Category Archives: Japan

1937: Ikki Kita

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On this date in 1937, intellectual Kita Ikki (Kita is the family name) was executed by the Japanese military government for inspiring a failed coup d’etat the previous year.

A onetime socialist turned radical nationalist, Kita — born Kita Terujiro — preached a doctrine of authoritarian national restoration around some socialist-sounding communitarian purpose, coupled with an unapologetic imperialism.

His Outline Plan for the Reorganization of Japan (the translation is from a reader, Sources of Japanese Tradition, partially excerpted here) argues that in the wake of Europe’s self-immolation in World War I, initiative lay with the Land of the Rising Sun — and that the country must adopt a muscular unity of purpose to grasp it.

The entire Japanese people, thinking calmly from this perspective which is the result of Heaven’s rewards and punishments, should, in planning how the great Japanese empire should be reorganized, petition for a manifestation of the imperial prerogative establishing “a national opinion in which no dissenting voice is heard, by the organization of a great union of the Japanese people.” Thus, by homage to the emperor, a basis for national reorganization can be set up.

Truly, our 700 million brothers in China and India have no path to independence other than that offered by our guidance and protection. And for our Japan, whose population has doubled in the past fifty years, great areas adequate to support a population of at least 240 million or 250 million will be absolutely necessary a hundred years from now. For a nation, one hundred years are like a hundred days for an individual. How can those who are anxious about the inevitable developments or who grieve over the desperate conditions of neighboring countries find their solace in the effeminate pacifism of doctrinal socialism? … At a time when the authorities in the European and American revolutionary creeds have found it completely impossible to arrive at an understanding of the “gospel of the sword” because of their superficial philosophy, the noble Greece of Asian culture [meaning Japan, of course] must complete its national reorganization on the basis of its own national polity. At the same time, let it lift the virtuous banner of an Asian league and take the leadership in the world federation that must come. In so doing let it proclaim to the world the Way of Heaven in which all are children of Buddha, and let it set an example that the world must follow.

One could quibble about particulars, but it’s essentially fascism — paralleling Mussolini in doctrine as well as ideological evolution. (According to W.G. Beasley Kita also co-founded a Gen. Jack Ripper-esque Society for the Preservation of the National Essence.)

A military coup was supposed to get the ball rolling, which made him a guru to an aggressive cadre of young officers who tried to seize the government in the February 26 Incident, named for the date in 1936 it took place.

Kita wasn’t himself involved in the coup, but his intellectual sponsorship was enough of a connection for the Kempeitai.* Modern Japanese Thought tartly observes that Kita’s vision for an imperial dictatorship didn’t turn on any misty-eyed allegiance to the emperor’s person.

When he was executed for his role in the mutiny of 1936, he was ordered to recant by saying “long live the emperor” as a final act of reverence and submission. He is reported to have refused by replying that he had vowed long ago never to joke about his own death.

In Fighting Elegy (or Elegy to Violence or Elegy to Fighting), Seijun Suzuki’s 1960’s skewering of militarist 1930’s Japan (review), Kita makes cameos to inspire the main male character to greater feats of violent sublimation of his repressed sexuality. (The following clip is merely the trailer.)

There’s also a 1973 biopic — the last film of Yoshishige Yoshida.

* I don’t have definite documentation on the method of execution; I’m supposing it was hanging, the standard method in Japan since the Meiji period.

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1947: Ding Mocun, not as hot a lay in real life

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On this date in 1947, Ding Mocun was shot for “conspiring with a foreign government to overthrow China” in Shanghai by the Kuomintang.

This former Communist turned right-wing radical may be most readily recognizable outside China as the real-life inspiration behind Ang Lee’s steamy 2007 art-house menace to undergarments Lust, Caution.

Based on a story by Eileen Chang (or Zhang Ailing), Lust, Caution fictionalizes Mocun’s real-life escape from an attempted assassination in 1939.

That incident was authored by Ding’s young plaything, who turned out to have a very serious side indeed. (Ding had her shot.)

While the attempt on the turncoat spy’s life really happened, there’s some dispute over whether Chang really had this particular woman strongly in mind over the twenty-plus years she composed her story. There’s more about the evolution of the fictional story here, but you’ll need Chinese skills to follow the links to Chang’s evolving text.

At any rate, Ding’s actual death would come by order of a more august character: Chiang Kai-shek.

Why so many people out to get him?

Despite his nationalist credentials, when Ding lost a party struggle in 1938, he found a gig with the collaborationist government of Japanese-occupied China running a nasty intelligence unit that made nationalists and Communists disappear. That’s the sort of resume anyone would be touching up come the mid-1940’s, and Ding went with a revision (not widely credited, though it has its advocates) that he was secretly passing information to the nationalist resistance all along. And as the nationalists and Communists turned on one another in the postwar power vacuum, it looked like his usefulness to the Kuomintang might get him off the hook after all.

It worked for a while, but Chiang — or so goes the story — caught a tabloid expose about Ding catching R&R at a lake when he’d used a medical pass to get out of prison, and impulsively ordered him shot.

Perhaps Ding’s status as official evildoer vis-a-vis a China whose messy birth many are old enough to remember helps account for the resonance of literary works that engage him as a human being. In a nonfiction vein, Konrad Lawson’s layered critique of the pro-Ding apologia linked above thoughtfully evokes the complexity of Ding’s era and the challenges it poses for historiography.

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1987: Sadamichi Hirasawa, by old age

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There is a joke in which some tyrant, having tired of a quick-witted minister in his employ, condemns the wretch to death — but adds that, in view of past good service, the victim will have liberty to choose the method. Thinking fast, the minister chooses old age.

On this date in 1987, something like that finally happened to Sadamichi Hirasawa, who died at age 95 after 37 years under sentence of death and 32 on death row. He was thought at the time to be the longest-serving condemned prisoner in the world, and few before or since could contend with him for the “honor.”


Hirasawa’s self-portrait at age 88. From a pro-Hirasawa site, via the blog hmmm.

Hirasawa, a tempera artist of some note, was convicted and death-sentenced in 1950 for a bizarre crime known as the “Teigin Incident” in which the culprit posed as an official in the American occupation and convinced the staff of a bank to take an elixir against an alleged dysentery outbreak. The potion turned out to be cyanide, and the culprit ransacked the bank while its staff lay dying around him.

Though the Japanese Supreme Court confirmed the sentence in 1955, exposing Hirasawa to immediate execution upon the authorization of any justice minister, widespread doubt about his guilt made the case a hot potato from the start. Time magazine reported authorities hoping that he’d be conveniently killed by poor prison conditions instead of hanging — in 1963.

Hirasawa just kept living, and justice ministers just kept his death warrant on the to-do list. The infamy of the crime made it too dicey to clear him;* the potential infamy of the hanging made equally dicey to carry out the sentence. Hirasawa knew it himself. In a secret 1980 recording after a rejected appeal, he jibes, “If they think they can hang me, they should go ahead and try.”

Eventually, Hirasawa provided the rare test case of the question of whether a 30-year statute of limitations could apply to a hanging. (Answer: no.)

The powers that be must have been relieved to see him go this day, but he’s not out of their hair yet. Hirasawa’s art is still being exhibited and his heirs are still fighting to clear his name.

* Innocence theories also focus on a chemical and biological warfare unit with a serious rap sheet from the occupation of China; at least one investigator suspected them early on, before official attention suspiciously switched to Hirasawa. No Japanese government ever had an interest in reopening that story, nor the comcomitant police cock-ups (or cover-ups) it would imply.

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1597: The 26 Martyrs of Japan, for God and trade routes

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On this date in 1597, 26 Christians were crucified at Nagasaki’s Tateyama (“Hill of Wheat”) as Japan began to close itself against western interference.

The 26 martyrs — five Europeans of Spanish extraction, one from Portuguese India, and 20 local converts — had been marched hundreds of kilometers over a period of weeks as a warning to the populace, before they were raised up on crosses and lanced to death. They could have had their liberty at the price of renouncing Catholicism; a 12-year-old altar boy among them reputedly answered such an offer on this day with the words, “Sir, it would be better if you yourself became a Christian and could go to heaven where I am going. Sir, which is my cross?”

Martyrs always cut heroic figures. The backdrop of these deaths, however, was a struggle over power and resources in Europe’s colonial age that was far from black-and-white.

European missionaries began their contact with Japan in the waning stages of Japan’s protracted civil wars. They did not scruple to interfere, winning converts with plum trade concessions like saltpeter.

At the same time, Spanish and Portuguese interests were contending with one another for overseas trade, as the European naval powers carved the world into colonies. To greatly simplify a conflict that would continue to unfold well into the 17th century, this day’s martyrdom was suffered by Spanish-backed Franciscans pressing into Portuguese territory in a proxy contest for access conducted by their respective secular authorities.

Portugal, in essence, got there first — and Japan was (disputably) within that seafaring realm’s official sphere of influence. Since legal recognition followed facts on the ground rather than the other way around, Spain sponsored mendicant orders like the Franciscans to make its own inroads.

The late-arriving group was less attuned to the local political climate. Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who had unified Japan and quelled civil strife, had pronounced an edict of expulsion against Christians ten years prior. It had not been enforced — but the ruler was sensitive to a slide back into civil war and watched the progress of cleric-aided colonization elsewhere in Asia warily. The Portuguese Jesuits took care:

The Jesuits knew that, even though Hideyoshi’s tolerance of Christian propaganda was “in direct proportion to the profits he hoped to gain from the Iberian traders,” their continuous mission would be granted as long as they acted submissively toward him and did not “touch the nerve” of the dictator. … Yet, this deliberate attitude was not shared by the Franciscans, who had just arrived in the country and took Hideyoshi’s acceptance “at its face value and promptly exploited it to the utmost, celebrating Mass openly and behaving generally as if they were in Rome.” The martyrdom at Nagasaki in 1597 was a fatal consequence of this …

When a merchant rashly boasted of Spain’s dominions and claimed that priests and trading ships preceded conquest, the crackdown caught up the martyrs (three of them were Japanese Jesuits seized mistakenly).

This incident did not close Japan against the outside world — that still lay 40 years to the future — but it was a sure step along the path. Intermittent, but more frequent, persecutions of Christians followed in the coming years, driving Japanese Catholics underground, a minuscule and secretive syncretic remnant now in ironic danger of disappearing without the cohesive pressure of persecution.

The 26 martyrs were beatified in 1627 but not elevated to sainthood until 1862 — when western powers once again pried open Japan.

They have a museum in Nagasaki, a city which today remains a (relative) stronghold of the tiny Japanese Christian population.

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1871: Kawakami Gensai

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On this date in 1871, the shadowy but legendary swordsman Kawakami Gensai was beheaded on a pretext — his use to the Meiji government at an end.

The Hitokiri — “mankiller” — Gensai came to manhood during the confusing death throes of the shogunate leading into the Meiji Restoration.

That Japan’s feudal stagnation would give way to the Meiji era’s centralization and modernization may well be accounted an inevitability of history. The particular form of its birth superimposed upon the epochal conflict a bitter internal division over openness to foreigners vis-a-vis the centuries-old isolation.

The Tokugawa Shogunate had been forced to accept trading pacts dictated by better-armed western nations, and the resulting cultural and economic shockwaves carried many to the camp of a long-slumbering imperial house ready to assert its authority. Power in Japan was a prize worth killing for.

Gensai did so. Physically small and even effeminate, he was justly among the most feared warriors of his day. He became an elite imperial assassin renowned for the speed of his blade; he was famous for murdering pro-western shogunate politician Sakuma Shozan in broad daylight in 1864 — only one of scores of Tokugawa retainers assassinated during the period, although the only one that can be definitively attributed to Gensai.

It was not for any of this that Gensai was put to death, for his side won the war.

But the legendary killer was really in it for the immigration policy — “Revere the Emperor, Expel the Barbarians” — and the Meiji government sensibly dropped the second plank of that platform as soon as it was in the saddle. That volte-face didn’t push Gensai into anything so drastic as revolt, but with modern police forces elbowing aside old-school samurai and outward-facing engagement still the political order of the day, the true believer had become a liability.

The character Himura Kenshin from the Japanese manga and anime series Samurai X is loosely based on Gensai. He’s the one helpfully marked with an “X” on his cheek:

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1945: Josefa Llanes Escoda

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On this day in 1945, Filipina suffragist Josefa Llanes Escoda was last seen before her presumed execution by the Japanese occupying troops holding her at Manila’s Far Eastern University.

Escoda came of age with her native archipelago under American colonization. An energetic and brilliant woman, Escoda lectured in sociology at the University of the Philippines, held several civil service posts, founded the Girl Scouts of the Philippines and helped win female suffrage.

During the Japanese occupation, her efforts to aid POWs — including those on the Bataan Death March — made her the “Florence Nightingale of the Philippines”.

But she declined to do so in the capacity of Japanese collaborator and she and her husband Antonio were arrested in 1944 and executed in the weeks following MacArthur’s return and push towards Manila.

Escoda is pictured on the Philippines’ current 1000-peso bill.


Escoda is in the center of the three figures on this banknote. Jose Abad Santos, also executed by the Japanese, is in the top left.

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1995: Kimura Shujish

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On this date in 1995, Kimura Shuji was hanged in Japan.

It remains the norm in that ancient land to hale a man to the gallows with little more than an hour’s warning, having kept him in a state of unremitting apprehension of that moment for the space of decades. Given that norm, this day’s hanging was distinguished by little save an accidental, heartbreaking particular.

According to a report by the International Human Rights Federation (this page has links to .pdf versions of the report in both English and French):

when his mother and sister in law visited him on the morning of the day of execution, they were told by an officer ‘could you come again at noon since we are very busy at the end of the year?’ When they returned they were told that he had already been executed during the morning. The officer made no mention of the time of his execution. His family members said that although he had asked the detention house to inform them they had not done so. In addition, he had hurriedly written a short letter to his family during the few minutes just before his execution

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1944: Richard Sorge and Hotsumi Ozaki

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On the day of the USSR’s October Revolution holiday in 1944, Stalin’s greatest spies were hanged in Japan.

Renowned among espionage aficionados for supposedly forewarning Moscow of the exact date of Germany’s planned surprise attack in 1941, Richard Sorge‘s work in the pregnant years leading up to World War II produced multiple intelligence coups and could lay claim to the uncommon distinction of having materially affected the course of the war.

His signal achievement was establishing, as a foreigner in a highly xenophobic Japan, a spy ring that for years penetrated the highest levels of the Japanese government and the German embassy, giving Moscow an inside look at Axis planning.

Working under the cover of journalism in the German expat community — he had grown up in a mixed German-Russian household in Berlin and won the Iron Cross for his service in the Kaiser’s army in World War I before embracing communism — Sorge struck Hitler from half a world away. His access to the German embassy was untrammeled — indeed, he had an affair with the ambassador’s wife. His lead Japanese collaborator Hotsumi Ozaki was a major public intellectual similarly privy to sensitive information through his contacts.

The two, along with several other Japanese and foreign collaborators, produced a steady diet of top-shelf intelligence, including the (ignored) forecast of Operation Barbarossa. But the ring’s most important coup — arguably a decisive one in the history of the war as a whole — was to inform Moscow in September 1941 that Japan did not intend to attack the Russian Far East. Relieved of the nightmare prospect of a two-front war, Stalin transfered desperately needed Siberian divisions to help throw back the German advance on Moscow.

Japan by 1941 was a dangerous place to operate, however, and the nerve-rattling work — and the alcoholism to which it contributed — were taking its toll on the master spy just as the authorities were closing in. Sorge and his ring were arrested in October 1941.

Sorge’s decisive communique regarding Japanese intentions in the East had not yet borne its fruit. The war had nearly four years yet to run, and Sorge would languish in prison for most of them — long enough to leave fellow detainees with recollections of the captured operative jubilant at Red Army victories. Soviet tanks were at Germany’s doorstep by the time the two went to the gallows, one after the other, with the few minutes’ notice still customary for Japanese hangings to this day.

The spies in history who can say from their graves, the infomation I supplied to my masters, for better or worse, altered the history of our planet, can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Richard Sorge was in that group.

–Spy novelist Frederick Forsythe

Sorge’s personal role in the crucible of world-shaping politics have proven a compelling topic for biographers. Among the notable works:

The Soviet government did not officially acknowledge Sorge until 1964, but the case had immediate and widespread interest in Japan. Ozaki inspired an early Kurosawa film, No Regrets for Our Youth:

The espionage ring’s operations were also the subject of a recent multilingual Japanese epic, Spy Sorge:

Part of the Themed Set: Spies.

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