Japanese
war crimes occurred in many Asian and Pacific countries during the
period of Japanese imperialism, primarily during the Second
Sino-Japanese War and World War II.
These incidents have also been described as an Asian Holocaust and Japanese war atrocities.
R. J. Rummel, a professor of political science at the University of Hawaii, estimates that between 1937 and 1945,
the
Japanese military murdered from nearly 3 to over 10 million people,
most likely 6 million Chinese, Koreans, Malaysians, Indonesians,
Filipinos and Indochinese, among others, including Western prisoners of
war.
According to Rummel, “This democide [i.e., death by
government] was due to a morally bankrupt political and military
strategy, military expediency and custom, and national culture.”
According
to Rummel, in China alone, during 1937–45, approximately 3.9 million
Chinese were killed, mostly civilians, as a direct result of the
Japanese operations and 10.2 million in the course of the war.
The
most infamous incident during this period was the Nanking Massacre of
1937–38, when, according to the findings of the International Military
Tribunal for the Far East, the Japanese Army massacred as many as
300,000 civilians and prisoners of war, although the accepted figure is
somewhere in the hundreds of thousands.
In Southeast Asia, the
Manila massacre of February 1945 resulted in the death of 100,000
civilians in the Philippines. It is estimated that at least one out of
every 20 Filipinos died at the hands of the Japanese during the
occupation.
In
Singapore during February and March 1942, the Sook Ching massacre was a
systematic extermination of perceived hostile elements among the
Chinese population there.
Lee Kuan Yew, the ex-Prime Minister of
Singapore, said during an interview with National Geographic that there
were between 50,000 and 90,000 casualties,while according to Major
General Kawamura Saburo, there were 5,000 casualties in total.
War
crimes have been defined by the Tokyo Charter as “violations of the
laws or customs of war,” which includes crimes against enemy combatants
and enemy non-combatants.
War crimes also included deliberate
attacks on citizens and property of neutral states as they fall under
the category of non-combatants, as at the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Military
personnel from the Empire of Japan have been accused or convicted of
committing many such acts during the period of Japanese imperialism from
the late 19th to mid-20th centuries.
They have been accused of
conducting a series of human rights abuses against civilians and
prisoners of war throughout East Asia and the western Pacific region.
These
events reached their height during the Second Sino-Japanese War of
1937–45 and the Asian and Pacific campaigns of World War II (1941–45).
In
addition to Japanese civil and military personnel, Koreans and
Taiwanese who were forced to serve in the military of the Empire of
Japan were also found to have committed war crimes as part of the
Japanese Imperial Army.
Japan did not sign the 1929 Geneva
Convention on the Prisoners of War (except the 1929 Geneva Convention on
the Sick and Wounded), though in 1942, it did promise to abide by its
terms.
The crimes committed also fall under other aspects of
international and Japanese law. For example, many of the crimes
committed by Japanese personnel during World War II broke Japanese
military law, and were subject to court martial, as required by that
law.
The Empire also violated international agreements signed by
Japan, including provisions of the Hague Conventions (1899 and 1907)
such as protections for prisoners of war and a ban on the use of
chemical weapons, the 1930 Forced Labour Convention which prohibited
forced labor, the 1921 International Convention for the Suppression of
the Traffic in Women and Children which prohibited human trafficking,
and other agreements.
The
Japanese government also signed the Kellogg-Briand Pact (1929), thereby
rendering its actions in 1937–45 liable to charges of crimes against
peace, a charge that was introduced at the Tokyo Trials to prosecute
“Class A” war criminals. “Class B” war criminals were those found guilty
of war crimes per se, and “Class C” war criminals were those guilty of
crimes against humanity.
The Japanese government also accepted the
terms set by the Potsdam Declaration (1945) after the end of the war,
including the provision in Article 10 of punishment for “all war
criminals, including those who have visited cruelties upon our
prisoners.”
Two Japanese officers, Toshiaki Mukai and Tsuyoshi
Noda competing to see who could kill (with a sword) one hundred people
first. The bold headline reads, “‘Incredible Record’ (in the Contest to
Decapitate 100 People)—Mukai 106 – 105 Noda—Both 2nd Lieutenants Go Into
Extra Innings”.
Special Japanese military units conducted experiments on civilians and POWs in China.
One of the most infamous was Unit 731 under Shirō Ishii. Unit 731 was established by order of Hirohito himself.
Victims
were subjected to experiments including but not limited to vivisection
and amputations without anesthesia and testing of biological weapons.
Anesthesia was not used because it was believed that anesthetics would adversely affect the results of the experiments.
To
determine the treatment of frostbite, prisoners were taken outside in
freezing weather and left with exposed arms, periodically drenched with
water until frozen solid.
The arm was later
amputated; the doctor would repeat the process on the victim’s upper arm
to the shoulder. After both arms were gone, the doctors moved on to the
legs until only a head and torso remained. The victim was then used for
plague and pathogens experiments
According to one estimate, the experiments carried out by Unit 731 alone caused 3,000 deaths.
Furthermore,
according to the 2002 International Symposium on the Crimes of
Bacteriological Warfare, the number of people killed by the Imperial
Japanese Army germ warfare and human experiments is around 580,000.
According
to other sources, “tens of thousands, and perhaps as many as 400,000,
Chinese died of bubonic plague, cholera, anthrax and other diseases …”,
resulting from the use of biological warfare.
Top
officers of Unit 731 were not prosecuted for war crimes after the war,
in exchange for turning over the results of their research to the
Allies.
They were also reportedly given responsible positions in Japan’s pharmaceutical industry, medical schools and health ministry.
One case of human experimentation occurred in Japan itself.
At
least nine out of 11 crew members survived the crash of a U.S. Army Air
Forces B-29 bomber on Kyūshū, on May 5, 1945. (This plane was Lt.
Marvin Watkins’ crew of the 29th Bomb Group of the 6th Bomb Squadron.)
The
bomber’s commander was separated from his crew and sent to Tokyo for
interrogation, while the other survivors were taken to the anatomy
department of Kyushu University, at Fukuoka, where they were subjected
to vivisection or killed.
During the final
months of World War II, Japan had planned to use plague as a biological
weapon against U.S. civilians in San Diego, California, during Operation
Cherry Blossoms at Night, hoping that the plague would spread as much
terror to the American population and thereby dissuading America from
attacking Japan.
The plan was set to launch at night on September 22, 1945, but Japan surrendered five weeks earlier.
On
March 11, 1948, 30 people, including several doctors and one female
nurse, were brought to trial by the Allied war crimes tribunal.
Charges of cannibalism were dropped, but 23 people were found guilty of vivisection or wrongful removal of body parts.
Five
were sentenced to death, four to life imprisonment, and the rest to
shorter terms. In 1950, the military governor of Japan, General Douglas
MacArthur, commuted all of the death sentences and significantly reduced
most of the prison terms.
All of those convicted in relation
to the university vivisection were free after 1958.In addition, many
participants who were responsible for these vivisections were never
charged by the Americans or their allies in exchange for the information
on the experiments.
In 2006, former IJN
medical officer Akira Makino stated that he was ordered —as part of his
training— to carry out vivisection on about 30 civilian prisoners in the
Philippines between December 1944 and February 1945. The surgery
included amputations.
According to historians
Yoshiaki Yoshimi and Kentaro Awaya, during the Second Sino-Japanese War,
gas weapons, such as tear gas, were used only sporadically in 1937, but
in early 1938 the Imperial Japanese Army began full-scale use of
phosgene, chlorine, Lewisite and nausea gas (red), and from mid-1939,
mustard gas (yellow) was used against both Kuomintang and Communist
Chinese troops.
According to Yoshimi and Seiya Matsuno, Emperor Hirohito signed orders specifying the use of chemical weapons in China.
For
example, during the Battle of Wuhan from August to October 1938, the
Emperor authorized the use of toxic gas on 375 separate occasions.
A resolution adopted by the League of Nations on 14 May condemned the use of poison gas by Japan.
Another
example is the Battle of Yichang in October 1941, during which the 19th
Artillery Regiment helped the 13th Brigade of the IJA 11th Army by
launching 1,000 yellow gas shells and 1,500 red gas shells at the
Chinese forces.
The area was crowded with
Chinese civilians unable to evacuate. Some 3,000 Chinese soldiers were
in the area and 1,600 were affected. The Japanese report stated that
“the effect of gas seems considerable”.
In 2004,
Yoshimi and Yuki Tanaka discovered in the Australian National Archives
documents showing that cyanide gas was tested on Australian and Dutch
prisoners in November 1944 on Kai Islands (Indonesia).
Japanese
imperial forces employed widespread use of torture on prisoners,
usually in an effort to gather military intelligence quickly.
Tortured prisoners were often later executed. A former Japanese Army officer who served in China, Uno Shintaro, stated:
The
major means of getting intelligence was to extract information by
interrogating prisoners. Torture was an unavoidable necessity. Murdering
and burying them follows naturally.
You do it so you won’t be found out. I believed and acted this way because I was convinced of what I was doing.
We carried out our duty as instructed by our masters. We did it for the sake of our country.
From
our filial obligation to our ancestors. On the battlefield, we never
really considered the Chinese humans. When you’re winning, the losers
look really miserable. We concluded that the Yamato race [i.e.,
Japanese] was superior.
The effectiveness of torture might also have been counterproductive to Japan’s war effort.
After
the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World
War II, the Japanese military tortured a captured American P-51 fighter
pilot named Marcus McDilda in order to discover how many atomic bombs
the Allies had and what the future targets were.
McDilda, who
knew nothing about the atomic bomb nor the Manhattan Project,
“confessed” under torture that the U.S. had 100 atomic bombs and that
Tokyo and Kyoto were the next targets. McDilda’s false confession may
have swayed the Japanese leaders’ decision to surrender.
Many Allied airmen captured by the Japanese on land or at sea were executed in accordance with official Japanese policy.
During
the Battle of Midway in June, 1942, three American airmen who were shot
down and landed at sea were spotted and captured by Japanese warships.
After
brief interrogations, two airmen were killed, their bodies then tied to
five-gallon kerosene cans filled with water and dumped overboard from
destroyer Makigumo; the third was killed and his body dumped overboard
from Arashi.
On August 13, 1942, Japan passed
the Enemy Airmen’s Act, which stated that Allied pilots who bombed
non-military targets in the Pacific Theater and were captured on land or
at sea by Japanese forces were subject to trial and punishment despite
the absence of any international law containing provisions regarding
aerial warfare.
This legislation was passed in response to the
Doolittle Raid, which occurred on April 18, 1942, in which American
B-25 bombers under the command of Lieutenant Colonel James Doolittle
bombed Tokyo and other Japanese cities.
According
to the Hague Convention of 1907 (the only convention which Japan had
ratified regarding the treatment of prisoners of war), any military
personnel captured on land or at sea by enemy troops were to be treated
as prisoners of war and not punished for simply being lawful combatants.
Eight
Doolittle Raiders captured upon landing in China (and unaware of the
existence of the Enemy Airmen’s Act) were the first Allied aircrew to be
brought before a kangaroo court in Shanghai under the act, charged with
alleged (but unproven) strafing of Japanese civilians during the
Doolittle Raid.
The eight aircrew were forbidden to give any
defense and, despite the lack of legitimate evidences, were found guilty
of participating in aerial military operations against Japan.
Five
of the eight sentences were commuted to life imprisonment; the other
three airmen were taken to a cemetery outside Shanghai, where they were
executed by firing squad on October 14, 1942.
The Enemy Airmen’s Act contributed to the deaths of hundreds of Allied airmen throughout the Pacific War.
An
estimated 132 Allied airmen shot down during the bombing campaign
against Japan in 1944–1945 were summarily executed after short kangaroo
trials or drumhead courts-martial.
Imperial Japanese military
personnel deliberately killed 33 American airmen at Fukuoka, including
fifteen who were beheaded shortly after the Japanese Government’s
intention to surrender was announced on August 15, 1945.
Mobs of civilians also killed several Allied airmen before the Japanese military arrived to take the airmen into custody.
Another
94 airmen died from other causes while in Japanese custody, including
52 who were killed when they were deliberately abandoned in a prison
during the bombing of Tokyo on May 24–25, 1945.
Many
written reports and testimonies collected by the Australian War Crimes
Section of the Tokyo tribunal, and investigated by prosecutor William
Webb (the future Judge-in-Chief), indicate that Japanese personnel in
many parts of Asia and the Pacific committed acts of cannibalism against
Allied prisoners of war.
In many
cases this was inspired by ever-increasing Allied attacks on Japanese
supply lines, and the death and illness of Japanese personnel as a
result of hunger.
According
to historian Yuki Tanaka: “cannibalism was often a systematic activity
conducted by whole squads and under the command of officers”.
This
frequently involved murder for the purpose of securing bodies. For
example, an Indian POW, Havildar Changdi Ram, testified that: “[on
November 12, 1944] the Kempeitai beheaded [an Allied] pilot.
I
saw this from behind a tree and watched some of the Japanese cut flesh
from his arms, legs, hips, buttocks and carry it off to their quarters …
They cut it [into] small pieces and fried it.”
In some cases,
flesh was cut from living people: another Indian POW, Lance Naik Hatam
Ali (later a citizen of Pakistan), testified in New Guinea and stated:
“…
the Japanese started selecting prisoners and every day one prisoner was
taken out and killed and eaten by the soldiers. I personally saw this
happen and about 100 prisoners were eaten at this place by the Japanese.
The
remainder of us were taken to another spot 50 miles [80 km] away where
10 prisoners died of sickness. At this place, the Japanese again started
selecting prisoners to eat.
Those selected were taken to a
hut where their flesh was cut from their bodies while they were alive
and they were thrown into a ditch where they later died.”
Perhaps
the most senior officer convicted of cannibalism was Lt Gen. Yoshio
Tachibana (立花芳夫,Tachibana Yoshio), who with 11 other Japanese personnel
was tried in August 1946 in relation to the execution of U.S. Navy
airmen, and the cannibalism of at least one of them, during August 1944,
on Chichi Jima, in the Bonin Islands.
The
airmen were beheaded on Tachibana’s orders. Because military and
international law did not specifically deal with cannibalism, they were
tried for murder and “prevention of honorable burial”. Tachibana was
sentenced to death, and hanged.
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