In Philip K. Dick's novel Man in the High Castle, the Japanese are treated as relatively benevolent rulers, while the Nazis are just the Nazis. Can you please respect Israel?
This is despite the fact that in reality, the situation couldn't even be further from the truth. Actually, the Japs were so bad that the Nazis freaked out and told them to chill. Unfortunately, this bootlicking isn't just isolated to the world of fiction and weebs.
In mainstream western politics, there's a call for the US to repent for its atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and emphasize American interament camps and history books. Trying to frame the narrative with the Pacific War as the European powers as the bad guys and the Japanese as the good guys. If you were to ask most Southeast and East Asians today, they would probably find this narrative highly ignorant and repulsive.
No matter how bad the Europeans were, Japan was just simply 10 times worse. It's actually quite disturbing of how little most Westerners know very little about Japanese war crimes against civilians and soldiers alike. Most Japanese war crimes can be categorized in one of three groupings: genocide, rape, and torture.
Oh boy, what a great start. In 1937, the Pacific theater was a lot longer than European theater. Two Japanese soldiers would often get into slaying contests.
The concept was quite simple. Who could slay x amount of Chinese civilians in the shortest span of time? So to rack up their body counts, the imperial officers would often just attack rural peasants or fleeing civilians in the besieged area that they were assigned to.
This poor discipline on the surface just seems to be an exception. Except it wasn't. This is because just days later was the rape of Nang Jing.
Following the capture of the Chinese city, General Msoui Awan ordered the cleansing of all the city's inhabitants. The Japanese would set a blaze across the city that would burn through onethird of all the infrastructure and construction in the region. And this Aberno would kill tens of thousands.
Unfortunately, the lucky ones died in the fire. Other ways you would get cleansed by the Japanese would be being buried alive, getting shot in the head, getting shanked in the stomach, or most commonly being beheaded. Japanese units also had quote scientists who unleashed bio warfare among innocent civilians in China.
Viruses such as chalera, small pox, bubonic plague, and other tropical diseases were forced upon the population, and some of the documented sick were taken away to the mainland to be further experimented on. Though the total number of deaths in the destruction of the city is unknown, it's estimated by Britannia to have had around only 100 to 300,000 people. All right, you might say it's just one rogue unit under a malevolent general.
This can't be true for the majority of the army. Oh, but it was. Acts of violence along this caliber were performed by the Imperial Army all across the Pacific.
And as the occupation of the Pacific dragged on, the Japanese found new ways to entertain themselves and get their mind out of war by putting their mind in the gutter instead, ensuing a policy of mass rape and sexual slavery. This started because of government mandated brothel to quote entertain the troops. Sex, though, as a silver lining, if you could even call it that, the first women in those brothel were actually consenting to it, mostly by being groomed, tricked, or swindled into the job.
But hey, consents consent. So yeah, turns out being a state sponsored prostitute wasn't a very popular option in a shame based society. So the army needed to find some alternatives.
Wait a minute, we have colonies, said Tojo probably. And thus the concept of comfort women were born. They're not sex slaves if we don't call it that.
Basically, if you were a woman from any of these countries in this part of the world during this time, you were probably horrifically assaulted. Sex. But remember, your misery was for the glory of Japan.
And as a token of thanks from the Japanese government, you were likely shot in the back of the head and dropped in a shallow grave. Don't worry, the alternative is even worse. You were likely sent back to the mainland for uh experimentation.
You see, one thing that fascinated industrialized Japan were bioatt attacks and human anatomy. Well, that was their cover story at the Tokyo trials, and it worked with Truman, trading all their classified files in exchange for pardons from all crimes. So, what were in these files?
To continue the story of the comfort woman, you would likely take part in the famous unit 731 experiment, the reverse abortion, which is exactly what it sounds like. You see, the Japanese were curious if a fetus could survive without their mother. So, a victim, if not a comfort woman, who usually was already pregnant, would be brutally raped until she very was visibly pregnant.
She would then be brought to a dissection table. This is where the fun begins. While still conscious, the woman would be strapped down to the table and be cut from her crotch to her breast like a cowzone with a fetus in it.
Then they would cut him to the womb and bring out the still developing fetus to see how long it lives. Here's a real shocker. Neither the woman nor the fetus survived.
Experiments that involved rape or pregnant women were actually pretty common due to the uh large accessibility of comfort women who weren't already in a shallow grave. There were also several reports of quote captivity babies, though no reports of any survivors. Unit 731 and the Japanese government as a whole would also use mass rape to quote study the effects of incest and known STDs at the time.
Another more common experiment was the hypothermia experiment. The Japanese needed to research the effects of hypothermia. So what they would do is dunk certain limbs of the victim into freezing cold water, then toss them outside.
Something to note is that these specific experiments took place in northern Hokkaido or Manuria. So it was pretty [ __ ] cold. Once the limbs of the victim, usually a child, turned purple and blue, the Japanese would simply cut off the limb and do it again.
Rinse and repeat until all you have left is a first aid doll. But we can't just sit here and let that 50% remaining human go to waste if they weren't already granted the liberation of death. The Japanese would then expose the barely alive victim with several different diseases.
Stuffing the squirming limbless former human with tons of biohazardous material like a cowzone filled with toxic waste. Turns out the immune system of a limbless child can't fight against chickenpox as well as your average battle hardened soldier. And then the poor child can finally be free of his or her pain.
Other common experiments included vivisections. The victim was typically a captured USAF, RAF pilot, or a Soviet sailor. The fate of these men were as about as gruesome as you can imagine, as a large portion of their skin was sliced off and their organs half-hazardly removed like a pumpkin that's about to be carved.
Then the doctors would just observe how long you last until you faint from exhaustion or die. I feel really bad for the guy who had his abdomen skin just to only have like his appendix or kidney removed. That would suck.
At the tide turned against the Japanese, the cruel conditions got in occupied lands. And for prisoners aboard, guinea pigs or not, life just got worse. Rations, if they even had any in the first place, were cut and random executions became more common.
As for an example, Japanese soldiers in occupied British Raj would typically cannibalize on PS, mostly because they didn't have any food of their own. But to truly emphasize how screwed you would have been, in 1945, out of the hundreds of thousands of captured Chinese PS from the SinoJapanese War, there was only a reported 56 survivors. Today, it is estimated that around 30 million people were killed at the hands of the Japanese.
For reference, only an estimated 6 million people died in the Holocaust. But hey, at least when the war was over, the Japanese adopted Article 9 and got past their blood lust. Wait a minute.
This has been Mr Asian Pie. See you on the flip. And don't be stupid.
