CHAPTER 6 The Violence of Imperial Dissolution at the Periphery

Resolving Disunity on the Chinese Mainland

We should not read the end of war as solely a moment of liberation—or in Yamaguchi’s case, salvation—because the regional inhabitants did not know exactly what they were returning to and were often quite frustrated.¹⁰ Unlike Western Europe, which saw many of its governments go into exile and thus have some sort of elastic authoritative body to repatriate and rule following the defeat of the Nazis, East Asia could not rely on similar institutions. Moreover, many regions had numerous hurdles to overcome. Korea never held formal war crimes trials of Japanese because it was not in a state of war with the metropole, but it did implement some domestic tribunals for those deemed as collaborators. But then again, Korea was not in control of its own fate since it had been a formal colony of Japan and remained in a dubious position as a “trust” under Allied leadership in the initial years after Japan’s surrender. US troops “performed” the defeat of Japan on the Korean peninsula.¹¹ China also faced multiple and competing issues, not only restoring or establishing Chinese authority in areas but also deciding precisely the boundaries of this management. The Chinese needed to disband two main puppet governments that had maintained their own armies during the era of Japanese aggression. The first was the Nanjing Provisional Government, which until his premature death in late 1944 had been under the leadership of Wang Jingwei, a defector from the KMT government in Chongqing. The second was the Manchukuo administration, based out of Changchun in the north; although it was run mainly by the Japanese, it still had thousands of Chinese bureaucrats and a strong contingent of weaponized forces in the form of the Manchukuo Imperial Army.

The fate of the Manchukuo army was a sensitive enough topic that it garnered division among high-ranking KMT military leaders. Chiang Kai-shek believed it necessary to reincorporate “traitor” soldiers into the fold, while his number two, General Chen Cheng, did not think they were useful.¹² General Chen believed KMT forces should not mix with Japanese and former Manchukuo forces because that would dilute the Chinese Nationalist fighting force. Chen wrote, “We are a victorious nation, we absolutely do not need to incorporate Japanese and Manchukuo forces to beat the Communist Party; we have battalions that are equipped with American arms which is enough to decimate the communists.”¹³ Chen was also perhaps overly optimistic about KMT military strength. KMT generals He Yingqin and Bai Chongxi were of the opposite opinion and chose to fold Manchukuo platoons into their own ranks.

One of the elements behind Chiang’s reasoning was that in the summer of 1945, KMT forces were stationed mostly in their home-front areas of China’s southwest. They had been essentially pushed there by Japan’s massive assault known as Operation Ichigō. This final major confrontation on the continent was a colossal setback for the Chinese. About half a million battle-ready Japanese soldiers mobilized in a supreme last-ditch effort in one of the war’s biggest operations. The aim was to link Manchukuo, Korea, and China since Japan was facing enormous setbacks in the Pacific and losing its naval fleet. A secondary Japanese goal was to destroy US bases in China, which were used to pummel Japan from the sky with all too frequent air raids. Chiang felt Ichigō was his worst humiliation and China’s greatest source of suffering in a series of battles that lasted eight months. KMT forces encountered enormous logistical problems. Many Chinese soldiers were too malnourished to be of use. While they might have been tough and disciplined, 90 percent of the recruits were also illiterate, which made training and maneuvers difficult.¹⁴

Estimates vary according to KMT sources or wartime Japanese generals, but the consensus was that the Manchukuo Army at the end of war mustered about six hundred thousand soldiers, including local forces. When those were extracted, and when the police and the others that were poorly equipped were removed, the KMT took in on the order of about four hundred thousand soldiers from the Manchukuo military. These troops were renamed and then woven into nationalist troops as the means to defeat the CCP.¹⁵ In all likelihood they had little impact on the outcome of the Chinese civil war, which the KMT lost.

The Violence of Imperial Dissolution at the Fringes of Empire

Three crucial historical episodes give us insight into the manner in which the end of empire and impediments to finding justice complicated the beginning of the postwar period. Because Japan was not merely a country at the time of its defeat, “the history of imperial memory was not a Japanese affair alone, but must be situated within larger processes and transformations of the postwar order in East Asia.”¹⁶ To investigate the failure of justice and the emergence of post-surrender violence requires conducting an autopsy of the 1946 Shibuya Incident in Tokyo, Japan; the February 28, 1947, Incident in Taiwan; and the 1948 Jeju Island Incident in Korea. After all, the course of justice was intimately affected by numerous events around the former empire. Violence that spewed forth at the end of empire was not always directed at the Japanese and thus the form justice took was also not monochromatic. Different allegiances and former networks of power affected how it evolved. In fact, these archetypal incidents—in Japan, Taiwan, and Korea—spotlight the difficulty of demobilized but weaponized societies where youths were recently disenfranchised from the empire. No Asian victory in World War II—Chinese, Korean, or Taiwanese—followed the path the early modern European theorist of war Carl von Clausewitz outlined.¹⁷ Triumph did not allow the victor, the Chinese Nationalist Party, to assert its dominance or its version of a new world order on the conquered party—in this case, Japan. The early postwar period in East Asia was disorganized and violent, though often the fracases were within the same ethnic groups where various cliques were vying for power. All three of these moments geographically relate to Japan’s crumbling empire, although historiographically they have normally been treated within their own national histories and rarely been viewed from a more regional perspective, linked specifically with the disintegration of Japan’s empire.

In fact, what these violent encounters tell us is that we have not yet crafted a suitable vocabulary for the interim between the failure of war, the twilight of empire, and the arrival of peace. It certainly does not happen overnight.¹⁸ The shift from defeat to finding justice is a process that requires years. What is the difference between “defeat” and “the end of war”? When does a postwar period begin, and do these terms come with a finite beginning and end? This is a period for which we currently have no real, adequate linguistic phrase. We have not yet sufficiently discussed these issues, because until recently history was preternaturally focused on the outbreak and denouement of war but not its conclusion or when fighting is brought to a close. A further historiographical problem is that we tend to discuss defeat as just the small sliver of time during which the formalities of military combat and the ceremony of surrender occur. We then quickly move on to the idea of the postwar period. However, this speed pushes us too easily to dismiss significant changes in circumstances.

Shibuya Incident, Tokyo, 1946

Japanese authorities were anxious about the immediate aftermath of the war. The empire and home islands teemed with malcontents nursing a variety of grievances. A Japanese report of unknown provenance detailing the situation of Taiwanese and Koreans stated that because of the change of circumstances, Japanese authorities were most worried about potential incidents at places where many Korean and Taiwanese workers were stationed. In Akita Prefecture there was an incident at a mine where a dozen or so Korean workers were drinking on August 15 and yelled at their Japanese supervisors, “Japan lost the war so now we will make you work in the mines!” Then they destroyed items in their dormitory and ran amok. It took fifty police officers and others to suppress the conflict. There were other incidents at various mines and at a naval facility in Kanagawa where about seven thousand Taiwanese labored. On August 23 they stopped work and food at the facilities quickly diminished. The incensed Taiwanese saw female employees and cafeteria workers absconding with supplies and accosted them. The dispatch of several hundred Japanese military police to the area was required to restore order.¹⁹ The Japanese MOFA investigated that for many expat Japanese living on Taiwan there had not been too great a change in lifestyle toward the end of the war, so things appeared relatively stable after the war. However, no one could sell their assets and with prices rising due to stricter rationing, it grew harder to make ends meet and the situation grew more precarious.²⁰

The Shibuya Incident in Tokyo was essentially a riot in July 1946 during which several hundred Taiwanese black marketeers fought with Japanese gangsters in pitched battles over turf. This was a time of penurious economic conditions brought about just after the conclusion of the war. Japan’s economy had virtually come to a standstill, and to eke out a living, those already at the bottom rungs of Japanese imperial society—the Taiwanese, Chinese, Koreans, and other “lesser Asians,” as they were often deemed—competed for profit among the forty-five thousand open-air stalls in Tokyo. In the end, six Taiwanese and a Japanese police officer were killed. Approximately forty Taiwanese were arrested and eventually put on trial in a specially established US military court because Chinese/Taiwanese were exempt from being pursued under Japanese domestic law. Non-Japanese were no longer legally Japanese with the signing of the surrender document. On the Chinese mainland the incident upset Chinese attitudes toward the Americans, whom the left wing increasingly viewed as eager to prop up militant Japanese regrowth.

The Japanese public closely observed the trial of the Shibuya Incident because it was one of the first test cases that showed the new postwar limits of Japanese law to resolve postimperial problems. The Chinese Mission in Japan also carefully supervised the trial to ensure that the Taiwanese (now newly enfranchised citizens of the Republic of China) were allowed access to proper legal representation.²¹ The overseas Chinese association assiduously followed the tribunal. The Americans tried the Taiwanese in a US military tribunal but ultimately allowed a Chinese judge to join the court. This was Henry Qiu (Qiu Shaoheng), who had initially been brought in as a secretary and interpreter for Chinese prosecutor Xiang Zhejun to assist in the Tokyo Trial. (As we will see, Qiu was also instrumental decades later in the Gang of Four trial in Beijing.)

Yorkson Shen (Shen Jinding), acting chief of the Chinese Mission, kept up pressure on General MacArthur. Shen felt the Americans occupying Japan were preferential to the Japanese and needed to take the incident more seriously and note its potential ramifications. The Mission assessed that the Taiwanese were “defenseless victims” upon whom the Japanese police had aggressively fired.²² In short, the “Shibuya Incident of 1946 was illustrative of China’s attempts to influence US policy in postwar Japan, and the ultimate frustration of those attempts.”²³

The trial started on September 30, 1946, and lasted until December 10 within a courtroom in the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Bureau. The Taiwanese were charged with crimes against the goals of the occupation. Of the formally indicted forty-one Taiwanese, two were released as not guilty, and the remaining thirty-nine were sentenced. One was given three years of hard labor, and the other thirty-eight were given two years of hard labor. Yorkson Shen dissented against the court’s decision to little avail.²⁴ The verdict chafed against Chinese official opinion, which many viewed as “Japan’s perceived unrepentant attitude toward China.”²⁵ Already from the outset of the end of empire, Taiwanese could see that they would be treated differently and that their former loyalty to the Japanese empire suddenly meant very little. For Japanese, while the war might have been about defending the empire, such propaganda slogans would now ring very hollow for the empire’s peripheral subjects so easily jettisoned after surrender.

February 28 Incident, Taiwan

Riots lit by the discontent of formerly militarily indoctrinated youths were endemic to immediate postwar imperial Japan. Like the young Taiwanese men who had to come to terms with the failure of the Japanese empire on the Japanese home islands, Taiwanese now under the heel of the KMT authorities on the island of Taiwan also had to deal with equally complex issues. By the late years of the war, slightly more than two hundred thousand Taiwanese men were mobilized in some capacity for Japan’s imperial military juggernaut. Some were soldiers, and others served as camp guards who were sent far away to remote islands in Southeast Asia. Many labored merely as support staff or low-level workers in camps. Some found this empowering or at least a positive experience. They did not necessarily see themselves as Japanese but nonetheless did consider themselves high on the imperial hierarchy.

During the last stage of the war, US planners were researching how to invade and then rule Taiwan to prepare for an eventual Chinese takeover. The United States estimated that the KMT military was weak and did not have the expertise to properly administer Taiwan. US officials believed that the UK was also not properly staffed militarily but maybe could join with the KMT to occupy and manage Taiwan together.²⁶ Fundamentally, there was discord between the Chinese vision of a sudden takeover following Japan’s defeat and the opinions of the other Allies. It was not clear in the initial handover who would have final authority. It is interesting to note that Chinese Nationalist leaders believed or acted as if Taiwan was or always had been part of China even though fifty years had passed since the island had been separated from Qing dynasty control, when the KMT had not even existed. Because the KMT could devote only a small force to occupy Taiwan, US authorities agreed to take control at first. This alacrity was also how the Americans were able to quickly procure the Japanese soldiers they wanted for trials in Shanghai of atrocities against downed American pilots.²⁷

Taiwan sits uncomfortably at the intersection of the history of decolonization and global history. Its story is not a happy and uplifting one, because it confronts difficult moments of the past. What the conflict revealed, in part, was the unbridled hostility of those who had grown up under Japanese colonial rule and were now suddenly constrained by Chinese authority. KMT leaders were baffled at the opposition, believing that all Chinese held the same political distaste for imperial Japan. The aftermath of the uproar showed the gap between native-born Taiwanese under Japanese rule, benshengren in Chinese, and those born on the mainland who arrived after Japan’s defeat, waishengren in Chinese. This chasm widened and remained a fairly constant source of political friction between the two societies arguably until at least the early twenty-first century.

The KMT was so disorganized concerning the takeover on Taiwan that it sent only a small number of soldiers and not its elite forces, which caused great consternation. We should recall that the KMT was militarily weak, not only on mainland China but particularly in Taiwan. It could not fully restore order, so it incorporated local paramilitary groups into its own police troops. This move clearly shows how there was no seamless shift from war to peace.²⁸ Kamisago Shōshichi had been a military police officer in Taiwan for thirty years. He remembered that in early October about 150 Chinese military police arrived in grand style at Danshui (Tamsui) port, all dressed to the hilt with new equipment, and parading on the quay in a way that puzzled as much as impressed the Taiwanese who watched from the shore.²⁹ But he added that even though the Chinese troops looked well prepared, the Taiwanese afterward said, “As we thought … the Japanese military is better.”³⁰ Kamisago recalled that the initial Taiwanese response to the Chinese military landing was to send their daughters away and shut their houses.³¹ A Japanese military report from Taiwan high command to Tokyo in late October 1945 detailed that immediately after the surrender the situation remained calm on the island but then picked up and was marred by a rise in theft and acts against the police. The Japanese military had not yet handed over its weapons, but the Japanese administration was quite concerned about the future of social stability in Taiwan. The Japanese military command also noted that there were thousands of demilitarized individuals in Taiwan, including naval laborers, soldiers, student workers who were employed by the military, injured soldiers, and others, all of whom were now in a predicament. There were also many Taiwanese families arriving at the Japanese military headquarters to request that the Japanese government repatriate their loved ones. The headquarters in Taiwan was forced to get in touch with offices in the Philippines, Indonesia, and other Southeast Asian locales where Taiwanese were frequently dispatched to find out what had happened since news from Tokyo was scarce.³²

Peng Ming-min recalled his initial reaction to the KMT. Peng came from a wealthy Taiwanese family and was educated in the Japanese language in Taiwan, later traveling to Japan for further study at Tokyo Imperial University. He returned toward the end of the war by way of Nagasaki, where he witnessed the atomic bomb being dropped. Peng was contemptuous of the KMT, perhaps reflective of his Japanese attitudes? He wrote, “Public officials from China proved incompetent and incredibly corrupt, and the rag-tag conscript Nationalist troops were petty thieves, becoming a rabble of scavengers as soon as they came off the ships.”³³ In his memoirs he described the terror he felt once order crumbled, hiding with his family, and the lack of certitude about the future.³⁴ Other KMT officials would criticize the party leaders in similar ways, but Peng reserved his deepest opprobrium for Taiwan’s secondary invaders. The world of high-ranking KMT officials, he wrote, was filled with loyalties or enmity based solely on personal relations with “no room for individual dedication to abstract causes as ephemeral as democracy and human rights.”³⁵ Many Taiwanese were also dissatisfied with their continual treatment as second-class citizens after the KMT arrival. KMT party individuals often took over jobs at the top of the food chain, with salaries higher than those of their Taiwanese counterparts.³⁶

Regardless of the inner mechanisms of the party, its fractured nature in part probably led to mistaken plans to take over Taiwan.³⁷ On October 25, 1945, more than two months after Japan’s formal surrender, General Chen Yi announced the “return” of Taiwan. Taiwan was being restored to the motherland and would be administered as a province of China, in some ways reverting back to its Qing dynasty status. The US role in underwriting this return orchestrating the removal of the Japanese was glossed over or ignored.³⁸

All of this tension among the various social and political layers had been brewing internally and found a pretext to explode just after February 27, 1947. That evening a Taiwanese widow was selling black market tobacco on the streets of Taipei. Thuggish agents of the Monopoly Bureau discovered her illegal activities and beat her. Passersby formed an angry mob into which an agent fired a warning shot, which killed an onlooker. Fleeing the scene, the agents took shelter in a nearby police station while the mob bayed for justice against the culprits.³⁹ The next day, things grew worse. The widow was reported to have died. The violent treatment incensed locals, and several thousand converged on the Monopoly Bureau demanding justice in the form of dismissal of the director. Unemployment in the former colony was running at very high levels, and many were struggling to buy food and find work. As the crowd crossed town, a soldier manning a machine gun perched on a government building let loose a volley, killing at least four in the melee.⁴⁰ Fighting and looting broke out in Taipei, where martial law was enacted in the afternoon of February 28, as the killings and riots spread across the island. Governor General Chen Yi made a radio appeal, which merely added fuel to the fire. One broadcast said that US diplomats witnessed armed forces killing unarmed civilians in Taipei.⁴¹ The situation continued to escalate, and demands of the government to release those being held pushed forward. On March 9, more Chinese Nationalist troops from the mainland arrived, and the killings continued to spiral upward.⁴² One problem stemmed from the KMT’s initial overly lax attitude toward the potential for difficulty in administrating Taiwan. Chiang Kai-shek, of course, wanted to keep as many troops as possible on the mainland to bring the civil war to an end. Initially, military leaders dispatched slightly more than five thousand KMT soldiers to the island to keep order, and they were thinly spread out. This was Chen Yi’s first miscalculation. The incident had taken him completely by surprise, and by early March he was requesting more troops.⁴³

US reports downplayed the potential for the rise of communism in Taiwan because the island had been schooled under Japanese colonialism. US analysts believed that as long as living standards remained high there was little support on the island for communist ideas.⁴⁴ However, the KMT, following a pattern South Korean leaders would employ when dealing with internal unrest, blamed a communist insurgency for the incident. George Kerr, a US diplomat in Taipei at the time, said, “Formosan enthusiasm for ‘liberation’ lasted about six weeks,” after which they started calling the KMT governor general a “fat pig.”⁴⁵ Widespread looting and a lack of respect from the KMT, the Taiwanese considered, for their private property and belongings quickly led to more friction.

The February 28 Incident might have started out as popular local discontent with KMT brutality against those seen as vulnerable—an old woman selling tobacco in a bad economy. But it quickly transformed into a backlash of deep-seated social discontent with KMT planning and policy. At one point, with the takeover of a radio station, broadcasts were made not in Chinese, a new language for many, but Japanese. The announcements called for everyone to protect themselves and their community. It was, effectively, a call to arms against the KMT. It is hard to determine whether this was done as an appeal to continue the riots, but that would not necessarily have been completely out of context.⁴⁶ The movement may have escalated because it allowed Taiwanese young men to feel energized, after the demasculinization of defeat, which they were also not allowed to wallow in or celebrate.⁴⁷ The KMT and US authorities believed some of the rumors and news, panicking that there were actual Japanese soldiers in Taiwan helping out.⁴⁸ In all likelihood, the February 28 Incident was the result of a tremendous underestimation of the ability of a colonized island to suddenly be retaken by a foreign power with whom the local population had no experience. Hundreds were soon arrested and charged, which meant by 1948 that Taipei Prison was “in part seriously overcrowded with inmates convicted of ‘rebellion.’ ”⁴⁹

Discord and economic riots were not unknown to the KMT, and in other areas of China, unrest was suppressed. On November 30, 1946, an enormous melee erupted in Shanghai between street stall vendors and the police. About seven hundred to eight hundred individuals were arrested, and a violent opposition to the police action grew. This was only slightly before what happened in Taiwan, so what allowed the KMT to regain control relatively more easily in Shanghai than in Taiwan? First, KMT leaders believed or at least espoused the idea that what was happening in Taiwan was a conspiracy of communist agents. The second problem was that in Taiwan the army took over, whereas in Shanghai the mayor did not permit the military police to take action. Consequently, KMT suppression against Taiwanese was more violent and brutal, in part because mainland Chinese forces saw the Taiwanese as individuals who had been supposedly indoctrinated with Japanese imperial education and were thus different.⁵⁰

The Republic of China (ROC) was attempting to take over territory within the former Japanese empire with little preparation. Taiwanese, as colonial subjects within Japan’s empire, had spread around East and Southeast Asia by choice and also due to military mobilization. They had taken up positions as guards in POW camps, as doctors, and as administrators in Manchukuo and in south China. As the empire crumbled, so did their prestige and qualifications to work. Following the outbreak of the February 28 Incident, the ROC government mandated that all Taiwanese who had served in administrative positions in Manchuria would not be eligible for work in official Taiwanese positions, nor would they be eligible to sit for national exams. It was therefore necessary to hide this experience if one sought employment or a new qualification.⁵¹ The British consul in Taiwan, G. R. Tingle, stationed at Danshui (Tamsui), noted that Chinese officials in Taiwan “appear to have been exploiting the island in a highhanded way and to have excluded native Formosans from all higher branches of the administration.” This bred deep discontent, Tingle concluded.⁵²

The February 28 Incident opened a Pandora’s box of excessive KMT responses to a perceived (though sometimes credible) communist threat within Taiwan’s borders. This was the tragic situation in Luku Village, a settlement in the northern mountains of Taiwan, midway between Taipei and Keelung City.⁵³ From December 1952 to March 1953, about ten thousand KMT soldiers surrounded this small village and crushed it for being a communist hive. About 183 villagers were arrested in the Luku Incident. Most were illiterate and worked in very poor conditions in the local coal mines. “In total 36 villagers were executed. A further 97 villagers (including 19 teenagers) were sentenced and imprisoned for a total of 871 years.”⁵⁴

KMT general Sun Li-jen was an early supporter of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, but he soon saw the writing on the wall and quickly came to grasp how poorly prepared the KMT was to take over the former colony. Sun had studied at the Virginia Military Institute and spoke excellent English. He was by all accounts a successful military leader during the Chinese civil war, and at one point he was approached by the Americans to depose Chiang. Originally one of Chiang’s right-hand men, he grew increasingly depressed about the downward political spiral in Taiwan by the early 1950s. He explained what he saw as a steep decline in the future of the Chinese Nationalist ability to rule: “There is no freedom of speech or press, or rule of law; any deviation from the Party line of thought expressed in any way—brings swift punishment. The Secret Police pick up people without warrant, and they are often shot without trial.”⁵⁵

Dealing with Postwar Colonies: Victim or Perpetrator?

The war crimes issue within the ranks of former colonial subjects cuts to the heart of two problems central to identity: Were these young men Taiwanese first, or imperial Japanese? One question that lurks behind the weaponized discontent in the immediate postwar period ties into their confusion concerning how we should consider this mixed colonial past and postwar period.⁵⁶

Hayashi Miki, like many young Taiwanese of his generation, became a POW camp guard. Hayashi completed his training at the Shirakawa Training Grounds. Like many other Taiwanese guards, Hayashi was eventually sent to north Borneo (which had been a British colonial territory), to the Kuching detention camp. Camp guards had duties to keep detainees working or deter them from escaping. The camp eventually moved farther into the jungle as the war worsened, and only when they came back to the village for supplies did they hear news of Japan’s surrender. Upon hearing the announcement, his whole body went numb, Hayashi recalled.⁵⁷ After the war, he was given a fifteen-year sentence in an Australia war crimes tribunal for maltreating POWs. Often Taiwanese arrested as war criminals saw themselves as double victims—of colonialism and then being tried for participating in imperialism.

What Hayashi did not talk about more explicitly was his role in empire at the Shirakawa camp, which also housed a notoriously brutal Japanese imperial POW camp.⁵⁸ Many foreign POWs recalled being shipped through Taiwan to other camps. Taiwan was a vital central depot within the Japanese empire. One glance at a map of imperial oceanic transport demonstrates the importance of Taiwan to Japan’s functioning as an empire. Taiwanese guards, and the location of Taiwan as a POW transport hub and the site of numerous labor camps, tell us this.⁵⁹

Jack Edwards, a British POW, spent a hellacious three years in Japanese-owned mines in Taiwan, particularly at Kinkaseki (Jinguashi in Chinese), under the management of the Nippon Mining Company. In intimate detail, he described the beatings and the Japanese officers’ disinterest in human life.⁶⁰ When US troops liberated the camp, Edwards weighed a mere eighty-five pounds. He went back to Asia after liberation and recuperation because he felt it was his duty to testify at court about his maltreatment.⁶¹ Edwards claimed that when he returned to Taiwan after the war to investigate war crimes, he found plans at the Kinkaseki mine. These records, which he included in a translated version in his autobiography, had not been completely burned and instructed the leaders of the camp to kill all the POWs before Japan’s surrender. These documents were also presented at the war crimes trial in Hong Kong of the men who had controlled the POW camp. Edwards asserted that he found the only document that was also produced at the Tokyo Trial, which revealed the order to kill POWs at the end of the war.⁶²

A problem with the memories of someone who has been victimized is that they do not always correspond to the scene on the ground, regardless of how much we wish it were so. After more careful investigation, the order that Jack Edwards claimed to have found in the burned-out remnants of Kinkaseki in Taiwan was most likely a Japanese imperial military response to a hypothetical situation that was recorded in a journal. It was not an official order. There were seemingly orders of a similar kind, often thoughts on paper, but no overall order emanating from imperial headquarters.⁶³ The masterful collator of the Tokyo Trial records, John Pritchard, is dubious. Pritchard takes a calculated and distanced approach. As he sees it, the problem is one of both provenance of the order and misunderstanding it. He admits that there was a cultural policy of deviance toward POWs, so wanting them dead was easily read into any Japanese document that revealed elements of such a cruel plan. Sadly, Edwards’s conspiracy was never supported by volumes of other data, rendering his smoking-gun testimony lukewarm.⁶⁴

However, the issue is complicated by the fact that the murder of Allied POWs did sometimes occur following superior orders. It just was not done necessarily in accordance with a centralized directive and thus was not evidence of a larger Japanese imperial conspiracy. Taiwanese guards, compelled to be the sharp end of imperial punishment at camps throughout Southeast Asia and the South Pacific, recall similar situations. For example, Ke Jingxing was an impoverished young Taiwanese man who joined the Japanese military out of economic need. He trained at the Shirakawa Training Ground in Taiwan and was later sent to Kuching in north Borneo (now the state of Sarawak in Malaysia) as a POW camp guard in 1942.⁶⁵ Ke was dispatched to several different work/POW camps and ended up in Labuan, where he oversaw work on an airfield. Toward the end of the war, the teams were split as the war took a turn for the worse, and Ke, along with a small coterie of guards and prisoners, retreated to a place called Miri. In June 1945 they learned that the Allies had come ashore in north Borneo, and their commanding officer gave the order to kill the prisoners. The Taiwanese guards were forced to take arms and shoot the prisoners, or, as Ke recalled, they themselves would surely have been killed. Ke never knew whether the order to shoot the prisoners came from central command or was solely the decision of the local commander. After the war, Ke was charged with war crimes and only returned to Taiwan in 1953.⁶⁶ In the face of this oral testimony, no one can deny the atrocities coordinated against Allied POWs. But doubt remains strong against the idea of conspiracy.⁶⁷ Japanese businesses did make a profit from POW suffering, and the fact that those conglomerates received postwar compensation, while the POWs were left out in the cold, was a travesty of justice. But, unfortunately, that part of the story does not mean that at the root level of the central government and military a conspiracy existed that gave the imperial order to kill all POWs at war’s end.

Aftermath of the Trials

Not only did the KMT continually waffle in its own internal policies toward Taiwanese war criminals, but the Japanese government did too. Tokyo made halfhearted attempts in December 1952 to educate society about creating rest homes for Korean and Taiwanese war criminals—places for these individuals to reside while they waited for transit back to their “own” countries. The idea of empire had now been virtually erased in Japan.⁶⁸ There were several rest homes established in Tokyo and at least one in Saitama Prefecture, which was the largest, but all were merely stopgap measures to help the men transit through Japan to their final destination.⁶⁹ There was public awareness but less direct public empathy in Japan for those who had fallen into the holes of history.

Where the Japanese public actively clamored for more input was ironically for Taiwanese stories of suffering in war crimes trials at the hands of the Allies. As the Taiwanese transited through Tokyo, copies of the last wills and final words of executed war criminals were folded into the collection of the Japanese bestseller Last Wills and Testaments of the Century, published in the early 1950s. This edited volume was a collection of the final declarations written by Japanese soldiers who were executed BC class war criminals. The collection was by no means exhaustive, but it did indicate that many former Taiwanese soldiers believed in themselves as imperial Japanese subjects and did not want to have died in vain. Many of their last writings were included, and Japanese readers snapped up copies. Lin Jinlong was a Taiwanese military laborer who was tried by the United States in Manila and executed on July 17, 1946. He wrote that it was the destiny of young Taiwanese to die on the field of battle, proclaiming, “I have sacrificed myself for imperial Japan and now go to heaven.” He wrote to his friends in an April 1946 letter, just after being handed his sentence, that although their assistance had been futile, he appreciated their efforts.⁷⁰ Li An, a Taiwanese military laborer from Jiayi, was tried in Guangdong. Li penned a will to his father and said rather stoically, “I swear that I have not broken any national laws. I have a wife and child, no debts. Even though I will be executed, please make sure no one seeks revenge for my death.”⁷¹

Like many of the Taiwanese rounded up in Southeast Asia, Lin Jiangshan was a Taiwanese military laborer executed at Rabaul by an Australian court. Lin thanked his friends and then wrote that he had given his youth to the nation and his body was destined to be spread on the fields of Rabaul. Then, in a measure out of character with many of the Taiwanese last testaments, Lin followed with a separate message in the Chinese language where he thanked his friends for sending flowers. Their fragrant smell lessened my loneliness, he wrote. “People are like flowers in that no two are alike, at their peak they blossom and then fall to the ground in slumber.”⁷² Yasuda Muneharu was one of the Taiwanese military laborers put to death by the British at Changi Prison in Singapore. Yasuda had been posted to Malaya and elsewhere since 1942 and was arrested by the Allies on suspicion of having committed torture. “The fact that my destiny has been decided in this way means that I have become a victim of having carried out my duties,” Yasuda wrote. He informed his family about his bank account in a Shimonoseki branch back in Japan and asked that they please take out the money. Yasuda also asked his brother to carry on the family name.⁷³ The fact that these men’s final writings were included in a postwar Japanese book to promote sympathy for Japan’s lost empire, while failing to investigate the issues of responsibility within the larger population itself, speaks volumes about the manner in which the details of imperial sacrifice were massaged depending on the geography of the postwar narrative.⁷⁴

Jeju, Korea: When Imperial Struggles Bleed into Cold War Conflict

The third incident in the chain of events demonstrating how the fall of Japan imperiled ideas of postwar justice surrounds the manner in which Koreans accepted and took on the mantle of independence. This moment concerns the dark terrain of violence on Jeju Island from April 1948 to May 1949. During this time and after an estimated thirty thousand Koreans were slaughtered by Korean police forces, who believed the island had become a hotbed of communist agitation.⁷⁵ Ultimately lasting for seven years, the massacre had harrowing consequences: “one out of every two households in the island became victims of rape, torture or murder.”⁷⁶

Jeju Island (sometimes Cheju in English) is now celebrated as the locale of many resorts and the site of international conferences owing to its fine hotels and beaches. But in the middle of the last century it was a poor island off the southwestern tip of the Korean peninsula. This small island saw its population double in size to three hundred thousand people in the immediate period after the end of World War II.⁷⁷ Many Koreans were choosing to move back after leaving for employment elsewhere, and others were trying to get away from difficulties on the peninsula, where the looming clouds of civil war kept growing. The situation on Jeju Island was similar to that of Taiwan, where young men had been mobilized and weaponized for imperial war, but after the war they were left hanging with nothing to do and no nation for which to fight. In the interim years after Japan’s sudden surrender, fear and discontent mounted. Both the KMT and South Korean forces (along with the Americans) were wary that these incidents might have been the work of fifth column communists, and so they tried to crush such uprisings with a strong and demonstrative military hand. Starting around early April 1948, people rose up in protest against the US-sponsored elections in South Korea and were met with a heavy police presence. Tens of thousands, about one-fifth of the island population, were killed, but as many as forty thousand had fled to Japan and half of the villages on the island had been destroyed. We likely need to use a different word than “incident,” because this term downplays the severity of what was at its core a seven-year guerrilla war with counterinsurgency battles.

The number of people killed between October 1948 and February 1949 accounted for a bit more than 60 percent of all deaths. This included children being shot, beheadings, and whole families being wiped out.⁷⁸ The US occupation of South Korea generally relied on the police to keep order and deemed homegrown local grassroots groups illegal. This decision was not popular since the police in Korea were seen as a symbol of collaboration with the imperial Japanese. As the Americans began taking measures against the JCP in Japan, they also began crushing the left wing in Korea.⁷⁹

Depending on one’s assessment, the Jeju Island Incident was a democratic movement, a popular uprising, a massacre, a riot, or even an anti-American struggle.⁸⁰ We must remember that Jeju, like Taiwan, was a demilitarized zone of the former Japanese imperial periphery, and many young men had been trained, had access to weapons, and were suddenly left rootless with the end of empire. Indeed, the Jeju Incident was not inevitable but rather an unfortunate outgrowth of the process of de-imperialization. Those involved had put forward little preparation for different former imperial elements coming into contact with each other.

In response, a general strike against police violence was called. As with postimperial violence in Taiwan, there was a cultural and psychological divide on Jeju between native islanders and more recent arrivals from the Korean peninsula. The majority of the police force was from the Korean mainland, and the islanders kept themselves distant. The Communist Party was present and did inspire protests, so it was not a fiction as the KMT had tried to pretend in Taiwan. In May 1948, the UN managed the first free elections in South Korea. Less than half a year later, in November, South Korean president Synghman Rhee declared martial law on Jeju Island and deployed a large number of Korean military forces to restore order.

Until the late 1980s, the Jeju Incident, like the February 28 Incident in Taiwan, was mainly depicted as a communist rebellion. However, since the democratization of South Korea in 1987, Jeju is now conceived as more of a popular uprising. More responsibility is put on Korean and US misrule and oppression. In parallel with the subsequent decades-long amnesia of similar events in Taiwan, South Koreans placed initial blame on President Rhee, who greatly relied on those who had collaborated with imperial Japan–aligned individuals for stability and support of his administration. In 1948, a special Korean court was established to investigate Japanese collaboration, and within several months the tribunal had opened 682 cases. Rhee said the court was pro-communist and used this label elsewhere and a fear of communism to suppress these sorts of investigations. A brief moment of light appeared in 1960 when students wished to pursue the truth, but the 1961 Park Chung-hee coup and his rule until his assassination in 1978 meant that repression and historical amnesia reigned until the later 1980s. Again, almost coterminous with Taiwanese historical redressing of past wrongs, it is only in the twenty-first century that South Korea has come face to face with its domestic litany of repression and atrocities.⁸¹

Postimperial Violence: What Does It Signify?

In all three incidents in Japan, Taiwan, and Korea newly enfranchised forces were bent on putting down what were essentially partially demobilized societies that until recently had contained large bands of young and weaponized Japanese imperial youths. Sometimes these groups had been connected to the imperial military but not necessarily. It is, perhaps, a gross oversimplification, but the example of South Korean autocrat Park Chung-hee helps fill in many gaps for this era. A young member of the Japanese empire, Park studied Japanese imperial military science, joined the ranks, and then rose through the staff of the South Korean military. Park’s most recent biographer in English noted the difficulty in assessing Park’s legacy in relation to contemporary attitudes in East Asia. “That a Korean young man in the 1940s could find his ‘true self’ in the IJA [Imperial Japanese Army] or Manchurian officer corps does not rest well today with Korean nationalist sentiment that tends to equate being true to one’s Korean self at the time with being anti-Japanese, and joining the imperial officer corps equivalent to betraying the Korean nation.”⁸²

Regardless of how they positioned themselves after the war, toward the end of World War II both Korean and Taiwanese men were being drafted and trained for the imperial Japanese armed forces. These incidents tell us that far from being suddenly over, the postwar period within East Asia and throughout areas that Japan previously controlled was affected by two major issues. First, the primary problem of how to expel the Japanese from various colonized or occupied lands remained a conundrum since this was either accomplished through violence or dependent on assistance from former colonial powers, such as the case with Indochina. The second major obstacle was how to establish independent and sovereign rule in the frequent absence of experience or ability. The question of how to repatriate the Japanese from their entrenched positions as imperial leaders was also far from easy, especially given that many of the former European colonial powers wished to gain a quick upper hand in “restoring” order, and many of those internal leaders retained connections with their own imperial past, or defined themselves by their opposition to it.

Even with the economic rise and growing importance of contemporary China, the region’s understanding of its own past and its internal dynamics remain deeply rooted in the contours of the manner in which World War II ended. These narratives became exceedingly important to the rise of numerous leaders and served as ballast for their authority. While the KMT and other political parties in East Asia did not necessarily maintain a sharp focus on their 1945 victory over the Japanese military as propaganda fodder for their contemporary political ideology, for many groups it is still an element of their founding ethos. These stories are often linked to the process of how Japanese imperial rule was dismantled at the local level, often by those who had opposed Japan but also by collaborators. Japan’s sudden surrender in no way signified that the country would immediately disavow its extensive imperial ideology. The same could be said for former Japanese occupied lands, which suffered as much trauma in trying to recover their claims to political authority as they did while pursuing justice against their former Japanese overlords and those they defined as national “traitors.”

The Korean War Interlude and Prisoner Repatriation

The Jeju Incident was not the end of violence on the Korean peninsula that was related to the end of empire. This continuation of instability in the wake of Japanese imperial dissolution would cast a long shadow on Korea, mainland Chinese society, and Taiwan for years to come. Within a few years of the start of the Korean War in the summer of 1950, a nearby island would face extremes of military violence, only this time between feuding bands of Chinese POWs.⁸³ Koje Island (Geoje) was smaller and closer to the Korean coast than its larger brother island Jeju. It was also the site of deep discord among captured Chinese prisoners and was representative of political fissures the Japanese empire had unleashed but never reconciled. The distinguished Japanese scholar Wada Haruki called the Korean War “unfinished,” and part of the triggering mechanism was linked to the fall of the Japanese empire. When Japan’s empire crumbled, the moment for reconciliation with Korea as a former colony was ripe. Unfortunately, Japan did little and ignored the potential problems. As Wada carefully notes, the end of the Japanese empire, sadly, did not bring peace to Asia, though strangely it did bring more stability to the Japanese islands where the military had ceased engagement with the world since 1945.⁸⁴ Hirano Ryūji goes further, suggesting that the origins of the Korean War can more likely be traced back to divisions within Korean armed forces—between those that were trained in Japanese and Manchukuo military academies and those who were educated by the communists as partisans against Japan’s imperial project. After 1945, they merely relocated their geographic struggle from Manchuria to the Korean peninsula.⁸⁵ The Korean War has also been understood as a proxy war between the USSR and the United States, a civil war, and “a northeast Asia war.”⁸⁶ Regardless of how we define this war, Japan’s demise ushered in this shift to a new regional order. In short, for many inhabitants of East Asia—Chinese, Taiwanese, Koreans across the peninsula and Japanese abroad—“news of Japan’s surrender marked only a momentary hiatus in their continuing experience of war.”⁸⁷

In the summer of 1950, under the leadership of Kim Il Sung, North Korea invaded the south and set off a vicious civil war that further engulfed the peninsula for three years. The Chinese had been prepped for the situation, and “on October 8, 1950, Mao ordered the formation of the Chinese People’s Volunteers Army (CPV).” The name was a misnomer because the Chinese “troops consisted of PLA [People’s Liberation Army] veterans, ‘liberated’ former Nationalist troops, and some new recruits.”⁸⁸ Within a matter of months an enormous deployment of slightly more than twenty-one thousand Chinese communist “voluntary” soldiers had surrendered, been vanquished, or just caved in to the United Nations’ forces.⁸⁹

Very soon thereafter, Koje Island became a fierce battleground surrounding the destiny of these Chinese POWs. Both sides—the United States and the PRC—dug in their heels concerning the right of POWs to choose their preferred country of repatriation. The PRC wanted all Chinese prisoners returned to the Chinese mainland. Representing “free China” or the Chinese Nationalists’ interest, the United States wanted to allow the Chinese soldiers to choose the ROC (the island of Taiwan) if they wished. So contentious was this issue that negotiations were one of the main stumbling blocks in reaching an armistice and arguably delayed the end of violence for close to two years. Both the United States and China inclined to employ POW repatriation for their own political ends, and neither was willing to concede. Admiral C. Turner Joy, who fronted efforts for the United States with PLA officials during the Korean War negotiations, noted that the Chinese communists had a hatred of Chiang Kai-shek “so intense as to border on psychotic.”⁹⁰

Ultimately, two-thirds of the approximately twenty-one thousand Chinese POWs detained during the Korean War chose to “repatriate” to Taiwan even if most had not originated from there. Huang Tiancai, a Taiwanese interpreter who worked at the front lines and in the POW camps during the Korean War, recalled the stories of numerous Chinese prisoners he interrogated. Many related sad tales of originally being Chinese Nationalist soldiers but later being folded into the PRC volunteer army after the KMT’s defeat. In actuality, both sides intimated that they constantly faced discrimination within prisoner ranks.⁹¹

This larger group of Chinese prisoners, who chose Taiwan over the PRC, was a public relations coup for the United States and “free China,” as the ROC would now emphasize. The ones who returned to the ROC were called anticommunist heroes, and nationalist Chinese celebrated the return of soldiers who had never before set foot in the new “motherland.”⁹² In late January 1954, the People’s Daily, the mouthpiece of the CCP, published an angry article that ranted against the supposed US perversion of justice of allowing the prisoners to go where they wanted. The newspaper criticized the exploitation of POWs in this way and added that this “allows the world to clearly see that the US uses the fresh blood of prisoners of war to dress up its signage that America stands for a belief in human rights.”⁹³ Appealing to ideas of international justice and recalling the “court of justice” that had pursued the “German fascists” after World War II, the newspaper was adamant that the world would see through this supposed US propaganda effort and not permit it to go unanswered.⁹⁴

By contrast, POW repatriates on the mainland did not receive the same hospitality from Chinese communists. While the PRC castigated the US and ROC plan to repatriate the larger share of Chinese prisoners, the seven thousand or so soldiers who chose repatriation to communist China faced unforeseen difficulties. Their fate was ironically similar to what their defeated former enemy Japanese forces had met with on their return to the home islands of Japan. The PRC leadership was fully capable of maintaining two contradictory policies toward its domestic prisoners. One policy was aimed at the KMT officers already in its prisons. The other was a massive reeducation and active propaganda strategy it implemented against returning Chinese POWs from the Korean War. The policies were by no means always in opposition, but neither were they unified. When the former POWs returned to China from Korea, instead of being welcomed with celebratory parades for their war sacrifices, “they faced a disheartening situation. Forced confession, persecution, punishment, and humiliation turned the former ‘war heroes’ into enemies of the state.”⁹⁵ The major problem surrounded the fact that regardless of all the rhetoric, at its core the Chinese communist military did not believe that captured soldiers remained loyal. These prisoners were considered suspect and needed to prove themselves to reenter PRC society.⁹⁶

China’s POW policy in the Korean War was important because the PRC was a newly minted country, and so how it managed its POW policy would have a direct impact on the international image of the nation.⁹⁷ The war was the frontier between old China and the potential new China—if it could eke out a victory, or at least claim it. And, all this was taking place at the same time as investigation offices in Fushun and Taiyuan were digging into Japanese war crimes and considering what to do with the KMT POWs. The new Chinese People’s Volunteer Army had slightly reworked the PLA military pledge into something resembling the Japanese imperial credo. The new code stated that soldiers “would rather die than become a POW.”⁹⁸ When these Chinese POWs returned from Korea, they were first debriefed under a new agency, the Repatriates Management Agency. The released prisoners stayed in this repatriation camp for three months, educating themselves and writing up confessions. In some ways, their treatment mirrored similar processes forced on KMT prisoners after the Chinese civil war and the investigations that had been undertaken for Japanese war criminals to assess their guilt. The Repatriates Management Agency implemented procedures that “went through four phases of study sessions: political verification and education, confession, reassessment, and reassignment.”⁹⁹ He Ming, a repatriated POW, noted the negative Chinese social attitudes toward former prisoners from the Korean War. “Many people believed that if you were not injured, or if you did not resist and just raised your hands that this was all a form of surrender. Many colleagues even said in their own confessions to the investigation committees that they ‘selfishly clung to life and feared death so were taken prisoner and surrendered.’ ”¹⁰⁰ Those sorts of ideas were prevalent. Antipathy within postwar Chinese society toward Korean War vets ran deep enough that even though these men were eventually allowed to reenter society, most still could not join the party and were discriminated against in job prospects. It was not until the 1980s, along with the reinstatement of the rule of law in China, that many were rehabilitated to full pensions and rights.