Book Review published in War in History, Vol.
22, No.2, April 2015
今月、英国の学術雑誌「War in History」に掲載された私の書評です。書評した著書は Evil Men（凶悪者） と題された戦争犯罪人、とくに日本兵の戦争犯罪人の心理を研究テーマとしたものです。
Evil Men. By James Dawes. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2013. 280 pp. US$25.95 cloth. ISBN 978 0 674 07265 7
Reviewed by: Yuki Tanaka
In
this unusually styled book, completely devoid of individual chapters, James
Dawes repeatedly uses interviews he conducted with Japanese veterans of the
Sino-Japanese War (1937–45) as the background for his multifaceted discussions
on military violence. These veterans were members of an organization called
Chukiren (an abbreviation of Chugoku Kikansha Renrakukai, the Association of
Returned Soldiers from China), and all of them honestly admitted that they had
committed various war crimes – rape, torture, the killing of children, medical
experiments, and the like –against Chinese citizens and prisoners. Chukiren was
abandoned in 2002 mainly because of a rapid decrease of member numbers due to
their age.
Five
years after the Asia-Pacific War, 1,109 Japanese war criminal suspects from
among POWs captured in Manchuria by the Soviet forces were handed over to the
Chinese communist regime. They were extradited to a POW camp run by the Chinese
Liberation Army (CLA) at Fushun. Another group of 140 Japanese war criminal
suspects was detained in a CLA POW camp at Taiyuan. The Chinese communist
government adopted a policy of re-educating Japanese war criminals by making
them honestly con- fess to the crimes they had committed during the war. This
involved repeated self-criticism until each man fully accepted responsibility
for his actions. Although it took many years, this unique method of making
assailants thoroughly aware of their own crimes helped the Chinese authorities
succeed in firmly implanting the concept of human rights in the minds of
Japanese war criminals, thereby helping them regain some humanity. Ultimately,
only 45 men were prosecuted, and no one received capital punishment. It was
only in 1956 that the surviving Japanese soldiers were finally allowed to
return to Japan. Subsequently, many of those returned soldiers have contributed
to building friendships between Japan and China, as well as educating Japanese
fellow citizens and children about Japan’s war responsibility.
By
contrast, more than 5,700 men were tried as war criminals at the B & C
Class War Crimes Tribunals conducted over several years after the war by each
of the seven Allied nations, namely the United States, Britain, France, the
Netherlands, Australia, the Philippines, and China (Taiwan). Following these
trials, 984 men were sentenced to death. If one compares the results of the
treatment of Japanese war criminals by the Allied nations with those of China,
it is clear that the Chinese policy – based on the principle ‘detest the crimes
but not the criminals’ – was in fact extraordinarily humane and, in the long
term, a wise and carefully aimed plan to build a good relationship with Japan
in the future.
In
his book Dawes repeatedly refers to the interviews with Japanese veterans each time
he embarks on discussion of a different aspect of atrocities, related human
behaviour, and psychological problems. Yet the information he has obtained from
the actual interviews is scant and superficial. Many parts of interview scripts
are marked ‘unclear’, probably because of poor translation by his interpreter.
At the beginning of the book Dawes even admits to the problem of ‘lost in
translation’ that a foreign researcher like himself faces when interviewing old
and frail Japanese veterans through an interpreter who has little knowledge of
the subject. I wonder if he is aware that many of these veterans in fact
published their own autobiographies, analysing crimes and atrocities that they
had themselves committed in China during the war. Those published materials are
extremely informative and vital for examining the human behaviour and
psychology of war criminals. They reveal how these men became so brutal and
also offer explanations on the psychological process that they underwent to
regain their humanity at the CLA POW camp after the war. As a historian
specializing in war crimes, with extensive experience in oral history, it seems
essential to me to utilize both the interviews and autobiographies. This would
enable both an examination of the cause of soldier brutality and also an
understanding of the rehabilitation from trauma undergone by the perpetrators.
In order to comprehend the behaviour of Japanese soldiers during the war, it is
also important to understand and explain the cultural and social background of
wartime Japan. Unfortunately Dawes seems unable to delve deeply into these
issues, probably because of a lack of proficiency in the Japanese language.
However,
each time he addresses a new discussion on a different issue of violence and
atrocities, using an extract from the interviews as a starting point, Dawes
refers to many interesting, relevant texts on the subject. Indeed, the volume
and diversity of information he mentions in his discussion is impressive. It is
obvious that he is well read in English sources on related topics, and that his
knowledge on each issue is substantial. He dis- cusses genocide, rape, infant
killings, torture, violence within the military forces, group psychology,
religion, nationalism, and many other subjects, referring to concrete cases in
the Second World War, the Vietnam War, the Afghan and Iraq War, as well as many
other wars and conflicts.
Yet
Dawes’s interesting discussion revolves mainly around the arguments of other
writers, as he chooses not to project his own ideas much on any issue. In
addition, the unique layout of the book – a preface of less than four pages,
followed by 224 pages of main text that is not divided into individual chapters
– means that his discussion flows from one topic to another without a deep
analysis of each important issue. It is a pity that his vast knowledge of the
relevant literature is not fully utilized and applied to conduct a more
structural and intensive discussion on some vital matters. Moreover, despite
the use of his interviews with Japanese veterans, his argument totally lacks a
comparative analysis between Japanese cases and similar war atrocities
committed by military forces or armed groups from other nations. Indeed, his
argument always focuses upon the universal characteristics of violence and
atrocities, thus ignoring specific cultural or historical elements of different
atrocities.
Dawes’s
attention to the guilt of the perpetrators of war crimes, rather than the motivations
or causes of their violent behaviour, is a strong feature of this text. In the
preface he states that some of the questions he wants to explore are ‘How do
societies turn nor- mal men into monsters?’ and ‘What is the individual psychological
process and felt experience of becoming a monster?’ Yet he offers little
analysis with which to tackle these questions. As mentioned above, we have
ample sources of information regarding such questions in the many
autobiographies written by Japanese veterans who committed heinous crimes in China
during the Asia-Pacific War. What we need is closer international co-operation
and comparative research between Japanese and Western specialists on the
subject of this global and continuing problem of military violence and
atrocities.