Japanese crimes, Chinese justice

Men to Devils, Devils to Men: Japanese War Crimes and Chinese Justice is the latest book by Barak Kushner, who teaches East Asian history at Cambridge. It deals with the trials of Japanese war criminals held in China from 1946 to 1949, little known in the West and almost as little in Asia, where they have been overshadowed by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (the “Tokyo Trial”) and the Chinese Civil War (1946-1949).

The slow acceptance of international law and the trials BC »

The Tokyo Trial, organized by the Allies—in practice, mainly the Americans—targeted primarily Japanese officials accused of “crimes against peace” (or Class A), that is, of having fomented a war of aggression. This category was limited by definition to a handful of decision-makers: 28 defendants, of whom Tōjō Hideki remained the most famous, were tried in Tokyo, most of them for Class A crimes. Far more numerous, because they were subordinate, were Class B (war crimes) and C (crimes against humanity) criminals. This last category had been created for the Nuremberg Tribunal, since existing law contained no provisions for judging Nazi genocidal practices. Since the Japanese military had not undertaken any extermination strictly speakingit is under the general heading ” BC ” that 5700 of them were judged.

The publicity surrounding the Class A felony trials relegated the class trials from the outset. BC in the background of the collective consciousness. This is regrettable, because of the seriousness of the facts that were judged there but also of the actors involved. Indeed, if the “crimes against peace” were only judged in Tokyo, trials BC were organized in forty-nine places in Asia by the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Australia and France, but also two Asian countries, the Philippines and China. China, that is to say the Guomindang regime, which put 883 Japanese on trial, found 355 guilty and executed 149.

The trials BC can be considered the first effective globalization of the prosecution of war criminals – much more so than the Tokyo Trial, where the Chinese played a marginal role. The Far East Military Tribunal, international on paper, was in reality under the unchallenged domination of the United States. Apart from the sentences handed down to those responsible for the Japanese war, presented (wrongly) as a plan for world conquest, disproportionate attention was paid to the crimes committed against Western prisoners of war. Only two perpetrators were put to death for the atrocities of the Imperial Army in China, which were on a much larger scale: Doihara Kenji for his responsibilities in Northern China and Matsui Iwane for his role in the Nanking Massacre (winter 1937-1938). The Tokyo Trial thus contributed to a global memory of the conflict in the East centered on the “Pacific War” (1941-1945), inaugurating a long Western – and to a certain extent Japanese – forgetting of the Chinese theater. Barak Kushner’s work is part of a global historiographical renewal which aims to restore its centrality.

The second reason why Tokyo was a missed opportunity for China was the poor performance of its representatives. The idea of ​​prosecuting Axis leaders, first proposed by the Polish and Czech governments in exile in London in 1943, immediately interested Chiang Kai-shek’s government in Chongqing. But the latter, believing it to be a mere propaganda operation, did not prepare its evidence with the necessary rigor. The Chinese jurists therefore presented Tokyo with a poorly supported indictment that destroyed their credibility. Their lack of preparation was also partly due to the distrust surrounding international law in China, which had long been used by the imperialist powers to limit the country’s sovereignty.

For the Republic of China, finally fully sovereign, the trials BC were therefore a catch-up session, even if it had to make do with the criminals that the Americans had been kind enough to leave it. It would be wrong, knowing that the Guomindang was doomed in the short term, to consider the enterprise as trivial. The regime’s flaws were incontestable, but its defeat was far from a foregone conclusion in 1946. Furthermore, and above all, the trials of war criminals that it organized were less important for their outcome than for their political symbolism. The modernization of the law – its alignment with the standards promoted, if not respected, by the Western powers – was a major issue for the Chinese nationalists, if only because it conditioned the abolition of the legal privileges wrested by the imperialist powers. The participation of the Guomindang in the trials BC This was therefore an effort to upgrade itself in relation to the “civilized nations”. China’s membership in this closed circle, theoretically accepted by the Allies – its permanent seat on the Security Council of theUN testified to this – was in fact contested in Western ruling circles. Nanking had to prove itself.

Quest for legitimacy and compromise of the Guomindang

Trying Japanese war criminals also allowed the regime to shore up its domestic legitimacy. In a China in 1946, mired in civil war and economic chaos, the victory of 1945, although due to the American ally, was the Guomindang’s main claim to fame. The fight against the communists, however, forced Chiang Kai-shek to compromise. Of the million Japanese soldiers on Chinese soil in August 1945, a certain number were immediately re-employed to fight the Communist Party, providing the latter with superb propaganda material.

Among other objectives, the trials BC were supposed to dispel these suspicions of collusion. The Chinese military tribunals therefore had to deal with, on the one hand, a strong popular desire for revenge and the need to appear intransigent and, on the other hand, the obligation to respect the forms so as not to fall on the international scene and alienate the American ally. The necessities of the civil war sometimes led to flagrant inconsistencies. The Americans having reserved Matsui Iwane for Tokyo, General Tani Hisao was tried and executed by the Chinese for his responsibility in the Nanking massacre. But Okamura Yasuji, commander-in-chief of the Japanese forces in China since 1944 and architect of a murderous counter-insurgency in the north of the country, was declared innocent at the insistence of the political power for having shown himself to be cooperative in the fight against the communists. He was even re-employed as a military advisor by the nationalists who had taken refuge in Taiwan after 1949. In 1952, after the signing of a peace treaty between Taiwan and Tokyo, the last Japanese prisoners held by the Republic of China were released.

The question of Taiwan, to which Barak Kushner devotes a chapter, illustrates particularly well the way in which the dismantling of the Japanese Empire precipitated the redefinition of national affiliations. The island had been a colony of Tokyo from 1895 to 1945. It was initially considered that the Formosan “collaborators” of some importance would be tried as traitors, as were some thirty thousand Chinese. The authorities gave up on this at the request of Taiwanese notables close to the Guomindang: 200,000 of their compatriots had certainly served in the Japanese army, but as subjects of the Emperor; they could therefore not be accused of having betrayed their “nation”. It was, however, possible to try them as war criminals: out of 883 Japanese convicted of class crimes BC In China, 173 were Formosan. And while the reclassification of “traitors” as “war criminals” greatly limited the number of executions (only 26 condemned were put to death), it came at the cost of an embarrassing reminder of Taiwan’s Japanese past, which confirmed the Chinese administration’s distrust of the islanders.

The strategy of the communists

The author concludes his book with a study of the trials of Japanese war criminals organized by the communists after 1949. Expeditious trials were held in the liberated zones at the end of the war. After the communists came to power, however, the prosecution of war crimes became a competitive arena between the new regime and its adversaries in Taiwan.

The Communists organized their trials less for the benefit of the Chinese population—which had been brought into line and absorbed by revolutionary changes—than for that of foreigners. Beijing was particularly keen to distance Japan from its American patron. The People’s Republic of China held about a thousand Japanese prisoners of war, most of them graciously provided by Stalin. Most were released without trial after a few years, during which they were well treated and underwent intensive anti-militarist and socialist reeducation. 45 were tried in 1956, with ostentatious and politically very effective magnanimity. All The defendants confessed and expressed repentance, something very few had done during trials organized by the Nationalist government. None were executed, several were released immediately, and the last were released from prison in 1964, eleven years before the last political prisoners of the Guomindang. Upon their return home, they often became fervent supporters of Sino-Japanese reconciliation, although suspicions of “brainwashing” sometimes made them unwelcome by their compatriots.

Japanese revisionism in the crosshairs

Barak Kushner’s book gives pride of place to Japanese, Chinese and Taiwanese sources and historiographies. It also engages in dialogue with American and European historiography on the Second World War, its end and the dismantling of empires that it brought about. This work therefore offers rich possibilities for comparison, especially since it is deliberately accessible to non-specialists.

The book can be judged to have the flaws of its qualities. The multiplicity of contexts and points of view imposes on the author back-and-forths and clarifications that sometimes interfere with the fluidity of the narrative. The choral project of the book also leads to a collateral effect that is due to the current stakes of the subject. These add to the interest of the book: the war crimes of imperial Japan are at the center of lively memorial quarrels between Beijing and Tokyo. Barak Kushner intervenes in this face-off from the outside, but not without bringing his own concerns, which are – to simplify – those of a progressive American intellectual specializing in Japan.

In this respect, and although the book deals with Chinese trials, its main target is Japanese revisionism, and the Japanese constitute (along with Westerners) the book’s tacit recipients. Going through the trials held in China allows the author to get away from the Japanese-American polemics on the Tokyo trial, which the apologists of imperial Japan have every right to denounce as an example of victors’ justice. The detour through China, the victim par excellence of Japanese aggression, is an opportunity for Barak Kushner to insistently recall the reality of the crimes committed – which no Western reader would dream of denying – and the reluctance of the Japanese public to admit them, to which an entire chapter is devoted. The Chinese political distortions (particularly communist) of the trials and their memory are treated with more indulgence, for fear of giving grist to the Japanese far right.

These reservations do not detract from the qualities of this erudite and ambitious book, but also readable and extremely current. Professions of faith on the need for a historiography of Asia that fully takes into account the imperial fact and the transnational scale are now commonplace. Convincing achievements are rarer. Men to Devils, Devils to Men is a particularly successful example.