Slitherine

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ORIGINAL: Dante Fierro

Remarkable story. Gruesome what the Japanese did to those they found in the jungle. Apparently they tortured to death any natives that helped them as well. I sometimes do wonder why the brutality was so prevalent among the Japanese military, from Nanking to Guam? Not that Americans weren't also occasionally brutal as well, but the Japanese it seemed to be almost a kind of ethos.

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It was those at the core of Japan’s military power, the general officers, who decided to brutalize prisoners of war, and who made conditions so despicable in the camps. Junior officers and soldiers went along with these crimes because they too believed the orders infallible and that the emperor wished them to commit such outrages. The generals knew that the culturally ingrained respect for authority, coupled with the fear of exclusion and loss of face, meant scant resistance when they ordered Japanese troops to carry out morally repugnant orders.

As Caucasians had dominated Asia before 1941, it was they, according to Japanese thinking, who had tried to subordinate the Japanese and who had refused to recognize Japan’s legitimate right to be a great power. Thus, from the Japanese point of view, World War II was literally a race war. When Tokyo’s initial victories in 1941 put the boot on the other foot, Japanese troops were quick to use it to stamp on the white man’s face. The widespread barbarity and cruelty practiced by Japanese forces were clearly indicative of that hatred and loathing —and perhaps a deep-seated inferiority complex—many Japanese soldiers harbored toward their white foes.

“By 1941 [the Japanese] were ready to take on the white world in war, and they truly did not care anymore what the white man thought of them,” wrote American author Gavan Dawes in his 1994 book Prisoners of the Japanese. “They had torn the Geneva Convention to pieces. White men could go to hell, and the Japanese would be the ones to send them there.”