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By Root 1178 0

carrier for the Japanese at Hutou in Manchuria. They knew nothing of the outside world: “We were conscious there was a war—that was all. We knew the Japanese expected to fight, because they were building all these fortresses.” They never saw the hapless slave labourers who toiled underground for months behind the Japanese perimeter wire, then were killed in their thousands to ensure that the secrets of Hutou’s defences were kept. Fields behind the town became the property of some of Manchuria’s 300,000 Japanese immigrants. The new landowners’ ventures into agriculture met with little success, however. To crop rice, many were obliged to enlist the labour of dispossessed locals. There was no social contact between occupiers and occupied.

One day the Japanese announced that the garrison was holding an exercise. All Chinese must remain indoors with their windows closed. It was a hot afternoon. The uncle of Zhou Baozhu opened his window. He was beaten half to death by Japanese police. Other offenders were thrashed with iron bars or thrown into boiling water. For local children, there were no games, no play with friends, no schooling, for all association was forbidden. In return for labouring all day beside his father, carrying water on their shoulders from the river to the garrison huts, Jiang’s family received a monthly ration of cooking oil and twenty-four pounds of corn, which somehow kept them alive, supplemented by wild vegetables from the nearby forest.

Liu Yunxiu, twenty-year-old daughter of teachers in Changchun, Manchuria, found herself obliged to learn Japanese in school, and to attend Japanese-sponsored classes in the arts of housewifery—cleaning, cooking, sewing: “This sort of thing was not at all the Chinese style.” Liu would have liked to train as a doctor, but such options were closed to a woman. Like Wu Yinyan, she knew nothing of the war, save as “noises off.” For instance, a friend’s brother ran away to join Communist guerrillas. His family heard long afterwards that he had been killed. Another classmate left the school to make an arranged marriage to the puppet emperor Pu Yi. Liu remembered the girl’s parents sobbing at her departure, because thereafter they were forbidden to see her.

Liu’s chief awareness of the war derived from chronic shortages, especially of food. She and her family were sometimes reduced to eating the bitter greenstuff xiang shan. One morning, her grandmother opened the door of their house to see corpses lying in the street. A typhus outbreak had struck the city, and her sister-in-law contracted the disease. In the absence of medicines, folk remedies revived. They bathed the girl’s body in a mix of egg white and rice wine. She lived. Liu’s parents, like Wu Yinyan’s, were intensely strict, “indeed, feudal.” She was forbidden to leave the house alone, or to have any contact with boys. As for the Japanese, “My parents felt382 that the only choice was to obey. They told me not to join or take part in anything. There was never any talk of politics in our house. That is how things were.”

In such a way did many Chinese survive the Japanese occupation—and the twentieth century. Collaboration with the Tokyo-imposed puppet government in Nanjing was widespread. “The Japanese made everyone spy on each other,” says historian Yang Jinghua. “If one family offended against the regime, ten were punished.” Many stories of resistance to the Japanese lacked heroic endings. Xu Guiming was born into a peasant family in Ji Lin Province, Manchuria, in 1918. In his early childhood there was some money, and he attended a Confucian school. But the family’s fortunes declined into abject poverty. At the age of thirteen he joined a local guerrilla group named the Red Guard Union, 5,000 strong, operating around the Songhua River. He shared their battles through two years that followed, until he was wounded by a bullet in the stomach in a clash with a Japanese-sponsored Manchukuan unit. For three months his father tended him in the guerrilla camp, then transferred him to the care of local Buddhist nuns. Soon after