Japanese and Chinese names throughout are given in Japanese and Chinese order, in which the surname precedes the given name.As for the spellings of Chinese names, mainly the Pinyin system is used. However, the Wade-Giles system is also employed for words still commonly used: for instance, "Chiang Kai-shek" instead of "Jiang Jieshi." Words like "Nanjing" and "Nanking" are regarded as interchangeable.This article is part of the online project The Nanjing Massacre.
Postwar Judgment II: Nanking War Crime Tribunal
Trial of the Nanking Atrocities
Along with the major Japanese governmental and military leaders indicted for Class-A war crimes, some 5,700 other Japanese¹ were tried for Class B and C war crimes by the Allied nations in Yokohama, Singapore, Rabaul, Batavia, Manila, Nanjing and numerous other venues.²
China established 13 tribunals, tried 650 cases, convicted 504 Japanese and sentenced 149 to death.
In Nanjing, presumably due to the difficulties in investigating atrocities that had happened more than 8 years earlier while caught up in the Civil War against the Communists, only four Japanese army officers were tried for the war crimes relating to the Nanking Atrocities between 1946 and 1947.
The accused were the commander of the 6th Division, Lieutenant General Tani Hisao, the company commander of the 6th Division, Captain Tanaka Gunkichi, and two Second Lieutenants in the 9th Infantry Regiment of the 16th Division, Mukai Toshiaki and Noda Tsuyoshi. Among the four defendants, Tani was the only one who was in a high commanding position when the city fell.
Of other possible suspects, General Matsui Iwane, the commander-in-chief of the Central China Area Army, was being tried at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East as a Class-A war crime suspect.
Lieutenant General Nakajima Kesago, the commander of the 16th Division and Lieutenant General Yanagawa Heisuke, the commander of the 10th Army, both died in 1945.
Lieutenant General Prince Asaka, the commander of the Shanghai Expeditionary Force and Emperor Hirohito’s uncle, was granted immunity for any war crimes trial because of his lineage as a member of the royal family.
And finally, Lieutenant Colonel Cho Isamu, an information staff officer of the Shanghai Expeditionary Force and a general staff of the CCAA, committed suicide in Okinawa before the Pacific War ended.³
Thus, Tani was the only one alive and available. In court he pleaded not guilty and indicated Nakajima and his troops were the real culprits, but the mounting evidence adduced against him and the testimonies of eyewitnesses and victims showed otherwise.
He was found guilty on February 6, 1947 and the court pronounced the sentence of death on March 10, which read:
Hisao Tani, having been convicted of instigating, inspiring and encouraging during the war the men under his command to stage general massacres of prisoners of war and non-combatants and to perpetrate such crimes as rape, plunder and wanton destruction of property, is hereby sentenced to death.
On April 26 he was sent before the firing squad at Yuhuatai execution site.⁴
The other three were brought to Nanking thanks to the domestic propaganda activity of the Japanese government during the wartime.
Tanaka was once mentioned in a book called Imperial Soldiers in Japan and became famous for killing “300 hateful Chinese enemies” with his “buddy sword” Sukehiro.
Mukai and Noda were also well known for their killing contest to cut down a hundred Chinese soldiers in combat with their swords on the way to Nanking. Their story was serially published in the Tokyo Nichi Nichi newspaper, where the two second lieutenants were treated as war heroes.
However, as many historians point out today, the stories of hyped heroism, in which those soldiers courageously killed a number of enemies in hand-to-hand combat with swords, couldn’t be taken at face value.⁵
Indeed, when Noda came back to his hometown in Japan and made a speech at an elementary school, he told his young audience that of more than a hundred Chinese soldiers he killed, most were actually prisoners of war.
In 1971 one of the schoolchildren, Shishime Akira, wrote to a magazine of what he heard from Noda years before, a part of which quoted the second lieutenant as saying:
I killed only four or five with sword in the real combat…. After we captured an enemy trench, we’d tell them, “Ni Lai Lai.” The Chinese soldiers were stupid enough to come out the trench toward us one after another. We’d line them up and cut them down from one end to the other.⁶
As if representing the hundreds of other “great swordsmen” in the Imperial Army of Japan who severed the heads of unresisting Chinese captives, Tanaka, Mukai and Noda were all sentenced to death and executed on January 28, 1948.
Interview: Fujiwara Akira
Fujiwara Akira is a professor emeritus at Hitotsubashi University.⁷
He has published a number of books on the Imperial Army’s wartime atrocities in Asia. Fujiwara indeed served in the China theater in the Army for four years and he is considered one of Japan’s most prominent scholars on the Nanking Atrocities today.
“When I saw common Chinese people resisting us, I questioned the meaning of ‘Holy War,” says Fujiwara.
“We were supposed to help them. But in reality we made an enemy of them.”
“I think the Tokyo War Crimes Trial has a tremendous significance in our history in the sense that it meted out justice for Japan’s aggression for the first time. The trial collected abundant historical evidence in a relatively short period of time as well, which is a treasure house of materials for even today’s researchers….”
“Yes, it [the IMTFE] has its own limitations and problems. The United States intentionally overlooked the experiments on human guinea pigs and poisonous gas experiments done by the Japanese troops in an exchange for the scientific data.
“The trial did not delve into all the battles and atrocities in all of China. They only chose a couple of them as symbolic incidents, such as the Rape of Nanjing and the one in Manila. But the Imperial Army massacred far more people all over China than in Nanjing alone. The trial also granted immunity to the Emperor and Prince Asaka [the commander-in-chief of the Shanghai Expeditionary Force]. There were some aspects that were problematic….”
“I would say Matsui [the commander-in-chief of the Central China Area Army] was far more responsible [for the Nanking Atrocities] than Prince Asaka was. After all, Matsui was his superior officer who had been in charge of the Central China theater. Prince Asaka was appointed in December and arrived China on the 7th. Of course, there is no doubt that he should have been tried, though….”
“The problem of the Class B and C war crimes trials in China was that another civil war was going on between the Nationalists and the Communists. I guess they didn’t have much time and manpower for the trial in Nanjing. In that sense, probably the Tokyo Trial was more thorough and systematic.
“I am also aware of the argument that the Second Lieutenant officers [who initiated the contest to cut down 100 Chinese soldiers with their swords] tried in the Nanjing War Crimes Tribunal were innocent. But the current argument lacks the context. They might not have been guilty as charged [for killing more than 100 Chinese in hand-to-hand combat] but I am almost certain that they beheaded many [Chinese prisoners of war]….”
[Footnotes]
- Richard H. Minear, Victor’s Justice: The Tokyo War Crimes Trial (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1971), 6.
- Philip R. Piccigallo, The Japanese on Trial: Allied War Crimes Operations in the East, 1945–1951 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979), 33 and173.
- Fujiwara, “‘Tokyo Saiban ni yoru Dechiage’ Setsu koso ga Dechiage [The Theory of ‘Fabrication at the Tokyo War Crimes Trial’ Is the Real Fabrication], 23–24; Kasahara, Nanking Jiken [The Nanjing Incident], 6–8; Hata, Nanking Jiken [The Nanjing Incident], 46–47; Frank Gibney, “Editor’s Introduction,” in Katsuichi Honda, The Nanjing Massacre: A Japanese Journalist Confronts Japan’s National Shame, ed. Frank Gibney, trans. Karen Sandness (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 1999), xxi, n2.
- Hata, 48–49; Piccigallo, 165–166.
- The three researchers interviewed by author for this project, Daqing Yang, Ikuhiko Hata, and Akira Fujiwara said that the contest could have been mere mass murder of prisoners.
- Quoted in Katsuichi Honda, Nanking he no Michi [The Road to Nanjing], 162–163.
- Akira Fujiwara, interview by author, Tokyo, Japan, 25 February 2000.
