Search for the truth leads to U.N. archives in Geneva

BY TATSUHIKO YOSHIZAWA, THE ASAHI SHIMBUN

At 9:18 p.m. on Sept. 18 of this year, I was standing in front of the Sept. 18 History Museum in Shenyang, China. It was raining. A siren went off. It sounded like the wailing of a fire engine.

In March 1932, members of the Lytton Commission visited Yasukuni Shrine. Lytton is pictured in the front row, second from left. (ASAHI SHIMBUN FILE PHOTO)

The booklet "Truth" that was delivered to the Lytton Commission. It was kept at the library of the United Nations office in Geneva. (PHOTO COURTESY OF UNITED NATIONS OFFICE AT GENEVA LIBRARY)

Chang Tso-lin

Chang Hsueh-liang

On this day each year, Shenyang holds a ceremony to mark the anniversary of a military crackdown against the city's unsuspecting citizens by the Imperial Japanese Army. This year was the 76th anniversary of that event.

Japanese forces swiftly overran a vast area of northeastern China. The annual ceremony seeks to keep this memory alive. It is also serves as a prayer for peace.

The wailing of the siren, reminiscent of an air-raid alert, lasted three minutes. High school students, soldiers and armed police officers all turned out for the ceremony and stood rigidly at attention in the rain.

Two days later, I was in the nearby city of Fushun to attend a symposium on the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945). There, I had the unexpected pleasure of meeting Chang Lushi, a 45-year grandson of Chang Tso-lin, who was known in the English-speaking world as the Warlord of Manchuria until his assassination by Japanese agents three years before the Manchurian Incident.

Chang told me the organizers of the symposium had asked him to attend. His uncle, Chang Hsueh-liang, was Chang Tso-lin's son. He became the effective ruler of Manchuria and much of northeastern China after his father's assassination, but remained exiled from his domain after the Manchurian Incident.

In 1949, he was transferred to Taiwan, where all other members of the Chang clan also relocated.

Chang Lushi, too, did not return to his ancestral city of Shenyang until May this year.

According to Lushi, his uncle was reluctant to talk about the past. However, he often mentioned to family members that he "could never figure out what the Japanese thought about the Chinese people."

The year after the Kwantung Army (see Fact File) staged the Manchurian Incident, the League of Nations sought to investigate the cause from an objective standpoint and try to resolve the Sino-Japanese conflict. The international body dispatched a commission to China, headed by Victor Bulwer-Lytton, the second Earl of Lytton.

The commission put together what is known as the Lytton Report, which portrayed Japan in a very different light from what most Japanese citizens believed at the time. As a result, Japan withdrew from the League of Nations, and became increasingly xenophobic and hostile toward the West.

What sort of people did Lytton meet in China? What were the stories he heard, and what did he see? To find answers, I decided to retrace his footsteps in China.

Communist Party the greater enemy

Why did the League of Nations send the Lytton Commission to China in the first place? At the time of the Manchurian Incident, the top priority of Chiang Kai-shek's nationalist government, whose capital was Nanking (now called Nanjing), was to eliminate the Communist Party as the "arch enemy" at home, rather than stand up to the invading Japanese army. Chiang immediately appealed to the League of Nations to deal with the Japanese invasion, thereby putting the problem in the international arena.

For the League of Nations that was born after World War I, the Manchurian Incident represented the first major international conflict. Japan was a permanent member of the Council, which effectively controlled the world body. China had only become a nonpermanent member four days before the Manchurian Incident. In other words, the positions of Japan and China were in reverse of what they are today in the United Nations Security Council, where China is a permanent member and Japan is not.

According to the Lytton Report, the team arrived in Japan in February 1932. Katsumi Usui, professor emeritus at the University of Tsukuba, notes in his book that the Lytton Commission met with Prime Minister Tsuyoshi Inukai and other top government officials in Tokyo and heard them out.

Army Minister Sadao Araki is quoted as stating candidly: "Japan cannot accommodate its growing population in its small territory. Japan has to seek the resources it needs from the Asian continent ... . I doubt that China has a legitimate government. My personal belief is that China cannot be regarded as a unified, civilized nation."

In China, the team met with Chiang and other top Nanking officials, and then moved on to Beiping (present-day Beijing), where they were met by Chang Hsueh-liang and others. Chang, who had been driven out of Manchuria, hosted a welcoming reception and gave an impassioned speech.

"Ethnically, politically and economically, the Three Northeastern Provinces (Manchuria) are an integral part of China," Chang asserted. "The true cause of the conflict is that Japan has become jealous of China for moving toward unification. Japan is trying to seize the Three Northeastern Provinces."

Was China capable of national unification? On this point, the Chinese and the Japanese disagreed completely.

Denied contact

Lytton was most interested in, but also had the hardest time, talking to ordinary citizens of Manchuria to hear their stories. This was because the Japanese government and its puppet, Manchukuo, prevented the Lytton Commission from coming in contact with the citizenry on the pretext of ensuring the safety of the team members. The Lytton Report notes to the effect that meetings with citizens "were always conducted amid extreme difficulties and in secret."

How did the citizens approach Lytton and his team and what did they tell them?

Wang Jianxue, a curator at the Sept. 18 History Museum, gave me a name: Gong Tianmin, a banker who was in Fengtian (present-day Shenyang) at the time.

According to Wang, more than 100,000 citizens of Fengtian fled to Beiping and other cities. But Gong stayed put, and began organizing a resistance movement against the invading Japanese. He organized Christian youths into a volunteer army, and urged them to write letters to the Lytton Commission.

The Lytton Report actually mentions that many letters were received from students and young people who refused to recognize Manchukuo.

In July 2005, the Shenyang Evening News, a local daily, ran a story about Gong's activities, based on an interview with his son, Gong Quoxian.

The article says that when Gong and his eight partners learned of the imminent arrival of the Lytton Commission, he determined to tell the members that the Manchurian Incident had been planned and executed by the Japanese, and that the new Manchurian regime was a puppet of the Japanese government. To substantiate his accusations, Gong secretly collected material evidence and compiled the information into a booklet. Titled "Truth," the booklet was entrusted to the safekeeping of an English clergyman residing in Shenyang. The clergyman, in turn, invited Lytton to dinner at his home and handed him the booklet. The article also notes that the clergyman and Lytton happened to be related.

Is this story accurate? When I asked Wang, he replied, "It's a familiar story, but its historic authenticity has not been verified. And we haven't confirmed what happened to the booklet, either."

I asked a third party to arrange an interview with Gong Quoxian, but the request was turned down for reasons that were never quite clear to me.

Feeling at a loss, I pinned my last hope on the library at the United Nations Office in Geneva, where archival materials concerning the League of Nations are kept.

"Did Lytton really receive 'Truth'?" I inquired at the library. Two days later, the library responded to the effect that the booklet had been located among League-related materials.

Bound in the style of a photo album with its front cover lined with blue fabric, the booklet was encased in a bag made of matching fabric. On the bag, the word "Truth" was embroidered in pink.

The booklet contains 75 information items, and some of the more prominent among them are titled as follows:

(1) List of names of innocent citizens who were shot by Japanese soldiers after Sept. 18, 1931;

(2) List of rewritten and deleted passages in school textbooks; and

(3) Letters censored by the Japanese military police.

Attached to the booklet was a 27-page typewritten letter in English explaining each item. Some of these pieces of evidence were obtained at great personal risk, the letter notes, and goes on to describe the premeditated nature of the Liutiaohu Incident and the subsequent Japanese violation of Chinese sovereignty, as well as the Japanese military's role in the establishment of Manchukuo.

The dynamiting of a section of the Japanese-owned South Manchuria Railway was used as a pretext for Japan's armed invasion, the letter states. The founding of Manchukuo was directed and manipulated by the Japanese, it adds.

The letter concludes with this desperate plea: Please remember that more than 95 percent of the Manchurian population is Chinese. The Chinese people desire to remain Chinese, and will do so forever.

All nine people who participated in the compilation of this booklet signed their names and identified their professions. However, the booklet I saw was missing all parts pertaining to anything that might suggest their identities. Perhaps they were removed by the League of Nations to protect their safety.

Chinese national sentiment rises

The Lytton Commission received 1,550 letters while it was in Manchuria. According to the Lytton Report, "all but two letters" were vehemently hostile toward the Japanese and the "new Manchurian government."

The report concluded to the effect: Having carefully examined the evidence, presented at official and private meetings as well as through letters and statements, we have concluded that the 'new Manchurian government' is perceived by the Chinese people as a puppet of the Japanese government, and that it does not have the support of the Chinese public.

As for the operations of the Japanese Army, the report refuted the Japanese claim of self-defense.

Sensing that the Lytton Report was not going to be in its favor, Japan proclaimed Manchukuo as an independent state in September 1932 just days before the report was released. The following year, Japan was the sole voice of dissent when the League of Nations adopted a resolution against recognition of Manchukuo's statehood. Its permanent Council membership notwithstanding, Japan withdrew from the League.

With the number of Chinese people who lived through the Manchurian Incident diminishing every year, I asked a local historian in Shenyang to find a survivor, and was introduced to Chao Lizhi. At 95, he was living in a home for the elderly.

Born and raised in the northernmost province of Heilongjiang, Chao was an impoverished tenant farmer at the time of the Manchurian Incident.

"We all felt the Kuomintang had abandoned us northeasterners," he recalled. The year after the incident, he said, Japanese soldiers came to his village. Chao joined a local resistance movement against the Japanese, and eventually became a guerrilla fighter.

Participating in anti-Japanese activities awakened a sense of national identity in the Chinese people. Bu Ping, director of the Institute of Modern History at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, noted: "The Chinese awareness of their own national identity, which began to bud around the time of the Opium War, surged with the Sept. 18 Incident and remained strong throughout the Second Sino-Japanese War. The Manchurian Incident served as the cue for the Chinese to unite."

Chang Hsueh-liang (1901-2001)

The eldest son of Chang Tso-lin (1875-1928), Chang Hsueh-liang inherited his father's "Warlord of Manchuria" mantle upon the latter's assassination at the hands of the Japanese military in 1928, and declared his support for the Kuomintang nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek.

In 1936, Chang put Chiang under house arrest in an attempt to get him to discontinue his policy of nonresistance against the Japanese and fighting the communists. Chiang's physical confinement resulted in Kuomintang and the Communist Party forming a united front against the Japanese military. Chang, however, would be put under house arrest and eventually transferred to Taiwan in 1949.

Lytton Commission

The Lytton Commission was dispatched by the League of Nations to investigate the Manchurian Incident. Headed by Victor Bulwer-Lytton, a former British governor of Bengal and son of a former Viceroy of India, the commission consisted of five members representing Britain, the United States, France, Germany and Italy. The Lytton Commission toured Japan and China from February 1932, and compiled the Lytton Report in autumn of that year. The commission refuted the Japanese claim that Manchukuo was a result of a spontaneous independence movement. But it also took Japan's interests into consideration and proposed the creation of an autonomous government under the auspices of the League of Nations, with Japan playing a central role.

The world in the 1920s

International society in the 1920s gave rise to a cooperative order known as the Washington System. The League of Nations was established in hopes of bringing international disputes to negotiated settlements.

The early years of the decade saw the signing of several treaties at the Washington Naval Conference. Among them were the Five-Power Treaty that limited the naval capabilities of its five signatories, and the Nine-Power Treaty that affirmed China's sovereignty and territorial integrity.

In 1928, the war-renouncing Pact of Paris, also known as the Kellogg-Briand Pact, was signed in the French capital.

Meantime, the Soviet Union and communism--the outcome of the 1917 Russian Revolution--were perceived as threats by the Imperial Japanese Army.

Then came the Great Depression of 1929. Shinichi Yamamuro, a Kyoto University professor, notes in his book that in 1931, it was a common practice among Japanese farmers to sell their daughters. Also that year, the ranks of undernourished children swelled, while labor disputes spiked to a pre-World War II record level amid rampant joblessness in cities.

The following year, family suicides occurred with unprecedented frequency, and the nation's suicide rate registered a record high, based on statistics on causes of death that were first compiled in 1900.

These desperate economic and social circumstances formed a backdrop to the creation of Manchukuo in 1932.

Fact File: Manchurian Incident

The Manchurian Incident was the starting point of Japan's invasion of northeastern China (Manchuria) and Inner Mongolia. By a narrow definition, the duration of the "incident" spans from the dynamiting of the South Manchuria Railway near Liutiaohu on Sept. 18, 1931, to the conclusion of the Tangku cease-fire treaty on May 31, 1933. By a broader definition, it went on until the Marco Polo Bridge Incident of July 7, 1937, that triggered the all-out, so-called Eight-Year War. In China, the Manchurian Incident is referred to as the Sept. 18 Incident.

To avoid being accused of violations of international law and war-renouncing treaties, the Japanese government of the time obtained Cabinet approval to refer to the military operations in Manchuria as jihen (incident), not war proper.

As spoils of its victory in the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905), Japan had come into possession of Lushun and Dalian as leased territories, as well as controls over the South Manchuria Railway. These holdings were referred to as "special rights and interests," and Japan valued them greatly. When a move to regain them surged in China, Japan's Kwantung Army, which was permanently stationed in Manchuria, blew up a section of the South Manchuria Railway near Liutiaohu in suburban Fengtian (present-day Shenyang), and passed it off as a sabotage by the Chinese military to justify the invasion of Manchuria. This was the Liutiaohu Incident.

The Kwantung Army sought to seize control of Manchuria and eastern Inner Mongolia. But as the top brass of the Imperial Japanese Army did not approve, the government created the puppet regime of Manchukuo, installing Pu Yi, the last Qing emperor, as its nominal ruler.

Fact File: Kwantung Army

The Kwantung Army was a unit of the Imperial Japanese Army stationed permanently in the Kwantung Leased Territory on the Liaodong Peninsula, where Lushun and Dalian are situated. Kwantung means "east of Shanhaiguan," an area at the eastern end of the Great Wall of China.

The unit was originally established to defend the Kwantung Leased Territory and the Japanese-controlled South Manchurian Railway. It was reorganized in 1919 and came to be called the Kwantung Army.

Until the Manchurian Incident in 1931, the army was a little over 10,000-strong. The Kwantung Army was responsible for planning the assassination of Chang Tso-lin as well as orchestrating the Liutiaohu Incident. After the Manchurian Incident, the troop strength was reinforced to suppress anti-Japanese resistance and engage in campaigns to invade northern China and Inner Mongolia. The notorious 731 Unit, which conducted human experiments to develop chemical weapons, was a unit of the Kwantung Army.(IHT/Asahi: November 30,2007)