Researching Japanese War Crimes Records

Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records; Interagency Working Group; Washington, DC, 2006

This book is about doing research about Japanese war crimes. I will do quite a bit of quoting from the book, but I will also be adding my own thoughts on the topic of research.

The first part of the book talks about an image of the cover, in particular the diary that is shown.

Diaries with entries on atrocities

Its author, Hosaka Akira, was an army medical doctor attached to the 3rd Infantry Battalion, 20th Regiment, 16th Division in the Shanghai Expedition Army.

Some people in Japan are attempting to rewrite history, claiming that the atrocities of the Japanese military either didn't happen or, if they did, they were much less than they have been reported to be. So, original diaries are a good source of information to help refute the revisionists. The doctor records an incident:

At 10:00 on 29 November 1937 we left to clean out the enemy in Chang Chou and at noon we entered the town. An order was received to kill the residents and eighty (80) of them, men and women of all ages, were shot to death [at dusk]. I hope this will be the last time I’ll ever witness such a scene. The people were all gathered in one place. They were all praying, crying, and begging for help. I just couldn’t bear watching such a pitiful spectacle. Soon the heavy machine guns opened fire and the sight of those people screaming and falling to the ground is one I could not face even if I had had the heart of a monster. War is truly terrible. [Allied Translator and Interpreter Section translation.]

Here was one single location on one single day when eighty people were murdered by the Japanese soldiers. It's a solid indication of the type of approach the Japanese Army used in dealing with civilians, and it strengthens the case for reports that came from other places, like Nanking, and that have made it into the better-known history books.

Another diary was that of Makihara Nobuo,who was a twenty-two year old private first class belonging to the 3rd Platoon of the Machine Gun Company of the 20th Infantry Regiment, 16th Division. He wrote of his experience on November 29, 1937:

Depart from the village at 9:00 a.m. Various units compete to enter the town. The tank unit also starts. In contrast with yesterday, there are no traces of the enemy at all. Enter the town magnificently, passing an impressive temple (even though there are many temples in China)…

Because Wu Jing is an anti-Japanese stronghold, we carry out “mopping up” [soto] operations in the entire town, killing all men and women without distinction. The enemy is nowhere to be seen, either because they have lost the will to fight after their defense line at Wu Xi was breached or they are holding strong positions further ahead. So far I haven’t seen a town so impressive as this one…

If the Japanese Army had not be vicious towards the Chinese civilians, then why do so many of these diaries keep turning up with entries like those above?

The diary of Hosaka Akira establishes beyond any reasonable doubt that a massacre of some eighty Chinese civilians was carried out by order by a Japanese unit equipped with heavy machine guns. The same unit almost certainly also took part in the battle of Nanjing. It reconfirms the argument, first advanced by Japanese journalist Honda Katsuichi, that the Rape of Nanking was not an isolated incident, but fit into a pattern of atrocities since the battle of Shanghai.

This is important in that we see that the reports of atrocities were not isolated and out-of-the-ordinary at all, but were basically business as usual.

Chapter 1: Problems in doing research on the topic of atrocities

For a long time the atrocities didn't really make major news at all.

American attitudes about Japanese war crimes changed markedly following the 1997 publication of Iris Chang’s The Rape of Nanking.2 Chang’s moving testament to the Chinese victims of the sack of Nanjing in 1937 graphically detailed the horror and scope of the crime and indicted the Japanese government and people for their collective amnesia about the wartime army’s atrocious conduct. The bestselling book spurred a tremendous amount of renewed interest in Japanese wartime conduct in China, Korea, the Philippines, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific.

This shows the power of the press and of dedication to a cause. Since that book there have been numerous others on the same topic. There's even been one or two books out from the revisionists claiming nothing really bad happened.

This, the author notes, gave rise to questions like why weren't the Japanese responsible for things like this punished as severely as the Germans for their crimes? How much did the government now but not let the public know? Some researchers who tried to find out answers found that government records were missing, removed for 'security' reasons.

The author then talks about the infamous Unit 731 which did things that would have made the mad German doctors who did their own experiments green with envy. Then the author talks about the issue of comfort women, woman and young girls forced to serve as sexual slaves for the soldiers. After that, he brings up the subject of forced labor that the Japanese used, especially Korean labor.

The next thing he discusses is how Japan dealt with what happened, saying all issues were settled by the Peace Treaty. After that was a movement by other countries to deal with the fact that many were never punished for their actions during the war.

One very bad thing that happened was that various countries got hold of various Japanese records and they have not shared those with other countries, so a complete history of what happened isn't really possible.

Responding to these concerns, on December 6, 2000, Congress passed the Japanese Imperial Government Disclosure Act (Public Law 106-567), which put to rest any doubt that U.S. records relating to Japanese war crimes were included under the aegis of the 1998 Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act (Public Law 105-246). The implementing directive ordered the Interagency Working Group (IWG) “to locate and disclose, subject I Researching Japanese War Crimes to the statute’s exceptions,” any classified U.S. government documents pertaining to Japanese war crimes and to recommend their declassification and release to the public. President Clinton appointed IWG members from the major government agencies holding classified records as well as three outside members to represent the public.

There's another factor that has to be taken into account, and that is the Japanese destroyed around 70% of the war documents between the end of the war and when the U.S. occupation forces actually landed in Japan. Combine that with the distribution of documents among various, usually unsharing countries, and putting together a complete picture of the atrocities is almost impossible.

Many records were eventually returned to Japan after some years.

As to what happened China, that is complicated even more by the fact that the U.S. did not have any major intelligence operation in that country.

The atrocities at Nanjing occurred four years before the United States entered the war. At that time, the U.S. government did not have a large military or diplomatic intelligence network in China. A handful of trained military or embassy personnel reported on events, sometimes second-hand; compared with the sensational press coverage, the official U.S. documentation was scant. As a result, with the exception of the records produced during the postwar Class A war crimes trial of the commanding general of Japanese forces deemed responsible for the Rape of Nanking, there are few materials on this subject at the National Archives.

There was also the matter of what things the U.S. was interested in, and what things the government did not considered of major importance.

Immediately after the war, American attention focused on the Japanese responsible for the Pearl Harbor attack, those involved in mistreatment of U.S. prisoners of war, and Japanese military and civilian officials implicated in war crimes, including rape (especially of Filipina women) or forced prostitution of Caucasian women. There was also knowledge of the Imperial Japanese Army’s field brothel system, as shown in scattered reports declassified during the 1960s. However, the scope of the brothel network (particularly in China) and the Japanese Army’s official sponsorship of the system were not well understood. Licensed prostitution was legal in prewar Japan, and Allied officials viewed the small part of the overseas system they uncovered as an extension of homeland practices. Prosecuting Japanese soldiers for rape, a notorious crime everywhere the army set foot, took precedence over investigating the circumstances of “comfort women,” who were seen as professional prostitutes, not as unwilling victims coerced into brothels by employees of the Japanese military. For instance, a significant document that linked the Japanese government with the military field brothel system, “Amenities in the Japanese Armed Forces,” was translated in November 1945 by ATIS and declassified in the 1960s.19 Although available to the public for years, it received little attention until the “comfort women” issue focused attention on these wrongdoings in the 1990s.

One more problem confronting people doing research into this whole series of topics is that fact that the documents are not all in one centralized location, and some may turn up in places a person wouldn't expect them to be. It would be like looking for material on irrigation, and expecting to find it under 'land' or 'water,' but finding it was also classified under 'pipes' and 'soldered materials.' That's one of the problems of research into anything major, of course, and that is figure out what words you use to search through things to return the highest number of results.

Chapter 2: Documentary Evidence and Studies of Japanese War Crimes: An Interim Assessment

The author notes that doing research into war crimes depends on a number of factors, including the overall culture that the researcher comes from. Basically, is the researcher predisposed to look for something, or overlook something, because of the culture he or she grew up in? I'll add some of my own. What things is the researcher personally interested in? Why? Are they just doing research, or do they have some kind of point to prove?

Do they have a personal point to prove? For example, were one of their relatives a victim of an atrocity? What kind of sources do they have access to? A personal example. I have done a lot of research on the American actress Maude Adams. I know of sources of information, though, that I can't access, including one school that has lots of material on her, but won't let anyone take any scans or photos of the material. Further, for certain reasons I can't actually go there, so that does have an impact on my research on her.

As the author of the book notes, the materials to be researched are basically scattered all over the place, and it would take a monumental effort, including a lot of money, for anyone to get access to all of these.

The author starts the chapter noting another difficulty, and that is the matter of definitions. When doing research, one needs to have a pretty good definition of what one is researching. In this case, exactly what is it that constitutes a 'war crime?'

The author examines the relatively recent history of war crimes, and various early attempts to define and outlaw them. Then the author points out that war crimes are not only defined in legal terms, but political issues also play a major role in what is considered a war crime and what is not.

Beyond revealing and punishing German and Japanese war crimes, the trials in Nuremberg and Tokyo established new standards for the future. The trials pose problems for those studying war crimes, however. As we shall see, not all war crimes committed by the Axis powers were tried. At the same time, Axis leaders were tried for “crimes against peace” established by the Nuremberg Principles, which did not exist at the time of war. Over the years, the war crime trials in Tokyo and elsewhere have come under criticism with regard to both legality and fairness. Since the trials did not try any Allied personnel for their violations of the laws of war, some critics argue, they constituted “victor’s justice.”5 Instead of accepting the definition of war crimes as adopted at these tribunals, this chapter embraces a broader concept of war crimes as activities of a state that violated international or humanitarian laws in time of war.

How do you define War Crime?

This brings up another issue. The victor in a war is the one who essentially defines war crimes. The winning country may have done many of the same kinds of things that the losing country did, but, since it one, what it did is often not considered a crime, but what the losing country did is considered a crime.

Propoganda and War Crimes

The author then goes on to talk about propaganda. Both sides use propaganda in a war, and in World War II there were major efforts on the parts of both the U.S. and Japan to paint the other side with a very nasty, very wide brush. This ends up causing people to presume that almost anything they hear must be true. Thus, when Japan lost the war, many places told the women living there to, basically, flee for the hills, since the American soldiers of the occupation would engage in widespread rape and various other crimes.

This was based on the propaganda that the Japanese civilians had been fed by their government-controlled media. This also pre-disposed the Japanese to believe those rumors, and to act on them, attributing almost automatic war crime-status to the occupation forces.

The problem of evidence

As with any legal case of any note, evidence is very important. You need evidence to have a fair and complete trial. With war crimes, though, there is a major problem, particularly. In Japan, much of the evidence was destroyed in fires, often in the firebombing raids of the U.S. The Japanese hid some evidence and burnt lots of it between the actual end of the war and the actual occupation of Japan by U.S. soldiers. Some evidence, also, just plan got lost. That all makes it harder to prove the issue of a war crime.

The evidence the U.S. did find included undestroyed documents, some partially destroyed documents, information from prisoners obtained during the war, diaries and other materials carried by those prisoners, intercepted radio messages, and information from the people who were the victims of the actions of the Japanese military. That sounds like a lot, and it was, but, as noted earlier, a large portion of written evidence was destroyed and what survived ended up in the hands of various countries.

The trials are over, so move on

Interest in what was actually done in the war crimes dropped.

After the conclusion of these trials, neither Western nor Japanese governments seemed interested in further investigating Japan’s war crimes, in contrast to continued prosecution of Nazi war criminals in western Europe and by the Israeli government. The issue was largely left to former POWs and a small number of popular historians.17 While many academic historians referred to the brutality of Japanese forces, few actually examined the subject of Japanese atrocities in depth. Some exceptions did exist. Japanese historian Saburo Ienaga’s book on the war, first published in Japan in 1968 and translated into English in 1978, contained a chapter titled “Horrors of War.” Based almost entirely on recollections and secondary sources, it remained the most comprehensive scholarly discussion available in English until the late 1980s.

After the war, Japan was concentrating on trying to rebuild its countries. Reports came from prisoners taken by the Soviet Union and released. They wrote an account of their experiences and it sold well, but a second printing was stopped due to actions by the right-wing.

Here's another problem. There's a strong right-wing group in Japan that paints the War Crime trials as unfair. They hold that the Japanese did not commit war crimes, or that the crimes that they did commit were no where near as bad as is generally believed. They have a lot of power, and, even back in the fifties, they were able to stop a second printing of the above book.

Although Japan and China later re-established diplomatic ties, and some more information came out about what was done in China, there were those in Japan who still refused to believe the accounts. There have been and still are controversies about how Japanese textbooks deal with the war and what the Japanese Army did during it.

The Rape of Nanking, for example, is a major source of controversy. There are a large number of books about the topic, almost all of them along the war-crimes-were-committed line. Yet there are also some publications, Japanese, that try to refute these other sources. I have seen a video online that was a program in Japan by a panel of 'experts' that was attempting to downplay what had happened.

The awareness of what was done rose after the resumption of ties, and with the awareness came stronger attempts from both sides to prove their case. China, naturally, gave great emphasis to what the Japanese had done in China. Remember that even the start of World War II depends on which country one focuses on. For example, for the U.S., the war started on December 8, 1941, when Congress went along with FDR to declare war on Japan. Yet, for Europe, the war started in 1939 with the German invasion of Poland. For China and Japan, though, the war could be said to have started back in 1931 with the Japanese actions in China that led to their taking over Manchuria and turning it into a Japanese puppet-state, Manchuko.

There was also a great growth of interest in what had happened as far as war crimes goes in the United States. There are now numerous books about Nanking, about the Japanese balloon bombs, about the 'comfort women,' about Unit 731, Japanese-run Prisoner of War camps, etc. There has also been a great growth of interest and publications in what happened in the United States itself with the internment of over 100,000 persons of Japanese ancestry during the war, these people forced to move from the West Coast and then forced to move to various internment camps (even the term 'internment' is a matter of controversy, with many authors using 'concentration camp'; others use 'internment' and some use 'relocation center.')

Also to be considered in how information is available, and how that changed drastically. At the end of the war, for example, there were a couple primary ways of learning about events. Radio programs were one, movies was a second, newspapers and magazines a third, and schools a fourth. That was pretty much it. Then came television, and that allowed more information to be presented.

Then came the growth of technology, and VHS tapes moving into DVDs and being available to a much wider audience. The growth of computers, and the establishment and explosive growth of the Internet allowed all of this information to be shared easier and to a wider audience than ever. So where at one time only a small number of people would have heard about and researched a topic, now untold numbers of people have access to the same information and, in fact, even more information as that information continues go grow in amount and accessibility.

In Japan, there are still some documents that, for one reason or another, are not available for examination. There is, though, a lot of progress being made.

The author then lists the various types of documents and studies appearing on Japan its war activities, and what those publications deal with.

1. Japan's war atrocities in Asia in general.

2. Mistreatment of Japanese P.O.W.s

3. The biological and chemical wartime efforts.

4. The forced prostitution of the comfort women.

5. Japan's role in drug trafficking and property theft.

The author then talks about the Rape of Nanking as to how many were killed, and notes that the figure depends on who is giving it. Some of the historical revisionists in Japan hold that only a few thousand were killed, while China holds that the number is around 300,000. That's a very substantial difference.

Another thing to keep in considering is what published material focuses attention on. For example, there's a lot of stuff on the Rape of Nanking and it's possible for some people to think that Nanking was the only place where Japanese atrocities were carried out, yet any study of the war shows that such atrocities, while lower in number, were rather widespread in China and not limited to Nanking at all.

The emphasis on China also can cause some people to think that China was the only target, yet there is firm evidence for Japanese atrocities in the Philippines (against the Filipinos and against captured U.S. soldiers), in Malaya, and in Burma, for example.

By far the largest quantity of English publications about Japanese atrocities concerns the mistreatment of Allied POWs in Japanese captivity. Many were written by former POWs themselves.48 The judgment at the Tokyo Trial noted that whereas 4 percent of some 235,000 American and British POWs in German and Italian captivity died, as many as 27 percent of the 132,000 American and British POWs lost their lives in Japanese captivity. Some put it in a starker way: 1 percent of American POWs died at German hands; thus, 9 out of 10 American POWs who died in captivity during World War II did so under the Japanese.

The single most infamous instance of Japanese mistreatment of American POWs was the Bataan Death March, in which over 70,000 American and Filipino soldiers were forced to march for days without food or supplies. Some 750 Americans and 5,000 Filipinos died en route from starvation, disease, or random execution.

I have reviews of some of the books that deal with this, including what happened in the building of the Burma railroad.

The author then brings up an interesting question about prisoners-of-war. Why did the Japanese treat POWs so harshly?

What explains Japan’s apparently brutal policy toward Allied POWs? Prisoners of the Japanese by Australian historian Gavan Daws is a scathing indictment of Japanese treatment of Allied POWs, placing great emphasis on the racial dimension. Although Daws noted that many Asians were forced to work in sometimes even worse conditions, he considered the racial tension between Japanese soldiers and white POWs as the single most important factor behind Japanese brutality.55 Indeed, as both the Japanese and Allies recognized at the time, the humiliation of white prisoners served to diminish their prestige in the eyes of native Asians. However, the treatment of surrendered Chinese soldiers in the conflict in China was no better. Japanese historian Hata Ikuhiko emphasizes the evolution of Japanese policy toward POWs since the Meiji era, which moved from consideration to contempt as Japan’s military came to prohibit its own troops from becoming POWs.56 Historian Yoichi Kibata believes that the Japanese military’s changing attitudes toward international law was another important factor in its brutal treatment of prisoners during World War II.57

The author points out that the harsh Japanese treatment was not centered on Westerners only, as their treatment of forced laborers from China, Korea and other areas was also often brutal.

The report estimated that of some 40,000 Chinese laborers taken to Japan, nearly 7,000 had died by the end of the war.

Biological Weapons

One of the areas receiving relatively limited coverage is Japan's plans for and use of biological weapons.

During the war, the Chinese government made repeated allegations that Japanese forces deployed chemical and biological weapons, an allegation they repeated at the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal but which was not prosecuted.67 The United States military was also interested in Japanese chemical and biological warfare efforts. Given the nature of the operation of such weapons, however, irrefutable evidence was often hard to come by. Although no Japanese were prosecuted at the Tokyo Trials for crimes related to chemical or biological weapons, some were tried elsewhere as B- or C-class criminals.

This was the group called Unit 731. Some of the experiments they carried out on people were beyond horrible. There was concern that the Japanese would use their balloon bombs to carry such germs to the U.S. West Coast area, but that never really got tried. The balloon bomb program was not exactly an overwhelming success, to put it mildly. The author goes on to write about how the textbook issue was involved with this, and about Chinese writings on the subject of biological warfare.

There is no doubt that Unit 731 conducted experiments on human subjects that included Chinese, Koreans, and Russians. The question of whether Allied POWs at Camp Hoten, in Mukden, Manchuria, were experimental subjects remains unresolved. Linda Goetz Holmes, Tanaka Toshiyuki, and some POWs themselves point to the fact that Japanese medical personnel from Unit 731 visited Camp Hoten in early 1943 and conducted medical experiments on the POWs at a time when hundreds of American POWs were dying each month. The U.S. government denied having any evidence supporting such a conclusion.

The Americans got the Unit 731 data, apparently, but where it is now is unknown.

While the diabolical nature of Unit 731 still commands considerable attention, recent research has expanded to include the activities of other Japanese biological and chemical warfare units. Scholars have shown that Japanese units stationed in Beijing (Unit 1855), Nanjing (Unit 1644, or Tama Unit), and Canton (Unit 1688) also experimented on human subjects.87 Moreover, newly discovered documents such as Imoto Kumao’s wartime journal confirmed the Chinese allegations that biological weapons had been used in Central China between 1940-42, if on experimental basis. Chinese researchers have recently published investigations of the victims of Japan’s biological warfare.

In other words, the more information leaks out, the more widespread the issue seems to have been.

The Japanese did use poison gas during the war.

In 2004, Yoshimi Yoshiaki published the most comprehensive study of the Japanese military’s use of poisonous gas. In captured Japanese documents as well as other newly discovered sources, Yoshimi found evidence of Japan’s use of poison gas in China and also in Southeast Asia.In a separate article, Yoshimi introduced a battle report from the 224th Infantry Brigade that detailed the use of mustard gas in a major operation against the Communist-led Eighth Route Army in Shanxi Province in the winter of 1942. Even the unit carrying out the operation noted its severity and remarked on the anti-Japanese sentiment among the civilian population affected. This report, captured by the United States and returned to Japan, was not made public by the Self-Defense Agency until May 2004.

Experiments on Living People

Though not part of a formal chemical or biological weapons program, it was known even during the war in the Pacific that Japanese doctors carried out experiments on live POWs. In 1944, for example, ATIS published a research report on Japanese medical war crimes.93 The incident at the Kyushu Imperial University in western Japan, where Japanese doctors dissected American pilots for medical experiments, received the most publicity, not the least in Endo Shusaku’s fiction The Sea and Poison.94 Thirty people— some military, others from Kyushu University—were tried by the Allies for this crime in 1948. Charges included vivisection, wrongful removal of body parts, and cannibalism. Twenty-three defendants were found guilty of various charges. (For lack of evidence, the charges of cannibalism were dismissed.)95 Testimony by Japanese veterans and Chinese witnesses also revealed that such medical experiments also took place in Manchuria and occupied areas in China.

Rape

The issue of Japanese troops raping women, and the use of 'comfort women' is something that has received increasing attention.

The rape of Chinese women by Japanese soldiers has long been identified with Japan’s war atrocities in China. Reports by American missionaries during the Rape of Nanking in late 1937 provided a glimpse into the extent of sexual violence committed by the Japanese Army. Numerous other incidents in China and later in Southeast Asia further tarnished the reputation of the Japanese forces. The postwar trials, however, largely considered rape to be part of a more general violation of law or inhumane treatment, and not a war crime per se.

There is, as expected, disagreement in Japan over how many such women were used, whether any of them or not were actually forced to serve as comfort women, and whether or not there were any comfort women at all, claiming that they were really just prostitutes.

Many issues concerning the “comfort women” are still hotly disputed in Japan. The number of women victims remains a subject of disagreement; popular accounts frequently give the figure of 200,000. Takasaki Shoji, an expert on Korean history and chair of the AWF History Committee, emphasized the distinction between the Korean women’s volunteer corps (teishintai), who were sent to work in factories in Japan, and “comfort women.” As he noted, these two terms had been confused by many Korean activists and had led to an inflated estimate of the number of Korean “comfort women.”106 A bigger issue concerns the degrees of coercion and government involvement. Some also question the veracity of the testimony provided by former “comfort women” as well as their motivation to testify in public. Hata Ikuhiko, for one, has taken the lead and published many essays as well as a major work on this subject. Hata essentially equates the “comfort women” system with prostitution and finds similar practices during the war in other countries.107 He has been criticized by other Japanese scholars for downplaying the hardship of the “comfort women.”

The author then goes on to talk about issues that don't receive a lot of attention, like Japan's role in drug trafficking and in theft of property like works of art.

The author then notes that historians need to pay more attention to materials available in Japan itself (which would mean getting them translated, of course). Coordinating the materials that are held by various countries would also help clear up various questions. There should be a more intense effort to get oral histories of the dwindling number of survivors.

Then, once all of this is done, the question of Why? needs to be tackled. Why were these rapes and other things done? Why were people experimented on when still alive? Why were the comfort women used? Even sixty years after the end of the war, many questions remain unanswered.

Following chapters deal with more documents being found, and a whole bunch of places that one could look for documents on specific topics. One chapter deals with message intercepts and their translations. Then there's a chapter on the war crimes records, how they were obtained, and the war crimes trials. One chapter covers how some records were returned to Japan, and another chapter discusses intelligence gathering in occupied Japan.

Main Index
Japan main page
Japanese-American Internment Camps index page
Japan and World War II index page