Session 6: North China (2)
Zhifen Ju, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences
“Japan’s Atrocities of Conscripting and Abusing North China Draftees after the Outbreak of the Pacific War”
Ju briefly outlined the background to her interest in the issue. In 1981 when she was studying one of the Communist base areas she found a daily newspaper with reports about how people were being pressed into labor gangs by the Japanese – and how millions of people were being forced away to Manzhouguo. Later, when working with the Tianjin archives to publish the archives of the National Government, she came across the actual statistics of the millions of people being sent to puppet regimes in Mongolia and Manchuria. “I was quite shocked to see how the Japanese could have sent such a sizeable number of laborers away,” she said.
Later, with the 50th anniversary of the end of the Sino-Japanese war, forced labor and labor export turned into a hot topic of study – and that was when the calls for compensation first started to be heard, she said. But she noted there were two weaknesses in the studies:
· There was very little study of Japanese official archives that could corroborate the accounts, which relied almost exclusively on oral history from people who had been laborers.
· A complete and comprehensive description of this coerced labor was lacking (in contrast to Germany, where evidence for war crimes was collected against the Nazis in a very comprehensive kind of way. While some people have argued that there were similarities between what the Germans and Japanese did, there were also differences, she said.)
Ju wanted to look at the issue as a historian: by looking at the whys of Japanese policy, how it was implemented, how it was carried out in different areas and at different times, how well it was implemented, and what methods were used to implement it. Also, how many casualties were suffered by the laborers and what kind of conditions they worked under.
In 1999 a project to study forced labor was launched. With the help of the Beijing and Tianjin archives, the No. 2 archives in Nanjing, plus the Jilin and Liaoning provincial archives and the work of over 20 people over three years, there has been significant progress and breakthroughs in unearthing materials. Ju noted there is probably now enough material to clarify exactly what was going on. 12 volumes, or a million characters, have already been edited and published, and Ju’s paper was written after finishing putting these together.
In terms of the conclusions she reached, Ju argued that, like the Nazis, Japanese militarists in China implemented a criminal system of forced labor. They enslaved millions of Chinese laborers to help their military industries and boost production.
She noted the system of coerced labor could be divided into two phases: pre- and post-1941. Before 1941, because of war and because of natural disasters, demand for labor in North China was low, and the Japanese need for it was concentrated in Manzhouguo. At that time the principal method used to get recruits was deception and trickery. She noted that between 1935 and 1941 about five million Chinese were exported to puppet regimes as laborers. Ju said laborers who were sent to war industries and to mines were basically all coerced. But there was also a significant number working in agriculture, forestry and commerce where the situation was a bit more nuanced, Ju said.
The focus of Ju’s paper, however, was on the post-1941 period. After the Pacific War started, because the labor sources in North China began to diminish, and Japan needed to expand its war economy, the Japanese openly started using forced labor. She argued that after 1942 all laborers—however they were obtained—were essentially forced, because if they refused to serve the Japanese punished them for disturbing the economic order. After 1942 the number of laborers that were forced exceeded 10 million, of which about seven million came from North China.
Lastly, Ju went into significant detail on her sources – which included reports from the Kôa-in or Asia Development Board, intelligence reports from the North China army, the North China Labor Association and the South Manchurian Railway, amongst others.
Comments:
Mitsuyoshi Himeta said mobilization of labor and labor requisition as well as its significance should be studied and that in this sense Ju’s paper was “very important.” It filled an important gap in that there has been a lot of study of the labor being moved to Manchuria before the war broke out. But the difference between just before and just after the Pacific War broke out, the characteristics, structure and organization of labor mobilization, had not yet been clarified in a systematic way.
Questions:
· Given the enormous movement of people: what happened to these people after the war? Did these people disappear after the war? The arrest of the Japanese is that all that happened? What happened to the batou(team head)?
· Himeta noted that in the original version of the paper there were some figures that didn’t align, but that Ju had already amended this. He noted that in Japan researchers are very strict about figures, especially for this kind of sensitive issue. He pointed out that there are still a lot of people who react sensitively to the numbers as a result of which he always warned scholars from China about the need to be particularly careful when they handle numbers, or statistics. He praised Ju for her precise and timely reaction to his suggestions in this regard.
· How have Japanese studies and the work of Japanese historians such as Takafsa Nakamura [who has studied the economy of North China in detail] been used? He noted that in a discussion of the Sino-Japanese war a Japanese historian, specializing in Japanese history, should be present, and suggested he had made a mistake in not bringing such a historian to the current conference. Himeta suggested the lack of Japanese history written in English as a reason it is not studied as thoroughly and called this “a most unfortunate thing.” He suggested the extensive Japanese studies should be used more.
Finally Himeta expressed his appreciation of the empirical data being presented. He noted that between 1985-9 he studied at Nankai University and requested to see the material from the archive in that area, but unfortunately was rejected. Looking at Ju’s paper he said he thought a lot of the materials had now been released. He said he wasn’t sure if a Japanese scholar visiting China would have the same access to these materials. Nonetheless, a lot of materials/archives have been disclosed, at least to the Chinese public, and it’s like living in a totally different generation, he said.
Toru Kubo, Shinshu University, Japan
“The Kôa-in (the Asia Development Board) and its Research on China.”
Tatsuo Yamada pointed out that Kôa-in materials were used by Chalmers Johnson in his book on peasant nationalism, but since then its material hadn’t been used much, because it is so scattered, and not easy to find.
Toru Kubo said the Kôa-in, or Asia Development Board, was established by the Japanese government as a special governmental organization to rule occupied China in 1938. Kubo noted that in spite of its importance, for a number of reasons, there isn’t much information on the Kôa-in or understanding of its real activities. But it issued more than 2000 reports on China.
He noted that his research group is now planning to publish a book on the Kôa-in and its research activities in China, with a special catalogue.
Important points:
· While the role of military officers in the establishment of the Kôa-in has been stressed, attention should also be paid to the role of civilian officers who participated. Some of the principal administrators in the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Commerce and Industries positively contributed to the establishment of the Kôa-in. The role of engineers was also important.
· In the list of engineers/technocrats recruited by the Kôa-in’s Technological Committee, 35 members graduated from Tokyo Imperial University and continued to have an influence after World War II.
· Kubo said attention should be paid to what that engineers themselves thought about their participation in the occupation of China. Some became very disillusioned, and were very realistic about the limits of Japanese rule.
Comments:
Mark Peattie noted that Kubo’s study was one of the most detailed descriptions of the Kôa-in, an agency the Japanese government and especially the army counted on heavily to do the work of organizing and developing the territory occupied in China. He pointed out that the Kôa-in’s stated purpose was incredibly ambitious and unbelievably optimistic (Peattie referred to “the inherently vast scale of the problem of trying to organize a territory of the size of the sphere the Japanese had carved out for themselves in China”) – even if the specialists who were brought in to grapple with the individual problems were ultimately pessimistic about the outcome of the entire project.
Question:
Did the Kôa-in represent concerted policy at the highest levels of the Japanese government? Peattie’s understanding (largely derived from a discussion by Barbara Brooks on the activities of the Japanese foreign ministry in China) is that the board was the result of a power play by the army: that the army had brought it into being in order to sideline the influence of the foreign ministry. In other words, it was the result of bureaucratic manoeuvring between agencies operating within China. If that was the case, and it didn’t have the full support of the Japanese bureaucracy, then it didn’t have a hope in China – no matter how many military and civilian specialists it managed to mobilize, Peattie suggested.
In contrast, Kubo seemed to believe that the Kôa-in is just as much a creature of the new bureaucrats, intent on mobilizing the resources of China for total war.
Peattie added that it was clear from the paper that:
· In its very brief life the Kôa-in never developed into the sort of centralized coordinating agency for Japanese rule in occupied China that had been intended for it. But it did undertake some fairly detailed research in China. Ramon Myers used some of the agricultural reports for his own research. These concentrated on various analyses of Chinese village economy, which indicated that the Chinese local economies—both those that were traditional and those that were market-oriented—were far more resilient than the Japanese had expected. This would certainly have contributed to an increased Japanese awareness of the capacity of rural China to resist the Japanese invader and thus to a growing sense of pessimism about Japan’s prospects in the China war, Peattie suggested.
· The schedule of the board’s research was overtaken by events. After the outbreak of the Pacific war, the Kôa-in was obliged to scramble to undertake new research projects which more directly contributed to the nation’s need to find new sources of strategic materials. Peattie wonders what this says about the army’s assumptions about the nature and mission of the board when it was established in 1938.
Suggestions/questions: Peattie hopes Kubo could provide a wider sense of the bureaucratic or functional context in which the Kôa-in operated. Since the board was a cabinet agency, what was its relationship to the cabinet planning board? To what extent did the research of the board compliment or duplicate similar research by the South Manchurian Railway?
Also: what about the response of the Japanese Army – the end-user of the research. Did it use any of the research to inform its policies in conquered territories? What can be said about the apparent absence of any Chinese input in this research (Peattie notes the absence of a single Chinese name—even a figurehead—among Kubo’s list of Kôa-in technicians)? In short, Peattie said he was looking for a better understanding of the place and status of Kôa-in’s research within the overall efforts by the Japanese government to inform itself about Asia during these years.
Peattie also suggests that since so little information about Kôa-in is available in English, Kubo might consider broadening his discussion of the institution beyond purely research activities. There is apparently a good deal of recent research on the board’s involvement in drug-trafficking in North China, for example.
In conclusion, Peattie noted that while a study of the structure/plans of the Kôa-in is good, it would be interesting to have more comments about what Kôa-in’s priorities/failures tell us about “the totality of the Japanese occupation of China.”
Comments/Questions from the floor:
Japan [Professor Eto]:
· Most of the upper officials of the Kôa-in were expatriates from the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Army – they were short-term expatriates. What they emphasized was economic policy as well as industrialization policy and hygienic/sanitary and welfare policies, but there were things they didn’t know how to deal with. So they wanted to have special professionals. These technical people, regardless of their political strength, if they were mobilized they had to go to China. Tokyo Imperial University people were sent to do six months to one year of work. After the war, these engineers took very high positions. Many of them became presidents of universities.
· When Taiwan became part of Japan first class Japanese professors studied the customs and practices of Taiwan – and based on their works improvements in agriculture, in the sugar cane industry, were carried out. These researches and investigations were completely linked to policy. Goto Shinpei tried to do the same thing in Manzhouguo and the Mantetsu had a large budget, but unfortunately the Mantetsu research group became an intelligence group and they did little serious work. They were just having coffee all morning, watching the young Russian women. They didn’t address how the research they collected could be implemented as policy/useful to economic development. So the Mantetsu research group was a useless, Leftist, group of Japanese – almost like a place to relax. Kôa-in, on the other hand, was extremely useful, I have the impression.
US: Eto uses the word mobilized, whereas Kubo emphasizes the voluntary aspect of technicians going to Kôa-in. I tend to agree with Kubo. In terms of why they were enthusiastic, Kubo ascribes this to militarism at the time.
But there were also other factors:
· When the Kôa-in was formed, many engineers had already been active in Manzhouguo, especially in areas like civil engineering.
· There was a certain idealism – a belief that technology could be used to develop China and assert Japan’s leadership role compared to other third parties (like the Americans or English or Germans, whose technical presence in China remained strong).
· The influence of Kôa-in activities and investigations overall reflected a kind of technological confidence on the part of Japan that they could develop China. There is a sense that before 1941, when Japan entered the Pacific War, there was a high degree of confidence that Japanese were indeed capable of constructing the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Zone.
In terms of the role of Chinese: There were no Chinese technicians, but some of the Kôa-in works are direct translations of Chinese studies, and in that sense the Chinese participated.
China: What do we make of the Kôa-in? How should we look at it? In March 1938, the basic framework of Japan’s policy towards economic development of North China was already set out. But its implementation took a long time, and that was because it was hard to figure out what agency to put in charge. That was the question and they talked about it over and over again.
There were many organizations, but an agency was needed to supervise these, and so the Cabinet decided to form the Kôa-in. It was a very important indicator of what was going on within the Japanese cabinet, because they were deciding what was going to be the supreme agency to oversee occupied China. It wasn’t a simple thing. The question of how to administer China had to be addressed.
Before the war, it was through the army and various intelligence agencies. But after the outbreak of the Pacific War, the Kôa-in took over the role of these various intelligence agencies. It was not some casual agency that might have existed or might not have existed – it was working hand in hand with the army. Instead of in principle the prime minister, ultimately the person in charge was the the head of the army, right?
Question: I have been studying the Southern Manchurian Railway, their research department – and was wondering about the links between the various research agencies. I had the impression the Kôa-in asked the Manchurian Railway to do a lot of the research for them – that the Kôa-in didn’t do themselves. The East Asian Research Institute was also set up almost at the same time, headed by the prime minister. What are the links between them, what are differences between them?
Also, concerning Eto’s comments on the research arm of the Southern Manchurian Railway, I know it is very controversial. It did decades of intelligence work and it’s fair to call it an intelligence agency because that’s what research was, it was intelligence gathering. But, to have another take on it, for over 40 years the Manchurian Railway—which at its height had about 2500 professional people in 1939—conducted research including Asia, China, the whole world. So among Japanese research agencies it was very central.
Also we should look at the uses the research was put to, we should fully look into that. We can’t really say, that the Southern Manchurian Railway didn’t do anything.
US: We’ve heard a lot about the end end-process of decision-making – coercion, exploitation, exporting labor etc. But what about the process that led to those decisions? Were there no voices on the Japanese side calling for restraint – that one can only exploit the economy so far before one starts destroying it (and it’s not in the Japanese interest to destroy it)? In other words the potential contradiction between different interests on the Japanese side.
The situation changed over time – my assumption is that if any attention was given to the preservation of the Chinese economy’s basic productive capacity it weakened over time as the Japanese war progressed.
US: I noted the first use of the word Greater East-Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. There are large issues on the table including population movement, population control and development. These seem to be most usefully approached or conceptualized if we see Manchuria as the centerpiece of a regional development conception, related to the Japanese economy and a larger region. That means we have to start with the Korean population in Manchuria.
There were more than one million Koreans, maybe two million, in Manchuria; there was also a substantial Japanese population in Manchuria: again more than one million. We have to think about issues of Manchuria not only in terms of exploitation of labor but also we have to come to grips with an understanding of what the development performance of this region is. After all, Manchuria had a big legacy post-1949 on China’s development in terms of industrialization – and this is partly true of agriculture as well.
This doesn’t mean abandoning the framework of exploitation. The two papers on labor illustrate well the important dimensions of a ‘super-exploitation’ – i.e. exploitation to death, forced labor etc. But we need a clearer conception of not only the way exploitation worked, but the way large numbers of Chinese, Korean and Japanese villagers responded to new economic opportunities in Manchuria over the decade that we’ve been discussing here. So I’m suggesting a broader developmental framework in thinking about the relation between coercion, population movement and the development process.
US: My understanding of the labor export to Manchuria is that part of it was in exchange for grain, particularly before the Pacific War. Because in that period, Japanese policy was that North China would concentrate on industrial crops and would get grain from Manchuria. But when North China bargained with Manchuria and later also Mongolia, they did not get the grain, so eventually they came to a bargain where they sent labor in return for grain.
After 1941, the policy changed to self-sufficiency of grain in North China.
Question: Does Ju have figures of the actual percentage of labor exchanged for grain? Also, I presume that after 1941 they did not have to send labor to Manchuria for grain because the policy was self-sufficiency in grain in North China. It is clear that this did not ease the problem. In fact, it intensified – especially as far as Henan is concerned. Ju mentioned before the Pacific War, most of the labor recruits were refugees. But after 1941 when there were a lot of famines in Henan, the problem of labor recruits increased, and it’s not clear why.
US: Noted he was struck by the recent historiography of modern China: 30 years ago, the history of places like Shanghai or Tianjin was purely one of the exploitation of imperialism. In recent years there’s been a fair amount written about concessions in Shanghai and Tianjin and the development that has happened in those places – economic development, order, urban reform, improved hygiene etc. There are plenty of historians in Shanghai that write a fairly positive account of what happened in Shanghai. In short, there’s been a change in the way Western imperialism has been treated, especially in the treaty ports. Also in discussions of Taiwan, and its prosperity in the 1960’s, 70’s and 80’s, there is often a reference that this may have something to do with the legacy of Japanese colonialism. This line of argument is used by some Chinese scholars as well.
Question: Is it conceivable that a similar historiographic reevaluation of Northeast China could take place?
Ju:
· While using forced labor, Japan made use of the system of batou (team head). The batou system was very complicated: it played a very important role in recruiting workers. Later on workers’ teams were formed, and the batou played a role in organizing the work, the salaries and even providing food. Therefore the batou played a very large role in helping the evil that was the Japanese exploitation of the Chinese labor force. Even the Japanese investigations concluded that the batou made the whole system even more heinous and resented in the eyes of the Chinese. So we cannot say there was no such system.
· *With regards to the question about the forced exploitation of labor and whether any Japanese criticized it because it was detrimental to economic development. Some people did just that: they were opposed to the forced export of labor. But the Japanese had to use it because it was a time of war and not an ordinary period of economic development.
Kubo:
· Under the regulations of the authority given to the Kôa-in, it was supposed to be the highest agency in terms of occupation policy. However, on November 18, 1938, when the decision to form it was made in the cabinet, a secret understanding was made that with regard to military activities, the various liaison offices of the the Kôa-in were not allowed to express their opinion. It would not have any influence over military affairs. That was reaffirmed in that meeting. The prime minister thought that the Kôa-in could control the activities of the military – but that ended up being impossible. The result is that Kôa-in ended up being an agency without much power. However, in terms of economic policy, technology issues, they worked to resolve problems and played an important role.
· In terms of the Manchurian Railroad and other research agencies. There was a lot of overlap and there was a lot of work to bring them together, to integrate them, but things didn’t go very well because it was difficult to make adjustments within the bureaucratic structure. This is still difficult today, and it was difficult then.
