Letters reveal Japanese soldiers upset about atrocities

Wartime letters from Japanese soldiers to their families and friends have revealed that they were upset about the army's atrocities during their colonial rule in northeast China.

Dated March 12, 1938, Watanabe Tokuemon, a Japanese soldier in China wrote in a letter to Sekihara Kusanae in Niigata Ken in Japan, "It's Feb. 6, my army division is on guard, thousands of enemies are around us. The locals are miserable, because we have received an order to kill them all. We feel sorry for the children, but we have killed many of them already."

In another letter in 1940 sent from Masuo Ueda in Mudanjiang railway bureau to Furukawa Jiro in Kyoto City, it read, "A block away from where we are, bodies of several coolies were lying here and there. Three blocks away in a dried up river, 12 to 13 bodies of coolies were piled up. Dogs ate the bodies."

In a letter dated June 8, 1938, Kimura Shizuo wrote to his wife Kimura Miyoko in Kanazawa City of Ishikawa Ken, "Frontier colleagues have substituted some Russian guys to stand guard, they've heard that rapes are happening every day. Colleagues believe all raped women are from Manchuria (now northeast China) judging from their language. Several women were raped by hundreds of men."

The letters were from the then Japanese forces' "monthly post review report", which is now kept at Jilin Provincial Archives.

To prevent Japanese soldiers spilling military secrets, the then Japanese government reviewed all letters of its soldiers, soldiers' relatives, Japanese people in China and diplomatic envoys. Some of the contents were deleted, some were placed into reports to military leaders, like the "monthly post review report", Zhao Yujie, head of the archives administration office said.

The Jilin Provincial Archives has 217 rolls of "monthly reports", which consist of 17,442 pages. The documents are dated from 1937 to 1944.

According to Yin Huai, archives curator, Jilin Provincial Archives has more than 100,000 books of Japanese wartime documents, 90 percent of which are in Japanese.

They documented what Japanese soldiers did in China's northeast region from 1931 to 1945, said Yin.

In August 1945, when Japan surrendered, Japanese troops buried documents that they did not manage to destroy before their retreat. In 1950, some of the documents were excavated from a construction site in Jilin Province.

Last year, the Jilin Provincial Archives began to translate and decipher them, and discovered more evidence of wartime crimes carried out by Japanese troops in China.