Interpreters and War Crimes by Kayoko Takeda

Abstract

Reviewed by: Interpreters and War Crimes by Kayoko Takeda Sandra Wilson Interpreters and War Crimes. By Kayoko Takeda. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2021. 192 pages. ISBN: 9780367557492 (hardcover; also available as e-book). Kayoko Takeda's Interpreters and War Crimes deals with the situation of interpreters operating during violent conflict and analyzes the implications of their work for the theory and practice of interpreting. She uses as her major case study thirty-nine Japanese military interpreters who were tried as war criminals by British authorities between 1946 and 1949, together with the interpreters who appeared in the British trials as witnesses. The Japanese empire between 1937 and 1945 encompassed vast territory and populations of many ethnicities across Asia and the Pacific. Managing the empire—installing occupation regimes, suppressing insurgencies, and extracting resources—was a complex and challenging task for the Japanese military. Language difficulties abounded and interpreters were a vital resource, sometimes on the front lines but more especially in the fraught business of gathering information from locals in occupied territories about possible threats to Japanese rule. Starting as soon as the conflict in China began in 1937, the Japanese authorities at home and in the field cobbled together a supply of interpreters to assist them in establishing and maintaining control of their empire. The majority were employed as civilian auxiliaries of the Japanese military. Many were Taiwanese and some were Korean. These colonial subjects, who served with the Japanese military with varying degrees of willingness, usually had had some education in Japanese, and could assist in communication with overseas Chinese populations or with Western inmates of prison camps. The interpreters worked with and alongside formally enlisted servicemen, often assisting the Kenpeitai (military police) in interrogating local people or prisoners of war. Some interrogations resulted in the torture of suspects in the course of attempts to extract information. When the conflict ended and Allied war crimes trials began, the mistreatment of local people in occupied territories and of prisoners of war was a special focus of investigations. In a loosely coordinated program that ran from 1945 to 1951, the military authorities of seven Allied nations—the US, the UK, the Netherlands, Australia, France, Nationalist China, and the Philippines—prosecuted about 5,700 Japanese war crimes suspects, including Korean and Taiwanese men who were tried as Japanese, in fifty or so venues in the Asia-Pacific region. These national tribunals [End Page 161] were separate from the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, in which twenty-eight Japanese political and military leaders were brought to account for their leadership roles in the war.1 Defendants in the national tribunals included servicemen of all ranks, plus civilian auxiliaries. Over one hundred interpreters for the Japanese military were among those prosecuted (p. 1). Military interpreters were also called as witnesses to the trials, sometimes testifying against the people with whom they had worked. In Interpreters and War Crimes, Takeda concentrates on the British trials because the British authorities prosecuted the greatest number of interpreters, and because the trial transcripts and other relevant documents are the most readily available. Part 1 of the book uses archival material to describe the backgrounds of the interpreters who were defendants or witnesses, the charges brought against the accused, the defense arguments, and the sentences passed against those who were convicted. Part 2 discusses the issues for interpreting that arise from this case study, with a focus on distinctive features of interpreting in war zones and on interpreter ethics and responsibility when war crimes are committed, referring also to recent examples from Guantanamo Bay, Iraq, and elsewhere. Takeda's most significant contribution to Japanese studies, as opposed to interpreting studies, lies in identifying the Japanese military interpreters as a specific group among defendants at the postwar national tribunals, and in highlighting their complex situations. The Taiwanese interpreters, who were also the subject of earlier work by Takeda with Lan Shi-chi, are a particular focus.2 Almost half of the interpreters tried by the British were Taiwanese (p. 154). Speakers of Hokkien, Mandarin, and Cantonese who could also speak Japanese were valuable to the Japanese military in China and Southeast Asia, including in Singapore and elsewhere in Malaya...