Year Zero

by Ian Buruma

  One of the most grotesque scenes of the immediate postwar period took place in Nanking, where tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, of Chinese had been massacred and raped by Japanese troops on an extended rampage in 1937. The Rape of Nanking still stands as one of the worst atrocities of World War II. General Okamura Yasuji was not directly involved in the massacre, but he was responsible for equally horrendous war crimes. In 1938, troops under his command murdered countless civilians with chemical weapons. His scorched-earth policy in 1942, known by Chinese as the “Three Alls” (“kill all, burn all, loot all”), caused the deaths of more than two million people. All men between fifteen and sixty were targeted for killing on suspicion of being anti-Japanese. And the systematic kidnapping of young women, mostly from Korea, to serve as sex slaves in Japanese army brothels, also happened on Okamura’s watch.

  But when this same Okamura surrendered to General Ho Yin-chin in Nanking on September 9, 1945, General Ho bowed to the Japanese general and apologized for the indignity of this humiliating ceremony. Ho, who had been trained at the military academy in Tokyo under Okamura, called him “sensei,” teacher.34 And so, Okamura continued to occupy the Foreign Ministry building in Nanking as though nothing had changed. After he was finally indicted for war crimes by a court in Nanking three years later, the Generalissimo himself shielded him from further indignities and kept him on as a military adviser to the Nationalists. Okamura Yasuji died peacefully in his bed in 1966.

  The key to the Chinese civil war really lay in Manchuria. The first to take this heartland of heavy industries and mines, set up and run by the Japanese, would be in an almost unassailable position. As we have seen, the Soviets got there first and stripped all the industrial and financial assets that could be transported to the Soviet Union. Their first encounters with the Chinese Communists were not always cordial. The ill-kempt Chinese soldiers were often treated with disdain by Soviet Red Army officers, and the lack of interpreters made communication almost impossible. Besides, Stalin, for the sake of Big Power stability, had decided for the time being to recognize the Generalissimo as the legitimate Chinese leader.

  Still, more and more Chinese Communists from the Eighth Route Army were trickling into Manchuria, and in some areas, with the help of sympathetic Soviet commanders, took over the local administration. Since most Communist cadres had neither knowledge nor roots in a region that most Chinese regarded as the Wild North, home of nomads and savages, this was not an easy task. Apart from tense relations with the Soviets, and the sinister presence of roaming gangs of puppet troops, the Eighth Route Army also had to deal with an assortment of local underground guerrilla bands, some attached to the Soviets, some belonging to provincial warlords, and some affiliated with the Nationalist camp. Just as the Nationalists wanted Japanese and American help to fight the Communists, the Communists asked for Soviet assistance to suppress “anti-Soviet bandits.”35

  Meanwhile, unnerved by the Communist advance into Manchuria, Chiang implored the Americans to transport Nationalist troops to the north. The U.S. complied, but halfheartedly, as the official policy was not to get involved in “fratricidal conflict.” Nationalists often arrived in the northeast too late, not in enough numbers, and sometimes in the wrong places.

  The curious nature of the snake pit that was Manchuria—things would get much worse; up to three hundred thousand civilians died of starvation and disease in the siege of Changchun by the Communists in 1948—might best be illustrated by the story of a famous brothel in Andong, on the North Korean border.

  Andong, in the fall of 1945, was quite a cosmopolitan place, a kind of Casablanca of northeast Asia, filled not only with Manchurian Chinese, but also with Koreans, Russians, and about seventy thousand Japanese, not just resident soldiers and civilians, but refugees from other parts of the former puppet state. Terrified of what the advancing Soviet troops would do to them, particularly to the women, Japanese civic leaders decided to set up a “cabaret,” in fact a brothel, to distract unwelcome Russian attentions from Japanese womenfolk. The task of running this establishment, named the Annei Hanten (Annei Inn), was a woman in her early forties named O-Machi. A former geisha in Japanese hot spring resorts, she recruited Japanese women, many of whom had no experience in this line of business, by appealing to their patriotism. They were asked to sacrifice themselves for the sake of Japan; they were the female kamikazes of Andong.36

  There is still a stone memorial to O-Machi in her native town in Japan, erected by grateful Japanese whose lives she helped to save. O-Machi prided herself on being “apolitical” and treated all men, high and low, Russian, Japanese, or Chinese, equally. Although it was initially meant for the entertainment of the Russians, O-Machi’s “cabaret” attracted other types of customers too, including Japanese ex-officers and community leaders, as well as Chinese collaborators with the Japanese who were now on the Nationalist side, and even Chinese and Japanese communists. With the patrons fueled by sake, vodka, and Chinese wines, all kinds of information was exchanged at the Annei Inn.

  O-Machi passed on to the Japanese what she heard from the Soviets about troop movements and planned arrests. Many Japanese, alerted in this way, managed to disappear at opportune times. There were spies and double-spies, “red radishes” (anticommunists pretending to be “reds”), and “blue radishes,” or communist infiltrators in the guise of anticommunists. Plots were hatched, and counterplots. A marriage was arranged at the Annei Inn between a Japanese employee and a Chinese Communist spy (who may have been a red radish), so the Japanese might find out what the Communists were up to. A military coup from the right, planned by Chinese Nationalists and Japanese ex-officers who had hidden artillery in the hills above Andong, was organized at the Annei Inn, but fell apart when the expected Nationalist troops failed to arrive.

  Instead, not much later, the Communist Eighth Army marched into town, replacing the Soviet Red Army. Nothing seemed to change at first. The Communists were treated to a Chinese banquet at the Annei Inn, albeit without female dalliance, which the cadres disapproved of. Perhaps the Japanese could be of assistance to the Eight Route Army? Former employees of the Japanese Manchukuo electric company set up a “red theater” troupe, hoping to stage socialist “people’s plays.”

  But the honeymoon didn’t last. The Communists decided that an international brothel was not what the new order called for. And, suspecting Japanese involvement in the failed Nationalist coup, the Communists arrested O-Machi and several Japanese community leaders as Nationalist spies. Not a great deal is known about what happened to them next. O-Machi was in prison for about a year, and then, in September 1946, she was executed on the bank of the Yalu River. Whether or not she was a spy, and for whom, remains a mystery.

  • • •

  FRANCE DESPERATELY NEEDED a sense of continuity and legitimacy. The embers of civil war had never stopped burning since the Revolution in 1789. Royalists and Catholic reactionaries had fought the Republic from its inception. German occupation and the Vichy regime had given them a temporary victory. General de Gaulle was hardly a man of the left, nor did he hold much truck with the messy business of multiparty democracy. But for the sake of continuity he set himself up as the natural heir of the Republic which he despised. Even though the National Assembly had voted constituent power to him in 1940, Marshal Pétain’s Vichy government was declared illegitimate as soon as the war was over. De Gaulle’s task in 1944 and 1945 was to stitch France back together again.

  The fear of civil war was real enough. The communists, who had played such a major role in the resistance, had as far back as 1941 already prepared lists of enemies to purge. They wanted to go after the industrialists as much as the petty thugs in the pro-Nazi milice. The important thing for all former resisters was to punish the elite, the leaders, and not only the “lampistes,” the subordinates hanging from the lampposts while the bosses went free.37 Aware that justice had to be seen to be done, and that France couldn�
�t afford purges on a scale that would put intolerable strains on an already battered society, de Gaulle wanted to get the process over with as quickly as possible, preferably within a few months. The deadline was February 1945, which was of course impossible.

  By then, however, much of the rough justice had already been done. Prisoners had been lynched, more than four thousand people summarily executed, some hanged by frenzied mobs. Especially in the south of France, some regions were almost in a state of anarchy. De Gaulle disapproved of this kind of thing; only the state should have the right to punish. A number of former resisters were, in fact, arrested for showing excessive zeal in executing suspected collaborators. But could de Gaulle really blame them? Pascal Copeau, a journalist and resistance leader in the south, wrote in January 1945:

  During four terrible years the best of the French learned to kill, to assassinate, to sabotage, to derail trains, sometimes to pillage and always to disobey what they were told was the law . . . Who taught these Frenchmen, who gave them the order to assassinate? Who if not you, mon général?38

  For the state to regain the monopoly of force, the first thing de Gaulle had to do was disarm the resistance. Since the maquisards, the underground fighters in the French resistance, had gained their weapons at great risk during the war, while de Gaulle had lived in the safety of the British capital, this was a delicate task. Communist resisters still had hopes of a second French Revolution for which they would need their guns. But this possibility was cut short, not only because the communists lacked enough support for such a radical venture in France, but also because Stalin made it clear that he would not back a revolution in the American sphere of influence. Stalin had other fish to fry. So he told the French communists to back off. And de Gaulle made a deal with the French communists. If they wanted permission for their leader Maurice Thorez, who had deserted the French army in 1939 and fled to Moscow, to come home without being tried for his treachery, they had to agree to disband their armed fighters. Many weapons were still carefully hidden in remote farms, under floorboards, or in warehouses. But the communists gave in, and little by little the state regained control.

  Some token figures, who had been particularly egregious or conspicuous during the occupation years, were put on trial. Pétain himself was tried, but was deemed to be too old and too grand to be executed after being convicted for treason, so he was banished instead to a small island off the Atlantic coast. He died there, and was buried there, a demented old man stripped of his military honors, an ignominious fate which enraged some of his loyal followers. An attempt was made by loyalists in 1973 to rectify Pétain’s humiliation by disinterring his bones and transporting them to the mainland for a more glorious burial in the cemetery for the war dead. When the Maréchal’s bones were discovered in the garage of his lawyer, Maître Jacques Isorni, they were swiftly shipped back to the island where, as far as is known, they remain.

  Pétain’s most powerful minister during the war, the unprepossessing and much loathed Pierre Laval, was less lucky, and his death sentence was carried out. He was shot in October 1945 after his attempt to take cyanide failed because the poison was too old to be effective.

  There were other war crime trials too. But before they could be seen to be at all persuasive, the judiciary had to be purged. Since only one judge in wartime France had refused to sign an oath of loyalty to Marshal Pétain, this was a problem. A purge commission of judges and former resisters had to decide whether magistrates had behaved as loyal Frenchmen. According to this very loose definition, 266 were judged to have been deficient. The same criteria were applied to civil servants. Sanctions ranged from temporary suspension on half pay to losing one’s job, as well as one’s civic rights, entirely. Out of roughly a million civil servants, 11,343 received some kind of sanction and 5,000 lost their positions. As was true in other countries, the business and industrial elite was left largely unscathed. Notorious sympathizers with the Nazis, such as the founder of L’Oréal, the perfume manufacturer, were not touched at all.

  Louis Renault, founder of the Renault motor car factory, was not a known Nazi. In his own account, he was given an awful choice by the Germans: either let his concern be taken over by Daimler Benz and see his workers shipped to Germany, or make vehicles for the German armed forces. He chose the latter. In communist resistance circles Renault was seen as the worst kind of industrial traitor, a class enemy of the first order. The communist newspaper L’Humanité wrote in August 1944: “The directors of the Renault factories must be made to pay for the lives of Allied soldiers killed as a result of their enthusiasm to equip the enemy.”39 Since so few other industrialists were purged, it is possible that Renault was a scapegoat, a bone thrown by the Gaullists to the left. Renault died of head wounds in prison before he could defend himself in a trial.

  In many cases of purged magistrates and civil servants, they quickly returned to their former positions, or to respectable careers in the private sector. The case of Maurice Papon, the last Frenchman to be tried for war crimes, was typical in every way except for its final denouement. Responsible as a senior police official in Bordeaux for sending more than a thousand Jews to the camps, he was never tried in 1945. On the contrary, he went on to become an important bureaucrat in various governments: secretary of state under de Gaulle, prefect of Corsica, prefect in Algeria where he helped to crush the anticolonial rebellion, and Paris police chief, again under de Gaulle, who presented him with the Legion of Honour for services to the French state, and finally budget minister under President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. What was unusual about Papon’s illustrious career is that he lived long enough for his unsavory past to catch up with him. His trial began in 1995. He was jailed in 1999, released in 2002, and fined the equivalent of about three thousand dollars for illegally wearing his Legion of Honour decoration, of which he had been stripped.

  De Gaulle mended France in the same way Japan was “mended,” or Italy, or Belgium, or even Germany: by keeping damage to the prewar elites to a minimum. He could not afford to polarize his nation further. The expertise of businessmen, financiers, lawyers, professors, doctors, and bureaucrats was needed. They had the right contacts.

  Men and women of the resistance had played their roles as brave mavericks risking their lives while others kept their heads down. They had done this for all manner of reasons: religious faith, political ideology, boredom, rage, a thirst for adventure, or just a sense of decency. But in the choices they made they were less representative of most people than were the opportunists and sycophants.

  Punishment for wrongdoing, in France no more or less than anywhere else, was frequently symbolic anyway, and the distribution was hardly fair. While the establishment remained relatively untouched, a former prostitute and possible spy named Marthe Richard lobbied in December 1945 to close the brothels in Paris. A year later the Loi Marthe Richard closed all the brothels in France. The reason given for this most un-French zeal was that brothels during the German occupation had been the principal centers of “collaboration.”

  CHAPTER 6

  THE RULE OF LAW

  Once the Communist Eighth Route Army had reached Manchuria in the late fall of 1945 and began to take city after city from the Chinese Nationalists who had replaced the Japanese in some places, and the Soviet Red Army in others, so-called people’s trials quickly followed. Justice was swift, the rituals of law rudimentary, if not primitive.

  In some instances, Chinese newspapers would advertise for witnesses, asking anyone with a complaint against former officials of Manchukuo, the Japanese puppet state, to come forward. In Andong, on the northern border with Korea, a primary school was set up as a “people’s court.” Many of the charges were trivial, sometimes driven by the sour residue of long repressed resentments. A rickshaw puller accused a Japanese businessman of smashing his lantern without offering compensation. A young man remembered how his father was worked so hard as a coolie for a Japanese firm that he died from exh
austion. The accused, who usually had no recollection of their misdeeds, were lucky if they got off with very stiff fines.

  There were far more serious accusations too. People’s justice proved to be just as quick in those cases. In December three hundred Japanese and Chinese functionaries in Andong Province were executed on the banks of the Yalu River. These were all men who had worked in the Manchukuo administration. There is an eyewitness account of what happened to two of them, the ex-governor of Andong, a Chinese named Cao, and his Japanese vice-governor, Watanabe.

  Black hoods were placed over their heads, and Manchukuo decorations pinned to their chests—badges of honor transformed into badges of shame. They were then paraded through the main street of Andong in horse-drawn carts, with their heads bowed down in a show of contrition, holding up wooden signs daubed with crimson characters for all to see. One said “reactionary,” the other “puppet.” The people’s court was held in the open air, with large crowds trying to get a glimpse of the culprits. The people’s judge shouted out: “What shall we do with them?” “Kill! Kill!” the mob screamed back. And so it was decided. The men were led to the banks of the river, made to kneel, and shot from behind. (It is said that Watanabe’s ears were cut off first, but this is disputed.)1

  What is interesting about this account is not the almost farcical nature of such summary trials, but the need for them. Why should the Chinese Communists have insisted on trials at all? Why not simply shoot the rascals? Clearly they wanted the executions to appear lawful. Establishing a form of legality is a necessary condition of legitimacy, even in a dictatorship, or perhaps especially in a dictatorship. But the concept of the law in show trials is entirely political. The trial is a ritual to demonstrate the authority of the Communist Party. The accused in Andong were charged not only with being instruments of the Japanese puppet state, but also, after liberation, of collaborating with the “reactionary” Chinese Nationalists, something they could hardly have avoided as the Nationalists took over Andong before the Communists arrived. Since the Communist Party supposedly represented the power of the people, the role of the people in this ceremonial affair was to shout out the verdict that was expected of them.