By Yuki Tanaka Westview Press, 1996 267 pages; $28.00
Battlefield stress and military tradition conspired with cultural and
historical factors to turn ordinary soldiers into war criminals, writes
scholar Yuki Tanaka in Hidden Horrors: Japanese War Crimes in World War
II. The first major work on Japanese war crimes by a Japanese writer, Hidden
Horrors is a compelling look at brutality, individual duty, and collective
responsibility. Tanaka, a visiting research fellow at the Australian
National University,
published his pathbreaking work on Japanese chemical warfare experiments
in the Bulletin in
1988. Here his focus is expanded to include the torture and murder
of prisoners, rape,
cannibalism, and the massacre of civilians.
The stories he tells are horrifying. Two particularly brutal examples
include the POW camp
established by the Japanese at Sandakan, Borneo, and the medical experiments
carried out by
Unit 731. The medical experiments, designed primarily to develop effective
biological weapons,
were not fully acknowledged until the early 1990s. The atrocities at
the Sandakan camp,
however, were never suppressed; there were simply too few survivors
to remember them.
The Japanese military command transferred 1,500 Allied prisoners of
war to Sandakan, Borneo,
in 1942 with orders to construct an airfield. Chosen for its suitability
as a fuel stop for Japanese
warplanes returning home, Sandakan would become the most brutal POW
camp in the Pacific
Theater.
For the first few months, prisoners received adequate food, humane treatment,
and reasonable
work orders. But conditions began to deteriorate in August 1942, when
two escaped prisoners
were caught in the jungle outside camp. As a warning to the other prisoners,
camp commandant
Hoshijima Susumu drew up a contract that specified execution by firing
squad as the punishment
for escape. The prisoners' reader, Col. A.W. Walsh, refused to sign
the contract, stating that
under Australian army regulations, it was a prisoner's duty to take
any "reasonable opportunity"
to escape. Bound and held at gunpoint in front of his men, however,
Walsh had no choice but to
agree to the Japanese terms.
The first test of Hoshijima's newfound severity came in May 1943, when
more than 20 men were
rounded up for possessing radio components. After enduring three months
of torture, the
ringleaders "confessed" not only to having the radio parts, but also
to plotting an armed uprising
with the intent of destroying Japanese authority in Borneo. They were
subsequently transferred
to Kuching, headquarters of the 37th Army. There they were tried, convicted,
and received
punishments ranging from six months in jail to immediate execution
by firing squad.
Following this so-called Sandakan incident, camp conditions began a
downward spiral that
would end with the death marches of 1945. Authorities eliminated weekend
leisure activities and
closed the camp canteen. Brutal punishments were inflicted on prisoners
deemed to be working
too slowly. Guards beat prisoners with axe handles or gunstocks, forced
them to hold push-up
positions for 20--30 minutes in the direct sun, or confined them in
"the cage." Prisoners in the
cage had to squat all day, were beaten at night, and given little or
no food.
Conditions at Sandakan remained much the same until January 1945, when
camp authorities were
ordered to transfer two battalions from Sandakan to Tuaran, on Borneo's
west coast. About 500
relatively healthy prisoners were chosen as "carriers" for the march,
whose circuitous route had
been mapped out by an anti-Japanese local chieftain. During the first
leg of the first march, the
supply system broke down. Rations were almost nonexistent, and prisoners
unable to continue
were shot or left behind to die. Possibly unaware of the fate of the
first march, a second march
left camp in May 1945.
Back at Sandakan, conditions had become medieval. Shootings and beheadings
were common,
and one prisoner was reportedly crucified and disemboweled for stealing
a pig. By the time the
war ended, only six of Sandakan's 2,000 prisoners were alive--a survival
rate of 0.24 percent.
The Japanese military used Allied prisoners not only as free labor,
but also as subjects for
Japanese medical "researchers," whose studies were an effort to determine
the best recipe for
germ warfare. Unit 731's largest experiment was conducted on 1,485
Allied POWs in
Manchuria. Told they were being inoculated against various tropical
diseases, prisoners were in
fact receiving injections of different pathogens. Witnesses and survivors
also tell of prisoners
being given lethal injections and dumped into mass graves after their
death throes were
observed, timed, and recorded.
Unit 731 was also charged with developing ways for the army to perform
more effectively on the
battlefield. In one experiment, researchers positioned Chinese prisoners
on a mock battlefield
under machine gun fire and lobbed shells containing mustard gas at
them. Other prisoners were
forced to drink mustard gas in liquid form. In each case, prisoners
were monitored and their
reactions to the gas measured.
To determine how to facilitate recovery from frostbite, Chinese prisoners
were sprayed with salt
water in below-freezing temperatures. Researchers hit them with hammers
to determine whether
frostbite had set in, and doused them with water. Gen. Shiro Shiro,
head of Unit 731, was said to
be "particularly proud" of the results of this experiment.
Medical experiments, biological warfare, and abuse of prisoners are
just a few of the atrocities
detailed in Hidden Horrors. When food was scarce and supply lines destroyed,
soldiers resorted
to cannibalism, sometimes harvesting flesh from live victims. "Comfort
women" (only recently
acknowledged by the Japanese government) were forced into prostitution
and given "quotas" as
high as 35 soldiers per day. Prison officials only occasionally marked
camps with a red cross
visible from the air, and captured nurses were forced into the ocean
and gunned down. Nor were
civilians spared; Tanaka describes two incidents in which noncombatants
were summarily
executed.
Unlike other accounts of Japanese war crimes, which focus exclusively
on atrocities, Tanaka
examines incidents from cultural and historical perspectives. The sheer
barbarity and frequency
of the war crimes, he contends, is due in part to Japanese military
tradition. A mandate issued
in 1894 ordered soldiers to commit suicide rather than surrender. The
Russo-japanese War in
1905 and the invasion of China in the 1930s had established Japan as
the eminent military power
in East Asia. Although the suicide order was lifted, the notion of
gyokusai, which emerged in
World War II, obliged soldiers to fight to the death in defense of
the emperor. Appropriate
methods were not suggested, inappropriate methods were not questioned,
and excuses for failure
were not tolerated.
The brutality of the Pacific Theater transformed this creed into barbarity.
As the war progressed,
Allied forces were increasingly less likely to take Japanese prisoners.
At the same time, a "kill
or be killed" attitude pervaded the Japanese army. Impersonal military
jargon wormed its way
into the minds of individual soldiers, melding individual Allied soldiers
into an abstract
"enemy."
As defeat grew nearer, Japanese soldiers felt frightened and betrayed
by a high command that
left them starving in remote outposts, overrun by Allied soldiers,
or destroyed by Allied
bombing. Weakening the enemy through cruelty and torture--even a pregnant
woman or a
defenseless prisoner--became a way to overcome that fear and betrayal
while staying within the
strict boundaries of gyokusai.
After World War II, the individuals who actually ordered and committed
specific acts of abuse
were tried and punished. Tanaka acknowledges the necessity of individual
punishment, but he
also argues that individual soldiers should not bear all the responsibility.
In many cases, the
individual soldiers were acting under orders from their superior officers
or even top army
leaders. Condemning only the individual soldiers, in Tanaka's view,
absolves the men at the top
whose orders resulted in the torture or deaths of thousands.
Nor does Tanaka accept the concept of universal responsibility. Humankind
as a whole cannot
and should not assume full responsibility for the actions of a few
overstressed, misdirected
soldiers. To saddle society with such a burden would not only fail
to punish those responsible
for ordering and committing war crimes, it would spread the responsibility
too thin. For the
Japanese people as a whole, Tanaka says, it is not enough to acknowledge
the atrocities their
soldiers committed in the name of the emperor. Individual Japanese
must also recognize their
own complicity in allowing their military leaders to allow, tacitly
or openly, the kind of war that
turned men into monsters.
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