If Japan was to expand as the nationalists wished then crucial to future success was a large and powerful army. The growth of the Imperial Army during the first part of the twentieth century was phenomenal — by 1937 it was five times bigger than at the turn of the century. This kind of rapid expansion brought with it, unsurprisingly, problems for the military — chiefly, they worried about how to maintain discipline. They found one answer to the problem in the training of recruits, which became more brutal. If the soldiers made the smallest mistake they were physically beaten. ‘Sometimes you’d be hit with fists, and sometimes you’d be hit with bamboo sticks,’ says Toyoshige Karashima, who was then a Taiwanese recruit in the Imperial Army. ‘Sometimes in the evening we couldn’t eat our food because our faces were so swollen.’ Another Japanese veteran, Masayo Enomoto, revealed that his instructors used to beat him and his fellow recruits so much during basic training that their arms ached, and by the day’s end they had no energy left to hit them. As a consequence the instructors found a novel way of maintaining discipline — ‘self-punishment’: ‘Once the instructors got tired of beating you up,’ says Enomoto, ‘they would have recruits face each other and slap each other. So we all of us recruits, comrades together, started to slap each other — instead of being slapped by the instructor. Gradually I felt that I’d missed out on something if by night-time I hadn’t been beaten up at least once.’ Hajime Kondo, another recruit into the Imperial Army, says simply that ‘the training was so severe that I felt I’d rather die’.
The instructors hit the recruits with their fists, with bamboo canes, and hard across their faces with the heels of their boots. Significantly, the recruits were not just subjected to such beatings by those formally in command of them. Senior recruits also beat the more junior ones, especially in the early days of training while the new intake were struggling to pick up the specialized argot of the military. There was little hope of escaping harsh physical punishment — a whole section of soldiers would be beaten if one of their comrades failed in some way, the justification being that this was an attempt to instil in the recruits the sense that they were not individuals but part of a unit. It was institutionalized bullying. ‘In the military there is no individual responsibility, only group responsibility,’ says Hajime Kondo, who served in the Imperial Army in China. ‘You’re often punished not due to your own crime. At the very beginning I didn’t think it was a good idea, but after a week, or a month or two, you learn that in the battlefield you have to behave as a group.’
Every single veteran we interviewed recalled an army training of the utmost brutality. The physical abuse of recruits was not arbitrary but planned and systematic, part of a carefully thought-out method by which the High Command attempted to mould the type of soldier they desired. When the recruit entered the Imperial Army he was joining a family — a cold, brutal family, but a family none the less. ‘The barracks is the soldier’s family where together soldiers share hardships and joys, life and death,’ says the 1908 Guntai naimusho (army handbook).3 ‘A family means that the company is one household in the one village of the regiment. The heads of the household are the father and the mother. The company commander is a strict father, and the NCO a loving mother. The lieutenants are relatives and in perfect accord with their company commander whom they loyally assist.’
The sense of the regiment as one ‘village’ was further enhanced by each unit being recruited from only one area of Japan. Recruits would be surrounded by people with whom they had grown up. In such circumstances the pressure to conform and not ‘disgrace’ one’s relatives back home must have been immense. Indeed, most of the veterans we interviewed confessed that their greatest fear was that by committing some misdemeanour in the army they might bring shame on their family.
Towering over the whole familial — hierarchical structure was the all-powerful god-figure of the emperor himself — the supreme commander of the imperial armed forces. The recruits had been taught since their schooldays that their emperor was a divine being, now through reciting the Imperial Rescript [proclamation] to Soldiers and Sailors, they learnt how much closer they were tied to the throne via their new status as soldiers in the emperor’s personal army. They were told their equipment was given to them by the emperor — the barrel of their rifles carried the imperial chrysanthemum symbol — and every day recruits would bow in the direction of the Imperial Palace to show respect; each order they were given was issued ‘in the name of the emperor’; every beating they received was meted out because the emperor would have wished it. Blind obedience to the emperor was the glue that held this ever-expanding army together.
With each passing year it became ever more apparent that the growing Imperial Army was being trained to fight and conquer China. In 1934, after taking Jehol Province, the Japanese moved on to Chahar and then as far as Hopei Province. The ostensible reason was to secure the protection of nearby Manchuria, but many in the Imperial Army had broader ambitions. The continuing tension between those factions in the army that wanted even more accelerated territorial expansion and those, chiefly politicians, who favoured securing existing gains, erupted in Tokyo on 26 February 1936. Soldiers of the Imperial Army in Tokyo — including the Third Imperial Guard Regiment — led by officers who were members of the far right ‘Imperial Way’ faction, moved during the night on those ‘weak’ government figures they despised. Viscount Saito, Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal, was murdered, as was General Watanabe, the newly appointed Inspector General of Military Education. Key buildings in the centre of Tokyo — the parliament building and the War Office amongst them — were seized. A pamphlet distributed by the revolutionaries read: ‘We have been compelled to annihilate those elder statesmen, military leaders, bureaucrats, political party leaders and other criminals who have been shamelessly hindering the Heavenly prerogative of the Supreme Being....’4
But when the ‘Supreme Being’ heard about the rebellion he acted with uncharacteristic steadfastness. Hirohito threatened to lead troops against the plotters himself if his generals wavered. By 29 February the rebellion was crushed. Universally lenient (or non-existent) punishments had been meted out to earlier conspirators, but this time thirteen of the plotters were executed (though leading figures in the army fought to minimize the number of officers who were arrested). The ‘2.26 Incident’, as it is known in Japan, is significant for two reasons. It demonstrated both that Hirohito had enormous latent power to control events — power he very rarely chose to use — and that the Japanese military risked revolution from within if the policy of colonial expansion in China was not pursued with sufficient radicalism.
In such unstable circumstances it needed only a spark to start a full-scale war on the Asian mainland. And such a spark duly occurred. Japanese troops were stationed in northern China to ‘protect Japanese interests’ just as the British and Americans maintained a presence in China at the time — since the Boxer rebellion forty years earlier, the Chinese Nationalists, now under the leadership of Chiang K’ai-shek, had been unable to prevent foreign governments placing troops on their soil for ‘protective’ purposes. In July 1937, a Japanese force was conducting an exercise around the Hu River when the soldiers came to what was known as the Marco Polo bridge. As they crossed it they passed Chinese troops and a shot was fired, though who fired first has never been conclusively established. The incident soon developed into a minor battle. When the news reached Japan the mood was for war — the Chinese must be taught a lesson. Three divisions were dispatched from Japan, and on 27 July the Japanese airforce began to bomb Peking.
The war in China that began in July 1937 is infamous in the West because of the brutal crimes that Japanese troops were to commit in Nanking that December. But Nanking was part of a pattern set from the early days of the conflict. From the first, Japanese troops were told that this was a war against sub-humans. ‘We called the Chinese “Chancorro”, says Yoshio Tshuchiya, who served in the Kempeitai, the infamous Japanese secret military police. ‘“Chancorro
”, that meant below human, like bugs or animals. Whereas the Japanese are a superior race, which had been in existence for 2600 years, the Chinese were inferior. The Chinese didn’t belong to the human race. That was the way we looked at it.’
On arrival in China, soldiers of the Imperial Army were subject to additional training based on this theory that the enemy they were fighting were ‘below human’. Hajime Kondo first learnt what this training would consist of when he and his comrades were summoned to a large, square, open area. On one side was a pit and next to it a mound of bodies. On the other side of the square, tied to trees, were Chinese men. ‘We had no idea what was going on,’ says Kondo. ‘Then the boss said, “We are going to give you bayonet practice.” We prepared our bayonets, and then two at a time we ran and we stabbed. When I first understood that we were killing them, stabbing live human beings, I was shaking. I was seventh or eighth to do it. At the order I ran and I stabbed and the bayonet went into the body very easily. I learnt that it was easy to bayonet a human being. We learnt it with our own hands. Once I did it, it became easy. I didn’t think anything about the man I killed.’
Yoshio Tshuchiya underwent similar training in Manchuria. ‘I didn’t have courage at the beginning, but I couldn’t escape from it. I would be labelled as “chicken”. So I had to do it.’ The first time he participated in this ‘bayonet training’ the victims were six Chinese men. ‘I think they were farmers,’ he says. ‘They were not bandits or anti-Japanese....Just some suspicious people who’d been caught.’ Just like Hajime Kondo, Yoshio Tshuchiya found that once he had bayoneted one unarmed Chinaman it was easier to bayonet another: ‘The first time you still have a conscience and feel bad. But if you are labelled as courageous, and honoured and given merit, and if you’re praised as having this courage, that will be the driving power for the second time. If I’d thought of them as human beings I couldn’t have done it. But because I thought of them as animals or below human beings, we did it.’
’I was taught that we should look down on the Chinese,’ says Masayo Enomoto, who also fought in the Imperial Army in Northern China. ‘They were one rank lower than the Japanese and we should treat them as animals. This was something I was taught in the army and I believed it, and as a result we had a lot of evil.’ Enomoto began his training in China by shooting prisoners. He and his comrades would tie Chinese men to poles and then use them as target practice. ‘We tried to shoot the heart and I was successful, but my colleagues sometimes hit the abdomen and other parts of the body. They weren’t very successful. So a single farmer could be shot by some ten or twenty people.’ His emotional state as he shot these helpless human beings was simple: ‘I felt like I was just killing animals, like pigs. And when the team leader asked who would like to go first I always raised my hand. And I thought that this was the way for the Japanese Imperial Army to do things. I was just totally convinced.’
Enomoto was an ambitious young man: ever since he had heard of the Japanese conquering Manchuria he had longed to make his fortune on the Asian mainland, and once he enlisted in the army he was keen to please. No matter what the task he wanted to be ‘first in everything’. It was hardly surprising, then, that once he reached China he was soon promoted to junior NCO and military instructor. ‘Even after I became an instructor my way of thinking didn’t change at all,’ he says. ‘One time, when I was training my students, I brought in a Chinese farmer and I cut him with a big knife from his chest to his stomach. And I told the soldiers to look carefully at what I was doing. And I had to use some force because the knife wasn’t that sharp. I cut this farmer and showed the young soldiers that the Chinese are beasts and that they had to do similar things.’
When Enomoto was pressed to explain why he thought this kind of behaviour was suitable ‘training’ for his recruits, he replied that there were no suitable ‘educational tools’ in the village other than the farmers. ‘And I wanted to test the courage of the recruits,’ he says. ‘These soldiers had been in the military for six months and they were going to have to take part in a military operation for the first time in their lives, and I didn’t have any other tools to educate them with. And the only thing I could think of was to kill someone in front of them and teach them what it’s like to kill someone. And that’s the reason I took that strategy.’
This was the kind of brutal training and conditioning that large numbers of Japanese soldiers received in China. Already their basic training had taught them that physical brutality was the appropriate response to the slightest setback, and now a belief that their enemy was ‘below human’ was added to the mix — a powerful cocktail that was to result in some of the most horrific war crimes committed in the twentieth century. The pre-condition for all the crimes committed by the Imperial Army in China was this belief beaten into the soldiers that the Chinese were inferior beings. The Japanese soldiers who had treated their German captives so well during the First World War had believed that these Westerners were at least their equals. After all, did not the West possess superior technology that the Japanese had had to discover and adapt for themselves? But as for the Chinese, the Japanese had looked down on them for centuries — nowhere better expressed than in the letter that Prince Shotoku of Japan had sent to the emperor of China hundreds of years before: Shotoku had called the Chinese emperor ‘Emperor of the Setting Sun’ and signed himself’Emperor of the Rising Sun.’5
To the Japanese, China appeared ripe for conquest. Ever since the revolution of 1911 the country had been riven by internal conflict. Central government was weak — in some places non-existent. Warlords fought for control of some provinces, others were dominated either by the fledgling Chinese Communists under Mao Tse-Tung or the Chinese Nationalists under Chiang K’ai-shek. In the words of the historian J. M. Roberts, ‘it was a little like the end of the Roman Empire’.
As they fought their way towards the then capital of China, Nanking, Japanese troops left a trail of brutality behind them. In the city of Suchow on the banks of the Tai Hu Lake, for example, they raped and murdered to such a degree that, according to the Chinese Weekly Review, only 500 people were left in the city out of a pre-war population of 350,000.6 Thousands were left for dead, many more fled and hid in the countryside.
The Japanese army finally reached Nanking in December 1937. After a brief struggle the defences collapsed and on 13 December the invading force swept into the city. Instantly, many captured Chinese soldiers were simply murdered. Masatake Okumiya was one of the first Japanese naval officers to arrive in Nanking and witnessed the executions of several hundred Chinese soldiers: ‘They didn’t make any noise, they were very quiet. They were tied with their hands behind their back. They were lined up by the river bank and bayonets and swords were used for killing them. Then they were thrown in the river. First I was very shocked, surprised. But because of the atmosphere I gradually got used to it. In the end I didn’t think about it. I didn’t feel anything about it. I was just looking at it. And since I was a naval officer I was not in a position to intrude into an army affair.’
It was not just captured soldiers who were savagely treated by the Japanese — women and children were at risk too. There were a substantial number of Westerners in Nanking and many bore witness to the atrocities committed on civilians within the city after its surrender. ‘On the night of December 14 there were many cases of Japanese soldiers entering Chinese houses and raping women or taking them away,’7 wrote Lewis Smythe, Secretary of the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone. ‘We Europeans are paralysed with horror,’ recorded John Rabe, Chairman of the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone. ‘There are executions everywhere, some are being carried out with machine guns outside the barracks of the War Ministry. Last night up to 1000 women and girls were said to have been raped. About 100 girls in Ginling college alone. You hear of nothing but rape. If husbands or brothers intervene, they’re shot.’8 ‘The slaughter of civilians is appalling,’ said Dr Robert Wilson of the International Red Cross.
‘Rape and brutality almost beyond belief. Two girls aged about 16 were raped to death in one of the refugee camps. In the University Middle School, where there are over 8000 people the Japs came in ten times last night, over the wall, stole food, clothing and raped until they were satisfied. They bayoneted one little boy, killing him, and I spent an hour and a half this morning patching up another little boy of eight who had five bayonet wounds.’9
Xiuying Li was nineteen years old when the Japanese army arrived in Nanking. She was seven months pregnant, and her husband had left the city days before. He thought it would be too dangerous for his wife to accompany him and he believed that women and children left within the city would be safe. Surely the Japanese would not molest his pregnant wife? But on the morning of 19 December Japanese soldiers broke into the house where she was hiding. Xiuying Li had already seen other women dragged into a nearby house to be raped and, since she saw none of them emerge afterwards, probably killed. ‘The soldiers came into our room,’ she says. ‘I knew if they dragged me into that house then I would also die. So I bumped my head into the wall and became unconscious. And several women were taken by the Japanese. After they left, some older women comforted me. They put me onto a bed. At that time I began to think — I want to die, but I didn’t die.’ As she lay in bed she resolved to try to fight the Japanese soldiers when they came back — even if it meant her own death. Later that day, once it was dark, the Japanese returned. ‘There was one soldier who saw me and he began to drive the other women out of the room. And he came for me. He wasn’t as tall as me and I began to bite him. I was very angry. I said that Japanese could not be called human beings. He began to shout and two other Japanese soldiers came and they began to bayonet me. I got lots of wounds in my face and lots of blood came out. Then I became unconscious and they thought I had died and they left.’
Horror in the East: Japan and the Atrocities of World War II Page 3
