Short answers, pulled from the story.
Over 27 percent of the roughly 132,000 Western Allied POWs in Japanese custody died before the war ended, representing more than 35,500 men. Australians had the highest recorded rate among Western nations at 34.1 percent, and Americans at 32.9 percent. One estimate placed this toll at over seven times the roughly 4 percent death rate for the same nationalities held by Germany.
Japan's Senjinkun military code, drafted in 1940 and enacted in 1941, explicitly forbade surrender and led soldiers to view prisoners as unworthy of protection. By the 1930s, rising nationalism had distanced Japan from Western norms and international law. In 1942, General Tojo Hideki declared that Japan would treat prisoners according to its own customs, openly endorsing forced labor despite the Geneva Convention's prohibition.
16,000 out of 40,000 Allied prisoners assigned to the Burma-Siam Railway died during its construction. The project became one of the most prominently documented instances of forced labor in Japanese captivity during World War II.
The International Military Tribunal for the Far East and the Yokohama War Crimes Trials were the main American-led proceedings; the British, Australians, Dutch, Chinese, and Soviets also conducted separate trials. Most concluded by the early 1950s. General Tomoyuki Yamashita was among the senior figures convicted, though critics noted that proceedings focused heavily on mid-ranking soldiers rather than the senior officials who had set POW policy.
Article 16 of the Treaty of San Francisco (1952) required Japan to pay reparations to Allied POWs who had been used as forced laborers. Administrative delays meant some payments did not begin until the 1960s; in the United States, some earlier compensation was available under the War Claims Act of 1948. Japanese courts consistently dismissed individual claims for further compensation, holding that only governments could negotiate war reparations.
Survivor memoirs appeared as early as 1946, including Behind Bamboo by Rohan Rivett and Slaves of the Samurai by Wilfrid Kent Hughes. Pierre Boulle's The Bridge over the River Kwai (1952) became a celebrated 1957 film, and Laura Hillenbrand's Unbroken (2010) traced the experience of Louis Zamperini before becoming a 2014 film. The British television series Tenko dramatized civilian internment from 1981 to 1985.