Family reveals wartime documents
Print Edition
A resident living in Xinzhuang Town has come forth with historical documents related to China’s war against the Japanese invasion of World War II. Officials with the Minhang District Archives said some of the documents are damaged and will require repair.
The resident, identified only by her surname Hu, said the documents were mainly testimony records from Japanese prisoners of war. Hu’s great-grandfather, who worked for the Shanghai Court before the establishment of People’s Republic of China, kept some of the archives.
Documents rediscovered
“Great-grandfather Hu Zhichao died in the 1980s,” said Hu. “We knew nothing about the archives until my father found during the move to Xinzhuang in 1997.”
Some of the records are in Japanese, and some were translated into Chinese. In them, Japanese soldiers confessed to war crimes they committed in China. All of them had finger print signatures. The recording date on the documents was April 1945, four months before Japan surrendered.
“In middle May of the Showa 16th year (1941),” wrote a prisoner named Isamu Takahayashi, a member of the 22nd Division of the Japanese army, “we killed several captives every day in an interment camp in Hangzhou, under the command of General Katsumi Oda.”
The 22nd Division landed in China in 1938. After a campaign in Wuhan, Hubei Province, the division moved to Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, and stayed there until it was dispatched to Hong Kong in 1944.
The confessions of the prisoners of war recounted how they stole food and livestock from Chinese people. A soldier named Kikunosuke Kubo said he and members of his military unit pillaged from families in provinces including Anhui, Hebei and Zhejiang.
Repair call
After finding the documents, Hu’s family tried to preserve them in dry places away from the sun, but the paper started to age. She said she hopes professionals can save them.
“I want to donate them to historical research,” she said. “This is just more evidence of Japanese atrocities during the war.”
She entrusted the document to the right hands. The Minhang District Archives is well known for its work in preserving historical material. It helped rescue ancient archives that were severely damaged during the massive earthquake in Sichuan Province in 2008.
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