I think you have to single out the Soviet POW's terminated by the Germans in your calculation to get that low percentage. The death rate among Soviet POW's was approx. 60%.

Last I heart the Soviets were "Allies", too.

I'm far from being an expert in Japanese history of WW II, but I assume that most Japanese studies dealing with Japanese war crimes are just ignored in western scholarship (I made the observation that many excellent newer Russian studies or former Soviet studies on some special aspects of the Russo-German war are completely ignored because of the language problem).

So I'm not an expert, but I think there are several Japanese studies dealing with Japanese crimes:

Seiichi Morimura: "Akuma no Hoshoku", Tokyo 1981

Nitchu Senso: "Nankin Daigyakusatsu Shiryoshu", Tokyo 1985

Katsuichi Honda: "The Nanking Massacre" New York 1999

Numerous studies by Yuji Ishida.

Iris Chang's popular study "The Rape of Nanking", New York, 1997 was planned to be translated into Japanese, but serious (japanese and western) historians were able to show weaknesses and mistakes in her book so this project was put on ice.

Cheers,

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"Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the War Room!"
(President Merkin Muffley in "Dr. Strangelove")

Some horrible proof of the Japanese terror...

As such excellent evidence but horrible truth...

Don´t look at the pics on this site unless you´re ready for it!!! BE warned!Examples:

Bayonetting POWs and captured civilians.
Burying alive.
Two Japanese officers, Toshiaki Mukai and Iwa Noda, held a competition of beheading Chinese. They denied the accusation as "imagination" but were confronted with the above evidence published in Tokyo Nicinichi Shimbun. They were executed in 1947 in Nanjing.

http://www.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/NanjingM.../NMFOTO02.html

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Good point about adding Russians into the percentage argument. Still the Japanese are tops in torture. Putting out cigarettes on the back of a sub commanders neck, machine gunning pilots in parachutes & in suvival rafts. these were low rank soldiers doing this kind of thing. So it would seem as this kind of behavoiur spanned all ranks, not just higher ups. On the flip side, read "Devil on my heels" about a B-24 bombadier. He spent 2&1/2 yrs as pow. He went through incredible torture, but also was treated well by some Japanese soldiers & civilians.

There's no doubt at all that the Pacific War was a terrible war, full of many atrocities by both sides. It was for the US what the eastern front was for Germany.

Regardless of how bad this sounds now, most US troops that fought in the Pacific thought that they were at war with sub-humans and they acted accordingly. A perfect example is the submarine USS Wahoo, whose crew shot thousands of Japanese soldiers of a troop-convoy they had just sunk. And there's a colour film footage of this action. The captain was never charged because of it.

And I think some of the figures posted by Kai are way too high. 7.000 Americans dead in the Death March? I have the figures somewhere. I don't think those were that high.

20.000 people machine-gunned in the East Dutch Indies? Too high number to pass unnoticed in war books...

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"War is less costly than servitude, the choice is always between Verdun and Dachau." - Jean Dutourd, French veteran of both world wars

"A mon fils: depuis que tes yeux sont fermes les miens n’ont cessé de pleurir." - Mère française, Verdun

A friend of mine told me that a Japanese ship was sunk & boats were sent out to pick up survivors & the Japanese fought with knives & refused to give up, so the captain fired a hedgehog & killed em all. So remember, some Japanese even in the water fefused to surrender.