Back in high school, my history teacher claimed that one of the Japanese tortures was to insert a glass rod into a man’s urethra, and then hit his penis with a hammer. (Obligatory :eek: ) Sounded plausible then, but not too long ago someone told me that the Vietnamese did the same thing back in the Sixties, and my BS meter started going, “Sounds like an UL!”
To me, it simply sounds like pure sadism, after all, if you’re going to torture someone, it’s generally to get them to do something that you want. Any man who’s had that done to him is going to be worthless and quite likely to die, so I can’t picture it being used.
Actually Tuck I have never heard of that particular torture, but I do know the Japanese were the inventors of “die of a thousand cuts” torture. Where they would use a shard of glass to make a thousand cuts on someone manytimes, waiting brief periods of time for a wound to clot and then re-cutting it to inflict maximum pain with minumum lethality <- is that a word?
I’ve read before that it had been used by the chinese, japanese, vietnamese, germans, and in the middle east. Along the same lines, the middle east also would use a tube to open the rectum and pour small shards of glass inside. Not to mention the vaginal and rectal pears of the inquisition times.
Keep in mind that torture is not always to get information, but can be used to simply send a message to others. Also, torture doesn’t have to be applied to an individual to make him talk. I’m pretty sure that if I was tied down next to somebody and watched that technique be applied to them, if they took one step towards me with a glass rod and a hammer I would sing like a canary.
The Aztecs also used a similar setup to the “thousand cuts” torture on their captives after battle. They called it “striping”, where they tied the guy to a platform, gave him some throwing clubs, and three guys would dance around him with wooden swords with small flint edges, making very shallow cuts. Eventually, the guy would die from exhaustion and blood loss from being covered in shallow cuts.
I know the Japanese were also inventors of a torture where they forced bamboo shoots down your throat and then some water. The bamboo shoots would grow and burst through your stomach.
I’ve heard of the piano wire torture wherein they tie piano wire around the penis and induce an erection. Nor sure of the validity though. Never heard of the glass rod torture.
When I was a junior in high school, in 1960, we used to love to pass around salacious books by authors such as Henry Miller.
I remeber reading a passage in William Shirer’s(1959) Rise and Fall of the Third Reich which had such a passage. It detailed a Nazi prison camp example–glass rod up the penis, and then breaking it. I can’t cite it better than that.
You wouldn’t even need to take me into the torture room. As soon as someone told me they were shoving a glass rod, broken or not, into my penis, I’ll talk. I mean, everyone has a breaking point, why go through the bother of the torture part if you’re just going to give it up anyway?
That sounds like a lot of BS to me. If you think about it, youre a wartime honorable japanese soldier and about to get medievil on your victim, japanese style… first get a small glass tube (hollow preferable) and a hammer and deftly insert tube (not the hammer)into victim’s urethra… then strike with hammer…
sheeesh In wartime, you gotta use what you can easily get. I bet I cant even find a glass tube that size even now. How would the japanese supply officer label that? glass penis rods. For torture use only…?
Too much preparation for very little result. It sounds more like some perverted masochistic fantasy than a real torture technique. Snooopys right, just hit the damn thing. The hell with a hammer, a rock would do. (and a side note: the bamboo growing and bursting out of the stomach is so bogus)
One quick way I could think of was done to mel Gibson, the ol goomba method of hammer to toe works real good.
Yea, the bamboo in the stomach story sounds like old men getting a kick out of telling kids that if they eat watermelon seeds a watermelon will grow in their stomach and sprout out of their ears.
The version I’ve heard of the torture in the OP is that they shove the hollow tube in the penis and then let fire ants crawl in and then smash it with a hammer :eek:.
