CHAPTER 7 The Geography of Power Producing Political Legitimacy in Republican China
On a partially cloudy summer day on June 17, 1947, a massive Chinese crowd in Shanghai surged forward to witness the executions of two Japanese former imperial officers: Captain Yonemura Haruki and Sergeant Shimota Jirō. Yonemura was known as the “wolf of Changshu,” a city in the vicinity of Suzhou, Jiangsu Province. Chinese newspapers and the foreign press labeled Shimota the “tiger of Jiangyin,” a city in the same region. The two men’s arms were tied tightly behind their bodies, and long, thin wooden signboards pinched their shoulders back and forced their bodies awkwardly upright. Each sign, written by hand in black ink Chinese characters, jutted upward several feet above their heads and detailed the soldier’s crimes and the military order that they were to be executed by pistol. The two detainees departed from the Chinese prison, located in the former run-down Jewish refugee sector of the city, in an open-bed military truck, provided by the US government. The large truck, crammed with guards, lazily led the prisoners in a sort of tragic parade from Ward Road Jail, through the city streets, and to the outskirts of town, finally stopping at the execution grounds. This was a conscious choice of political and propaganda expediency because the Ward Road Jail had its own internal execution grounds. These two Japanese officers, however, were specifically taken outside of city limits and publicly executed as a moment of cathartic theater for the masses. Nearly five years earlier, the Japanese imperial army had used these same Kiangwan (Jiangwan in contemporary Chinese transliteration) grounds to execute a handful of US soldiers who had been crew members in the famous 1942 Doolittle air raid on Tokyo.
In the 1930s Ward Road was the largest prison in the world. It was notorious for not allowing those incarcerated to speak, and disease and desperation ran rampant. No one had ever escaped from Ward Road. Following the end of World War II, the jail was managed briefly by the Americans and used to incarcerate Japanese and other war criminals. Later, the Chinese Nationalists recouped it to house more suspected Japanese war criminals and Chinese communists who were already fomenting trouble as a Chinese civil war loomed. Finally, after 1949, when the Chinese communists took over leadership of mainland China, the communists used the jail to incarcerate those they labeled as counterrevolutionaries. More often than not these individuals were the previous Chinese Nationalist administrators, along with others. Grumbling over the capitalist name of the former foreign jail, communist leader Mao Zedong finally renamed the prison Tilanqiao Prison (Basket Bridge Prison), based on its location.1
At the time of the executions, World War II in East Asia had been over for almost two years, but the mob in arguably one of China’s most important former international cities, Shanghai, wanted blood. Men dressed in their daily garb of a long outer coat and Western-style hat jostled with police officers and peasant women, all sporting smiles. The West Australian newspaper described the crowds as “jeering” and wrote that “some spat and even threw garbage,” straining forward to see the delivery of capital punishment and baying as they followed former imperial officers to their end.2 Some Japanese captives chose to receive a tranquilizer before the moment of execution; others were more stoic.3 Yonemura had ordered the live burial of more than one hundred Chinese. Shimota was charged with murdering several Chinese on the day of surrender. After both men were shot, Chinese newspapers pressed graphic photos of their executed corpses dripping with blood.
The war crimes trials and subsequent executions of these two men were big news in immediate postwar China and reverberated somewhat in Japan, but they mostly went ignored elsewhere and certainly few paid attention in the West. News teletype wires twitched more excitedly with the events of seven executions more than a year later, near Christmas Day 1948. On that day, the main imperial Japanese military leaders and one former prime minister were held responsible for Japan’s aggressive war in Asia. In Sugamo Prison, Tokyo, their sentence was death by hanging.
The executions of these seven Japanese leaders in Tokyo were of such importance that the full Tokyo Trial judgment, all 1,200 lengthy and legally cumbersome pages of it, was read in open court November 4–12, 1948, in what naval officer William Sebald, political adviser to General MacArthur during the occupation of Japan, called a “wearisome ceremony.”4 The death sentences were handed down on November 12, 1948, but the date for the execution was decided in secret and delayed until a few days before its final implementation in late December. The US occupiers wanted to avoid any public rallies or demonstrations of support for the accused Japanese. On December 23, 1948, in a much less public manner than the Chinese chaos of justice that was pursued in Shanghai, the Americans executed the leaders the Tokyo Trial charged with Class A war crimes, or “crimes against peace.” For their evening meal prior to execution, the prisoners dined simply on rice, miso soup, and grilled fish. General Tōjō Hideki and three others were escorted downstairs to the ground floor at 11:30 p.m.
William Sebald was officially present at the executions, having been ordered to stand as a witness, and reminisced that at 11:50 p.m. the Allied observers entered a well-lit room and “faced a long wooden platform, over which were suspended five ropes, each ending in a noose.” Sebald said that outside the door he could hear “banzai,” what he described as the traditional ceremonial Japanese yell “used to express triumph, joy, sorrow or resignation.”5 Hanayama Shinshō, chief Buddhist priest of the Sugamo Prison, recalled that the men proclaimed three times in a loud chorus “Long live the Emperor” and “Long live the Japanese Empire!” Then he gave each prisoner a sip of wine and offered them a biscuit. All but General Matsui Iwane declined because they had already removed their various dental fittings.6 The first four men entered seconds after midnight, all muttering what Sebald suspected were Buddhist prayers. All the prisoners were wearing US military clothing that was sizes too big and devoid of any insignia. “It helped to make them all look old, very old, helpless, pitiful, and tragic,” Sebald said.7 The accused mounted the platform, nooses were placed around their necks, and black hoods were fitted over their heads. One word, “proceed,” was given, and all the prisoners simultaneously dropped through the trap doors below their feet.
Hanayama Shinshō recollected the moment of execution walking from the death chamber back to his cleric’s office, from which he had ushered the condemned men. “I heard a banging sound behind me and when I looked at my watch it was one minute past midnight,” he wrote.8 The second group of three prisoners soon followed suit and were executed at twenty past midnight. A doctor attended to the prisoners quickly, using a stethoscope to listen to their hearts, and officially declared them deceased. As Sebald wrote, the prisoners’ bodies, which included men who only a few years prior had been at the apex of power in the Japanese empire, were cremated and their ashes were distributed to an undisclosed location so that they could not become martyrs later on, even though that did occur to a certain extent. The US officer Sebald, who had spent time in Japan in the 1920s and 1930s, only to depart during the uptick in militarization in 1939, observed that he was humbled by the Tokyo executions. The somber scene in Tokyo was quite different from the cacophonous executions in Shanghai. Sebald detailed, “These men, who had wielded such enormous power and influence, died secretly and alone, surrounded by former enemies. There was something inexorable in this finale, for the mode of death, not the fact of death, was impressive to fatalistic Japanese.”9
But even as the Tokyo Trial came to completion, the US occupiers were closing up shop on further war crimes trials, and this irritated their Chinese colleagues. On December 25, 1948, the KMT-led Shenbao newspaper castigated General MacArthur’s decision to release nineteen not-yet-charged Class A war criminals.10 Several days later, Tokyo Trial judge Mei Ruao announced his displeasure at the release of these suspected Class A war criminals, which included former foreign minister Amō Eiji, Minister of Munitions Kishi Nobusuke, founding member of the ultranationalist Black Dragon Society Kuzuu Yoshihisa, and others. Mei said that these men had committed crimes against the Chinese and had been arrested, so they should be handed over to China. The USSR also opposed the release of these Class A war criminals and opined this was the beginning of the end of Allied cooperation on high-level war crimes trials.11
The postwar adjudication of wartime responsibility did not see all Japanese trussed up, paraded in front of execution grounds, or even put to death in somewhat secretive locations as the clock struck midnight. Many key figures of Japan’s imperial and collaborationist administrations both in Japan and throughout the former empire managed to evade capture and punishment altogether. For these individuals, the end of war evolved into a story not about an execution but about continuity from the war to the postwar. This third category tells us as much about the pursuit or failure of finding justice at the end of the war as it does about serendipity and being in the right place at the right time. According to most accounts, Japanese colonel Tsuji Masanobu, although monomaniacal and convinced of his own military greatness, was responsible for countless atrocities in Singapore and elsewhere in Southeast Asia. He should have been arrested and put on trial for war crimes. However, Tsuji was a master spy, and at the moment of Japan’s surrender, he dropped his imperial Japanese military kit, donned the saffron robe of a Thai Buddhist priest, and slipped into the shadows of a religious pilgrim. He remained essentially untouched and unrecognized until his reappearance in Japan later. He returned to Japan before the end of the US occupation in 1952 but remained incognito, relying on the help of friends, right-wing financial backers, and his own cunning. Tsuji had fled China at the end of the war and journeyed around Southeast Asia to arrive back in Japan, where he published a self-aggrandizing account of the exciting details of his adventures and his attempts to supposedly help East and Southeast nationalist groups push for independence against European recolonization in the immediate postwar period. In 1950, these exploits were published in My Long Underground Escape, which quickly became a bestseller in Japan.12 Advertisements in Japanese newspapers at the time trumpeted the electrifying details one would learn from Tsuji’s journey of escape and eagerly proclaimed, “Looking death in the face 7 times while crossing 4 frontiers—the thrilling and tumultuous secret story of the defeat.”13
Unlike other high-ranking officers who were executed on a damp field outside of Shanghai or alone in a bright cell in Tokyo, Tsuji evaded capture and then mesmerized the Japanese public with his alleged insights gained while on his lengthy quest to repatriate undetected. It was too late for the occupation authorities to charge him, even if evidence could have been procured, but Tsuji also banked on his notoriety for later success. In 1952, he was elected as a representative to Japan’s lower house and later the upper house. He obviously managed to dupe many, and for a time even the CIA tried to reel him in as an intelligence agent. However, according to their own analysis, they realized that “Tsuji is the type of man who, given the chance, would start World War III without any misgivings.”14 In August 1952, addressing a large crowd in Kanazawa, Tsuji announced “Truman is the number one war criminal and Stalin the number two war criminal.”15 Apropos of war crimes, he was also quoted as saying, “Although America may find it hard to forget Pearl Harbor, Japan finds it more difficult to forget Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”16 He died under mysterious circumstances while on a personal trip to meet Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam in 1961.
The globalization of law and the internationalization of norms advanced quickly in the early 1940s, mainly in London, which centered on discussions among exiled governments fleeing Nazi oppression. China was part of these debates. This global moment, in part, also emerged from parallel debates around the world, all slowly propping up the ideal that law could resolve political debacles. This was not only a point made among liberal democracies and their representatives in London, but a global set of new opinions.17
This global conversation about jurisprudence and the laws of war was not limited to the West. The USSR produced key players who pushed at the edges of redefining the idea of crimes against peace. A well-known Soviet legal theorist and judge, Aron Trainin, produced the doctrine of complicity and helped formulate the concept of crimes against peace. Soviet prosecutor Andrey Vyshinsky, the man responsible for Stalin’s great purge trials of the 1930s, promoted new ideals of Soviet legal doctrine. This could be considered doubly ironic since it was likely that some of Vyshinsky’s ideas about justice were dubious to say the least. But, concerning the issue of war and international law, Soviet legal minds early on pressed the idea that aggressive war should be considered a Class A war crime. The result of this international groundswell of opinion about war crimes was the establishment of the United Nations War Crimes Commission on October 20, 1943. The committee comprised seventeen of the Allied nations, including the Chinese, and eventually also created a subcommittee in Chongqing, China (the wartime capital of the Chinese Nationalist Party), to track Japanese war crimes. Essentially, the UNWCC managed an international discussion that widened the purview of not only what could be defined as a war crime but also what would be pursued in a court of law. “Until 1939, legal theory maintained that war crimes must be dealt with in military courts, or in civilian courts applying the laws of war—a line the British Foreign Office still adhered to during the 1940s—and could only involve cases which had been committed within a state’s own territory or against its nationals.” Obviously, the establishment of the UNWCC demonstrated a significant change in international thinking and greatly expanded the idea of borders in which legal jurisdiction could be applied.18
One of the main differences between the Class A Tokyo Trial and its sister trials around the region was tedium. The Tokyo Trial dragged on for two and a half years, and to echo the words of famed journalist Rebecca West, who covered the Nuremberg Trial, “the courtroom was a citadel of boredom.”19 BC class war crimes trials, by contrast, were generally short, and sometimes they were held in the very venues where only months before Allied soldiers had been incarcerated or abused, and so theirs were the sites of legal retribution. But despite being dull, the trials still galvanized Japanese public opinion, and the Chinese needed to consider this. Take, for example, what happened after the executions of the Class A Japanese war criminals. On the afternoon of December 24, 1948, a Buddhist ceremony of remembrance was supposed to be held at the Aoyama Funeral Home. Hanayama Shinshō, who had been the main cleric at Sugamo Prison and had ministered to the seven guilty men in their last moments, had planned to preside at this public event.
The Yomiuri Newspaper announced on the morning of December 24 that a remembrance ceremony would be held.20 The newspaper reported that the event would be led by Hanayama and that the widow of Tōjō Hideki and other surviving family members would be in attendance. At the last moment, occupation authorities canceled the event, but people started to gather anyway. By 2:30 that afternoon more than one thousand people had gathered, some traveling from afar to pay their respects. An Asahi Newspaper car pulled up with Hanayama inside, and he told some of those gathered that SCAP had canceled the day’s events. Then, perhaps to disperse the crowd, Hanayama wrangled up a few priests, and together they performed a brief ceremony and placed the deceased spirit tablets with the executed leaders’ posthumous names on them at the site. Relatives of General Doihara Kenji had also shown up so they all went to a coffee shop and chatted. Policeman in plainclothes were present but did not directly intervene. About 4.30pm the whole event finished and everyone departed.21
KMT War Crimes Trials, 1946–1949
As the Tokyo Trial was getting under way, the Chinese domestic adjudication of hundreds of their own Japanese prisoners was also unfolding. The latter, however, followed a different set of political goals. Even before General Okamura Yasuji, the Japanese imperial army’s last commander in China, met with his Chinese counterparts and laid down his arms, Chinese Nationalist Party leader Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek’s radio broadcast in August 1945 had ordered the Chinese people to be benevolent toward the Japanese and not seek retribution. Chiang exhorted his countrymen to repay malevolence with benevolence. His mix of Confucian ethics, Christian teachings, and political savvy made for a very effective policy toward the recently defeated Japanese.
The Chinese trials of Japanese war crimes were at worst a microcosm reflecting the horrors of the Japanese empire and at best a record of how the stated aims of the war were actually experienced at the local level. Consequently, Chinese adjudication of Japanese soldiers demonstrates two facets of the postwar period: First, it reveals how the Japanese behaved during their imperial reign, because the trials recorded a trail of atrocities that came to light. Second, the trials signified the manner in which China attempted to appropriate power in the aftermath of surrender, to the extent possible, by following the model of using law and order to gain international respect from the other Allies.
We need to think about the difference between the aims of the Tokyo Trial and what the KMT was doing. The Tokyo Trial was led mostly by the United States, and thus its sights were focused on POWs and how the war with the West was on a different timeline than what happened in China. This was a key reason China tried to use the charge of crimes against peace against several defendants in the beginning, because the nature of the war in China was different from how Japan’s war against the West evolved. In China, it was mostly midlevel Japanese imperial officers whose careers were centered on China who plotted and commanded the series of assassinations and incidents that developed organically over a period of years as Japan slowly gobbled up China beginning in the early 1930s. Against the United States, Japan’s policy to go to war was a cabinet-level decision of government and the highest-ranking officers, so that is who the United States pursued for war responsibility. However, for China, those who designed the invasion and “conspiracy” against China were a different class. China was also now independent after the war. So, what to do? China would allow the United States to take the yeoman’s share of Class A glory, and then it would try to push its own interpretation of who was responsible for the war. This plan demonstrates the difficulty of trying to let the Tokyo Trial stand for the closure of several war theaters that were of an entirely different nature. There were key differences among the Chinese trials as well. Nanjing was the seat of postwar KMT power once the capital returned there in May 1946, so it was important to have trials with more public impact there. Most defendants for trials in Nanjing were transferred from other sites or Japan, but in other cases, adjudication of justice took place in venues that were closer to where the war criminal was originally captured or arrested.22
A Republic of China committee meeting concerning how to deal with Japanese war criminals discussed the aims of war crimes trial procedures for the KMT. Present at the October 25, 1946, meeting, among others, were Bai Chongxi, head of the Ministry of Defense; Yang Zhaolong, head of the criminal section of the Ministry of Justice; and Wang Shijie, who represented the Foreign Ministry. The meeting pushed the idea of how to showcase the spirit of Chinese benevolence toward the Japanese war criminals. Those gathered at the meeting acknowledged that China, at the time, was short on legal expertise in international law, so the goal needed to center on “preventing trials that would be judged poorly by international standards.” A secondary goal was speed to further highlight the goal of benevolence through all the trials. The aim was to conduct the investigations and finalize charges within a year. But if this could not be achieved, then a decision would be made not to indict and to release those prisoners to repatriate. The KMT wanted to avoid requesting that those being tried in the Tokyo Trial stand trial a second time. The pay for most clerks at these trials was very low, the report noted, and had a great influence on the work done. Thus, there was a dire need to find a way to improve salaries. The committee also observed that those imprisoned were not in good health, likely due to cold or sickness, and the conditions in the prisons needed to improve.23
At the outset, Chinese jurisdiction for the trials was shared among a number of competing government sections, and there was little uniformity. This sort of legal game of Go, in which lawyers, defendants, prosecutors, and diplomats moved around a geographic area, was a complex matrix of events, ideas, locations, and people. Various authorities around East Asia vied to arrest and prosecute the same Japanese war criminal, at times even sharing information and collaborating. At the same time, particularly in many cases that took place within Japan’s home islands, key figures also obstructed the pursuit of justice for more nationalist aims. These linkages among the trials in the form of the movement of ideas and people had a major influence on exactly what sort of postwar cases arrived in courts all throughout East Asia.
When Justice Gets Misplaced
As mentioned in chapter 1, the “hundred-man killing contest,” the archetype of a heinous Japanese war crime against the Chinese, involved a Japanese newspaper touting the supposed December 1937 actions of two Japanese low-ranking officers, Mukai Toshiaki and Noda Tsuyoshi. The wartime Japanese media broadcast the story that the two concocted a competition to see who could slay one hundred Chinese on the military campaign toward the city of Nanjing. Whether the incident actually happened remains dubious for several reasons, including the disputed details, the language used in the Japanese news articles, the actual rank of the two men in the imperial army, the fact that Japanese military swords do not have the tensile strength to kill that many people in one stroke, and numerous other unsavory reasons.24 The Japanese press at the time was far from honest, and the “media’s fixation on kill-counts both dehumanized the enemy into an abstract numerical figure and transformed battlefield violence into a modern game with outcomes easy for readers to compare, classify, and track.”25 In a sense, Japan was drunk on its propaganda euphoria regarding its expanding military might. The late November to early December 1937 siege of Nanjing witnessed a Japanese media whirlwind of exaggerated exploits by individual soldiers highlighted as propaganda. These came to symbolize aggressive Japanese imperial warfare tactics and a hatred of the Chinese.
The hundred-man killing contest has led a vibrant, if not checkered, historical life as a war crimes trial. The trial was closely linked with the Nanjing Massacre in general and has the patina of legal precedent because the two Japanese were found guilty at a postwar Nanjing court in 1947, regardless of the contrived nature of the evidence. Because this event received prominent press at the time, it was sanctified as a legal fact in a Chinese court. The “contest” has gained stature as a pillar of modern Chinese history in the war against Japanese aggression, as it is termed on the mainland.26 By contrast, Japanese textbooks usually do not discuss the incident in any fashion, either real or imagined. While this incident remains burned into the memories of Chinese schoolchildren, because of the education system, it also enflames public passion in Japan in a contrary way. In the early 1970s, Japanese journalist Honda Katsuichi brought the “killing contest” story back to life in postwar Japan with his interviews of Chinese who had supposedly been at the scene.27 In 2003, descendants of the two Japanese soldiers executed for the “contest” sued several publishers along with Honda for defamation of character. In 2006, a Japanese court rejected the plaintiff’s argument and pronounced that even if they were uncomfortable with their families’ history, they could not prove the incident did not occur. Many now believe that the event was at least a partial fabrication by Japanese news companies at the time. This was a fairly confusing decision but turned on the fact that what the Japanese court was analyzing was not the veracity of the historical atrocity but whether any narrative of it was libelous to the reputations of the two executed Japanese soldiers.28
On December 18, 1947, the Nanjing military tribunal opened against Noda and Mukai. The KMT government blanketed the city of Nanjing with large posters of the verdict on January 27, 1948. The government announced that the men had been found guilty of killing Chinese POWs and unarmed civilians, according to evidence provided in court. At noon on January 28 the sentence of death would be carried out at the Yuhuatai execution site, on the outskirts of Nanjing.29 Today, Yuhuatai is a national park that houses memorials for Chinese communists executed there during the KMT purges of communists and those who died during the civil war. No mention is made about the same grounds being used to execute Japanese war criminals in the immediate postwar period. At this large public site outside of Nanjing, the supremacy of CCP victimhood trumps the desire to discuss or memorialize Japanese war crimes—the historical thread there has been severed, unlike with the courtroom museum of CCP trials up north in Shenyang or the Lijixiang comfort women museum in Nanjing.
Another reason this story regained traction in China was because of the wall-to-wall coverage of Gao Wenbin as one of the few remaining legal staff members of the Tokyo Trial. When historical analyses of the Tokyo Trial were reinvigorated in China after 2011, Gao was the go-to interviewee until he passed away in 2020 at the ripe age of ninety-nine. He had been sent in May 1946 to provide English translation at the Tokyo Trial. In the postwar period, contrary to our assumption that the hundred-man killing contest must have repulsed Chinese in and around Nanjing and thus aroused passions for justice, Gao’s recollection suggests otherwise. The pursuit of these defendants appears much more happenstance and due to his intervention and the chance that he came across this story while in Japan looking for evidence of Japanese atrocities during the Tokyo Trial. He found, ironically, what he was looking for in Japanese newspapers.30 Was the pursuit of Chinese justice really this haphazard, or was it more methodical, as others have tried to suggest? For example, Gao Wenbin first served as a translator and then later as an assistant to the Chinese prosecutor at the Tokyo Trial, Xiang Zhejun. Gao’s placement was significant but serendipitous for the evolution of what came to be a symbolic war crimes trial in China. His story helps us understand the linkages between the Class A trial in Tokyo and the BC class cases that were managed on the Chinese mainland. Gao, in several postwar revelations and in a story that has gained attention over the past decade in the Chinese press, claims that he was the catalyst for uncovering the hundred-man killing contest after reading the Japanese newspaper article about it during the immediate postwar period.31
War Responsibility and War Crimes Trials—the Search for Justice
The problem with war and war crimes is that nationality and the action of the crime do not heed state boundaries. Not only did the US military dispatch war crimes investigation teams to China—to pursue the Shanghai war crimes trials against those who had harmed US military soldiers, and arguably US interests—but so did the British. Letters from the British embassy in Nanjing on August 1, 1946, informed the Chinese about the British war crimes investigation groups. Some of those on the team were police officers who had worked in Shanghai before the war when it was an international city. They asked for Chinese understanding and assistance, particularly when trying to gain access to former Japanese military police agents, kempeitai.32 Of particular interest to the British was what happened at Bridge House, in Shanghai. The British authorities wanted a list of Japanese who had worked at this prison so that they could be judged.33 The British Foreign Office requested Chinese assistance, and in Shanghai the British established the 9th War Crimes Investigation Team.34
To get a personal feel for how nationalist China competed in this milieu, I interviewed Li Zhiqun, daughter of Shanghai military tribunal clerk Li Yechu. She was very energetic and talkative, telling us a lot about her father’s life and how he had taken part in the trials of two infamous Japanese war criminals, Yonemura Haruki and Shimota Jirō (whose executions were detailed at the beginning of this chapter). Li Zhiqun explained that her father had recounted to her the details of the parade of the two Japanese officers around town in the truck on the way to their execution. The vehicle was surrounded by such large crowds that Li Yechu had to keep slapping the side of the truck, loudly yelling at people to let the vehicle pass. His daughter said that on their way through the city the mob threw all sorts of things at the Japanese prisoners. It was certainly not “civilized,” she said, and her dad had to continually remonstrate the crowds. Li Zhiqun quoted her father as saying, “I told everyone to control their emotions. I slammed the door with my hand, and my watch eventually broke.”35 The parade of the prisoners had departed at 3:15 p.m. from the prison and they arrived at the execution site at 4:45 p.m., according to the Zhonghua ribao newspaper.36
Li Yechu tried to assume some of the blame for having created a public disturbance where throngs of unruly Chinese witnessed the condemned Japanese on their way to the execution grounds. Li Yechu had been the clerk for Li Liang, a well-known civil law expert. Li Yechu explained that initially Judge Li Liang had held a meeting with court officers, telling them to be prudent and vigilant on the day of the execution. Li Yechu asked the judge to change the plans because, after being occupied by such a vicious Japanese overlord for years, seeing the condemned Japanese would help the downtrodden Chinese to once again “feel proud.” The judge agreed but the mob-like behavior surrounding the execution created an unforeseen international backlash. About a month after the execution fiasco, a package from China’s Ministry of Defense arrived at the court. When Li Yechu opened it, he found international news clippings critical of the treatment of the Japanese prisoners on the way to the execution site. Li Yechu summarized the enclosed official letter, which informed the court that “our allies are dissatisfied” with the way China was running things. Li Yechu drafted a response letter in which he admitted that the parade was his idea and showed it to Judge Li Liang. The judge looked at the response and then changed it to read, “It was this court’s opinion for the parade to take place,” allowing Li Yechu off the hook. Judge Li Liang took full responsibility and was eventually dismissed, seemingly due to complaints from the US government and others.37
Li Yechu reflected on the trial:
“I took the team to Changshu on October 5, 1946 and informed the newspapers Shenbao and Xinwenbao to send reporters along with us.” The locals from the area angrily told us: “Yonemura killed people like it was a child’s game.…” One of the locals showed Li Yechu and his team where bodies were buried. Li continued: “I remember coming to a mound above the ground level at Tiantaigang. The folks immediately used shovels and started digging. After a few spadefulls, I heard a ‘cachaw’ sound, and the ground opened to expose a few white bones. The crew dug further and soon found the bones of several corpses. Some were on their sides, some were standing, some were headless.… I packed a few bags up of the corpses as evidence, and reporters promptly took photos to publish in the newspapers. During the time of the formal trial, Judge Li took out the bones and put them on the dais. The hundreds of spectators packing the court to capacity seethed with anger, tears dripping down their faces.”38
Li Liang served as the chief of the civil court in the Shanghai High Court before the war of resistance against Japan. After the fall of Shanghai, the Japanese army forcibly occupied the courts, hoping that Li Liang and several other members of the Shanghai judicial community would work for the Japanese side. Li Liang was arrested and imprisoned because he was unwilling to work for the Japanese. In his autobiography, entitled National Difficulties, Li Liang describes his experience in the Japanese prison. “The prison was connected with the toilet; there was no distinction between men and women, all were packed in a messy room. We sit and sleep on the floor, forbidden from chatting. We were fed three times a day with porridge and rice. There was no salt and chopsticks. I suffered for my nation, and the food was hard to swallow.”39
In a separate interview, Judge Li Liang’s daughter, Li Jiajing, intimated to the director of one episode of our documentary, “After my father was arrested and imprisoned, my mother was frightened and tortured by the Japanese and eventually developed a psychosis so she could no longer take care of herself. My elder and younger brother both starved to death because of our poor family condition, or else they’d still be alive.” After victory, in July 1946, the forty-eight-year-old Li Liang received his new appointment as head of the Shanghai Military Tribunal and was awarded the rank of major general.40
Li Zhiqun was very nice and talked to us at length, but sadly she would not let me copy her father’s diary, which I am sure contained much more than the news articles I could see poking out from between the handwritten pages. After the interview, in a situation that would become familiar in other interviews I conducted for the documentary, Li Zhiqun followed me downstairs to the tiny alley and spoke to me alone. With everyone else out of earshot, she wanted to tell me what happened to her father after the KMT trials. Someone in Li Yechu’s neighborhood had informed on him, and he was called to the police station in the mid-1950s. After a cursory trial of sorts he was handed an eight-year sentence; he had been branded a counterrevolutionary for seemingly having taken part in the KMT’s war crimes trials of the Japanese or a related trumped-up charge. The former law clerk who had assisted in Chinese Nationalist war crimes trials against the Japanese was soon sent to remote Qinghai Province, where he served out his communist sentence of prison labor. In the mid-1960s, when he was about to be released, the party once again labeled Li Yechu a counterrevolutionary and made him wear a dunce cap. In the end, Li did not return to Shanghai until 1980, his daughter told me. This was not an unknown story; it had happened to many in China.
A similar interview in Taiyuan, Shanxi Province with Liu Linsheng brought home this issue of the postwar maltreatment of those connected to the Japanese imperial war machine but in very different ways. Liu was a professor and is the author of a book about a Japanese prison camp in the city of Taiyuan where Chinese were previously detained. The book is titled China’s Auschwitz: A True Record of the Japanese and the Taiyuan Detention Camp.41 Aside from the obvious problems of trying to compare what happened in China to the Holocaust, his book is informative. With the exception of a POW camp in Shenyang, which was mainly for Western military prisoners, the one that Professor Liu helped research and ultimately managed to turn into a cultural heritage site remains one of the few extant examples in China.42 As I discussed briefly in chapter one, there is scant research on Chinese POWs incarcerated by the Japanese imperial armed forces.
In the city of Taiyuan the facility where the Chinese prisoners were kept was medieval. Years later, improved conditions were created for the Japanese prisoners when they were confined in the same place for the Taiyuan war crimes investigations and trials. Liu informed me that he used his own money to buy a stone monument in the shape of Shanxi Province and erect it as a memorial in front of one of the former detention sites. Liu’s father had been a prisoner of the Japanese during the war and detained in one of the buildings. Against the city planners who preferred to use the site for industrial expansion, Liu managed to raise funds to restore the prison buildings. But Liu also explained that his own father never told him anything. It was only after his father died and Liu read his father’s memoirs that he learned about his time as a prisoner in Taiyuan.
One of the situations that always seems to develop in China, and perhaps more so when you are a foreigner dealing with Japanese war crimes in a country to which you are not native, is that your interviewees also like to intimate details to you they do not wish broadcast within China. Liu explained to me, after we had wrapped up filming and put the cameras away, that he had also done an interview with the Guardian newspaper a few years prior. In that interview with a foreign journalist Liu noted that while his father was imprisoned by the Japanese he then escaped. Ironically, his father was then actually imprisoned longer by the CCP postwar, during the Cultural Revolution, something Liu did not mention in the Chinese TV interview. I pointed this out to the directors. They noted the discrepancy and the lack of criticism but said we could not include Liu’s dual historiography because it would just get the documentary into trouble with censors. The Guardian had published:
Liu’s father, who had been imprisoned from December 1940 to June 1941, was packed off to a labour camp in Inner Mongolia during the 60s and returned a broken man. “My father always said, ‘The Japanese kept me in jail for seven months while the Communist party kept me in jail for seven years,’ ” he said.43
The fascinating part is that Liu himself was motivated to find the locations of the detention site because of a visit from two former Japanese war criminals who returned to Taiyuan and wanted to pay their respects and apologize. The city had to help these former Japanese soldiers figure out where the buildings were, and that is also what started Liu on his research journey.
Both Li and Liu’s stories of postwar injustice to those already caught up in the Chinese legal system gave me pause. This was, interestingly, because while they did not wish to broadcast news of their fathers’ double incarcerations too volubly their stories were already known. For Liu it was in his admission to a foreign journalist and for Li it was a small byline on an article her father had written in 1989, which explained, “Li Yechu […] after liberation was unjustly charged and for a long time sent down to Qinghai Province. In 1982, he was finally formally re-instated.”44
Judging Justice with the KMT
The Number Two Archives in Nanjing, in concert with the Center for the Tokyo Trial Studies at Shanghai Jiaotong University, published many of the records related to the KMT trials against Japanese war criminals. In his introduction to this new archival record, the director of the Number Two Archives, Ma Zhendu, is a bit disingenuous when he writes that one of the limitations that previously pushed against releasing these materials was Chinese anxiety over responses from Japan’s right wing, which denies atrocities.45 Rather, it was Chinese politics that slowed the opening of these important archives to the public. After all, I had asked for them twelve years earlier and was rebuffed!
Liu Tong, a researcher into the KMT trials at the center, offered his own assessment of the KMT trials.46 While they were a good attempt at pursuing justice under difficult legal and international circumstances, he admits, such tribunals were not without their problems. In some ways this view correlates with my previous findings, but Liu’s extensive archival research advanced further conclusions. He postulates a major lacuna that prevented the KMT from implementing a greater number of and more important trials domestically derived from a paucity of evidence. This absence of corroborative evidence was due to several contributing factors. By comparing Japanese and US statistics with Chinese numbers of individuals eventually brought to trial, Liu tabulated that out of around 2,259 arrested individuals, only 38 percent were eventually convicted in some form in Chinese military tribunals. Approximately 41 percent of the Japanese prisoners were found not guilty or were never charged and brought to court.47 The cause for this gap between plan and action was a lack of evidence, and it was one issue that ate away at the core of the KMT’s ability to bring justice to Japanese war crimes. This is also one reason that evidence was more in supply for trials against Japanese kempeitai forces or special intelligence services stationed in cities. There, Chinese citizens could bring their own statements based on personal experience to serve as evidence. There was, in contrast, much less personally related evidence with which to charge and then convict higher-ranking Japanese officers accused of larger-scale atrocities. There were other problems as well, which concerned the difficulty in procuring solid evidence overall. Chinese who were involved, or at least who frequently knew about such crimes, were potentially considered as collaborators and thus did not wish to divulge what they knew, to avoid getting wrapped up in further postwar complications.48
KMT trials of the Japanese military machine followed a format very different from a normal situation where a victorious power judges the vanquished. The KMT had side motives of reestablishing a postwar peace deal with Japan that, in part, guided its war crimes trial policy. It is for this reason that Yan Haijian suggests that the KMT pursuit of justice was both benevolent and overly lenient. The magnanimity of KMT trials allowed the ROC to secure an early peace treaty with Japan, but the sometimes insufficient sternness of this justice later permitted some quarters within Japan too much leeway to harbor ambivalent ideas about actual Japanese war crimes. Such ambiguity, in the end, also hampered Sino-Japanese relations and the process of reestablishing diplomatic relations in the region.49 This duality mirrored the international stature of China. The KMT was eager to demonstrate through such trials that it was collaborating with international efforts to secure justice in the immediate postwar period as one of the four main victorious allies. But at the same time, Chinese Nationalist leaders at many levels also realized they were far from being powerful enough to branch out on their own on a path that diverged too much from what the other Allied powers were doing. Aside from the focus that the Nanjing Massacre received at the Tokyo Trial, China, internationally, failed to emphasize how Japan’s war in and against China had been unique and thus worthy of a different set of trials of Japanese imperial aggression than occurred elsewhere. In this regard, the KMT failed to extend justice to its citizens.50
Even with all the Chinese attention to detail and budgetary limitations to pursue Japanese war crimes, soon after the KMT wrapped up its proceedings in 1949, the Korean War exploded in the summer of 1950. This new battleground shifted the sands on which the world order would be restructured once again and propelled the West to turn away from war crimes trials because it appeared they were not helping the situation. Seemingly, all parties struggled with the meaning and significance of why they had held war crimes trials—it was not merely a Chinese difficulty.