This morning we made a trip to the Temple of Heaven. … Here the emperor used to kneel, once a year, on a three-tiered, open-air marble altar, to worship Heaven on behalf of himself and his people.
When we arrived, the outer grounds looked much as we remembered them, but inside, what a depressing spectacle! All the buildings, including the Temple of Heaven itself and the approaching gateways, are filled with hundreds of young men (also, in certain quarters, girls). They are wartime student refugees from Shansi, some of whom seem hardly older than twelve or thirteen. Most of the stone terraces outside, as well as the floors of the temple itself are covered with their thin sleeping pads and meager possessions. … As one mounts the steps toward places once reserved for the emperor and his followers alone at the most solemn of religious ceremonies, one can but turn from this scene of human misery and degradation to look at the unchanging Western Hills on the horizon. … The mental condition of these boys is far worse than that of the poorest coolie. There is no trace of leadership or organization. Portions of the courtyard, and even the lower tiers of the Altar of Heaven itself, are littered with their half-dried excrement.
—DERK BODDE
After Japan was defeated on August 15, 1945, China simmered in colossal chaos. The Nationalist government’s war against Japan may have been over, but there was still one more war to go, with the Communists, who were gaining strength by the day. “In an instant,” wrote Jin Moyu, “the Kuomintang and American soldiers as well as MPs in white helmets replaced the Japanese soldiers in the city. … Once the Kuomintang came into Beijing … the situation was even more turbulent than under the Japanese. Not a single day was calm. Prices quickly skyrocketed, the currency changed, all over the city there was a thriving black market in dayang (the one-yuan coins made from silver), and people were rattled by the approach of the Communists.”
Chiang Kai-shek’s forces scrambled to take over the regions formerly controlled by the Japanese, before the Communists could get there first. Many leaders of the puppet regimes set up by the Japanese were kept at their posts for the time being, on the assumption that a government run by former collaborators was preferable to total bedlam or rule by the Communists. “A few of the puppets have been tried and shot; most have been forgiven and taken back into the National Government.” Keeping the puppet leaders in place may have made sense at military briefings of Chiang’s forces but did not placate those Chinese after quick and thorough revenge. Chiang’s assumption of rule was disorganized, his officials corrupt. He might declare that peace had come to China, but scores would reply that his peace had arrived elsewhere, where they were not living.
In addition to the fighting between the Nationalists and Communists, the Japanese surrender brought another kind of pandemonium to the Northeast. There were those hundreds of thousands of Japanese settlers spread out over Manchukuo, many of course sent to distant regions close to the border with the Soviet Union, in case the Soviets got any ideas. Once the war ended, not only did the Soviets have plenty of new ideas, but the local Chinese also seized their moment. On August 8, 1945, the Soviets threw aside the Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact, and their troops came pouring over the border, lusting for land, women, and, in particular, wristwatches, which they liked to line up on their arms. Chinese joined in, seeking a more sweeping kind of retaliation.
Japanese settlers throughout Manchukuo found themselves abandoned, without the military might to defend themselves. Japan’s Kwantung Army—hitherto so feared that babies were said to stop crying at the sight of them—had quickly arranged for trains to evacuate their ranks from Manchukuo, leaving the settlers behind. Japanese families tell of rushing to the homes of their military protectors in Manchukuo only to find that all had left in a big hurry, with meals sometimes still on the table. Once their army vanished, the Japanese settlers were left alone to face the Soviets, the Chinese, the cold, and deadly infectious diseases.
“Even if Japan loses the war,” a settler in a novel declared, reflecting one complacent belief, “that will have no effect on Manchukuo, which is a firmly established, independent country. As proof, isn’t it a fact that not a single American plane can fly over us? It’s the Soviets who can stir up trouble. But there’s the Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact, and Soviets are not likely a country that will easily break a treaty. And even if the Soviets attack us, the impregnable barrier of seven hundred thousand crack troops of the Kwantung Army will prevent their approach.”
Born in Shenyang in 1939, Yamamoto Takeo tells of his father, who had been in Manchukuo since 1935. Extremely idealistic and immersed in Chinese culture, the father had tried to live just as the Chinese did. His complacency at the end of the war took another form:
After the war ended, my father thought that he and the rest of the family could stay on in Manchukuo, happily, without the Japanese army and Japanese authorities to bother them. He wasn’t going to leave. Then Japanese officials came and told him that he should at least send his wife and children to the city.
“They can always come back,” the officials said, “but it may be dangerous for them here now.”
So my father sent us to Tieling. I was six years old then. We departed on an open truck, leaving my father behind.
My father set about enjoying himself with his Chinese friends, but then one of them told him that the Soviets were coming, and he should leave right away. The Soviets were rounding up Japanese men and sending them to the Soviet Union as POWs. My father’s Chinese friends dressed him as a Chinese peasant and told him that if he spoke, the Soviets would know he was Japanese. So pretend to be a mute, they instructed him. He started walking and soon saw the highly mechanized Soviet army roaring down the streets. He stayed away from the highway and hid.
Several weeks later, he suddenly appeared at our refugee camp in Tieling dressed as a Chinese peasant.
Japanese settlers had to make the terrible flight from far-flung homes to cities, where, lacking money and supplies, survivors had to scrounge around for essentials until their government found ways to repatriate them. Approximately eighty thousand settlers died along the way. The settlers’ escape from Manchukuo to Japan has given rise to a Japanese literary genre that often focuses on this horrific mass evacuation and the settlers’ victimization by the Soviets, Chinese, and the Japanese government and army. The settlers were doubtless victims when it came time to flee, but a reader may wonder whether their prior activities in Manchukuo had been as blameless.
Like any tale of a holocaust miraculously survived, life or death during the escape often hinged upon chance happenings—Chinese clothing offered as disguise by sympathetic Chinese; the ability to fend off measles and typhus; money sewn into clothing. The lust of the Soviet soldiers and Manchuria’s cold were constant hazards of the journey.
The royal family of Manchukuo also had to make a hasty exit from Changchun before they too were overwhelmed by the Soviets and Chinese. As for the getaway of Emperor Puyi and his entourage, it was brief and disastrous. Once the Japanese emperor broadcast the news of Japan’s surrender, Puyi announced his abdication as the emperor of Manchukuo.
“Chang Ching-hui and Takebe Rokuzo came with a group of ‘ministers’ and ‘privy councilors,’” Puyi writes. “As there was one more farce to be played out, they had brought with them a new composition by the Japanese sinologue Sato—my ‘Abdication Rescript.’ They looked like so many lost dogs as I stood before them and read it out.”
Puyi and his entourage next boarded a plane to Japan, but on August 19, 1945, they were captured by the Soviets during a stopover in Shenyang. “The next day,” Puyi wrote, “I was put on a Soviet aircraft and flown to the U.S.S.R.” He would remain imprisoned, first by the Soviets and then by the Chinese, until 1959. Hiro’s husband, Pujie, who had accompanied his brother Puyi, was also jailed and would not be free until 1960.
Hiro meanwhile was left behind, part of a group of over two hundred remaining members of the Manchukuo court who began their own flight through vengeful Chinese mobs and soldiers. More than the other members of the royal family, who had to contend with the crowd’s hatred, Hiro faced additional perils since she was a Japanese. “Outside, the rioters used fire axes to attack the Japanese they found. They even searched the clothes of the children,” she wrote. “The rioters didn’t just steal the possessions of the Japanese, they marched the Japanese along with only the clothes on their backs, one tied to the next. The people of Manchukuo had been persecuted during the war, and their fury erupted in such looting and assaults.”
Nonetheless, she rallied and, once again, was able to summon extraordinary strength. “Once we realized what we faced, moaning about our fate was a waste of time. We had expected to have help from our husbands, but they were gone, and so we women had to think hard about what to do and somehow find a way to get to Japan.” She was determined to protect her five-year-old daughter, Kosei, and also the opium-addicted empress.
Her group headed to Linjiang, where they were soon captured by the Communists’ Eighth Route Army. Around about here, Hiro’s story starts to sound like the imperial version of the escape sagas written by other Japanese settlers who fled Manchukuo. Her companions were more illustrious, and since she was considered a trophy prisoner by her captors, she was not liable to be raped or murdered on the spot. Still, she faced the same freezing cold and crushing change in circumstances that bedeviled all the fleeing Japanese. As in the other accounts, her horrible flight takes prominence—weather, illnesses, marauders from all sides—and diminishes all that has gone on before.
Capture by the Communists meant forced peregrinations, sometimes taking them up steep mountains in primitive vehicles and on long marches in an always cruel cold. Hiro, interrogated countless times, was forced to explain such things as why she had married Puyi’s brother, whether she had been an agent of the Kwantung Army brought in to extort money from her husband’s family, and whether she was in fact the Japanese emperor’s daughter. Remnants of the Japanese Kwantung Army learned of her group’s incarceration in Tonghua and, joining forces with the Nationalists, attempted a rescue, which ended in their defeat and the deaths of many Japanese.
Driven mad by these events, the empress became a filthy wreck. She was dragged around from place to place but, deprived of her opium, gradually sank into stink and delirium. Hiro made efforts to tend to her but in the end lacked the strength to keep this sister-in-law alive.
“The empress,” Kosei recalls, “had become extremely thin. Sometimes she thought she was still in the palace. She’d call out as if talking to her servants, ‘Bring the hot water.’ ‘Have you prepared my bath?’ She would say all this in a very loud voice. My mother always made sure she had the empress’s opium in her bag. But when that ran out, the empress suffered a lot. That voice of hers was very frightening to a little child like me.”
While captives of the Communists, the empress, Hiro, and Kosei were forced to ride in a horse-drawn cart with a large white flag that labeled them as “The traitorous imperial family from the false nation of Manchukuo.” By then the empress was too far gone to bother about the derisive crowds that watched the procession. Finally, the Eighth Route Army had had enough, and the empress was taken to another town, where she died alone.
Hiro was finally released by the Communists, who could find no proof of her collaboration with the Kwantung Army. Next she tried to pass herself off as a settler’s wife when she joined a Japanese settlers’ group fleeing to Jinzhou. Soon enough, she was betrayed by a Japanese who revealed her true identity to Chiang Kai-shek’s forces.
Now she became a prisoner of the Nationalists, who were delighted to have her in their custody. They could proclaim that, because of their vigilance, another prime enemy of the Chinese people had been seized. After taking Hiro and Kosei off to Beijing and then Shanghai, where Hiro was declared a war criminal, the Nationalists refused to free her, despite the protests of Japanese officials. At times the Nationalists claimed they were her “protectors,” not her captors; or, they said that she was now a Chinese and so the Japanese authorities had no right to tell them what to do:
“We’ll put her on trial like Kawashima Yoshiko and send her to Suzhou Prison if we feel like it.”
At last, stealth and negotiation brought this part of Hiro’s ordeal to an end: she and Kosei were able to board a ship and return to Japan. During the voyage home, Hiro had plenty of time to reflect upon the sixteen months that had passed since she had parted from her husband.
My life has been threatened by gunfire, I have suffered through starvation and cold, I have felt my heart torn apart by despair within the walls of a cold prison. How many times have I seen people betray each other, cheat, and kill each other? At the mercy of a cruel fate, I have drifted through a world that was the very picture of hell. … Since the Russo-Japanese War, how much Chinese and Japanese blood has been spilled on the Chinese soil I just left?
Why didn’t the Japanese try to join hands and make efforts to get along with the Chinese?