BEIJING -- Prior to the 1989 Tiananmen Square incident, the Japanese Embassy in Beijing readied to have its staff escape from the city and burn up classified papers, a then-official of the embassy told The Yomiuri Shimbun.
Descriptions by former official Morio Matsumoto serve as testimony to how tense the situation was on June 4 three decades ago, when the Chinese communist regime forcibly cracked down on demonstrators calling for democracy.
Matsumoto, 67, who later served as an ambassador to Papua New Guinea, was working at the Embassy in Beijing when the incident happened. He recalled that a meeting had been held in mid-May 1989 within the embassy to discuss how to deal with unexpected situations, on the assumption that the Chinese military would rush into the premises.
At the meeting, it was decided that the staff would be sent back to Japan by stages according to circumstances. The staff's families and female officials were to evacuate first, and two young officials fluent in Chinese, including Matsumoto, were to stay in Beijing until the last moment.
The two were directed by a senior embassy official to "escape in ordinary clothes if the military breaks into the building," meaning to wear something inconspicuous and escape into the crowd.
Matsumoto said he and his colleague were directed to head to the port city of Tianjin, more than 100 kilometers away from Beijing. He said the embassy prepared two old bicycles, which looked like ones "used for delivering milk" for them to use, in case main roads were blocked.
According to Matsumoto, decision had also been made, depending on circumstances, to burn all the embassy's classified papers to prevent them from being obtained by the Chinese.
Back then, many students staged sit-ins at Tiananmen Square, and fears of turmoil had grown day by day. Three days after the armed crackdown, a Chinese military unit sprayed gunfire at an apartment where Japanese diplomats lived.
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