Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015. 403 pp. (Illustrations.) US$45.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0674-72891-2.
After a recent conference at Leiden, Ethan Mark (a comparative historian of Japan and Indonesia) showed me a remarkable film from the Philippines entitled Three Godless Years (1976), which confronted the experience of Japanese war atrocities with surprising complexity. I thought, if Mario O’Hara can direct such a film under Marcos and with little funding, why
is nuance so difficult to find in Chinese cinematic treatments? Some of the answers are in Barak Kushner’s new book, Men to Devils. At 321 pages, plus voluminous notes, this important work on Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) war crimes is not lite fare; nevertheless, it succeeds in being a readable and wide-ranging examination of the intersection of the legal history of B and C class war criminals’ trials, on the one hand, and the contentious memory of these events, on the other.
Kushner asserts that the legal history of adjudicating war crimes should be considered an independent “terrain” of memory (21). Although Kushner is careful to aver that the legal process here did not reveal hidden “truths,” at the level of basic self-expression (for example, in memoirs) the influence of trial language as a recognized method of discussing “what really happened” is palpable. Although space limitations do not permit me to describe them in depth, chapters 6 and 7 feature a useful critical examination of later memories of the trials, and their (ab)uses during the Cold War. “Given the show trial nature of many of the proceedings, the attempt to resolve disputes without further bloodshed was a noble one,” Kushner writes, “but the politicization of the trials quickly rendered them more as fodder in Cold War battlefields of propaganda” (247).
Consequently, Kushner begins his book by “triangulating” the Chinese (or, CCP), Taiwanese (or, KMT), and Japanese historical standpoints regarding war crimes (27). Right out of the gate in chapter 1, however, we see how the story of Japan’s surrender and war crimes trials are even more complex, involving European, Commonwealth, Southeast Asian, and American actors. Kushner shows how “Japanese at the edge of empire could not fathom that they had actually lost” (36); his account echoes Lori Watt’s When Empire Comes Home, as well as new comparative work by multilingual scholars like Konrad Lawson and Adam Cathcart. Then, Kushner confronts the debate about the legality of the trials, engaging with Yuma Totani’s The Tokyo War Crimes Trialand Richard Minear’s Victor’s Justice, siding with Totani against Minear in that the discussion of local perpetrators, including rapists and the infamous “Comfort Women” system, was advocated by Filipino (Pedro Lopez) and French (Roger Depo) prosecutors (46).
Chapter 2 explains how the KMT failed to eke out a place for Chinese jurisprudence in the international war crimes trials while simultaneously dealing with the rise of the CCP and the necessity of the Japanese Empire’s diaspora. In an interesting diversion, Kushner summarizes how Shanxi Province under Yan Xishan challenges Manichean views of treason and justice: during his fight with the CCP, Yan promoted remaining Japanese infantrymen to the officer class and encouraged them to take Chinese wives (106). As Kushner puts it, “there was no one path toward a war crimes trial,” and the process was hopelessly determined by forces that had little or nothing to do with any notion of “justice” (107). Chapter 4 returns to this theme in its discussion of KMT trials on the mainland, which drew on a tradition of revolutionary courts and never managed to make Chinese law accepted internationally. Kushner delves into scattered reports of early instances of torture, squalid prisons, and kangaroo courts set up to satisfy local Chinese populations’ “lust for revenge” (145). This was followed by the 30 May 1946 Nanjing Military Tribunal for War Crimes, which did not resolve conflicting Chinese domestic demands and international legal standards. The KMT eventually shipped Japanese POWs en masse back to Japan simply to deny the CCP the privilege of using the courts for political legitimization (182).
Chapter 3 looks closely at the confusing racial, ethnic, and national politics that spewed forth in the wake of empire, and the “legal snafu” behind determining who was Japanese, Taiwanese, Chinese, and Korean (128). The brutal and tragic “Sinification” of the Taiwanese people followed closely the various “Japanification” campaigns. Kushner also describes the violent encounters between Taiwanese residents of Japan, whose legal status was
now “reduced to that of aliens,” and Japanese gangs who were often backed by the police (132). Chapter 5 returns to Taiwan, with a special focus on the White Group (baituan) that formed to facilitate postwar KMT and Japanese military cooperation—a relationship that Kushner views to be “eminently consistent in the continuation of their mutual stance against Communism” (191). Here Kushner issues an important challenge to his colleagues: the network of alliances in Japan, Taiwan, and mainland China show how “discussions of Japanese behavior after the war cannot be examined within the national framework of Japanese history” (208).
The only problem I have with this otherwise excellent volume is its focus on the China theatre, which may be unfair as the book sets out to examine the Sino-Japanese relationship. As Kushner shows, however, understanding China is necessary for making sense of trans-war Japan, and I reckon Southeast Asia is also important. For example, echoing Joshua Fogel, another Sino-Japanese expert, Kushner mentions that Nanjing was “not a Holocaust” (23), which is fair enough, but should we see such incidents simply as “mass murder run viciously amok”? If so, what do we make of the IJA’s orders to systematically exterminate populations in the Philippines at the end of the war? Research on genocide has come a long way from using Nazi Germany as a standard, and I think the experience in Southeast Asia must now illuminate what we think we know about the war and its aftermath in China.
Aaron William Moore
University of Manchester, Manchester, United Kingdom
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