Horror in the East: Japan and the Atrocities of World War II (25 page)

In a flawed and in many ways unjust series of trials held by the Allies at the end of the war, around 5000 Japanese were tried for war crimes.
But this only served to highlight the immunity of the emperor and grow the fiction that he had been a puppet head of state unable to prevent the horrors that had occurred — a fiction that carefully overlooked the truth that it had been this puppet who, by finally acting decisively, had brought the war to an end.
Even if Hirohito had not stood trial, he could have abdicated in favour of the young crown prince, thus preserving the institution of the emperor but still acknowledging his own responsibility.
But it was not to be.
The supreme commander of the Japanese armed forces, the man in whose name more than a million Japanese soldiers died, stayed on as emperor.
‘Why did the person at the top,’ asks Hajime Kondo, that rarest of veterans in Japan — a man prepared to speak out about the past, ‘why did the person who had supreme responsibility, not take responsibility for the war?
I would have expected if the emperor had given any thought to those who died in misery on the front line, he would have taken some responsibility.’

Emperor Hirohito remained on the throne until his death in 1989.
As a result, the majority of Japanese people had to learn to develop amnesia about events before 15 August 1945.
‘Veterans don’t really talk about the war openly,’ says Kondo.
“Don’t talk about bad things,” they say, “as it would shame Japan.
Keep quiet.”’

POSTSCRIPT

          
S
even years ago I began a journey that was at once physical, intellectual and emotional.
Physical because it would take me around the world — from the bourgeois villas of Munich to the high-rise apartments of Tokyo, from the wastes of Siberia to the jungles of Borneo; intellectual because I would have the privilege of seeking answers to my questions from some of the cleverest academics in the world; and emotional because I sought to confront the perpetrators
¹
of some of the worst crimes in recent history.
Now it is over, and what I discovered was not what I had expected.

Since 1994 I have written and produced a trilogy of projects — each a TV series and a book — on Nazism
(The Nazis: A Warning from History)
, on the war between Hitler and Stalin
(War of the Century)
and, finally, on the Japanese experience of the Second World War
(Horror in the East)
.
Of course, neither I, nor the production teams who worked with me, thought that as subject matter this was virgin territory for television — the military history of the war, for example, had long ago been covered in Jeremy Isaacs’ brilliant
The World at War
.
But what we did believe was new was our desire to explore the mentality of those who had taken part in the conflict — particularly the mentalities of the perpetrators, those who had committed the murders, the rapes, the war crimes.
We had a desire not to excuse their actions, but to try to understand them, to obtain answers to questions that were childlike in their simplicity — how, and why, could they have done such things?

Over the last seven years many people have contributed to the work, but no one person, apart from myself, has worked as a journalist across all three projects.
It seemed, so the joke in the office went, as if my appetite for learning about horror was limitless.
What was driving me on, however, was not the desire merely to collect different brutal stories from continent to continent, but an increasing feeling as the years passed that, broadly speaking, I was hearing the same stories again and again — only the faces and the countries changed.
I felt less and less the importance of national or cultural differences, more and more a common thread that linked all of those who had committed terrible crimes during the war.
This kind of comparative historical experience is normally one denied to professional historians, since they are both wary of moving outside of their disciplines — an expert on the Third Reich does not travel to Japan to study Hirohito — and more inclined to study documents than track down and interview the perpetrators in person.
So I began to feel that my experience of encountering war criminals across several continents was not only disturbing, it was unique.

When I started my research I had no predetermined theory that I was trying to prove, but I did think that the perpetrators I would meet would be somehow obviously ‘evil’ in themselves — not that they would have horns exactly, but that they would be demonstrably different from the rest of society.
Not a bit of it.
The Japanese farmer who raped Chinese women, the Lithuanian peasant who shot Jewish children, the Russian woman who murdered a young German major, all shared one attribute — their apparent normality.
In many cases not even their close families had suspected the terrible acts they had committed during the war.
Another misconception I had was that they would almost certainly be tortured by guilt as a result of their crimes.
Again — not so.
The majority of them were not sorry for the crimes they had committed (in fact, most did not think they had committed any crime).
Was it correct to kill Jews?
‘Well, it was a problem that had to be dealt with.’
Was it acceptable to shoot German prisoners after an interrogation?
‘Of course, they’d been trying to kill us on the battlefield.’
Was it a crime to bayonet Chinese prisoners?
‘Well, there was an administrative problem and not all of them could be fed.’

What the majority of the perpetrators I met had in common was this desire to excuse their actions by context.
‘If you had been there, you would have done the same,’ was their constant refrain.
And in their claim that anyone who fully understood the circumstances of their time would recognize that they had not committed any crime at all, these worst of perpetrators were merely repeating the same kind of answers given by most of the people we interviewed who had lived more peacefully through the regimes concerned.
There was the nice lady in Munich who told us how she willingly took part in Nazi parades because she and her family thought Hitler was ‘doing good’ for Germany, the ambitious woman in Kiev who said she had joined the communist party because she thought Stalin ‘was a god’, and the Japanese gentleman who firmly believed that it was hypocritical of Western countries that had colonies to protest at Japan’s expansion into Manchuria.
All of these interviewees — many hundreds across Germany, the former Soviet Union and Japan — sought to justify their participation in the regimes concerned by referring only to the immediate circumstances.
What made them angry was the paradox that it was the ‘law-abiding’ people of the time who had become criminals in the eyes of today.

As I travelled from country to country over the years, and thought long and hard about the interviewees’ point of view, I began to think there was more than an element of truth in what they were saying.
It is not so much that we had been judging the past by today’s standards — plenty of people, Winston Churchill amongst them, had warned about the evil of these totalitarian regimes at the time — as that we massively underestimate the willingness of human beings to conform.
In Japan, the most conformist of the three societies we examined, the search is always to preserve the harmony of the group.
As a result the concept of
geri
is vital.
Geri
is often translated as ‘duty’, but that is not quite accurate.
In the West ‘duty’ can mean adherence to an abstract idea like ‘justice’, but in Japan
geri
is defined only by the group.
Ethical values are what the leadership say are ethical values — and in the 1930s that meant the emperor was a god and the Chinese were subhuman.
Japanese school-children learnt these corrupted values and were told they were honourable.
Once that kind of idea is put into your brain as a child it is hard to get it out without living through a revolution.
Similarly, under Nazi rule in Germany in the 1930s, the mass of people simply wanted to lead quiet, contented lives — if that meant adapting to the new values of Nazism then so be it.
Witness this mournful report written in 1936 by a member of one of the outlawed opposition parties, the SPD:

’The average worker is primarily interested in work and not in democracy.
People who previously enthusiastically supported democracy show no interest at all in politics.
One must be clear about the fact that in the first instance men are fathers of families and have jobs, and that for them politics take second place and even then only when they expect to get something out of it.’
²

And before British readers react smugly, thinking there is something inherently Japanese or German or Russian about this desire to conform and not cause trouble, remember the research that has recently been completed about collaboration in the German-occupied Channel Islands during the Second World War — the pleasant climate, the friendly population (a number of local girls married German soldiers) and the lack of any real threat from a resistance group meant that the Channel Islands were the German military man’s dream posting.

This is not to say, I hasten to add, that I believe this longing to conform to the values of the group is something that is inherently weak.
It is not that these Germans or Japanese or Russians for the most part went along with the regimes concerned against their better judgement at the time.
No, because of what psychologists call ‘the situational ethic’, their better judgement
was
that by conforming they were doing the right thing.
It is only afterwards that they can sometimes look back in wonder at what they did.
The enormous importance of this ‘situational ethic’ in understanding why people acted as they did came to me with greatest force several years ago as I was sitting in the front room of a small, neat house on the Baltic coast of what had until recently been East Germany.
We were interviewing a charming, helpful old man who was telling us how, as a teenage member of the Hitler Youth, he had taken part in the fighting against the advancing Red Army.
Only after the interview, as we sat over a cup of tea, did I discover his subsequent career: from being a fanatical member of the Hitler Youth, he had gone on to become a committed communist, rising to become mayor of the town.
And now that communism had gone?
He was an utterly committed capitalist entrepreneur, with a thriving business.

And this desire to please whoever is in control demonstrably extends across continental boundaries.
A few years after meeting this chameleon-like German, I sat in a traditional Japanese inn in Tokyo and listened to a veteran of the Imperial Army explain how he had moved swiftly from being the member of his platoon most keen to bayonet Chinese prisoners, to being the most cooperative war criminal held by the Chinese after the war.
‘The Chinese praised me and said I always wrote the longest and most accurate confessions,’ he told us without a hint of irony.
His move from best murderer to best prisoner was seamless.

It is easy to react cynically to these kinds of story, thinking that each of us is somehow different from these veterans who so swiftly adapted to their changing world.
But look at your own life and think how many of the beliefs and values you hold are genuinely inherently ‘yours’ and how many are products of the situation.
For example, when I was at Oxford the vast majority of colleges did not admit women — something that now I think was indefensibly sexist, but I don’t remember saying (or even thinking) so at the time.
I just went along with the system because it was the way things were.
Similarly, when I first visited Hong Kong and saw it ruled by the British I didn’t think there was anything abnormal with that state of affairs.
Only on a recent visit when a Chinese friend said ‘didn’t you ever ask yourself what right did you British ever have to be here telling us what to do?’
did I think, ‘Ah....
Maybe she’s got a point.’

In my immediate family, I remember an uncle of mine — a man who was enormously kind and generous — telling me twenty years ago that homosexuals were ‘unnatural’ and ‘bad’; a view that today would rightfully have him condemned as a bigot were he still alive to express it.
But it is easy to forget that my uncle was born in 1905 and until his retirement lived in a society that proclaimed homosexuality to be illegal — so it is hardly surprising that my conformist uncle held the view he did.
Had he been born at a different time he would almost certainly have held a different view.

But it is still hard for those of us who live in a relatively peaceful, democratic society to recognize that the ethical values around us can appear to shift fundamentally according to the situation.
Ask, for example, a respectable young mother if she would ever consider resorting to prostitution and she will — almost certainly — say no.
But thousands of respectable mothers turned to prostitution in Germany in the immediate aftermath of the war in order to feed their children.
These mothers had not suddenly become less moral — they were simply responding to a change in the situational ethic.

Even on the Allied side the ‘ethics’ that governed military behaviour during the Second World War were subject to change.
As demonstrated earlier in this book, the Allies altered their attitude to the ethical question of bombing enemy cities.
At the start of the war it was a crime — by the end it was legitimate.
Even the use of poison gas was considered by the British during the war.
In an extraordinary memorandum to the military chiefs of staff, written on 6 July 1944, at the height of the threat from the German flying bombs, Winston Churchill stated:

’I want you to think very seriously over the question of using poison gas.
I would not use it unless it could be shown that (a) it was life or death for us, or (b) that it would shorten the war by a year.
It is absurd to consider morality on this topic when everybody used it in the last war without a word of complaint from the moralists or the Church.
On the other hand, in the last war the bombing of open cities was regarded as forbidden.
Now everybody does it as a matter of course.
It is simply a question of fashion changing as she does between long and short skirts for women.’
³