Japanese war crimes

• 1. Introduction

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  Japanese war crimes stand among the most extensive and systematically documented atrocities of the twentieth century. Prince Mikasa, the younger brother of Emperor Hirohito, was stationed in China in 1943 as an officer in the Imperial Japanese Army. What he witnessed there left him so shaken that he addressed Japanese troops to denounce their own aggression. In a 1984 book and a 1994 interview with the Yomiuri Shimbun, he described officers using Chinese prisoners for bayonet drills, and POWs being asphyxiated and shot in large numbers while restrained to posts. A prince of the ruling house could not look away. Most soldiers did not look away either. Reports from the era indicate that most Japanese troops stationed in the Asia-Pacific region either took part in the crimes or did not oppose them. How did a military that had, after the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905, released all 79,367 Russian prisoners and paid them for their labor come to inflict some of the worst mass violence of any modern army? What combination of ideology, law, and culture made these crimes possible? And why, decades later, does the reckoning remain unfinished?

• 2. The Making of a War Machine

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  After the Meiji Restoration ended the Tokugawa shogunate, the Emperor became the center of military loyalty and nationalist devotion. An Imperial Proclamation in 1894 still instructed Japanese soldiers to win without violating international law, and the record up to that point bore out those intentions. During the First Sino-Japanese War, Japanese historian Yuki Tanaka has noted, 1,790 Chinese prisoners were released unharmed after signing an agreement not to resume arms. In World War I, some German prisoners found conditions so agreeable that they remained in Japan after the war. By the late 1930s, this picture had changed beyond recognition. The Bushido code was by then "inculcated into the Japanese soldier as part of his basic training." Soldiers were taught that death for the Emperor was the greatest honor and that surrender was cowardice. Men who had surrendered, regardless of how courageously they had fought, were viewed as having forfeited all rights to dignity. This belief justified what followed. Officers beat the men beneath them; those men beat the men beneath them; and at the bottom of that chain, prisoners of war absorbed the worst of it. A parallel force also shaped conduct: the phenomenon known as gekokujo, in which lower-ranking officers overthrew or even assassinated superiors. Any commander who tried to restrict atrocities risked being mutinied against or reassigned. Historians have pointed to this breakdown of oversight, alongside the absence of functioning court-martial procedures, as conditions that allowed a culture of impunity to take root. Japan's military secret police, the Kempeitai, performed functions in occupied territories similar to those the Nazi Gestapo performed in Europe, though the Kempeitai had existed for nearly a decade before Adolf Hitler was born. The ideology sustaining all of this was racial. During the Showa period, Yamato nationalism and eugenics moved from fringe belief to official government policy. Propaganda portraying Chinese and Koreans as cowardly, inferior, or animal-like was circulated in woodcuts. The Myrdal-Kessle woodcut cartoon collection, donated to the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities in Stockholm, Sweden, and exhibited in 2011, contains examples produced from as early as the Meiji period. Former Army officer Uno Shintaro admitted plainly: "On the battlefield, we never really considered the Chinese humans. When you're winning, the losers look really miserable. We concluded that the Yamato race was superior."

• 3. Repression Begins at Home

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  Researcher Andrew Roth traced a direct line from the Japanese government's treatment of its own dissidents to its later treatment of Allied prisoners. Before and during the war, the Special Higher Police imprisoned and tortured scores of political dissidents, mostly communists, socialists, and anarchists who opposed militarism. Methods included starvation, sleep deprivation, and sexual humiliation. The most widely cited victim was Takiji Kobayashi, a Communist writer who died in police custody. His interrogators paused their hours of torture to extend what the source describes as a "hand of benevolence" by ordering food and eating with him. Historian Richard H. Mitchell described fascist Japan as a "paternalistic police state", where the government was the parent, the people were the children, and the police functioned as their "nurses." This contradiction, of simultaneous punishment and benevolence, was not confined to political prisoners. Japanese historian Maruyama Masao found the same logic extended to Allied POW camps, where guards genuinely believed they were helping prisoners even while beating and kicking them. By the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor, all organized political dissent within Japan had been completely crushed. Roth observed that Americans failed to understand the significance of this fact: the internal suppression of democrats and radicals in Japan was, he argued, a prerequisite for the external aggression that followed.

• 4. The Scale of Mass Killing

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  R. J. Rummel, a political science professor at the University of Hawaii, estimated that between 1937 and 1945, the Japanese military murdered between nearly three million and over ten million people, most likely around six million Chinese, Indians, Koreans, Malays, Indonesians, Filipinos, and Indochinese, as well as European, American, and Australian prisoners of war. His estimate of 3.9 million killed in China alone as a direct result of Japanese operations sat alongside a war total for China he placed at 10.2 million. British historian M. R. D. Foot put civilian deaths across the conflict at between ten million and twenty million. British historian Mark Felton argued the figure reached thirty million, the majority of them civilians. According to the findings of the Tokyo Tribunal, the death rate among Asian prisoners held by Japan stood at 27.1 percent. The death rate of Chinese prisoners was much higher because Emperor Hirohito, under a directive ratified on the 5th of August 1937, removed the constraints of international law on their treatment. Only 56 Chinese prisoners of war were released after Japan's surrender. The Nanjing Massacre of 1937-38 concentrated this violence in a single, documented episode. The International Military Tribunal for the Far East found that the Japanese Army massacred as many as 260,000 civilians and prisoners of war; some estimates reach 350,000. The Memorial Hall of the Victims in Nanjing Massacre by Japanese Invaders has the figure of 300,000 inscribed on its entrance. Japanese journalist Honda Katsuichi, after extensive interviews and record reviews in the early 1980s, concluded the Nanjing killings were not isolated but were part of a broader pattern of atrocities against the Chinese population in the Lower Yangtze region dating from the Battle of Shanghai. Historian Mitsuyoshi Himeta reports that a formal strategy called the "Three Alls Policy" (Sanko Sakusen) was implemented in China from 1942 to 1945. It directed Japanese forces to "kill all, burn all, and loot all." Sanctioned by Hirohito himself, it resulted, by Himeta's account, in more than 2.7 million Chinese civilian deaths on its own. One massacre under this policy, at Panjiayu, killed 1,230 Chinese people. In the Philippines, the Manila massacre of February 1945 killed 100,000 civilians. A separate assessment estimated that at least one in twenty Filipinos died at Japanese hands during the occupation. In Singapore during February and March 1942, the Sook Ching massacre targeted ethnic Chinese perceived as anti-Japanese, but soldiers made no genuine effort to identify who actually was. Former Prime Minister of Singapore Lee Kuan Yew, who narrowly escaped the massacre himself, stated that casualties numbered between 50,000 and 90,000. Lieutenant Colonel Hishakari Takafumi, a newspaper correspondent at the time, reported that the original plan was to kill about 50,000 Chinese and that 25,000 had already been murdered when the order came to scale down.

• 5. Unit 731 and the Biology of Atrocity

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  Shirō Ishii commanded Unit 731, the most notorious of Japan's human experimentation programs, and his operations extended far beyond the laboratory. Victims were subjected to vivisection, amputations without anesthesia, biological weapons testing, horse blood transfusions, and injections of animal blood. Anesthesia was withheld because researchers believed it would distort results. To study frostbite, prisoners stood outside in freezing weather with bare arms, drenched with water until frozen solid. Arms were amputated; the process was then repeated up to the shoulder, then moved to the legs, until only a head and torso remained. A former Unit 731 member described what followed: the victim was then used for plague and pathogen experiments. A second survivor account described the dissection room procedure: "He was strapped down, still screaming frightfully. One of the doctors stuffed a towel into his mouth, then with one quick slice of the scalpel he was opened up." According to the 2002 International Symposium on the Crimes of Bacteriological Warfare, germ warfare and human experiments conducted by the Imperial Japanese Army killed approximately 580,000 people. Unit 731 was not alone. Scholars have established that Units 1855, 1644, and 1688, stationed in Beijing, Nanjing, and Canton respectively, also experimented on human subjects. Yoshio Onodera of Unit 1644 testified that his group conducted experiments on roughly 100-150 people and murdered them with chloroform injections. The experimentation reached Japan itself. At least nine of the eleven crew members of a U.S. Army Air Forces B-29 from Lt. Marvin Watkins' 29th Bomb Group survived their crash on Kyushu on the 5th of May 1945. The survivors were taken to the anatomy department of Kyushu University at Fukuoka, where they were subjected to vivisection or killed. On the 11th of March 1948, thirty people including several doctors and one nurse were brought to trial. Fukujiro Ishiyama, the doctor most responsible, killed himself before the proceedings opened. Twenty-three were convicted. In 1950, General Douglas MacArthur commuted all death sentences and reduced most prison terms. By 1958 virtually all had been freed. In 1980, a researcher found that one of the doctors originally sentenced to death was still alive and practicing medicine. Top officers of Unit 731 were never prosecuted at all. In exchange for turning over their research results to the Allies, they received immunity and were reportedly placed in senior positions in Japan's pharmaceutical industry, medical schools, and health ministry. In July 1989, a mass grave of more than one hundred skeletons was discovered at a construction site in Tokyo on the former grounds of the Army Medical College, which had operated there from 1929 to 1945. Skulls bore the marks of scalpels, sword cuts, and pistol shots, leading investigators to conclude that military physicians had conducted battlefield brain experiments and buried the evidence on site.

• 6. Chemical Warfare and Its Sanction

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  Historians Yoshimi Yoshiaki and Seiya Matsuno found that Emperor Hirohito personally signed orders authorizing the use of chemical weapons in China. During the Battle of Wuhan from August to October 1938, the Emperor authorized toxic gas on 375 separate occasions. This occurred despite Japan having ratified the 1899 Hague Declaration and the 1907 Hague Convention, both of which prohibited chemical weapons. According to history professor Walter E. Grunden of Bowling Green State University, Japanese commanders turned to gas warfare because they concluded that Chinese forces could not retaliate in kind. Gas was not a field expedient; it was built into the army's war against China at every level, deployed by specialized gas troops, infantry, artillery, engineers, and air units. From 1937 to 1945, the military used chemical weapons on over 2,000 occasions, primarily in the China theater, by Grunden's count. The earliest gas use in 1937 involved tear agents, but by early 1938 the army had moved to full-scale use of phosgene, chlorine, Lewisite, and nausea gas. From mid-1939, mustard gas was directed against both Kuomintang and Communist Chinese forces. In 2004, Yoshimi and Yuki Tanaka found documents in the Australian National Archives establishing that cyanide gas was tested on Australian and Dutch prisoners in November 1944 on the Kai Islands in Indonesia. The Narashino Military Academy near Tokyo compiled fifty-six case studies of chemical weapons use by Japan in China during World War II, covering lethal agents including Yperite, commonly known as mustard gas. A Japanese historian discovered the document at the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration. The League of Nations had condemned Japan's use of poison gas by a resolution adopted on the 14th of May 1938. Prince Mikasa later stated that he had personally watched an army film showing Japanese troops gassing Chinese prisoners who were tied to stakes. Recent studies indicate that Chinese deaths from Japanese chemical warfare may have exceeded 500,000.

• 7. Reckoning and Its Limits

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  The Tokyo Trials produced seven death sentences, and Prime Minister Hideki Tojo was among those executed by hanging in 1948. Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo received a twenty-year sentence; Navy Minister Shigetaro Shimada received life. The trials also created three categories: Class A criminals charged with crimes against peace, Class B convicted of war crimes, and Class C guilty of crimes against humanity. Yet the framework of accountability contained its own contradictions from the start. Japan signed the 1929 Geneva Convention on Prisoners of War but declined to ratify it. Japan ratified the Treaty of San Francisco in 1952, accepting the judgments of the post-war trials. Former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe nonetheless argued publicly that those verdicts had no relation to Japanese domestic law and that the convicted were not criminals under that law. Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs has acknowledged the country's role in causing "tremendous damage and suffering" before and during the war, and since the 1950s numerous senior government officials have issued apologies. Those apologies have been criticized by some as insincere. Former prime ministers Junichiro Koizumi and Shinzo Abe both paid respects at the Yasukuni Shrine, which honors all Japanese war dead including convicted Class A war criminals. Some Japanese history textbooks give only brief mention to the war crimes. Certain members of the Liberal Democratic Party have denied government involvement in abducting women to serve as comfort women, a euphemism for sex slaves. The legal gap that Abe articulated is not the only one. The Tokyo Charter itself defined war crimes as violations of the laws or customs of war, and the trials classified Pearl Harbor as an act of aggression because the U.S. was neutral when Japan struck, with the 14-Part Message arriving an hour after the attack was over rather than the thirty minutes before it that Japanese diplomats had intended. Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, who planned the Pearl Harbor attack, told associates that if Japan lost the war he expected to be tried as a war criminal. He was killed by the U.S. Army Air Forces in Operation Vengeance in 1943, before that reckoning arrived. The mass grave unearthed in Tokyo in July 1989, with more than one hundred skulls marked by scalpels and bullets, remains one of the last pieces of physical evidence to surface; how many other sites lie beneath the city is still not known.