Introduction Making Bad Television

On a brutally hot day in late May 2019, sitting on an impossibly low sofa in an insignificant village in northern China, I failed. All I had to do was ask my guest a simple question on camera. Without a doubt, it was the worst interview of my life.

“Ask him,” she said. The TV director pressed me. “Ask him what happened to his little sister.” The director, who also served as translator when the Chinese dialect got the better of me, sat diagonally to my right, off camera. She kept urging me on, but I glanced at her and I knew. I realized at that moment the interview had taken an unexpected turn away from my control. It was too hot, and I was perspiring through my shirt. Rivulets of sweat dripped off my face; the room was airless and sticky. I was barely keeping it together, and I was supposed to be the one on camera leading the interview.

In the winter of the previous year I had been contacted by one of China’s leading TV stations in Shanghai to see if I was interested in hosting a documentary series on Chinese war crimes trials in the aftermath of World War II.¹ Since I was the author of one of the few books on this topic, and since they were using my book as the template for some of the scripts, the choice seemed easy. However, I was reluctant. After all, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) does not have a great record in open and trustworthy journalism. To put it more succinctly, the fourth estate has no role in China. Media is heavily censored, and there is no agency that is assigned the task to speak truth to power. And yet, I felt that by going to China and working with this team—an excellent group of young and enthusiastic Chinese journalists struggling with reservations similar to mine—I could learn about how history is written and conceived of in the PRC. In short, as a Japan specialist I could use this opportunity to travel around China and gain access to sites and people who would otherwise be off-limits. I would be able to observe how Chinese at the local level saw historical relations with Japan, and then also experience how this news was shaped and reported.

So, here I was in this dusty village in the middle of nowhere and not really doing my job well. How do you tactfully ask a man in his early nineties about the death of his family? I was unsuccessfully peppering this elderly Chinese peasant with questions regarding the intimate details of his family’s demise during a wartime imperial Japanese military attack. It seemed grossly hypocritical to smile on camera and lean forward, attentive to his words, while he revealed the specifics of the singular horrible event that defined his life.

I started, but then suddenly I could not do it. For the first time in my life I failed to form words to pose a question. I was overcome with emotion; the moment was too intense. For years I had read accounts of Japanese imperial soldiers and the horrors they perpetrated on the Chinese, as well as Chinese recollections of these events. I had poured over transcripts of war crimes trials and read Japanese military field reports and diaries containing admissions of their crimes. I thought I was equipped. However, reading about such events and directly hearing it from the mouths of those who endured the experience are two completely different animals. It turns out that I was far from mentally or even academically prepared, so I sat and remained silent. All I could muster was the act of giving witness. I believe that when faced with a moment that defies understanding or challenges our vocabulary, one is obliged to sit and listen. The act of listening, of carefully hearing and providing human contact in the face of the unthinkable, is in my opinion a careful measurement of offering compassion.

The camera crew and I were in Beituan Village, Hebei Province, interviewing a number of Chinese peasants who were very young in 1942. In late May of that year an imperial Japanese army battalion stormed the village to eradicate Chinese communist resistance to Japanese rule. At the time, a young Li Qingxiang escaped the advancing assault by diving into one of the dark tunnels that honeycombed his village below ground. Japanese encroachment had worsened in 1938, prompting Chinese communists and locals to begin digging the passages. Short on weapons but strong on resistance, Communist Party members and others tunneled their way underground to defend themselves because they were so militarily outgunned and outmaneuvered by the Japanese imperial forces. Tunnel warfare became such a hallmark of Chinese communist resistance that popular Chinese films were later made about these campaigns, and remakes have been made as well. The Japanese flushed out this underground opposition by throwing poison gas cannisters into the tunnels. Those who chose to remain—often women and children—suffocated; those who came out were frequently rounded up at the entrances and sometimes summarily executed by the Japanese. In the terrifying and almost suffocating blackness of the tunnel, one was never sure of the direction—were you headed north and out of town or east toward another attack? Only when you dared to pop your head up in a hidden access hole could you maybe find safety. Li had fled with one of his sisters, and during the ensuing chaos in the maze-like subterrain, while they were both gasping for air, his grasp of his sister’s hand loosened. When he finally surfaced, she was no longer next to him.² Li recounted the tragedy, and I instantly regretted that we had pushed him to grant us an interview: “My younger sister in my arms said that she couldn’t move. She was just eight. It was too dark to see her. I don’t really want to talk about this. I can’t eat for days if I talk about it.” His eyes swelled up with tears as he recalled the moment. “It wrenches my heart and makes me want to cry. My younger sister told me to go without her. I went out [he paused, having difficulty finishing the sentence] she died inside the tunnel.”³

The room was suddenly drenched in silence, and I needed to ask the next question. But how do you follow up an interview when the person on the couch next to you is recalling a personal horror from the deep recesses of his mind? I was flummoxed. I wanted to reach out and hold his hand, to offer some form of comfort for a tragedy that took place in another time, long before I arrived on this earth, and which we had pushed him into recalling. There was nothing I could do, yet I was supposed to be in charge. I could not respond, because there was nothing to say. It was an infinitely horrible moment that seemed to drag on forever. Luckily, the director intervened and saved me from further shame. What is more, this was not making for good television. Previously, the directors had explained to me that on TV—in China or anywhere for that matter—things have to move; there has to be action. Turning the lens to Li might have been powerful, his eyes glistening as we pushed him to remember precisely what he was attempting to forget. But that would have been a cheap play. It was, in the end, a very difficult day.

Unfortunately, as emotionally entangling as Li’s tragedy is, doubt remains. There are many problems with the history of Japanese war crimes and the trials that adjudicated justice in postwar East Asia. Discrepancies between fact and fiction, or facts that are able to be proved in a court of law, result in a situation that even today renders what actually happened in that small Chinese village and the war in Asia open to interpretation. More than seventy-five years after the war, these disagreements about whether justice was correctly pursued continue to feed political friction in the region. Japanese interpretations call into question the story of the Beituan massacre that Li survived. At least, this was according to the initial admissions of Japanese soldiers and officials. The KMT (Chinese Nationalist Party) never pursued justice for this atrocity. Not until 1956, fourteen years after the events, did the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) even bring charges to a tribunal of its own and gain confessions from the Japanese officers responsible. Unfortunately, within months these verdicts disappeared from mainland Chinese media, subsumed by the innumerable Chinese campaigns against their own counterrevolutionaries over the next few decades. These judgments were then also ignored by the rest of the world. The story of how this amnesia occurred and why will be explained in this book. Many Chinese who suffered Japanese war crimes would have to wait until the 1990s, but really the start of the twenty-first century, to resolve these injustices.

The legacy of war crimes trials in East Asia is an underexplored avenue for understanding the political divisions in the region today. This is because the trials tie the war and empire together in a set of competing narratives about modern history in East Asia. Obviously, Japan bears the brunt of responsibility for its actions, but the reasons why many individuals were not pursued after the war or put on trial, or not memorialized until decades later, is a topic that begs attention. Contrary to popular opinion, the failure to secure postwar justice in East Asia is not merely due to Japanese reluctance to apologize. The discord originates in the political and historical divisions that ensued over debates concerning the meaning of Japan’s empire that emerged from war crimes trials. This is precisely the reason this book does not contain a singular definition of justice—in short because one does not exist. For vastly different ideological reasons, both Japanese and Chinese leaders aim to pursue such a utopian notion of justice. However, this goal cannot be enacted by fiat. I aver that it is because the notion of justice is arrived at through negotiated practices over the longer duration, that it becomes enmeshed (or negated) in the historical representations of the past.⁴

Distinctions within formulations of justice do, of course, exist. Haiyan Lee eloquently expands on notions of high and low justice in China. What serves the state interest is “high,” while punishing the unfair treatment of individuals is “low.”⁵ But this orientation examines the ideas of justice within a sovereign nation, whereas my book investigates how the legacy of the pursuit of justice played a role in regional history and politics.⁶ Transnational formulations of justice, I postulate, cannot be deemed solely by law; they emerge through convention and practice. Justice is mutually agreed upon by the aggrieved and perpetrating parties. Consequently, as much as politicians would like to call for an end to history so that justice can be declared, this is not possible. History has no end and is always evolving, as are our interpretations of the past. A declaration that history has arrived at its final terminus, that a complete consensus has been reached, is destined to disappoint and end in failure. In reconciliation, parties need to constantly engage, which is why justice and reconciliation are two different processes. Domestically, justice can be finite and have a declaration attached. This can be announced in a court of law but should not be confused with international historical interpretation. Beyond domestic boundaries, international reconciliation is without end and is based on present as well as future behavior. History never stops; we cannot put an end to discussions or debate.

To trace the paths of these national and international conversations about justice, I constructed this book in chapters that alternate between Japan and China to allow those who are neither East Asian specialists nor focused on either country to assess the history of war crimes trials as a regional juridical moment. The first several chapters trace the history of the end of World War II while looking back at the origins of imperial competition between China and Japan. Subsequent chapters delve into the constituent legal zones and efforts that formed East Asia’s postwar search for justice and how Japan and China involved themselves in those often-competitive processes. Later chapters push the investigation beyond the conclusion of war crimes trials and examine how the verdicts evolved into blunter tools that both shaped foreign policy and generated industries of memory that further galvanize public opinion in contemporary East Asian society.