Japanese atrocities

[Peter]

I find it disturbing that the Japanese have seemingly never come to terms with their actions during WWII as the Germans did.  I also find it disturbing that they expressed such an intensity of sadism, far beyond that of the Nazis and Russians.

    We had fun killing Chinese. We caught some innocent Chinese and either buried them alive, or pushed them into a fire, or beat them to death with clubs. When they were half dead we pushed them into ditches and burned them, torturing them to death. Everyone gets his entertainment this way. Its like killing dogs and cats. --Asahi Shimbun, Japanese soldier, describing Japanese atrocities during the Rape of Nanking.

Despite overwhelming evidence of Japanese WWII crimes against humanity, modern Japanese politicians, academics, and newspapers, continue to deny and to rewrite history, innocuously referring to these atrocities as the  "Nanjing Incident," or "the entrance into China."

Nationalistic Japanese politicians continue to falsely claim that Japan never declared war on China or other Asian nations, but instead was seeking to "liberate" these countries. Japanese war-guilt is increasingly minimized and there is no mention of the atrocities or sex slavery.  On page 12 of Japanese  New History Textbook, children are taught that  "doubts have been raised over historical documents pertaining to the number of victims."  If "Japanese forces caused a large number of casualties among Chinese soldiers and civilians.... [t]here are various viewpoints and controversy continues to this day."

As to rape and sex slavery, the Textbooks Reform Society concludes: "no material evidence has been found showing Japanese military or police authorities took women by force."

Japanese textbooks minimize war guilt and make no mention of Japanese war-time atrocities against millions of civilians. Is Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi recent "deep remorse and heartfelt apology" sufficient? Is it even honest?

On the same day he apologized members of his cabinet and more than 80 Japanese lawmakers visited Yasukuni Shrine, the bastion of emporer worship where Japanese war criminals are enshrined.

The delusion of denial becomes more emphatic every year. The Japanese parliament has passed resolutions glorifying Japan's Imperial militarist past while minimizing wrong-doing. Japanese school children are taught that Japan was a liberator and not an aggressor, and words such as "invasion" and "colonial rule" are being excised from Japanese government documents. Militarism is on the rise in Japan.

If Japan did nothing wrong during WWII, except suffer the ignominy of defeat, and if Japanese leaders such as Koizumi can only offer a generalized apology while avoiding the fact that Japan committed unspeakable atrocities, then certainly, from the Japanese perspective, it might be acceptable for Japan to engage in identical actions in the future.

Will Korea, Nanking and other Asian cities be raped yet again?

The best predictor of the future, is the past, and those who do not learn from the past, and those who deny the past, are condemned to repeat it: so concludes the recently completed 77-minute documentary film, Nightmare in Nanking, which I produced. The film documents with photographs and film taken by Japanese soldiers  an 8-week orgy of nightmarish atrocities committed by Japanese soldiers against 280,000 women, children, babies, and elderly Chinese: Japanese soldiers tear out the eyes of children, gang-rape women and little girls then set them on fire, bury people alive or use them for bayonet practice, behead women, children, and old men, and torture people for fun, laughing hysterically as victims, who have been set on fire, run screaming through the night.

These quotations give a sense of what went on:

"We used barbed wire to bind the captured Chinese into bundles of ten and tied them onto racks. Then we poured gasoline on them and burned them alive. I felt like killing pigs." --Kozo Tadokoro, Japanese soldier.

"The Japanese came to the safety zone and demanded volunteers for a labor crew, and gave "promises of protection." About 50 people were led off, taken to a vacant house, robbed of all their valuables and clothes, and when completely naked, tied up together in groups of five. Then the Japanese built a large bonfire in the courtyard, led the groups out one by one, bayoneted the men and tossed them still alive on the fire." --John Rabe, German Nazi and Chairman of the Nanking Safety Zone.

Westerners and even Nazis living in the security of the Nanking Safety Zone, described their experience as an "unimaginable hell."  And if it was "Hell" for the Nazis, what must it have been like for the people of Nanking? As detailed in the documentary what took place in Nanking, then the capital of China, was a nightmare collectively suffered by 300,000  helpless men, women, and children.

"It was about ten in the morning when a dozen Japanese with rifles and fixed bayonets rushed into the house. They shot my father and grabbed my baby sister, being breast-fed by my mother. They bayoneted the baby and stripped my mother and raped her. Then the Japanese killed my grandparents and dragged two of my sisters out and raped them. Then they stabbed me and my 3-year old sister with bayonets. I saw both of my older sisters lying in pools of blood, dead." --Xia Shu-qin, 7-year old resident of Nanking.

"No matter how young or old, they could not escape the fate of being raped. Neither old women nor young girls were spared. We sent out coal trucks to the city streets and villages to seize women, and then each was allocated to 15 or 20 soldiers for sex and abuse. Every soldier was issued a Red Ticket --a paper with the seal of his company's commander--and they lined up in their underwear to wait their turn." --Takokoro Kozo, Japanese soldier.

It has been estimated that nearly 80,000 women were raped in Nanking. Many were tortured, bayoneted, beheaded, set on fire, or gang raped to death.

"We took turns raping them. We always stabbed and killed them. When we were raping her, we looked at her as a woman. But when we killed her, we just thought of her as something like a pig." --Azuma Shiro, Japanese soldier.

"You can't breath for the sheer revulsion when you keep finding bodies of women with bamboo poles thrust up their vaginas. Even old women over 70 are constantly being raped" --John Rabe.

Thousands of Chinese men and boys were used for bayonet practice. Men and women were hung by their tongues. Pregnant women were disemboweled and their fetuses torn from the bleeding bodies. Men, women, and children were buried alive. Japanese soldiers impaled babies on bayonets, and then tossed them alive into pots of boiling water.

The crimes of the Japanese were so horrific that they almost made their German allies look civilized in comparison. Shooting someone is a terrible act. However, stabbing someone is truly horrific and takes a lot of effort. The victim is screaming and bleeding on the perpetrator who must push the blade in and out, over and over again. These are called "crimes of passion" and are generally motivated by extreme hatred and rage.  And yet the Japanese soldiers committing these crimes did not feel rage but pleasure.  They tortured people for fun, using their swords and knives like some gleaming steal phallus.

By contrast, Nazi soldiers became ill and began to break down after a few hours of shooting people. Even Heinrich Himmler, the head of the dreaded SS and the concentration (extermination) camps, became ill, turned green and almost threw up while watching his men shoot civilians. Himmler decided there must be a more "humane" way of killing. Himmler was not concerned for the victims, helpless Jews, but the mental state of the Nazi soldier.

By contrast, the Japanese obtained an almost sexual pleasure from committing horrible, hellish, almost unimaginable crimes against innocent people who had never caused them any harm. And they did so not just to satisfy their sadistic sexual desires, but in order to honor their god, emperor Hirohito:

"We did everything for the sake of the emperor, raping, killing, everything," --Masayo Enomoto,  Japanese soldier.

Unlike their Nazi counterparts, the Japanese Emperial Army ordered their men to rape, torture, maim, behead, set on fire, and to use Chinese men, women, and children for bayonet practice as Japanese officers and fellow soldiers stood and laughed. They called it: "Killing practice."

Murder, rape, and torture, including the rape of children, were believed to be a good way for bolstering the morale of their soldiers, and contests were held to see who could kill the most Chinese.

In fact, the Japanese were committing identical atrocities in hundreds of towns and villages.

As Nightmare in Nanking documents, it was not just Asians but Americans who suffered at the hands of the Japanese. Americans and other prisoners of war, were starved, denied water for days at a time, deprived of sleep, harshly beaten, bayoneted, beheaded, buried alive, castrated, tortured, set on fire, and killed without reason.

Despite overwhelming evidence of the nightmarish crimes committed by the Japanese Emperial Army,  nationalistic Japanese politicians, textbooks, and newspapers, continue to deny that the Japanese committed atrocities against millions of innocent men, women and children. These lies constitute the second Rape of Nanking, and they come with a price: Those who do not learn from the past, are condemned to repeat it.

[Peter]

Denial of Japan's war guilt

"The Pacific War was a war of liberation..."
Nagano Shigeto, Japan's Justice Minister (1994).

"The Pacific War was a war to liberate colonised Asia."
A resolution moved in the Japanese Parliament (the Diet) in 1995 by 221 members of Japan's long-dominant Liberal Democratic Party (LDP).

"Japan was forced to go to war by American oil and other embargoes."
Hosei Norota, senior member of Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party (2001).

"Japan was forced into WW II to liberate Asia from the yoke of Western colonialism."
Hideaki Kase, producer of the controversial Japanese film "Merdeka" (2001).

Denial of atrocities

"The Nanjing Massacre is a lie made up by the Chinese."
Ishihara Shintaro, former Japanese Cabinet Minister, interviewed October 1990.

..the Nanjing Massacre is a fabrication.
Nagano Shigeto, Japan's Justice Minister (1994).

"The Americans brainwashed the postwar Japanese into believing they had committed terrible war crimes."
Professor Nobukatsu Fujioka, Professor of Education, Tokyo University (1997).

"We have to pass on true history to young people. We must fight this information war against the rest of the world."
Eiichiro Washio, member of a group of Japanese politicians who deny the Nanjing Massacre occurred in 1937.

"Foreign 'Comfort Women' conscripted for Japanese Army brothels were 'prostitutes'."
Kajiyama Seiroku, Japan's Chief Cabinet Secretary (1997).

Rehabilitating Japanese war criminals

"Why should it matter any more?"
Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto's response to criticism of his paying homage to Japan's worst war criminals at the infamous Yasukuni Shinto Shrine in Tokyo (1996).

"Why do we have to select among the dead."
Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's response to criticism of his paying homage to Japan's worst war criminals at the infamous Yasukuni Shinto Shrine in Tokyo (2001).

Reviving the ideology of Japanese militarism

"Japan is a divine nation centered on the emperor."
Yoshiro Mori, Prime Minister of Japan (2000).

And the final word

"I do not think things are going well in terms of Japan accepting responsibility for the past."
Professor Saburo Ienaga, distinguished Japanese historian (1998).

[Christopher McCandless]

To be fair, Germany didnt have two atom bombs dropped on it. Nor a culture that revolves around honour.

[Alex179]

Looks pretty fucked up.   Though it is normal for nations to minimalize the atrocities they commit actually.   Good thing there are nations with contrasting records of those events that can set them straight on what happened.   War is hell unfortunately and such things have happened throughout time in wars.   That doesn't excuse anything, just makes me wonder why people act surprised that it happened.    I expect crap like that to happen during a war.   Maybe I read too much about what the Vikings did to people haha.

I noticed that they try to take the aggression out of the Japanese kids from interacting with them in FFXI.   That game had no PvP at release for a reason haha.   The hate that went back and forth between the NA/EU contingent and the Japanese playerbase was pretty priceless.  They condition their kids in a weird manner over there and the removal of Shinto was necessary obviously.   There are some perverted ass Japanese kids lol.

[Parts]

To be fair, Germany didnt have two atom bombs dropped on it. Nor a culture that revolves around honour.

Because of that they don't have to admit anything?  Germany may not have had the atom bomb used on it but it was bombed to hell. I feel the west didn't push as hard for this because it was Chinese killed not Europeans.  That is not an excuse for it just the reason it wasn't pushed harder for.  Now recognition will be harder to get because the passage of time makes it easier for people to forget.

[Alex179]

Do you know why Japan had to have atom bombs dropped on them?   Have you really read up on Shinto and how they responded to the commands of their Emperor?   Their will was not going to be broken any other way, the Emperor of Japan himself had to give up as he was their god.   You can't compare them to the Germans.   Hitler was never seen as a god with will that was never to be questioned, he was also voted into office lol.

[Peter]

Do you know why Japan had to have atom bombs dropped on them?   Have you really read up on Shinto and how they responded to the commands of their Emperor?   Their will was not going to be broken any other way, the Emperor of Japan himself had to give up as he was their god.   You can't compare them to the Germans.   Hitler was never seen as a god with will that was never to be questioned, he was also voted into office lol.

With the result that the Japanese engaged in the murder, rape and torture of millions with the joyful glee of Jihadists, but that doesn't excuse them from accepting responsibility for their actions.  Perhaps the shame of being by far the most barbaric of the countries involved in the war was too much for them to bear, but I think a lot of the problem is that the Americans were too soft on them.  The Japanese lost only 580,000 civilians, compared to Germany's 1,810,000, with the two countries having almost identical population sizes at the start of the war.  In total Germany lost 10.77% of it's population, while Japan lost a mere 3.67%, and after the war, 2 million German women were raped by the Russians, often repeatedly over a period of years, with 200,000 dying as a result.  Having a couple of low-yield nuclear bombs dropped on them was mild by comparison, and merely made the prospect of fighting to the death no longer palatable, since the Americans could, as far as the Japanese knew at that point, completely annihilate them without losing a single American life, and afterwards they got what amounted to a slap on the wrist.  Even the emperor was allowed to retain his position, and the Americans largely brushed the war crimes under the carpet for political convenience.  While Germany was in ruins, divided in half between the Russians and the West, and it's population was forced to tour the concentration camps, Japan had no such humbling, and was not forced to come to terms with what it had done.

Hirohito and all members of the imperial family implicated in the war such as Prince Chichibu, Prince Asaka, Prince Takeda and Prince Higashikuni were exonerated from criminal prosecutions by MacArthur, with the help of Bonner Fellers who allowed the major criminal suspects to coordinate their stories so that the Emperor would be spared from indictment [45]. Many historians criticize this decision. According to John Dower, "with the full support of MacArthur's headquarters, the prosecution functioned, in effect, as a defense team for the emperor" [46] and even Japanese activists who endorse the ideals of the Nuremberg and Tokyo charters, and who have labored to document and publicize the atrocities of the showa regime "cannot defend the American decision to exonerate the emperor of war responsibility and then, in the chill of the Cold war, release and soon afterwards openly embrace accused right-winged war criminals like the later prime minister Nobusuke Kishi."[47] For Herbert Bix, "MacArthur's truly extraordinary measures to save Hirohito from trial as a war criminal had a lasting and profoundly distorting impact on Japanese understanding of the lost war."[48]

[morthaur]

While Germany was in ruins, divided in half between the Russians and the West, and it's population was forced to tour the concentration camps, Japan had no such humbling, and was not forced to come to terms with what it had done.

Not to mention the loss of nearly a third of the national territory and the brutal eviction of Germans from all over eastern Europe (which resulted in about two million deaths).  But you're right, there was relatively little accounting for the Japanese.  Their only territorial losses were inconsequential, and they received a great deal of help in rebuilding.  Perhaps part of the problem was that they were occupied only by the US, which was always more interested in economic factors than in accounting for crimes.  With four powers involved in Germany, there was simply too much jockeying for advantage in the post-war world for the Germans to escape unscathed.  But even then, de-Nazification never went far enough, and war criminals were soon enough re-employed by the West German government.

Another problem, as noted above, may have been that the victims were Chinese.  The American and west European Jewish communities were instrumental in bringing the Nazis to account, and there was no similar constituency for the Chinese.  Worse, the fall to Maoism in 1949 meant that the Chinese were international pariahs for some time, which dramatically reduced chances of getting foreign help to address Japanese crimes.  (Of course, they were soon committing their own crimes in Tibet, about which the world was sadly near-silent.  Not even the British military treaty obligation was dealt with, but at least the Indians opened their borders to refugees.)  All told, I think the nature of the Chinese government (as opposed to the Japanese) is a major part of the reason for continuing Western silence.  It is now considered politically and economically advantageous to favour the Japanese as a balancing power in the region, and Realpolitik carries a lot more weight than human rights internationally.

Do you know why Japan had to have atom bombs dropped on them?   Have you really read up on Shinto and how they responded to the commands of their Emperor?   Their will was not going to be broken any other way, the Emperor of Japan himself had to give up as he was their god...

This is misleading.  The Japanese had been trying to surrender for months by the time of the Hiroshima bombing, with their only condition the retention of the imperial dynasty.  And the US insistence on unconditional surrender was, in the end, almost wasted, as the constitution drafted with US help did allow them to retain their emperor, with much of his symbolic significance intact.  Doesn't it seem odd to you that a man who was being called a war criminal during the war was allowed to remain emperor once the US had troops on the ground?

But to get back to the main point, the atomic bombs were dropped on Japan in keeping with Truman's foreign policy goals, not merely to induce surrender.  Their primary purpose was to intimidate the Soviet Union, and if they managed to bring about a surrender before the Soviets declared war on Japan (as they had pledged to do six months after the cessation of European hostilities) all the better, as the US would not need to share the spoils.  You can read a tonne of declassified documents from Truman's administration to see how thinking on this matter evolved, and the implications were made clear in the actions to follow.  The US refused to follow the pleas of diplomats and scientists alike to internationalise nuclear power and outlaw its use as a weapon.  Instead, they made bold predictions that the Soviets had no chance of developing a bomb of their own, and planned to use the American nuclear capability as a foreign policy tool to ensure unchallenged supremacy.  In the event it only took the Soviets four years, and then our chance of ridding the world of those hideous things was gone forever.

Question to admin: Why is it that when I use the word "ar-sen-al" (without the dashes, of course), it is replaced in post preview by "AAARRSE!!nal"?!

[Callaway]

Question to admin: Why is it that when I use the word "ar-sen-al" (without the dashes, of course), it is replaced in post preview by "AAARRSE!!nal"?!

It is our word filter.  We don't filter the traditional words, so we got a little silly with it.  Arse is arse. 

One of our members uses fuckn quite often, so it is fuckn.

[Calandale]

Awfully silly.

[Janicka]

You know, when I went to school in the U.S. and took the unredacted version of World History (prior to that, I'd had history classes, but they were in Communist Czech schools, so I don't count those), we learned all sorts of stuff about the atrocities of the Germans.  I didn't learn a fucking thing about the Japanese, other than the fact they bombed Pearl Harbor and the U.S. nuked them.  Seriously, I had no idea about any of their atrocities, or even how crazy they were as soldiers until I saw it on the History Channel.  I don't know why that is.  But it seems like they'd never come to terms with it if it's so overshadowed by what the Nazi's did. 

Just my thought. 

[Parts]

In the US they encouraged the racism many felt towards Asians in general to get them to fight harder.  My uncle who served in the Pacific during WWII still hated them when he died at almost eighty and talked of the Japanese as less than human.  That and everyone wanting it to be over I think is why it turned out that way.  The German though killed Europeans which most people in the US traced their ancestry to so they felt more compelled to do something about it

[AlCapone]

It was part of their culture, and they kept their old imperial traditions. Kamikaze? Most of the young men were brainwashed into believing that their emperor was somehow holy, and something good would come out of suicide bombing the allies.

Japan has adopted a pacifist stance to war now, and is strongly against nuclear weapons, having experienced their destructive power first hand and been crippled by it.

Now that they're a huge economic power, their culture has since moved on from all that. Still, the Japanese have trouble coming to terms with their crushing defeat, perhaps, and remember their war losses. However, they aren't so resentful, having not been crushed, but having risen to become very economically powerful after WWII.

The world, I guess, learned its lesson, and didn't treat post WWII Japan and Germany the same way they had been treated post WWI. The treaty of Versailles was probably to blame for Hitler's rise in the first place. Most Germans were inclined to agree with his Nationalist views after the treaty of Versailles, Hyperinflation, the Great Depression, all the crap that Germany had gone through after WWI.

Still, Japan needs to fully come to terms with the legacy of WWII, in the same way Germany does. In Germany, wearing nazi uniforms and doing the fascist salute will get you in trouble with the police. Yet in Japan, some high ranking politicians visit the old war shrines. China gets very ticked off when that happens. I reckon that it's ok for people to visit axis war graves, those people were fighting for their nations, and both sides committed atrocities. Should we punish people for remembering their old relatives and friends?

So long as each side admits the atrocities caused, and shakes hands honestly, I think that the world can get over WWII, but we must remember its lessons in History.

[maldoror]

To be fair, Germany didnt have two atom bombs dropped on it. Nor a culture that revolves around honour.

What the fuck does that have to do with it?

[Izaak]

Interesting enough that neither germany or japan did anythign really different than any other nation did in the some 100 thousand years of modern human history before it. The only real difference is the advent of telivision and temporal proximity.

Humans have ALWAYS been brutal and merciless in warfare. The ONLY thing that has changed is efficiency and scale.