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Robert Cribb and Sandra Wilson, "Twelve Japanese War Criminals and One Who Got Away" (U Hawaiʻi Press, 2026)
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Professor Sandra Wilson
Welcome to the New Books Network. New Books in Southeast Asian Studies is sponsored by the ANU Southeast Asia Institute, the Griffith Asia Institute, the New York Southeast Asia Network, the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, and the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre.
- [01:31]
Patrick Jory
Hello everyone and welcome back to New Books in Southeast Asian Studies. We're a podcast channel on the New Books Network. I'm Patrick Jory, I teach Southeast Asian history at the University of Queensland and I'm co host of this channel. Now let me start with a quote from the introduction to the book for today. Japanese war crimes are notorious. During the Second World War, as Japanese forces overran Southeast Asia and the Pacific, they massacred, murdered, raped and tortured Asians and Westerners who fell into their hands. They also mistreated hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war and civilian internees. After the war ended in 1945, the victorious Allied powers conducted trials in which they brought Japanese perpetrators to justice, as they also did with Japan Germans in Europe. In his provocative new book, 12 Japanese War Criminals and One who Got Away, published by University of Hawaii Press, historians Robert Cribb and Sandra Wilson analyse 13 case studies of Japanese war crimes. They attempt to answer a crucial question with contemporary relevance. How does one become a war criminal? Today I'm talking to the book's co authors, Professor Robert Cribb and Professor Sandra Wilson. Robert is Emeritus professor of Asian History at the Australian National University in Canberra. Sandra is professor of Japanese History at Murdoch University in Perth. Robert and Sandra, it's such a pleasure to have you on the podcast. Thanks so much for coming on. New books in Southeast Asian Studies.
- [02:54]
Professor Robert Cribb
Thank you very much.
- [02:56]
Patrick Jory
Now, before we start, I should say to listeners that the content of this discussion may be distressing, so please be aware of this. Can I start off by asking you both how you became interested in the subject of Japanese war criminals?
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Professor Sandra Wilson
Right, well, I'll begin. I'm a historian of modern Japan and I wanted to find a topic that placed Japan in its Asian context after many years of studying Japanese nationalism and events in the 1930s and the Second World War. So I was looking for a topic about Japan in Asia rather than Japan as a single entity or perhaps in its relations with Western countries. And I stumbled on the fact that there were extensive diplomatic relations all through the 1950s between Japan's former enemies and Japan itself, about what to do with war criminals that had been convicted in those places and were in prison and in what circumstances they might be repatriated to Japan. From there, a group of us, Robert and me and our colleagues Beatrice Treffeldt and Dina Ashkalovich, ended up with a book about the trials and the repatriations. After that, Robert and I started to get interested in why those war crimes had to happen in the first place and what motivated people to commit them. So we've sort of gone backwards, if you like, from the original concerns. And I think Robert has a different kind of angle on this.
- [04:26]
Professor Robert Cribb
Well, in my case, I was interested to begin with in the question of comparison. I've done quite a lot of work on violence in Indonesian history. The mass killing of communists in 1965-66, violence during the revolution against the Dutch, to some extent violence in the colonial era. And I was interested to look at Japanese wartime violence to see how it might inform my understanding of those episodes of violence in Indonesian history. There was also a direct question, and that is many scholars suggest that Japan was responsible for introducing habits and practices of violence during its occupation during the Second World War that turned Indonesia away from a more peaceful existence in the colonial era to a more violent set of habits in the independence era. I was a little bit doubtful about that. And so one of the reasons for this project is to look at the question of whether the Japanese did indeed bring an unusual degree of violence into the Indonesian environment.
- [05:33]
Patrick Jory
Now, this is a co written book. Robert You're a historian of modern Southeast Asia. Sandra, you're a historian of modern Japan. Can you tell us something about your collaboration, about how you went about dividing the labor in researching and writing the book?
- [05:48]
Professor Robert Cribb
Well, we were attracted to the project partly because it's a bigger project than either of us could have managed on our own. It requires knowledge of Japan and it requires knowledge of Southeast Asia. And so we felt that we had expertise, complementary expertise to tackle the project. Also complementary linguistic skills. Sandra is fluent in Japanese and can read French. I'm fluent in Dutch and Indonesian, and I can read German. So we have access to a wide range of materials relevant to the topic. We also realized that working as a team pushes us on. We have the social pressure that arises from not wanting to slow the other person down. And we also find that as problems arise, we can discuss them and solve them much more quickly than we could if we were working as individuals. I'm sure you and many of our listeners are familiar with the problem of coming up with an issue, a tangled, messy issue in research, and having to spend several days mulling it over, working it through, and trying to come up with a solution. So when we talk together about the problems that we encounter in the research, we can often make breakthroughs much more quickly. It helps that we have a similar approach to research and to writing. We believe in strongly empirical research. We believe in clear academic writing. So we tend to agree with each other on some of the main principles of scholarly historical research.
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Patrick Jory
Sandra, do you have anything to add to that?
- [07:36]
Professor Sandra Wilson
I would agree with all those things. I'd have to say that working with someone from a very different field broadens the perspective very nicely. It helps to expose some of the things that may have become rather unexamined assumptions in one's own field. And so being constantly challenged by Robert to say why I think something that everybody in my field thinks is challenging. Also, I think for someone who is in an ordinary teaching and research position, with constantly increasing teaching and administrative workloads, that kind of social pressure that Robert talked about helps just to keep the focus on research and writing when there are always so many more immediate demands on your time. So it does help to keep the pace up, providing that you have that fundamental level of agreement on how to go about things. Otherwise, it gets worse because you start arguing productively.
- [08:31]
Patrick Jory
Okay, for the historians who might be listening, I have to ask, what kind of source materials were available to you in writing the history of Japanese war criminals?
- [08:42]
Professor Sandra Wilson
Well, the major ones are the massive amounts of documents from war crimes Trials that are in archives all around the world. So, as you've briefly alluded to, Patrick, there were two sets of war crimes trials for Japanese suspects. The more famous ones in Tokyo, on the international bench, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East. But then these numerous trials in Southeast Asia and the Pacific, and some in China and later, and also in the Soviet Union. There are voluminous records of these, and they have been our major source. Trial records might seem narrow, but in fact they're very diverse. Not only trial transcripts and statements from prosecution and defence, but. And from witnesses, of course, but many other documents in those files. For example, affidavits from other potential witnesses or defendants, interrogations of people who did or didn't end up in court. So the trial records have been extremely useful to us. There are Japanese military records remaining. Most of us know that many of them were destroyed, usually deliberately, at the end of the war. But a surprising number of them have survived, so much more than people tend to think. And we've also been using personal diaries and memoirs where they're available, especially in the case of memoirs, the ones that were written closer to the war, which tend to be more reliable as historical sources than the ones written after intervening decades. Press reports have been useful in some cases too.
- [10:17]
Professor Robert Cribb
From my point of view, in comparison with the record of violence in Indonesia, working on Japanese war crimes is an enormous privilege, because there is just so much documentation on individual incidents often described by eyewitnesses soon after the event, from many different points of view, from the point of view of the perpetrators and witnesses, people who were involved on the victim side, people who were involved on the perpetrator's side. As a set of historical documents for understanding some complex violence, it's really a wonderful resource.
- [10:59]
Professor Sandra Wilson
I could add one more thing. We suspect that that's one reason that Japanese war crimes are so notorious, because there's so much documentation. Compared with perhaps other incidences of war crimes or other violence, there's a huge amount of documentation. And on the memoirs, tackling the massive pile of POW memoirs is a daunting task in itself. So there is a great deal of material for us.
- [11:24]
Patrick Jory
Can you give the listener a general overview of the war crimes trials of Japanese war criminals that were conducted after the war? For example, how many trials were held, who conducted the trials and what were the verdicts?
- [11:39]
Professor Sandra Wilson
As I said, there were the Tokyo trials, which are better known and are the equivalent of Nuremberg. We have only one case in our book from that trial, and that's Tojo Hideki, the prime Minister. So that was an international bench. 11 judges from different countries and their prosecution teams. Of course, there were 25 verdicts from those trials and seven executions. Nobody, everybody was found guilty of at least one charge, that there were several charges. The ones that most of our cases come from are the trials popularly known as the class B and C war crimes trials. It's not a term we use in our book because it's not a very good one. There were class B trials incorporated, sorry, class B charges incorporated into Tokyo, for example. So we tend to refer to them as the national military tribunals. These tribunals were in a loosely coordinated program by seven allied countries. See if I can get the seven right. Australia, the uk, France, the Philippines, the United States, the Netherlands and China. Later Communist China ran trials, and also the Soviet Union ran trials. Neither of those last two was included in what's more or less a loosely coordinated set among the others. So most of our evidence comes from those first seven. There were about 2,400 trials altogether. In that set of seven over six years from 1945 to 1951, there were about 5,700 defendants. If I remember rightly. Is it about 4,700 were found guilty? Robert?
- [13:24]
Professor Robert Cribb
I think 4,600.
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Professor Sandra Wilson
4,600. Thank you. And there were about 920 executions. The rest of those found guilty served prison terms originally fairly close to or as close as possible to where the crimes had committed. So There are about 50 venues all over Southeast Asia and the Pacific and China. And over time, the next few years, there were complex negotiations between those countries and Japan, as I said at the beginning, about moving the prisoners back to Japan, not to free them in most cases, but to serve out their sentences in a prison in Tokyo. Then there were even further delicate negotiations about the terms in which they could be released on parole or some other form of clemency. The Japanese were not free to do this even after 1952. They did not have control of the sentences of the war criminals under a clause in the peace treaty between Japan and its former enemies. So it had to be by negotiation with the countries that had originally prosecuted them. This process took up until 1958, which is when the last war criminals in prison were released, except for a small number who remained in China, a very small number, the last of them being released in 1964.
- [14:35]
Patrick Jory
You start the book by highlighting the historical problem of explaining Japanese war crimes. You write that the dominant explanation was that it was due to certain aspects of Japanese culture, such as the so called military cult of the warrior. Or this phenomenon called priming, that is the harsh military discipline of the Japanese military and the experience of combat, which over time made it easier for Japanese soldiers to commit atrocities. As I understand it, you tend to reject both these explanations. Why is that so?
- [15:10]
Professor Robert Cribb
There's a couple of reasons. The first is that when we look at specific war crimes, these cultural explanations mostly evaporate. There's no hint in most of the cases that we're looking at that the perpetrators were driven by any aspect of Japanese culture or Japanese military culture. So the emphasis on Japanese culture as a source of war crimes seems to be something that people have invented in order to explain the fact that there was a very wide variety of war crimes. So amongst those 5,700 defendants, 2,400 trials, huge range of different war crimes, people said, well, they're all by Japanese, therefore they must have arisen from some dark element in Japanese society. The problem with that, on the one hand, as I said, is that when we look at the individual crimes, they don't seem to relate to Japanese culture at all. The other problem is that when we look at comparable cases in colonial wars, we find colonial soldiers from the west doing exactly the same things to their colonial subjects in the wars in Italy's wars in Ethiopia, Britain's wars in Malaya and Kenya, French wars in Algeria and Indochina, and so on. So the cultural explanation is often a matter of faith rather than a matter of serious analysis. And a lot of people have in their mind a single imaginary instance of a soldier standing in front of a group of civilians and being ordered to shoot those civilians. So that's a model that is based on what seems to have happened very often in Europe. It's a very uncommon scenario in Southeast Asia. So we found the cultural explanation very unsatisfactory. And a big part of the project is to try and work out, well, if it's not culture, if it's not Japanese culture or Japanese military culture, then what is it?
- [17:34]
Patrick Jory
So what is it? Sandra, perhaps I can push that to you.
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Professor Sandra Wilson
Thank you, Robert, for setting me up for that. We think that all walk crimes are the result of individual decisions. So our explanations are in no way meant to reduce individual or group, in some cases, group culpability. Having said that, the context of the war is hugely important. Japan was basically fighting an impossible war. It went to war with an army half the size of its main adversary, the United States. It went with far fewer material resources. It was spread over a huge combat zone and occupation zone spread very thinly, with really very little surveillance of its own troops. That was the job of the military police, the Kempeita. It was small, it was thinly stretched, it was occupied with trying, not only with discipline within the Japanese military, but with trying to suppress insurgency operations from local people. So you end up with soldiers in very difficult circumstances. As we know, the places that Japan fought were often extremely inhospitable, fought and occupied. There were few resources. There were often jungle, swamps, mountains, other natural barriers. Communications were often poor. They were in situations where they were called upon to make difficult decisions. And sometimes they made the wrong decisions and terrible decisions, terrible consequences for others. That, at least, is one line of explanation Robert may care to add to that.
- [19:18]
Professor Robert Cribb
So one of the things we find is that many of the Japanese who commit war crimes do so for, very broadly speaking, military reasons, for what they think is military necessity. But in many cases, they've misjudged military necessity. They've misjudged the advantage that would. The military advantage that would come to them from these atrocious acts that we've seen in recent years in the war in the Middle east, both sides claiming military necessity as the basis for acts of massive destruction. That's very much the pattern that we find amongst war crimes in Southeast Asia. Maybe military advantage, but the military advantage is disproportionately small in relation to the huge suffering that was caused by those actions. The second element that we have found, it's not the most important element, but it's certainly a significant part of it. And that is what we're calling military, or rather wartime license. So war is a time that confines and constricts opportunities for many people. Their hopes for a brilliant or a comfortable future get shattered. But there are always people who have good wars, people who do well out of wartime and who make the most of opportunities that they find. Sometimes it's the opportunity to show valor and to win glory for themselves. Other times it's the opportunity to make a lot of money. So one of our or two of our characters were basically wartime profiteers, although that wasn't necessarily directly the source of the war crime. But there are others who suddenly discover that they have impunity, that they can be brutal without any consequences. And that element of wartime license sits alongside this use of military necessity as an excuse for excessive, vastly excessive violence. Those, we think, are the two main explanations for the scale of Japanese war crimes.
- [21:37]
Patrick Jory
I'd now like to delve into some of the case studies that you discuss in the book, and I'd like to start with the one that for me, was the most horrific that is the case of Ichigawa Segi and the bayonetting to death of hundreds of villagers in Burma, including, I think it was a couple of hundred women and children. This village had been suspected of helping the British in their operations against the Japanese. Can you explain this case and how this crime was prosecuted?
- [22:07]
Professor Sandra Wilson
Yes, it is a horrific case. It happened at the end of the war when Japanese troops in Burma were under enormous pressure and where it was clear even to the Japanese soldiers in the field in this case, that defeat was not far off. It was in an area that was known to be. To be a temporary home to guerrilla forces, anti Japanese guerrilla forces, also assisted by British Special Forces, very small numbers and secretly, of course. So there was a real sense of threat that there would be an Allied landing, that they would be assisted by these local people and foreign interference from the Japanese point of view, and that they would assist any allied landing to the detriment of the Japanese forces. There was a particular village, Kalgon, that was strongly suspected of being supporters of the guerrillas. A Japanese mission was operation was sent there to deal with the village. The commander, Ichikawa, was given a rather ambiguous order, or at least there are ambiguous accounts of the order. But it's pretty clear that he was told that he either could or should, if necessary, kill villagers. They go to the village, they round up all the people, put them in a couple of buildings and interrogate some of them, trying to find out where the guerrillas are, how many there are, who's in contact with them, what equipment they've got, that sort of thing. And they end up taking out all the villagers in groups, small groups, and bayoneting them and throwing their bodies into wells. Including women and children? Yes, as well as the men, almost certainly those in the village who were assisting the guerrillas had already escaped because they would have been warned of the Japanese advance and got away. So very few of those people would have been actually connected with insurgency in any direct manner. Then the operation moved on to the surrounding jungle and went on to other duties. There was a trial after the war. It was the first trial of Japanese war crime suspects in Burma. So it was very high profile. There were a number of the people from that force on trial of whom Ichikawa was the most senior. There were also some Kempeitai members, military police members, because they had been taken along as interrogation specialists. A number of death sentences were passed, including Ichikawa. Ichikawa's defence was, I think, a really interesting defence. That is, the defence put up by his lawyers on his behalf. And that was military necessity. Well, first of all, there were two parts of it that it was not a crime. It was argued that they had not committed a crime because in circumstance of occupation it was permissible to deal with people who forcibly opposed that occupation. Occupied people, under international law had a duty to obey the occupying government. Therefore, certain measures, surprisingly harsh measures, were permissible against people who did not obey the occupying government. That was the first line of defence. And the second was that Ichikawa had been acting on superior orders. This is the most common defence in the war crimes trials. Almost inevitably, he and the others were found guilty and he was executed for this. But in the meantime, his defence had put up very interesting arguments invoking comparison, really. It was one of a few trials, not sure how many in total, but one of a few trials that brought up the atomic bombings, for example, which references to the atomic bombings were quickly swept under the carpet by the court. But the argument was that the Allies, in bombing Japanese cities, including the atomic bombings, had behaved absolutely indiscriminately in killing everybody, women and children included. In Caligon, women and children had been killed from the air, women and children had been killed. There's a quite powerful line in the defense that says what makes it acceptable to kill people by bombs and not acceptable to kill them with bayonets. It was drawing attention to the double standards of the perceived double standards of the trials in punishing one side and not punishing the other side. These arguments did not find any favor with the court, but they were nevertheless very powerful arguments.
- [26:41]
Professor Robert Cribb
I think the interesting thing is that defence was put forward by the British lawyers who had been appointed to defend Ichikawa. So it was something that these lawyers, at least on the British side, very much had in their mind as a moral issue.
- [27:01]
Professor Sandra Wilson
One was Australian. One of those lawyers, by the way, there were two, a British and an Australian.
- [27:06]
Patrick Jory
In popular understandings of Japanese war crimes, the mistreatment of Allied POWs on the construction of the Thai Burma railroad looms large. And one of your chapters is about a camp doctor guy called Nobusawa Hisashi, who was in charge of deciding who in the POW hospital was actually fit enough to work on the railway construction. So he was charged with forcing sick prisoners to work on the railway as a war crime. Can you tell us about this case?
- [27:38]
Professor Robert Cribb
Yes. Nobusawa is one of the cases where, although he was clearly a war criminal, we felt sorry for him in the sense that his life was completely ruined. He had been a pediatrician, middle aged pediatrician. In Japan when he was recruited, when he was conscripted to join the Japanese army, he was sent to Southeast Asia, spent a little bit of time in Indochina, and was then posted to the Thailand Burma Railway. Initially, he was in charge of a relatively small camp and he did a reasonably good job there of keeping the prisoners in that camp safe from a cholera outbreak. So if that had been all, he would have been celebrated as one of the. A number of Japanese doctors who had really tried hard to keep the prisoners safe. Then he was posted to manage a huge POW hospital at the Thailand end of the railway. He had a single medical orderly to assist him. He had two ordinary Japanese soldiers. He was in charge of a hospital with a thousand critically sick soldiers and more prisoners of war arriving every week from the stations further upstream. So he was constantly having to make a decision about who was in a better condition than the POWs being brought in and who could therefore be kicked out and sent back to work. He was also under pressure from the managers of the railway construction project to ensure that enough prisoners were available to work on the. On the railway. So he would go around and choose prisoners whom he judged to be less, less ill than the others, and he would send them off. So in some respects he was a victim of circumstances. On the other hand, within the nearby camp there was a large number, a significant number of POW doctors, some military doctors who had been captured with the soldiers and who were themselves doing everything they could to keep the prisoners in good condition. And Nobusawa would not work with them. We don't know whether he felt inadequate or ashamed or just arrogant, but he refused to cooperate with these other doctors. And as a consequence, he was responsible for a great many deaths on the railway. And he was found guilty of sending men to their death when they were out to work and therefore to their deaths when they were unfit to work. And he was executed.
- [30:33]
Patrick Jory
Another case that looms large is the. The infamous Batam Death March in the Philippines in 1942. The forced march of tens of thousands of Filipino and American POWs, in which I think it's hundreds of Americans and thousands of Filipinos lost their lives. The Japanese commanding officer, Honma Masaharu, was tried after the war for his role in the death march. You write that the case was more complex than what might have at first appeared.
- [31:02]
Professor Sandra Wilson
Yes, it was a complex case. It was one of a few key cases of the new principle in international law that was called command responsibility. This is a principle which says that commanders can be held responsible for the acts of their subordinates failing to prevent, halt or punish is the term. So either prevent war crimes, halt war crimes underway, or punishment people who have committed war crimes. So a commander can be held responsible for those actions even if he was not there, even if he did not know. And the most famous case is Yanmashita Tomoyuki, the very first of the war crimes trials in the Pacific, Honma, was very shortly afterwards. His verdict came just after. In fact, the judges were deliberating in his case when the Janashta verdict came down. So he was the commander of Japanese forces in the Philippines. He was in charge of the troops who defeated the American forces and Bataan and Correhido, the island off Bataan. After the defeat at Bataan, the Japanese forces took hundreds of prisoners on the American side. They were surprised at the number. Their intelligence had not let them know that there was that number of soldiers there. They were surprised at the weakness of those forces. They'd been fighting in difficult conditions for some months. They were sick and they were malnourished. They were weak. There were also a large number of Filipinos, either soldiers in the army or civilians, who'd fled from fighting elsewhere and had fled up to Bataan, which was the wrong thing to do, as it turned out. The Japanese forces did what you were supposed to do, given that this was still a war zone, which is evacuate the prisoners away from the front line and towards a prisoner of war camp further down the peninsula. It was, in theory, a pretty well planned evacuation. Hona was in charge of the plans. Ultimately, there were plans for rest stops, food dumps, water supply, orderly retreat. And the number of people and the weakness of their condition and the chaotic circumstances in which it happened really stuffed that out completely. So things went wrong. Things went wrong in some groups more than other groups. They went off in groups of about 100, I think, with their Japanese guards with them. Some of them fared fairly well with reasonable guards, doing their best in difficult circumstances. Others of them did not. They had to walk further than was feasible in the circumstances. It was very hot. There were a few supplies. Many of them were already weak. Some guards were brutal to them. So we don't really know what the ultimate death toll was. And I think it's about. In Americans, it's about 600. Is that right, Robert? Yep, about 600Americans. An unknown number of Filipinos, because most accounts don't take account of the fact that Filipinos could much more easily slip away from the march, and an unknown number of them did. So Homma set this process in motion. But Then he was very busy with the final battle on Corregidol, which is where the American troops ultimately surrendered. And he went off to run that battle, leaving the evacuation to his subordinates. It went wrong, as we can see. He, for other reasons, was. Was within a few months, recalled by the Japanese military more or less in disgrace because he hadn't finalized the Filipino operation as quickly as they had wanted him to. He went back to Japan and lived in semi retirement for the end of the war. In those intervening months, he had got down to the prisoner of war camp. He had found it into terrible condition. He'd taken quite strong measures to improve life for the prisoners in the prisoner of war camp. O', Donnell, I'm talking about. He dismissed the camp commander, who was ineffective. He appointed a new one. He took the really interesting move of releasing the Filipinos on the ground. So that they would be better off going back to their families. There was no reason to hold them. They were Asian people. They were not the Western enemy. So he arranged for the release of the Filipinos, the improvement of the camp and all the rest of it. Then he went back to Japan. He was held responsible after the war for what had happened on what came to be called the Bataan Death March for Americans, the most notorious of the crimes. And his defense was very strong that he hadn't known about that. He'd been busy with the battle. He'd done his best. But it was probably inevitable that he would be held responsible for this. Especially with what was going on with the trial of Yamashita at almost the same time. And he was sentenced to death for that crime.
- [36:01]
Patrick Jory
You try to be representative in the case studies discussed in the book. One of them is about the only woman known to have been tried for war crimes, Tsutsui Shizuko. She was a nurse who was involved in horrific medical experiments on allied prisoners of war. Can you tell us her story?
- [36:19]
Professor Sandra Wilson
Hey, I'll take that one, too. She was a nurse. She was the head nurse. These were fairly big teams. She had, I think, 12 nurses under her control. She worked in a medical unit with a doctor who was very well known in medical circles in Japan, Dr. Ishiyama. And he was thought to be a brilliant but quite maverick medical person. He was interested in medical research. He was a medical researcher. He was interested in how to increase the chances of surviving for soldiers who were injured in the war. Or, for that matter, civilians, victims of bombing. And he was engaged in experiments, as it turned out, into what to do when you ran out of other resources. So, for example, saline solutions were becoming very scarce in Japan at that time. He started experimenting with what happened if you injected seawater instead of normal same end solution. And some other kind of what you'd call. He wasn't in the battlefield. This took place in Fukuoka, in Kyushu, in city. But what you would call kind of battlefield measures for wartime trauma. This is at the end of the war again over Kyushu. There were air battles. As the war came to an end, air battles between Japanese and American forces. And a number of American aircraft crashed over Kyushu. Kyushu being the closest to Okinawa. Closest main island to Okinawa, which was under battle at that time. Crashed. Airmen were all eventually taken around Kyushu to Fukuoka. They came into the hands of the military there and the hospital that was close to the military station. And by one means or another, Dr. Ishiyama got hold of some of these prisons. There were thought to be eight of them who were involved in this case. It's called the Kyushu Imperial University case or the MIVA section case. They would have probably been sentenced to death in any case. They were smuggled to the hospital. And within the hospital. They were smuggled to an underground room where Ishiyama was able, over several weeks to carry out these experiments on them. They all died on the operating table, all under anesthesia. We're not talking about cutting up live bodies or anything like that. The saline experiment was only one. Also experiments on brains and hearts. And Tsutsui Shizuko was in charge of the nurses. She had no responsibility for the decision to do this or any part of the planning. But she was there. She did things like hand instruments to the doctors. Make sure their hands were sterile, that sort of thing. She was a devoted fan of Ishiyama. She defended him as much as she possibly could. During the process of investigation, he committed suicide, leaving a note telling his colleagues to continue to research till the end. She abruptly stopped defending him, which I thought was interesting. She didn't defend his memory at all. Confessed everything that had happened. Having previously refused to do so, she went to trial. Nobody thought she had done anything directly other than participate in the operations. But as I suppose, the representative of the nursing team. She was the only nurse tried. She was found guilty, and she received the quite short sentence of five years. Many, many other people were tried in connection with that trial. Doctors and military.
- [39:49]
Patrick Jory
One of the most harrowing chapters of the book is the one where you discuss cannibalism. The case of Ainoda Hajime and his unit, who had become isolated in the jungles of Mindanao in the southern Philippines. At The End of the War. And this chapter has an interesting discussion of the phenomenon of survivor cannibalism, which I understand is less uncommon than one might think. But this guy Inada, his unit took it to an extreme level maybe. Robert, could you tell us about this case?
- [40:22]
Professor Robert Cribb
So as you've said, survival cannibalism is surprisingly common in human history. It's even been described as the custom of the sea. So when sailors were marooned on a desert island or drifting around for weeks and weeks in a little boat, it was quite common to resort to cannibalism to survive. Of course, that's a morally terribly difficult decision to decide which person is going to be killed. So Ainoda was one of a group of so called Japanese stragglers who retreated into the mountains in Mindanao close to the end of the war and were there when Japan surrendered. Rather than coming down the mountain and surrendering, they continued the fight up in the mountains. Not clear whether they got weren't sure about the surrender or whether they thought Japan might make a comeback. But anyhow they kept fighting. But they were up in the jungle. There's not a lot of wildlife in the jungle. They began to suffer from shortage of protein and they began to eat the bodies of people killed in skirmishes. First of all they ate the bodies of enemy soldiers and then they began to eat the bodies of Japanese soldiers who had died in battle. And then over time, as they remained hungry, they began to hunt and catch people for food. The extreme position that we discovered was when they ambushed a little hut with two people and a water buffalo. They killed the people and ate them and they didn't kill the water buffalo because by this time they had developed a taste for human flesh. So it's a really horrible, horrible story, especially because Inoda of course was a medical doctor. He did claim that he didn't take part directly in the cannibalism, but he did say that he authorised it for the others on nutritional grounds. So it's a case on the one hand of people being forced initially into a horrible act by very difficult circumstances, but then making the most of those circumstances and going further than was necessary. So that element of wartime license that led them to become cannibals by choice rather than by pure necessity was at work. Inoda's case is very interesting. The straggler group was eventually captured by a Philippine army unit. Inoda was put on trial. He was sentenced to death for his crimes. But the Philippine president, Pirio Quirino, was interested in a post war deal with Japan. He first Commuted the death sentence to life imprisonment, and then he pardoned all the Japanese who were still under sentence from the post war trials. Ainoda then went back to Japan. He took up medical practice, but every year he went back to the Philippines to offer medical services. Not in Rusom, where he'd committed the crime, but in other words, regions as a kind of penance for his wartime crimes. And then very late in life, he went back to Luzon and took part in a kind of reconciliation ceremony with the local people. So his was one of the worst cases, one of the worst crimes of all. But he's the only case that we have of an individual who took responsibility for his crimes and then did something concrete about it for many years thereafter, and then something symbolic about it right towards the end of his life.
- [44:33]
Patrick Jory
Japan, of course, was an empire at that time, controlling Korea and Taiwan. And your book discusses two cases, one of a Taiwanese and the other of a Korean who served with the Japanese and were also charged with committing war crimes. Were they in the wrong place at the wrong time, or did they really have personal responsibility for the crimes with which they were charged?
- [44:55]
Professor Sandra Wilson
Well, I'll talk about the Taiwanese case, Yochu Bok. I think both of the things that you said, yes, he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and yes, he definitely had personal responsibility for what he did. He was an interpreter working with the Kempeitai, the military police. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time because he was one of a number of interpreter. Well, I should say first of all, the military police needed interpreters. Their job in occupied territories was to detect, stamp out, punish insurgencies against Japanese rule. So we're talking about local people, Chinese, Malay, other people who might be suspected, rightly or wrongly, of plotting against the Japanese. And they did this by rounding up large numbers of people in some cases and interrogating them, often with torture. So they needed interpreters for the interrogations. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time because he lived in Penang when the Japanese moved in and occupied Penang, and they had these big roundups and he was called in. So he was a. He was a musician. He played the clarinet and the violin and he was called in to work as an interpreter. So in that he appears to have had little choice then he would have had very little choice about assisting the Campeitai in their activities, which included being there at interrogations in which torture was used. But there is a great deal of evidence that he joined in the torture in his own defense. He said he didn't Have a choice to. The Kempeitai were there. I think he said something like, they looked at me with the eye of a tiger or something like that. Forced me to do it. The really compelling evidence is that a number of former victims said that he tortured them even when the Kempeitai were not in the room. So that's the clincher. He may have been under great pressure when they were in the room, but if he did it when they were out of the room, then that is a different matter. And he was also accused of taking women out of the cells and bringing them back looking frightened. This, I think, is code for sexual assault of the women prisoners. So it is very clear that he made choices of his own as well as being in a very difficult situation. Robert might want to comment on the Korean case.
- [47:22]
Professor Robert Cribb
Yes, the Korean Cho Unko is a very interesting case. He trained as a dentist and he spent some time in British India as a dentist because there was a big demand for capable Japanese and Korean dentists in British India in the late colonial period. He was probably doing a bit of espionage there. And he was found and expelled, went back to Korea. He was unemployed. And he signed up to become a prison guard on the Thailand Burma Railway. And this was his choice. There were advertisements in the newspaper. The promised pay was actually quite good. It was the. The same pay that a sergeant in the Japanese army would have got. But he ended up on the Thailand Burma Railway in a group of particularly brutal Korean guards. He himself was by no means the worst of them. He doesn't seem to have been especially bad. But he was one of the group that was unusually brutal towards the. The prisoners. They were all tried together. Three of the guards were sentenced to death. Cho himself was. It was recognized that he hadn't been a ringleader or one of the worst, but he was in really bad company and he was sentenced to 10 years. So he made a choice that he would go as a prison guard. He was part of a little group that was socially isolated, isolated from their Japanese superiors, of course, isolated from the prisoners. But they behaved collectively very badly towards the prisoners in a way that other groups of Korean guards often did not behave badly. So, once again, there's a combination of being placed in very difficult circumstances and of personal choice.
- [49:21]
Patrick Jory
If we could zoom out now towards the end of the book, you ask the question, how does someone become a war criminal? It's such a simple question, but quite a very profound one. What is the answer?
- [49:33]
Professor Robert Cribb
Well, as we said, we think that in these circumstances there are two big factors. One, is the pressure of war. Sandra mentioned how thinly spread Japan was, how Japan was constantly not very far from the edge of defeat. They managed remarkably well in conquering Southeast Asia, in holding off against the Allied attacks that started to push them back after the middle of 1942. But they were always on the edge. So the sense of having to be willing to take extreme steps in order to defend Japan's war effort was always present. In those circumstances, people made bad decisions that caused a great deal of suffering. Second element to that is that part of Japan's being thinly spread was that there were a lot of not very competent, not very capable people in important positions. So they were put in positions that they hadn't been prepared for, either in terms of training or in terms of moral awareness. And people made bad decisions in those circumstances. And we've also mentioned this problem of wartime license. Sometimes people found themselves in a position where they realized that they had impunity, they could do anything. And the Kempeitai, the military police, wasn't going to stop them, wasn't going to punish them. They didn't think about the potential for war crimes trials at the end of the the war, and they indulged themselves in horrible actions. What we don't find in this particular case, in the case of Japanese war crimes, is the element which is so prominent in Nazi war crimes, of racial hatred. Of course there is a sense that the lives of the people who are being killed don't particularly matter. One of the striking things is how often Japanese express some at the time or soon after, how often they express some element of regret at having to treat people brutally. They were treating people brutally for their own interests, but they weren't doing it necessarily out of malice or out of intense racism. There's certainly no attempt at genocide. So it's a war that is driven, in which atrocities are driven by circumstance and by opportunity rather than by ideology. And it's ironic that the big exception in this case is the one who got away, Tsuji Masanobu. He was a colonel in the Japanese army. He was very much a rogue figure. It was a description in the Japanese military circles of a phenomenon called gekkokujo, which can be translated as creative insubordination. So this was where mid ranking Japanese officers would take action, sometimes against the instructions that the orders that they'd received from above, because they thought that their actions could generate some advantage for the Japanese military. Tsuji was a past master of that, that kind of action. His career is full of cases where he Ignored instructions, took action which he hoped would deliver the benefits for Japan. And sometimes they did, often they didn't. And he was then very adept at wriggling out of responsibility. He had significant responsibility, for instance, for sending Japanese troops across the Kokoda Track towards Port Moresby, which was. It was a big struggle for the Australians on the other side, but it ended up being disastrous for the Japanese. Tsuji seems to have been to have played a crucial role in persuading the Japanese commander that they should send the troops over Kokoda and then in shedding all personal responsibility for it. Matsuji was someone who was. Who reveled in notoriety, reveled in brutality. So he stands out as an exception amongst the other war criminals that we deal with in the book.
- [54:17]
Patrick Jory
One final question, and maybe I could direct this to you, Sandra. One of the themes of the book is the extent to which justice was served by the. The war crimes trials. And your book contains some cases where the Japanese personnel who were convicted and sometimes sentenced to death, they were done so on somewhat questionable evidence or proceedings. On the other hand, Robert just mentioned the case of Tsuji, who was probably one of, if not the worst of the war criminals who managed to get away. So I was wondering, do you have a general view about the extent to which justice was served after the war in making Japanese war criminals accountable for their actions?
- [54:57]
Professor Sandra Wilson
That's a very big and tricky question. First, I'd say, as we said before, there were two sets of trials of Japanese suspects. The big international one in Tokyo and the numerous military tribunals run by individual countries. Our general impression is that the trials held in the military courts, which means all of our cases in this book, except for Torojo, were more fair than the ones at the international trial. There are a couple of reasons for this. One is that in the international trial, people are there because of the position they held, by and large, the Prime Minister, the Foreign minister, other people who were there essentially on the principle of command responsibility, although that term is not used, I don't think, at the trial. So they're there by virtue of their position. There are certainly people in the national military tribunals we just talked about, Homba, who were there because of their position, but they're much more likely to be there because there's strong evidence against them. The prosecutors and the investigators had a lot of choice, and they chose the ones for whom there was strong evidence. So that's one reason. Another reason is that in the national courts, people were much more likely to be tried for things that any of us would recognize as crimes. So murder, rape, mistreatment of prisoners, massacre in Tokyo, they were being tried for more than one thing, including responsibility for ordinary war crimes, those crimes, but they were principally in terms of the time spent on it, being charged with what was called waging aggressive war, which is a new principle and one that was unfamiliar. So the national military tribunals were much more likely to be the nitty gritty. I suppose, having said that, it's inevitable in such a huge undertaking that there are going to be discrepancies. We said before 2,400 trials, 5,700 defendants over six years. If you consider, for example, the trials for war crimes in the former Yugoslavia that began in the 1990s, they took I think 24 years. And if I remember rightly, there are 111 completed cases. So it's a very different speed. In the case of the trials of Japanese war crime suspects, the authorities wanted to move quickly so that everybody could move on. They didn't move nearly as quickly as they thought they were going to. I think it's Mount Battenman who says at the beginning that it will all be over in six months and it took six years. But there was much more speed. There were very complicated proceedings going on all over the place at the same time with not necessarily a lot of communication between them. So inevitably there are some discrepancies. One of the biggest, I think is discrepancy in length of sentence or type of sentence, as in death sentence or imprisonment between cases. So in other words, two individuals who were tried for roughly the same crime in different courtrooms might get wildly different sentences. This one the war crimes authorities were quite concerned about and it was one of the major reasons for reduction of sentence at review. There were review processes in these trials. One of at least one of our cases, you, Norman, the one who executed the commandos, he benefits from this. He's sentenced to death and on review it's reduced because there's a related trial going on somewhere else and the trials and the sentences don't match and it is reviewed. So the authorities were worried about some aspects of it. But on the whole, people were tried for real crimes in those cases, I think.
- [58:44]
Patrick Jory
Well, sadly we're out of time, so. Robert and Sandra Kamau, thank you so much for joining us on this episode of New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to discuss your new co written book, 12 Japanese war criminals and one who got away. The book is hot off the press, just published this year by that great publisher and supporter of Southeast Asian History, University of Hawaii Press.
- [59:07]
Professor Sandra Wilson
Thank you for inviting us. Patrick.
- [59:08]
Professor Robert Cribb
Thank you very much.
- [59:10]
Patrick Jory
And you've been listening to new books since Southeast Asian Studies, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. Thanks everyone for listening. You can download or stream these interviews and thousands more free of charge via the New Books Network website or itunes.
- [59:30]
Professor Robert Cribb
Sam.