On Saturday June 19, a group organized by Taiwan POW Camps Memorial Society gathered on Lane 44, Jinshan South Road, Section 2 (金山南路2段44巷) to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the execution of 14 US airmen by the Japanese at the end of World War II.
The airmen had been incarcerated in the old Taihoku Prison and charged with “indiscriminate bombing,” at the time a capital offense. The trials, based on falsified evidence, were a sham. The accused were afforded no legal representation or adequate interpretation of the proceedings.
A year later, the Japanese responsible for this kangaroo court were themselves indicted as war criminals at a US-led trial in Shanghai. Two of them were sentenced to death, though this was later commuted to life imprisonment.
In Men to Devils, Devils to Men, Cambridge academic Barak Kushner documents a comparable incident that occurred in Japan, almost contemporaneously with the events in Taipei. This was the decision by Major General Okada Tasuku to behead 38 US airmen for their part in the catastrophic firebombing of Nagoya.
Unlike the defendants in the Shanghai trial and most other cases, Okada took full responsibility for his actions, refusing to deflect the blame onto his superiors in Tokyo.
In the end, the summary trial, “inhumane” method of execution and apparent attempt to hide the deed by digging up and burning the corpses days after Japan’s surrender undermined Okada’s claim to have been acting honorably.
Still, Okada’s stance underscored the nebulous, transitory notion of justice and international law in the postwar era and served to stoke Japanese
While the emergence of a Japanese victim mentality is a recurring theme in the book, it is secondary to Kushner’s aim of dissecting the motivations behind the differing approaches to postwar justice.
Rather than focus on the Class A trials of high-profile policymakers, Kushner examines the B (“conventional war crimes”) and C (“crimes against humanity”) class cases pursued by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The form these took and the results they yielded, Kushner asserts, have had an overlooked influence on the development of Sino-Japanese relations.
In his introduction, Kushner relates two conversations with students that crystallize the issues in Men to Devils. The first was with an undergraduate in one of Kushner’s classes who asked why, after the war, the Chinese did not exact wholesale retribution on the estimated 3.7 million Japanese soldiers and civilians remaining in China. The second was essentially a response to this question given by a Chinese student in Nanjing. The young man opined that Chinese restraint stemmed from their benevolence as a people.
Understandably dissatisfied with this answer, Kushner proposes a variety of interlocking reasons to explain the magnanimity displayed by the KMT and the CCP. In key respects, their aims were similar: to show the West that they were responsible and mature stakeholders in the international community and that their governance was based on ethically solid foundations.
Issues of face were also a factor. Chastened by decades of extraterritoriality, the Chinese demanded a role in the process of postwar justice. Yet, with a dearth of qualified personnel and the world watching, the KMT feared looking incompetent. This, Kushner says, meant they did not pursue as many cases as they might have.
Finally, political expediency played a role. The party’s top brass maintained ties with their Japanese counterparts, even allowing the defeated army to maintain its chain of command in China. One example is the case of General Okamura Yasuji. The head of the military in China, Okamura swanned around Nanjing unmolested for three years after the war ended.
Kushner writes: “Okamura’s relatively exalted status in postwar Chinese KMT circles was well known, even to the Western press, which commented on the shocking incongruity of his stature as a named war criminal who supposedly lived the high life.”
Okamura was a trailblazer in the use of comfort women and architect of the “three all” policy in China: “kill all, loot all, burn all.” However, when he was tried in 1948, orders came to exculpate him. Judge Shi Meiyu (石美瑜) was presented with documents stamped by the ministry of defense with the words “not guilty” written on them.
Naturally, the CCP seized upon such leniency for propaganda purposes. Yet, the call for appropriate punishment was not just hot air. In perhaps the most fascinating section of the book, Kushner analyzes their motives, remarking that “unlike the KMT’s goal of merely seeking justice, Communist China’s aim … was to make the prisoners reflect on their crimes and to turn them ‘from devils back into men.’”
This effort was remarkably successful, with some of the most intransigent types breaking down in court as they begged forgiveness for their crimes.
Although Kushner admits there might have been an element of stage management, he contends that “based on similar testimony after these men were released and their activities once repatriated to Japan, their zeal and emotion in their conversion from imperial aggressor to contrite war criminal are difficult to refute.”
Scholars of Taiwanese history and identity politics will find chapter three of the book — Flexible Imperial Identity — of particular interest. A total of 173 Taiwanese were prosecuted as war criminals and Kushner notes that these colonial soldiers suffered disproportionately high conviction rates.
This was partly because many Taiwanese served as guards at POW camps where they were in contact with allied soldiers who remembered them after the war. These loyal subjects were “tossed aside” by the Japanese after the war as “abandoned people.”
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.
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