My memories of the Chinese continent begin with Fushun. Known for its extensive open-pit operations, Fushun was a coal-mining town run by the South Manchurian Railway Company. The image that
floats before my eyes is one of steep green precipices in the distance
spiraling downward into the valley depths like tiers of gyrating stairways. And then
there were the dark, glossy
layers of coal, the procession of freight trains, the sound
of their whistles reverberating into the distance, the wobbly haze of factory
smoke rising into the distant sky, and the red sun descending into the expanse
of the mountain valley.
I was born on February 12, 1920, the ninth year of Taishō,
in North Yantai in
the suburbs of present-day Shenyang (formerly Fengtian), the
capital city of Liaoning Province in Northeast China, or Manchuria as the
region was previously
known. As my whole family moved to Fushun soon after I was
born, the town
became the backdrop for practically all my memories as a
young girl.
The Manchurian sun setting into the sorghum fields is a
famous sight, but
for me the sun in Fushun’s western sky beautifully
complemented the grand view
of the open mines as the fading rays brought an extra tinge
of red to the knotweed
blossoms along the road to the coal mines. I was then living
in the center of town
on Sixth Street, while the mining area was in Fushun’s
southern suburbs. As
elementary school students, we could go there only during
excursions that were
part of our school curriculum. Passing through the town
center on our way to
Yong An Elementary School on South Main Street with my good
friends, Toshiko
and Midori, and going back the same way, were big parts of
my everyday routine.
Going straight east on East Seventh Street, we walked beneath
the poplar trees
that lined the chessboard-like streets from the corner of
East Sanbanchō to Fushun Shrine. Even today, the name of Fushun evokes not so
much of the scene of
chimney-filled coal mines as vivid memories of rows of green
poplars rising into
a sky so blue that it hurts the eyes.
The town of Fushun itself was witnessing vibrant economic
growth, reflecting
Japan’s national policy of promoting development of the
area’s natural resources.
1
2
At the same time, the coal-mining town was living in fear of
attacks from antiJapanese bandits. But for a young girl like me, Fushun was
just a quiet community of rolling hills where the enchanting poplar trees
coexisted in perfect
harmony with the distant view of mountain valleys and their
open mines. And
then there were my good friends, my loving parents, and my
dear brother and
sisters. . . . At least that was what this peaceful town was
like before the outbreak
of the Manchurian Incident.
I lived in Fushun until I was twelve. Until the age of
eighteen, when I visited
Tokyo on a short trip in the fall, I knew nothing about my
Japanese homeland. I
was what you might call a dyed-in-the-wool Manchurian girl.
We in the Japanese
community spoke only Japa nese in our daily lives. But years
later, I was also
an actress using the Chinese stage name Li Xianglan,
speaking Chinese, singing
Chinese songs, and in the process turning myself more or
less into a woman of
indecipherable nationality. In the prewar years, this naïve
young girl, swept by
the currents of her time, thought she could live her life
loving two countries—her
native land and the land of her birth—but in reality those
two countries were facing off against each other in a war. It was only much
later that I could acutely
experience a sadness comparable to what a person of dual
nationality might feel.
During my Fushun years, I was just a very ordinary girl who
knew nothing about
the world.
I was my parents’ first child. My father, Yamaguchi Fumio,
was born in Saga
Prefecture in 1889, the twenty-second year of Meiji. My
grandfather Hiroshi was
a Sinologist of samurai origin. My father studied Chinese
under the influence of
my grandfather, and, in 1906, the year after the
Russo-Japanese War ended, he
traveled to the Chinese continent, as he had long been
yearning to do. After studying in Beijing, he received an acquaintance’s
recommendation to work for the South
Manchurian Railway Company (Minami-Manshū Tetsudō Kabushiki
Gaisha, or
Mantetsu), first at its Yantai Coal Mining Office and later
at the Fushun mines.
As he was proficient in Chinese and knowledgeable about
Chinese customs and
the people’s way of thinking, he became an instructor of
Chinese and Chinese affairs to Mantetsu’s employees and apparently worked also
as a consultant for Fushun County.
All the basic education I received in preparing me to speak
standard Chinese—
that is, Mandarin—came from my father. Like the contingents
of young Japanese
men who crossed the sea to China at the time, Father was
something of a nationalist in temperament, but twice as enthusiastic as the
others about studying the
Chinese language. He also had many Chinese friends and
acquaintances. Before
entering Mantetsu, he had studied at the Association of
Common Learning
(Tongxue Hui), a Beijing school specializing in teaching
Chinese. Among his
friends during those days were some pro-Japanese Chinese
figures such as Li Ji-
3
chun and Pan Yugui, both prominent in financial and
political circles. Following
a Chinese custom practiced among close friends, they
exchanged brotherhood vows
with my father. Accordingly, I became as a matter of decorum
their adoptive daughter and was given Chinese names such as Li Xianglan and Pan
Shuhua.
My mother, like my father, was from Kyushu, hailing from
Fukuoka Prefecture. Her father, Ishibashi Kinjirō, operated a shipping agency
whose business
fell on hard times with the development of the railroad ser
vice. After first moving to Gyeongseong (present-day Seoul) in Korea, the
family settled in China under the auspices of her uncle, the owner of a retail
outlet of polished rice in Fushun. It was there that my father, Fumio, and my
mother, Ai, five years his junior,
met and got married. Judging from superficial appearance, I had
no idea whether
their marriage was the result of a private romance or a
family arrangement, as
people from the Meiji generation never talked about such
matters.
My father studied classical Chinese books and the Chinese
language in Japan
before his Tongxue Hui days. From the viewpoint of Japan’s
educational system,
he was a self-educated man. My mother, on the other hand,
was a graduate of
Tokyo’s Japan Women’s University and what you might call an
intellectual type.
She was strict about her children’s education, and when it
came to matters of manners and etiquette, she was particularly demanding. Since
I was not good at mathematics, I was made to study with a student who took up
lodging at Fushun’s branch
of the Higashi Honganji.1 Yet Mother also had a childlike
side to her. Far from
scolding the children for playing in the dirt in the garden,
she would join us and
cover herself with mud as she dashed about with total
mischievousness.
At school, my favorite subjects were Japanese language and
music, but I did
poorly in mathematics and gymnastics no matter how hard I
tried. I did best in
music. My parents had high if vague expectations of me as
their eldest child and
were quite enthusiastic about my education, though I was not
asked to learn things
like the tea ceremony, flower arrangement, cooking, and
needlework like girls back
in my homeland. Instead, I was made to take violin, piano,
and koto lessons. After
returning home from school, our inseparable band of three
girls would always
have our playing time; I also had to go for music lessons
every other day, and at
night I had to attend Father’s Chinese class—quite a frantic
schedule for just a little child. I was fond of singing, and it appeared that I
was also a passable performer.
There were times when I was chosen to represent my class of
the year by singing
solo at school plays and concerts.
Father seemed to have expected that his scrupulous Chinese
instruction would
enable me in the future to apply that knowledge in a
profession related to SinoJapanese relations. As he himself had the dubious
title of Consultant to Mantetsu
and to Fushun County, he apparently hoped that I would
distinguish myself by
becoming a politician or a journalist after working as a
politician’s secretary or
4
interpreter. When I was in kindergarten, he would sit me in
front of a desk during his free time and give me private lessons on Chinese
pronunciation. When
I became an elementary school student, he made me attend his
evening Chinese
class at the Mantetsu Research Center. I sat in the last row
of the classroom and
was treated just like a regular student among other adults.
As we all know, geographically, historically, and
ethnically, the Chinese continent is a huge land mass with numerous spoken
languages, even though they are
all called “Chinese” for short. It is often said that even
in Japan, people speaking
the Aomori and Kagoshima dialects cannot understand each
other, but there is no
comparison with Chinese dialects, which are, simply put, not
so much regional
tongues as independent foreign languages. The ways people
speak are as varied as
the country’s geographical regions, thus rendering
communication difficult. The
speech used around the capital of Beijing, though only one
among many dialects,
was therefore made into a standard language applicable
throughout the country.
That was the language Father taught me.
In prewar Japan, baptized as it was by European thought in
the Meiji period,
education in such Western languages as English, German, and
French was given
much attention, while it was extremely rare for Chinese to
be included in the regular school language curriculum. For this reason, it was
common for aspiring
students like my father to begin studying classical Chinese
and Chinese poetry
in Chinese schools in Japan before going to places like
Beijing’s Tongxue Hui or
Shanghai’s Academy of East Asian Common Culture (Dong’ya
Tongwen Shuyuan).
A Chinese language text widely used by such students was the
Kyūshūhen, a most
highly regarded work compiled by Miyajima Daihachi and the
only Chinese language series in Japan during the prewar years. Miyajima learned
Chinese along
with men like Kawashima Naniwa (well known as the foster
father of Kawashima
Yoshiko) and Futabatei Shimei in foreign language institutions
during the early
Meiji period. Reacting against the government’s lack of
attention to Chinese, Miyajima staunchly chose to remain outside the arena of
political power and remained
in the Academy of Good Neighbors (Zenrin Gakuin) as an
erudite scholar of Chinese studies.2
Father also learned Chinese through the Kyūshūhen and
proceeded to further
his studies in China itself. There, he used the textbook
while serving as a lecturer in
Mandarin, the dialect traditionally used in Beijing’s
official circles, to Fushun’s
Mantetsu employees. As one of his students, I studied the
same textbook from the
elementary to the advanced levels. In those days, it was
mandatory for Japanese
Mantetsu employees to study Mandarin to facilitate their
communication with
the Chinese. Based on a standardized national qualifying
examination, the certification had five levels ranging from elementary to
advanced: Four, Three, Two,
One, and Special. As Mantetsu allowed only those who passed
the examination
5
to become regular employees with a salary commensurate with
the level of their
proficiency, all Father’s students studied with undeviating
concentration.
Father taught Chinese at night after the day’s work had
ended. Every evening,
a large number of Japanese employees would pack the lecture
hall at the Mantetsu
Study Center. I attended the elementary class when I was in
my beginning years
at elementary school, and I passed Level Four when I was in
the fourth grade;
during my middle school years I took the intermediate level
and passed Level
Three in the sixth grade. Thus, a bob-haired “Tiny Tot”—that
was the nickname
Father gave me—was the only child, and the only female at
that, who attended his
classes. Father would meticulously teach pronunciation one
word at a time and
do demonstrations of sample readings while explaining the
meaning and usage of
expressions before asking the whole class to repeat. After
that, each student would
practice the drill. When his adult students were done, he
would ask, “Yoshiko,
why don’t you pronounce this word. All right, now what does
it mean?” When I
offered my answer, he would nod with apparent satisfaction.
I have no intention here to give a lecture on Chinese, a
language that I almost
no longer use. But the pronunciation of Chinese, and
Mandarin in particular, is
very complicated and difficult. Take for instance the case
of aspirates. The number
seven is pronounced “qi,” but when spoken without
aspiration, the pronunciation
might lead one to take the word to mean “chicken.” Father
taught such distinctions with an easy-to-understand method. In practicing
aspirated “qi,” he would
say, “Students! Take out your facial tissues, but not to
blow your nose! Fold them
into thin, longish strips and apply saliva to one end to
make them hang down from
the tip of your nose. That’s it! You got it! Now, say ‘qi’!
One, two, three, qi, qi, qi.”
The sight of all those full-grown adults chirping “qi” in
unison with thin strips of
tissues hanging from their noses might strike others as
ludicrous, but Father’s students, myself included, could not have been more
serious.
Apart from receiving Father’s special Chinese drills, I was
a very ordinary girl.
Since my first year at elementary school, I was in the same
class with two other girls,
Yanase Toshiko, from a nearby family that ran a hospital,
and Ogawa Midori,
whose family next door operated a restaurant. We did
everything together, including our violin and piano lessons. We all had to have
the same things, too. We
had the same dresses made at the same Western dress shop,
which we would wear
on the same day; we carried the same school backpacks and
wore the same shoes.
We had our hair trimmed at the same barber shop every month
around the same
time and ended up with the same hairstyle. Come to think of
it, we had the same
ribbons. If, by some mistake, one of us should violate our
“agreement,” it would
turn into a huge life crisis in our miniature society.
That is to say, the years of my childhood were mundane and
peaceful. At the
time, however, war clouds were already gathering around the
world of grown-ups.
6
In September of 1931, when I was in sixth grade, mortar fire
was heard near Fushun. It signaled the outbreak of the Manchurian Incident and
the beginning of
the fifteen-year war between China and Japan.
The September 18th incident was triggered by a railroad
explosion at the hands
of the Japanese military at Liutiao Lake (then called
Liutiaogou or Liutiao Ditch),
only fift y kilometers west of Fushun in the Fengtian
suburbs. From then on, my
destiny would come under the sway of the tides of the times.
And yet, our children’s world remained as carefree as before, and I have no
recollections whatsoever
about this particular incident. But another incident that
occurred on a summer
night in 1932, the following year, was forever burned into
my memory. Even to this
day, it sometimes reappears in my dreams.
Shaken awake in the middle of the night, I got up from my
bed rubbing my
sleepy eyes and found Mother looking on, ashen-faced, and Father
all dressed and
about to leave home. Even though it was the dead of night,
there were noises outside; cars came and went, and people were shouting. Mother
said, “Something terrible might have happened! Now get up and get dressed. No
matter what happens,
don’t leave my side!”
I was then twelve years old and a first-year student at
Fushun Girls’ School. I
had four brothers and sisters, all very small. “Yoshiko, you
are the big sister. Take
good care of them.” With those words, Father left in a
hurry. I had no idea what I
was supposed to do. What had happened? I asked Mother but
did not get any clear
answer. “A messenger came and asked Father to go to the
Mantetsu office” was all
she said, with no further elaboration.
Like a mother bird protecting her fledglings, Mother put her
arms around
my brothers and sisters, bundling them together. She looked
as if she hadn’t had
any sleep at all. After a while, she quietly pointed her
finger and drew my attention to the window. Cautiously, I sneaked up to the
window sill, trying not to make
any noise, and opened the rain shutter a small crack to peep
out, only to find that
the night sky had turned bright red.
The roofs of the buildings, along with the poplar trees
lining the curb, emerged
before my eyes like a dark silhouette, their background
engulfed in a ferocious sea
of red, with tongues of flames blazing wildly into the
distant night sky. I realized it
was a fire, but I couldn’t utter the word. Uncontrollable
shivers ran through my
body though it was summertime.
Even as a child, I realized that the source of the fire was
the open-pit coal mines,
and yet I knew that it was no accident. Had the fire been a
mere accident, Mother
wouldn’t have turned so utterly pale, considering that we
were quite far away from
the scene. On top of that, the town, all lit up, was thrown
into confused commotion.
As Mother and the children huddled together in the night,
the fire gradually
died out, its lingering flames dissolving in the first hints
of morning light. Noth-
7
ing had happened to us, and as dawn came, we went back to
bed. Before long my
brothers and sisters were soundly slumbering. Only I
couldn’t sleep. When I stood
again by the window and looked outside, the sky glowed
white. I rested my chin
on the window sill and recalled the horror of the fire that
had blackened the summer night sky just a few moments ago. As the rays of
morning sun pierced the air,
the strong reddish-brown color of Fushan’s soil grew
increasingly distinct. Next
door to our house stood the Association of Industry, a
commerce and trade organization, with its courtyard extending all the way to
the area below our family’s
windows. This was where Toshiko, Midori, and I would relax
in the cool of the
evening in our yukata after our evening bath.
That morning, as we opened the windows at home, a large
group of men walked
into the courtyard while talking loudly among themselves.
They were members
of the military police and other Japanese in plain clothes.
Walking in front of them
was a middle-aged Chinese man, his eyes blindfolded and his
hands tied behind
his back. He walked with staggering steps, poked along by
the military police holding the end of the rope. Judging by his clothes, I got
the feeling that the Chinese
was a head coolie, a member of the lower working class.
The group of men tied the head coolie to a huge pine tree in
the middle of the
courtyard and removed his blindfold. The Chinese man’s face
was looking in my
direction. Timidly, I watched this unusual spectacle from my
window, and I couldn’t
help feeling that the eyes of the bound man were looking at
me. Gradually, many
more men, Chinese and Japanese, gathered around the scene.
With gun in hand, an MP began to interrogate the man. He was
shouting,
but I couldn’t catch exactly what he was saying. Clenching
his teeth and turning
away his ashen face, the Chinese coolie made no attempt to
utter even a single
word. The MP yelled still louder for a while, but again he
got no reply. Even as the
MP’s voice grew increasingly violent, the Chinese man
averted his eyes and did
not respond.
Just then, before I knew it, the MP flipped his weapon with
his hand and hit
the Chinese man’s forehead as hard as he could with the butt
of his rifle. At that
moment I instinctively closed my eyes, and the hitting was
already over; yet the
image of the rifle drawing a big arc in the air had already
burned into my mind.
The next moment, I saw blood gushing from the man’s forehead
and streaming
onto his chest as he slumped over. Collapsing while still
tied to the pine tree, he
did not move after that. The single blow apparently killed
him.
The hush that had fallen upon the crowd now gave way to a
renewed state of
commotion, and a human circle was again formed around the
pine tree. Then, as
the noisy crowd dispersed in all directions, what was left
standing in the courtyard
was only the solitary pine tree. It was as though the man’s
body had been carried
off by the wave of people around him. The familiar sight of
the square reappeared,
8
with the rays of the sun falling low on the front of the
Industry Association
building, accentuating the stark whiteness of its walls.
Stunned by what had happened, I thought that what I
witnessed must have
been a nightmare. Nobody could tell me that everything I saw
before me was any
different from the usual peaceful morning scene. I dashed
out of my house and
into the courtyard as fast as I could, despite Mother’s
shouting for me to stop. The
earth at the base of the pine tree was covered with a pool
of blood. When Mother,
chasing after me, embraced me tightly in her arms, I began
to cry aloud for the
first time.
I wrote at the beginning that an unforgettable memory from
my childhood
was of the green foliage of the poplar trees, but that image
of Fushun streets lasted
only as long as I was in elementary school. After I entered
a secondary girls’ school,
unremitting incidents involving bandit attacks around the
suburbs of the coal
mines led to a travel ban beyond the city limits for
nonessential business. On the
grounds that the Japanese army in Fushun was shorthanded,
officials, bureaucrats,
and retired military personnel formed squadrons for civic
defense, and police units
were also organized in various sections of town. In 1932, at
the age of twelve, a
time when I was starting to comprehend things about the
world, the color of Fushun’s poplar-lined streets was changing from green to
red, the red of gunfire,
the color of the conflagration that night, the color of the
earth at the interrogation square, and the color of blood gushing from the head
coolie’s forehead.
What in fact had happened that night? Years later, I learned
from Father that
it involved attacks by bandits on the Fushun coal mines.
Powerful Manchurian
bandit militias in those days included the Big Sword Society
(Dadao Hui), the Red
Spear Society (Hongqiang Hui), and the forces led by Ma
Zhanshan.3 Among them,
the Red Spear Bandits formed a sort of religious community,
a contingent of brave
and resolute local outlaws who, red spear in hand, believed
in their immortality,
gained by ingesting magic inscriptions. It was rumored that
it was this group that
had attacked Fushun.
However, referring to those groups as “outlaws,” “mountain
brigands,” or
“horseback bandits” was just arbitrary name-calling on the
part of the Japanese.
From the point of view of the Chinese people, they were
antigovernment militias
forming an anti-Manchukuo and anti-Japanese guerilla force.
In the region, an
anti-Japanese volunteer army (kan’ri yiyongjun), a
resistance force referred to as
“communist bandits,” was also becoming active.
From what I heard from Father and friends, along with the
notes from those
who worked at the Fushun mines at the time, the incident
occurred on the night
of September 15, 1932, not as my memory registered, on a
midsummer night. September 15th was the day of the Mid-Autumn Festival, a
holiday for both the Chi-
9
nese and the Japanese at the coal mines. People had spent
the festive but quiet evening drinking wine or savoring tea as they admired the
full moon. Then, during
the night, fires were set all over the coal-mining hills. Of
the ten coal-mining control offices, four were burned down. The number of
attacking bandits was said to
be around one thousand.
According to Northern Wind: Thirty Years of Challenge
(Sakufū: Chōsen
sanjūnen, 1985), a memoir by Kuno Kentarō, who was an
employee at Mantetsu’s
Fushun mine at the time, it appeared that on September 14th,
the night before the
Mid-Autumn Festival, the bandits stayed in villages in
Yangbaibao and made preparations for their fiery attacks. They had laborers
from the workers’ dormitory bring
them large quantities of inflammatory materials and lumps of
coal from the mining areas. They then made ready-to-use torches out of those
materials by wrapping
them in cleaning rags and tying them with electric wires.
The next night, they
soaked them in heavy oil, set them on fire, and, after
breaking all glass windows
with spears or bars, threw their firebrands all at once into
the coal-processing facility, the winch room, the repair areas, and the
offices. They carried out their plans
with extraordinary precision. Spurred on by the wind, the
firebrands quickly turned
the southern side of the open-pit mines into a river of
flames. That river of fire is
what Kuno reported seeing from the streetcar stop at Yamato
Park and from inside the streetcar on his way to the Electric Lights Department
in the town center
after receiving an emergency call. It was also the very
spectacle I saw that night
through the rain shutters at Fushun’s reddened sky.
Watanabe Kan’ichi, head of Yangbaibao’s coal-collecting
center, was killed
by a company of bandits as he rushed to his office at the
scene. Additionally, six
or seven Japanese employees were killed in Yangbaibao and
Dongxiangkang. As
most of the Kwantung Army’s Fushun garrison was out of town
for security duties in the surrounding areas, the weak defense left in the area
was caught off guard,
leading to the success of the bandits’ surprise attacks. The
coal mine’s security force,
comprised of stationary troops, the police, and retired
military men, fought desperately alongside the city’s volunteer police groups
and finally managed to drive
back the bandits. It was not until the early morning hours
of the next day that the
fire was brought under control in the major areas. That
dawn, on September 16th,
was when I witnessed the interrogation scene of the head
coolie who was believed
to have assisted the guerillas.
The story described above was what I first learned about the
sequence of the
Yangbaibao Incident from Father and the individuals
connected with the Fushun
coal mines. It was the anti-Japanese guerilla attack
occurring that night that first
implanted in me the horror of fire and blood. But in fact,
there was an even more
wretched sequel to this incident, which was covered up at
the time and only gradu-
10
ally came to light after the war ended. I am referring to
the Roundtop Hill Incident
(Pingdingshan shijian), which occurred the next morning and
involved a massive
massacre of Chinese residents from the hamlet of
Pingdingshan not far from
Yangbaibao. The act was committed by the Japanese Fushun
garrison in retaliation against the anti-Japanese guerilla attacks the night
before.
In the early dawn of September 16, the Fushun garrison
surrounded Pingdingshan and scrupulously rounded up each and every one of the
villagers from their
homes on suspicion of harboring or assisting anti-Japanese
guerillas. Lined up at
the foothills of Pingdingshan, the villagers were mowed down
by machine-gun
fire. Their bodies were then doused with oil, burned, and
buried a few days later
under a layer of earth and rocks from a dynamite-induced
landslide from the cliff.
Thus, the two tragedies at Yangbaibao and Pingdingshan were
interconnected
through cause and effect.4 What I heard from Father was what
might be called the
first act of the Yangbaibao Incident; the scene that opened
it was the inferno I
saw from my window that night. The interrogation in the
courtyard that I witnessed from the same window the next morning was, then, an
episode in the
second act, which was the Pingdingshan Incident.
I suppose part of the reason that Father never mentioned
anything to me about
the Pingdingshan Incident had to do with the fact that the
shameful act had been
committed by the Japanese, but apparently the real reason
was that the episode was
looked upon as taboo by concerned parties at the time. In
fact, the Pingdingshan
Incident was later taken up by the League of Nations and
escalated into an international controversy when the Lytton Commission deemed
it serious enough to send
a special investigative team to Fushun. The Kwantung Army
responded by putting a gag order on the subject and imposing strict media
control. For this reason,
not even Fushun’s local population in general, to say
nothing of Japanese residents
in China or the Japanese in Japan itself, had any public
knowledge of the affair,
which remained buried until the end of the war. In 1948,
sixteen years after the
Pingdingshan Incident, a military tribunal of the Chinese
Nationalist government
handed out death sentences, not to those within the Fushun
garrison responsible
for the massive murders, but to seven individuals, including
Kubo Makoto, who
held a doctorate in engineering and had been the head of the
coal mines.
As time went by, more facts about the entire incident were
unveiled after Morishima Morito, former Consul to Fengtian, mentioned it in his
Conspiracy, Assassinations, and the Sword: A Diplomat’s Reminiscences (Inbō
Ansatsu Guntō: Ichigaikōkan no kaisō, 1950). For my part, however, I learned
the truth about the
Pingdingshan Incident when I revisited my beloved Fushun
during my recent trip
to China.
Going south from downtown Fushun along the valley of the
open-pit coal
mines, one can see Pingdingshan’s rolling landscape not far
from the hamlet of
11
Yangbaibao. On the hilltop stands a plaque commemorating the
dead; and in the
foothills one can find the Pingdingshan Memorial Hall for
the Remains of Our
Sacrificed Fellow Countrymen. The interior of the building
is divided into rectangular sections resembling exhibition sites of
archeological finds. Everywhere,
scattered before one’s eyes, are human bones—bones of human
arms stretching
vainly into the air, skulls of mothers who still seemed to
let out screams in their
last moments of trying to shield their children from harm.
I closed my eyes and recalled to my mind Fushun on the night
of September
15th and at dawn the next day. That morning, on the 16th,
just as I was witnessing
the interrogation scene at the courtyard with breathless
horror, the people of
Pingdingshan were being killed en masse in the very
foothills where the memorial
hall now stands. There are various estimates as to the
number of murdered victims, ranging from four hundred to three thousand. As I
stepped out of the memorial hall, the summer breeze over the rolling hills of
Pingdingshan seemed to
sob with bone-chilling sorrow as it drifted across the
trees.
Regardless of whether war time atrocities occur in the East
or West, there are
always divergent views and interpretations as to what
actually happened. The Pingdingshan Incident is no exception. To be sure, there
have been reports that primarily focused on the Pingdingshan killings with only
the slightest examination
of the coal mine attacks by the anti-Japanese militia.
Doubts have also been raised
about the trial and execution of the seven civilians,
Director Kubo included, who
were not directly responsible for the incident. With various
different estimates, it
also remains unclear how many people were actually killed.5
On the other hand,
it is an undeniable fact, substantiated by virtually all
sources and testimonies, that
the Japanese Fushun garrison, specifically the Second
Squadron of the Second Battalion in the Manchurian Independence Defense
Infantry, had recklessly and brutally massacred noncombatant civilians in a
convulsive act of retaliation. The morning after the incident, Director Kubo,
along with the other executives of the Fushun
mines, were reportedly stunned and agonized to learn of what
had happened.
While there have been various testimonies detailing the
incident, the most
objective account is thought to have come from A Record of
the Fushun Mines at
the End of the War (Bujun tankō shūsen no ki, 1963) by Kume
Kyōko, an employee
at the Office of Electricity of the Fushun mines. She
described what occurred
as follows:
Taken by surprise with a small garrison force in the absence
of Commander
Officer Captain K, it was true that Lieutenant N, the
officer in charge, suffered
a setback more than he could bear. Completely convinced that
there had been
spies within the Fushun mines passing information to the
bandits over security matters, he viewed with greatest suspicion the residents
of Pingdingshan
12
where the bandits had staged their attack. . . . As he was
searching the hamlet
with a platoon, stolen objects from the scene of the attack
the night before were
found, leading him to conclude that the villagers had acted
in unison with the
bandits. Individuals being questioned at the village offered
ambiguous answers
and did not readily confess. Angry at what was happening, he
gave orders for
a “thorough investigation,” the temporary removal of the
residents, and their
assembly at the foothills about one kilometer west of the
village. Lieutenant
N was by reputation a man of high-strung nerves and was
extremely severe
when it came to military matters. . . .
When all men, women, and children of all ages were lined up,
Lieutenant N ordered his men to kill all by a hail of machine gun fire. A few
villagers
who were protected by the fallen bodies of their fellow
neighbors and managed to escape under the cover of night were later able to
tell the world what
had happened through the reporting of foreign news agencies.
After the League
of Nations received the report while in session in Geneva at
the time, Ambassador Plenipotentiary Matsuoka, later to become Mantetsu’s
President, found
himself unable to avoid answering some very tough
questions.6 Meanwhile,
as we Japanese company employees at the time privately
complained of the
act of atrocity, the victims’ bodies were burned with oil by
Japanese defense
troops and buried with earth and rocks from a
dynamite-induced explosion
at the hilltop.7
The peculiar character of Lieutenant N to which Kume’s work
refers—his
“high-strung nerves”—has also been mentioned in other
sources. I discovered a
remote cause of this personality trait in a chapter I read
later in Sawachi Hisae’s
Women in Shōwa History (Shōwashi no onna, 1980). I refer
readers to Sawachi’s
book on N’s circumstances before he joined the Fushun
garrison and her analysis
of his personality; here I wish to mention that his wife
committed suicide on the
eve of his departure for the Manchurian front in December
1931. She laid her sixmatted tatami room in her house with white shirayū fiber
before slashing the right
side of her throat with a dagger nearly a foot long,
accomplishing what she set out
to do in a sea of blood.8 The young couple had just been
married in October
the year before; the lieutenant was twenty-nine, his wife
twenty-one. The alcove of
the room in which the suicide took place was reportedly
decorated with a picture
of the Emperor and the Empress. The wife fashioned her hair
in a “swept-back”
style and wore a black crested kimono with patterns of a
peony and seven autumn
flowers on the sleeve. She was also wearing minimal makeup
and white tabi.
In the will she left to her husband, she wrote, “My profound
joy fills my heart.
I am at a loss to offer my words of jubilation, but I will
gladly leave the world be-
13
fore your departure for the front tomorrow. Please do not
have the slightest worry,
as I will do what little I can to look after you and all
your comrades. Please carry
out as much as your heart pleases for the sake of our
nation.”
While the real motivations for the new wife’s suicide were
unclear, she was
much venerated by the nation’s newspapers as a shining
example worthy of emulation by all wives in a nation mobilized for war. Wars
without fail incite fanaticism among human beings, bring madness to nations,
and transform the times into periods of lunatic chaos.
Now, juxtaposing what I witnessed in Fushun fift y-five
years earlier with an
incident rescrutinized and illuminated by history, I become
acutely aware of a sense
of inevitability that links the individual and history, for
I found myself situated
exactly at the confluence of the time and the place of
destiny. The series of events
I mentioned earlier occurred on the day when the
Japan-Manchukuo Protocol was
signed, leading to Japan’s recognition of Manchukuo. The
Liutiao Lake Incident,
taking place the year before on September 18th, was the
signal shot to the outbreak
of the Manchurian Incident. Surely, the anti-Japanese
guerillas must have planned
their uprising to coincide with the first anniversary of
those events. Not only was
I in the middle of the Sino-Japanese conflict, in terms of
time and space; I was at
the focal point of its origins.
A recent Chinese source entitled A History of the
Anti-Japanese Volunteer Army
in Northeast China (Dongbei Kangri Yiyongjun shi, 1985)
states that it was Liang
Xifu who led three thousand men from the People’s
Self-Defense Army of Liaoning
to launch an attack on Yangbaibao. In retaliation, the Japa
nese army instigated
the Pingdingshan Incident by massacring over three thousand
Chinese residents.
The Pingdingshan Incident led me another step toward my
destiny: because of it,
my family moved to Fengtian.
After the incident, the military police took Father in for
questioning on suspicion of having worked with the enemy. He was, in other
words, suspected of
betrayal. Father had many Chinese friends and acquaintances,
and the police’s
assumption was that he had spoken with the bandit leaders
concerning a peace
settlement. In those days, primarily because of its coal and
steel production, Fushun was Manchuria’s largest mining and industrial
center—hence, the target of
attack from a variety of bandits. With his patriotic
temperament, knowledge of
the Chinese language, and understanding of Chinese public
sentiment, Father
might have convinced himself to work seriously on
maintaining peaceful relations in an attempt to avert any possible future
attacks on the city. For this reason, he had already been forced to resign from
his position as a consultant to
Fushun County. It was at this point in time that the
anti-Japanese guerilla attacks
took place.
14
Father was subsequently cleared of suspicions of working
with the enemy, but
life for him in Fushun became difficult. He decided
therefore to leave the place
where he had been residing for so long and, availing himself
of the goodwill of his
friends, to move to Fengtian.
The year was 1933, and I was turning thirteen.
========================================================================
========================================================================
Notes to Chapter 1: My Fushun Years:
1. A branch temple of Kyoto’s Higashi Honganji, the head
temple of the
Ōtani Branch of the True Pure Land Sect of Buddhism.
2. The accurate name of Miyajima Daihachi’s Chinese language
academy was
Zenrin Shoin. For a study of other Chinese language texts
compiled in the Meiji period and the contents of Miyajima’s Kyūshūhen, see Paul
Sinclair, “Thomas Wade’s
Yü yen tzŭ êrh chi and the Chinese Language Textbooks of
Meiji-Era Japan,” Asia
Major 16, no. 1 (2003): 147–174.
3. Ma Zhanshan (1885–1950) became Governor and
Commander-in-Chief of
Heilongjiang Province in October 1931 and soon acquired wide
recognition as a national hero in his war of resistance against the Japanese
invaders. Ostensibly brought
by Doihara Kenji to defect to Manchukuo, Ma orga nized the
Northeast AntiJapanese National Salvation Army to continue his war of
resistance without assistance from Chiang Kai-shek. As Commander of the
Northeastern Advance Force after
Notes to Pages 10–15
the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, Ma cooperated with the
Chinese Communist Party
before becoming Chairman of the Provisional Government of
Heilongjiang from
August 1940 to the end of the war.
4. For the Pingdingshan Massacre, see Honda Katsuichi’s
report along with
eye witnesses’ accounts in his Chūgoku no tabi (Tokyo: Asahi
Shimbunsha, 1981),
pp. 95–118, and Rana Mitter, The Manchurian Myth:
Nationalism, Resistance, and
Collaboration in Modern China (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2000),
pp. 112–114.
5. The number of casualties has remained a controversy.
Honda Katsuichi reports the approximate number of victims as three thousand
(Chūgoku no tabi, pp. 96
and 111), while Tanabe Toshio, a relative of Kawakami
Seiichi, a captain of the Fushun
garrison, gives the number as being between four hundred and
eight hundred in his
Tsuiseki Heichōsan jiken (Tokyo: Tosho Shuppansha, 1988).
6. Matsuoka Yōsuke (1880–1946) was a strong advocate of the
“ManchurianMongolian Lifeline” (Man-Mō seimeisen) for Japan in the Diet before
transforming
himself into “the hero of Geneva” for walking out of the
General Assembly of the League
of Nations in 1933 in opposition to its censure of Japan’s
imperialist enterprise in Manchukuo. He served as President of Mantetsu from
1935 to 1939 and as Foreign Minister in the Second Konoe Fumimaro cabinet before
he was named a Class-A war criminal by the Military Tribunal of the Far East.
7. According to a May 5, 2009, report by Xinhua Net, a
letter of apology
signed by twenty-four members of the Japanese Diet was
delivered by Aihara Kumiko,
a member of the Upper House, to the survivors of
Pingdingshan. According to the same
report, there were twenty to thirty survivors from the
massacre at the time, only five
of them were still alive in May 2009, and all were in their
late eighties. Three survivors had brought a lawsuit against the Japanese
government, only to be rejected by
the Japanese Supreme Court on May 16, 2006.
8. The original text also describes the dagger as having a
shirasaya wood
sheath, likely to be unvarnished and presumably to
accentuate her sincerity of spirit
at the time of her suicide.
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