Combating Indiscipline in the Imperial Japanese Army: Hayao Torao and Psychiatric Studies of the Crimes of Soldiers

I. Psychiatry, the IJA, and the Issue of Professional and Institutional Prestige

Like the conscript army that replaced the samurai caste as the sole armed force of the country, psychiatry as a medical speciality and profession was established during the Meiji period (1868–1912) and owed its introduction to the new leadership’s mission to ensure Japan’s political and economic independence through the adoption of foreign institutions and practices. By serving the military, which enjoyed a privileged place in a state that had adopted ‘rich country, strong army’ as its early twin goals, psychiatrists aspired to increase official and public respect for their profession. However, the army’s efforts to promote and then preserve the image of Japanese soldiers as the most psychologically and physically fit members of the male population ¹⁰ both provided and limited opportunities for psychiatrists to demonstrate their usefulness.

Victories over the Qing dynasty in 1895 and Russia in 1905 bolstered a belief that the Japanese people possessed a national spirit (yamato damashii) – unique characteristics that were manifested in their loyalty to and willingness to sacrifice themselves for the imperial institution – which could ensure triumph over enemies enjoying more manpower and technological advantages. ¹¹ Later, when the military became bogged down in its war with China in the 1930s and then an expanded conflict with the Allied Powers, the need to maintain faith in some innately Japanese ability to endure hardships circumscribed the discussion of possible war- or combat-related mental disorders among troops. Even in a report urging superiors to adopt more measures to preserve the mental health of soldiers, one of the few army medical officers who specialized in psychiatry, Colonel Suwa Keisaburō, still found it necessary to reassure his readers that American soldiers, coddled by living in an individual-centred society, were more likely than their Japanese counterparts to crack under the pressures of war. ¹² In paying lip service to state propaganda about the psychological resiliency of the people, psychiatrists undercut their own arguments about the dangers of mental disorders. Army officials, if not those of the navy, had at least established a special facility for psychiatric cases in 1937 known as Kōnodai Army Hospital, but remained unmoved by requests for more measures to prevent and treat such casualties. ¹³

Still, while IJA administrators demonstrated a reluctance to address the problem of combat-related mental disorders, long before the Asia-Pacific War, they had called upon psychiatrists to evaluate soldier-criminals in their effort to combat indiscipline. As in Germany, which had provided the model for the profession, psychiatry in Japan was greatly influenced by hereditarianism, by the belief that character, personality, and intelligence were a matter of genetics. Consequently, psychiatrists could help to safeguard the reputation of the IJA by deflecting blame away from the army itself and instead pathologizing defiance of authority, associating such behaviour with a disorder of the mind and thus reinforcing an assumption that no normal Japanese soldier would rationally disobey orders and violate laws. Defiance and violations, it could be argued, were symptomatic of inherent defect, and, in an examination of soldiers assigned to a special disciplinary unit of the IJA known as the ‘Education Unit’, psychiatrists described many as ‘morons’, ‘dull-witted’, and ‘degenerates’.

II. The Problem of Indiscipline and the Education Unit

Considerable effort was devoted to shaping domestic and international views of the IJA soldier, and the conduct of troops during the early Meiji period counters any notion that obedience and respect for military authority were innately Japanese. Conscription had been fiercely resisted, with thousands arrested in 1873–4 for rioting against the so-called ‘blood tax’, and, four years later, 200 members of an elite battalion stationed in Tokyo staged a revolt, the Takebashi uprising, in response to the postponement of campaign rewards. Although the uprising was crushed in less than 5 hours, it and the Port Arthur massacre during the Nisshin Sensō (1894–5), the war with the Qing dynasty, galvanized the leadership’s drive to reinforce control over its armed forces. ¹⁴

The massacre, which resulted in the slaughter of Chinese soldiers and civilians, occurred after Japanese troops taking over the city of Port Arthur (Lüshun) in November 1894 discovered the mutilated remains of captured comrades. The massacre almost threatened to derail the Meiji leaders’ decades-long campaign to liberate the nation from the unequal treaties, which were widely detested as the symbol of Japan’s subordinate status vis-à-vis Western countries. Influenced by the New York World’s detailed coverage of the incident, some US senators questioned the wisdom of ratifying a revised treaty that would rescind extraterritoriality and thus bestow upon Japan membership in the ‘civilized’ world community. ¹⁵

Given the high stakes involved in maintaining the nation’s hard-won prestige, it is unlikely that the military high command ordered the slaughter. Meiji leader and commanding general Yamagata Aritomo (1838–1922) impressed upon his subordinates that Japan had become in 1886 a signatory of the Geneva Convention regarding the treatment of captured combatants, and other commanders repeatedly issued similar warnings to their troops. Lieutenant General Sakuma Samata (1844–1915), who headed a division responsible for Port Arthur’s capture, had instructed his men a month before the massacre that ‘whatever actions the enemy may take during this war, we must preserve international justice and … raise our nation’s dignity in the world’. At this time at least, the IJA leadership clearly associated obedience to authority with adherence to rules of war, and Stewart Lone has described the Port Arthur massacre as ‘the gravest incidence of mass indiscipline’ during the Nisshin Sensō. ¹⁶

Japan’s military leaders were determined to prevent another incident of mass indiscipline that could work to the advantage of territorial rivals. In a report to the prime minister and cabinet that was delivered shortly before the Russo-Japanese War (1904–5), Army Minister Terauchi Masatake addressed the problem of soldiers for whom punishment had no effect, pointing out the need to isolate these individuals and prevent them from corrupting others. The resulting Central Army Unit 76 or Education Unit, which was established in the city of Himeji in western Japan around 1903, was an experiment involving a small and very select number of soldier-inmates. ¹⁷ Admission to the unit, return to a regular unit, or dismissal from the army required the permission of unit commanders, the division commander, and the army minister. The number of inmates during the period from 1906 to 1944 amounted to only 881 persons (801 from the army and 80 from the navy), and staff appear to have always outnumbered inmates, beginning in 1903 with a unit commander, 3 officers, and 9 warrant officers placed in charge of 9 persons. ¹⁸

In 1911 Tokyo Imperial University was commissioned to produce a study of the unit’s 50 inmates that would be presented to the army minister. The psychiatrist in charge was Miyake Kōichi (1876–1954), an authority on the subjects of criminality as well as intellectual development, having been one of the first researchers to introduce the Binet-Simon intelligence test in Japan. ¹⁹ Miyake and his colleague Sugie Tadasu calculated that the inmates had, altogether, committed 311 offences and been punished 101 times, which averaged out to 6 crimes and 2 punishments per person. With regard to their crimes, most were charged with desertion (83 cases), followed by theft (54 cases), fraud and swindling (20 cases), embezzlement (7 cases), gambling (5 cases), and retreating during a battle (4 cases). Inmates, it was noted, had also been guilty of attacking and insulting a superior. As for the motives of the crimes, while inmates attributed their actions to obstacles in adapting to military life, the psychiatrists concluded that the problem lay in the individual rather than the institution of the army and navy. In their estimation only 12%, or 6 out of the 50 individuals, were normal or average (futsū kenzen), and, even before conscription, 80% had committed crimes, most frequently theft but also assault and rape. ²⁰

Miyake and Sugie described many inmates, or 68%, as having grown up in unhealthy family environments, where parents were indifferent to or could not meet their children’s needs, resulting in 74% having only the lowest level of education. At the same time, they investigated personal, medical, and family histories, looking for tattoos and evidence of parental alcoholism as signs and causes of what they called ‘degeneration’. Appearing in discourses that spanned the natural and social sciences since the late nineteenth century, the theory of degeneration provided a biological and hereditary explanation for various socially undesirable conditions or aberrant activities, ²¹ and, in the opinion of Miyake and Sugie, the vast majority of the Education Unit’s inmates, 88%, were ‘pathological deviants’ (byōteki ijōsha), who could be further classified as so-called ‘morons’ (chigu), ‘dull-witted’ (rodon), or ‘degenerates’ (henshitsusha). ²² In contrast to the 52% considered intellectually impaired or diminished, degenerates consisted of 36% of the inmates and covered those described by the psychiatrists as weak-willed, lazy, alcoholic, and having a history of compulsive thievery and vagrancy, as well as the traits of a Lombrosian ‘born-criminal type’ (seirai hanzaigata). ²³

In 1944, reflecting the changes in psychiatric theory, another psychiatrist described some of the unit’s inmates as ‘psychopathic’ (seishinbyōshitsu), which lacked the specific definition ²⁴ that it has today and was at the time still a rather broad term that could be applied to anyone who violated legal or moral expectations or was considered in some way inherently socially undesirable. Conscripted and assigned to Kōnodai Army Hospital, Asai Toshio (1911–2000) examined 44 unit inmates whose crimes included attacking and even attempting to murder superior officers. Asai’s findings only differed from those of his predecessors in that he identified among inmates more ‘psychopaths’ than individuals who were intellectually disabled. He insisted that ‘psychopaths’ had to be quickly identified because they often committed crimes within six months of being admitted into the army. Echoing the conclusions reached by all of the psychiatrists who examined soldier-criminals, he called for more rigorous screening of conscripts and the greater involvement of psychiatrists in the selection process. ²⁵

IJA authorities may have appreciated the rather reassuring explanations provided by psychiatrists who conducted studies of the Education Unit and who focused on the supposedly endogenous defects of inmates. However, in contrast to US military officials during the Asia-Pacific War, they did not act on the advice of psychiatrists to vigorously exclude recruits who seemed predisposed to neuropsychiatric disorders. ²⁶ As demonstrated in one of the most famous Japanese examples of wartime insubordination, that of Lieutenant General Satō Kōtoku, IJA officials were willing to rely on psychiatric opinion but only as long as it supported their interpretation of events. The battle of Imphal-Kohima in 1944 was an attempt to invade India that became the greatest defeat for the IJA up to that time, and a division commander, Satō, abandoned his positions without permission, complaining that he could no longer wait for promised supplies and continue watching his troops starve to death. After being relieved of command, he demanded a court martial so that he could expose his superiors’ incompetence in planning the invasion. Instead, Satō’s superiors had him subjected to a psychiatric assessment. Decades later, psychiatrist Yamashita Jitsumu asserted that in his report he described Satō as ‘a splendid general, who was self-composed and free of any slovenly qualities that could invite contempt’. Superiors in the Burma Area Army were nevertheless able to dismiss Yamashita’s diagnosis that Satō was competent to stand trial and had the lieutenant general declared mentally unstable and demoted to the reserves. ²⁷

In his account of his assessment, Yamashita noted that he felt torn between his professional duty as a doctor and, since being conscripted into the army, his new obligation to maintain the honour of the military. ²⁸ Other psychiatrists who conducted research for the wartime army, such as Hayao Torao, experienced a similar conflict of conscience and presented assessments equally unlikely to please army officials. In contrast to his colleagues who had examined the Education Unit’s small and select group of inmates, Hayao was trying to account for the numerous crimes of soldiers in combat zones and occupied territories in China during the late 1930s. He thus called attention to the defects and deficiencies of military practices and commanding officers, and not just those of the perpetrators.

Hayao maintained priorities when it came to crimes that were clearly different from his wartime military superiors, who were primarily, if not exclusively, concerned with matters that could undermine unit efficiency. Especially after their nation defiantly withdrew from the League of Nations in 1933, IJA officials no longer associated their soldiers’ obedience with adherence to international rules of war. Whether or not the military leadership authorized terrorizing the enemy’s civilian population in places such as Nanjing, a possibility that has yet to be confirmed through official documents, ²⁹ placating troops and hopefully encouraging compliance with orders were prioritized to the point that any recommendations to ensure civilian protection could be dismissed as impracticable and even detrimental to the war effort.

III. Hayao Torao’s Studies of Crimes on the Battlefront and in Occupied Areas

If the Port Arthur massacre is a lesser-known atrocity of the Nisshin Sensō, the Nanjing massacre has become one of the emblematic war crimes of the Asia-Pacific War. The scholarship on the Nanjing massacre is extensive, and contemporary accounts include those by foreigners who remained in the city and by Japanese nationals, such as the journalist Ishikawa Tatsuzō (1905–85), who was able to interview soldiers in the city shortly after its occupation. ³⁰ Ishikawa’s censored 1938 novella Living Soldiers, which was based on these interviews and which included references to murder, rape, and looting, has been described as ‘a central plank in a realistic acknowledgement of Japanese brutality in China’. ³¹ In comparison to Ishikawa’s novella, Hayao Torao’s studies for the IJA, which consisted of three secret reports for army medical officers and another three for those in legal affairs, are only beginning to be incorporated in scholarship on Japanese wartime atrocities. In fact, the two sources are complementary. Whereas Ishikawa arrived in Nanjing on or about 8 January 1938 and stayed for 8 days, Hayao arrived on 20 December 1937, one week after the city’s capture and the commencement of the massacre, and departed around 13 days later. No less than Living Soldiers, Hayao’s research was an effort to understand the psychological effects of war on combatants, but one undertaken by a specialist in mental health for the specific benefit of military officials. ³²

A professor at Kanazawa Medical School, Hayao served in the army from 1937 to 1939, spending one year in China and another at Kōnodai Army Hospital. He was called up for service again in 1941 but succeeded in being exempted due to illness. His family members nevertheless have claimed that he was not physically sick at the time, and Kanazawa colleagues have surmised that Hayao suffered psychological shock from his experience in China. Hayao was beyond the normal age limit for conscription, being already 47 years old when he was drafted in November 1937, and one of his Kōnodai Army Hospital colleagues has suggested that his conscription was a form of belated ‘payback’ because Hayao, who had been an army-funded student, had only served for a short period after graduation. Still, Hayao was immediately commissioned to study the impact of war on soldiers and their crimes, so perhaps army officials simply recruited a well-qualified researcher. His publications included work on ‘psychopaths’ and on mental disorders arising from the great Kantō earthquake of 1923. Comparing the experience of the earthquake that devastated the Tokyo area to that of a fierce battle, he proposed that those who suffered psychological breakdowns as a result of such traumatic events, whether natural or man-made, probably had a pre-existing neurological weakness or inherited condition. ³³

Hayao reiterated the recommendation of colleagues who had examined the Education Unit’s inmates: he underlined the importance of identifying individuals with mental defects and, if not excluding, at least carefully monitoring former convicts among conscripts. Called upon to conduct psychiatric evaluations of court-martial cases for the Central China Expeditionary Army, he discussed two cases, that of defendants D and E, which provide contrasting examples of interactions between soldiers and Chinese non-combatants. Hayao claimed that intellectual disability often accounted for the desertion of soldiers, such as Defendant D, who was reportedly ‘dull-witted’ (rodon) but not delinquent in character. Because of his low intelligence, Defendant D could not perform his duties, became depressed, and left his barracks with the intention of committing suicide. After wandering aimlessly through Shanghai and being befriended by a city dweller who spoke Japanese and who sheltered him, he decided not to kill himself and was arrested a week after deserting. ³⁴

While Hayao successfully argued that Defendant D should be acquitted and discharged from the army, he insisted that a murder suspect, Defendant E, whom he described as lacking emotional development as well as possessing the intelligence of a 12-year-old, posed a great danger to society and needed to be permanently confined in an appropriate facility. ³⁵ As the vast majority of the individuals whom psychiatrists at the time diagnosed as ‘psychopaths’ suffered no discernible or serious impairment to their intellectual faculties and seemed rational, Hayao preferred the term ‘intermediate types’ (chūkansha). ³⁶ Defendant E was an example of these types that Hayao further classified as the morally corrupt, pathologically agitated or combative, innately weak-willed, and sexual deviant. ³⁷ Hayao conceded that he had yet to examine in the course of his research for the army a sexual deviant but pointed out that reports of soldiers raping children and mutilating both the living and dead, actions that he asserted were undeniably abnormal, were evidence of such individuals among the troops. Hayao admitted that even clinicians had difficulty identifying intermediate types because of their surface normality. However, he criticized the army’s failure to carefully screen recruits and claimed that the IJA was becoming something of a ‘den’ or ‘hangout’ for these types, whose crimes, if committed in Japan, would merit severe punishment. ³⁸

Hayao noted that Defendant E possessed qualities that might in fact make him an ideal soldier. He was fearless, which would be an asset on the battlefield. But Hayao also observed that in a question-and-answer session Defendant E did not understand why he should feel regret for murdering the enemy, admitting that he had beheaded captured Chinese soldiers in Nanjing. The actual charges against Defendant E nevertheless stemmed from his murder of six villagers in May 1938. Having consumed alcohol while on a mission to ostensibly requisition supplies from the local inhabitants, Defendant E had entered the village and, after asking for women and trying to barge into a home, opened fire when one of the villagers accidentally struck his hand. In Hayao’s opinion Defendant E had no conscience and, being emotionally deficient and of limited intelligence, was prepared to opportunistically apply in all situations the earlier battlefield instructions of his superiors, who had ordered troops to kill all Chinese. ³⁹

In their evaluations of individual soldier-criminals, psychiatrists paid comparatively less attention to exogenous influences on behaviour, and neither Hayao nor other psychiatrists assigned much importance to what Maruyama Masao considered a factor that contributed to aggression and thus atrocities – routine violence among soldiers. A recruit who blundered during training could find himself beaten up by senior comrades who set up ‘kangaroo courts’ when soldiers were alone in their barracks. Such ‘informal punishment’ was explicitly forbidden in army regulations, and the anonymous author(s) of a 1941 military police report called attention to these abuses in discussing the causes of crimes within and outside a unit. ⁴⁰ However, officers, who were free to physically reprimand subordinates for the smallest infraction, turned a blind eye to such abuse because, as experts on the history of the IJA have demonstrated, they were intent on ‘making unquestioning obedience second nature’. ⁴¹

Although psychiatrists were not ignorant of these conditions, Miyake and Sugie only mentioned and did not indicate any further interest in Education Unit soldiers’ accounts of cruel superiors. In a report on battlefield suicides, Hayao advised officers to refrain from striking and flogging individuals for appearing cowardly or insolent. But he also tended to find fault within the individual, warning that the ‘innately timid’ could probably overreact to physical abuse. ⁴² Unlike Maruyama, who has been criticized for emphasizing the uniqueness of the Japanese military experience, these psychiatrists did not seem to consider the brutal aspects of life in the IJA exceptional or a factor that could account for the crimes committed by a majority of psychologically normal soldiers. ⁴³

With regard to the impact of combat on persons deemed psychologically normal, Hayao described how the intoxicating experience of narrowly escaping death on the battlefield, combined with the praise that the army heaped on those who performed distinguished service, fostered an excessive sense of superiority among soldiers. As an example he referred to a regimental commander in Nanjing who, when informed that soldiers were violating nurses at a facility for wounded Chinese soldiers, retorted that ‘they should be honoured to be raped by soldiers of the imperial army’. ⁴⁴ Notably, racism towards the Chinese, which coexisted with the public’s presumption that Japanese rule would benefit so-called lesser peoples, did not figure prominently in Hayao’s analyses of troop conduct. At most he attributed the torture and murder of prisoners of war to an extreme hatred of the enemy and desire for revenge arising unavoidably from combat experiences. Pillaging and the defilement of women, he proposed, were not as motivated by such hatred, and he prioritized these atrocities, but not just because he believed that they were crimes of opportunity and thereby preventable. ⁴⁵

Like other members of the home-front population who, by the late 1930s, had been subjected to decades of propaganda and censorship, ⁴⁶ Hayao was probably less prepared for violence against enemy civilians. The media’s glorification of battlefield self-sacrifice and the army’s well-known condemnation of soldiers who allowed themselves to be taken prisoner no doubt helped to attenuate sympathy for captured combatants. Years of war inured individuals in Japan, as elsewhere, to the deaths of soldiers, and newspapers even celebrated extreme violence against the enemy on the battlefield.

In November and December 1937 a major daily carried reports of two sub lieutenants who were waging a ‘killing contest’ to see who would be the first to behead 100 Chinese soldiers in individual sword combat. Although a post-war Chinese military tribunal would sentence to death these officers for murdering helpless captives and civilians, the Tōkyō nichi nichi shinbun articles had depicted the men as killing armed enemy soldiers. Moreover, after the war, the reporter who publicized the event insisted that publications could never have run stories of troops mistreating prisoners of war and non-combatants. ⁴⁷ Newspapers instead made the most of opportunities to accuse the enemy of atrocities, and when Chinese soldiers attacked a Japanese resident community and killed some 200 civilians during the Tongzhou incident of July 1937, war correspondents described in detail the slaughter of women and children. ⁴⁸

No longer shielded from the reality of life in occupied China, in an April 1938 report produced just a few months after the capture of Shanghai and Nanjing, Hayao chastised army officials for betraying the trust of the home-front population in the following description of soldiers in these cities:

they carouse and act indecently with low-class prostitutes, brandish their swords for no reason and injure people, discharge their pistols, eat and drink without paying [in restaurants], and act in ways so regrettably contrary to the expectations of those back home in Japan. In truth, Shanghai has become the Japanese army’s city of crime and Nanjing can hardly be any better. Truly, this only speaks of the decline of the Japanese army. ⁴⁹

In addition to criticizing the army’s failure to maintain controls, such as an adequate military police presence in occupied cities, Hayao strongly denounced certain army policies for having a corrupting influence on hitherto law-abiding individuals. He found irresponsible the IJA policy regarding alcohol, which he blamed for many of the attacks against civilians as well as fellow soldiers and officers. It was a mistake, he reported, to distribute alcohol to soldiers on the battlefronts and to ration it according to the number of members of a unit. Not all unit members would consume their share, which would result in others becoming drunk on the remainder. To illustrate the scope of dissipation among soldiers, Hayao wrote of hospitalized soldiers who tried to smuggle in alcohol or who left without permission to visit prostitutes and who, when reprimanded, all too often complained that they were only following the example set by their superiors. ⁵⁰

Hayao had worked closely with the military police and officers of the legal affairs department, having access to their investigative reports and military court documents, and he believed that the cases that he was examining represented just the tip of an iceberg, a small fraction of the actual number of criminals among soldiers. This problem of under-reporting crimes was nothing new to military law enforcement officials. In a 1930 article published in a criminology journal, for example, the Ninth Division’s legal affairs department chief, Takezawa Uichi, proposed that a notable decrease in crimes from 1912 (1,246) to 1928 (724) may be misleading, being the result of officers trying to protect their own reputations or that of their unit by concealing crimes committed by subordinates. ⁵¹

IV. Comparing Psychiatric Assessments and Army Reports

Hayao’s research, such as his April 1938 report on battlefront neurological disorders and crimes, was distributed throughout the army, but even his surviving wartime studies probably left out certain details. One of his junior colleagues at Kanazawa Medical School, Inohara Kiyoshi, who helped organize Hayao’s wartime work shortly after his return to civilian life, found that the content was revised and became less critical as the reports moved up the ranks of army readers. By the time of his military discharge, Hayao probably realized that few of his recommendations would be given much consideration, and the IJA’s prioritization of crimes and their perpetrators becomes clearer when one compares the reports by psychiatrists and army officials. ⁵²

When it came to the issue of so-called mentally defective soldiers, army officials demonstrated more interest in so-called ‘psychopaths’ than intellectually disabled soldiers. In 1937 Kaikōsha Kiji, the journal of the Army Officers’ Association, published an article on the Education Unit which described the common inmate as lacking will-power or self-control, a sense of shame, empathy, and gratitude, and being predisposed to debauchery and violence. The anonymous author(s) of this article concluded that there was little hope of reforming these individuals. However, by 1944, the desperate need to maintain troop strength made it difficult to justify the rejection of any able-bodied male, and in that year the War Ministry’s senior adjutant sent out a secret dispatch to all army units on how to deal with intellectually disabled and ‘psychopathic’ soldiers. With regard to ‘psychopaths’, the dispatch advised officers to look for certain characteristics, which were the same ones listed in the 1937 Kaikōsha Kiji article, but recommended that only severe cases be released from service. So-called mild cases, it was asserted, could be trained and guided. ⁵³

Any decision to retain or rely on ‘psychopaths’ contradicted the advice offered by Hayao Torao, who warned the readers of his studies that the retention of ‘psychopaths’ would contribute to insubordination. But, while Hayao’s past professional interests included ‘psychopaths’, as mentioned earlier, he focused more on soldiers who were supposedly mentally sound and on the negative repercussions of policies, such as the army’s recreation policy. He had observed that individuals having few outlets for relieving stress and boredom turned to alcohol, gambling, and other activities that he considered morally questionable, and that this resulted in crimes among army personnel actually increasing at supply bases and in occupied cities. ⁵⁴ Some figures compiled by the military police seemed to support his assertion about the relatively high incidence of such crimes outside, rather than within, combat zones. Concerning known crimes against superior officers, which ranged from insults to murder, the police arrested 152 individuals during the first six months of 1942, with 40, the second-highest number according to location, occurring among soldiers stationed in Japan proper. ⁵⁵

In discussing crimes among soldiers and especially against officers, Hayao was addressing the major concern of IJA officials, and in a 1939 study he recounted a rumour of ‘fragging’ or murder of superiors. The rumour, which Hayao reported to his own immediate superiors, closely resembled an actual case that was later included in material circulated within the Manchuria-based Kwantung Army in 1941. In Hayao’s account a group of battle-hardened and unruly soldiers had resented the efforts of a pair of young officers to restore discipline and had retaliated by machine-gunning the two and arranging to have them listed as war dead or casualties of battle. In the Kwantung Army reports, which were entitled ‘Secret/Crime Prevention Material’, 13 superior privates and 14 privates, who began drinking after being denied leave from their barracks by a much-hated warrant officer, went on a rampage that ended in their assaulting the officer, destroying the equipment in the non-commissioned officers’ quarters, and ransacking the provisions room. The Kwantung Army enjoyed a reputation for maintaining strict discipline among its troops, and in the written judgement of the court martial of these privates, their company commander was blamed for allowing his soldiers to flaunt regulations and become contemptuous of superiors. ⁵⁶

When it came to crimes among military personnel, psychiatrists such as Hayao and army administrators were in agreement about causes – intemperance and lack of proper guidance from officers. His warnings were in fact repeated in a 1942 document, ‘Army Secret General Order #3833’, which was circulated to all units of the IJA and eventually fell into the hands of the US enemy. ⁵⁷ In July 1945 the office of the American Commander-in-Chief, Pacific Fleet, distributed this Japanese confidential dispatch to various sections of the US Army, Navy, and Marine Corps, describing it as ‘a general report on the numerous problems of discipline and morale encountered in the Japanese army’ and suggesting that as ‘a study in disaffection … it may be of some value particularly to those interested in the problems of Psychological Warfare’. ⁵⁸ In ‘Army Secret General Order #3833’ the War Ministry’s adjutant Kawahara Naoichi noted that ‘since it is the only comfort of soldiers, the success of the army and liquor actually have a very close connection’. However, he also declared that the ‘evil of excessive drinking has already been noted’ and, like Hayao, called on commanders to limit liquor rations, encourage temperance, and sternly handle any violations of discipline and morals. Advising commanders to be on the lookout for officers and soldiers who were cruel, violent, or of ‘loose character’, Kawahara nevertheless provided no specific instructions other than ‘note such cases and pass this information along through the regular channels’. Consequently, army administrators in the War Ministry supported but did little to enforce measures to counter crimes among military personnel. ⁵⁹

As for the protection of civilians, no evidence has been found that Hayao’s detailed accounts of crimes and his recommendations to prevent them ever made it into army reports. One can identify some similarities between his criticism, which was based on his case studies and what he observed in occupied cities in the late 1930s, and the exhortations in the Army’s Field Service Code, Senjinkun, which was issued to all soldiers in 1941. Hayao had complained that soldiers interpreted requisition as a right to plunder and enrich themselves. The Army Penal Code, which was established during the Meiji period, outlined the penalties for soldiers on the battlefront or in occupied territories found guilty of stealing from inhabitants or committing rape, with perpetrators convicted of murdering their victims facing the death sentence. Senjinkun’s author(s) also appeared to prohibit looting by warning soldiers that ‘requisitions, seizures, and the destruction of goods and similar actions must be executed in keeping with the regulations and always under the orders of your commanding officer’. However, as troops moved from north to south-central China in the 1930s, the IJA expected soldiers to ‘free forage’, and Haruko Taya Cook observes: ‘Such a policy, which was little less than a license to loot and confiscate anything, was justified by difficulties in transporting food for troops for [whom] no supplies had been laid in and who were advancing at high speed ever deeper into the interior.’ ⁶⁰

Senjinkun, which is best known for sanctifying a policy of ‘death before surrender’, is understood to have been a response at the highest level of the military to increasing incidents of indiscipline, which Steven Bullard describes as ‘rising cases of violence against officers, desertion, insubordination, as well as murder and rape of civilians’. The booklet enjoined officers to ‘be zealous in giving a worthy example in everything’, declaring that ‘if there is disorder above, those below will be unruly’, and instructed those on the field ‘not [to] indulge in wine and women or allow desire to becloud their consciences’ and instead ‘be gentle to and protect innocent inhabitants’. As its author(s) ignored the fact that the army was supplying its soldiers with ‘wine and women’, Senjinkun was hardly a fulfilment of Hayao’s recommendations. He had advocated specific changes to the army’s recreation policy, which, in his opinion, encouraged rather than prevented misconduct and crimes: for example, he unsuccessfully called for the official promotion of cultural activities for soldiers, such as visiting museums in occupied cities, and the abandonment of the existing ‘comfort station’ system. ⁶¹

After troops committed mass rapes in Nanjing, the IJA allowed for the commission of other war crimes by further promoting so-called comfort stations, which amounted to a system of sexual slavery for the benefit of soldiers. The established explanation for this measure was that army officials thought that these stations could decrease the chance of espionage, the spread of venereal diseases, and the incidence of sexual assaults, which, despite the efforts of Japanese censors, was reported in foreign newspapers’ accounts of the occupation of Nanjing. ⁶² A leading expert on the topic, Yoshimi Yoshiaki, has also proposed that the stations were an attempt to somehow pacify front-line troops. According to Yoshimi, ‘The Japanese Imperial Army feared most that the simmering discontentment of the soldiers could explode into a riot and revolt. That is why it provided women.’ ⁶³

The stations may have helped to deflect violence away from superiors, but it was a failure as a rape-prevention measure. Soldiers had little reason to pay what Hayao claimed was the exorbitant comfort station service charge of 2¥ for 30 minutes ⁶⁴ when they remained free to assault enemy women. The rapes of Chinese women, he declared, were too numerous to count, and Yoshimi again quotes Hayao as reporting that ‘those arrested are simply unlucky, and we can’t tell how many more remain anonymous in the shadows … [because] unit commanders, on the contrary, consider them [rapes] necessary to build up the soldiers’ morale’. Hayao’s condemnation of the system was thoroughly dismissed, and in 1940 the aforementioned Kawahara Naoichi issued a War Ministry memorandum, entitled ‘Measures to Enforce Military Discipline from the Experiences in the China Incident’, in which he declared that the ‘sexual comfort the men receive from comfort stations [is] especially beneficial. We cannot but think that if we can lead and control such stations adequately, it will contribute greatly to heighten the men’s moral[e], keep discipline and … prevent crimes and sexual diseases.’ ⁶⁵

V. Conclusion

IJA administrators or policymakers remained highly selective in accepting, never mind acting upon, the analyses of psychiatrists and, during the Asia-Pacific War, ignored or adopted policies contrary to recommendations for reinforcing discipline. Tasked with examining a small number of soldier-criminals who were selectively incarcerated in the experimental Education Unit, Miyake and Sugie arrived at conclusions that may have been appreciated by IJA authorities insofar as they effectively shielded the army, its practices, and its policies from blame for crimes by ascribing criminality to some deficiency in perpetrators. But, like all the psychiatrists examined in this article, Miyake and Sugie recommended more rigorous screening. Broadening the exclusion of prospective conscripts nevertheless conflicted with efforts to prevent draft-dodging, and, in response to the desperate wartime need to maintain troop strength, the War Ministry issued a secret dispatch to all army units that ordered the expulsion of severe examples of ‘psychopathy’ but the retention of mild cases.

A comparison of psychiatric and army reports indicates that IJA officials, like most, if not all, army authorities in other countries at the time, focused on crimes that could undermine unit efficiency, such as those among military personnel, especially defiance of superiors. Concerning these crimes, psychiatrists such as Hayao Torao and army administrators were in agreement about the role of intemperance and lack of proper guidance from officers, and Hayao’s warnings were repeated in a 1942 document, ‘Army Secret General Order #3833’, which was circulated to all units of the IJA and eventually acquired by the US enemy. As for Hayao’s recommendations to prevent crimes against civilians, at the very most one can identify similarities to the exhortations in the army’s Senjinkun, which was a response at the highest level of the military to increasing incidents of indiscipline. However, this Field Service Code, whose author(s) ignored the fact that the army was supplying its soldiers with ‘wine and women’, was hardly a fulfilment of Hayao’s demands for changes to specific policies. The IJA during the late 1930s was clearly experiencing serious logistical problems. Yet, while military policymakers increased the likelihood of pillaging by having troops in China ‘free forage’ for food, as ‘Army Secret General Order #3833’ reveals, they were still providing rations of alcohol in 1942 because they believed that liquor contributed to the army’s success.

Examining psychiatric analyses of soldiers’ crimes and recommendations for preventing them does not only throw into sharper relief the limits of the IJA’s efforts to police the actions of its troops. The newly conscripted Hayao was unaware that the military authorities concerned themselves with crimes against enemy civilians only insofar as their disclosure could threaten the Japanese public’s image of their armed forces, and his reaction to the crimes of soldiers functions as a reminder of how propaganda and censorship promoted an expectation of protection for some groups in society. Prioritizing atrocities against civilians, he demonstrated less concern for the plight of both Japanese and Chinese soldiers, commenting extensively on neither the army’s brutalizing training practices nor the abuse and murder of prisoners of war. Although he recognized the negative effects of combat on behaviour, he reserved his harshest criticism for the army’s recreation policy, which, he asserted, was clearly contributing to and not combating indiscipline. Anticipating the post-war prosecution of military commanders based on the doctrine of hierarchical accountability for war crimes, ⁶⁶ Hayao personally castigated IJA officials for allowing their soldiers to become drunken thugs who fought among themselves, disrespected or threatened superiors, and stole from, raped, and murdered civilians as a reward for battle victories.