Horror in the East: Japan and the Atrocities of World War II (6 page)

’During the operations there were many times when you raped women.
Did you not feel guilty about what you were doing?’

’I didn’t feel any sense of guilt then,’ he replied.

’Why?
Why didn’t you have any sense of guilt then?’

’Because I was fighting for the emperor.
He was a god.
In the name of the emperor we could do whatever we wanted against the Chinese.
Therefore I had no sense of guilt.’

Time and again when we pressed Japanese veterans to explain similar acts of barbarism or cruelty they would respond in the same way.
‘We were doing it for the emperor — he was a god,’ became as familiar an exculpatory phrase as the German ‘We were acting under orders.’
In a way, such an attempt to escape individual culpability is understandable.
These Japanese soldiers had been trained never to think for themselves — only to show unquestioning loyalty through their NCOs and officers to the emperor himself.
They had been taught that every military operation they took part in was for the glory of their sacred emperor.

Hajime Kondo, who during the Sanko ‘pacification’ actions believed that ‘if you kill a person then it’s good for the emperor’, also has powerful memories of the atrocities he and his colleagues committed against women and children.
‘When soldiers went into the village and entered the houses, they first searched for any valuables to take, then they searched for women,’ he says.
‘Once, my comrades found a woman in her thirties and then a group rape took place.
Normally when group rape happened the victims were killed.
But this time she and her baby were not killed but taken with us to the next base camp.
Then she was taken with us on the march the next day.’The woman was stripped, and made to march over mountainous territory naked apart from her shoes.
Kondo believes her clothes were taken from her because this made it difficult for her to escape, but it is hard to believe that the soldiers were not also motivated by a desire to cause further sexual humiliation to the poor woman.

During a break in the march Kondo heard older soldiers whispering ‘What should we do?’
as both the woman and her child were clearly becoming weaker.
‘Suddenly one of the soldiers stood up,’ he says, ‘and grabbed her baby and threw it over a cliff which was thirty to forty metres high.
Then instantly the mother of the baby followed, jumping off the cliff.
And when I saw what was happening in front of me I thought what a horrible thing to do.
I felt sorry for them for a while, but I had to carry on marching.’

Whilst the murder of a small child in this way may not have been a frequent occurrence, the crime of rape, as we have seen, was commonplace — so much so that the rigid system of hierarchy within the Imperial Army, with the senior soldiers bullying the more junior, was even carried over into the way the abuse of the Chinese women was conducted.
‘Rookies were too tired to rape,’ says Kondo.
‘The rookies were treated so badly, made to carry heavy loads, and the other soldiers were so mean to us, that I could never think of women.’
But in an admission of startling honesty, he confessed that once he was deemed ‘senior’ enough he too was invited to participate in group rape.
‘The soldiers caught a woman and one by one they committed rape.
And I was in my third year as a soldier and one of the fourth-year soldiers summoned me and said, “Kondo, you go and rape.”
You couldn’t turn it down.’

The insight offered by Hajime Kondo’s description of the circumstances surrounding the rape he committed is significant, for it demonstrates the institutionalized nature of the crime.
For these Japanese soldiers, rape had become more than an act of sexual violence; it had become a kind of bonding exercise between comrades, a reward to be offered to junior soldiers once they had proved their worth.
Military training is built around acts of initiation, the receiving of symbolic rewards like a beret once a difficult period of training has been completed.
Clearly, for the soldiers in Hajime Kondo’s unit, and probably for many thousands of other soldiers in the Imperial Army fighting in China, being invited to participate in a group rape became just such an act of initiation — a demonstration by the senior members of the squad that after years of training a junior soldier was finally thought worthy of truly ‘belonging’ to the unit.

Officially, rape was a crime in the Japanese army.
But only a handful of those who committed the offence were ever held to account for their actions, not only because many of the soldiers killed their victims after the crime, but also because senior officers must have either turned a blind eye to what was happening or indeed condoned it.
A similar situation occurred during the training of recruits, where much of the brutal bullying and punishment was administered not ‘officially’ by the NCOs or officers, but by other more senior soldiers of the same rank.
Professor Edward Drea makes an insightful comparison with political parties in Japan, who use ‘go betweens’ (in Japanese
nakadachi)
’to deal with unsavory elements that the politicians cannot officially have links with for reasons of avoiding confrontations and maintaining group solidarity’.
¹²
Thus it is simply not accurate, as some Japanese apologists claim, that the rapes encouraged in this institutionalized way by senior soldiers within each squad were the actions of men going against firm orders that preached the contrary.
From the moment they entered training the recruits learnt first to fear the more senior members of the squad and then to imitate them.
This was the only way they could avoid entering an ever-increasing spiral of vicious bullying.
Just as no sane recruit would have complained to an officer about being bullied by a more senior soldier, so it would have been rash in the extreme for a relatively junior soldier like Hajime Kondo to refuse to take part in a group rape when finally asked to do so.
And it seems likely, since so very few of those Japanese soldiers who committed such crimes were ever punished for them by the Japanese army, that the senior soldiers within the units who initiated these group rapes must have known that, tacitly at least, their superior officers would not be particularly concerned at their actions.
A Japanese officer in such a case would (as Emperor Hirohito was to try to do after the war) first and foremost seek to preserve credible ‘deniability’.
The system was best served by those higher up the hierarchy trying
not
to find out if their men were raping anyone.

All of which leads to the central question — given his phenomenal importance to his troops, how much did Hirohito know about the brutal way his army was conducting the war in China?
This is a profoundly sensitive question to ask in Japan and one that has been made deliberately hard to answer.
Documents that might conclusively establish the truth have either been destroyed or are still kept secret.
In the weeks following their surrender thousands of documents were burnt by the Japanese before the Americans arrived to occupy their country.
Thousands more are still kept hidden in Japanese archives.
So in the absence of incontestable evidence, historians have been forced to speculate.
Take, for example, Hirohito’s state of knowledge about the Nanking massacre.
For Edward Behr, one of Hirohito’s first critical biographers, ‘it is difficult to believe that this — one of the most appalling events of the China War — came and went without Emperor Hirohito becoming aware of it’.
Behr points out both that Prince Asaka, one of the Japanese commanders in Nanking, was Hirohito’s own grand-uncle, and that Hirohito would surely have been aware of coverage of the massacre in the foreign press.
Stephen Large, in his measured biography of Hirohito, is less certain, demonstrating that Hirohito relied primarily on the information others chose to give him in order to form his own views.
Herbert Bix, in the latest full-length examination of the emperor, leans more towards the Behr view — that it is virtually inconceivable that Hirohito did not know about Nanking at the time.

Trying to decide what Hirohito knew overall about the criminal conduct of his troops in China is like peeling away the layers of an onion, only to reach the core and find nothing there.
This, of course, is precisely the difficulty that those around him hoped future historians would encounter.
The ‘deniability’ of the emperor must always have been the paramount concern of his advisers.
But despite this carefully constructed wall of vagueness, it is still possible to reach definite conclusions about Hirohito’s culpability.
For it is certain that at some point he would have known of the crimes his army had committed — even if it was only from the Americans at the end of the war (and it would have been truly extraordinary if he did not know sooner than that).
Yet at no time in his long life did Hirohito call for those who had committed crimes in China to be investigated and properly held to account for their actions.
His silence, in fact, is hugely eloquent.
As supreme commander of the imperial armed forces he was ultimately responsible for the actions of his soldiers — a man of honour who held such a position would, no matter at what stage he learnt the truth, have openly admitted and publicized his country’s culpability and wanted those who were guilty to be punished.
Instead, Hirohito’s actions are entirely consistent with those of a head of state who wanted his army to succeed and was indifferent to the methods they used to do it — a philosophy reminiscent of one of Hitler’s orders to his subordinates, when he told them to ‘Germanize Poland, and he would ask no questions about their methods’.

One of Hirohito’s most important functions in the Japanese constitutional system was to question his military commanders about the methods his army was using — no one else, least of all the civilian cabinet, was in a position to do so.
And yet Hirohito either knew what his army was doing and did nothing about it, or deliberately did not ask the questions that needed to be asked in order to find out.
It is hard to know which is worthy of greater moral condemnation.

Moreover, Professor Bix reveals that in certain key areas Hirohito was clearly involved in a military decision-making process that led in China to the use of outlawed weapons.
In a directive dated 28 July 1937 Hirohito sanctioned the use of tear gas in China (banned under the Versailles peace treaty signed by the Japanese at the end of the First World War), and two months later he authorized ‘special chemical warfare units’ to be sent to the Asian mainland.
¹³
The Imperial Army went on to use poison gas on many hundreds of occasions during the war in China — the ultimate authorization for their actions coming from directives sealed by their emperor.
Such internationally outlawed weapons were never used in the subsequent war against the West — a revealing distinction that speaks of the pragmatism of the emperor and his military advisers (since they must have been concerned about the Western Allies using similar weapons against them in reprisal) rather than any sudden moral scruple.

Whilst documents tie Hirohito to knowledge of the use of chemical weapons by the Imperial Army in China, the paper chain does not conclusively establish his guilt in the use of bacteriological weapons, though it is clear that he must have at least read some of the documents relating to the infamous Unit 731, Japan’s biological warfare research unit.
Under General Ishii, Unit 731 provided assistance to the conventional forces of the Imperial Army in China by such methods as ‘infected-rat air-raids’ in which rats contaminated with plague and other toxins were dropped on the Chinese.
A measure of how deadly this bizarre and horrific weapon could be is that once, when the rats were dropped in the wrong place, 1600 Japanese troops became infected and died.
¹⁴
The Japanese use of bacteriological weapons during the conflict on the Asian mainland and their policy of testing these weapons first on innocent Chinese is one of the darkest crimes of the twentieth century.

An insight into the mentalities of those Japanese who took part in these human medical experiments in China is given by Ken Yuasa, a Japanese doctor who worked in a military hospital in Shansi prefecture in China — a hospital visited many times by General Ishii, director of Unit 731.
Yuasa was posted to the hospital after receiving a similar education to that of the other veterans interviewed.
He was taught that ‘all the subjects of the nation should serve the emperor and dedicate their lives to the emperor and die for him.
That’s what we were told.
To dedicate our lives for the emperor so as to pay the debt we owed our parents.’
Similarly, Yuasa believed that it was necessary to seek expansion on the Asian mainland so that ‘Japan could become an imperial power — to become a big and great country, like the Western countries’.
If, during his education or his subsequent service as a doctor in Asia, he ever felt the remotest desire to question the prevailing
mores
he always knew that, ‘if you made any criticism, even among friends, that was a really frightening thing.
Because if you did that you’d be scolded by your military superior or your teacher, and called a “non-patriot”.
It’s probably difficult for the younger generation to understand just what that would mean.
It’s like excommunication from your village or community.
It’s probably more severe than if you had committed a crime.’
Dr Yuasa finally arrived in China having learnt that the ‘Chinese and Koreans were like waste and garbage’.

About six weeks after he began work in the military hospital the general manager approached him and said there would be an ‘operations exercise’ that evening and told Dr Yuasa to attend.
‘I felt very uneasy, but, of course, I couldn’t say anything.
In the military, orders are absolute.’
Dr Yuasa was anxious because he knew that in order to train doctors to become surgeons quickly the Japanese army was organizing ‘practice’ operations on healthy Chinese.
As he walked into the operating theatre he saw two Chinese men standing against the wall.
One was ‘taller than me, well built, around thirty.
The other was forty to fifty years old, he looked like a farmer.
He was crying.’