Why Japanese fought on both sides of China's civil war

BY SHINICHI KUMAMOTO THE ASAHI SHIMBUN

Most Japanese believe that the nation's peaceful "postwar" era started on Aug. 15, 1945, when Japan lost World War II and surrendered.

Lu Yanchen, a farmer in Nanzhuang village in Shanxi province, stands before his home, where about 20 Imperial Japanese Army soldiers holed up in 1948 as members of the Kuomintang army during China's civil war. The gate's roof was damaged during the fighting. (SHINICHI KUMAMOTO)

Waichi Okumura

Yen Hsi-shan

But because Japan had invaded other parts of Asia, some Japanese troops were left behind even after the conflict ended and fought "postwar" battles as soldiers in those countries.

"I had never imagined that my grandfather underwent such a harrowing experience," said Takumi Abe, 22, a sophomore at J.F. Oberlin University (Obirin University) in Machida, western Tokyo.

Abe's grandfather, Yoshio, was called to duty in March 1945 and sent to China to fight. It wasn't until 1954, nine years after the war had ended, that he was finally able to return to Japan.

Yoshio worked as an elementary school teacher until he died of illness in 1963 at age 38.

Takumi was born 22 years later and grew up knowing practically nothing about his grandfather.

Takumi's grandmother, Teruko, 73, who lives in Fukushima Prefecture, never knew what her husband had experienced in China, either.

It was only in February 2007, when she saw the film "Ari no Heitai" (The Ants), that Teruko felt she finally understood the meaning behind Yoshio's silence.

The movie is a documentary about Japanese soldiers who fought in the Chinese Civil War between the Chinese Communist Party and an army that the Kuomintang organized after World War II, mobilized for the latter's side.

When the film was shown in Tokyo in September, Takumi went to the venue carrying Yoshio's photo.

Waichi Okumura, 83, the main character of the film, was there to give a lecture.

When Takumi showed the photograph to Okumura, he exclaimed, "It's Zenpu!" calling his brother in arms by his nickname.

The two trained together as new recruits and fought in World War II. They were together for the duration of the Chinese Civil War and returned to Japan at the same time.

The encounter with Takumi was also a moving experience for Okumura, who had never thought he would meet his war buddy's grandson under such circumstances.

Why did Okumura and others have to fight even after the war had ended? Why did Yoshio go to his grave without telling his side of the story? I decided to visit old battlegrounds to find out.

First, I visited Taiyuan, the capital of China's Shanxi province.

During World War II, the city served as the base of command of the first army of the Japanese China Expeditionary Army in northern China.

At the end of 1944, Okumura arrived in Ningwu, north of Taiyuan, after he was called to service.

It was 20 degrees below zero. Even Okumura, a native of Niigata Prefecture who was used to cold weather, found the climate almost unbearable.

It was also freezing the day I arrived there.

In Niutuozhai, in suburban Taiyuan, more than 100 Japanese soldiers died in 1948 after fighting fierce battles as members of the Kuomintang army.

I wanted to see the remains of an artillery emplacement there but I could not get near them because they were covered with snow.

Japan accepted the Potsdam Declaration and surrendered in August 1945. Japanese officers and troops were required to disarm and return to Japan in accordance with the terms of the declaration.

But 2,600 of the 59,000 men of the first army stayed on in China. Five hundred and fifty soldiers were killed during fighting against the Communist army, and more than 700, including Okumura, became prisoners of war.

"Of course, we wanted to go back to Japan, but we had no choice but to follow orders and stay behind," Okumura said. "In the army, orders of a superior officer were tantamount to orders of the emperor. We were not allowed to disobey or rebel."

Why were they made to stay behind systematically? As if moved by the grudges of fellow soldiers who perished in war, Okumura and others continued to search for clues in Japan and China.

Now, he believes he found the answer and gave the following account.

Secret deal in place?

When World War II ended, Shanxi province was under the control of Yen Hsi-shan (1883-1960), a warlord affiliated with the Kuomintang. However, the Communists were gaining power.

If the confrontation was going to develop into a civil war after a Japanese withdrawal, it was clear that the Kuomintang forces would be overwhelmed by the Communists.

Meanwhile, Raishiro Sumita, commander of the first army, and other officers of the Imperial Japanese Army were suspected by the Chinese of having committed war crimes.

Okumura believes that some Japanese officers secretly agreed with the Chinese warlord to leave Japanese troops behind to side with him in exchange for being exempted from war crimes charges.

Once Okumura and others returned to Japan, however, the Japanese government determined that they had stayed behind of their own accord and denied them compensation as former members of the Imperial Japanese Army.

They sued the government but lost.

I also visited Nanzhuang village, south of Taiyuan, where Okumura was seriously injured and taken prisoner in July 1948.

Kuomintang troops were besieged by Communist forces in this small village. Here and there, I found bullet holes in brick walls.

Lu Yanchen, a local farmer, recalled the time some 20 Japanese soldiers holed up in his home and stayed for two days.

Lu, then 14, hid underground in his backyard and waited for the fighting to end.

"Many Japanese soldiers were killed, and their bodies were piled up in the house," he said. "We cleaned the house after the fighting ended, but it wasn't easy because body grease had soaked into the floor."

I also met with Hu Pin, 75, who headed the machine gun unit of the Communist forces that surrounded Okumura and his fellow soldiers.

"I felt the spirit of Bushido (the feudal Japanese code of behavior valuing honor above life) in Japanese soldiers," said Hu, who is retired and now lives in Taiyuan. "Unlike the army of Yen Hsi-shan, they did not surrender easily. Some of them pretended to give up their weapons and then launched a counterattack."

Still, Hu added: "Be that as it may, I could not understand why Japanese were staking their lives for Yen Hsi-shan."

Taiyuan fell into the hands of Communist forces in April 1949, and the war also ended for the Japanese soldiers who had stayed behind.

Okumura, who had been taken prisoner, was moved to Beijing in December 1948. Soon after, he was transferred to a prison camp in Tianjin.

The Communist army captured Tianjin in January 1949, and the situation eventually led to the bloodless surrender of Beijing.

Japanese soldiers were also among the Communist troops that won the civil war.

I left Taiyuan for Tianjin. The purpose of my trip was to visit a monument dedicated to those killed in the battle that led to the fall of Tianjin.

I wanted to go there because I had heard from Yoshikiyo Hyodo, 79, who lives in Tokyo, that the name of a fellow Japanese soldier who fought with him is inscribed on the monument.

In 1932, Japan established the puppet state Manchukuo in northeastern China. Many Japanese were sent there to settle.

Among them were an organized group of boys called Manmo Kaitaku Seishonen Giyutai (Manchuria-Mongolia youth volunteer corps).

In 1943, Hyodo left his home in Ehime Prefecture and went to Harbin in northeastern China to join an institute to train leaders of the youth corps. A year later, he was joined by Kozo Sakaguchi from Osaka Prefecture.

The two stayed close until Sakaguchi's death.

In September 1946, the youth corps started training to carry stretchers.

Hyodo assumed the purpose was to carry sick and wounded soldiers of the Kwantung Army, or the Imperial Japanese Army stationed in Manchuria, and load them onto trains to be taken back to Japan.

But actually, Hyodo and his classmates were taken to a battlefield as members of a stretcher party of the army organized by the Chinese Communist Party.

At that time, Hyodo did not understand what was happening.

"Looking back, I remember something that might have had to do with how we ended up there," said Hyodo, adding that he did not want to discuss it "because it might cause trouble to those involved."

Members of the stretcher party had to carry soldiers wounded at the front, risking their lives amid a shower of bullets.

Hyodo, who was physically weak, was soon relieved of the duty and became a medic to treat injuries, while Sakaguchi, who was sturdy, continued to carry stretchers.

On Jan. 15, 1949, Hyodo's unit caught the commander of the Kuomintang army and liberated Tianjin. While its citizens were celebrating the Communist victory, Hyodo learned of Sakaguchi's death.

He was killed in a mortar attack. According to witness accounts, he was so badly injured that his internal organs were exposed.

Later, Hyodo took part in fighting across China, moving from battleground to battleground.

When the civil war ended, he became a pharmacist and returned to Japan in 1958.

Although he did everything he could to track down Sakaguchi's relatives in Osaka, he never located them.

Are there any traces of Sakaguchi in modern-day Tianjin?

I found the monument referred to by Hyodo, but the plot had been cut back because of an urban development project, and the register of the war dead had been moved to a different cemetery.

At the new cemetery, an official brought out the register and I went through all 2,025 names.

I found the name Sakaguchi at the end of the list, but the second character of the first name was different. It must have been an entry error.

I also visited the Beiping-Tianjin Campaign Memorial Museum, which exhibits records of the civil war.

Inside the museum is a corner in which the names of the war dead are inscribed one by one. But Sakaguchi's name was not there.

"I didn't know there were Japanese (among the dead)," said Liu Guangxin, 48, vice curator of the museum. He sounded apologetic.

"We want to promote Japan-China friendship," he continued. "If he left behind any personal effects, we are willing to put them on display."

Japanese expertise sought

Japanese soldiers fought in the Chinese Civil War, some as members of the Kuomintang army and others as part of the Communist forces. And a good number died in the war.

As this fact is beginning to fall into oblivion, even in China, a Chinese scholar in Japan has taken it upon himself to verify what actually took place.

Lu Xijun, 52, a professor of modern and contemporary Chinese history at Daito Bunka University in Saitama Prefecture, believes he can point to diverse aspects of Japan-China relations by focusing on the roles Japanese played in the process of postwar China's transformation.

"There were at least 20,000 to 30,000 Japanese on both the Kuomintang and Communist sides who stayed behind and 'worked' in China," Lu said.

Some were forced to remain, while others followed orders or stayed at the request of Chinese authorities, he said.

What is notable is the large number of doctors, nurses and engineers among them.

For example, a report written in January 1948 by a high-ranking Communist Party official in northeastern China states that 80 percent of the doctors and nurses at an army hospital were Japanese and that the Communist Party could only dispatch a single officer to head the hospital.

Okumura was treated by a Japanese medical officer after he was injured in Shanxi province and taken prisoner by Communist forces.

The story of the late Yaichiro Hayashi, a former captain of a flying corps of the Kwantung army, is also well known in China.

Hayashi is said to have taken his men with him to train Chinese pilots and oversee the technical training of the Communist forces, which had no air force at the time.

In short, both the Kuomintang and Communist forces relied on Japanese soldiers to make up for a shortage of combatants to fight on their sides as the civil war intensified.

Could it be that Communist military leaders wanted to take advantage of Hyodo's and Sakaguchi's youth and military training?

"We would have ended up being captured by the Kuomintang along the way even if they had tried to send us back to Japan," Hyodo said.

He believes the Communist leaders must have decided it would be better to have Japanese fighting for their army instead of letting them fight for the Kuomintang.

"I went to China, as a boy driven by a passion to take part in the establishment of Manchukuo, but what I actually did was to build a new China," Hyodo said with deep emotion. "Now, I only pray for the peaceful and prosperous co-existence of Japan and China."

Once they returned to Japan, those who fought on opposite sides in the Chinese Civil War found themselves in similar situations.

"I was visited by a detective of the security police the very next day after my return," Okumura said. "No employer would hire me, saying there was no telling what might become of their companies if they had taken in a man who had returned from (Red) China."

No doubt Yoshio Abe, who fought for the Kuomintang army, also had similar experiences. He never even confided in his wife, but perhaps behind his silence lay a deep sense of despair.

Takumi Abe made up his mind to take over his grandfather's unspoken thoughts.

On Dec. 14, he took the initiative to show "Ari no Heitai" at Obirin University. After the show, he had a discussion with Okumura, his grandfather's comrade, and Kaoru Ikeya, the film's director.

When Okumura spoke of his determination to go to court once again, Ikeya told Takumi: "You, too, are qualified to be a plaintiff." Takumi replied: "Yes, I know."

With the support of young people, the fight of Okumura and fellow soldiers who shared the same fate still continues.

Fact File: Chinese Civil War

Kuomintang forces, led by the government of the Republic of China, and Chinese Communist Party troops both fought against Japan as a common enemy during the Second Sino-Japanese War that started in 1937.

But antagonism flared again after Japan's defeat in World War II in 1945, and civil war erupted in China in June 1946.

The Kuomintang initially maintained dominance with a 4.3 million-strong army against the Communists, which had 1.2 million troops.

The Soviet Union, unlike during the Cold War era that followed, supported the Kuomintang government based on the Sino-Soviet Friendship and Alliance Treaty, signed in August 1945.

In June 1947, Yanan, where the Communists were based, fell.

The Communist Party, however, gained control in northeastern China, where the former Manchukuo was established.

The Communists launched and won three major battles after September 1948.

They are the Liaoshen campaign centering on Shenyang, Liaoning province, in the northeast; the Huaihai campaign centering on Xuzhou in the lower reaches of the Yellow River; and the Pingjin campaign in Beijing, then called Beiping, and Tianjin.

The Kuomintang gave up Beijing without bloodshed in January 1949, and its leader Chiang Kai-shek surrendered.

The capital city of Nanjing also fell. Mao Tse-tung declared the establishment of the People's Republic of China in Beijing in October.

Chiang fled to Taiwan to live in exile and was reinstated as president. He maintained the Republic of China but lost control over the Chinese mainland.

Yang Kuisong, a professor of history at Peking University, attributes the Kuomintang's defeat to "Chiang Kai-shek's strategic failure."

"The global community had recognized the Kuomintang as the central government," he said. "Chiang would not have been forced to give up the continent, had he taken advantage of the situation in a peaceful manner."

Chiang was apparently confident that once war broke out, the Kuomintang could easily win.

But his troops were already exhausted after eight years of fighting in the Second Sino-Japanese War. The Chinese people were also angry at the Kuomintang government for its failure to deal with inflation and root out entrenched corruption.

The Communist Party appealed to the masses with its call for land reform, which resonated with farmers. The fact that the Soviet Union had secretly passed on weapons left behind by the Japanese army to the Communists also had a major impact.

Fact File: Overseas Japanese

Some 6.88 million Japanese are believed to have been living abroad when Japan lost World War II in 1945.

Of them, 3.67 million were in the military, with 3.3 million serving in the army and 370,000 in the navy. Civilians, including immigrant settlers, numbered 3.21 million.

In the four years from Japan's defeat through the end of 1949, 6.24 million people, accounting for slightly more than 90 percent of overseas Japanese, returned to Japan.

It means that most of the remaining 640,000, not counting those who died in the course of repatriation, had stayed behind for one reason or another.

Those who did not return to Japan shortly after the war included war-displaced Japanese children and women who were left behind in northeastern China, the former Manchuria, and Japanese detainees in Siberia.

In addition, an estimated 1,000 or more Japanese soldiers are known to have stayed behind in Indonesia to fight in the country's war of independence.

In China, 1.2 million Japanese troops remained. By May 1946, 1.66 million Japanese, including civilians, returned to Japan. The figure accounted for more than 80 percent of Japanese who were in China after the war.

Thus, the case of Japanese soldiers who stayed behind in Shanxi province was exceptional.

For this Fact File box, Yoko Kato's "Senso no Ronri" (Logic of war) and other books were referenced.

Yen Hsi-shan

Yen Hsi-shan (1883-1960), a warlord of the Republic of China, studied in Japan and graduated from the Imperial Japanese Army Academy.

While in Japan, he joined the Chinese Revolutionary Alliance, an underground society organized by Sun Yat-sen, and fought against the Qing Dynasty in the Xinhai Revolution.

With the establishment of the Republic of China in 1912, Yen became the head of Shanxi province. He stayed in power for so long that he came to be dubbed the "Shanxi king."

He became commander of the second theater with the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937.

Yen fled to the mountains after losing Taiyuan to Japanese forces, and he is said to have concluded a local truce with them.

He fought against the Communist forces after the war, even mobilizing Japanese troops who had stayed behind.

Yen fled to the south after the fall of Taiyuan to the Communists in 1949. He eventually moved to Taiwan, where he served as prime minister and defense minister of the Nationalist government.

Yen devoted his late years to writing. He died in Taipei.(IHT/Asahi: February 1,2008)