Excerpt from: People's Daily News, author: Zhou Jun.
Tilanqiao is a prestigious place in Shanghai. "Send Nong to the Tilan Bridge to eat 'plaid rice'" is a twisted insult.
The Shanghai Prison Exhibition Hall, located in the Cross Building of Tilanqiao Prison in Shanghai, is a 6-storey building, named after the cross-shaped structure of the building. Each floor of the cross building has two corridors, east and west and north and south, intersecting in the middle to form a circular atrium, the upper and lower atriums are all opened all the way to the top of the building, plus a glass roof cover, which is convenient for lighting. In order to prevent various accidents, a strong barbed wire mesh is laid between each atrium. A fully enclosed barbed wire mesh was also laid around the stairwell.
Eight senior Japanese military officers were tried in court. From left are Masanosuke Sasaki, Katsumi Uesaka, Shigeru Fujita, and Keihisa Suzuki
As the heavy door slowly opened, the first thing that jumped into view was a cement stele with the following inscription:
Shanghai Municipal Anti-Japanese Memorial Site, Japanese War Criminals Detention and Trial and Enforcement Office
Promulgated by the Shanghai Municipal People's Government on August 11, 1997
Shanghai Municipal Commission of Cultural Relics Administration
This monument tells the story of the punishment of Japanese war criminals at Tilanqiao Prison.
One
The slow-flowing Huangpu River gives birth to Shanghai, the largest city in China and even in the Far East, and on the north bank of Shanghai's mother river is one of the famous downtown areas, The Tilan Bridge. Old Shanghai knew that before the liberation, it was a place of prostitution and gambling, and it was a "free world" created by the colonists. But mentioning Tilanqiao now immediately reminds people of a strict prison - Shanghai Tilanqiao Prison.
Originally built in the 27th year of the Qing Dynasty (1901) and opened on April 22 of the 29th year of Guangxu (1903) (18 May of the Gregorian calendar), Tilanqiao Prison was successively expanded and rebuilt after 1916, and the existing main buildings were built between 1917 and 1935. After the finalization in August 1935, it had a total construction area of more than 64,000 square meters, with more than 3,900 cells, most of which were 3.3 to 3.6 square meters, three walls of steel bone cement, and one wall was an iron fence made of steel strips thicker than fingers. The locks on the iron fence have been used so far, manufactured by the British Hobble Hartl Company, with 3 levels of tongues, and the key is more than ten centimeters long.
The prison is surrounded by a wall of more than 5 meters high, and in addition to the ordinary prison, there are special facilities such as "rubber prison" (riot prevention cell), "wind wave pavilion" (confinement room), "indoor execution ground" (hanging room) and outdoor execution ground, covering an area of 60.4 acres, with 9 5-story prison buildings, 1 4-story and 6-story prison buildings, as well as workshop buildings (5 floors), hospitals (8 floors on the ground, moved to No. 1236 Liren Village, Zhoupu Town, Pudong on July 26, 2007), office buildings, lookout buildings, xin'an auditorium, etc. It was grand in scale, well-built and stylish, and larger than Sugamo Prison in Higashi-Ikebukuro, Tokyo,D., which was demolished and converted into Tokyo's tallest building, Sunshine City in 1971, and Mumbai Prison in India.
As a microfilm film in modern China, in 1994, Tilanqiao Prison was listed by the Shanghai Municipal People's Government as a Shanghai municipal building protection unit. On May 3, 2013, the State Council announced the list of the "Seventh Batch of National Key Cultural Relics Protection Units" in 1943, among which the early buildings of Tilanqiao Prison in Shanghai were listed. This is the only judicial entity in the hundreds of prisons in the national prison system that has been designated as a "national key cultural relics protection unit".
……
After the victory of the War of Resistance Against Japan, from December 1945 onwards, the U.S. army used Tulanbridge Prison to detain Japanese war criminals as well as war criminals of British, Russian, American, French, Jewish and other nationalities. From January 24, 1946, when the U.S. Military Military Tribunal in Tilanqiao Prison tried 18 Japanese war criminals for the first time, to February 14, 1947, when the U.S. Military Court and Japanese War Criminals Detention Center were evacuated from Tilanqiao Prison, a total of 47 Japanese war criminals were tried. Since the archives of the US Military Court for the Trial of Japanese War Criminals are in existence abroad, the author cannot consult them, but according to the archives of the Second Historical Archive of China and the Shanghai Archives, as well as various newspapers, periodicals, and other books, the following historical facts can still be known:
In early 1946, General Wei Demai, chief of staff of the US-China Theater and commander-in-chief of the US Forces in China, was ordered to set up a US Military Tribunal in Shanghai, China, to try cases of Japanese troops killing captured members of the US Air Force in Chinese mainland and Taiwan. The military tribunal was housed in a 6-story prison building in Tilanqiao Prison at No. 147 Huade Road (present-day Changyang Road) (then known as the "Shanghai Prison Directly Under the Administration of Justice", also known as the "Shanghai Prison"). Built in 1933, the building has a construction area of 5,600 square meters and more than 140 prison buildings. It was originally a place for foreign male prisoners in the prison, each with an area of 8 square meters, good lighting and ventilation conditions, equipped with fixed single beds, small tables, stools and flush toilets, and more complete facilities, then called "Xiren Prison" (now the cross building of the Shanghai Prison Exhibition Hall). The U.S. Military Tribunal is located on the 2nd floor of the building. There are 5 judge seats on the front of the courtroom, with the recorder and the interpreter sitting on both sides, the reporter seat behind the recorder, and the 3 rows of seats behind the interpreter seat to sit Japanese war criminals, each row of 6 people, a total of 18 people. Opposite the judge, on one side is the prosecutor's seat and on the other side is the defender's (lawyer's) seat.
On the morning of January 24, the U.S. Military Court opened its trial of Japanese war criminals. Judges, prosecutors, apologists, interpreters, recorders and other staff members are all U.S. military officers. The presiding judge is composed of General Miduton, the prosecutor is Lieutenant Colonel Weiss and other two people, and the defenders are Lieutenant Colonel Heggins and Major Blue Wen. The 18 Japanese war criminals were, led by Major General Masataka Dysprosium, chief of staff of the Thirty-fourth Army of the Japanese Army invading China, and Daisa Fukumoto Kameji, commander of the Hankou Gendarmerie Corps; the other 16 were Minoru Sakai, Keisuke Kosaka, Warrant Officer Fujii, Shozo Shozo, Hisamatsubin, Hisaguchi Hisayoshi, Takayoshi Tsukada, Koyuki Takeuchi, Koichi Matsuda, Junichi Fujii, senior soldiers Yusaburo Shirakawa, Shoji Nishikawa, Yumizu Mizuda, and Masahira Hamada, Ryoichi Manabe, and Katosmi, a staff member of the Japanese Consulate in Hankou.
At 10 o'clock, the court announced the opening of the trial, and the judge ordered the recorder to take the oath first, and then ordered the interpreter Captain Xian Junlong and 3 other people to take the oath. After taking the oath, the chief prosecutor, Lieutenant Colonel Weiss, stood up and read out the list of orders and prosecutions of the US military, which was confirmed by the judge and approved for the record. Judges, prosecutors, defenders, etc. have successively taken the oath. Then, the prosecutor reads out the "Indictment": accusing 18 Japanese war criminal Masataka Dysmu and others of crimes. Born in 1897 in Ishikawa Prefecture, Japan, the first offender, Masataka Dysprosium, graduated from the Japanese Army Non-Commissioned Officer School in May 1920 and invaded China in August 1938. During his time in China, he commanded the massacre of Chinese soldiers and civilians, and in December 1944, he created the killing of American pilots in Hankou (on November 21, 1944, an American aircraft was destroyed by Japan over Hankou, three American pilots were captured by the Japanese army, tortured in every way, and on December 16, the three people were severely beaten by the Japanese army, hanged and incinerated). In June 1945, Dysprosium returned to Japan as chief of staff of the Fifty-fifth Army. After Japan announced its final surrender, he was extradited from Tokyo to China on December 24 and held in Tilanqiao Prison.
On the morning of February 11, a military tribunal once again held a public trial of 18 Japanese war criminals, including Masataka Dysprosium, at Tilanqiao Prison. In addition to the 60 journalists who originally attended the courtroom, 100 additional auditoriums were added, and the hearing certificate was issued outside the prison that morning, and anyone could collect it until the end of the hearing. No photographs may be taken with the exception of the original photojournalist. On December 18, Major General Chennault, former commander of the U.S. Army's 14th Air Force, also attended the trial, and the military court specially set up a chief auditor's seat for Chennault.
During several court hearings, Major Monnecko and Captain Justin of the US Military, who were in charge of investigating the case, and Chinese civilians Yang Deyou and Song Wentong, who witnessed the killing of the American pilot by Japanese war criminals, made statements in court, accusing the Japanese war criminals of all kinds of inhumane atrocities committed against the US captured pilots in Hankou. On February 28, the U.S. Military Court pronounced verdicts on 18 Japanese war criminals, sentencing 5 people, including Masataka Takashi Takashi, Mitsumi Fujii, Shozo Masui, Koichi Matsuda, and Yusaburo Shirakawa, to life imprisonment for Kameiji Fukumoto, to 20 years' imprisonment for Sakai, 15 years for Takayoshi Kumatsu, Takayoshi Yamaguchi, Yoshiyuki Takeuchi, and Junichi Fujii, and 3 years for Keisuke Kosaka and Ryoichi Mannabe. Kato was sentenced to 2 years, Mizuta Yu was sentenced to 1 and a half years in prison, and Hamada Masahira was acquitted.
According to investigations, since December 16, 1945, the National Government has successively set up military tribunals for the trial of war criminals in 10 cities, including Beiping, Shenyang, Nanjing, Guangzhou, Jinan, Hankou, Taiyuan, Shanghai, Xuzhou, and Taipei. Among them, the Nanjing Military Tribunal is directly subordinate to the Ministry of National Defense of the National Government, and the other 9 military tribunals are subordinate to various "war zones" ("appeasement zones" and "xingyuan"). Among the 10 military tribunals, the earliest trial of Japanese war criminals was the Military Tribunal for the Trial of War Criminals in the First Appeasement District in Shanghai and the Military Tribunal for the Trial of War Criminals in the Eleventh Theater of Operations in Beiping, both in April 1946. The U.S. Military Court-Martial at Tilanqiao Prison was heard in January 1946, as mentioned above. It can be seen that Tilanqiao Prison is indeed the first place in China to try Japanese war criminals.
Two
In addition to the first trial of 18 war criminals, including Masataka Takashi Tsui, the U.S. Military Court also tried other Japanese war criminals in 1946 in Tulashibashi Prison, mainly against Japanese war criminals who destroyed and mistreated captured American pilots and Allies in the Philippines. In chronological order, the trials are summarized as follows:
In March, the U.S. Military Tribunal tried Lieutenant General Shigeru Sawada, Captain Rita Keijiro, Captain Mitsunosuke, and Captain Takahira Okada, commander of the Japanese 13th Army. The main crime charged was involvement in the killing of a Medolid pilot. The military trial committee consisted of 6 members, including Colonel Marano, 2 people, including Lieutenant Colonel Hendren, as prosecutors, and 2 people, including Lieutenant Colonel Bai Ding, as apologists. On March 14, Shigeru Sawada was sentenced to five years in prison, Mitsuyo Sei was sentenced to nine years, and Rita Keijiro and Okada Takahira were sentenced to five years.
In the same month, the U.S. military court tried Ishihara Yong, director of translation for the former Jiangwan prisoner of war concentration camp, and Miki Sui, director of the U.S. military concentration camp near Shenyang. The main crime charged with abusing American prisoners in concentration camps was charged. The presiding judges were General Miduton, Colonel Lake, Lieutenant Colonel Mitch, and Captain Gerard was the prosecutor. On March 7, Ishihara was sentenced to life imprisonment, and on March 14, Miki was sentenced to 25 years in prison.
In April, the U.S. Military Court tried Japanese war criminals Sergeant Hoshikawa Morijiro, Warrant Officer Tadashi Xiangshan, and Masaji Nagai, and was charged with the main crime of torturing and mutilating the bodies of five Filipinos at the Japanese Gendarmerie Command, No. 94, Jisifei Road (now Wanhangdu Road) in Shanghai, between February 28 and April 15, 1944. On 26 April, they were sentenced to 27, 22 and 20 years in prison, respectively.
In June, the U.S. Military Tribunal tried Japanese war criminals Ryo Nakano, Kawai Yasushi, Hideichi Imura, Seki Shinjo, and others. The four war criminals are charged with shooting down the plane on which Lieutenant Hader was flying in Taiwan in May 1945 and committing atrocities against Lieutenant Hadd. On June 8, Nakano was sentenced to life imprisonment, while Yasukai Kawai, Shuichi Imura, and Shin Seki were all sentenced to 30 years in prison.
In July, the U.S. Military Tribunal tried Lieutenant General Haruki Isayama, chief of staff of the Tenth Front in Taiwan, Daisaku Furukawa, chief of the Military Justice Department of the Headquarters, Anda Narita Nakasa Sugiura, Lieutenants Nakano, Tetsuo Ito, and Masaharu Matsui, and Lieutenants Date and Ken Fujii. Colonel Marlan, Lieutenant Colonel Bailey, and Lieutenant Petr Walter were judges, Captain Philos and Lieutenant Osborne served as prosecutors, and Captain Gloria and Lieutenant Shina were defense lawyers. The charges were in June 1945, when 16 American pilots who had been shipwrecked in the Taiwan Strait and captured by the Japanese were tried illegally and executed with the approval of Isayama and Furukawa. On July 25, Haruki Isayama was sentenced to life imprisonment, Furukawa and Sugiura Wereomasa were sentenced to death, Nakano was sentenced to life imprisonment, Ito was sentenced to 20 years in prison, Masaharu Matsui was sentenced to 40 years in prison, and Date Anda and Ken Fujikawa were sentenced to 30 years in prison.
In August, the U.S. Military Tribunal tried Lieutenant General Hisaichi Tanaka, commander of the 23rd Army and governor of Hong Kong, who invaded China, major general Haruko Fukuchi, chief of staff of the Hong Kong Governorate's Department of the Japanese army, and former Japanese military tribunals in Hong Kong, as well as former Japanese military tribunals in Hong Kong, where they were hirosa, Watanabe Masamori, and Keiichi Yamaguchi. Mainly accused them of abusing and killing Major Hok, a pilot of the U.S. Army's Fourteenth Air Corps, in Hong Kong in 1944. On September 3, the U.S. Military Court sentenced Tanaka Andeichi Fukuchi to death. (But this was not carried out, and Tanaka was later escorted to Guangzhou.) In March 1947, the Military Tribunal for the Trial of War Criminals in Guangzhou received a telegram from the Nationalist Government's Hanwen Defense Lü Shizi No. 4578 approving his execution on the spot. On the afternoon of March 27, Tanaka Washichi was mentioned from the War Criminals Detention Center to the "Guangzhou Military Tribunal for the Trial of War Criminals" at No. 4 Guangwei Road in Guangzhou City, and Cai Lijin, chief procurator of the Guangdong Higher Prosecutor's Office, verified his identity and informed him that he was now executed, asked if he had a last word, and then gave him tobacco and alcohol. After 3:15 p.m., gendarme Li Mingde executed him with a rifle at the Liuhuaqiao Execution Ground in the north of Guangzhou. Kuboguchi and Watanabe Werehimori were sentenced to life imprisonment, Yamaguchi Kyuichi was sentenced to 50 years in prison, and Captain Hiroko Asakawa was acquitted.
In September, the U.S. Military Tribunal tried Japanese war criminals Daisa Matsuda and Captain Kawashima, accused of abusing American prisoners in concentration camps in Changchun, Jilin Province, in a brutal manner. On September 15, Matsuda was sentenced to seven years in prison and Kawashima was sentenced to death.
Some Japanese war criminals committed suicide or died of illness in Tilanqiao Prison during their detention and trial, such as The Japanese Commander in Taiwan and Governor General Toshiyoshi Ando at 23:45 on the night of April 19, 1946, when he swallowed highly toxic drugs hidden in the cracks of his clothes and committed suicide at the age of 63. Riki Ando and 15 of his subordinates were escorted from Taiwan to Shanghai on April 15 of the same year, and he was the top Japanese general who committed suicide in China. In his memoirs, the commander-in-chief of the Japanese dispatch army that invaded China, Okamura Ningji also mentioned the historical facts of Ando's suicide in prison. A few days later, Ando's legal adviser, Shosa Matsuo, who was escorted to Tilanqiao Prison on the same plane as Ando, also committed suicide in prison. On November 28 of the same year, General Naosaburo Okabe, who had been the commander of the Japanese Sixth Front, suffered a cerebral hemorrhage in Tilanqiao Prison and died at 7 p.m. that night, at the age of 60. Okabe was the supreme Japanese general who died of illness in China.
Three
On March 20, 1946, the First Appeasement District Military Tribunal for the Trial of War Criminals was established in Shanghai. In July of the following year, the First Appeasement District Military Tribunal for the Trial of War Criminals was ordered to be abolished and merged into the "Military Tribunal for the Trial of War Criminals of the Ministry of National Defense", with Shi Meiyu as the president of the court, Wang Jialin as the chief procurator, Li Jun, Xu Naikun, Gao Shuoren, Shi Yong as procurators, Lu Qi, Li Yuanqing, Lin Jianpeng, Ye Zaizeng, Sun Jianzhong, Long Zhonghuang, Zhang Tikun and others as judges, and the office was located on the fourth floor of the port headquarters at No. 1 Jiangwan Road in Shanghai. In August of the same year, after the discussion of the 53rd Standing Committee of the War Crimes Handling Committee jointly formed by the Ministry of Military Affairs, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Justice and Administration, the Secretariat of the Executive Yuan, and other departments of the National Government, it was decided to upgrade the Shanghai War Criminals Detention Center at No. 5 Yingao Road in Jiangwan (after the original site was the Shanghai Municipal Re-education Through Labor Detention Center) to a "War Criminals Prison of the Ministry of National Defense." Because this prison is located near the Jiangwan Gaojing Temple, it is also commonly known as the "Jiangwan War Criminals Prison", and most of the Japanese war criminals who were originally in The Basket Bridge Prison were transferred here, but the Japanese war criminals sentenced to death are still detained in the Basket Bridge Prison.
According to relevant information, the Shanghai Military Tribunal, including the First Appeasement District Military Tribunal in the early period and the military tribunal for the trial of war criminals by the Ministry of National Defense after the annexation, tried a total of 116 Japanese war criminals, of whom 14 were sentenced to death, 22 were sentenced to life imprisonment, 75 were sentenced to fixed-term imprisonment, and 5 were acquitted. The other 11 people who were sentenced to death were executed by The Chinese judicial police between August 12, 1947 and September 9, 1948, and were shot at the execution ground of Tilanqiao Prison. Among them, the first to be executed was Kurosawa, a member of the recruitment work class of the General Staff of the 22nd Division of Japan, who was 34 years old at the time. Kurosawa was a law student at Waseda University who was transferred to China in August 1938 and stationed with the army in the Zhejiang area. Kurosawa once led his troops in Hangzhou, Shaoxing and other places to carry out collective massacres of Chinese civilians, or buried alive, or slashed, or machine gun strafing, killing more than 1,000 Chinese civilians, known as the "Lion of Hangzhou". This executioner, whose hands were stained with the blood of Chinese people, hid in the Hangzhou Japanese Overseas Chinese Management Office after the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, was later arrested by a case, transferred to Tilanqiao Prison, and executed by shooting by the Shanghai Military Tribunal on August 12, 1947.
On the day of the execution, the murderous demon king made many demands, such as "Let me bathe and shave, clean and go to see God" and "I will write a last word, please take more care" and so on. Kurosawa was handcuffed to the prison execution site with his hands crossed. At that time, the prison execution ground was against the wall on one side and only separated from the surrounding residential areas by bamboo fences on the other. When Kurosawa was escorted to the execution ground, some of the surrounding residents were lying on the bamboo fence, some stood on the roof, and some watched from the window, and the applause and shouts came and went, and the crowd was excited. Kurosawa sat in the "execution chair" escorted by the bailiff. Just listening to the sound of "popping", the bullet that executed the Japanese war criminal was shot at the back of Kurosawa's head, and the murderous "Lion of Hangzhou" fell down in response.
The last person to be shot in prison was Date Shunnosuke (Zhang Zongyuan), who had been living in seclusion in Qingdao and engaged in secret service activities as a senior adviser to the Japanese Navy. Also executed were Cao Tomitaku of the Japanese Gendarmerie Corps in Liyang, Jiangsu Province; Heizaburo Shibahara, intelligence director of the Japanese Gendarmerie Corps in Hangzhou; Warrant Officers Kubo Eji and Tongji Koshinoma of the Japanese Gendarmerie Corps in Shanghai; Hayashi Ōtino, captain of the Japanese Gendarmerie Brigade in Chongming, and Hisahiro Nakano, chief of the Special High School Section; Kaneji Oba, captain of the Japanese Gendarmerie Detachment in Ningbo; and Yoshimori Matsutani, sergeant attached to the Japanese dispatch team in Hangzhou and Matsue. In addition, three Japanese war criminals, including ai Wu, former director of the Special High School of the Japanese Gendarmerie Headquarters in Vietnam and deputy wife of the captain of the Hanoi Gendarmerie Detachment, and Nobuo Cao Nagashima, former special senior division of the Military Police Detachment in Da Nang, Vietnam, and Shinsaburo Konishi, who were originally sentenced to death by the Guangzhou Xingyuan Military Tribunal, have been submitted to the Ministry of National Defense for approval.
Four
In summary, from January to September 1946, a total of 8 batches of 47 Japanese war criminals were tried by the US military court, and according to the statistics reported by the news media at that time, 10 people were sentenced to death (6 people were actually executed), 6 people were sentenced to life imprisonment, 29 people were sentenced to fixed-term imprisonment, and 2 people were acquitted. According to the statistics released by the Aid Bureau of the Japanese Ministry of Health and Welfare (equivalent to the Ministry of Health) on March 1, 1955, from February 1946 to September 1946, the US Military Court tried 45 Japanese war criminals at Tilanqiao Prison in Shanghai, sentenced 6 to death, sentenced 8 to life imprisonment, sentenced 26 to fixed-term imprisonment, and acquitted 5.
On December 22, 1948, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East executed seven war criminals, including Hideki Tojo and Ishigen Matsui, at Sugamo Prison in Tokyo, Japan. In November 1948, 18 Japanese war criminals, including Umezu Mijiro and Hata Shunroku, who were held at Sugamo Prison, were sentenced to life imprisonment and fixed-term imprisonment, respectively. In terms of the number of Japanese war criminals held, tried, and executed, Tilanqiao Prison is far more than Japan's Sugamo Prison.
"The autumn wind is now again, changing the human world." The stone stele of this "Anti-Japanese Memorial Site" in Tilanqiao Prison is engraved with the heinous crimes committed by Japanese war criminals on Chinese soil. With the approval of the Shanghai Municipal People's Government, the century-old Tilanqiao Prison has been listed as a memorial site for the Anti-Japanese Resistance in Shanghai and has been erected as a monument to preserve its history.