The Kamloops Kid

The Canadian government did not pay much attention to prosecuting enemy war criminals after the Second World War. The commander of the 12th SS Panzer Division Hitlerjugend, Kurt Meyer, was tried by a military tribunal for ordering the murder of Canadian prisoners of war in Normandy, found guilty, and sentenced to be shot, but his sentence was commuted to life in prison on review. Ottawa had neither representation nor influence on the Nuremberg trials. In the Far East, it did have a judge on the tribunal created to try Japanese war criminals, but, according to Gary J. Bass’s recent book, Judgment at Tokyo, his presence had no impact on the proceedings.

There was, however, one war criminal in Hong Kong in whose case Canada had an interest. This was Kanao Inouye, accused of abusing Canadian officers and other ranks who were taken prisoner in December 1941, during the Imperial Japanese Army’s conquest of the British Crown colony. Some 2,000 Canadian troops had arrived in Hong Kong three weeks before the attack; after seventeen days of bitter fighting, many had been killed or wounded, while 1,689 were captured. Housed in vile conditions, the prisoners of war were overworked, starved, and denied medicine.

From November 1942, POWs at Sham Shui Po, on the Hong Kong mainland, were subjected to the malevolent ministrations of Inouye, born in Kamloops, British Columbia, in 1916. As an interpreter — fluent in English, if not completely so in spoken or written Japanese — he worked with the camp administration and participated in berating and beating the Canadians for whom he had a special hatred, because, he said, of the prejudice shown him during his youth. “They humiliated me,” Inouye told another interpreter. “I was just another dirty little Jap to them. But two can play that game, and now they are the pigs and I am the master.”

Inouye savagely beat one officer in front of his men and repeatedly kicked another, and some of the POWs, according to hundreds of affidavits they gave after their liberation, claimed he was responsible for the killing of three to eight Canadians. The “Kamloops Kid” or “Slap Happy Joe,” as he was called, was a sadist, and no one was sorry to see him posted to Singapore in September 1943.

In March 1944, Inouye was released from service as an interpreter, and he made his way back to Hong Kong because he wanted to marry his Chinese girlfriend. At the same time, he joined the Kempeitai, the brutal gendarmerie and counter-intelligence service that worked in Japan and its conquered territories. While working as an interpreter, Inouye observed and participated in the torture of civilians — British, Chinese, and Indian, male and female. One favourite method was water torture, in effect causing the near drowning of victims to get their confessions to crimes real or imagined. Another method — the airplane technique — was to hang suspects from a beam and beat them or hold lighted cigarettes against their skin. Again, victims were said to have died from Inouye’s actions. Inouye left the Kempeitai in February 1945, but he remained in Hong Kong with his now pregnant wife.

Patrick Brode’s Traitor by Default is the first full-length account of Inouye’s life, actions, and trials. A lawyer from Windsor, Ontario, Brode has previously written on war crimes trials (and has published mystery novels and histories of the city). With this latest book, he has gone deeply into the primary sources in Canada and Hong Kong. Although sometimes wobbly on military and bureaucratic matters — there is no such rank as lieutenant corporal, for example, and Max Wershof of External Affairs was not a clerk — this is without question the best study we have on the Inouye case.

After the Japanese surrender in August 1945, the British authorities, restored to power in the Crown colony, began to round up war criminals, and Inouye was taken into custody on September 9. At first, Ottawa was not especially interested in vigorously pursuing action against him or any other Japanese war criminals, Brode argues, because of growing political and public concerns over the ways in which Japanese Canadians had been treated following the attacks of December 7, 1941 (though ultimately Canada participated in the prosecution of thirty-four “minor” Japanese war criminals). Some 700 suspected hard-line Issei and Nisei (first- and second-generation Japanese Canadians) had been interned in a northern Ontario camp, and more than 21,000 had been forcibly removed from the West Coast, their property stripped from them and sold off at fire sale prices, and then moved into the B.C. interior, to Alberta sugar beet farms, or to points farther east. These actions upset civil libertarians, a small constituency at the time. Trying Inouye in Canada, one option, would likely stir up hatred of the Japanese Canadians and increase pressure on the government to deport them all to Japan, whether they were born there or not. (The Mackenzie King government did eventually “repatriate” some 4,000 back to Japan, a country in ruins that many had never seen.) If Inouye was put on trial in Hong Kong, the thinking went, these contradictory pressures might be lessened.

Inouye’s case came before the tribunal on May 22, 1946. The judges were British officers; the defence was provided by a British lieutenant who had not yet been called to the bar; and the prosecution was in the hands of Major George Puddicombe, who had served in the Canadian Expeditionary Force in the First World War and been a successful lawyer in Montreal. He was second-in-command of the tiny Canadian War Crimes Liaison Detachment–Far East, and he and a small staff were dispatched from Japan to Hong Kong.

The charges against Inouye were three: First, that he had beaten an officer. Second, that he had kicked another. And third, that while a member of the Kempeitai, he had ill-treated civilians, resulting in the death of four and the physical suffering of others. Puddicombe presented no witnesses to the first two charges, only affidavits; the defence objected but the tribunal allowed it. The prosecution did present witnesses to attest to the third charge, and they made the case that Inouye was, as one said, “the leading spirit in torturing people.”

The defending officer’s only avenue for refuting the charges involving the officers was to have Inouye claim that he was following orders. On the third charge, Inouye maintained that he was not present for the interrogation of one of the civilians, because he did not speak Chinese, and that he was merely the interpreter for the others. Essentially, his defence was that none of it was his doing.

Puddicombe’s cross-examination began with Inouye’s life in Canada. Inouye said that had been idyllic — happy school days with many friends and sports — and that he held no grudges against Canadians. This was a lie in direct contrast to his remarks noted in 200 POW affidavits. On Inouye’s claim that he was not involved in torturing civilians, Puddicombe quickly showed that it too was a tissue of lies. The closing addresses by the prosecution and defence replayed these themes, and the tribunal adjourned to consider its verdict. In less than an hour, the members returned and sentenced Inouye to death for his “barbaric acts.” His only hope was to appeal to the British high command in Singapore.

Inouye’s counsel made the best case he could, which included a new point: his client was a Canadian citizen. “If tried for any offence at all,” Inouye asserted, “I claim that I should be tried under Canadian Law by a competent civil court there.” This proved enough to invalidate the war crimes trial: if Inouye was Canadian, and there now was a birth certificate to prove it, he was beyond the jurisdiction of the tribunal. His trial was invalid.

After much discussion with Ottawa, Singapore, and the Canadian detachment in Japan, Inouye would now face trial in Hong Kong before a civilian court on a different charge: high treason. He was a British subject born in Canada, but new evidence had been uncovered that Inouye had served in the Japanese army in Manchuria and had sworn allegiance to the emperor. Did that invalidate his status as a British subject? Even if he had not formally renounced it? The picture was becoming very murky, but a magistrate in the Crown colony sent Inouye to trial by a seven-person jury under the Treason Act of 1351. He pleaded not guilty to all counts.

The second trial began on April 15, 1947. Inouye had a new defence counsel who based his argument on the claim that Inouye owed sole allegiance to the Japanese emperor and no duty to the British king. The court heard the same evidence of Inouye’s participation in torture, and Inouye testified on the last day of the trial. Gone was his idyllic life in British Columbia; in its place were his love for and loyalty to Japan, his conscription, and his service in Manchuria and the Kempeitai. “The English King was our enemy,” he said. “Did not think I owed him any allegiance by reason of my birth. To my knowledge I did not owe him any.” In effect, Canada was not his homeland — a glaring contradiction to the story he had told the military tribunal. No formal documentation was available to back up claims of Inouye’s Japanese citizenship.

The judge’s instructions to the jurors made much of the fact that Inouye had not formally renounced his status as a British subject. Thus the question for the jury: Had he intended to assist the King’s enemies, or had he believed he was bound to act as he did? Before the jurors left the courtroom, the foreman asked the judge, “Do you direct that he was definitely never a Japanese subject?” The judge replied yes. Within ten minutes, the jurors returned and announced that they had unanimously found Inouye guilty of high treason. Once again, he was sentenced to death.

Inouye appealed the verdict, but his conviction was upheld. After futile attempts to prolong the inevitable, he was executed on August 26. His last words were “Tenno Heika Banzai,” shouting his final salute to the emperor of Japan.

Was justice served by Inouye’s execution? George Puddicombe believed so, as did most of the Canadian POWs Inouye had beaten and abused. But what doomed Inouye were his crimes against civilians — not Canadian soldiers. What’s more, many Japanese with worse records during the war were not executed and served relatively short times in jail. Was Inouye’s prosecution motivated by racism? Certainly, the wartime animus against Japan was intense, as was Japan’s hatred for the Americans and the British Commonwealth. It was a racial conflict in the Pacific, as the American historian John Dower has shown. Yet the trial seemed to turn not so much on race as on the question of citizenship. Bias must have been present, but it was not overt in court.

Kanao Inouye was no saint. He was a torturer, he lied repeatedly in court, and he deserved punishment. What seems evident now is that he did not really know who or what he was. If being a good Canadian had worked to save him, he would have been pleased; if being a servant of the emperor could have done the trick, he would also have been content. By trying each tack, he convicted himself. Most likely, Inouye was a victim of a war that left him torn between dual loyalties.