Evil Men by James Dawes (review)

James Dawes set out on no small endeavor when he decided to interview the remaining members of the now-defunct Chukiren, or the Association of Returnees from China, a former society of Japanese World War II veterans. These men are admitted war criminals—rapists, murderers, torturers—who committed heinous acts in their youth, underwent “thought reform” in China, and then united in Japan to bring national attention to these acts. These men narrate in something near a dream state, feeling unreal and distant from their younger selves who committed the crimes; when shown pictures of themselves from the Second Sino-Japanese War, they see only demons, men without souls, entirely different creatures. Dawes went in search of these demons, seeking both the tangible men and the symbols of unadulterated “evil” that they represent. What he found confused and disoriented him, and raised questions about morals and morality as they relate to being an interviewer and to recording oral history. While the book is a study of the Churiken, it is also a text in which Dawes explores his role as a documentarian, revealing many fascinating personal insights into what it is like to speak face-to-face with criminals, with “evil men.” Given the subject matter, the reader is also exposed to questions of ethics in oral historiography and to the responsibilities that come with documenting war crimes and atrocities. This is where Dawes’s work is valuable particularly to oral historians: as a testament to the power and challenges of using an oral history methodology to understand and engage with trauma and human cruelty.

Dawes’s initial goal with the book, as stated in his preface, was to seek out perpetrators of human rights abuses and interview them. This purpose quickly changed upon meeting some of his narrators. Dawes discovered with his first interviews that he began to experience a profound crisis of identity, unsure how to deal with his feelings towards these men who were, by public moral standards, abhorrent criminals. As he notes, one of the greatest challenges in documenting this history, and recording the details of egregious acts of violence committed consciously by coerced men, was not letting their actions come off as hyperbolic, sign-posted examples of inhuman evil. This challenge of appropriate representation led Dawes to the point where even discussing the subject matter of his research was an act in self-ostracism, his content too graphic to describe, his narrators too evil even for casual academic conversation. These confrontations with morality are the meat of Dawes’s work and are the guiding principle behind what is an otherwise fluid and reflective text, ranging from the experiments of Stanley Milgram to meditations on the nature of evil itself.

Dawes’s philosophical ruminations have a direct application to oral history, as he believes that though one can learn a lot from being a witness to stories of trauma and torture, captured stories must be manipulated for society to learn from them. This mindset is the force behind one of the more interesting aspects of what is in many ways a book of oral histories, yet also in many ways is not: he has almost no interview portions longer than a few pages. With interviews parceled and split into extremely short selections, most of which never exceed two to three pages in length, Dawes gives his readers a remarkably intimate yet diluted and indirect exposure to his narrators, which can make his book disconcerting for those wanting to read more raw narrative. This editorial decision is intimately tied both to Dawes’s background as a comparative literature professor and his directorship of the Human Rights program at Macalester College. While an oral historian may have focused more on the primary nature of his narrators as direct windows into the reflective nature of evil and situational morality, Dawes instead drives home that these narratives, if read unedited, can lead one to the same revulsion that he faced while describing his work to colleagues. Dawes believes that to truly comprehend these...