All of which leads to the central question — given his phenomenal importance to his troops, how much did Hirohito know about the brutal way his army was conducting the war in China? This is a profoundly sensitive question to ask in Japan and one that has been made deliberately hard to answer. Documents that might conclusively establish the truth have either been destroyed or are still kept secret. In the weeks following their surrender thousands of documents were burnt by the Japanese before the Americans arrived to occupy their country. Thousands more are still kept hidden in Japanese archives. So in the absence of incontestable evidence, historians have been forced to speculate. Take, for example, Hirohito’s state of knowledge about the Nanking massacre. For Edward Behr, one of Hirohito’s first critical biographers, ‘it is difficult to believe that this — one of the most appalling events of the China War — came and went without Emperor Hirohito becoming aware of it’. Behr points out both that Prince Asaka, one of the Japanese commanders in Nanking, was Hirohito’s own grand-uncle, and that Hirohito would surely have been aware of coverage of the massacre in the foreign press. Stephen Large, in his measured biography of Hirohito, is less certain, demonstrating that Hirohito relied primarily on the information others chose to give him in order to form his own views. Herbert Bix, in the latest full-length examination of the emperor, leans more towards the Behr view — that it is virtually inconceivable that Hirohito did not know about Nanking at the time.
Trying to decide what Hirohito knew overall about the criminal conduct of his troops in China is like peeling away the layers of an onion, only to reach the core and find nothing there. This, of course, is precisely the difficulty that those around him hoped future historians would encounter. The ‘deniability’ of the emperor must always have been the paramount concern of his advisers. But despite this carefully constructed wall of vagueness, it is still possible to reach definite conclusions about Hirohito’s culpability. For it is certain that at some point he would have known of the crimes his army had committed — even if it was only from the Americans at the end of the war (and it would have been truly extraordinary if he did not know sooner than that). Yet at no time in his long life did Hirohito call for those who had committed crimes in China to be investigated and properly held to account for their actions. His silence, in fact, is hugely eloquent. As supreme commander of the imperial armed forces he was ultimately responsible for the actions of his soldiers — a man of honour who held such a position would, no matter at what stage he learnt the truth, have openly admitted and publicized his country’s culpability and wanted those who were guilty to be punished. Instead, Hirohito’s actions are entirely consistent with those of a head of state who wanted his army to succeed and was indifferent to the methods they used to do it — a philosophy reminiscent of one of Hitler’s orders to his subordinates, when he told them to ‘Germanize Poland, and he would ask no questions about their methods’.
One of Hirohito’s most important functions in the Japanese constitutional system was to question his military commanders about the methods his army was using — no one else, least of all the civilian cabinet, was in a position to do so. And yet Hirohito either knew what his army was doing and did nothing about it, or deliberately did not ask the questions that needed to be asked in order to find out. It is hard to know which is worthy of greater moral condemnation.
Moreover, Professor Bix reveals that in certain key areas Hirohito was clearly involved in a military decision-making process that led in China to the use of outlawed weapons. In a directive dated 28 July 1937 Hirohito sanctioned the use of tear gas in China (banned under the Versailles peace treaty signed by the Japanese at the end of the First World War), and two months later he authorized ‘special chemical warfare units’ to be sent to the Asian mainland.13 The Imperial Army went on to use poison gas on many hundreds of occasions during the war in China — the ultimate authorization for their actions coming from directives sealed by their emperor. Such internationally outlawed weapons were never used in the subsequent war against the West — a revealing distinction that speaks of the pragmatism of the emperor and his military advisers (since they must have been concerned about the Western Allies using similar weapons against them in reprisal) rather than any sudden moral scruple.
Whilst documents tie Hirohito to knowledge of the use of chemical weapons by the Imperial Army in China, the paper chain does not conclusively establish his guilt in the use of bacteriological weapons, though it is clear that he must have at least read some of the documents relating to the infamous Unit 731, Japan’s biological warfare research unit. Under General Ishii, Unit 731 provided assistance to the conventional forces of the Imperial Army in China by such methods as ‘infected-rat air-raids’ in which rats contaminated with plague and other toxins were dropped on the Chinese. A measure of how deadly this bizarre and horrific weapon could be is that once, when the rats were dropped in the wrong place, 1600 Japanese troops became infected and died.14 The Japanese use of bacteriological weapons during the conflict on the Asian mainland and their policy of testing these weapons first on innocent Chinese is one of the darkest crimes of the twentieth century.
An insight into the mentalities of those Japanese who took part in these human medical experiments in China is given by Ken Yuasa, a Japanese doctor who worked in a military hospital in Shansi prefecture in China — a hospital visited many times by General Ishii, director of Unit 731. Yuasa was posted to the hospital after receiving a similar education to that of the other veterans interviewed. He was taught that ‘all the subjects of the nation should serve the emperor and dedicate their lives to the emperor and die for him. That’s what we were told. To dedicate our lives for the emperor so as to pay the debt we owed our parents.’ Similarly, Yuasa believed that it was necessary to seek expansion on the Asian mainland so that ‘Japan could become an imperial power — to become a big and great country, like the Western countries’. If, during his education or his subsequent service as a doctor in Asia, he ever felt the remotest desire to question the prevailing mores he always knew that, ‘if you made any criticism, even among friends, that was a really frightening thing. Because if you did that you’d be scolded by your military superior or your teacher, and called a “non-patriot”. It’s probably difficult for the younger generation to understand just what that would mean. It’s like excommunication from your village or community. It’s probably more severe than if you had committed a crime.’ Dr Yuasa finally arrived in China having learnt that the ‘Chinese and Koreans were like waste and garbage’.
About six weeks after he began work in the military hospital the general manager approached him and said there would be an ‘operations exercise’ that evening and told Dr Yuasa to attend. ‘I felt very uneasy, but, of course, I couldn’t say anything. In the military, orders are absolute.’ Dr Yuasa was anxious because he knew that in order to train doctors to become surgeons quickly the Japanese army was organizing ‘practice’ operations on healthy Chinese. As he walked into the operating theatre he saw two Chinese men standing against the wall. One was ‘taller than me, well built, around thirty. The other was forty to fifty years old, he looked like a farmer. He was crying.’
The younger Chinese moved forward when he was ordered to and lay on the operating table. The older man resisted and Dr Yuasa went over and helped push him towards a second operating table in the room. ‘I had never beaten anyone before, but because of my military indoctrination I was able to push him. I still remember, I held my feet strongly on the ground and pushed and then the farmer gave up and went forward. We had to demonstrate our greatness in front of the Korean soldiers [considered ‘inferior’ members of the Imperial Army] who were there. Then I was very proud.’ Once on the operating table the farmer was forcibly injected with anaesthetic and then the ‘operation’ began. ‘One of the doctors punched the farmer’s thigh — that meant the anaesthetic was working. The first operation was removing an appendix because there were many appendix cases amongst Japanese soldiers —
we didn’t have any antibiotics and there were quite a few cases of soldiers dying as a result of that operation. The medical officer doing this operation was not very experienced and a healthy appendix is quite slippery, so I think he had to make the incision three times. After that his intestine was removed, then his arms were amputated and then the doctor practised injecting him in his heart.’ Right to the end of this gruesome procedure the farmer kept breathing until ‘eventually another officer and myself tried to hold his neck’ whilst he was injected with the drugs that finally killed him. After the middle-aged farmer died, the younger Chinese was assaulted in a similar way. Altogether, during his time in China, Dr Yuasa participated in around six of these human vivisection experiments at his hospital on a total often healthy Chinese men. None of the victims survived.
Dr Yuasa and his colleagues always used general anaesthetic on their Chinese victims, but elsewhere the Japanese conducted human experiments without anaesthetic of any kind. Once, at another Japanese military hospital in China, Dr Yuasa attended a lecture and suddenly heard the head of the medical division announce, ‘I will show you something good’. He took them to the nearby prison, and there, in front of the assembled doctors, two Chinese men were shot in the abdomen so that the Japanese could ‘practise removing the bullet’ in field conditions, without anaesthetic. ‘I think they died of great pain during that operation,’ says Dr Yuasa. ‘I still remember their sort of cry, but I didn’t pay much attention because we actually treated them as materials — we called them maruta [’timber’ or ‘logs’].’
Doctors like Ken Yuasa murdered Chinese during conventional operations. At his research camp in Manchuria General Ishii (and later Kitano Masaji) of Unit 731 killed the local population in more advanced experiments. As Sheldon Harris, who has conducted ground-breaking work into the activities of Unit 731, recorded:
’They researched human reactions to plague, typhoid, paratyphoid A and B, typhus, smallpox, tularemia, infectious jaundice, gas gangrene, tetanus, cholera, dysentery, glanders, scarlet fever, undulant fever, tick encephalitis, ‘songo’ or epidemic hemorrhagic fever, whooping cough, diphtheria, pneumonia, berysipelas, epidemic cerebrospinal meningitis, venereal diseases, tuberculosis, salmonella, frostbite, and countless other diseases that were endemic to the communities and surrounding regions that fell within the responsibility of a Unit 731 branch Water Purification Unit. No one has been able to catalogue completely all the maladies that the various death factories in Manchuria visited on human guinea pigs.’15
Horrific stories like this emphasize how impossible it is to overestimate the atmosphere of cruelty in which the Japanese conducted their war in China. The context of this war would, in turn, contribute to the brutal storm that broke upon Allied servicemen once the Pacific War began. Indeed, probably the greatest single Western misconception about the war against the Japanese is that it began, for all parties, in December 1941 with the bombing of Pearl Harbor. For the Japanese, the war against the Western Allies was but a part of their overall struggle for supremacy in Asia, a conflict that had begun in Manchuria. For the Imperial Army, the war in Asia lasted from 1931 to 1945 — it was not merely the four-year struggle against the Western nations that began in 1941.
Thus it is a grave mistake to try to understand why the Japanese behaved as they did in the Pacific War without understanding the conditioning that soldiers of the Imperial Army received during the war in China that both preceded it and then carried on alongside it. At the turn of the twenty-first century, particularly since the publication of Joanna Bourke’s intriguing work An Intimate History of Killing, it has become fashionable to emphasize how much men can enjoy killing — and there is clearly much insight to be gained by shining a light on to this darker side of the male psyche. But the revelation that throughout history men have taken pleasure in combat does not ultimately help us to understand how a nation that behaved so well to its prisoners in the First World War was, less than twenty years later, using its captives for bayonet practice and human experiments. One answer to this paradox lies in knowledge of how the German army behaved during the Second World War. After the war in the Soviet Union began in June 1941, there were some units that served first in the West, then in the East and then back in the West again. Interviews with veterans who went back and forth like this demonstrate that it was possible for the same soldier to behave ‘chivalrously’ in the West and then bestially in the East. The identical unit could happily treat prisoners with respect in the West, yet shoot their captives without remorse in the East. And the reason they could behave in such a schizophrenic way was their contrasting beliefs about their enemies. In western Europe they faced nations who they believed were ‘civilized’, whilst in the East they confronted a ‘Judeo — Bolshevik’ mass of ‘subhumans’.
All of which leads to the inescapable conclusion that the overwhelming reason that the Japanese treated the Chinese so badly was that they believed them to be utterly inferior — mere ‘beasts’. And whilst the Japanese rapidly discovered that defeating these ‘beasts’ was going be tougher than they had thought (Hitler also underestimated the Red Army, to his cost), which led to frustration, which led to still greater brutality, it remains the case that the pre-condition without which these appalling crimes could not have been committed was the Japanese loathing of the Chinese which preceded the war.
During the 1930s, while the Japanese conducted their barbarous campaign in Asia, both the Western democracies and the emerging Western fascist states debated how best to deal with this growing Asian super-power. How they chose to react to the Japanese aggression was to be a crucial reason why the Pacific War occurred when it did. It is a story of racism, military incompetence and overweening self-confidence — and is the subject of Chapter 2.
DEALING WITH THE WEST
By taking control of Manchuria in 1931 the Japanese solved one pressing problem — the need for ‘living space’; but they created another — the antagonism of the Western democracies. The call of the hard-line militarists for Japan to throw off all contact with the West may have been seductive, but it was impractical. Japan had few natural resources of its own and relied largely on oil imports from the United States to fuel not just the Imperial Army but the whole commercial operation of the country. Japan simply did not possess the raw materials necessary to endure total isolation in the modern machine age. Yet from the moment that the Imperial Army took Manchuria it was politically inconceivable that the Japanese would give up their new-found Garden of Eden. But without compromise over Manchuria, the anger of the West could not be calmed. Resolving these contradictory positions without eventual armed conflict was, from the first, a delicate and problematic task given the suspicion and distrust that existed on all sides.
The prevailing view of many in the Japanese elite was expressed by Prince Fumimaro Konoe, who was to be prime minister three times before the end of the war. For years Konoe had been calling on Japan to reject what he took to be the hypocritical values of the Western democracies. In an essay written in 1933, he condemned Western nations who
’brandish the Covenant of the League of Nations and, holding high the No-War treaty as their shield, censure us! Some of them even go as far as to call us public enemies of peace or humanity! Yet it is they, not we, who block world peace. They are not qualified to judge us....As a result of our one million annual population increase, our national economic life is extremely burdened. We cannot wait for a rationalising adjustment of the world system. Therefore we have chosen to advance into Manchuria and Mongolia as our only means of survival.’1
It was Neville Chamberlain who, during 1933 and 1934 (years before he became infamous as the appeaser of Hitler), first mooted one possible solution — the recognition of the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo in exchange for ‘a permanent friendship with Japan.’2 There was no consensus in the British cabinet for such a dramatic diplomatic step, and the plan was dropped. This strangled initiative is significant for two reasons: it shows that Ch
amberlain personally was prepared to appease not just the Nazis but the Japanese, and it demonstrated the willingness of British politicians to discuss possible solutions to the problem of Japanese expansion outside the unified approach of the League of Nations.
Horror in the East: Japan and the Atrocities of World War II Page 5