CHAPTER 9 The Pathology of Justice in Post-Occupation Japan
While the Chinese were investigating and processing their socialist formulations of justice, the Japanese government and society struggled over the same situation but in the opposite direction. How could a defeated nation “own” justice? This would center on redefining the meaning of the trials and critiquing the form of justice the Allies had pursued.
Preparations for how to compete with the vision of justice being meted out in China and elsewhere began even before Japan regained its sovereignty with the implementation of the 1952 San Francisco Peace Treaty. Behind the scenes, in preparation for the return of Japan’s political sovereignty, Toyota Kumao and his team in the Ministry of Justice were putting together a new strategy for a change in the Japanese public’s attitude toward war crimes and former war criminals.1 Former naval captain Toyota Kumao headed an office within the Second Bureau of Demobilization (formerly the Ministry of the Navy), which was charged with keeping naval officers out of legal trouble, defending them if things went to trial, and collecting trial records and evidence as the means to offer a defense or apply for later clemency. This group was active from the end of 1945 until the 1970s, suggesting that some portions of the former Japanese military and leadership were keen to keep their names disconnected from the idea of war responsibility. Aiming to coordinate a policy for compiling a record of war crimes trials to be used as a reference for the larger plans, Toyota wrote about a consultation meeting and detailed how the historical summary should be organized like a plan of attack. This preparation concerned how to mobilize parliament and coordinate files, among other matters. The plan called for encouraging the Japanese government and recommending the restoration of privileges to war criminals. Toyota noted the need to get all of this systematized in advance of when Japan’s peace treaties were to be enacted. He suggested using lawyers groups and family associations of the war bereaved in a media campaign to guide public opinion. His team discussed ways of gathering necessary materials to deal adequately with the legal issues concerning compensation problems of “third country nationals,” referring obliquely to Taiwanese and Koreans who had been convicted in war crimes tribunals. One of the most interesting elements of Toyota’s plan was the recognition that once sovereignty was restored, Japan needed to have the complex planning in place in order for it to be effective for the former soldiers who required it. The first step to attain this “was to create a solid foundation for the public to perceive that those connected to war criminals (including families) were victims of the war.”2
Toyota’s group wanted to incorporate bereaved family members’ grievances into the general sacrifices made during the war in the cases of war criminals in a bid to secure government aid. This inclusion would serve as a further linkage between regular deaths in the war and those who were executed, the plan enunciated. The burial remains or bones of the war criminals who died abroad were to be returned in the same manner as those who were deemed “regular battlefield deaths.” Also, the group outlined the need to further examine the issue of getting executed war criminals enshrined in Yasukuni and how to keep a focus on public opinion. Importantly, this move would take place on a national scale by going to each region and getting those locales to schedule “comfort the spirits” events in geographic coordination for those who died during the war.
The plan also detailed “operations for managing political public opinion.” This media campaign was directed at raising awareness among the people about the true situation of war criminals, according to conservative Japanese officialdom. Public materials from international law specialists and their associations, talking about the related issues, needed to be produced and distributed. Letters from families that “have emotional appeal,” materials from the last wills and testaments of executed war criminals, and materials from Japanese who were abused as POWs themselves would need to be collected, the plan observed. Toyota’s blueprint recommended using such materials in different media campaigns to influence government policy. The group intended to use and release these resources in newspapers and magazines after the implementation of the peace treaty (around April, the plan noted). While one cannot prove that these plans were actually implemented as they were outlined, their goals seem fairly consistent with what happened in Japan after the San Francisco Treaty. The ultimate thrust, the plan noted, was to get those in positions of authority to empathize with the predicament of war criminals. An additional goal was to get the minority judgments of the Tokyo Trial publicly published. This was a reference to Judge Radhabinod Pal’s dissent, which, like most of the other elements of the Tokyo Trial, took decades to be fully released. Finally, the plan referenced a need to organize and publicly produce background notes about Allied atrocities and illegal activities as a counterbalance to the charges against Japan.3 Having plans at hand was crucial to coordinate the collection of war crimes materials from tribunals outside of Japan, the report assessed.4
Within the plan, a fascinating diagram from 1950 shows how the Ministry of Justice kept up with what was happening to Japanese war criminals domestically and those still incarcerated abroad. It is telling that the Japanese government was more anxious about its former soldiers after the war than it had been concerned about their well-being during the war. The handwritten spreadsheet displays Sugamo Prison, Australia’s Manus Island prison, and detention centers in the Philippines, Burma, Singapore, Hong Kong, and other locations. Officials tabulated a general summary of prisoner daily activities, conditions of food, work, clothing, daily necessities, entertainment, medical and communication circumstances, and so forth.5 All of these debates and decisions ultimately paved the way for the Japanese government to eventually claim the souls of those executed as war criminals and have them enshrined at Yasukuni Shrine.6
Intense negotiations and discussions had led up to the San Francisco Peace Treaty, enacted on April 28, 1952. Debates had revolved around whether Japan should enact a multilateral peace with all its previous enemies, including China and the USSR, or a more singular orientation toward US interests and excluding the communist nations. In the short term, US leverage won the day. But this did not mean such policy weighed in on all features of political life in newly sovereign Japan. One of the first policies the Japanese government declared days later was a pronouncement of how the nation should view its war criminals. At an April 30, 1952, press conference, Attorney General Kimura Tokutarō stated that he wanted to put forward processes to grant amnesty to BC class war criminals.7 The next day, Kimura issued a more affirmative directive to other government offices that war criminals who had died while incarcerated would be considered as “deaths in public service” and that currently jailed war criminals would be legally treated as having been “detained” or “arrested.” This meant previous welfare and military benefits that had been denied to those men and their families would now be permitted. Such a government pronouncement issued from the Ministry of Justice to relevant government agencies effectively meant that on the level of domestic Japanese law, those prisoners would no longer be defined as war criminals.8 On June 21, 1952, the Japanese Federation of Lawyers handed Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru and Attorney General Kimura a memo of the federation’s opinion to have all the war criminals released because such a move undergirded the real principles for establishing a lasting peace.9 Several months later, Kimura became minister of justice in the fourth Yoshida Shigeru cabinet, but he was perhaps better known as the backbone of postwar movements that fiercely opposed communism and harkened back to the heady prewar days of ultranationalism.10
Kimura’s announcement, which amounted to a national volte-face concerning Japanese war criminal responsibility, was not a shock to most. The political tide had been building for months. In mid-November of the previous year, at the Japanese Diet Committee on Judicial Affairs, Attorney General Ōhashi Takeo had made statements in the Diet that once the occupation had ended, war criminals would no longer be deemed as such on the level of Japanese domestic law.11 Because foreign governments conducted these trials, he claimed, they did not have legal validity in the eyes of Japanese domestic law. In a sense, what Ōhashi was saying was that Japanese prisoners would be treated in accordance with Japanese law as prisoners, but not as special “war criminals” as they had previously been defined. Such a change in terminology allowed Japan to treat the verdicts or review the trials as it deemed fit, according to its own legal standards and policies.12 In fact, even before conservative political elements within Japan’s former imperial superstructure began pushing a narrow interpretation of the Tokyo Trial, outspoken conservative opinion leaders were using Judge Pal’s dissent to that end. In 1952, Tanaka Masaaki, who had been secretary to General Matsui Iwane (executed for Class A war crimes), published a book in which he argued that Judge Pal had pronounced Japan not guilty. The book, whose original title was The Argument for Japan’s Innocence: Judging the Truth, has been republished and repackaged a bit over the years. In the same year, a second popular book emerged in the form of Yoshimatsu Masakatsu’s partially translated and edited version of Pal’s dissent, Refuting the History of the War: Japan Was Innocent.13 Both tomes had excellent sales and championed Japan as “not guilty” in the Tokyo Trial, perverting to some extent what Pal had intended. Pal had noted that the trial was unlawful on the level of international law, but he did not claim that Japan had acted nobly in any measure, nor had he diminished the problems inherent in Japanese imperial rule.14
Not everyone in Japan agreed. The always-vocal-until-they-were-banned JCP and the budding Japanese Socialist Party (JSP), formed in the late autumn of 1945, both voiced strong opposition. These minority parties reasoned that unless Japan took measures of its own to both atone for and delve into the causes of the crimes of war, peace in Asia would be short-lived. And both parties’ positions stemmed from how they saw the validity of the Tokyo Trial. The JCP “uncritically accepted the Tokyo Judgment. The JSP accepted the judgment but explicitly argued that the trial had serious flaws, including the failure to subject the Allied powers to the same standards of criminal justice.”15 It is important to note that conservative powers picked up the criticisms of the JSP but not its intent.
Early Postwar Interactions with China
Contrary to Chinese stories about Mao’s unique form of benevolence toward postwar Japan, it appears that the decision to “reeducate” Japanese suspected war criminals did not solely emerge from Soviet pressure or from internal PRC plans. An additional avenue of pressure interestingly developed from increased contact with disparate Japanese groups and bilateral meetings from the early 1950s. This is a hitherto unexplored facet of the postwar Sino-Japanese relationship that influenced decisions concerning war criminals. Such efforts also reflect the nature of entangled pasts, in “that the past that is remembered—the object of memory—must itself be placed in a transnational context and be seen as a product of processes of exchange and influence.”16
In the summer of 1950, the head of the Japanese Red Cross, Shimazu Tadatsugu, had traveled to Monaco to represent Japan at an International Red Cross meeting. At a party, he ran into PRC Red Cross representative Li Dequan. Shimazu asked Li if she could investigate the whereabouts of Japanese whose repatriation had not yet taken place from China, including more than three hundred Red Cross nurses.17 Opportunities for communication between mainland China and Japan were few and far between but held immense importance for bilateral relations.18
In April 1952, concomitant to the implementation of the San Francisco Peace Treaty, the ROC (Taiwan) signed a special and separate peace treaty with Japan. The USSR was also trying to shore up its international support, and at the beginning of April the Soviets held an international economic conference in Moscow to sponsor trade between the Cold War blocs. Even with the knowledge that Japanese were still detained in China, but unclear on the actual numbers, the two countries were keen to organize new but unofficial economic agreements. The first of these was created through the personal visits of several Japanese Diet members, including Kōra Tomi, Hoashi Kei, and Miyakoshi Kisuke. Kōra Tomi was a Diet member of the upper house and the first Japanese woman to get a PhD from Johns Hopkins University, having also studied at Columbia University. Hoashi Kei was a former member of the upper house of parliament and representative of the Japan–China Trade Promotion Association. Miyakoshi Kisuke was a member of the lower house and director-general of the Federation of Japanese Parliamentarians to Promote Sino-Japanese Trade. Rebuilding the national economy and infrastructure was important to both Japan and China.19
The Japanese group was not officially permitted passports to travel to China because Japan did not legally recognize the PRC. The Yoshida government also used a clause within the Japanese passport law to deny anyone a travel pass if there were potential issues of national security. At this time, Yoshida Shigeru concurrently held the posts of both prime minister and foreign minister, so he had much bureaucratic power in hand. Regardless, the Japanese leftists pulled a ruse to travel, and the game was on. The members used their privilege as former and current members of the Diet to exit the country and then took roundabout travel itineraries to eventually find their way to the meeting in Moscow.20 In the USSR, during their travels from Khabarovsk to Vladivostok, Kōra and the others were able to learn firsthand what was happening with the remaining Japanese detained as prisoners and war criminals. In Moscow, their invitations to Beijing had already been prepared, and they traveled from there to China as, unofficially, the first Japanese government representatives in the postwar era to enter Beijing. (JCP leaders had already snuck into Beijing previously.) On May 15, 1952, Sun Pinghua, who had studied in Japan during the war, met the group at Beijing’s airport and welcomed them to new China. Sun had been placed in the group that would coordinate with the Japanese, specifically owing to his experience while working briefly for the Manchukuo government and his years of study in Japan. His interpretation, however, was not always praised.21
On June 1, 1952, the First Sino-Japanese Trade Agreement was announced by Hoashi, Miyakoshi, and Kōra. The main Chinese interlocutor was Nan Hanchen from the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade.22 It was an unofficial trade agreement as the Japanese delegates were opposition party members and did not represent the government in power.23 The Yoshida cabinet had put up all sorts of obstacles, but the group’s efforts paid off. Getting home after their trip to China was another matter. Kōra recalled that all three were refused reentry to the USSR for their return journey on the pretext that news about them would harm Soviet relations with Japan. The other two eventually went home by way of Hong Kong, whereas Kōra was invited to Switzerland to present her account of how Japanese POWs were faring in the Soviet Union.24
Upon their return, Hoashi and Miyakoshi joined the speaking circuit around Japan, reporting on their findings in the USSR and China. They conducted a whistle-stop tour in Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, and finally Nagoya, where a riot ensued. On the evening of July 7, 1952, a collection of labor unionists, students, and North Korean–linked activists numbering five thousand, according to some reports, welcomed the two Diet members for an event celebrating their return. After the festivities, newspapers reported that the North Korean flag and a red flag were raised. Police tried to stop the demonstration and a clash ensued. Protesters threw Molotov cocktails, numbers grew, more police were called in, and a massive riot ensued. In the end, more than twenty people were injured and ninety arrested.25 The newspapers noted what was happening to many of the Japanese prisoners in the USSR, some having been charged as war criminals and serving sentences after trials that were poorly understood.26 Kōra said in a press conference in Hong Kong that the PRC had calculated about twenty-five thousand Japanese were still living in China.27 She returned to Japan on July 27, 1952. The Japanese media highlighted criticism from some of the nurses and technicians who were able to repatriate in this initial stage. The nurses and technicians refuted reports of Hoashi and others, which had been produced in the Chinese press. The repatriating doctors and nurses said that with the exception of those Japanese who were believers in communism, everyone else wanted to repatriate and life was difficult in the PRC.28
In December 1952, two years after initially being asked, the Chinese finally officially responded to Japan’s query about Japanese who stayed behind. Beijing radio announced to a very surprised Japanese public that approximately thirty thousand Japanese were still living in China. Things developed fairly quickly after this admission, and the Chinese invited Uchiyama Kanzō, head of the Japan-China Friendship Association, to lead a delegation to China composed of himself, the Japanese Red Cross chief, Shimazu Tadatsugu; head of the Peace Liaison Group, Hirano Yoshitarō; Upper House Representative Kōra Tomi; and seven others.29 This was the start of “people’s diplomacy,” the heart of a new form of Chinese international relations in the absence of official diplomatic recognition. In part, this Chinese strategy built on the CCP’s wartime policy of treating the Japanese people as innocent and blaming the Japanese military leadership for the war. This also meant further separating those who had been in positions of authority as having responsibility, whereas other public officials of lower ranks had merely made mistakes and did not have the same burden.30
Even with the ups and downs in Japan’s relations with China, it was not until late January 1953 that Kōra Tomi finally received an official passport to travel to China. Japan had resumed its sovereignty, and although travelers were limited in the amount of money they could take out of the country, international travel was still procedurally tricky and permitted for only a select few. Once again, the Japanese government initially dragged its heels providing Kōra with travel documents, which delayed the group’s departure for a few weeks. Early 1950s official Japanese government policy toward China was complex for a variety of immediate postwar political reasons. “In essence, the Yoshida cabinet employed a double-tongued policy and promoted Sino-Japanese economic relations, while denouncing China publicly in order to save its face with Washington.”31 Once the Japanese group got to the mainland, they met with Chinese officials to discuss the as-yet-unrepatriated thousands of Japanese as well as meetings to expand trade. Uchiyama’s group met with a variety of Chinese delegates, including Red Cross head Li Dequan and Japan hand Liao Chengzhi.32 The groups agreed on enough steps to get the ball rolling once again to advance in March 1953 Japanese repatriation of the more than thirty thousand Japanese still residing in China who wished to return to Japan.
However, 1953 was also a pivotal year for a confrontation with the conservative forces at work in Japan and their efforts to define the meaning of Japan’s recent war. Parliamentarian Kita Reikichi, a member of the Liberal Party, queried the government about its goals for raising the morals of the country. Politicians on both sides of the spectrum were worried about the supposed decline of social values in the postwar period. In response, Minister of Education Okano Kiyohide explained, “Postwar the people have completely lost their confidence. For me this is most regrettable.” He went on to detail that he did not wish to enter into a debate about whether the Greater East Asian War was bad. He wanted the Japanese people to find some historical fixtures on which they could restore their pride. Regardless of the outcome of the war, he said, “the fact that the Japanese are superior I think I can prove. At the very least, the fact that they were at war with many of the world’s countries for four years points to Japanese superiority we can say. I will probably be told that I am exaggerating ethnic hubris, or rather that this is a feudalistic way of thinking. But I think because we have completely lost our confidence, I want Japanese who have lost confidence to such an extent to claim this feeling back so that is why I am saying things like this.”33
PRC assessments noted the Japanese discomfort with its predicament, concerning how to analyze its recent past. An “internal eyes only” report within the Chinese government from March 28, 1953, stated that it was important to consider the mind-set of Japanese returnees from Shanghai and their attitudes toward repatriating. The internal investigation noted that many Japanese felt that this repatriation was very sudden and the majority did not wish to repatriate. Only about twenty-nine wanted to return to Japan. The internal report detailed that the Japanese said they liked their lives in new China and were afraid of unemployment in Japan. The report labeled some as communists or “progressives.” These Japanese repatriates were afraid of being blacklisted in Japan by the Yoshida government, something that later experience proved accurate in many cases.34 Some even cried and would not fill out the necessary forms, saying in the end, “If you order us to repatriate that will be the only way we will return.” Others said that because China now had access to advanced USSR technology, Japan was no longer necessary.
According to the report, other Japanese said they would repatriate and carry on the revolutionary struggle. Some Chinese public security officers who were mobilizing the Japanese for repatriation spoke to them in rather stern language, saying, “We don’t need you now that we have advanced Soviet technology.” Or, “if you don’t take up this opportunity to repatriate, it will be too difficult in the future.” Such statements, the report cautioned, cause the overseas Japanese distress and should be stopped. One group of Japanese in Tianjin gathered to repatriate admitted upon return to Japan that they would study Mao Zedong thought. Many gave tearful goodbyes upon embarking on the ship, according to the PRC analysis.
But the same report noted several deficiencies in the repatriation process: there were many ill Japanese among the groups repatriating. Those from Hebei Province, with more than three hundred Japanese, had more than fifty who were ill. Other areas sent Japanese who had communicable diseases and mental issues, as well as pregnant women who were about to give birth. Additionally, there was no uniformity of monetary assistance given to those who were going to repatriate. Some groups were provided a bit of financial assistance, others a month’s salary.35
The March 28, 1953, report also analyzed the mental states of those Japanese repatriating from Shanghai. The internal analysis concluded that the Japanese were of many minds regarding repatriation. Some factory workers and technicians believed that this was China’s way of dealing with the Yoshida government’s comments that China was detaining Japanese so Tokyo insisted the Japanese repatriate. Many women said that their lives were stable in China and they questioned why the Chinese government was forcing them to repatriate. Others felt that with US president Dwight Eisenhower’s administration just beginning, the situation would become tense in the future. Others accepted returning to Japan if they could take their Chinese wives and children with them. If forced to separate, members of that group announced that they would jump into the ocean, presumably committing suicide. Others had already taken Chinese names, so it was obvious they were not keen on returning to Japan. This sort of internal report for Chinese high-level officials admitted that given all these problems related to repatriation, the issue demanded serious attention.
The “reactionary” Japanese government, the report pointed out, also wanted to use repatriating Japanese for intelligence purposes to learn whether Japanese war criminals were still being detained in China. Rumors around China maintained that tens of thousands more were detained in the north. Others said that the searching of Japanese baggage upon departure was too stringent and that this left a bad feeling because the Chinese officials were breaking personal items. Some felt Japanese women were singled out and embarrassed, the reported noted, so Chinese officials took steps to correct this and began using female inspectors.36
Man in the Iron Mask, Communist Style
While Japanese leftists of all stripes were traveling in competing groups to China and the Soviet Union to link with partners, gain advice, and direct the winds of political change back in Japan, the JCP was falling apart. The harbinger of what could have become the catalyst for domestic pressure within Japan to investigate its own war crimes was tragically lost to infighting and political backstabbing. Nowhere was this dissolution more evident than in the tragic story of Itō Ritsu.
Photographs of Itō Ritsu from 1948 show a confident man in the full splendor of his thirties with swept-back black hair, sporting a handsome face with pronounced cheekbones. Itō’s experience was very different from those of his two main CCP postwar rivals—Tokuda Kyūichi and Nosaka Sanzō. Tokuda had spent almost two decades in harsh conditions imprisoned in Japan. Nosaka Sanzō had been abroad, helping the CCP in Yenan for much of that time, while keeping the political fires of international socialism burning bright far from the hearth of Japanese imperialism.
In the early 1950s the JCP faced an internal dilemma: which party line to follow? Nosaka pushed for a softer line but faced Cominform criticism, which wanted the Japanese to be violent in the promotion of the revolution. This friction produced further factionalism within the JCP regarding which party to follow and what revolutionary line to take. In late June 1950 the Korean War exploded, but the US occupation authorities had already stopped publication of the Japanese communist flagship newspaper Red Flag, which by this point had grown into a media force in Japan. Starting with only ten thousand copies in October 1945, with its original publication calling for justice in Japan, Red Flag reached a distribution of three hundred thousand by the beginning of 1950. Its departure from Japan’s public media arena was significant.37 On June 6, 1950, SCAP ordered the “removal from public life” of twenty-four members of the JCP’s central committee, which essentially shut down its functioning as a political party.
FIGURE 9.1. CCP criticism of “Imperious America pressing Yoshida, oppressing the democratic people, and shutting down the Red Flag newspaper.” Image is from box 29, “17 Chinese communist propaganda postcards,” Preliminary Inventory of the Zhongguo Gongchandang Issuances, HIA.
This era soon witnessed bickering about policy and adherence to ideology that caused fissures within the left-wing leadership. Trotskyites, petty bourgeois, deviationists, sectarians, and other epithets were thrown at each of the factions. These arguments sadly overwhelmed the original aims to topple the emperor and establish political rights for the disenfranchised.38 In the interim, labeled as the “Molotov cocktail period” by some, many of the purged leaders went underground or voyaged in secret to China by boat, to wait things out.39 Nosaka, Tokuda, and Itō found themselves in political exile on the mainland. Further political divisions soon appeared. In December 1952, at a JCP safe house in Beijing, surrounded by high walls and monitored by public security guards, Itō was questioned by his comrades. Itō recounted that he was told Moscow had directed the JCP to hold this meeting. Tokuda was in China but not present. In part, this was because Tokuda’s long years in detention had broken his health and he had already been in a Beijing hospital for three months. Nosaka and other party luminaries were present, including Nishizawa Takaji, and several CCP members, Li Chuli, and Zhao Anbo.40 Zhao often served as translator between the Chinese and Japanese communist party elements because of his strong language skills gained from having studied in Japan. At this initial meeting, Nosaka pulled out a piece of paper and claimed that instructions from Moscow, meaning Stalin, intimated that Itō should immediately be removed from party duties. Although Itō had already been accused several times in the immediate postwar period, the party had found him not guilty in the Sorge affair. Nosaka told Itō that to clear everything up about the Sorge incident, party leaders required him to write yet another self-criticism.41
The group that was detaining Itō changed buildings, and from that time for about a year Itō was kept under house arrest in Beijing.42 Ironically, he said that he felt something like this might happen when he secretly went to China. At that time, Japan was still under occupation rules and no official travel abroad was permitted, particularly to communist countries. It is obvious that Itō got swept up in intraparty politics as well as the conflict between the JCP and the CCP and their mutual reliance on Soviet leadership. His house arrest began on December 24, 1952. Along with extensive self-criticisms constantly being requested, during his initial sequestering he was treated well and had a servant boy in the house for food and errands, who also brought in water for cleaning. Doctors were called when Itō fell sick.
As Japanese political representatives traveled more frequently to China for improved relations, and tens of thousands were repatriating, former Japanese communist leader Itō Ritsu was being more carefully withdrawn from public view. Throughout the end of 1952 and into 1953 the JCP and CCP leadership kept pushing and asking Itō if he was a spy. Had he been the one who had given up Richard Sorge in Tokyo during World War II? In the midst of this, in March 1953 Stalin died and deeper fissures opened up between the JCP and the CCP.
By the end of 1954, Nosaka Sanzō, leader of the JCP, and other high-ranking members of the JCP had stricken Itō from party membership rolls for having been in contact with an officer of the special higher police during the war and for supposedly having given succor to the imperialist United States in the immediate postwar period. In China, Itō was moved several times under guard and eventually was put in prison. From this time until Itō returned to Japan in 1980, Nosaka Sanzō denied this entire story. Itō always felt that unless Nosaka had been complicit, the Chinese would never have thrown him in prison. Itō was never formally charged, only detained in various Chinese prisons for decades. He was literally thrown into a dungeon along the lines of dark fiction that Alexandre Dumas made famous in his nineteenth-century story, The Man in the Iron Mask.
Had Itō become a symbol of ideological conflict among the various East Asian communist parties, or was he being punished in China because the Japanese could never find sufficient evidence to pursue him in a Japanese court? Regardless, the JCP was intent on using extralegal measures to silence one of Nosaka’s main competitors for party leadership. As Itō languished in a series of Chinese jails, efforts to augment Sino-Japanese relations continued unabated throughout the 1950s. In September 1953, a group of twenty-three Japanese politicians and industrial experts and businessmen formed a mission to China to further expand trade and received an enthusiastic welcome. Zhou Enlai’s first postwar meeting with a Japanese was with Ōyama Ikuo, head of the Peace Protection Committee.43 By the end of October 1954, Japan and China had already signed their second trade accord. Hatoyama Ichirō took the reigns as prime minister and exchanged letters with Beijing, on August 29 and October 20, 1954, saying that Japan needed to resolve issues related to Japanese stranded in China, including the problems concerning Japanese war criminals.44
This era continued to see a steady flow, mostly of Japanese to China, of interaction and attempts toward reconciliation and reconstructing a more formalized system for trade and political relations. At the same time, both sides were a bit wary of the other. On September 5, 1954, Beijing broadcast a shortwave radio roundtable program of seven Japanese former soldiers who had been granted amnesty by the PRC and who would soon be repatriated. The family of one soldier, Nishii Kenichi, had not received any word from him since his mobilization in September 1943 and had woken early to travel to a self-defense forces’ site to hear the transmission. The broadcast was full of static and hard to decipher, but when Nishii’s mother, wife, and eldest daughter heard his voice, for the first time in twelve years, they held their breath, the Asahi Newspaper reported.45
An “internal eyes only” Chinese report from September 28, 1954, examined the situation of meetings with formerly released Japanese military officers and Diet members of Japan’s left-wing political parties. Socialist party members Tanaka Toshio and Kameda Tōgo, among others, including kabuki actor Nakamura Kan’emon, met with a group of former Japanese soldiers who were granted clemency and released. The Chinese government had invited Tanaka to visit China from July 30, 1954, and he returned to Japan on October 21.46 Kameda was an old leftist and labor organizer who had written several books on China and related issues.47 Nakamura was a thespian, a kabuki performer who had gotten wrapped up in a political scandal and sought refuge in China for a number of years.
As more Japanese visited China, some of them were able to observe or meet with former Japanese POWs and war criminals. Tanaka, Kameda, and Nakamura held a roundtable with about twenty former Japanese imperial soldiers to whom the CCP had given amnesty. Tanaka explained to them, according to the Chinese assessment of the event, that rural life in Japan was more prosperous than the urban areas, and that land reform had been fairly successful. The former soldiers asked Tanaka if their livelihoods would be protected once they returned home. Tanaka replied that if they had technical skills they would find work, but the subtext of his comments was that unemployment was the future for those who had no skill set. The Chinese report stated that during the meeting the former soldiers incessantly posed questions and Tanaka responded, sweating from being placed in a difficult position. The Japanese soldiers asked him if the Japanese government would pay for their repatriation, and Tanaka explained that because these men had chosen to stay and fight with KMT warlord General Yan Xishan, after Japan had already declared surrender, such funds would not be forthcoming. Some of the soldiers showed disappointment with Tanaka’s comments. The men immediately responded that they had been forced to remain and join forces with KMT troops, which rendered Tanaka speechless. The former soldiers were more conciliatory toward Kameda and Nakamura, the report indicated.48
Many of the men who talked with Tanaka showed their displeasure. Others said, “What Tanaka is talking about seems more like propaganda from his party.… He’s not really saying anything factual.” Others retorted that Tanaka wanted them to go back to the rural areas so that they would not continue the struggle in the urban areas. Kameda’s talks met with a better reception, and his remarks received great applause from the former soldiers, the report noted. The final paragraph of the internal Chinese report detailed that, after this meeting, many former Japanese soldiers came to realize that Japan’s socialist party was a “faker” but that “the communist party was the people’s party.” It was only because they received education from the liberation army, the PLA, that they claimed to have realized the true aims of the socialist party and now understand the need to unite behind them, the report concluded.49 After three years abroad, in November 1955, Nakamura proclaimed to the media that his return was a “Triumphant Repatriation.”50
In late September 1954, an academic/political delegation traveled to China to celebrate the fifth anniversary of the People’s Republic. The mission included LDP member Yamaguchi Kikuichirō, JSP member Suzuki Mosaburō, Sino-Japan Friendship Association head Matsumoto Jiichirō, and others.51 On October 11 they engaged in a broad set of talking points covering economics and diplomacy with Chinese premier Zhou Enlai and also touched on the war criminal issue. Zhou informed the mission that some Japanese soldiers who fought with KMT general Yan Xishan and committed atrocities had already returned home. There were still one thousand or so war criminals remaining in China, Zhou remarked. KMT leader Chiang Kai-shek dealt with those who took part in the invasion of China. The ones left in China belonged to one of two categories, Zhou explained: (1) those taken prisoner by the Soviets and returned to China and (2) the one hundred or so who committed crimes while with the post-1945 Chinese Nationalist forces. Zhou stated that all these individuals were permitted to communicate with their families through the Chinese Red Cross, a point that would be touched on by Red Cross head Li Dequan when she visited Japan. China wanted to resolve this problem quickly, Zhou added. The PRC followed its wartime practice of refraining from killing Japanese POWs. However, among these prisoners were those who committed serious war crimes, so the PRC could not treat them the same and explained that it was looking into how to deal with them, Zhou underscored to the Japanese visitors.52
On October 12, 1954, the PRC and the USSR released a joint statement concerning their new policy toward Japan. The gist of the statement was an acknowledgment of the fact that Japan had emerged from the occupation once again as an independent nation, and launched an appeal of sorts for the Japanese to break from the military dictates of the United States.53 On the same day, the Soviet Union removed the military forces it had stationed at Port Arthur on China’s Liaodong Peninsula. Both the PRC and the USSR were pressing Japan that the time was ripe to consider reestablishing diplomatic relations.54 On his way home in late October 1954, which involved a stop in Hong Kong, Tanaka Toshio held a press conference where he remarked that he supported the recent Sino-Soviet statement on relations with Japan because it would help restore diplomatic relations with those two countries.55 It is apparent that the CCP was greatly interested in keeping an eye on the pulse of public opinion in Japan in part because of the great information gap that had grown since 1949. So few were the conduits of news and knowledge over the short geographic distance that Chinese leaders leapt at anything they saw as potentially adverse to their stance.
On the last day of October 1954, the long-awaited visit of the Chinese Red Cross representative, Li Dequan, finally arrived. Japanese newspapers had been drumming up interest in her and the potential for change that a high-ranking Chinese official visit might bring. When she arrived, the Asahi Newspaper announced that a “grand reception team” awaited her at the Tokyo airport.56 The Japanese media was clear she had been invited in a private capacity by the Japanese Red Cross and was thus not “an official guest.” Nonetheless, the public were elated. Li brought a list of the thousand or so Japanese on the rolls as war criminals to be tried. The papers asked that they not be used as political hostages but be dealt with in a civilized manner. Japanese newspapers noted that while many Japanese Diet members had visited China and traveled around unaccosted, some of the right wing in Japan threatened to make Li’s trip difficult. This should not happen, and Li should be able to travel around Japan freely and without worry, Japan’s media underscored.57 Li embodied three elements of change and transformation that fascinated the Japanese public. In the political realm, “left-leaning social organizations, intellectuals, and activists saw the Li visit as a valuable step forward in the restoration of China-Japan friendship and East Asian peace.” Japanese women saw in Li an example of the heights to which gender equality could be reached outside of Japan. At least in the minds of many at the time, this parity had been achieved in the PRC and demonstrated how far Japan still had to go to attain such a milestone. Finally, Li was a beacon of hope for bereaved families “who would learn from the Li delegation if their soldier sons, husbands, and fathers would finally be coming home.” For them, “her visit was a blessing that offered relief from painful uncertainty.”58 Li brought over the first official Chinese enunciation of who was detained as a Japanese war criminal in China, and she handed over lists of names. It is important to recognize that she came under the auspices of the Red Cross, not as a CCP member, which she was not. With her deputy Liao Chengzhi, Li had undertaken the first large-scale Chinese mission for new China to visit Japan.
The Chinese Red Cross, Japanese Red Cross, and the Japan-China Friendship Association released a memo of understanding on November 3, 1954.59 They publicly put forward the steps to be taken for how repatriation would proceed and included a proviso that children born from the union of Japanese and Chinese under the age of sixteen would be considered Chinese, but a child above sixteen would be allowed to choose his or her citizenship and thus repatriate if desired. Article 7 of the memorandum touched on the war criminal issue. Some would be released, as Premier Zhou had already told a Japanese delegation about a month prior, and the Red Cross would represent the governments in the absence of official diplomatic channels. But other war criminals, those who had committed serious crimes, would remain in China to fulfill their sentences. In these cases the Red Cross organizations of both countries would aid in exchanging letters and packages.60 If the Japanese side wanted to know about the terms of incarceration, where they were being held, their sentences, and other related matters, the Chinese said they would consider publicly releasing this information and would consult with the relevant ministries.
On December 4, 1954, an “internal eyes only” Chinese report on Japanese journalists visiting the city of Tianjin assessed that Chinese cooperation with the Japanese journalists, in which they let them into their homes and allowed them to interview repatriates, surprised the visiting Japanese.61 Such internal Chinese reports, like the Americans before and the Japanese authorities after 1952, were responsible for interviewing repatriates to analyze the mood of the nation and the direction in which national attitudes were leaning. A report from December 15, 1954, contained an interview with Fukuda Kumajirō on the situation in China after his return. Fukuda was Japanese and a former high-level technical consultant in Beijing. He became a POW in Dalian (Dairen in Japanese) at the end of the war and was detained by the CCP. He had been in charge of a chemical plant at that point. Fukuda said that in 1949 the CCP arrested many owing to the activities of counterrevolutionaries. Fukuda was very critical of Chinese courts that dealt with counterrevolutionaries. Others opposed these Chinese courts, which had no defense counsel, and there was no written law that could be utilized. Fukuda said, “China thinks it has already learned enough from Japanese technicians so it can send them home but I feel China is still thirty years behind Japan.” The five-year plan would not be able to get China to where it aims to go, he believed. Fukuda wrote a piece in the Japanese magazine Mainland Problems, in which he revealed his impressions of new China. He penned that China participated in the Korean War so that citizens would shift their focus from domestic problems and displeasure toward the war.62 The internal Chinese report detailed Fukuda’s whole article, and investigators seemed vexed about it.63
In the April 1955 issue of the Japanese magazine Sekai, Murata Shōzō talked about his trip to China. Murata had been a prewar entrepreneur, minister in the wartime cabinets, and suspected postwar war criminal who was arrested but eventually released. He later became an adviser in the Foreign Ministry and assisted with the reestablishment of diplomatic relations. Murata claimed that Japan had preconceived notions of the Communist Party and the PRC, but they were wrong. The PRC is not narrow minded, he told readers. After all, he managed to get a face-to-face meeting with Zhou Enlai that lasted four and a half hours, Murata wrote. Murata said, “We ought to accept the notion that a new neighbor to this country has risen,” meaning that new China should be treated afresh. Japanese used to think of old China as dirty, but now everything was clean. Murata also said that Zhou told him that the Chinese would like to forget the past, because “in the long-range view of history, the disputes in the past fifty or sixty years mean very little.” The two discussed trade issues to a great extent because that was the focus of Murata’s visit.64
While China had been officially closed off to the Japanese, former imperial lines of communication and negotiation remained open. These were not always the same avenues for reconciliation one would have imagined, but they demonstrate Japanese and Chinese efforts to remove the obstacles put in place by the burgeoning Cold War alliances and attempts to establish a new stage on which to build future political relations. Sadly, while the main role to bridge this divide was lost to the JCP, which slid into decline and theoretical squabbles, other Japanese groups stepped into the fray to push the dialogue forward.