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Pawns of Empire: Postwar Taiwan,Japan and the Dilemma of War CrimesBarak Kushner aa University of Cambridge , UKPublished online: 09 Apr 2010.

To cite this article: Barak Kushner (2010) Pawns of Empire: Postwar Taiwan, Japan and theDilemma of War Crimes, Japanese Studies, 30:1, 111-133, DOI: 10.1080/10371391003639120

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Pawns of Empire: Postwar Taiwan, Japan and theDilemma of War Crimes

BARAK KUSHNER, University of Cambridge, UK

Examining the plight of the Taiwanese, who were pawns in the larger conflict of World War

Two, helps us to understand the complicated process of the breakdown of the Japanese empire.

The postwar legal adjudication of BC class Japanese war crimes in East Asia is a key element in

unwinding the historical complexity of postwar power shifts, the formation of a Taiwanese

identity, and its connection to Japan’s postwar foreign relations goals. This paper considers three

inter-related issues – analyzing how Japanese rule was restructured in the postwar former

colonies, dissecting the prosecution of lower-level Japanese war crimes, and resolving the

conundrum of collaboration within the former empire. These problems are tied intimately

together due to the transformation of postwar identity and colonial politics.

In December of 1974 a scrawny and raggedly dressed former Japanese imperial soldier

was discovered in the jungles of Morotai, a dot of an island in the middle of the

Indonesian archipelago. The Japanese media feverishly spilled rivers of ink reporting the

story, following a pattern unleashed during the discovery of two Japanese soldiers, Yokoi

Shoichi and Onoda Hiroo, in formerly occupied jungles. Unfortunately, the glee did not

last long. It was eventually uncovered that Nakamura was not Japanese, he was

Taiwanese; his Chinese name was Li Guanghui. But the mystery unravelled even further

because Li/Nakamura was not even a Han Chinese but an aboriginal Taiwanese, one of

the many who ‘volunteered’ for service, receiving a Japanese imperial military education

and shipping out for combat in the late years of World War Two.1 Li/Nakamura’s plight

was that he lived for 30 years in the jungle believing he was a Japanese imperial subject

yet in the end he received somewhat less than the treatment due to one. The postwar

Japanese government only agreed to offer him half of what it paid other Japanese soldiers

for lost wages.2

From 1895 to the present day, the shifting sands of Taiwanese identity have been very

much like those of Li/Nakamura, a soldier who through no doing of his own suffered

three changes of nationality under various administrations. As modern Taiwanese

historian Lo Jiu-jung has observed, ‘Within a period of half a century, the Taiwanese had

been put under the political domination first of the Qing, then of the Japanese, and

finally of the Republic of China.’3 With such quick reversion back and forth the precise

nature and dynamics of authority over Taiwan, especially at the end of the war, are

1Marukawa, ‘Liu Lianren, Yokoi Shoichi, Nakamura Teruo ni totte no senso’, 339. The noted

Taiwanese public intellectual, Long Yingtai, has also recently discussed the Li/Nakamura case as an

archetype for thinking about postwar Taiwanese identity, in her book Dajiang dahai 1949.2Tomizawa, Taiwan sh�usen hishi, 213.3Lo, ‘Trials of the Taiwanese’, 280.

Japanese Studies, Vol. 30, No. 1, May 2010

ISSN 1037-1397 print/ISSN 1469-9338 online/10/010111-23 � 2010 Japanese Studies Association of AustraliaDOI: 10.1080/10371391003639120

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predictably difficult to nail down. Nonetheless, since the turn of the century the

Japanese had ruled Taiwan and corralled many of its inhabitants into supporting the

imperial cause. It was this influence that had to be resolved at the moment Japan’s 15-

year war in East Asia ended in the late summer of 1945.

Either as volunteers or draftees Taiwanese soldiers in the Japanese imperial forces

served in many capacities but often as translators or in low-level jobs. Such positions

frequently placed Taiwanese on the front lines in conflict with local Chinese or other

ethnicities within Japan’s Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere. In essence Taiwanese

had a dual identity, as Lo points out. Ethnically they stood as Han Chinese but legally

until the end of 1945 they were recorded as Japanese nationals.4 This duality was

bequeathed through the legacy of the empire and when that collapsed the very identity

that undergirded the Taiwanese role in Japan’s imperial enterprise quickly crumbled.

The subsequent political dilemma turned on the issue of how to resolve Taiwan’s

historical role in Japan’s imperial efforts and how to process such responsibility with an

eye toward future policy.

Examining the plight of Taiwanese – ethnic Han or aborigines – as pawns in the larger

circumstances of World War Two (1931–1945) helps us to start to understand the

complicated process of the breakdown of the Japanese empire. More importantly, the

manner in which justice was pursued by Chinese authorities in the immediate aftermath,

part of what I call the legal adjudication of Japanese war crimes in East Asia, is a key

element in unwinding the complexity of postwar power shifts, the formation of a

Taiwanese identity, and its connection to Japan’s postwar foreign relations goals.5

This paper sits at the intersection of three issues – how Japanese rule was restructured

in the postwar former colonies, the prosecution of Japanese war crimes, and the

conundrum of collaboration within the former empire. These problems are intimately

tied together due to the transformation of postwar identity and colonial politics but I am

interested in following the story to the edge of the Japanese empire after 1945. My

research centers on two inter-related aspects: how war crimes trials of the Japanese were

constructed in Taiwan, and how that process influenced the postwar growth of

Taiwanese and Japanese nationalism. Taiwan was a complex geographical space, never

fully confirmed as a legal entity of the Japanese empire or the Qing.6 This legal liminality

increased dramatically with Japan’s surrender in 1945. Legal questions concerning

jurisdiction, international law and the nature of colonial responsibility still weigh heavily

today within the historical legacy of Japanese imperialism. Who exactly was responsible

for Japan’s war in Asia in which ethnic Chinese and aboriginal Taiwanese became

soldiers for the Japanese and guarded Allied POWs? How should postwar punishment

and mercy be meted out? Taiwan is an exceptionally difficult case study because, unlike

in Korea or northern China, the Japanese had not really worn out their welcome as

colonial overseers. Because the island was on the periphery of the newly established

geographic borders of Chinese Nationalist rule after 1945 Taiwan was at first not a

priority for Chinese political management or military administration, and would not

become so until a few years into the Cold War.

4Ibid., 285–286.5See Kawashima, ‘Sengo shoki Nihon’.6Even today the international stature of Taiwan remains contested – does it represent itself or is it part of

the Chinese mainland? The two major competing political parties, the Democratic Progressive Party and

the KMT or Chinese Nationalist Party, continually contest this issue and it remains at the forefront of the

Taiwanese political debate.

112 Barak Kushner

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My aim in this research is to analyze the pursuit of justice in this postwar contested area

of Japanese military and economic control. There were two major issues impinging on

war crimes trials in Taiwan: the ethno-political identity of those liable to be charged with

war crimes; and the question of collaboration. The Nationalists needed to determine who

was legally defined as a Japanese or a Chinese (or aborigine), I argue, because this

affected the manner in which the individual would or would not be prosecuted. The

Kuomintang (KMT) had also to delineate a policy regarding treatment of all Taiwanese,

particularly concerning collaboration. A third factor was the manner in which the

Japanese responded; after all, there were several hundred thousand of them left in Taiwan

at the end of the war, including colonists and soldiers. For the Nationalist party it was in

their best interest not to deem everyone on the island as a traitor, but neither could KMT

leaders allow gross acts of Taiwanese collaboration to go unpunished. Given Taiwan’s

previous long duree as a colonial state the conditions conducive to cleaving it away from

Japanese rule and culture initially appeared daunting. Dongyoiin Hwang considers that

punishing Chinese collaborators was important to ‘re-establish national discipline and

dignity’.7 Delineating who was a traitor/collaborator, hanjian in Chinese, as opposed to a

war criminal whose trials were separate, required an open and frank discussion about the

nature of Japan’s entire empire, Taiwan’s role, and more importantly and perhaps most

difficult, Chinese identity within that empire. Lo Jiu-jung encapsulates the entangled

circumstances of those moments when she asks how ‘Taiwanese people [could] convince

the Chinese that despite their donning Japanese clothing, eating Japanese food, speaking

Japanese, living in Japanese houses, and wearing Japanese slippers’ they were still

Chinese at their core.8 This was a deep question, the ramifications of which reverberate

even today, and not only in Taiwan. Historian of Korea, Koen De Ceuster, boldly

remarks that a similar situation for other former Japanese colonies exists because, as he

says, ‘Collaboration is the original sin in Korea.’9

Postwar trials concerning Taiwanese wartime behavior were a breed apart from

mainland trials but revealed two similarities. First, the KMT struggled to assert that it

was the ruling political authority over all Chinese, including those of recently liberated

areas. Second, the KMT battled with public opinion. In China, it contended with the

Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for support and in Taiwan the Nationalists had to

convince the formerly Japanese-led native Taiwanese that the KMT could do a better

job in managing the country than imperial Japan. Thus, the pageantry or ceremony of

the legal process provided a platform for the Nationalist Party from which it could

demonstrate that it was legally administering Taiwan under the banner of international

law along the lines drawn by the Cairo Declaration of 1943. The tricky part was forging a

new identity for the Taiwanese and getting them to go along with the results of the new

policies. We should not forget that for all intents and purposes throughout the 1930s

and 1940s those under the yoke of Japanese rule had no reason to expect a sudden

conclusion to the Japanese empire. The end of Japanese colonial management called

into question the entirety of the education many Taiwanese had acquired and even the

language they spoke.

7Hwang, ‘Wartime Collaboration in Question’, 75. The scholarship on collaboration trials in postwar

China is growing but usually focuses on the mainland: see Marsh, ‘Chou Fo-Hai’; Brook, Collaboration;

Zanasi, ‘Globalizing Hanjian’; Masui, Kankan saiban, 1946–1948. Ang Lee’s 2008 film Lust Caution,

based on the Zhang Ailing story, dealt with this issue in a more popular vein.8Lo, ‘Trials of the Taiwanese’, 307.9De Ceuster, ‘The Nation Exorcised’, 207.

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This perception of victimhood in the postwar, that Taiwanese were stifled by Japanese

colonialism and then ensnared under KMT rule, is reflective of immediate postwar

attitudes among Japanese as well. Japanese soldiers ‘trapped’ by the war were stylized in

the Japanese TV movie concerning a BC class war criminal, ‘I Want To Be Left Alone’

(Watakushi wa kai ni naritai). The film version, based on Kato Tetsutaro’s diary about

being a lesser class war criminal, adopted the key phrase about wanting to be left alone.

The plot focused on the supposedly misguided pursuit of postwar justice concerning a

peaceful young man forced to be a POW camp guard during the war. He was tried, he

believed unlawfully, and sentenced to be executed. The ending, as adapted by one of

famed Japanese director Kurosawa Akira’s screenwriters, was emotionally moving. To

paraphrase a lengthy section Kato wrote,

If I were reborn I would not want to be Japanese. No, I wouldn’t even want to

be human. I would not want to be a cow or a horse because they are bullied by

humans. If I had to be reborn I would want to be a shellfish. Shellfish stick to

rocks deep in the ocean. They share no anxiety to consume them. Because they

know nothing they are not sad, they are not happy. They feel no pain . . .10

This self-pity at being convicted of crimes over which he had no control became the

cornerstone of both the peace movement and the postwar structure of irresponsibility, as

Japanese historian Ishida Takeshi noted.11 Matsunami Jun suggests that this type of

literature portrays the occupation, though grudgingly accepting the benefits, mostly in a

negative light. Thus, postwar BC class war crimes trials appear as a calamitous fate

reserved for mostly undeserving souls.12

My research in the Japanese and Chinese archives leads me to conclude that the

proper approach to analyzing the war crimes conundrum in the imperial periphery is not

via the oft-rehearsed experiences of a small number of class A war criminals at the Tokyo

War Crimes Trials. Instead, we need to unravel the threads of the almost 5,700 BC class

war crimes trials in East Asia. The massive number of these trials across Japan’s former

empire offers a departure from what Lisa Yoneyama calls the ‘Americanization of

Japanese war crimes’.13 An examination of BC class war criminal trials in East Asia

places what happened at the local level in formerly colonized areas of Japan’s empire

back into the crucible of historical scrutiny. How the Chinese, Taiwanese and former

imperial subjects reacted to the dismemberment of Japan’s empire, specifically

concerning wartime responsibility, set them apart from American aims. American trials

did not have to deal with collaboration or national identity issues; they merely wished to

assign legal blame. For many of the Asian inhabitants of Japan’s empire, the same legal

process was much more prone to becoming a political and social issue at the outset.

Yoneyama avers that the ways ‘in which legal and other discursive forces have produced the

Asian/American as the agent-subject through and over which demands for different kinds

of historical justice’ are pursued has blinded our historical insight into the postwar. Her

10As quoted in Utsumi, Sugamo purizon, 175.11The actual translation would be more along the lines of I want to become a shellfish but that doesn’t really

make sense in English. The desire to be a shellfish means the author wants to roll up and hide, away from

the outside world in which he finds himself in the predicament of being labelled a BC class war criminal.

Ishida, ‘Senso sekininron saiko’.12Matsunami, ‘Senryo kaikaku to shite’, 209.13Yoneyama, ‘Traveling Memories, Contagious Justice’.

114 Barak Kushner

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argument suggests that this unipolar approach to analyzing Japanese war crimes,

committed against the Allies, remains a key impediment to grasping the way in which

East Asians dealt with the dissolution of the Japanese imperial structure in the postwar

period.14

The current wave of historical study tends to examine memory and its interaction

with history, but we have failed to notice deep in the background of this elastic memory

the larger role the courts and the media at the time exerted in molding it into firmer

public opinion. Part of the reason for this neglect is that scholarship has needed to

unearth the details and horror of the atrocities themselves and has had less time to

engage the manner in which legal responsibility was pursued for all but the most heinous

events. Memory gives birth to emotional history – it tends toward the recollection of the

individual – but legal judgments are a form of public memory that creates precedents, on

which foreign policy and future strategy can be built. One goal of my larger project is to

examine the manner in which the Chinese, Japanese, and Americans used the political

shifts in the early Cold War to engage in new domestic and foreign propaganda plans

and politics to solidify support for their camps.15 During the late 1940s and 1950s

propaganda goals in East Asia shifted their focus and raised the banner of ‘humanity and

justice’. Each nation tried to prove its ‘justness’ by enacting the proper and legal pursuit

of Japanese war criminals in the immediate postwar.

National memory is personal and domestic; legal opinions are public and publicized

and, more importantly, strive to be international. Legal judgments are an attempt to

balance personal experiences and biases with an accepted standard of norms which will,

if followed correctly, admit the nation to an international brotherhood of like-minded

states which base their societies on ideas of truth and justice. Postwar trials of Taiwanese

often served as ‘political rituals’ and gave the populace a series of ‘solemn and repetitive

practices that connect[ed] leaders and communities with larger, higher forces, be these

God or gods, transcendental movements of history, the fate of the nation, the future of

the people, or whatever’.16 The KMT encouraged such procedures with an eye toward

demonstrating its new allegiance to international law and to assert its new rule of law,

after Japan had surrendered. This process also assists in our understanding of the

dismantling of the Japanese empire and how Chinese power and authority reaffirmed

themselves on the mainland, and in Taiwan. This legal process was the very definition of

international law. Whether these were legal trials and not show trials is difficult to

conclude given that many of them belonged partly to both categories. The system

adjudicated public guilt and delineated who was Japanese and who was Chinese. This

process legally untangled various issues but failed to do so culturally, often leaving

Taiwanese, Manchukuo residents, Koreans, and colonial Japanese individuals to sort

out their own identities during the initial years of the Cold War.17

14Ibid., 57. Ishida Takashi’s essay on Japanese wartime responsibility makes a similar criticism but also

points out that already in the 1950s Takeuchi Yoshimi was stating that the Tokyo War Crimes Trials

were lacking since they failed to develop from an Asian country’s point of view; Ishida, ‘Senso sekininron

saiko’, 13–18. Sandra Wilson discusses 1950s Japanese society’s relationship with war criminals and the

idea of victimhood in her article, ‘War, Soldier and Nation’.15This paper is extracted from a longer manuscript, tentatively titled ‘Dealing with the ‘‘Devil’’: BC Class

War Crimes Trials and Sino-Japanese Relations’, and focused on the manner in which the Japanese

public responded to postwar BC class war crimes trials in China and how the process of these trials

affected early Cold War Sino-Japan relations.16Zarrow, ‘Political Ritual in Early Republic of China’, 155.17Cowles, ‘Trials of War Criminals (Non-Nuremberg)’.

Pawns of Empire 115

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The lag in dismantling Japanese rule in China, in contrast to the alacrity of the US

occupation of Japan, demonstrates that Chinese military policy did not always follow the

American lead and it underscores the fact that China was still relatively beyond the

control of any one major military force – the KMT, CCP, the US, and (of course) Japan.

As the late Japanese military historian Fujiwara Akira and others have ably

demonstrated, Japan still had slightly more than one million soldiers in China as well

as additional troops in Taiwan and Korea on the eve of its surrender.18 Those on the

home islands of Japan and the South Pacific were in poor condition to fight, but that was

not necessarily the case in China. The KMT had to deal with the lingering Japanese

military as they slowly repatriated but remained in many key positions. The formalities

for surrender did not occur on the mainland until 9 September 1945 and on Taiwan

command and control was not handed to the KMT until 25 October. Even as

demobilization efforts were under way, the KMT complained that the CCP blocked the

postwar repatriation of Japanese soldiers by disturbing transportation and communica-

tion, or pilfering weapons transfers.19

Immediate Postwar Taiwan

The numbers of Japanese the KMT and CCP had to deal with in mainland China were

staggering: a little more than two million, of whom slightly over one million were

military POWs and 780,000 were civilians. Approximately 56,000 were defined as

Korean and 40,000 as Taiwanese. Given the sheer numbers and their disparate locations

the KMT quickly made a decision to retain Japanese train crews on staff. As Chinese

Republican archives note, many prewar train lines in China were managed by foreigners,

so immediately following Japan’s surrender crews of Chinese were not available in

enough numbers to run the systems. ‘We must use these materials and Japanese

technicians who are prisoners, Rifu gongren, to fix and maintain the tracks in this early

postwar time’, one report stated.20 The Nationalist government, still stationed in

Chongqing, reasoned that with properly operating transport it would be able to more

quickly receive the Japanese weapons that were supposed to be delivered to KMT

hands.

At the moment of surrender on 15 August 1945 no one – not the Chinese, the

Taiwanese or the Japanese – could envision the future with any clarity. Commentary

from the repatriates, hikiagesha, when they reached Japan suggests the Taiwanese

harbored ambivalence toward the incoming mainland Chinese administrators and

military, although these comments could be attributed to colonial arrogance. Shiomi

Shunji, a long-time Japanese economic specialist who worked in Taiwan for the

colonial administration and who returned to Taipei from Tokyo by plane on 9

September 1945, aptly pointed to this duality in his postwar diary.21 Many Japanese

were at first worried they would find themselves on the receiving end of vicious

retribution but once the situation calmed down the former colonial population grew

more relaxed, and some Japanese even opted to stay. The pay was good and

18Fujiwara Akira details the military situation in Nihon gunjishi.19‘Zhongguo lujun zongsilingbu shouxiang baogaoshu’, Quanzonghao 787, 16598, May 1946, The

Second Historical Archives of China, Nanjing, China.20Ibid.21Shiomi, Hiroku sh�usen chokugo no Taiwan.

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technicians, especially those welcomed by the new Chinese rulers, believed they still

had a lot more to ‘teach’ the Chinese to help them modernize. General Albert

Wedemeyer, head of US command in Chongqing, told KMT General He Yingqin

that he wanted all Japanese out of China by the summer of 1946, while allowing

Taiwan a later deadline of January 1947. Many Japanese in Taiwan wanted to stay;

the Americans were acquiescent and the Chinese believed they needed Japanese

technicians. In the end approximately 7,000 Japanese technicians and their families

(totaling about 28,000 Japanese) stayed in Taiwan for the first few years after the end

of the war.22

Relations between the native Taiwanese and Japanese colonial rulers were not without

their resentments, and surrender offered the perfect opportunity to settle old scores.

Groups of vigilantes and armed hoodlums formed gangs and harassed Japanese enclaves

around the country. Just after the surrender there was an incident in the northern area of

the capital Taipei called Dadaocheng where a score of Special Higher policemen were

assassinated.23 The authorities took pains to keep such incidents from being publicized

in the media and limited any mention of aggression toward Japanese citizens because it

was believed such news could further enflame public resentment. Certainly in the

immediate months following surrender and at least until late 1946 Japanese military and

police still greatly outnumbered KMT forces in Taiwan.24 Security required some

flexibility in dealing with the dismantling of empire.

As Cold War historian Sayuri Shimizu illuminates, many Japanese, despite their new

status as underlings and facing domination by America through the occupation, ‘sought

to define their nation’s place in postwar East Asia in ways autonomous of strategic

imperatives imposed by the American occupation overlord’.25 While the Chinese were

coordinating their policy on Taiwan and exploring how to assert themselves as the new

rulers, the Japanese military had not yet halted its own efforts. General Okamura Yasuji,

a Japanese military leader in charge of the imperial army in China, quickly developed a

plan to allow Japan to assist China. This time it was a postwar plan. Okamura’s

immediate postwar reflections demonstrate the disparity within Japanese military

opinion toward the surrender, depending on where it was located. On the homeland and

on the Pacific Islands the Japanese faced imminent defeat at the hands of the Allies,

principally because of the imperial military’s lack of planning or insufficient supplies.

Okamura’s diary entries from the first few weeks of the postwar put into perspective the

fact that many Japanese soldiers in China, in contrast, did not believe that they had

actually lost the war. The imperial military’s China Expedition Force remained

convinced that it had won an eight-year series of rolling victories on the mainland and

remained undefeated.26 Okamura drew up a document with the assistance of his

colleagues on 16 August, the day after surrender, full of confidence in the Japanese

military and Japan’s ability to aid postwar China. His program detailed that with the

Japanese militarily out of the picture China was now the only superpower in East Asia

and that Japan’s role should be to offer assistance so the region could continue the

struggle against western imperialism.27

22Yang, ‘Resurrecting the Empire?’, 193. See also Yang, ‘Ch�ugoku ni tomaru Nihonjin gijutsusha’.23Tomizawa, Taiwan sh�usen hishi, 99–100.24Xu, ‘Zhanhou liutai riqiao de lishi guiji’, 155.25Shimizu, ‘Occupation Policy and Postwar Sino-Japanese Reflections’, 201.26Inaba, Okamura Yasuji taisho shiryo, jokan, 9.27Ibid., 21.

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As complicated as Taiwanese nationality was in the immediate period following

surrender, identity would remain relatively fluid throughout the early years of the

postwar. Zhang Rongshu was one example of this ambiguity. Born in 1925, Zhang was

part of the Taiwanese volunteer corps that entered the Japanese navy during the later

years of World War Two. When a US submarine torpedo sank his ship, Zhang was

rescued after some 14 hours at sea. Even though he fought for the Japanese side during

the war, postwar he recollected in his memoirs that he began thinking that he should

reconsider his opinions toward the Chinese because, after all, they defeated the

Japanese. Zhang was fairly excited about the Nationalists’ arrival in Taiwan but grew

disappointed after his first encounter with KMT officials and soldiers. It is possible that

Zhang also remained biased due to the lingering influence of Japanese wartime

propaganda but it was mainland Chinese behavior in comparison to his own experience

under the Japanese that changed his initial opinions. ‘First their [mainland Chinese]

educational level was low, many were virtually illiterate. They had no moral compass

and harassed the peasants. Second, they saw us from a colonial management standpoint,

namely in calling those who had been soldiers for the Japanese imperial military

‘‘hanjian’’, or traitors. Third, they were corrupt. Fourth, I felt that none of them was

patriotic’, Zhang coldly recollected.28

At the end of Japanese colonial rule, the imperial military had already surrendered on

paper but in reality on Taiwan the KMT and Japanese forces ruled in unison, and in the

beginning both sides wanted it that way. The last Governor General of Taiwan, Ando

Rikichi, revealed in the final imperial Japanese report filed from Taiwan that his last

months from August 1945 to April 1946 were mostly spent worrying about social order

and taking care of repatriation efforts. In a similar manner, many Japanese looked fondly

on their 50-year project of modernizing Taiwan and somehow, like Okamura, could not

really fathom that they had lost, because the proof of Taiwan’s colonial development

appeared to demonstrate otherwise.29

Alphabet Soup of War Criminals

According to Chinese historian Song Zhiyong, KMT leaders believed that removing the

Japanese imperial military presence from Chinese territory was among the most pressing

postwar issues.30 The practical matter of assuming dominant power in formerly

occupied China was the KMT’s priority, not the pursuit of ideals such as ‘justice’. The

dismantling of colonial rule in Taiwan also focused on repatriating Japanese and

determining which Taiwanese had committed war crimes or had been traitors to their

motherland. The fact that Taiwan had been colonized for about half a century by Japan

made the processing of the BC class war crimes trials involving Taiwanese more

cumbersome than on the mainland.

Class A war crimes – those dealt with in Nuremberg and Tokyo – were labeled as

crimes against peace. These were committed by men who planned and executed

‘aggressive’ war but did not necessarily sully themselves with the dirty job of directly

putting plans into action. The BC class was reserved for conventional war crimes (B:

rape, murder, illegal incarceration, abusing POWs, etc.) and crimes against humanity

28Wang et al., Taiji Ribenbing zuotanhui, 46.29Su, Zuihou de Taiwan zongdufu, 258–280.30Song, ‘Zhanhou chuqi zhongguo’, 41.

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(C). The B and C classes of crime are legally slightly unusual. In traditional

international law a defendant could not be tried for action against his own people or

for actions committed before a war began. The creation of the new C class was a way to

prosecute genocide and get around this legal barrier. The Japanese military did not

implement a genocidal policy, so those arraigned for B class trials were indicted as being

in positions of responsibility for conventional war crimes, and those who actually carried

out the crime were C class (though mostly defendants were just charged as a combined

category, BC class).31

Including Japan, BC class war crimes trials took place in 49 different locations. KMT-

managed trials began in February 1946 across ten cities including Taipei, Shenyang,

Beijing, Nanjing, and elsewhere. The Nationalists brought 883 defendants to court and

executed 149 of them. The Chinese pursued fewer war criminals and certainly executed

less than England or Holland – a notable point considering that the Chinese bore the

brunt of suffering during the war. In total across East Asia 5,700 cases were heard and

984 individuals were executed.32 It is important to note that, even though these lower

BC class trials receive much less scholarly attention, their scale dwarfs the Class A war

crimes trials. Within the group of 5,700 cases, 173 individuals were Taiwanese, of whom

26 were executed. Korean/Taiwanese defendants made up 5.6% of those convicted of

BC class crimes.33 The Japanese government, even though it had lost its sovereignty and

mandate to conduct diplomatic relations with neighboring countries, paid detailed

attention to the domestic opinion of these trials on the Chinese mainland and conducted

interviews with repatriates. Most, for many reasons, did not hold the mainland war

crimes trials and legal conditions in high regard.34

These BC class trials were military tribunals. At the same time in China, and many

Taiwanese were caught up in these as well, there were many more trials that concerned

who was a Chinese collaborator. Over 30,000 individuals were charged in the period

1945–1947 with treason. About 6,000 were absolved but approximately 15,000 were

convicted and for many the sentence was death.35 So great was the KMT pursuit of

crimes of collaboration that the Nationalists had to put a cap on collecting evidence

because the courts could not handle the load and the government wished to concentrate

more of its attention on the civil war with the Communists.

One reason, I suspect, why Chinese war crimes trials did not mete out justice as

harshly to the Japanese as they did their own was because the Chinese civil war

distracted KMT efforts. Another major reason was also Chiang Kai Shek’s policy that

promoted dealing with the Japanese aggressors in a unique fashion. General Chiang

expressly announced his postwar policy of yi de bao yuan, ‘to repay hatred with kindness’

31Higurashi, Tokyo saiban, 27–28; Totani, The Tokyo War Crimes Trials, 20–23.32Statistics vary according to source, government, and time but these numbers are based on Hayashi

Hirofumi’s calculations in his BC ky�u senpan saiban, 61, 64.33BC class war crimes trials across East Asia displayed a prejudice against colonials who served as

Japanese soldiers, as noted by Utsumi, Chosenjin BC ky�u senpan no kiroku, ii.34‘Honpo senpan saiban kankai zakken, gaichi ni okeru honpojin no gunji saiban kankei, Ch�ugoku no

bu’, D 1.3.9.2–5–1, Ministry of Foreign Affairs Archives, Tokyo, Japan. Yang Daqing explores the force

with which the returnees from China influenced public opinion, serving as a lever against the more

conservative Kaikosha group, an organization composed of prewar cadets. See his ‘Living Soldiers, Re-

lived Memories?’, 81–88.35Liu, Kankan saiban, 178; ‘Zhongguo lujun zongsilingbu shouxiang baogaoshu’, Quanzonghao 787,

16598, May 1946, The Second Historical Archives of China, Nanjing, China; Meng and Cheng,

‘Chengzhi hanjian gongzuo gaishu’, 110.

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on the day of Japan’s surrender, 15 August 1945. The Chinese generalissimo broadcast

a radio message to the nation clearly enunciating that China held the ‘Japanese military

clique as the enemy and not the Japanese people. We want to hold them responsible but

do not want to seek revenge on the innocent, nor add to their suffering’.36 The next day

an editorial in the main Chongqing newspaper glossed the same message and

editorialized that keeping the peace after the war was a difficult undertaking. The

paper postulated that if China were too harsh with the defeated Japanese postwar the

result could descend into a more hateful scenario. Should they be too lenient, however,

the paper theorized that China risked assisting the Japanese ‘to once again rally to their

fantasies’ of imperial domination. The newspaper was adamant that it was necessary to

destroy Japan’s machines of war and lead them on the road toward democracy. ‘We have

achieved the peace, now we have to complete it’, the editorial concluded on a hopeful

note.37 This was a brave move given the lingering Japanese mood on the Chinese

mainland. An American-led questionnaire polled Japanese in Beijing in December 1945

concerning their thoughts on the war, East Asia, and Japan. A clear majority of the

respondents still believed that Korea was not mature enough to be independent and that

Taiwan should not be returned to China. Even more telling was that an overwhelming

percentage believed that Japanese were superior beings in East Asia and that if China

had truly understood Japan’s aims Japan would have won the war.38 Okamura Yasuji,

the imperial militarist, certainly subscribed to this point of view and apparently so did

many others. Even after surrender the Japanese only slowly and reluctantly relinquished

their ‘imperial’ way of thinking. Japanese wartime propaganda had shaped a mindset

that was not going to deflate overnight regardless of the empire’s collapse.

The issue of adjudicating legal responsibility for war crimes and collaboration trials

became a struggle for legitimacy between the Nationalists and the Communists. The

CCP touched on the idea of benevolence, as Chiang had, but pushed further on the

issue of pursuing war criminals. In part this was a calculated political move to show

the Chinese populace that the CCP believed the KMT was reneging on its pledge to

pursue Japanese war criminals, but it was also a move to force the issue more into the

media spotlight. On 14 September 1945 the main organ of the Chinese Communist

party in Yenan, Liberation Daily, printed an editorial preaching the need to ‘sternly judge

war criminals’ and claimed that Japan’s militarists were fooling the Allies because they

were just waiting for the right time to return.39

Contestation over the administration of postwar Taiwan remained a pitched battle for

legitimacy among three competitors – the KMT, the CCP and the remaining Japanese.

The KMT initially dragged its feet in looking at war crimes trials but faced the issue of

hanjian, or traitors, immediately. This was not just a major issue within the areas

formerly occupied by Japan but a complex task in the relatively freer sections of the

mainland as well where relations with the Japanese were sometimes even more

complex.40

36Tian, Zhanhou zhongri guanxi, 10. Also see Tai, Zhonghua minguo zhongyao, 633–635. The Chinese

were not the only ones to cut short pursuit of Japanese war crimes. See Pritchard, ‘The Gift of

Clemency’.37Zhongyang ribao (Chongqing), 16 August 1945, reprinted in Tian, Zhanhou zhongri guanxi, 11–12.38Yoshida, Nihonjin no sensokan, 57.39Jiefang ribao (Yenan), 14 September 1945, reprinted in Tian, Zhanhou zhongri guanxi, 20–22.40The wartime Japanese government was already aware of the endless Chinese debates concerning the

legal definition of traitor, Shanghai jimusho chosashitsu, Mantetsu, J�ukei seiken.

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Hanjian or War Criminal?

The question of who faced indictment for being a traitor and who was charged as a war

criminal was an important one in the immediate postwar, as it continues to be today. At

the outset there was no standard and each geographic region was told it would have to

decide for itself how to try both traitors and Japanese war criminals but should do so in

an even-handed and juridical fashion. The courts and police were told ‘discrimination

will not be tolerated’ and that the highest court in each region should try traitors. War

criminals would be treated by the special military courts set up for that purpose or

measures would be put into place to extradite such individuals from appropriate

governments such as the US. Maintaining KMT party unity was an utmost priority but

so was re-educating the Japanese POWs. Internal KMT discussions quickly ensued

concerning the need to send instructors to where the Japanese were encamped to ‘guide’

them and teach them the doctrine of Sun Yat Sen’s ‘democratic principles’.41

According to the Chinese dictionary definition, a hanjian was originally a loser in

battle, a degenerate or scum of the Han race, or one who lived off of the invader’s

largesse or accepted tribute from the outside. This meaning then expanded to represent

the dregs of the Chinese nation, so a traitor in that situation was one who went against

the state.42 Historian of Sino-Japan relations Wada Hideho clarifies the issue when he

notes that the issue of war crimes in Taiwan was like being stuck between being a war

criminal and a traitor – it was a situation in which one could not come out a victor.43

One must remark that the Chinese understanding of hanjian is more malleable than the

US legal definition of treason, which has no ethnic component within its mandate.

Hanjian is deeply rooted in being Chinese. America is one of the few democratic

societies to articulate the specific crime of treason in its constitution but this act is also

notoriously difficult to assert and prove in open court. To sustain the charges at least

two witnesses are necessary and the prosecutors must prove intent. Such was not the

case with Chinese traitors.

The lines between being a traitor in the war of resistance against Japan and being

deemed a war criminal were blurred at best. What’s more, who to try first was a dilemma

– domestic criminals who could destabilize the fragile CCP-KMT united front, or

Japanese who potentially had the power to rise again and continue the occupation of

China? At the start of the war, on 8 August 1938 the KMT government had already

released a law, Xiuzheng chengzhi hanjian tiaoli (Amended Regulations for Punishing

Traitors) which stated in part that passing information to the enemy or spies or taking

part in leftist activities was synonymous with being a traitor, the penalty for which was

death.44 The KMT might have softened their position after the war but by no means had

they clarified it. On 23 November 1945 the Nationalist government again released a law,

Chuli hanjian anjian tiaoli (Regulations for Dealing with Cases of Treason) and it

classified many government officials as traitors. Chinese historian Lin Qiuping notes

that the difference between the more traditional Chinese definitions of traitor and the

41‘Zhongguo lujun zongsilingbu shouxiang baogaoshu’, Quanzonghao 787, 16598, May 1946, The

Second Historical Archives of China, Nanjing, China.42Lin, ‘Hanjian de ciyi jieshi yu falu jieding’, 154. Frederick Wakeman espouses the same definition. See

his ‘Hanjian (Traitor)!’, 298–299.43Wada, ‘Senpan to kankan’, 75.44Lin, ‘Hanjian de ciyi jieshi yu falu jieding’, 155.

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new postwar legalized definition was that previously being a traitor was defined by

action, but after World War Two it was no longer what you did but rather your job title

and your position that defined whether you were a traitor. War criminals were widely

defined through crimes such as ‘murder, starvation, enforcing slave labor . . . selling

drugs, abuse, etc’.45 Traitors, on the other hand, were thrown into a more vague set of

categories legally defined in one phrase as ‘those in China who cooperated with the

enemy’.46

In its 6 December 1945 promulgation the KMT further defined the legal status of a

traitor as ‘having participated in or conducted activities for a puppet organization or related

group; acted on behalf of enemy or puppet structures, acted in a manner that benefits the

enemy or goes against the benefit of the country’.47 The subtlety of what constituted an act

that benefited a puppet organization was vague at best, and impossible to delineate at worst.

The essence of the hanjian issue was that virtually anyone with any connection or scant

relation to the enemy or any Japanese controlled institution was inherently implicated.

Obviously, for postwar Taiwan this was a dilemma of enormous consequence. (The postwar

situation in France and Korea was not dissimilar.) Such activities were characterized as

plotting to oppose the nation or disturbing the peace. Black marketeers, those who profited

from the disorder and sold food and financial specie, were also included.48 A well-known

Chinese journalist watching traitors’ trials in Shanghai remarked that no military person was

ever tried as a traitor and that many ‘economic traitors’ escaped justice by using

underhanded methods. Highly placed local traitors even retained their positions in the

village official ranks while lower echelons were charged.49

The CCP defined traitor more simply as an ‘enemy of the people’. Both the KMT and

CCP struggled at the outset with separating the two categories of criminal activity –

collaborator and war criminal – and at times there was not much of a distinction. In the

CCP media the term zhanfan hanjian (war criminal traitor) frequently occurred as one

phrase. Such criminals were the enemy Japan as well as the wei, the ‘imposter’ Nanjing

government officials presided over by the Wang Jingwei clique, and those Japanese and

Chinese bureaucrats who had staffed the puppet government of the ‘fake’ country of

Manchukuo.50

The Liminality of Imperial Japanese Postwar Identity

With the putting of Taiwanese on trial we come to the heart of the matter concerning

identity, law and the entire colonial enterprise. It is in the gap between policy and

execution that a crucial element of the story lies: the postwar Chinese grasp of law and

justice. The question was: did immediate postwar Chinese law attain this new

international sense of justice? All the World War Two victors wanted to try Japanese war

criminals, but what did they gain in the legal pursuit of such ends? Further confounding

the issue of whom to pursue as a war criminal was the legal conundrum of determining

45Wada, ‘Senpan to kankan’, 76.46Meng and Cheng, ‘Chengzhi hanjian gongzuo gaishu’, 107.47Luo, ‘Kangzhan shenli’, 272. (In Taiwanese pinyin Luo’s name is romanized as ‘Lo’, but the current

and more correct pinyin would be Luo if one wanted to actually find her works in Chinese.)48Wada, ‘Senpan to kankan’, 77.49Furumaya, ‘Sengo chiiki shakai’, 359.50Wada, ‘Senpan to kankan’, 78.

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who was Japanese and who Chinese. The Japanese historian Oguma Eiji notes that the

December 1945 change in the Japanese household registration (koseki) law confused the

situation because it suddenly returned a large number of Japanese citizens to their

Taiwanese and Korean legal identities, instantly stripping them of Japanese rights.51 In

one fell swoop this mass of colonial humanity was summarily discharged from the

Japanese empire. It was not, however, until 1947 that Koreans in Japan received legal

status as foreigners. Later with the 1952 San Francisco peace treaty they were given

foreign residential permits.52

The hanjian issue worried those Taiwanese who were formerly Japanese. A memo

dated 23 January 1947 from the Xiamen City Taiwan Brotherhood Association to KMT

officials pleaded that Taiwanese should not be pursued as war criminals because they

were invaded by Japan and occupied for 51 years. After decades of resistance they were

glad to resume Chinese citizenship and identity. This memo sent to Nationalist party

headquarters concerned the problem of Taiwanese legal status and whether such

individuals could be charged as Japanese war criminals or not, considering their former

status as colonized subjects and sudden change in national status following Japan’s

surrender.53

Just before the end of the war the KMT Ministry of Defense produced a clear policy

outlining how it aimed to deal with Japan postwar, but the matter of Taiwan developed

haphazardly and in fact became reliant upon Japanese assistance. Among other issues,

the plan included passages advocating the need to change the emperor system and alter

the Meiji constitution so that authority rested in the hands of the Japanese people. The

policy stated that to help change Japan meant to eradicate the politics and education that

produced the emperor-worshipping society, which included Shintoism and the

militarization of society.54 While the KMT generated detailed plans for the Japanese,

it found it more difficult to produce a similarly clear vision for its fellow Chinese

countrymen on the island of Taiwan.

In trials held under Nationalist jurisdiction before the flight to Taiwan, Nationalists

often tried Taiwanese as ‘Japanese’. As demonstrated above, slightly more than 150

Taiwanese were indicted in military tribunals for BC class crimes across East Asia and

some two dozen were executed. Some Taiwanese, however, were fortunate to go before

more lenient judges and there was little uniformity in dealing with former colonized

peoples – their sentences were more often the result of serendipity than an

implementation of policy. In one of the first test cases where a Taiwanese stood trial

as a collaborator the outcome was unusual. Zhuang Sichuan worked for a newspaper in

Wuhan and was found not guilty in a Hubei court because, the judge said, as a Japanese

national Zhuang had to obey orders and was thus not responsible for his actions.55

The Japanese for their part merely tossed aside these Taiwanese who had supported

the Japanese empire. They were abandoned people, kimin in the Japanese language.

Hayashi Miki’s story is far from unique – there were many who faced worse experiences.

51Regarding the former status of Koreans in the Japanese empire, Amy Gurowitz has observed, ‘All

Koreans became Japanese citizens in 1910, but a distinction based on lineage was maintained between

ethnic Koreans and ethnic Japanese. Nonetheless, when male suffrage was passed in 1925, Korean men

were given the vote.’ See Gurowitz, ‘Mobilizing International Norms’, 425.52Morris-Suzuki, Exodus to North Korea, 66.53‘Zhongguo lujun zongsilingbu shouxiang baogaoshu’, Quanzonghao 787, 16598, May 1946, The

Second Historical Archives of China, Nanjing, China.54Qin, Zhonghua minguo zhongyao shiliao chubian, 637–640.55Lo, ‘Trials of the Taiwanese’, 290.

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Hayashi was once Taiwanese but later took Japanese citizenship due to postwar

exigencies. Even though he believed he remained Taiwanese or ethnically Chinese, after

the war he claimed he could not really return because he did not speak Chinese; he only

spoke Japanese, which would not have been unusual for his generation. Hayashi had

been sent as a Japanese imperial guard to a POW camp in Borneo during the war when

he was only 16. He said that he took to heart his Japanese officer’s orders and did not

regard the POWs (men and women) as human.56 Hayashi returned to Japan after

repatriating to Taiwan due to his colonial heritage. He had lost his Japanese identity

postwar but no longer possessed a clear Chinese one; essentially he had become in the

immediate postwar a legally lost soul. The Japanese empire demonstrated more clearly

in its easy postwar dismissal of colonial identity what it really had stood for – a racially

structured hierarchy that was primarily interested in augmenting wealth for its ethnic

Japanese subjects to the almost total exclusion of outsiders.

The first several years of KMT rule on Taiwan were an uncomfortable mediation

between a Japanese identity that had lost its lustre and an imposed mainland Chinese

identity. Street violence between Taiwanese (ethnic Chinese who had been born in

Taiwan under imperial Japanese rule) and mainland Chinese was not uncommon and to

ascertain who was a mainlander (and thus a recent ‘Chinese’ arrival) Taiwanese would

make random checks on other Chinese, ‘making them speak Japanese or sing the

Japanese anthem’.57 If they could speak Japanese then they had grown up under

Japanese colonialism and were acceptable to the native-born former colonials. The

majority of Taiwanese might not have been pleased with their lot but they had little

choice, having automatically become Japanese citizens in 1897 when the two-year

moratorium allowing them to leave for the mainland was up. With the end of World War

Two, they once again found themselves with a new identity – Republican Chinese –

thrust upon them. Resulting conflicts surrounding these shifting identities and the

waxing and waning of political privileges spurred on political violence within Japan as

well as in other former reaches of the empire.

While Taiwanese on the mainland met with a mixed bag of legal outcomes, in Japan

their presence reminded former fellow imperial subjects just what the empire had

created. On 17 July 1946 an incident in the Shibuya district of Tokyo between a

Japanese police officer and a Taiwanese national quickly escalated into a mass conflict

pitting Japanese police and an armed gang against the Taiwanese. Though the final

count remains murky, the incident resulted in possibly hundreds injured and one

Japanese policeman dead.58 The conflict stemmed from the fact that during the war

many Taiwanese had come to live in Japan as Japanese imperial subjects but after the fall

of empire their legal status was transformed to that of aliens. In postwar Japan these

Taiwanese were quickly forced into a second-class legal status. With few economic

outlets to support their difficult situation, many Taiwanese participated in the black

market and underground economy, further exacerbating ethnic tensions in postwar

Japan. Attitudes toward Taiwanese, which arguably had never been that positive during

56Hayashi, Taiwan no Yamato damashii, 257. For individual stories of repatriating Taiwanese who had

been Japanese soldiers see Kawasaki, Kaette kita Taiwanjin Nihonhei.57Lo, ‘Trials of the Taiwanese’, 280. Wu Zhuoliu was an influential Taiwanese journalist who wrote

about the fluctuating nature of postwar Taiwanese identity and their ambivalence toward the imperial

era.58Yang, ‘Zhanhou chuqi de RiHua RiTai guanxi’, 13.

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the empire, only worsened and the Shibuya conflict with Japanese authorities laid bare

this friction.

By the end of the 1940s as China teetered on the edge of falling into the grip of the

CCP, Chinese Nationalist Party leaders looked toward Japan for assistance. Taiwanese

citizens in Japan faced discrimination but the KMT hoped to curry favor with Japanese

elites and to combine forces with former members of the imperial Japanese military to

use Taiwan as a springboard to reclaim the mainland. The fact that Chiang Kai Shek

employed Japanese war criminals for this enterprise, to the exclusion of Taiwanese who

had participated in Japan’s imperial expansion, speaks to the early Cold War philosophy

of the KMT and how for many prewar Nationalist military officers training in prewar

Japanese colleges often trumped postwar ethnic considerations. The 28 February 1947

incident in Taiwan (usually referred to as ‘the 2.28 incident’) when KMT soldiers

massacred thousands of native Taiwanese in a conflict that pitted benshengren, or native-

born Taiwanese Chinese, against waishengren, those who arrived recently from the

mainland, underlined even more profoundly that the supposed bonds of Chinese

ethnicity quickly frayed in the face of a larger conflict concerning who would rule

postwar Taiwan. Chinese with a tainted Japanese upbringing struggled against the more

‘authentic’ Chinese who were raised in the crucible of war against the Japanese on the

mainland and who had brought the mantle of KMT rule to Taiwan.

The ‘White Group’ and Ghosts of the Imperial Army

While the KMT was keen to identify Chinese traitors they were seemingly most lenient

with the Japanese war criminal General Okamura Yasuji, a military leader the CCP

labeled as public enemy number one. Okamura had spent most of the immediate

postwar years under a form of house arrest in China and was brought before a KMT

military tribunal only reluctantly at the last possible moment. Okamura’s direct impact

on postwar Taiwan remains to be debated in future scholarship as Taiwanese and

mainland archives are more fully explored. Recently declassified American CIA

evidence, along with Chinese and Japanese diaries, demonstrates that not only was

Chiang’s policy of benevolence toward the Japanese useful in gaining an ally in East Asia

but it also ultimately aided the Nationalist military confrontation against the CCP by

securing Japanese military expertise.59

On 26 January 1949 Okamura Yasuji was declared not guilty by one of the last KMT

military tribunals to adjudicate Japanese war crimes and on 31 January he was

repatriated with about 260 other Japanese war criminals on an American vessel.

According to one of the Chinese judges, the proceedings were unusual and had the

trappings of a kangaroo court. Chief judge Shi Meiyu told the other judges that he had

been ordered by the Ministry of Defense to once again open up the Okamura trial after it

had been temporarily adjourned. Because it was such a sudden move the court was not

fully prepared, but that did not matter since Okamura’s second trial was not public and

therefore only needed a court reporter and a few staff. The court completed legal

formalities but no new evidence or questions were introduced. The trial may have been

conducted in haste at the behest of the Ministry of Defense but all the judges strongly

59See Petersen, ‘The Intelligence That Wasn’t’. The nature of the trade between Chiang and Okamura of

war crimes leniency for postwar military assistance is alluded to in Iwatsubo, ‘Paidan’, 348; and Zhang,

‘Riben zhengjie de Taiwanbang’, 5–6.

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agreed that Okamura was guilty. Chief Judge Shi Meiyu then took out two documents to

show the other judges. One was from the Acting President of China Li Zongren and the

other was from General Tang Enbo. Both telegrams laid out the case that Okamura held

immense value to the future of the Nationalist Party’s goals in China and declared

‘Prisoner Okamura Yasuji is of use, please find him not guilty’. Judge Shi Meiyu then

also pulled out a sheet of paper from a set of documents that had the verdict ‘not guilty’

written on it. The verdict already had the stamp of the new head of the Ministry of

Defense Xu Yongchang clearly imprinted on it, meaning that the decision had been

made ahead of time without consulting the judicial branch.60

By the late summer of 1949 US policy toward Taiwan was at a crossroads and it is

possible that without the eruption of the Korean War the island would not have received

the attention from the US military that eventually was bestowed on it.61 Given that the

KMT was unsure of US attitudes toward the future of Nationalist rule, support clearly

had to be secured elsewhere. Former Japanese imperial soldiers filled this potential

power vacuum. The fact that the KMT was in the process of retreating from mainland

China, ceding political control to Mao’s Communist forces who announced the

establishment of the People’s Republic on 1 October 1949, only compounded fear

concerning what would happen next.

Ogasawara Kiyoshi, a former lieutenant colonel in the Japanese imperial forces in

China, detailed the beginnings of the ‘White Group’, a collection of former Japanese

officers who were hired by the KMT to travel to Taiwan, after the KMT lost the fight for

the mainland to the CCP, and train the next generation of Chinese Nationalist soldiers

to retake the mainland in an eventual counter-attack.62 During the American occupation

of Japan this team of ex-military Japanese officers formed a group and exported military

knowledge to Taiwan, acts that contravened the laws of the occupation. The Chinese

and Japanese archival records suggest that this arrangement supplied the KMT with

acutely needed military expertise and offered the Japanese an income in penurious

times. The relationship provided an outlet for former imperial Japanese soldiers to

explicitly repay Chiang Kai Shek for what they termed his ‘magnanimous policy’ of

letting Japanese war criminals off easily at the end of the war. By the early part of 1949

memory of the war against the Japanese seems to have waned in the minds of high-level

KMT staff in favor of a new focus on conflict with the Chinese Communists. In

conversations between Okamura and KMT General He Shili about the war, the latter

remarked, ‘Let’s just let bygones be bygones’. Many KMT military officials in the early

postwar wished to focus on the military crisis of the moment, the Nationalists’ desire to

fight against the CCP and retake the mainland.63 To this end Major General Cao

Shicheng led several other members of the Republic of China Diplomatic Mission to

Japan and approached Okamura and several other high-ranking former imperial

Japanese army officers in July 1949 to start up a group of Japanese officers to assist the

Nationalists against the CCP.

Major General Cao and his men brought a message from Chiang Kai Shek to the

effect that the civil war was not going well for the KMT. Nationalist military and

60Ye, ‘Shenpan Rijun qinHua’, 203–204.61For more on the American side of this, see Kerr, Formosa Betrayed.62Nakamura, Paidan (shinpan); Tai, Taiwan, 149–153.63Gangcun xiansheng yu He tuanzhan Shili tanhua, in ‘He Shili tuanzhang yu Riben Gangben shangtan

han jushi ji Zhongri hezuo wenti tanhua jilu’, (7 June 1950), O08–25, 00041641, 00010004–00010010.

Ministry of Defense Archives, Taipei, Taiwan.

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political leaders were planning on retreating to Taiwan and regrouping for a future

assault on the mainland. While regrouping to retake mainland China Chiang requested

the help of old former imperial military ‘colleagues’, those Japanese who had trained and

studied with their Chinese fellow students at prewar Japanese military schools.64 Several

former members of the White Group also claimed that Okamura’s release from a serious

war crimes trial in China was due to the fact that he had promised such a team to Chiang

in return for his freedom and repatriation back to Japan. Whatever the exact

circumstances, the result was that four former Japanese imperial officers, General

Okamura, Lieutenant Colonel Ogasawara Kiyoshi, Lieutenant General Sumida Raishiro

and Lieutenant General Sogawa Jiro, banded together and sought out other members.

Japanese participants adopted Chinese aliases to throw the Americans off the scent and

the group took its moniker from the surname of one of the first leaders whose Chinese

name was ‘White’. In Chinese the word for ‘white’ is bai and ‘group’ is tuan, so the

group was called baituan, the White Group, though in various conversions from Chinese

to Japanese it was also known as paidan and similar corruptions.

The goal of the baituan was to retrain and help the KMT army regroup for a later

mass assault on the mainland. The White Group’s classes and training were conducted

near Beitou, just north of Taipei city, and Chiang Kai Shek came by frequently to

attend. Japanese recollections of their own activities suggest that US military advisors

either did not see that there were Japanese using Chinese aliases or were unaware even

though they came into contact with each other. Ogasawara wrote that American military

officials in Taiwan could not tell the difference between Chinese and Japanese

soldiers.65 This turns out to be patently false, though the record is still vague concerning

whether the Americans actually cared about this issue because they had their own CIA-

funded undercover Japanese groups operating in Taiwan and elsewhere.66 After the

White Group had been around for several years, in April 1955 US Major General

William C. Chase exchanged correspondence with the KMT Acting Chief of the

General Staff, General Peng Meng-chi, regarding Japanese military advisors assisting

Nationalist forces on Taiwan. Obviously unsatisfied with the response Chase placed

another series of requests higher up the ladder of administration to KMT Minister of

National Defense Yu Ta-Wei. Chase wrote sternly that Americans specifically requested

the Japanese presence cease because ‘the Japanese politico-military instruction will have

a detrimental impact upon our agreed program of fostering the acceptance and use of

US military doctrine as Chinese doctrine’.67 Ultimately, about 83 people worked for the

White Group over its nearly two decades of existence from the late 1940s to late 1960s.

While the verdict over the group’s influence on Taiwan and Taiwanese-Japan relations

awaits future research, participants at the time strongly believed that during battles over

Jinmen Island (a small island sandwiched between the Chinese mainland coast and

Taiwan) the KMT destroyed two CCP divisions precisely due to Japanese retraining.68

64Gillin, Warlord: Yen Hsi-shan.65Ogasawara, ‘Shokaiseki o tsukutta Nihon shokodan’, 161.66Petersen, ‘The Intelligence That Wasn’t’, 205–206.67Word in italics was underlined for emphasis in the original. Major General William C. Chase to

Minister Yu Ta-Wei, 6 April 1955, in ‘Wo zhengfu shouzhang yu Mei yaoyuanhuitan jiluan’, N36–06,

00034450, 00090046,47, 56, Ministry of Defense Archives, Taipei, Taiwan.68Ogasawara, ‘Shokaiseki o tsukutta Nihon shokodan’, 163. Ogasawara is never clear on precisely which

battle he is talking about or whether he defines KMT military victory on Jinmen (Quemoy) in the

aggregate. The key battles for Jinmen were in 1949 and 1958 and while mutual bombardments were

extremely heavy at times, the KMT never militarily succumbed to the Communist forces. Whether that

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Recently declassified CIA records suggest that the White Group and similar groups that

were funded directly through General Willoughby’s team within the American

occupation forces in Japan not only failed to deliver on intelligence gathering but the

efforts of Japanese former military men often amounted to veiled thievery. Moreover,

‘from the US perspective, results of the Taiwan operations were not much better’,

especially concerning military efforts to retake the mainland.69 The former imperial

Japanese soldiers were obviously very pleased with their postwar ‘special relationship’

with Nationalist Taiwan because it showed to them that what Japan had fought for

during World War Two was not lost. Chiang Kai Shek’s aims were oriented to his own

advantage and it is doubtful that he saw Japan’s imperial goals in the same manner.

Nonetheless, this intersection of postwar Sino-Japan interests and the overlap with

treatment of imperial war criminals sheds new light on a story that is normally expressed

in much more black and white terms.

We should also remain skeptical toward stories implying that former Japanese soldiers

worked hand-in-glove and were of one mind with the Chinese in Taiwan. One

fascinating episode concerns former imperial officers’ use of colloquial Japanese

language and their inability to fathom how it offended the Chinese. The Japanese

imperial military had instilled in officers and enlisted men a strict code of hierarchy and

officers of rank were used to treating any lower standing soldier very poorly. It would not

have been out of place for a Japanese officer to deride and belittle his underlings. And

certainly, in China and the former Japanese colonies, this sort of military behavior was

widely experienced. With Japan’s surrender such an aggressive manner no longer had to

be tolerated because Japan was a defeated nation, but traditions died hard. Many

Japanese soldiers were used to verbally abusing one another using the Japanese word

‘baka’. Baka in the Japanese language means ‘stupid’ or ‘ass’; in the imperial period it

was frequently used against the colonized and was quite often one of the Japanese

pejorative terms that former colonies remembered all too well as a symbol of their

oppression. The problem is that the syllables of ‘baka’ are also found in Japanese words

that are not insults, like ‘bakari’, which means ‘only’, and other terms. To Chinese ears,

however, it often sounded as if their Japanese teachers were continuing to deride them in

the same way as they had recently experienced before the war. Even though they were

dead set on fighting their Communist enemies, if a Japanese instructor used the sound

baka in any context the Chinese nationalist army students became violently angry. As

one team member recalled,

the face of the person who it was used toward suddenly transformed. It

wasn’t just the word ‘baka’, it was also words like bakabakashii or bakarashii

[which meant that some behavior was idiotic or ill-informed]. If these terms

were uttered they elicited the same facial reaction. The translator told

members of the White Group, ‘it doesn’t matter how much I offer excuses

or explain, they won’t listen, so please whatever you say just avoid using

these words’.70

was due to Japanese military education remains doubtful but is an oft-cited source of White Group pride.

Yamashita Masao offers a much less flattering view of the situation in an oral history interview archived

on Yonehama Yasuhide’s online Oral History Project (accessed 20 June 2009).69Petersen, ‘The Intelligence That Wasn’t’, 205–206.70Iwatsubo, ‘Paidan’, 355.

128 Barak Kushner

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Most of the Japanese officers never quite seemed to grasp why these particular words

were so offensive.

Conclusion

We often tend to think of World War Two East Asian history (1931–1945) through one

conceptual lens – what did Japan do and why do the postwar government and Japanese

public not take more responsibility for the atrocities committed? It is, to be sure, an easy

mindset to fall into. The American occupation (1945–1952) at first censored such

questions, while the Tokyo War Crimes Trials centered on placing blame on the military

and not the civilian government or civilians. As I have attempted to demonstrate in this

paper, discussions of Japanese behavior postwar cannot be discussed merely within the

national framework of Japanese history as it involved extensive interactions with the

Chinese on both the mainland and Taiwan. Early Cold War Japanese relations with its

most important immediate East Asian allies were undoubtedly complex and also

involved considerations that did not force the Japanese to think of themselves as losers in

the war, especially when the KMT requested their military assistance. The adjudication

of Japanese war crimes in China had to compete for public opinion with domestic crimes

of the so-called collaborators and equally pressing issues of the Chinese civil war that

quickly changed the paradigm for the defeated Japanese. The search for justice in

postwar East Asia was anything but a black and white situation with victim and

transgressor clearly separated by impartially applied legal principles.

The issue of the defeated Japanese military’s role in postwar Taiwan, especially during

the anxious 1950s, remains a hotly contested political topic. These episodes also

demonstrate how heavily colonial era political baggage weighs on Japan and its East

Asian neighbors even today. Many contemporary Taiwanese who write on this topic

support an independent Taiwan and they enjoy analyzing the existence and record of the

White Group because it shows how duplicitous General Chiang was. Chiang Kai Shek

often claimed that he was anti-Japanese during the war but this new history, as the pro-

independence groups claim, underscores how this was not the case. At the same time

this history is linked with the current political situation in Taiwan, the struggle between

those who are pushing for independence and those pushing for unification of some sort

with the mainland. Critics point out that the KMT has no grounds to attack Taiwan

independence movement leaders such as Su Jingqiang, who visited the Yasukuni shrine,

if at the same time Nationalist party members cannot come clean about their

connections with former Japanese imperial army officers during the early postwar

period.71 The KMT administration’s long involvement with the Japanese military

through the White Group is an example that reveals the inner workings of the

Nationalist Party. As such history is never removed from the political battlefield in

Taiwan, and until recently the KMT did not want to discuss its deeper relations with the

former imperial Japanese army, the louder elements of the independence camp charged

that Chiang Kai Shek was two-faced for using this Japanese assistance.72 The

independence camp uses Japan as a foil to show how the colonial era had already

71Su visited Yasukuni shrine in April 2005 and caused an international ruckus. For more concerning how

this incident fits into larger historio-political debates in Taiwan and Japan see Kushner, ‘Nationality and

Nostalgia’.72Matsushima, ‘Kokuminto no saiken’, 78–79.

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created a viable Taiwanese culture that separated it from the Chinese mainland, and the

KMT opposes such opinions. Japanese history is in this sense intimately tied to

Taiwanese political maneuvers and concepts of national self.

The manner and process through which some in the international community,

beyond the scope of the Tokyo War Crimes Trials, pursued Japanese war criminality

were at times at odds with the new international definition of justice but the players were

often more worried about the immediate pragmatics of realpolitik. The fact that these BC

class trials bore multiple agendas and were more responsive to the state of domestic

affairs in China than to the demands of procedural rigor should alert us to the need to

chart new courses for historical inquiry away from an American-centered approach to

East Asian history. Foreign policy amongst East Asians developed under its own logic

and for quite often different reasons than those motivating the European or American

occupiers. More importantly, the legal and political decisions on which many of these

trials were based continue to exert a formative pressure on how postwar Japanese

experienced the destruction of their former colonial empire and how Taiwanese

conceived of their early postwar reconstituted position in East Asia.

Acknowledgements

This research was assisted by a grant from the Abe Fellowship Program administered by

the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies in

cooperation with and with funds provided by the Japan Foundation Center for Global

Partnership. I would like to thank Ishikawa Makoto for his generous sharing of archives

and insight, Hsiao Hui-fen for help in the National Taiwan archives, Uma Wang for her

supreme effort in organizing thousands of archives as a research assistant, Wu Chinghsin

for her assistance deciphering hand-written KMT legal documents, and Yang Tzu-

chen. Professor Robert Bicker’s invitation to the University of Bristol to deliver a talk

and Chang Chihyun’s comments during the question and answer period pushed me to

think further about the role of Taiwan in Japanese war crimes trial history and the nature

of the Cold War in East Asia.

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