Release of Archives Helps Fill Gap in Files on Wartime Atrocities

The U.S. government's search for classified evidence of Japanese war crimes finds many documents scattered throughout its holdings

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Colloquy: Read the transcript of an onlne discussion with the National Archives' Greg Bradsher and with Edward Drea, a specialist in modern Japanese history, about the issues raised by the declassification of U.S. records about Japan's war crimes during World War II.

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By RICHARD BYRNE

Whether it is the hunt for the last surviving perpetrators of the Holocaust, the restitution of looted artworks, or new evidence of the complicity of governments in that immense crime against humanity by Germany and its allies, U.S. public interest in European war crimes has not flagged since the end of World War II.

But the war crimes committed by Japan — including biological warfare, human experimentation, and massacres — have attracted much less attention in the six decades since the war's conclusion, though events such as the publication of Iris Chang's book The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II in 1997 created spikes in public interest.

Indeed, when the U.S. Congress created a commission to find and declassify records related to World War II war crimes still held by the United States in 1998, the bill was explicitly titled the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act. Only a new bill passed in 2000 formally extended the efforts of that commission — renamed as the Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group (or IWG) — to Japan's war crimes.

"As in World War II," says Greg Bradsher, a senior archivist at the National Archives who worked on the project, "we first tackled Germany and then Japan."

Since 1999, the working group has released eight million pages of previously classified documents on Nazi crimes. But this week, the group will release 100,000 pages of newly declassified documents related to Japanese war crimes, along with a new guide to U.S.-held materials on that topic. (A book of introductory essays, Researching Japanese War Crimes, will accompany the release.)

"Japanese war crimes have not received the intense scrutiny from the public or from scholars that has been given to Nazi materials," says Allen Weinstein, archivist of the United States and chairman of the working group.

The tremendous disparity in the amounts of material turned over has raised eyebrows. Some scholars have wondered if the U.S. government retains files on its complicity in saving Japanese war criminals. Other researchers question why files captured by the United States were returned to Japan after the war.

Members and staff of the working group hope that the new material puts many questions to rest. For one thing, they note that much of the relevant material on Japanese war crimes has already been declassified, but is scattered widely.

Yet scholars also say the new material helps fill holes in understanding the war in the Pacific as a whole.

"There's a huge gap between what we know about the European theater and the Asian theater," says Carol Gluck, a professor of history at Columbia University. "Any filling of that gap with primary materials, rather than conjecture and speculation, is critical."

Destroy and Search

Part of the gap in the knowledge of Japan's war crimes is the result of that nation's wholesale destruction of documents.

In the case of Germany, the effective seizure of documents from the Nazis by the Allies at the end of the war frustrated efforts to destroy them. Efforts to recover Japanese documents were less successful.

Edward Drea, who recently retired as the chief of the research and analysis division of the U.S. Army Center of Military History, writes in an essay introducing the working group's new work on Japan that many key records were destroyed by Japanese authorities "between the announcement of a cease-fire on August 12, 1945, and the arrival of small advance parties of American troops in Japan on August 28."

That destruction was so immense that many copies of Japan's wartime cables now exist only in translated American records. "Because the United States was able to decrypt so much of the Japanese military communications," he says in an interview, "a great number of those documents exist only in English."

Ms. Gluck says that inattention by American military and intelligence officials to details of atrocities also played a role. The new documents, she says, help trace "the disparity of interest on the part of the United States in the closing months of the war and immediately after in the details of the Japanese wartime operations in Manchuria and China." Where the Allies made documentation of the Holocaust a priority in Europe, she says, agencies such as the Office of Strategic Services, a forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency, did not take similarly intensive action when operating in Manchuria and elsewhere in Asia.

Mr. Bradsher also notes that some crimes took precedence over others. Gen. Douglas A. MacArthur, the supreme Allied commander in the Pacific, took a personal interest in crimes related to the Philippines and to American captives. "MacArthur was personally really upset about the Filipino people and U.S. prisoners of war," he says. "He put the word out to gather information, and we started to document it, as did the Australians."

Ms. Gluck says that the lack of documents and the lesser degree of interest in war crimes in Asia underscore the point that, as far as the war went, "we knew less about Asia, less about the Pacific. All the way through we knew less — from the beginning of the war to the end. We didn't care then. We do now. And not to blame us for not caring, but it explains why we don't have these documents."

Hiding in the Open

Scholars hope that newly released U.S. files will shed new light on particularly contentious issues, including the operations of Japan's notorious biological warfare group, Unit 731. That unit conducted various experiments during the war on live subjects, including germ warfare, vivisection, and hypothermia. Scholars' hopes were also raised by the fact that Unit 731's commander, Lt. Gen. Ishii Shiro, evaded prosecution for his crimes and apparently cut a deal with U.S. authorities in exchange for data gathered through his crimes.

Daqing Yang, an associate professor of history and international relations at George Washington University, writes in an essay included in Researching Japanese War Crimes that both Lt. Gen. Ishii's deal and his data remain partial mysteries. "What happened to the data produced by Unit 731 remains largely unanswered," Mr. Yang writes.

Those involved in the project say that some records, including documents concerning Unit 731, have not been included in the new batch of releases because they have already been declassified.

In his introduction to the volume, Mr. Drea writes that "during the search for classified records, it soon became apparent that historians, researchers, and concerned parties have not fully exploited the many records about Japanese war crimes previously declassified and made available at the National Archives." Other records about Unit 731, he adds, were at the Library of Congress.

So the creation of a guide by Mr. Bradsher and other colleagues to locate such materials and make them more accessible became a high priority. (The guide is included as a CD-ROM with Researching Japanese War Crimes.)

"Many Japanese intellectuals believe that the United States still has vast amounts of classified material," says Mr. Drea. "In point of fact, no such materials were found. Most of the Ishii material, for instance, that we found was in open sources, already declassified, albeit scattered about."

Returning Records

Another nagging question raised by the search for records was the American decision to return many captured documents to Japan in the 1950s.

This issue was reignited by Chang's book on Nanjing, in which the author (now deceased) accused the United States of returning key records to Japan without keeping copies.

Mr. Drea praises Chang's book as "very good at raising public consciousness and awareness of Japanese crimes in China." But, he continues, "her allegations that the U.S. government simply returned documents to the Japanese under some sort of Japanese government pressure does not stand up under scrutiny."

Indeed, Mr. Bradsher's detailed essay on the return of the records in the new book concludes that "the records were thoroughly exploited for war crimes purposes ... and also for historical and intelligence purposes prior to their return to Japan. There is virtually no likelihood that captured Japanese records relating directly to war crimes were returned to Japan without having been copied or explored."

In an interview, Mr. Bradsher says that "I turned myself into a historian and a detective" to follow the various twists and turns of the saga. He also observes that "traditionally, in the archival field, captured records are eventually returned to their country of origin."

Worth the Effort?

The release of the documents may not satisfy all critics, says Mr. Yang. In an e-mail message to The Chronicle, he writes that "for skeptics, I doubt this book/project will completely eliminate their doubts. The Japanese government has not come out and said: 'We've opened every file returned from the U.S.'; nor has the U.S. government said they've opened every file on such individuals or fully accounted for the whereabouts of some Unit 731-related files."

"But on the whole," he concludes, "I think this project has gone a long way toward opening the U.S. side of the documents."

Mr. Drea admits to some disappointment that smoking guns on Japanese war crimes did not turn up, especially when compared with documents on Nazi crimes that have led to new conclusions on what American officials knew about the Holocaust.

"To be honest, I'd hoped we'd find something," Mr. Drea says. "That's the historian's dream: fresh information that illuminates a dark problem. It just wasn't there."

Nonetheless, scholars say that the material has furthered study in other areas. An essay in the new volume by Michael Petersen, a working-group staff member, examines conflicts between Army intelligence officials and the fledgling CIA in postwar Japan, including the use of gangsters and war criminals as informants.

Ms. Gluck says that such work demonstrates the utility of poking around in the files. The conflict described by Mr. Peterson, she observes, "is not directly concerned with Japanese war crimes, but it's really useful and really helpful and adds to what we already know about the conflicts between these intelligence services, which were huge."

As the working group's activities wind down, Mr. Weinstein says he is satisfied with the "labor of devotion" that has characterized the work on Japanese war crimes.

"The things that have been revealed have been more than adequate to justify the cost," he says. "I feel privileged to have been a part of it."