Chapter 4 2. Our gendarmerie has done all kinds of bad things

I joined the Gendarmerie in Gongzhuling, Jilin Province in 1931 at the beginning of the Manchuria Incident (September 18 Incident—Editor's Note).At that time, I was still a person who didn't even dare to step on insects to death. However, when I was in the gendarmerie for less than two months, I participated in the "bravery test" for recruits. Under the order of the battalion commander, I killed a Chinese with a bayonet on the spot.From that day on, I was no longer human.I thought I was for His Majesty the Emperor, for the prosperity of the Yamato nation, and for getting a medal for getting ahead, and completely turned into a murderous devil.

In the winter of 1934, I worked as a gendarmerie on the Sino-Korean border in eastern China, responsible for blocking the border, and was ordered to interrogate captured soldiers of the Anti-Japanese Allied Forces.Under the leadership of Corporal Matsuzawa, we tortured and tortured the captives, pouring cold water on them, chopping them with wooden knives, scalding them with hot chopsticks, kneeling on a triangle, piercing nails, and finally killing them with Japanese knives.That scene was indeed hell on earth, and I completely lost my humanity at the time. Qiqihar is what I call my second hometown, but on the contrary, it is a stronghold for my crimes. In August 1933, I served in the Qiqihar Gendarmerie, where I worked for 12 years until the defeat in August 1945.At that time, I held the life and death power of ordinary Chinese people in my hands. No, it was actually a fox pretending to be a tiger.At that time, I thought: "Chinese people are like bugs, killing a few of them is nothing!" During the torture process, I regarded violence as my bounden duty. As for the pain of those Chinese people, I was not at all moved.

In Qiqihar, when the 14th Division replaced the 2nd Division, the security management was replaced by the "Police Control Committee" by the "Public Security Committee".Subsequently, gendarmerie units were dispatched to the counties to keep in touch with the headquarters at any time.The gendarmes all took "killing a hundred people" as their goal.That's all the talk in the cafeteria.When Sakata, the corporal leader with a 3-foot-long saber hanging from his waist, complacently said, "I killed 33 Chinese", another person said: "What is that, I have killed 70 people", Sakata said Immediately fell silent.

The gendarmerie does everything.Corporal Kojiro Sawada, who was born in Sakata City, and others, after becoming police instructors, patrolled day and night and made more than 7 reports to their superiors every day.The gendarmes under him are never idle, very active, and take killing as their mission. The "Police Control Commission" is led by the captain of the gendarmerie and oversees other police agencies, and holds the so-called "serious punishment power" for arbitrary killings.Based on the reports of spies, they can search overnight and arrest those who do not have ID cards or behave suspiciously.Those who are caught, they can be killed on the spot with any crime.On the banks of the Noeng River outside the west gate of Qiqihar, hundreds of innocent Chinese were killed.

At the time, I was just a private first class.One day, the squad leader Xishan ordered me to say: "Today at one o'clock in the afternoon, 15 people will be killed outside the west gate. You should be the execution officer!" When I rode to the scene in uniform, the Manchurian policemen said: "Ah, the gendarme is here!" As soon as I got off the horse, there was a burst of gunfire. A group of Chinese youths who were tied up and kneeling around the pit were hit by bullets from the police, and some even had their brains blown out.I thought I was here to visit the killing scene, but in fact, I became the commander of the killing operation.why?Because the Manchurian police do not have the "power of serious punishment", they have no right to kill without the presence of Japanese military police.

Since then, the task of the gendarmerie has changed from public security countermeasures to ideological countermeasures, Communist Party countermeasures, and espionage countermeasures.Now, I don't remember the whole picture of the crimes of the Qiqihar Gendarmerie so clearly, so I can only talk about the few things that left the deepest impression on my mind. In June 1935, 20 newspaper employees headed by the president of Heilongjiang Minbao Wang Beihai and reporter Jin Bailai, and more than 100 well-known figures in the education field were arrested by the military police and the police.They were charged with establishing the Communist Party organization "People's Front Movement".However, after torture and interrogation, we still found nothing. We had no choice but to send them to court in the name of organizing the "Life Improvement Association" and carrying out the People's Front Movement.In this way, President Wang and other 5 people were sentenced to death, and the other 40 people were sentenced to more than 10 years in prison.In this incident, Wu Zhang Zhongtian and I interrogated Ju from the train section of the Railway Bureau, tortured him to death by dousing him with cold water, etc.; we also arrested Wang Zhonghua, a teacher from Longjiang Middle School, and used the dirty water in the bath tub to torture him to death. Feed him, then kill him again.

In the same year, the Qiqihar Gendarmerie detachment sent Liao Zhang, Governor of Xing'an North Province, his son, his secretary, and several others to the Kwantung Army Headquarters on charges of spying with the Soviet Union. Later, these people were all killed. In 1935, Warrant Officer Sakamoto of the Qiqihar Gendarmerie Headquarters became the captain of the Gendarmerie. He established a "Bacterial Human Experiment Laboratory" in Heyingge on the Rabin Railway Line.Later, this laboratory became part of the notorious Ishii Unit (Unit 731), and an institution located in Siping was moved here.This is indeed an ogre den that is more ferocious than Hitler's concentration camp!

This is my crime. In November 1936, the Qiqihar Gendarmerie detachment reported 12 Soviet radio spies.This report was considered by the Gendarmerie of the Kwantung Army to be the most outstanding achievement, so Hideki Tojo, the commander of the Gendarmerie, personally awarded them the certificate of "Epoch-making Contribution to the Imperial Army's Espionage Prevention". As a result, eight people headed by Brother Zhang Huimin were shot to death on the grassland in the Beidaying camp in Qiqihar.At that time, the image of Zhang Huimin chanting the slogan "Resist Japan and save the nation" at the last moment of his life is still deeply engraved in my mind.

On December 31, 1936, 110 Chinese detained in the Army Prison in Qiqihar City escaped collectively under the command of Fang Xian, the leader of the Anti-Japanese Allied Forces.On the way to escape, about 90 people were caught back, and the rest, some escaped successfully, and some were frozen to death by the severe cold.In response to this incident, the "Police Control Commission" decided to execute all those who were arrested, and shot them all through the hands of the gendarmerie and the police. This is my crime. In April 1937, I arrested three Chinese people for bombing the railway: Huang Yiping, Cai Zilin, and Ma Jiacai.They received spy training in Moscow, and after returning to China, they worked under the leadership of Wang Hao, the leader of the underground work in Harbin, and were appointed as Qiqihar staff.These three people were ordered by the Kwantung Army Command to be sent to Unit 731 to be killed.

The anti-Japanese armed detachments under the leadership of the Third Route Army of the Anti-Japanese Coalition Army carried out extensive plain guerrilla warfare in the counties north of Harbin.They raided the county seat, opened prisons, and carried out various anti-Japanese and national salvation activities.Their actions, elusive and invisible, made it difficult for the Japanese army and police to find them, because the majority of farmers supported them and protected them.For this reason, the Japanese army and the police planned to suppress farmers in various counties. The Japanese army concentrated its forces on the Nehe County where the 12th and 14th Detachments often haunted.From 1939 to 1941, several large-scale raids were carried out, and a total of 400 to 500 farmers were arrested, and 200 of them were thrown into Qiqihar Prison.In the Qiqihar Gendarmerie, Tian Ze took on this task.

The so-called "special transfer" is the "code word" used in the documents when the living people were sent to Unit 731 of the Kwantung Army Harbin for live experiments.Documents related to such matters have been treated as "permanent secrets" since 1938. After the gendarmes and the police tortured the Chinese, some of them were "specially transferred" to Unit 731 because their limbs were severely damaged and they could not be sent to the court for a public trial.During the transfer, the military police and the police used the code word "transfer a few pieces of luggage" to mean "transfer a few people".These people were first secretly sent to the Harbin Gendarmerie by the military police and police from various places, then transferred to the secret service agencies in various places, and finally transferred to the Ishii Army. At that time, we regarded both Lutheran and Pope Catholic priests as foreign spies, and we kept an eye on them for a long time.But since there was no evidence, there was nothing they could do about it. In 1945, the Qiqihar Gendarmerie detachment arrested and imprisoned some Lutheran foreign pastors on the charge of "wartime harmful elements".Killed them all secretly behind the mountain before retreating in defeat. This is the crime I committed. In October 1941, a Communist Party organization led by the Anti-Japanese Third Route Army was established with Qiqihar Railway Bureau employees and Harbin Institute of Technology students as the main body.For them, I organized a special search team to track and investigate them for a month, grasped the whole picture of the organization, and then took action against them to catch them all. The clues were discovered by Tanaka's troops and Shiramaru's troops.When they fought against the 12th Detachment of the Anti-Japanese Allied Army, they seized the briefcase of the dead detachment leader and found a coded contact letter.Later, after another month of investigation, a "Tianbai Operation" raid was organized.As a result, 120 people were arrested and sent to the court. Among them, Wang Yaojin and Shi Lizhang were killed, and about 40 people were thrown into prison. This is my crime too.While carrying out the "Tianbai" operation, another underground anti-Japanese organization in Qiqihar was discovered.To this end, in December 1941, I organized another special search squad. This organization is led by the Chinese Kuomintang, and it has gone deep into the railway bureaus of Qiqihar, Harbin, Jilin, Fengtian, Jinzhou, etc., as well as the officials, army and intellectuals of the puppet Manchukuo.Therefore, the scale of the raid this time is very large.Our special search team was short of manpower, so the commander of the Kwantung Army Gendarmerie, Yuan Shou, ordered the military police, police, and railway guards to cooperate in the operation.As a result, more than 550 people were arrested, 20 people were sentenced to death, and most of them were thrown into prison. (This operation was named after Lieutenant Colonel Xing Xing of the Qiqihar Gendarmerie.) Looking back on the past now, I still remember that I had a misconception at that time, that is, "as long as it is for the country, I can do anything."Under the guidance of this thought, I killed so many people and committed so many inhumane crimes. In 1954, when I accepted the final review, there were hundreds of letters from the parents, brothers and wives of the victims in China exposing my crimes. I read them one by one without feeling stunned.I wrote a paragraph with my own hand, "These people were indeed killed by me, and I accept any punishment given to me." And signed my name. The mother of Wang Keen, the person in charge of Harbin Institute of Technology who was killed in the "Tianbai" operation wrote: "I am just such a son. Tsuchiya captured him and tortured him to death. The government must avenge me!" The family members of Yuan Yaowen, a Heilongjiang supervisor who was killed in the "Zhenxing" operation, wrote a letter to complain: After Yuan Yaowen was killed, his wife Zhang became seriously ill due to long-term detention, and died shortly after being released from prison. They left behind their two young daughters and An 80-year-old mother.Unable to support her two granddaughters, the 80-year-old mother committed suicide by lying on a train in grief.In the future, one can imagine what happened to these two young girls. Now, looking back at the past history, I have indeed committed countless crimes!The rank of second lieutenant of the gendarmerie I got was stained with the blood and tears of the Chinese people!During the half-life of the invasion of China, the traces of crime I left on the land of North Manchuria will never be erased. After the defeat, I was imprisoned in the Fushun War Criminals Management Center as a war criminal for 6 years.Although I killed so many people in the Northeast and caused great suffering to the people of the Northeast, the people in the management office treated me very humanely.They never hit me, never even called me a curse.Especially in 1956, the policy of "repaying grievances with virtue" was implemented against us. War criminals like me who should be sentenced to death were also exempted from prosecution and released back to China.If someone told me to pick up a gun a second time, I would die!I sincerely apologize to the Chinese people.When I was saving the spirits of the dead, I was determined to dedicate the rest of my life to the cause of opposing war and pursuing peace.This is the only thing I have to do in the future to atone for my sins. If I can't do it, I'm not qualified to live anymore. Author bio: In 1931, he joined the Japanese Army in Gongzhuling, Jilin Province; in 1933, he became a gendarme of the Qiqihar Gendarmerie; and later became a second lieutenant in the headquarters of the Qiqihar Gendarmerie.