China will commemorate the 70th anniversary of the victory of the Chinese People's War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression and the World Anti-Fascist War on Sept. 3, including inviting foreign militaries to participate in a parade in Beijing.[Special coverage]
After the war that costed China over 35 million casualties, China had kept Japanese war criminals in Fushun, a city in northeast China's Liaoning Province, for their humanitarian rehabilitation.
On July 21, 1950, some 969 Japanese war criminals were transported by train from the Soviet Union to Fushun, where they were held in the Fushun War Criminal Management Center (FWCMC).
The center was converted from Fushun Prison, set up during Japan's occupation of northeast China. The authorities added an assembly hall, bath pool and hospital, equipped the cells with heaters, turned the execution ground into a sports ground, and the torture chamber into a barber room. They even managed to open a library and a cinema room.
Another 13 prisoners were transferred from other facilities in China, and FWCMC held a total of 982 Japanese war criminals: 667 from the army, 116 from the military police, 155 from the secret police, and 44 from the civil administration.
Fujita Shigeru was special among them.
"He (Fujita Shigeru) wore a uniform of general grade and a combat hat, and had a thick moustache. He walked proudly into the administration center, and said, 'I am a Japanese soldier, whose duty is to serve the emperor of Japan'," said an FWCMC document from 1964.
According to his written confession in August 1954, Fujita Shigeru was born in 1889 in Hiroshima Prefecture, Japan, and went to Shanxi, China, in August 1938 to join the Japanese invasion of China, serving as a colonel and commander of the 28th Cavalry Regiment.
He took the position of lieutenant-general and commander of the 59th Division of the 43rd Army in March 1945, and was captured in Hamhung, on the Korean Peninsula, five months later.
Many war criminals in the center were from the same division of the 43rd Army, and they still saw Shigeru as their leader.
"Every day he wore his general's uniform and shouted 'Tennouheika banzai' (long live the emperor of Japan)," said Cui Renjie, who worked in the FWCMC. "He refused angrily to answer questions, saying, 'I'm an imperialist, you're communists -- there's nothing we can talk about'."
He once said that prisoners of war should be returned at the end of war under international law and he even wanted to complain to Mao Zedong, Jin Yuan, one of the administration cadres and later head of the center, wrote in his memoirs.
Then Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai had instructed that the war criminals should not be executed or jailed for life. They were to be released after a process of reformative "transformation," which did indeed change them.
The administration center gave them better food than its own staff. Every inmate had a quota of 0.42 to 1.54 yuan per day, depending on their rank. At that time a kilo of pork sold for 0.6 yuan and a kilo of rice for 0.2 yuan.
"We got fish and vegetables, all cooked Chinese style. Sorghum rice was hard to chew, but we had enough food," Tetsuro Takahashi recalled in a documentary released by Japan's TV channel NHK in 2008.
Ike Yamaguchi said that every week they could have fried fish. "It tasted good, but made us nervous."
