Author: Wu Zhiwei

On September 9, 1945, He Yingqin accepted the Japanese surrender on behalf of China

I. Participation in the advance party of the Chinese occupation forces in Japan

    On August 14, 1945, the Emperor of Japan announced his surrender to the Allies. According to the Potsdam Proclamation, after Japan's surrender, the Allies dispatched occupation forces to occupy key areas of Japan and to supervise its disarmament (only the police remained armed) and the practical implementation of the instrument of surrender.

    The National Government finally chose the 67th Army Division, with three regiments of 14,500 men, as the Chinese occupation force in Japan. The CPA was centered in Aichi Prefecture, with the addition of Shizuoka and Mie Prefectures. The division headquarters was located in Nagoya, the capital of Aichi Prefecture, and was under the command of the U.S. Eighth Army.

    At 7:00 a.m. on May 27, 1946, at Jiangwan Airport in Shanghai, a 13-member advance party consisting of Lt. Gen. Zhu Shiming, head of the delegation to Japan, Maj. Gen. Li Lipai, adviser, Maj. Gen. Dai Jian, commander of the 67th Division of the Occupation Forces, and Lt. Cmdr. Lu Dongge, Commander of the port of Nagoya, boarded a B-24 Liberator bomber bound for Japan.

    A victorious nation carries arms into Japan to show the majesty of a victorious nation. Therefore, the bomber was left intact with a dozen machine guns on board, except for the fact that it carried no bombs. Liao Jiwei, 32, a colonel staff officer in the military group of the Chinese Mission in Japan, was also in this advance party.

II. Escorting Mukai Toshiaki and other war criminals to China for trial

    One of the important tasks of the mission in Japan was to punish war criminals. Liao Jiwei inadvertently saw in the Tokyo Nichijin Shimbun of November 30, 1937, a gruesome picture of two Japanese officers holding up samurai swords, grimacing and laughing maniacally, with the caption, "A Hundred Decapitations Beyond the Record".

    Newspapers reported with great interest on the "100-killer contest" between the two men in China. The two Japanese officers were Toshiaki Mukai and Tsuyoshi Noda.

    In November 1937, the invading Japanese army from the Songhu battlefield to Nanjing on the way, the 16th Division, the ninth unit of the third brigade second lieutenant artillery squad leader to the sai Minming animalistic, to the third brigade of the third second lieutenant Noda Tsuyoshi proposed to carry out the "chopping and killing a hundred people competition", to kill 100 people first for the winner, the prize for a bottle of wine.

    This report quickly reached home and shocked the nation. After the Chinese representative in Japan intervened, Mukai Toshiaki and Noda Tsuyoshi were arrested in Tokyo by the military police of the Allied Forces in Japan and handed over to the Chinese Mission in Japan, and on December 18, 1947, the Military Tribunal for the Trial of Japanese War Criminals held a public trial of war criminals Noda Tsuyoshi and Mukai Toshiaki in Nanjing.

    On January 28 of the following year, Toshiaki Mukai and Tsuyoshi Noda were escorted to the Yuhuatai Execution Ground in Nanjing for execution. Liao Jiwei not only attended the Tokyo trial, but also personally participated in escorting war criminals such as Tani Shoufu, Mukai Toshiaki and Noda Tsuyoshi back to China for trial.

III. Reality as reflected in the movie "Witnesses

    Eight years of war, Liao Jiwei personally witnessed the invading Japanese army committed heinous crimes against the Chinese people; in Japan, he also witnessed the tragic situation after the Japanese domestic militarism.

    On the streets of Tokyo, Yokohama, and Nagoya, most of the Japanese men wore yellow uniforms, hung their heads and did not smile, and when they saw Allied officers, they were too inferior to look them in the eye; while the Japanese women walked briskly with their heads buried in their hands, and the occasional smile was a bow of respect to the Allies.

    The American troops who initially landed in Japan fought the Japanese many times, and many of them had their comrades brutalized and killed by the Japanese, and were filled with hatred for the Japanese. Even MacArthur, was almost captured by the Japanese. As a result, American soldiers who saw Japanese still wearing military uniforms hated them and went to beat them up if they did not like them. The Japanese movie "Human Witness" has reflected these things.

    Liao Jiwei once recalled, "What happened in reality was even worse than what had happened in the movie. After the war, the U.S. Army's military discipline was lax, and drunkenness and beatings, robberies and rapes by soldiers were frequent occurrences. I once read a news report in a Japanese newspaper that several black dolls were born in Japanese hospitals in the year since the U.S. troops entered the country, the first generation of blacks in Japan."

    After the defeat, the Japanese did not dare to fight back against the Allied forces. Some of the wooden signs near the American barracks read in English and Japanese, "Any Japanese who comes within this line will be killed."

IV. Witnessing the tragedy of Japan after its militarization

    Most of the houses in Japan's major cities burned down after the war, and all the buildings within a two- or three-kilometer radius of the atomic bombing center in Hiroshima were razed to the ground. Many Japanese people picked up those melted objects in the ruins and sold them as souvenirs. Liao Jiwei also bought a few. Steel, cement, glass melted into one into a mixture of substances, is indeed a spectacle.

    Food was scarce, with each person supplied with four taels of rice per day, eating establishments were almost extinct, and sweets and pastries were not available at all, as documented in the Japanese animated movie Grave of the Fireflies. Generally, the lunch of the Japanese laborers is a few potatoes or a little sweet potatoes, therefore, many Japanese people are thin and malnourished.

    Flower beds and lawns in parks are used to grow vegetables and potatoes; zoo animals, such as lions and tigers, are killed and eaten.

    Except for the immediate family members of Emperor Hirohito, all other members of the imperial nobility were abolished and their special treatment was canceled. After being cut off from their financial resources, these people made a living by selling antiques, paintings and jewelry. During this period, Liao Jiwei engraved a crystal private seal in Tokyo, with the margin "Autumn of the 35th year of the Republic of China, purchased in Tokyo, Japan".

V. Occupation forces in Japan have been redeployed to fight the civil war

    On August 15, 1945, the front page of Ta Kung Pao had the huge headline "Japan Surrenders!" "This is the first time in nearly 100 years that the Chinese people have won a complete victory against imperialism." The Chinese people, who had suffered so much from the war, were immersed in cheers of victory.

    Before the advance party of the Chinese occupation troops in Japan entered the country, media such as Ta Kung Pao, Shimbun, China Times and Free China reported this historic event, and some newspapers even published the full list of names and ranks of the occupying troops. These contents were also reported in Japan at the same time, and the Japanese Chinese were all overjoyed.
    In mid-July 1946, the advance troops in Yokohama received a call from the mission in Japan to return to the mission, and were then told that a call had come from home that our occupying forces were not coming.

    As it turned out, the domestic civil war was in full swing, and the 67th Division had been ordered to move to the liberated areas of Suzhou, Luyu, and Yu, where it was integrated into the 65th and 69th Divisions of the forces of Tang Enbo, the commander of the First Appeasement Area (who was succeeded by Li Moan in mid-July).

    The 67th went up in smoke under the fire of the Civil War.

    On August 28, Su Yu and Tan Zhenlin led by the Central China Field Army sent a telegram to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China: our army on the 26th in the southwest of Rugao destroyed the 99th Brigade of the 69th Division, and then on the 27th in the above area to destroy the 187th Brigade of the 65th Division of the enemy from Rugao to reinforce the 79th Division of a regiment, and the second time a regiment of the reinforcement from Rugao was also annihilated by half.

    Thus, the 67th Division, an occupying force in Japan that was to be sent to Japan, went up in smoke under the fire of the Civil War.

    In 1960, Liao Jiwei, who was fluent in Japanese and English, joined the Sichuan Provincial Library and managed the foreign language library. During the Cultural Revolution, his collection of graphic materials on the Tokyo trial was copied and destroyed, and in 2005, on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the victory in the war, he left his right handprint on the Chinese Veterans' Handprint Square in the Jianchuan Museum.

    Liao Jiwei passed away in Chengdu in 2007 at the age of 94. His son, Liao Pinzheng, followed his father's wishes and donated the crystal seal to the Jianchuan Museum, and in November 2009, the seal was rated as a national cultural relic by the State Administration of Cultural Heritage.

Sixth, Jianchuan Museum, resistance series of the front battlefield museum, there is an exhibition hall to show the victory of the war; which displays a crystal seal, the owner of the seal is "armed occupation of Japan" Liao Jiwei ......