During the China phase of Japans war from 1931 on it is estimated Japan murdered between 25-35 million people. Committed awful atrocities. Read up on Unit 731 sometime. This is many times the damage done by Germany.
My question is…why is all the attention focused on Germany? You rarely hear or read anything about Japan and their war crimes. Is it because Germany pretty much owned up to theirs but Japan continues to deny them?
The Japanese used your basic bullet/bayonette/samarai sword/or simple starvation for their murders. And they took 14 years to do it. The Germans, however, took advantage of modern industrial technology and made an assembly line production of it. This, it seems, is what historians feel to be noteworthy.
And there is the feeling that “Who cares what yellow heathen people do to other yellow heathen people?”
And if you want to talk about modern mass murders, don’t forget Joe Stalin’s purges of the 20’s and 30’s.
*Poster’s note: The racist thought expressed above is **NOT *the personal view of the poster.
I’m pretty sure is was the assembly line-like mechanization that makes the German atrocities so note worthy. Not only were they killing people, they developed and put into practice to do it as fast and efficiently as possible.
IIRC the number cited for deaths caused by Japanese contained a lot of collateral deaths such as starvation. Also civilian causualties caused by bombing (Chungking aka Chongqing was the most bombed city during WW2).
The Japanese may also get the blame for collateral damage and deaths caused by the KMT, such as when they blew river dykes and flooded thousands of miles of land.
Also a major difference is that the Japanese did not try to wipe out a specific race. Even in Manchuria, while there were atrocities and experiements, the Japanese were not trying to eliminate the Manchurians. It was a puppet and colonial state.
One could be callous and say that the amount of Chinese who died at the hands of the Japanese (as opposed to the civil war that was raging at the same time) was an almost insignifcant percentage of the population. Whereas the Jews in Europe controlled by Germany were annihilated en masse. Eg, a very focused and targeted program against a specific group as opposed to being brutal in China
I think the mechanics and efficiency was special and part of the reason.
What also was different was that the Germans aimed to remove a people from the face of Europe (Jews & Gypsies) & if given the chance, from the face of the earth.
The Japanese were inhuman b^st^rds, the worst kind of conqueror, but their aim was not immediately to extinguish the Chinese, Korean, or Philippino people
There are also some political aspects of it.
After the Communist Revolution in 1949, China pretty effectively cut itself off from a lot of the world. They weren’t very open about bringing specific, documented charges before the world, and there wasn’t a whole lot of support from the West to help them do so. There’s more being said about it now, but the time lag has hurt their case.
Unlike Germany, there are many high-ranking members of the Japanese government who simply deny that any of it happened. Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara, who has stated on many occasions that the Nanking Massacre is a complete fabrication, while Prime Minister Koizumi has started regularly making official visits to Yasukuni shrine, which contains the remains of a number of Class A war criminals. In addition, politicians, as well as the school textbooks, portray Japan as the victim of WWII, with the standard sequence of events being “there was a battle between Japan and America at Pearl Harbor, and then Japan was attacked with atomic weapons.” As a result, many ordinary citizens are simply unaware of what happened.
Jeez, that scans badly. Sorry, I changed some sections and then forgot to proofread.
The second to last sentence should read, “many Diet-level politicians and university professors, as well as the school textbooks…”
I also forgot to mention, there are almost regular battles of words now between various citizens’ groups and the Ministry of Education over whether or not school textbooks should have any mention of WWII atrocities, with the MoE typically pushing for the censored versions.
:mad:
That’s because the Chinese haven’t screamed “We are the victims!” at the top of their lungs long enough.
Really, the brutality of the Japanese disgusted even the Germans. John Rabes, the Good Man of Nanjing, was himself a Nazi.