Mystery of 11 Chinese tortured in Japan unearthed in forgotten WWII document trove
It has been 75 years since Japan's surrender brought the second world war to an end, but researchers are only now piecing together the story of 11 Chinese men who were arrested in 1944 and 1945 by police in Osaka, accused of being spies and tortured. Six subsequently died.
The police destroyed all documents connected to the case when it became apparent that Japan had lost the war, and the Chinese community who survived the devastating air raids on Japan's second-largest metropolis largely kept silent on the matter out of fear that they could once again become the target of nationalists and xenophobes.
Details of what happened to the men only started to come to light thanks to the work of a Japanese NGO called the POW Research Network, whose investigators uncovered a trove of long-forgotten documents in the country's national library. Stored on microfilm, the documents found in the National Diet Library had been drawn up by the General Headquarters of the Allied Powers (GHQ) and used in the trial of the Japanese police officer who led the investigation into the Chinese men.
After that, the documents - and the killings - were forgotten.
"It is likely that the Chinese had to keep their mouths tightly shut to carry on living in Japan after the war," said Taeko Sasamoto, a researcher with the NGO, adding that the daughter of one of the victims said in an interview with the Mainichi newspaper that her mother also worried that if she knew the story of her father's fate, she "would hold a grudge against Japanese people".
The GHQ records detailed an investigation from September 1946 to October 1948 into seven people over the abuse, though only one was punished.
Hiroichi Konishi went on trial in Yokohama, where he was found guilty of four of the nine charges that he faced and sentenced to eight years' hard labour at Tokyo's Sugamo Prison - notorious for holding war criminals.
The court found that Konishi, an assistant inspector with the Osaka Prefectural Police, "did wilfully and unlawfully mistreat Liu Chien-chi, a Chinese civilian, by beating, torturing and otherwise abusing him".
He was convicted of a similar charge against Kung Ching-heng, Liu Ching-po - "burning him with flaming newspapers and severely beating him with a bamboo sword" - and "numerous other" ethnic Chinese, "by beating them and causing them to be beaten with sticks and clubs, burning their flesh, using pins under their fingernails and other tortures". He was never charged over the six deaths, however.
The recently uncovered documents show that the 11 Chinese men, aged from their late teens to their 40s, bought and sold kimono fabric in Osaka. They travelled frequently for work, which was apparently enough for the police to suspect that they were spies, communicating information to Nationalist Chinese forces.
As well as being repeatedly tortured, the men were left in their cells during Allied air raids and deprived of sufficient food.
"As Japan had been fighting China since 1937, Chinese people living in Japan were regarded as enemies and their movements were closely watched," said Sasamoto, the researcher, adding that further work needs to be done to determine more of the details.
Visitors walk past a tank confiscated from a Japanese tank factory in China at the end of World War II. Photo: AP
The researchers have also reached out to Lin Zhurong, whose father, Chen Shouhai, was among those who died as a result of their treatment in detention. Lin, 79, was three when her father died and has no recollection of him but has researched a book on the topic based on conversations with her mother before her death in 2015.
According to her mother, Lin Musong, police entered the family home in Osaka in August 1944 and took Chen Shouhai away. Three months later, they returned and arrested his younger brother, Chen Shouhu. On January 8, 1945, Lin Musong received a message telling her to go to the police station to collect her husband.
She said he was unrecognisable and "skin and bone" when she arrived. Both Chen Shouhai and his brother died soon after being released and are buried in the Chinese cemetery in Hyogo Prefecture, just west of Osaka.
Lin Zhurong told the Mainichi that she wrote her book to highlight her family's story in the hope that it might help bring further details to light. But Sasamoto is not optimistic.
"I don't think that more documents or evidence can be found," the researcher said. "Maybe these GHQ documents are all that remain because most Japanese records were destroyed soon after the war because officials and military officers did not want to be tried as war criminals."
But she said it is still important that the story is told.
"We have to dig out these hidden histories and hand them on to the next generation to prevent the same thing from happening again."
This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (SCMP).
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