Xiuying Li’s father returned home to find what he believed was the dead body of his daughter. Only when he took her outside into the cold air to bury her did he realize that she was not dead, but unconscious. Immediately he took her to the nearby foreign hospital where she was treated for multiple stab wounds. On her second day in hospital she lost the baby boy she was carrying. As she lay in her hospital bed her father told her that their home had been burnt down ‘because Japanese soldiers wanted to get warm and set up lots of fires, and they didn’t care about the houses’.
A few days later, an American missionary, the Reverend John Magee, brought a home movie camera into the hospital and took pictures of the victims. The significance of this film footage of the injured Xiuying Li would only become apparent years later when its existence became known in Japan. Incredibly, one writer on the ultra-right in Japan recently denied that the Xiuying Li in the film was the one who exists today. On the face of it, it is a nonsensical claim. Not only are there witnesses alive in Nanking today who have known Xiuying Li all her life (including the nurse who treated her in the hospital at the time) but the most cursory glance at her face today, sixty-four years later, shows multiple scar wounds. Through lawyers in Japan Xiuying Li is pursuing a libel action against the writer concerned. But, understandably, she feels that this allegation is another crime against her. The attempt by some in Japan to discredit survivors of the Nanking massacre (even to deny that the massacre ever happened) is a phenomenon that has not received the publicity it deserves in the West — it is as if a substantial body of opinion in Germany sought to allege that Holocaust victims were simply ‘making it up’, for this attempt to downplay what Japanese soldiers did in Nanking is not confined to the lunatic fringe. There is a lively debate in Japan over the number of people killed in the Nanking massacre. Most Western estimates are that several hundred thousand died, but at least one respected Japanese professor maintains the number is in the low tens of thousands. Significantly, those Japanese academics who seek to minimise the number of Chinese dead often omit from their writings any detailed mention of the crimes committed or any sense of national shame about what happened in Nanking. More than once on my research trips to Japan I heard the phrase, often uttered by eminent people, that ‘the Japanese did nothing in the war to apologise for’.
The Nanking massacre remains by far the most infamous of Japanese crimes in China. As a result, there has been considerable debate as to how such an atrocity could have occurred. Contributing factors suggested by various historians include the frustration felt by Japanese troops who had been forced to battle hard in the preceding weeks to conquer Shanghai, a city they had optimistically expected to take in a matter of days, and the notion that the Imperial Army were ‘rewarded’ for their achievement in taking the Nationalists’ capital by being permitted to rape and murder with impunity.
However, such explanations will only ever be part of the truth, because focusing on particular reasons for the Nanking massacre implies that what happened there in 1937 was wholly out of the ordinary. And whilst it is true that in terms of scale the atrocity was unique amongst Japanese war crimes, what’s often missed, especially in the West, is that in terms of type Nanking was not extraordinary at all. Seen in the context of Japanese beliefs about the Chinese, and the training of Japanese troops at the time, the events at Nanking become all too understandable.
Take, for example, the attitude of Japanese soldiers to Chinese women. Horrific stories are told of the rape of young girls and old women in Nanking. Gang rapes followed by the murder of the victims were almost commonplace. There’s even anecdotal evidence of Japanese soldiers tearing open the stomachs of pregnant women and bayoneting the foetuses. But Japanese soldiers did not suddenly start to rape and mistreat Chinese women only when they reached Nanking. The problem had been all too evident five years earlier when, during the Shanghai incident in January 1932, soldiers of the Imperial Army committed a whole series of rapes. So serious was the problem in Shanghai that senior army officers decided to adopt a radical solution proposed by General Okamura Yausji, deputy chief of staff of the Shanghai Expeditionary Army — they would establish and run brothels for their men in order to dissuade them from raping the general population. Japanese soldiers would not need to look for sex — the army would provide it for them.
Initially the idea was that Japanese prostitutes would staff the military brothels, but the army soon changed its policy and began to search for women from elsewhere within their empire, especially when many more ‘comfort stations’ were established in the wake of the atrocities at Nanking. But, as became immediately apparent, there were not enough willing volunteers. The Imperial Army solved that problem in a straightforward, brutal way — if women would not become prostitutes willingly, they would be tricked or forced into prostitution. The experience of Sol Shinto, recruited as a teenager in Korea, is typical. She was approached in the remote village where she lived and asked if she would like to take a job working for the Japanese army, cleaning the barracks and washing the soldiers’ uniforms. Coming as she did from a desperately poor background, she saw this as an opportunity both to make money and to ‘serve the country’ (like all Koreans at the time, she had been taught that she was a subject of the Japanese emperor — Korea had formally been under Japanese control since 1910). She was taken to a camp in northern China where she learnt that she had been recruited not as a cleaner or washerwoman, but as a prostitute. ‘I was told that I had to “take care” of the soldiers,’ says Shinto. ‘Of course professional women, prostitutes, know how to do this, but I didn’t know. I was very naive. I was sixteen years old.’ When she heard that this was to be her job she was horrified, but, hundreds of miles from home and penniless, she had no means of escape. When she protested that she had been tricked into prostitution, she was slapped and told once more that she would have to ‘take care’ of the soldiers. ‘I was told I’d just have to lie on the bed, that’s all you do. Then the men, the soldiers would come in. But it’s not just lying on the bed, is it?’ From the first she found the experience of having sex with Japanese soldiers ‘very painful’. She spoke little Japanese and the soldiers spoke hardly any Korean, so at the start she could barely communicate with them. ‘I had to be obedient,’ she says. ‘And if I was not then I would be slapped. Many battalions would come along and sometimes it would be very busy, and I think occasionally I would black out. Sometimes there would be perhaps seventy soldiers a day, from seven in the morning until twelve at night. It was very busy, fifteen or twenty minutes per man, and then the other people queuing up behind. I might be told to get totally naked, nude, and people wanted to take photographs. And I was told to take many positions, on top. That was tough. But if I said no then the soldiers would slap me and demand, “Why are you in the brothel in the first place?” I mean, I couldn’t talk Japanese, I couldn’t answer back in Japanese. And there were violent officers who would rampage around. So really I was just trying to find somewhere to die.’
As a comfort woman Sol Shinto was a creature the soldiers of the Imperial Army could treat as they wished. Known as ‘public toilets’, comfort women were often at risk of severe physical violence. Once one of the soldiers drew his sword in front of Shinto. Drunk, he lashed around and cut her back — she still bears the scar to this day. Another soldier, who took a particular fancy to her, demanded that she have her Japanese name tattooed on her arm. She complied with an abject sense of resignation, thinking that this too must be just another ‘part of the job’.
Some of the soldiers who had sex with her grew fond of Shinto and, in a request that offers insight into the suffering they themselves were enduring at the time, asked her if she would ‘commit suicide’ with them. ‘When I was asked if I would commit suicide with them I always refused,’ she says. ‘If you die you die, and can’t be revived.’ She learnt first hand how ‘some soldiers were deaf and hard of hearing, some were near blind, because of all the slapping, the violence they went through.
I could see some soldiers who were hit and who were really bullied by the other soldiers, and I saw one Japanese soldier who actually committed suicide by diving into a pond.’
For all this suffering, for enduring all this horrific treatment, Sol Shinto was paid a salary of precisely nothing by the manager of the military brothel she worked in. ‘I got pocket money sometimes from the soldiers and the officers,’ she told us. ‘But I never got any wages.’
There is no exact figure for how many ‘comfort women’ (though ‘victims of forced rape’ is a more accurate term) were employed and abused by the Japanese in this way. Estimates range from 80,000 to 100,000. But the overall scale of the crime is clear, as is the complicity of the Imperial Army and Japanese government of the time. In the words of Professor Yuki Tanaka, who has made a special study of Japanese policy towards comfort women: ‘The comfort women case could well be historically unprecedented as an instance of state controlled criminal activity involving the sexual exploitation of women.’11
Moreover, if the purpose of the ‘comfort stations’ was to prevent Japanese soldiers raping Chinese women, then the policy was a spectacular failure — not just because of the infamous events in Nanking, but because of the subsequent behaviour of Japanese troops during the war against China, particularly in what became known as the Sanko ‘pacification’ actions in the north of the country. Hajime Kondo took part in the Sanko actions and paints an astonishing picture of the mentality of the Japanese soldiers who fought in this brutal struggle. ‘We had the feeling that in the enemy district we could do anything,’ he says. ‘We were not told officially we could do anything but we learnt it from our senior colleagues. Basically it was all connected to the emperor system. We were brought up to kill communists and in this province everybody was communist so these people should all be killed for the emperor. That was the thinking of the ordinary soldiers.’
This attitude of’kill all the communists’ is reminiscent of the behaviour of German troops in the war against the Soviet Union which began in 1941. Hitler had declared that Germany’s war in the East was to be a ‘different kind’ of war from that fought in the West. The war in the East was to be a war of’annihilation’ against ‘sub-humans’. And the parallels do not end there: to anyone who has heard German veterans speak about their attacks on Russian villages suspected of concealing ‘partisans’, the testimony of Masayo Enomoto, who served in the Imperial Army in China, sounds chillingly familiar: ‘When you enter a village, first you steal their valuables. Then you kill people and then you set the village on fire and burn everything. Such killing, burning and robbing was seen everywhere.’
However, there is one glaring respect in which the Japanese soldiers behaved differently from their German allies. Whilst both Germans and Japanese raped women in the territories they occupied, the Imperial Army committed the crime on a far greater scale. German rape of Russian women was against explicit Nazi racial teaching, but the Japanese had no such racial ‘scruples’ when it came to sex and it appears that any Chinese woman was fair game. Enomoto was one Japanese soldier who freely confessed he had committed rape during his time in China. ‘We’d go into villages as part of the operations, singly or together, and then if we saw any women in the village we would rape them. And if there were two of us, then one would keep guard and we wouldn’t talk about it afterwards.’ On occasion Enomoto did not choose to rape the women he found — he chose to torture them instead. Once, in the countryside looking for Chinese soldiers, he and his comrades came upon ‘a woman who was about twenty-seven or twenty-eight. We had some petrol and we covered her in it and set fire to her so she died.’ When asked to explain how it was possible that he could do such a thing, he replied: ‘We were going to battle and we thought we were probably going to die, so it’s a strange word to use but I think we were looking for some sort of entertainment.’
After the war, Enomoto was one of the few Japanese soldiers held to account for their actions, imprisoned first by the Russians and then by the Chinese. And once he had fallen into the hands of his enemies one wartime crime in particular returned to haunt him. ‘I went into this village and there was a girl aged about fifteen there. And I went up to her, and then her father appeared, so I killed him. I wanted to rape her and so I thought, well, if he was her father he probably wouldn’t be very happy if I was raping his daughter, so I shot him. I didn’t have very long to do it all in. As I said, I’d just arrived in the village. She cried and she was shaking. She may have known what was going to happen to her and she was shaking. So then I raped her and killed her there and then after raping her. But what happened was that there was a young boy who caused me problems later. He was hiding and I thought he was just a young child so I thought it would be OK, but when the war trials took place he appeared and he recognized me, and that led to problems for me.’ Astonishingly, the Chinese did not execute confessed murderers and rapists like Masayo Enomoto after the war. Instead, in the late 1950s they allowed them to return to Japan. (One consequence of this policy is that veterans like him are free to speak of their crimes without risk of further prosecution.)
Enomoto’s crimes are terrible indeed, but the most shocking part of his interview was the moment when he was asked about his own sense of guilt:
’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.
Horror in the East: Japan and the Atrocities of World War II Page 4
