Berkley Center

My political science class in Harbin, China often discusses foreign relations. For all the talk of a trade war with the United States, very few Chinese people actually dislike America. My teacher just believes that the United States does not know China’s true plans and motivations well enough. She believes that if Americans were better acquainted with China’s true intentions, then the United States would come around to support China.

The only country that I have seen engender an angry response from my teacher is Japan. World War II atrocities committed by Japan are inevitably brought up whenever Japan is mentioned in the political sphere today. Northeast China has a special history with Japan as the location of the Manchukuo puppet state controlled by Japan from the 1930s until the end of World War II. Last semester I took a course on ancient Japanese history which gave me a deep appreciation for the subject. When I came to Northeast China I was eager to see all the remnants of Japan left from the occupation. Unfortunately, almost everything left of Japan in northeastern China are shocking remnants of a campaign against human dignity.

First, I went to the concentration camp to the south of Harbin where biological weapons were tested on mostly Chinese prisoners. The administrative building still stands, but the prisoner holding cells, experimental chambers, and furnaces for burning human remains were mostly exploded by the retreating Japanese army. Legend has it that the Japanese attempted to blow up the administrative building as well, but it was so well-constructed that they couldn’t blow it up. The Chinese government constructed an enormous museum in 2015 that describes the crimes against humanity that Japan committed on the site. The museum has a clear political goal in also placing responsibility for those acts squarely on the Japanese emperor. This history is not taught in American schools and is definitely not taught in Japan.

Although the horrible acts committed by Japan against ordinary people were shocking and sobering, especially since my grandmother was an ordinary person living only a few provinces to the south at that time, one of the oddest things I found was in the administrative building. There, on the second floor, was a Shinto shrine room where guards could pray for the Japanese lives lost while running the concentration camps. I wondered how could someone pray there when only a few hundred feet away human beings were being experimented on like disposable pieces of meat. I knew the guards referred to the prisoners as maruta (logs) to dehumanize them, but to dehumanize people to that degree seemed unfathomable.

I found another instance in the coastal city of Dalian. There the Japanese ran a prison from which many were sent up to the concentration camp in Harbin. Down the hall from the room where they tortured prisoners was another shrine where the guards would have prisoners recite Buddhist scripture as a way of sapping their fighting spirit before they were killed. The callousness with which they treated religion struck me again. It felt like religion was only used for the Japanese national interest, and when anything impeded that, religious tenets could be easily ignored. Religion was used in these spaces to reach a political end. The contrast of these holy spaces made me reflect on how strong religion must be for adherents to make space for it in even the most dehumanizing of places, but also how easily religion can be manipulated by those adherents who decide to use it for their own interests.