Men to Devils, Devils to Men: Japanese War Crimes and Chinese Justice by Barak Kushner (review)

Barak Kushner deserves thanks for this informative, stimulating monograph. Multifaceted and wide ranging, it will spark contention among specialists on post-1945 Japan, the Republic of China (ROC) before and after its move to Taipei, and the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Citing an impressive array of titles from secondary scholarship, examining declassified archival sources, boldly straddling the politically contrived Taiwan-PRC border, and paying due heed to ethnic Chinese and Koreans in Japan, Kushner sheds light on decolonization, B and C class war crimes trials, cold war politics, and expedient shifts in memory that fuel acrimony in East Asia today about historical correctness. His account of B-C class trials—for conventional war crimes as opposed to A class trials of high-level leaders for crimes against peace—is the most detailed we have in English, and he deftly meshes it within “a triangular analysis” of “legal memory” (pp. 22, 27) in Japan, the ROC under the Kuomintang (KMT), and the PRC.

Kushner is highly thought provoking. He made me reflect on the normative assumptions I bring to the topic and on my professed aims as a historian which entail openness to rightwing Japanese scholarship, however distasteful, so long as it accords with empirically verified fact. As Kushner graciously observes, “Wakabayashi does not deny atrocities; he corrects inaccuracies [in their depiction]” (p. 339). By contrast, Kushner is less concerned with verifying alleged war crimes such as the Nanking 100-man killing contest than with showing how the memory of it got exploited, distorted, or forgotten. He practices a type of history espoused by leftist Japanese academics to change society for the better. This is discernible, for instance, in his claim that Japan was loath to admit defeat in China, which obstructed atonement for war crimes, without which “real peace” is unachievable (p. 44). This idea is central to the “1931–45 fifteen-year Asia-Pacific war thesis”—that Japan invaded, despoiled, and lost to China before attacking the United States in December 1941—which historians such as Ienaga Saburō and Fujiwara Akira advanced for other than dryly academic reasons.¹ In the Vietnam and cold war eras, they sought to “revise” prevailing establishment views by giving credit to the Eighth Route Army, and to promote reconciliation by arousing feelings of guilt and respect for the Chinese, who had been objects of derision in Japan since 1895. This sympathy for the left, which I share, warrants neither praise nor blame per se. Kushner’s book stands or falls on its evidence and logical rigor, and I found his one-sided, at times dogmatic criticism of Japan repelling. I apologize if my criticisms are unfair or based on a misreading, and JJS readers should examine the book themselves to reach their own conclusions. Kushner’s thesis, as I see it, boils down to three main points.

First, B-C class trials presented Japan, the ROC, and PRC with a chance to implement the rule of law as “a new code of behavior” in place of “arbitrary decisions based on military force” (p. 246). Each nation fumbled the ball: Japan by wallowing in a self-pitying victim ideology that precluded efforts to internalize and atone for war guilt; the ROC, by regressing to martial law in the cold war and purging leaders with the judicial expertise to build on its B-C class trials; and the PRC, by plunging headlong into ideologically inspired mass murder that destroyed law itself for decades. The two Chinas conducted B-C class trials in order to convince skeptical Western powers of Chinese legal sophistication. As sovereign states freed from colonial rule, they sought recognition for their ability to function as equals in a world dominated by Western conceptions of law. Yet there also was an idealistic plank in this scheme, as seen in the last half of Kushner’s title: “devils to men.” By taking...