CHINA: They Make Mischief

Four months after the Japanese surrender, China grappled with the problem of the surrendered Japanese who still cluttered China’s landscape. Of 3,000,000 Japanese soldiers and civilians in China on V-J day, the vast majority were still waiting for shipment home.

Policemen. A quarter of a million Japanese troops were still armed and on duty in North China. Most were guarding towns and communications against Communist and other guerrillas. Their commander was slight, polite General Yasuji Okamura, 62.

Technically, Prisoner Okamura took orders from Chungking. But he still carried on from a comfortable stucco headquarters in Nanking, equipped with a formal garden and teahouse. He drove about in a black Buick sedan. He maintained direct radio contact with his forces in the field. Meticulously uniformed, his riding boots a bit worn but smartly polished, he talked with a TIME correspondent.

Blandly the General said he had always favored “coordination” between Japan and China. “A limited war was always our intention,” he explained. “Throughout the war on both sides there were always those who hoped to be able to end the war by negotiated peace.” Japan had indeed sought persistently to end the “China incident” by negotiations with Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, or somebody. The Generalissimo, even in direst straits, refused to listen; the other somebodies were of no avail.

Technicians. A spokesman for Japanese civilians in China was suave Viscount Hisaakira Kano, an executive of the once powerful Yokohama Specie Bank and a leading carpetbagger of the late Co-Prosperity Sphere. In Peiping he talked to the New York Herald Tribune’s A. T. Steele.

The Viscount said that the Japanese economic development of North China v, as greater than generally supposed. Some 70,000 Japanese technicians had supervised combined industries employing 1,400,000 Chinese. Said Kano:

“It is most desirable from the Chinese standpoint, and ours . . . that numbers of Japanese be retained in subordinate capacities which cannot be filled by qualified Chinese.”

Fifth Columnists. Inevitably, some of the displaced Japanese had gone underground. Into a Shanghai restaurant came a mild-looking Oriental dressed in a Chinese gown. Suddenly a Chinese woman rose from a table, screamed: “That man! He’s not Chinese—he’s a Jap! He burned me at the Bridge House!” (headquarters of the notorious Kempeitai, the Japanese Gestapo). She lifted her skirt to show ugly scars across her thighs. In the confusion, the mild-looking man vanished.

Shanghai was the focus of a loosely knit and potentially dangerous Japanese fifth column. U.S. newsmen reported that it was composed of Black Dragon terrorists and diehard operatives of Japanese intelligence services. The fifth-column objectives were said to be: 1) promoting anti-democratic propaganda; 2) promoting Chinese civil strife.

Both U.S. and Chinese counter-intelligence were aware of the fifth column. Said Lieut. General Tang En-po, National Government commander in the Shanghai area:

“You know, when people have a lot of time on their hands, they don’t know what to do, and they make mischief.” The practical Chinese looked upon the displaced Japanese with practical cynicism: they would keep the indispensables as busy as possible and pack off the idle as soon as possible.