CHAPTER 3 When the Hero of Your Story Is the Villain of Another

While anchored to the past through the physical form of captured naval vessels and war booty, China was also tethered to an outmoded tradition in its legal arena. This proved to be a major obstacle in its attempts to uphold international goals of justice given the constraints. Even though the Chinese faced an uphill battle in terms of both staffing and creating the actual sites for war crimes tribunals, they had slowly pushed ahead during the war at least with a nod to the future and what might be legally within reach.¹ As the international community began to pay more attention to Nazi atrocities in Europe, China’s role in interacting with the UNWCC and the development of war crimes processes advanced but was not always a well-coordinated activity.² Chiang Kai-shek had told his men: confiscate enemy property, do not collude with those who were collaborators, disarm Japanese and prepare them for repatriation, and ensure as little disruption as possible to commerce and public services.³

The rule of law existed, but at the dawn of its victory over Japan, the Republic of China was feeling anything but triumphant. Its population never had a chance to enjoy the spoils of victory, if any were to be had, nor did the Japanese still stationed in China really believe in the empire’s defeat. One of the last directors of Japan’s Cabinet Information Bureau, Minister Shimomura Kainan (Hiroshi), wrote in his memoirs that the Japanese military in China remained without enemies. He assessed that Japan had never succumbed to the Chinese and that defeat was only due to the American intervention. Shimomura quoted KMT general He Yingqin as saying that China had not won the war by itself but with the assistance of the Allies.⁴ And regardless of the supposed victory, China was in dire straits. Millions were starving in Hunan Province, and the prognosis of further massive food shortages was evident for Sichuan, Guangxi, and Guangdong Provinces as well. This was followed by “a tidal wave of confiscation throughout the once-occupied regions. Confiscation technically referred only to enemy and hanjian [traitor] property, but it quickly degenerated into general looting.”⁵

Just before the opening of the Tokyo Trial, Chinese legal consultant Ni Zhengyu journeyed to the United States to deepen Chinese understanding of international law procedures. One of his key consultants was Roscoe Pound, a renowned professor of law at Harvard University and postwar legal consultant to the KMT.⁶ Pound had already been involved in the curriculum and teaching of law at Soochow University in 1935 and 1937. He was seventy-seven when he retired from Harvard and made his way to China after the war to teach and serve as an adviser in 1946. Ni went by the English name of “Judson Nyi,” and on January 5, 1946, he, once again, opened correspondence with Pound. In his letter to the Harvard professor, Ni told him that he had been a judge for twelve years in Shanghai and Chongqing and recently was a counselor to the Ministry of Justice. But the letter was mostly to press Pound to accept and make plans to teach and advise on law in China. On February 16, 1946, Ni wrote to Pound, saying that he enjoyed their meeting and requested several introductions to legal scholars in the UK “who can explain to me some of the salient features of judicial administration there. In the meantime I would also like to meet some professor with whom I can discuss a few problems in connection with court system [sic], procedure, etc.”⁷ Ni was introduced to at least two scholars at Cambridge University—Sir Percy Henry Winfield and Henry Arthur Hollond, both scholars of law—and Arthur Lehman Goodhart, an American-born British academic who was professor of jurisprudence at the University of Oxford. In addition, Ni met with Lord Wright of Durley (Robert Wright), who was then serving as chair of the UNWCC.

Ni wrote back to Pound on April 19, 1946, thanking him for the introductions in England and saying that he had met with Lord Wright and was himself going to Tokyo to observe the war crimes trial. Ni visited London courts and a prison in the UK. He also toured Scotland Yard “to see how they investigate criminal cases before they are prosecuted in courts. The kind of liason [sic] between the police and the courts is very much needed in China.”⁸ It is interesting, and perhaps a bit of a window into the problems of cronyism that continually plagued the KMT, to see several appeals from Hsia Ch’in, president of the Supreme Court of the Republic of China, to Pound. Hsia wrote directly to Pound in a bid to get his son into Harvard. “Would you be so kind as to help him get his admission and a tuition scholarship if possible,” Hsia wrote.⁹

The Chinese faced difficulties at the Tokyo Trial and were caught off guard—Judge Mei Ruao, legal consultant Ni Zhengyu, and head of the KMT War Crimes Investigation Committee and witness at the Tokyo Trial, Qin Dechun, all mentioned this in their memoirs.¹⁰ In Ni’s estimation, the Chinese were not completely familiar with the system of evidence procurement, and this demonstrated the paradox of Chinese law at the time.¹¹ The Chinese were fundamentally unprepared for trial, and when Japan declared surrender, Ni Zhengyu was in the United States. He heard the surprising news about the extensive damage caused by the two atomic bombs. Tokyo Trial Chinese prosecutor Xiang Zhejun was dispatched to Tokyo several months later and handed the US legal team a list of eleven names of war criminals for prosecution. The Allied prosecution team was stunned that the Chinese had arrived with such a short list and that they were not prepared to prosecute in open court. The Chinese were also flummoxed; they had not been told to bring materials or evidence, or really to prepare anything. They had not collected evidence or prepared much in advance because they believed the guilt of Japanese war criminals was “plainly obvious,” as Ni Zhengyu wrote in his memoirs.¹² Only when they arrived in Japan did they realize the Tokyo Trial would not be using continental law but English/US law. In Ni Zhengyu’s understanding, the US and UK legal systems employed a direct confrontation system, where both sides battled it out equally in the court, taking care with evidence but asking the questions. The continental system, the one Chinese lawyers were theoretically used to at home even if many of them trained in American law at Soochow, used the interrogative system, where the judges posed the questions and managed the trial process.¹³

At one point in the prosecution’s presentation of evidence for the Nanjing Massacre section of the Tokyo Trial, the Chinese got into trouble. They did not offer the court much in the way of what was expected, and this drew Chief Justice William Webb’s sharp criticism. “Most of them [witness statements] were formulaically written, single-page statements of offense that contained bare minimum information about dates, locations, types of offense, and victims involved. In a word, there was not much substance in them.” This lackluster showing pushed Webb to remark, “There is hardly evidence. There are no details. What court could act on evidence like that?” Webb felt the Chinese were using slim material to put forward their prima facie case, but that had only a very limited application.¹⁴

The phenomenon of the “obviousness” of the crimes could also be seen in the Nanjing and Shanghai BC class war crimes courtrooms, where the bones of victims were placed on the judge’s dais in open court. It seemed normal to the Chinese at the time to set up their courts with such displays because they believed Japanese guilt was self-evident. But it was certainly a legally suspect move. While the nature of the war crimes might have been easily discernible, the speed of justice was not. The Tokyo Trial advanced at a glacial pace, with each statement translated from English into Japanese and back again, announcing to defendants each charge and asking whether he was guilty. The process bogged down. The Chinese, and others, continually commented on the interminable slog.¹⁵ Prosecutor Xiang and his staff realized they also needed stronger evidence to stand up to this sort of prolonged scrutiny, so they quickly returned to China and asked for an increase in staff. They interviewed witnesses and shuttled through war-torn areas but had a hard time amassing concrete proof in the budding civil war. In Nanjing, Yang Zhaolong, who was now Ministry of Justice Criminal Division chief, assisted Xiang in looking through Nanjing Massacre files. American prosecutor Joseph Keenan used up part of his budget and sent subordinates to China, while permitting Xiang to hire five more assistants.¹⁶ This tiny Chinese team was dwarfed by the platoon of legal staff the Soviets originally wanted to send of seventy men, which the Allied coordinators negotiated down to thirty.

The Imposition of War Crimes Trials

The move to use international law to stem postimperial violence in East Asia after Japan’s surrender emerged first from Europe and the various exiled governments in London that pushed the world to think about how to prosecute the Nazis for crimes over which law had not yet ably defined its jurisdiction. While the Chinese were keen to pursue war crimes against the Japanese, they were also noticeably circumspect in how they went about doing it. Both parties—the KMT and the CCP—took a stance on what they termed “to repay hatred with kindness” at the time of Japan’s surrender. Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek broadcast a radio message to the nation clearly enunciating that China held the Japanese military clique as the enemy and not the Japanese people. Chiang emphasized that the Chinese wanted to hold the military leadership responsible but did not seek revenge on the innocent, nor wish to add to their suffering. It is worth mentioning that Chiang never actually employed the phrase “to repay hatred with kindness,” but the slogan came to symbolize KMT strategy.¹⁷ Many criticized the KMT as the war ended, even though Chiang Kai-shek said he would take back in those who had worked for other administrations—meaning those who had saddled up to Wang Jingwei’s government in Nanjing that accommodated the Japanese, as well as those who took positions in the Japanese-managed Manchukuo administration. There was also much criticism that Chiang was doing this just to gain financial support. In the parlance of the day, “Those with money get consideration, those without will not see the light of day.”¹⁸

The issue of adjudicating legal responsibility for war crimes and collaboration became a long-term 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 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. Precisely how Japan responded is investigated in the next chapter.

Chinese POWs and the Legacy of Trials

The tales and trials of Japanese who abused or killed Allied POWs were a mainstay of news stories during and in the immediate aftermath of the war. For obvious reasons the pursuit of justice against those crimes was a crucial focal point for the United States and European former colonial powers. However, one of the great contradictions when examining Japan’s war from the Asian context is the absence of parallel trials for Chinese POWs. While a grand number of Allied trials concern abused or murdered western POWs, during the war imperial Japanese forces also no doubt killed and captured tens of thousands of Chinese soldiers. But their records are scarce. With the exception of some select examples, mostly in Australia trials, they remain outside the grand narrative. Consequently, trials of Chinese POW abuse and their legacy do not follow the same trajectory as the history in the West. But the story is vastly more complicated because while the “Japanese authorities claimed to have had in their possession scores of thousands of Western prisoners, they acknowledged having only fifty-six Chinese prisoners of war.”¹⁹ The Chinese were unable to organize tribunals around Chinese prisoners owing to this lacuna, and such an absence would also therefore dictate the sort of war crimes that later became foundations of China’s postwar history of the war of resistance against Japan.

Part of the reason that the numbers of Chinese POWs disappeared from the story of World War II is that various agencies within the Japanese government did not open their archival treasures to public scrutiny, failed to collate adequate information, and often were just remiss in doing due diligence.²⁰ There was also great ambiguity concerning who was a soldier, who was Chinese, or what was actually happening. An example of this can be seen during an incident described by Yamada Fūtarō, a young student at the Tokyo Medical Higher School, who was transferred to the countryside of Nagano Prefecture to avoid the increasing US air raids. Yamada wrote in his diary that the aisles and all the seats of the train were packed. The train departed Shinjuku Station in Tokyo in the morning and arrived at the central mountainous area at Tatsuno Station at 5 p.m. All the students disembarked and waited two hours for a connecting ride on another line toward their destination. While they were waiting they observed what was happening at the rail station. Yamada spied a motley crew of forty to fifty young, middle-aged, and old soldiers in formation in front of the station. They were speaking Chinese to each other, and two or three were being carried by stretcher. Were they POWs? he wondered. Commands in Japanese were yelled at them, and they took off marching down the street, singing “March of the Beloved Horse,” a peppy Japanese military tune.²¹

At the end of 1942, the Japanese wartime cabinet under General Tōjō Hideki recognized that Japan was facing labor shortages owing to more manpower being drained to the front. In an effort to sustain domestic industrial and agricultural production, the cabinet passed a November 27, 1942, decision to “move Chinese laborers to Japan’s interior.” Kaya Okinori was the finance minister and Kishi Nobusuke was minister of commerce and industry at the time. The law allowed the government to “transport” Chinese laborers into positions within what were considered key industries of mining, production, or construction projects for national defense.²²

Yamada was not sure whether these men were Chinese forced laborers or soldiers taken as POWs and put to work. He believed, however, that it was possible they were the ones taken to construct what he had heard rumors about—the Matsushiro Underground Imperial Headquarters in Nagano Prefecture.²³ This massive complex, for which unknown tunnels were still being discovered in the 1990s, was built by the Kajima and Nishimatsu construction companies. Labor was provided mainly by about seven thousand Koreans, although the true size and composition of the labor teams are not fully known.²⁴

Although the specifics of how many Chinese were taken prisoner were never truly clear, what was known was the high death toll and the fact that Chinese POWs and forced labor did exist. Key to this knowledge was a five-volume set of investigations that the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) conducted in the immediate postwar and then “lost.”²⁵ The ministry wanted all places of employment to inform it of the conditions of Chinese forced laborers, their contracts and status of employment, deaths, numbers, salaries, and so forth. In all likelihood this was done to avoid being charged with war crimes.²⁶ Many Japanese officials knew of the existence of these records, or had heard about them, but no one could find them. Sadly, they appeared either adrift in the wreckage of war or deliberately destroyed after their commission.²⁷ For over five decades these investigations were mentioned in parliament, but whenever the topic was broached, MOFA confirmed that it could no longer locate the documents. They ended up being known as the “phantom Ministry of Foreign Affairs reports.” This remained the situation until 1993, when Japan’s public broadcasting corporation, NHK, filmed a documentary of the reports finally being located after almost a half century of enforced obscurity.²⁸ This revelation about forced labor resulted in a whole new set of contemporary legal trials, which links back to my point that war crimes trials did not resolve the entirety of the war.²⁹

MOFA’s use of the term “laborer” for Chinese workers demonstrates its concerted effort to show that Japanese were hiding the fact that they forced Chinese civilians and soldiers to work—it was not always voluntary. Included in the five volumes was the file “Top Secret: Record of Committee Countermeasure Activities concerning Chinese and Korean Laborers.” It discussed ways of dealing with the postwar compensation demands that would inevitably arise from these workers and how to avoid future legal trials. This document also talked about investigating what happened with this forced labor with the potential for dealing with future war crimes trials in mind. Japanese officials wanted to collect information concerning what happened at various companies regarding the forced labor of Chinese, including POWs, to stem any legal problems. There was tellingly much less Japanese interest in investigating for the sake of actually seeking justice. In March 1946, while the government was still fumbling around with deliberating its own war responsibility, MOFA dispatched sixteen investigators to every single one of the sites where Japanese companies used forced labor. A number of these companies continue to exist today.³⁰ Many of the companies do not reveal their past abuse of forced Chinese labor, let alone offer financial redress. In many ways they remain hidden behind the cloak of the law.³¹ But here we find injustice once again because “the Japanese government repurposed these records to determine the allocation of compensation to 135 corporate offices, which amounted to approximately 57 million Japanese yen.” In short, the Chinese were denied compensation, but the actual Japanese industrial culprits profited with “tacit US approval.”³²

Over the last few years of the war, in those 135 locations within Japan, approximately forty thousand Chinese had been dragooned into forced servitude. In theory they were supposed to have been paid and treated as workers. In reality, most were often treated like slaves or worse. About seven thousand died.³³ One site, the Hanaoka Mine in Akita Prefecture, operated under the Kajima Corporation, had been particularly brutal in its treatment of Chinese laborers. They eventually rose up and rioted in protest during the late summer of 1945. Of the close to one thousand Chinese forced laborers who worked at Hanaoka, about four hundred had died by the end of the war.³⁴ After the uprising, the local and military police went into the mountains to search for escaped Chinese laborers. They dragged many back and kept them tied up for several days in the town square.³⁵ During that time, the two police forces tortured and killed about one hundred Chinese laborers in a building off the main square.³⁶

It was not just domestically that Japan used a wide range of dragooned labor, clouding the issue of civilian and military prisoners. Across its oceanic empire on remote islands in the Pacific at the fringes of Japanese power, a mix of Chinese civilians and military men found themselves in varying formats of forced labor. In Australian war crimes trials at Rabaul, in what are currently the domestic frontiers of Papua New Guinea, Chinese military officers provided testimony of having been taken as POWs from China, then relocated an ocean away to serve the Japanese empire in a forced labor capacity.

Forced labor during World War II was a complicated affair for several reasons. First, these Chinese were from several layers of society when pressed into servitude. Taiwanese laborers of various stripes, military and civilian, had also been dispatched in the spring of 1943 to build what would become fortifications of key Japanese military outposts on Rabaul. Because Taiwan was a colony under Japanese imperial control, hiring these men as war labor would not be considered a war crime. However, some of the first Chinese POWs brought to Rabaul for forced labor were Chinese Nationalist troops taken prisoner during the late 1937 Sihang Warehouse Battle of Shanghai. This was before Japan had declared official war on China, so these men were never legally defined as POWs.³⁷ Forced labor from captured or surrendered Indian forces who had made up portions of British troops in Southeast Asia was much larger in number than the Chinese. They were transferred throughout the empire after their capture in early 1942 when Southeast Asia fell to the Japanese onslaught. Like the Taiwanese, they, too, fell through the cracks in the postwar period concerning their lack of access to legal redress. Their stories compelled one historian to label them “the men who never were.”³⁸

The captured Chinese soldiers from the Sihang Warehouse Battle were first taken to a Nanjing POW camp, but the several hundred soldiers taken from that conflict were fiercely opposed to Japan and Japanese authorities feared an uprising among them. Japanese officers separated the group over several sites for labor. In late 1942, about fifty-seven men were taken as laborers to what became the land known as Papua New Guinea, where many died due to harsh conditions.³⁹ Eventually, through various battles with both KMT and “guerilla troops,” which sometimes referred to CCP soldiers, POW detention sites in Nanjing and Shanghai expanded. From there about fifteen hundred Chinese forced laborers ended up in Rabaul by the end of World War II. There they mixed with local populations and Indian coolies also compelled into forced labor or indentured in other kinds of labor.⁴⁰ One former Chinese soldier, Li Weixun, who was taken and detained in the Nanjing concentration camp, said that the detention center was so well known as a source of forced labor for the Japanese empire that it became colloquially referred to as the “Coolie Dispatch Center.”⁴¹ Lu Xinfang from Zhejiang Province had been taken prisoner during the Quzhou Battle, in western Zhejiang Province. The ship that transported him to Australia gave him a small bunk but lacked adequate water and food and took about a month to make the journey across the ocean. After arrival, the prisoners were put to work digging air raid shelters underground. Lu managed to get back to Shanghai in 1947, and then in 1950 he followed the KMT military to Taiwan.⁴²

KMT lieutenant Colonel Woo Yian featured as a prominent member of the forced POW labor group and showed up in several war crimes trials, testifying against the Japanese. He appears in numerous photos as well, documenting his situation. Woo stated that the POWs were from the KMT military and included some Chinese guerrilla fighters as well.⁴³ Confounding the situation were Chinese from mainland China already living in the region, having arrived years earlier to work as coolie laborers. They were not necessarily integrated into Australian life in the Rabaul area but had been around since the 1920s.⁴⁴

Regardless of the makeup of the Chinese POWs held in Rabaul, the Japanese were found responsible for war crimes against some of them. Matsushima Tozaburō was charged with other Japanese soldiers and seven “other Formosans,” as they were labeled in the Australian court record. Matsushima was on trial for having taken part in the killing of numerous Chinese POWs, some of whom had been KMT soldiers. In the cross-examination of one Chinese officer, Captain Liu Wei Pao, the issue of relations between the Formosans and the Japanese was called into question. Liu replied, “In my opinion the Japanese treated these Formosans on an equal level and they certainly were vested with a great deal of power. We regarded these particular Formosans as not being true to type of their country but were very pro-Japanese and as they treated us most brutally it is rather difficult to explain just how we regarded them.”⁴⁵ The “Formosans,” for the most part, tried to paint themselves as pawns of the Japanese, hapless victims of circumstance who were not military at all and mere laborers in the empire. To a man, they all submitted petitions to the court protesting that the Chinese “hated” them because of their own wartime situation and that “false charges” were being made against them. They all wrote at the end of their petitions that they had come from Taiwan as “laborers” and had family waiting for them back home in Taiwan.⁴⁶

At the trial of Hirota Akira, held in Rabaul, KMT lieutenant colonel Woo Yian offered testimony in a related case of Chinese POW murders. He declared that he “was captured by the Japanese at the end of May 1942.” Along with about five hundred Chinese military POWs taken in various places, their party was joined by a thousand Chinese POWs made up of guerrilla forces. “All the Chinese troops brought to Rabaul were made to work as labourers,” he explained. The Chinese military POWs showed up in Rabaul still in their uniforms, but “after we had been in Rabaul for two or three months the Japanese took our uniforms and issued us with Japanese style uniforms without badges or rank.”⁴⁷ However, other POWs had different experiences. Major Chen Kwok Leong said that he was “a guerrilla leader of the Chinese National Army fighting against the Japanese in China.” He was taken prisoner, and then with a thousand others, as Woo had mentioned, shipped from Shanghai to Rabaul. At Rabaul, these “guerrilla fighters” were paid for the first ten months. But his section was the only one paid for the first ten months because the Japanese officer in charge “was well disposed to the Chinese,” Chen said. But, Chen emphasized, their loyalty never wavered, and they did not lose their status as POWs just because they were laborers.⁴⁸

The trial of the wartime Japanese commander of the area, General Imamura Hitoshi, fuzzied the issue of POW or laborer because the Japanese officers serving under the general did not seem to fully grasp the illegality of forcing a prisoner to be a laborer for an enemy force. Hosoda Hiromu, who had been a staff officer of the Imperial General Headquarters, at one point said in his testimony at the Imamura trial that although there were extant regulations that covered what a military could and could not do in terms of employing labor, he had a different view of what happened in the Rabaul area: “The staff of the Imperial GHQ in Japan recognized and knew that the Japanese soldiers and the Third Nationals, that is, labourers, were working together in harmony. This is not only the opinion in Imperial GHQ but also the general public, and even at this present day this is still thought. The reason for that is Gen Imamura’s good character, his wide international and public fame, and his endearing efforts that is his life for his subordinates, and their supervision and direction, and I am strongly of this opinion.”⁴⁹

The importance of these trials, and the earnestness of those being prosecuted, did nothing to impede the problems faced at other trials of the Japanese—namely, language issues that added to the torpor of getting justice. The humid and sticky weather at many Southeast Asian tropical venues created at times what can only have been moments of farcical levity. At one point during his own trial, not only did General Imamura fall asleep, but the military police officer assigned to guard him also dozed. The president of the court had to wake both.⁵⁰

And yet, this was the same Imamura who was very keen not to let his soldiers get haphazardly caught up in war crimes trials. Before anyone in Tokyo had gotten their act together—or perhaps in coordination (the record is not clear)—Imamura took matters into his own command and counseled his men on how to respond to war criminal allegations:

Top Secret: Burn after reading

Re: concerning those suspected of being war criminals

From Japanese Commander in Charge, General Imamura Hitoshi

December 4, 1945, Rabaul

This instruction is for Japanese soldiers who are now under criminal investigation by the Allied army, particularly for those who have had their photographs taken and soldiers who are under suspicion. The commanding officer must educate them in detail concerning the following measures.

Area Army Chief of Staff: Katō Rinpei

In prior wars atrocities such as robbery, looting and other violence inflicted on innocent civilians by military soldiers were adjudicated in their own military’s court martial tribunals. Now, however, these trials are being managed by the enemy’s side after the conclusion of the war. In this way because there are no precedents, under the label of a war crime they obstinately select each individual action as fodder for their indictments. They say that doing things in this manner will extinguish all possibility of war erupting again in the future.

But their true nature masks nothing more than deep feelings of enmity and hatred toward the Japanese and Germanic races. As the Commander in charge in Rabaul, I, upon reflection believe that because you men have maintained good military discipline there are not so many war criminals. It is likely the Australian forces have the same opinion, but following the demands of their home government, even if it is political, it appears they are obliged to open courts in this region. The result of this is that when such courts are established I will enumerate below how you must answer them and this is most important to remember.

First: Regardless of the category of your act, I, as the commander in chief, feel deeply responsible in leading you and this moves me to great sympathy. Shameful offences, or crimes, as reflected in our military law, are not permitted. Moreover, as Japanese we should be embarrassed by such issues. For example, during the heat of the moment in a fierce air raid should you inflict violence on a powerless POW, who had no connection to the incident, this contravenes the Japanese spirit which sanctifies helping the weak. However, I suppose problems related to the treatment of POWs emerges from battlefield exigencies and were based on actions thrust upon you. You have no reason to feel shame about this. Rather, as a Japanese who loyally performed his duties, you should be praised.

Second: Do not disgrace samurai honor

As mentioned above, if you can regain the calmness of spirit, there is no need to fear the investigating officers of the Allied forces. You must not posture a sulky attitude toward their demands. However, behaving in ways that you think will be perceived in a lofty and heroic manner shows the differences in how the East and West see the world. They will most definitely not accept your responses in this way. You must take care when answering and ensure that there are no discrepancies in what you say before and after. Speak calmly and ensure your expressions are clear. A good example of this can be found in the Tokugawa Era. Even when facing the threat of drawn swords in the hands of forceful samurai guards of the Shogun, Banzuiin Chōbei responded in a calm and courteous demeanor without bringing shame to the “Edokko” [those who lived in early modern Tokyo].⁵¹ This is the reason why his story is still told even now in the tales of our traditions as a man among men, the symbol of manliness.

On one hand, we all want to call on a friend when we cannot bear the burden alone. “It was not my idea to do this, it was a command,” or “my fellow corpsmen also committed such and such.” Such a response will result in causing problems for many others. If a situation comes to this it will be troublesome and it will be impossible to avoid being labeled as a coward. The fact is in military courts martial at the New Guinea front because this sort of behavior was present the spirit of bushido was sullied. These stories were picked up in the enemies’ newspapers, becoming the object of derision and gaining a bad reputation as the actions of the “mean and cowardly.” In these times I recall the story of “Sakura Sōgorō,” one of the most famous martyrs in our country.⁵² To carry out his mission he sacrificed himself and even his family, without getting any of his fellow villagers wrapped up in the matter. It is precisely due to these actions that he is now enshrined as a “just imperial subject.”

Third: It is of the utmost importance to painstakingly prepare for answering clearly and in good order. Of course, in court you must say that affairs are uncertain when they are, but if there may be an act for which the enemies deem you to be guilty, you must explain in detail that during a severe air-raid the extreme stupidity of the actions of the Indian military prisoners was, as it were, as if they had committed suicide. It is advisable to explain that there was no other way besides soundly rebuking them. To this end we slapped them with our bare hands and during the chaos due to instances of burglary we could not help but mete out further punishments to preserve order. This unfortunate turn of events was due to problems in communication and such which rendered the situation even more confusing. You should maintain high spirits in the knowledge that these were special circumstances of your duty.

Fourth: Think about your fellow soldiers who are also under suspicion and imprisoned. “To the victor go the spoils.” Allied force front line camps are already incarcerating several thousand of our countrymen in detention centers and calling them war criminals. In our motherland many of our high officials, ministers, high ranking military officers, nobles and even the princes of our imperial families who had direct concerns with this great war, have been detained and sent to the same interned lives as you now face. When you feel unease and loneliness of spirit, remind yourselves that your sacrifice is the cornerstone of our great nation and that among your fellow detainees are the elderly with grey hair aged more than seventy to eighty. For example, Tokutomi Sohō, the famous statesman aged eighty-two, is now still solemnly facing a moment in court. As such, deepen your resolve, and use your utmost effort to avoid embarrassing yourselves as true Japanese.⁵³

Six months later Imamura was less sure of his stance, or at least less pleased with the prospect of life imprisonment. He first tried to commit suicide in July 1946 by taking poison, but it proved ineffective and only left him sick. He also tried to cut his own throat but missed the main artery and was unsuccessful a second time. Ultimately, he went on to live a long life in postwar Japan and wrote about his time as a war criminal under Australian oversight.⁵⁴

Japan’s Other Role in the Region as Innovator

Certainly Japan’s dubious efforts to dragoon labor to feed its war machine, even as victory petered out, needed to be adjudicated in some measure. However, for many in the region, Japan was not one solely defined by its military actions. The Japanese empire and its imperial legacy meant that for those living in East Asia, their experience would be very different from those of Americans or Europeans who were coming into contact with the Japanese only through battle. Our singular and mostly nationalistic approach to investigating history has obscured large arenas. I am not arguing that we have missed the historical record of Japanese atrocities, but I would agree with Timothy Snyder’s assessment that we should consider a supranational and more regional approach to cut across nationalist histories that overly emphasize a Western-centered approach.⁵⁵ Europe “works as a silent referent in historical knowledge,” and we should try to recenter our thinking so that when we talk about war crimes and guilt it is not merely from the standpoint of overemphasizing the role of Nuremberg.⁵⁶ Nuremberg is, of course, central to the evolution of international law, but war crimes trials in East Asia birthed a historical industry of its own that also requires analysis on its own terms.

This is especially the case in both Japan and East Asia, where national suffering or victory is remembered and sanctified above all else, creating a very easy to digest yet overly simplistic version of history that essentially smooths out the complex and uneven seams. Hiroshima is certainly foremost in the minds of many Japanese as a memory of the end of war, a recollection that feeds a victimhood mentality, while that is not the case outside the main Japanese islands. We need to pit more of the domestic history against a regional and international backdrop to ascertain the larger context of war crimes trials, as well as postimperial violence pertaining to de-imperialization in Taiwan, Korea, and China. This will reveal a more accurate picture of how the rule of law and new political bodies were able to be reconstructed after the war.

East Asia, for the reasons that I detail in this book, was a vastly different historical landscape in comparison with Europe. We need to recall that the region of East Asia frequently held two conflicting opinions concerning Japan, and these attitudes colored the pursuit of justice. Even acknowledging the horrific impact of World War II initiated by Japan’s imperial expansion, key leaders throughout the East also remembered the other side of Japan’s influence. This aspect is worth reiterating to balance our historical assessments of what sort of legacy these trials pursued. This is not revisionist. I merely propose to include in our equation why some war crimes might have been pursued differently in various geographic settings.

One of the obstacles created by the memory of war crimes trials and the legal precedents they set is the potential tendency to overemphasize Japan’s aggression to the neglect of the rest of its lengthy imperial legacy. Consider the differences in the way those who interacted with Japan in the East shared contrasting perspectives from their European or American interlocutors. This is manifest in three examples that I briefly illustrate below. Most specifically, these attitudes come into relief when postwar PRC Korean, and Republic of China leaders expressed their opinions on Japan’s Meiji Restoration, in their eyes a seminal moment not to be ignored.

Guo Moruo, Chinese literary giant and head of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, had studied for decades in prewar Japan and only returned to China on the eve of Japan’s more aggressive stature for war in 1937. He made an important set of comments in a wide-ranging discussion with a Japanese colleague of the literary world, Tanizaki Jun’ichirō. In the mid-1950s Guo was on a trip to Japan as part of mainland China’s attempts to entertain more civilian diplomatic relations. At a roundtable promoting bilateral exchange, he remarked that Western scholars said that the “Meiji Restoration was the ‘miracle of the Far East.’ In that same vein, the changes in our new China are, if we can call it such, ‘the second miracle of the Far East.’ ” According to the newspaper, Guo grew more excited as he made this comparison, and his voice began to rise.⁵⁷ It might not seem like much to us now, but Guo was a man very close to the Chinese center of power, including Premier Zhou Enlai. For Guo to remark that he still valued much of what the previous generation in Japan had developed as a model of modernity was a remarkable statement. That Guo left his Japanese wife and five children in Japan when he returned to China in 1937 and then remarried and had another family on the mainland is not often included in biographic descriptions of him in China. He believed that he remained indebted to Japanese publishing magnate Iwanami Shigeo, who had paid for some of his Japanese children’s education during that interim. In 1955 during his trip to Japan, Guo visited Iwanami’s grave to thank him.⁵⁸

South Korean autocrat Park Chung-hee, who received his formative education and ideas about economic development under Japanese colonialism in an imperial Japanese military academy, reformed Korea in the 1970s along the lines of the Meiji Restoration. While Park’s interpretation of renovation had eerie overtones reminiscent of Japan’s imperial leaders, he specifically chose to name it Yushin (Revitalizing Reform), employing the exact same Chinese characters as Japan’s Meiji reformers had chosen.⁵⁹ There is no equivocation. Park, like Guo, assessed that Japan had modernized, and Korea, like Japan, needed to follow a similar pattern for its society to progress. Even after World War II, Japan and its advancement remained the template for the region. When Harvard historian Carter Eckert interviewed Park’s former close comrades about the most formative moment in Park’s life, they all answered in unison: “Japanese army officer education” at the Manchukuo Military Academy.⁶⁰

At the graduation of the first class of the KMT’s military officer training school in the mountains north of Taipei city, Taiwan, on June 27, 1950, Chiang Kai-shek told his students to listen to their new Japanese instructors. (Former Japanese imperial officers had secretly and in contravention to existing surrender treaties at the time been smuggled in as part of Generalissimo Chiang’s efforts to reform his party and military for their planned “retake” of mainland China.⁶¹) Chiang admonished the military trainees to pay attention to the six important characteristics that Japanese instructors embodied: “feelings of responsibility, attention to commands, spirit of service, spirit of sacrifice, power of imagination, and respect for the law.”⁶² It was the Meiji Restoration that had created the conditions necessary, Chiang believed, for that small country of Japan on the edge of East Asia to renovate and within a few short decades make itself great. Japan understood, Chiang said years later, how to marry “knowledge and action” in a way that the Chinese Nationalist top leader so ardently wished he could implement for his own people.⁶³

The postwar period in East Asia was a mix of these conflicting sentiments: Japan as imperial success story, and Japan as wartime military aggressor. How the war crimes trials and subsequent historical debates balanced both of these elements was at the heart of this conundrum.

4. Laying Blame for Japan’s War Responsibility