In November 1948, the two-and-a-half-year-long Trial of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East finally came to an end.
This world-renowned post-war international incident has successively tried 28 Japanese war criminals, and finally 2 people died in the trial, 1 person pretended to be crazy and stupid to avoid punishment, 7 people were sentenced to death, and 18 people were sentenced to imprisonment.
The seven people sentenced to death were hanged in December of that year and killed in Sugamo Prison, ending their sinful lives.
When we look back at this well-known history today, we will find that there are still many important points that can be studied by future generations, and many historical events can be used as references for today.
Combined with the last words of the 7 most heinous death row inmates, we will finally find out how powerful the driving force is when the will of the state is projected on the individual, and when the will of the individual is fed back to the state, its effect is minimal.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="5" > the end of the crossbow</h1>
By the summer of 1945, the Chinese military and civilians had begun a final counteroffensive against the Japanese army, and the Japanese had completely lost the Southeast Asian and Pacific theaters, and even retreated to the mainland to clamor for a "home-based decisive battle" with the Allies.
Because of the bitter lessons of the landing battles on Iwo Jima and Okinawa, the main anti-Japanese force at that time, the United States army, gave up the idea of landing on the Japanese mainland and instead adopted a new weapon that had not been put into use before- the atomic bomb.
On August 6 and 9, 1945, the Americans dropped two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki respectively, causing a large number of Japanese casualties and forcing the Japanese government to abandon resistance as soon as possible.
On August 14, 1945, Emperor Renyu of Japan finally accepted the Potsdam Proclamation, declaring Japan's unconditional surrender; at noon the next day, the news of the surrender reached every corner of the Japanese mainland, and to all The Japanese soldiers who were still fighting and could be contacted.
On the morning of September 2, with the signing of the letter by Shigemitsu Kei and Umezu Mijiro, the most tragic World War II in human history finally ended.
The Second World War profoundly changed the history of mankind, from the beginning of 39 years to the end of 45 years, lasting 6 years, more than 60 countries and regions, more than 2 billion people were affected, and finally led to the death of more than 70 million people, more than 100 million people suffered non-renewable function damage.
For our country, since the "918 Incident" in 1931, more than 35 million Chinese soldiers and civilians have suffered casualties in this catastrophe, which can be said to be the heaviest blow suffered by the Chinese nation in modern times.
The next thing to do is to try and punish war criminals, so as to comfort the undead and give an account to the living.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="7" > the Tokyo Trial</h1>
On January 19, 1946, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East was formally established, the coordinates were located in the valley of Tokyo City, and 11 countries, including China, the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, France, the Netherlands, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, India, and the Philippines, participated in the trial.
On May 3, the trial officially began, and the Chinese side dispatched a team of more than ten people, including judge Mei Ruxuan (áo), procurator Xiang Zhejun (jùn), chief adviser to the procurator Ni Zhengyi (yù), and secretary Yang Shoulin to participate in the Trial in Tokyo.
The trial lasted more than two years and was fairly tried against 28 Class A war criminals.
Among them, Yuki Nagano and Yosuke Matsuoka died of natural reasons during the trial, Shumei Okawa was diagnosed with syphilitic encephalitis and exempted from prosecution, and the remaining 25 were convicted of serious war crimes in World War II.
Seven of the main personnel were sentenced to death: Kenji Doihara, Hideki Tojo, Ishigen Matsui, Akira Muto, Seishiro Itagaki, Hiroshi Hirota, and Kitaro Kimura.
As descendants of the Chinese nation, each of us should firmly remember each of these names, and it was they who launched the "918 Incident," established the puppet state of Manchukuo, provoked the "July 7 Incident," planned an all-out war of aggression against China, created the Nanjing Massacre, and other tragedies that shocked China and foreign countries.
It is worth mentioning that when the final vote was cast on whether to hang the 7 main war criminals, the final result was 6 votes in favor, and a difference of 5 votes was won by one vote. It is not known which five judges handed down the sentence of not carrying out the death penalty at that time, for various reasons.
According to my guess, it is very likely that there are two judges in New Zealand, Australia, Canada and the United States.
One of the reasons is that, except for Hawaii in the United States, the war has never burned to the mainland of the above four countries, causing almost no civilian casualties, making them less aware of the crimes committed by war criminals;
The second reason is that although New Zealand, Australia, and Canada have all sent troops to join the Allies and participate in the anti-fascist war, in the course of the battle, the main forces of the Allied forces have always been the United States, Britain, Free France, etc. New Zealand, Australia, and Canada are mainly in the form of flanking assistance, and there are not many soldiers killed, adding up to no more than 100,000 people;
The third reason is that at that time, the United States was eager to drop atomic bombs to replace the landing operation, and a very important reason was that the Soviet Union also wanted to carry out the island landing operation, preemptively occupy the Japanese mainland, hoping to divide Japan's territory after the war, and in the face of this huge red empire, the US cabinet that made a lot of war gains in World War II had already begun to deploy, intending to build Japan into the nearest forward position of the United States to the Soviet Union in the Pacific coastal waters after the war, so it wanted to keep these high-level people alive.
No matter how analyzed, the fact is that these 7 war criminals who committed the most heinous crimes were sentenced to hanging. On December 22, 1948, at Sugamo Prison in Higashi-Ikebukuro, Tokyo, seven condemned prisoners were escorted to the execution ground. In the early hours of the morning, seven people were hanged one after another.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="9" > last words</h1>
The order of execution was decided according to the lottery, and kenji Doihara, the head of the Chinese spy, won the jackpot and was the first to go to the hanging table.
Kenji Toihara was an out-and-out Chinese master, and planned many early incidents of chaos in China, such as the assassination of Zhang Zuolin and the instigation of Wang Jingwei, which can be said to have paved the way for the subsequent large-scale invasion of China by Japanese militarism. Before the execution, he left a sentence:
"Cross forward, the narrow road will also become wider, and the erhe white road will be as wide as it is, but I hope it will also be wide."
The whole sentence is a very quintessential Chinese character, which basically means that after I die, when I enter the Buddhist white path, the road can be more spacious and let myself walk safely. This is completely to death thinking about his own extreme self-interest, and there seems to be no remorse for the crime.
The second is Hideki Tojo, the fortieth Prime Minister of Japan, who committed the crime of launching aggression against China and the Pacific War, a typical representative of Japanese militarism. Hideki Tojo left two poems:
"When this goes, the earthly mountains cross from the beginning, and Maitreya Buddha has only a place to go, how happy."
At the beginning of tomorrow, no one is afraid of anything to worry about, and Maitreya Buddha is only sleeping, how leisurely. ”
These two poems say that Hideki Tojo spent two years in prison very tormented, and finally took refuge in Buddhism and persevered. But what is this little punishment for the innocent Chinese people who were killed and slaughtered?
The third was the Japanese Army general Matsui Ishigen, who was mainly responsible for the occurrence of the Nanjing Massacre, and as the commander-in-chief of the troops, although he had instructions for his subordinates to "pay attention to military discipline", he did not prevent soldiers from entering the city of Nanjing to slaughter and burn, which was itself a tacit approval of this behavior. He composed a poem before his execution:
"There is no hatred in heaven and earth, no resentment, only fearless thoughts in the heart, thinking of The Spirit of Peace on the journey, moving forward without worry and worry."
What wants to stay in the world? Only my heart and lungs are loyal, since he is equal and must not be forgotten, and he should be sincere and courageous. ”
The poem recounts his own mental journey and reflects on the war to a certain extent at the end.
The fourth was Lieutenant General Muto Akira of the Japanese Army, who was also the person who was directly responsible for the Nanjing Massacre, and it was on his orders that his soldiers rushed into the city and acted recklessly. In addition, he was directly involved in several massacres in Southeast Asia and can be said to be the public enemy of Asia. Before his death, he said:
"In the world, wives and children are lovely.
Heroic hero Haojie, how can you steal peace? ”
In addition to his longing and nostalgia for his family, Muto Akira also compared himself to a heroic hero, which shows that the two years of detention and trial have not played any role, and have not shaken his militaristic ideas in the slightest.
Itagaki Seishiro was appointed as a general in the Japanese Army, the first of the second batch of war criminals to go to the execution ground. He was the only one to mention China in his last words:
"Kneel before bowing down to the gods, begging for forgiveness. Infinite remembrance, Chinese friends, in this day is to see, outside of East Asia, there is East Asia. I wish our country peace with all countries, contribute to world peace, and pray for the prosperity of China and the great Republic of Korea. ”
The sixth was the thirty-second Prime Minister of Japan, Hiroshi Hirota, whose crimes were also widely known, and he left only one sentence to his wife:
"Everything can be forgotten, but the beloved wife liang muzi cannot forget." From now on, one heaven and one man, may I see him in my dreams at night. ”
The last one is The Japanese Army General Kitaburō Kimura, known as the "Burmese Butcher", who single-handedly created tragedies such as the Yangon Massacre.
Similar to Hirota, Kimura was also thinking of his wife when he was dying:
"I left, hoping that my beloved wife Ying Fengzi would want to open up, transcending death, that is, eternal life." May we both be blessed to have a good relationship in the next life. ”
Hirota and Kimura finally think of their wives, but how many of the people they killed waited for the safe return of their husbands who had gone to war?
During the two years of the Tokyo trials, international military tribunals were also established in many parts of Asia to try more than 5,000 class B and C war criminals and to execute more than 900 people fairly.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="11" > the inferiority of the Japanese nation</h1>
This period of history has passed a long time ago, the Sri Lankans have passed away, and the war criminals have been duly punished, but what about the future? In fact, as early as the 15th century to the 17th century, the phenomenon of foreign conquest was already beginning to emerge.
At the end of the Sengoku period, after the assassination of Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi unified the various japanese ministries. Because the hierarchy in Japanese culture is very strict, the peasant class is only in charge of farming, and the samurai class is only in charge of fighting, so the samurai class that did not fight lost their income and raised dissatisfaction.
In order to reverse this contradiction, Toyotomi Hideyoshi had to decide to go on a foreign expedition, and the first stop was Korea, which was the closest and weakest to Japan.
In 1592, Toyotomi Hideyoshi led an army to invade Korea, once occupied the whole territory of Korea, and even began to have the ambition to conquer the Ming Dynasty and then step on India, which was quite the prototype of the "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere" later established.
However, the Ming Dynasty and Korea at that time were related to the suzerainty, and there was also a concept of an early military alliance between the two.
In 1593, Song Yingchang, the right attendant of the army, and Li Rusong, the viceroy of the army, led a 40,000-strong army to attack Korea, uniting the Korean native army and defeating Toyotomi Hideyoshi at Pyongyang. It can be said that Japan's first foreign conquest ended in complete failure.
After Tokugawa Ieyasu seized power to unify Japan, Japan entered the 200-year-long Tokugawa shogunate era. With the arrival of U.S. troops at the port of Edo in 1853, Japan, which had been closed to the outside world, was bombarded by western guns.
The Meiji Restoration, which was followed, led Japan to the East Asian countries in the 19th century in economic, military, and political terms.
However, forcibly transplanting Western institutional concepts in a short period of time will inevitably lead to a variety of social problems.
Japan, a land of bullets, has always been known for its lack of resources, some raw material shortages, some overcapacity, and the power of the old aristocracy has not completely dissipated, popular discontent is rising, and domestic contradictions are intensifying.
Against this historical background, the conquest of Korea was once again put on the agenda by the Japanese high command.
However, Japan's domestic GDP could not be raised in a short period of time, and the war military expenditure could only be obtained from the people, and the high taxes that had always been high and the short-term national debt that appeared for the first time in Asia came in handy, and the Japanese government was ready to carry out a foreign invasion of "betting on the fate of the country".
The Japanese not only occupied the Korean Peninsula, but also defeated the corrupt and incompetent Qing Dynasty in the Battle of the Yellow Sea, and signed the Treaty of Maguan, receiving huge reparations.
In the middle of the war, the Japanese army landed in the Lushun area, and under the command of Nogi Yoshinori, created the first tragedy against China in history - the Lushun Massacre.
The Russo-Japanese War that followed from 1904 to 1905 was the same route, only this time, Japan defeated Tsarist Russia and did not receive much reparations, only preserving its vested interests in China.
This has led to a surge of anti-government sentiment in Japan, with student demonstrations intensifying, many government residences and public buildings burned down, and the government in power is already in jeopardy.
At this time, no one noticed that Japan's militarist ideology had quietly risen, and for this nation, which was accustomed to passing on domestic contradictions through foreign conquest, martial arts and aggression had been called the only clear way in the hearts of ordinary people.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="15" > exotic mountains and rivers, not common heaven</h1>
In October 1978, the tablets of 14 Class A war criminals and more than 2,000 Class B and C war criminals were moved to the Yasukuni Shrine under the name of "Martyrs of the Showa Era."
Almost every subsequent prime minister's cabinet will visit and worship. To this day, no cabinet government in Japan has sincerely apologized to the people of Chinese and the people of the world for the crimes committed in that year.
For the descendants of China who have suffered from the disaster, we can no longer trace the mistakes made by our predecessors, all we want is an apology so that those who survived can be relieved.
As the surviving witnesses of the War of Resistance Against Japan passed away one by one, there were very few witnesses to that disaster, and soon, these years would be wrapped in dust and go away with the wind by the rolling wheels of history...
As the descendants of great heroes, we are not qualified to forgive the Japanese for their crimes, and all we can do is remember this history of humiliation.
To borrow a line from the movie "Dream Quest": "The real death is that no one in this world remembers you." "Remember history, don't forget the national shame!" As long as we remember these years, remember this history, and remember these people, the blood of our compatriots will not be shed in vain!