“5. The Tyranny of Tiny Decisions” in “The Geography of Injustice”
CHAPTER 5 The Tyranny of Tiny Decisions The Failure of the Japanese Left
One of the mainstays of antagonism toward war criminals that drove calls to pursue justice within Japan emerged from a group that had been pushed underground during Japan’s imperial rise. In the immediate postwar period, the Japanese Communist Party (JCP) tried to rebuild after years of forced inactivity. During the war, Japanese government officials and police had all but eviscerated the communists with imprisonment, along with threats and efforts to cajole them into abandoning their policies. The start of the occupation had not changed their situation much. The immediate postwar Japanese government had retained the force of the imperial Peace Preservation Law, which suppressed public criticism of the imperial house and strove to uphold the national polity (kokutai).1 The persistence of this law and the authority it bestowed to detain political prisoners, even after Japan’s surrender, demonstrated the reluctance of Japanese leaders to finally face the winds of change.
To be sure, the imperial authorities who had dragged Japan into war and were trying to salvage their own power were not keen on seeing it all swept away by enthusiastic communists. The release of Japanese political prisoners and initial official recalcitrance to allow the Peace Preservation Law to lapse ultimately pulled down the Higashikuni cabinet. Ministers had opposed these measures and the changes that the lapse would force in Japan’s imperial system. In fact, in the initial moments after Japan’s surrender from late August to September 1945 the Home Ministry closely monitored the movements of the left wing. One report stated that about 7,700 or so individuals, particularly communists, needed to be surveilled as they believed in Japan’s defeat. They were being relatively quiet, police noted, but officials should monitor their activities and prepare to immediately arrest them if the need arises during this “new situation,” referring to Japan’s surrender, the internal assessment suggested.2 The word “surrender” was never used in these documents. Sometimes “defeat” was mentioned, but often in these early days the applied term was Japan’s “new situation.” Later in September, Ministry of Home Affairs’ reports estimated that it was only a matter of time before the communists “take advantage of unemployment, inflation, starvation, and other social problems among the vast litany of social chaos issues that will probably arise.” If that happens and they coalesce their power, the authorities must get ready to sow dissent and factionalize, another report concluded.3
French journalist Robert Guillain, a long-term Asia hand who lived in Japan during the war, was one of a group of foreign journalists who broke the story that the Japanese government had not released its political prisoners after surrender. Guillain discovered that the Japanese government was keeping the JCP vanguard imprisoned. Along with Harold Isaacs from Newsweek and a few others, on October 1, 1945, Guillain traveled to Fuchū Prison on the edge of Tokyo to find out what was happening.
Guillain recalled, years later, that he had heard communists were still being held but did not know in which prison. He decided that he could easily drive to the massive Fuchū Prison complex on the outskirts of the city, and so Guillain and his colleagues dressed as US officers and drove an American Jeep there. The prison head initially denied that any communists were incarcerated. At first, the Western journalists, closely watched by the guards, found no sign of the communists in the prison. Then, in a move that seems straight out of a bad comedy movie, Guillain wrote that they pushed the prison guard to one side and took off in the opposite direction of where he was trying to lead them. They eventually pressed deeper into the heart of the prison against the guards’ remonstrations and came to an enormous door at the end of the hallway. “Open it,” they demanded. The guard reluctantly took out a key and, with great effort, opened the heavy door. What Guillain saw, he wrote, he would never forget. “In the middle of this enormous cell was a small group of people all wearing khaki colored clothing. Their heads were all shaved as monks and they were sitting on benches.” The room fell silent as both groups looked at each other in astonishment. “I heard English spoken in a trembling voice. ‘We are communist party members. I am Tokuda.’ Two guys with Korean features got on top of the bench and sang the Internationale [communist anthem]. Another prisoner with a thin face walked over and started speaking English. ‘Finally, you came to get us. We have been waiting for weeks.’ That was Shiga [Yoshio].”4 Japanese Domei news reporter Kay Tateishi, a Nissei from the United States, was also there. He wrote that when the Japanese were initially arrested, along with several Korean prisoners, they were “beaten with baseball bats and tortured with burning incense sticks forced under their fingernails.”5 The foreign journalists ended up interviewing Tokuda Kyūichi, Shiga Yoshio, and Kim Ch’on-hae, a Korean communist activist. That Japanese communists were still being detained weeks after Japan surrendered shocked the Allies.
Tokuda was a fascinating character, a stalwart communist who could not back down when he saw injustice. In part, this might have started in his early childhood, given the extreme poverty in which he grew up on the fringes of the Japanese empire in Okinawa. His father was the illegitimate offspring of a union between an itinerant marine salesman from Kagoshima and one of his Okinawan mistresses. At this time, many men who traveled between Okinawa and mainland Japan to trade goods had a family in each port. This was not morally unacceptable in Japan, but the circumstances meant that Tokuda grew up penniless and on the bottom rungs of Okinawan society, already at the low end of the social and political hierarchy within the Japanese empire. His maternal grandmother was a loan shark of sorts, lending small sums for extortionate interest rates.6 He detested her. His mother had been born into a family in such dire straits that two of the three daughters had been sold into prostitution.7 One gets a feeling of Tokuda’s born leadership ability and his goal to constantly better himself, perhaps based on the constant opposition he encountered. Discrimination against Okinawans was rampant in mainland Japan at that time. When he traveled to Tokyo to study, a distant relative with whom he stayed would not allow him to eat with the family or use the family’s bathing tub. Tokuda was forced to use the public baths.8
He was a founding member of the JCP in 1922. He wrote that to extricate himself from poverty and ignorance, he woke every morning at five to study, usually for several hours until nine or so. Every day. Maybe this was due, he says, to his long incarceration or age. He would read voraciously and then write letters and manuscripts.9
Tokuda’s eighteen years of imprisonment had been harsh. He was first incarcerated with Shiga Yoshio, a fellow communist leader, in a Hokkaido prison. It was not unusual for outside temperatures to drop to thirty degrees below zero. Even inside rooms with heaters the temperature might rise to only minus eight or nine degrees. One’s breath at night often caused small icicles to form on the walls. Tokuda wrote that the chill never really left one’s body. “God it was cold! This was the sort of cold that took away the ability to speak and cut to the core of your bones. The memory even now of the cold six years living at Abashiri Prison freezes me.”10 Suicide was not uncommon in such severe conditions. To counter this, the prison had a rule that inmates could not envelop their entire bodies inside their futons; this way, the guards could constantly monitor them. Detainees ignored this rule, Tokuda said, due to the frigid temperatures inside their cells. Tokuda recalled that prisoners would wrap their whole bodies and tuck their heads inside their futons at night, or they risked getting frostbite on their lips if they directly breathed the outside air. Even getting ready for bed was a challenge. Prisoners would normally splash ice water on their bodies before getting into their pajamas, which were normally frozen stiff. If you put on the freezing nightgown without preparing your body, you would instantly catch a chill and risked getting pneumonia, he recalled.11 Years later, Tokuda and Shiga were transferred to the Fuchū Prison outside of Tokyo, where it was not as cold as Japan’s deep north. But such conditions took their toll. Tokuda died relatively young in 1953 after only an eight-year political life following his release. Shiga, however, lived into his late eighties. He was deaf in one ear because prison guards had continually slapped him, and his eyesight was poor due to malnutrition during his long imprisonment.12
The foreign news reporters’ announcement to the world that Japan was continuing to incarcerate political prisoners galvanized US occupation officials into action. John Emmerson, longtime China hand diplomat who was posted to Japan in the early postwar period, wrote in his memoirs that he was having drinks with Harold Isaacs, the Newsweek correspondent, in the Dai-Ichi hotel. Isaacs had interviewed some of the communists at Fuchū, along with the French reporter Guillain, and said that SCAP should send someone to chat with them since they would be future political activists. Emmerson was friendly with the Canadian diplomat and Japan expert E. H. Norman, so on October 5 they drove to the prison. Emmerson penned that the Fuchū warden “looks like a pig-literally.” He has a “bullet shaped head, small eyes, sadistic face!” Tokuda got together in a room with many others and they all chatted. Tokuda and several others “spoke volubly, with the pent-up flood of nearly two decades of isolation.” Shiga was less showy, Emmerson detailed, having graduated from Tokyo Imperial University, and spoke decent English.13
On October 7, 1945, Emmerson and Norman drove Tokuda, Shiga, and Kim to the SCAP headquarters in Tokyo for more careful discussions. Emmerson said Tokuda was “fiery” and a “spellbinder,” very different from the quiet JCP leader in western China, Nosaka Sanzō, whom Emmerson had met in Yenan during the war. Nosaka had also grown up poor but managed to graduate from the elite Keiō University and studied at the London School of Economics under Clement Attlee for several years, before being expelled from Great Britain for political agitation following the end of World War I.14 Emmerson noted that Tokuda wanted to overthrow Japan’s imperial system. Nosaka had a different and more careful approach. He aimed to make the party lovable to gain more members, not just rally for revolution like Tokuda initially wanted.15 This interrogation of the JCP members had a long political propaganda life in the 1950s and later set off an extended conspiracy hunt for communist agents within the US State Department, reaching its apex during the McCarthy hearings. General Charles Willoughby, essentially MacArthur’s second in command within the occupation leadership, had a deep-seated fear of the supposed communist world conspiracy. His writings and the false beliefs of many others in the higher chains of the US command pointed to Emmerson’s interaction with the JCP as evidence that the American occupiers were aiding the Japanese communists and giving them succor.16
Whatever the case, the American occupiers quickly called the Japanese out on their torpor to release those deemed politically unsavory. But what had also set off quivers of anxiety was that only a week earlier, on September 26, famed Marxist philosopher Miki Kiyoshi died in Toyotama Prison from an entirely preventable death of “malnutrition, scabies, and kidney failure.”17 This news spurred the occupation forces to command the Japanese to release or produce all political prisoners, something the Japanese leaders were initially very reluctant to implement. Eventually, Japanese officials relented, and this was when the Americans realized that, for change to occur, much of it, like the eventual new Japanese Constitution, would have to be foisted on the Japanese from above and could not initially spring forth from below.
Not long after, on October 10, 1945, heir apparent to the communist leadership throne in Japan, Tokuda, was feted at a massive event. Upon release, Tokuda Kyūichi and Shiga Yoshio, among others, immediately joined a rally hosted by the JCP and left wing, “The People’s Rally to Celebrate the Warriors Release from Prison.” Red flags stood tall around the hall and banners with slogans such as “Punish All of the War Criminals!” were draped on the walls.18 About two thousand people attended the event, and the Japanese newspapers noted, in what was a first for such gatherings since they had previously been banned, that even a few women joined. This was a key moment for the rebirth of the JCP. Before the war, it never mustered more than a thousand souls on the party roster, but by 1950 it would gain about one million.19 After the master of ceremonies Fuse Tatsuji gave opening remarks, a few more rousing speeches followed and the participants all went outside to demonstrate.20 Fuse was a top-flight lawyer who had long assisted Koreans in imperial Japan in their struggles for equality and justice. He also openly criticized the imperial system in a publicly produced pamphlet and called for a public debate on whether the imperial throne should be preserved.21 As part of its occupation plan, SCAP authorities invited Tokuda Kyūichi to debate Kiyose Ichirō in a US-sponsored radio roundtable on Japan’s imperial system that was broadcast on November 21, 1945. This was also later produced into a newsreel for public consumption in cinemas. Such shows generated immense debate within Japan regarding the emperor, his responsibility, and his role in postwar society.22 Although communist sympathies were growing at this time, a Yomiuri Newspaper public opinion poll revealed in December 1945 that a majority of Japanese still supported the imperial institution.23
Zainichi Issues
The Korean issue in Japan was intimately tied to the problem of imperial and colonial responsibility as well as the resurrection of Japan’s left-wing political force. Many Koreans were communist, and some had worked side by side with Tokuda and Shiga. Many had faced years of discrimination within Japan’s empire, but thousands had also joined the Japanese imperial armed forces in some capacity. Korean attitudes toward war crimes trials have not been well examined, but in the initial years of the occupation they were vocal and it was a topic of great interest.24
Koreans were quickly booted from the bosom of Japan’s empire, so they had to create their own organizations to assist livelihoods in the new post-downfall social setting. Early on, with JCP support, alliances quickly formed. These organizations, numbering almost three hundred throughout Japan, coalesced toward the end of August 1945. Their main focus was on helping Koreans living in Japan and resolving other problems, including health and welfare, and repatriation. There were, of course, different groups of Koreans—communists, pro-Japanese, and nationalists. These various associations reflected differing political and social orientations among the Koreans who remained in Japan after the war and were known as Zainichi, which in Japanese literally means “to be in Japan.” But these associations sprouted up in individual cities, so a move was quickly afoot to push them into a national coalition.25 Facing grave issues of feeding families and discrimination in the aftermath of a crumbling empire, a splinter group of individuals broke off and formed a more cohesive unit: the League of Korean Residents in Japan (Zainihon chōsenjin renmei, Chōren for short in Japanese).26 Interestingly, the left-leaning Korean organization Chōren came into a financial windfall that was used to restart the JCP. Hundreds of Zainichi Koreans had yelled mansei (all hail!) when Tokuda and Kim exited the Fuchū prison on October 10, 1945. Before the war, the JCP was the only political party that had opposed the colonialization of Korea. And because Kim had been chosen within the JCP’s leading committee soon after its resurrection, start-up money to the JCP came from the Chōren’s coffers as a thank-you.27
At the Korean League’s inaugural October 15–16 convention, Kim Ch’on-hae delivered a speech on punishing pro-Japanese Korean traitors and called for the establishment of people’s trials.28 Chōren publicly announced in its manifesto that it aimed to “eliminate the remnants of Japanese imperialism,” among other goals.29 Members worked closely with the various elements of leftist Japanese political parties. However, JCP and Korean ideologues such as Kim increasingly pushed the Chōren toward more left-leaning ideological visions and alienated many. One can understand why this group had difficulty initially steering its own path, because it was attended by both pro-Japanese Koreans and Korean communists. The communists tried to push out the pro-Japan faction and those who they felt were not upholding Korean nationalism, now labeled as “ethnic traitors.” The shift in how Koreans in Japan dealt with Japanese imperialism relates, in part, to how they were being treated by the postwar Japanese administration. In one sense, the pendulum had swung from one direction of Koreans as a “liberated people” to now being considered more as an “enemy people.” In 1949 the occupation authorities ordered Chōren to disband as fears over the threat of communism rose in Japan. The vestiges of the Chōren later reformulated and by 1955 emerged as the General Federation of Resident Koreans in Japan (Zainihon chōsenjin sōren gōkai, Sōren in Japanese, Chongryun in Korean).
Similar to Shiga and Tokuda, Korean political activists were also sometimes imprisoned for lengthy terms in prewar Japan. Korean anarchist Park Yeol was released from Akita Prison in October 1945. In 1923, Park had been implicated with his wife, Kaneko Fumiko, in an alleged plot to assassinate the Crown Prince (later Emperor Hirohito).30 Their trial in 1926 handed down a death sentence to both, although this was later commuted to life in prison. Kaneko died by suicide not long after. After release in October 1945, Park helped form and lead a competing nonleftist Korean ethnic association that assisted with repatriation and support during the tumultuous time of transition.
The reappearance of Park Yeol, after more than twenty years in an Akita prison and much of it in solitary confinement, galvanized sections of the Korean community in Japan. He had been young when first incarcerated, but that did not dull his innate charisma when he exited prison. Park took a bit of time to acclimate to life out of jail, and in December 1945 he made his way south to Tokyo. On December 7, a grand welcoming home party was held in Tokyo’s Hibiya Park in his honor.31 Park, along with a select coterie of supporters, chafed at the Korean communists’ approach. He asserted that Koreans in Japan needed a different organization to represent their interests. In 1946, they organized a more nationalist Korean group. Park and others wanted it to be an association that would have the people, democracy, and the people’s livelihoods at its core. In February 1946, they established the New Korea Constructive Alliance. They opposed the administration of a political trust imposed on Korea by the Allies to manage the country until the international community deemed Koreans “mature enough” to rule themselves.32
Within several years, Korean associations further developed, and in 1948 a new and more forceful group emerged, naming itself the Community of Resident South Koreans in Japan (Zainihon daikanminkoku kyoryū mindan, abbreviated as Mindan). Park Yeol was its first leader, in part because he was already widely known owing to media exposure during the circus of his mid-1920s trial and his efforts to push against the Korean communists. However, by the 1950s a paradox had emerged within the Zainichi Korean community. Even though most hailed originally from locales in South Korea, ideologically at this point more identified with the North through the Sōren organization.33
To maintain the upper hand on their political leverage during the breakdown of imperial authority, the old guard took several steps. On November 5, 1945, the Shidehara government handed down a cabinet decision that confirmed the absence of the emperor’s war responsibility. In a word salad revealing enormous textual flexibility and prehensile groping, the announcement deprived the emperor of any agency or indeed the ability to have altered the course of history. With such a move, the immediate postwar Japanese government leaders also played into the hands of the similar judgment later revealed by the Tokyo Trial verdict that the military were the main culprits. In rather archaic language reserved for referring only to the imperial sovereign, the decision’s first section significantly related to the emperor. The cabinet-level decision explaining the war focused mainly on issues relating to Japan’s military engagement with the West and avoided mentioning China, or Japanese actions before 1941, and nothing in general concerning the extent of Japanese atrocities.34
In November 1945, the left-wing People’s Newspaper came out with its first issue. This newspaper was a sort-of sister news journal following the postwar restart of the JCP main newspaper, Red Flag (Akahata). The inaugural issue editorial, penned by Sunama Ichirō, called for “opposing the ideas of the leadership class who are war criminals.”35 This was reflected in its headline: “Let’s Start a Mass Movement to Punish the War Criminals.”36 The paper reiterated what Tokuda Kyūichi had first raised in his public speech a few weeks prior.37
Not long after, a tiny article at the bottom of the morning edition of the Asahi Newspaper noted that on December 8, 1945, the JCP would hold a “people’s rally to pursue the war criminals” in Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, Kobe, Yokohama, Sapporo, Fukushima, and elsewhere around Japan to memorialize the day the war began.38 (While December 7 is remembered in the United States as the “day of infamy,” it was already a day later in Japan, so for the Japanese the official start of the war is December 8.) Of course, this decision reflected a bias toward the West in defining Japan’s war, whereas Japan’s imperial army forays into China had already started in 1937 with years of an undeclared war. Regardless, one node of the event, held in the Kyoritsu Hall in Tokyo, was electric and very well attended. The journalist Mark Gayn was there. He wrote that the venue was packed and “hummed with impatience.”39 Shiga was in a “more fiery mood on the stage.” Poised in front of the large audience, he began to name individually all the leaders and businessmen who had mistakenly led Japan to war. He came to the last name—the emperor—and paused for dramatic effect.40 The impact on those watching was palpable. “The crowd cheered and stamped its feet. The whole cavernous darkness of the hall was now filled with sound and with fury, and they beat against the stage and the thin figure behind the pulpit.”41
Shiga told those gathered that unless the imperial system was destroyed, militarism would return. The JCP then handed out its central committee decision from a few days prior. The course of action called out the emperor and other royal members and said the party would be announcing a list of who should be put on trial. The decision stated “the fact is and without a doubt … all elements of the ruling elite, starting namely with the emperor, his ministers, the military clique, bureaucrats of the legal administration, landlords who cooperated with the financial clique’s war, members of the upper and lower houses, thuggish reactionary groups, and others are the leaders and organizers of this criminally aggressive war.”42 A few days later, on December 11, JCP Central Committee chair Kuroki Shigenori visited the government’s chief cabinet secretary Tsugita Daizaburō and a member of the US occupation leadership to hand them the party’s list of more than one thousand names concerning which Japanese should be prosecuted as war criminals.43
All of this occurred at a frantic pace and before the grandfather of Japanese communists, Nosaka Sanzō, had even returned from his self-enforced exile in China. Nosaka withstood the war from the outside, having found refuge first in Moscow, where he was close to Stalin, and then later with Mao in western China. Nosaka was instrumental at the CCP refuge in Yenan, the seat of the CCP, and assisted the Chinese Eighth Route Army in managing the surrender of and reeducation of Japanese imperial soldiers during the war. His repatriation was big news. On January 26, 1946, Nosaka’s triumphant return received a grand reception in Hibiya Park, just down the road from the imperial palace in Tokyo. The event, called the “National People’s Gathering to Welcome Home Returning Nosaka Sanzō,” was attended by tens of thousands of eager supporters who braved the rain on a winter’s day.44
Prince Higashikuni, the first Japanese postwar prime minister, had not been far off the mark in terms of assessing the larger issue of wartime responsibility, and his comments were repeated in early 1946 by the JCP. By this time the Japanese communists had regrouped and were fully flexing their political muscles in opposition to what they felt was a government and leadership that merely wished to drag their feet and bide their time until the US occupiers left. The communist pressure on the war crimes issue increased and soon published another call to arms in a short pamphlet, A People’s Court to Try War Criminals. It was an intriguing document that demonstrated one aspect of how the discussion of war crimes trials developed in Japan during the early months of the occupation. “The exploitative and cruel war is over and the Allies are democratizing Japan,” the pamphlet joyously announced. However, the JCP told its followers, what awaited them was deprivation, unemployment, sickness, and poverty at never-before-seen levels. This was the result of a war labeled as “the liberation of the Asian peoples” and the “establishment of the new world order.”45
What the JCP called for, to right those past wrongs, was a social revolution. Where were the war criminals and who should pursue them? the JCP queried. What the communists realized and proclaimed to the Japanese public was that, chillingly, war criminals were everywhere—they were “in every factory, every hamlet, every organization, within every managerial group … within villages and towns and within schools.”46 Who was going to conduct the trials of these criminals? they asked. Was it going to be the upper house of parliament, those who guarded their special class privileges, and “who applauded the budget for the war, who strengthened for the worse the 1938 Peace Preservation Law?” Or should they expect justice to emerge from the lower house of the Diet, from those “who pushed forward the decision to pursue the holy war with a standing ovation?” “It is obvious,” the pamphlet concluded, that “these groups do not have one iota of qualification to stand at the forefront of a democratic movement.”47 The manifesto ended by touching on the issue of war responsibility and the emperor, asking: Who announced the start of the war? And in whose name were those who opposed the war thrown into prison? For the Japanese communists, anyone who had been in power or linked to the wartime administrations, which meant everyone in authority in the early days of the postwar period, was suspect.
While the individual strategies may have shifted, the situation continued to escalate even further. On May 1, 1946, responding to a worsening situation with both rations and the economy, left-wing groups staged an enormous rally in front of the imperial palace. Calls to “pursue and root out all war criminals” were part of the slogans, while forums with such goals in mind were held all over the country. The Tokyo event was enormous, with tens of thousands massing into the gathering. Blurry pictures of it were published in the Asahi Newspaper under the headline “Historic May Day Adds Our Voice to the World.”48
But no one listened.
The JCP certainly had the ear of popular opinion at the time, so what happened? In short, as we will see in later chapters, the JCP and the left wing in general soon fell into a long period of internecine warfare. One faction aligned itself with the Soviets and called for a full revolution, or a partial one. The JCP and other vanguard political groups, after once again being given a seat in the theater of power, squandered their efforts instead by trying to upend each other rather than focusing on the task at hand—reforming the nation.49
At the moment of surrender and immediately thereafter, the JCP struggled with its political orientation. Should it cleave close to its elder brother the Soviet Union and follow calls for outright violent revolution as the locus of change? Such appeals left many cold. Or should they, as Nosaka opined, promote the idea that the JCP should create a likable party and talk about abolishing the imperial system when democracy in Japan evolved to a point that the whole nation could discuss it?50 The JCP had not really been popular before the war; its membership was dismal. This change of tack was a grand transformation but also pitted Nosaka’s orientation against others. His main rival would soon turn out to be Itō Ritsu, another long-standing member of the JCP. Itō was assistant editor of the JCP main organ, Red Flag, and had not fled to the mainland, eking out a living throughout the war in country. Although beginning in 1940 he was imprisoned for several years.
Further undermining JCP support was the belief that the party was responsible for a series of train-related mishaps in 1949. The first president of the Japanese National Rail was assassinated and the culprit never found, in what was called the Shimoyama Incident. Two rail accidents in the summer of 1949, the Mitaka Incident and the Matsukawa Incident, were publicly perceived as violent acts by a disruptive JCP. Was this part of a battle between the lovable and violent factional split in the JCP? It is hard to ascertain the truth, but blame was squarely placed on communist elements. By January 1950, the Cominform (Information Bureau of the Communist and Workers’ Parties, but essentially a political organization under Soviet rule to maintain a Stalinist political orientation in communist countries) was criticizing Nosaka’s ideas, saying that his notion of reform through parliamentary procedure was not tenable.51 At the same time, it was somewhat embarrassing for the JCP that it could not orchestrate the return of hundreds of thousands of Japanese POWs from the USSR.52
Even though they initially proclaimed the US military to be their liberators, within a few years JCP members openly condemned the same occupation on the Diet floor. As a consequence, on February 24, 1950, Major General Courtney Whitney of SCAP’s Chief of Government Section summoned lower house member Sunama Ichirō and reprimanded him. Sunama had written the editorial in the People’s Newspaper calling for war crimes trials. The reprimand read in part: “You, your leaders, and hundreds of your fellows were released from prison where you have long been incarcerated by the Civil Liberties Directive issued by the Supreme Commander immediately following the surrender. Since then, the Supreme Commander has fed you, clothed you and your families and protected your right to organize as a lawful political party in Japan. He has literally saved Japan from the brink of impending disaster. Have you no intelligence or gratitude?”53 By this point SCAP was wary of the JCP and, more importantly, anxious about its actual and supposed links with the Soviet Union to foment an international conspiracy. Nowhere was this more evident than with General Charles Willoughby, MacArthur’s “lovable fascist” and head of SCAP’s counterintelligence bureau. After the occupation, Willoughby wrote a book about this supposed international communist conspiracy. General Douglas MacArthur penned the preface. The former head of Japan’s occupation believed that Willoughby’s book was gravely important because it “presents a clear delineation of a world-wide pattern of communist sabotage and betrayal which is still being practiced today.”54 Willoughby saw conspiracies everywhere, even within SCAP. He called Beate Sirota Gordon, the only woman on the team that had redrafted the Japanese constitution and a key figure owing to her fluent Japanese, “ ‘childish,’ ‘almost psychopathic,’ ‘stateless jewess’ [sic] with imagined family connections to Richard Sorge, a German communist spy who had relayed intelligence from Tokyo to the Soviet Union in the Second World War.”55
To learn why MacArthur and his number two assessed that Japan played a role in this international communist conspiracy, we need to go back in time to the war and the Sorge spy ring. Sorge, a double agent who posed as a Nazi but who gave important intelligence to the Soviets, along with his Japanese counterpart, Ozaki Hotsumi, was executed in the midst of the war. The Japanese Ministry of Justice had published some intelligence about the events publicly in 1942, but mostly the story was unknown and kept out of the Japanese media because of concerns about national security. But the whole secretive affair turned into something very different after the war was over. This was because “the case was of interest to the public: Ozaki had been executed as a traitor to the very system they were in the process of dismantling.” From the immediate postwar standpoint, was Ozaki not therefore a patriot?56 He had never been a member of the Communist Party, but, nonetheless, the JCP wanted to paint him as a martyr and say that he was one of them. This would help support the movement as it tried to reestablish a political voice from its oppressed membership that had barely survived the war. As the JCP developed a deepened interest in the case in the hopes of creating a party hero for the postwar period, SCAP suffered growing anxiety about the same case. By early February 1949, SCAP released a report, “The Sorge Spy Ring: A Case Study in International Espionage in the Far East.” The report named JCP stalwart Itō Ritsu as an “unwitting Judas” whose confession had eventually led to Sorge’s arrest.57 The party publicly claimed that it had examined all charges against Itō and found him blameless. However, he disappeared in June 1950 and seemingly so did the whole JCP leadership. By 1953, Itō was purged from the party and formally expelled in 1955, though at the time no one could say where he had gone or what happened to him. It was as if he had vanished from the face of the earth. The mystery of his whereabouts and the JCP’s machinations would not come to light until 1980, and even then they disavowed any connection.58
SCAP and MacArthur’s men, and later the CIA in Japan, frequently saw communist fire even where there was no smoke.59 For Willoughby and the American public devouring his theories about communist aims to dominate the world in the early 1950s, the Sorge spy ring was indicative of an international conspiracy. This fear was building at precisely the time when the United States considered that it had “lost” China to the Chinese communists and that the USSR and its bloc would soon threaten the world. Willoughby wrote, “Shanghai was the vineyard of communism. Here were sown the dragon’s teeth that ripened into the Red Harvest of today, and the farm labor was done by men and women of many nationalities who had no personal stakes in China other than an inexplicable fanaticism for an alien cause, the ‘Communist jehad’ for the subjugation of the Western world.”60 Through Willoughby’s mind-set of fear concerning the Sorge case and what it symbolized for America’s future, we can see why the JCP had such difficulty gaining traction for its cause of pursuing war crimes within Japan. Willoughby concluded his bestseller: “The purpose of the Tokyo investigations can hardly be stated more clearly. The thefts of our atom secrets—the fruits of American technical ingenuity—were made possible by naïve tolerance of Communists and their front organization, of the saccharine vagaries of fellow travellers and prostituted liberals, and, unless we learn the art of self-defense in international terms, we will have the suicide of Western civilization on our conscience.”61 A US congressional subcommittee debate on US security issues related to the activities and fears of communist moves even mentioned Tokuda and Shiga’s eighteen years in prison. This reflected fears in the United States about the potential destabilizing power of the Japanese communists.62
Not all communists were as adamant about the war crimes trials, and the conversion of some reflected the intense pressure prewar Japanese society had exerted on the left wing. A few years after the war, famed communist turned nationalist Nabeyama Sadachika helped usher this new era forward. After defeat, Japan switched its ideological project from being imperialist to aligning with neighbors to defeat communism in Asia. “As it was recast into an ideology of its own, anti-communism partially replaced prewar imperial ideology,” and this helped provide a new platform on which “new connections could be forged” both domestically and internationally.63 Former Japanese communists and imperialists established new alliances across former lines of enmity to create alternate bogeymen—the PRC, the USSR, among others. Nabeyama even went as far as to serve as an informant for the Chinese Nationalists in postwar China before the end of its civil war. He became the darling of postwar Japanese defense and police agencies, such as the Public Security Investigation Bureau, and gave talks on anticommunism and loyalty. Tokuda Kyūichi despised him. Nabeyama joined forces with Yabe Teiji and assisted on the Japanese side in linking with the Asian People’s Anti-Communist League, launched by Chiang Kai-shek in Taiwan and Synghman Rhee in South Korea.64 Yabe was a political scientist and had been a member of the short-lived yet influential wartime Showa Research Association. A Chinese Nationalist author at the time explaining the situation suggested that the fate of Japan to resist communism was linked to similar KMT objectives owing to their shared predicament of having to remake themselves after defeat. Japan regained its sovereignty but “still stands in the chaotic battleground of rebuilding its nationalistic spirit and reshaping its intellectual world.” The KMT “well understands Japan’s struggle to impede the flood of communism from the outside.” To achieve a common goal, Japan needed to first strengthen its own “cultural traditions” and use those to restore itself. This shift required a strong anticommunist policy and the need for improved defense forces, the author wrote. Japan also needed to deepen ties with fellow democratic and free nations (like the ROC, Taiwan). This was not just a goal for Japan alone, the author exerted, but something that needed to be done together across Asia.65
Imperial Interference
The JCP was clear about its aim to remove the emperor and the Japanese imperial throne from power. But there were also other plans proposed from different sectors of society concerning what the emperor should do following surrender: abdicate, persist, or become a Buddhist monk and retreat from society. And these were only a few of the recommended strategies. There was even a secret plan to reinstate the imperial system when possible, and the team that espoused that objective did not formally disband until the 1980s.66
While it is possible that the emperor in his talks with MacArthur in the late summer and early autumn of 1945 pleaded for general leniency and attempted to take some responsibility for the war upon the throne, the result never bore fruit.67 Little more than a year later, the emperor took a much more proactive stance. The public clamor to limit the areas placed under judicial scrutiny concerning war responsibility soon led to a large portion of Japanese society being forgiven. On November 3, 1946, Emperor Hirohito bestowed a “great amnesty” to the Japanese people. Ironically, this was the same day of the announcement of Japan’s new constitution, imposed by the United States. In fact, Hirohito’s decree ended prison for many charged with crimes during the war, such as those convicted of lèse-majesté, thought crimes, and political crimes. At the same time, the imperial fiat also granted amnesty to soldiers who had gone AWOL, those who had been convicted in courts-martial, those who had not followed orders of a superior officer during the war, and, more importantly, members of the imperial navy and army who had committed crimes against POWs or other crimes abroad.68 The Asahi Newspaper labeled this scope “unprecedented.” The imperial measure also contained a clause that stipulated that such amnesty was not applicable to those who committed crimes “against the goals of the occupation.”69 In some ways, Hirohito’s imperial pronouncement offered an imperial pardon for the very type of war crimes that the Allies were starting to pursue against the Japanese, though it remains unclear whether the edict had any legal teeth. Regardless, it certainly set the moral contours for the internal debate on war crimes soon after Japan’s surrender.
Japanese newspapers wrote of seven types of crimes being pardoned, which led to 330,000 suspects being granted amnesty.70 That this imperial benevolence extended to improper wartime laws, which had terrorized Japanese liberals, as well as laws that related to war crimes and crimes against non-Japanese, would serve to dampen even further Japanese postwar interest in the need to address the legacy of war crimes. With the “Great Amnesty,” as it was termed, the emperor appeared to have essentially delivered his own imperial verdict on the war. However, even this was not exactly as it initially seemed because we now know that the emperor was deeply conflicted. According to newly disclosed diaries of those close to the emperor, Hirohito actually toyed with the idea of being allowed to abdicate or at least to face the public and talk openly about war responsibility not long after surrender. Ironically, it was his new office—democratized and now symbolic—that constrained him from doing so. What kept the emperor quiet was that Japan’s new constitution denied him a political role, and Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru told him not to make public statements. Japan’s own postwar government wanted to focus on rebuilding the nation, not imperial soul-searching. The postwar imperial emperor seemingly wanted change, but the democratic administration did not wish to allow him to play a role in it.71
The Imperial Military Response
As previously discussed, Japan’s imperial forces never saw eye to eye and further divided their own internal power into small subgroups that vied for ascendancy at any one time: the imperial Japanese army and imperial navy ministers each held a cabinet post, which were in charge of administrative matters. The armed forces also retained the Chief of the Imperial Army General Staff (Sanbō sōchō) and Chief of the Imperial Navy General Staff (Gunreibu), who dealt with operational and battle strategy matters and were consultative offices directly under the aegis of the emperor, separate from the government. The navy had already moved on September 10 to establish a section that would carefully manage and arrange matters dealing with POWs and international law. The army had responded on September 17 with its own “plan concerning a summary of responses to Allied investigations of treatment of POWs,” which it sent to all its troops. This plan admitted that previous orders to burn documents left the army with little evidence to defend its own actions, so each unit needed to organize and forward all the materials that it could to the Army Ministry. To prove that POWs were not maltreated, the committee amassed details about the items served for POW meals, though the death statistics released thereafter would contradict that data.72
In short, Japanese military officials took diverging strategies toward war crimes trials depending on the geography of the venue. Men like army lieutenant general Tanaka Hisakazu, charged in China for war crimes, were contemptuous in internal reports about the meaning and value of their trials. Tanaka wrote to military headquarters complaining about Chinese war crimes trial procedures, stating that he could accept Chinese attempts to charge his underlings with crimes, but they needed to do it lawfully and bear in mind the burden of proof. Tanaka claimed that he was not trying to avoid responsibility, but the courts could not sit idly by and rely on Chinese oral testimony or newspaper articles because these materials were too flimsy for the purposes of an indictment.73 The navy was even more diligent in its long-term efforts to keep its men out of war crimes trials.
These postwar efforts continued for decades even after the war crimes trials were finished, demonstrating that long-term Japanese postwar military anxiety about its image did not cease with defeat.74 It is important to note that in all these discussions few voices were heard that castigated the military for having caused so many Japanese young men to die a death that should not be considered a sacrifice. The eminent Japanese historian Fujiwara Akira, who wrote on a personal level about his own experiences in the war, questioned many of the dubious tactics used by the Japanese imperial forces. He said that even as an old man he still dreamt about having to feed his men on the battlefields of China. The Japanese army had made little provision to supply its soldiers.75 Fujiwara penned a very poignant article concerning the issue of dying a “dog’s death”—that is, a death with no meaning. Fujiwara explained that he could understand why many believed using this term against former “brothers in arms” or fellow fallen soldiers might be considered blasphemous. But, he cautioned, we should remember that Japan’s invasion was nothing more than an unmitigated aggressive imperial war. We are not permitted to “glorify” those who died in this unjust and immoral war at Yasukuni Shrine. Their deaths were without value and thus a “dog’s death,” he asserted. Fujiwara admitted that many involved in the war or part of survivor families might not be able to accept his views. But let us look at their deaths, he suggests. Many were due to starvation, not actual warfare. In short, the imperial Japanese army did not look after its own and did not care about supplies. These were unnecessary sacrifices. Most men killed in Japan’s war died in conflict during the last year. As victory grew ever more distant and less certain, the Japanese high command insisted on sending more and more young men to their deaths, cognizant of its uselessness.76 Fujiwara concluded his observations on a cold note, that the Japanese military did not value life.77
Japanese public intellectual Oda Makoto took a slightly different stance. For him, these were “meaningless deaths” but important because they reflected a moment devoid of significance. Oda exhorted his readers not to look to the last day of the war and kamikaze pilots to find some beauty in sacrifice. Instead, look to the day before, August 14, and the air raid on Osaka, he suggested. Is there not anything more pitiful than the people who died on that day, he asked, those in the armaments factory that was completely destroyed? They had managed to survive and the war was already confirmed over, so their deaths “were the most meaningless of all were they not?” Oda recalled that he “lived near the factory and passed that hellish afternoon shaking in the air raid shelter. Afterward, I picked up leaflets dropped from the sky which said things like ‘Your country’s government has surrendered, the war is over.’ ” Oda questioned this sort of death. It was not gallant or glorious; it was a waste, he averred. It was a death “devoid of meaning” because, within a day, sacrifice for the emperor and the ideals of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere became laughable notions.78 Oda analyzed that the growing gap between the public situation, where the war was described as inevitable and a holy war, and an individual’s personal circumstances, where their rights were increasingly deprived and men were being sent off to die in distant battlefields, grew untenable. To bridge this divide, people tried to bestow a deeper meaning on death, even though it actually had served no purpose.79
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