Interpreters and War Crimes

Kayoko Takeda

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000365221
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Taking an interdisciplinary approach, this book raises new questions and provides different perspectives on the roles, responsibilities, ethics and protection of interpreters in war while investigating the substance and agents of Japanese war crimes and legal aspects of interpreters' taking part in war crimes. Informed by studies on interpreter ethics in conflict, historical studies of Japanese war crimes and legal discussion on individual liability in war crimes, Takeda provides a detailed description and analysis of the 39 interpreter defendants and interpreters as witnesses of war crimes at British military trials against the Japanese in the aftermath of the Pacific War, and tackles ethical and legal issues of various risks faced by interpreters in violent conflict.

The book first discusses the backgrounds, recruitment and wartime activities of the accused interpreters at British military trials in addition to the charges they faced, the defence arguments and the verdicts they received at the trials, with attention to why so many of the accused were Taiwanese and foreign-born Japanese. Takeda provides a contextualized discussion, focusing on the Japanese military's specific linguistic needs in its occupied areas in Southeast Asia and the attributes of interpreters who could meet such needs. In the theoretical examination of the issues that emerge, the focus is placed on interpreters' proximity to danger, visibility and perceived authorship of speech, legal responsibility in war crimes and ethical issues in testifying as eyewitnesses of criminal acts in violent hostilities. Takeda critically examines prior literature on the roles of interpreters in conflict and ethical concerns such as interpreter neutrality and confidentiality, drawing on legal discussion of the ineffectiveness of the superior orders defence and modes of individual liability in war crimes. The book seeks to promote intersectoral discussion on how interpreters can be protected from exposure to manifestly unlawful acts such as torture.

Part I

Interpreters as defendants at British military trials for Japanese war crimes

1 The accused interpreters

At British military trials against the Japanese in the aftermath of the Pacific War, 39 wartime interpreters were prosecuted and 38 of them were convicted as war criminals.¹ The trials with interpreters as the accused took place in Singapore, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, Penang, Jesselton, Kuala Kansar, Taiping and Alor Star. Table 1.1 shows the dates and numbers of those trials and the numbers of interpreter defendants, with a breakdown of those who were initially recognised as Japanese and those initially recognised as Taiwanese. Taiwan was under Japanese colonial rule from 1895 to 1945, and these Taiwanese interpreter defendants were among over 200,000 Taiwanese who had been mobilised for the Japanese war effort as imperial subjects during the Asia–Pacific War (Utsumi, 2002, p. 38). Although they were no longer Japanese subjects after the end of the war, these wartime interpreters were prosecuted as “Japanese” at the British military trials.

Table 1.1 British trials with interpreters as the accused

Trial location	Dates	Number of trials	Japanese defendants	Taiwanese defendants	Total interpreter defendants
Singapore	02/46 – 06/47	9	10	2	12
Hong Kong	03/46 – 02/47	6	7	0	7
Kuala Lumpur	07/46 – 08/47	12	0	11	11
Penang	08/46 – 09/46	1	1	3	4
Jesselton	12/46	1	0	1	1
Kuala Kansar	08/47	1	1	0	1
Taiping	09/47 – 12/47	2	2	0	2
Alor Star	09/47 – 11/47	1	0	1	1
Total		33	21	18	39

Drawing on the records of the relevant trials and other primary and secondary sources on the historical contexts and individual defendants, this chapter presents the backgrounds of the accused interpreters, including their place of birth, family, education and prewar occupation, and discusses how they were recruited as interpreters by the Japanese military and what kinds of tasks they engaged in during the wartime.

Backgrounds of the accused interpreters

Although there are some references to locally hired female interpreters in the trial transcripts,² the accused interpreters were all male. Their average age at the time they committed the alleged war crimes was 30.9, the youngest being 18 (Kazuo Miyazaki³ and Chan Eng Thiam) and the oldest being 53 (Otojiro Takemoto). Of the 39 interpreter defendants, 21 (51%) were initially recognised as Japanese and 18 (49%) as Taiwanese. These Taiwanese interpreters were recruited (forcibly or otherwise) as Japanese imperial subjects, and more than half of them used Japanese names within the military organisations they served. Reasons for needing Taiwanese interpreters in the Japanese war effort are discussed in the next section. Beyond being Japanese or Taiwanese, attention to where these interpreters were born and lived, who their parents were, where they were educated and what occupation they held before the war builds a complex and diverse picture of their backgrounds. The following examination is based on the statements and testimonies of the accused interpreters contained in the relevant trial records⁴ unless indicated otherwise.

Foreign-born Japanese

Among the 21 Japanese interpreters, 8 (about 38%) were born outside Japan to at least 1 parent from Japan: Namely, 3 in Malaya (Miyazaki, Ichiro Mine⁵ and Kunio Kuroki) and 1 each in California (Masayoshi Nigo), Hawaii (Susumu Hashida), British Columbia (Kanao Inouye), Bangkok (Genichiro Miyakawa⁶) and Singapore (Itsuo Tsutada).

Kazuo Miyazaki was born to a Malay father and a Japanese mother in Perak, Malaya, in 1924. At age ten, he was registered by his mother as Japanese at the Japanese Consulate in Singapore. He had a Malay name, but started using his mother’s surname, Miyazaki, when his father died. Following the outbreak of the war in December 1941, his mother, Shimo Miyazaki, was arrested by the British authorities and detained in a Japanese internment camp in India. The lists of Japanese interned in India (Public and Judicial Department, 1944) show that Shimo had a son named Ahmet Bin Hashim in Malaya, which indicates that the British were aware of Kazuo’s existence but did not recognise him as Japanese.

Ichiro Mine was born in Penang, Malaya, in 1904 to a Chinese father and a Japanese mother. His mother registered him as Japanese at the Japanese Consulate in Singapore when he was around 13, and again in 1936 Mine registered himself as Japanese at the Consulate. When the war broke out, Mine was detained in a jail in Penang and had his Japanese passport confiscated by the British.

Kunio Kuroki was born to Japanese parents in Seremban, Malaya, in 1922 and registered as Japanese at a local police station. At age 14, he was separated from his parents, and at age 15 started using a Malay name, Aziz bun Abdullar. When he was 16, Kuroki registered himself at a police station as a younger brother of the Chinese Muslim boxer who trained him.

Although these three Malayan-born interpreter defendants had never been to Japan, their Japanese parents registered them as Japanese. Owing to their place of birth and residence (i.e. Malaya under British colonial rule), however, they could have been considered British subjects. Two of them even had Malay names as well. How the issue of dual nationality played out at the trials is discussed in Chapter 4.

According to the Japanese-American Internee Data File and ship passenger lists from Japan to the United States available at the US National Archives,⁷ Masayoshi Nigo was born to Japanese immigrant parents in California in 1919. He was in Japan for about two years and came back to Los Angeles in 1933, which makes him a Kibei,⁸ American-born Nisei who received some schooling in Japan and returned to the United States. Nigo worked as a truck-farmer before being interned in August 1942 at the Gila Valley War Relocation Center in Arizona (one of the camps where nearly 120,000 persons of Japanese descent were incarcerated as enemy aliens after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor). Urged on by his father who had returned to his hometown in Hiroshima, Nigo took advantage of the arrangement his father had made to leave the camp and board an exchange ship with his mother to move to Japan in September 1943. There were two exchanges of civilians between Japan and the United States, who were on the “wrong” side when the war broke out in December 1941. There were over one hundred Nisei (individuals born in the Americas to Japanese immigrant parents), including Nigo, who were on the second exchange ship (Murakawa and Kumei, 1992). Boarding the exchange ship meant that Nigo renounced his American citizenship and chose to be a Japanese national exclusively. When the ship made a stop at Singapore, Nigo and other Nisei were recruited as interpreters by the Japanese military.

Susumu Hashida was also Nisei, born in Hilo, Hawaii, in 1913. In 1940 he moved to Japan for university (Nippu Jiji, 1940), carrying his American passport. Hashida was a student until September 1942, when he was conscripted by the Japanese military as an interpreter. During the 1930s there was a spike in the number of Nisei studying in Japan (Yamashita, 1935, 1938), prompted by anti-Japanese sentiment in North America, the cheaper yen (Morimoto, 1995) and their parents’ idealistic vision of Nisei becoming a bridge between the United States and Japan (Azuma, 2005). Hashida was one of those students at the tail-end of this “study-in-Japan boom” among Nisei. It is not known if he was stranded in Japan or chose to stay in Japan when the war broke out.

A Canadian Nisei, Kanao Inouye was born in Kamloops, British Columbia, in 1916.⁹ The name Kanao comes from Kanagawa (his father’s birthplace) and Canada (his birthplace)—a reflection of his family’s wish for Kanao to serve as a bridge between the two countries. His father, To Inouye, also known as Tadashi Tow Inouye, was a son of Tokutaro Inouye.¹⁰ Tokutaro was a founder of Keio Electric Railway and a member of the House of Peers in Japan. To was born in 1882 or 1883¹¹ and immigrated to Canada as a young man. After working in a sawmill and as a merchant, he enlisted in the Canadian Army and was sent to Europe in 1916. He was severely wounded and awarded the Military Medal for bravery in battle in 1919. Through his military service, To earned Canadian citizenship and land ownership. He was visiting his family in Japan when he became ill and died in 1926. In 1935 Tokutaro convinced his grandson Kanao to move to Japan out of concern for his well-being without his father. Kanao enrolled in Waseda International Institute (a preparatory school for entering Waseda and other Japanese universities) in Tokyo to learn Japanese in 1936, only to leave after a term.¹² Around that time, Kanao, along with a Nisei journalist he knew, was brought in by the Kenpeitai for interrogation, which included waterboarding that resulted in lasting health issues.

Genichiro Miyakawa was born in Bangkok in 1920 to Japanese parents. His father, Ganji Miyakawa, was a successful businessman in Bangkok with strong connections with influential Thais. Ganji acted as a liaison between Japanese government officials and pro-Japanese Thais (Murashima, 2017). Ganji remarried a member of the Thai royal family. Genichiro was working for his father’s trading business when the Japanese military invaded Thailand.

Lastly, Itsuo Tsutada was born in Singapore in 1916. He was educated at the Anglo-Chinese School in Singapore. He moved to Tokyo at age 19 but returned to Singapore in the following year and took the Senior Cambridge Exami...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Note on names and terms
• Introduction: Shooting the messenger?
• PART I Interpreters as defendants at British military trials for Japanese war crimes
• PART II Interpreters in war and conflict zones
• Bibliography
• Index