Retribution_ The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 - Max Hastings [136]
Historians of Asia assert that the Second World War properly began in China, rather than Poland. In 1931 Japan almost bloodlessly seized Manchuria—the north-eastern Chinese provinces, an area twice the size of Britain, with a population of thirty-five million people, ruled by an old warlord—to secure its coal, raw materials, industries and strategic rail links. The Nationalist government based in Nanjing was too weak to offer resistance. The following year, Tokyo announced Manchuria’s transformation into the puppet state of Manchukuo, nominally ruled by the Manchu Emperor Pu Yi, in practice by a Japanese-controlled prime minister, and garrisoned by Japan’s so-called Guandong Army. The Japanese perceived themselves as merely continuing a tradition established over centuries by Western powers in Asia—that of exploiting superior might to extend their home industrial and trading bases.
As a sixteen-year-old in 1941, Souhei Nakamura was dispatched by his family from Japan to work for an uncle’s motorcycle-repair business in Manchuria, where he was introduced to the delights of colonial mastery. “It was wonderful there—an easy life with lots of good food, much better than being at school. All I had to do was keep an eye on the Chinese doing the real work.” He had money in his pocket, and used it to pleasant purpose. After being sent packing by the first local brothel he visited—“You’re much too young”—he was introduced to a twenty-four-year-old geisha, who solaced the teenager’s life for the next four years. “In Manchuria in those days377, every Japanese was a privileged person. I will tell you just how privileged. One day in town, I watched a Chinese policeman book a Japanese woman for crossing a road against a red light. A Japanese soldier who saw them told the Chinese to release the woman and apologise. When the policeman refused, the soldier shot him dead.” There was a frontier atmosphere about Manchuria, soon overflowing with Japanese peasant immigrants who were supposedly obliged to buy land from local Chinese, but who in reality sequestered what they wanted without payment.
The Japanese annexation of Manchuria, and their progressive advance into China thereafter, involved rapacity and brutality on a scale which shocked the world, and inflicted untold misery on those in their path. “For me, the war started on 18 September 1931, when the Japanese seized my home town,” said Wen Shan, a Manchurian lawyer’s son who fled south to Yunnan to escape the occupation. “We were victims of those gangsters378 for the next fourteen years.” He was reared on Nationalist propaganda about Japanese barbarities, much of it true. In 1937 Japan extended its mainland empire, occupying most of the Chinese coastline with its ports and industrial cities, chief sources of wealth in a chronically starving land. “The Japanese forced my father379 to become a traitor, by joining one of their business syndicates and working for them,” said Jiang Zhen, a landlord’s son from Shanghai. “When he would no longer do so, they made him a slave labourer, and when he became too sick to work, they sent him home to die.”
As the Japanese armies moved inland, millions of Chinese fugitives fled west, including the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek. He abandoned his capital, Nanjing, in favour of Chongqing. The Nationalist army’s resistance to the invaders cost much blood and achieved little success. Xu Yongqiang, an engineer’s son who lived in the British concession at Tianjin, south-east of Beijing, a precarious island of safety amid the rising Japanese tide, said: “Every morning we watched corpses380 drifting downriver to the sea. Out in the countryside, the Japanese were using peasants to build pillboxes for their positions. When the pillboxes were completed, they shot the peasants.”
China is larger than the United States, and characterised by extreme