dgaad
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Tohoku :
In case you lack the resources to find this information on your own :
Hidden Horrors : Japanese War Crimes in World War II
(Transitions--Asia and Asian America)
by Yuki Tanaka
HIDDEN HORRORS reveals for the first time Japanese atrocities during World War II, including cannibalism; the slaughter and starvation of POWs; and the rape, enforced prostitution, and murder of noncombatants.
"As sobering and thought-provoking a book as one could read on the subject". - THE JAPAN TIMES.
Paperback - 296 pages (January 1998)
Westview Pr (Trd Pap); ISBN: 0813327180
The Good Man of Nanking : The Diaries of John Rabe
John Rabe, et al
Like Oskar Schindler of Schindler's List, John Rabe was an enterprising and fundamentally decent German businessman caught up in war. Head of the Nanjing branch of Siemens, the German electronics firm, he had lived and worked in China for almost 30 years. Rather than flee from the threatened city, he stayed to organize a safety zone as refuge of last resort for Chinese civilians. The Good Man of Nanking is his firsthand description of the terrible events and his ultimate success in saving perhaps a quarter of a million lives. The diary format provides a forum for the extraordinary power and immediacy of John Rabe's words, including his gallows humor, placing the reader there in Nanking as the bombs explode and the Japanese soldiers begin their massacres. Rabe's trials were not over when he returned to wartime Germany; diary entries that he wrote during the occupation of Berlin by the Soviet army form a fascinating coda to this book. --John Stevenson, Amazon.com
Paperback - 320 pages (March 14, 2000)
Vintage Books; ISBN: 0375701974
The Rape of Nanking : The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II
Iris Chang, Foreword by William C. Kirby
China has endured much hardship in its history, as Iris Chang shows in her ably researched The Rape of Nanking, a book that recounts the horrible events in that eastern Chinese city under Japanese occupation in the late 1930s. Nanking, she writes, served as a kind of laboratory in which Japanese soldiers were taught to slaughter unarmed, unresisting civilians, as they would later do throughout Asia. Likening their victims to insects and animals, the Japanese commanders orchestrated a campaign in which several hundred thousand--no one is sure just how many--Chinese soldiers and noncombatants alike were killed. Chang turns up an unlikely hero in German businessman John Rabe, a devoted member of the Nazi party who importuned Adolf Hitler to intervene and stop the slaughter, and who personally saved the lives of countless residents of Nanking. She also suggests that the Japanese government pay reparations and apologize for its army's horrific acts of 60 years ago. Amazon.com
Paperback - 290 pages (November 1998)
Penguin USA (Paper); ISBN: 0140277447
The Comfort Women : Japan's Brutal Regime of Enforced Prostitution in the Second World War
by George L. Hicks
Paperback - 303 pages Reprint edition (October 1997)
W.W. Norton & Company; ISBN: 0393316947
Ships from Hell : Japanese War Crimes on the High Seas
by Raymond Lamont-Brown
(Hardcover - May 2002)
Japanese War Crimes
by Peter Li (Editor)
(Paperback - April 2002)
Sugamo Prison, Tokyo : An Account of the Trial and Sentencing of Japanese War Criminals in 1948, by a U.S. Participant
by John L. Ginn
(Hardcover - November 1992)
The Knights of Bushido : A Short History of Japanese War Crimes
by Lord Russell
(Hardcover - July 2002)
From a review of Tanaka's book :
"Battlefield stress and military tradition conspired with cultural and historical factors to turn ordinary soldiers into war criminals, writes scholar Yuki Tanaka in Hidden Horrors: Japanese War Crimes in World War II. The first major work on Japanese war crimes by a Japanese writer, Hidden Horrors is a compelling look at brutality, individual duty, and collective
responsibility. Tanaka, a visiting research fellow at the Australian National University,
published his pathbreaking work on Japanese chemical warfare experiments in the Bulletin in
1988. Here his focus is expanded to include the torture and murder of prisoners, rape,
cannibalism, and the massacre of civilians.
The stories he tells are horrifying. Two particularly brutal examples include the POW camp
established by the Japanese at Sandakan, Borneo, and the medical experiments carried out by
Unit 731. The medical experiments, designed primarily to develop effective biological weapons,
were not fully acknowledged until the early 1990s. The atrocities at the Sandakan camp,
however, were never suppressed; there were simply too few survivors to remember them.
The Japanese military command transferred 1,500 Allied prisoners of war to Sandakan, Borneo,
in 1942 with orders to construct an airfield. Chosen for its suitability as a fuel stop for Japanese
warplanes returning home, Sandakan would become the most brutal POW camp in the Pacific
Theater.
For the first few months, prisoners received adequate food, humane treatment, and reasonable
work orders. But conditions began to deteriorate in August 1942, when two escaped prisoners
were caught in the jungle outside camp. As a warning to the other prisoners, camp commandant
Hoshijima Susumu drew up a contract that specified execution by firing squad as the punishment
for escape. The prisoners' reader, Col. A.W. Walsh, refused to sign the contract, stating that
under Australian army regulations, it was a prisoner's duty to take any "reasonable opportunity"
to escape. Bound and held at gunpoint in front of his men, however, Walsh had no choice but to
agree to the Japanese terms.
The first test of Hoshijima's newfound severity came in May 1943, when more than 20 men were
rounded up for possessing radio components. After enduring three months of torture, the
ringleaders "confessed" not only to having the radio parts, but also to plotting an armed uprising
with the intent of destroying Japanese authority in Borneo. They were subsequently transferred
to Kuching, headquarters of the 37th Army. There they were tried, convicted, and received
punishments ranging from six months in jail to immediate execution by firing squad.
Following this so-called Sandakan incident, camp conditions began a downward spiral that
would end with the death marches of 1945. Authorities eliminated weekend leisure activities and
closed the camp canteen. Brutal punishments were inflicted on prisoners deemed to be working
too slowly. Guards beat prisoners with axe handles or gunstocks, forced them to hold push-up
positions for 20--30 minutes in the direct sun, or confined them in "the cage." Prisoners in the
cage had to squat all day, were beaten at night, and given little or no food.
Conditions at Sandakan remained much the same until January 1945, when camp authorities were
ordered to transfer two battalions from Sandakan to Tuaran, on Borneo's west coast. About 500
relatively healthy prisoners were chosen as "carriers" for the march, whose circuitous route had
been mapped out by an anti-Japanese local chieftain. During the first leg of the first march, the
supply system broke down. Rations were almost nonexistent, and prisoners unable to continue
were shot or left behind to die. Possibly unaware of the fate of the first march, a second march
left camp in May 1945.
Back at Sandakan, conditions had become medieval. Shootings and beheadings were common,
and one prisoner was reportedly crucified and disemboweled for stealing a pig. By the time the
war ended, only six of Sandakan's 2,000 prisoners were alive--a survival rate of 0.24 percent.
The Japanese military used Allied prisoners not only as free labor, but also as subjects for
Japanese medical "researchers," whose studies were an effort to determine the best recipe for
germ warfare. Unit 731's largest experiment was conducted on 1,485 Allied POWs in
Manchuria. Told they were being inoculated against various tropical diseases, prisoners were in
fact receiving injections of different pathogens. Witnesses and survivors also tell of prisoners
being given lethal injections and dumped into mass graves after their death throes were
observed, timed, and recorded.
Unit 731 was also charged with developing ways for the army to perform more effectively on the
battlefield. In one experiment, researchers positioned Chinese prisoners on a mock battlefield
under machine gun fire and lobbed shells containing mustard gas at them. Other prisoners were
forced to drink mustard gas in liquid form. In each case, prisoners were monitored and their
reactions to the gas measured.
To determine how to facilitate recovery from frostbite, Chinese prisoners were sprayed with salt
water in below-freezing temperatures. Researchers hit them with hammers to determine whether
frostbite had set in, and doused them with water. Gen. Shiro Shiro, head of Unit 731, was said to
be "particularly proud" of the results of this experiment.
Medical experiments, biological warfare, and abuse of prisoners are just a few of the atrocities
detailed in Hidden Horrors. When food was scarce and supply lines destroyed, soldiers resorted
to cannibalism, sometimes harvesting flesh from live victims. "Comfort women" (only recently
acknowledged by the Japanese government) were forced into prostitution and given "quotas" as
high as 35 soldiers per day. Prison officials only occasionally marked camps with a red cross
visible from the air, and captured nurses were forced into the ocean and gunned down. Nor were
civilians spared; Tanaka describes two incidents in which noncombatants were summarily
executed.
Unlike other accounts of Japanese war crimes, which focus exclusively on atrocities, Tanaka
examines incidents from cultural and historical perspectives. The sheer barbarity and frequency
of the war crimes, he contends, is due in part to Japanese military tradition. A mandate issued
in 1894 ordered soldiers to commit suicide rather than surrender. The Russo-japanese War in
1905 and the invasion of China in the 1930s had established Japan as the eminent military power
in East Asia. Although the suicide order was lifted, the notion of gyokusai, which emerged in
World War II, obliged soldiers to fight to the death in defense of the emperor. Appropriate
methods were not suggested, inappropriate methods were not questioned, and excuses for failure
were not tolerated.
The brutality of the Pacific Theater transformed this creed into barbarity. As the war progressed,
Allied forces were increasingly less likely to take Japanese prisoners. At the same time, a "kill
or be killed" attitude pervaded the Japanese army. Impersonal military jargon wormed its way
into the minds of individual soldiers, melding individual Allied soldiers into an abstract
"enemy."
As defeat grew nearer, Japanese soldiers felt frightened and betrayed by a high command that
left them starving in remote outposts, overrun by Allied soldiers, or destroyed by Allied
bombing. Weakening the enemy through cruelty and torture--even a pregnant woman or a
defenseless prisoner--became a way to overcome that fear and betrayal while staying within the
strict boundaries of gyokusai.
After World War II, the individuals who actually ordered and committed specific acts of abuse
were tried and punished. Tanaka acknowledges the necessity of individual punishment, but he
also argues that individual soldiers should not bear all the responsibility. In many cases, the
individual soldiers were acting under orders from their superior officers or even top army
leaders. Condemning only the individual soldiers, in Tanaka's view, absolves the men at the top
whose orders resulted in the torture or deaths of thousands.
Nor does Tanaka accept the concept of universal responsibility. Humankind as a whole cannot
and should not assume full responsibility for the actions of a few overstressed, misdirected
soldiers. To saddle society with such a burden would not only fail to punish those responsible
for ordering and committing war crimes, it would spread the responsibility too thin. For the
Japanese people as a whole, Tanaka says, it is not enough to acknowledge the atrocities their
soldiers committed in the name of the emperor. Individual Japanese must also recognize their
own complicity in allowing their military leaders to allow, tacitly or openly, the kind of war that
turned men into monsters. "
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