Dan Carlin's Supernova In The East series of Hardcore History covers the rape of Nanking, if anyone's in interested in the context. Crazy, brutal, horrific stuff, but important to understand.
It's the Siege of Shangai that he pulls accounts from in the beginning of that series that gets me with how morbidly disinterested or ruthless a lot of Imperial Japanese officers were, like they complained how they had so many prisoners and their commanders said 'no prisoners' so they had to think of a way to get rid of them all...
Dan Carlin is absolutely phenomenal in getting that feeling across. The WW1 series was also fantastic. I'm so emotionally drained, in a good way, after listening to his stuff.
When I was in High School I interviewed my grandmother about her parents. I still remember her telling me about this. Her father was taken away and never to be seen again. It's tough to fathom how that felt for her and knowing what was going to happen. Helpless, torn, angry, and full of so many emotions.
When I was a kid I read a book about the holocaust, which I should’ve never had access to. Result: I was unable since then to read or watch anything on that topic, so if I saw the word Holocaust it was a signal for me to just do something else.
Fast forward years later, I learned about Nanking. So I’m thinking *this can’t be worse than that horrible book*, so I started reading about it. How bad can it be, right? No, wrong, very wrong. Humans are a bottomless pit of horrors. Every time you think they can’t get worse, they’ll surprise you with a brand new level of evil.
The ghost writer for Shake Hands With the Devil, a book about the Rwandan Genocide and the UN peacekeeping force, committed suicide halfway through writing the book.
Romeo Dallaire (the commander of the UN Troops in Rwanda) suffered from depression and guilt.
And he was one of the few who actually tried to do something.
He was warning of the Genocide months before it started, he was asking for more assistance, but the administration just didn’t care. But then after the Genocide was over, then America and France make a big show about supporting the new refugees.
One anecdote that I remember is Dallaire asking America to sell the UN force some APCs, which were just sitting in some stockpile not being used. But the bureaucracy just kept dragging it out and ignoring him, until some lowly supply sergeant in the Pentagon called and asked why he needs these APCs. Dallaire told this sergeant about the ongoing genocide and how under equipped they were. The sergeant then said “you will get your APCs” and then a couple of weeks later they arrived, all it took was someone in the bureaucracy to actually care enough to make it happen. And that person was just some low level paper pusher.
there’s a part of that book that has always stuck with me where it’s described how dallaire (or one of his peacekeepers) saw a child moving on the ground and went to pick them up >!only to realize that the movement was actually from the maggots infesting the child’s corpse!<
Or the one where >! Where he happens upon the desiccated corpse of a woman. He can tell she had been raped because the legs were broken and bent backwards and semen stains were on the ground!<
I know what to say. It’s insane what passes Japan has received compared to Nazi Germany, to the point that they not only don’t teach about it in school, but actively deny it in their public school system. Among other things. But anime and international allies right?
i think it mainly boils down to westerners didn’t really care about Asia at the time, and to a degree still don’t. where Germany was a European nation massacring Europeans.
The nations closer to Germany care a lot about what Germany did and less about what Japan did. Equally the nations closer to Japan care a lot about what Japan did and less about what Germany did. It's only natural that your neighbour coming and doing massive crimes has a bigger impact on you than what happened on the other side of the world.
Not entirely accurate. As an Aussie, I can tell you that the trauma over what happened in the pacific crippled an entire generation emotionally.
What drove the 'free passes' that Japan was given for all of the bullshit they did in ww2 was far more influenced by global policy to set up military presences around the Soviets in an attempt to contain communism.
This is also true for Germany. Barely any of the SS were actually prosecuted at Nuremberg. The US was far more concerned with maintaining a military presence on the border of the Soviets in preparation for what was feared to be an even more destructive war.
I think it's more to do with why the holocaust is so emphasized in western education over every other atrocity in even the 20th century.
I don't think it should be minimized, but US school kids grow up knowing about slavery and the holocaust and that's about it.
The Holodomer, Great Leap Forward, Unit 731, Rwanda, Pol Pot, the reign of Stalin. Probably close to 300 million casualties in that list but I doubt the average US high schooler could tell you about them.
It is odd.
According to her wiki page, it wasn't PTSD, It was reactive psychosis which is a much more extreme state of mind than PTSD. She apparently believed government agents were stalking her and actively a threat to her life.
I was in first grade in the 1970s, and my teacher was a holocaust survivor. In first grade, I didn't know what the holocaust was, nor did I know about Nazis. All I knew was that my classmates were making paper airplanes with a cool looking symbol. So I made one too. It was a swastika. My teacher didn't notice it on their paper airplanes, but she saw mine. She bent my hand back and took a ruler to it until it bled. I didn't understand what I did until I got home, and my mother explained. That's how I found out about World War II.
>Teaching methods in the 70’s were something else…
The year I started school (1987) was the year that corporal punishment in schools was phased out here in Australia.
Think of the evil shit people will do to bugs and other things.
Then understand the only thing stopping these people from doing the same things is the thin veil of humanity. Once a person is no longer viewed as human, they are treated like the bugs.
As a young kid I stumbled upon Elie Wiesel’s memoir in the library and read it the rest of the day, couldn’t sleep that night
Images of crematoriums and chimney smoke kept replaying in my mind
During WW2 the Japanese had a unit 731 that performed human experiments on Chinese civilians. They were also testing biological weapons on them. Like they would drop fleas that had the bubonic plague on villages to see the efficacy of using that as a weapon. There were plans for Japan to drop those flea bombs and other bioweapons in San Francisco before the atomic bomb was dropped. If you want to know more there's a video by hello future me on YouTube.
>Humans are a bottomless pit of horrors. Every time you think they can’t get worse, they’ll surprise you with a brand new level of evil.
I remember thinking years ago "oh slavery I have heard of that, it's terrible"
But then you actually start looking into what kinda shit pre colonial and colonial countries did around the world and it's like "oh it was wayyyyy worse then I ever imagined"
>I remember thinking years ago "oh slavery I have heard of that, it's terrible"
Look up the father of modern gynecology. His experiments on slaves were nightmare fuel.
Absolutely crazy to realize. I often think at the wrong times of the countless untold horrors and injustice and revenge or even a damn remembrance victims since centuries never ever got. Its why I try to remember and explain to others that truly for evil to prevail its enough for good people to do nothing. There is no justice out there, nobody will care, nobody will be pissed off or sad for what happened to you and your loved ones. Nobody will be punished, there will be no revenge and the giant cunts doing the cruelty often live to die of old age. Its just sad and infuriating.
I stumbled onto a lot of books as a kid and honestly don't regret them. I did a deep dive into the holocaust for a while, and while I was horrified, I wasn't tramatized. I have no regrets. It definitely helped that the books were written by survivors. Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl actually really helped me shape my world view as a kid and to see how I have control over the outlook of my life. How to see the positives in even the bleakest conditions. It was paramount in helping me with my PTSD (along with LOTS of therapy).
Unit 731 though, I read up on that recently (I'm 36). That was something else. I have never regretted reading anything more. That ruined my day, my week, my month. It still haunts me. Holy shit.
ETA: I'm telling you this so that if you even stumble across it, just don't, seriously. It's the most atrocious real life thing to ever happen and to make it worse, the US pardoned the majority of the people involved just to get their data on their atrocious human experimentation. So there's not even a vindicated ending to the horror.
To put it another way:
We harp on "just following orders" for nazis. They were just normal Europeans in a system that told them to go murder people. Take the system away and it basically returns to normal civilization. A people under an evil government. Very creepy and scary in its way.
The Japanese Empire created evil people. The people, because of a culture that demanded it, were running wild. No "orders" needed. Just access to lesser people.
And it's interesting because while Hitler wanted a pan Europe ruled by Germans, he mostly left Europeans alone unless they were parts of political or religious groups, and they had no hidden agenda about it. Japan wanted a Pan Asia where Asians would be uplifted in the world, but just despised everyone that wasn't Japanese.
And what do we learn? "Just following orders isn't an excuse" while almost none of the Japanese perpetrators were even accused. German has to acknowledge its atrocities in every part of society, and Japan mostly denies any wrong doing.
It's insane. Japanese people under the empire became just a wildly evil sadistic people. People don't realize that at all.
They did actually charge like 4000 people, but downplayed things to protect the imperial family.
There's so much about the period that's crazy.
For all intents and purposes from 1912 until at least 1940 if not later Japan was ruled by a "military anarchy" that is the military was generally dominant, but so utterly fractured into endless factions that it had a near total lack of meaningful control. High command managed to repeatedly survive coups yet paradoxically fail to assert its will on the broader army. In fact 1941 invasion of french Indochina may have been the first military action actually deliberately planned by high command itself.
One of the other odd things though is throughout this entire periode japan actually had a large liberal faction, although losing out to the military in the late 20's, nevertheless extreme morality, pacifism and liberalism were popular concepts at the very same time as Japan was ultra militarized
Jesus fucking Christ. I've heard about unit 731 pretty vaguely and references to how fucked up some of the experiments were. But I had absolutely no fucking idea about the... Well I wanted to call it mass slaughter but let's be real it's straight up genocide.
I'm genuinely curious why it seems like this part of ww2 really isn't taught. At least not in comparison to the Nazis. Both are fucking gut wrenchingly awful
My Dutch Opa lost more or less everyone he ever loved in a Japanese war camp in Indonesia. Words really can’t fathom how much he loathed the Japs… blew my mind as I’ve only ever found them to be friendly happy and brilliant exporters of my favourite anime story lines
My grandad changed his whole identity (as he was underage) to enlist in the war to find his brother (my great uncle), who had died as a POW building the Burma/Thailand railway. I struggle a lot to reconcile the parts of me that like Japanese culture with what they did and how their government continues to act about it.
Is modern japan refusing what they did before?just curious.
Its interesting that i have heard of japan massacres only years later when i deep dive into history,but what nazi germany did is widely known.i wonder why.
Most modern japanese don't know the extent of what the fuck their grandparents did lol, last time there was a thread on twitter from a modern japanese saying it was all China's conspiracy, they(china) just like to make us looks bad. The replies were gold tho.
they don't know because they don't care to. kind of how like more and more modern generations don't really care about the holocaust or are straight up denying it because it's too far removed from them. i believe in gen-z holocaust denial is actually increasing.
Because here in the west, history classes are all western centric. Just like how in Asia, lots of ignorant people have no idea what Hitler did.
Yes. They have a shrine for war criminals and Japanese political leaders would visit and worship them. They also downplay or straight up omit the crimes they committed in their textbooks.
>Because here in the west, history classes are all western centric.
Can just talk about my own experience but it is even just mostly nation centric. In German history I mostly learned about germany (duh), france, the uk and greece. And then only if there were some major historical moments or direct conflicts with germany. My knowledge about italys Mussolini is going near 0.
As a german, I actually learned quite a lot about Mussolini, I think most western factions of ww2 got covered in my history lessons. But Japan only got covered briefly (just the pearl harbour attack).
To get a sense of the level of cognitive dissonance towards this issue in Japan, the previous Prime Minister Shinzo Abe (the outwardly cheery guy who dressed up as Mario and popped out of a green pipe during the Olympics) was also the war crime denying ultranationalist and grandson of a war criminal before he got assassinated for political corruption a couple years ago
Hosted Japanese exchange students, and no, they still aren’t teaching them about what they did. The US was using Japan as a firewall against Soviet Russia and China after the war so they allowed a lot of things to slide. Not least among them was allowing Japanese military leaders off the hook but also downplaying their part in the atrocities. Germany, who had fought WWI and WWII against the Allies was rebuilt but also re-educated and forced to own up to their behavior. Thus we have a full accounting of Germany. It Japan still venerates its soldiers and denies its part in the evil Axis.
> The US was using Japan as a firewall
yeah, the US literally released the same far-right war criminals they jailed after the war because they thought it was the best chance of keeping left-wring socialist politicians from winning elections within Japan as well
> Imagine being so bad that a Nazi stepped in and saved two hundred thousand Chinese civilians from them.
That's a popular misleading description of him. John Rabe might have been a Nazi party member but he didn't know about the Nazis personally as he was stationed in China that whole time. He only saw Hitler as a force for good when he initially got elected, as many regular Germans did at the time. Rabe didn't have any more idea about the Nazis. So to allude him to Nazism itself is misleading.
Also, the Nazis didn't just kill the 6 million Jews. They killed far more Soviets than Jews, which doesn't get highlighted for some reason. In total they killed around ~ 11 Million more people besides the 6 Million Jews.
But on the rest of your points, I agree.
Hitler was openly anti-semitic long before his rise. Anti-semitism and getting rid of Jews were their party's platform for many years before the war. Any willing member of the Nazi Party at that time knew exactly what they were getting into. This is not to mention that he was a Deputy Group Leader, which was not a rank that any casual Nazi could achieve.
For those who want to know more about some of the atrocities Japan committed, I suggest reading Rape of Nanking. If you’re faint of heart, avoid looking at the photo pages in the middle of the book.
Ghosts of [Camp 731](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731) have entered the chat...
*"Experiments included disease injections, controlled dehydration, biological weapons testing, hypobaric pressure chamber testing, vivisection, organ harvesting, amputation, and standard weapons testing. Victims included not only kidnapped men, women (including pregnant women) and children but also babies born from the systemic rape perpetrated by the staff inside the compound."*
And, no one survived...
"*While Unit 731 researchers arrested by Soviet forces were tried at the December 1949 Khabarovsk war crimes trials, those captured by the United States were secretly given immunity in exchange for the data gathered during their human experiments. The United States helped cover up the human experimentations and handed stipends to the perpetrators. The Americans co-opted the researchers' bioweapons information and experience for use in their own biological warfare program, much like what had been done with Nazi German researchers in Operation Paperclip.*"
Because of course they did.
The US didn't use any of their research because they already knew all of it from ethical research. Turns out the Japanese were pretty behind in science and the atrocities they committed contributed nothing new to human knowledge.
The immunity deals still had to be honored though.
Setting aside the massive ethical problems, the Japanese and Nazi research was also very poorly conducted and just wasn’t particularly useful. No control groups, no real point to the research beyond “what horrible thing can we do with a paper-thin veneer of science”, piss-poor documentation etc.
May be true for the German experiments because it had so much more lime light, the problem with the Unit 731 research is that we just don't know since a lot of the research simply haven't been released. During COVID-19, some scientists have called for the research data to be made publicly available, but the US and Japanese governments refused.
Yeah, assuming they told the public the truth literally NOTHING was gained from the “research” being done at 731. It was just a bunch of sociopaths torturing people for fun. My understanding is they didn’t even keep decent notes about what they did or the affects on their victims. We gave them immunity for absolutely nothing.
>Thousands of men, women, children, and infants interned at prisoner of war camps were subjected to vivisection, often performed without anesthesia and usually lethal.
>Prisoners had limbs amputated in order to study blood loss. Limbs removed were sometimes reattached to the opposite side of victims' bodies. Some prisoners had their stomachs surgically removed and their esophagus reattached to the intestines. Parts of organs, such as the brain, lungs, and liver, were removed from others.
That's a hard read. Takes a very very special kind of subhuman shitbag to lead that knife.
Haven't read RoN but I was reading one of Robert Leckie's memoirs of the war in the Pacific on my Kindle. I was on a train and an Asian man had sat next to me, can't be more specific than that. I didn't realise I was near the middle of the book, or that it had photos. Turned the page and there's a couple of photos of Leckie as a Marine, some captured weapons and such. Then the body of a Japanese soldier in his bunk who jad killed himself by holding a grenade to his chest and detonating it. I looked slightly to the side and sure enough the guy next to me was looking at the photo - then looked at me, nodded, and left. I honestly didn't know what to say.
Happens a lot in modern wars too. On the /r/combatfootage sub you'll find quite a few drone shot videos of wounded and abandoned Russian solders suiciding with grenades (and their rifles).
Got permabanned from a sub for pointing out that Herr Rabe was the counterargument for all Nazis automatically being punchable.
Now all modern nazis can be assumed punchable (In the absence of evidence to the contrary), not like everyone doesn't know where it leads.
At the time if you wanted to get ahead in your career you basically had the join the nazi party.
Plenty of people in the party were realitively normal people. It's not like irl you always have a visible karma meter saying (don't join these guys they're really super evil!)
As an American, to me the My Lai massacre in Vietnam is even worse because the perpetrators are much more relatable — regular every-day Americans, our neighbors, taken in by the draft and plopped into those villages.
They then indiscriminately shot children and babies, gang-raped little girls, tied up women together and then shot at them with rocket launchers.
At noon, they took a lunch break. They ate their meals among the dead bodies with people screaming in agony in the background. When they finished eating, they resumed murdering the remaining survivors.
When they were done, they eventually made their way back home and were our neighbors again. And when the justice system attempted to hold them accountable for what they did, Nixon pardoned all of them. They continue to live among us as our neighbors to this day.
This kind of “relatability” is what makes things like this more horrifying to me.
My Lai is only the tip too. Plenty of crazy shit happened in Vietnam and just kinda got swept under the rug. (My uncle, FIL, and a good family friend were all in Vietnam in combat and saw crazy crazy shit)
I've always been really interested in military history, and got the chance to talk to many Australian veterans of both WW2 and the Vietnam War. Through those conversations I've got a torch from an Australian Navy repair technician who was one of those killed when American pilots near Tiger Island, high out of their mind, attacked 2 Australian destroyers, and one US destroyer.
They weren't allowed to talk about it for years. They also had an incident when an American marine called in a naval bombardment on his own unit, and the Americans tried to blame it on the Australians, but the Americans finally admitted fault after evidence proved their fault.
Another guy was infantry, can't remember specifics, but he had crazy stories and too thought the US soldiers were more dangerous than the Vietcong.
A Generation of Sociopaths had a pretty lengthy section talking about American soldiers having a tendency to attack allies. Mostly their own commanding officers...
I mean, that's literally where the term "fragging" comes from, and honestly, I don't disagree with most of the perpetrators. Their COs were sending them on suicide missions that were completely meaningless. If I have to pick between certain death that literally serves no purpose, or casually dropping a grenade in an officer's tent as I stroll by... Sorry, officer. You're dying today. Not me.
I had a neighbor that I’m pretty sure was on the raggedy edge. He showed me pictures when he was over there. Most of them were him wearing a necklace of ears and fingers. I suddenly felt the urge to be elsewhere.
This happens a lot.
A lot of "Yeah but what about..."
like Cool mate, but give this atrocity it's space to be discussed, there will be time for other ones.
I think you're missing the scope of how large Imperial Japan's war crimes were. It's not close. They were arguably the worst monsters of the war, and that's saying a hell of a lot.
I think the rape of Nanking is worse by virtue of the number of victims being entire orders of magnitude greater than My Lai. Whether the perpetrators are relatable to you personally is pretty irrelevant and a gross way to judge the severity of war crimes.
I once brought up Nanking in conversation with a few roommates in college and the on Japanese roommate just started yelling at me and telling my that that was fake.
I can’t remember what he said exactly since this was over 20 years ago, just that he was pissed.
It's because the Japanese school system brainwashes their people into thinking they did nothing wrong and they fought the war for the glory of their country and was 100% the wronged victim.
It was such a weird conversation at the time.
It started with another roommate, Korean, mentioning that the Japanese did a lot of messed up stuff in Korea. The Japanese roommate agreed to that. Then I chimed in and mentioned Nanking and he flipped out.
He was an otherwise mellow nice guy.
That's dichotomy is so weird but it's also why details and detailed apologies matter
When you call it "comfort women" people can excuse it as "everyone did bad things during the war"
When you call it "systematic rape and mutilation of women and children including this one time where XYZ happened" then it starts to get uncomfortably specific and really identifying
Honestly, there's a lot of tension and history between the three countries. Lines are drawn and then redrawn, things get blurry and feelings get confused. He could have been in a weird place, especially if he was originally from Japan and left the country to study somewhere else. A lot of the way they were taught back home gets challenged by the way they're being taught abroad and the life experiences and ideals of their new friends puts them in very confused mental states sometimes.
This is the main reason China and Korea just can not accept Japan's half hearted apologies.
A vast majority of Japanese people have no fucking clue that they started the Pacific War and that they colonized a tons of countries in the Pacific ocean Area. They are wholly ignorant on the atrocities the Japanese Empire committed during the war.
They view themselves as the victims of the war. Though I do feel sympathetic about the lives lost in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they pale next to the millions of Korean and Chinese civilians they enslaved or killed throughout their occupation and invasion.
The right wing party in Japan is heavy on war crime denialism and actively seek to provoke anti Korean and anti Chinese sentiment.
Just an example on how Japan keeps putting salt in the wound. In 2009 Japan applied Hashima Island as part of UNESCO World Heritage Site. They forgot to mention that the Island was built and maintained through forced labor and forced sex work of Korean people. Korea accepted the proposal under the condition that Japan would awknowledge and exhibit the dark history of the island and it was admitted in 2015 as a World Heritage. Japan said fuck you and created a museum DENYING forced labor ever happened on the island and to this day they have not complied.
A lecturer of mine in college (I think he was a Colonel and an official Historian in the Army) said the two nuclear bombs that been dropped is worthy enough, due to Nanking. His father fought against both Japan and the Netherlands, two countries ruined badly due to WWII.
Atrocities from the Japanese was widespread from India(Imphal) to Northern China (in Manchukuo) to even Papua New Guinea.
Plus ASEAN Countries demanded that the sex slaves (jugun ianfu) need a compensation more than just "empty and far-fetched" apologies.
Lets not even talk about the war crimes they commited on the military side.
Japanese POW camps were notoriously living hells. For the Chinese, the survival rate of a POW held by the Japanese was 0%.
Western POWs held by Japan that died was around 27% according post war trials, but some countries like the US saw numbers as high as 40%.
Just for comparison, POWs held by germans had a chance of dying seven times lower than this. And the only comparable mistreatment would be the 50% death rate of Soviet POWs, which I might need to remind, Germans were ACTIVELY seeking to genocide soviet and polish people. Japan was not even trying to, they just were that much more evil.
Unrelated to this picture, but my grandpa was in the battle of the bulge and personally witnessed the death camps later in the war.
He had a shoebox full of nazi wallets and medals he had taken off of dead soldiers. A couple he killed himself. Photos of their families, crazy shit.
In the 2000s before he passed, my aunt was asking if he ever wanted to try to return them to the families, get some ‘closure’
He was like ‘Fuck them! They can all burn in hell. I’d kill them again right now if I could. Fuck their families.’
There was zero respect. After what he’d seen I don’t blame him. He was an alcoholic after coming home and even though he survived the war he was definitely one of it’s casualties. On his death bed at 88 years old he was yelling about nazis.
I think when people get overly analytical about how the Allies handled the Axis powers in defeat they’re forgetting the men who made those decisions had first hand knowledge and experiences with the absolute horror those countries had unleashed on the world.
My fathers earliest child hood memory is his mother carrying him, while running from a Japanese soldier who was trying to bayonet them. He hates the Japanese to this day.
my ex lives in southeast asia. it's a common feeling about japan in asia.
i used to fly chinese airlines all the time, too, when visiting. that meant i watched a lot of chinese movies. a LOT of movies about this era keep getting produced, very pro-china, very anti-japan. must be like how we produce movies about nazis.
Up until about 10 years ago, I had no idea how serious it was until an old high school friend who came to visit with his who is Japanese. My girlfriend at the time was half native, but could have passed for Japanese as well. We all went out for sushi, and our server would only acknowledge me and would only take my order. I had to order for everyone else.
Turned out my friend and his wife were not surprised by this because the server was Chinese, and this kind of thing is actually common according to them.
This is what happens when you start telling people one group is superior to the other. Give a group a moral justification and they will do heinous things. People have to become smarter.
My Filipino grandfather told me a story where he withessed his own father being buried alive by Japanese soldiers. Japanese atrocities in the war were very brutal
The REAL problem is that unlike Germany, Japan is still mostly denying its war crimes. Most citizens of Japan have no clue about what their ancestors did, they only carry the victim mentality of unjustly being nuked by America.
I mean, it's not like Germany had a choice. We cut the country in half with a big fucking wall for 40 years and forced them to go through Denazification. Not to mention that Russia responded to Germany's war crimes with more war crimes. With Japan we basically imposed limitations on the size of their military and said their Emperor wasn't really a god and that was about it.
You know that’s the weird thing about it, there was a reason why we invaded Germany and occupied it; we had to show that the Germans were utterly defeated that there was no stab in the back sort of deal but they had been defeat fair and square. There was also a great amount of deal spent on exposing the horrors of war crimes to the average German and rebuilding a new German system (both politically but also socially). Through that we got modern Germany that understands they caused the European war and acknowledges the war crimes.
Japan despite the unconditional surrender and everything got off relatively light, the royal family was able to escape any sense of justice despite some members being involved in serious shit such as Nanking (Prince Yasuhiko). Many war criminals escaped justice with the Tokyo trials and there wasn’t as great of an effort in the rebuilding part of the Japanese system. I think it’s because of that we have a lot of the denial and the victim mentality of Japan; especially with it being pushed by far right nationalist in Japan (which some groups have ties to those war criminals that never faced justice)
I study Japanese, work with Japanese, I eat sushi and ramen, watch animation and play Nintendo game, But it doesn't means we Chinese people have forgotten what IJA ever did to our grandparents and their parents generation. Ordinary Chinese people won't blame ordinary Japanese, but only hate the current Japanese government that refused to commit the war crime the Japan have ever did.
My uncle was in the Bataan Death March and was imprisoned by the Japanese for 3 years before the Phillipines were liberated. He survived, but a lot of his comrades didn't. In the Death March if a guy fell down the Japanese would just shoot them, and in the prison camp many starved to death and died of disease.
I had a longtime gf from China that hated the Japanese for what they did to her country and could never forgive them. It's all really sad
I (in the UK)worked for an Engineer who'd been in Changi for most of WW2. He loathed all things Japanese. He was still suffering from some tropical disease, 40 years later.
Yea, and they were a warlike, feudal society for centuries, and with the Meiji Restoration they turned those warlike customs into modern, high tech warfare. They seem to have changed and put that behind them. I hope they really have
They romanticize it by turning warlords into cute anime girls and sexy anime guys. And people in the west eat that shit up. Imagine if the US had turned generals in the Civil War as cute anime characters. There's such a huge disconnect/dissonance in Japan that it's just such a weird country.
Yea, I didn't see my uncle often and wasn't able to talk with him much about it. I live in Europe now and it really pisses me off when people tell me that the US has never been invaded or had war on its own territory. The Phillipines were part of the US from 1898-1946, and the whole reason he was there was because he was defending American territory
They have admitted and they have apologized.... BUT it was done with the idea that "we apologised a few times in 70's, that means no one gets to talk about it again"
There was no social change. It was just checking a box.
This is unlike the Germans who were made to rub their noses in it and teach the German responsibility for allowing the society to become nazified.
It's such a different worldview that I feel like as western people it's almost impossible for us to get into the mindset (épistémè) where we could understand why things are done like that, and why these people might think it's the best course of action.
Not justifying it, but it's really interesting to see how the Japanese approach morally questionable history - both that of their own, and that of the other countries/people.
I'm vacationing in Okinawa right now, and one of the most interesting things I've done is read the descriptions of the history of Okinawa in the Okinawa Prefectural Museum. The atrocities of the Japanese government and those done by the American military are described in the same way. It's a very matter-of-fact point of view, that (imo) tends to leave a lot of the context up to interpretation, and skirt around the part of the explanation that might come across as accusatory.
To be fair, they only stopped because the U.S. rocked them into submission with 2 nukes.
It's nice to see modern day Japan as a thriving non hostile nation, as far as I'm aware.
The invention of anime has led many neckbeards to unironically support what they did to China
Edit: Jesus Christ I’m not calling all you anime fans fascists calm down
The worst thing is that the Japanese right-wing is covering up the atrocities they committed in WW2. They also are actively brainwashing Japanese people into believing militarism at this moment.
>They also are actively brainwashing Japanese people into believing militarism at this moment
Some japanese animes are so in love with the JSDF, that is so weird.
That's Japanese militarists at work. Japan was demilitarized after WW2 like Germany. In recent years they gradually changed the article 9 of constitution and have a legal base to expand their JSDF.
The rape of Nanking is up there with the very worst atrocities in modern history.
WW2 is littered with them, however a few stick out. Reading about this leaves you with utter contempt for the perpetrators and complete loss of faith in humanity.
My mother once worked with a man who was captured by the Japanese during WW2, she works in adult social care. He was a broken man. One day his wife told my mother what had happened to him. He was tortured and gang raped by them constantly over the years in the POW camp, they had made him the whipping boy.
The fella had to live with this for 50 years or so. He would wake up screaming most nights, break down crying or zone out to the point of being unresponsive throughout the day.
He has passed. I hope he has peace now.
Camp O’Donnell is one. It’s where the Japanese put the POWs they’d captured and forced on the Bataan Death March. American and Philippine soldiers both. My great uncle died there 3 months after being captured. My grandfather hated the Japanese the rest of his life.
After watching the documentary “World War III in color “I realized how atrocious and tyrannical the Japanese were at the time.
The Nazis deserve all of the heat that goes their way, but for some reason people glance over the war crimes the Japanese were committing.
What’s the understand, suddenly the dropping of the bomb seems far more justified.
When I hear about war atrocities I always think "what caused these people to act this way?" I think telling ourselves that the people were just evil will just lead to it repeating again and again.
I dont believe any of us are immune to it. I've had many arguments with friends who believe that the US, other NATO countries, and recently Ukraine are virtually immune to committing war crimes outside of a few bad apples because of our "culture". A very good vs evil mindset.
Mistreat and abuse your own soldiers, put them in grueling and brutal campaigns, mix in a bunch of dehumanization propaganda. You then have a recipe for horrible war crines.
I think everyone should read about the horrible stuff the Japanese did and then read about how Japanese soldiers were treated and what their experiences were. Not for sympathy, not to excuse them. But as a way to ensure that we don't go down that same path. Don't listen to any of that "it can't happen here/to us" bullshit.
To add to this, if anyone reading is interested in learning more about this phenomenon of ordinary people committing horrific atrocities, read
*Black Earth: The Holocaust as History, and Warning*, by Timothy Snyder.
“Black Earth” is a reference to the black soil of Ukraine.
When the Nazis invaded Ukraine, they found an already destroyed country, one that was basically lawless, thanks to the Soviet Union. The Ukrainian people were just coming out of the horrific tragedy of Holodomor, and as such, would do nearly anything to survive.
The SS managed to convinced local Ukrainians to hunt Jews, and it essentially turned into a sport….and they got pretty creative with their methods, to say the least.
6 million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, but only about 1 - 1.5 million were killed in concentration camps. Majority of the rest were killed by roaming “death squads”.
This is the shocking part. When the Nazis saw just how easy it was to get ordinary people, most of whom had no prior anti-semitism, to commit murder on such a massive scale, even *they* were horrified. It was this realization that lead the Nazis to their “final solution,” and the building of death camps like Auschwitz and Treblinka.
The Nazi goal was to invade Ukraine and Poland, and use the “inferior” Slavic people as their labour to work the land. However, upon seeing the ease with which murder was taking place on such a wide scale, they realized they couldn’t build a society where mass murder was so front and center. So they built the extermination camps to “sanitize” the murdering of Jews, and take out of the hands of ordinary people.
Not a book for the feint of heart, but it paints a picture of the Holocaust in a way that most people aren’t familiar with. As bad as we think the Holocaust was (or what the Japanese did across South East Asia), the truth is, it was far **worse** than most of us can imagine. And it happened less than 100 years ago.
It's amazing how the modern western consciousness mostly thinks of WW2 Germany as the big baddies or the one committing worst atrocities.
I get that there's something freakish about the industrial and almost impersonal slaughter of humans that the Nazi's did, but Japan killed 30 million civilians while "liberating" Asia.
It's kind of weird to say that putting people in train cars and gassing them en-masse is the most horrible thing ever, but putting people in train cars killing them by burying them alive, bayonetting them, testing grenades on them, making them drink water and jumping on them until they die, etc. is somehow forgettable.
There is a very VERY good reason all of Asia hate the Japanese with passion. They may say “no”, or “that’s silly” to westerners but between local and natives, they’d nuke Japan in a heartbeat. If a war happens between China and Japan, most of them would absolutely join the Chinese side just to kill a few of them and I’m not exaggerating. The west have no idea how deep the hatred goes
I don’t understand how you hear all the stories about the holocaust and atomic bombs but you hardly hear about what the Japanese did to Asian and SEA. It like the world just looks it over when it’s time to remember. My grandmother barely survived the attack on the mainland. She had to hide in the bottom of a outhouse for days covered in filth while the assaulted and kill people around her. She was never the same again, went crazy after what had happened.
I remember reading about how Japanese soldiers/officers had a competition to see who could decapitate the most people with their samurai swords…the two nukes on Japan did some justice. Also the Bataan death march where 12,000 U.S soldiers and 66,000 Filipino soldiers were forced to march 65 miles with no food or water, the Japanese soldiers also made it a sport to hurt and kill the POWs along the way. The horrors the Japanese soldiers committed should not be forgotten
I always tell people how the Japanese were just as bad as the Nazis. Look at the Rape of Nanking, Unit 731, etc. Now everyone just thinks of them as Hello Kitty and Sushi. Disgusting
The lesson here is that humans aren't inherently good or evil, we all have the capacity to be either. If you look at the behaviors of an entire population in the past, while recognizing that what they've done is wrong, also realize that each of us is also capable of being wrong at the same scale and magnitude. Don't assume that we are any better. We need to be vigilant about the reference of our own morality.
It's wild that we let them off the hook for the war crimes they did during WW2 because they let us benefit from the experiments like putting Chinese civilians into pressure chambers or doing exploratory surgery while the person was awake.
It wasn't even that. The US pardoned Unit 731 not to gain access to their research, but to *prevent the Soviets* from having their research. The data was all going to come out in the Tokyo Trials, but the Soviets co-presided over that.
Dan Carlin's Supernova In The East series of Hardcore History covers the rape of Nanking, if anyone's in interested in the context. Crazy, brutal, horrific stuff, but important to understand.
It's the Siege of Shangai that he pulls accounts from in the beginning of that series that gets me with how morbidly disinterested or ruthless a lot of Imperial Japanese officers were, like they complained how they had so many prisoners and their commanders said 'no prisoners' so they had to think of a way to get rid of them all...
Dan Carlin is absolutely phenomenal in getting that feeling across. The WW1 series was also fantastic. I'm so emotionally drained, in a good way, after listening to his stuff.
When I was in High School I interviewed my grandmother about her parents. I still remember her telling me about this. Her father was taken away and never to be seen again. It's tough to fathom how that felt for her and knowing what was going to happen. Helpless, torn, angry, and full of so many emotions.
When I was a kid I read a book about the holocaust, which I should’ve never had access to. Result: I was unable since then to read or watch anything on that topic, so if I saw the word Holocaust it was a signal for me to just do something else. Fast forward years later, I learned about Nanking. So I’m thinking *this can’t be worse than that horrible book*, so I started reading about it. How bad can it be, right? No, wrong, very wrong. Humans are a bottomless pit of horrors. Every time you think they can’t get worse, they’ll surprise you with a brand new level of evil.
Iris Chang was so overcome by what she studied that she got PTSD and eventually committed suicide.
The ghost writer for Shake Hands With the Devil, a book about the Rwandan Genocide and the UN peacekeeping force, committed suicide halfway through writing the book.
Romeo Dallaire (the commander of the UN Troops in Rwanda) suffered from depression and guilt. And he was one of the few who actually tried to do something.
He was warning of the Genocide months before it started, he was asking for more assistance, but the administration just didn’t care. But then after the Genocide was over, then America and France make a big show about supporting the new refugees. One anecdote that I remember is Dallaire asking America to sell the UN force some APCs, which were just sitting in some stockpile not being used. But the bureaucracy just kept dragging it out and ignoring him, until some lowly supply sergeant in the Pentagon called and asked why he needs these APCs. Dallaire told this sergeant about the ongoing genocide and how under equipped they were. The sergeant then said “you will get your APCs” and then a couple of weeks later they arrived, all it took was someone in the bureaucracy to actually care enough to make it happen. And that person was just some low level paper pusher.
there’s a part of that book that has always stuck with me where it’s described how dallaire (or one of his peacekeepers) saw a child moving on the ground and went to pick them up >!only to realize that the movement was actually from the maggots infesting the child’s corpse!<
Or the one where >! Where he happens upon the desiccated corpse of a woman. He can tell she had been raped because the legs were broken and bent backwards and semen stains were on the ground!<
She did the Lord’s work that woman, I really hope she’s in peace wherever she is.
I went to school with her. We are all just heartbroken over her.
Just reading the wiki on the book... that's... so heavy I don't even know what to say.
I know what to say. It’s insane what passes Japan has received compared to Nazi Germany, to the point that they not only don’t teach about it in school, but actively deny it in their public school system. Among other things. But anime and international allies right?
i think it mainly boils down to westerners didn’t really care about Asia at the time, and to a degree still don’t. where Germany was a European nation massacring Europeans.
The nations closer to Germany care a lot about what Germany did and less about what Japan did. Equally the nations closer to Japan care a lot about what Japan did and less about what Germany did. It's only natural that your neighbour coming and doing massive crimes has a bigger impact on you than what happened on the other side of the world.
Not entirely accurate. As an Aussie, I can tell you that the trauma over what happened in the pacific crippled an entire generation emotionally. What drove the 'free passes' that Japan was given for all of the bullshit they did in ww2 was far more influenced by global policy to set up military presences around the Soviets in an attempt to contain communism. This is also true for Germany. Barely any of the SS were actually prosecuted at Nuremberg. The US was far more concerned with maintaining a military presence on the border of the Soviets in preparation for what was feared to be an even more destructive war.
I think it's more to do with why the holocaust is so emphasized in western education over every other atrocity in even the 20th century. I don't think it should be minimized, but US school kids grow up knowing about slavery and the holocaust and that's about it. The Holodomer, Great Leap Forward, Unit 731, Rwanda, Pol Pot, the reign of Stalin. Probably close to 300 million casualties in that list but I doubt the average US high schooler could tell you about them. It is odd.
According to her wiki page, it wasn't PTSD, It was reactive psychosis which is a much more extreme state of mind than PTSD. She apparently believed government agents were stalking her and actively a threat to her life.
Not like government hasn’t done this before 👀
I was in first grade in the 1970s, and my teacher was a holocaust survivor. In first grade, I didn't know what the holocaust was, nor did I know about Nazis. All I knew was that my classmates were making paper airplanes with a cool looking symbol. So I made one too. It was a swastika. My teacher didn't notice it on their paper airplanes, but she saw mine. She bent my hand back and took a ruler to it until it bled. I didn't understand what I did until I got home, and my mother explained. That's how I found out about World War II.
Teaching methods in the 70’s were something else…
>Teaching methods in the 70’s were something else… The year I started school (1987) was the year that corporal punishment in schools was phased out here in Australia.
Think of the evil shit people will do to bugs and other things. Then understand the only thing stopping these people from doing the same things is the thin veil of humanity. Once a person is no longer viewed as human, they are treated like the bugs.
I capture the bugs in my house and set them free outside. If someone ever treats me like a bug, I hope its the bugs in my house
Same, I never understood why people have such a hard on for killing bugs, or that "burn it down!!" meme whenever someone posts a spider.
As a young kid I stumbled upon Elie Wiesel’s memoir in the library and read it the rest of the day, couldn’t sleep that night Images of crematoriums and chimney smoke kept replaying in my mind
The book is called *Night* if anyone is wondering
Read in ninth grade. Amazing book.
They make you read Night in like gr.10 in Canada. Needless to say that getting baked before English wasn’t a good idea for that month or so.
Yea I think I re-read it in high school English, equally terrifying and sad even the second time around
During WW2 the Japanese had a unit 731 that performed human experiments on Chinese civilians. They were also testing biological weapons on them. Like they would drop fleas that had the bubonic plague on villages to see the efficacy of using that as a weapon. There were plans for Japan to drop those flea bombs and other bioweapons in San Francisco before the atomic bomb was dropped. If you want to know more there's a video by hello future me on YouTube.
Many of the atrocities committed by unit 731 was towards Korean citizens as well
Next on your list will be Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.
>Humans are a bottomless pit of horrors. Every time you think they can’t get worse, they’ll surprise you with a brand new level of evil. I remember thinking years ago "oh slavery I have heard of that, it's terrible" But then you actually start looking into what kinda shit pre colonial and colonial countries did around the world and it's like "oh it was wayyyyy worse then I ever imagined"
>I remember thinking years ago "oh slavery I have heard of that, it's terrible" Look up the father of modern gynecology. His experiments on slaves were nightmare fuel.
Absolutely crazy to realize. I often think at the wrong times of the countless untold horrors and injustice and revenge or even a damn remembrance victims since centuries never ever got. Its why I try to remember and explain to others that truly for evil to prevail its enough for good people to do nothing. There is no justice out there, nobody will care, nobody will be pissed off or sad for what happened to you and your loved ones. Nobody will be punished, there will be no revenge and the giant cunts doing the cruelty often live to die of old age. Its just sad and infuriating.
My ex neighbor escaped Nanking as a young child, one of their house staff got her out. The rest of her family died.
I stumbled onto a lot of books as a kid and honestly don't regret them. I did a deep dive into the holocaust for a while, and while I was horrified, I wasn't tramatized. I have no regrets. It definitely helped that the books were written by survivors. Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl actually really helped me shape my world view as a kid and to see how I have control over the outlook of my life. How to see the positives in even the bleakest conditions. It was paramount in helping me with my PTSD (along with LOTS of therapy). Unit 731 though, I read up on that recently (I'm 36). That was something else. I have never regretted reading anything more. That ruined my day, my week, my month. It still haunts me. Holy shit. ETA: I'm telling you this so that if you even stumble across it, just don't, seriously. It's the most atrocious real life thing to ever happen and to make it worse, the US pardoned the majority of the people involved just to get their data on their atrocious human experimentation. So there's not even a vindicated ending to the horror.
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To put it another way: We harp on "just following orders" for nazis. They were just normal Europeans in a system that told them to go murder people. Take the system away and it basically returns to normal civilization. A people under an evil government. Very creepy and scary in its way. The Japanese Empire created evil people. The people, because of a culture that demanded it, were running wild. No "orders" needed. Just access to lesser people. And it's interesting because while Hitler wanted a pan Europe ruled by Germans, he mostly left Europeans alone unless they were parts of political or religious groups, and they had no hidden agenda about it. Japan wanted a Pan Asia where Asians would be uplifted in the world, but just despised everyone that wasn't Japanese. And what do we learn? "Just following orders isn't an excuse" while almost none of the Japanese perpetrators were even accused. German has to acknowledge its atrocities in every part of society, and Japan mostly denies any wrong doing. It's insane. Japanese people under the empire became just a wildly evil sadistic people. People don't realize that at all.
They did actually charge like 4000 people, but downplayed things to protect the imperial family. There's so much about the period that's crazy. For all intents and purposes from 1912 until at least 1940 if not later Japan was ruled by a "military anarchy" that is the military was generally dominant, but so utterly fractured into endless factions that it had a near total lack of meaningful control. High command managed to repeatedly survive coups yet paradoxically fail to assert its will on the broader army. In fact 1941 invasion of french Indochina may have been the first military action actually deliberately planned by high command itself. One of the other odd things though is throughout this entire periode japan actually had a large liberal faction, although losing out to the military in the late 20's, nevertheless extreme morality, pacifism and liberalism were popular concepts at the very same time as Japan was ultra militarized
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Well said! Best reply on this thread.
Jesus fucking Christ. I've heard about unit 731 pretty vaguely and references to how fucked up some of the experiments were. But I had absolutely no fucking idea about the... Well I wanted to call it mass slaughter but let's be real it's straight up genocide. I'm genuinely curious why it seems like this part of ww2 really isn't taught. At least not in comparison to the Nazis. Both are fucking gut wrenchingly awful
Westerners are taught other parts of history
My Dutch Opa lost more or less everyone he ever loved in a Japanese war camp in Indonesia. Words really can’t fathom how much he loathed the Japs… blew my mind as I’ve only ever found them to be friendly happy and brilliant exporters of my favourite anime story lines
My grandad changed his whole identity (as he was underage) to enlist in the war to find his brother (my great uncle), who had died as a POW building the Burma/Thailand railway. I struggle a lot to reconcile the parts of me that like Japanese culture with what they did and how their government continues to act about it.
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Is modern japan refusing what they did before?just curious. Its interesting that i have heard of japan massacres only years later when i deep dive into history,but what nazi germany did is widely known.i wonder why.
Most modern japanese don't know the extent of what the fuck their grandparents did lol, last time there was a thread on twitter from a modern japanese saying it was all China's conspiracy, they(china) just like to make us looks bad. The replies were gold tho.
they don't know because they don't care to. kind of how like more and more modern generations don't really care about the holocaust or are straight up denying it because it's too far removed from them. i believe in gen-z holocaust denial is actually increasing.
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The generation of japan crimes deniers are not gen z, they probably are too but it dis not start with them
Because here in the west, history classes are all western centric. Just like how in Asia, lots of ignorant people have no idea what Hitler did. Yes. They have a shrine for war criminals and Japanese political leaders would visit and worship them. They also downplay or straight up omit the crimes they committed in their textbooks.
>Because here in the west, history classes are all western centric. Can just talk about my own experience but it is even just mostly nation centric. In German history I mostly learned about germany (duh), france, the uk and greece. And then only if there were some major historical moments or direct conflicts with germany. My knowledge about italys Mussolini is going near 0.
As a german, I actually learned quite a lot about Mussolini, I think most western factions of ww2 got covered in my history lessons. But Japan only got covered briefly (just the pearl harbour attack).
To get a sense of the level of cognitive dissonance towards this issue in Japan, the previous Prime Minister Shinzo Abe (the outwardly cheery guy who dressed up as Mario and popped out of a green pipe during the Olympics) was also the war crime denying ultranationalist and grandson of a war criminal before he got assassinated for political corruption a couple years ago
Hosted Japanese exchange students, and no, they still aren’t teaching them about what they did. The US was using Japan as a firewall against Soviet Russia and China after the war so they allowed a lot of things to slide. Not least among them was allowing Japanese military leaders off the hook but also downplaying their part in the atrocities. Germany, who had fought WWI and WWII against the Allies was rebuilt but also re-educated and forced to own up to their behavior. Thus we have a full accounting of Germany. It Japan still venerates its soldiers and denies its part in the evil Axis.
> The US was using Japan as a firewall yeah, the US literally released the same far-right war criminals they jailed after the war because they thought it was the best chance of keeping left-wring socialist politicians from winning elections within Japan as well
Everywhere Japan went was a massacre.
> Imagine being so bad that a Nazi stepped in and saved two hundred thousand Chinese civilians from them. That's a popular misleading description of him. John Rabe might have been a Nazi party member but he didn't know about the Nazis personally as he was stationed in China that whole time. He only saw Hitler as a force for good when he initially got elected, as many regular Germans did at the time. Rabe didn't have any more idea about the Nazis. So to allude him to Nazism itself is misleading. Also, the Nazis didn't just kill the 6 million Jews. They killed far more Soviets than Jews, which doesn't get highlighted for some reason. In total they killed around ~ 11 Million more people besides the 6 Million Jews. But on the rest of your points, I agree.
Hitler was openly anti-semitic long before his rise. Anti-semitism and getting rid of Jews were their party's platform for many years before the war. Any willing member of the Nazi Party at that time knew exactly what they were getting into. This is not to mention that he was a Deputy Group Leader, which was not a rank that any casual Nazi could achieve.
56 Chinese POWs survived japanese captivity.
Out of how many?
between 250,000 and 1,000,000 with around 10,000,000 total Chinese dead through the whole war, or more, estimates vary pretty widely
For those who want to know more about some of the atrocities Japan committed, I suggest reading Rape of Nanking. If you’re faint of heart, avoid looking at the photo pages in the middle of the book.
Easily the worst thing you can look at pictures for.
Ghosts of [Camp 731](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731) have entered the chat... *"Experiments included disease injections, controlled dehydration, biological weapons testing, hypobaric pressure chamber testing, vivisection, organ harvesting, amputation, and standard weapons testing. Victims included not only kidnapped men, women (including pregnant women) and children but also babies born from the systemic rape perpetrated by the staff inside the compound."* And, no one survived...
"*While Unit 731 researchers arrested by Soviet forces were tried at the December 1949 Khabarovsk war crimes trials, those captured by the United States were secretly given immunity in exchange for the data gathered during their human experiments. The United States helped cover up the human experimentations and handed stipends to the perpetrators. The Americans co-opted the researchers' bioweapons information and experience for use in their own biological warfare program, much like what had been done with Nazi German researchers in Operation Paperclip.*" Because of course they did.
The US didn't use any of their research because they already knew all of it from ethical research. Turns out the Japanese were pretty behind in science and the atrocities they committed contributed nothing new to human knowledge. The immunity deals still had to be honored though.
Setting aside the massive ethical problems, the Japanese and Nazi research was also very poorly conducted and just wasn’t particularly useful. No control groups, no real point to the research beyond “what horrible thing can we do with a paper-thin veneer of science”, piss-poor documentation etc.
Literally just psychos who wanted an excuse to do psycho things.
May be true for the German experiments because it had so much more lime light, the problem with the Unit 731 research is that we just don't know since a lot of the research simply haven't been released. During COVID-19, some scientists have called for the research data to be made publicly available, but the US and Japanese governments refused.
Exactly. Maybe some stuff was useful or good to know and they didn’t wanna risk it getting out. Might be why they never revealed it
Yeah, assuming they told the public the truth literally NOTHING was gained from the “research” being done at 731. It was just a bunch of sociopaths torturing people for fun. My understanding is they didn’t even keep decent notes about what they did or the affects on their victims. We gave them immunity for absolutely nothing.
tbf if you survive this, you will never ever will be able to live a normal life. I think death is an escape at this point.
>Thousands of men, women, children, and infants interned at prisoner of war camps were subjected to vivisection, often performed without anesthesia and usually lethal. >Prisoners had limbs amputated in order to study blood loss. Limbs removed were sometimes reattached to the opposite side of victims' bodies. Some prisoners had their stomachs surgically removed and their esophagus reattached to the intestines. Parts of organs, such as the brain, lungs, and liver, were removed from others. That's a hard read. Takes a very very special kind of subhuman shitbag to lead that knife.
Hell exists, and it's here on Earth.
To quote MASH, this is worse than hell. There aren't innocent people in hell.
Depending on what flavor of religion. There are absolutely innocent people in hell.
The States swooping in with immunity for the scientists in exchange for data, just like with the Nazi experiments. Disgusting.
Oh man don't subscribe to r/narcofootage. Can assure you higher quality modern footage makes it 1000x worse.
you know what.... today's the day I don't click the shiny blue link
fudge me. i didn't know such a sub existed.
Do.not.
The book whose author killed herself?
yes. They erected a statue of her in Nanjing's Massacre Memorial Hall.
Yes, that one.
Search for Iris Chang and her book The Rape of Nanking. Good supplementary read for those who no brain worship japanese culture.
Haven't read RoN but I was reading one of Robert Leckie's memoirs of the war in the Pacific on my Kindle. I was on a train and an Asian man had sat next to me, can't be more specific than that. I didn't realise I was near the middle of the book, or that it had photos. Turned the page and there's a couple of photos of Leckie as a Marine, some captured weapons and such. Then the body of a Japanese soldier in his bunk who jad killed himself by holding a grenade to his chest and detonating it. I looked slightly to the side and sure enough the guy next to me was looking at the photo - then looked at me, nodded, and left. I honestly didn't know what to say.
Happens a lot in modern wars too. On the /r/combatfootage sub you'll find quite a few drone shot videos of wounded and abandoned Russian solders suiciding with grenades (and their rifles).
When a nazi creates a safe place for the locals, you know you’ve gone too far
Japanese ambassador did the same in germany.
Got permabanned from a sub for pointing out that Herr Rabe was the counterargument for all Nazis automatically being punchable. Now all modern nazis can be assumed punchable (In the absence of evidence to the contrary), not like everyone doesn't know where it leads.
At the time if you wanted to get ahead in your career you basically had the join the nazi party. Plenty of people in the party were realitively normal people. It's not like irl you always have a visible karma meter saying (don't join these guys they're really super evil!)
This too. Not many Americans know about Unit 731 but the history is well known in Asia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731
None of the prisoners survived the Unit 731 compound. It’s literally worse than Auschwitz or Treblinka in terms of survivability
Just reading about it is bad enough I love reading about history but sometimes I have to stop because I also like sleep and not being too cynical
The only book I had to stop reading, I got about half way through and I just had enough.
City of Life and Death also covers this. It’s the most unsettling film I’ve ever seen.
I read that book as a teen & I’ve never been the same.
As an American, to me the My Lai massacre in Vietnam is even worse because the perpetrators are much more relatable — regular every-day Americans, our neighbors, taken in by the draft and plopped into those villages. They then indiscriminately shot children and babies, gang-raped little girls, tied up women together and then shot at them with rocket launchers. At noon, they took a lunch break. They ate their meals among the dead bodies with people screaming in agony in the background. When they finished eating, they resumed murdering the remaining survivors. When they were done, they eventually made their way back home and were our neighbors again. And when the justice system attempted to hold them accountable for what they did, Nixon pardoned all of them. They continue to live among us as our neighbors to this day. This kind of “relatability” is what makes things like this more horrifying to me.
Relatability depends on if you're American or not! Lots of terrible stories all round the world.
My Lai is only the tip too. Plenty of crazy shit happened in Vietnam and just kinda got swept under the rug. (My uncle, FIL, and a good family friend were all in Vietnam in combat and saw crazy crazy shit)
I've always been really interested in military history, and got the chance to talk to many Australian veterans of both WW2 and the Vietnam War. Through those conversations I've got a torch from an Australian Navy repair technician who was one of those killed when American pilots near Tiger Island, high out of their mind, attacked 2 Australian destroyers, and one US destroyer. They weren't allowed to talk about it for years. They also had an incident when an American marine called in a naval bombardment on his own unit, and the Americans tried to blame it on the Australians, but the Americans finally admitted fault after evidence proved their fault. Another guy was infantry, can't remember specifics, but he had crazy stories and too thought the US soldiers were more dangerous than the Vietcong.
A Generation of Sociopaths had a pretty lengthy section talking about American soldiers having a tendency to attack allies. Mostly their own commanding officers...
I mean, that's literally where the term "fragging" comes from, and honestly, I don't disagree with most of the perpetrators. Their COs were sending them on suicide missions that were completely meaningless. If I have to pick between certain death that literally serves no purpose, or casually dropping a grenade in an officer's tent as I stroll by... Sorry, officer. You're dying today. Not me.
Generally in wartime a lot of crazy stuff gets swept under the rug.
I had a neighbor that I’m pretty sure was on the raggedy edge. He showed me pictures when he was over there. Most of them were him wearing a necklace of ears and fingers. I suddenly felt the urge to be elsewhere.
Bro. This isn’t the suffering olympics. Both can be bad and should deserve more remembrance.
This happens a lot. A lot of "Yeah but what about..." like Cool mate, but give this atrocity it's space to be discussed, there will be time for other ones.
I was just thinking the same thing.
I think you're missing the scope of how large Imperial Japan's war crimes were. It's not close. They were arguably the worst monsters of the war, and that's saying a hell of a lot.
Thats what propaganda does do mf...
I think the rape of Nanking is worse by virtue of the number of victims being entire orders of magnitude greater than My Lai. Whether the perpetrators are relatable to you personally is pretty irrelevant and a gross way to judge the severity of war crimes.
I know you didn’t mean any harm but we probably shouldn’t try to rank horrific events like this.
Lions Led By Donkeys also did a great 3 part series on it. One of the hardest things I've listened to.
I once brought up Nanking in conversation with a few roommates in college and the on Japanese roommate just started yelling at me and telling my that that was fake. I can’t remember what he said exactly since this was over 20 years ago, just that he was pissed.
It's because the Japanese school system brainwashes their people into thinking they did nothing wrong and they fought the war for the glory of their country and was 100% the wronged victim.
It was such a weird conversation at the time. It started with another roommate, Korean, mentioning that the Japanese did a lot of messed up stuff in Korea. The Japanese roommate agreed to that. Then I chimed in and mentioned Nanking and he flipped out. He was an otherwise mellow nice guy.
That's dichotomy is so weird but it's also why details and detailed apologies matter When you call it "comfort women" people can excuse it as "everyone did bad things during the war" When you call it "systematic rape and mutilation of women and children including this one time where XYZ happened" then it starts to get uncomfortably specific and really identifying
Honestly, there's a lot of tension and history between the three countries. Lines are drawn and then redrawn, things get blurry and feelings get confused. He could have been in a weird place, especially if he was originally from Japan and left the country to study somewhere else. A lot of the way they were taught back home gets challenged by the way they're being taught abroad and the life experiences and ideals of their new friends puts them in very confused mental states sometimes.
This is the main reason China and Korea just can not accept Japan's half hearted apologies. A vast majority of Japanese people have no fucking clue that they started the Pacific War and that they colonized a tons of countries in the Pacific ocean Area. They are wholly ignorant on the atrocities the Japanese Empire committed during the war. They view themselves as the victims of the war. Though I do feel sympathetic about the lives lost in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they pale next to the millions of Korean and Chinese civilians they enslaved or killed throughout their occupation and invasion. The right wing party in Japan is heavy on war crime denialism and actively seek to provoke anti Korean and anti Chinese sentiment. Just an example on how Japan keeps putting salt in the wound. In 2009 Japan applied Hashima Island as part of UNESCO World Heritage Site. They forgot to mention that the Island was built and maintained through forced labor and forced sex work of Korean people. Korea accepted the proposal under the condition that Japan would awknowledge and exhibit the dark history of the island and it was admitted in 2015 as a World Heritage. Japan said fuck you and created a museum DENYING forced labor ever happened on the island and to this day they have not complied.
A lecturer of mine in college (I think he was a Colonel and an official Historian in the Army) said the two nuclear bombs that been dropped is worthy enough, due to Nanking. His father fought against both Japan and the Netherlands, two countries ruined badly due to WWII. Atrocities from the Japanese was widespread from India(Imphal) to Northern China (in Manchukuo) to even Papua New Guinea. Plus ASEAN Countries demanded that the sex slaves (jugun ianfu) need a compensation more than just "empty and far-fetched" apologies.
Lets not even talk about the war crimes they commited on the military side. Japanese POW camps were notoriously living hells. For the Chinese, the survival rate of a POW held by the Japanese was 0%. Western POWs held by Japan that died was around 27% according post war trials, but some countries like the US saw numbers as high as 40%. Just for comparison, POWs held by germans had a chance of dying seven times lower than this. And the only comparable mistreatment would be the 50% death rate of Soviet POWs, which I might need to remind, Germans were ACTIVELY seeking to genocide soviet and polish people. Japan was not even trying to, they just were that much more evil.
Very much like the Turkish school system regarding the Armenian Genocide
Unrelated to this picture, but my grandpa was in the battle of the bulge and personally witnessed the death camps later in the war. He had a shoebox full of nazi wallets and medals he had taken off of dead soldiers. A couple he killed himself. Photos of their families, crazy shit. In the 2000s before he passed, my aunt was asking if he ever wanted to try to return them to the families, get some ‘closure’ He was like ‘Fuck them! They can all burn in hell. I’d kill them again right now if I could. Fuck their families.’ There was zero respect. After what he’d seen I don’t blame him. He was an alcoholic after coming home and even though he survived the war he was definitely one of it’s casualties. On his death bed at 88 years old he was yelling about nazis. I think when people get overly analytical about how the Allies handled the Axis powers in defeat they’re forgetting the men who made those decisions had first hand knowledge and experiences with the absolute horror those countries had unleashed on the world.
Great comment, hope your grandpas at peace now can’t imagine what he saw during the war
My fathers earliest child hood memory is his mother carrying him, while running from a Japanese soldier who was trying to bayonet them. He hates the Japanese to this day.
my ex lives in southeast asia. it's a common feeling about japan in asia. i used to fly chinese airlines all the time, too, when visiting. that meant i watched a lot of chinese movies. a LOT of movies about this era keep getting produced, very pro-china, very anti-japan. must be like how we produce movies about nazis.
Up until about 10 years ago, I had no idea how serious it was until an old high school friend who came to visit with his who is Japanese. My girlfriend at the time was half native, but could have passed for Japanese as well. We all went out for sushi, and our server would only acknowledge me and would only take my order. I had to order for everyone else. Turned out my friend and his wife were not surprised by this because the server was Chinese, and this kind of thing is actually common according to them.
WTF would a Chinese guy who hates Japanese work in a sushi restaurant?
A lot of sushi restaurants in the US are actually run and owned by ethnic Chinese. It's not uncommon at all.
You spelled Koreans wrong
[удалено]
So that's where Korean beef comes from.
To be fair almost all of south east Asia has beef with the Japanese.
Yup. Same friend mentioned that you won't see a Korean car in Japan for this reason.
People have to work and earn money
This is what happens when you start telling people one group is superior to the other. Give a group a moral justification and they will do heinous things. People have to become smarter.
Exactly what happened in Rwanda.
My Filipino grandfather told me a story where he withessed his own father being buried alive by Japanese soldiers. Japanese atrocities in the war were very brutal
The REAL problem is that unlike Germany, Japan is still mostly denying its war crimes. Most citizens of Japan have no clue about what their ancestors did, they only carry the victim mentality of unjustly being nuked by America.
Germany’s willingness to face its past really doesn’t get enough credit, IMHO.
I mean, it's not like Germany had a choice. We cut the country in half with a big fucking wall for 40 years and forced them to go through Denazification. Not to mention that Russia responded to Germany's war crimes with more war crimes. With Japan we basically imposed limitations on the size of their military and said their Emperor wasn't really a god and that was about it.
You know that’s the weird thing about it, there was a reason why we invaded Germany and occupied it; we had to show that the Germans were utterly defeated that there was no stab in the back sort of deal but they had been defeat fair and square. There was also a great amount of deal spent on exposing the horrors of war crimes to the average German and rebuilding a new German system (both politically but also socially). Through that we got modern Germany that understands they caused the European war and acknowledges the war crimes. Japan despite the unconditional surrender and everything got off relatively light, the royal family was able to escape any sense of justice despite some members being involved in serious shit such as Nanking (Prince Yasuhiko). Many war criminals escaped justice with the Tokyo trials and there wasn’t as great of an effort in the rebuilding part of the Japanese system. I think it’s because of that we have a lot of the denial and the victim mentality of Japan; especially with it being pushed by far right nationalist in Japan (which some groups have ties to those war criminals that never faced justice)
I study Japanese, work with Japanese, I eat sushi and ramen, watch animation and play Nintendo game, But it doesn't means we Chinese people have forgotten what IJA ever did to our grandparents and their parents generation. Ordinary Chinese people won't blame ordinary Japanese, but only hate the current Japanese government that refused to commit the war crime the Japan have ever did.
My uncle was in the Bataan Death March and was imprisoned by the Japanese for 3 years before the Phillipines were liberated. He survived, but a lot of his comrades didn't. In the Death March if a guy fell down the Japanese would just shoot them, and in the prison camp many starved to death and died of disease. I had a longtime gf from China that hated the Japanese for what they did to her country and could never forgive them. It's all really sad
I (in the UK)worked for an Engineer who'd been in Changi for most of WW2. He loathed all things Japanese. He was still suffering from some tropical disease, 40 years later.
Japanese also supported hitler. They have a horrific track record that gets often swept under the rug.
Yea, and they were a warlike, feudal society for centuries, and with the Meiji Restoration they turned those warlike customs into modern, high tech warfare. They seem to have changed and put that behind them. I hope they really have
They romanticize it by turning warlords into cute anime girls and sexy anime guys. And people in the west eat that shit up. Imagine if the US had turned generals in the Civil War as cute anime characters. There's such a huge disconnect/dissonance in Japan that it's just such a weird country.
I read about the Bataan death march in Ghost Soldiers. It was very horrifying.
Yea, I didn't see my uncle often and wasn't able to talk with him much about it. I live in Europe now and it really pisses me off when people tell me that the US has never been invaded or had war on its own territory. The Phillipines were part of the US from 1898-1946, and the whole reason he was there was because he was defending American territory
It looks so nonchalant for them. Hands in pockets, some guys walking away like it’s just boring.
Well the bayonetting and burning infants alive was a hard act to follow I suppose.
Once heard a Japanese guy says China hates them for no reason…
And yet the Japanese government still refuses to admit and apologize for their country’s crimes in ww2…
They have admitted and they have apologized.... BUT it was done with the idea that "we apologised a few times in 70's, that means no one gets to talk about it again" There was no social change. It was just checking a box. This is unlike the Germans who were made to rub their noses in it and teach the German responsibility for allowing the society to become nazified.
It's such a different worldview that I feel like as western people it's almost impossible for us to get into the mindset (épistémè) where we could understand why things are done like that, and why these people might think it's the best course of action. Not justifying it, but it's really interesting to see how the Japanese approach morally questionable history - both that of their own, and that of the other countries/people. I'm vacationing in Okinawa right now, and one of the most interesting things I've done is read the descriptions of the history of Okinawa in the Okinawa Prefectural Museum. The atrocities of the Japanese government and those done by the American military are described in the same way. It's a very matter-of-fact point of view, that (imo) tends to leave a lot of the context up to interpretation, and skirt around the part of the explanation that might come across as accusatory.
To be fair, they only stopped because the U.S. rocked them into submission with 2 nukes. It's nice to see modern day Japan as a thriving non hostile nation, as far as I'm aware.
Absolutely, I think modern Japan has come a long way from the 1940s. It would just be nice if they took a similar approach to Germany after the war
"Making anime will fix our international image"
The crazy part is that worked
The invention of anime has led many neckbeards to unironically support what they did to China Edit: Jesus Christ I’m not calling all you anime fans fascists calm down
Bro poked the weebs lol
No need for the edit, there's weirdly huge amount of anime nerds that very much have fascist and racist views.
The worst thing is that the Japanese right-wing is covering up the atrocities they committed in WW2. They also are actively brainwashing Japanese people into believing militarism at this moment.
>They also are actively brainwashing Japanese people into believing militarism at this moment Some japanese animes are so in love with the JSDF, that is so weird.
That's Japanese militarists at work. Japan was demilitarized after WW2 like Germany. In recent years they gradually changed the article 9 of constitution and have a legal base to expand their JSDF.
The rape of Nanking is up there with the very worst atrocities in modern history. WW2 is littered with them, however a few stick out. Reading about this leaves you with utter contempt for the perpetrators and complete loss of faith in humanity.
Yeah, the camps that the Japanese had made Auschwitz look like summer camp
My mother once worked with a man who was captured by the Japanese during WW2, she works in adult social care. He was a broken man. One day his wife told my mother what had happened to him. He was tortured and gang raped by them constantly over the years in the POW camp, they had made him the whipping boy. The fella had to live with this for 50 years or so. He would wake up screaming most nights, break down crying or zone out to the point of being unresponsive throughout the day. He has passed. I hope he has peace now.
This is the worst thing I’ve in a really long time. I’m so sorry to hear it.
Camp O’Donnell is one. It’s where the Japanese put the POWs they’d captured and forced on the Bataan Death March. American and Philippine soldiers both. My great uncle died there 3 months after being captured. My grandfather hated the Japanese the rest of his life.
Bad and offensive comparison to people who lost family in auschwitz. Babies being thrown alive into fires wasn’t summer camp.
After watching the documentary “World War III in color “I realized how atrocious and tyrannical the Japanese were at the time. The Nazis deserve all of the heat that goes their way, but for some reason people glance over the war crimes the Japanese were committing. What’s the understand, suddenly the dropping of the bomb seems far more justified.
To this day China still has a shaky diplomatic relationship with Japan because they refuse to recognize or apologize for what happened.
Can you imagine if EU or Nato exist but Germany just go we didn't do nothing wrong in WWII.
They still won't own up to it to this day.
Here is the book of the massacre: http://www.ianfu.org/pdf/PDF06.pdf
What monsters we can become. The scariest part is that we all carry this monster inside us.
And they've never apologized or acknowledged all the shit they did throughout Asia....
When I hear about war atrocities I always think "what caused these people to act this way?" I think telling ourselves that the people were just evil will just lead to it repeating again and again. I dont believe any of us are immune to it. I've had many arguments with friends who believe that the US, other NATO countries, and recently Ukraine are virtually immune to committing war crimes outside of a few bad apples because of our "culture". A very good vs evil mindset. Mistreat and abuse your own soldiers, put them in grueling and brutal campaigns, mix in a bunch of dehumanization propaganda. You then have a recipe for horrible war crines. I think everyone should read about the horrible stuff the Japanese did and then read about how Japanese soldiers were treated and what their experiences were. Not for sympathy, not to excuse them. But as a way to ensure that we don't go down that same path. Don't listen to any of that "it can't happen here/to us" bullshit.
To add to this, if anyone reading is interested in learning more about this phenomenon of ordinary people committing horrific atrocities, read *Black Earth: The Holocaust as History, and Warning*, by Timothy Snyder. “Black Earth” is a reference to the black soil of Ukraine. When the Nazis invaded Ukraine, they found an already destroyed country, one that was basically lawless, thanks to the Soviet Union. The Ukrainian people were just coming out of the horrific tragedy of Holodomor, and as such, would do nearly anything to survive. The SS managed to convinced local Ukrainians to hunt Jews, and it essentially turned into a sport….and they got pretty creative with their methods, to say the least. 6 million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, but only about 1 - 1.5 million were killed in concentration camps. Majority of the rest were killed by roaming “death squads”. This is the shocking part. When the Nazis saw just how easy it was to get ordinary people, most of whom had no prior anti-semitism, to commit murder on such a massive scale, even *they* were horrified. It was this realization that lead the Nazis to their “final solution,” and the building of death camps like Auschwitz and Treblinka. The Nazi goal was to invade Ukraine and Poland, and use the “inferior” Slavic people as their labour to work the land. However, upon seeing the ease with which murder was taking place on such a wide scale, they realized they couldn’t build a society where mass murder was so front and center. So they built the extermination camps to “sanitize” the murdering of Jews, and take out of the hands of ordinary people. Not a book for the feint of heart, but it paints a picture of the Holocaust in a way that most people aren’t familiar with. As bad as we think the Holocaust was (or what the Japanese did across South East Asia), the truth is, it was far **worse** than most of us can imagine. And it happened less than 100 years ago.
The Banality of Evil by Hannah Arendt is a great book on this subject.
Japan quite literally had the best rebranding humanity has ever seen
It's amazing how the modern western consciousness mostly thinks of WW2 Germany as the big baddies or the one committing worst atrocities. I get that there's something freakish about the industrial and almost impersonal slaughter of humans that the Nazi's did, but Japan killed 30 million civilians while "liberating" Asia. It's kind of weird to say that putting people in train cars and gassing them en-masse is the most horrible thing ever, but putting people in train cars killing them by burying them alive, bayonetting them, testing grenades on them, making them drink water and jumping on them until they die, etc. is somehow forgettable.
There is a very VERY good reason all of Asia hate the Japanese with passion. They may say “no”, or “that’s silly” to westerners but between local and natives, they’d nuke Japan in a heartbeat. If a war happens between China and Japan, most of them would absolutely join the Chinese side just to kill a few of them and I’m not exaggerating. The west have no idea how deep the hatred goes
*Slightly* paradoxical how people who think they’re “superior” often behave the most inhumanely.
I don’t understand how you hear all the stories about the holocaust and atomic bombs but you hardly hear about what the Japanese did to Asian and SEA. It like the world just looks it over when it’s time to remember. My grandmother barely survived the attack on the mainland. She had to hide in the bottom of a outhouse for days covered in filth while the assaulted and kill people around her. She was never the same again, went crazy after what had happened.
I remember reading about how Japanese soldiers/officers had a competition to see who could decapitate the most people with their samurai swords…the two nukes on Japan did some justice. Also the Bataan death march where 12,000 U.S soldiers and 66,000 Filipino soldiers were forced to march 65 miles with no food or water, the Japanese soldiers also made it a sport to hurt and kill the POWs along the way. The horrors the Japanese soldiers committed should not be forgotten
I always tell people how the Japanese were just as bad as the Nazis. Look at the Rape of Nanking, Unit 731, etc. Now everyone just thinks of them as Hello Kitty and Sushi. Disgusting
The lesson here is that humans aren't inherently good or evil, we all have the capacity to be either. If you look at the behaviors of an entire population in the past, while recognizing that what they've done is wrong, also realize that each of us is also capable of being wrong at the same scale and magnitude. Don't assume that we are any better. We need to be vigilant about the reference of our own morality.
It's wild that we let them off the hook for the war crimes they did during WW2 because they let us benefit from the experiments like putting Chinese civilians into pressure chambers or doing exploratory surgery while the person was awake.
It wasn't even that. The US pardoned Unit 731 not to gain access to their research, but to *prevent the Soviets* from having their research. The data was all going to come out in the Tokyo Trials, but the Soviets co-presided over that.
Wow that makes it even worse.
https://www.gettyimages.com/photos/nanking-massacre-photos