Posted on 07/04/2014 9:29:50 AM PDT by DeaconBenjamin
China began publishing “confessions” of 45 convicted Japanese World War II criminals on Thursday, officials said, in Beijing’s latest effort to highlight the past amid a territorial dispute between the two countries.
The documents, handwritten by Japanese tried and convicted by military courts in China after the war, are being released online one a day for 45 days by the State Archives Administration (SAA), it said in a statement on its website.
In the first, dated 1954 and 38 pages long, Keiku Suzuki, described as a lieutenant general and commander of Japan’s 117th Division, admitted ordering a Colonel Taisuke to “burn down the houses of about 800 households and slaughter 1,000 Chinese peasants in a mop-up operation” in the Tangshan area, according to the official translation.
Among a litany of other crimes with a total toll in the thousands, he also confessed that he “cruelly killed 235 Chinese peasants seeking refuge in a village near Lujiayu (cutting open the bellies of pregnant women among them)”.
He also “ordered the Epidemic Prevention and Water Supply Squad to spread cholera virus in three or four villages”.
The document, which is littered with descriptions of “Japanese imperialists”, appeared to have been written by someone with native-level command of Japanese, said one Japanese journalist who saw it.
However, some of the sentences were very long and contained multiple clauses, possibly indicating it had gone through several drafts.
It was not clear whether Suzuki’s or the other yet-to-be-published confessions—all of them relating to 45 war criminals put on trial in China in 1956—were previously publicly available.
Suzuki was held by Soviet forces at the end of the conflict and transferred to Chinese custody in 1950, earlier Chinese documents said, adding that he was sentenced to 20 years in prison by the court and released in 1963.
The publication of the confessions comes as Tokyo and Beijing are at odds over a territorial dispute in the East China Sea, and as Beijing has argued that a reinterpretation of Japan’s pacifist constitution could open the door to remilitarization of a country it considers insufficiently penitent for its actions in World War II.
China regularly accuses Japan of failing to face up to its history of aggression in Asia, criticism that has intensified during the term of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who won a democratic election in December 2012 and has advocated a more muscular defense and foreign policy stance.
Historians concur that Japan was guilty of numerous atrocities in China, including the Nanjing Massacre in 1937 and germ warfare and other experiments conducted by the infamous Unit 731 on live Chinese captives.
While China is quick to remind Japan of past wrongs, it has been far less willing to recognize the role of the ruling Communist Party in domestic disasters such as Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward and the ensuing famine that killed tens of millions of people.
Beijing has never allowed a full historical reckoning of the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76 or the 1989 Tiananmen Square killings.
China was outraged in December last year when Abe visited Tokyo’s Yasukuni Shrine, where the souls of Japan’s war dead, including several high-level officials executed for war crimes after World War II, are enshrined.
“These archives are hard evidence of the heinous crimes committed by Japanese imperialism against the Chinese,” the SAA’s deputy director Li Minghua was quoted as saying by the official Xinhua news agency.
“Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, disregarding historical justice and human conscience, has been openly talking black into white, misleading the public, and beautifying Japanese aggression and its colonial history since he took office,” Li said.
The SAA said the documents were being released to mark the 77th anniversary Monday of the Marco Polo Bridge incident.
The clash between Chinese and Japanese troops near Beijing is commemorated as the start of what is known in China as the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, which ended with Tokyo’s World War II defeat in 1945.
Japan can start publishing the names of 100,000,000 Chinese that their own regime executed. Maybe a public discussion of the Laogai system in China?
Looks bad. Seems the ChiComs are escalating pre-war propaganda to start a naval war with Japan. Duh, gee how come the the all seeing, hyper brilliant beyond ordinary human comprehension Mahdi didn’t see this coming???
which ended with Tokyo’s World War II defeat in 1945.................................... and China won that war? They were to busy fighting amongst themselves to have time to fight the Japanese. Both sides in China did more damage to themselves than the Japanese.
Communism and hypocrisy. Like bread and butter.
We have enough of our own...
And we still free trade w Red Communist China...yikes
More atrocities were committed by the Nationalists and Communists against each other than those attributed to the Japanese. The nationalists during WW II took our money and supplies to strengthen their forces to fight the Communists. They held back their forces, so only a few fought the Japanese. More on the subject is in the book about General Joseph Stilwell, by Tuchman. I recommend it.
The last time I was in China, I did see a debate on the current Laogai system on both CCTV and the English language government-controlled press. It was limited to current abuses of the system rather than its horrific past. However, at least in the English language press, it was the subject of debate. I can’t definitively say whether the Chinese language press had similar debates, but my conversations with local and expatriate Chinese speakers suggested that it did.
The English-language CCTV debates on the Laogai system that I watched were actually quite thoughtful and intelligent discussions among law professors. Unfortunately, to counter the anti-Laogai debate, the pro-Laogai side could and did argue that even the US justice system allowed for extra-judicial imprisonment (and even execution) of its citizens. They didn’t mention Japanese internment, limiting their criticism to Guantanamo, black-site prisons, and drone strikes against US citizens.
Dear Wei Too Late,
They’re dead, Wei.
Suck it up.
PS You Orientals have been torturin’ each other for thousands of years. Why whine now?
When will the Chinese Communist dictators start publishing confessions of the Chinese Communist Party over the millions of Chinese civilian deaths at the hands of Mao and the government he founded AFTER that government was founded. Those deaths make the Japanese World War II atrocities seem minor by comparison.
The Japanese could do an immense service by volunteering some confessional spirit of their own, and start publicly publishing the crimes of the Chinese Commmunist dictators against their own people, for which there are even documented Chinese sources. The Tit-for-Tat would be good for Asia.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.