Japanese atrocities in WW2

This may be old news to many of you but it just came4 up on MSN's homepage; They rarely print substantive things so maybe worth a look.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/a-new-look-at-japan%E2%80%99s-wartime-atrocities-and-a-us-cover-up/ar-BBmiEit?li=AAa0dzB

Gaines

 

checking it out, it does look like the US dropped the ball here....designing war weapons was not the same as what 731 did...much thanks, I've never seen this before....makes me disgusted....I read where Russians prosecuted some scientist and military leaders from 731....but, just like the European Theater murderers, many were free around 10 years after the war!!

http://www.japanfocus.org/-tsuneishi-keiichi/2194/article.html

 

I think they may need to actually check the facts:

"In contrast, many Nazi doctors in Europe who did similar things were prosecuted by the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal."

Is not really accurate. Actually, in contrast not many doctors in Europe were indicted by the AMT either. 300 doctors volunteered for concentration camp duty. The vast majority of which, were allowed to continue their careers, uninhibited by their misdeeds.

"Twenty-three physicians, scientists, and other senior officials in the Nazi medical administration and the army were put on trial. Seven of the accused were sentenced to death and executed; nine were sentenced to long prison sentences; and seven were acquitted. Several major perpetrators were never tried for their crimes, among them Josef Mengele, doctor at Auschwitz-Birkenau, who escaped to South America; and Horst Schumann, who was judged physically unfit to stand trial in the 1960s."
http://www.ushmm.org/research/research-in-collections/search-the-collections/bibliography/medical-experiments

At "denazification" hearings, doctors could be slapped on the wrist with a fine....

 

IIRC, the "Doctors' Trial" at Nuremberg saw only 23 Nazi doctors on trial. Of these, 16 were found guilty, and, of those, 7 were sentenced to death. This hardly comes near the bar of "many."

It was rumored that the Unit 731 was covered-up, because it was directly linked to Emperor Hirohito, whom the Americans/MacArthur were trying hard to protect.

 

Of the 23, only 20 were doctors, ... (Viktor Brack, Rudolf Brandt, and Wolfram Sievers were Nazi officials)

 

Thanks for the correction.

 

disregard

 

I was going to say, that those that the US sentenced to death were all eventually executed(140 or 141 depending on source).

 

A element to be factored in must also be war trial fatigue that cropped up. To be blunt many wished to move onto other matters and just lost interest in past deeds not inflicted on 'western' victims.

Not pretty I grant you, but all too human just the same.

 

My Grandmother was Japanese and served as a nurse during the War. Her oldest brother was sent to China and survived and many relatives served in the branches as officers, with one as a Colonel, I believe it was an uncle. She was quite open about her service and about her family, but when the subject of China and the many horrible things that were done by Japan, she would be vague or not discuss it saying, "It was a long time ago". Having done a lot of research on Japan's war crimes, I was surprised and some cases appalled by Japan's methods and either deny or trivializing what what happened.

 

got any wartime pictures?? would be great to see

 

I don't have any pictures with me, but I'm certain they exist, perhaps with her family still living in Japan. I've been looking for those for some time. We do have those taken of my Grandfather during the war. He was in Guam and some of the other islands before the end of it.

 

I feel there are times that the Japanese atrocities sometimes receive less recognition than the atrocities committed by the Germans. At times the violence the two sides committed were practically equal on a certain scale, but it is the German atrocities that seem to be given more focus than those committed by the Japanese. The Germans atrocities were more systematic. They had a specific target they focused on, which primarily included those of Jewish heritage. They had people in the medical field, such as those at Auschwitz and those involved in the T4 program who did horrendous experiments on people as if they were guinea pigs. There were countless numbers of people shot in firing squads and gas chambers.
The Japanese, although they committed acts of violence against 14+ million Chinese, they didn't particularly commit acts of atrocities against a specific people with the aim of wiping them off the face of the earth as the Nazis did. In the Philippines nearly 900,000 Filipino civilians were killed as a result of military operations and acts of violence against the Japanese. In order to maintain a supply line to their troops in Burma, the Japanese forced thousands of Allied POWs and Asian conscripts to build a 300 mile railroad between Burma and Thailand. As a result approximately 13,000 POWs and between 80,000-100,000 laborers died building this railroad. Throughout the empire countless acts of violence were carried out against those who were under the Japanese flag. Now some Japanese atrocities did become infamous and 'known' such as the Bataan death march and the Rape of Nanking. But throughout the war the Japanese committed acts of atrocities that were barely noticed by the outside world. One example is how the Japanese forced Korean women to act as comfort women for Japanes officers and soldiers which it refused to acknowledge until 1992 when the Japanese government acknowledged that it had used coercion of sex slaves during the war and that the military was involved in such actions. Then there is the infamous Unit 731, which conducted horrendous experiments, biological warfare against people and POWs. This unit was largely unknown because most of its actions are known from only a few members of the unit who were willing enough to talk.
In my observation, part of the reason why the Japanese atrocities receive less attention is because they weren't focused on exterminating a specific group of people. Rather they committed acts of violence against a number of different people. A lot of these acts of atrocities have started to get the recognition and acknowledgement that they need, but it is almost too late after the act. The German acts of genocide and violence has become common knowledge, where as the Japanese acts of genocide and violence are sometimes barely even known. The Japanese atrocities need to receive as much recognition as those committed by the Germans. Because although their aim wasn't to eliminate a specific group of people, it was equally as damaging to those who were affected by it.

http://listverse.com/2014/05/06/10-japanese-atrocities-from-world-war-ii/

 

It was a matter of scale. Casualties in the Pacific theater were paltry compared to the European Conflict.
https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.TAB3.1.GIF

Factoring out Civilian, Japanese and Chinese casualties (of little or no interest to the Allied side)
± 304,179 total War Casualties and some 199,212 POW's (Presumably only the survivors) in the Pacific Theater

Compared to 19.6 million Military deaths (latest estimates 80.4 million including Civilian) in the European / North African Conflict.
(7.3m Axis Military 12.3m Allied Military 45.9m Civilian 14.9m North Africa)

80.4 million final math error at: http://necrometrics.com/ww2stats.h

Detailed Japanese Atrocities Table: https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.TAB3.1.GIF
from: https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP3.HTM

 

'Sandakan Death March'

6000 Australian and British soldiers marched to death in Nth Borneo in the last few weeks of the war.

SIX Australians were the only survivors.




2051

 

I agree...a matter of scale...just for an example on scale, etc, -in Rwanda there weren't as many killed as in WW2, but the percentage of people that particpated in the murders and the numbers that died in so 'quick' a time period were large....

 

To piggy back the present scope of the conversation, one also could consider, as Smiley mentioned, in addition to the systematic nature of the genocide, the very fact that the original practices by Germans were upon native people (euthanasia, medical experimentation, etc). This genocide began as a bureaucratic process that waged for many years until the liberation of extermination and concentration camps throughout Europe and the East. The fact that yes, numbers were unparalleled, but it began with the murder of their own people including native Jewish citizens. Committees and governments offices were created for this purpose. This contrasts with the Japanese style of doing things.

People tend to study more of the Holocaust, perhaps, due to the nature of evil as a state organization. The reality of that is quite unnerving and people want to delve into those psychological factors.

 

the Japanese did not have the infrastructure in many places to even get near the numbers of the Germans....trains, complex RRoad system for one example

 

Except they may acutally have killed more than the Germans. Look at the losses in China and the Dutch East Indies for instance.

 

You can also say that based on the summary executions which coincided with the advance of the Wehrmacht through Eastern Europe and beyond.