CHAPTER 1 The Kaleidoscope of Defeat in East Asia

Anchors of History

Outside of specialists in Japan and a handful of people in the West, few have heard, much less care, about the Qing-era Dingyuan and Zhenyuan warships. However, the history of the Qing dynasty’s humiliation at the hands of imperial Japan is still vividly recalled, albeit most frequently in China’s museums or on TV shows. But equally important is the evolution of this memory and how it has endured in China. The “national humiliation” of China began with the Qing dynasty’s failure in the 1840s Opium Wars and continued in fits and starts through the 1890s. This escalated until the Chinese masses overthrew the ossified regime in the 1911 revolution. The subsequent government of the Republic of China shared this humiliation and then transplanted it to the KMT, or Chinese Nationalist Party, in the 1920–1930s. But the inherited humiliation did not cease. Even now, decades after the CCP’s victory over the Chinese Nationalists in 1949, the CCP shoulders those same symbols of Qing dynasty shame as part of its own version of modern Chinese history.

The key moment of imperial competition with Japan in the early modern era can be traced to August 1886, when several naval vessels of the powerful Qing dynasty northern fleet pulled into the western Japanese port of Nagasaki. Japan was only twenty years into its Meiji project to renovate the nation, and the jury was still out whether it would be able to successfully modernize. Along with numerous other ships, the Qing fleet included several massive ironclad vessels, the prize of the squadron being the Dingyuan and the Zhenyuan. The Dingyuan was considered one of China’s premier warships and dominated anything the Japanese maintained in their arsenal.⁴ In the late summer of 1886, within a few days after docking during its tour of maritime East Asia, dozens of Qing sailors from the ships had a rollicking time in the Maruyama red-light section of Nagasaki. Riots with Japanese police and the public escalated to the point that local officials issued complaints and pleas for compensation to the Qing consulate. In the end, the disturbances left two Japanese and five Chinese sailors dead, and seventy-four injured.⁵ The Nagasaki Incident, as it came to be known, created a notoriously bad image of Qing naval behavior on the archipelago.⁶ In part, this friction unleashed a competition for supremacy in the region that would continue to feed behavior on both sides, pushing the Japanese to develop their subsequent imperial superiority.

Following the fracas in Nagasaki, the Japanese then encountered these same vessels eight years later in key naval battles during the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895. This was a war in which Japan sought dominion over the Korean peninsula and aimed to further influence the manner in which Korea would reform. In the ensuing years since the Nagasaki Incident, Japan had poured precious national funds into augmenting its naval strength. When the two clashed in the China Sea, world opinion assessed that the much larger and more powerful Qing forces would soon triumph over the more poorly equipped and outnumbered imperial Japanese sailors. However, corruption and inadequate military strategic command within the Chinese ranks opened up opportunities that the Japanese exploited. The Qing were routed. It was not a battle that immediately gained public attention, and most Chinese expected the Qing to be ultimately victorious. Chinese newspapers touted such conclusions to the public. The Chinese media referred to the Japanese as “dwarf pirates,” a belittling but long-standing traditional epithet, and rarely reported the actual results of battles.⁷

Unfortunately, the Qing navy piled miscalculation on top of poor strategy on top of bad luck. On November 18, 1894, when the Zhenyuan left the port of Weihaiwei, it was seemingly damaged by sea mines that the navy had placed in its own harbor. It then beached.⁸ In celebration of this major turning point, on December 9, 1894, the Tokyo city government staged an enormous celebration of a singular moment of victory. According to the program in the Japanese Yomiuri Newspaper, the main event was to be held from 5–7 p.m. on the banks of the Shinobazu Pond in Ueno Park.⁹ The climax, celebrating Japan’s successes in the war even before the final outcome was determined, was the reenactment of a fierce gun battle between Qing warships and the Japanese navy. Colossal plaster of paris models of the ships dramatized a naval encounter on the pond, complete with fireworks to replicate the actual mortars.¹⁰ The “spectacle of battle” was employed in a propaganda orgy of self-congratulation to galvanize Japanese public opinion toward support for the military and imperial expansion.¹¹ One can only imagine the belated glee Japanese nationalists experienced in 1894 when they confronted these Qing ships after having been humiliated by them in 1886. The Qing losses in a major moment of the war prophesied its ultimate political demise, but the ensuing victory celebrations in Japan were unparalleled. Estimates of costs were way under as attendance ran high. The final bill came to more than 14,500 yen at the time (a budget of approximately $2.5 million in current US dollars).¹² It was a massive outlay for a victory party in the nation’s capital, especially when the coffers were already virtually bare from wartime expenditures.

A few months later marked the end of Qing naval dominance and inaugurated imperial Japan’s arrival on the world stage. By February 12, 1895, the second key port of northern China, Weihaiwei, had succumbed to Japanese naval attacks and the city was taken. The Japanese acquired the Zhenyuan as war booty, along with a whole host of other ships. In a barrage of international reporting the vessels were described as having been sunk or severely impaired by the imperial Japanese navy. In the end, while some were scuttled a bit below the water line and others were damaged in various states of disrepair, several were in semiworking condition.¹³ The Zhenyuan was repaired and commandeered into the Japanese naval fleet. On its journey to Japan it steamed first back through Nagasaki and eventually to the Japanese naval port of Yokosuka, where cheering crowds greeted its arrival.¹⁴ Japan’s victory over the Qing was symbolized by two colossal Qing naval anchors on the edge of the Shinobazu Pond in Ueno Park as a permanent display of war booty.¹⁵ Elsewhere in the capital, enormous panoramas, which were constructed in entirely new buildings, allowed city dwellers to encounter aspects of famous battlefronts from numerous geographic angles. These 360-degree “experiences” offered a visual and sonorific immersion that also trumpeted Japan’s victory.¹⁶

Peace talks eventually resulted in the acceptance of a humiliating military loss and forced the Qing empire to cede the island of Taiwan as reparation, although the Japanese were prevented by France, Germany, and Russia from taking over the Liaodong peninsula. The Japanese were euphoric with the triumph and fortune they received in indemnity payments. Japanese newspapers published advertisements for magic lantern shows that depicted the sinking of the Qing naval forces to show the public that the Qing empire had been subjugated.¹⁷

After Japan’s conquest over the Qing, the anchors remained on a tiny outcrop of land in the middle of Ueno Park but gathered dust over the ensuing years. Japanese imperialism began to focus on pilfering other items from China’s vast geographic storehouse of treasures. As the years piled up, the anchors’ origin might have been forgotten, but they once again became fodder for patriotic propaganda in 1942, as Japan’s naval front against the Western Allies expanded toward the Pacific in World War II. On May 28, 1942, the Japanese Asahi Newspaper notified the public that the Monument Dedication Ceremony of the anchors in Ueno Park had taken place the day before as part of National Imperial Navy Memorial Day.¹⁸ Part of the reason, perhaps, the Qing anchors had been neglected amid the fog of war in Japan was that the country had escalated its celebratory war victories in other arenas. For example, in 1939, the fall of Wuhan (a major city in China) was honored with a massive war panorama model, which “completely filled a baseball field,” built within the Nishinomiya Sports Stadium in Hyogo Prefecture in central Japan.¹⁹

Several years later in 1945, when Japan’s imperial power had been vanquished, Chinese Nationalist forces began to negotiate with Japanese and US officials about returning the massive anchors. Theoretically, the KMT had no real legal claim to them since the booty had been part of the Qing empire. But the naval vessels represented the KMT’s lineage as heir to the humiliation that the Qing had suffered. Restoring lost national pride would go a long way toward bolstering the image of the KMT to the Chinese public. KMT military attaché Lieutenant Commander Zhong Hanbo played a key role in this process. He was a naval officer sent as part of the Allied forces to represent China and assist in the occupation of Japan in the early years after World War II. In his memoirs he wrote that being able to occupy Japan after the war as one of the four victorious nations helped expunge China’s hundred years of humiliation.²⁰ What was at stake for Zhong and others of his generation was a chronicle of national competition that predated the entire Western narrative about World War II. In the Western narrative Japan became an enemy in the late 1930s, more pointedly of course after December 1941. But in the Chinese view, like Zhong’s, the desire for China to upstage Japan in the postwar era was a story that long predated World War II and had stronger links to the growth of the Japanese empire from the late nineteenth century, more than a half century prior.

The Chinese Mission in Japan, part of the occupation government but a force with few teeth since it had no power to dispatch any significant military to back its opinions, requested the anchors and leftover artillery shells because “they were part of war booty brought back by the Japanese at the conclusion of the Sino-Japanese War in 1895.” “It is the belief of the Chinese Mission,” they stated, “that public display of such objects should be at once discontinued and that the objects should be dismantled and brought back to China.”²¹ Initially, the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP), which oversaw the occupation of Japan essentially under US authority, cared little for this maneuver. SCAP indicated that incidents before 1937 were not in its purview. However, the Chinese Mission appears to have worn down US recalcitrance by suggesting that the objects glorified war and militarism and were in contravention of “educating the Japanese people in the fundamental principles of peace.”²² Ultimately, the KMT was able to procure the anchors and return the booty in a sort of reverse repatriation ceremony that attempted to publicly expunge the humiliation of the Qing empire’s loss five decades prior.²³

But the Chinese massage of the historical narrative was not yet complete.

A few years later in 1949, when mainland China switched hands to authority under the CCP, the anchors once again became an important part of national history under new management. Only this time the story needed to be linked to the communist version. Nowadays, the anchors are on display at the Military Museum of the Chinese People’s Revolution in Beijing. This is not just any museum but one of the ten monumental buildings decreed by Premier Zhou Enlai to symbolize new China and completed in October 1959. The museum was expressly designed and constructed with the aim to “establish the hegemony of the interpretation of history by controlling both the retelling of the past and the means of representation.”²⁴ Even though the history is seemingly unrelated, the Nanjing Massacre Museum (officially known as the Memorial Hall of the Victims in Nanjing Massacre by Japanese Invaders) also houses a picture of the sunken Zhenyuan warship with the obvious aim of establishing this moment as the true start of Japanese violent imperialism in 1894 and not solely with the 1937 massacre in Nanjing. Mainstream Chinese views of Japan maintain that there had been a single plan from that time, if not from the early 1870s with the military expedition to Taiwan, of Japanese military hegemony and imperial dominance in East Asia. The story continues today in more than one celebratory venue because the Dingyuan warship has been resurrected and is now a museum of sorts in Shandong Province. It forms part of a larger Sino-Japanese War Museum complex in Weihai City (renamed from Weihaiwei).

The memory of this history did not remain relegated to the Chinese mainland when the Chinese Nationalist Party fled after losing the civil war in 1949. Competition to control the historical narrative continues. In fact, the guardians of Chinese historical memory for China split into two—the communist People’s Republic of China (PRC), with its capital in Beijing, and the Republic of China (ROC, later Taiwan), with what at that time was considered a temporary capital in Taipei. A few months before the repatriation of the anchors, a riot had erupted in the former Japanese colony of Taiwan, which evolved into a larger massacre beginning on February 28, 1947. I will detail this later in the book, but over the course of several months this social unrest led to the killing of tens of thousands of native Taiwanese. The unrest also impelled the shaky KMT rulers to implement martial law that, in fits and starts, eventually ruled Taiwan until the mid-1980s. Ironically, while the KMT was striving to expunge the humiliation for Qing-era mistakes, it was simultaneously trying to create a new political identity based on this heritage in the former Japanese colonial outpost of Taiwan.

These “anchors of history,” as I describe the role of the warships in both the late nineteenth century and then the mid-twentieth century, demonstrate that friction in Sino-Japanese relations did not suddenly arise at the end of World War II.²⁵ Governments on the Chinese mainland chose to position themselves as though they were successors to the legacy of the Qing-era humiliation. This is paradoxical because both the KMT and the CCP governments declared that they were revolutionary and throwing off the shackles of the past.²⁶ Their subsequent search for justice and requests for the repatriation of war booty suggests, however, that long-standing feelings of what it meant to be Chinese in the face of Japanese aggression, regardless of the chronology, would play a serious political role. After the war, this incongruous nature of claiming a revolutionary break with the past but then providing continuity on the level of historical emotions will be a theme we encounter frequently as the book progresses. And a major element of this effort to overcome the humiliation of the past is linked to post-1945 war crimes trials of the Japanese.

A Short History of War Crimes Trials— Nuremberg versus Tokyo

Trying to find justice in the wake of wartime atrocities led the West to form the Nuremberg Principles, which have fundamentally taken hold of the political realm in many places around the world. Guided by the legal principles and international law ideology that emerged from the Nuremberg Trials of Nazi war criminals (1945–1946), the United Nations later helped to develop international criminal tribunals that served to adjudicate crimes in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. International law “represents an effort to impose a neutral restraint on power,” and its offspring “international criminal law has, since the Second World War, been central to this project.” The focus in the immediate postwar era aimed to ascertain “criminal accountability” with these new juridical tools, in a sense “promoting a world community under law.”²⁷ In Europe and East Asia, Nuremberg is frequently invoked as a story of triumph—one that not only led Germany down the path of atonement and helped it gain reentry into the pantheon of civilized nations, but also created a blueprint for other post-catastrophe countries to help recover their dignity. Echoing the discussion above, “a central tenet of the Nuremberg legacy is that the International Military Tribunal (IMT) at Nuremberg helped construct the singular story that Germans tell regarding the violence of World War II. The legacy of the IMT is that ‘truth’ emerged from trials that individualized guilt. This liberal, individualist-humanist narrative supplanted the collective guilt accompanying the virulent nationalism that fueled Nazi atrocities.”²⁸ Of course, not all agree. One of the deleterious effects of a narrative emerging from a system of war crimes trials is that the story becomes harder to adapt later. With Nuremberg the world prosecuted individuals and the Nazi Party for war crimes. However, in that quest the transaction costs have been great. We have grossly overlooked the financial and industrial structures that permitted such a genocide and atrocities to be carried out with impunity, all the while making a profit. The Germans created a new term for these individuals: “desk killers,” those who murder through bureaucracy but never see the faces of their victims.²⁹

This is similar to what happened at the Tokyo Trial; there, however, it was not individualized guilt but military culpability writ large. This verdict, which was not unanimous like the Nuremberg judgments, resulted in a pointed absence. The Tokyo Trial (1946–1948) and the lesser war crimes trials of former Japanese imperial soldiers throughout East and Southeast Asia never get mentioned with the same hushed tones of legal reverence as Nuremberg. Nor, importantly, was anyone able to apply the same potent legal salve to political and economic wounds in East Asia to help redress imperial Japan’s wrongs. Most Japanese lawyers had been pro-war; few were purged in the postwar period. The main exception would have been Yokota Kisaburō, one of the vocal legal Japanese minds who promoted the pursuit of war crimes trials.³⁰ The story of what Nuremberg was for the Allies, compared with the goals of the Tokyo Trial and its aims, is encapsulated here. “In short, the narrative which the Nuremberg prosecution crafted was that of sedition from Western standards and values. This story of how Germany had deviated from the Western way promised to explain the unexplainable, and this very explanation would be the first transitional step back on the right path.”³¹ The story for Japan formulated differently.

Adjudicating justice for Japan’s imperial aggression was not just about repatriating war booty. International pressure had grown during World War II to pursue entirely new categories of war crimes. And the narrative of justice linked to a similar sort of prewar competitive pursuit of those symbols of victory and humiliation—the anchors. Only now in the immediate post–World War II era, the anchors to historical interpretation turned into international tribunals that would define justice.

In Europe, war crimes trials were not divided into legal classes. However, in Asia, the trials were split between what were considered the leadership (Class A) and the “lesser” war crimes (Classes B and C). The three categories of war crimes—A, B, C—against Japanese defendants were, respectively, “crimes against peace,” “conventional war crimes,” and “crimes against humanity.” Class A war criminals were the men who coordinated Japan’s “aggressive” war but did not directly and physically commit crimes. There was only one Class A trial, and that was the Tokyo Trial (officially known as the International Military Tribunal for the Far East). There were two additional quasi–Class A trials, that of Lieutenant General Tamura Hiroshi and Admiral Toyoda Soemu, but they were not considered of the same magnitude.³²

The lower classes of war crimes were labeled as BC. The B class was a holdover category from World War I for “conventional war crimes” (rape, murder, illegal incarceration, abusing prisoners of war [POWs], etc.). The C class was an entirely novel category of “crimes against humanity” (what essentially came to be known as genocide, though strictly speaking, genocide and crimes against humanity are legally different categories). The imperial Japanese armed forces were frequently brutal, as they were in Beituan Village, but they did not have a genocidal policy like the Nazis. Consequently, most lower-ranking Japanese defendants were charged as a combined category, “BC class.”³³ One can think of the Class A war criminals as those who led the aggressor nation in its bid to conquer. BC class war criminals were the ones who came into direct contact with individuals, those who became the greater focus for the Chinese as we shall later see.

These BC class trials encompassed an enormous geographic space. Around 2,300 proceedings took place in approximately fifty locations throughout Asia and the Pacific. Australia, (Nationalist) China, France, the Netherlands, the Philippines, the United Kingdom, and the United States all convened various trials from 1945 until 1951. Some 5,700 imperial Japanese soldiers stood trial, and in the end just over 900 were executed.³⁴ The Soviets held a December 1949 trial at Khabarovsk, which has been relatively ignored, but given the fact that it was the sole tribunal to focus on Japan’s bacteriological weapons, it merits attention.³⁵ The CCP, although not one of the wartime Allies, held its own investigations of approximately 1,000 Japanese prisoners. In 1956, it put forty-five of the “worst” offenders on trial but granted clemency to almost 960. Officially, along with the Soviet Union, the PRC was the only other postwar government not to execute a single Japanese prisoner, a fact that would come to play a large role in Chinese communist media pronouncements in the twenty-first century. There were, however, numerous unofficial so-called “people’s trials” in the USSR and parts of China that remain either unrecorded or still buried in archival detritus. These were essentially summary executions after a sort of mock-up tribunal or mob revenge that might have taken the form of a tribunal. Estimates run in the thousands, but since evidence remains scant, there is only conjecture at this point. Chinese trials, both KMT and CCP, also muddy the statistics because many of those who might have been seen as war criminals, such as Chinese who engaged in actions for the Japanese side, were often instead indicted as traitors, hanjian in Chinese.³⁶ Essentially, only those soldiers with Japanese citizenship (which sometimes included Taiwanese and Koreans) were legally classed as war criminals. Those of other nationalities were frequently dealt with through local law.

For the Europeans there were a host of reasons for establishing tribunals to adjudicate Japanese war crimes, and the geographic range was wide. In Burma, for example, the British aimed at reasserting their colonial authority, but this was also the case for the Dutch in the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia), the French in Indochina, and the British in Hong Kong and Singapore. First, trials were commensurate with the overall goals of former European colonizers to reimpose colonial authority in former colonial holdings to regain prestige and resurrect their economies. The British Empire had racked up enormous bills in its efforts to bolster its faraway imperial defenses. At the time, this “soared to some three billion pounds—over a third of Britain’s gross domestic product.”³⁷ France was no better off. Defeat of Japanese rule meant little for former European imperial colonies “because liberation was a means to re-establish French greatness, not an end in itself.”³⁸ Second, the trials helped discredit collaborators or interim leaders who had worked in concert with the Japanese. Importantly, some of these trials, including those in China, were held in former Japanese sites of authority or where prisoners had been incarcerated in former Japanese camps or prisons. Third, the trials were used as a form of propaganda to domestic audiences in the home country to inform them that the war had meant something and that the Europeans or other Allied powers were in a dominant position over the Japanese and had regained strength in the region. And fourth, the trials kept at bay the potential that the Japanese would militarily rise again by producing a record and memory of the atrocities they committed during their imperial era.³⁹ For some countries like France, which had been mostly occupied and partly managed by Nazi Germany during the war, the goal was also to make sure it could regain its international reputation, and this meant pushing for a judge’s seat on the world’s stage at the Tokyo Trial and putting Japanese on trial in Indochina. Most importantly, such trials offered an official record of proof that France had returned to being an ally and would be treated as such until the current day.⁴⁰

War Crimes Trials Then and Now

In this maelstrom of postwar competition to control debates about the meaning of the war, the Japanese did not take the surrender lying down. Japanese officials of many stripes attempted to initially manage their own trials. Later they tried to secure the records of the war crimes trials to investigate the charges but encountered persistent resistance from the Allies. These impediments convinced many Japanese and others that the trials were a form of victor’s justice and that the Allies were hiding their mistakes. The unbridled confidence that Japan was always working with East Asia’s best interest in mind remains a conservative mainstay political belief in contemporary Japan. Today’s conservative groups in Japan undergird this assertion by opposing the historical pronouncements concerning those who were “damned” by the Tokyo War Crimes Trial and other war crimes tribunal verdicts. Numerous monuments around Japan laud the martyrdom, as it is termed, of those war criminals, but few try to delve into the issue of the war crimes themselves.

Mainland China, by contrast, is a one-party state and so does not allow for competing historical views within either government or society. There is no competition for public opinion about history in China. However, it is important to note how these histories were neglected for so long on the mainland but then suddenly reinvigorated more than seven decades after the end of World War II. This renovation of wartime and postwar history now supports the Chinese state in its drive to codify what it labels as “proper historical understanding.” The CCP strives to depict its postwar benevolence and how it stemmed revenge toward those Japanese who were “damned” in war crimes tribunals for their actions while imperial soldiers.⁴¹

The competition over notions of “correct history” and justice that emerged from the military tribunals of those “damned” war criminals remains hotly contested long after the embers of battle have cooled. The furor surrounding efforts to massage the history of Japan’s military actions shows a lack of consensus among the Japanese public, officialdom, and Japanese academics, who are the international vanguard for uncovering this uncomfortable history.⁴² It is a history known well in some circles in Japan, but outside of the country such activities receive weak international attention. What does receive rousing headlines in the international media is what makes front-page news—Japanese official denials.

The Difficulty of Implementing War Crimes Trials and Controlling Their Legacy

International criminal law is not sufficient to render justice all the time, particularly when the scale is so large or based on state-sponsored violence. To pose this issue crudely, did the hanging of seven Japanese leaders bring about adequate closure to the end of World War II in East Asia?

Regardless of the potential of enlightened goals, these sorts of trials harbor a litany of stumbling blocks. Martti Koskenniemi, a professor of law and eminent philosopher about the complexity of war crimes trials, makes a cogent point about the slippery nature of these trials:

The reasons that make “show trials”—that is to say, trials of only few political leaders—acceptable, even beneficial, at the national level, while others are granted amnesty, are not present when criminal justice is conducted at the international plane. When trials are conducted by a foreign prosecutor, and before foreign judges, no moral community is being affirmed beyond the elusive and self-congratulatory “international community.” Every failure to prosecute is a scandal, every judgement too little to restore the dignity of the victims, and no symbolism persuasive enough to justify the drawing of the thick line between the past and the future.⁴³

It is precisely at a war crimes trial where the creation of history and an anti-history narrative emerge. The crucial distinction here lies between legal and historical truth. To avoid the pretext of having a predetermined outcome, judges must allow defendants room to speak and to mount a defense. More importantly, the court needs to take such utterances seriously, however repugnant or removed from reality they may be. But this format creates a subsequent problem. Through recording their defense at court, defendants are able to propose a counternarrative to the history being presented in the same venue by the prosecutor.⁴⁴ It is at this intersection that legal trials and history come into conflict. While the prosecution is attempting to interpret law to gain a conviction, defendants are thinking of posterity and their personal construction of history. This competition between prosecutor and defense sets up a power play at trial. Judges want to base a historical verdict on evidence. Lawyers for the victims need to ensure that a courtroom can also serve as a surrogate emotional stage on which to mourn the memory of those who perished.

The competition for the domestic and international audiences first involves public acceptance of the necessity for war crimes trials, which was not a guarantee after the end of World War II, or even now for that matter.⁴⁵ Regardless of all the merits of implementing war crimes trials, detractors point out that the accused will try to protect himself (usually male) or his view of history within the context of which the whole trial is taking place. French lawyer Jacques Vergès, colloquially referred to as “the devil’s advocate,” once defended Algerian independence activists that the French government labeled as terrorists. In Vergès’s opinion, the real battle was not in attaining a client’s freedom. The key, he wrote, revolved around creating a historical rupture. At that moment, “the goal for the defense is not so much to get the accused released but rather to get his ideas out for public consumption.”⁴⁶ In Vergès’s strategy, war crimes tribunals were fundamentally sites of historical contention. The power play, in the same vein as British prime minister Margaret Thatcher argued when facing those critical of her, was to control “the oxygen of publicity” to win the day.

When the historical narrative is reconstructed by the defense, these sorts of large trials about state violence can end up being show trials but not in the strict Soviet sense from the Stalinist 1930s. Because of the limits of what the law imposes, these trials remain venues for the accused to manipulate historical narratives and gain adherents. Koskenniemi says there are great risks in trying to establish “ ‘sacred facts’ through the banality of the legal process.”⁴⁷ This caution that war crimes trials have their limits strongly reverberates. Viet Thanh Nguyen, a Pulitzer Prize winner for literature, wrote about his personal insights on “just memory” concerning the Vietnam War and the United States. As Nguyen explains, we face a need outside of the courts and public venues of commoditized memory packaging in films and books to consider a past that does not lean on nationalistic tendencies. As he sees it, “A just memory opposes this kind of identity politics by recalling the weak, the subjugated, the different, the enemy, and the forgotten. A just memory says that ethically recalling our own is not enough to work through the past.” Nguyen ends by reminding us that the key to “just memory” is making sure our history is precisely one not only composed of memories that can be abused by those in power.⁴⁸ Specialists would label this “competitive victimhood” and underline that “groups who compete over their share of victimhood are more motivated to establish their in-group’s suffering than to let go of the painful past.”⁴⁹ The parallel phenomenon is also a tendency to oppose a historical story “that can be seen as ‘winner justice,’ a narrative forced by outsiders.”⁵⁰ I think positioning the issues in this way, to show how trials create a powerful engine for national memory, sums up many of the conflicts that plague Sino-Japanese relations, as we will see in subsequent chapters.

This list of ever-expanding problems we hope the law will resolve also goes to the heart of the problem. Such considerations are not limited to problems with war crimes trials but stretch further toward the larger interaction between the realm of politics and the law. Judges, the law, and the courts help order society. Theoretically, therefore, the same should be true for war crimes tribunals. They should, in the best of all worlds, lead to a transition of peace. But society’s overreliance on the law has formed what the former chief of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, Lord Jonathan Sumption, describes as a situation where we are ruled by an “empire of law.” Societies are too dependent on the law, while courts are too frequently the sole venue to consider resolutions and create reconciliation in their pursuit of what they deem as justice. Sumption argues that the use of the law as a panacea for resolution has shoved significant political processes to the sidelines.⁵¹ This diversion comes into greater relief when we look at Japan’s bilateral relations. Chinese and Japanese consistently try to resolve imperial-era crimes in the courts but less in political discussions or at the level of popular dialogue. Unfortunately, the record of success continues to be dismal. Yukiko Koga has analyzed the numerous failed legal proceedings brought by Chinese against the Japanese government and corporations. She arrives at a conclusion similar to Sumption’s but emphasizes that this sort of case “positions the plaintiffs not before the law but between the law by declaring the Law’s irrelevance in belatedly accounting for historical violence.”⁵² Other scholars assess that the insistence to include the offense of crimes against peace for any defendant charged in the Tokyo Trial shifted the historical focus to “examining less the way Japan had conducted the war but more the reasons why Japan had conducted it.”⁵³

Many on both sides of the Japan Sea and across the Taiwan Strait to a lesser extent believe, ironically, that these war crimes tribunals did not resolve the problems because not enough law was applied. We need stronger courts and more trials to make things right, goes their reasoning. The fundamental question, then, follows: Did East Asian war crimes lend themselves to being resolved through legal channels? Can the history of empire be something resolved outside of the courtroom?

War Crimes Trials and Supposedly Impugning Japanese Dignity

A secondary problem that has developed over the years, reflecting this growing competitive divergence between Japan and China, is the lived legacy of the war crimes trials. Many of the KMT-managed trials in China during the second half of the 1940s had been rushed, relied on dubious evidence, or lacked proper translators. This became a constant refrain in numerous Japanese memoirs of these tribunals. The situation was depicted as far from always legally dependable. In the ensuing chaos of rebuilding East Asia, many of these deficiencies were forgotten, only to reemerge in the twenty-first century after the rise of China, the bursting of Japan’s economic bubble in the 1990s, and the democratization of Taiwan and South Korea. The lost memories of war crimes trials, combined with a renewed effort to build political relations on the backs of the trial judgments, caused deep fractures to develop between Japan and its closest geographic neighbors. The history of war crimes trials is now deeply entwined with the postwar political history of both China and Japan and at times virtually inseparable from national identity.

A prime example that combines all these issues would be the grisly “hundred-man killing contest.” The gist of this episode emerged from an infamous wartime Japanese newspaper article that detailed a hideous competition between two Japanese soldiers to see who could lop off more heads of Chinese peasants on the imperial army’s march to conquer Nanjing in December 1937. The competition became a celebrated story in postwar China, and the news article was used as evidence for the subsequent war crimes trial of the two Japanese officers, who were eventually executed. The trial and aftermath serve to link past and present, which has unfortunately grown into a malignant tumor that continues to enflame contemporary political relations. The story was most likely a Japanese wartime propaganda fabrication, but because the evidence and the record of the trial are enshrined in an internationally recognized war crimes trial verdict, the Chinese mainland government consistently uses the case to recall imperial Japanese barbarity.⁵⁴

Japanese conservatives, in turn, employ the same trial to demonstrate in their eyes the lack of Chinese understanding of international law and the absence of rational thought in historical analysis. A standoff has ensued, but the case lives on. In 2003, the families of the executed Japanese soldiers sued the Japanese Mainichi Newspaper and related publishers for defamation over their coverage of the events.⁵⁵ The case was eventually dismissed, but the idea of injustice to Japanese domestic pride drew the attention of top Japanese leaders lending their names to the cause of “defending Japan’s national honor.”⁵⁶ One such champion was Inada Tomomi. She rose to fame within Japan’s majority political party as the lawyer who pushed the defamation case and wrote a book about it.⁵⁷ She served as defense minister in 2016, among other key roles. Inada is also a prominent player in one of Japan’s most powerful political lobbying groups, the Nippon Kaigi (Japan Conference). The Japan Conference is the leading political pressure group for Japan’s main political party, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). The Conference is a consistent critic of the Tokyo Trial and other Japanese war crimes trials of having perverted the real pursuit of justice and tarring Japan with a negative historical brush.⁵⁸ While not wholly incorrect in the assertion that the war crimes trials contained many defects, the Conference is incapable of reflecting on Japanese imperial behavior and seeks only to glorify itself as a victim of Western or Chinese international malfeasance.

Finding justice for Japanese war crimes, or creating injustice where crimes were not committed, is just one example of the weighty emotional baggage that infects East Asia and shapes the current political landscape. The legacy of war crimes trials casts a long shadow on the present, but we need to look at the situation from both the Chinese and the Japanese sides to understand how this seemingly insurmountable structure was erected over time. Initial euphoria to manage justice in East Asia quickly gave way to other concerns, and these dominated the situation until recently. In this way, authorities in the region did not get a chance to reconcile the excesses of war until the present day. In part, this language explains why now in the twenty-first century we see a tendency to lean on emotional opprobrium, whereas a seeming calm about the past is thought to be more the norm in Western Europe. We should be wary, however, of painting too rosy a picture of reconciliation in Europe, noting with care that “the overall records of justice were poor on both sides of the Iron Curtain.”⁵⁹

In the West, Europe coalesced ostensibly in a bid to rebuild and avoid the frictions that would potentially lead to a third world war. At the same time, and facing similar pressures, East Asia never united around anything more than a continual focus on blaming Japan and keeping that emotional catalyst alive, even as the war grew more distant with each subsequent generation. Why did justice seemingly fail in East Asia when theoretically the same international law was pursued on both sides of the globe? Why has the evolution of seeking justice given birth to two such divergent postwar forms in the East and West? Put another way, even with all of the legal and political problems Nuremberg divulged, its legal moment bequeathed an academy to carry forth into the next generation the Nuremberg Principles. By contrast, what happened in Tokyo that rendered it legally impotent?⁶⁰ I am not making a normative statement that justice was found only in the West. Rather, I aim to investigate the constellation of structures and policies that pushed parallel legal attempts across the globe to seemingly opposite conclusions.

The question concerning how this apparent significant construction and implementation of international law and its by-products took root in the West and produced a countereffect, spurring further separation among countries in the Far East, is potent to the twenty-first century. By looking at the geography and distribution of what was perceived as unjust—under what circumstances local and national officials brought Japanese war crimes to justice and then memorialized that story—we can chart the disassembly of the Japanese empire and then analyze the causes behind why justice was believed lost.

Let’s return briefly to Beituan Village and the issue of law, justice, and history. What are we to make of an atrocity that is revered as an indisputable historical fact in a small village in central China, but where inhabitants were forced to forget the massacre for so many of the subsequent decades? Beituan is a village that now, once again, remembers this tragedy as a single defining feature of its existence. Even today, almost eighty years after this brutal attack, political slogans painted on village walls exhort Chinese citizens to remember the valor of those who resisted Japan. What we are dealing with here is history on two levels. First is the history of justice lost in East Asia—the sort that Chinese peasants might have expected but missed out on during the lengthy restructuring of the political order across the Chinese mainland that I detail in this book. Moreover, the war crimes trials themselves and the story of justice gained or lost are only one plotline. The secondary thread is the life of the memory and commemoration of, or absence of, these trials in East Asia. Because the main protagonists involved in this contestation over the meaning and impact of these trials are mainly Japan and China, I will spend most of the time focused on their histories.