Three Alls Policy

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The Three Alls Policy (Japanese: 三光作戦, Sankō Sakusen; Chinese: 三光政策, Sánguáng Zhèngcè) was a Japanese scorched earth policy adopted in China during World War II. Although the Chinese characters literally mean "three lights policy", in this case, the character for "light" actually means "all"; an alternative meaning is the three bare, as "光" also mean empty. Thus, the term is more accurately translated as "The Three Alls Policy", the three alls being: "Kill All", "Burn All" and "Loot All". In Japanese documents, the policy was originally referred to as "The Burn to Ash Strategy" (燼滅作戦, Jinmetsu Sakusen^?).

The name "Sankō Sakusen", based on the Chinese term, was first popularized in Japan in 1957 when a Japanese war criminal released from the Fushun war crime internment center wrote a controversial book called "Sankō, Nihonjin no Chūgoku ni okeru senso hanzai no kokuhaku" (The three all, Japanese confessions of war crimes in China) (new edition : Kanki Haruo, 1979), in which some Japanese veterans were confessing their crimes committed under the leadership of general Yasuji Okamura. The publishers were forced to stop the publication of the book after receiving death threats from militarists extremists and shôwa fanatics.

Initiated in 1940 by Ryûkichi Tanaka, the "sankô sakusen" was implemented in full scale in 1942 in north China by Yasuji Okamura who divided the territory into pacified, semi-pacified and unpacified areas. The approval of the policy was given by Imperial Headquarters army order number 575 on 3 December 1941. Okamura's strategy involved burning down villages, confiscating grain and mobilizing peasants to construct collective hamlets. It also centered on the digging of vast trench lines and the building of thousand of miles of containment walls and moats, watchtowers and roads.

According to a joint study of historians such as Mitsuyoshi Himeta, Toru Kubo, Mark Peattie and Zhifen Ju, more than 10 millions Chinese civilians were mobilized by the shôwa army for slave work in north China and Manchukuo under the supervision of the Kôa-in. (Zhifen Ju, "Japan's atrocities of conscripting and abusing north China draftees after the outbreak of the Pacific war", Joint study of the sino-Japanese war, 2002).

In his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan, Herbert Bix, based on the works of Mitsuyoshi Himeta and Akira Fujiwara, claims that the Three Alls Policy, sanctioned by Hirohito himself, was responsible for the deaths of 2.7 million Chinese civilians, far surpassing The Rape of Nanking not only in terms of numbers, but perhaps in brutality as well.

Like much of Japan's WWII history, the nature and extend of the policy is however controversial today. Because the now well-known name for this strategy is Chinese, right-wing Japanese historians claim that the policy is merely Chinese propaganda, that using this term promulgates this left-wing disinformation, and they have even argued whether or not this policy actually existed. They further claim that this kind of scorched-earth policy was a part of Chinese, not Japanese history, saying that the Chinese maintained a scorched-earth policy during World War II—known in Japan as "The Clean Field Strategy" (清野作戦, Seiya Sakusen^?)—under which, Chinese soldiers would destroy the homes of their own civilians in order to wipe out any hiding places that could be utilised by the Japanese troops.[1]. Many supposed victims of the Three Alls Policy, they claim, actually died at Chinese hands, and their deaths were misattributed to the Japanese.

[edit] References

• Fujiwara, Akira (藤原彰) The Three Alls Policy and the Northern Chinese Regional Army (「三光作戦」と北支那方面軍), Kikan sensô sekinin kenkyû 20, 1998
• Himeta, Mitsuyoshi (姫田光義) Concerning the Three Alls Strategy/Three Alls Policy By the Japanese Forces (日本軍による『三光政策・三光作戦をめぐって』), Iwanami Bukkuretto, 1996
• Bix, Herbert P. Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan, HarperCollins, 2000. ISBN 0-06-019314-X

Some of the content of this article comes from the equivalent Japanese-language article (accessed on April 7, 2006).