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MASANOBU TSUJI’S ‘UNDERGROUND ESCAPE’ FROM SIAM AFTER THE JAPANESE SURRENDER Colonel Tsuji (1901–1961?), nicknamed ‘The Wolf’, in formal dress as a young offi cer of the Imperial Japanese Army MASANOBU TSUJI’S ‘UNDERGROUND ESCAPE’ FROM SIAM AFTER THE JAPANESE SURRENDER Edited, with an Introduction and Annotations by Nigel Brailey This book is printed on acid-free paper by CPI Antony Rowe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Tsuji, Masanobu, b. 1902. [Semko sanzenri. English] Masanobu Tsuji’s ‘underground escape’ from Siam after the Japanese surrender / edited, with an introduction and annotations by Nigel Brailey. p. cm. “Original edition published 1952 in Tokyo by Robert Booth and Taro Fukuda as ‘Underground Escape’” ISBN 978-1-905246-79-3 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Tsuji, Masanobu, b. 1902. 2. World War, 1939–1945--Personal narratives, Japanese. 3. China--Politics and government--1945–1949. 4. Japan. Rikugun-- Offi cers--Biography. I. Brailey, Nigel J. II. Title. D811.T795A3 2012 940.54’152092--dc23 [B] 2011037627 ISBN 978-1-905246-79-3 Copyright 2012 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Global Oriental, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhof Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without prior written permission in writing from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. Contents Introduction by Nigel Brailey vii Author’s Foreword to the Japanese Edition xvii Map of Tsuji Masanotu’s Escape Route via Siam xxi Chapter l: Man to Man – 1945 1 Chapter 2: Into the Jaws of Death 20 Chapter 3: Annam in Ferment 77 Chapter 4: Proud Chungking 122 Chapter 5: Nanking, After the Return of the Government 168 Chapter 6: Aspects of a Changing China 219 Chapter 7: A Handful of Earth 245 Introduction t least by implication, this is a book that casts what is, for most AWesterners, a very unfamiliar light upon twentieth-century Japanese expansionism. As expressed by Colonel Tsuji, it presents a picture far from unfamiliar to southeast if not also southern Asians, if quite at variance with the orthodox view not only of Westerners, but also of Chinese and perhaps even Koreans. It is one of Japan making common cause with other Asians, substantially from idealistic and disinterested motives. After all, for many Asians, their decolonization, which involved Japan so much, and for which many Japanese had been showing sympathy since the 1890s, was the critical event of the century. Tsuji Masanobu is at one and the same time one of the most interesting and preposterous fi gures of the entire Japanese war – which, if you rely on his own megalomaniac accounts, he waged ‘almost single-handed’. In this way was Colonel Tsuji characterized in an essay, currently at press,1 by somebody who became one of his chief adversaries on the Allied side, charged with the task, along with others, of bringing about his arrest at the war’s end for trial as a war criminal. And this same adversary, Louis Allen, who became post-war an academic and histo- rian, described Tsuji’s end-of-war activity more specifi cally: Knowing the Allies were looking for him as a war-crimes sus- pect, Tsuji was said to have gone underground at the [Japanese] surrender, after getting funds from the Japanese higher command in Siam [T hailand], and, with shaven head and a monk’s begging bowl and saffron robe, had entered a Thai Buddhist monastery in disguise, under the very noses of the British. This was so obviously and hilariously a piece of fantasy à la John Buchan that it instantly aroused sceptical irreverence in all of us, and we continued our investigations. It was, in point of fact, the cold sober truth. This book is an English translation2 of Colonel Tsuji’s own version of this end-of-war ‘escape’, and hardly so ‘megalomaniac’. First and fore- most it is a good, well-written read portraying a kind of Japanese Scarlet Pimpernel fi gure. Once back in Japan, as even the American historian John Dower, one of Tsuji’s principal critics, concedes,3 the colonel pro- duced for the Japanese market a whole series of best-sellers. And this viii Masanobu Tsuji’s ‘Underground Escape’ book, for some time the only translation of any of Tsuji’s works into English, goes with a swing.4 Beyond that, however, for good or ill, ‘inspirational’ would appear to be the most appropriate word for the author in at least two respects.5 Certainly this would seem to have been how he was viewed at wartime Japanese army headquarters. ‘A master planner and outstanding fi eld offi cer’ is how the Australian Lieut. General Gordon Bennett, involved in defending Singapore at the end of 1941, describes him in the introduction to Tsuji’s Singapore: the Japanese Version.6 And, similarly, another British Japan historian, Richard Storry, in a review of the same work featured him as ‘a gifted and dangerous man,’ albeit somewhat wild and indisciplined, ‘whom the Japanese have nicknamed Senryaku no Kami-sama, “the God of Strategy”.’7 Thus, in June 1944, following earlier service in Manchuria, China, Malaya, the Philippines and the Solomons, he was transferred to Burma to try to help hold the line as General Mutaguchi Renya’s ‘last throw’ attempt to invade India collapsed in chaos.8 Initial Japanese success at Kohima and Imphal in March-April 1944, might instead have involved the collapse of the Raj, but eventual failure quickly brought the Japanese in Burma to destruction. And by June 1945, it had been decided to transfer Tsuji to Thailand, the ‘rear area’ as Louis Allen called it to put Japanese defences there in a better state. And it was expected that he might have upwards of a year to realize this, as Lord Mountbatten’s South-East Asia Command (SEAC), under pressure from Churchill in London, was giv- ing priority to moves south from Burma, namely the invasion of Sumatra and the recapture of Singapore in order to restore both British and Dutch colonial prestige in South-East Asia; this was to be in preference to a strike eastwards into China or even Thailand. ‘Save England’s Asiatic Colonies’ was how many Americans interpreted the SEAC acronym.9 However, out of the blue so far as the Japanese, and also the British were concerned, the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, prompting a sudden general Japanese surrender which deprived Tsuji of any further military role, and turned him into a potential Allied ‘war criminal’ target. Inspirational is also the word for this book surely. For in this fairly imme- diate translation,10 it appears to have prompted an Australian team backed by General Bennett to embark later on a translation of Tsuji’s Shonan: the Hinge of Fate. This team included as editor, H. V. Howe, (Military) Secretary for the Australian Army, 1940–46, and Margaret Lake, sometime Lecturer in Japanese at the University of Sydney as translator.11 Of course, its Japanese title recalls volume four of Churchill’s History of World War II. Apparently Churchill was a fi gure admired by Tsuji. As Singapore the Japanese Version, it fi rst appeared in Sydney in 1960, and has since become something of a classic, with English, Singaporean, and American editions.12 Of particular interest is a comparison of the attitudes towards Tsuji of British Japan specialists Richard Storry and Louis Allen, contemporaries but quite different personalities who experieneed very different careers. Like G.C. Allen before him (unrelated to Louis Allen), Storry taught Introduction ix in Japan pre-war, and took employment post-war with the Australian National University at Canberra before returning to Oxford to teach about Japan. Other British Japan specialists such as Ian Nish and Arthur Stockwin also spent time in Australia. Louis Allen. by contrast, a rather more rumbustious fi gure, but who, apparently, not entirely happily accepted employment at the University of Durham to teach French, and also featured as a stalwart of the BBC’s Round Britain Quiz, made only a few trips to Japan to pursue his researches. Both Allen and Storry had served in the later stages of the war in Burma, but the more sensitive and romantic Storry less happily. According to Raymond Callahan, thanks to his command of Japanese, Storry felt himself distrusted even by his fellow offi cers as a kind of ‘Japanese Joe’.13 However, after Storry’s death his widow, Dorothie Storry, paid tribute to his unusual devotion to Japan with a biography entitled Second Country: The story of Richard Storry and Japan (Ashford: Norbury, 1986). Meanwhile, Louis Allen’s Japanese and his involvement with Japan had been the outcome of membership of a small group of students specially trained at the London School of Ori- ental and African Studies (SOAS) towards the end of the war, several of whom were to enjoy outstanding prominence in Japanese studies after 1945.14 And he, too, later became strongly committed to letting ‘bygones be bygones’ in Anglo-Japanese relations. While Storry was enabled to meet Tsuji in 1953, it seems Allen never met him. And while Allen employed his writings much more, he was not particularly friendly to them, and preferred to highlight instead the career of Major Fujiwara Iwaichi, founder of the wartime Bangkok-based intelligence unit, the F.

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