CHAPTER THIRTEEN: End of a Scruffy Show

Just who was Kanao Inouye?

It seems impossible to capture a man who went to such great lengths to mask his heart’s core. Was he the happy Canadian who was the “teacher’s pet” in school and had gotten along with his white compatriots? Was he unable to culturally adapt to Japan, brutalized by the police, and forced to serve as a military interpreter? If this scenario is to be believed, then he remained more Canadian than Japanese. His wartime actions, including any beatings he administered, were all done under the force of orders he could not avoid. According to Arthur Rance, Inouye even entertained wistful notions of returning to Canada after the war. By portraying himself as a Canadian, Inouye might have hoped to avoid a severe penalty when he was judged by his own. This version also enabled the Canadian bureaucracy to avoid difficult questions as to his — and Japanese Canadians in general — treatment in Canada.

Or was Inouye a devoted Japanese who in 1935 had returned to his homeland with no regrets about leaving the racist country that had repeatedly rejected and humiliated him? He had relocated to the land where he belonged, where he was like everyone else. Serving in his homeland’s army was not a duty, but an honour. Fighting in Manchuria or interrogating spies in Hong Kong was all part of the fabric of being a patriotic Japanese during a time of war. Moreover, it also gave him the opportunity to express his fury against those Canadians who had once mistreated him. Viewed from these contrasting perspectives, loyalty was not always a straightforward proposition and, especially in a time of war, it might have different shades of meaning. This was especially true for a man such as Inouye who lived on the margins in both of his worlds. The complexity of Inouye’s identity as a Japanese Canadian, and dueling nature of his allegiances made his case unique, and one that the legal system of the day could not satisfactorily address.

Perhaps there may be some sympathy for Chief Justice Blackall, for in the context of the times, the concept of dual nationality was far from acceptable. In the early twentieth century, a citizen was expected to pledge his allegiance to one country. The Hague Convention of 1930 proclaimed as one of its ideals to seek the abolition of “all cases both of statelessness and of double nationality.” Only twenty states ratified the resulting convention. After World War II, with the expansion of diverse populations and the growth of minority communities around the world, many countries found ways to accommodate divided loyalties. By the late twentieth century, many states allowed for dual citizenship. This was acceptable as there was usually a low possibility for conflict between nations. But as the Inouye case demonstrated, such conflicts were possible, and the moral quandary of dual loyalty could have fatal consequences.

On the issue of citizenship, Inouye was apparently Canadian by birth and could claim Canadian citizenship; however, he also presented significant evidence that his allegiance lay exclusively with Japan. He had not only sworn loyalty to the emperor of Japan but served him in battle. No less a figure than Colonel Orr, the head of war crimes detachment, concluded after reviewing Inouye’s registration as a Japanese citizen and service in the Imperial Japanese Army, “If a man can abandon his previous allegiance by his own acts and declarations I should think that this man had gone about as far in indicating his intention as any reasonable law would require of him.” Orr was a perceptive observer, and it was apparent to him that determining the nature of Inouye’s loyalties would not be a straightforward process. Unfortunately, the procedures applied to the case turned out to be disappointingly simplistic.

The question of dueling nationalities unsettled the Canadian government. Having dealt with the relocation of the Japanese Canadians during the war and their repatriation afterwards, the last thing it needed was a showcase trial that had the potential to highlight the mistreatment of Canadian citizens because of their race. The horrors committed by Nazi Germany in the name of racial superiority shocked the world, and there was no need to bring up Canada’s record of mistreatment of its racial minority. Repatriating Inouye would have raised questions as to his supposed loyalty to a society that never accepted him in the first place. Moreover, despite Canada’s sacrifices during the war, the Mackenzie King government had little interest in an expanded foreign policy or in the “war crimes business.” Canadian investigations in Europe were quickly wrapped up in early 1946, and there was only a limited contribution to the Asian war crimes process. It was so much cheaper to leave such matters to the great powers. After all, the British in Hong Kong were more than happy to raise their prestige by dealing with the individual who tortured so many of their colony’s citizens. While so many of his colleagues had escaped, Inouye was at hand and available to pay the price for what others had done.

Avoiding the political consequences of trying Inouye in Canada was one of the many political minefields the King government faced as a result of the Pacific war. Many in Canada wanted to know why an entire brigade had been placed in such a precarious position where it had been annihilated in a matter of days. A one-person Royal Commission into the Hong Kong force was conducted by the country’s leading judicial officer, Chief Justice Lyman Duff in 1942. He concluded that there were persuasive political and military reasons to have dispatched C Force. It was a conclusion that would be challenged in later years, especially in Carl Vincent’s No Reason Why. It seemed that sending out two ill-trained battalions on what seemed to be a political gesture served no real military purpose. That it cost the lives of 557 Canadians seemed far too high a price to pay to bolster what everyone knew was already a hopeless defence. But it served the purpose of Prime Minister King to dampen any further discussion on Hong Kong, a topic that might be inflamed by the trial of a Japanese Canadian war criminal in Canada.

Kanao Inouye’s execution that sultry August morning received only a perfunctory notice in Canada. The Toronto Star covered it in its back pages under the headline “Canadian-Born Jap Hanged in Hong Kong.” The report was barely longer than two paragraphs and contained few facts. His case raised so many difficult issues as to loyalty that his fellow Japanese Canadians were equally prepared to ignore it and move on. The report in the New Canadian was as brief and uninformative as that in the Star. Almost two years after the execution, E.H. Norman of the Canadian Liaison Mission in Tokyo enquired as to what had happened to Kanao Inouye. His file, as well as that of the External Affairs department, was still open and he wished to close the matter. Ottawa officialdom was advised by the Registrar of Canadian Citizenship in June 1949 that Inouye was executed in 1947, and added with ironic understatement, “I would say, therefore, that this closes the file.”

Law schools attempt to instill in their pupils a reverence for the law as a rational, logical set of principles that brings order and stability to society. But in practice, the law is frequently a an absurd, exercise. One judicial academic concluded that, “A trial, it is said, ought to be a search for the truth; instead it is often a game.” The case of Kanao Inouye is an example of the latter.. When the issue was supposedly the nature of his loyalty, that question was put aside while the Court fixated on his failure to comply with bureaucratic codes. There was no serious attempt to determine who Inouye was and where his loyalties truly lay. Perhaps it did not really matter as it was the nature of his actions that drove the judgment against him. As Chief Justice Blackall made clear in his post-trial comments, nationality was irrelevant and he wanted Inouye to die for the suffering he had brought on others. The failure to file the required declaration of alienage became simply the pathway to conclude the game and get to the desired result.

The real difficulty in Inouye’s case was the clash with allegiances and the issue of not one but a choice of national loyalties. His argument that he was at heart a citizen of Japan was plausible and deserved to be weighed on its merits. Unfortunately, it was not.

As for the sentence of death at the war crimes trial, defence lawyer Haggan tried to minimize Inouye’s responsibility, but conceded that he had committed “petty tyrannies.” He had done far more than that, for he had victimized and cruelly abused helpless individuals who had fallen under his authority. While there was no proof that he killed anyone, he was responsible for immense pain and probably long-lasting psychological damage inflicted on his many victims. For that, he unquestionably deserved severe punishment. But as a minor war criminal, Inouye might be expected to receive a prison sentence of five to ten years. Sentences are supposed to be consistent and proportionate to the harm done. For example, a civilian interpreter attached to the Kempeitai at Kuala Lumpur was found guilty of a string of beatings and water tortures similar to those committed by Inouye. He was sentenced to five years in prison. Stodda, the chief interpreter at Sham Shui Po and an individual whose studied brutality mirrored Inouye’s, received only three years. A similar result was the norm for rank-and-file interrogator-torturers. Colonel Stewart’s comments that as Inouye was properly educated and a Christian and should have known better took his case out of the norm. Why that meant that he was therefore more deserving of a harsher sentence than that given to the ordinary Japanese prison guard is hard to understand. Condemning Inouye to death for heavy handed interrogations while giving far lighter sentences to other soldiers who were responsible for multiple murders defied any logical explanation.

In Japan, the horrors of the war and the urgency of rebuilding made the population try to put the issue of war crimes and war criminals behind them. In December 1947, a magazine reported on the Tokyo trial of major war criminals and noted how these men who were so acclaimed in their day were reviled in defeat with some facing execution, and others “virtually forgotten.” A lawyer, Yokota Kisaburo, who challenged Japan’s policies back in the 1930s, condemned the nationalist leaders. Under them, Japan “ignored treaties, scorned justice and has committed horrendous atrocities.” There were rare voices raised in shock when news of the horrors committed by the Japanese army against innocent civilians and helpless prisoners became public. But they were few, and as time wore on, the prisoners — especially the “minor” war criminals — gained public sympathy in Japan. Over the years it seemed to be the case that “the brutality and crimes committed by the Imperial Japanese Army are dismissed or played down by nationalists who see the focus of such events as evidence of a desire to blacken Japan’s name.” By 1953, war criminals such as Niimori and Tokunaga, who committed crimes that made Inouye’s pale by comparison, were repatriated. One returning ship was met by an enthusiastic crowd of over twenty-eight thousand.

There were few Japanese accounts of Inouye’s trials. Consistent with the growing sympathy for convicted war criminals, the accounts tended to emphasize the racism he encountered in Canada and the alienation from his home country. Moreover, later accounts point out that his conduct was not dissimilar from most camp guards and that he stood out only because he spoke such good English and was easily remembered by the POWs. Sumi Kojima wrote for a regional journal Nomin Bungaku [Agricultural Literature] about “Haka nashi bito” [people with no graves] concerning a young Canadian-born Japanese “whose life was cut short as a war criminal only because he was an interpreter for the Japanese.” In a postwar investigative report prepared by the Japanese government, Kanao Inouye is “presented as an admirable man” who sang patriotic hymns as he went to his death.

For forty years after his execution, the case of Kanao Inouye was largely ignored. It was not until 1991 that the National Film Board’s production, The Valour and the Horror brought his life back to public attention. Widely viewed in Canada and probably accepted by many as accurate, the documentary announced at its beginning that “this is a true story… there is no fiction” even though what followed was largely fictional. Inouye was introduced with menacing music as a camp guard at Sham Shui Po, and falsely as “a member of the Japanese Gestapo, the Kempeitai.” The narrator grimly reported that “at least two wounded Canadians died after beatings by Inouye,” but no details or names were given to back up this allegation. The inaccuracies multiplied when the documentary described his postwar fate. The producers stated that Inouye was “found guilty of beating Canadian soldiers to death” and that his conviction was set aside as “Canada couldn’t try a Canadian citizen for war crimes,” both of which were not true. The only section of the documentary that is in any way accurate is a recollection from a surviving prisoner to whom Inouye introduced himself: “I want you to know that I was born and raised in Kamloops, British Columbia and that I hate your goddamn guts.” Inouye went on to describe how when he was growing up, he had been called a “little yellow bastard” and now his tormenters would pay.

Over time, the notion of a sadistic Japanese prison guard emerging from the bland conformity of the British Columbia interior captured media attention. He became a significant focus of nationalists who branded him as a repellent evil. In 2007, Canada’s popular history journal The Beaver Magazine published an article on “Canada’s Hall of Infamy,” a compilation by historians of the greatest villains in Canada’s past. Kanao Inouye featured prominently on the list. He was, according to David Bercuson, the “leading death camp torturer.” He was certainly an irascible presence in the Canadian POW camp, which was by no means a “death camp,” nor was it clear that he was the worst of the staff. Bercuson also took a cavalier approach to the facts and misstated Inouye’s birth date and indicated that his treason trial took place in Canada.The falsehoods and legends seemed to build up over time. In a bombastic piece published in the Toronto Sun in 2018 titled “Kamloops Kid: Treason treated with a rope,” the newspaper gave a wildly inaccurate portrayal of Inouye. According to the Sun, “Canadian, British and Chinese soldiers testified he was responsible for the deaths of at least eight Canadian soldiers,” an account that is utterly false. Facts were simply tossed aside in the interests of inflammatory journalism to vilify this “proficient torturer and master of cruelty.” As late as 2021, the Globe and Mail would print a retrospective on C Force in which the often stated and never substantiated assertion that Inouye was responsible for “killing several vulnerable men” — the number of victims seemed to have a life of its own varying from two to eight — was yet again made.

Beyond the bombast in the common press, serious reconsiderations of Inouye’s life and fate began to emerge. A far more balanced look at Inouye was published in Mutual Hostages: Canadians and Japanese during the Second World War in 1990. The authors referred at length to affidavits from POWs, which established Inouye as a vengeful and violent figure in the camps. But they also stated that he was “responsible for several deaths and countless beatings,” although this was never established in court proceedings. After a time, there was even some sympathy for him. In 2015, the Toronto Fringe Festival featured a short play, Interrogation: Lives and Times of the Kamloops Kid. According to one of the performers the purpose was “to humanize him” and suggest that he did not act “out of malice.” Another performer commented that “He was caught in between Canada and trying to prove his loyalty to Japan.”

Kanao Inouye’s hanging was the last and likely the final time a Canadian would be executed for treason. This is not to say that there would still be traitors. After the Gouzenko Affair in 1945–46, several Canadians prominent in the military and government were revealed as Soviet spies. While the press called for treason charges, Canada was a recent ally of the USSR, and in any event, no state of war existed. As a result, Russian agents such as Montreal M.P. Fred Rose were prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act. During the October Crisis of 1970, when Front de Libération du Québec terrorists captured a British consul and then a provincial minister, killing the latter, it could be argued that the insurgents attacked the foundation of the state. However, those apprehended were charged with kidnapping and murder instead of treason. There was no attempt to apply the treason provision in the Criminal Code, and several suspects were simply held for extended periods under the terms of the War Measures Act. Trying them for treason would likely have turned criminals into martyrs. Neither was treason invoked when police seized a terrorist, Hiva Mohammad Alizadeh, who imported bomb triggers into Canada in 2010. Instead, he was convicted under recently enacted anti-terrorism provisions. At Alizadeh’s sentencing, Justice Colin McKinnon found that he had “betrayed the trust of your government and your fellow citizens” and that “you have effectively been convicted of treason.” But the reality was that the treason provisions were not invoked and were never likely to be used. They had become an outdated appendage waiting for their eventual repeal.

It would perhaps be easy to excuse Inouye’s conduct by alleging that he himself was a victim of racism. This is a comfortable contemporary explanation, but it lacks any foundation in the actual proceedings. His war crimes trial was by no means a kangaroo court – it was a meticulous affair in which numerous witnesses attended and sworn affidavits were examined. Legal scholar Suzannah Linton concluded that the courts offered “a broadly fair trial in difficult circumstances” is justified. If anything, Germans accused of war crimes seemed to have been judged on a higher standard. Those soldiers who directly ordered to shoot escapees from the “Great Escape” were tried and executed, and their conduct was significantly less heinous than Niimori Genichiro's. There was considerable discontent among rank-and-file Allied staff that the Japanese were being granted unwarranted leniency. This might be due to the circumstances that the Western allies had endured two harrowing world wars with Germany and a reckoning was at hand. The same feeling of traditional animosity did not exist towards Japan, and justice was tempered by an understanding that they would all have to co-exist in a postwar world.