THE TIGER OF KYUSHU: LIEUTENANT GENERAL TANI HISAO (22 DECEMBER 1882 TO 26 APRIL 1947)

On this date, 26 April 1947, a Japanese War Criminal, Tani Hisao A.K.A the Tiger of Kyushu was executed by the firing squad for his part in the Nanjing Massacre. Let us not forget the thousands of innocent Chinese brutally murdered during World War II.

INTERNET SOURCE: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hisao_Tani

Hisao Tani (谷 寿夫 Tani Hisao, 22 December 1882 – 26 April 1947) was a Lieutenant General in the Imperial Japanese Army in the Second Sino-Japanese War, and was implicated in the Nanjing Massacre.

Lieutenant General Tani Hisao

Nickname	Tiger of Kyushu
Born	December 22, 1882 Okayama, Japan
Died	April 26, 1947 (aged 64) Shanghai, China
Allegiance	Empire of Japan
Service/branch	Imperial Japanese Army
Years of service	1903–1945
Rank	Lieutenant General
Commands held	Imperial Japanese Army
Battles/wars	Russo-Japanese War, Second Sino-Japanese War, Pacific War

Biography

Tani was a native of Okayama Prefecture. He graduated from the 15th class of the Imperial Japanese Army Academy in 1903 and from the 24th class of the Army War College. He saw service as a second lieutenant in the Imperial Guard's infantry regiment during the Russo–Japanese War. Subsequently, he was posted to Great Britain as a military attaché from 1915–18, during which time he was an official observer for the Japanese government on the combat situation on the Western Front in World War I. After his return to Japan, from 1922–24, he was attached to 6th Regiment/IJA 3rd Division.

In 1924 Tani became an instructor at the Army War College, and his texts on strategy and tactics during the Russo–Japanese War became required reading.

From 1929–32 Tani was assigned to various posts in the Imperial General Staff, and in 1932 when was made Chairman of Military Investigation. In 1933 he took command of the 2nd Imperial Guards Brigade, and in 1934, Commandant of the Tokyo Bay Fortress, and in 1935 Command of the 9th Depot Division.

From 1935–37 Tani was commanding officer of the 6th Division (Imperial Japanese Army), which was assigned to the China Expeditionary Army in December 1937 under the overall command of General Matsui Iwane. The 6th Division fought in North China during the Peiking – Hankow Railway Operation. Shipped south with the Japanese 10th Army, it took part in the end of the Battle of Shanghai, and the Battle of Nanking.

Returning to Japan at the end of 1937, Tani became Commander in Chief of the Central Defence Army until 1939 when he went into reserve and retired. In 1945, towards the end of World War II, Tani was recalled to active service and given command of the IJA 59th Army and Chugoku Army District.

The chief Japanese invader officer Tani Hisao (left), who was in charge of the Nanjing Massacre, 1937, about 300,000 Chinese were killed.

Trial and Execution

After the end of World War II, the Chinese government demanded that Tani be extradited to China to stand trial for war crimes at the Nanjing War Crimes Tribunal. Some historians portrayed the prosecution at the trial as incoherent and incompetent, and pointed out its alleged errors, such as the prosecution repeatedly blaming Tani for actions of the IJA 16th Division (which he did not command), instead of the IJA 6th Division, confusing events between the Battle of Shanghai and the Battle of Nanjing, and accusing Tani of atrocities on dates after which he had already been transferred back to Japan. Nevertheless, as the commander of the IJA 16th Division, General Kesago Nakajima had died in 1945, and General Matsui Iwane would be executed by the Americans after the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, Tani was the highest surviving commander in Chinese custody, and his association in Chinese minds with the Battle of Nanjing and its aftermath meant that a guilty verdict was certain. Tani was convicted of instigating, inspiring and encouraging the men under his command to stage general massacres of prisoners of war and non-combatants and to perpetrate such crimes as rape, plunder and wanton destruction of property, during the Battle of Shanghai, Battle of Nanking and early in its occupation, the Rape of Nanking, and he was consequently executed on 26 April 1947.

Lieutenant General Tani Hisao [PHOTO SOURCE: http://www.kangzhan.org/www.kangzhan.org/node/50.html]

INTERNET SOURCE: http://www.nankingatrocities.net/Tribunals/nanjing_02.htm

Trial of the Nanking Atrocities

Along with the major Japanese governmental and military leaders indicted for Class-A war crimes, some 5,700 other Japanese (168) were tried for Class B and C war crimes by the Allied nations in Yokohama, Singapore, Rabaul, Batavia, Manila, Nanjing and numerous other venues. (169)

 

China established 13 tribunals, tried 650 cases, convicted 504 Japanese and sentenced 149 to death. 

In Nanjing, presumably due to the difficulties in investigating atrocities that had happened more than 8 years earlier while caught up in the Civil War against the Communists, only four Japanese army officers were tried for the war crimes relating to the Nanking Atrocities between 1946 and 1947. 

The accused were the commander of the 6th Division, Lieutenant General Tani Hisao, the company commander of the 6th Division, Captain Tanaka Gunkichi, and two Second Lieutenants in the 9th Infantry Regiment of the 16th Division, Mukai Toshiaki and Noda Tsuyoshi. Among the four defendants, Tani was the only one who was in a high commanding position when the city fell. 

Of other possible suspects, General Matsui Iwane, the commander-in-chief of the Central China Area Army, was being tried at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East as a Class-A war crime suspect. 

Lieutenant General Nakajima Kesago, the commander of the 16th Division and Lieutenant General Yanagawa Heisuke, the commander of the 10th Army, both died in 1945.

Lieutenant General Prince Asaka, the commander of the Shanghai Expeditionary Force and Emperor Hirohito's uncle, was granted immunity for any war crimes trial because of his lineage as a member of the royal family.

And finally, Lieutenant Colonel Cho Isamu, an information staff officer of the Shanghai Expeditionary Force and a general staff of the CCAA, committed suicide in Okinawa before the Pacific War ended. (170)

Thus, Tani was the only one alive and available. In court he pleaded not guilty and indicated Nakajima and his troops were the real culprits, but the mounting evidence adduced against him and the testimonies of eyewitnesses and victims showed otherwise. 

He was found guilty on February 6, 1947 and the court pronounced the sentence of death on March 10, which read:

Hisao Tani, having been convicted of instigating, inspiring and encouraging during the war the men under his command to stage general massacres of prisoners of war and non-combatants and to perpetrate such crimes as rape, plunder and wanton destruction of property, is hereby sentenced to death.

On April 26 he was sent before the firing squad at Yuhuatai execution site. (171)

The other three were brought to Nanking thanks to the domestic propaganda activity of the Japanese government during the wartime. 

Tanaka was once mentioned in a book called Imperial Soldiers in Japan and became famous for killing "300 hateful Chinese enemies" with his "buddy sword" Sukehiro. 

Mukai and Noda were also well known for their killing contest to cut down a hundred Chinese soldiers in combat with their swords on the way to Nanking. Their story was serially published in the Tokyo Nichi Nichi newspaper, where the two second lieutenants were treated as war heroes (to read some of the articles in English, see Reference below). 

However, as many historians point out today, the stories of hyped heroism, in which those soldiers courageously killed a number of enemies in hand-to-hand combat with swords, couldn't be taken at face value. (172)

Indeed, when Noda came back to his hometown in Japan and made a speech at an elementary school, he told his young audience that of more than a hundred Chinese soldiers he killed, most were actually prisoners of war. 

In 1971 one of the schoolchildren, Shishime Akira, wrote to a magazine of what he heard from Noda years before, a part of which quoted the second lieutenant as saying: 

I killed only four or five with sword in the real combat.... After we captured an enemy trench, we'd tell them, "Ni Lai Lai." The Chinese soldiers were stupid enough to come out the trench toward us one after another. We'd line them up and cut them down from one end to the other. (173)

As if representing the hundreds of other "great swordsmen" in the Imperial Army of Japan who severed the heads of unresisting Chinese captives, Tanaka, Mukai and Noda were all sentenced to death and executed on January 28, 1948. 

Interview: Fujiwara Akira (174)

Fujiwara Akira is a professor emeritus at Hitotsubashi University. He has published a number of books on the Imperial Army's wartime atrocities in Asia. He is considered one of Japan's most prominent scholars on the Nanking Atrocities today.

"I think the Tokyo War Crimes Trial has a tremendous significance in our history in the sense that it meted out justice for Japan's aggression for the first time. The trial collected abundant historical evidence in a relatively short period of time as well, which is a treasure house of materials for even today's researchers...."

"Yes, it [the IMTFE] has its own limitations and problems. The United States intentionally overlooked the experiments on human guinea pigs and poisonous gas experiments done by the Japanese troops in an exchange for the scientific data. The trial did not delve into all the battles and atrocities in all of China. They only chose a couple of them as symbolic incidents, such as the Rape of Nanjing and the one in Manila. But the Imperial Army massacred far more people all over China than in Nanjing alone. The trial also granted immunity to the Emperor and Prince Asaka [the commander-in-chief of the Shanghai Expeditionary Force]. There were some aspects that were problematic...." 

"I would say Matsui [the commander-in-chief of the Central China Area Army] was far more responsible [for the Nanking Atrocities] than Prince Asaka was. After all, Matsui was his superior officer who had been in charge of the Central China theater. Prince Asaka was appointed in December and arrived China on the 7th. Of course, there is no doubt that he should have been tried, though...." 

"The problem of the Class B and C war crimes trials in China was that another civil war was going on between the Nationalists and the Communists. I guess they didn't have much time and manpower for the trial in Nanjing. In that sense, probably the Tokyo Trial was more thorough and systematic. I am also aware of the argument that the Second Lieutenant officers [who initiated the contest to cut down 100 Chinese soldiers with their swords] tried in the Nanjing War Crimes Tribunal were innocent. But the current argument lacks the context. They might not have been guilty as charged [for killing more than 100 Chinese in hand-to-hand combat] but I am almost certain that they beheaded many [Chinese prisoners of war]...."

168. Richard H. Minear, Victor’s Justice: The Tokyo War Crimes Trial (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1971), 6.
169. Philip R. Piccigallo, The Japanese on Trial: Allied War Crimes Operations in the East, 1945-1951 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979), 33 and173.
170. Fujiwara, “‘Tokyo Saiban ni yoru Dechiage’ Setsu koso ga Dechiage [The Theory of ‘Fabrication at the Tokyo War Crimes Trial’ Is the Real Fabrication], 23-24; Kasahara, Nanking Jiken [The Nanjing Incident], 6-8; Hata, Nanking Jiken [The Nanjing Incident], 46-47; Frank Gibney, “Editor’s Introduction,” in Katsuichi Honda, The Nanjing Massacre: A Japanese Journalist Confronts Japan’s National Shame, ed. Frank Gibney, trans. Karen Sandness (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 1999), xxi, n2.
171. Hata, 48-49; Piccigallo, 165-166.
172. The three researchers interviewed by author for this project, Daqing Yang, Ikuhiko Hata, and Akira Fujiwara said that the contest could have been mere mass murder of prisoners.
173. Quoted in Katsuichi Honda, Nanking he no Michi [The Road to Nanjing], 162-163.
174. Akira Fujiwara, interview by author, Tokyo, Japan, 25 February 2000.

• To read some of the articles on the killing contest, see Reference: Articles on the Killing Contest below.
• To read the judgment of the IMTFE on the Rape of Nanking, Matsui Iwane and Hirota Koki, go to The Postwar Judgment (Reference): The Judgment of the IMTFE.
• To see a collection of photographs taken at the IMTFE, click here.

Reference: Articles on the Killing Contest

The following article was quoted in Timperley's What War Means (American title: Japanese Terror in China) in 1938. It appeared in the Japan Advertiser, an American owned and edited English-language daily paper in Tokyo, on December 7, 1937. 

SUB-LIEUTENANTS IN RACE TO FELL 100 CHINESE RUNNING CLOSE CONTEST

Sub-lieutenant Toshiaki Mukai and Sub-lieutenant Takeshi Noda, both of the Katagiri unit at Kuyung, in a friendly contest to see "which of them will first fell 100 Chinese in individual sword combat before the Japanese forces completely occupy Nanking are well in the final phase of their race, running almost neck to neck.

On Sunday when their unit was fighting outside Kuyung, the "score," according to the Asahi, was: Sub-lieutenant Mukai, 89, and Sub-lieutenant Noda, 78. 

On December 14, 1937, the same paper published another report that read: 

CONTEST TO KILL FIRST 100 CHINESE WITH SWORD EXTENDED WHEN BOTH FIGHTERS EXCEED MARK

The winner of the competition between Sub-Lieutenant Toshiaki Mukai and Sub-Lieutenant lwao [Takeshi] Noda to see who would be the first to kill 100 Chinese with his Yamato sword has not been decided, the Nichi Nichi reports from the slopes of Purple Mountain, outside Nanking.

Mukai has a score of 106 and his rival has dispatched 105 men, but the two contestants have found it impossible to determine which passed the 100 mark first. Instead of settling it with a discussion, they are going to extend the goal by 50.

Mukai's blade was slightly damaged in the competition. He explained that this was the result of cutting a Chinese in half, helmet and all. The contest was "fun," he declared, and he thought it a good thing that both men had gone over the 100 mark without knowing that the other had done so.

Early Saturday morning, when the Nichi Nichi man interviewed the sub-lieutenant at a point overlooking Dr. Sun Yat-sen's tomb, another Japanese unit set fire to the slopes of Purple Mountain in an attempt to drive out the Chinese troops.

The action also smoked out Sub-Lieutenant Mukai and his unit, and the men stood idly by while bullets passed overhead. "Not a shot hits me while I am holding this sword on my shoulder," he explained confidently.

• To read the judgment of the IMTFE on the Rape of Nanking, Matsui Iwane and Hirota Koki, go to The Postwar Judgment (Reference): The Judgment of the IMTFE.
• To see a collection of photographs taken at the IMTFE, click here.
• To continue reading the story, go to The Nanking Atrocities in the 1990s: The Death Toll - Early Estimates.

 

Lieutenant General Tani Hisao [PHOTO SOURCE: http://shiroishii.deviantart.com/art/Hisao-Tani-1882-1947-163039599]