Three Alls Policy
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The Three Alls Policy[1] (Japanese: 三光作戦, Sankō Sakusen; Chinese: 三光政策; pinyin: Sānguāng Zhèngcè) was a Japanese scorched earth policy adopted in China during World War II, the three alls being: "Kill All", "Burn All" and "Loot All". In Japanese documents, the policy was originally referred to as "The Burn to Ash Strategy" (燼滅作戦 Jinmetsu Sakusen?). This policy was designed as a retaliation against Chinese Communists following the Hundred Regiments Offensive.[2] The name "Sankō Sakusen", based on the Chinese term, was first popularized in Japan in 1957 when a Japanese war criminal released from the Fushun war crime internment center wrote a controversial book called "Sankō, Nihonjin no Chūgoku ni okeru sensō hanzai no kokuhaku" ("The Three Alls: Japanese Confessions of War Crimes in China") (new edition : Kanki Haruo, 1979), in which some Japanese veterans confessed to their crimes committed under the leadership of General Yasuji Okamura. The publishers were forced to stop the publication of the book after receiving death threats from militarists and Shōwa fanatics.
DescriptionInitiated in 1940 by Ryūkichi Tanaka, the Sankō Sakusen was implemented in full scale in 1942 in north China by Yasuji Okamura who divided the territory of five provinces into pacified, semi-pacified and unpacified areas. The approval of the policy was given by Imperial General Headquarters Order Number 575 on 3 December 1941. Okamura's strategy involved burning down villages, confiscating grain and mobilizing peasants to construct collective hamlets. It also centered on the digging of vast trench lines and the building of thousands of miles of containment walls and moats, watchtowers and roads. These operations targeted for destruction "enemies pretending to be local people" and "all males between the ages of fifteen and sixty whom we suspect to be enemies." [3] According to a joint study of historians such as Mitsuyoshi Himeta, Toru Kubo, Mark Peattie and Zhifen Ju, more than 10 million Chinese civilians were mobilized by the Shōwa army for slave work in north China and Manchukuo under the supervision of the Kōa-in.[4] In a study published in 1996, historian Mitsuyoshi Himeta claims that the Three Alls Policy, sanctioned by Hirohito himself, was responsible for the deaths of "more than 2.7 million" Chinese civilians. His works and those of Akira Fujiwara about the details of the operation were commented by Herbert P. Bix in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan, who claims that the Sankō Sakusen far surpassed The Rape of Nanking not only in terms of numbers, but in brutality as well. Controversy and DisputeLike much of Japan's WWII history, the nature and extent of the policy is still controversial today in Japan. Because the now well-known name for this strategy is Chinese, a minority group of right-wing Japanese historians claim that the policy is merely Chinese propaganda and that using this term promulgates this left-wing disinformation. They have even argued whether or not this policy actually existed. They further claim that this kind of scorched-earth policy was a part of Chinese, not Japanese, history, saying that the Chinese maintained a scorched-earth policy during World War II - known in Japan as "The Clean Field Strategy" (清野作戦 Seiya Sakusen?) - according to which Chinese soldiers would destroy the homes of their own civilians in order to wipe out any hiding places that could be utilised by the Japanese troops.[5] They claim many supposed victims of the Three Alls Policy actually died at Chinese hands and that their deaths were attributed to the Japanese. However, these claims are unfounded are attributed to Japanese right-wing nationalism that also claims the Rape of Nanjing never happened, despite the overwhelming evidence as well as first-hand accounts by Chinese, Japanese, and international witnesses at the time. MovieThe forthcoming movie The Children of Huang Shi, which covers the Japanese invasion from 1938 to 1945, is set in part along the sankō sakusen. [6] Notes
References
Some of the content of this article comes from the equivalent Japanese-language article (accessed on April 7, 2006).ja:燼滅作戦 |
