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AT LEAST SOME OF HITLER’S industrial elite had spent some time in prison, albeit with access to good food and very acceptable wines. Their Japanese colleagues were spared even that fate. The purges in Japan, apart from arrests of suspected war criminals, were meant to be “preventative,” not “punitive.” What they were meant to prevent was the resurgence of “militarism.” The problem was that the Americans were unsure whom to purge, and too much inclined to view Japan as an Oriental version of the Third Reich.
Who exactly had “misled the people of Japan”? Not the emperor, since SCAP had already decided he was innocent. The military organization that most closely resembled a Nazi-type outfit was the military police, the Kempeitai, much feared by Japanese and non-Japanese alike for its expert use of torture and murder. About forty thousand Kempeitai officers lost their jobs; few Japanese tears were shed over them. Other patriotic organizations, having to do with the Shinto religion, emperor worship, martial arts, or wartime economic planning, may have looked like Nazi organizations, but were not really the same at all. Nor was the Imperial Rule Assistance Association, founded in 1940 as a reformist political umbrella group to mobilize politicians, bureaucrats, and intellectuals for the war effort. It lacked a coherent ideology, and some of its founders were actually socialists. The War Planning Board included a few left-wing economists too. Even the policy on what to do with officers in the armed forces was unclear. First it was decided that all officers down to the rank of major had to be purged. Surely no one lower than that could have been in a position to mislead anyone. When Major General Richard Marshall, deputy chief of staff, got wind of this, he erupted in a fury. In his experience, Japanese captains and lieutenants had been the worst fanatics. If they were not added to the list, he said, they would mislead the Japanese people again. So they were added to the list as well.19 In short, SCAP’s Americans didn’t have much of a clue.
If any institution had played a major role in the Japanese war effort, it was the bureaucracy: the Home Ministry, in charge of policing dissent, but also the Ministry of Commerce and Industry (absorbed during the war into the Munitions Ministry), in control of wartime industrial planning. And even the Ministry of Finance, which had a big hand in exploiting the resources of conquered Asian countries. Industrial bureaucrats had been responsible for massive slave labor operations, in the puppet state of Manchukuo, in other parts of China, and in Japan itself, where large numbers of people were put to work in factories and mines, mostly in atrocious conditions. But the U.S. Occupation guidelines for dealing with these cases were vague. Senior figures in the top ranks were to be removed from office. Lower-ranking figures could remain in their jobs. The purged officials were not supposed to exert any more influence. It was never exactly clear how they could be prevented from meeting their former subordinates for informal consultations. And so they usually did.
It was on the question of what to do with the business and industrial elites that the U.S. administration was most divided. The Supreme Commander, in his typical pompous manner, intoned: “It was these very persons, born and bred as feudalistic overlords, who held the lives of the majority of Japan’s people in virtual slavery, and who . . . geared the country with both the tools and the will to wage aggressive war.” They, he insisted, had to be “removed from influencing the course of Japan’s future economy.”20
MacArthur actually said this in 1947, a year after the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal (formally the International Military Tribunal for the Far East) had been convened, modeled on the Nuremburg trials. Other Americans took a very different view. The chief prosecutor of the Tokyo tribunal, Joseph B. Keenan, a former director in the U.S. Justice Department, said in that same year: “We have neither been offered nor have we found evidence of instances where prominent business and industrial leaders conspired with anyone to plan or initiate the war.”21
How the Japanese themselves felt about purges depended on their politics. One letter writer to SCAP wanted him to understand that “99 percent of the Japanese people, at least until now, were absolute fanatics and militarists.”22 Another, more temperate correspondent claimed that the “bureaucrats are unprincipled, to the extent that they even allowed a fascist and a war criminal like . . . the former home minister, to keep his office. Even if there were a liberal among them, he would be timid and passive.”23
What made things a little simpler in Japan is that only one of the Allied powers, the United States, was responsible for “demilitarization” and “democratization.” There was no equivalent of SCAP in Germany, not even General Lucius Clay, who certainly would not have received letters such as the one that said, “We look to MacArthur as the second Jesus Christ.”24 But internally divided, in terms of bureaucratic turf and political persuasion, the Americans never really came up with a consistent purging strategy. The actual governing of Japan was left up to a Japanese cabinet, which instructed the bureaucracy to institute its own reforms. While these were perfunctory at best, there was another target which, despite the views of chief prosecutor Joseph Keenan, the American New Dealers took far more seriously. Individuals who “do not direct future Japanese economic efforts for solely peaceful ends” had to be removed, and “industrial and banking combines which have exercised control over a great part of Japan’s trade and industry” must be dissolved.25 These combines, or zaibatsu, were designated as the main economic warmongers.
This came as a shock to the industrialists, who, like the banker Hermann Abs and his colleagues in Germany, cherished their prewar contacts in the boardrooms of London and New York. Before the war was even over, the president of a large steel company, a Harvard graduate, exclaimed (in English) in a secret meeting of industrialists, “Our friend is coming.”26 Japanese business leaders with international experience, many of whom had studied in Europe or the United States, expected to be put in charge of the reconstruction of the Japanese economy by like-minded Americans. Instead, they were ousted and their business conglomerates pulled apart.
To the New Dealers in MacArthur’s military government, this was their proudest achievement—this and the land reforms which broke the back of “feudalism” in rural Japan. Many Japanese leftists felt enormously encouraged by U.S. policies. In the first few years of occupation, Washington was seen as the left’s best friend. Women’s suffrage, the right to strike, collective bargaining, these were all great innovations pushed by the Americans and gratefully acted upon by the Japanese. Communists as well as socialists began to wield considerable power in trade unions and higher education.
But even some Japanese with leftist views who had no warm feelings for the industrialists were a little bemused by the special blame attached to the zaibatsu. In a letter to his friend Donald Keene, Theodore de Bary, then a naval officer, mentions a conversation with a businessman in Tokyo named Miyauchi, who called himself a socialist and a democrat. De Bary asked him about the wartime role of the zaibatsu. Miyauchi replied that they had counted for little with the military establishment. Yes, some of the new zaibatsu, such as Nissan, had done well out of the war, but the “Big Four” old zaibatsu families, Mitsubishi, Mitsui, Sumitomo, and Yasuda, had been co-opted like everyone else: “They were weak, the zaibatsu were weak.”27
De Bary is only half convinced. He had heard this line so often from Japanese that he suspected the influence of military propaganda. He writes: “The army, during the thirties, must have propagated the idea first and then have proved its truth by buying out or intimidating the zaibatsu.”
One thing is certain: by going after the zaibatsu and leaving the bureaucracy more or less alone, the Americans showed that they had not really understood how the Japanese wartime system worked. But this was not just a matter of ignorance or misunderstanding; there was a confluence of views between idealistic American planners, who wanted to help build a new Japan, and the Japanese “reform bureaucrats” who were expecting to continue their wartime grip on the economy, albeit to more peaceful ends.
Not that nothing was done. By 1948, the careers of more than nine hundred thousand people had been screened, and more than one and a half million questionnaires examined. The Home Ministry was dissolved, the armed forces disbanded, and 1,800 bureaucrats were purged. But most of these (70 percent) were former policemen and other officials from the Home Ministry. Economic bureaucrats were hardly touched at all. From the former Ministry of Munitions only forty-two men were dismissed, and from the Ministry of Finance just nine.28 The man who ran the Ministry of Munitions, after being in charge of slave labor in Manchuria, and who then helped to plan the Japanese imperialist enterprise known as the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, was arrested but never formally charged with war crimes. His name was Kishi Nobusuke, and his career flourished after his release from prison; he would go on to become prime minister of Japan.
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IN THE HISTORY of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, the Philippines occupies a curious place. The country was invaded and occupied by the Japanese on December 8, 1941, ten hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Douglas MacArthur, then officially Field Marshal of the Philippine Army, retreated to Australia in March of the following year, where he asserted, “I shall return.” The Filipino president, Manuel Quezon, also left for Australia and thence to Washington, D.C., where he established a government in exile. This in itself was unusual; there was no Indonesian government in exile, or Burmese government in exile. There was a Thai government in exile, but Thailand was never a colony. By the time the Japanese invaded, the Philippines was somewhere in between a colony and a state. It already had commonwealth status and was supposed to become fully independent in 1946. The Japanese, in spite of promising, as General Homma Masaharu put it, to emancipate the Filipinos from the oppressive domination of the United States, in fact recolonized the country in a more brutal form. Even though the Philippines was formally declared an independent republic in 1943, under president José P. Laurel, the Japanese were fully in charge. Behind every Filipino government official was a Japanese “consultant,” and behind every consultant stood the Japanese army and the dreaded Kempeitai military police. The republic, in short, was a sham.
There was, however, a tough Filipino resistance movement against the Japanese. The most effective anti-Japanese guerrillas, operating in the rural areas of the main island of Luzon, shared the politics neither of Quezon nor of Laurel. The Hukbalahap, meaning People’s Anti-Japanese Army, were barefooted peasant revolutionaries whose enemies were not only the Japanese but also the big Filipino landowning families. Enriched by their vast sugar and coconut plantations, the landlords, masquerading as democrats, ran the country as a feudal oligarchy. The most famous Huk leader, named Luis Taruc, was a son of sharecroppers. Another colorful Huk was a huge and ferocious female warrior named Felipa Culala. Her nom de guerre was Dayang Dayang. Even the Japanese were afraid of Dayang Dayang.
Since many of the landlords had fled their plantations for Manila during the Japanese occupation, the Huks did what communists had done in other countries: they took over the land and set up a kind of state within a state. Their disciplined fighting “squadrons” were ruthless killers of Japanese, but also of any Filipinos suspected of collaboration or indiscipline. Even the formidable Dayang Dayang was punished when she broke the rules. Abiding by her own motto that “those who don’t get rich in this war have liquid brains,” she went on a spree of looting anything from water buffalo to jewelry. She was caught, tried, and shot.29
José Laurel and most of his cohorts in the puppet government, such as Manuel Roxas and Benigno Aquino, were from the elite landowning families, whose power the Huks would have wished to overturn, even without a Japanese occupation. In the sense of serving under the Japanese and promoting an anti-American, pan-Asianist cause, these men were certainly collaborators. But like the collaboration of other Asian nationalists in former Western colonies, their motives were complex. Laurel was an impressive man, a graduate of Yale Law School, a senator, and an associate justice on the supreme court in Manila. Although a member of the colonial elite, he may genuinely have believed that the Japanese brand of militant “Asianism” was needed to wean Filipinos from their dependence on the United States. Similar claims have been made by European quislings, who thought that a new order run by Nazi Germany would restore some vim to their decadent societies. But they were betraying independent nations; Laurel, Sukarno, and others were operating under foreign rule or domination, before and after the Japanese landed.
Laurel remained a prime target for Filipino guerrillas. While playing a round of golf with Benigno Aquino at the Wack Wack Golf and Country Club in June 1943, he was shot in the back by two assailants, one of whom bore the name of “Little Joe.” Later that year, after he had recovered from his wounds, Laurel attended the Greater East Asian Conference in Tokyo, where Asian brotherhood and cooperation were pledged. The following year he agreed to declare war on the United States as the Japanese demanded.
Meanwhile, in October 1944, General MacArthur made good on his promise to the Filipinos that he would return. To heighten the drama of this event, he waded through the surf of Leyte, a scowling figure in aviator glasses. Indeed, he waded through the surf more than once to get the image just right for the newsreels. And he reenacted the same scene in Luzon. In his usual biblical manner, sure to appeal to the Catholic as well as the mystical side of Filipinos, he intoned: “People of the Philippines, I have returned. By the grace of the Almighty God our forces stand again on Philippine soil—soil consecrated in the blood of our two peoples . . . Rally to me . . . The guidance of divine God points the way.”
On their long and often bloody slog to Manila, American troops were actively helped by the Huks. The Filipino guerrillas drove out the Japanese from various parts of central Luzon, hoisted the Stars and Stripes along with the Philippine flag, and set up their own administration, expecting U.S. support for the independent Philippine socialist republic. This is not how it turned out, however. Despite some words of admiration for the fighting spirit of the Huks, MacArthur was persuaded to bring back the people he knew best, that is to say, the old landowning elite. Despite his vow to “run to earth every disloyal Filipino,” MacArthur made Manuel Roxas, a loyal member of Laurel’s puppet government, a brigadier general in the U.S. Army.30
The Huks were ordered to give up their arms. When they refused, they were arrested. Some were jailed without formal charges. One of them was Luis Taruc, who shared his prison cell with several former collaborators of the Japanese. When fifty thousand peasants marched in protest to the Malaca?ang Palace in Manila, Taruc was released, but many of his troops remained in prison. What followed is murky. Arms were twisted, money changed hands. The Manila press came out with stories about Laurel and his colleagues having acted as impeccable patriots during the war, shielding the Filipinos as best they could from the horrors inflicted by Japanese. MacArthur called Roxas “one of the prime factors in the guerilla movement.” Filipinos were admonished to be above “petty jealousy” and “unnecessary misunderstanding,” for such things would only “impede progress.”31
As the first president of the Philippines after World War II, Manuel Roxas declared an amnesty for wartime collaborators. Thousands were released from jail. Luis Taruc took to the hills and the Huks became the Army to Liberate the People, forerunners of the Maoist New People’s Army. And the old landowning families, firmly in charge of their possessions once more, continued to rule Philippine politics. This was still true in 1986, after “people power” had toppled Ferdinand Marcos, inspiring the world with the promise of Asian democracy. The People Power star was Corazon “Cory” Aquino, Benigno Aquino’s daughter-in-law. Her vice president was “Doy” Laurel, José Laurel’s son. As I write, the president is Benigno Aquino III, Cory’s eldest son.
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TO RESTORE LEGITIMACY to a ravaged country, it helps to have a symbolic figure to rally around. This can be a respected monarch, a resistance hero, even a foreign general who can plausibly pose as a savior. General Douglas MacArthur’s style may have been a little too histrionic, even egomaniacal, for some tastes, but he played this role to perfection in both Japan and the Philippines. His use of the Japanese emperor as the symbol of continuity was calculated to complement his own performance as the temporary shogun. Heroism, including MacArthur’s, is often a matter of theater, and in some cases a complete fiction. In North Korea, for example, “the Great Leader” Kim Il-sung was imposed by the Soviet Red Army as a great partisan hero who had single-handedly chased the Japanese from the Korean peninsula. In fact, he had spent most of the war in a Soviet army training camp near Khabarovsk.
When the figureheads of prewar regimes have lost credibility, and legitimacy is contested, you have the basis for civil war. This broke out in full force in Greece, and after a year of shadowboxing and skirmishes, it would soon cut loose in China too.
The Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, known to Americans as the Gimo, and to the U.S. commander in wartime China, General Joseph “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell, as “Peanut Head,” was nominally in control of China. But many parts of the country were clearly beyond his grasp. The Gimo presented himself, and was depicted in American wartime propaganda, as a great national leader, heroically battling the Japanese. But Mao Zedong, holed up with his guerrilla army in the northwest, promoted the idea—not entirely spurious—that Chiang had been passive at best, and a Japanese collaborator against the Communists at worst. The Communists claimed that they were the true resisters, and Mao the national hero. In fact, both sides often regarded the Japanese as a tedious sideshow which the U.S. would eventually take care of. The real enemies were at home. As two hostile Chinese armies squared up for the final battle, one heroic narrative was pitted against another.
The two leaders actually met, just after the war, at an extended meeting in the Nationalist wartime capital of Chungking (now spelled Chongqing). They couldn’t really bear one another, but had a mutual respect for the other’s toughness, like bosses of rival gangs. Mao toasted Chiang at the official banquet and wished him ten thousand years of prosperity. In an attempt to stave off an all-out civil war, polite talks were held about power-sharing, who would occupy which parts of the country, what kind of government might be shared, and so forth. No firm agreement was reached. Mao told his comrades that the statement of peaceful intentions (“democracy,” “one army,” Chiang’s “leadership”) was “a mere scrap of paper.”32 But the U.S. ambassador to China, the mentally unstable Patrick J. Hurley, who disconcerted his Chinese hosts by treating them to whooping Choctaw Indian war cries, still had hopes that he, a man who knew next to nothing about China, would bring the two parties together. Any American who harbored doubts on this issue, including diplomats with far greater expertise, was, in Hurley’s fevered imagination, a traitor and probably a communist.
The New York Times reporter had it right. In a report on October 6, he wrote, “To Westerners who wonder why there is so much haggling, it should be pointed out that troops are the decisive factor in Chinese politics.” Not only that, but arms were decisive too. Which is why Chiang insisted on his sole right to disarm the Japanese, and why Mao chose to ignore this.
In the summer of 1945, Chiang’s Nationalists had an army of about four million men spread all over southern and central China. But they were badly trained, ill disciplined, and often led by corrupt and incompetent officers. “Puppet armies,” set up by the Japanese in Manchukuo, northern China, and Nanking (Nanjing), the old Nationalist capital, numbered more than a million men. They were better equipped than the Nationalists and often superior fighters, and, rather than disarm them, Chiang preferred to absorb them into his own ranks. Then there was an assortment of provincial warlords whose loyalties were self-seeking and always fluid.
Chinese civilians dreaded the arrival of Nationalists in their villages and towns, for the troops tended to behave more like brigands than soldiers, looting property, robbing food, raping women, and shanghaiing peasants into the army. Puppet troops and warlord armies were not much better. The Communists, who had about a million soldiers and two million militiamen, could be ruthless masters too, but they at least understood the value of discipline. Their public relations were better; they realized that a war is partly won by propaganda. Being seen as a heroic people’s army was one of their greatest assets.
Much of China was not just horribly damaged, but also corrupted by foreign occupation, warlord misrule, and many years of purges and counter-purges in a civil conflict that was often as brutal as the war with Japan. Donald Keene, the Japan scholar, was a young U.S. Navy officer stationed in Tsingtao (Qingdao), a port city on the Yellow Sea, known for its naval base, European architecture, and German-style beer breweries. The Japanese Imperial Navy was still in town when the U.S. Marines arrived, and Keene soon sensed “something fishy in the atmosphere,” a stink of skullduggery and corruption; “the charge of collaborationist is no less pervasive than the generally suspicious character of the city itself.”33
He found that Tsingtao was still run by Chinese who had been appointed by the Japanese, generally louche characters who had done well out of foreign occupation. He found Japanese naval officers bragging of their wartime exploits, and Chinese being purged for collaboration by other Chinese whose records were just as blemished; they simply wanted to loot the suspects’ properties. Tsingtao was a place of seedy carpetbaggers, gangsters, spies with shifting loyalties, and Japanese who still behaved like a master race. None of this was unique to Tsingtao. Keene heard reports from other parts of China about heavily armed Japanese troops being asked by Nationalists to help contain the Communists. These reports were entirely accurate. Some right-wing factions in Chiang’s government actually wanted to start a war with the Communists immediately with active Japanese assistance. The cautious Gimo did not wish to go that far, but large numbers of Japanese troops were used to guard Chinese railroads and many other installations against possible Communist attacks.
There were reprisals against the Japanese here and there, but on the whole, both Nationalists and Communists concentrated on their domestic enemies, and the Nationalists needed Japanese help. Besides, the relationship between Chinese and Japanese was often too tangled for simple solutions.
One of the most grotesque scenes of the immediate postwar period took place in Nanking, where tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, of Chinese had been massacred and raped by Japanese troops on an extended rampage in 1937. The Rape of Nanking still stands as one of the worst atrocities of World War II. General Okamura Yasuji was not directly involved in the massacre, but he was responsible for equally horrendous war crimes. In 1938, troops under his command murdered countless civilians with chemical weapons. His scorched-earth policy in 1942, known by Chinese as the “Three Alls” (“kill all, burn all, loot all”), caused the deaths of more than two million people. All men between fifteen and sixty were targeted for killing on suspicion of being anti-Japanese. And the systematic kidnapping of young women, mostly from Korea, to serve as sex slaves in Japanese army brothels, also happened on Okamura’s watch.
But when this same Okamura surrendered to General Ho Yin-chin in Nanking on September 9, 1945, General Ho bowed to the Japanese general and apologized for the indignity of this humiliating ceremony. Ho, who had been trained at the military academy in Tokyo under Okamura, called him “sensei,” teacher.34 And so, Okamura continued to occupy the Foreign Ministry building in Nanking as though nothing had changed. After he was finally indicted for war crimes by a court in Nanking three years later, the Generalissimo himself shielded him from further indignities and kept him on as a military adviser to the Nationalists. Okamura Yasuji died peacefully in his bed in 1966.
The key to the Chinese civil war really lay in Manchuria. The first to take this heartland of heavy industries and mines, set up and run by the Japanese, would be in an almost unassailable position. As we have seen, the Soviets got there first and stripped all the industrial and financial assets that could be transported to the Soviet Union. Their first encounters with the Chinese Communists were not always cordial. The ill-kempt Chinese soldiers were often treated with disdain by Soviet Red Army officers, and the lack of interpreters made communication almost impossible. Besides, Stalin, for the sake of Big Power stability, had decided for the time being to recognize the Generalissimo as the legitimate Chinese leader.
Still, more and more Chinese Communists from the Eighth Route Army were trickling into Manchuria, and in some areas, with the help of sympathetic Soviet commanders, took over the local administration. Since most Communist cadres had neither knowledge nor roots in a region that most Chinese regarded as the Wild North, home of nomads and savages, this was not an easy task. Apart from tense relations with the Soviets, and the sinister presence of roaming gangs of puppet troops, the Eighth Route Army also had to deal with an assortment of local underground guerrilla bands, some attached to the Soviets, some belonging to provincial warlords, and some affiliated with the Nationalist camp. Just as the Nationalists wanted Japanese and American help to fight the Communists, the Communists asked for Soviet assistance to suppress “anti-Soviet bandits.”35
Meanwhile, unnerved by the Communist advance into Manchuria, Chiang implored the Americans to transport Nationalist troops to the north. The U.S. complied, but halfheartedly, as the official policy was not to get involved in “fratricidal conflict.” Nationalists often arrived in the northeast too late, not in enough numbers, and sometimes in the wrong places.
The curious nature of the snake pit that was Manchuria—things would get much worse; up to three hundred thousand civilians died of starvation and disease in the siege of Changchun by the Communists in 1948—might best be illustrated by the story of a famous brothel in Andong, on the North Korean border.
Andong, in the fall of 1945, was quite a cosmopolitan place, a kind of Casablanca of northeast Asia, filled not only with Manchurian Chinese, but also with Koreans, Russians, and about seventy thousand Japanese, not just resident soldiers and civilians, but refugees from other parts of the former puppet state. Terrified of what the advancing Soviet troops would do to them, particularly to the women, Japanese civic leaders decided to set up a “cabaret,” in fact a brothel, to distract unwelcome Russian attentions from Japanese womenfolk. The task of running this establishment, named the Annei Hanten (Annei Inn), was a woman in her early forties named O-Machi. A former geisha in Japanese hot spring resorts, she recruited Japanese women, many of whom had no experience in this line of business, by appealing to their patriotism. They were asked to sacrifice themselves for the sake of Japan; they were the female kamikazes of Andong.36
There is still a stone memorial to O-Machi in her native town in Japan, erected by grateful Japanese whose lives she helped to save. O-Machi prided herself on being “apolitical” and treated all men, high and low, Russian, Japanese, or Chinese, equally. Although it was initially meant for the entertainment of the Russians, O-Machi’s “cabaret” attracted other types of customers too, including Japanese ex-officers and community leaders, as well as Chinese collaborators with the Japanese who were now on the Nationalist side, and even Chinese and Japanese communists. With the patrons fueled by sake, vodka, and Chinese wines, all kinds of information was exchanged at the Annei Inn.
O-Machi passed on to the Japanese what she heard from the Soviets about troop movements and planned arrests. Many Japanese, alerted in this way, managed to disappear at opportune times. There were spies and double-spies, “red radishes” (anticommunists pretending to be “reds”), and “blue radishes,” or communist infiltrators in the guise of anticommunists. Plots were hatched, and counterplots. A marriage was arranged at the Annei Inn between a Japanese employee and a Chinese Communist spy (who may have been a red radish), so the Japanese might find out what the Communists were up to. A military coup from the right, planned by Chinese Nationalists and Japanese ex-officers who had hidden artillery in the hills above Andong, was organized at the Annei Inn, but fell apart when the expected Nationalist troops failed to arrive.
Instead, not much later, the Communist Eighth Army marched into town, replacing the Soviet Red Army. Nothing seemed to change at first. The Communists were treated to a Chinese banquet at the Annei Inn, albeit without female dalliance, which the cadres disapproved of. Perhaps the Japanese could be of assistance to the Eight Route Army? Former employees of the Japanese Manchukuo electric company set up a “red theater” troupe, hoping to stage socialist “people’s plays.”
But the honeymoon didn’t last. The Communists decided that an international brothel was not what the new order called for. And, suspecting Japanese involvement in the failed Nationalist coup, the Communists arrested O-Machi and several Japanese community leaders as Nationalist spies. Not a great deal is known about what happened to them next. O-Machi was in prison for about a year, and then, in September 1946, she was executed on the bank of the Yalu River. Whether or not she was a spy, and for whom, remains a mystery.