In Los Angeles, Leith’s wife, Helen, read the wire story and said aloud: “That’s my Hal.”
In October 1945 the Soviets offered Leith a choice: leave immediately or get a free trip to Siberia. William Donovan, the head of the OSS, seethed, “When did Manchuria become part of Russia?” In fact, the Soviets would remain in the railway zone and Port Arthur until 1955. Leith departed but reappeared in Manchuria soon after. Code-named Mr. Williams, he was America’s first intelligence agent in China’s northeast. After a year in the field, the Communists expelled him for good in 1946. I met him at his home in Golden, Colorado.
With ex-POWs, he had returned to the former camp twice—in 1989 and 2003—to publicize the Shenyang city government’s announcement of a museum at the prison site. On my visit I avoided the guard dog by sliding a dead bolt open and sneaking through a side door. The former barracks hall was garlanded with exposed wiring and pocked with standing puddles. A purple banner said: PRESS CONFERENCE OF VETERANS REVISITING SHENYANG WWII ALLIED POW CAMP. The words faced rows of orange plastic chairs occupied by piles of dust.
After the war, the camp’s factory was repurposed into an electrical plant and surrounded by worker’s housing blocks. Now they were being replaced by high-rises whose billboards promised, in English, LOW DENSITY OF THE HONEY LIFE. Across a ten-lane expressway loomed a new mall anchored by a Pizza Hut.
In Chinese and English, a sign posted outside the camp told nothing of Operation Cardinal, but informed that “only the help of kind-hearted Chinese fellow-workers provided any comfort” to the prisoners. It concluded that the camp “deeply illustrates one aspect of Japanese fascism.”
The English translation of the conclusion had been sanded over, however. Since its groundbreaking a decade before, the museum project started and stopped from disagreements over what it would show, what lessons it would teach, what patriotic education really entailed. Construction was ongoing.
After I visited the tombs of Japanese settlers in Fangzheng, a Japanese newspaper interviewed a sixty-two-year-old retired elementary school teacher who the local government had commissioned to write the county’s war history. Standing on the Songhua River docks where Japanese mothers had placed their children onshore, then drowned themselves, the teacher told the reporter, “What occurred here reflects the essence of civilian victims of war. Preserving this place can only help the healthy development of Sino-Japanese relations.”
He had sought permission to post a plaque retelling the events here and at a nearby tributary, which women had attempted to cross by clinging to torn and knotted kimonos before being swept away. Officials said: “In present circumstances, the plaques are impossible to approve.” But, the teacher noted optimistically, “circumstances change.”
The Japanese invasion caused 14 to 20 million Chinese deaths, and while Japanese officials continued to pay respects at Tokyo’s Yasukuni Shrine—where the nation’s honored dead included convicted war criminals—some former Japanese soldiers returned to China to record oral histories of their wartime actions. Others even took the stand. In a Tokyo courtroom in 2002, a veteran soldier testified in a lawsuit brought by the families of 180 Chinese who had been killed by a secret Japanese army unit in Manchuria. For the first time a Japanese court found that its Imperial Army had, in fact, conducted germ warfare in China. Under international law, the victims were not entitled to compensation, but the verdict ended a half century of official denials.
“Forgetting history means betrayal,” reads the display at the Japanese Invading Army Unit 731 Museum. “The fascistic guilt of Unit 731 brooks no denial.” Japan’s biggest bacterial warfare research unit experimented on live Chinese, Russian, Mongolian, and Korean prisoners in a suburb fifteen miles south of central Harbin. Here, Japanese doctors subjected maruta—logs, as they referred to the prisoners—to hypothermia, amputation, bullet wounds, and a range of disease and bacteria, noting at which level of suffering a person finally expired.
The museum stood in what remained of the base’s seventy-six buildings—covering four square miles—after retreating Japanese had torched all they could. Inside the dimly lit halls, visitors pace past gas masks, bone saws, and viscera hangars. Outside, signs mark the footprint of the Cave for Manufacturing Germ Shell Cases, the Frostbite Laboratory, and the Nursery of Yellow Rats. Children’s shouting and laughter carries over the high brick wall from the grounds of the adjoining Number 25 Middle School.
Over thirteen years, an estimated three thousand prisoners were gruesomely killed at this site, in addition to the seven to nine thousand who died in Unit 731–affiliated bases across occupied China under the cover of being “anti-epidemic water supply units”—which, in turn, poisoned local wells, a sickening echo of the mind that thought to post Work Makes You Free at the entrance to Nazi concentration camps.
Japan’s version of Josef Mengele was a doctor and lieutenant general named Ishii Shiro, who began his bacterial warfare research in 1932. As the Soviets invaded in August 1945, Ishii ordered Unit 731 and other research bases destroyed and the remaining 404 prisoners killed. It took three days to burn their bodies, after which the ranking officer on-site said, “Now the Emperor will not be hanged.”
Ishii and his top staff fled to Japan with crates of files. American troops found him hiding in his home village, where residents had placed a newspaper story saying he had been shot to death and had even held a mock funeral. Ishii was not placed under arrest, only brought to Tokyo for questioning. After nearly two years of off-and-on interrogation of Ishii, a U.S. Army Basic Sciences chief wrote to his commander:
Evidence gathered in this investigation has greatly supplemented and amplified previous aspects of this field. It represents data which have been obtained by Japanese scientists at the expenditure of many millions of dollars and years of work. Information has accrued with respect to human susceptibility to those diseases as indicated by specific infectious doses of bacteria. Such information could not be obtained in our own laboratories because of scruples attached to human experimentation.
The letter concluded by noting that the army funds spent investigating Ishii’s work in China was “a mere pittance by comparison with the actual cost of the studies.”
In 1948 the United States granted Ishii and eighteen subordinates immunity from war crimes prosecution. None were ever charged, let alone punished. For three decades the deal was kept secret before it was uncovered by an American journalist. Ishii was said to have opened a clinic in Japan, treating children, before dying of throat cancer at age sixty-seven.
His Majesty the Emperor, Puyi, read the notice dissolving Manchukuo on August 17, 1945. For the second time in his life, Puyi abdicated, then fled his palace. Soviet forces nabbed him at an airfield, boarding a plane bound for Japan. They packed him away to detention in Siberia, where he pleaded not to be returned to China, certain that he would be killed the moment he crossed the border.
In 1946 the Soviets brought him to Tokyo to testify at the war crimes tribunal. Looking frail beyond his forty years, Puyi talked to save his life. Wearing an expensive brown suit and speaking Chinese, he put on a good show: China’s last emperor on the stand, striking a patriotic chord. “The people in Manchuria were complete slaves of the Japanese,” he averred. “It is almost impossible to describe the pain of the Chinese people in Manchuria. They could not obtain necessities and they could not even get clothing in severe weather. It would be an offense if a Chinese had in his possession any high-grade rice. The Chinese did not have the freedom to say anything without fear of facing death. Manchukuo was a completely darkened country during the term of Japanese rule.”
Previously, the looting of his family’s imperial tombs by Chinese soldiers had made Puyi vow revenge, hastening his decision to cast his lot with the Japanese. But they had not even allowed him to visit those tombs to make an annual sacrifice. “I had better not go,” a general had told him, “because, since my ancestors were all Manchurians, if I went there to worship it would look
as if Manchurians stood out unique among other groups of people in Manchukuo.”
Why hadn’t he told the League of Nations’ visiting Lytton Commission investigators the truth and asked for help? “The situation was like myself being kidnapped by bandits, and now my neighbors try to come to my rescue, yet in their presence I could not tell them what actually happened because after my rescuers left I was liable to be killed by the bandits.”
So he had bided his time over the next fourteen years, waiting for the right moment to rise against the occupation. “That was my ideal, and so I entered the mouth of the tiger.”
In his autobiography, written two decades later, Puyi admitted: “I now feel very ashamed of my testimony . . . I said nothing about my secret collaboration with the Japanese imperialists over a long period . . . I maintained that I had not betrayed my country but had been kidnapped . . . I covered up my crimes in order to protect myself.”
Like the Japanese emperor and his family, Puyi was not charged with any crime. In 1950 the Soviet Union handed him back to China. He was shipped to a prison near Qingyuan, the Manchu county along the Willow Palisade whose name meant “Origin of the Qing,” the dynasty that had ended when he abdicated the dragon throne.
At the former prison, now a patriotic education base, school groups pause before the former cell of the “living god” who became prisoner number 987. In photos, Puyi darns socks and drinks tea from an enameled mug captioned, “Working Is Glorious.” The guide narrates, “In the end, he became a useful friend of China and the Chinese people at large.”
Useful, again.
In 1959, on the tenth anniversary of the People’s Republic founding, Puyi was pardoned and released. He returned to his hometown of Beijing for the first time in thirty-five years. Dressed in a baggy blue serge Mao suit, he served as a “special guide,” leading a one-off tour of his former palace, the Forbidden City. His memoir, published by the state press, did not record his impressions of the visit other than to note that the palace walls had been repainted and the “old and desolate atmosphere” had gone.
The Party assigned him to work in the hothouses at Beijing’s Botanical Garden. Always slight and sad-eyed, Puyi looked as delicate as the orchids that had once adorned the Manchukuo imperial seal. His memoir concluded with the first words he learned to write in Chinese, from a Confucian primer:
People at birth
Are naturally good
Their natures are similar
Their habits diverge
When foolishly taught
In 1967, as the Cultural Revolution consumed China, Red Guards found Puyi, enfeebled by kidney cancer, and shouted, “We will take you back to the Northeast and smash you, you dog’s head!” The cancer took him before they could: he died, aged sixty-one, leaving no heirs or treasure. In its obituary, the New York Times called him “a historical leftover.” Since he was no longer an emperor, his cremated remains were interred not at the Qing tombs alongside his royal ancestors but at Beijing’s Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery, the final resting place for Communist heroes.
But in new, market-driven China, Puyi became useful yet again. In 1995 a private cemetery in the capital’s outskirts paid his widow an undisclosed fee to move his ashes to one of their plots, aimed at the wealthy elite. The graveyard, named Hualong (Chinese Dragon), neighbors the Western Qing tombs—favoring the interred, its advertisements promise, with imperial feng shui. Puyi’s presence proves it. Buried under a headstone bearing only his name—written not in Manchu but in Chinese—he remains a symbol for all eternity.
After Japan surrendered in August 1945, the Soviets rolled south through Manchuria, not halting until they reached Korea’s Thirty-eighth parallel. The peninsula was divided into north and south, into the Democratic People’s Republic and the Republic. The next war was about to begin.
But first the Chinese civil war played out. In 1936 the Young Marshal, Zhang Xueliang, had forced Chiang Kai-shek at gunpoint to form a united front with Mao Zedong. For this, Zhang would never return to Manchuria, spending the next fifty-four years under house arrest on the mainland and Taiwan, and dying at age one hundred in Hawaii. With Japan defeated in 1945, Chinese Nationalist and Communist forces divided and fought each other for four years.
One of the deciding blows for the Nationalists happened in Changchun, site of the erstwhile Manchukuoan capital seventy miles west of Wasteland. Before Japan’s invasion, Changchun had 100,000 inhabitants; at the fall of Manchukuo, nearly 900,000 people lived there.
The Communist People’s Liberation Army, commanded by Lin Biao, encircled Nationalist forces, and the city itself. Lin—later credited as the creator of the “Little Red Book” of Chairman Mao’s sayings—called for Changchun to be turned into a “city of death.” His soldiers ringed its perimeter with barbed wire barricades. For five months, from June to October 1948, no civilians were allowed to leave and no supplies were allowed in. Survivors told of eating rotten grain, then corncobs, then tree bark. Others tore open pillows for their corn husk stuffing. Belts were boiled; dead bodies were consumed. Soldiers seized the aid packages dropped by American planes. At least 160,000 civilians perished, equaling the number killed by the first atomic bomb.
“The casualties were about the same,” a People’s Liberation Army colonel later recorded. “Hiroshima took nine seconds; Changchun took five months.” The colonel’s book describing the siege, White Snow, Red Blood, was published in 1989 but was soon banned for “insulting the Communist Party.”
No patriotic education base commemorated, let alone mentioned, the Siege of Changchun. A Hong Kong–based researcher recalled that every elderly army officer she interviewed for a book about China’s civil war broke down when recalling the siege. “It’s an unspeakable national trauma that has not once been opened up,” she said.
“Some refugees threw down their babies and ran away, others hung themselves with ropes right in front of the sentries,” the colonel wrote in his book. He cited a cable from a People’s Liberation Army officer on the scene, lamenting that soldiers had shown reluctance to follow his orders. “Not allowing the starving city residents to leave and sending other starving citizens back into the city has become difficult to explain to the troops.”
You can meet the siege’s survivors among the elderly who congregate in Changchun’s Victory Park. Originally built by the Japanese, it is now punctuated by a statue of Chairman Mao. There, a former soldier said the Party’s official line was that “Changchun was liberated without firing a single shot.” He knew how: with 170,000 other Communist troops, he drove back civilians who tried to escape the city. He wished the siege’s full story would be made public. Chinese schoolchildren, he said, “only know the propaganda. Maybe if they know how horrible war is, they can try to avoid it in the future.”
The war still suppurates into daily life. China estimates that, since 1945, at least two thousand people have been killed by unearthed Japanese chemical weapons. Two million pieces of ordnance were left behind in the Northeast alone, bleeding their contents into the soil and water table, or worse. In Jilin province in 2004, boys aged twelve and eight were burned and sickened after coming into contact with a rusting toxic shell they found in a stream. The Japanese government acknowledged it was one of their weapons but refused to pay damages. Under its obligations as a signatory of the United Nations Chemical Weapons Convention, Japan agreed to send teams to excavate and dispose of the munitions at a facility it would build outside of Dunhua city, where the boys had been injured.
Dunhua was two hundred miles east of Wasteland, and I wanted to check the project’s progress. Previously, Japan had pledged to dig up its ordnance by 2007. A Japanese Foreign Ministry spokesman said the cleanup was “extremely important for improving trust.” But in 2008 the agency in charge was discovered to have misused $1 million of public funds.
For four hours my bus curved past green foothills over an empty expressway that gently dipped and rose, passing a villa development named the Islan
d of Egrets. I misread it as “Regrets” while under the spell of the Liam Neeson action film blaring on the bus’s video player. His vengeful oeuvre was replacing the regional comedic opera Er Ren Zhuan on Northeastern buses. I never thought I would miss the opera’s clatter, until spending seated hours captive to recorded gunfire and gravel-voiced threats.
Dunhua’s street grid still showed traces of a Japanese planner’s pencil: in front of the train station, axial roads radiated diagonally off a roundabout, leading to the town center. With a population of 500,000, Dunhua counted as a small Chinese city but felt more like a county seat. Its only fast-food outlets were knockoffs, including CFC, California Fried Chicken.
A local man named Dong Gang offered to take me to the weapons cleanup site where the boys had been injured, twenty miles north of town. Dong Gang was wound tight. He clutched an iPhone hard enough to whiten his knuckles, mirrored sunglasses indented the temples of his shaved head, and his jeans and black T-shirt looked painted on. He told me to call him “brother” and began most sentences with, “Here’s my analysis.” As he sped down the country road, over the Peony River and past rolling tobacco fields, he turned and looked at me while talking.
“Eyes straight ahead, brother.”
“Don’t worry. Here’s my analysis. The Japs reject any claims for compensation because they think the peace pact signed with us in 1972 settled the matter.”
“Watch the road, brother.”
“Here’s where the Japanese airfield used to be. When I was a kid, we would ride bikes on the runway. Now it’s rows of corn. Here’s my analysis . . .”
Thirty minutes later we entered a narrow valley, passing signs announcing the activities forbidden in the forest preserve: chopping, burning, barbecuing. The single-lane road looked like a bike trail winding toward the stream where the boys had discovered the toxic shell. The house where they had lived, however, was now deserted.
In Manchuria Page 24