Men to Devils, Devils to Men: Japanese War Crimes and Chinese Justice Hardcover – January 5, 2015
by Barak Kushner (Author)
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The Japanese Army committed numerous atrocities during its pitiless campaigns in China from 1931 to 1945. When the Chinese emerged victorious with the Allies at the end of World War II, many seemed ready to exact retribution for these crimes. Rather than resort to violence, however, they chose to deal with their former enemy through legal and diplomatic means. Focusing on the trials of, and policies toward, Japanese war criminals in the postwar period, Men to Devils, Devils to Men analyzes the complex political maneuvering between China and Japan that shaped East Asian realpolitik during the Cold War.
Barak Kushner examines how factions of Nationalists and Communists within China structured the war crimes trials in ways meant to strengthen their competing claims to political rule. On the international stage, both China and Japan propagandized the tribunals, promoting or blocking them for their own advantage. Both nations vied to prove their justness to the world: competing groups in China by emphasizing their magnanimous policy toward the Japanese; Japan by openly cooperating with postwar democratization initiatives. At home, however, Japan allowed the legitimacy of the war crimes trials to be questioned in intense debates that became a formidable force in postwar Japanese politics.
In uncovering the different ways the pursuit of justice for Japanese war crimes influenced Sino-Japanese relations in the postwar years, Men to Devils, Devils to Men reveals a Cold War dynamic that still roils East Asian relations today.
Barak Kushner examines how factions of Nationalists and Communists within China structured the war crimes trials in ways meant to strengthen their competing claims to political rule. On the international stage, both China and Japan propagandized the tribunals, promoting or blocking them for their own advantage. Both nations vied to prove their justness to the world: competing groups in China by emphasizing their magnanimous policy toward the Japanese; Japan by openly cooperating with postwar democratization initiatives. At home, however, Japan allowed the legitimacy of the war crimes trials to be questioned in intense debates that became a formidable force in postwar Japanese politics.
In uncovering the different ways the pursuit of justice for Japanese war crimes influenced Sino-Japanese relations in the postwar years, Men to Devils, Devils to Men reveals a Cold War dynamic that still roils East Asian relations today.
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Introduction
1. Defeat in Denial: The Regional Impact of Japan’s Surrender
2. Devil in the Details: Chinese Policies on Japan’s War Crimes
3. Flexible Imperial Identity: Administering Postwar Legal Guilt
4. Chinese Nationalist Justice: The KMT Trials
5. Taiwan: Political Expediency and Japanese Imperial Assistance
6. An Unsatisfying Peace: Shifting Attitudes on War Crimes
7. Socialist Magnanimity: The CCP Trials
Conclusion
Notes
Glossary
Acknowledgments
Index
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* Illustrations
Map: BC trials in Asia
Asahi newspaper article about POWs
An entry ticket to the Sakai trial, 1946
The execution of Tani Hisao
Life photographs of Japanese war criminals executed by the KMT in China
A Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs map showing foreign embassies in Tokyo
“Love statue” in front of Tokyo Station
Map of route taken from USSR to China by Japanese prisoners
Pu Yi testifying at the Shenyang trial
Chinese propaganda leaflet, “Together China and the USSR are strong”
“Chinese people should learn from the Jews”
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“A fascinating and reliable account of the ending of the long war between China and Japan in 1945, with particular emphasis on how the Chinese dealt with Japanese war criminals―and how the Japanese failed to come to terms with their own war crimes. As Kushner shows, Chinese authorities were eager to show themselves as knowledgeable about international law rather than seeking revenge, which often resulted in their hesitation to conduct lengthy trials of a large number of Japanese, who on their part had little awareness of their war crimes, even viewing themselves as having been ‘victims’ of circumstances. This book is must reading for anyone interested in understanding the still tortuous relationship between the two countries.”
―Akira Iriye, editor of Global Interdependence: The World after 1945
“Men to Devils, Devils to Men breaks through national boundaries to show how war crimes and the question of war guilt reshaped East Asia after the Second World War. It is a major book on an important and timely topic, and will spark serious debate about the Cold War, law in Asia, and the end of empire.”
―Rana Mitter, author of Forgotten Ally: China’s World War II, 1937–1945
“Using newly available sources from both China and Japan, Kushner examines the complex motives that shaped the Chinese trials.”
―Foreign Affairs
“Men to Devils is formidable in scope and convincing in its conclusions regarding the postwar pursuit of justice. In lucid, engaging prose, Kushner presents the trials and their ramifications as a vital component in sculpting political mindsets in Japan, China and Taiwan. For anyone interested in the political maneuvering between the power brokers in postwar East Asia and how it affected contemporary Sino-Japanese relations, this book is a valuable resource.”
―James Baron, Taipei Times
“Kushner has written a superb book, underpinned by rich research in Chinese and Japanese, that will force historians seriously to reassess the story of Cold War Asia. At a time when relations between China, Japan and Taiwan continue to be tense, Kushner’s book is a timely reminder that relations in the region have always been in a state of flux.”
―Rana Mitter, History Today
About the Author
Barak Kushner is University Senior Lecturer in Modern Japanese History at the University of Cambridge.
Product details
Publisher : Harvard University Press (January 5, 2015)
Language : English
Hardcover : 416 pages
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Guillemin on Kushner, 'Men to Devils, Devils to Men: Japanese War Crimes and Chinese Justice'
Author:
Barak Kushner
Reviewer:
Jeanne Guillemin
Barak Kushner. Men to Devils, Devils to Men: Japanese War Crimes and Chinese Justice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015. 416 pp. $45.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-674-72891-2.
Reviewed by Jeanne Guillemin (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Published on H-Diplo (December, 2015) Commissioned by Seth Offenbach
The plot of Dorothy Sayers’s 1935 mystery Gaudy Night turns on the suicide of a literary historian whose magnum opus was destroyed by the discovery of a single document that refuted his entire thesis. Every historian lives in some dread of the next archival discovery that could consign years of work to the dustbin. None perhaps are more vulnerable than those who study China, an ancient civilization and vast nation, with a modern history disrupted by colonialism and civil war and then wrapped in government secrecy. After the 1949 creation of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Westerners with an academic interest were often reduced to decoding propaganda, tracking leadership turnover, or hoping that visiting Chinese colleagues would speak in confidence, without incriminating the speaker or the listener. Since the 1990s, with the PRC government more open, access to information has improved and, with the end of martial law in Taiwan in 1987, researchers have better access there as well. Young Asian and Western scholars are greatly enriching our understanding of China, not as a nation apart but in its regional and world relationships. Their transnational frameworks for analysis and perhaps their factual discoveries may unsettle their professors.
Barak Kushner, University Senior Lecturer in Modern Japanese History at Cambridge University, is part of the new, linguistically prepared generation enjoying this liberal phase. In his new book, Men to Devils, Devils to Men, he shows exceptional acumen in analyzing the difficult period just after World War II when China, victoriously allied with the West, sought justice for war crimes committed by the leaders of defeated Japan. The author has mined invaluable postwar sources in the original Chinese and Japanese and added to them references to the writings of contemporary Asian commentators, also untranslated and difficult for the ordinary reader to check—although nearly everything these days can be found on the Internet.
In 1945, a small group of American lawyers working under secretary of war Henry Stimson created the codes and specified the legal process for bringing top Nazi war criminals to justice (the alternative had been to shoot them). The innovations challenged and sometimes confused the Allies and led to years of legal quarrels. The Nuremberg Charter, for example, introduced two new definitions of war crimes—the crime of aggressive war and crimes against humanity. The Four Powers (the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and France) were entitled to hold a military tribunal to prosecute a small, representative number of defendants.
The subject of Kushner’s book is what happened when these innovations, through US influence, made their way into Chinese law, shaped Nationalist China’s war crimes tribunals (more than 600 by late 1949), and affected relations with Japan. The “Class A” Japanese war criminals, mostly those held responsible for waging aggressive war, were put on trial in Tokyo in 1946 at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE). A corollary to the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, with a nearly identical charter, the Tokyo trial was the most international of any international criminal tribunal before or since; it assembled judges and prosecutorial teams from eleven Allied nations: the Four Powers plus China, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the Netherlands, India, and the Philippines. Of these, China had the longest and most brutal history of Japanese armed invasion and oppression.
In his introduction, Kushner points out the well-known distinction in Western law between jus ad bellum, the rules guiding the initiation of war, and jus in bello, the customs of law that impose limits on its conduct. The crime of aggressive war (designated a “Class A” crime) referred to the illegal initiation of war, as in Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor or its 1937 provocation of the Sino-Japanese War. Crimes committed in war, for example, abuses of prisoners of war, and destruction of enemy property and the environment were classed as “B” war crimes. “C” war crimes referred to atrocities, especially violence to civilians; the thought in mind in Nuremberg was the Nazi mass murders of Jews, Poles, and Russians.
The remaining seven chapters of Men to Devils take on complicated history episodes with admirable clarity. In the first chapter, the tumult of the Japanese surrender is covered in fine detail, with an important corrective. General Douglas MacArthur, leader of the US occupation in Tokyo and the Harry Truman administration in Washington both believed that the Japanese surrender had been speedily accomplished after the signing of the Surrender Instrument on September 2, 1945. Japan itself was calm. Kushner points out that the Japanese Empire stretched across the Asia-Pacific region and took time to disintegrate. In China and Manchuria, the largest affected area, Japanese soldiers and the civilians who had been living there for years were swept up in the chaos of the war’s end and in China’s continuing civil war with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Kushner dismisses historian John Dower’s account of the rapid Japanese accommodation to the occupation (their “embracing defeat”) as too focused in Japan’s four home islands and its relationship with the United States, at the expense of comprehending how Japan, the colonial hegemon, related to its East Asian neighbors (p. 67). He also makes no reference to Dower’s 1986 book War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War, which documents American wartime stereotypes of the Japanese and would have made a good basis for comparison, especially for the “devil” images and Japanese wartime propaganda, about which Kushner has written an earlier book (The Thought War—Japanese Imperial Propaganda, 2005).
Chapter 2 offers a fascinating view of the Chinese struggle to affirm its national sovereignty through its handling of war crimes tribunals and Japanese prisoners. Chapters 3 and 4, the heart of the book, follow through with how the Chinese administered justice in competition for jurisdiction with the Allies, especially the United States. Given the over 600 war crimes trials that the Chinese held and the often fragmentary nature of their records, it is to the author’s credit that he makes sense of this period and the demands on the Chinese to select defendants, provide for prisoners, and decide between acquittal and punishment, which tended to be lenient. The fifth chapter, on Taiwan, adds a note of complexity. The training of Nationalist troops by a contingent of former Imperial Japanese officers—a surprising alliance—illustrated the respect with which certain high-ranking military were held, if and when they could give an advantage in battles against the CCP forces.
The defeat of the Chinese nationalists in 1949 and the re-establishment of their government in Taiwan leads to chapter 6 and the Cold War context for war crimes adjudication, which markedly slowed, not only in Asia but in Europe. The Nationalists with defeat curtailed their tribunals; the People’s Republic was more preoccupied with its own domestic reorganization and the purges of counterrevolutionaries and spies. The PRC involvement in the Korean War was a further distraction. In 1951, the San Francisco Peace Treaty gave Japan back its autonomy (with provisions attached) and with it the Japanese retrieved some control of the fate of war criminals still imprisoned. Here the book’s discussion shifts to the growing cynicism of the Japanese population about “so-called war crimes” and the legitimacy of the IMTFE and the hundreds of other trials of Japanese war criminals. By 1955, all those convicted at the Tokyo trial, even those given life sentences, were freed from prison. What, then, was the meaning of justice? Kushner adds new detail and nuance to the Japanese shift towards seeing themselves as victims, not perpetrators, of the dreadful war.
Chapter 7 is the best in the book. In about 50 pages, the author covers what happened to Japanese prisoners of war still captive in the People’s Republic in the early 1950s or delivered there from the Soviet Union. “Benevolence” was the policy and “reeducation” the goal. Trial transcripts and personal remembrances add to the drama of this chapter, in which the CCP aim of maximizing political impact is not forgotten. One thinks back to the 1979 book by Philip R. Piccigallo, The Japanese on Trial, with its brief but very good overview of the Chinese war crimes trials, and cannot help but be grateful for Kushner’s revival of a time otherwise erased from history and still needing more investigation and thought. It is often said that, compared to the Nuremberg trial, little attention has gone to the prosecution of the Japanese. Men to Devils helps right the balance.
Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=44546
Citation: Jeanne Guillemin. Review of Kushner, Barak, Men to Devils, Devils to Men: Japanese War Crimes and Chinese Justice. H-Diplo, H-Net Reviews. December, 2015. URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=44546
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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MEN TO DEVILS, DEVILS TO MEN: Japanese War Crimes and Chinese Justice | By Barak Kushner
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015. 403 pp. (Illustrations.) US$45.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0674-72891-2.
After a recent conference at Leiden, Ethan Mark (a comparative historian of Japan and Indonesia) showed me a remarkable film from the Philippines entitled Three Godless Years (1976), which confronted the experience of Japanese war atrocities with surprising complexity. I thought, if Mario O’Hara can direct such a film under Marcos and with little funding, why
is nuance so difficult to find in Chinese cinematic treatments? Some of the answers are in Barak Kushner’s new book, Men to Devils. At 321 pages, plus voluminous notes, this important work on Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) war crimes is not lite fare; nevertheless, it succeeds in being a readable and wide-ranging examination of the intersection of the legal history of B and C class war criminals’ trials, on the one hand, and the contentious memory of these events, on the other.
Kushner asserts that the legal history of adjudicating war crimes should be considered an independent “terrain” of memory (21). Although Kushner is careful to aver that the legal process here did not reveal hidden “truths,” at the level of basic self-expression (for example, in memoirs) the influence of trial language as a recognized method of discussing “what really happened” is palpable. Although space limitations do not permit me to describe them in depth, chapters 6 and 7 feature a useful critical examination of later memories of the trials, and their (ab)uses during the Cold War. “Given the show trial nature of many of the proceedings, the attempt to resolve disputes without further bloodshed was a noble one,” Kushner writes, “but the politicization of the trials quickly rendered them more as fodder in Cold War battlefields of propaganda” (247).
Consequently, Kushner begins his book by “triangulating” the Chinese (or, CCP), Taiwanese (or, KMT), and Japanese historical standpoints regarding war crimes (27). Right out of the gate in chapter 1, however, we see how the story of Japan’s surrender and war crimes trials are even more complex, involving European, Commonwealth, Southeast Asian, and American actors. Kushner shows how “Japanese at the edge of empire could not fathom that they had actually lost” (36); his account echoes Lori Watt’s When Empire Comes Home, as well as new comparative work by multilingual scholars like Konrad Lawson and Adam Cathcart. Then, Kushner confronts the debate about the legality of the trials, engaging with Yuma Totani’s The Tokyo War Crimes Trialand Richard Minear’s Victor’s Justice, siding with Totani against Minear in that the discussion of local perpetrators, including rapists and the infamous “Comfort Women” system, was advocated by Filipino (Pedro Lopez) and French (Roger Depo) prosecutors (46).
Chapter 2 explains how the KMT failed to eke out a place for Chinese jurisprudence in the international war crimes trials while simultaneously dealing with the rise of the CCP and the necessity of the Japanese Empire’s diaspora. In an interesting diversion, Kushner summarizes how Shanxi Province under Yan Xishan challenges Manichean views of treason and justice: during his fight with the CCP, Yan promoted remaining Japanese infantrymen to the officer class and encouraged them to take Chinese wives (106). As Kushner puts it, “there was no one path toward a war crimes trial,” and the process was hopelessly determined by forces that had little or nothing to do with any notion of “justice” (107). Chapter 4 returns to this theme in its discussion of KMT trials on the mainland, which drew on a tradition of revolutionary courts and never managed to make Chinese law accepted internationally. Kushner delves into scattered reports of early instances of torture, squalid prisons, and kangaroo courts set up to satisfy local Chinese populations’ “lust for revenge” (145). This was followed by the 30 May 1946 Nanjing Military Tribunal for War Crimes, which did not resolve conflicting Chinese domestic demands and international legal standards. The KMT eventually shipped Japanese POWs en masse back to Japan simply to deny the CCP the privilege of using the courts for political legitimization (182).
Chapter 3 looks closely at the confusing racial, ethnic, and national politics that spewed forth in the wake of empire, and the “legal snafu” behind determining who was Japanese, Taiwanese, Chinese, and Korean (128). The brutal and tragic “Sinification” of the Taiwanese people followed closely the various “Japanification” campaigns. Kushner also describes the violent encounters between Taiwanese residents of Japan, whose legal status was
now “reduced to that of aliens,” and Japanese gangs who were often backed by the police (132). Chapter 5 returns to Taiwan, with a special focus on the White Group (baituan) that formed to facilitate postwar KMT and Japanese military cooperation—a relationship that Kushner views to be “eminently consistent in the continuation of their mutual stance against Communism” (191). Here Kushner issues an important challenge to his colleagues: the network of alliances in Japan, Taiwan, and mainland China show how “discussions of Japanese behavior after the war cannot be examined within the national framework of Japanese history” (208).
The only problem I have with this otherwise excellent volume is its focus on the China theatre, which may be unfair as the book sets out to examine the Sino-Japanese relationship. As Kushner shows, however, understanding China is necessary for making sense of trans-war Japan, and I reckon Southeast Asia is also important. For example, echoing Joshua Fogel, another Sino-Japanese expert, Kushner mentions that Nanjing was “not a Holocaust” (23), which is fair enough, but should we see such incidents simply as “mass murder run viciously amok”? If so, what do we make of the IJA’s orders to systematically exterminate populations in the Philippines at the end of the war? Research on genocide has come a long way from using Nazi Germany as a standard, and I think the experience in Southeast Asia must now illuminate what we think we know about the war and its aftermath in China.
Aaron William Moore
University of Manchester, Manchester, United Kingdom
pp. 864-866
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Men to Devils, Devils to Men
Men to Devils, Devils to Men
Men to Devils, Devils to Men: Japanese war crimes and Chinese justice
By Barak Kushner
Harvard University Press, 2015
403 pages including index and notes
ISBN978-0-674-742891-2
Review by Sir Hugh Cortazzi
‘War crimes’ judged at the international tribunal at Nuremberg were divided into three categories. Class A were ‘crimes against peace,’ class B were ‘conventional war crimes’ (such as rape, murder, illegal incarceration, abusing POWs etc.) and Class C were ‘crimes against humanity’ such as genocide. Class A war criminals in East Asia were tried by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE) in Tokyo. The trial lasted two and a half years. Although Barak Kushner deals in his book with aspects of the IMTFE his focus is on Class B and C war crimes and the way in which trials were held in China/Taiwan. He stresses that war responsibility and war crimes are ‘two different species.’ Kushner is senior lecturer in modern Japanese history at the University of Cambridge.
Barak Kushner’s book ranges widely and deals not only with the definition, nature and legal aspects of war crimes. It is based on meticulous and detailed research in Chinese (and Taiwanese), Japanese and American records. He notes that the trial records (p.20) bequeathed a legacy of historical records about Japan’s military action in China.’
Kushner draws attention to the relative absence of desire for revenge as shown by Chinese treatment of Japanese guilty of war crimes. It covers aspects of Japan/China relationships, which are relevant to our understanding of the issues between the two countries today
Kushner’s first chapter headed ‘Defeat in Denial, The Regional Impact of Japan’s Surrender’ reminds readers that the Japanese military in China were reluctant to accept orders to surrender as they did not see themselves as defeated. Even though officially hostilities were over, Japanese forces remained in control of vast areas of China for some time after the official surrender. If all Japanese forces had been immediately disarmed, there would have been chaos in parts of China. The same was true of parts of South East Asia. In the Netherlands East Indies (NEI) and in French Indo-China the allies were at first dependent on Japanese military guards.
The occupying forces in Japan were concerned that the large number of Japanese returning from China who did not feel that they had been defeated might pose a security threat to the relatively weak allied forces occupying Japan. Many Japanese who had lived in China and Manchuria had indeed hoped to be able to stay.
The Japanese authorities, aware at the end of the war that war crimes trials were inevitable, made some half-hearted efforts (p.51) to ‘chase its own war criminals.’ ‘The pursuit of justice appeared secondary to the aim of mitigating any blemish on the imperial prestige of Japan – seemingly unsullied even with the unconditional surrender.’ One argument made on behalf of those accused of war crimes was that the crimes were ‘merely “over-exuberance” on the battlefield or, rather, the natural by-product of a fierce war.’ Another Japanese report (p.54) argued that B & C class crimes trials were ‘misguided revenge, publicly permitted under the guise of legality.’
The Japanese navy tried particularly hard to exonerate their personnel. A group led by a Captain Toyota (p.56) worked tirelessly to encourage former naval officers to lie under oath during Allied court proceedings.’
Accusations were made that allied war criminals e.g. aircrew who carried out indiscriminate bombing of civilian targets in Japan went unpunished. Some Japanese also argued that Japan was more a victim than a perpetrator.
Japan continues to suffer from amnesia about its imperial past (p.230). Up to the surrender, Japanese official propaganda maintained that its soldiers did not give up until death. As soon as the war ended, the Japanese were very intent on saving from execution those charged with war crimes. As Kushner points out (p. 314) ‘Japanese politicians continue to debate legal minutiae in a manner that indicates an inability to come to terms with the BC class war crimes trials.’ Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in response to questions in the Diet demonstrated in this context that he is a master of obfuscation and avoiding responding to a direct question.
Kushner has no doubt (p.63) that while ‘egregious legal errors in trials did occur and should not be ignored, imperial Japanese soldiers did commit grievous acts of random violence, especially in China.’
Chapter 2 ‘Devil in the Details’ outlines Chinese policies on Japan’s war crimes. The Chinese had much to learn about international law, but their responses were complicated not only by the extent of Chinese collaboration with the Japanese in China but also by the extent to which the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) government were dependent on Japanese help in pursuing their civil war with the communists. Kushner notes (p. 103) that ‘some war criminals…were pawns in the realignment of power during the immediate aftermath of the war.’
The situation in Taiwan which he scrutinizes in his third chapter headed ‘Flexible Imperial Identity’ was even more complicated than in mainland China, as the island had been under Japanese administration for over half a century when the war ended. Taiwanese had been recruited into the Japanese forces. Some of them had served as guards at POW camps and together with Koreans and Japanese were accused of maltreatment of POWs.
In Chapter 4 Kushner discusses KMT (Kuomintang/Guomindang = 国民党) trials of Japanese war criminals. He points out (p.153) in commenting on the notorious Nanjing massacre that ‘there were actually many imperial Japanese military massacres on the way to the city. Nanjing was not an isolated incident.’ As General Iwane Matsui, who was regarded as having the main responsibility for the massacre, was indicted before the IMTFE in Tokyo, the KMT concentrated on trying Hisao Tani, another Japanese general. One charge among many (p.160) was that he had commanded ‘a platoon that murdered 122 souls, wounded 334, bayoneted 14, and assassinated and raped numerous others.’ Tani who denied all the charges was found guilty and executed.
Another example of a senior Japanese officer indicted in 1948 was that of General Yasuji Okamura, commander of the China Expeditionary Army, which adopted a policy (p.70) termed by the Chinese the ‘three alls’ policy of ‘kill all, burn all and loot all.’ He was tried by a Chinese Nationalist Military Tribunal, but on 26 January 1949 despite convincing evidence against him was found ‘not guilty.’ The court had been ‘advised’ to come to this conclusion because Okamura and his fellow conspirators in the ‘White Group’ were thought too valuable in helping the KMT in their struggle against the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
In another trial of an ordinary soldier, Kiyoshi Sakakura (p.64) confessed that he had taken part in one operation in which women and children were rounded up with bayonets and killed.
A further case, which Kushner discusses in some detail, is that of ‘The 100-man Killing Contest,’ involving two junior officers Toshiaki Mukai and Tsuyoshi Noda. The Japan Advertiser on 7 December 1937 (p.167) reported this horrifying incident under the headline ‘Sub-Lieutenants in Race to Fell 100 Chinese Running Close.’ Whatever the truth about the details of this crime it is a gruesome story.
The KMT trials despite some flaws seem to have been reasonably well-conducted and Japanese war criminals were not made the objects of revenge.
Kushner deals in his chapter 7 entitled ‘Socialist Magnanimity’ with the trials of Japanese war criminals by the CCP. Many of these came into their hands after internment in the Soviet Far East. The ‘vast majority of Japanese prisoners (p.259) were released after extensive investigation of their crimes where the government chose not to indict, either on grounds of benevolence or because the prisoners had sufficiently recanted and “learned” from their time during incarceration.’ In the CCP trials every single Japanese admitted their crimes. ‘Unlike the KMT’s goal of merely seeking justice, Communist China’ s aim for its Japanese prisoners…was to make war criminals reflect on their crimes, and to turn them from “devils back into men.”’ The CCP were expert at brainwashing.
This book is an important contribution to the history of the years immediately following the end of the war in East Asia. It is full of interesting and valid comments and reminds readers of facts which tend to be overlooked not least by Chinese and Japanese historians.
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