“10. Behind the Curtain” in “The Geography of Injustice”
CHAPTER 10 Behind the Curtain Forces Shaping Sino-Japanese Postwar Attitudes toward Justice
Chinese Nationalists across the strait in Taiwan were paying close attention to communist Chinese visits to Japan as well as Japanese calls to the new China. KMT leaders were not pleased with such developments and commented about it in their discussions of Japanese attitudes toward the ROC in the mid-1950s. In an ROC Ministry of Foreign Affairs report from November 1955, the compilers made it clear that they were unhappy with Japan’s acceptance of Li Dequan, Guo Moruo, and the visits of other “bandits,” as they termed various CCP and other leaders. The report added that allowing the “fake Taiwan independence party” to visit did not enamor the ROC to Japan. Japan’s attitude was “clearly unfriendly” toward us, the report enunciated.1 ROC misgivings were not unfounded, but a core of stalwart Japanese support within the higher echelons of government still wanted to maintain strong ties to Taiwan.
Even though Japanese war criminals were being released by Beijing, Itō Ritsu did not come into contact with another “criminal” in his prison until the start of 1955. This prompts the question: given how busy everyone was with trying to reestablish relations and rebuild trade with Japan, why even waste time with Itō? Was he Mao’s trump card, or Zhou’s? The JCP had obviously abandoned him, so what was the motive for keeping him around?2 At one point even Itō himself could not figure out his misfortune; he surmised that he really had no future and would soon be executed or die during imprisonment.3
We can learn a bit more about Itō’s tragic fate by retracing the life and times of Zhao Anbo. Before the war, Zhao had traveled to Japan to study and then returned to China to join the CCP resistance movement. He later met JCP leader Nosaka Sanzō in Yenan, China, at the end of 1940. Zhao began serving as Nosaka’s translator and wrote that the two were inseparable for five years. In 1951, Wang Jiaxiang, head of the International Liaison Department of the CCP, called Zhao to Beijing from Shenyang. Zhao was tasked with the responsibility of managing propaganda toward Japan and receiving Japanese guests. Few people knew much about Japan, so there was much work to do and he was kept busy. In addition, Zhao stated that he was doing all the interpreting for Mao Zedong, as well as CCP generals Zhu De and Liu Shioqi. Zhao revealed part of why he was called from Shenyang to Beijing by Wang was to assist with testy relations between the two JCP leaders, Tokuda and Nosaka, who were in self-exile in Beijing. They had arrived in late 1950 and early 1951. Tokuda told Zhao that the reason he traveled secretly to Beijing was to keep an eye on Nosaka because “who really knows what he’s been saying.”4 There was little trust among competing factions in the JCP.
In a 1990s interview Zhao Anbo elaborated on the role he played between JCP leaders and Itō Ritsu. Zhao explained that JCP leaders had asked him to “get rid of” Itō Ritsu, which he refused to do.5 Zhao’s revelation set off a Japanese media firestorm, revealing the long trail of damage caused by the Itō scandal. The Japanese historian who interviewed Zhao wrote that the editorial staff at the magazine chose to “shelve the piece.” She estimated that after a three-decade interim of frosty relations, the mood between the two communist parties was finally thawing, and perhaps the editors at the Japanese magazine thought Zhao’s disclosure would inadvertently impede political resolution.6
News of the censored interview fed a further uproar in Japan and renewed interest in the whole Itō Ritsu drama, along with the explosive issue of Nosaka’s supposed complicity. In the final analysis, according to Zhao’s recollections, after the JCP moved its central bureau to Beijing, the leaders entreated the Chinese to remove Itō Ritsu. At the time, the JCP was split into two factions: the international clique and the emotional clique. Tokuda, Nosaka, and Itō were part of the emotional clique, hoping to create a more lovable communist party. Hakamada Satomi and Miyamoto Kenji were part of the international clique, hewing more closely to USSR guidance of violent revolution.
Zhao confirmed that the request to handle the Itō situation came from both Nosaka, head of the emotional clique, and Hakamada, leader of the international clique. Zhao remembered that Nosaka used the words “deal with” (shori), while Hakamada was much more explicit in 1955, saying to Zhao that he “wanted Itō killed” (koroshite hoshii).7 After Tokuda’s death and the dissolution of the international clique, the two sides eventually reunited. CCP leaders estimated the whole debacle was a problem internal to JCP leadership squabbles and did not wish to intervene. The Itō story also suggests a larger struggle within China concerning justice. The CCP leadership took a variety of stances in implementing what it deemed as justice, but there was little uniformity. There was one plan for notable Japanese war criminals, one for JCP brethren, and a third for domestic KMT “war criminals,” as well as other formulations as one moved down the scale of publicity and political hierarchy.
At the same time as Itō was settling in for a long incarceration, moves were afoot that tried to push forward Sino-Japanese diplomatic rapprochement. As an outgrowth of the pro-communist World Peace Conference in 1954, Indian leaders opened the Asian Conference on the Relaxation of International Tension in New Delhi from April 6–10, 1955. Famed Japanese writer Hino Ashihei attended with the Japanese mission and then journeyed to China. During his trip he visited Fushun Prison and wrote about the detained Japanese war criminals.8 Hino received a guided tour of the prison facilities and was introduced to those incarcerated. He recalled that it was a very different environment from what prisoners experienced in the previously Allied-managed Sugamo Prison in Tokyo. The prisoners in Fushun had undergone a “human renovation” through a ten-year process of “thought reformation,” he wrote. However, Hino observed, when considering the plight of these men, they were still languishing in incarceration a decade after the war had finished.9
On April 18, 1955, the famous Bandung Conference opened, and Japanese envoy Takasaki Tatsunosuke met his Chinese counterpart, Liao Chengzhi. The two advanced talks for trade and bilateral political negotiations on the sidelines. The UK embassy in Beijing commented that even though progress had been made, there was still an imbalance in Sino-Japanese relations. A September 14, 1955, editorial in China’s People’s Daily made a contrast between the Japanese in China who were treated well and the Chinese in Japan who had been used for forced labor. The PRC criticized Japan for continued failures to investigate the crimes committed against these Chinese. Tens of thousands of Japanese who wanted to return to Japan from China were allowed and even encouraged to do so. However, Japan had done nothing for Chinese nationals in Japan. In some ways this story emerged because the Japanese government insisted that some forty thousand Japanese were still unaccounted for in China. China responded, stating that Tokyo had not accounted for the forty thousand Chinese it had taken during the war for forced labor.10
Just prior to the People’s Daily article, in August 1955, the first meeting in Hiroshima of the World Conference against Hydrogen and Atomic Bombs convened. Representatives from China and the USSR attended. The moment was ripe for engagement, but it was also contentious. Antileft groups hired an airplane to drop anticommunist leaflets, while left- and right-wing political groups clashed outside the hall.11 August 6, 1955, marked a decade since the end of World War II, but Japan and China had still not signed a peace accord. Chinese representative Liu Ningyi joined the World Conference in Hiroshima that day. He was the deputy head of the All China Federation of Trade Unions. Following the ceremonies and back in Tokyo, Katayama Tetsu, along with Kazami Akira, who was in part responsible for the establishment of the People’s Federation to Protect the Constitution, met with Liu at his downtown hotel. The federation wanted to keep Japan’s pacifist constitution, while the opposition assessed that the postwar constitution was foisted on Japan by the victorious Americans and was therefore unjust. Liu was in Tokyo to attend an informal discussion with federation members at the Prince Hotel in Shinagawa.12 Endō Saburō made the decision to make an appearance as well.
Endō, a former imperial officer, had been at the center of the military intrigue during and after the war.13 Worried that the country in the early postwar was sliding into panic mode, Endō pushed for a meeting with Prime Minister Higashikuni to offer ideas to which the people could cling to for hope. Endō, like many others, was later arrested and poised to be charged with war crimes, ultimately spending about a year in Sugamo Prison. He was released without charge in January 1948.14 Endō was also an example of conversion, perhaps rare among high-ranking military circles, where he shifted from a hawkish stance, to being a pragmatist, to supporting peace initiatives with communist China. Endō had not started out as pro-Chinese, although he certainly developed in that capacity over the years.
Upon meeting Chinese representative Liu, Endō explained that Japan would not interfere in the PRC’s relationship with Taiwan, because that situation was akin to a spat between a husband and wife. Endō said rather bluntly, which Liu enjoyed, “The Taiwan issue is a matter of domestic concern and we will not meddle.” However, Endō added that “if this relation is resolved using military force we cannot just sit back and watch from the sidelines. If military force is used against Taiwan this could turn into WWIII and this might then entail the use of a hydrogen bomb,” which of course everyone wished to avoid.15
Endō suggested that stopping the cycle of retaliation was the way to move forward. Endō said that Liu listened and that he would relay this message to his superiors. Endō thought Liu was just being polite, but not long after, Katayama Testu received a letter from Chinese representative Zhang Xiruo, formally inviting him to the PRC. Katayama, in turn, invited Endō.16 Other sources offer a slightly different background to this story. Isogai Rensuke, who had been an imperial army “China expert,” was supposedly in consideration. In the immediate postwar period, the KMT had put Isogai on trial. He was found guilty as a war criminal and sentenced to life in prison but was eventually repatriated from China to Japan. In October 1954, on his first postwar visit to Japan, Liao Chengzhi unofficially traveled to Isogai’s villa on the coast of Chiba Prefecture.17 Initially, the Chinese invited Isogai to head a mission from Japan composed of former military veterans to China. But when Isogai went to get a passport photo, there were some problems and Isogai was refused travel permission by the Japanese government. In his place, according to some accounts, the Chinese invited Endō Saburō to assist in the mission. Endō detailed in his diary his motivation to see for himself what was really happening in China: “First, I want to see whether the people under communist authority are living in fear. Second, I want to determine if there are harbingers of the regime’s demise. Third, I want to ascertain if they have ambitions of revenge against Japan.”18
In the meantime, Tsuji Masanobu, who was on his way home after a September 1955 visit to the USSR, stopped in Beijing and met with Zhou Enlai. According to some sources, Tsuji was also being courted to lead a group of former imperial veterans to China because he was seen to wield influence in Japan. It is interesting that China ultimately rejected Tsuji as a former veteran to head such a mission but accepted his visits while he was a Diet member a couple of years later in 1957.19
For his part, Endō knew that Kishi Nobusuke, as chief whip of the newly formed ruling party the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), was not at all interested in letting a group of former imperial soldiers go to China. Kishi felt they would just be used for propaganda purposes and be wined and dined, to be shown only one side of new China.20 Endō insisted that former military men understood the delicacy of the situation and surely would not be satisfied with “attending banquets.”
There were excursions to China by different Japanese groups and individuals around this time, so it is possible Kishi suspected ulterior motives. JSP member Nomizo Masaru met with Zhou Enlai on October 3, 1955, and while he supported China’s policies toward Taiwan as a “domestic matter,” he still broached the topic of Japanese war criminals.21 One of the first official group of Japanese parliamentarians, headed by Kanbayashiyama Eikichi, visited China in autumn 1955 and released a joint statement with CCP leader Peng Zhen on October 17. A few days prior, Kanbayashiyama and his group had met with CCP chairman Mao Zedong and Premier Zhou Enlai. After exchanging pleasantries, Kanbayashiyama broached the war criminals question concerning repatriation after their release. He told his Chinese counterparts, “I know this is a difficult question but please consider their families. So I just want to put this suggestion out there and hear your opinions on the matter.” Mao responded: “You cannot talk about this problem in that way. This problem is an issue for the Chinese people; China and Japan, our two countries have still not concluded their state of war, have not restored diplomatic relations, so to talk about this problem is a bit premature. This is not the same matter as the repatriation of overseas Japanese. The war crimes problem is a result of the war but the overseas civilians is not the result of the war.” Zhou Enlai then chimed in and said, “You visited the war criminals, what do you think? We have already dealt with a portion of this problem. If their war crime was light we already released some.” Kanbayashiyama then backtracked a bit after this remonstration, adding that his concern was for the families in Japan. After hearing Zhou’s explanation, he expressed his gratitude and said they would not bring it up again. Zhou pressed a bit, asking, “You visited the war criminals. If there is a specific problem, like some are sick, or if they are not being treated well, or cannot write letters to their families, please tell us.”22
Even with political support from some quarters, the Japanese government’s ambivalent stance toward a renovated relationship with China was due in part to bureaucratic continuity with the prewar period. The continued service of many wartime Japanese bureaucrats and politicians, who had taken up significant postwar political and economic leadership positions, advanced conservative wartime attitudes into the postwar period. Kishi Nobusuke was one such imperial figure who had worked in key wartime government agencies and in Japan’s puppet kingdom of Manchukuo. He was arrested but never indicted as a war criminal. Kishi waxed poetic about Japan’s imperial efforts. Revealing a brashness that reeked of nostalgia, he demonstrated a noted absence of reflection concerning the less than savory aspects of Japan’s imperial era and why the Japanese administration was hesitant to allow military veterans to reorient interpretations of Japan’s “glorious” wartime past.
On the numerous occasions when I made state visits to the various countries of SE Asia, I recalled Manchukuo. At the time, Asia was in the throes of its economic resurgence and this reminded me of how we built the ideal and racially harmonious country of Manchukuo. So many young Japanese filled with idealism crossed the sea to prepare and take a stand against the West in the boundless and plentiful material treasure house of Manchukuo. Afterward, the facilities, infrastructure, technology and manpower they left behind lives on within the Chinese economy. Japan’s destiny in the future is, of course, unchanged from before and remains united with Asia’s economic regeneration. To accomplish this feat the experience and reflection on what was done prior in Manchukuo can serve as a most valuable reference guide.23
Ultimately, after completing all the travel preparations, a small group led by Katayama Tetsu departed on November 6, 1955, from Tokyo and returned a month later. Endō recalled his meeting with CCP general Peng Dehuai, where he learned that the delay in special tribunals to adjudicate Japanese war criminals was due to the CCP desire to wait until the emotions of the Chinese people had softened so that the Chinese judgments against the Japanese would be less harsh. Such a rationale, of course, was not exactly accurate since the Chinese were not of one mind regarding such a policy, but the reasoning probably sounded good to Japanese ears.24
Katayama’s group met Mao and Zhou directly. Endō regaled Mao with a story of how he had been sent to Sugamo Prison as a war criminal.25 While being processed, Endō received two right shoes, not a pair of left and right. The shoes were too big, Endō joked, and his toenails grew in, pushing his feet left. The upshot was that when he walked, he ended up ambulating toward the left, suggesting that politically he was also now leaning left.26 Mao, according to several accounts, enjoyed the tale. After meeting Endō and being entranced with his fresh attitude toward new China, Mao explained that rather than meeting with more Japanese leftists, he hoped to meet more former military men like Endō. Endō returned from his mission to China on December 7, 1955, and spoke to the Japanese press and radio, explaining that Mao and Zhou wanted to meet with former imperial Japanese military officers.27
On March 3, 1956, Inoue Masutarō, director of foreign affairs for the Japan Red Cross Society, held a meeting in Beijing with his Chinese counterparts. The repatriation of Japanese who had remained in China had proceeded smoothly over the previous few years, and now the Japanese wondered about the remaining Japanese war criminals still detained in China, more than a decade after the war had come to a close. Katayama Tetsu had announced the release of war criminals in the Japanese media, so Japanese society was expecting them back, the Japanese visitors explained. Peng Yan, a representative from the China side, responded that he and his team had “no more information than you.” Inoue said, “The question of war criminals should not be an object of political bargain. This question is fundamentally a judicial one. Therefore, the release of war criminals should be granted according to the Chinese Criminal Law. Therefore, even after the opening of diplomatic relations, you need not release them in case your criminal law requires so.” Peng agreed that China would not make Japanese war criminals part of any political bargain. The Japanese contingent received over 1,224 letters from the war criminals to give to their families, and letters from the Japan side were handed to the Chinese to be forwarded to the Japanese war criminals.28
Esler Denning, British ambassador in Tokyo, informed London on April 13, 1956, about the growth of the recently established Japan-China Cultural Association. Denning wrote that it grew from the November 1955 visit of the People’s Federation to Protect the Constitution to China, led by Katayama Tetsu, and the December 1955 Guo Moruo visit to Japan. Regardless of this progress, Chief Cabinet Secretary Nemoto Ryūtarō had already announced on March 27 to push forward measures to restrict what Nemoto called “useless visits of Japanese to China.” The Japanese government had taken notice that not everyone who traveled to China, which they estimated at eight hundred, had the correct travel documents, so it was obvious that some passed through other countries. MOFA officials wanted to investigate whether there was a way to design an alternate passport that would make these visits more difficult. This British dispatch voiced that the Chinese had invited a group of thirty former Japanese officers, and such a move was of interest. According to the British assessment, Japan’s MOFA seemed to think former soldiers would be level-headed and not easily duped by Chinese propaganda to provide an overly positive assessment. The analysis postulated that before the war, many of the young officers of the Japanese army were communist, so perhaps the CCP had this in mind.29
After Endō returned to Japan, the next step was to wait for the formal invite from Zhang Xiruo and then form a group of former military officers to visit China. Two hundred former imperial soldiers applied for the mission. Endō and his team chose eighty, then they pared that down to a list of thirty-four. But the Japanese government in 1956 was not so accommodating. Endō assessed that the leaders were worried about upsetting the United States. It is possible that Japanese politicians and Foreign Minister Shigemitsu Mamoru were also anxious about left-leaning former soldiers or those who had been incarcerated by the CCP or USSR and were pro-communist, or supposedly spies. Endō felt his biggest obstacle was Tsuji Masanobu, who by this point was a mainstay within the LDP and a politician with political might. As we now know, Tsuji had been pursuing his own path to lead a mission to China.
From the end of 1955 through 1956, Mao Zedong, but moreover Premier Zhou Enlai, made numerous overtures to the Japanese for improved relations, if not more frequent high-level meetings. In May 1956, when Zhou met a Japanese peace delegation, he told them that “last year we met with about 800–900 Japanese friends who visited China.”30 A May 11, 1956, Chinese internal report for high-ranking officials detailed the still-unresolved issue of Japanese war criminals incarcerated in Taiyuan, Shanxi Province. At stake was their psychological condition. The report stated that before the indictments had been opened, Japanese in Taiyuan under detention had some “premonition” about how trials might proceed in the near future. The staff had been talking a lot with Jōno Hiroshi and eleven others. Jōno and the other prisoners appeared to want to admit their crimes, the report suggested, but “mentally their tendency toward apprehension and to psychologically struggle remained deep.” Some evenings, officials reported, the prisoners were so agitated they could not sleep. The Japanese detainees feared the outcome of the trial, according to the report, and never being able to return to Japan.31
On June 6, 1956, Endō met with Kishi to plead his case. Eventually a consensus was reached, and on August 12, 1956, Endō officially left for China with his team of Japanese veterans. They had provisioned to go as a group of thirty-five, but Japanese officials said that number was too high and so only fifteen former officers departed.32 The group traveled to Changchun, Anshan, Shenyang, and eventually made it to Fushun Prison just after the war crimes trials had been concluded. Liao Chengzhi suggested that if Mao met with visiting former soldiers, the effort would have a lasting impact.33 Mao did just that, by greeting each of the former Japanese officers and shaking their hands. Mao told them how the Chinese, in part thanks to the officers, have rallied together. Mao made sure to mention that China respected the Japanese emperor system, and at one point he asked Endō to pass on his respects to the emperor.34
The impact of Endō’s former Japanese military officer mission was not lost on other foreign embassies keeping track of what was happening in China and on potential rapprochement between China and Japan. UK foreign office officials believed that China had invited former imperial Japanese officers in a bid for “impressing people who are not automatically sympathetic to the regime.” The British assessment focused on how Zhou Enlai invited Endō as an explicit strategy to avoid having only left-wing ideologues observe new China.35 After visiting the PRC and then returning in 1956, Endō subsequently pulled together many former vets and took them on several more missions to China in a bid to restore relations from 1956 to 1972.36 The director of the Taiyuan War Criminals Management Center, Wang Zhendong, wrote about Endō’s visits and the impact of discussions with his imprisoned former detainees. Initially, Endō only listened to them recount their war crimes, but upon subsequent visits he was moved to talk about his own participation in Japan’s war of aggression.37
At the end of February 1957, Tsuji Masanobu was once again in a meeting with Zhou Enlai in Beijing. A few days prior on February 25, Prime Minister Katayama Tetsu had resigned due to a long-term illness, but Tsuji had already departed on a two-month, twelve-nation tour including Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt, Josip Tito’s Yugoslavia, and elsewhere. The goal was to convince potential Allied nations that Japan was not merely a client state of the United States and that Japan wanted to create partnerships with African and Asian nations. In late April 1957, just after Kishi Nobusuke’s cabinet took over, JSP member Asanuma Inejirō produced a joint communiqué with Zhang Xiruo, who by this point had become the chair of the Chinese People’s Foreign Affairs Study Association. The announcement called for advancing the friendship of the two countries and pushing toward diplomatic relations. The communiqué also called for the abolishment of the production, use, and holding of nuclear weapons.38
A confidential British embassy dispatch from China on May 9, 1957, drew attention to the growing number of visiting Japanese delegations, which the embassy signaled as a portent that a normalization of political relations was in the air sooner than previously suspected. Movements of the Japanese delegations were widely reported in the Chinese press, the embassy noted, so much so that space devoted to noncommunist entities was unusual. A JSP visit with Asanuma Inejirō was underlined as important because the socialists openly said that they supported China, the dispatch explained.39
However, even after all these Chinese tactical moves, by 1957 the Japanese were reevaluating the Chinese war crimes trials and repatriating prisoners. They were not impressed and seemed to have arrived at the opposite conclusion that the CCP had been careful in its treatment of the incarcerated Japanese.40
Shifting Landscape of Memory in Japan
As the 1950s melted into the 1960s, Japan’s attitudes at the higher altitudes of governance began to lean more conservative. We can see this already in the return to power of wartime elites and their retrograde attitudes. Prime Minister Kishi Nobusuke’s comments in Japan’s parliament concerning responsibility over forced Chinese labor in April 1958 are indicative of this conservative swing. This was around the time that Chinese laborer Liu Lianren was found in the mountains of Hokkaido, after hiding there for thirteen years following the end of World War II. In the Diet, JSP politician Tanaka Toshio asked the prime minister about the illegality of the cabinet decision to allow forced labor when Kishi had been in the wartime cabinet. Tanaka stated that “the fact is obvious that these people did not enter the country [Japan] of their own free will,” and Tanaka wanted to know how the government assessed this history. Kishi responded bluntly, mostly skirting the issue. “The government does not have any materials that would shed light on the situation at the time. There is, in truth, no way for us to confirm what occurred.” He added, “However, the real problem is we have not been able to ascertain if those people were brought by force, or if they were those who came on their own having accepted [a contract]. Whether the government has responsibility is something at this point in time, I believe, that has not yet been made clear.”41
Throughout the 1960s and the era of the Vietnam War, Japan’s postwar youth grew angrier toward their parents’ generation. This division within Japanese society continued to widen, as seen through the anti-security-pact riots that led to months of unrest on the streets of most major Japanese cities. For more than a year, from the spring of 1959 to the summer of 1960, about thirty million Japanese took part in protests. The US occupation had attempted to remake Japan in its own vision, but after the 1952 resumption of Japan’s sovereignty, the Japanese were keen to redo what many felt had merely been imposed from above.42 Returning to the stage of power in 1957, Prime Minister Kishi Nobusuke would railroad through the Diet, during that fateful summer of 1960, a new security alliance with the United States. The terms of the agreement were actually an improvement over what Japan had previously ratified, but the manner in which Kishi manipulated the situation galvanized public anger because it stank of wartime government backhandedness and ignored democratic processes.
Many more traditionally minded Japanese politicians and bureaucrats began to devise a strategic move away from apology toward a more concrete affirmation of the imperial past. To do this required a reanalysis of the Tokyo Trial and the lesser BC class war crimes tribunals. Tucked away in the deep recesses of the national archives in Tokyo is evidence of such a plan. Toyota Kumao, who had previously assisted imperial naval officers to avoid war crimes prosecution in the immediate aftermath of the war, drafted a set of proposals on March 19, 1964, concerning the establishment of a study group to investigate the Tokyo Trial. It is clear that Toyota aimed to use the findings as part of what he deemed necessary for “future countermeasures” in international and domestic policies. The proposal had many iterations, and one draft from April 23 details how the study group would examine all the charges of the Tokyo Trial: Was it aggressive warfare or a form of defense? Was the trial the misapplication of ex post facto law? Where did the role of individual responsibility lie on the axis of international law? What about the emperor’s responsibility? Toyota’s proposal strove to reconsider the trial verdicts in light of these issues. More drafts were produced, and budgets were outlined. Much of this work seemed to be at the behest of the Ministry of Justice.43 The plan, which eventually was implemented, involved both legal scholars and a variety of economic and media talent, including a few individuals from the Ministry of Justice. The matters the group would analyze were numerous, so a large budget of approximately 100 million yen (about US$1 million) was set aside to be used over what was envisioned as a two- to three-year schedule. The group set its sights on examining the Tokyo Trial, BC class war crimes trials, and the Nuremberg trials as well.
The study group’s goal, in part, appeared to question the validity and findings of the war crimes trials, and the intention was less to serve as an open commission to examine the larger legal and political concerns. A memo in the files from April 25 detailed that the major goals of the group would be to investigate (1) jurisdictional rights, (2) ex post facto law, (3) the crime of conspiracy, (4) questioning if invasive war was a crime, and (5) the issue of individual responsibility in international legal trials.
Participants included, among others, professor of law Ichimata Masao, professor of politics Tsunoda Jun, and lawyer Sakano Junkichi, along with the administrative assistance of two individuals from the Ministry of Justice, Toyota Kumao and Inoue Tadao. Ichimata’s section would lead the international law discussions, and diplomatic history would be covered under Tsunoda’s group. The actual management of the war crimes trials would be scrutinized by Sakano’s crew. Ichimata was a professor of law at Waseda University, and Tsunoda had graduated from Tokyo’s First Higher School and had been part of the editorial team that put together the series Japan’s Road to the Pacific War.44 Sakano had been active as a defense lawyer at the Tokyo Trial for Class A war criminal Army General Itagaki Seishirō. Sakano had also served as a witness for the prosecution in the BC class trials of Lieutenant General Okada Tasuku, but his testimony served to support the defendant in a surprising discussion of the legal issues at stake.45
The study group formally began in June 1964, the year that Japan hosted the Olympics. Prime Minister Ikeda Hayato had died later that year, and following on Kishi Nobusuke, his predecessor, Ikeda had focused on increasing Japan’s economic growth.46 The study meeting took place with the assistance and guidance of the Ministry of Justice, in part and perhaps because Kaya Okinori was minister of justice from 1963 to 1964. Tellingly, when Kaya had been paroled from prison in 1955, a large “gathering to offer solace and encouragement” was held in his honor at the expensive Chinzansō Hotel in Mejiro, Tokyo. From 1962 to 1977, Kaya headed up the politically influential Japan Association of War Bereaved Families (Izokukai), and under his leadership the group added “ ‘honoring the glorious war dead’ (eirei no kenshō) to their traditional slogans of world peace, social welfare, and the prevention of war.”47 The schedule of all the meetings, from the preparatory meeting on June 15, 1964, to the mostly bimonthly meetings, extended to more than one hundred gatherings. The last meeting, the 107th, was held on March 24, 1969. Normally, four intellectuals would assemble for discussions, with Toyota and Inoue in attendance most frequently as observers. The initial meetings were held at Tokyo’s Lawyer’s Association Hall (Hōsō kaikan).
A handwritten memo on Ministry of Justice stationery offered insight into why so many found it necessary to form this study group. The pursuit of Japanese for war crimes was unprecedented in the history of civilization. And thus there might be many important issues the Japanese could glean from examining the trials on the level of criminal law and international law, the memo disclosed. The group claimed that it hoped to probe international law through the ideas about self-defense and how evidence was presented at the Tokyo Trial. And they planned to debate the idea of self-defense while looking at the issues from a lawyer’s point of view. The processes of the trial as well as its torpid pace were key points for investigation. In addition, the study group conducted interviews with notables such as Japanese and American lawyers who were involved. Finally, they aimed to gauge the influence of Nuremberg on the Tokyo Trial.
Regardless of the important legal questions that the study group focused on, they assiduously avoided one major historical topic: Why did the Allies believe they had to implement special trials to pursue justice against Japanese war criminals? In short, without looking into the pervasive and excessive brutality of Japanese imperial military and political rule, such trials would not have been necessary. Starving POWs and rampant abuse of prisoners and Chinese were so commonplace that they were a standard feature of Japanese imperial expansion. Focusing exclusively on legal issues, to the exclusion of moral questions and issues of the rule of law within the empire, and avoiding how the Japanese managed the empire meant that the Tokyo Trial study group was looking at only half the puzzle. They concentrated on Allied legal responsibility toward those whom the study group assessed were “victims” of the war crimes trials, namely the Japanese.
As the study group moved into its third year, it added the examination of the Pal dissenting judgment in the Tokyo War Crimes Trial. A long memo from June 9, 1966, discussed the necessity for research into BC class trials as well. In the end, the study group published a book about this and other related projects.48 Ichimata stated that the group would not make any profit from the book, but “it is vexing that this mistaken history is what is now so prevalent.” He added, “I also want to put this into print for the young people who do not know history.”49 This project in the 1960s was a trend that has never lapsed.50
However, the conservative sway in Japan did not always run in a straight line through all of society. Social discontent continued to find release through the younger generations, percolating into a massive social volcano when students at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto defaced the campus’s archetypal war memorial statue. The Listen to the Voices of the Sea statue represented the suffering of wartime drafted students.51 The statue had emerged from a social movement, which in turn had been galvanized by a 1949 book of the same title.52 Nothing can surpass the intense emotional depths that this statue embodied for many concerning sacrifices made in the name of the war.53 The book became a movie, which was a box-office hit in Japan the following year. However, postwar students witnessing the US-led war in Vietnam during the 1960s were different. They believed those who had previously erected the statue failed to do anything of merit to stop Japan’s war and were thus blameworthy. In the eyes of the 1960s generation, the Voices of the Sea statue had become the false prophet for pushing peace and needed to be toppled. In the same manner that political debates about the role and meaning of statues in the United Kingdom and the United States during the later 2010s divided generations who ascribe significance to public art based on their own historical experience, Japan was no different. An editorial in the Asahi Newspaper from May 21, 1969, asked if the students understood the actual meaning of the statue as antiwar and that it had been funded by the proceeds of sales of books edited from collections of letters that student draftees had written during World War II. But the editorial then explained that blame should not be placed solely at the feet of the students for their lack of compassion. After all, the previous generation bore responsibility for not offering a full explanation of the war. The students accused the previous generation: “Why didn’t you flee the battlefield, why didn’t you drop your guns and leave? If you didn’t do this then you were nothing more than a fascist.” These deep-seated emotions fed the anti-US hegemony, anti–Vietnam War movement in Japan. The editorial concluded by saying that it was not just an imperial war of aggression that required examination—Japan needed to delve into the state and the terror of authority to explain its past. Obviously, Japanese have failed to teach these lessons to the next generation, the editorial wrote, which is why Japan found itself at this current impasse.54
“White Terror” in Taiwan
Japan was not the only country to experience conservative governments that were more interested in reestablishing order than they were in rooting out the origins of their own war crimes. Owing to a disparity in geopolitical circumstances, Japan’s postwar evolution differs greatly from Germany’s (West Germany until 1990). In Europe, Germany was confronted on the west by France, which had reintegrated its democratic government, and the United Kingdom. There was pressure in the region for Germany to conform. Until the 1990s, to the east, West Germany faced its rival, East Germany, whose leaders took delight in propagating how little West Germany had acknowledged its Nazi past and how many former war criminals remained in government. Not only did Japan not face repeated pressure or inquiries after the initial postwar years, but its regional neighbors were constrained under their own punitive and tight political conditions. So, rectifying Japan’s past was one of the last thing on their minds. In addition, because Japan had closely allied with the United States in the early stages of the Cold War, US pressure to discuss war crimes dissolved rather abruptly as well.
This quick turnaround can also be seen with the example of the ROC, more commonly known as Taiwan, or Formosa by many Westerners until the 1990s. Taiwan is currently more interested with righting the wrongs of a half century of domestic martial law and coming to terms with those excesses, rather than parsing over Japanese atrocities that took place either on Taiwan or on the mainland when the KMT was in power prior to 1945. That social pressure, combined with years of Chinese Nationalist efforts to curb public discussion of these issues, makes for a very different core public opinion toward the Japanese imperial era.
Taiwanese memory of Japanese imperial history cuts against any transnational veneer because of this complexity. Moreover, today’s Taiwanese seem less concerned about Japan’s excesses than they do about the much longer reign of difficulty they lived under with KMT rule from 1949 until the later 1980s. This era is known as the age of “white terror” (baise kongbu in Chinese), which should be thought of as the continual exertion of state violence. The KMT declared martial law on May 20, 1949, and this state of enforced security persisted until July 14, 1987. During this era of extrajudicial abuses, which were more extreme in the early 1950s, the KMT defined all who opposed any KMT political goals as “subversive” and thus a traitor to the ROC. Ironically, this was fairly similar to the sort of counterrevolutionary panic the CCP was trying to contain along the same lines at a similar moment.55 There is no one definitive accounting of those killed, incarcerated, or abused during the long decades of the white terror in Taiwan. Estimates suggest there were “some 3,000 to 4,000 executions,” of “roughly 140,000 political trials conducted by ROC martial-law courts (including some 30,000 retrospectively deemed ‘improper’).”56 Not all of these trials took place in the early years, and many stretched to the very end of KMT military rule on the island.
One can get a feeling of the sort of suppression the Taiwanese public faced from an early postwar interview with KMT general Sun Li-jen. He was disappointed with the continued internecine political spats within the military elite in Taiwan, and in 1955 he was put under house arrest for thirty years under the false suspicion of having tried to foment a rebellion. Sun heaped scorn on the Chiang Kai-shek regime.57 Things did not improve, even after a decade and growing US support of what the United States, with no irony, called “free China.” In 1961, famed legal scholar of China Jerome Cohen recounted that one lawyer in Taiwan told him, “Judges were commonly believed to be so corrupt that lawyers joked that ‘honest’ judges only kept the bribe given by the winning party.”58
By the 1960s many Taiwanese had grown interested in Formosan self-determination. This was due, in part, to the KMT political disenfranchisement of native Taiwanese. The enormous budgets the KMT spent on its military and youth leagues were to Peng Ming-min reminiscent of Hitler youth organizations. With the arrival of the KMT, Taiwan had ossified—labor unions were illegal, there was no opposition party, and representatives in the national legislature remained frozen in time from 1947 with no new elections. In fact, the national congress would not reflect reality until decades later. Peng and his supporters produced a manifesto that contested this standoff and drew attention to these issues. He was arrested in 1964 and court-martialed. Sentenced to eight years, he was then freed by Chiang Kai-shek’s decree. The news media in Taiwan, controlled by the government, broadcast that Peng had confessed but was released due to the generalissimo’s largesse. However, Peng was far from truly free and remained under constant surveillance. He decided to escape the rising pressure and violence. Without telling his family, he fled to Sweden, and in 1970 he traveled to the United States to seek asylum.
Regardless of the government pressure to tamp down popular discontent, along with control of the media and the courts, discussions of the February 28 Incident were never far from the surface, be it on the government or civilian side. It was still such a divisive political issue in the early 1980s that KMT authorities crafted a new policy in 1983, labeled as the “clearing away the dust plan” (fuchen zhuanan). The aim was to keep the incident from being further openly debated, and the government suggested that anyone who did bring it up was by nature a pro-independence Taiwanese political agent. To stifle such arguments, a group went around and collected an enormous number of documents related to the incident, compiled oral histories, and collated police reports in a move to establish the definitive account. The materials were published in a twenty-nine-volume series as part of the KMT plan to start to direct the discussion and no longer let it be directed by Taiwan independence supporters or other groups.59 In 1986, an extension of the plan managed to publish a book in the United States, Brushing Away Dust from the Mirror of History. The book was a crusade by the KMT intelligence agencies to separate the Taiwan independence movement from “the truth” of what had happened in 1947 and to render it mute as a tool to criticize KMT abuses.60 The book painted the Taiwanese as innocent dupes of the communists, described the KMT’s handling of the situation as “benevolent and accommodating,” and tried to underline incidents of Taiwanese assisting mainlanders as demonstrative of “brotherly love.”61 Interestingly, within a few years after this and only two years after martial law was lifted, Taiwanese society was rocked into a new discussion sparked by a feature film: Hou Hsiao-hsian’s cinematic opus, City of Sadness. The film portrays the legacies of the colonial era, the aftermath of the February 28 Incident, and the ensuing era of the white terror. His efforts visually depict “what is ultimately beyond words—the experience of cultural suppression, dislocation and disconnection, and the weight of historical rupture, violence, and pain.”62 Because of the impact of this film, as well as a variety of other domestic and international elements, within a decade Taiwan was holding national elections and was on the path toward instituting full democracy.
Owing to such political changes over the last few years, Taiwan had invested national finances toward compensation for transitional justice. But its critics emphasize that the focus on money has denied any substantive investigation of the legal and political systems within which these abuses flourished. Two Taiwanese academic detractors summarize the situation as one where “without experiencing social processes like public hearings held by a truth commission or wide dissemination of the results of research, the public’s knowledge of the dark past is simplified and fragmented. Furthermore, with respect to dealing with the perpetrators, no institution has ever been initiated. This illustrates Taiwan’s situation as a case of transition without justice.’ ”63
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