CHAPTER 8 Creating a Theater of Law in Mao’s China

The Start of CCP War Crimes Investigations

Wang Shilin was a young man studying law at Chaoyang University when the war with Japan started. He then headed south as the war worsened, kept studying, and ended up as part of the new legal team that was rebuilding the country. Soon after the announcement of liberation in autumn 1949 he was drafted into the CCP central government’s efforts to study war crimes and put together an investigation team. At first the staff were not informed of what they would be doing—it was all top secret. After it was explained, team members were told their work was classified. Wang was not even permitted to tell his family about his new post. He said that he was initially sent from Taiyuan to be part of the investigation team in Beijing, which was trying to assist the legal staff to squeeze in all the necessary study of law so that they would be properly prepared to advance the prosecution team’s investigations. The team received lectures from Judge Mei Ruao (the Chinese judge who had served on the Tokyo Trial) and a number of other high-profile legal practitioners with international experience. It was clear the CCP was pulling out all the stops to ensure proper procedures on the long road to the potential for having war crimes trials or at least creating a legal record of Japan’s imperial misdeeds. Wang could not recall the specifics of Mei’s lectures, but we can guess at some of their content based on the small array of Mei’s media commentary. The PRC wanted to draw closer to Japan, and a new imperialist demon had been found in the United States, on which to heap vitriol. Legal clerk Li Fang recalled that real investigations of the Japanese prisoners only began after the Korean War concluded, when he was summoned to Beijing in December 1953 from the Hebei Provincial Public Security Bureau to the Beijing Procuratorate Office.²⁰

Most of the PRC legal team members have died, but their reminiscences were recorded for posterity in two volumes, entitled Recollections of Reforming the War Criminals.²¹ Wang recalled that he and the others did not know much about the Tokyo Trial when they started their jobs, but they knew that such a trial had taken place in Japan’s capital. From the outset, most were not too keen on their new employment. Wang personally did not think the Japanese war criminals merited trials. It turns out that not only did the investigation teams have to study law and history, but the CCP leadership also had to spend time and effort to persuade investigators to complete their tasks. This was not a foregone conclusion, because initially many investigators did not want to comply with the directives. Wang explained that the decision not to summarily execute the Japanese POWs was made by Premier Zhou Enlai. Zhou explained to the investigation teams at one meeting that executing the Japanese was not an action that would gain justice for China, although he did not use those exact words, Wang said. It was obvious that China’s communist central government paid careful attention to ensuring that the investigations ran smoothly. The goal was to orchestrate careful and deliberate probes while pressuring the Japanese war criminals to admit their crimes. The Communist Party wanted to be able to predict the outcome of the trial. The ultimate aim was an admission of guilt that would then be declared in open court. A few months after Wang finished preparatory study and training in Beijing, he was dispatched farther north to Fushun Prison (officially known as the Fushun War Criminals Management Center) in Liaoning Province for a time. He said he was not there very long, and he was quickly returned to Taiyuan.

Wang intimated the careful approach he took when investigating Japanese prisoners such as Tominaga Juntarō and Jōno Hiroshi. Jōno was a former military officer who teamed up with the KMT leaders in Shanxi Province immediately after Japan’s surrender to organize Japan’s imperial revival. Tominaga was in his fifties and also a former military officer. In his confession he admitted to working undercover as a railway police officer. Initially Tominaga was reluctant to talk. Wang voiced to me the frustration he felt when facing Tominaga’s recalcitrance to advance the investigation, because if someone did not talk, then nothing happened. It took months of extra work and patience, something Wang admitted he struggled with at the outset. Wang added that the investigations took time to move forward because the team itself had to learn how to treat the Japanese prisoners. They could not just start out by calling these men “war criminals,” because the Japanese officers did not conceive of themselves as such.²² So, the investigators used proper titles and names with the prisoners and kept pushing. This took months and then years. This decision was a noticeable trend, because when I interviewed Wang, he never defaulted to the often-used term in China of “Japanese devils” when talking about the war criminals.

On the Road to PRC War Crimes Trials

One of the methods the PRC used to restore order was through a new application of law. Dong Biwu, future chief justice of the PRC’s Supreme People’s Court and legal scholar for China’s new communist legal ideology, offered commentary on the nature of law and why the Chinese needed to learn more. In June 1954 at the Sixth National Public Security Meeting, in what must have been a long-winded report, Dong pointed out problems with training the masses to use and understand political and legal ideology. Carefully laying out his premise with several examples, Dong elucidated that the imperialists and counterrevolutionaries “want to break our inevitability, they want to destroy our institutions and our law. They know they cannot achieve this openly so they use secretive methods or loopholes in the law to their advantage. They use the fact that our law is not yet complete, exploit weak deficiencies in our work, most especially taking advantage when we let down our guard.” Dong explained that the masses not only needed to understand the law but also needed to respect it, because “if the masses do not respect the law that will give our enemies a convenient opening. If the masses respect the law our enemies will not be able to find a way to gain an advantage.”²³ A stable and legally cognizant new China was therefore a secure and robust People’s Republic of China.

Unfortunately, much of PRC commentary on law is not case law but a system where higher courts release an opinion saying “correct” or “absolutely correct.” There was very little legal reasoning involved.²⁴ Regardless, in the full throes of passion midway through his report, Dong Biwu then turned to the issue of training the next generation of socialist legal workers. This change would not be easy, he expounded, because there were many judicial clerks formed in the old style with outdated legal training. Legal knowledge during the Republican era was not a science, Dong stated, but “Lenin said that socialism is a science.” The new legal workers would need to unlearn their previous habits and adapt to the idea that socialist law was formulaic. To throw away the old and learn the new took time, he instructed. And we need to construct new schools to teach this law as well, he added.²⁵

Most Chinese leaders realized that molding new Chinese law with no reference points was untenable, and their greatest asset was to learn from the Soviets. And while technical advice abounded, doubt remains concerning what sort of legal specialists came to China and trained new specialists. China had to work hard to rebuild its legal environment, but it was not always clear whether it was trying to adopt Soviet law or merely struggling to gain international attention.²⁶ There were not that many Soviet legal specialists compared with the immense number of other technicians. There are numerous competing lists but no official and final tabulations. One scholar calculated that the USSR sent only twenty-four legal specialists to China, fifteen of whom were installed at People’s University; others have slightly higher numbers. For a vast country of virtually half a billion people, only a small number of nonnative legal scholars trickled in and then stayed in China for only a short time, maybe a year or two at best.²⁷ From 1949 to 1960 approximately eighteen thousand Soviet specialists of all stripes worked in some capacity in China. Regardless of their actual numbers, these legal specialists were like a “drop in the ocean,” according to another estimate.²⁸ And while the PRC prided itself on many of the advances in jurisprudence it borrowed from the USSR, including mandating a defense lawyer for defendants and a public trial, not all citizens would have necessarily known about any given law. After all, it was not until 1988 that the Chinese state decided that all laws must be published.²⁹

Training also worked in the other direction, with Chinese visits to the Soviet Union. One of the first missions was led by Shi Liang, the minister of justice. Shi Liang was a key author of new laws for women in the PRC and also wrote about the further need to renovate Chinese law in the new era when socialism was supposed to shine brightly.³⁰ Shi was unique in many ways. One of the few female lawyers in China, she graduated from the Shanghai Law Academy in 1927, when there were only three female graduates.³¹ Lucky to survive the anti-Rightist purge of 1958, Shi would be quietly excused from public life until her resurrection in the early 1980s.

Shi Liang made it abundantly clear that reforming the law also meant reforming people’s attitudes toward it. In a report to the government on August 13, 1952, she put forward her thoughts. This report was also later published in the People’s Daily.

The thorough reform and reorganization of all the levels of the people’s courts is an important step in consolidating the people’s democratic dictatorship and guaranteeing the economic construction of the state. This concerns not only reassigning staff within the people’s courts, but it is also a question of purging the remnant reactionary legal ideology and ways of doing business of the old Chinese Nationalist Party. For this reason, it is necessary to begin in a planned and step by step manner, by mobilizing the masses from top to bottom toward a campaign to oppose the old judicial viewpoints and to reform all the judicial organs.³²

Shi Liang was indispensable in coordinating a mass of meetings and education programs to redo China’s legal infrastructure and to train cadres.³³ It took from the first several years after Mao’s announcement of a new China until about 1953 to establish courts in every region. The CCP leadership also tried to put women into as many new positions as possible. The size of the staff that served legal agencies expanded under her tutelage from 1950 to 1956.³⁴ Shi was also crucial to how Mao later prosecuted war crimes trials against the Japanese. Her team became a key conduit of information about how law operated in the Soviet Union, and these techniques seemed to have informed how investigations were managed. Shi led the three-month mission to the USSR with members of the Supreme People’s Court, Supreme People’s Procuratorate, the Ministry of Justice, and professors of legal studies.

The mission began on April 11, 1955, and the group returned on July 10, 1955. Those joining included twelve jurists and eight translators.³⁵ In her published mission reports, Shi Liang claimed she was surprised that even though the USSR was established thirty years prior, the people still had remnants of imperial or capitalist thinking. So, she believed, the law still needed to clamp down on them. The aim was not to punish crime that had already taken place; she also paid attention to issues that would lead to crime in the future. Educating the masses about the law, the courts, and what the party was doing was key, she instructed.³⁶ In another report, several members of the mission stated, “The court is an important weapon for the party and the state in guiding the people forward in socialism.” They continued, “As such, trials are not divorced from political meaning nor do they advance in isolation.” Of course, one had to scrupulously follow legal principles and rules of evidence, they agreed. In the end, the authors of the report tended toward exaggeration and claimed that Soviet investigations were so good and scientifically advanced that all crime immediately was uncovered. Regarding selecting and training members of the court, the report found that the members must reflect party and government policies and were key because “they are one tool of the fight to realize policy.”³⁷ Shi later softened her stance on who could perform legal work, perhaps by 1957, owing to the torpid pace of educating competent staff. On a later trip to the USSR she remarked that she saw czarist-era lawyers at work and realized that in China, lawyers trained during the Republican era could still be employed to stem national shortages. They might not be able to be judges, but they could do real legal work, she opined.³⁸

Wang Huai’an wrote a similarly laudatory article about the mission’s findings, noting that “the cadre legal staff of the Soviet Ministry of Justice is extremely talented, and their work experience is very rich.”³⁹ Wang Huai’an had attended National Sichuan University law school but dropped out shortly before graduating and left for Yenan, the Chinese communist stronghold, in 1940. He was falsely persecuted as a spy in 1943 and spent three years under arrest. Later, he would spend twenty years in labor camps after his subsequent PRC arrest in 1958.

Wang Ruqi, also part of this first mission to the USSR, was propaganda section chief in 1955 and instrumental to the major restructuring of the Chinese marriage law. She finished her legal studies at elite Fudan University in prewar Shanghai and wrote a draft of the important new law in postwar China concerning marriage. The marriage law was one of the many new ways of renovating China and had two purposes. The first order aimed to eradicate the vestiges of what was determined to be “feudal”: multiple wives and related hierarchical family relations, which were believed to retard China’s modernization. Second, “mass legal education was to contribute to linking state and society through knowledge, boost popular legitimacy for the young regime, and create the ‘new’ socialist masses that abided by policies, laws, and party doctrine.”⁴⁰

Minister of Justice Shi Liang wrote that the marriage law was not just a step forward for China but revolutionary in its scope because it broke the bonds of feudal relationships and guaranteed the establishment of a democratic household marriage. However, like most other legal staff participating in the creation of a new legal state, and connected to the prosecution of Japanese war crimes trials, Wang Ruqi’s time in the limelight was short-lived. In the summer of 1957 many juridical staff suffered at the hands of another counterrevolutionary wave and she was sent to other posts, though never directly purged like so many others. Wang returned to the center stage of Beijing, where she served as a defense attorney for the Gang of Four trial in late 1980.⁴¹

As China embarked on research concerning how to construct a new legal system, on February 28, 1955, officials in the Supreme People’s Procuratorate discussed releasing about five hundred Japanese prisoners the following month and they wanted to hear opinions on such a potential decision. China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs replied that it held no particular opinion, but taking such a big step before the Bandung Conference in April 1955 could have merit. (Bandung was the first postwar international conference of African and Asian states to discuss their roles in the decolonized world order.) However, the ministry suggested that China should be careful with making this publicly known because officials would not want to be misread as celebrating Japanese prime minister Hatoyama Ichirō’s ascension to office. Or maybe the PRC should release a smaller number of prisoners before the Bandung Conference, officials queried, and then make a statement about those remaining afterward?⁴²

The CCP also struggled with what to do about China’s intellectuals, as it did concerning how to create a new legal structure out of whole cloth while lacking the staff. It could not summarily dismiss everyone, because talent, technicians, and able-minded cadres were in desperately short supply. In this vein in July 1955, Dong Biwu, Shen Junru, and Zhang Xiruo all delivered comments at the Second Session of the 1st National People’s Congress. After Dong spoke, Shen followed up with a short discussion on intellectuals: “During the construction of a socialist society and the great struggle of using socialism to reform society intellectuals are for the near future important troops in that battle. However, on the other hand, we must recognize these intellectuals are born from the capitalist class or lower capitalist class and thus are inherently deeply flawed.”⁴³

Intellectuals who later became communist cadres, like Shen Junru, had to make sure they constantly affirmed their own personal journey of transformation regarding their background and attitudes. At the July 1955 meeting, Shen made a statement to the gathering:

Have I or have I not intimately drawn myself into the Communist Party?

Am I arrogant or emotionally full of myself?

Am I not capable of serving the people with all my heart and spirit, and serving society?

I believe we intellectuals must at this time investigate ourselves, sternly require ourselves to earnestly study Marxist Leninism, study Mao Zedong’s works, train ourselves amidst this unfolding revolution, and advance education widely among the people, all before we can claim to have been reformed into a new individual in the new society. This all needs to be accomplished before we can contribute to socialism’s great efforts.⁴⁴

This moment of legal fermentation during “the 1954–1957 interlude represents the potential golden age of law in Communist China. The concern in that country with due process and normal, stable juridical relations impressed the Soviet legal clan favourably.”⁴⁵ Unfortunately, it would not last.

On the Eve of the Trials of Japanese War Criminals

A consultancy group was formed and put to work to deal with the long and numerous individual investigations that teams in Fushun and Taiyuan had coordinated for years. According to instructions from Zhou Enlai, in January 1956 a group of legal minds including Tan Zhengwen, Jia Qian, Wang Ruqi, and Mei Ruao debated sentencing guidelines.⁴⁶ The members focused on the principle of being magnanimous but still advancing the notion of adjudicating and dealing with war crimes.⁴⁷ Contrary to contemporary accounts and the media in China, the CCP was not solely concerned with Japanese war crimes. At the time, the PRC widely defined what had caused the century of humiliation, and there was much responsibility to be shared.

Six years had passed since the Japanese prisoners had been delivered to the PRC’s border rail station in 1950. Stalin had died in March 1953, and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev delivered his famous “On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences,” condemning Stalin in a secret session of the 20th Party Congress on February 25, 1956. Rumors of its content abounded, but it was hard to nail down. By June, the entire contents were published in the New York Times, and Stalin’s crimes were exposed to the world.⁴⁸ Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin surprised the Chinese, particularly Mao, who would soon be busy constructing his own cult of personality. But we should be careful in ascribing too much to the moment as the start of the souring of Sino-Soviet relations as “it artificially inflates the differences between the Soviets and the Chinese.” In short, “Khrushchev appeared to downplay class struggle and sought peaceful coexistence with the United States. Mao criticized these policies as ‘revisionist,’ setting the stage for the ideological conflict that fully unfolded in the 1960s.”⁴⁹

At the end of March 1956, Soviet ambassador to China P. F. Yudin discussed with Mao the ramifications of Khrushchev’s epoch-making speech. The two agreed that Stalin’s mistakes should be avoided in the future, but Mao seemed less worried, Yudin wrote. Mao answered that, “evidently, there will be these types of mistakes again.” This was because, in Mao’s view, “there are still too many vestiges of the past.”⁵⁰

Importantly, while downplaying Stalin’s mistakes, Chinese officials, like Zhou Enlai, did not wish to make any international gaffes in their dealings with Japanese war criminals. As detailed in a Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs report that was sent to the Central Committee, the government was worried that if the trials improperly employed international law, or that if a venue misquoted the law, especially while the PRC had not officially recognized international law, new China would not look good on the international stage.⁵¹ The courts and the government needed to be prudent so as not to cause themselves national and international embarrassment.

By the spring of 1956, Chinese officials had formalized the manner in which they would use the six-year-long investigations they had opened against the Japanese war criminals. They noted how such a decision related to other groups the PRC deemed as war criminals. The official history of China’s public security operations acknowledged that the KMT put Japanese war criminals on trial but asserted that the Chinese Nationalists “failed to reflect the true wishes and hopes of the Chinese people.” The KMT did not bring to justice, in the vocabulary of the PRC, the three kinds of “domestic war criminals.” These were the sixty-one high-ranking members of the Manchukuo administration (including ministers and Manchu royalty), about ten people who served in the Mongol United Autonomous Government, and KMT war criminals. All together they added up to just under one thousand individuals.⁵² The Manchukuo war criminals, as the CCP deemed them, proved reluctant to reform in the initial years. Li Fang, who was head of the prosecutorial investigation team formed to interrogate and reform the prisoners, recalled that the Manchukuo prisoners “had knowledge related to previous laws and because they thought we should tell them that confessions to their crimes would be used against them later in court some stubbornly refused to acknowledge their crimes.” Li went on to say that the CCP investigation teams did not just question the prisoners, they educated them. Wars were won or lost depending on who was just or unjust. For example, Li said, imperial Japan had invaded China and subsequently lost. In the War to Resist America and Aid Korea (how the Chinese refer to the Korean War), the imperial United States was defeated by the Chinese and the Korean people.⁵³

Luo Ruiqing, chief of the Public Security Ministry, detailed how he categorized war responsibility in China. The first group, he explained in a March 1956 public speech “concerning problems with war crimes,” were Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalist soldiers taken prisoner during and after the civil war. Some were summarily executed, he noted. The second group were Japanese war criminals, and the investigations against them had been proceeding for some time, Luo remarked. The third group included the last emperor of Qing China, Pu Yi, and some sixty-one “fake Manchukuo” war criminals, including former ministers and others, Luo pronounced. In 1956, high-ranking CCP officials were still using the term “war criminals” for all these parties, which signified in some sense that Chinese Nationalist POWs were being consolidated with Japanese war criminals and former members of the Manchukuo leadership who were not Japanese. As part of their reeducation, Luo highlighted, KMT prisoners were toured around to factories, mines, water projects, and cultural sites. The report quoted an incarcerated KMT officer, General Liao Yaoxiang, who is said to have exclaimed: “Although I am a criminal bequeathed from an outdated society, I am still a Chinese. I cannot be but sincere in my fervent desire to support the great and holy projects that are now being undertaken to restore the motherland.”⁵⁴

Toward the end of his speech, Luo, almost as an aside, mentioned thirteen Americans held in China. He told the audience that all of them have “already been sentenced according to the law,” which was more than one could say about the so-called trials of KMT prisoners who were usually summarily imprisoned with no trial. Luo offered further details on the incarcerated Americans, such as that some were taken around China to see the ways in which the country was rebuilding itself. Luo offered the example as a PRC mode of success when treating such foreign criminals.⁵⁵

In April 1956, the CCP made public its announcement about how it would deal with Japanese war criminals. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs held internal top-secret discussions about coordinating its policy with the Soviets. In view of this issue, Liao Chengzhi expressed two points. Liao was the go-to man in postwar Sino-Japanese relations. He had grown up in Japan and was bilingual, serving elite bilateral relations and for a long time fronting PRC policy toward Japan. At this juncture the two policies were not unified, so, first, China should inform the Soviets, he ventured. Second, if China does inform the Soviets, Liao wrote, it might be a good idea to just hand them a copy of the Chinese decision and explain the Chinese policy on Japanese war criminals. Officials voiced concerns that the Japanese trials were going to take place more than ten years after the conclusion of World War II. Sino-Japan relations had changed, the report noted, so China should aim to implement a policy that was magnanimous. The Chinese explained these points to a high-ranking officer of the Soviet embassy.⁵⁶ At this time, the central core of the CCP was still talking about how to deal with the three groups of war criminals: the Japanese, the “fake” Manchukuo government officials, and other counterrevolutionaries, as they deemed KMT officials and officers.⁵⁷ As the final preparations for the trials of Japanese war criminals were under way, the central government sent out its opinion on how to punish these disparate groups and other counterrevolutionaries who were all now seemingly lumped together legally. They needed to be punished appropriately. “We need to prudently investigate,” the directive said.

Concerning the group of criminals including Pu Yi and other domestic and Manchurian traitors, along with Kang Ze, Du Yuming, Wang Yaowu and other civil war criminals, whether we should take the most egregious among them and merely execute them, or treat them magnanimously without using the death penalty but give them appropriate sentences according to their cases, is the question. Moreover, we also have to think whether we should continually acquit those who do not need to be sentenced for all charges or successively give amnesty to those who demonstrate repentance, to the biggest war criminals who make efforts to atone, and then use them as effective political capital? This problem is something worth prudently studying.⁵⁸

The same directive discussed the fact that the war crimes trials of traitors, Japanese, and those from former Manchukuo could also be used to isolate the enemy and strengthen China’s own position. But, the report noted, China needed to be careful because even though these men had already spent a long time in prison, there would still be those in Chinese society poised against this decision because the masses had suffered direct harm.⁵⁹ Communist officials labeled the KMT officials and soldiers captured as “war criminals,” even though technically in a civil war these men had not committed crimes against humanity, or peace, and it was not a war in the legal sense. It is clear that CCP authorities struggled with layers of doubt in a legal haze, oftentimes mixing how to deal with counterrevolutionaries and the problems of Japanese war criminals in the same or related policy proceedings.

In the end, the CCP chose two locations for its public trials against Japanese war criminals—Taiyuan, Shanxi Province, and Shenyang, Liaoning Province. Both temporary courtrooms had theatrical lighting installed, and both events were recorded on film, though not released to the public until the twenty-first century. The stage was, literally and figuratively, set. In a sense, any trial is an event that creates a specially defined space. Trials are procedures that fulfill important social rituals to announce the pursuit of justice. An arena of justice needs to be “embedded in a social fabric” for it to have significant meaning for the society.⁶⁰ Law is the process within that space where justice is found or the process of justice is presumed to occur. A tribunal is a venue where different actors come together to find resolution or assign responsibility and mete out punishment. At the same time, trials define national territory. States seek to delineate the borders of what crimes will and will not be charged under the jurisdictions they control. But what drove the PRC to pour money and time into pursuing Japanese war criminals long after other courts had adjourned concerning these issues around the rest of the region?

The war crimes trials in communist China that took place in the two venues of Taiyuan and Shenyang stretched from June to July 1956, charging only forty-five of the highest-ranking Japanese with war crimes. All the other remaining Japanese prisoners, including the initial almost one thousand who were “gifted” from the USSR, had been repatriated in waves preceding these trials.⁶¹ Many facts about the war crimes trials of the Japanese were unknown until recently. For example, why was a building in the north of the city of Shenyang, which required daily transportation of the prisoners and staff, used as the location for one set of the CCP tribunals? It turns out that officials had discussed holding the court in Fushun, where the prison was located, but no appropriate building or room was grand enough in scale. The building selected in Shenyang was the Beiling Cinema, which was a working movie theater both before and after the war crimes trials.⁶² Shenyang was deemed a fitting location because it was precisely where Japanese war crimes began with the September 18, 1931, Manchurian Incident. Chinese lawyer Lian Xisheng, who worked on the trials, claimed “former Tokyo Trial Judge Mei Ruao, who had joined the training teams for the CCP trials, suggested the location of Shenyang. ‘Shenyang was where the 9.18 Incident happened so we should hold judgement in Shenyang. There the crimes were committed, so the trial should be there. This is the way to provide the world education and a warning; it is a way to guard peace, and contain malevolent forces.’ ”⁶³

In late June 1956, on the eve of the military tribunals of Japanese war criminals in Taiyuan, Shanxi Province, Supreme Court procurator Zhang Dingcheng spoke at the Third Session of the First National People’s Congress. Zhang was pleased that 1955 had been a high point for the country in achieving its socialist goals, and he announced that China had won the struggle against counterrevolutionaries. The country was now arresting, investigating, and bringing criminals to court, while following the rule of law correctly. Toward the end of his remarks, Zhang got around to the “Japanese war criminal elements,” as he categorized them. Being benevolent toward the Japanese war criminals was “in our longer-term interest,” Zhang said. This policy demonstrated China’s magnanimous spirit but “can also show the power of our nation’s people and the great force of world peace.” Such moves will also “gain the sympathy of the Japanese people and support of those around the world who cherish peace.”⁶⁴

Chief Judge Jia Qian presided over the 1956 Shenyang trials. Jia was a graduate of one of Republican China’s top law schools before heading into the hinterland to join the CCP during the war of resistance against Japan. One of the people who helped arrange the defense teams was Wang Ruqi, a top Ministry of Justice official, a Republican law graduate, a participant in Shi Liang’s 1955 tour to the USSR, and a key drafter of China’s new marriage law. These former Republican-era lawyers had years of personal experience with the Chinese Nationalist judicial system, which probably had a much deeper impact on their understanding of the law and judicial process than abstract socialist theories they had recently read concerning a judicial system they barely knew. But to acknowledge a positive Chinese Nationalist legal debt was career suicide, so instead anything that looked like formal Republican-era legality had to be represented as Soviet.

The long effort in investigating Japanese war crimes and then consistently having the prisoners write and rewrite their confessions was designed to get them to admit their atrocities. One result of these sessions was that many Japanese prisoners promised to reform and then did so when they eventually repatriated to Japan. This was a fundamental element of the whole process. Feng Jingyu recalled such a moment. He had attended the entirety of the Shenyang trials and had assisted in the drafting of the language for the verdicts. Feng was the political section editor of the Progressive Newspaper, a local Shenyang newspaper. Feng witnessed Fujita Shigeru (former lieutenant general of the Japanese imperial army) pledging his life to antiwar efforts and promoting peace. Fujita did just that upon repatriation with his role in the formation of the Liaison Group of Returnees from China (Chūgoku kikansha renrakukai, hereafter referred to as the Liaison Group).⁶⁵

But there were also problems with the communist trials, including those of special military tribunals for Japanese war criminals. CCP judges were often army judges, few had postsecondary education, and “legal training [was] not compulsory until 1983.”⁶⁶ In addition, the euphoria over Beijing’s announcements to stand as the most benevolent nation toward Japan was short-lived when PRC agencies started to analyze the actual situation. A report from June 28, 1956, concerning Japanese reactions to the Chinese announcement of prisoner releases and trials caused much consternation in elite PRC circles. In general, newspapers in Japan and public opinion were positive regarding China’s moves, the report noted. However, challenges remained and attitudes were not wholly consistent, the report enunciated.⁶⁷

Even before the ink was dry on the CCP trial verdicts, China was nonetheless congratulating itself on a job well done. The Political Division Enemy Military Operations Section of the People’s Liberation Army kept tabs on Japanese reactions to the prisoners’ repatriation. China highly estimated the impact of its war crimes trials education, release program, and overall process. Arima Torao, a prisoner and former head of the Railway Police School in Manchukuo, gave an interview to a Japanese newspaper.⁶⁸ Arima had been handed over from the Soviets to the Chinese in the big exchange in June 1950.⁶⁹ This Chinese report mentioned another news article, but I have been unable to find corroboration in any Japanese sources to verify this news event that the Chinese cite. They had supposedly interviewed former Japanese soldier Kawanishi Kinji, who upon returning home to Tokyo learned that his three brothers had died and only his mother survived the war. The article recorded that his mother, “tearfully embracing her son upon his return,” said, “Regardless of what happens I will never again let him go.” Kawanishi’s mother “thanked China for its humane treatment of her son and for nursing him back to health when he was ill.”⁷⁰

Confessions

The CCP trials not only reformed prisoners and fashioned “Japanese devils” back into being men, but the courts also offered concrete forms of justice to the Chinese public for crimes that had never been recognized during either the last years of KMT rule on the mainland or the first years of the PRC. This plan was orchestrated in terms of the level of care investigators took in their prolonged and detailed interrogations of Japanese prisoners from 1952 to 1956, as Wang Shilin explained regarding his experiences.⁷¹ These materials were then used to ensure a “correct” verdict but also to push the successful admission of Japanese guilt in court when the time came. These confessions of the CCP-convicted Japanese war criminals were published in a set of ten volumes in 2005, followed by a few reprints over the years.⁷² The forty-five confessions were later truncated and translated in online versions around 2014. The final moment of revelation came in 2015 when the first tranche of 120 volumes of all the confessions of about eight hundred Japanese war criminals was produced. The vast majority of these men were granted early release and not put on trial, but the record of their actions in their own words remains, even though the Chinese public was denied access to it for the past sixty years.⁷³ Obviously, years of work remain to analyze more fully the contents of these confessions, as well as their meaning and significance. However, one key confession, that of Major General Uesaka Masaru, provides a key link to the tragedy narrated in this book’s introduction. Uesaka was the military leader involved in the poison gas incident in Beituan Village, where I interviewed Li Qingxiang at the start of this book. In the preface to Uesaka’s investigation, images of the atrocities for which he took responsibility are printed in the 2015 version of the confession. One of them shows a photograph of bones lined up before a memorial cenotaph in the village.

On December 7, 1954, Uesaka confirmed the photos and the incident in Japanese and then in translation that these were the bones of his victims. The Japanese confession is a bit over the top in terms of language and style and probably does not reflect his own words but rather employs a repeated set of phrases that are consistent throughout many of the confessions. Uesaka refers to his actions as “an atrociously inhuman massacre that defies language.” And yet, he still confirmed the incident on May 27, 1942, in Beituan Village when the Japanese military used poison gas to kill Chinese civilians.⁷⁴ Uesaka admitted to having used the green and red gas containers in Beituan. Soldiers threw this “poison” into tunnels, causing asphyxiation or enough pain for the rebels to try to escape from underground, where the Japanese would shoot them as they fled, he explained. Uesaka wrote that the orders to kill the suspected Eighth Route Army soldiers and civilians came from him.⁷⁵ In tightly handwritten Japanese, as with the Chinese translation, Uesaka personally recorded this admission.⁷⁶ His trial was held with Suzuki Hiraku and a group of eight in Shenyang from June 9–19, 1956.

CCP officials designated Wang Minqiu as Uesaka’s defense lawyer. CCP defense teams existed, but, until recently, insight into their motivations, or even what they did, had remained thin on the ground. While memoirs abound from the guards and reeducation campaigns of the prisoners, scant records exist from the legal side. There are also very few declassified archives that detail their activities. Wang was the head of the Northeast China Branch School for Central Government Political Cadres, and he had been dispatched to Shenyang to lead the court’s legal teams. One of the lawyers who worked on the team, Quan Deyuan, recalled a car ride he shared with Wang. During the ride Wang pulled some letters out of his leather satchel, turned to Quan, and said, “These are all letters sent to lawyers at the military tribunal from people in Guangdong, Zhejiang, Shanghai and elsewhere. These letters all reproach us and ask ‘You are a public servant for China but help defend the beastly Japanese imperial fascists. How far does this go to defend the position of the Chinese people?’ ” Wang lamented to Quan, “I can understand the people’s hatred of the Japanese war criminals but they do not comprehend why at this sort of trial the regulations requiring that we must have lawyers present.”⁷⁷

Lian Xisheng, who was only twenty-three years old, harbored a similar internal conflict about being a defense lawyer for Japanese war criminals. He was from Tianjin and was five years old when the Japanese arrived. At fifteen he studied for a bit in a Japanese school in the city, experiencing life under colonial occupation. Lian said,

If I am to be truly honest, I did not willingly think we should offer a defense for the Japanese. Afterward, many people cursed us and I can understand their emotional state. At that time a lawyer’s work had not been formally established so many people did not understand lawyers and thought that lawyers just said nice things about bad people, or said things that helped the Japanese, these men who killed so many Chinese. However, we had to prudently complete the plan that we initiated and defense is one link in the trial. Without it, a civilized trial ceases to be just that.⁷⁸

Lian added it that was hard to defend against the testimony revealed at court. “The prosecution side had already done a lot of work. Not only did they have material evidence but they also had many who would testify. The evidence was very specific and factual. For example, there would be someone who would come to court and testify, showing the back of their neck where there was a knife wound, a wound from being cut by a Japanese. How do you offer a defense in the face of that sort of evidence?”⁷⁹

Testimony came from far and wide. One villager from Beituan managed to travel all the way to Shenyang to give testimony, although not everyone remembered this when I interviewed them in the village. Li Dexiang went into horrific detail in his testimony at Uesaka’s trial on June 12, 1956. After detailing how the “devils” (his label for the Japanese military) closed up tunnel vents with futons and then threw poison gas down into the tunnel entrances or air vents to kill or force those hiding to come out, he explained his personal situation. He came up from the tunnel inside a neighbor’s home. As soon as he stuck out his head, “the devils [the Japanese military] seized me. They said they wanted the guns and the hand grenades, the armaments of the 8th Route Army. I said I am just a kid and did not know about such things. The Japanese devils didn’t believe me. They beat me with a wooden baton, pushed me down, then had me get up and forced me to take off my clothes. There were about 50–60 of us who had been captured by the Japanese. They also took off all the women’s clothing just to humiliate them.”⁸⁰ After describing the litany of Japanese crimes against civilians, including murder and rape, Li continued with his own story. The Japanese soldiers dragged him to his own house, where there were many people in the courtyard, including his mother, his younger brother, and elder sister. They pushed many people into the house and, using sorghum and surrounding materials, set fire to Li’s home.

The testimony became overwhelming for Li, and the court record details that he cried at several intervals. At one point, Li turned to Uesaka, the accused, and said,

I am the only one left from my family of six. You killed five members of my family, you completely burned down our house, the only asset we owned. All of my misfortune is entirely of your inhumane Japanese devil making. My being here saying a few words in no way dissolves my hatred for you. You not only created this painful calamity for me but you also did the same to all the families in my village, and equally caused the same to millions of civilians. How many children lost their mothers, how many mothers and fathers lost their children, how many young women lost their husbands? All of this horrible inhumanity was caused by you, you Japanese devils. Today I call on this court to sternly mete out punishment to these murderous culprits.⁸¹

Uesaka had been arrested in 1945, was ultimately sentenced to eighteen years in prison for his crimes, and was released in August 1963. His years incarcerated in the USSR and China before trial were counted as part of his sentence.

Confessions of a Kind

The story of how these war crimes were discussed in postwar Japan is equally important and played a large role in galvanizing feelings of injustice. In fact, the official postwar record of the Japanese imperial army’s battles in Beituan Village does not mention the use of poison gas. The account acknowledges the number of Chinese dead at one thousand, which was similar to the accounts of Chinese witnesses. But the authorized Japanese military compilation only includes a description of the troop movements as they approached Beituan and that they had intelligence it was going to be riddled with tunnels. The official record blandly states, “We found the tunnel entrances and closed them off with a mass of enemy soldiers inside. We crushed the enemy and suffered 3 deaths and 5 wounded on our side. The security of this village and the surrounding areas greatly solidified after this.”⁸² The skirmish ended in success, according to the official postwar analysis, “due to the spiritual rigor of the Japanese military and the stern military command and control that gained the understanding of the Chinese people.”⁸³

This imperial record drew on Japanese regimental histories, including the personal recollections of Major Ōe Yoshiwaka, who was a battalion commander within the 163rd Regiment.⁸⁴ An intrepid Japanese journalist, Ishikiriyama Hideaki, who had studied at Beijing University, grew deeply interested in what really happened at Beituan Village.⁸⁵ He wondered how Chinese villagers could be telling one story while the Japanese imperial army recounted something different. He was fortunate enough to locate Ōe’s report and realized a glaring error. Major Ōe had clearly written that his battalion had used poison gas to “annihilate” the Chinese enemy.⁸⁶ Somehow or other Ishikiriyama managed to track down Ōe, who was still alive and well in the early 1990s, and requested a personal interview. At first, Ōe insisted that what he had written in his personal report was that the Japanese troops had used gas but that it was “sneezing gas,” a weapon that does not kill. It just incapacitates, he added. After a long argument Ōe admitted that he probably had used some form of gas in battle against the Chinese.⁸⁷ But if Ōe had admitted using poison gas, a war crime, why was that not showing up in Japan’s official military record?

To get to the bottom of it, in 1998 Japanese photojournalist Arai Toshio and Asahi Newspaper reporter Honda Masakazu went to the publishing house that produced the official military history to complain and request an explanation from the lead editor of that volume, Morimatsu Toshio. After waffling, Morimatsu eventually revealed to the two Japanese journalists that because using poison gas was illegal in international law he had been instructed “from above” not to write those elements into the official Japanese military history.⁸⁸ For years Ōe’s personal record was available for consultation in the reading room of Japan’s Ministry of Defense archives. Suddenly, in 2003 it was no longer allowed to be seen.⁸⁹ What became obvious was that somewhere down the line there were a growing number of manifest inconsistencies in the military record compiled by Japanese officials.

From the end of the war until today, former military and official Japanese government efforts have tried to both hide and conserve what they deem as a true record of the war so they can write up their “correct” version of history. It is not dissimilar to what Nazi architect Albert Speer attempted with his secret diaries, trying to explain his side of the Holocaust genocide.⁹⁰ What is disconcerting within the history of Japan’s poison gas war crimes in China is that these years of back and forth between Japanese researchers and ministry hesitation have delayed the wheels of justice.⁹¹ But these impediments were not just of Japanese making. The United States and, in part, the Soviet Union were also complicit in their respective bids to keep the investigations into some war crimes far from glaring courtroom eyes so that the information could be monopolized for their own potential national military utilization.⁹² Which Japanese war crimes were prosecuted was the result of an international game of cat and mouse, as were the stories of which trials were able to be researched long after the war was over, if the archives were deemed sufficiently declassifiable.

The Case against Sumioka Giichi

Taking a cursory look at the declassified and fully published confessions of former Japanese war criminals offers a new window into the CCP investigations and 1956 war crimes tribunals. The trials shake off their monolithic appearance when we can see behind the curtain concerning what aspects of Japanese military activity they concentrated on and perhaps why these forty-five men were chosen to stand trial while others were released. The confessions also provide insight into the sort of justice the CCP believed it was pursuing.

Sumioka Giichi was first charged in a Taiyuan court on June 12, 1956, along with Jōno Hiroshi, in a trial of eight defendants. The trial began early at 8:30 a.m. Perhaps this was scheduled to avoid the afternoon heat in what was then known as the Hall of Self-Reflection, built by General Yan Xishan, but what is now the Shanxi Hotel. Until 1949, even though Shanxi Province was theoretically part of China, the warlord General Yan Xishan managed the region as a personal fiefdom. In the 1940s the hall was a two-story building that stood at the end of a large courtyard, fronting a big lake in the center of Taiyuan city, the provincial capital. Taiyuan was one of the two communist war crimes tribunal sites in 1956 as it contained one of the, if not the largest and most spacious, halls in the region. Later, the Hall of Self-Reflection was torn down and on the same site a large resort hotel was erected. The park adjacent to the hotel houses another famous building that Yan Xishan built in honor of his father’s birthday. In English, the building has several names but is usually called the Propitious Tower. It was here that, at the end of the war, Japanese lieutenant general Sumita Raishirō and KMT general Yan colluded to create collaborator battalions of Japanese soldiers. These were initially a division of around ten thousand Japanese soldiers who were coerced, or volunteered according to some sources, into continuing to wage war with the KMT against the CCP after Japan’s surrender.

Among a long list of charges against Sumioka were (1) staying on in Shanxi after Japan surrendered and trying to resurrect Japan’s defeated empire and (2) rounding up prisoners and using them for “live target practice.” To toughen up new Japanese recruits and accelerate their training to deal with a Chinese enemy that was showing deep reserves of resistance, the goal was not to waste bullets. Instead, young imperial soldiers were put into close contact with the enemy to get used to killing another human being without hesitating. Sumioka explained that the prisoners were a mix of Chinese Nationalist soldiers, Eighth Route Army soldiers from CCP anti-Japanese guerrilla forces, and others.

Sumioka’s published confession reads almost the same as the court record. After going through all his crimes—some of which included battles with the Communist Eighth Route Army and a long list of killing civilians—he arrives at the part where he bayonetted Chinese prisoners. On July 26, 1942, he was serving as second lieutenant instructor for education of the First Year Soldier’s Machine Gun Platoon stationed in Taiyuan City. Colonel Yasuo Masatsuna wanted his new soldiers “to receive real armed training in bayonetting the enemy in combat” and chose the horse track just outside of the Small Eastern Gate of the city as the site. Sumioka was Yasuo’s aide-de-camp and participated in the roundups and “live target” training. Sumioka detailed in his confession, and then later to the court, that on that day in late July he brought out about 220 first-year soldiers, officers, and 220 prisoners, most of whom were anti-Japan CCP Eighth Route Army soldiers, but others were mixed in as well. He then lined up both groups to face each other. In the confession we can see Sumioka is not using his own language but perhaps has adopted the language of his captors when he explains “this mass slaughter,” which is a very Chinese way of referring to the event.⁹³

Sumioka observed that it was obvious the new Japanese soldiers were reluctant. In the court record he recalled, “At the time, the new recruits could only really injure the victims, they could not kill them. So, I took my own knife, faced the new soldiers to show them how it was done, and stabbed the [Chinese] prisoners in the chest killing them.”⁹⁴ On that specific day, Major General Tsuda Moriya, who had commanded this sort of field training, arrived to observe the exercise. Sumioka said there was one prisoner who escaped on this day and later there was a report about him in a Xinhua newspaper.⁹⁵ In August, the same practice was repeated with about seventy prisoners, many of whom were women and students. They screamed “Long Live China!” when about to be stabbed, and many Japanese soldiers missed their mark. Sumioka had to show them, or when that proved insufficient shoot the prisoners himself. Sumioka signed off on his own graphic confession on March 16, 1955.⁹⁶

In these CCP trials, judges and prosecutors posed questions to the defendants. After the presentation of Sumikoka’s confession, the judge wanted to add a bit more context to exactly what happened on the racecourse with the killings. He recommended including the affidavit of Zhao Peixian. Zhao did not attend the trial, but his accusation was read into the court record. Zhao had been imprisoned in the Taiyuan Prisoner Camp. During the war it was surrounded by electric and barbed wire. Zhao testified: “On the dark and damp ground we slept, ate, crapped, pissed, and were treated like pigs. It stunk of sweat, piss and excrement, baked by the heat of the hot sun our flesh was slowly rotting. Those whose bodies were already weak fell ill after a few days and died! Those who were relatively strong, were gradually whittled down to being nothing more than skin and bones.”⁹⁷ Zhao’s testimony narrated his narrow escape:

On July 26 it was our turn to be taken for live target practice. At 3.30pm eighty of us from the ‘wu section’ were divided into four groups, and from the Xiaodongmen [Small Eastern Gate] we were taken to a cemetery amidst the trees. Immediately a group of about 100 armed fascist bandits (the Japanese army) arrived, took the first group of 20 of my revolutionary brothers, stripped off their shirts, tied both hands behind their back, and lined them up [.…] [The testimony continued] […] raising their bayonets the soldiers screamed as they rushed toward us. We are brave warriors of the revolution, continuing the glorious traditions of the 8th Route Army, pledged to die rather than give in! Facing down the bayonets we let loose streams of abuse. At the top of our lungs screaming: “Long live the Communist Party! Long live the victory in the war of resistance! Down with Japanese imperialism!” It was soon the third group’s turn, the group I was in. [A Japanese soldier tied each prisoner up and kicked Zhao down, forcing him to kneel.] I thought: “I can’t be slaughtered like a sheep, I must struggle against them as I face death.” […] Just before the enemy had removed his bayonet from the chest of my comrade before me, at this moment pregnant with tension, I escaped my ropes, jumped across a ditch and flew with my back to the enemy. I was lucky to have escaped.⁹⁸

Having heard Zhao’s testimony, Sumioka was asked if he had any response. He said, tearfully, “I have just heard the accusations from Zhao Peixian, and while I cannot take full responsibility, I still am a part of the Japanese militarism that killed those people. As such, I implore the judge to give me a stern sentence. This punishment itself expresses a minute fraction of apology toward the victims and the Chinese people. This expression of apology is extremely small, but in its absence I have no other way of seeking apology for my offense.”⁹⁹

Problems with This Format of Justice?

When these confessions were made to the Chinese investigators during the 1950s, the details were not released to the public in China or Japan. However, Japan’s public was greatly aware of the atrocities Japanese imperial soldiers had committed, as these appeared in news reports of the various trials of Japanese war crimes and what the Liaison Group published. These were the war criminals formerly imprisoned in Shenyang and Taiyuan who were released by the CCP after being investigated and who admitted their crimes. After establishing their organization they immediately set out publishing exposés of their former crimes in books that quickly sold out. But one problem was when the soldiers were initially repatriated, the Japanese media were dubious as to how the PRC trials had taken place after ten years of incarceration. The Asahi Newspaper asked in its June 23, 1956, editorial, Were the trials not implemented a bit too hastily? What was obvious with such skepticism was that the Japanese public had not been primed to understand that the Chinese communists had already been investigating the Japanese war crimes for years and had made a decision based on a pragmatic foreign policy and domestic concerns to let the lesser war criminals go and put the major ones on trial. The CCP trials were, in part, predetermined because the defendants had already admitted their crimes. At the same time, the Japanese newspaper expressed concern, no doubt voicing an opinion that resonated throughout the archipelago, that it was clear to most Japanese that the defendants’ postwar circumstances were random. Not only were Japanese suspicious of the nature of the “victor’s justice” of such trials, but in general there was seemingly an arbitrary aspect to the laws and sentences handed down at the trials, the Japanese media reasoned. There was no uniformity, which in part mirrors Liu Tong’s summary findings of the KMT trial history. “It causes one to have grave doubts about what exactly the justice of humanity is,” the Asahi editorial complained.¹⁰⁰

These confessions were employed to great effect in the 1956 PRC trials, but then they disappeared. They were first unearthed for the Japanese media in the late 1990s, and readers were astounded at the depravity of the former imperial army. War crimes trials, like those of Tokyo and elsewhere, had in many ways already depicted the horrors of war, but for many Japanese such stories were mainly only accessible in specialized history tomes and were not part of the mainstream media. Arai Toshio, an award-winning photojournalist, had secured the confessions directly from Fushun Prison.¹⁰¹ This was big news on April 5, 1998, when it was scooped in the Asahi Newspaper.¹⁰² The discovery split Japan’s academic community mainly along political lines. Historian Fujiwara Akira, emeritus professor at the time, said that these confessions, when transposed against other materials, “showed the fairness of the Chinese trials.” Yoshimi Yoshiaki, known in other circles for his work on wartime history and the comfort women issue, assessed that such confessions were valuable because they offered a rare, detailed record from officers at the army division commander level concerning war responsibility and the establishment of comfort women stations. The more conservative historian Hata Ikuhiko opined that while the materials were historically useful, how the prisoners had undergone conversion or “brain washing” remained a mystery.¹⁰³

Not everyone took the Japanese confessions at face value. Tanabe Toshio is a long-standing Japanese revisionist who sometimes treads a dubious path of investigation. He sees these sorts of confessions as part of Japan’s history problem. “I have concluded on the basis of personal investigations the fact that masochistic history ideas, anti-Japan historical views and such, or critical views of early modern history have been constructed on the basis of unfairness and a lack of common sense,” he writes.¹⁰⁴ Tanabe believes that ideas about Japan’s historical “wrongness” were built on the holy trinity of Honda Katsuichi’s book Journey to China, reporting from China itself, and the confessions and diaries of those who were detained in China for war crimes after the war. This would include the work of the Liaison Group. Tanabe labels those who produced such material as “charlatans,” but who have also become the “darlings of the media,” which in his case refers to media that is supposedly liberal.¹⁰⁵ Tanabe is not completely full of hot air. He compared Suzuki Hiraku’s personal diary, which ended up in Tokyo’s Ministry of Defense archives, with his Chinese-produced confession, which was released in 1998 to much fanfare in the left-wing Japanese magazine Sekai (World).¹⁰⁶ In short, Tanabe does not believe the Chinese confessions. In the Chinese version, Suzuki provided a confession of using poison gas to kill Eighth Route Army prisoners instead of detaining them, though he says he had ordered his men to repatriate them to their respective provinces of origin. According to Tanabe, in the personal diary Suzuki kept (deposited in Japan’s Ministry of Defense archives), he wrote that the army used smoke cannisters and tear gas to flush out those in the tunnels and finish them off. This same gap between personal diary and official military record appeared when investigating the official military record of actions in Beituan Village and personal memoirs. The official confession in China from Suzuki admitted crimes, whereas, according to Tanabe, Suzuki’s personal diary stored in Japan does not refer to these actions. Tanabe proposes, as several others have, that the cannisters used were filled with sneezing or tear gas, not poison. Suzuki’s personal diary is as detailed as his confession in China was but less damning, and Tanabe chooses to believe the less aggressive iteration. An additional issue is that Suzuki also wrote in his Chinese confession about his supposed experience of spreading plague in China, which even historian Fujiwara Akira admitted was probably an amalgamation of stories Suzuki had heard from other prisoners. Tanabe is not having it and challenges progressive historians for believing one part of the confession and not other parts. In the end, Tanabe manages to cast doubt in some places, but he is also selective in evidence that is less damning in all cases. Nonetheless, skepticism remains.

Regardless of the use of poison gas as a military terror tactic, what remains important to underline is that neither the KMT during its 1946–1949 trials nor the CCP in its 1950s investigations really dug into these issues on their own. In fact, the PRC never really investigated poison gas or biological war crimes. Chinese communist leaders grudgingly accepted the USSR-selected war criminals and then asked those Japanese to confess. But aside from this select few, no domestic Japanese war criminal cases were independently uncovered by Chinese investigations outside of the Soviet ones. Similar to the KMT, the PRC limited its pursuit of these poison gas war crimes in what appeared to be a bid to more quickly improve postwar Sino-Japanese ties.¹⁰⁷

The End of Justice?

The Liaison Group, the repatriated Japanese former war criminals who coalesced into a major lobbying and educational force, has unfortunately been largely forgotten outside of Japan. Almost to a man, these former Japanese officials and military officers took on the new mantle of expressing war responsibility because they brought back their experiences and used them to ensure that Japan’s peace education exposed the darker side of the historical narrative that was normally absent—Japan as perpetrator.¹⁰⁸

The returnees started arriving back in Japan in the mid-1950s and quickly pressed for compensation from the state. In 1957, an initial group held its first big national meeting at the end of September and established itself formally in Tokyo with thirty members. Their goal was to assist war criminal repatriates in restoring some semblance of order to their postwar lives. They also aimed to help members financially since they were meeting with much hardship, discrimination, and police harassment. But the group’s secondary goal was more overtly political and strove to oppose Japanese militarism. Their first book, of personal memoirs about the war crimes they committed, was published as The Three Alls, referencing the Japanese wartime imperial military policy of the enemy’s total annihilation in China: “kill all, burn all, loot all.” The publication met an explosive readership demand and within three weeks had sold fifty thousand copies.¹⁰⁹ At the same time, the Liaison Group wanted to promote better Sino-Japanese ties, so the group cooperated with the veneration and repatriation of the remains of Chinese forced laborers in Japan. Tsuji Masanobu pilloried the book for setting back Sino-Japanese relations when they were on the eve of improving, he said. Other rightists could not forgive former imperial soldiers for exposing Japan to international embarrassment.¹¹⁰

The Liaison Group continued activities in Japan through its books and journal, as well as numerous trips to China and the establishment of a committee to seek stronger Sino-Japanese ties and to recognize the violent nature of Japan’s war. The museum exhibit now curated at the Fushun War Criminals Management Center began in 1987, and a lot of the materials were donated or collected from former Japanese inmates. The group’s influence was not instantaneous but gestated slowly over time. In 1989, Japan’s public broadcasting corporation, NHK, filmed a TV special, “War Criminals’ Confessions from Fushun and Taiyuan War Criminal Management Centers,” which detailed for the first time the experiences these men had undergone in China. The confessions episode was part of a larger show concerning the war in general, which was broadcast each night over four nights in August. The public broadcaster had recorded almost forty hours of interviews, many of them part of, or related to, the Liaison Group for what was ultimately edited to a forty-five-minute episode. The show gained an unprecedented 12 percent of the viewing market on those nights, an astounding twelve million Japanese viewers.¹¹¹

While the Japanese public’s reaction to the Liaison Group was earnest but slow to develop, Beijing’s own analysis of the evolution of how it had “re-educated” those Japanese is worth considering. The CCP’s internal assessment of the confession exercises was written up on the eve of the Cultural Revolution, on June 10, 1964. The Fushun Prison put together its analysis just after the last Japanese war criminals had been repatriated to Japan, and the investigation aimed to analyze the entirety of the project from the prisoners’ arrival in 1950 and over their fourteen years of incarceration.¹¹² The 1960s report reflected what Wang Shilin had revealed in his interview with us. Prison executives divided the fourteen years into four stages. Stage one was the first year until the following summer, which saw the Japanese prisoners push back against the system and continue to show distaste for the Chinese staff. Stage two took place over the next two years, until about March 1953. During this period the prisoners were shocked by China’s victory in the Korean War. Slowly they began to soften in the face of the benevolent and humanistic attitude the Chinese took toward them. They began to study and think about Japan’s war of aggression. Stage three came around the autumn of 1954, as the investigations into the Japanese officials’ confessions intensified. Even if they admitted that Japan’s war was invasive and not one of liberation, it was still difficult for them to question the validity of their own behavior as anything criminal. Stage four was their final acceptance and acknowledgment of their guilt and social recognition around the summer of 1956 as the trials began.¹¹³

And then, after all that work, the trials were over, and once again Chinese public debate about counterrevolutionaries took up more media attention than worrying about Japanese war criminals. By the end of the 1950s, Mao’s policies of destruction were evident in the legal sphere, but sadly little had been created to replace it. The Hundred Flowers Campaign had initially launched in the spring of 1956, just as trials of Japanese were taking place. From that spring through 1957, much domestic discussion about China’s orientation and criticism of the CCP emerged. The campaign came to a shuddering halt and turned volte-face with the subsequent anti-Rightist campaign, beginning in June 1957, almost a year after the war crimes trials of Japanese finished and “justice” was then subverted to politics. This move was a defensive measure by Mao, pushback against the intellectual criticism that the party had requested and then duly received much more of than anticipated.¹¹⁴ It was here that the beginning of the end started: three thousand lawyers in 1957 reduced to four for the ensuing decades (1958–1980). By 1959, the Ministry of Justice was completely abolished, and the rule of law would not reemerge on the mainland until the early 1980s.¹¹⁵ However, even as courts were dismantled and the law was put to sleep, the legacy of injustice would percolate to the surface and continue to disturb Sino-Japanese relations on both sides of the East China Sea.