Researching Japanese War Crimes Records
Introductory Essays
Edward Drea
Greg Bradsher
Robert Hanyok
James Lide
Michael Petersen
Daqing Yang
Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records
Interagency Working Group
Washington, DC
日本戦争犯罪記録の研究
入門的試論集
エドワード·ドリー
ロバート·ハニョク
ジェイムズ·ライド
ミヒャエル·ペーターセン
ダーチン·ヤン
ナチ戦争犯罪と帝国日本政府記録
省庁横断作業部会
ワシントン首都区
Published by the National Archives and Records Administration for the Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group, 2006
Contents
About the Cover: Diary of a Japanese Army Medical Doctor, 1937 …… ⅳ
Daqing Yang
1. Introduction …… 3
Edward Drea
2. Documentary Evidence and the Studies of Japanese War Crimes: An Interim Assessment …… 21
Daqing Yang
3. Recently Declassified Records at the U.S. National Archives Relating to Japanese War Crimes …… 57
James Lide
4. Japanese War Crimes Records at the National Archives: Research Starting Points …… 79
NARA staff
5. Wartime COMINT Records in the National Archives about Japanese War Crimes in the Asia and Pacific Theaters, 1978–1997 …… 111
Robert Hanyok
6. The Exploitation of Captured and Seized Japanese Records Relating to War Crimes, 1942-1945 …… 151
Greg Bradsher
7. A “Constantly Recurring Irritant”: Returning Captured and Seized Japanese Records, 1946-1961 …… 169
Greg Bradsher
8. The Intelligence that Wasn’t: CIA Name Files, the U.S. Army, and Intelligence Gathering in Occupied Japan …… 197
Michael Petersen
About the Contributors …… 231
目次
表紙カヴァーについて：1937 年、日本陸軍の軍医の日記 …… ⅳ
ダーチン·ヤン
１．序論 …… 3
エドワード·ドリー
２．日本の戦争犯罪の証拠文書と研究状況 …… 2
ダーチン·ヤン
３．最近機密解除された日本戦争犯罪関連の国立古文書管理書保管記録 …… 57
ジェイムズ·ライド
４．国立古文書管理所の日本戦争犯罪記録：研究の出発点 …… 79
NARA (国立古文書·記録管理所) 職員一同
５．アジア太平洋戦争戦域における日本の戦争犯罪についての 1978 年から 1997 年の戦時 COMINT 記録 …… 111
ロバート·ハニョク
6. The Exploitation of Captured and Seized Japanese Records Relating to War Crimes, 1942-1945 …… 151
Greg Bradsher
7. A “Constantly Recurring Irritant”: Returning Captured and Seized Japanese Records, 1946-1961 …… 169
Greg Bradsher
8. The Intelligence that Wasn’t: CIA Name Files, the U.S. Army, and Intelligence Gathering in Occupied Japan …… 197
Michael Petersen
About the Contributors …… 231
１
Introduction 序論
Edward Drea エドワード·ドリー
Japanese war crimes committed in Asia and the Pacific between 1931 and 1945 concerned few Americans in the decades following World War II. Japan’s crimes against Asian peoples had never been a major issue in the postwar United States, and—with the notable exceptions of former U.S. prisoners of war held by the Japanese—even remembrance of Japanese wartime atrocities against Americans dimmed as years passed.1
1. A few researchers (such as Professor Sheldon Harris) investigated the activities of the Japanese Army’s Unit 731 during the 1980s.
1931 年から 1945 年にかけて日本がアジアと太平洋で犯した戦争犯罪に関心を持つアメリカ人は、第二次世界大戦後の数十年間はほとんどいなかった。アジア諸国民に対する日本の犯罪が戦後のアメリカで主要な論点になったことはなかったし、日本軍に捕らえられた元アメリカ人捕虜の目立った例外を除けば、アメリカ人に対する日本の戦時中の残虐行為に対する記憶さえ、年月が経つにつれて薄れていった｡1
1. わずかな研究者 (シェルドン·ハリス教授の様な) が 1980 年代中に日本陸軍の七三一部隊の活動を調査した。
American attitudes about Japanese war crimes changed markedly following the 1997 publication of Iris Chang’s The Rape of Nanking.2 Chang’s moving testament to the Chinese victims of the sack of Nanjing in 1937 graphically detailed the horror and scope of the crime and indicted the Japanese government and people for their collective amnesia about the wartime army’s atrocious conduct. The bestselling book spurred a tremendous amount of renewed interest in Japanese wartime conduct in China, Korea, the Philippines, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific.
2. Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (New York: BasicBooks, 1997).
日本の戦争犯罪に対するアメリカの態度が目に見えて変わってきたのは、1997年にアイリス·チャンの『南京陵辱』2 が出版されてからだ。1937 年の南京攻略が要求した中国人の犠牲者についてのチャンの心を動かす証言は、その犯罪の恐ろしさと広がりを微に入り細に入り描き出し、日本政府と日本人が戦時中の軍の残虐行為について集団的記憶喪失に陥っていることを告発した。ベストセラーになったチャンの本は中国、朝鮮半島、フィリピン、東南アジア、太平洋における日本人の戦時中の行為に途轍もない規模の関心をあらためて呼び起こした。
2. アイリス·チャン『南京陵辱：第二次世界大戦の忘れられたホロコースト』(ニューヨーク、ベイシックブック社、1997 年)
The Rape of Nanking raised many issues that demanded further explanation. Why were the Japanese not punished as severely as the Nazis for their crimes? Did the United States suppress evidence of the criminal responsibility of activity by the emperor to ensure a smoothly running occupation of Japan? Did the U.S. government protect Japanese medical officers in exchange for data on human experimentation?
さらなる説明を必要とする多くの問題を『南京陵辱』は呼び起こした。 なぜ日本人は自分の犯罪に対してナチスほど厳しく罰せられなかったのか。米国は日本の占領を円滑に進めるために、天皇の活動にかかる刑事責任の証拠を隠蔽したのではないか。アメリカ政府は人体実験のデータと引き換えに日本の軍医将校たちを保護したのではないか。
Chang also charged the U.S. government with “inexplicably and irresponsibly” returning confiscated wartime records to Japan before microfilming them, making it impossible to determine the extent of Japan’s guilt.3 Others were convinced that the U.S. government retained highly classified documents that would prove Japanese guilt beyond doubt and implicate the highest levels of Japanese government and society in the crimes.
3. Chang, 177.
戦時中に押収した記録を「不可解かつ無責任にも」マイクロフィルム化する前に日本に返却して、日本の罪の重大性を明らかにすることを不可能にしたとして、チャンはまたアメリカ政府をも非難した｡3 日本人たちの犯罪性を疑いなく証明し、日本の政府および社会の最上層部がその犯罪に関与していることを示す高度機密文書を保管していると確信する人たちもいた。
3. チャン同書、p. 177
I am indebted to Carol Gluck and Gerhard Weinberg for their insightful comments on this essay.
私はこの小論に対するキャロル·グルックとゲルハルト·ワインバーグの洞察に富んだ評言に恩義がある。！
These issues led concerned parties to investigate Japanese wartime records among the holdings at the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in College Park, Maryland, and at other U.S. government agencies. Thorough documentation of Japanese war crimes and criminal activities among these holdings seemed unavailable, leading to speculation of an official cover-up. Suspicions that the U.S. government was deliberately concealing dark secrets were fueled when, instead of finding the records they sought, researchers encountered a card stating the records had been “withdrawn for security reasons,” as well as when they received a notice that requested information could not be located.
これらの問題のために関係者たちはメリーランド州カレッジ·パーク市の国立古文書·記録管理所 (NARA) の所属する記録のうち戦時中の日本に関するものを調査することになった。日本の戦争犯罪および犯罪的活動の決定的な裏付けとなる文書は閲覧できない様に見え、それが公権力による隠蔽についての憶測につながった。合州国政府が暗黒の秘密を意図的に隠しているのではないかという疑念の火に油が注がれたのは、探している記録が見つかる代わりに、記録が「安全保障上の理由により撤収」されたと告げるカードに行き当たったり、あるいは請求された情報は所在が不明であるとの通知を受けたときのことだった。
Motivated by Chang’s assertions, disparate groups who had struggled to raise awareness of Japanese crimes and win justice for the victims were galvanized in their pursuit of answers and documentation. Armed with this latest evidence and capitalizing on a heightened consciousness in the United States about Japanese wartime crimes, victims and advocates pressed their cases with more determination and with greater popular and political support than had been the case in years prior.
日本の犯罪の認知度を高め、被害者に正当な裁定を勝ち取るために苦闘してきた様々な団体が、チャンの断言に触発されて、回答と証拠文書を追い求める活動をさらに強めた。この最新の証拠を武器とし、日本の戦時犯罪ついての合州国の人々の意識の高まりを資本にして、被害者とその支援者はこれまでよりもさらに強い決意のもとに、以前の時期の場合よりも大きな支持を大衆と政治家から受けて、自分たちの主張を押し通した。
American veterans who had been held captive by the Japanese renewed claims for justice and recompense, and wanted an official apology from the Japanese government for the institutionalized brutality under which they suffered during their long years in captivity. Others asserted that they had been the victims of diabolical human experiments conducted under the auspices of the Japanese Army’s notorious Unit 731, whose military medical doctors and specialists, under the command and direction of Lt. Gen. Ishii Shirō,4 carried out army-sponsored experiments on humans for the purpose of developing effective biological warfare weapons.5
4. Japanese names are rendered as given name followed by surname.
5. Sheldon Harris, Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare, 1932–1945, and the American Cover-up (New York: Routledge, 2002 rev ed). Harris published his original volume in 1994.
The controversy over the Japanese Army’s system of coercing young women to
work as prostitutes in army field brothels, the so-called “comfort women” issue, had
been simmering, especially in South Korea. The 1994 publication of George Hicks’ The Comfort Women: Japan’s Brutal Regime of Enforced Prostitution in the Second World War presented the issues in the English language and described the coerced women’s attempts to gain restitution from Japan.6 By the late 1990s, the plight of “comfort women” had erupted into front-page news in the United States and became a lodestone for women’s rights advocates and other groups demanding the Japanese government acknowledge responsibility for these wartime abuses of human rights.
6. George Hicks, The Comfort Women: Japan’s Brutal Regime of Enforced Prostitution in the
Second World War (New York: Norton, 1994).
The People’s Republic of China, which unquestionably suffered the worst depredations during the Japanese occupation and war from 1937 to 1945, was a persistent critic of the Japanese government’s attitude toward the plunder, arson, and widespread killing that characterized Japan’s occupation of vast sections of China. In the 1990s, Chinese victims of Japanese experiments, American veterans held in Japanese prisoner-of-war camps in Manchuria, and Chinese-Americans also found their pent-up grievances expressed in Chang’s narrative.
Japan was also called to account for its wartime use of slave labor or coerced workers. During the war years, the Japanese government forcibly removed workers from Korea, China, and elsewhere in Asia and shipped them to Japan as unpaid labor for dangerous work in coal mines and for heavy construction. American POWs were also subjected to brutal labor details that were illegal according to the Geneva Convention protocols governing the rights of prisoners. Filipino, Indonesian, and Dutch victims added their voices to a swelling protest against the Japanese government’s refusal to acknowledge these crimes.
When confronted by advocacy and human rights groups, the Japanese government insisted these issues had been settled by stipulations of the peace treaty signed in San Francisco in September 1951.7 Nothing more needed to be said on the matter. Not only did Japanese authorities refuse to acknowledge any wartime responsibility, but several conservative politicians and senior bureaucrats went so far as to publicly denounce the accusations as groundless historical revisionism and Japan bashing. There was, of course, a domestic political dimension to the accusations (no candidate from the conservative ruling party could win an election by blaming Japan for a war of aggression), but the hard-line official Japanese position created the impression in the United States that Japanese war crimes and related subjects such as war guilt or the role of Emperor Hirohito in the war were taboo subjects in Japan.
7. The treaty was formally implemented on April 28, 1952.
Ian Buruma’s the Wages of Guilt (1994) compares responses to war crimes in postwar Germany and Japan.8 According to Buruma, Germany publicly accepted responsibility for the evils perpetrated by the Nazi regime and educated future generations by discussing its sordid Nazi history in school textbooks and classes. Germany apologized to various European nations and Israel. Conversely, Japan rejected responsibility, downplayed the historical evidence of aggression and atrocity in its schools with sophistry and euphemism, and apologized to no one. Worse yet, ultra-conservative Japanese commentators insisted the war crimes, if they happened at all, were exaggerated to embarrass the Japanese people.
8. Ian Buruma, The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1994).
Although the Japanese have not confronted their wartime conduct as the Germans have, there has been a popular and an academic reaction to the Japanese government’s denials. As Daqing Yang points out in chapter 2, scholars and special interest groups in Japan have pursued the topic of Japanese war crimes with academic rigor, fervor, and commitment. Such views appear regularly in mainstream Japanese publications, although most of this work has had little impact in the West because it remains untranslated. A notable exception is Honda Katsuichi’s graphic and highly controversial description of Japanese Army atrocities in central China, which was published in 1972 in Japan, but not translated into English until 1999. Japanese writers, historians, and authors freely publish their work in mass circulation media where it is widely read and openly commented upon in a wide variety of opinion journals and the press.
The rise of concern about Japanese war crimes in the 1990s reinforced the notion that most Japanese war criminals escaped punishment, either because the U.S. government needed their cooperation against the Soviet Union during the early days of the Cold War, or to appease current Japanese economic and commercial interests. Unfortunately, some Japanese war criminals were not punished. Perhaps the most notorious was Gen. Ishii of Unit 731, who escaped postwar prosecution in exchange, apparently, for supplying the U.S. government with details of his gruesome human experiments. Other suspected Japanese war criminals who were never indicted include three postwar prime ministers: Hatoyama Ichirō (1954–1956), Ikeda Hayato (1960–1964), and Kishi Nobusuke (1957). A convicted Class A war criminal, Shigemitsu Mamoru, a senior diplomat and foreign minister during the war years, regained the foreign minister portfolio in 1954. The controversial treatment of Emperor Hirohito by occupation authorities was a subject of debate in Japan and elsewhere since the late 1940s, and especially since the early 1990s in the United States.
Although many notorious war criminals went unpunished and lived prosperous
and prestigious lives, it is important to recognize that thousands of Japanese war crimes were prosecuted. Twenty-eight Class A war criminals accused of crimes against peace, conventional war crimes, and crimes against humanity included many of Japan’s wartime leaders, such as Prime Minister Gen. Tōjō Hideki. The Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, the counterpart of Nuremberg, began in May 1946 and ended in November 1948 with the conviction of twenty-five of these defendants. Seven, including Tōjō, were hanged, sixteen were sentenced to life imprisonment (of whom four died in prison), and two received lesser terms. Of the three remaining, two died during the proceedings, and one was declared unfit for trial. The Japanese government paroled all those imprisoned by 1956 and the Foreign Ministry released them unconditionally in April 1958. Allied nations also held war crimes trials throughout Asia and the Pacific. Americans, British, Australians, Dutch, French, Filipinos, and Chinese held trials at forty-nine locations between October 1945 and April 1956. The British prosecuted numerous Japanese for war crimes in Southeast Asia, including those involved in the construction of the Thai-Burma railway of death, immortalized as the Bridge over the River Kwai. Australian prosecutors worked in conjunction with British and American courts to bring Japanese to justice and tried large numbers of Japanese at Amboina, Dutch East Indies, and at Rabaul, New Britain. China tried at least 800 defendants, including some involved in the Nanjing massacre. France and the Netherlands tried several hundred more. The French brought to justice a Japanese civilian on Java who forced dozens of women into prostitution for the military authorities, and the Dutch condemned Japanese to death for the murder of indigenous people and Dutch prisoners.9 In late 1949 at Khabarovsk, the Soviet Union also put twelve Japanese on trial for biological warfare crimes—six were members of Unit 731, two of Unit 100, an independent biological warfare entity, and four from elsewhere—and later transferred several hundred Japanese ex-servicemen suspected of war crimes to the People’s Republic of China, where Chinese authorities judged them in the mid-1950s. Of 5,379 Japanese, 173 Taiwanese, and 148 Koreans tried as class B and C war criminals for conventional crimes, violations of the laws of war, rape, murder, maltreatment of prisoners of war, about 4,300 were convicted, almost 1,000 sentenced to death, and hundreds given life imprisonment.10
9. Robert Barr Smith, “Japanese War Crime Trials,” World War II (September 1996).
10. Philip R. Piccigallo, The Japanese on Trial (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1979) covers the B- and C-class war crimes trials.
Documentation of these trials has never been compiled into one source, or at one site. The Allied nations naturally gathered Japanese documents for their respective tribunals, resulting in the disbursement of Japanese records among the various nations of the Allied World War II coalition. Japanese unit records and documents held by the People’s Republic of China or the former Soviet Union were, with few exceptions, unobtainable in the West because of Cold War realities. Even the handful that reached the West during this period was so encumbered with communist Cold War propaganda that many questioned their veracity. For example, when the Soviets published the official court proceedings in 1950 of the December 1949 trials in Khabarovsk, they included Unit 731 related documents, but many in the West dismissed the verdicts along with the evidence as another in a series of long-running Stalinist show trials.11 With the dissolution of the former Soviet Union in December 1991 and positive change in United States–China relations, information about war crimes became somewhat more accessible, but still very limited. Diligent efforts in Japan have uncovered extensive documentation related to Unit 731 and other war crimes, but the amount of material still remaining classified is unknown. By the late 1990s, many people focused on whether the U.S. government still had classified material about Japanese war crimes, and, if so, whether it would implicate other Japanese who had escaped justice.
11. Materials on the Trial of Former Servicemen of the Japanese Army Charged with Manufacturing and Employing Bacteriological Weapons (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1950).
Declassifying U.S. Documents on Japanese War Crimes
Responding to these concerns, on December 6, 2000, Congress passed the Japanese Imperial Government Disclosure Act (Public Law 106-567), which put to rest any doubt that U.S. records relating to Japanese war crimes were included under the aegis of the 1998 Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act (Public Law 105-246). The implementin directive ordered the Interagency Working Group (IWG) “to locate and disclose, subject to the statute’s exceptions,” any classified U.S. government documents pertaining to Japanese war crimes and to recommend their declassification and release to the public. President Clinton appointed IWG members from the major government agencies holding classified records as well as three outside members to represent the public. The Japanese Imperial Government Records Disclosure Act provided for a fourth public member, but none was appointed. IWG public members, Thomas H. Baer, Richard Ben-Veniste, and Elizabeth Holtzman, gave willingly of their valuable time. Their shared characteristic was a determination to make the record available to the American people. It is in large measure thanks to their efforts that the work of the IWG met with cooperation and success. It was due to their persistence that the CIA redoubled its search efforts and released additional information on Japanese war criminals. Special acknowledgment is due to Senators Mike DeWine and Dianne Feinstein and Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney, who supported the IWG’s work in Congress and worked with the IWG to elicit the full cooperation of the CIA in the search effort. The NARA staff members who worked on the Japanese portion of the IWG project under the able direction of David Van Tassel were responsive to authors’ queries, unfailingly provided requested materials, and searched collections meticulously to identify still-classified items. In particular, without the professional expertise of Senior Archivists William Cunliffe and Richard Myers and their superior working knowledge of the massive collections, the IWG could not have accomplished its goals. The distinguished IWG Historical Advisory Panel (HAP), chaired by Gerhard Weinberg, always provided sound guidance as the IWG navigated among record groups, constituencies, and politics. Professor Carol Gluck, a member of the HAP, provided insight into Japan’s wartime experience and also suggested the substantive approach of this volume. Steven Garfinkel, chair of the IWG, unfailingly identified sensitive issues during the search period, brought them to the attention of the public members and HAP, and acted to ensure they were expeditiously addressed. Larry Taylor, IWG executive director, skillfully managed the multiple day-to-day administrative responsibilities of the IWG, ensuring it functioned smoothly.
The government agencies that reviewed their classified record holdings for documents pertinent to Japanese war crimes were the CIA, the Department of the Army, the Department of the Navy, the Department of the Air Force, the FBI, NARA, the
Department of State, the National Security Agency, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as well as the non-FBI components of the Department of Justice, the U.S. Information Agency, and the National Security Council.
An estimated 8 million pages of documents were declassified under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act, whereas significantly fewer pages—100,000—were released under the Japanese Imperial Government Disclosure Act. There are many reasons fo this discrepancy, most of which fall under two overarching explanations. First, the United States originally confiscated fewer documents pertinent to Japanese war crimes than to Nazi war crimes. Second, by the time the disclosure laws were signed, far fewer World War II Japanese documents than Nazi documents remained classified by U.S. agencies.
Factors Influencing the Number of Documents in U.S. Possession
米国所有の諸文書の数に影響を与える要因
U.S. government agencies held far fewer records pertaining to Japanese war crimes than to Nazi war crimes. A major reason is that at war’s end, the Japanese destroyed or concealed important documents, which dramatically reduced the amount of evidence available for confiscation by U.S. authorities. How could this happen? At the time the Third Reich surrendered in May 1945, Allied armies occupied almost every inch of Germany. Document collection teams and specialists were on the scene and already confiscating Nazi records for use in announced war crimes trials. While the Germans, beginning in 1943, did engage in substantial efforts to obliterate evidence of such crimes as mass murder, and they destroyed a great deal of potentially incriminating records in 1945, a great deal survived, in part because not each one of the multiple copies had been burned. The situation was different in Japan. Between the announcement of a ceasefire on August 15, 1945, and the arrival of small advance parties of American troops in Japan on August 28, Japanese military and civil authorities systematically destroyed military, naval, and government archives, much of which was from the period 1942–1945. Imperial General Headquarters in Tokyo dispatched enciphered messages to field commands throughout the Pacific and East Asia ordering units to burn incriminating evidence of war crimes, especially offenses against prisoners of war. The director of Japan’s Military History Archives of the National Institute for Defense Studies estimated in 2003 that as much as 70 percent of the army’s wartime records were burned or otherwise destroyed.12
12. Conversation with author, 2003.
米国政府機関が保有する日本の戦争犯罪に関する記録は、ナチスの戦争犯罪に関する記録よりもはるかに少ない。 その大きな理由は、終戦時に日本軍が重要な文書を破棄したり隠匿したりしたため、米国当局が押収できる証拠が激減したことである。なぜこのようなことが起こったのか。1945 年 5 月に第三帝国が降伏した時点で、連合軍はドイツのほぼ全域を占領していた。 文書収集チームや専門家たちが現場に駆けつけ、発表された戦争犯罪裁判で使用するために、すでにナチスの記録を押収していた。ドイツ軍は 1943 年以降、大量殺人のような犯罪の証拠を抹消するために相当な努力をし、1945 年には犯罪の証拠となりうる記録を大量に廃棄したけれども、大量の複写の一つ一つを焼却できなかったこともあって、かなりの部分が生き残った。日本では状況が違った。1945 年 8 月 15 日の停戦発表から、8 月 28 日にアメリカ軍の小規模な先遣隊が日本に到着するまでの間に、日本の軍と民政当局は、軍、海軍、政府の公文書を系統的に破棄した。東京の大本営は、太平洋と東アジア全域の現地司令部に暗号の伝言を発信し、戦争犯罪、特に捕虜に対する犯罪の証拠となるものを焼却することを各部隊に命じた。防衛省防衛研究所の戦史史料館の館長は 2003 年、陸軍の戦時中の記録の 70 ％までもが焼却またはその他の方法で破棄されたと推定している｡12
12. 筆者との会話、2003 年
第 5 海兵師団第 2 7海兵隊が 1945 年 9 月 24 日に提出した報告書には、連合国への最初の降伏後、連合軍が到着する前に日本軍が組織的に記録を破棄したことが記録されている。 NA (国立公文書館), RG 127, entry 1011, box 23, folder: intelligence (情報) - Japanese (日本軍)
Nevertheless, some important records survived by chance. Documents discovered in an old safe in the burned-out Navy Ministry turned out to be Imperial Navy planning and policy papers from the 1930s. The salvaged materials reposed with the Metropolitan Police Agency in Tokyo, which transferred them in 1955 to the cabinet archives. They remained there until 1968, when the Defense Agency’s National Institute for Defense Studies took control of the collection.13 Japanese authorities also willfully concealed other wartime records. During the Allied occupation, former Col. Hattori Takushirō, a wartime senior staff officer at Imperial General Headquarters, ordered subordinates to conceal key policy and operational documents from occupation authorities. Once the occupiers departed, Hattori intended to write a factual history of Japan’s war based on the important concealed materials. Individuals also hid official documents or personal diaries, some of which came to light only decades later. For example, in 1989, Kaikōsha, the association of former Imperial Japanese Army officers, published a history of the Nanjing operations together with a two-volume collection of contemporary military documents pertinent to the campaign.14 These had not been previously available to the public. Disturbing excerpts from December 1937 entries in the diary of Lt. Gen. Nakajima Kesago, commander of the 16th Division at Nanjing, were published in a mass circulation monthly magazine in the early 1980s, with permission of the family.15 These enormously valuable documents, however, had never been in the possession of U.S. authorities.
13. Peter Wetzler, Hirohito and War: Imperial Tradition and Military Decision Making in Prewar Japan (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 1998), 19.
14. Kaikōsha, ed., Nankin senshi shiryō-shū (Nanjing campaign chronology primary source collection) (Kaikosha, 1989).
15. Kuninori Kimura, “Nankin kōryakusen ‘Nakajima dai 16 shidanchō nikki’” (The capture of Nanjing: Diary of 16th division commander Nakajima) (Zōkan Rekishi to jimbutsu, December 1984), 252–71.
The compartmentalization of the war in Asia also diminished the possibility that one nation would end up with the lion’s share of Japanese documentation. Unlike the German case, there was no one central repository for Asia-specific war crimes documentation. British Empire forces, for example, took charge of Japanese materials in Southeast Asia. Returning colonial authorities in Indochina and the Dutch East Indies gathered material for their war crimes trials. As many as 40,000 U.S. Marines garrisoned transportation centers in north China from October 1945 into 1947 and accepted the surrender of Japanese units, but otherwise there was little U.S. presence in the huge country, and U.S. units collected relatively few Japanese documents from China. The continuation of the civil war between the central government and the Communists complicated efforts to secure documentation in China. The Chinese central government confiscated Japanese material in 1945; the victorious Chinese Communists, in turn, seized it from them in 1949. The Soviet Union also captured important records about Unit 731 and the Japanese Army when it overran Japanese forces in Manchuria in August 1945. Sixty years later some of this documentation was still coming to light. In August 2005, for instance, the Chinese publicized detailed research findings based on previously unavailable Unit 731 documents, and in Japan two of Gen. Ishii’s notebooks with brief entries for August 1945 and January through November 1946 were made public.16 Thus, archival
material remains fragmented, and while the United States might hold a large amount
of Japanese navy or government archival material, many Japanese Army files apparently remained in the possession of other Allied nations or in Japanese hands concealed from the Occupation authorities.
16. “Identities of Unit 731 Victims Unearthed,” 3 August 2005, englishnews@chosun.com, http://english.chosun.com/w21data/html/news; “Nana san ichi butai chōmei no-to hakken,” (Unit 731 commander’s notebook discovered) Asahi shimbun, 4 August 2005.
Factors Influencing the Number of Documents Still Classified Many records relating to the war in Asia were declassified long before the Disclosure Acts were passed, leaving fewer classified records to review. Because much of the material from the European Theater dealt with the former Soviet Union or its eastern European satellites, it was regarded as useful after the War; records that concerned intelligence sources and methods were considered indispensable during the Cold War. As a result, an enormous number of these documents remained security classified until the IWG’s review. The case in the Asia-Pacific Theaters was different. The United States perceived no immediate threat from the region in 1945. By the time perceptions changed with the Chinese Communist victory on the mainland in 1949 and the North Korean invasion of South Korea in 1950, the great bulk of the Japanese records had already been declassified.
A second reason is that declassification agreements with foreign governments affected the ease with which documents could be opened. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) gathered intelligence in the European Theater, often in cooperation with Allied governments. Before declassifying these documents, the CIA, as successor to the OSS, had to obtain agreement from the nations that had equities in them. However, the U.S. military—not the OSS—had control of most of the Asian Theater records. It created, captured, or confiscated records without the involvement of Allied foreign governments, which enabled the United States to declassify documents unilaterally. Most of these Japan-related records, including wartime intelligence records, were routinely declassified in the 1970s and 1980s by the Army, Navy, and other Department of Defense entities in the course of their regular review programs. In short, the United States could declassify and release Japanese records much earlier than it could German records, but the quantity and quality of the Japanese cache was also inferior to the German.
Furthermore, there were few still-classified postwar records relating to Japanese war criminals because there was not a continuing hunt for Japanese perpetrators as there was for Nazis; therefore, the Army Counterintelligence Corps, CIA, and FBI did not create dossiers on large numbers of Japanese individuals as possible intelligence assets, suspected spies, or prospective immigrants. This is not to say the U.S. Army did not employ unsavory characters in Japan, but for intelligence about the Soviet Union the U.S. government relied less on ex-Imperial Japanese Army officers than it did on former Nazis in Europe.
Finally, the United States focused on its war against Japan at the expense of other major combat theaters in Asia, especially China. This emphasis resulted in less scrutiny of Japan’s treatment of fellow Asians and the Imperial Army’s conduct on the Asian mainland. One might compare the situation to the attention given to the Holocaust, the genocidal campaign against Jews and other “undesirables.” The enormity of these Nazi crimes stamped an indelible mark on the collective consciousness, yet Americans displayed only vague awareness of the even larger scale of the Nazi barbarities inflicted on the people of the Soviet Union beginning in June 1941. Both the Chinese and the Soviets dealt with Nazi and Japanese war criminals as they saw fit, and the United States demonstrated little concern about how they did it, unless Washington complained that the tribunals were being used as propaganda forums to embarrass the West for complicity in Axis crimes.
In sum, the U.S. government acted quickly to declassify Japanese wartime documents in its possession. By the time the IWG began its work, there were relatively few postwar records related to Japanese war criminals that remained classified.
↑Researching Japanese war crimes records : introductory essays https://www.archives.gov/files/iwg/japanese-war-crimes/introductory-essays.pdf
