Hanaoka Monogatari: The Massacre of Chinese Forced Laborers, Summer 1945

The Hanaoka Massacre

When U.S. occupation forces liberated Allied POW camps in the Akita area in northern Japan in the early fall 1945, they came across piles of unburied dead bodies, mass graves, and a labor camp of emaciated Chinese men living in appalling conditions.

Akita shown in red.

This was Chūsan Dormitory near the Hanaoka copper mine and river diversion project run by Kajima Corporation, one of Japan’s biggest construction and public works companies. Kajima-gumi, as it was then known, was headquartered in Tokyo with branches throughout Japan and Manchuria. The company had built Japan’s first hydroelectric dam in the 1920s and would remain at the forefront of innovative engineering projects in Japan and Asia throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century.¹

In the closing years of the war, Kajima participated in a nation-wide system of forced labor from northern China and Korea ostensibly to offset labor shortages in Japan and to maximize industrial and mining production, including at the Hanaoka mine. Mitsui, Mitsubishi, and most other industrial combines used forced labor as well.

Map of 135 sites of forced labor in Japan, in Japanese, from the bookletShōgen chūgokujin kyōsei renkō accompanying the video of testimonies made by Nitchū yūkō kyōkai, 1995.

Nine hundred eighty-six Chinese civilians and prisoners of war from five north-Chinese provinces were brought to Hanaoka in three waves between August 1944 and June 1945 to join Korean conscripts, Allied POWs, and Japanese laborers moving ore cars into and out of the mine, repairing roads, cementing, excavating river beds, and tilling the rocky land.

Working conditions worsened for everyone as food supplies dwindled towards the end of the war. But the Chinese workers were singled out for ever-increasing levels of physical and mental abuse, especially severe beatings. Food rations and living conditions at Chūsan Dormitory deteriorated to sub-subsistence levels in the last year of war. including starvation, unsanitary living conditions, systematic beatings and plain murder.

“Dogmeat Stew”

On June 30, 1945, six weeks before the war ended, the men at Chūsan Dormitory organized an uprising, killing four Japanese overseers and one Chinese spy and fleeing into the woods, from where they tried to defend themselves with rocks. Over the following four days, local and military police recaptured the rioters with the help of locals and tortured them in the Hanaoka town square. Over 200 Chinese died in what has come to be known as the Hanaoka Incident, and the dying continued at a high rate in the months to follow. Between August 1944 and October 1945, 418 Chinese died of malnutrition, illness, physical abuse and plain murder.

A first report on the incident by Japanese authorities on 20 July 1945 titled “On the Riot by Chinese Workers of Kajima-gumi” found that the excessive workload, severe food shortages, and lack of compensation lay at the root of the revolt. It also established that “[the Chinese laborers] were treated like animals and beaten whenever they stopped working for a pause…” The report notwithstanding, the inhumane treatment continued even past Japan’s surrender and extended to the dead as well, who were denied proper burial. Kajima-gumi simply ignored an August 1945 SCAP directive stipulating an end to all forced labor, payment of wages, release of prisoners, collection of remains, and repatriation.

Later in the fall, the head of a U.S. investigation into forced labor at Hanaoka, William Stimpson, furnished a thirty-page report on the atrocities in preparation of war crimes indictments. This led to the arrest of Kajima’s president and thirteen top officials as well as camp supervisors, guards, and policemen who worked in or around Hanaoka during the last year of the war. Occupation authorities evidently found Kajima’s corporate leaders too central to reconstruction efforts to pursue the company’s criminal responsibility for forced labor and released the officials in 1946 after payment of a fine to the Lawyers’ Association.

Criminal investigations instead focused on the day-to-day perpetrators of brutality in the camp. A U.S. military commission of the Eighth Army in Yokohama found six out of the indicted eight camp supervisors, guards, and policemen guilty of war crimes against the Chinese laborers as Hanaoka. On 1 March 1948 the court sentenced two guards and one camp commander to death, the Hanaoka general manager to life, and two policemen to twenty years of hard labor each. Over the following decade all sentences were gradually commuted by the U.S. Clemency and Parole Board in the course of bringing the Allied war crimes trial program to an end. Despite repeated clemency appeals on their behalf, the Hanaoka camp guards ended up in the “hard core” category of war criminals who were the last to be released from Sugamo Prison between 1956 and 1958. The trial unearthed much gruesome detail about the slave labor conditions in Hanaoka and the massacre in particular but was otherwise fraught with contradictory witness testimony, coerced affidavits, and controversy over the very legitimacy of the trial.

In the face of Allied war crimes investigations, Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs launched its own investigation of all 135 forced labor worksites in March 1946. Besides the Ministry’s investigative reports, each company involved, including Kajima, was ordered to furnish its own site report. Meanwhile, state bureaucrats crafted a five-volume “Investigative Report of the Working Conditions of Chinese laborers” also known as the “Foreign Ministry Report.” Based on exhaustive statistics from different ministries, it provided detailed information on all 38,935 Chinese males brought to Japan as forced laborers, their hometowns, procurement through the North China Labor Association, transport to Japan, working conditions in Japanese mines, docks, and factories, causes of death, etc. This report has a fascinating history in its own right, as it was successfully kept from the Allied war crimes investigation in the 1940s, “vanished” in the late 1950s, and only reappeared in 1993 when NHK (Japan’s national broadcasting service) launched an aggressive investigation for a documentary on wartime forced labor.

In documenting the system of forced labor broadly, the Foreign Ministry Report sought to draw attention away from individual businesses involved and instead to demonstrate that the forced labor system as a whole had been a failure for Japan, for it had neither alleviated the acute shortage of labor nor brought companies financial relief. Perhaps the most problematic part of the report was its use of falsified death records supplied by the company site reports, which claimed that many Chinese laborers had died of diseases they had contracted before coming to Japan rather than of abuse and murder on site.²

The Creation of Hanaoka Monogatari

None of the official investigation reports of the Hanaoka Incident were allowed to become public knowledge in the early postwar year, and all vanished from the record thereafter. The war crimes trial was subject to Allied censorship at the time and—apart from the announcement of the verdict—could not be discussed in the public media. The only information about the Hanaoka atrocities in the media at that time appeared in articles in the left-wing monthly journal Shakai hyōron in 1946 and the Communist newspaper Akahatain 1947. But local Japanese in the Akita area knew. They remembered. And some of them acted when the political time was ripe.

That time came in 1950, when the Occupation was entering its fifth year and its priorities had changed from ensuring Japan’s democratization to building up a strong military alliance with Japan’s conservative leadership. SCAP (the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers) had come to see the People’s Republic of China, as a threat to Japan’s peace and reconstruction and to suspect the Korean minority as well as pro-China activists of communist infiltration. This change of policy, which began in 1947, came to be dubbed the “reverse course” in the Japanese media. For the political Left, the reverse course centered on the so-called Red Purge in 1950, when more than 20,000 teachers, labor and peace activists deemed communists or communist sympathizers lost their jobs, while erstwhile militarists who had been purged under early postwar Occupation directives were being rehabilitated and many soon returned to public office. The critical context both for the Red Purge and a growing peace movement was China’s Communist Revolution, culminating in the formation of the People’s Republic of China in October 1949 and the outbreak of war on the Korean Peninsula the following June. In 1950, then, in response to both international and domestic political developments, Japan’s labor movement, the peace movement, and the Sino-Japanese friendship movement joined forces.

Hanaoka Monogatari was a product of a heightened sense of crisis among the left, which saw itself as representing the (peace-loving) Japanese people resisting the (remilitarizing) Japanese state. Three local woodcut artists from the Akita area sat down to create what was for decades virtually the only public source of information on the Hanaoka Incident: a collection of 56 woodcuts, each accompanied by a poem in the Akita dialect, telling the story of the Chinese forced laborers at Hanaoka. A three-month strike at the electric engineering company Hitachi following 5,555 job losses proved decisive for the genesis of this project. The struggle cost Hitachi’s regional art cooperative director Maki Daisuke his job. Barred from work under the American-sanctioned Red Purge, Maki spent his time recording the Hitachi struggle (Hitachi Monogatari), the farmers’ movement (Jōhō Monogatari), and finally the Hanaoka Incident (Hanaoka Monogatari) through lengthy pictorial narratives.³

“Bamboo Spears”

Under the slogan “Never forget Hanaoka,” Maki Daisuke worked with two artist friends, Nii Hiroharu and Takidaira Jirō, and the poet Hara Tarō while finding refuge at the home of the Akita branch representative of the newly founded Japan-China Friendship Association. It was also the Friendship Association that first published Hanaoka Monogatari in book form in May 1951 and promoted its 1956 appearance in China, where it became a bestseller under the title “The Hanaoka Disaster.” The disappearance of the original woodblock panels at around this time put a hold on subsequent editions, although a reprint of an existing copy was published in 1971, some years after a local committee of the Japan-China Friendship Association erected a five-meter-tall stele near the site of the former Chūsan Dormitory.

Hanaoka memorial. Courtesy of Nitchū yūkō kyōkai, Hanaoka 34

A documentary on the Hanaoka Incident by the Akita NHK TV station based on this book followed in 1975, when public interest in the issue began to emerge. A second edition became possible in 1982, after the original wood panels were located through the efforts of the radio and newspaper reporter Nozoe Kenji, who had been researching both the historical event and the history of Hanaoka monogatari since his days as a logger in the Hanaoka area in the 1950s. Mumeisha Publishing put out the most recent edition in connection with the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war in 1995.

Hanaoka Monogatari did more than just document the June 30 massacre. It paid tribute to the suffering and heroism of the Chinese laborers caught in the vicissitudes of capitalism gone rampant under wartime militarism and imperialism. The facts about the Chinese laborers’ procurement and transportation to Japan, their life and work in Hanaoka, the organization of the uprising, the massacre, and finally postwar struggles over issues of responsibility are well corroborated by the U.S. war crimes trial records as well as newly rediscovered Japanese records. The pictorial story’s narrative and interpretive scope, however, differed greatly from both U.S. and Japanese records on Hanaoka. American investigations focused narrowly on a selected handful of perpetrators whose crimes could be conclusively verified by legal means in a trial whose very legitimacy was questioned at every turn. Japanese government reports all but buried specific crimes within a larger bureaucratic system of importing and controlling foreign labor having gone wrong.

Maki Daisuke and his colleagues, in contrast, told the story from the perspective of local Japanese workers forced to become accomplices in the crimes against Chinese workers. It mattered greatly to Maki and his colleague that, although the Chinese laborers had suffered alongside poor Japanese farmers and other locals, Korean conscripts, Allied POWs, and even student soldiers, the Chinese were singled out for the most inhumane treatment of all.⁵ Being literally worked to death, denied adequate clothing, food, and water while subjected to beatings with shovels, cudgels, and swords—all this was depicted with frightening candor. While social class united the workers at Hanaoka in the face of capitalism serving the aims of war, ethnicity separated them by the hierarchical logic of imperialism. Class solidarity, moreover, was betrayed when the military police enlisted local Japanese to recapture the Chinese rioters.Hanaoka Monogatari was meant to restore this solidarity by celebrating the Chinese (and Korean) laborers’ courage, resilience, and belief in liberation. Their resistance served as a bittersweet example, and a call for action among the workers of contemporary Japan to rise up against a state that once again ignored the welfare of working people, allied itself with the new imperialists (America), and denied its responsibility towards China.⁶

Maki Daisuke was apparently also motivated by a sense of personal allegiance to his home (furusato) and the responsibility that this entailed. Growing up in difficult circumstances, he had spent some of his student years at his uncle’s place in back of the Kyōrakkan theater on the square where the Chinese rioters were tortured for days after the uprising. In creating Hanaoka Monogatari, he paid tribute to the Chinese victims of this incident that marred part of what he called home and, in his view, simultaneously exposed the deadly—and continuing—conjuncture of capitalism, imperialism, and war. It is therefore significant that these local Akita artists chose a medium that had come to visually define the anti-Japanese resistance movement in China among left-wing artists in the 1930s and continued into the 1940s as the Chinese revolutionary woodcut movement. The human characters depicted through rugged bold lines in black and white brimmed with the rage of humiliated, destitute people and their call for liberation. Perhaps the most famous of these woodblock prints was Li Hua’s “China, Roar!” (1935).

This modernist political art form had emerged in Shanghai around the writer Lu Xun in the 1930s, but its roots were quintessentially international. A wave of translated European and also Japanese modernist and socialist art theory had deeply influenced Chinese artists in the 1920s, and Lu Xun himself promoted the engagement with these art forms by exhibiting his collection of the German artist Käthe Kollwitz’s work and by using foreign modernist art to illustrate his novels. He was also principally responsible for the promotion of the narrative picture series as an accepted art form in China at that time.

Precisely how Maki Daisuke and his collaborators came to adopt this art style is impossible to reconstruct, but it most likely depended on personal contacts both during and after the war. We know that cross-national relations among left-wing artists and intellectuals critical of Japanese imperialism flourished during the war, centered on Uchiyama Kanzō’s bookstore in Shanghai also known as the Japanese-Chinese Culture Salon. The floor above the bookstore served Lu Xun as a refuge in the years before his death in 1936; moreover, Lu Xun invited Uchiyama’s brother to teach Japanese woodcut styles to Chinese artists there. Uchiyama Kanzō went on to become the Japan-China Friendship Association’s first president from 1950 to 1953, when many Japanese with deep cultural connections to China joined the movement.⁷

Hanaoka Monogatari’s most harrowing prints were undoubtedly those depicting the extreme brutality of the Japanese overseers, which started well before the Chinese men arrived in Hanaoka. In the poems accompanying the three slides entitled “Why were there Chinese at Hanaoka?” the victims themselves told their Japanese co-workers at Hanaoka the story of their abduction in China and the suffocation, beatings, and drowning to which Japanese men subjected them on their way to Japan.

“Why were there Chinese at Hanaoka?”

Thereafter, the narrative voice changed to the Japanese workers witnessing the trampling and beating of their Chinese co-workers at the hands of the Hanaoka camp guards. In all these prints, the well-nourished, almost oversized Japanese with their swords, spears, and brutal faces exuded a dark, ruthless presence of total control on the one hand, and out-of-control behavior on the other. Just as in the Chinese war-resistance woodcuts, the few bold white lines against the overwhelming darkness of the print left no space for moral ambiguity.

Postwar Japanese avant garde artists such as Yamakawa Kikuchi and Tomiyama Taeko further explored the links between the war and postwar exploitation of workers, in particular miners, in changing contexts. Tomiyama began her career in the 1950s painting the worlds of miners in black and white. In later decades, she extended this subject to the memory of victims of various violent struggles in Asia, utilizing woodcuts and lithographs in the Käthe Kollwitz tradition in addition to her colorful oil paintings.⁸

The Politics of Memory in the 1950s

In the context of the early 1950s, a responsible war memory emerged in the crucible of progressive democratic resistance that pitched citizen activists against an unresponsive or obstructionist conservative state. Workers demonstrated against what they saw as big capitalists once again enriching themselves at workers’ expense. A multifaceted peace movement exploded in protest not only in response to war in Korea but specifically against the remilitarizing Japanese state through the US-Japan Security Treaty. People with allegiance to Asia rallied against the government’s decision to throw its lot in with the United States at the expense of building harmonious relations with Japan’s neighbors, regarding this as a perpetuation of imperialist enmities. Some of this combined energy on the political Left reached a violent peak in May 1951 in what came to be known as “Bloody May Day.”

Hanaoka Monogatari spoke passionately to the Japanese government’s evasion of responsibility as reparations payments were negotiated away under the San Francisco Peace Treaty that ended the US occupation, while leaving intact the US military presence and nuclear umbrella. Former forced labor czars then returned to public life, virtually all convicted war criminals had their sentences commuted, and the Chinese dead still lay unburied and unrecognized by the Japanese or Chinese governments. A particularly powerful print to this effect depicted three “Kajima bosses” celebrating their rehabilitation after the war while ignoring their responsibility for the crimes committed.

“Those who plan war”

While many prints captured the desperate state of affairs in Hanaoka in ways similar to that of the 1930s Chinese woodcuts, equal if not greater emphasis lay on the positive energy of the victims’ solidarity and determination to fight for their liberation. In that senseHanaoka Monogatari bore greater resemblance to the post-1945 Chinese revolutionary prints both in theme and style.

While repatriation of Japanese from China decreased to a trickle after 1947, the Chinese expatriate community in Japan joined forces with Sinophile Japanese and Zainichi Koreans concerned about SCAP’s and their government’s increasing hostility towards the Communists on the mainland. A variety of pro-PRC citizen organizations sprang up in Japan during this time, from the Overseas Chinese Association and the Chinese People’s Association for Promoting Democracy to academic and cultural organizations to promote the study of Chinese history and culture. The Japan-China friendship Association, founded in October 1950, served as an umbrella organization for these various groups.

At around this time, the Overseas Chinese Association secured a copy of the Foreign Ministry report on wartime forced labor, which had been leaked by a conscientious Foreign Ministry official. Although the Association did not make this public (not, indeed, until 1993), it clearly used the knowledge gained from the report to exert pressure on companies like Kajima as well as local governments to return the remains of the dead to China and hold memorial services. The first such service for the Hanaoka victims was held in Honganji temple in Tokyo in November 1950 with Chinese, Korean, and Japanese in attendance.

In March 1953, an umbrella organization called the Memorial Committee for Martyred Chinese Captives formed around the Japan-China Friendship Association, the Overseas Chinese Association, and the Japanese Red Cross to petition the government to return the remains of the dead and hold commemorative services. In July of that year, the government paid for the return to China of the remains of 551 Chinese victims of forced labor. During Buddhist memorial services in October, spokespersons of several pro-China citizen organizations delivered a joint statement of deep apology to China in the name of all Japanese, pledging themselves to work for lasting friendship between the two countries.

The Chinese government, for its part, sent the remains of 2,472 Japanese killed in China to Japan while also pressing the Japanese government for an explanation of the forced labor issue, on which the Foreign Ministry stonewalled. Chinese demands for war reparations were equally unsuccessful. Nevertheless, in a remarkable move, the People’s Republic in 1956 released 1,017 of a total of 1,062 Japanese war criminals held in prisons in Manchuria after a short trial. Many of these soldiers had previously been in Russian captivity and had been extradited to China in the late 1940s. For almost ten years, they had undergone a type of re-education that confronted them with their individual crimes, explained those crimes in terms of Japanese imperialist aggression, and encouraged the prisoners to write confessions describing their crimes in detail.⁹

By releasing these prisoners, the PRC followed the example of the nationalist government on Taiwan (KMT), its biggest rival, which had pardoned all war criminals convicted by KMT courts in 1952. Over the next half century, through the Association of Returnees from China (Chūgoku kikansha renrakkai or Chūkiren), the repatriated war criminals publicized their personal roles in perpetrating war crimes and called for public atonement for Japan’s crimes and reconciliation. Their forthright testimony raised public awareness of Japanese wartime aggression. Their lifelong insistence on their own and their country’s culpability would be dismissed by conservatives as the result of Chinese “brainwashing,” but the fact remains that over the decades they played a crucial role in promoting critical war memory at the grassroots level throughout Japan.¹⁰ Chūkiren exemplified the pattern of citizens taking the lead in the public management of war memory and postwar responsibility in place of the government. There is no doubt that the PRC’s carrot-and-stick approach to war legacies was no less politically motivated than the Japanese government’s politics of refusing to address war legacies such as forced labor. Both served immediate political aims that stood quite apart from a moral imperative to demand the truth about past atrocities or take responsibility for them.

In a very different way of dealing with convicted war criminals serving sentences in Tokyo’s Sugamo Prison, Japanese officials in charge of moving prisoners to the American-instituted parole system petitioned the U.S. Clemency and Parole Board on behalf of those convicted in the Hanaoka trial. They pointed to the fact that—

given the Chinese politics of amnesty—had these men been convicted in a Chinese instead of an American court they would now be free. In the language of these petitions, moreover, not only had the perpetrators acted in accordance with admittedly unfortunate but “common and customary practices” during the war, but the government had appropriated for itself the work of public atonement that in fact had been carried out by citizen activists. [quote from NOPAR’s clemency petition for Fukuda Kingoro¹¹ The Hanaoka war criminals, placed in the “hard-core” category by the Americans, were eventually paroled, but not until the war crimes trial program as a whole wound to an end after 1956.

Recently released documents reveal that by the end of the decade, when the revision of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, major labor unrest, and Chinese reparations demands loomed large, Foreign Ministry officials moved to put an end to the discussions of Chinese forced labor generally. The Ministry flatly stated that all documents pertaining to this issue, including the Foreign Ministry Report, had been irretrievably lost. In this way, the government washed its hands of its responsibility to deal with this war legacy and instead left the job of commemoration and atonement to citizen groups. Neither the PRC nor the government on Taiwan pressed the issue after 1961, and in 1972 Zhou Enlai gave up China’s right to reparations in the Joint Chinese-Japanese Communiqué that paved the road to normalization of official relations. Meanwhile, Japanese citizen groups continued to dig up the bones of the dead, hold commemorative ceremonies, return the ashes to the bereaved families in China, and build memorials.¹² Hanaoka Monogatari remained, for the time being, the only public narrative on Japanese wartime atrocities against Chinese (and Korean) forced laborers on Japanese soil.

The Struggle for Compensation in the 1990s

Official efforts to suppress information relating to the Hanaoka Massacre and its aftermath began to break down in the late 1980s. Japanese journalists, academics, lawyers, and citizen activists have since chronicled the facts in public discourse as part of a call for belated apology and compensation for victims. William Underwood, a former professor at Kyushu University and an expert on war compensation lawsuits, worked tirelessly to bring the issues to the attention of Anglophone readers since the 1990s. The following relies heavily on his work and that of Japanese and Chinese colleagues.

First, a group of Hanaoka survivors in China organized to demand compensation from Kajima Corporation and worked with Japanese lawyers to press their case through the Japanese courts. This time, the impetus for putting issues of war responsibility on the public agenda came from outside Japan (albeit without Chinese government support) and tapped into existing progressive citizen networks in Japan.

Second, this was part of a much larger, transnational, and indeed global movement to address heretofore neglected war atrocities through highly publicized demands for full disclosure of the historical facts, apology, compensation, commemoration, and public education. The urgency of this move towards historical restitution and reconciliation stemmed at least in part from the impending loss of the generation of survivors and witnesses, all of whom were of an advanced age.

Third, public and private organizations collaborated in the early 1990s to turn up crucial government documentation on the wartime and early postwar handling of forced labor, most important being the 1946 Foreign Ministry Report. It gave much needed ammunition to the lawsuits making their way through the courts, created unprecedented public awareness of the issue, and moved the government’s war responsibility into the public limelight. The Hanaoka case proved to be a rare success story among the many war legacies taken up in Japanese courts since the 1990s, but the legal process it followed also exemplified a common trend among redress movements.¹³

In late 1989, Hanaoka survivors and bereaved families in China organized around the figure of Geng Zhun, the erstwhile leader of the Hanaoka uprising. They contacted Kajima Corporation through the mediation of two Japanese human rights lawyers and several academics in Japan involved in war responsibility issues. The result was a “joint statement” of the survivors and Kajima in July 1990, in which Kajima, with extensive interests in China and, therefore, powerful incentives to come clean, acknowledged its historical responsibility, apologized to the victims, and vowed to continue negotiations.

The case nevertheless went to court when Kajima stonewalled on the survivors’ demands for financial compensation. On September 28, 1995 a suit was filed seeking 60.5 million Yen in compensation. First rejected in the Tokyo District Court because of the statute of limitations on forced labor, it received favorable rulings in the Tokyo High Court, which mediated a compromise settlement in November 2000 in which 500 million yen was to be shared by survivors and their next of kin. While Kajima did not acknowledge its legal responsibility to make amends, it agreed to set up the Hanaoka Peace and Goodwill Foundation, a trust fund used for memorial services and payments to survivors and bereaved families. The Foundation was managed on the recipient side by the Chinese Red Cross. The two parties also agreed on the establishment of a memorial hall, the Hanaoka heiwa kinenkan, which opened in April 2010.¹⁴

Among numerous Japanese forced labor compensation cases, Hanaoka remains perhaps the best documented and best managed. Early local efforts to keep its memory alive contributed to this outcome. The 1951 woodcut story of Hanaoka in historical and contemporary context impresses not only for its brutal candor, which the historical records amply confirm, but also for its creators’ keen perception of the larger processes and meanings of war and postwar responsibility then in the making. Hanaoka Monogatari was a product of its time, and its sponsor, the Japan-China Friendship Association, defined the contemporary context in the book’s epilogue as one of unprecedented collaboration between labor, peace, and pro-China movements actively resisting a government that seemed bent on reviving its anti-Asian, militarist proclivities.

In keeping with this spirit, the first edition in 1951 did not mention the names of the artists who had created the prints and poems. One suspects that the disappearance of the original wood panels in the mid-1950s, most probably hidden by Maki Daisuke, may have had something to do with this. Hanaoka became the Japan-China Friendship movement’s first showcase of its political activism. Hanaoka Monogatari bridges the gap between the need for recording what happened in order to claim compensation for the victims and an act of registering moral outrage, ethical witnessing and mourning akin to some of the avant-garde art of the time. Indeed, the reader might very well linger over a print or poem in this book and feel its power on its own terms, quite apart from the politics of the past of whichHanaoka Monogatari was such a significant part.

Franziska Seraphim is associate professor of Japanese history at Boston College and the author of War Memory and Social Politics in Japan, 1945-2005 (Harvard University Asia Center Press, 2006) She wishes to thank John Dower for his initiative to bring this work to public attention and his invaluable help in understanding woodblock print art at this time, as well as Richard Minear for taking on the translation and Mark Selden for bringing the project to publication.

Richard H. Minear is professor emeritus of Japanese history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and editor/translator ofHiroshima: Three Witnesses (Princeton, 1994), Japan’s Past Japan’s Future: One Historian’s Odyssey (Rowman & Littlefield, 2011), The Day the Sun Rose in the West: Bikini, the Lucky Dragon, and I (Hawaii, 2011), and other works. He wishes to thank Franziska Seraphim for introducing him to Hanaoka Monogatari, Chisato Kitagawa for line-by-line explication of the text, and Fujita Shōzō of Hitachi for responses to specific inquiries.

Recommended citation, Introduction by Franziska Seraphim, Translation by Richard Minear, “Hanaoka Monogatari: The Massacre of Chinese Forced Laborers, Summer 1945” Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol 13 Issue 26, No. 3., June 29, 2015.

Notes

¹ . Cf. Kajima history in English.

² . Cf. essays by William Underwood, among them: “NHK’s Finest Hour” (Aug. 2006); “Names, Bones and Unpaid Wages (1): Reparations for Korean Forced Labor in Japan” (September 2006); and “Proof of POW Forced Labor for Japan’s Foreign Minister: The Aso Mines” (May 2007).

³ . In addition to Hanaoka Monogatari, Richard Minear has prepared translations of Hitachi Monogatari and Jōhō Monogatari.

⁴ On one side of the memorial are inscribed the characters for a “growing tradition of friendship” (hatten dentō yūgi), on the other side, “opposition against aggressive war” (hantai shinryaku sensō). On the back the inscription reads: “With the support of caring people from both Japan and China, we have erected this monument to friendship and will never again allow war between Japan and China. In 1944-1945, 993 Chinese, who had been brought here illegally under Japanese militarism, lived here in the Chūsan Dormitory at the foot of this mud-filled dam, abused and forbidden to speak their native language. On 30 June 1945, these laborers, as well as those who wanted to protect the honor of their fatherland, rose up as a group to at last oppose Japanese imperialism heroically. Here lie the remains of 418 people who gave their lives patriotically to this cause. We will forever remember this incident, our prayers never again to allow war between Japan and China are chiseled into stone for the grandchildren of both countries.” Quoted in Seraphim, War Memory and Social Politics in Japan, 1945-2005 (Harvard, 2006, p. 131)

⁵ According to Nozoe Kenji, the Hanaoka mine had put to work over the years approximately 300-400 Allied POWs (1944-45); 800 Chinese POWs (1944-45), 300 Chinese drafted workers (1944-45); 4500 Koreans (1942-1945); 600-800 reservists and volunteers (1944-45); 300 Japanese student soldiers and 1500 Japanese contract workers.

⁶ “Capitalists and reactionary bureaucrats in this country are working together mercilessly to sack admirable workers who are trying to rebuild a democratic and peaceful Japan. The number of violent incidents in which workers’ resistance is suppressed in a bloody manner is increasing by the day. If things are left untended, there is going to be World War III as they desire, and fascists will again turn us into slaves.” Quoted in Mari Yamamoto, Grassroots Pacifism in Postwar Japan: The Rebirth of a Nation, Routledge, 2004, p. 38

⁷ . Cf. Seraphim, “People’s Diplomacy”.

⁸ . Cf. “Imagination Without Borders”; Tomiyama’s “Prayer in Memory of Kwangju”; and Tanaka Nobuko, “Brushing with Authority: the Life and Art of Tomiyama Taeko”.

⁹ See Takahashi Tetsurō, Kaneko Kōtarō, Inokuma Tokurō, “Fighting for Peace After War: Japanese War Veterans recall the war and their peace activism after repatriation” (tr. Linda Hoagland).

¹⁰ . Cf., here.

¹¹ “As for the numerous Chinese lives lost in misery at Hanaoka Mine, it has been taken by the Japanese nation as a blunder committed during wartime by the nation as a whole, and from such point of view, big memorial services were held at the mine as well as in Tokyo by the government and people of Japan, and the government has shown its sincere regrets in arranging safe sending home of ashes of the deceased. It is most ardently hoped that some sympathetic steps will be taken now for the subject prison inmates who had unfortunately taken part in this disastrous case.” (quote from NOPAR application for clemency, quoted in a summary of the “Application for Clemency for Fukuda, Kingoro” by the U.S. Clemency and Parole Board, 1952. RG 153, Clemency & Parole Board Files, Box 884, No. 331, US National Archives)

¹² . Cf. photo of one of many Sino-Japanese Friendship memorials.

¹³ . For a narrative introduction of the lawsuit in English by one of the main attorneys involved in the Hanaoka case, see here.

¹⁴ . Cf., here. Parallel to this decade-long legal process, the Society to Think About Chinese Forced Labor published eight volumes of documents on the wartime and postwar history of the Hanaoka mine case from 1990 to 2001, including a special volume on reconciliation, followed in 2006 by the trial records of the U.S. Class B/C war crimes trial on Hanaoka. The Society maintains a useful website which includes Japanese documents and their translations into English and Chinese.

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家業（かまど）コけえして　お前どこサ行ぐ
北のはずれの　花岡よ

春にや　つつじも　につこりさくドモ
百年このかた　かなほりやよろけよ
たからうずまる　その地のそこにゃ
骨がないてる　カネのやま

いくさのたんびに　ふくれてふえたワ
ハモニカ長屋と　山もちのサイフよ
おちにや地ごくの　カネのやま

金（カナ）くそ

地ごくサ　まるで　この山ア
山からあふれるカナくそ
カナくそでうずまつてゆく田んぼ
怒（ごしやい）つた百姓がた　むしろ旗（はた）おし立て立て
鉱山（やま）さ　かけあつたこともあつたド
まンズ　歌の文句でゆうならば

たんぼうずめた　カナくそみたバ
うちの嬶（あは）も
山のからすも　ああとなく

死んだ田んぼを　ながめていたバ
もえてくるぞえ
にえてくるぞえ　はらわたが

よろけ

なんばカントクがぶつたたいたとて
「ぞうさん增產」のねんぶつとなえたとて
人のちからにや　かぎりのあるものさ
合宿（がつしゆく）じや配きゆうのピンハネ
ろくろく食うものくわせねば
よろけるのわ　あたりまえでねスか
まして娘（あね）コのうでさもかなわねえ
ひよわな商人（あきない）コの人がたアなおさらだべ

はだかの娘コ

そのうえ　なんぼ「くにのため」だとて
むりやりしよつぴいてきた娘（あね）コがたア
あられもねえ姿（すがた）で　トロツコおし
へそまでだしたすつぱだか
小ぎれ一枚で前ばかくしてよ
なんぼかはずかしく
なんぼか　うらめしかつたべドモ
はずかしいとて　うらめしいとて
口にだせることでねえ
うしろにやカントクの六尺 棒（ぼお）だ
もうハア　おえらがた
人間なみのきもちでわ　なかつたべモノ

病人までも

からだわるくして　うちで休んでいるものまで
ひつたてられて　よろよろと
「軍の命れいだ」
「せい（聖）戰のためだ」
歯（は）くいしばつて　うらんでも
もうけることに　目のいろかえた
戰爭（せんそう）商ばいのやつらにわ
蛙（びつき）の　つらコサ　水だつたノス

七つ館（だて）のらく盤（ばん）

ラクバンだあ！
七つだてが落ばんだあ！
マリみてえに　鉱夫（こうふ）がすつとんでゆく
「父（おど）親　けえしてけれ！」
「わらしの骨だけでもけえしてけれ！」
どよめきあつて　泣いて　ねがうアツパがた
それに会社の奴らなにをした
あとにも　さきにも
いれい祭（さい）のときの　ほんのめくされ金だけよ
いきうめになつた二十三人の
骨わいまだに　それつきり
四四年の五月のことだス
ンだす
この山がもうかるうらにわ
地のそこのむかしからの骨が
ないているノス

たたかつた朝鮮（ちようせん）のひとがた

朝鮮のはたらき人（つど）――
百姓がたも　徴用（ちようよう）されてきたス
その半島のひとがたサ
とうとうだまつておれずになつて
みんなで事務（じむ）所（しよ）さおしかけて
「きゆう金はふやせ！」
「はい給ばまともにやれ！」
おらだち　こころの中で　ウンと手をたたいたス
なんぼ朝鮮のひとがた　ど胸（きよう）のええことか！
みんなどうにも　できずにいたときよ
あんまりひどい　あつかいに
徴（ちよう）用工も　どんどん　夜にげするように
なつていたどもなア

きんろう報國隊

あかがねのとれる　この山ア
火藥（やく）のもともとれる　この山ア
いくさのときわもうハア　氣ちがいじみた
ごつたがえしよ
あねコもしよつぴかれ
学生がたもしよつぴかれ
町の商人（あきないこ）のだんながたもしよつぴかれ
みんなしよつぴかれて　くらしわめちやくちや
そして大（でつ）けえこえでおどかされたことわ――
「くにのためだ」　おまえたち　しんだかくごせえ！

三本の汽車

まいにち　まいにち　この花岡の地のそこの
鉱石（こうせき）はこぶ汽車といれちがいに
花岡の地のそこえ　人間はこぶ　汽車がとおる
土地ぬすみとられた百姓がた
家業（かまど）けえした 商人（あきない）コ
かせいでも　かせいでも　食（か）れなえひとがたを
花岡の地のそこさ
くたばるまでかせがせるため
はこんでやつてくる汽車だス

そのうちでも　おらだちのわすれていけねえのわ
あの三本の汽車
中国のホリヨがたを　はこんできた汽車
一回　一九四四年七月
二回　一九四五年五月
三回　一九四五年六月

中國の人がたどうして
花岡サきたか　㈠

中国のホリヨのはなしだスー

おれわ破かい工作のとき
日本軍につかまつた
ほおりこまれた收容所（しゅうようじよ）にわ
子どもから　としよりまでも三千人のなかま
国をぬすむうらぎりものに
いぢめぬかれた
每日二十人ずつわ　死んでいつた
女という女わ日本鬼にはずかしめられ

二度のコウリヤンめし
この人数（ずう）にたつた一つの井戸
そのひもじいこと
いりつくように　かわくこと！

中國の人がたどうして
花岡サきたか　㈡

ある日　貨車（かしや）につめこまれ――
車にわ北京行きとかいてあつた
いきつけぬほど　押（お）しつめられて
よわいなかまわ　着（つ）くまでに死んでいつた
おれたちも　くるまのすきまから
ふなのように　空氣（くうき）を　ぱくぱくやつた
じぶんの小べんものんだ

中國の人がたどうして
花岡サきたか　㈢

むかし　ドイツにぬすまれ　今でわ
日本鬼にぬすまれいる　港（みなと）
おれたちの靑島（ちんたお）から　船につみこまれた
あいもかわらぬ　ひもじさ　かわき
水のませろといえば　海にけおとされ
船の鉄管（てつかん）のしたたりをなめた
息もたえだえ――日本につれられてきた

これが　ほりよのはなしだス
あばら　がらがら　ひざ　がくがくの
あの人がたわ　つれこまれた
秋田の北のどんずまり――花岡え
そこで　土木のかしま組の
中山寮さ　ぶちこまれた

かしま組（ぐみ）

中山寮（ちゆうざんりよう）たち　人ぎきもええが
なんの　地ごくの一丁目
それからわ――九百人あまりの中国人の人がたの
みるもむごいあつかいが　はじまつたノス
おれたちわ　每日　眼をそむけたス
げん場までの　みちみち
ちょつと列（れつ）が　みだれたとて
こんな　太い捧でぶちのめす
半ごろしの目にあわす
あれが　抗日戰のよりすぐり
八路の人がたが　先とうだつたため
日本軍はばつと　汪（おお）政けんがはなしあい
いたぶりころすために
つれてきたということだース

ぢごく作業（さぎよう）

夜の　外出わ　かたくとめられ
なつ冬なしの　きたきりすずめよ
ほねも　ちぎれそな　この北国（きたぐに）の
寒（かん）のどろ水　はだしではたらき
ごろごろと　うえ死に　こごえ死に
うごけなくなつて　スコツプにもたれ
ひと息つけば　打ちのめされ
のめれば　かならず死んでいつた

こうして　夜わ九時になり
ときにわ　夜中になるまでも
日本刀と捧コ　どなりごえ
かりたてられるのが　きこえたス

一ぱいの水

どんなに　のどがつかえても
作業中わ　水一ぱいものませねえ
どんなにたのんでも　ゆるさねえ
これわ　花岡川のなか
ひざまでつかつて　はたらきながら
しやくつてのむにも眼がひかる
とうとうたまらず一口のめば
いきなり　捧が　くつが　刀のさやが
しやがんだ人の　肩（かた） 腰（こし） せなか
ところきらわず　つく　ける　なぐる
（むりやりころすつもりだべナ）
みたものわ　みなそうおもうたス

かいこん

病氣になつた　人がたも
スコツプかつがせ　ウバサワの
あれ地ひらくに　かりだされたノス
みていりや　今にものめりそうに
シヤベルにすがる　うしろから
ピシヤリ　ピシヤリ！
捧コがうなつたス

畑わ　あおあお　みのつだども
なんと　はぢしらずなことだべカ

いのちがけのしごとした　あの人がたの
口エわ　ひとつもはいらなかつたド

毒草（どくぐさ）

ドングリの粉（こ） リンゴのカス　ヌカと水
馬もくわねえ　こんなものが
あの人がたの　くわせられたもの
いつたい　おかみの配給わどうした！
かしま組のかしらが　よこながししたらしい
そこで　ふまれた　リンゴの皮をくい
道ばたの草もくいつくし
――毒草くつて死んだ人もあつたド
立つておれるのが　ふしぎなほどの
栄養失調（えいようしつちよう）のあの人がた
それでもなおも　歯（は）をくいしばり
ふみこたえ　行きぬいてきたス
なにがために
ああ　なにがために

うらぎりもの

みさげた奴が　ここにもいたど――
なかまみんながくるしみ
なかまみんなが　ふみこらえているときに
そやつわ　ぬすつとみたいに
カントクさへつらい　かおいろうかがい
酒のしやくやら　めしの給仕
配給のピンハネ　やつたぬすつとの
おこぼれもらつて　腹ふくらませ
なかまをくるしめ　いばりちらし――

やなぎの葉（は）つぱ

「そんな　むごいことみていられねえ」
やなぎの葉つぱをくれてやつた　父親（おど）がいたす
みんな草だんご食つたときだもの
きつと　じぶんでやなぎの葉つぱ食つた
父親（おど）だべヨ
はたらくものわみな一つ
びんぼう人わ　みな兄弟（きようだい）
カントクの目かすめて　草だんごはこぶ
人もあつたス
鉱夫わ配給（はいきゆう）のカンパわけてやり
学生さんまで　お茶のませたりしたスヨ
そして
中国のことばや唄（うた）ならつたど
――会社のやつら肉バくらい
のみあまつた　うさぎ（どぶろく）を水路（せき）コさ
すてていたときに

手をむすぶ

あのひとがた　おしえてくれた唄

たて　　どれいとなるな人民

人民の血で　　きずこう萬里（ばんり）の長城（ちようじよう）

中華民族　　いま危機（きき）にあり

おたけびあげよ

たて　　たて　　たて――

（義勇軍行進曲）

たたかいの唄（うた）

それでもなア――
あの人がたア　へこたれなかつたド
かつえても　うえても　ころされても
あの人がたア　へこたれなかつたド
ほねだけにやせた　のどから　むねから
みんなで唄コ　うたつたド
世なおしのうたを
はたらくもののくるしみを
ときはなすうた（解放歌）を
みんなで力ずよくうたつたド！

ばく音

あの時　あの音を
どんなおもいで　あの人がたわ聞いたべか――
それは　二十年の夏のこと
キイーンと　ひびく尾をひいて
Ｂ２９がこの山の上をとんでいつた
中国のホリヨの先とうにたつ
八路軍の人がた
勞働者（ろうどうしや） 農民（のうみん）のくるしみの根つコを
ひきぬく役目をもつた　よりすぐりの人がた
さかしい眼が　きらりとひかり
おつかけたべエ　あのばく音を
「時がきた！」と

ひみつの會議（かいぎ）

  （時がきた！）
牛馬　けだものよと　ののしられ
けられ　なぐられても
ぢつとこらえてきたのわ　そのため
今こそ――
「日本の天皇制（てんのうせい）をうちたおし
侵略戦争（しんりやくせんそう）にとどめさし
日本の人民をときはなし
世界（せかい）の平和（へいわ）
人類（じんるい）のしあわせのために」
あの人がたわ　たたかつてきた
本国の戰場（せんじよう）を　眼にうかべていたべ
それから――
たたかいのけいりやくをねつたとよ
夜ごとの　ひみつのあつまりで

主力部隊（しゆりよくぶたい）

まンず　なにより
よりすぐりの人がたで
あくまで　体（からだ）のたえてゆく
鉄（てつ）のような　たたかいぬく決心の
主力部隊を編（へい）せいしたど
日本のはたらく人たちにも　うつたえかけ
たがいに手をとり　おなじ敵（てき）と
さいごの斗いに　立ち上らせてよ
みんな　なけなしの食糧（しよくりよう）をかきあつめ
この人がたにやつたトヨ

勝利（しようり）のちかい

おれたちわ　なにがため　この日本にわたつたか？
なにがため　犬にも　まだおとる
しうちに　たえてきたか？
中国の　おれたちをほろぼそうとするやつら
日本の兄弟をくいものにするやつら
世界を血びたにする　ヒトラー　東條（とうじよう）ら
フアツシヨの死神どもを　この世から
追つぱらうためにこそ――

日本の世なおしの　のろしをうちあげよう
勞働者と農民に　夜あけをしらせよう
かれらを　自分の力にめざめさせよう
戰爭をやめ　金もちと軍ばつどもをうちたおし
平和で　さいわいな国をつくるために

ヒトラーわ　つぶれた
ソ同盟の偉大なたすけが
東にあらわれるのも　もうちかい
勝利に　かがやく日わちかい

あの人がたわ　なかまを　こうはげました
くぼんだ　まなこに　光をかがやかせて

スパイ

氣をつけろ！
こつそり　消えたやつがいるぞ！
この　いにちがけの瀬戸（せと）ぎわに
そいつわ　あの虫けらやろう！
はくそだらけの　うらぎりもの
いのちおしさに　なかまの
見あげるような　計りやくをうつた
（大事わ　ばれた！）

總（そう）けつき

もう一刻もひまわない！

みんな　ぬかるな！

けいりやくはやめて　總けつき

抗日中国人民の旗をたかく！

かどでの血（ち）祭（まつ）り

思いしれ――　血まつりの一げきは
まンず　民族（ぞく）のうらぎりもの
よくまあ　なかまをけり　なぐり
大事な任務（にんむ）までうつた！
おれたちの　ツルハシをくつてみろ！
つぎにわ！
食糧をぬすみ　なかまを殺した
軍ばつのダニ　カントクめ！

よいカントクわ

したどもシヤ
おなじ　かしま組のカントクでも
すこしわましな
すこしわ人間らしい　カントクも
いたべもの
ホリヨの人がた　分べつつけて
その　カントクわ
わざと　にがしてやつたど

鉱（こう）山でわ

うらぎりもののささやきに
目ン玉でんぐりけえした　会社の上役ども
懸の特高課長（とくこうかちよう）さ電話（でんわ） がちやつかせ
びつくり　しやつくり
現場さ　かけつけ
ま夜中に　懸下のケイサツさ
命令ぶつとばす

竹やり

「武器（ぶき）もつとるド」
「身のほどしらねえ　チヤンコロめ」
「ぶつころせ」
――將校らの　さるまね　手まね
役人　地主めらわ　おらだちの心さ
毒氣ぶつこんだよ
おらも　おめえも
やつらの　口車さ　まんまと　のり
竹やりかつぎ　刀ぶんぬき
身ふるわせて　山さ　わけいり
部しよさ　ついた

朝鮮人

將校らと会社わよ
日本人の勞働者を山がりさ
かり立てた
朝鮮人がたわ　うむをいわさず
坑（こう）内さとぢこめた
うしろぐらい　やつらにや
あの人がたわ
「ふていの　やから」
いつ火がつくことか
――解放（かいほう）のばくだん！

山がりの訓示（くんじ）

しこまれた　とおり　立ちならぶ
在郷（ざおごう）軍（ぐん）人　よくさん青年團
婦人会　消防團
將校わ軍刀ぶんぬき　わめきたてた
「関東（かんとう）しんさいのときの　不てい鮮人のごとく
中国のホリヨわ　ぼう動をたくらみ
すでに　陛（へい）下の赤子数名をざん殺した
やつらわ　りやくだつ　放火　殺人
ぼうどうのため　手だんをえらばぬぼう徒（と）である
諸子はただちに　配ちにつけ」

いでたち

電話線をひきちぎつた
武器をうばつた
出（しゅつ） 発（ぱつ）
一時（とき） ちつて
また　あつまるときをかせぐため
山にむかえ　みのりある山え！
くらやみを足ふみしめ　ふみしめ
解放（かいほう）のうたごえわ　とおい海鳴り
あの人がたわ　ちつていつた

秋葉山え

主力部隊わ　南え　大館（だて）え
だす　だす　だす　だす
だす　だす　だす　だす
銃身（じゆうしん）わ　星（ほし）をうつし
スコツプわ　夜つゆにしめり
あの人たちのまなこわ　しつかりと
みひらかれ
秋葉山え
秋葉山え

秋葉山の石合戰

あきば山さ　わけいつた中国の人がたの
ふりかざしたあの手　さけんだあの声
おら達（だ） 勞働者　農民に
よびかけの合図（あいづ）で　なかつたベカ
〝ともに起て　日本人民の解放に――」と

けん兵　巡査（しゆんさ） 資本家（しほんか） 地主らにケシかけられて
おらだち　あの人がたさ　石ぶつつけた
わら　わら　わら・・・・・・と
山の上からも　石がぶつとんでくる
おらだち　あの時　兄弟ちげえになつた
〝くそつ　チヤンコロ　くたばつちまえ〟・・・・・・と

よくまア　二日もつずいた石合戰よ
かなし　中国の人がた
病みつかれた　人がた
ふりしぼる解放の歌声（うたごえ）わ　たえないが
とんでくる石わ　だんだん力がなくなり
ま夏の青葉のさわぎも　なえていつた

その部隊長（ぶたいちよう）らわ

ああ　その部隊長――
骨がらみにやつても　はがねのように
おとろえをしらぬ　部隊長
とわいえ――いきおいにわ勝てぬ
悲しい戰場に　なかまわ　つぎ　つぎに
力つき　たおれ　とらわれ――
戰つてわしりぞき　とうとう見えなくなつたス

この部隊長わ　今も生きのこつて　中国にいるド
一隊とともに　海をわたつて　かえり
国をうつた蔣介石（しようかいせき）との　たたかいに
大陸をかけめぐつているど
中国の　人民解放（かいほう）のしあげのために
そして　アジアの国々の人民解放の
とりでを　かたく　うちきずくために

たぬきじる

おら達（だ） みた――
一本捧につるされた
骨が折（お）れ　片手もぎとられた
中国の若衆（あんちや）だち
一人としてうめきもあげなかつたス
大館（だて）のケイサツ前さ　はこんでくるやつら
〝たぬきじるさ〟と　うそぶいた
地主めらのおそれ　にくみきつたつらつき
けん兵のあざわらい
しばられて手むかいできぬものを
なおも竹やりでつき　捧でなぐり
その時　ひんむいた　あの人がたの
まなこの光りよ
犬をさげすむような
無言の　あのまなこの輝（かが）やき

ひろばのごう問

共樂館（きようらくかん）まえの　ひろばわ
この世の　地ごく
いきもたえだえの　あの人がたを
三角捧さ　すわらせ
くそ小便にも　二人つなぎ
ギラギラする　ま夏のまひる
銃床（じゆうしよう）だ　捧だ　刀のさやだ！
いきもつかせぬ
のませず　くわせぬ三日間
おらだちわ　あきめくら　みたいに
ながめて　いたばかり

血だまり

くされ　まぐろか
くたばつた馬か
おりかさなつて　トラツクからけおとされたス
二人ずつ　しばられたまンま
そのところ――花岡共樂館のひろばわ
いまも　あの人がたの血が　にじんでいるド
その血わ　ぬぐいきれぬ
この世に　犬ちくしようめらのいるかぎり
いまもなお　そのひろばに――

草だんご

あまりの　いとしさに
そおつと　ひざかぶちかく
草だんご　ころがしてやつた嬶（あは）
あの人がたの一人が　ひざで
それをかきよせた
いきなり　それをけん兵がけたおし
嬶（あは）らのつらをガンとぶんなぐつたど

針（はり）がね

共樂館（きようらくかん）の中からわ
身（み）のけだつうなり
ぶつたたく　にぶい音
びん　びん　ゆれる針がねに
親（おや）ゆびくくつて　つるしあげ――
肉がむけ　指（ゆび）がのこつたど
あとできいておらだ
からだが　ずんとしびれたど

死体（したい）

殺（ころ）された三百あまりの死体
三日ぶつずけた　ごう問のはての
ま夏のまつぴるま――
とびたてぬほど　血ぶとりの
まつくろな　くそばえに　おおわれ
夜（よる）わ　うえた犬めが
鼻ならし　鼻すりつけた

白骨（はつこつ）

ウバサワの原つぱにわ　いまも
なんぼでも　なんぼでも　骨がでる
なげすてられて　肉（にく）がおちたままの――
雨でながれた土からでてくる
東條（とうじよう）と　ヒロヒトと　その下手人（げしゆにん）どもの
手にかかつた　あの人がたの骨が
雨にあらわれ　風にさらされ――
これが人民をいたぶり　しぼるにわ
手をかかさぬ　国よとゆうように
資本家と地主のけいさつの
むごたらしさのしるしを
おらだわ　みつずけている

戰爭（せんそう）わおわつた

まもなく　バカないくさがおわつた
勝つ　勝つと　おらだち　だましつずけた
日本の軍ばつと天皇（てんのう）が
とうとう　家業（かまど）けえしたス
Ｂ２９わ　アメリカのホリヨに
いろいろな物　なげおとし
キイーンと　とびさつた
あのときの　ホリヨがたの
はじめてみる　生き生きとしたつらつき

したども――
中国（ちゆうごく）のホリヨがたわ　一物（もつ）もなく
やぶれきもの　草つるで
むすびつけたまんまよ

立ちあがり

どこまで　ずうずうしく　むごたらしく
どこまで　慾（よく）の皮（かわ）つっぱった会社（かいしや）だべ
いくさおわつたごど
日本がまけたつうごど
ほうかぶりで　とおすつもり――
あの人がた　なおも　前まえどおり
こきつかおおとしたス
それが　しらさずに　とおせるものか！
中国の人が立ち上がつた
会社につめよつた
「ふざけるな
人間なみにあつかえ！
一こくも早く国にかえせ！
おらだちをいぢめ　兄弟の血で
手のよごれた戰犯をだせ！」

戰爭たくらむ奴らわ

青くなつた資本家（しほんか） 地主（ぢぬし）の犬ども
アメリカさまに　泣きついた
かしま組のおやかた　けん兵隊長（たいちよう）
知事　警察（けいさつ）部（ぶ）長　特高（とつこう）課（か）長
在郷（ざいごう）軍人会　よくさん青年團の　かん部
いずれおとらぬ　血まみれの人ごろしども
したが　どうしたことだべか
下手（げしゆ）人の小戰犯（せんぱん）だけがしよばつ（処罰）され
大戰犯どもわ　またも大もうけ
いま花岡わ　よそぐにの軍事基地
しんきの戰爭準備（じゆんび）を　あいつらが
たくらんでいる――
おらがた勞働者　農民を
どれいにし　肉彈（にくだん）にするべと

めざめの 唄（うた）

地のそこゆるがす
中国の先（せん）だちの　とおといギセイのうたが
おらだちの魂（たましい）をゆりうごかした
ようやく目ざめた　おらだち勞働者
農民の　いかりの　まえに
ふるえ上つた戰犯（せんぱん）――
かしま組のどたまども
ほとけずらして
こそこそ　骨ひろい
そいつを石ころみたいに　石油かんにつめ
はたけのすみさ
申しわけばかりに墓石（はかいし）立てた

先だちにならつて

解放（かいほう）のうたが　たかくつよく　うたわれたス
生きのこつた中国の人がた
朝鮮（ちようせん）の人がたの　胸（むな）そこから
うたわれたス
おらだちも
そのうたごえにあわせてうたつたス
そのときから　おらだちわ
会社や　地主や　政府あいてに
たたかいはじめたス

二・一のたたかいでも
血をながした帝石のたたかいでも
おらたちのギセイ者わ　先だちにつずいて
たたかつたノス
先だちの骨をみんなほりだせ
一人のこらず　戰犯をといただし　しよばつさせ
先だちのいさおしをながく　のこしつたえるのわ
おらたちのつとめだンス

骨（ほね）ばこ

嬶（あは） ないてだど
「おらどこの人
骨ばこ　とどいたども
骨コのひとかけらもはいつていなかつたべ
シナの人がた　しあわせだシナ
骨コひろつてもらえるで――」
嬶（あは） 汽車のなかで
中国の人がたさ　だかれた骨ばこ
みて泣いたっけど

とむらい

ンだす
はたらく人が　力もつた国の人がたア
草をわけても
兄弟（きようだい）の骨ひろつてくれるス
みろ　日本の天皇と　軍ばつを
紙きれ一枚でいくさサ　ひつぱりだし
あとわ　野ざらし　吹きざらし

おめえ　嬶（あは）さいつて呉（け）れ――
「中国の人がた　葬式（そうしき）まで
力一ぱいもつたド」とな
ンだども――おらだちも　みならわずに
おくものか！
殺されていつた人がたの魂（たましい）が
おらだち日本の　みんなにつたわり
もえあがらずに　おくものか！
今こそ反動のくされ網（あみ）うちやぶり
この国の人民を
日の目にあてるときがきた！

ピストルトコン棒（ぼう）

この葬（そう）式のも主はだれか？
生きのこつた　あの人がたの兄弟
草だんごたべさせた　花岡の親父（どど） 嬶（あは）
それだけでわないど――ほんとうのも主こそわ
五億のあの人がたの同胞（どうほう）
八千萬日本の働く兄弟
いや　それだけか—
平和をまもり　戰爭をにくみ
日本をしんりやく戰爭の足ば
アジアの不幸のみなもとにさせぬため
ひとつになつてたたかう　全アジア　全世界の人民！
このむごい　できごとをくりかえすな！
この人がたに見ならつて　たたかえと――

そのこえに　ふるえ上つた犬どもわ
葬式でうた　うたわせず
あの人がたのこと　かたらせず
ピストルに　コン捧で
赤旗にちかう　勞働者を
むりやり追つぱらつだド

こばまれたとむらいの言葉（ことば）

いつしよにくるしみ
いつしょにたたかつた
生きのこりの　あの人がたのなかまが
殺（ころ）された兄弟のこと　いうべとしたどき
蔣介石（しようかいせき）の手先どもが　とびかかり
おさえたど
先だちにみならう日本人民と
中国の人がたと　むすばるが　こわさに
泣（な）いて　もがく　その人おしのけて
いわせながつたど
どいつだ　そうさせた奴（やつ）わ？
わかるべ！
なあ　みんなあいつらわ　ぐるだ
よくわかるべ！

中國人民のいかり

花岡のぎせい者のことしつた
中国の人民（じんみん）わ　いかりにふるえ
地たたいて　立ちあがつた
郭沫若（かくまつじやく）わ　さけんだ
「花（はな）岡のぎせい者　四百わ
一部にすぎぬ　なん倍（ばい） なん十倍の
ぎせい者がいるのだ」
「草の根わけても同胞うちころした
戰犯どもを　さがしだし
しよばつしなければならぬ」
「いまも世界平和の敵　軍国主義の根をたつために
血にわ血をもつて・・・・・・」
《註　郭沫若氏わ中華人民共和國副総理
世界平和ようご委員会の副会長》

わすれるな

わすれるな　嬶（あは） 親（どど）だち
きもに　きざんでおけ　童（わらし）だち

七つ館（だて）にわ　むかしから　いままで
おらだち兄弟の骨もそのまま
いまも　おらだちわ　口ふさがれ
腕（うで）しばりあげられ
つぎつぎと兄弟たちがよろけ　胸やみし
ゆきどころもねえ秋田が北のどんずまりに
うちころされてゆくのをみている
だれが　おらだちをころしてゆくか？
わかつたべ！
おらだちもホリヨよ　自分の国（くに）ながら
れつをみだすこともできず
草くつてかせがされ
よそぐにに　こきつかわれる
死んだ　あの人がたと　おなじこと

見ならわずにか！
花岡をわすれるな！

あとがき

花岡事件は、軍國主義日本の罪惡のかたまりのようなものである。これをてつてい的に追究し、えぐりとることは古い日本の腐つたカスをなくして、日本と中國のほんとうの友好をきずくいしずえである。これをあいまいにのこしておくことは、軍國主義のばい菌をつちかつておくようなもので、ふたたびおそろしい戰爭をひきおこすもとになる。
この絵ものがたりは、平和を愛し、日本を愛し、日中両國の永遠の友好をねがう人々によって、一大國民運動をおこすためにつくられた。あらゆる困難をおかして、闇にほうむられようとする事件の眞相について、調査に調査をかさね、これを、ほんとうにいきいきした藝術作品として表現するために、討論し、修正し、それこそ血のでるような努力がつみかさねられた。この作品は、在日華僑四万と日本の民衆のあいだにおこされた日中友好運動の力にささえられ、また、現地秋田の鉱山、山林労働者、農民及び民主的な團体とその運動に援助されつつ、友好運動者、画家、詩人、文学者、音樂家その他多くの人々の集團創作としてうまれたものである。これは日本の藝術運動の上に、あたらしい方向をきりひらいたものとして、藝術史の一頁をかざるものであろう。
の困難な、劃期的な、事業を遂行された関係者各位に感謝するとともに、読者の一人一人が絵本を日本のすみずみまで普及する一大國民運動に參加されんことを期待してやまない。

一九五一・五・三〇　　日本中国友好協会文化部