At the end of the Pacific War, there were more than 6 million Japanese (this figure includes not only military and naval personnel but olso civilians) scattered in overseas theaters; Korea, Manchuria, China, the Philippine islands, and the islands of the Western Pacific. At that moment, there was no one who dared imagine that Japanese nationals overseas could get back home safely and smoothly.
But in fact, 90 percent of them were repatriated by the end of 1949. In particular, 80 percent of the Japanese in former Japanese occupied territory in China, could return by May 1946.
This paper focuses on how the disarmament and repatriation policies for the Japanese overseas were made, and why they could be repatriated so quickly.
Who had the supreme responsibility to accomplish the disarmament of Japanese nationals and to provide for their repatriation? The Chinese National government troops under Chiang Kai-shek's rule could not carry out this mission. During the anti-Japanese War, the Nationalist government moved into the western regions, far from the coastal araes, so it took time for them to reach Japanese occupied territory.
Only the United States had the power and will to govern all the processes of repatriation. But at the same time, she had to solve other problems. First, she was supposed to maintain the pace of her own demobilization. There was strong pressure to bring Americans out of China. Second, she had to consider Manchurian problems. Generalissimo Chiang asked United States to transfer his army to the northern part of China, as quickly as possible, or the Soviet and Chinese Communist Party would have enterd into the vacuum.
In short, the repatriation of Japanese, demobilization of Americans, and transportation of Chinese were absolutely necessary for Washington. In order to carry out all these programs, the Joint Chiefs of Staff mapped out detailed plans for navigating large numbers of LST and Liberty vessels in December 1945.

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It is said that Japan did not approach her enemies to end the hostilities until the last stage of the Pacific War. But she tried repeatedly to negotiate a cease-fire between herself and Nationalist China (Chungking) during the war. What made Japan consider a separate peace only with China? How did she intend to make peace with China? This paper aims to analyze the objectives of Japan's approach to China and to make clear the circumstances of her peace efforts toward Chungking.
At first Japan contemplated making peace with China as a part of the plan to weaken the will of the United States to continue the war. As the tide of war turned unfavorably to her, Japan wanted to move her troops stationed in China to the other fronts by making a cease-fire with Chungking. In the last stage of the war, some of the Japanese leaders hoped that China would act as an intermediary between Japan and the United Nations to obtain less severe peace terms than unconditional surrender.
Japan, however, did not negotiate directly with China. The approaches in the early stage of the war were limited to gathering intelligence about Chinese tendency to make peace. Japanese were afraid that they would betray their weakness if they made overtures to China. Japan relied on the Wang Ching-wei Government (Nanking) to make contact with Chungking. Nanking government leaders, especially Chou Fo-hai, opened and maintained various routes of contact with Chungking through liaison agents. But they used the routes as a means to pursue their own purposes other than making peace overtures.
Japan did not regard China as a full-fledged member of the United Nations. So she expected that she would be able to exploit the differences between Chungking and its allies and to make a separate peace with it. But China would not show any attitude to accept Japan's overtures. Japan had few resources or means to induce China to consider making a separate peace.

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This article attempts to shed light on the heretofore little known aspect of the Sino-Japanese diplomatic relations during their protracted war of 1937-1945. More than fifteen years ago, John H. Boyle published a highly commended book on Wang Ching-wei's peace movement and his Nanking regime, China and Japan at War, 1937-1945. But among the important topics he did not deal with in detail (but rather discussed only in passing) was the controversial issue of Nanking's participation in the Greater East Asian War. It is hoped that this short article will make some contribution to better understand the missing part in the wartime history.
If there was anything Wang Ching-wei and his followers has least dreamed of or dreaded most, it was the outbreak of a new war in the Pacific between Japan, their sponsoring nation, and the U. S. In spite of the seemingly close ties between Nanking and Tokyo due to the latter's heavy multi-faceted commitments to the former, the Japanese government did not make any advance notice to Wang Ching-wei about its decision to open hostilities with the United States and its allies. On the eve of the war, it even decided unilaterally to prohibit the Nanking regime from joining the Japanese by declaring war against the Allies.
The Pearl Harbor attack was a sudden jolt for the nucleus of the Nanking regime. Above all else, Wang had been surprisingly optimistic about the prospect of the peace talks in Washington. The other side of the coin of this optimism was Wang's great frustration with and serious disappointment at the prospect of his regime under Japanese occupation. Peace with Chungking looked dim and almost impossible. Japan's demands and impositions on Nanking after Pearl Harbor were rising, and, as was rightfully pointed out by Chen Kung-po, Wang's foremost disciple, the regime was seriously beset with major problems of low morale and profiteering attitudes.
Now that the Sino-Japanese War had to be fought and eventually settled in the context of World War II, Wang made a critical decision to live and die with the Japanese by declaring war against the Allies.
However, Nanking had to wait long until Tokyo, after many turns and twists, reached a consensus to signal a green light. This article treats at length the decision-making process of the Japanese side, and tries to analyze the gradual shift of views, from a flat “no” to a more conciliatory attitude, held by the Japanese politico-military leaders. As the trends of the war in the Pacific became increasingly less favorable, they came to realize the need to beef up politically the Nanking regime, and the idea of letting Nanking declare war against the Allies became more receptive to the Japanese. However, this idea proved to be contradictory and self-defeating, as Japan wanted to use Occupied China as a rear base to keep their war machine rolling.

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『麦と兵隊』は、戦記文学の代表作であるにもかかわらず、基本的な校異作業も行われてこなかった。初出、初版、増刷過程、再録の各過程での異同をみたが、検閲によると判断されるものは、予想に反して少なかった。また、検閲に抗して、どのような戦略を取ったのかに関しても考察した。特に、兵士の〈性〉の問題と、孫圩での毒ガス使用の問題を取り上げ、検閲の網の目をかいくぐりながら、どのようにして、作品内に〈痕跡〉として留めたのかを明らかにした。

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Stemming from the insight, gained in my previous work, into the fictive nature of the plan for Jewish extermination in wartime Shanghai, the present account will elucidate the process of establishment of the Designated Area for Stateless Refugees, so-called ‘Shanghai ghetto’ (18 February 1943). A day-by-day description of this process was enabled by the newly discovered documents of the Japanese Naval captain Toshiro Saneyoshi (1886-1973), who led the Special Investigation Department in the Naval Attaché's Office in Shanghai from April 1942 to June 1943.
Analysis of these first-hand documents corroborates the conclusion that I reached in my previous work for the non-existence of interference by the Nazi authorities in this policy decision. It was on the initiative of Saneyoshi and his subordinate Tsutomu Kubota (1895-1975) that the plan of the Designated Area was conceived, embodied and executed, as they sought direction from the Naval General Staff Office and meticulously conferred with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Army, as well as the Ministry of Greater East Asia, newly formed on 1^st November 1942.
As to whether or to what extent this Designated Area deserved the appellation of ‘ghetto’, the answer is to be found through further analysis of Saneyoshi documents posterior to February 1943.

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The host of Japanese “peace-feelers” who tried to contact the Chinese side in order to bring about peace between the two warring nations in the period 1937-1941 may be regarded as “informal contact-makers” in the context of state-to-state negotiations. Depending on whether contact-makers have official credentials or not and whether their contacts are pre-announced (namely, announced to the public in advance) or not, informal contact-makers are of three types: those with unofficial capacity seeking pre-announced contacts; those with official capacity seeking secret contacts; and those with unofficial capacity seeking secret contacts.
A detailed analysis of the binational contacts of this period reveals that no peace-feelers belonged to the first type mentioned above, while there were some peace-feelers such as diplomats who, in their official capacity, sought secret contacts. Apart from those diplomats who participated in the peace efforts, however, it is difficult to identify other peace-feelers who could belong to this second type, mainly because of the ambiguity of the definition of “official capacity.”
The third type of informal contact-makers became active after Japan denied the the legitimacy of the Chinese Nationalist government in January 1938, thus prompting a breaking off of relations. Peace-feelers of this kind in this study included (1) a diplomat who contacted the Chinese at his discretion without advance official approval (2) military officers who without official credentials joined the search for peace; and, most significantly, (3) those private individuals who had no official capacity but who voluntarily sought opportunities for peace, utilizing their own personal ties with the Chinese and other influentials. Typically, they were Matsumoto Shigeharu (a journalist working in Shanghai for Domei News Agency and one of the entourage of Konoe Funimaro), Kayano Nagatomo (a “comrade” of the Chinese Revolution and a friend of Sun Yat-sen), and Nishi Yoshiaki (an official of the South Manchurian Railway Co.).
The active presence of peace-feelers may be explained by the close, if not friendly, historical contacts between the two peoples and also by the relatively short distance between the two countries and the existence of neutral zones such as Hong Kong, Macao, and the Settlements in Shanghai, which made it easy for the informal contact-makers to operate. Another contributing factor may be the diffuseness of the Japanese (and perhaps Chinese, too) policy-making structures.

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