 2011). There is now a small but well-​laid-​out museum, 2.28 Museum, in the center of Taipei

354

Notes to Pages 135–142

devoted to the history of the incident and the aftermath, http://228.taipei .gov.tw/. 76. Meng Xianzhang, ed., Zhongguo fanmei furi yundong douzhengshi (Zhonghua shuju chuban, 1951), 11. 77. Ibid., 33. 78. Deokhyo Choi, “Crucible of the Post-​empire: Decolonization, Race, and Cold War Politics in U.S.-​Japan-​Korea Relations 1945–1952,” PhD disserta­ ­tion in the History Department of Cornell University, 2013, 3.

4. Chinese Nationalist Justice

Epigraph: As quoted in Gary Jonathan Bass, Stay the Hand of Vengeance: The Pol­ itics of War Crimes Tribunals (Princeton University Press, 2000), 147. 1. Phillida Purvis, “Philip Malins, Prisoners of War and Reconcilia­­tion with Japan,” in Hugh Cortazzi, ed., Japan Society Biographical Portraits 7 (Global Oriental, 2010), 621; Vice-​Admiral the Earl Mountbatten of Burma, Post Surrender Tasks: Sec­­tion E of the Report to the Com­bined Chiefs of Staff, by the Supreme Allied Com­mander, South East Asia, 1943–1945 (H.M.S.O., 1969), 282. 2. Yang Wei-​Chen, “Lu Han yu zhongfa yuenan jiaoshe, 1945–1946,” Dangan jikan 10, no 1 (March 2011): 16–27. 3. Iwakawa Takashi, Kotō no tsuchi to narutomo: BCkyū senpan saiban (Kōdansha, 1995), 602; Law Reports of Trials of War Criminals, Selected and Prepared by the United Nations War Crimes Com­mission 14 (Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1949); Song Zhi-​yong, “Shūsen zengo ni okeru chūgoku no tainichi seisaku,” Shien 54, no. 1 (December 1993): 63–80. To be clear, there are other Japanese war crimes trials in the UN record, but not from China. 4. Hayashi Hirofumi, BCkyū senpan saiban (Iwanami, 2005), 102–103. 5. Ikō Toshiya, “Chūgoku kokumin seifu no nihon senpan shobatsu hōshin no tenkai (ge),” Kikan sensō sekinin kenkyū, dai 33gō (winter 2001): 73. 6. Ikō Toshiya, “Kokumin seifu no BCkyū senpan saiban—​sono ito to genkai,” in Awaya Kentarō, ed., Kingendai nihon no sensō to heiwa (Gendai shiryōshuppan, 2011), 219. 7. Ikō, “Chūgoku kokumin seifu no nihon senpan shobatsu hōshin no tenkai (ge),” 67. 8. One can see this quite clearly in Utsumi Aiko and Nagai Hitoshi’s collec­­tion of related newspaper articles in Shimbun shiryō ni miru tōkyō saiban BCkyū saiban, vol. 1 and 2 (Gendai shiryō shuppan, 2000). There are many tiny articles but noth­­ing significant. The Japanese media kept people apprised, if noth­­ing more. No doubt this was due, in part, to occupa­­tion censorship. 9. Matsura Sōzō, “Shirarezaru senryōka no genron danatsu—​iwayuru senpan tosho o megutte,” in Shisō no kagaku kenkyūkai, ed., Kyōdō kenkyū, nihon no senryō (Tokuma shoten, 1972), 219–227. 10. Iwakawa, Kotō no tsuchi to narutomo, 441–443. See also Daq­­ing Yang, Technology of Empire: Telecommunications and Japanese Expansion in Asia, 1883–1945 (Harvard University Asia Center, 2011). 11. Iwakawa, Kotō no tsuchi to narutomo, 453–455.

Notes to Pages 143–147

355

12. RG 331, SCAP, Legal Section, Administrative Division, Misc Subject File, 1945–50, Board of Officers to Demobilization, Box 1227, Folder, “Chinese Mission to Japan: Memo for Record from 15 Apr 1947, NAUS. 13. See Satō Ryōichi, Pekin shūyōjo ichi kisha no gokuchū nikki (Arechi shuppansha, 1977), for his postwar insistence that he was kicked and beaten in a Beij­­ing jail while investigated but ultimately released with no charges. 14. Tessa Morris-​Suzuki, “Ethnic Engineering: Scientific Racism and Public Opinion Surveys in Midcentury Japan,” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 8, no. 2 (fall 2000): 499–529. 15. RG 331, SCAP, Legal Section, Administrative Division, Misc Subject File, 1945–50, Box 1225, Folder Formal Demands (Jpn Gov’t), NAUS. 16. D 1.3.9.2–5–1, “Ippan jōkyo kankei (kyū manshūkoku saiban o fukumu),” February 5, 1946, Honpō senpan saiban kankei zakken, gaichi ni okeru honpōjin no gunji saiban kankei, Chūgoku no bu, GKSK. 17. RG 331, SCAP, Legal Section, Administrative Division, Misc Subject File, 1945–50, Board of Officers to Demobilization, Box 1227, Folder, “Chinese Mission to Japan: Memo for Record from 15 Apr 1947, NAUS. 18. RG 331, SCAP, Legal Section, Administrative Division, Misc Subject File, 1945–50, Box 1225. G2 Chief of Staff report from 18 Feb. 1948 con­cern­­ing “Transfer of Japanese as suspected war criminals to the Chinese gov­­ern­­ment for transfer to China,” NAUS. 19. D 1.3.9.2–5–1, “Ippan jōkyō kankei (kyū manshūkoku saiban o fukumu),” February 5, 1946, Honpō senpan saiban kankei zakken, gaichi ni okeru honpōnin no gunji saiban kankei, Chūgoku no bu. The dates are a bit jumbled in the various semiorganized documents; the report on page 1 says produced in Feb. of Showa 21, but then the first line says last year in July of Showa 21. A later second copy of this same report has corrections of the type and seems as if it was produced in Showa 22, 1947, GKSK. 20. D 1.3.9.2–5–1, “Ippan jōkyō kankei (kyū manshūkoku saiban o fukumu),” this report has a date at the end of August 3, 1947, but I estimate that the initial report is from 1946, GKSK. 21. D 1.3.9.2–5–1, “Ippan jōkyō kankei (kyū manshūkoku saiban o fukumu),” February 5, 1946, Honpō senpan saiban kankei zakken, gaichi ni okeru honpōnin no gunji saiban kankei, Chūgoku no bu, GKSK. 22. Quanzonghao 18, Anjuanhao 2278, “Guanyu meiguojun zaihua dibu yindu ji shenpan zhanfan de anjian,” SHAC. Document record of a discussion within the foreign ministry from Minguo year 35 (1946 if my estimate is correct) Sept. 27, SHAC. 23. For the overall Chinese synopsis of the legal issues and testimony of the Nanj­­ing war crimes trials, see Hu Jurong, Zhongwai junshi fat­­ing shenpan riben zhanfan: guanyu nanj­­ing datusha (Nankai daxue chubanshe, 1988), especially 110–170. 24. Mark R. Peattie, “The Dragon’s Seed—​Origins of the War,” in Mark Peattie et al., eds., The Battle for China: Essays on the Military History of the Sino-​ Japanese War of 1937–1945 (Stanford University Press, 2011), 69. 25. Inaba Masao, ed., Okamura Yasuji taishō shiryō jō, senjō kaisōhen (Hara shobō, 1970), 104–105.

356

Notes to Pages 148–155

26. For the full Chinese judgment of the case, see Guofangbu shenpan zhanfan jushi fat­­ing panjue, beigao Jiuj­­ing Long (Chinese read­­ing of Sakai’s name), 020–010117–0033–0039a to 0051a, AH. 27. Law Reports of Trials of War Criminals, Selected and Prepared by the United Nations War Crimes Com­mission 14 (Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1949), part 83, Trial of Takashi Sakai (Chinese War Crimes Military Tribunal of the Ministry of National Defence, Nanking, Judgment delivered on 29 August 1946), 1–2. 28. Wang Junyan, Riben zhanfan shenpan miwen (Zhongguo huaqiao chubanshe, 1995), 277–278. 29. Wang, Riben zhanfan shenpan miwen, 281. 30. Law Reports of Trials of War Criminals, Selected and Prepared by the United Nations War Crimes Com­mission, vol. XIV (Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1949), part 83, 3. 31. Iwakawa, Kotō no tsuchi to narutomo, 598. 32. Ibid., 601. 33. RG 331, SCAP, Legal Section, Administrative Division, Misc Subject File, 1945–50, Board of Officers to Demobilization, Box 1227, NAUS. 34. Wada Hideho, “Kokumin seifu no tainichi sengo shori hōshin no jissai: senpan monai to baishō mondai, ICCS, Research Report of Youth Researchers (March 2006): 127–128. 35. Wang, Riben zhanfan shenpan miwen, 284. 36. Fujiwara Akira, “Nank­­ing Atrocity—​Interpretive Overview,” in Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, ed., The Nank­­ing Atrocity, 1937–38: Com­plicat­­ing the Picture (Berghahn Books, 2007), 40. 37. Hattori Satoshi and Edward Drea, “Japanese Operations from July to December 1937,” in Mark Peattie, Edward Drea, and Hans van de Ven, eds., Battle for China: Essays on the Military History of the Sino-​Japanese War of 1937–1945 (Stanford University Press, 2011), 179. 38. Fujiwara Akira, “Nank­­ing Atrocity—​Interpretive Overview,” 47. 39. Ibid., 50. 40. Yuma Totani, The Tokyo War Crimes Trial: The Pursuit of Justice in the Wake of World War II (Harvard University Press, 2008), 120–121. 41. Ibid., as quoted on 122–125. 42. Mei Xiaobin and Ye Shubing, Wei zhengyi qiaoxiang fachui: shenpan riben zhanfan de junshi faguan Ye Zaizeng (Nanj­­ing chubanshe, 2007), 105–106. Wang claims that Tani was arrested in February 1946 and held at Sugamo but then only processed to China in August. Wang, Riben zhanfan shenpan miwen, 264. 43. Mei Xiaobin and Ye Shubing, Wei zhengyi qiaoxiang fachui, 106–108. 44. Mei Xiaobin and Ye Shubing, Wei zhengyi qiaoxiang fachui, 108–109, gives the date as August 8, 1946. In his first book on this topic, Hu Jurong has Tani already in Shanghai and be­­ing questioned by Chinese authorities on August 3, 1946, Zhongwai junshi fat­­ing shenpan riben zhanfan, 147, but in his expanded version he lists the document to order the transfer of Tani from Japan on August 3 and then his transfer from Shanghai to Nanj­­ing on

Notes to Pages 156–161

357

August 10, 1946. See Hu Jurong, ed., Nanj­­ing datusha shiliaoji, vol. 24, Nan­ jing shenpan (Jiangsu renmin chubanshe, 2006), 60–61. 45. Wang, Riben zhanfan shenpan miwen, 265. For Ye’s personal observations of the trial, see his “Shenpan rijun qinhua zongsil­­ing Gangcung Ningci neimu,” Jiujiang wenshi ziliao xuanji, Jinian kangri zhanzheng shengli sishi zhounian zhuanji, (Zhongguo renmin zhengzhi xieshang huiyi jiujiangshi weiyuanhui, 1985), 199–205; Hu Jurong, “Zhongwai junshi fat­­ing dui zhanfan Songj­­ing Shigen, Gu Shoufu deng shenpan gaikuang,” Wenshi zhuanji (Qinghua rijun nanj­­ing datusha shiliao zhuanji, no. 4) (Zhongguo renmin zhengzhi xieshanghuiyi jiangsusheng, 1983), 54–71. 46. Matsui was a central figure in postwar Chinese war stories and became an archetypal character in one of China’s first popular films about the war made in 1955, Guerrillas on the Plain (Pingyuan youjidui) produced by Changchun Film Studio. His character is portrayed in a sort of mockingly humorous way. 47. Kasahara Tokushi, Hyakuningiri kyōsō to nankin jiken: shijitsu no kaimei kara rekishi taiwa e (Ōtsuki shoten, 2008), 229. 48. Ibid., 230. 49. Ibid., 231. 50. Hu Jurong, ed., Nanj­­ing datusha shiliaoji, vol. 24, Nanj­­ing shenpan, 62. 51. Ibid., 72–73. 52. Kobayashi Kazuhiro, Shinatsū ichi gunjin no hikari to kage—​Isogai Rensuke chūjōden (Kashiwa shobō, 2000), 233–237. 53. Letter from LH Lamb to Wang, British Embassy in Nanj­­ing to Secretary General of UNWCC Far Eastern and Pacific Subcommission, 13 September 1946, 020–010117–0034–0007a, AH. We should assume Lamb wished to discuss this issue with Wang Chonghui because he was the head of the subcommission in Chongq­­ing at that moment, though the name is garbled in the original. 54. Letter from LH Lamb to Wang, British Embassy in Nanj­­ing to Secretary General of UNWCC Far Eastern and Pacific Subcommission, AH. 55. Letter from HD Bryan to Huang, British Embassy in Nanj­­ing to Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, July 9, 1947, 020–010117–0034–0052a, AH. 56. For more on his diary dur­­ing years of incarceration, see Kobayashi Kazuhiro, Shinatsū ichi gunjin no hikari to kage—​Isogai Rensuke chūjōden. 57. Mei Xiaobin and Ye Shubing, Wei zhengyi qiaoxiang fachui, 131. 58. Kasahara, Hyakuningiri kyōsō to nankin jiken, 233. 59. Mei Xiaobin and Ye Shubing, Wei zhengyi qiaoxiang fachui, 158; RG 84, Records of the Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State, China, U.S. Embassy, Nanking, General Records, 1946–1948, 1947:711.6 to 1947:715, folder 711.6, May 16, 1947, report from embassy “Trial of Hisao Tani before Chinese Court as a Japanese War Criminal,” NAUS. See online article on him, http://www.japanfocus.org/-​David-​Askew/1729. 60. Wang, Riben zhanfan shenpan miwen, 268. 61. Ibid., 270–271. 62. Kasahara, Hyakuningiri kyōsō to nankin jiken, 234.

358

Notes to Pages 162–169

63. The Chinese judgment can be found in Guofangbu shenpan zhanfan junshi fat­­ing panjue, beigao Gu Shoufu (Chinese read­­ing for Tani’s name), 11-​ EAP-​02227, MFAT. 64. Mei Xiaobin and Ye Shubing, Wei zhengyi qiaoxiang fachui, 182. Sugamo isho hensankai, ed., “Tani Hisao,” in Seiki no isho (Kōdansha, reprinted edition, 1984), 50–51. 65. Wang, Riben zhanfan shenpan miwen, 272–276. The American embassy in Nanj­­ing filed a cable about the trial to the State Department on May 16, 1947, which corroborates the general Chinese scholarship and details of the trial. “Trial of Hisao Tani before Chinese Court as a Japanese War Criminal,” May 16, 1947, RG 84, Records of the Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State, China, U.S. Embassy, Nanking, General Records, 1946–1948, Box 66, File711.6, NAUS. 66. RG 331, SCAP, Legal Section, Administrative Division, Misc Subject File, 1945–50, Box 1225, NAUS. 67. RG 331, SCAP, Legal Section, Administrative Division, Misc Subject File, 1945–50, Box 1225. G2 Chief of Staff report from 18 Feb. 1948 con­cern­­ing “Transfer of Japanese as suspected war criminals to the Chinese gov­­ern­­ment for transfer to China,” NAUS. 68. Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, “The Nank­­ing 100-​Man Kill­­ing Con­test Debate: War Guilt amid Fabricated Illusions, 1971–75,” Journal of Japanese Studies 26, no. 2 (summer, 2000): as quoted on 326. 69. Zhang Xianwen et al., eds., Zhonghua minguoshi, vol. 3 (Nanj­­ing daxue chubanshe, 2005), preface, 1. On page 1 is the Japanese newspaper image of the “kill­­ing con­test.” In Zhang Xianwen et al., eds., Zhonghua minguoshi, vol. 4 (Nanj­­ing daxue chubanshe, 2005), preface, 5, there is a picture of Noda on trial for his role in the “kill­­ing con­test.” 70. Bob Wakabayashi’s article details all the issues surround­­ing both the incident itself and the postwar heated historical debates surround­­ing the incident and trial in “The Nank­­ing 100-​Man Kill­­ing Con­test Debate,” 307–340. 71. H.  J. Timperley, What War Means: The Japanese Terror in China (Victor Gollancz, 1938), 284–85. Timperley quotes directly from the December 7 and 14 Japan Advertiser. 72. To cite just a few Chinese articles of the many that repeat the same charges, see Li Donglang, “Guomindang zhengfu dui riben zhanfan de shenpan,” Bainianchao, di 6 qi (2005): 27–35; and Luo Junsheng, “Shi Meiyu yu zhanhou nanj­­ing dui rijun zhanfan de shenpan,” Dangshi zonglan, di 1qi (2006): 20–26. 73. Honda Katsuichi, Chūgoku no tabi (Asahi shimbunsha, 1972); also available in an English translation, The Nank­­ing Massacre (M. E. Sharpe, 1999). Mukai Chieko, ‘“Mujitsu da!’ chichi no sakebi ga kikoeru,” Seiron (March 2000): 60–71. 74. Kasahara, Hyakuningiri kyōsō to nankin jiken, 201. 75. Hu Jurong, ed., Nanj­­ing datusha shiliaoji, 496–497. 76. Ibid., 492. 77. Kasahara, Hyakuningiri kyōsō to nankin jiken, 145–151.

Notes to Pages 170–177

359

78. Wang, Riben zhanfan shenpan miwen, 296. 79. Ibid., 297. 80. Ibid., 298. 81. Hu Jurong, ed., Nanj­­ing datusha shiliaoji, 505. 82. Sugamo isho hensankai, ed., “Mukai Toshiaki,” in Seiki no isho, 40–42. 83. Two excellent sources discuss the Asahi newspaper com­pany’s role in support­ ­ing Japanese imperialism. See Asahi shimbun, ed., Asahi shimbun shōwa hōdō: kenshō (Asahi Publishing, 2010); and Yamamoto Taketoshi, Asahi shimbun no chūgoku shinryaku (Bungei shunjū, 2011). 84. Kasahara Tokushi, Hyakuningiri kyōsō to nankin jiken, 222. 85. Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, “The Nank­­ing 100-​Man Kill­­ing Con­test Debate,” 332. 86. Kasahara Tokushi, Hyakuningiri kyōsō to nankin jiken, 217. 87. Hattori Ryūji, Nicchū rekishi ninshiki, Tanaka jōsōbun o meguru sōkoku 1927– 2010 (Tokyo daigaku shuppankai, 2010), 1. See also John J. Stefan, “The Tanaka Memorial (1927): Authentic or Spurious,” Modern Asian Studies 7, no. 4 (1973): 733–745. 88. Hattori Ryūji, Nicchū rekishi ninshiki, Tanaka jōsōbun o meguru sōkoku 1927– 2010, 18. 89. Ibid., 263–264. 90. Kasahara Tokushi, Hyakuningiri kyōsō to nankin jiken, 222. 91. Mei Xiaobin and Ye Shubing, Wei zhengyi qiaoxiang fachui, 249. 92. The term originally came from the Chinese response to the Japanese practice. See Totani, The Tokyo War Crimes Trial, 188. 93. Yoneyama Yasuhide, Nihongun sansei zanryū: kokkyō naisen ni honrōsareta Yamashita shōi no sengo (Abiko: Ōraru hisutorī kikaku, 2008), 32. 94. Lin Zhaozhen, Fumian budui: riben baituan zaitai mishi (Shibao wenhua publishers, 1996), 15. 95. Weng Youwei and Zhao Wenyuan, Jiang Jieshi yu riben de enen yuanyuan (Renmin chubanshe, 2008), 281. 96. See a brief discussion on the origins of the White Group in Barak Kushner, “Pawns of Empire: Postwar Taiwan, Japan and the Dilemma of War Crimes,” in Japanese Studies (special issue on Japan and Taiwan) 30, no. 1 (May 2010): 111–133. 97. Cao Shicheng, Paidan hōon no tame seimei o kakete taiwan ni mikkō shita mumei no eiyū nihon shōkōdan (undated personal manuscript), 12, YKA. 98. Zhai Qiang, “Meiri tongmeng yu Mao Zedong de ‘yibiandao’ juece, (1947– 1950),” in Niu Dayong and Shen Zhihua, eds., Lengzhan yu zhongguo de zhoubian guanxi (Shijie zhishi chubanshe, 2004), 112–117. See also Michael Schaller, The American Occupa­­tion of Japan: The Origins of the Cold War in Asia (Oxford University Press, 1985). 99. Ren Haisheng, ed., Gongheguo teshe zhanfan shimo (Huawen chubanshe, 1995), 6. 100. Ye Zaizeng, “Shenpan rijun qinhua zongshil­­ing Gangcun Ningci neimu,” Jiujiang wenshi ziliao xuanji, di sanji, Jinian kangri zhanzheng shengli sishi zhounian zhuanji, (Zhongguo renmin zhengzhi xishang huiyi jiujiangshi weiyuanhui, 1985), 203–204. Xu Yongchang was also involved later in other

360

Notes to Pages 177–184

plans to keep Japanese military soldiers and officers fight­­ing on the Nationalist side against the Com­munists. See Zhang Hongbo, “Nihongun no sansei zanryū ni miru sengo shoki chūnichi kankei no keisei,” Hitotsubashi ronsō 134, no. 2 (2005): 201. Yiban, 532/197 Shi Meiyu, “Shenpan zhanfan huiyilu,” Zhuanji wenxue, di erjuan, di erqi, March 1963, 35–41, KMTPA. 101. Zhong Hanbo, Zhuwai wuguan de shiming—​yiwei haijun junguan de huiyi (Maitian chubanshe, 1998), 113. His name is also romanized as Lt. Com­ mander Chung Han Po. 102. Ibid., 114–115. 103. Zhai Qiang, “Meiri tongmeng yu Mao Zedong de ‘yibiandao’ juece, (1947– 1950),” 117. 104. Riben wenti wenjian huibian, vol. 1 (Shijie zhishisha, 1955), 36. These volumes are a collec­­tion of reprinted primary source documents about Sino-​ Japanese relations. 105. Hakudan no kiroku o hozonzurukai, ed., “Hakudan monogatari, (1), Hakudan haken no haikei,” Kaikō (October 1992): 18. (This was a series of articles based on meetings from October 1992 to January 1994.) 106. “Riren dui shenpan zhanfan guangan zhi diaocha,” report submitted from the Chinese mission in Japan, first section, July 1949, 073.8/0001, Lianheguo zairi renminsifa guanxiaquan ji megzong zhunxu rizhanfan yux­­ing baoshe, yingxianghao:11-​EAP-​02228, MFAT. 107. “Riren dui shenpan zhanfan guangan zhi diaocha,” MFAT. 108. G3–00182, box 384, Folder John W. Weeks, Dec. 1948–Dec. 1949, NDLKS. 109. G3–00286, Box 384c, NDLKS. 110. Saka Kuniyasu is one of the few to detail these American-​led trials in China, in Shanhai hōtei sensō saiban shijitsu kiroku, vol. 1 (beigunkankei) (Tochōsha, 1967). 111. G3–00182, box 384, Folder John W. Weeks, Dec. 1948–Dec. 1949, NDLKS. 112. Ibid. 113. Ibid. 114. Ibid. 115. Higurashi Yoshinobu, “Gasshūkoku to tainichi senpan saiban no shūketsu,” Shigakkai 109, no. 11 (November 2000): 1967. 116. Ibid., 1961. 117. Ibid., 1967–1969. 118. Totani, The Tokyo War Crimes Trial, 59. 119. Riben wenti wenjian huibian, vol. 1, 45. 120. Ibid., 53–57. 121. Ibid., 76. 122. Meng Xianzhang, ed., Zhongguo fanmei furi yundong douzhengshi (Zhonghua shuju chuban, 1951), 15. This is a collec­­tion of newspaper articles, collated and published together as part of this movement. 123. Ibid., 29.

Notes to Pages 185–186

5. Taiwan

361

Epigraph: From the 1965 album That Was the Year That Was. Tom Lehrer parodied the fact that the United States helped Nazi scientists useful for the American Cold War immigrate after World War II. 1. The literature on Wernher von Braun is growing, but a selec­­tion that details his Nazi past as well as the early American interest in his research can be gleaned from Michael J. Neufeld, “Wernher von Braun, the SS, and Con­ centra­­tion Camp Labor: Questions of Moral, Political, and Criminal Responsibility,” German Studies Review 25, no. 1 (February 2002): 57–78; Dennis Piszkiewicz, Wernher von Braun: The Man Who Sold the Moon (Praeger Publishers, 1998); and Bob Ward, Dr. Space: The Life of Wernher von Braun (U.S. Naval Institute Press, 2005). 2. Japanese technology was important to postwar China; see Daq­­ing Yang, “Resurrect­­ing the Empire? Japanese Technicians in Postwar China, 1945–49,” in Harald Fuess, ed., The Japanese Empire in East Asia and Its Postwar Legacy (Iudicium, 1998), 193; Yang Daqing, “Chūgoku ni tomaru nihonjin gijutsusha,” in Liu Jie and Kawashima Shin, eds., 1945 nen no rekishi ninshiki (Tokyo daigaku shuppankai, 2009), 113–139; and Matsumoto Toshirō, “Anzan nihonjin tekkō gijutsushatachi no ryūyō mondai—​chūgoku tōhoku tekkōgyō no sengo fukkō,” Jinbun gakuhō (Kyoto daigaku jinbunkagaku kenkyūjo) 79 (March 1997): 235–284. Chinese nationalists were not the only parties in China to employ Japanese in the early postwar; the Chinese Com­munist Party (CCP) did as well. Details on Japanese soldiers and nurses who joined the CCP military forces can be read in Furukawa Mantarō, Itetsuku daichi no uta: jinmin kaihōgun nihonjin heishitachi (Sanseido, 1984). For stories con­cern­­ing the difficult choices and fear that many military and civilian Japanese nurses and doctors experienced at the end of war that sometimes influenced their decision to join the CCP forces, see Anzai Teiko, Yasen kangofu (Fuji shobō, 1953); and Lu Xijun, “Tōhoku kaihō guniryōtai de katsuyaku shita nihonjin: aru guniin no kiseki kara,” Hokutō ajia kenkyū 6 (January 2004): 35–55. 3. John Farquharson, “Governed or Exploited? The British Acquisi­­tion of German Technology,” Journal of Con­temporary History 32, no. 1 (January 1997): 23–42. 4. For a descrip­­tion of the problems both Chinese sides faced in their civil war, see Odd Arne Westad, Decisive Encounters: The Chinese Civil War, 1946–1950 (Stanford University Press, 2003). 5. See Michael Petersen, “The Intelligence That Wasn’t: CIA Name Files, the U.S. Army, and Intelligence Gather­­ing in Occupied Japan,” in Research­­ing Japanese War Crimes Records, Introductory Essays (National Archives and Records Administra­­tion for the Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Work­­ing Group, 2006). The nature of the exchange between Chiang and Okamura con­cern­­ing leniency for war crimes in trade for postwar military assistance is alluded to in Iwatsubo Hirohide, “Paidan—​chūka minkoku gunji komondan ni tsuite,” in Dōdai kurabu kōenshū, eds., Shōwa gunji hiwa, chūkan (Dōdai keizai konwakai, 1989),

362

Notes to Pages 186–188

348; and Zhang Jinshan, “Riben zhengjie de taiwanbang yu taiwan de duiri yuanwai huodong,” Dangdai yatai, 2qi (2001): 5–6. 6. Steve Tsang, “Chiang Kai-​shek and the Kuomintang’s Policy to Reconquer the Chinese Mainland, 1949–1958,” in Steve Tsang, ed., In the Shadow of China: Political Developments in Taiwan since 1949 (University of Hawaii Press, 1993), 48–72; and Steven Phillips, Between Assimila­­tion and Indepen­ dence: The Taiwanese Encounter Nationalist China, 1945–1950 (Stanford Uni­ versity Press, 2003). 7. Stephen C. Mercado, The Shadow Warriors of Nakano: A History of the Imperial Japanese Army’s Elite Intelligence School (Brasser’s, 2002), 293, fn 64. Mercado suggests that the United States was fully cognizant of the plans for former imperial Japanese soldiers to aid the KMT. Sayuri Shimizu, “Occupa­­tion Policy and Postwar Sino-​Japanese relations, Sever­­ing Economic Ties,” in Mark Caprio and Yoneyuki Sugita, eds., in Democracy in Occupied Japan: The U.S. Occupa­­tion and Japanese Politics and Society (Routledge, 2007), 203, assesses that the White Group was sanctioned neither by the American authorities nor the Japanese gov­­ern­­ment. See also Shigehiro Yuasa, “Japanese Views on China dur­­ing and Immediately after the War,” 445–459, in Larry I. Bland, ed., with special assistance by Roger B. Jeans and Mark F. Wilkinson, George C. Marshall’s Media­­tion Mission to China, December 1945– January 1947 (George C. Marshall Foundation, 1998); Jay Taylor, The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-​Shek and the Struggle for Modern China (Belknap Press, 2009), 452; and Hsiao-​t­­ing Lin, “The U.S.-​Taiwan Military Diplomacy Revisited: Chiang Kai-​shek, Baituan, and the 1954 Mutual Defense Pact,” Diplomatic History (April 2013): 1-​24. 8. FO 371/83400—​Japanese Forces Operat­­ing in China in Support of Both Nationalist and Com­munist Armies, A “Minute” from to Head of UK Mission in Tokyo from the Military Advisor, 28 December 1949, NAUK. 9. Weng Youwei and Zhao Wenyuan, Jiang Jieshi yu riben de enen yuanyuan (Renmin chubanshe, 2008), 296. 10. For more on the American side, see George Kerr, Formosa Betrayed (Da Capo Press, 1976); and Gary Rawnsley and Ming-​Yeh Rawnsley, eds., The Clandestine Cold War in Asia (Frank Cass, 2000). 11. Tsuji Masanobu fled China at the end of the war and journeyed around Southeast Asia to arrive back in Japan and quickly publish the excit­­ing details of his escape and attempts to supposedly help nationalist groups push for independence against European recolonization. See Tsuji Masanobu, Senkō sanzenri (Mainichi wanzu, 2008, originally published in 1950). 12. Frederick Wakeman, Spymaster, Dai Li and the Chinese Secret Service (University of California Press, 2003), 351. For the Chinese details of the earlier KMT efforts to recruit Japanese, see Zhang Rui, “Yuan guomindang juntongju dongbeiqu ‘duiri gongzuo’ de yingmou huodong,” Liaon­­ing wenshi ziliao (neibu faxing) no. 9 (1984), Liaon­­ing renmin chubanshe, 83–95. 13. Masaya Inoue, “Yoshida Shigeru’s ‘Counter Infiltration’ Plan against China: The Plan for Japanese Intelligence Activities in Mainland China 1952–1954,” World Political Science Review 5, no. 1 (2009): 1–24.

Notes to Pages 188–190

363

14. Li Enmin, Zhongri minjian jingji waijiao: 1945–1972 (Renmin chubanshe, 1997), 49–50; Huang Zijin, “Kangzhan jieshu qianhou Jiang Jieshi duiri taidu: yide baoyuan zhenxiang de tantao,” Zhongyang yanjiuyuan jindaishi yanjiusuo jikan, di 45qi (September 2004): 143–194. Even though Chiang Kai-​shek’s message to treat the Japanese benevolently supposedly reached the four corners of China on the day of Japan’s surrender, as a means to stave off mass revenge and keep the Chinese na­­tion focused on the future, a questionnaire com­pleted in Hebei Province casts doubt on how far the message was com­municated. A 1994 study of people older than sixty found that more than 85.5 percent had never heard of this immediate postwar broadcast to treat the Japanese benevolently. Of those that had heard of the broadcast 68 percent felt it was not a proper policy for the time. Supposedly Chiang’s media talks to the public were quite small and fairly rare. 15. Tian Huan, ed., Zhanhou zhongri guanxi wenxianji, 1945–1970 (Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 1996), 10. See also Qin Xiaoyi, ed., Zhonghua minguo zhongyao shiliao chubian, Duiri kangzhan shiqi, di 7 bian, Zhanhou Zhongguo, vol. 4, (Dangshi weiyuanhui, 1981): 633–635; Zhongyang ribao (Chongqing), August 16, 1945, reprinted in Zhanhou zhongri guanxi wenxianji, 1945–1970, 11–12. 16. “Chuzhi riben,” Jiang Zhongzheng zongtong wenwu dangan: 002–020400– 00052–001 (Song Ziwendian Jiang Zhongzheng meizhengfu fenrenshi yanlun shi riben jieshou touxiang tiaojian), AH. This was not necessarily a new policy as the KMT was essentially follow­­ing a similar policy the Nationalists and the CCP had taken toward Japanese POWs dur­­ing the late 1930s in the war of resistance against Japan. See Barak Kushner, The Thought War: Japanese Imperial Propaganda, (University of Hawaii Press, 2006) 133–34. 17. Kikuchi Kazutaka, Nihonjin hansen heishi to nicchū sensō: jūkei kokumin seifu chīki no horyo shūyōjo to kanren sasete (Ochanomizu shobō, 2003), in particular, 123–151, laws pertain­­ing to management of Japanese POWs in KMT camps. For more on the CCP Eighth Army policy on Japanese POWs, see the translated 1939 article by Luo Ruiqing, “Hachirogun no horyo seisaku ni tsuite,” Kikan gendaishi (August 1974): 86–90. 18. “Zhongguo lujun zongsilingbu shouxiang baogaoshu,” Quanzonghao 787, 16598, May 1946, SHAC. 19. Gary Jonathan Bass, Stay the Hand of Vengeance: The Politics of War Crimes Tribunals (Princeton University Press, 2000), 161. 20. Gangcun xiansheng yu He tuanzhang Shili tanhua, in “He Shili tuanzhang yu riben Gangben shangtan han jushi ji zhongri hezuo wenti tanhua jilu,” (7 June 1950), O08–25, 00041641, 00010004–00010010, MDA. 21. Donald G. Gillin, Warlord: Yen Hsi-​shan in Shansi Province, 1911–1949 (Princeton University Press, 1967). 22. Hakudan no kiroku o hozonzurukai, ed., “Hakudan monogatari, (1), Hakudan haken no haikei,” Kaikō (October 1992): 23; Tai Guohui, Taiwan—​ ningen, rekishi, shinsei (Iwanami shoten, 1988), 149–153; Nakamura Yuetsu, Paidan (shinpan)—​taiwangun o tsukutta nihongun shōkōtachi (Fusō shobō shuppan, 2006). In the English language the group is known as the White

364

Notes to Pages 190–194

Group because that is the literal transla­­tion of the Chinese. In Chinese it is known as baituan, but in Japanese the group is often known as paidan, a sort of hybrid pronuncia­­tion of the Chinese. The real pronuncia­­tion of the Japanese would be hakudan. 23. Ogasawara Kiyoshi, “Shōkaiseki o tsukutta nihon shōkōdan,” Bungei shunjū (August 1971): 163. Ogasawara is never precise about which battle he is talk­­ing about or whether he defines KMT military victory on Jinmen in the aggregate. The key battles for Jinmen were in 1949 and 1958, and while mutual bombardments were extremely heavy at times the KMT never militarily succumbed to the Com­munist forces. Whether that was due to Japanese military educa­­tion remains doubtful but is an oft-​cited source of White Group pride. Yamashita Masao offers a much less flatter­­ing view of the situa­­tion in an oral history interview. See http://www.ohproject.com /ivlist/03/35.html. 24. See Petersen, “The Intelligence That Wasn’t,” 205–206. 25. Okamura maintained a strong network of relations within the KMT elite, and his relatively exalted status in postwar China was well known, even to the Western press. 26. Zhang Hongbo, “Nihongun no sansei zanryū ni miru sengo shoki chūnichi kankei no keisei,” Hitotsubashi ronsō, 187. 27. Ibid., 191. 28. Li Enmin, Zhongri minjian jingji waijiao, 1945–1972; Yoshihide Soeya, Japan’s Economic Diplomacy with China, 1945–78 (Clarendon Press, 1998). 29. For a full survey of who worked in the Chinese mission in Japan, see Yang Zizhen, “Zhongguo zhuri daibiaotu zhi yanjiu—​chutan zhanhou zhongri tairi guanxi zhi eryuan jiagou,” Guoshiguan guankan, di 19 qi, 2009, 62. 30. Cao Shicheng, Paidan hōon no tame seimei o kakete taiwan ni mikkō shita mumei no eiyū nihon shōkōdan (undated personal manuscript), 15, YKA. 31. Joyce Chapman Lebra, The Indian National Army and Japan: Jungle Alliance, Japan and the Indian National Army (Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2008, originally published in 1971); Harry J. Benda, The Crescent and the Ris­ ­ing Sun: Indonesian Islam under the Japanese Occupation, 1942–1945 (W. van Hoeve, 1958). 32. Zhang Jinshan, “Riben zhengjie de taiwanbang yu taiwan de duiri yuanwai huodong,” Dandgai yatai, di 2 (2001): 5, claims that Okamura was behind Nemoto’s secret initiative to Taiwan and that Nemoto was send­­ing arms to Chiang Kai-​shek. Imai Takeo, “Nemoto Hiroshi chūjō,” in Imai Takeo et al., eds., Nihongun no kenkyū shikikan, (ge) (Hara shobō, 1980), 140. 33. Lin Zhaozhen, Fumian budui: riben baituan zaitai mishi (Shibao wenhua publishers, 1996), 46. See also James Boyd, Japanese-​Mongolian relations, 1873–1945: Faith, Race and Strategy (Global Oriental, 2011). 34. A February 24, 1955, article in the Taiwanese newspaper Taibei zhongyang ribao detailed Nemoto’s political views where he pronounced that a “free China means a free Japan and that that is also part of Japan’s responsibility. What happens in China affects what happens in Japan.” 35. Monta Ryūshō, Kono inochi gi ni sasagu: taiwan o sukutta rikugun chūjō Nemoto Hiroshi no kiseki (Shūeisha, 2010), 79–82.

Notes to Pages 194–197

365

36. Komatsu Shigerō, Senryaku shōgun Nemoto Hiroshi—​aru gunshireikan no shinbō (Kōjinsha, 1987), 196–197. 37. Ronald McGlothlen, Con­troll­­ing the Waves: Dean Acheson and U.S. Foreign Policy in East Asia (Norton, 1993), 122–125. There was no love lost between the exasperated U.S. gov­­ern­­ment, represented mainly by Secretary of State Dean Acheson, who loathed Chiang Kai-​shek, and the KMT. Elements of the U.S. gov­­ern­­ment at one point con­sidered support­­ing a coup against Chiang. Dur­­ing World War II one sec­­tion of the U.S. gov­­ern­­ment hatched an elaborate plan to assassinate Chiang, but it was never given the green light by President Roosevelt. 38. Monta Ryūshō, Kono inochi gi ni sasagu: taiwan o sukutta rikugun chūjō Nemoto Hiroshi no kiseki, 113–121. 39. Hakudan no kiroku o hozonzurukai, ed., “Hakudan monogatari, (15), Hakudan haken no haikei,” Kaikō (December 1993): 22–23. 40. Lin Zhaozhen, Fumian budui: riben baituan zaitai mishi, 49. 41. Hakudan no kiroku o hozonzurukai, ed., “Hakudan monogatari, (15): 24. 42. Hakudan no kiroku o hozonzurukai, ed., “Hakudan monogatari, (3), daiichiwa hakudan no tanjō (ge),” Kaikō (December 1992): 27. 43. Monta Ryūshō, Kono inochi gi ni sasagu: taiwan o sukutta rikugun chūjō Nemoto Hiroshi no kiseki, 147. 44. We should call into ques­­tion imperial Japanese military tactics overall in light of Edward Drea’s com­ments that Japan lost militarily not because of science or morale but because of poor military strategy. Edward Drea, In the Service of the Emperor (University of Nebraska Press, 1998), xii. 45. The actual number of soldiers killed or wounded on both KMT and CCP sides remains a con­tested historical topic. See Hong Xiaoxia, “Guanyu jinmen zhanyi jige shishi de kaozheng: jian lun jinmen zhanyi de lishi dingwei,” in Lu Shaoli et al., eds., Lengzhan yu taihai weiji (Guoli zhengzhi daxue lishi xuexi, 2010), 9–25. 46. Michael Szonyi, Cold War Island: Quemoy on the Front Line (University of Cambridge Press, 2008), 16–17. The legacy of this battle, or at least the fact that Taiwan con­tinued to exist independently from the mainland and then punched well above its weight internationally, is analyzed in Shelley Rigger, Why Taiwan Matters: Small Island, Global Powerhouse (Rowman and Littlefield, 2011). 47. Lin Zhaozhen, Fumian budui: riben baituan zaitai mishi, 53. 48. Nishida Satsuo, “Giyūgunron—​Nemoto Hiroshi motochūjō taiwan e iku,” Hyōjin (February 1950), 10–13. 49. FO 371/83400, NAUK. 50. An April 16, 1953, article on Nemoto in the Taiwanese newspaper Taibei zhongyang shibao detailed his exploits. When asked about why he returned to Japan with his fish­­ing pole Nemoto said that it was a prize possession because originally when he departed dur­­ing the U.S. occupa­­tion of Japan his actions were illegal so he had to make it look like he was not go­­ing to Taiwan: “So, I said that I was go­­ing fish­­ing and took this pole.” Nemoto kept his plan secret, not even tell­­ing his wife where he was going, and he did not con­tact her until two months after he arrived in Taiwan. In the interim she believed

366

Notes to Pages 197–200

that he was lost or had run off. See also Asahi shimbun, June 25, 1952 (Tokyo edition), for a small article with a photo of Nemoto’s return. 51. Monta Ryūshō, Kono inochi gi ni sasagu: taiwan o sukutta rikugun chūjō Nemoto Hiroshi no kiseki, 219. The press coverage on Nemoto had been somewhat primed by the Tsuji Masanobu story of imperial Japanese military resurrec­­ tion in Southeast Asia. 52. Cao Shicheng, Paidan hōon no tame seimei o kakete taiwan ni mikkō shita mumei no eiyū nihon shōkōdan (undated personal manuscript), 3, YKA. 53. Hakudan no kiroku o hozonzurukai, ed., “Hakudan monogatari, (5), daisanwa Sō Shichō shōgun ōini kataru,” Kaikō (March 1993): 41. 54. Cao Shicheng, Paidan hōon no tame seimei o kakete taiwan ni mikkō shita mumei no eiyū nihon shōkōdan (undated personal manuscript), 6, YKA; Weng Youwei and Zhao Wenyuan, Jiang Jieshi yu riben de enen yuanyuan, 291; Yao Huiyun, Shiji dashenpan: nanj­­ing datusha riben zhanfan shenpan jishi (Beij­­ing wenyi chubanshe, 2007), 118. Yao claims that it was Cao Shicheng who went to Tokyo to work out the extradi­­tion of high-​level Japanese war criminals like Tani Hisao from Japan back to China with U.S. occupa­­tion authority assistance. 55. Hakudan no kiroku o hozonzurukai, ed., “Hakudan monogatari, (1), Hakudan haken no haikei,” Kaikō (October 1992): 22–23. 56. Ikeya Kaoru, Ari no heitai: nihonhei nisenroppyakunin sanseishō zanryū no shinsō (Shinchōsha, 2007); Okumura Waichi and Sakai Makoto, Watashi wa ari no heitai datta: chūgoku ni nokosareta nihonhei (Iwanami shoten, 2006). See also the 2008 documentary film by Ikeya Kaoru, produced by Makuzamu in 2008, Ari no heitai. Sumita Raishirō glosses over his role in the whole endeavor in his self-​serv­­ing vanity memoir, Watakushi no ashiato (Sumita Satoshi, 1980). 57. Zhang Hongbo, “Nihongun no sansei zanryū ni miru sengo shoki chūnichi kankei no keisei,” 202; Zhang suggests that in his memoirs Sumita tried to make it seem as if the idea to send Japanese soldiers to Taiwan to help Chiang’s army was his and Okamura’s idea. 58. Okamura Yasuji taishō kaisōroku, senshi shiryō 3, Okamura Yasuji, 16ki hikiage engokyoku (1954), 116, YKA. 59. Weng Youwei and Zhao Wenyuan, Jiang Jieshi yu riben de enen yuanyuan, 292. 60. Accord­­ing to one Chinese historian the money was initially not that good and the men were given salaries of about 80 U.S. dollars a month. In Japan, occupa­­tion forces who hired Japanese offered 200 U.S. dollars a month. Okamura com­plained, and eventually the Japanese instructors received more. With all the added benefits and such, salaries con­tinued to rise and were fairly substantial by the 1960s. Chen Hongxian, “Jiang Zhongzheng xiansheng yu baituan, 1950–1969,” Jindai zhonguo, dai 160qi (March 2005): 113–117. 61. Hakudan no kiroku o hozonzurukai, ed., “Hakudan monogatari, (1): 24. On October 1, 1949, the CCP declared victory in the civil war, but still many groups remained to fight for a while. 62. Lin Zhaozhen, Fumian budui: riben baituan zaitai mishi, 14.

Notes to Pages 200–203

367

63. Weng Youwei and Zhao Wenyuan, Jiang Jieshi yu riben de enen yuanyuan, 293. 64. Hakudan no kiroku o hozonzurukai, ed., “Hakudan monogatari, (1): 26. 65. Hakudan no kiroku o hozonzurukai, ed., “Hakudan monogatari, (4), dainiwa jō, 17ningumi no mantenkōkai taiwan,” Kaikō (January 1993): 30. 66. Hakudan no kiroku o hozonzurukai, ed., “Hakudan monogatari (5) dainiwa, kyōiku hajimaru—​Shō sōtō no netsui,” Kaikō (February 1993); 27. 67. Weng Youwei and Zhao Wenyuan, Jiang Jieshi yu riben de enen yuanyuan. 68. Hakudan no kiroku o hozonzurukai, ed., “Hakudan monogatari (3) daiichiwa hakudan no tanjō (ge),” Kaikō (December 1992): 28. Sun Yat-​sen established the Whampoa academy near Canton in 1924 to create an officer class for China’s new military. For a taste of the life in the KMT military and the sort of train­­ing that was needed, see Sang Pin-​zai, “I Wanted to Go to War,” in Pang-​Yuan Chi and David Der-​wei Wang, eds., The Last of the Whampoa Breed: Stories of the Chinese Diaspora (Columbia University Press, 2003), 26–42; and Diane Lary, Warlord Soldiers: Chinese Com­mon Soldiers, 1911–1937 (Cambridge University Press, 1985). 69. Hakudan no kiroku o hozonzurukai, ed., “Hakudan monogatari (3) daiichiwa hakudan no tanjō (ge): 29. 70. Weng Youwei and Zhao Wenyuan, Jiang Jieshi yu riben de enen yuanyuan, 296. 71. William C. Kirby, Germany and Republican China (Stanford University Press, 1984); R.  K.  I. Quested, Sino-​Russian Relations: A Short History (Routledge, 1984, reprinted in 2005). 72. Issues pertain­­ing to the Japanese media dur­­ing the occupa­­tion are ably detailed in Ariyama Teruo, Senryōki mediashi kenkyū: jiyū to tōsei (Kashiwa shobō, 1996). 73. HCI/57/198 Japanese Viet minh; “le probleme Japonais en Indochine,” 1946, AOM. 74. Christopher Goscha, “Build­­ing Force: Asian Origins of Twentieth-​Century Military Science in Vietnam (1905–54),” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 34, no. 3 (October 2003): 547. See also Christopher E. Goscha, “Belated Allies: The Technical Con­tributions of Japanese Deserters to the Viet Minh (1945–1950),” in Marilyn Young and Robert Buzzanco, eds., A Com­panion to the Vietnam War (Blackwell, 2002), 37–64; Christopher Goscha, “Alliés tardifs: les apports techniques des déserteurs japonais au Viet-​Minh durant les premières années de la guerre franco-​v ietnamienne,” Guerres mondiales et con­flits con­temporains (February/March 2001): 81–109; Tachikawa Kyōichi, “Dainiji sekai taisenki no betonamu dokuritsu undō to nihon,” Bōei kenkyū kiyō, dai 3kan, dai nigō (November 2000): 67–88; and Tachikawa Kyōichi, “Indoshina zanryū nihonhei no kenkyū,” Senshi kenkyū nenpō, dai 5 gō (March 2002): 43–58. The Chinese Con­sulate in Guangzhou also struggled with the French con­sulate con­cern­­ing who was go­­ing to get the pick of Japanese war criminals to try. The Chinese said that, in theory, follow­­ing international legal precedent and the stipulations set down by the Allies, if Japanese war criminals were found to have abused or com­mitted atrocities only against the French, then they would hand them over, but not if they

368

Notes to Pages 203–209

had harmed Chinese. Then the Chinese retained the right to charge the Japanese. Waijiaobu 020–00000–1163A, “Zhanfan shenpan yu chengzhi,” AH. 75. RG 84, Records of the Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State, China, U.S. Embassy, Nanking, General Records, 1946–48, Box 19, “Folder 711,” NAUS. 76. Ibid. 77. Ogasawara Kiyoshi, “Shōkaiseki o tsukutta nihon shōkōdan,” 161. 78. Petersen, “The Intelligence That Wasn’t,” 205–206. 79. Word in italics was underlined for emphasis in the original. Major General William C. Chase to Minister Yu Ta-​Wei, 6 April 1955, in ‘Wo zhengfu shouzhang yu mei yaoyuanhuitan jiluan,’ N’36–06, 00034450, 00090046,47, 56, MDA. 80. Zhou Yan, “Zhanhou riben de aiwanbang yu zhongri guanxi,” Riben yanjiu jilin (Shangban niankan), (2009): 1. 81. Marius Jansen, The Japanese and Sun Yat Sen (Harvard University Press, 1954); Sven Saaler and Christopher W. A. Szpilman, eds., Pan-​Asianism: A Documentary History, Volume 1: 1850–1920, and Pan-​Asianism: A Documentary History, Volume 2: 1920–Present (Rowman and Littlefield, 2011). 82. Fukamachi Hideo, “Shi ka? teki ka? Shō Kaiseki, En Shakuzan no ryūnichi keiken to kindai seisaku,” in Kishi Toshihiko, Tanigaki Mariko, and Fukamachi Hideo, eds., Mosaku suru kindai nicchū kankei, taiwa to kyōson no jidai (Tokyo daigaku shuppankai, 2009), 61–62. 83. Stephen Con­nor, “Side-​Stepp­­ing Geneva: Japanese Troops under British Con­trol, 1945–7,” Journal of Con­temporary History (2010): 389–405; see also Steve Tsang, The Cold War’s Odd Couple: The Unintended Partnership between the Republic of China and the UK, 1950–1958 (I. B. Tauris, 2006). 84. Hakudan no kiroku o hozonzurukai, ed., “Hakudan monogatari, (5): 40. 85. Hakudan no kiroku o hozonzurukai, ed., “Hakudan monogatari (11), dai gowa,” Kaikō (August 1993): 28. Com­plicat­­ing this historical assessment is Nagahara Yōko ed., Shokuminchi sekininron—​datsushokuminchika no hikakushi (Aoki shoten, 2009). 86. Satō Takumi, Hachigatsu jūgonichi no shinwa—​shūsen kinenbi no mediagaku (Chikuma shobō, 2005); Katō Kiyofumi, Dainihon teikoku hōkai—​higashi ajia no 1945nen (Chūkō shinsho, 2009). 87. Kawashima Shin et al., eds., Nittai kankeishi 1945–2008 (Tokyo daigaku shuppankai, 2009). 88. Ogata Taketora was also Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru’s choice as special envoy to Taiwan in his bid to create an intelligence network con­cern­­ing mainland China. Masaya Inoue, “Yoshida Shigeru’s ‘Counter Infiltration’ Plan against China,” 5–8. 89. “Saikin no senpan kankei jōkyō ni tsuite renraku kaisō,” 4A-​022-​0 0, Hei 11 hōmu 07314100, NAJ. 90. Iwatsubo Hirohide, “Paidan—​chūka minkoku gunji komondan ni tsuite,” 355. 91. Su visited the Yasukuni shrine in April 2005 and caused an international ruckus. For more con­cern­­ing how this incident fits into larger historio-­

Notes to Pages 209–215

369

political debates in Taiwan and Japan, see Barak Kushner, “Nationality and Nostalgia: The Manipula­­tion of Memory in Japan, Taiwan, and China since 1990,” International History Review 29, no. 4 (December 2007): 793–820. 92. Matsushima Kazumi, “Kokumintō no saiken ni kanyo shita ‘paidan’ (sono 2)—​saikin no taiwan ni okeru hōdō to hyōka,” Hōyū (March 2006): 78–79. 93. Liu Jie and Kawashima Shin, “Gurōbaruka jidai no higashi ajia,” in Kawashima Shin and Hattori Ryūji, eds., Higashi ajia kokusai seijishi (Nagoya daigaku shuppankai, 2007), 323-​354. For a discussion on how these ideas leak into con­temporary international relations, see Tsuyoshi Hasegawa and Kazuhiko Togo, eds., East Asia’s Haunted Present Historical Memories and the Resurgence of Nationalism (Praeger, 2008).

6. An Unsatisf y ing Peace

1. Ian Neary, The State and Politics in Japan (Polity, 2002), 59. 2. Xiaob­­ing Li, Allan R. Millet, and Bin Yu, eds. and trans., Mao’s General Remember Korea (University Press of Kansas, 2001), 26. 3. While not definitively com­­­ing down on either side, Ruth Rogaski makes the case that Chinese allegations were linked to other longer-​term con­cerns about how the state was viewed by the populace. See “Nature, Annihilation, and Modernity: China’s Korean War Germ-​Warfare Experience Reconsidered,” Journal of Asian Studies 61, no. 2 (May 2002): 381–415. Historian Tom Buchanan suggests a more elaborate plot to hoax a visit­­ing com­mission headed by noted historian of Chinese science, Joseph Needham. See “The Courage of Galileo: Joseph Needham and the ‘Germ Warfare’ Allegations in the Korean War,” History (October 2001): 503–522. 4. Igarashi Takeshi, Nichibei kankei to higashi ajia: rekishiteki bunmyaku to mirai no kōso (Tokyo daigaku shuppankai, 1999), 121–123. 5. Mikuriya Takashi, “Tōkyō saiban minaoshi ga motomeru ‘kokkaron,’ ” Chūō kōron (October 2005): 246. Bruce Cumings avers that the Korean War is not a proxy or international war but a civil war, best summarized in his The Korean War: A History (Modern Library, 2010). 6. Michael Schaller, Altered States: The United States and Japan since the Occupa­­ tion (Oxford University Press, 1997), 25. 7. For more on this and the subsequent split, see Odd Arne Westad, ed., Brothers in Arms: The Rise and Fall of Sino-​Soviet Alliance, 1945–1963 (Stanford University Press, 1998). 8. Thomas Christensen, Worse than a Monolith: Alliance Politics and Problems of Coercive Diplomacy in Asia (Princeton University Press, 2011), 45. 9. Odd Arne Westad, Decisive Encounters: The Chinese Civil War: 1946–1950 (Stanford University Press, 2003), 322. 10. Patrick Wright, Passport to Peking: A Very British Mission to Mao’s China (Oxford University Press, 2010). 11. Tan Yihui, Jinsanjiao guojun xueleishi (1950–1981) (Zhongyang yanjiuyuan: lianj­­ing chuban gongsi, 2009). 12. Qiang Zhai, The Dragon, The Lion and The Eagle: Chinese, British-​American Relations, 1949–1958 (Kent State University Press, 1994), 135.

370

Notes to Pages 216–220

13. The Chinese and North Koreans did go to tremendous propaganda lengths to demonstrate their benevolence of Allied POWs dur­­ing the Korean War, by even hold­­ing an Olympics event over twelve days in November 1952. See Zhu Jiguang, “Zhanfuyingli de auyunhui,” Huanqiu junshi, 18qi (2002): 58–60. The legal and political issues that needed to be resolved regard­­ing Korean War POWs were almost more ideologically tax­­ing than what the Allies faced dur­­ing World War II. See Jan P. Charmatz and Harold M. Wit, “Repatria­­tion of Prisoners of War and the 1949 Geneva Con­ven­­tion Author,” Yale Law Journal 62, no. 3 (February 1953): 391–415. POW: The Fight Con­ tinues after the Battle, The Report of the Secretary of Defense’s Advisory Com­ mittee on Prisoners of War (U.S. Government Print­­ing Office, August 1955). 14. Chen Jian, Mao’s China and the Cold War (University of North Carolina Press 2001), 109–110. 15. Steven Casey, Sell­­ing the Korean War: Propaganda, Politics, and Public Opinion, 1950–1953 (Oxford University Press, 2008), 285–286. 16. Schaller, Altered States, 21. 17. Mineo Nakajima, “Foreign Relations: From the Korean War to the Bandung Line,” in Dennis Twitchett and John K. Fairbank, eds., The Cambridge History of China, vol. 14, The People’s Republic, Part I: The Emergence of Revolutionary China 1949–1965 (Cambridge University Press, 1987), 260. 18. Schaller, Altered States, 79. 19. Christensen, Worse than a Monolith, as quoted on 38. 20. Julia C. Strauss, “Paternalist Terror: The Campaign to Suppress Counter­ revolutionaries and Regime Con­solida­­tion in the People’s Republic of China, 1950–1953,” Com­parative Studies in Society and History 44, no. 1 (January 2002): 83. 21. Ibid., 87. 22. Asahi shimbun, April 28, 1952 (Tokyo edition). 23. Inaba Masao, ed., Okamura Yasuji taishō shiryō jō, senjō kaisōhen (Hara shobō, 1970), 103. See also Okamura’s com­ments in a volume dedicated to the memory of Tang Enbo, Tō Onhaku kinenkai, ed., Nihon no tomo Tō Onhaku shōgun (Tō onhaku kinenkai, 1954), 149–160. 24. Weng Youwei and Zhao Wenyuan, Jiang Jieshi yu riben de enen yuanyuan (Renmin chubanshe, 2008), 301. 25. Ibid., 302–304. 26. Inaba Masao, ed., Okamura Yasuji taishō shiryō jō, senjō kaisōhen, 109. 27. Yoshiko Nozaki, War Memory, Nationalism and Educa­­tion in Postwar Japan, 1945–2007 (Routledge, 2008); Yoshida Yutaka, Nihonjin no sensōkan (Iwanmi shoten, 1995), in particular 28–84. Yin Yanjun, “Nihon no sengo shori,” in Akazawa Shirō et al., eds., Nenpō nihon gendaishi vol. 5 (Gendai shiryō shuppan, 1999), 85–116. 28. Takamae Eiji, trans. and adapted from the Japanese by Robert Rickets and Sebastian Swann, Inside GHQ—​The Allied Occupa­­tion of Japan and Its Legacy (Continuum Publishers, 2002), 510. 29. A full text of the treaty can be found at http://www.taiwandocuments.org /sanfrancisco01.htm.

Notes to Pages 221–225

371

30. The letter was dated October 1951, Inoue Tadao shiryō, Senpan shakuhō undō, YKA. 31. Imamura’s war crimes trials are the prime example for postwar criticism. At first arrested in Rabaul (Australian territory then) he was imprisoned. He was con­v icted in an Australian military court, sentenced to ten years, and sent to Indonesia, where he was found not guilty. In 1950 he repatriated back to Australia where he served out his sentence on Manus Island (part of the New Guinea archipelago) until 1953. That prison closed then, so he served out the rest of his term at Sugamo Prison in Tokyo. 32. 393.4, Inoue Tadao shiryō, Senpan shakuhō shiyō, 469, Inoue Tadao 40ki shiryō hōmu daijin kanbō shihō hōsei chōsabu. The huge tome is marked “do not release beyond this section,” in red on the front cover, YKA. 33. D’1.3.0–1, “Honpō senpan saiban kankei zakken, dai ni kan,” GKSK. 34. John Swenson-​Wright discusses the difficult political challenges in untangling the BC class war criminals issue in his introduc­­tion to the Sasakawa Ryōichi diary. See “Sasakawa Ryouichi: Unravell­­ing an Enigma,” in Ryoichi Sasakawa and Ken Hijino, trans., Sugamo Diary (Hurst/Columbia, 2010), xiii–xxxi. 35. “Sugamo Interview,” typed AP story by William Barnard, dated September 3 but no year, though we can assume from the file that it is 1952. Hei-​11-​4A. 21 5872, Sensō saiban sankō shiryō, NAJ. 36. Kishi was an example of the uneven pursuit of postwar justice in Japan. He was imprisoned as an A class war criminal but then never formally indicted nor brought to trial. 37. “Sugamo Interview,” typed AP story by William Barnard. 38. Inoue Tadao shiryō, Senpan shakuhō undō, YKA. 39. Inoue Tadao shiryō, Senpan shakuhō shiyō, 40ki shiryō, hōmu daijin kanbō shihō hōsei chōsabu, 433, YKA. 40. The actual transla­­tion would be more along the lines of “I want to become a shellfish,” mean­­ing the author wants to roll up and hide, away from the outside world in which he finds himself in the predicament of be­­ing labeled a BC class war criminal. Ishida Takashi, “Sensō sekininron saikō,” Nenpō gendaishi 2 (Gendai shiryō shuppan, 1996), 1–60 41. Matsunami Jun, “Senryō kaikaku to shite no BCkyū sensō hanzai saiban,” Hōgaku kenkyū (Osaka), dai 28kan, dai 1 gō (September 2001), 209. Naoko Shimazu, “Popular Representations of the Past: The Case of Postwar Japan,” Journal of Con­temporary History 38, no. l (January 2003): 101–116. 42. In a court deposi­­tion in 1959, Katō claimed that the authors of the movie script had inappropriately purloined the con­tents of his 1953 essay “Kurueru senpan shikeishū,” which had been published in a collec­­tion of BC class war criminals letters titled, Are kara shichinen—​gakutō senpan no gakuchū kara no tegemi. See “Chosakuken funsō no keika shiryō,” in Katō Tetsutarō, Watakushi wa kai ni naritai: aru BCkyū senpan no sakebi (Shunjūsha, 1994), 226–232. 43. “Ichi senpansha, ‘watashitachi wa saigunbi no hikikae kippu de wa nai—​ senpan shakuhō no imi ni tsuite’,” Sekai (October 1952): 231.

372

Notes to Pages 226–234

44. Ibid., 243. 45. Chaen Yoshio, “ ‘Watakushi wa kai ni naritai’ shimatsuki,” Sensō saiban shokeisha issen, Bessatsu rekishi dokuhon, dai 15gō (Shinjinbutsu ōraisha, 1993), 243. Sandra Wilson, “War, Soldier and Na­­tion in 1950s Japan,” International Journal of Asian Studies 5, no. 2 (2008): 198; Utsumi Aiko, “Kaisetsu,” in Katō Tetsutarō, Watakushi wa kai ni naritai: aru BCkyū senpan no sakebi, 264. Katō’s chapters (written under pseudonyms) in the book are: “Kurueru senpan shikeishū,” 101–118, and “Sensō ha hanzai de aru ka,” 171–192, in Īzuka Kōji, ed., Are kara shichinen—​gakutō senpan no gokuchū kara no tegami (Kōbunsha, 1953). 46. “Ichi senpansha,” Sekai, 233–234. 47. Katō Tetsurō, “Watashi wa naze ‘kai ni naritai’ no isho o kaita ka,” in Katō Tetsutarō, Watakushi wa kai ni naritai: aru BCkyū senpan no sakebi, 105–122 (originally published in the March 1959 Fujin kōron magazine); Wilson, “War, Soldier and Na­­tion in 1950s Japan,” 197–202. 48. Shin Hakyoung, “Taishū bunka kara miru BCkyū senpan saiban to ‘sekinin,’ ” Nihon bungakubukai hōkoku, dai 4kai kokusai nihongaku konsōshiamu, http://hdl.handle.net/10083/49136, 187. 49. As quoted in Utsumi Aiko, Sugamo purizon: senpantachi no heiwa undō (Yoshikawa kōbunkan, 2004), 175. Watakushi wa kai ni naritai, Tōho films, 1959. 50. Such heinous incidents did, in fact, occur and can be frequently read about in soldiers’ personal diaries. See Kuwajima Setsurō, Kahoku senki (Tosho shuppansha, 1978), 38. 51. Hayashi Hirofumi, Senpan saiban no kenkyū: senpan saiban seisaku no keisei kara tokyo saiban BCkyū saiban made (Bensei shuppan, 2010), 7–8. 52. Hōmu daijin kanbō shihō hōsei chōsabu, ed., Sensō hanzai saiban gaishiyō, 1973. This book is a bound version of mimeographed copies. It is inscribed toriatsukai chūi (handle with care), and one has to wonder what the gov­­ern­­ ment was worried about. Toyota Kumao talks about his decision to do this work in “Sensō saiban no ato shimatsu ni tuite,” Suikō (July 1973): 22–24. 53. Barak Kushner, The Thought War—​Japanese Imperial Propaganda (University of Hawaii Press, 2006), 25. 54. 393.4, Sensō saiban kankei shiryō. This collec­­tion is part of the Yasukuni Kaiko archive from Inoue Tadao shiryō, Senpan kankei shiryō shūshū ni kansuru tsuzuri, YKA. 55. “Iwayuru ‘zhanfan’ no shakuhō, genkai nado ni taisuru ippan kankoku no jūyō kyūsei ni tuite no iken,” June 2, 1952, Hei-​11-​4A. 21 5872, Sensō saiban sankō shiryō, NAJ. The issue of transla­­tion just between English and Japanese as a legal problem has been treated by Kayoko Takeda, Interpret­­ing the Tokyo War Crimes Trial: A Sociopolitical Analysis (University of Ottawa Press, 2010). 56. “Senpan shori hōsaku (an), October 1, 1952, Hei-​11-​4A. 21 5872, Sensō saiban sankō shiryō, NAJ. 57. Hei-​11-​4A. 21 5872, Sensō saiban sankō shiryō, NAJ. 58. Ibid. 59. Ibid.

Notes to Pages 234–242

373

60. Ibid. The report uses an abbreviated form of the Japanese idiom kateba kangun makereba zokugun, which means that “the officer’s army wins and the pirate’s army loses” or, in plain English, “losers are always in the wrong.” 61. In many places the men­­tion of “war” was dropped from the title of the association. 62. Hei-​11-​4A. 21 5872, Sensō saiban sankō shiryō, NAJ. 63. Ibid. 64. 393.4, Inoue Tadao shiryō, Senpan shakuhō undō, YKA. 65. Ibid. See also Ariyama Teruo, Senryōki media-​shi kenkyū: jiyū to tōsei, 1945–nen (Kawashima shobō, 1996). 66. 393.4, Inoue Tadao shiryō, Senpan shakuhō undō, YKA. 67. 393.4, Inoue Tadao shiryō, Sensō saiban to shotaisaku narabi ni kagai ni okeru senpan jukeisha no hikiage, hikiage enjohogokyoku hōmu chōsashitsu 29, produced in September 1954, YKA. 68. Franziska Seraphim, War Memory and Social Politics in Japan, 1945–2005 (Harvard University Press, 2006), 79. 69. 393.4, Inoue Tadao shiryō, Senpan shakuhō undō, YKA. 70. Ibid. 71. Ibid. The story of the Japanese civilized treatment of German POWs dur­­ing World War I has become part of a popular narrative in Japan about the benevolent imperial military and was further explored in the rather sappy 2006 Japanese film Baruto no Gakuen. The film depicts a happy relationship between Japanese guards and townspeople and the grateful German prisoners of war. 72. 393.4, Inoue Tadao shiryō, Senpan shakuhō undō, YKA. 73. Ibid. 74. The statue was removed in 2007 while the sta­­tion was remodeled, but as of 2012 when I spoke with Japan Railway officials I was told that while the statue is slated to be returned, no specific date or timetable has been established and the piece remains in storage. 75. Tajima Shinyū, ed., Tajima Ryūjun no shōgai (Ryūjunjizōsonhōsankai, 2006), 87. 76. Ibid., 83. 77. Ibid., 89. 78. Sugamo isho hensankai kankō jimusho, editors, Seiki no isho (Sugamo isho hensankai kankō jimusho, 1953). 79. Sugamo isho hensankai, ed., Seiki no isho (Shinkosha, 1953), (Tajima Ryūjun, preface, 2). 80. Shunsuke Tsurumi, A Cultural History of Postwar Japan, 1945–1980 (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987), 13–27. 81. Sugamo isho hensankai, ed., Seiki no isho (Shinkosha, 1953), 4. 82. Tajima had started a movement to remember the executed BC class war criminals by publish­­ing their last wills and testaments. The proceeds from this bestseller, Seiki no isho (Sugamo isho hensankai kankō jimusho), published in 1953, helped provide at least part of the money that funded the com­mission of the statue, accord­­ing to the April 20, 2009, Mainichi shimbun.

374

Notes to Pages 244–251

83. For more on this theme, see Barak Kushner, “Heroes, victims, and the quest for peace: war monuments and the con­tradictions of Japan’s post-​imperial com­memoration,” in Frank Müller and Dominik Geppert, eds., Imperial Sites of Memory (Manchester University Press, forthcoming). 84. John Nelson, “Social Memory as Ritual Practice: Com­memorat­­ing Spirits of the Military Dead at Yasukuni Shinto Shrine,” Journal of Asian Studies 62, no. 2 (May 2003): 443–467. 85. 393.4, Inoue Tadao shiryō, Senpan shakuhō yōshi, 755, Inoue Tadao, 40ki, hōmu daijin kanbō shihō hōsei chōsabu, YKA. 86. Ibid. 87. 393.4, Inoue Tadao shiryō, Senpan shakuhō yōshi, 756, Inoue Tadao, 40ki, hōmu daijin kanbō shihō hōsei chōsabu, YKA. 88. Tony Judt, “The Past Is Another Country: Myth and Memory in Postwar Europe,” in Istvan Deak et al., eds., The Politics of Retribu­­tion in Europe: World War II and Its Aftermath (Princeton University Press, 2000), 319. 89. Masahiro Yamamoto, “Japan’s ‘Unsettling’ Past: Article 11 of San Francisco Peace Treaty and Its Ramifications,” Journal of U.S.-​China Public Administra­ ­tion 7, no. 5 (serial no. 55) (May 2010): 1–16. 90. Timothy Brook, “The Tokyo Judgment and the Rape of Nanking,” Journal of Asian Studies 60, no. 3 (August 2001): 675.

7. Socialist M agnanimit y

1. Wang Zhanping, ed., Zhengyi de shenpan: zuigao renmin fayuan tebie junshi fat­­ing shenpan riben zhanfan jishi (Renmin fayuan chubanshe, 1991), 486 2. There is also a whole other subset of related POWs who were tried, namely Chinese officials who collaborated with the Japanese and KMT soldiers who were captured dur­­ing the civil war. My research here only focuses on the Japanese interac­­tion with the CCP even though the KMT should not be forgotten because it is clearly linked. 3. Handō Kazutoshi et al., BCkyū saiban o yomu (Nihon keizai shimbun shuppansha, 2010), 24–25; Iwakawa Takashi, Kotō no tsuchi to narutomo: BCkyū senpan saiban (Kōdansha, 1995), 544–547. 4. Michael Hunt, “Beij­­ing and the Korean Crisis, June 1950–June 1951,” Political Science Quarterly 107, no. 3 (autumn 1992): 470. 5. Tian Huan, ed., Zhanhou zhongri guanxi wenxianji, 1945–1970 (Zhonguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 1996), 57–58. 6. The speech was delivered on March 18, 1957, after the trials but is still quite indicative of the idea behind international law in China. 7. Dong Biwu, “Zaijunfa jianchayuan jianchazhang, junshifayuan yuanzhang huiyishan de jianhua,” March 18, 1957, in Zhonggong zhongyang wenjian yanjiushibian, Jianguo yilai zhongyao wenjian xuanbian, vol. 10 (Zhongyang wenjian chubanshe, 1994), 140. 8. Ibid., 142. 9. Edward Fung, The Intellectual Foundations of Chinese Modernity: Cultural and Political Thought in the Republican Era (Cambridge University Press, 2010), 159.

Notes to Pages 252–256

375

10. Philip Piccigallo, The Japanese on Trial: Allied War Crimes Operations in the East, 1945–1951 (University of Texas Press, 1979), 150. Little scholarly work has been com­pleted on the 1949 Soviet trials due to inaccessible archives. 11. Ōsawa Takeshi, “Maboroshi no nihonjin ‘senpan’ shakuhō keikaku to Shū Onlai,” Chūgoku kenkyū geppō (June 2007): 1; and Ōsawa Takeshi, “Chūka jinmin kyōwakoku no nihonjin senpan shori—​sabakareta teikoku,” in Masuda Hiroshi, Dainihon teikou no hōkai to hikiage fukuin (Keiō gijiku daigaku shuppansha, 2012), 109–138. 12. For more on the CCP trials, see Adam Cathcart and Patricia Nash, “War Criminals and the Road to Sino-​Japanese Normalization: Zhou Enlai and the Shenyang Trials, 1954–1956,” Twentieth Century China 34, no. 2 (April 2009): 89–111. For details on how important Japan was to the postwar CCP message of revolution, see Cagdas Ungor, “Reach­­ing the Distant Com­rade: Chinese Com­munist Propaganda Abroad (1949–1976),” PhD disserta­­tion at the State University of New York at Binghamton, Department of His­ tory, 2009. Also see Toyoda Masayuki, “Chūgoku no tainichi senpan shori seisaku—​genzaishugi kara ‘kandai’ e,” Shien 69, no. 181 (March 2009): 15–44. 13. Arai Toshio, “Chūgoku no senpan seisaku to wa nan datta no ka,” Chūkiren (September 2000): 19. 14. Li Chunq­­ing et al., eds., “Riben wenti quanmianlun,” originally printed in 1948, reproduced in vol. 2 of Zhongri wenti zhongyao guanxi ziliaoji (Ryūkeishosha, 1972), 128. 15. Ibid., 137. 16. Chen Jian, “The Ward Case and the Emergence of Sino-​A merican Con­ frontation, 1948–1950,” Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs no. 30 (July 1993): 157. 17. Ibid., 163. 18. Ibid., 165. The USSR was initially reluctant to abolish its treaty with the Chinese Nationalists and switch support to the Chinese Com­munists even in late 1949. See Chen Jian, Mao’s China and the Cold War (University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 52. 19. Yang Kuisong, “Huade shijian yu xinzhongguo duimei zhengce de queding,” Lishi yanjiu 5 (October 1994): 104–118. 20. Chen, “The Ward Case,” 167. 21. Michael Schaller, The American Occupa­­tion of Japan: The Origins of the Cold War in Asia (Oxford University Press, 1985); Marc S. Gallicchio, The Cold War Begins in Asia: American East Asian Policy and the Dall of the Japanese Empire (Columbia University Press, 1988); John Swenson-​Wright, Unequal Allies?: United States Security and Alliance Policy toward Japan, 1945–1960 (Stanford University Press, 2005). 22. Allyn and Adele Rickett, Prisoners of Libera­­tion (Cameron Associates, 1957); see also Derek Bodde, Pek­­ing Diary: A Year of Revolu­­tion (Schuman, 1950). 23. In the early 1950s, reminiscent of other Nationalist Chinese–assisted fiascos, the CIA sent in two spies, John Downey and Richard Fecteau. Dar­­ing but fully unprepared and lack­­ing a strategic plan, the duo were quickly shot down on their first mission in 1952. The CIA’s plans for undermin­­ing

376

Notes to Pages 256–260

­ om­munist rule in China were numerous and mostly prone to failure. C Nicholas Dujmovic, “Two CIA Prisoners in China, 1952–73,” Studies in Intelligence 50, no. 4 (2006); James Lilley, China Hands: Nine Decades of Adventure, Espionage, and Diplomacy in Asia (Public Affairs, 2004): 78–83. Lilley, later U.S. Ambassador to Beijing, describes the “three prongs” of CIA covert operations against the Chinese mainland at the time: support of Nationalist efforts, the Third Force program, and unilateral operations. See also Frank Holober, Raiders of the China Coast: CIA Covert Operations dur­­ing the Korean War (Naval Institute Press, 1999). 24. Ren Haisheng, ed., Gongheguo teshe zhanfan shimo (Huawen chubanshe, 1995), 6–7. 25. Shijie zhishi, ed., “Zhonggong zhongyang guanyu nanj­­ing maiguo zhengfu shifang riben qinhua zhanfan shengming,” February 4, 1949, in Riben wenti benjian huibian, vol. 1 (Shijie zhishishe, 1955), 36. 26. Shijie zhishi, ed., “Zhonggong zhongyang wei jinian kangri zhanzheng 12guonian fabu de kouhao,” July 1, 1949, in Riben wenti benjian huibian, vol. 1, 39. 27. Shijie zhishi, ed., “Zhou’s announcement on May 15, 1950,” in Riben wenti benjian huibian, vol. 1, 45; Ren Haisheng, ed., Gongheguo teshe zhanfan shimo, 20. 28. Shijie zhishi, ed., “Guanyu zhanzheng zuifan de jianzhu he chengfa,” part of Shen Junru’s September 6, 1951, report at the International Democratic Law Workers Association, in Riben wenti benjian huibian, vol. 1, 78. 29. These allegations are somewhat borne out by research on the No Gunri atrocities dur­­ing the Korean War. However, journalist Sang-​Hun Choe in his talk at Cambridge on November 22, 2010, also said that both sides com­ mitted atrocities against civilians—​the Americans did not monopolize wartime violence. 30. Chinese sources put the total at 1,069. Yuan Shaoy­­ing and Yang Guizhen, eds., Con­g ren dao gui, con­g gui dao ren: riben zhongguo guihuanzhe lianluohui yanjiu (Shehui kexue wenxian chubshe, 2002), 13–14. Tao Siju, ed., Xin zhongguo di yiren gongan buzhang Luo Ruiq­­ing (Qunzhong chubanshe, 1996), 117. 31. For a full list of the defendants’ names and sentences, see Arai Toshio and Fujiwara Akira, eds., Shinryaku no shōgen: Chūgoku ni okeru nihonjin senpan jihitsu kyōjutsusho (Iwanami shoten, 1998), 278. 32. Kweku Ampiah, The Political and Moral Imperatives of the Bandung Con­ference of 1955: The Reactions of US, UK, and Japan (Global Oriental, 2007), 203–205. For more see Miyagi Taizō, Bandon kaigi to nihon no ajia fukki (Sōshisha, 2001). 33. Matthew Jones, “A ‘Segregated’ Asia?: Race, the Bandung Con­ference, and Pan-​Asianist Fears in American Thought and Policy, 1954–1955,” Diplomatic History 29, no. 5 (November 2005): 841–868. 34. Ampiah, Political and Moral Imperatives, 24. 35. Jones, “A ‘Segregated’ Asia?,” 854. 36. Ungor, “Reach­­ing the Distant Com­rade,” 63. For Japan’s reac­­tion and participa­­tion at the Bandung con­ference, see Ampiah, Political and Moral Imperatives, and his “Japan at the Bandung Con­ference: An Attempt to Assert an Independent Diplomacy,” in Iokibe Makoto, Caroline Rose,

Notes to Pages 260–264

377

Tomaru Junko, and John Weste, eds., Japanese Diplomacy in the 1950s: From Isola­­tion to Integra­­tion (Routledge, 2008). 37. Mineo Nakajima, “Foreign Relations: From the Korean War to the Bandung Line,” in Dennis Twitchett and John K. Fairbank, eds., The Cambridge His­ tory of China, vol. 14, The People’s Republic, Part I: The Emergence of Revo­ lutionary China 1949–1965 (Cambridge University Press, 1987), 259–289. 38. Ampiah, Political and Moral Imperatives, 98. 39. Ibid., 186–187. 40. Compare Song’s assessment of CCP trials with Ōsawa Takeshi, “Maboroshi no nihonjin ‘senpan’ shakuhō keikaku to Shū Onlai,” 5–6. 41. 105–00220–06(1), “Guanyu shifang riben zhanfan wenti de qingshishijian, baogao, minglingdeng,” February 28, 1955–April 13, 1955, MFAC. 42. 105–00220–06(1), “Zuigao renmin jianchayuan danzu baogao,” February 19, 1955, MFAC. 43. Nakajima Mineo, “Sino-​Soviet Con­fronta­­tion in Historical Perspective,” in Akira Iriye and Yonosuke Nagai, eds., The Origins of the Cold War in Asia (Columbia Press, 1977), 208–209. 44. Ibid., 211. 45. Maksim Zagorul’ko, ed., Voennoplennye v SSSR 1939–1956: dokumenty i materialy (Prisoners of War in the USSR, 1939–1956: documents and materials; Logos, 2000), 864, Document #8.39. The original source as listed in the archive and quoted accord­­ing to con­ventions of Slavonic studies scholars: GARF (State Archive of the Russian Federation), f. 9401, op. 1, d. 855, l. 77–82, Original document. 46. Maksim Zagorul’ko, ed., Voennoplennye v SSSR 1939–1956: dokumenty i materialy (Prisoners of War in the USSR, 1939–1956: documents and materials; Moscow: Logos, 2000), 876, Document #8.49 (Original source: Centre for the Preserva­­tion of Historical-​Documentary Collections), f. 1/p, op. 01e, d. 46, l. 219–220, Original document). I thank my graduate student Sherzod Muminov for find­­ing and translat­­ing these Russian language documents. 47. Arai Toshio, “Chūgoku no senpan seisaku to wa nan datta no ka,” 3. 48. Kikuchi Kazutaka, Nihonjin hansen heishi to nicchū sensō: jūkei kokumin seifu chīki no horyo shūyōjo to kanren sasete (Ochanomizu shobō, 2003), 199–208; Arai Toshio, “Chūgoku no senpan seisaku to wa nan datta no ka,”,4; Arai Toshio shiryō hozonkai, ed., Chūgoku bujun senpan kanrisho shokuin no shōgen: shashinka Arai Toshio no nokoshita shigoto (Nashi no kasha, 2003), 56. Shi Zhe published different postwar diaries but does not seem to men­­tion the Japanese transfer of war criminals incident in his descrip­­tion of Mao’s visit. See Zai lishi juda shenbian, Shi Zhe huiyilu (Zhongyang wenjian chubanshe, 1991). Barak Kushner, The Thought War: Japanese Imperial Propaganda, see Chapter 5, “The Japanese Propaganda Struggle on the Mainland.” 49. Fushun shi zhengxie wenshi weiyuanhui, ed., Weiman huangdi Pu Yi ji riben zhanfan gaizao jishi (Zhongguo wenshi chubanshe, 1990), 21. 50. Arai Toshio, “Chūgoku no senpan seisaku to wa nan datta no ka,” 6–7. 51. Tao Siju, ed., Xin zhongguo di yiren gongan buzhang Luo Ruiqing, 118–134. 52. This is now reprinted in expanded and revised form, Chūkiren, ed., Kanzenban sankō, Banseisha, 1984. The full history of the Chūkiren group,

378

Notes to Pages 264–270

their trial experiences, and their activities in Japan to promote peace with China and educate subsequent generations about their war crimes has been written up in their edited volume, Chūgoku kikansha renrakukai, ed., Kaette kita senpantachi no kōhansei: chūgoku kikansha renrakukai no 40nen (Shinpū shobō, 1996). Some individual former prisoners published their accounts even more rapidly. See Hirano Reiji, Ningen kaizō, watashi wa chūgoku no senpan de atta (Sanichi shobō, 1956). For English interviews see James Dawes, Evil Men (Harvard University Press, 2013). 53. Dur­­ing his time with the Japanese prisoners Jin Yuan was assistant and then eventually warden. Follow­­ing the prisoners’ release he con­tinued to work at the prison until 1978. Fushun shi zhengxie wenshi weiyuanhui, ed., Weiman huangdi Pu Yi ji riben zhanfan gaizao jishi (Zhongguo wenshi chubanshe, 1990), 1. See also Liu Jiachang and Tie Han, Riwei jiang zhanfan gaizao jishi: zhongguo fushun zhanfan guanlisuo de qiji (Chunfeng wenyi chubanshe, 1993). 54. Jin Yuan, Qiyuan yige zhanfan guanli suozhang de huiyi (Zhongguo renmin jiefangjun chubanshe, 1999). Jin Yuan published another book similar to this, Con­g zhanzheng kuangren dao pengyou: gaizao riben zhanfan de chenggong zhi lu (Qunzhong chubanshe, 1986). 55. Furumi Tadayuki, Wasureenu manshūkoku (Keizai ōraisha, 1978), 215–217. 56. Kaeriyama Noriyuki, Ikite iru senpan—​Kanei Sadanao no ninzai (Fuyō shobō shuppan, 2009), 133–134. 57. Jin Yuan, Qiyuan yige zhanfan guanli suozhang de huiyi, 38–39. 58. 6693, “Bujun senpan no so chū ikan no keii to shūyōjonai no gaikyō,” July 7, 1956, archive in TB. 59. Frank Dikötter, “Crime and Punishment in Post-​Libera­­tion China: The Prisoners of a Beij­­ing Gaol in the in the 1950s,” China Quarterly no. 149 (March 1997): 147–159; Frank Dikötter, “The Emergence of Labour Camps in Shandong Province, 1942–1950,” China Quarterly 175 (September 2003): 803–817. 60. Kaeriyama Noriyuki, Ikite iru senpan—​Kanei Sadanao no ninzai, 138–139. 61. 6693, “Bujun senpan no so chū ikan no keii to shūyōjonai no gaikyō,” July 7, 1956, archive in TB. 62. Jin Yuan, Qiyuan yige zhanfan guanli suozhang de huiyi, 60. 63. Ibid., 53. See also October 2005 special issue of the journal Chūkiren, which published a roundtable discussion con­cern­­ing “Bujun senpan kanrisho de no taiken.” The Japanese repatriates from Fushun remembered be­­ing transferred to Harbin much earlier; 6693, “Bujun senpan no so chū ikan no keii to shūyōjonai no gaikyō,” July 7, 1956, archive in TB. 64. How the Com­munists dealt with Chinese Nationalists who had worked with the Japanese or were caught up at the end of the civil war and also incarcerated and reeducated is detailed in Zhongguo renmin zhengzhi xieshang huiyi quanguo weiyuanhui wenshi ziliao yanjiu weiyuanhui, ed., Con­ gzhanfan dao gongmin: yuanguomindang jiangl­­ing gaizao shenghuo de huiyi (Zhongguo wenshi chubanshe, 1987); Shen Zui, Zhanfan gaizao suojianwen (Baix­­ing wenhua shiye, 1987); and Fushun shizhengxie wenshi weiyuanhui, ed., Zhenhan shijie de qiji: weiman huangdi Pu Yi ji riben zhanfan gaizao jishi

Notes to Pages 270–276

379

(Zhongguo wenshi chubanshe, 1990). For more on the former emperor Pu Yi, see Wang Qingxiang, Pu Yi mishi (Tuanji chubanshe, 2007). 65. Inaba Isao and Okumura Waichi, “Taidan, watashitachi wa ari no heitai datta,” Chūkiren (January 2009): 43. The 1929 novel Crab Cannery Boat (Kani kōsen) by Kobayashi Takiji touched a nerve in early Showa Japan by highlight­­ing the exploita­­tion of workers and the poor lives of the labor­­ing underclass. Men on the ships lived below decks in what were called the “kuso tsubo,” or shit pots—​airless and unhealthy holes for sleep­­ing and eat­ ­ing in deplorable con­ditions. See Tomoko Aoyama, Read­­ing Food in Modern Japanese Literature (University of Hawaii Press, 2008), 69, for more on how Kobayashi was arrested, tortured, and killed by the Japanese police a few days after the publica­­tion of his novel, which was banned and not available until after the war. 66. Kaeriyama Noriyuki, Ikite iru senpan—​Kanei Sadanao no ninzai, 150–156. 67. Waijiaobu, “Jiaqiang duiRi xuanchuan,” 0200000–14875A, 1951–54; Waijiaobu, “Feiqu Rifu qianfan,” 020000019748A, 1952–57, AH. 68. “British Embassy Tokyo Memo to Ministry of Foreign Affairs, March 4, 1953,” FO 371/105459, NAUK. 69. Franziska Seraphim, War Memory and Social Politics in Japan, 1945–2005s (Harvard University Press, 2006), 108–119; Ōsawa Takeshi, “Zaika hōjin hikiage kōshō o meguru sengo nicchū kankei,” Ajia kenkyū 49, no. 3 (July 2003): 54–70. For more on Liao’s role with the Japanese war crimes trials and relations after them, see Wu Xuewen and Wang Junyan, Liao Chengzhi yu riben (Zhonggongdang chubanshe, 2007). 70. Cathcart and Nash, “War Criminals and the Road to Sino-​Japanese Normalization,” 96. 71. Kaeriyama Noriyuki, Ikite iru senpan—​Kanei Sadanao no ninzai, 170–171. 72. Tian Huan, ed., Zhanhou zhongri guanxi wenxianji, 1945–1970, 156–160; “Lun zhongri guanxi,” editorial in Renmin Ribao, October 30, 1953. 73. W. Allyn Rickett, “Voluntary Surrender and Con­fession in Chinese Law: The Problems of Con­tinuity,” Journal of Asian Studies 30, no. 4 (August 1971): 797. The select con­fessions of many Japanese war criminals housed in PRC institutions have been republished in a ten volume series, Zhongyang danganguan, ed., Riben qinhua zhanfan bigong (Zhongguo dangan chubanshe, 2005). 74. Jin Yuan, Qiyuan yige zhanfan guanli suozhang de huiyi, 65. 75. Ibid., 66–67. 76. Ibid., 80–83. See also Chūgoku kikansha renrakukai, ed., Watashitachi wa chūgoku de nani o shita ka (Sanichi shobō, 1987), 180–181. 77. Furukawa Takahisa, Aru erīto kanryō no shōwa hishi: Takebe Rokuzō nikki o yomu (Fuyō shobō shuppan), 2006, 204. 78. Jin Yuan, Qiyuan yige zhanfan guanli suozhang de huiyi, 93. Sassa’s con­fession in Japanese can be found in Arai Toshio and Fujiwara Akira, eds., Shinryaku no shōgen: chūgoku ni okeru nihonjin senpan jihitsu kyōjutsusho, 69–81. 79. Motohiro Kobayashi, “An Opium Tug-​of-​War,” in Timothy Brook and Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, eds., Opium Regimes: China, Britain, and Japan, 1839–1952 (University of California Press, 2000), 351; Mark Driscoll,

380

Notes to Pages 276–280

Absolute Erotic, Absolute Grotesque: The Living, Dead, and Undead in Japan’s Imperialism, 1895–1945 (Duke University Press, 2010), 232–240. 80. Jin Yuan, Qiyuan yige zhanfan guanli suozhang de huiyi, 97. For Furumi’s full con­fession, see Arai Toshio and Fujiwara Akira, eds., Shinryaku no shōgen: chūgoku ni okeru nihonjin senpan jihitsu kyōjutsusho, 109–147. 81. Kaeriyama Noriyuki, Ikite iru senpan—​Kanei Sadanao no ninzai, 183–184. Another former prisoner, Miyake Hideya, recalled that this public con­ fession took a lot of courage on Furumi’s part and that it also influenced the Chinese side. Miyake assessed that Furumi’s admission of guilt as a high-​ rank­­ing official allowed many lower-​level soldiers and officials to be released. See Miyake’s reminiscence in Furumi Tadayuki kaisōroku kankōkai, ed., Kaisō Furumi Tadayuki (Furumi Tadayuki kaisōroku kankōkai, 1984), 241. 82. Furumi Tadayuki, Wasureenu manshūkoku, 226. 83. Arai Toshio and Fujiwara Akira, eds., Shinryaku no shōgen: Chūgoku ni okeru nihonjin senpan jihitsu kyōjutsusho, 282. See also Tanabe Toshio, “Chūgoku senpan Suzuki Hiraku chūjō no yūryo,” Seiron (October 1999): 274–287. 84. Arai Toshio, “Chūgoku no senpan seisaku to wa nan datta no ka,” 10. Furumi wrote in his postwar memoirs about the Fushun deten­­tion center in Furumi Tadayuki, “Yume narishi ōdōrakushi manshūkoku,” in Mikuni Ichirō and Ida Rintarō, eds., Shōwashi tanbō, vol. 5, Shūsen zengo, (Kadokawa bunko 1985), 69. 85. Arai Toshio, “Chūgoku no senpan seisaku to wa nan datta no ka,” 13. 86. Ibid., 12. 87. Arai Toshio, “Sabaku to wa nani ka,” Kikan chūgoku no. 61 (summer 2000): 35–36. 88. A Japanese summary of Suzuki’s con­fessions can be found in Arai Toshio and Fujiwara Akira, eds., Shinryaku no shōgen: chūgoku ni okeru nihonjin senpan jihitsu kyōjutsusho, 13–29. 89. Jin Yuan, Qiyuan yige zhanfan guanli suozhang de huiyi, 102–104. 90. Shimamura Saburō, Chūgoku kara kaetta kita senpan (Nitchū shuppan, 1975), 76. 91. Kaeriyama Noriyuki, Ikite iru senpan—​Kanei Sadanao no ninzai, 176–177. 92. Ibid., 170–171. 93. It appears that Japanese statesman Takasaki Tatsunosuke’s discussions with Chinese Com­munist Premier Zhou Enlai at the Bandung Con­ference may have gained this privilege for the Japanese war criminal prisoners in CCP jails. See Takasaki Tatsunosuke, “Shū Onrai to kaidan shite,” Chūō kōron (February 1961): 246–252. 94. Guo Zhangjian et al., eds., Riben zhanfan de zaisheng zhidi—​zhongguo fushun zhanfan guanlisuo (Japanese translation) (Wuzhou zhuanbo chubanshe, 2005), 91. There is an identical book with a dual English transla­­tion and the subtitle “Place of New Life of Japanese War Criminals.” The Japanese version is different. 95. Guo Zhangjian et al., eds., Riben zhanfan de zaisheng zhidi—​zhongguo fushun zhanfan guanlisuo, 96. 96. The whole Japanese version of this book documents this process. See Guo Zhangjian et al., eds., Riben zhanfan de zaisheng zhidi—​zhongguo fushun

Notes to Pages 280–282

381

zhanfan guanlisuo. A Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs report secret memo from April 1956 details that these trips began in various groupings around February. The goal was to get the war criminals “to see that China had progressed since they had com­mitted their crimes.” See 105–00502–10, “Zaiya riben canguan qingkuang jianbao,” April 1954, MFAC. 97. The idea of brainwash­­ing and coerc­­ing rational individuals to admit to crimes they did not com­mit was first broached by journalists and scientists follow­­ing American experiences in the Korean War and Chinese accounts stream­­ing into Hong Kong from Com­munist China. See Edward Hunter, Brain-​washing in Red China: The Calculated Destruc­­tion of Men’s Minds (The Vanguard Press, 1951); and Robert Jay Lifton, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of Brainwash­­ing in China (Penguin Books, 1961). 98. Adam J. Zweiback, “The 21 ‘Turncoat GIs’: Nonrepatriations and the Political Culture of the Korean War,” Historian (December 1998): 355. 99. See the articles “Trial for Treason,” Newsweek, November 10, 1952, 31–32; “A Tale of Treachery on Corregidor,” Life, November 24, 1952, 28–29; “Case of the Buddhist Sergeant,” Time, November 24, 1952, 22; and “Million Dollar Loss,” Time, September 6, 1954. For a full treatment of the Provoo case, see Barak Kushner, “Treacherous Allies: The Cold War in East Asia and American Postwar Anxiety,” Journal of Con­temporary History (October 2010): 812–843. 100. The arrest of Ezra Pound, famous expatriate American poet who broadcast anti-​A merican and anti-​Semitic diatribes on the radio, drew public atten­­ tion to the fact that traitors were not always marginal figures. Unlike Provoo who was captured, Pound chose to go to Fascist Italy and actively searched out supporters to listen to his propaganda for Mussolini. To the dismay of many who awaited the trial Pound was found mentally unfit to stand trial and spent a little more than a decade afterward at a Washington, D.C., asylum, housed at public expense. Robert Wernick, “The Strange and Inscrutable Case of Ezra Pound,” Smithsonian 26, no. 9 (December 1995): 112-​127. Also see Julien D. Cornell, The Trial of Ezra Pound: A Documented Account of the Treason Case (J. Day Co., 1966). 101. Rosemary Foot, “The Eisenhower Administration’s Fear of Empower­­ing the Chinese,” Political Science Quarterly 111, no. 3 (autumn 1996), 507; Mark R. Jacobson “ ‘Minds then Hearts’: U.S. Political and Psychological Warfare dur­­ing the Korean War,” PhD dissertation, Ohio State University, 2005, 66: “In order to expose and counter Soviet propaganda dur­­ing the Korean War, the Army launched programs dur­­ing the Korean War to study the specific Com­munist indoctrina­­tion techniques known popularly as ‘brainwashing’. . . .” 102. Arai Toshio, “Chūgoku no senpan seisaku to wa nan datta no ka,” 23. 103. Arai Toshio, “Sabaku to wa nani ka,” 32–33. 104. Yuan Guang, “Dui riben zhanfan de shenpan,” Gemingshi ziliao no. 7 (Wenshi ziliao chubanshe, 1982), 46, 49. 105. The transcript or at least partial official Chinese record of the Shenyang trials, includ­­ing excerpts from the investigations into the men, their con­ fessions, gov­­ern­­ment orders, and trial sec­­tion transcripts is available in Wang

382

Notes to Pages 282–286

Zhanping, ed., Zhengyi de shenpan—​zuigao renmin fayuan tebiejunshi fat­­ing shenpan riben zhanfan jishi (Renmin fayuan chuban she, 1991). 106. Cathcart and Nash, “War Criminals and the Road to Sino-​Japanese Normalization,” 102, may be partly correct when not­­ing that “it was likely that attendance in the courtroom was by invita­­tion only.” Nonetheless, while the trial itself was probably not open to the public as were the KMT trials, the CCP did publicize the events soon after their launch in the main newspaper, the People’s Daily. 107. Wang Zhaofei, “Shenpan riben zhanfan caifang huiyi,” in Quanguo zhengxie ji Liaon­­ing Beij­­ing Shanghai Sichuan Neimenggu Chongq­­ing zhengxie wenshi ziliao weiyuanhui, ed., Gai zao zhan fan ji shi (Zhongguo wenshi chubanshe, 2000), 215–216. 108. CCTV documentary that initially aired on public television and is now available on DVD, Zui yu fa, produced by Zhongguo guoji dianshi zonggongsi, produc­­tion date not provided (two-​DVD set of five episodes). 109. Guo Xiaoye, Riben youling—​wentu duizhao—​erzhan qijian qinhua zhanfan shenpan jishi (Dangdai shijie chubanshe, 2004), 420. For biographical data on these eight Japanese war criminals, see Arai Toshio shiryō hozonkai, ed., Chūgoku bujun senpan kanrisho shokuin no shōgen: shashinka Arai Toshio no nokoshita shigoto, 40–46. The partial con­fession in Japanese for Fujita is 30–39; Uesaka is 40–53; Nagashima is 54–68, in Arai Toshio and Fujiwara Akira, eds., Shinryaku no shōgen: chūgoku ni okeru nihonjin senpan jihitsu kyōjutsusho. 110. Yuan Guang, “Dui riben zhanfan de shenpan,” 50. 111. ht t p://w w w.ne.jp/asa hi /t y uuk iren /website/ back number/02/ hujita _kandaiseisakunituite.htm. This is an online reprint of a slightly altered Japanese article that first appeared in print. Fujita Shigeru, “Chūgoku jinmin no kandai seisaku nit suite,” Chūkiren (September 1997): 19–27. A similar version of the story, which Fujita recounted in speeches around Japan and published, is presented in Chūgoku kikansha renrakukai, ed., Watashitachi wa chūgoku de nani o shita ka, 222–223. See also Yuan Guang, “Dui riben zhanfan de shenpan,” 52. 112. Yuan Guang, “Dui riben zhanfan de shenpan,” 54. 113. Furukawa Takahisa, Aru erīto kanryō no shōwa hishi: Rokuzō nikki o yomu, 204–206. Takebe was indicted with Furumi and others on July 1, 1956, but he was too ill by that point to make it to court. He was sentenced to twenty years for his crimes as leader of Manchukuo but was assessed as hav­­ing a “changed attitude.” Due to his serious illness he was released and allowed to return to Japan where he died in January 1958. 114. Yuan Guang, “Dui riben zhanfan de shenpan,” 55. 115. Saitō’s con­fession is in Arai Toshio and Fujiwara Akira, eds., Shinryaku no shōgen: chūgoku ni okeru nihonjin senpan jihitsu kyōjutsusho, 229–260. See Jōno Hiroshi’s story in two postwar memoirs, Sansei dokuritsu senki—​shūsen yonnenkan mo chūgoku de tatakatta nihonjin no kiroku (Sekkasha, 1967); also see his Chūgoku no hassō (Ushio shuppansha, 1968). Asahi shimbun, April 8, 1964 (Tokyo edition). 116. Liang Zhian and Chen Haibing, eds., Con­g zhanfan dao gongmin—​yuan guomindang jiangl­­ing gaizao shenghuo de huiyi (Zhongguo wenshi chubanshe, 1983), 298–311.

Notes to Pages 286–293

383

117. Saitō Yoshio, Tobiyuku kumo—​saigo no senpan wa kataru, ed. Maeda Kuniko (Yōransha, 1987), 131. 118. For the personal stories of these men, some of whom were ordered by their superiors to stay behind and help rebuild Japan’s empire, see Ikeya Kaoru, Ari no heitai: nihonhei 2600nin sanseishō zanryū no shinshō (Shinchōsha, 2007); and Ikeya’s 2006 film documentary Ari no heitai. 119. Shanxisheng renmin jianchayuan, ed., Zhenxun riben zhanfan jishi (taiyuan): 1952–1956 (Xinhua chubanshe, 1995), introduction, 2. 120. Zhongyang danganguan, Zhongguo dier lishi danganguan, and Jilinsheng shehui kexueyuan, eds., Heben Dazuo yu rijun shanxi, canliu (Zhonghua shudian, 1995), “Zhanfan Heben Dazuo de zuihou suiyue,” 337–364. 121. 6692, “Chūkyō senpan kikansha taigengumi no jitsujō,” Rikujō 941gō, report from July 7, 1956, deposited as an archive in TB. 122. Shanxisheng renmin jianchayuan, ed., Zhenxun riben zhanfan jishi (taiyuan): 1952–1956, introduction, 3–4. 123. Ibid., 487. 124. Ibid., introduction, 42. 125. Ibid., introduction, 66. 126. My main understand­­ing of the development toward trial of the prisoners in Taiyuan is taken from the first half of Shanxisheng renmin jianchayuan, ed., Zhenxun riben zhanfan jishi (taiyuan): 1952–1956. 127. Ren Haisheng, ed., Gongheguo teshe zhanfan shimo, 22. 128. Shanxisheng renmin jianchayuan, ed., Zhenxun riben zhanfan jishi (taiyuan): 1952–1956, 498. 129. Ibid., 156; Zhonggong zhongyang wenjian yanjiushibian, ed., Jianguo yilai zhongyao wenjian xianbian, vol. 8 (Zhongyang wenjian chubanshe, 1994), 241–242. The Chinese text of the April 25 declara­­tion is in Wang Zhanping, ed., Zhengyi de shenpan: zuigao renmin fayuan tebie junshi fat­­ing shenpan riben zhanfan jishi, 2 130. Ibid., 679–734. Also see Kong Fanzhi, “Shanxi Taiyuan dui riben zhanfan de liangzi shenpan (shang),” Shanxi dangan, di 6qi (2007): 49–51; and Kong Fanzhi and Zhang Ruiping, “Shanxi taiyuan dui riben zhanfan de liangzi shenpan (xia),” Shanxi dangan, di 1qi (2008): 49–52. 131. Shanxisheng renmin jianchayuan, ed., Zhenxun riben zhanfan jishi (taiyuan): 1952–1956, 156. 132. Nagatomi Hakudō, Hakurō no tsumeato: sansei zanryū hishi (Shinpū shobō, 1995), 175–176. Nagatomi also testified several times in postwar film documentaries. See Riben guizi “Japanese Devils” Con­fessions of Imperial Army Soldiers from Japan’s War against China (2001), directed by Matsui Minoru. 133. Noda Masaaki, Sensō zaiseki (Iwanami shoten, 1998), 212–214; Nagatomi Hakudō, Hakurō no tsumeato: sansei zanryū hishi, 177; Aaron William Moore, Writ­­ing War: Soldiers Record the Japanese Empire (Harvard University Press, 2013), 256–257. 134. The history of this organiza­­tion is grow­­ing in both Japanese and the Chinese languages. See Yuan Shaoy­­ing and Yang Guizhen, eds., Con­g ren dao gui, con­g gui dao ren: riben zhongguo guihuanzhe lianluohui yanjiu. 135. Dong Biwu, “Guanyu zuigao renmin fayuan de gongzuo baogao,” and Zhang Dingcheng, “Guanyu yijiuwuliunian yilai jiancha gongzuo qingkuang de

384

Notes to Pages 293–301

baogao” (two speeches that were published in the same pamphlet) (Falu chubanshe, 1957), 30–31. 136. Sui Shu-​y ing, “20shiji wushiniandai zhongguo dui riben zhanfan de shenpan yu shifang,” Yantai daxue xuebao (Zhexue shehuike xueban) (October 2006): 459–463. 137. Shanxisheng renmin jianchayuan, ed., Zhenxun riben zhanfan jishi (Taiyuan): 1952–1956, 365–366. 138. Fujita Shigeru writes about his three visits back to China after he was released in Fushunshi zhengxie wenshi ziliao weiyuanhui, ed., Nanwang de zhongguo: riben zhongguo guihuanzhe lianluohui lici fanghua jianwen shilu (Liaon­­ing daxue chubanshe, 1992), 17–46. 139. Jin Yuan, Qiyuan yige zhanfan guanli suozhang de huiyi, 278–279. Former war criminal Tominaga Shōzō writes about what this monument meant for the former prisoners, Fushunshi zhengxiehui wenshi ziliao weiyuanhui, ed., Nanwang de zhongguo, 137–142. See also his postwar memoir, Tominaga Shōzō, Aru BCkyū senpan no sengoshi (Suiyōsha, 1977). 140. Arai Toshio, “Chūgoku no senpan seisaku to wa nan datta no ka,” 31. 141. See Kimie Hara, Cold War Frontiers in the Asia-​Pacific: Divided Territories in the San Francisco System (Routledge, 2007). 142. Compare Song’s assessment of CCP trials with Ōsawa Takeshi, “Maboroshi no nihonjin ‘senpan’ shakuhō keikaku to Shū Onlai,” 2. 143. 6692, “Chūkyō senpan kikansha taigengumi no jitsujō,” Rikujō 941gō, report from July 7, 1956, 16, archive in TB. 144. 6692, “Chûkyô senpan kikansha taigengumi no jitsujô,” Rikujô 941gô, report from July 7, 1956, 19, archive in TB. 145. Shimizu Masayoshi, “Sensōsekinin to shokuminchi sekinin moshiku wa sensō hanzai to shokuminchi hanzai,” in Nagahara Yōko ed., Shokuminchi sekininron—​datsu shokuminchika no hikakushi (Aoki shoten, 2009), 53. 146. 105–00503–11(1), “Riben zhanfan huiguo yihou de fanying, riben duiwo panchu shifang rizhanfan fanying, you guan shenpan zhanfan de cankao qingkuang gaiyao,” October 1956, MFAC. 147. Tian Huan, ed., Zhanhou zhongri guanxi wenxianji, 1945–1970, 283–285. 148. Zhonghua renmin gongheguo waijiaobu, ed., Zhou Enlai waijiao wenxuan (Zhongyang wenxian chubanshe, 1990), 169. 149. Zhang Fulin et al., Shizheng: zhongguo jiaoyu gaizao riben zhanfan shilu (Jilin renmin chubanshe, 2005), 317. 150. Furukawa Mantarō, Nicchū sengo kankeishi nōto (Sanseidō, 1983), 102–103. 151. Tian Huan, ed., Zhanhou zhongri guanxi wenxianji, 1945–1970, 321–323. 152. Iokibe Makoto, Sengo nihon gaikōshi (Yūhikaku, 2010), 96. 153. Amy King, “Imperialism, Industrialisa­­tion and War: The Role of Ideas in China’s Japan Policy, 1949–1965,” PhD Disserta­­tion in International Relations at Oxford University, St. Antony’s College, 2012, 18–19.

Conclusion

1. Asahi shimbun, April 8, 1964. 2. Arne Westad, “The Sino-​Soviet Alliance and the United States,” in Odd

Notes to Pages 301–306

385

Arne Westad, ed., Brothers in Arms: The Rise and Fall of the Sino-​Soviet Alliance, 1945–1963 (Stanford University Press, 1998), 178–179. 3. Background on this aspect of China’s involvement com­es from Yang Kuisong, “Mao Zedong and the Indochina Wars,” in Priscilla Roberts, ed., Behind the Bamboo Curtain (Stanford University Press, 2006), 55–96; Niu Jun, “Background Shift in Chinese Policy toward the United States in the late 1960s,” in Priscilla Roberts, ed., Behind the Bamboo Curtain (Stanford University Press, 2006), 319–347. 4. Liang Pan, “Fight­­ing with Formulas over China: Japan and the United Kingdom at the United Nations, 1961–1971,” International History Review (June 2009): 329–355. 5. Frank Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastat­­ing Catastrophe, 1958–1962 (Walker & Co., 2010); Jasper Becker, Hungry Ghosts: China’s Secret Famine (John Murray, 1996). 6. Gary Jonathan Bass, Stay the Hand of Vengeance: The Politics of War Crimes Tribunals (Princeton University Press, 2000), 7–8. 7. Ibid., 13. 8. Tony Judt, “The Past Is Another Country: Myth and Memory in Postwar Europe,” in Istvan Deak, Jan T. Gross, and Tony Judt, eds., The Politics of Retribu­­tion in Europe: World War II and Its Aftermath (Princeton University Press, 2000), 300. 9. Ibid., 302. 10. James Mark, The Unfinished Revolution: Mak­­ing Sense of the Com­munist Past in Central-​Eastern Europe (Yale University Press, 2010). 11. Kang Sang-​jung, Ajia kara nihon o tou, Iwanami bukkuretto no. 336 (Iwanami shoten, 1994), 12–13. 12. Yoshimura Akira, Tōi hi no sensō, trans. by Mark Ealey as One Man’s Justice (Mariner Books, 2002); see also http://www.japanfocus.org/-​Yoshimura -​A kira/1884. 13. Matsunami Jun, “Senryō kaikaku to shite no BCkyū sensō hanzai saiban,” Hōgaku kenkyū (Osaka), dai 28kan, dai 1 gō (September 2001): 208. 14. China Fushun War Criminals Management Center, ed., Place of New Life of Japanese War Criminals (China Intercontinental Press, 2005) (an English– Chinese dual translation). 15. Neil J. Diamant, “Conspicuous Silence: Veterans and the Depoliticiza­­tion of War Memory in China,” Modern Asian Studies 45, no. 2 (2011): 431– 461. 16. Mei Xiaobin and Ye Shubing, Wei zhengyi qiaoxiang fachui: shenpan riben zhanfan de junshi faguan Ye Zaizeng (Nanj­­ing chubanshe, 2007), 351. 17. Harry Harding, “The Chinese State in Crisis, 1966–9,” in Roderick MacFarquhar, The Politics of China, 1949–1989 (Cambridge University Press, 1993), 163–165. 18. Kawano Masahiro, “Seikei o gyūjiru sabakarenakatta senpantachi,” Ushio (August 1972): 253. Janice Mimura delves into this issue, con­cern­­ing Kishi Nobusuke’s wartime policies and postwar impact, in Plann­­ing for Empire: Reform Bureaucrats and the Japanese Wartime State (Cornell University Press, 2011).

386

Notes to Pages 306–312

19. Devin O. Pendas, “Seek­­ing Justice, Find­­ing Law: Nazi Trials in Postwar Europe,” Journal of Modern History 81 (June 2009): 353. 20. Hirowatari Seigo, “Doitsu ni okeru sengo sekinin to sengo hoshō,” in Awaya Kentarō, Tanaka Hiroshi et al., eds., Sensō sekinin sengo sekinin nihon to doitsu wa dō chigau ka (Asahi shimbunsha, 1994), 172. Simona Tobia disagrees with this assessment, writ­­ing that “observers generally agree that the post-​war process of judgement and punishment of Nazi war criminals, within the whole denazifica­­tion of Germany, substantially failed to achieve the results that Churchill expected.” See her article “Question­­ing the Nazis: Languages and Effectiveness in British War Crime Investigations and Trials in Germany, 1945–48,” Journal of War and Culture Studies 3, no. 1 (May 1, 2010): 124. 21. Shogo Suzuki, “The Com­peti­­tion to Attain Justice for Past Wrongs: The ‘Com­ f­ ort Women’ Issue in Taiwan,” Pacific Affairs 84, no. 2 (June 2011): 223–244. 22. Yokohama bengoshikai BCkyū senpan yokohama saiban chōsa kenkyū tokubetsu īnkai, ed., Hōtei no seijōki: BCkyū senpan yokohama saiban no kiroku (Nihon hyōronsha, 2004), 238. 23. Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (Penguin, 1997); for some of the problems with Chang’s research, see Joshua Fogel, “Review of The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II by Iris Chang,” Journal of Asian Studies 57, no. 3 (August 1998): 818–819. 24. Asahi shimbun, September 2, 1972 (Tokyo edition). The newspaper stated that the total sum paid to victims in five different countries was a one-​shot payment of 460 million yen, approximately $1.5 million in today’s money. 25. Mark Mazower, “Reconstruction: The Historiographical Issues,” Past and Present 210, suppl. 6 (2011): 20. 26. As quoted in Edward Friedman, “Rais­­ing Sheep on Wolf Milk: The Politics and Dangers of Misremember­­ing the Past in China,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 9, no, 2–3 (2008): 391. 27. Ibid. 28. Jeremy E. Taylor and Grace C. Huang, “Deep Changes in Interpretive Currents? Chiang Kai-​shek Studies in the Post-​Cold War Era,” International Journal of Asian Studies 9, no. 1 (2012): 99–121. 29. Brian Orend, The Morality of War (Broadview Press, 2006), 106. 30. Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations (Basic Books, 2006). 31. Igor Primoratz, “Michael Walzer’s Just War Theory: Some Issues of Responsibility,” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 5, no. 2 (June 2002): 222. 32. Akiyama Yoshiaki, “Gyōseihō kara mita sengo hoshō,” in Okuda Yasuhiro et al., eds. Kyōdō kenkyū chūgoku sengo hoshō: rekishi hō saiban (Akashi shoten, 2000), 55. See also Kawashima Takeyoshi, Nihonjin no hō ishiki (Iwanami shoten, 1967), for a detailed explana­­tion of how the average Japanese views the law. 33. Akiyama, “Gyōseihō kara mita sengo hoshō,” 60–61. 34. Ibid., 66. 35. Hisashi Owada, “Japan, International Law and the International Com­ munity,” in Nisuke Ando, ed., Japan and International Law Past, Present and Future (Kluwer Law International, 1999), 364.

Notes to Pages 312–316

387

36. Kevin Doak, “Beyond International Law: The Theories of World Law,” in Tanaka Kōtarō and Tsunetō Kyō,” Journal of the History of International Law 13 (2011): 210. 37. As quoted in Mark Mazower, “The Strange Triumph of Human Rights, 1933–1950,” Historical Journal 47, no. 2 (June 2004): 385. See also Dan Plesch, America, Hitler and the UN—​How the Allies Won WWII and Forged a Peace (IB Tauris, 2011), 95–98, for a brief men­­tion of how China was eager to participate. 38. As quoted in Mazower, “The Strange Triumph of Human Rights,” 388. 39. Caroline Rose, “The Yasukuni Shrine Problem in Sino-​Japan Relations,” in John Breen, ed., Yasukuni: The War Dead and the Struggle for Japan’s Past (Hurst and Co., 2007), 26, notes that between 1951–1985 with the excep­­ tion of Hatoyama Ichirō and Ishibashi Tanzan every Japanese prime minister visited the Yasukuni shrine dur­­ing the spr­­ing or autumn rites. On August 15, 1975, Prime Minister Miki Takeo visited the shrine in secret. Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro’s public visit was judged unconstitutional by later courts but did not deter Prime Minister Koizumi Ichirō. Nakasone had already visited the shrine in 1982 and 1983, but he never clarified whether he was do­­ing so publicly. 40. Barak Kushner, “Nationality and Nostalgia: The Manipula­­tion of Memory in Japan, Taiwan, and China since 1990,” International History Review 29, no. 4 (December 2007): 793–820. 41. John Breen, “The Dead and the Liv­­ing in the Land of Peace: A Sociology of the Yasukuni Shrine,” Mortality (February 2004): 91. 42. James Reilly, “Remember History, Not Hatred: Collective Remembrance of China’s War of Resistance to Japan,” Modern Asian Studies 45, no. 2 (2011): 470. Reilly cites the Tanaka-​Zhou con­versation, available in full at http:// www.ioc.u-​tokyo.ac.jp/~worldjpn. 43. http://www.asil.org/files/asil_100_ways_05.pdf. 44. [001/001] 165—​Shū—​yosanīnkai—​3gō, October 6, 2006, NDR. Abe said as much in his 2006 manifesto; see Abe Shinzō, Utsukushī kuni e (Bunshun shinsho, 2006), 70. 45. [001/001] 165—​Shū—​yosanīnkai—​3gō, October 6, 2006, NDR. For state views on what history is, see Yoshiko Nozaki, War Memory, Nationalism and Educa­­tion in Postwar Japan, 1945–2007: The Japanese History Textbook Con­ troversy and Ienaga Saburo’s Court Challenges (Routledge, 2008), 97–99. 46. Linus Hagström and Björn Jerdén, “Understand­­ing Fluctuations in Sino-​ Japanese Relations: To Politicize or to De-​politicize the China Issue in the Japanese Diet,” Pacific Affairs 83, no. 4 (December 2010): 720. 47. See leaked U.S. State Department cables online: “Despite Potential Hiccups, PRC Pushes for Improved Japan Ties,” September 12, 2007, http:// cablegatesearch.net/cable.php?id=07BEIJING5977&q=arc%20freedom %20of%20prosperity. The cable notes that Abe’s resigna­­tion would not affect Sino-​Japanese relations because they were already “warming.” In particular the cable also noted that “most young Chinese ‘hate Japan.’ However, since Abe took office, Beij­­ing has begun tout­­ing positive aspects of Japan to overcome these negative feelings. Chinese public responses to Abe’s visit­­ing

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Notes to Pages 316–321

Justice Pal’s son and offer­­ing a small tree to Yasukuni were ‘low key.’ ” (I thank Giulio Pugliese for point­­ing me to this source.) 48. http://www.fmprc.gov.cn/eng/wjdt/zyjh/t311544.htm. 49. Kazuhiko Togo, “Development of Japan’s Historical Memory: The San Francisco Peace Treaty and the Murayama Statement in Future Perspective,” Asian Perspective 35 (2011): 341. 50. http://news.sina.com.cn/s/p/2006–08–10/104410685661.shtml; http://www .globaltimes.cn/NEWS/tabid/99/ID/670336/Atonement-​a nd-​forgiveness .aspx. 51. h t t p : // w w w. g l o b a l t i m e s . c n / D e s k t o p M o d u l e s / D n n Fo r g e % 2 0 -​%20NewsArticles/Print.aspx?tabid=99&tabmoduleid=94&articleId=6703 36&moduleId=405&PortalID=0. Thanks to Tony Brooks for point­­ing this story out. See also http://ajw.asahi.com/article/asia/china/AJ201208140003. 52. h t t p : // w w w. g l o b a l t i m e s . c n / D e s k t o p M o d u l e s / D n n Fo r g e % 2 0 -​%20NewsArticles/Print.aspx?tabid=99&tabmoduleid=94&articleId=6703 36&moduleId=405&PortalID=0. 53. Robert Efird, “Japan’s ‘War Orphans’: Identifica­­tion and State Responsibility,” Journal of Japanese Studies 34, no. 2 (summer 2008): 367–368. 54. Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (The Penguin Press, 2005), 45. 55. Kosuge Nobuko, Sengo wakai (Chūō kōronsha, 2005), 68. 56. Gerry Simpson, “War Crimes: A Critical Introduction,” in Timothy L. H. McCormack and Gerry J. Simpson, eds., The Law of War Crimes: National and International Approaches (Kluwer Law International, 1997), 20. 57. Yuan Guang, “Dui riben zhanfan de shenpan,” Gemingshi ziliao, no. 7 (Wenshi ziliao chubanshe, 1982), 45. 58. Kaihatsu Kōjirō, “Shōwa tennō dokuhakuroku saikō (1),” Nihon daigaku geijutsu gakubu kiyō 38 (July 2003): 57. 59. William A. Callahan, “History, Identity, and Security: Produc­­ing and Con­ sum­­ing Nationalism in China,” Critical Asian Studies 38, no. 2 (2006): 181–182.

Glossary

Abe Shinzō  安倍晋三 Amended Regulations for Punish­­ing Traitors  修正懲治漢奸條例 Andō Rikichi  安藤利吉 Araki Sadao  荒木貞夫 Arita Hachirō  有田八郎 Asakanomiya Yasuhiko  朝香宮鳩彦 Asami Kazuo  浅海一男 Associa­­tion to Help Those Sentenced for the War  戦争受刑者世話会 Ayukawa Yoshisuke  鮎川義介 Bai Chongxi  白崇禧 baituan  白團 Battle of Guningtou  古寧頭戰役 benshengren  本省人 bunian jiue  不念舊惡 Bureau of Corrections Special Investigations Section  保護局特別調査課 cansheng (pyrrhic victory)  慘勝 Cao Shicheng  曹士澂 Central Governance Bureau’s Taiwan Investiga­­tion Com­mittee Round Table  中央 設計局台灣調查委員會座談會 Chen Boda  陳伯達 Chen Cheng  陳誠 Chen Guangyu  陳光虞 Chen Shuiyun  陳水雲 Chen Yi  陳儀 Committee to Deal with War Crimes  戰爭犯罪處理委員會 Control Yuan  監察院 Daisankokujin  第三国人

389

390

Glossary

detainees  抑留者 Doihara Kenji  土居原賢二 Dong Biwu  董必武 Fujita Shigeru  藤田茂 Fuketo Shiichi  福家俊一 Fukuchi Haruo  福地春男 Funaki Kenjirō  船木健次郎 Furumi Tadayuki  古海忠之 Gao Qunshu  高群書 gemingjia  革命家 Great Hall of the Lizhishe (Society for Vigorous Practice of the Three Principles of Sun Yat-​sen)  励志社禮堂 guang fu  光復 gunzoku yōnin  軍属傭人 Guo Qi  郭歧 hanjian (kankan in Japanese)  漢奸 Hara Chūichi  原忠一 Hata Shunroku  畑俊六 Hatoyama Ichirō  鳩山一郎 He Yingqin  何應欽 Higashikuni Naruhiko  東久邇稔彦 hikiagesha  引揚者 Homma Masaharu  本間雅晴 Hosokawa Morihiro  細川護煕 Huang Zhaoqin  黃朝琴 Imai Takeo  今井武夫 Imamura Hisako  今村久子 Imamura Hōsaku  今村方策 “Investiga­­tion Record of Japanese Military Atrocities in China”  日軍在華暴行 調查表 Ishida Tōshirō  石田東四郎 Ishii Shirō  石井四郎 Isogai Rensuke  磯谷廉介 Itō Hirobumi  伊藤博文 Iwata Chūzō  岩田宙造 “Japanese Devils” (riben guizi)  日本鬼子 Japanese Peace Liaison Group  日本平和連絡会 Ji Min  紀敏 Jin Yuan  金源 Jinmen Island (Quemoy)  金門島 Jōno Hiroshi  城野宏 Kanei Sadanao  金井貞直 Kang Youwei  康有為 Katayama Tetsu  片山哲 Katō Tetsutarō  加藤哲太郎 Kawashima Yoshiko  川島芳子 Kaya Okinori  賀屋興宣

Glossary Ke Taishan  柯台山 kimin  棄民 King Wunz  金問泗 Kishi Nobusuke  岸信介 Kobayashi Masaki  小林正樹 Kobayashi Yoshinori  小林よしのり Kodama Yoshio  児玉誉士夫 Koizumi Junichirō  小泉純一郎 kokutai  国体 kōminka  皇民化 Kōmoto Daisaku  河本大作 Konoe Fumimaro  近衛文麿 koseki  戸籍 Li Wanju  李萬居 Li Zongren  李宗仁 Liaison Group of Returnees from China  中国帰還者連絡会 often abbreviated as Chūkiren  中帰連 Liang Qichao  梁啟超 Liao Chengzhi  廖承志 Liao Ming-​ou  廖嗚歐 Lin Yu  林蔚 Liu Kai  劉鍇 Long Zhongyu  龍鐘煜 Luo Ruiqing  羅瑞卿 Matsui Iwane  松井石根 Matsuoka Yōsuke  松岡洋右 Mei Ruao (Ju-​ao)  梅汝璈 Minobe Tatsukichi  美濃部達吉 Muchaku Noriaki  無着仙明 Mukai Toshiaki  向井敏明 Murayama Tomiichi  村山富市 Nagano Osami  永野修身 Nagashima Tsutomu  長島勤 Nagatomi Hakudō  永富博道 Nakajima Kesago  中島今朝号 Nakamura Toyoichi  中村豊一 Nanj­­ing Military Tribunal for War Crimes  南京審判戰犯軍事法庭 Nanj­­ing Provisional Council  南京臨時参議會 National Meet­­ing of Families Left Bereft  留守家族全国協議会 Nemoto Hiroshi  根本博 Ni Zhengyu  倪征𣋉 Noda Takeshi [Tsuyoshi]  野田毅 Ogasawara Kiyoshi  小笠原清 Ogata Taketora  緒方竹虎 Okada Katsuya  岡田克也 Okada Tasuku  岡田資 Okamura Yasuji  岡村寧次

391

392 Ōkawa Shūmei  大川周明 Okazaki Katsuo  岡崎勝男 Ōkuma Shigenobu  大隈重信 Ōnuki Kenichirō  大貫健一郎 Ōoka Shōhei  大岡昇平 “oppose American support of Japan movement”  反美扶日運動 Peng Meng-​chi  彭孟緝 Peng Minghui  彭明輝 prisoners  捕虜 prisoners of war (fulu)  俘虜 Qin Dechun  秦德純 Qiu Niantai  丘念台 A Record of Blood and Tears in the Fallen Capital  陷都血淚錄 Regulations for Deal­­ing with Cases of Treason  處理漢奸案件條例 Ri Kōran  李香蘭 Rifu gongren  日俘工人 Saitō Takao  斎藤隆夫 Saitō Yoshio  斎藤美夫 Sakai Takashi  酒井隆 Sakakura Kiyoshi  坂倉清 Sanzao Island (Three Furnace Island)  三竃島 Sasakawa Ryōichi  笹川良一 Sasakibara Hideo  榊原秀夫 Sassa Shinnosuke  佐佐真之助 seikei bunri  政経分離 Seya Hiraku  瀬谷啓 Shang Zhen  商震 shanzi shifang  擅自釋放 Shen Jind­­ing (also know as Yorkson C.T. Shen)  沈覲鼎 Shen Junru  沈鈞儒 Shi Liang  史良 Shi Meiyu  石美瑜 Shi Zhe  師哲 Shigemitsu Mamoru  重光葵 Shimada Shigetarō  嶋田繁太郎 Shimamura Saburō  島村三郎 Shimomura Hiroshi  下村宏 Shimomura Sadamu  下村定 Shiomi Shunji  塩見俊二 Sino-​Japan Friendship Association  日中友好会 Sone Eki  曽根益 Sugamo Prison  巣鴨刑務所 Sugiyama Gen (Hajime)  杉山元 Sumita Raishirō  澄田睞四郎 Suzuki Hiraku  鈴木啓久 Suzuki Kantarō  鈴木貫太郎 Taiwan Investiga­­tion Com­mittee  台湾調査委員會

Glossary

Glossary Taiwan jihō  台灣時報 Taiwansheng ribao  台灣生日報 Tajima Ryūjun  田嶋隆純 Tajiri Akiyoshi  田尻愛義 Takasaki Tatsunosuke  高碕達之助 Takayanagi Kenzō  高柳賢三 Takebe Rokuzō  武部六蔵 Tan Zhengwen  譚政文 Tanaka Giichi  田中義一 Tanaka Gunkichi  田中軍吉 Tanaka Hajime  田中魁 Tang Enbo  湯恩伯 Tang Jiaxuan  唐家璇 Tani Hisao  谷寿夫 tewutuan  特務團 “three alls”  三光 Tōkai region  東海区 toman  渡満 Tominaga Juntarō  富永順太郎 Tominaga Shōzō  富永正三 Toyoda Soemu  豊田副武 Toyota Kumao  豊田隈雄 tushou guanbing  徒手官兵 TV Soong  宋子文 Uesaka Masaru  上坂勝 Umezu Yoshijirō  梅津美治郎 Uno Shintarō  鹈野晋太郎 waishengren  外省人 Wang Chonghui  王寵惠 Wang Jiaxiang  王稼祥 Wang Jingwei  汪精衛 Wang Shicheng  王式成 Wang Shijie  王世杰 Wei Daoming  魏道明 Wellington Koo  顧維鈞 Witness Record of Japanese Atrocities  日冠暴行目撃記 Wu Yuzhang  吳玉章 Wu Zhuoliu  吳濁流 Xiang Zhejun  向哲浚 Xie Guansheng  謝冠生 Xu Yong  徐勇 Xu Yongchang  徐永昌 Yamaguchi Momoe  山口百恵 Yamashita Tomoyuki  山下奉文 Yan Xishan  閻錫山 Yanagawa Heisuke  柳川平助 Yang Zhaolong  楊兆龍

393

394 Ye Gongchao  葉公超 Ye Zaizeng  葉在增 yi de bao yuan  以德報怨 Yokomizo Mitsuteru  横溝光暉 Yonai Mitsumasa  米内光政 Yoshida Shigeru  吉田茂 Yu Ta-​Wei  俞大維 Yu Xinqiang  于信强 Yuan Guang  袁光 Zhang Dingcheng  張鼎丞 Zhang Qun  張羣 Zhang Zuolin  張作霖 Zhong Hanbo  鍾漢波 Zhou Fohai  周佛海 Zhu Shiming  朱世明 zongli yamen  總理衙門 Zou Renzhi  鄒任之 zuguohua  祖國花

Glossary

Acknowledgments

This book is dedicated to my three sisters, Tamah, Sura, and Aviva, who threatened to disown me if I did not specify them by name. At the same time I must not forget the other side of my family. While stay­­ing in Japan so often, my brother-​in-​law cum personal fashion con­sultant Watanabe Kiyoshi, along with my sister-​in-​law Mizutori Michi, have both been supportive beyond the call of duty. I attribute my relaxed state of mind to their excellent and expansive repertoire of fine meals and redemptive con­versation. To family and friends in several countries I owe much gratitude. My partner, Mami, always lends an analytical ear in dissect­­ing and analyz­­ing the political circumstances in East Asia, temper­­ing my tendency to look only historically at the situation. On the academic side of the equation, several friends and close colleagues, includ­­ing Stephen Large, Sandra Wilson, Naoko Shimazu, Amy King, Lily Chang, and Giulio Pugliese, all read earlier drafts of this book and proffered extremely helpful suggestions and criticisms. Robert Weatherley read portions and was supportive. Paul Dunscomb and Michael Baskett, as always, have been excellent sound­­ing boards over the years. Matthew Stavros was instrumental in draft­­ing the excellent map that visualizes all the BC class war crimes trials throughout East Asia. A long con­versa­­tion with Wang Tay-​sheng in Taiwan and Tzeng Shih-​jung’s work on lawyers in Taiwan pushed me 395

396

Acknowledgments

to reconsider how law was both con­ceived and articulated in reac­­tion to Japan. The initial research was assisted by a grant from the Abe Fellowship Program administered by the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies in coopera­­tion with, and with funds provided by, the Japan Founda­­tion Center for Global Partnership. I am indebted to Chen Qianp­­ing of Nanj­­ing University (through the kind introduc­­tion of my colleague Hans van de Ven) for sponsor­­ing my three-​month stay in China to start on the Chinese side of the research and to Hu Cheng of Nanj­­ing University for sett­­ing up a talk in 2008 where students and researchers patiently listened to my mangled Chinese presenta­­tion and responded with pointed questions. In Nan­ jing I also had the assistance of an immensely talented young Chinese researcher, Su Yangyang. The British Academy sponsored summer travel and collaborative con­ferences, also under the auspices of the Taiwanese Ministry of Education, in 2009 and 2010. The guidance of Lin Pei-​y in and Chang Bi-​y u proved immensely valuable, as did getting to know Jeremy Taylor. Okamoto Kōichi from Waseda University allowed me to almost take up permanent residence in his faculty’s fine library dur­­ing 2009, and Morita Nori has been extremely supportive in this regard over the years as well. A 2012 summer Japan Endowment Founda­­tion Com­mittee Grant allowed me to track down loose ends, while a 2012–2013 British Academy Mid-​Career Fellowship gained me precious time to put the research into final form and paid for substitute teaching. That such a grant exists is testament that scholarship has not com­pletely succumbed to the con­sultancy fantasy of codify­­ing every moment of life and search­­ing for a quantify­­ing coefficient to academia output. A 2013 Newton Trust Small Research Grant allowed me to hire Daphne To, who assisted in sourc­­ing many images and proved invaluable as a research assistant. As the book reached the midway point I was awarded a five-​year European Research Council grant, which proved immensely helpful with travel and research costs and allowed me to widen the scope for future research. Invitations to deliver talks related to this research are too generous to note individually, but highlights include present­­ing a keynote address at Murdoch University at the Fourth Japanese History Workshop Australia in 2011. I thank Sandra Wilson and her colleagues. A more pointed

Acknowledgments

397

talk at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London, hosted by Naoko Shimazu, was equally instrumental, as were talks at many other locations in the United States, Taiwan, Japan, Israel, and Europe. I cannot thank my interlocutors enough for offer­­ing such varied and interest­­ing venues to interact with other scholars and students. My students, current and former, especially Tony Brooks, Sherzod Muminov, Don Q Kim, Aiko Otsuka, and Jurei Yada, have also provided excellent feedback at various times, as have the undergraduates with whom I have com­e into con­tact over the past few years. Chi Man Kwong kindly helped me obtain archives of war crimes trials in Hong Kong for com­parative purposes. Lovely con­versations over tea with Higurashi Yoshinobu in Kagoshima and one with Hayashi Hirofumi in Tokyo rounded out many misconceptions I held. Dur­­ing our many con­versations and while co-​teach­­ing a Cold War history class, my caffeine-​charged colleague John Swenson-​Wright has con­tinually proved enlightening, as has student debate in that course. The indefatigable Roger Brown offered his seminar at Saitama University to dissect some finer points. Miyagi Taizō and Liang Pan offered their research seminars, as did Suzuki Norio at Aichi University, where the audience posed questions for two hours and certainly tested the limits of my Japanese to explain legalese. Nissim Otmazgin and Ben-​Ami Shillony were very generous with their time in Israel, while Chang Chihyun has been very supportive over the years in Taiwan; his generosity is only surpassed by his ability to s­­ing xiongdi songs. Hou Yanbo, a graduate student and excellent tutor in the intricacies of Chinese Republican Era documents, along with the assistance of Uma Wang, was key in help­­ing move things along. At the Guoshiguan in Taipei, Wu Shufeng was very generous, offer­­ing numerous insights, copies of her articles, and guidance in the archives. I am also indebted to other colleagues and friends, such as Jessie and Jon Abel at Penn State, who have provided venues and seminars for me to present my research and gain valuable feedback. I am sorry I cannot list everyone, but all the assistance was immeasurable, as a scholar cannot and should not live in a vacuum. The librarian for Japanese materials at the University of Cambridge library, Koyama Noburu, almost seems to have an unnatural ability to surmise in advance what

398

Acknowledgments

new sources I will require. Charles Aylmer, who is in charge of Chinese materials at the same site, is also a fantastic resource, scour­­ing the globe for books and such that are not often easy to locate. Francoise Simmons, our faculty librarian, is also a treasured resource always ready to lend a helping and supportive hand. Without their assistance much of the research could not have taken place. Rana Mitter and his China’s War with Japan project at Oxford, where I presented several times, was particularly treasured, as was a roundtable with his team at Cambridge, where they spent an afternoon analyz­­ing one of my chapters. I thank his entire team. Collaborative work on the issue of Taiwan and war crimes with Mike Lan of National Chengchi University and Wada Hideho of Shokei University, penetrat­ ­ing the com­plexity of that historical dilemma, along with the participa­ ­tion of Beatrice Trefalt, Xu Xueji, and several other members, was an excit­­ing development. I also thank Kathleen McDermott at Harvard University Press for her support and the two anonymous reviewers whose critical remarks forced me to redouble efforts and present a coherent narrative. Lastly, my scholastic mates—​John Swenson-​Wright, Anna Boermel, Brigitte Steger, and Barry Plows—​a ll helped me fine-​t une my oral presenta­­tion at the ERC program, which made all the difference as this project developed from a small one into a much larger-​scaled initiative. My success is very much due in part to their time and unflagg­­ing ­support.

Index

Abe Shinzō, 314–316 Agape (“statue of love” or “ai no zō”), 239–245. See also war memorials Amended Regulations for Punishing Traitors, 123 Amō Eiji, 257 Andō Rikichi, 92, 116 Araki Sadao, 43 Arita Hachirō, 206–207, 223 Asakanomiya Yasuhiko, 156 Asami Kazuo, 168 Association to Help Those Sentenced for the War, 206–207 Ayukawa Yoshisuke, 206–207 Bai Chongxi, 96, 102, 124 baituan, 186, 190, 204. See also White Group Bandung Conference, 211, 259–261 benshengren, 134 bunian jiue, 188 Cao Shicheng, 174, 176, 189, 192, 206; White Group, 198–200 Carpenter, Alva C., 50, 83–84, 155, 181 Central Governance Bureau’s Taiwan Investigation Committee, 113–114 Changchun, 104, 261, 268, 279, 290 Chen Boda, 261 Chen Cheng, 96, 218

Chen Shuiyun, 121 Chen Yi, 113–114, 305 Chiang Chingkuo (Jiang Jingguo), 190 Chiang Kai-shek, 106, 308; domestic policies in mainland China, 75, 94, 141, 251; domestic policies in Taiwan, 113–114, 305; postwar Japanese assistance, 193– 202, 204–206, 209; relation to CCP, 72, 90, 95, 97, 100, 107, 188, 256, 261, 310; relation to Japan, 33, 43–44, 140, 187– 191, 219, 298; relation to Okamura Yasuji, 174–176, 186; relation to POWs, 41, 90, 94–96, 100, 170, 218, 316, 318; relation to Wang Jingwei, 125–126 Committee to Deal with War Crimes, 93–94, 100 daisankokujin, 135 detainees, 16, 50; CCP trials, 249–252, 265, 295 Doihara Kenji, 6, 43, 149 Dong Biwu, 251 Dulles, John Foster, 212, 226, 237 Fangzheng, 317 Fujita Shigeru, 283–284, 293–294 Fuketo Shiichi, 53–54 Fukuchi Haruo, 223 Funaki Kenjirō, 283 Furumi Tadayuki, 265, 275–277, 285

399

Index

400 Gao Qunshu, 78–79 gemingjia, 127 Great Hall of the Lizhishe (Society for Vigorous Practice of the Three Principles of Sun Yat-sen), 160–161. See also Sun Yat-sen guang fu, 110 Guningtou, battle of, 196–197 gunzoku yōnin, 118–119 Guo Qi, 161 hanjian (kankan in Japanese), 93, 95, 112, 122–124 Hara Chūichi, 231 Harbin, 64, 109, 317; prison, 266, 270–272, 278, 290 Hata Shunroku, 71 Hatoyama Ichirō, 51, 212, 260, 298, 306 He Yingqin, 96, 116, 196, 256; meeting with General Okamura Yasuji, 30–31; trial of Okamura Yasuji, 174–176; trial of Sakai Takashi, 147–148 Higashikuni Naruhiko, 44, 50–51 hikiagesha, 47–48, 115–116 Hirohito, Emperor, 43, 174 Homma Masaharu, 46, 71 Hosokawa Morihiro, 10 Huang Zhaoqin, 114 I Want to Be a Shellfish (Watakushi wa kai ni naritai), 25, 225, 227–229, 304 Imai Takeo, 32, 36, 95, 127, 331–333 Imamura Hisako, 221 Imamura Hōsaku, 107 Inoue Tadao, 231 “Investigation Record of Japanese Military Atrocities in China,” 140–141 Ishida Tōshirō, 317 Ishii Shirō, 257–258. See also Unit 731 Isogai Rensuke, 158–159 Itō Hirobumi, 75 Iwata Chūzō, 51 “Japanese Devils” (riben guizi), 5, 23, 171, 318; CCP trials, 248–253, 293–294; guizi, 5, 14, 218, 318 Japanese Peace Liaison Group, 271, 294–295 Jews/Jewry, 31, 308–309 Ji Min, 261 Jin Yuan, 286, 294; Fushun prison, 264–266, 269, 271, 273–279

Jinmen Island (Quemoy), 92–93, 190, 195–196, 201 Jōno Hiroshi, 106, 286–287, 292 Kanei Sadanao, 265–266, 268–270, 276 Kang Youwei, 74 Katayama Tetsu, 106 Katō Tetsutarō, 225–227. See also I Want to Be a Shellfish. Kaya Okinori, 223, 306 Ke Taishan, 114–115 Keenan, Joseph, 77, 182 kimin, 129 King, Wunz, 40–41 Kishi Nobusuke, 206, 212, 223, 298–299, 306. See also Abe Shinzō Kobayashi Masaki, 78 Kobayashi Yoshinori, 308 Kodama Yoshio, 254 Koizumi Junichirō, 66, 313–316 Kōmoto Daisaku, 106–107, 287 Konoe Fumimaro, 51, 53, 97 Koo, Wellington, 42, 75, 218–219 Korean War, 67, 187, 204, 211–218, 278; American POWs 280–281; Chinese role, 252, 258–259, 274; Japanese role, 222; relation to Japanese war criminals, 214, 234, 269–271 Kurosawa Akira, 225 Kwantung, 75; Kwantung army, 148, 262 Labuan, 121 Lauterpacht, Elihu, 42 Li Wanju, 117 Li Zongren, 177–178, 198 Liaison Group of Returnees from China (Chūkiren), 264, 278, 293–295 Liang Qichao, 74 Liao Chengzhi, 271–272, 282 Liao Ming-ou, 91 Lin Yu, 156 Liu Kai, 101 Long Journey, The (Nagai tabi), 57, 304 Long Zhongyu, 170 love statue. See Agape Luo Ruiqing, 262, 290, 305 MacArthur, Douglas, 19, 187, 214, 227, 257–258; Japanese surrender, 48–50, 81, 85, 97; KMT Trials, 155, 177–178, 181–183 Manus Island, 14, 121

Index Mao Zedong, 5, 55, 70, 80, 308, 318; domestic policies, 105, 217, 250, 272–273; prosecuting war criminals, 261–263, 291, 293; relation with KMT, 72, 90, 97, 176, 187, 310; relation with Soviet Union, 213–214, 265, 300 Marshall Mission, 90, 97 Mashbir, Sidney, 50 Matsui Iwane, 6, 43, 106, 139, 153–157. See also Nanjing Massacre Mei Ruao (Ju-ao), 20, 22–23, 264, 305; CCP trials at Shenyang, 282; judge at Tokyo War Crimes Trial, 78–84; trial of Tani Hisao, 155 Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, 304 Minobe Tatsukichi, 311 Mothers of Sugamo (Sugamo no haha), 25 Muchaku Noriaki, 54 Mukai Toshiaki, 84, 139, 157; 100-man killing contest, 166–172 Murayama Tomiichi, 10 Nagano Osami, 55 Nagashima Tsutomu, 283 Nagatomi Hakudō, 292–293 Nakajima Kesago, 154, 156 Nakamura Toyoichi, 48 Nanjing Massacre, 7, 11, 23, 170; legal response to, 43, 46, 71, 83–85, 139, 150–151; representations of, 35, 56, 67, 171–174. See also Matsui Iwane; 100-man killing contest; Tani Hisao Nanjing Military Tribunal for War Crimes, 147, 159, 170 Nanjing Provisional Council, 156 National Meeting of Families Left Bereft, 221–222 Nemoto Group, 193–198. See also White Group Nemoto Hiroshi, 192 Ni Zhengyu 20, 141–142; Chief Advisor at Tokyo War Crimes Trial, 79–84 Noda Takeshi (Tsuyoshi), 84, 139, 157, 242; 100-man killing contest, 166–172 Nuremberg Trials, 7, 12, 20, 22, 87, 137, 182; legal precedents, 44, 57, 81, 150, 318–319 Ogasawara Kiyoshi, 189, 204 Ogata Taketora, 206 Okada Katsuya, 314–316 Okada Tasuku, 57–62, 143, 227

401 Okamura Yasuji, 43, 70, 116, 256; Japan’s surrender, 29–36; KMT trials, 139, 147, 153; personal trial, 174–182; relation to Taiwan, 186–189, 192, 198–200, 205–207, 218–219; war crimes policies, 95–97 Okazaki Katsuo, 50 Ōkuma Shigenobu, 75 100-man killing contest, 139, 164–174. See also Mukai Toshiaki; Noda Takeshi One Man’s Justice (Tōi hi no sensō), 304 Ōnuki Kenichirō, 131 Ōoka Shōhei, 57–58, 304. See also Long Journey, The  “oppose American support of Japan movement,” 135, 183–184 Pal, Radhabinod 10, 45, 78 Peng Meng-chi, 204 Peng Minghui, 101 Place of Rebirth (Zaisheng zhidi), 304 Potsdam Declaration, 33, 47–48, 98, 120, 182, 239, 257 prisoner(s) of war (POWs): Allied POWs , 7, 12, 59–60, 118–119, 154, 215–216, 288; as political tools, 104, 251–253, 258–259, 265, 269, 279–281; fulu, 90, 95; Japanese POWs, 16, 31, 37, 96, 107, 115; legal considerations, 40, 50, 90, 99, 145, 161–162, 169, 233, 265, 295; other prisoners of the Japanese, 121, 129, 238; prisoners of the KMT, 170, 188; repatriation of Japanese POWs, 85, 180, 260, 262–263; specific cases, 91, 149–150, 161, 170, 227 Provoo, John David, 280–281 Pu Yi, 103–104, 270, 279, 282, 285 Qin Dechun, 81–82, 93 Qiu Niantai, 113, 124 Red Doubt, 70 Rhee Syngman, 39, 71, 213 Ri Kōran, 86 rifu gongren, 115 Saitō Takao, 52–53 Saitō Yoshio, 286, 292 Sakai Takashi, 139, 147, 152, 158, 167 Sakakura Kiyoshi, 64–66 San Francisco Peace Treaty, 128, 184, 218–220, 225; contemporary ramifications, 314–316; legal status of war criminals, 230–231, 238, 247, 295

Index

402 Sanyūtei Enshō, 2 Sanzao Island (Three Furnace Island), 56–57 Sasakawa Ryōichi, 254 Sasakibara Hideo, 283 Sassa Shinnosuke, 275, 283 SCAP (Supreme Commander of Allied Powers), 19, 50, 103, 227, 237; relation to CCP, 179–181; relation to Taiwan, 200; role in KMT trials, 143–145, 152, 155–156, 164, 168, 175, 182; Shibuya Incident, 132–133. See also MacArthur, Douglas seikei bunri, 298 Seya Hiraku, 279 Shang Zhen, 85, 155, 178 Shanxi Province, 19, 180, 193, 249, 258, 272, 283; relation to Yan Xishan, 104–107, 180, 199; Taiyuan trials, 286, 289, 292. See also Sumita Raishirō; Yan Xishan Shen Jinding (also known as Yorkson C. T. Shen), 85–86, 131 Shen Junru, 183, 257–258 Shi Liang, 263 Shi Meiyu, 102, 305; KMT trials, 150, 155–156, 160–161, 165, 176, 177 Shi Zhe, 262 Shibuya Incident, 130–136 Shigemitsu Mamoru, 50, 206, 212, 258, 306, 314 Shimada Shigetarō, 55 Shimamura Saburō, 277–278, 285 Shimomura Hiroshi, 67–68 Shimomura Sadamu, 50–51, 53 Shiomi Shunji, 116 Sino-Japan Friendship Association, 271–272 Sone Eki, 57 Soong, T. V., 76 statue of love. See Agape Sugamo Prison, 60, 62, 86, 207, 219, 222, 231; CCP trials, 250, 286, 295; Japanese impressions, 240, 244, 246; KMT trials, 144, 155, 177 Sugiyama Gen (Hajime), 43 Sumita Raishirō, 189, 199, 249; in Shanxi Province, 104–107. See also Shanxi Province Sun Yat-sen, 70; relation with Chiang Kaishek, 75, 205, 251; Three Principles, 74, 188, 160 Suzuki Hiraku, 248–249, 277, 283–284 Suzuki Kantarō, 44, 50 Taipei, 94, 116–117, 121, 144, 190, 195, 200 Tajima Ryūjun, 63, 240–242

Tajiri Akiyoshi, 47 Takasaki Tatsunosuke, 260 Takayanagi Kenzō, 57 Takebe Rokuzō, 275, 285 Tan Zhengwen, 289–290 Tanaka Giichi, 172–174 Tanaka Gunkichi, 169–170 Tang Enbo, 96, 175, 177, 218; relation to Taiwan, 193, 195–196, 198 Tang Jiaxuan, 66 Tani Hisao, 83, 139, 305; trial, 153–170 Thick-Walled Room, The (Kabe atsuki heya), 25 “three alls,” 70, 248 Tōjō Hideki, 50, 53, 70, 174 Tokyo Trial, The (Dongjing shenpan), 78 Tokyo War Crimes Trial (International Military Tribunal for the Far East), 6, 7, 11–12, 20, 22, 303, 318; American views, 168, 173, 175, 182; Chinese views, 77–87, 89, 94, 142, 153–154, 172; Japanese views, 43–44, 55, 207; relation to CCP trials, 252, 254, 294. See also Nanjing Massacre; war crimes Tominaga Juntarō, 286, 291–292 Toyoda Soemu, 50–51 Toyota Kumao, 55–56, 231–233 Tsuji Masanobu, 188 tushou guanbing, 95–96 2.28 (two two eight) incident, 134–135 Uesaka Masaru, 283 Umezu Yoshijirō, 50–51, 147; He-Umezu agreement, 147, 149 Unit 731, 46, 64, 257. See also Ishii Shirō United Nations War Crimes Commission (UNWCC), 40–42, 102 Uno Shintarō, 283 Viet Minh, 138, 202–203 Vietnam War, 45, 305 waishengren, 134 Wang Chonghui, 41, 75, 78, 158–159 Wang Jingwei, 12, 112, 124–127 Wang Shijie, 102 war crimes: Chinese views, 72–77, 87–93; international views, 40–43; Japanese views, 40–57; KMT views, 93–102, 185–191; notions of justice, 57–62, 135–136; postwar attitudes, 210–218. See also Nuremberg Trials; Tokyo War Crimes Trial

Index war criminals after the war: in China, 251–256; in Taiwan, 115–125. See also White Group war memorials, 239–244. See also Yasukuni Shrine Ward, Angus, 255–256 Webb, William, 71, 79 Wei Daoming, 76 White Group, 107, 186–192, 198–202; knowledge of activities, 202–209. See also Nemoto Group Wu Yuzhang, 97 Wu Zhuoliu, 108, 129 Xiang Zhejun, 20, 78, 82 Xie Guansheng, 102 Xu Yong, 69 Xu Yongchang, 107, 177 Yamaguchi Momoe, 70 Yamashita Tomoyuki, 14, 43, 46, 71, 175 Yan Xishan: CCP Trails, 256, 286–287, 291–292, 296; in Shanxi province, 104–107; KMT Trials, 176, 180; Taiwan, 199, 205. See also Shanxi Province

403 Yanagawa Heisuke, 160 Yang Zhaolong, 79, 101, 305 Yasukuni Shrine, 62, 209, 242, 245–247, 313. See also war memorials Ye Gongchao, 218–219 Ye Zaizeng, 156, 160–161, 305 yi de bao yuan, 94, 188 Yokomizo Mitsuteru, 231 Yonai Mitsumasa, 50–51 Yoshida Shigeru, 188, 206, 212, 217, 226, 298, 306 Yu Ta-Wei, 204 Yu Xinqiang, 308–309 Yuan Guang, 283, 297, 319 Zhang Dingcheng, 291, 293 Zhang Qun, 218–219 Zhang Zuolin, 106, 287 Zhong Hanbo, 86–87, 177 Zhou Enlai, 183, 214, 218, 313–314; CCP trials, 253, 257, 260, 263, 265, 269, 296; reeducation of prisoners, 271–272, 278 Zhou Fohai, 127 Zhu Shiming, 85, 192 Zou Renzhi, 102