A Japanese military officer mentioned to a reporter Morton, p. 41.
The propaganda posters, another correspondent noted Holmes, p. 12.
“They asked me only two questions” Puyi, p. 188.
Japanese officers accompanied the commission Inventory of the Papers of Roy L. Morgan. Box 1, Folder 6, MSS 93-4. Item 2: Affidavit of Henry Pu Yi, p. 8.
The president of the South Manchuria Railway Elliot 2, p. 639. The poem was “Ode to Mukden” by the emperor Qianlong. Japan’s argument is still seen at Tokyo’s Yushukan war museum, which displays a time line dating back over two thousand years correctly, if elliptically, showing the homeland of the Manchu “with varying official names throughout history,” and kingdoms “frequently at odds with the Han Chinese.”
For more on the Lytton Commission, see Young, Louise (p. 150), Duara (p. 53), and the International Relations Committee, which gives a sampling of world opinion at the time, via newspaper editorials.
The commission was not convinced The league stated it would not recognize Manchukuo and that Japan should recall its soldiers to within the South Manchuria Railway zone. Time magazine called the report the financially strapped league’s “last chance to escape political and moral bankruptcy as well.”
Japan’s representative to the league, Yosuke Matsuoka, pronounced: “Japan stands ready to be crucified! But we do believe, and firmly believe, that in a very few years, world opinion will be changed and that we shall be understood by the world as Jesus of Nazareth was.” Matsuoka would soon become the head of the South Manchuria Railway.
One witness was the American Newman, p. 21.
The truce that ended the fighting The Tangu Truce was named for the Bohai Sea port where the agreement was signed in May 1933.
“First Emperor Enthroned” Manchuria Daily News.
I expected the story to end with the observation Paraphrasing Karl Marx’s appending of Hegel’s famous quote.
“A silk hat and frockcoat will be needed” Japan Railways Department, p. 000viii.
In an article he wrote for the Atlantic Kinney, Henry, 1.
In a 1924 Atlantic article Kinney, Henry, 2. p. 130.
The article described the horrors of 1923’s Great Kanto Earthquake. Since the Richter scale wasn’t developed until the 1930s, the quake’s magnitude has been estimated to have been between 7.9 and 8.4.
In a memo sent to Western journalists then Kinney, Henry W., in Payson J. Treat Papers at the Hoover Institute Archives, Stanford University 1. Memo dated November 30, 1931.
There was no mention of the building of Shinto shrines Yamamuro, pp. 187 and 194.
Foreign correspondents dubbed the puppet state Ibid., p. 189.
The Times of London correspondent Fleming 3, p. 130. This is a funny book. Fleming was twenty-seven years old on the trip, which he recorded in a diary that he did not organize into a book until 1952. His entries sound familiar to a traveler even today: “This hotel is depressing. The men on the desk are devoted to me, vaguely, I suppose, suspecting that I may one day ventilate their obscure and unnumbered grievances . . . A typical Harbin man deduced that I was a correspondent; finally insisted on giving me his name, written on a piece of paper with the word drunk after it. The only Russian in Harbin with a sense of humour” (p. 135).
Travelers could rely on all-American equipment South Manchuria Railway Company 2, p. 49.
“The shriek of these American locomotives” Ibid., p. 69.
The memo was discovered and published Powell, p. 309.
And the talk of Japanese being “conspicuously boisterous” Kinney, Henry W., in Payson J. Treat Papers at the Hoover Institute Archives, Stanford University 2. Memo dated June 8, 1935.
Manchukuo, he gushed, had 5,500 miles of railroad Ibid. Memo dated March 10, 1937, on the fifth anniversary of the founding of Manchukuo.
In 1933, Henry Kinney wrote Manchukuo: A Handbook of Information, p. 96.
Japanese had migrated in numbers before Wilson 2, pp. 251–52. See also Young, Louise, pp. 310–12.
Fewer than one thousand Japanese farmers moved Ibid., p. 253.
As planners drew up the modern Manchukuo capital Young, Louise, p. 324.
Officials recorded the sale of 11,604 Ibid., p. 324.
In 1932, after intense debate and lobbying Ibid., p. 321.
In 1936, however, the Japanese government Ibid., p. 307.
Previously, Japan had backed Korean migration to the region Hyun, pp. 36–43.
The South Manchuria Railway had urged farmers Ibid., p. 52. The map appears on p. 48.
Puyi visited the wounded Manchuria, pp. 211–12. In Russian, the Nomonhan Incident is known as the battles of Khalkhin Gol.
Unnoted, of course Inventory of the Papers of Roy L. Morgan. Box 1, Folder 6, MSS 93-4. Item 7: Interrogation of Pu Yi (Continued), p. 12. Puyi told the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal that this occurred at Nomonhan, although I found no other mention of this incident. In his landmark two-volume history of the battle, Alvin Coox reported a 1936 mutiny in eastern Manchukuo by one hundred Chinese troops who killed three Japanese officers, burned their barracks, fled over the Soviet border, then returned with Red Army escorts for further skirmishes. It provides this indelible image: “During the heaviest combat, ‘three men of a commanding rank in the Soviet army were unmistakably observed to be directing the deserters with whips’” (Coox, p. 95).
In Manchuria magazine’s summer issue of 1941 Ibid., pp. 215 and 129.
An item about Puyi and the founder of the Gestapo began Ibid., p. 175.
Puyi announced that Manchukuo was also at war Yamamuro, p. 194.
The Japanese army had secretly called them Young, Louise, p. 406.
Chapter 13: Occupation’s Aftermath
“Go! Go and colonize the continent!” Young, Louise, pp. 364–68.
Colonization manuals included articles Ibid., pp. 368–69.
A 1941 journal promised Wilson 2, p. 278. For an interesting look at how Japanese planners (including Uchida Yoshikazu, architect of the Tokyo University campus) envisioned these settlements, see Tucker.
Skilled professionals such as doctors Young, Louise, pp. 400–401.
Instead, settlers were handed cultivated land Ibid., pp. 401–4, and Tamanoi 2, p. 29.
Dissenters could expect the retribution Wilson 2, p. 267.
One of the most publicized migrant villages Scherer. Also noted in Tamanoi 2, pp. 31–32. I rely on Scherer’s translations, taken from her dissertation.
Just plant one grain of wheat Ibid., pp. 205–6.
The train departed at 5:24 a.m. It left from a little-used station in western Jilin city that resembled a German Gothic castle. It was a relic of the Young Marshal Zhang Xueliang’s attempt to break the Japanese monopoly and build a competing railway, called the Jihai Line. The station was designed by Lin Huiyin—also known as Phyllis Lin—the sister-in-law of the archaeologist Liang Siyong and aunt of Maya Lin, creator of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall in Washington, D.C. Built in 1928, the station’s barn-roof, granite-block structure is meant to resemble “a crouching lion, with its tail ingeniously designed as a bell tower,” according to a plaque at its entrance. Around me passed crowds entering a temporary waiting room and construction workers—in yellow hard hats and olive green plimsolls—off to build high-rise apartments named Park Scenery House.
“Especially for the construction” Scherer, p. 213.
The writer described the settlers’ village Ibid., p. 211.
When the Japanese settlers left Ibid., pp. 205 and 209.
Although they made up only 17 percent Chan, pp. 17 and 20. Young, Louise, citing Foreign Ministry surveys, found that of the 223,000 settlers at war’s end, only 140,000 (63 percent) ever returned to Japan. “More than a third of settlers—78,500 people—died in the wake of defeat” (p. 411). See Also Tamanoi 2, p. 167. Yamamuro cites the same figures as Chan: “roughly 270,000 settlers” and “some 80,000” dead (p. 282).
The Japanese army had abandoned
them Young, Louise, pp. 406–8. See also Wilson 2, p. 283: “No military protection was provided for them and there were no plans for their evacuation. In fact, Kwantung Army contingency plans against Soviet entry into the war, made two months before the event, placed the line of Japanese defense in such a way that the majority of Japanese settlers would be abandoned.”
“I had the misfortune” I came across Nagamine via a 2010 article in Nikkei West, “Northern California’s longest printing Japanese-American newspaper—now in our 20th year.” See Sammon. I met Nagamine with his wife, their daughter Janet, and UC Santa Cruz professor Alan Christy. Their collaborative book and documentary film on Nagamine’s life is forthcoming.
Commanded by the architect of the Stalingrad His name was Aleksandr Vasilevsky.
“Lightning flashed unexpectedly” General Beloborodov quoted in Glantz, p. 44. His landmark and highly readable monograph gave the battle its more mellifluous name.
Once this site was a busy dock The hamlet is named Yihantongxiang.
A Place of Four Families settler later recalled Tamanoi 2, p. 48.
Several authors survived collective suicides See Chan, pp. 19–22, and Itoh, pp. 186–87, for examples.
Hundreds of Japanese women Estimates range from the hundreds to thousands. In a 2006 report, China’s state news agency said more than 10,000 Japanese gathered at the docks waiting for evacuation boats, and that “many chose to commit suicide.” By spring “more than 5,000 had died.” Of the survivors, 2,400 chose to be repatriated, while “more than 2,000 remaining, mostly women and children, were adopted by the local people.” (See “War Proves a Mixed Blessing for Some Japanese,” Xinhua, August 12, 2006.) Chan writes: “It is estimated that 20,000 Japanese refugees were kept in Fangzheng” in refugee camps. Only 8,649 survived the winter. By spring 2,300 had married Chinese men, 2,360 had died from disease and hunger, 1,120 children had been adopted locally, and 1,200 had tried to walk toward Harbin (Chan, p. 22).
In the first year after surrender Young, Louise, p. 410.
An equal number was press-ganged Dower, pp. 50–51.
I talked to him The farm began by growing flowers, and is named A. Nagamine Nursery. It’s in the town of Watsonville.
Across Manchukuo, the majority of surviving settlers Young, Louise, pp. 410–11. From the beginning, with a housing and food shortage at home, Japan was not officially eager to have settlers return. Even in postwar Japan, returnees receive a subsidized apartment, language and job training lessons, and a monthly stipend of around $1,500, a pittance in Tokyo, one of the world’s most expensive cities. An estimated 60 percent of returnees live on welfare (Tamanoi 2, p. 131). For details on the boat lift, see Maruyama.
Of the survivors A local offspring of a Japanese woman and Chinese man told Xinhua that their parents’ union was not voluntary: “At that time, anyone could go there and bring a Japanese woman or child home,” said fifty-four-year-old Bi Zhongqing.
According to the county government “War Proves a Mixed Blessing for Some Japanese,” Xinhua, August 12, 2006.
The cemetery’s roots date to 1963 Ibid. See also Pulvers; Chan, p. 22; and Itoh, p. 187.
“The people of Japan and the settlers” Pulvers. I am reminded of the oath some pioneer farmers took before leaving Japan: “I shall not let my family interfere with my decision. I shall sacrifice my life for our colony. I shall make every effort to settle down permanently in Manchuria.”
A Japanese officer, expressing guilt Itoh, p. 40.
“We have to ask them not to plant any more” The caretaker’s name is Zhang Lin.
The previous week, five Chinese nationalists au. Itoh (p. 187) wrote that the cemetery has a caretaker due to previous vandalism.
“Our economy profits thanks to people who went to Japan” Nishimura 1. The county has one of the largest amounts of foreign currency being exchanged by a local government, as migrants remit money home in yen.
Once this site had been an Allied prisoner of war camp In Chinese, it’s called er zhan meng jun zhan fu jizhongying jiuzhi, and it’s located in Shenyang’s Dadong district, southeast of the intersection of Pangjiang Jie and Zhulin Lu.
Now age ninety-two, Leith remembers I met him after finding his self-published book for sale online, which he mailed to me inscribed: “Dear Michael Meyer! I hope you enjoy my memoirs! I would like to talk with you so call me on the phone.” I’m grateful to his wife, Helen, and son Mike for welcoming me into their home in Golden, Colorado, and assisting with the reproduction of photographs Hal Leith took on his mission. Leith passed away on Christmas Eve 2013.
Also: beat the advancing Yu, p. 231.
Dubbed Operation Cardinal, it was one of eight The others: Operation Magpie (Beijing), Duck (Weixian), Flamingo (Harbin; aborted due to Soviet advance), Sparrow (Shanghai), Pigeon (Hainan Island), Raven (Vientiane), and Quail (Hanoi). The latter was headed by a young captain with the enviable name Archimedes L. A. Patti, who came face-to-face with Ho Chi Minh and found himself calming the five French soldiers who were part of his team and itching to begin a fight with the guerrilla Communist leader. (Imagine if they had.) Ho would soon launch a war of independence against the French colonizers. Ibid., p. 232.
One of these OSS operations would end with the execution Ibid., pp. 236–41.
Chinese Communist forces were angered by the Yalta agreements Historians debate whether Franklin D. Roosevelt “sold out” Manchuria at these talks, which restored Russia’s rights to the Northeast’s railroads and shipyards at Dalian/Port Arthur, which it had lost in the Russo-Japanese War of 1905. General Albert Wedemeyer, commander of U.S. forces in China, felt the Yalta agreement was a betrayal of Chinese sovereignty, as did the American ambassador to China, Patrick Hurley, who tried to convince Winston Churchill to assuage Stalin by ceding control of Hong Kong. Churchill balked, saying the colony “would be taken out of the British Empire over my dead body.” Ibid., pp. 241–42.
The nearest American forces were stationed nine hundred miles away Clemens, pp. 73 and 77.
“If we are not in Korea and Manchuria when the Russians get there” Yu, p. 231.
He ordered his agents Clemens, p. 76.
The survivors of that battle had been shipped to Taiwan Harris, pp. 162–64. The men were from the “hell ship” Tottori Maru.
There, the men were divided Yardley.
Japanese stacked their frozen bodies Harris, p. 165.
An improved camp Brougher, p. 168.
The Japanese considered Hoten a model camp Ibid., p. 168. Whereas the average death rate in a Japanese camp was 27 percent—compared to 4 percent in German-run camps—at Hoten, 12 percent of prisoners died, three of whom were executed in 1943 after trying to escape.
“It is entirely out of my expectations” Yang Jing, p. 235. Professor Yang (of Shenyang University) reprinted Matsuda’s address, which the colonel had handwritten in cursive English.
“I am down 14 pounds” Brougher, p. 179.
On August 8, two days after the bombing Ibid., p. 181.
August 15: “Many rumors” Ibid., p. 182.
August 16: “Wildest kinds of rumors” Ibid., p. 183.
At the sight of the dozen soldiers The Chinese team member was named Cheng Shiwu and is lost to history. The Nisei doctor, Fumio Ito, lives in Hawaii.
In his prison diary, Brigadier General W. E. Brougher Brougher, p. 183.
In one of his last entries from the camp Ibid., p. 184.
General Wainwright, gaunt and wearing threadbare clothes Clemens, p. 87.
A Cardinal report described a binge Clemens, p. 95, and Yu, p. 244.
“Some of the Chinese took my side” Leith, pp. 60–61.
Soviet forces, an OSS officer reported Clemens, p. 99.
The Russians even took “Changchun Mayor Inspires His City,” New York Times, March 11, 1946.
William Donovan, the head of the OSS Yu, p. 245.
Standing on the Songhua River docks where Japanese mothers Ishida.
Officials said Ibid. The tributary is the Daluomi River, called “Siwangdu” (Ferry of Death) for those swept away and drowned when trying to cross.
The Japanese invasion caused 14 to 20 million Mitter 1, p. 5, notes the former figure is a conservative estimate. On p. 363 he says “the numbers are not clear” and adds the latter figure. Mitter notes, too, that the war resulted in massive refugee flight. Official mainland accounts usually use the higher estimate of deaths.
In a Tokyo courtroom in 2002 Lewis and “China Alerted by Serious Soil Pollution, Vows Better Protection,” Economist, April 17, 2014. The historian Sheldon Harris (see note below) died four days later.
Over thirteen years, an estimated three thousand prisoners Estimate given at the museum. Harris notes that the number actually underestimates people killed prior to the base’s inception, since Ishii had begun human experiments in Harbin nine years earlier, in 1932. Nor does the figure take into account the postwar death toll of civilians living around the camps (thirty thousand dead from plague in 1947, for example). Harris, pp. 86–87.
Which, in turn, poisoned local wells Ibid., p. 99. Earlier, Harris notes that, with a perimeter of six square kilometers, the Pingfang camp rivaled Auschwitz-Birkenau in area (p. 43).
As the Soviets invaded in August 1945 Ibid., p. 245.
American troops found him hiding in his home village Ibid., p. 246.
“Evidence gathered in this investigation” Ibid., p. 263.
In 1948 the United States granted Ishii Ibid., pp. 287–91 and 304–5. See also Drea, p. 37. It summarizes National Archives holdings on the matter, and also that Harris believed immunity was approved not only by Generals MacArthur and Willoughby in Tokyo but by their superiors in Washington.
For three decades, the deal was kept secret The journalist John W. Powell was a veteran China hand who had published and edited the China Monthly Review from Shanghai until 1953. (His father had cofounded it in 1917 as the China Weekly Review. He lost both his feet to gangrene in a Japanese prison camp and died in 1947 at age sixty.) Powell had been unsuccessfully tried for sedition after claiming the United States used chemical weapons in the Korean War. His articles on Unit 731—and the American immunity deals—appeared in the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars in 1980 and in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 1981 after mainstream media turned him down. See Fox.
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