Same level of evil as Hitlers Germany and Stalin’s USSR. I was going to vote more evil simply because their attack on China basically gave us Mao (who was at least as evil as Hitler and Stalin), but that’s an unintended consequence.
It was only recently that I saw this video about the historical treatment of Japan’s activities in China–it was quite a shock to see that one of the real heroes in that story was a proper nazi who helped people escape and saved lives.
If you have somehow manage to work things out such that a real card-carrying nazi is the good guy, then you have achieved true evil.
Well put.
Exactly. Far too many people, even on this board, give Stalin a pass. He killed more people than Hitler, but he gets a pass because the USSR was our ally. Or something.
It is hard to build a chart of those murdered by these regimes.
As far as civilian deaths though most estimates these days actually place Hitler & the Nazis ahead of Stalin, though not by much. But it is very messy and hard to get anything close to exact numbers.
However most reports in the last 15 years puts Mao well ahead of both of these monsters. I’ve seen fairly good estimates that put him at 45 million.
All were horrible monsters. I guess we each have our own reasons for placing one as more evil then the other. For me the systematic genocides of the Nazis bump them ahead of the others.
I reject that opinion. In Malaysia, the Japanese had an organized program of eliminating Chinese people. There may have been a pretense by the civilian government that no such program existed, but the occupation was run by the military, not the civilian government, and the occupation government did have an organized program of eliminating Chinese people.
FWIW, I can’t say if they had an ethnic hatred, or if they acted without hatred.
There is a book by Pappy Boyington called “Baa Baa Black Sheep” (yes the same as the tv show) where he talks about being a Japanese POW. In it he said the Japanese were a mix.
Some were cruel sadists. Some were just idiots who treated POW’s bad because they didnt know any better (like beating a prisoner to death because they dont understand japanese). But on the other hand he actually did find some Japanese even within the prison system who had some prewar knowledge of the west, knew and hated the militarists who had taken over the country, and tried to aid the POWs whenever they could.
To chime in -
The USSR was not less evil than Nazi Germany, IMO.
Japan, the USSR, and Nazi Germany were much of a muchness. Then Hitler invaded the USSR, and the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Regards,
Shodan
I said 3 - here’s why:
Nazi Germany was acting out of a philosophy of hate and evil, and bending their industrial and scientific power to further that philosophy, even when, and especially when there was nothing to be gained (most Holocaust victims died in 1943-1945, as the war was turning against the Germans). And the Soviets were nearly as chillingly evil, in that they perpetrated famines and other mass killings for the sake of political reasons- the Holodomor and the dekulakization are the classic examples.
The Japanese weren’t coming from that same place of hatred; they were conquerors and monstrously indifferent toward those they conquered or faced, but I never got the impression that any of their atrocities were organized on an industrial scale from the higher echelons of leadership. Rather it was more low-level decisions that made the Japanese starve POWs and have comfort women, etc… Or at least that’s the impression I’ve had.
One could make a (defective) argument that “Colonial powers” wanted to deprive Japan of world power, but “wanted to usurp power from within”?
How were they planning to accomplish that feat? By kidnapping the Emperor and replacing him with a body double?
Just to give one example you seem to have missed, they held contests, widely publicized and followed avidly in Japan, for the soldier who could kill the most Chinese (man, woman or child) with a sword, with the winner getting a lot of publicity and lionization by the public as well as the government and military. It was a hell of a lot more than just starving some POWs and raping comfort women, and a lot more systematic than you seem to get. It wasn’t as industrialized and organized as the Germans, but then no one is as organized and regimented as the Germans. The USSR wasn’t either, yet they still managed to kill a lot more of their own folks than the Germans ever dreamed of using their more pedestrian methods.
I agree with the general thrust of this. As I said earlier, the valid reason IMO Westerners would view the Nazi’s as worse than the Soviets or Japanese militarists is a view that expects better from Western societies than non-Western. ‘Scientific’ or ‘industrialized’ killing is often mentioned but without the cultural aspect of the Germans being ‘closer to us’ I don’t think the particular means are really the key.
One side note though. The Japanese ‘contest’ was presented in Japan at the time as killing Chinese soldiers in combat with swords. You can see that in the two infamous articles about it which appeared in the English language Japan Advertiser in December 1937 here:
https://thenankingmassacre.org/2015/07/04/nanking-war-crimes-tribunal/
These stories, though perhaps not true in their particulars at all, represented an underlying reality of large scale murder of Chinese military prisoners at least, but the public face of the war effort shown in Japan was not actually atrocity against civilians. Which is one reason the exact facts of these cases are still obscure. It wasn’t recorded like a lot of the Holocaust for example. There is no absolute agreement but relative consensus about the scale and circumstances of German genocide, save for a few people denying clear facts. In case of Japan’s actions there are some people denying clear facts, but no similar consensus apart from those people. For example the total death toll for the Nanking Massacre given on the wiki page (and the footnotes are reasonable sources) varies by a factor of 6-8 and the low numbers are not by crazy people. But the high numbers are the ones Nationalists then Communists insisted on, and where it’s now basically prohibited for historians in China to come up with lower ones. And a variable portion, a potentially large portion of the lower totals, were murdered POW’s. That’s a war crime but not necessarily on an identical moral level with massacre of civilians. The basic facts are not as clear with Japanese actions in China. It’s another obstacle in the way of precise quantification of evil.
Another part of this, is that most of us here were born after the war, in many cases well after the war. We grew up with the Nazis as the ultimate go to Hollywood bad guys. No, not bad guys, worst guys. Documentaries, fiction, science fiction, comic books, historical dramas, etc.
So I think many of us are to some degree biased towards Nazis = The Worst!
I agree with some others who have said it was a different kind of evil, and you can’t really put it on the same spectrum.
After some thought, I voted “worse than Nazis”.
If you have not read the details of the Nanjing massacre, congratulations, you are still living in the happy phase of your life. And whereas many Germans didn’t know the extent of what was happening, many of the basic details: of atrocities being committed abroad were printed in Japanese newspapers. Finally bonus points for the fact the Japanese still do not accept any responsibility and in fact are actively trying to erase this history.
Disclaimer: I’m posting this from China, so you may think I am following my country’s propaganda, however I am British and would have given the same answer prior to moving to China.
What kind of lives did the people of China and Korea have before the Japanese invasion? How did there own governments treat them?
Korea is tricky, you have to go back before 1910 when Japan annexed Korea or really 1905, as it was a “Protectorate” of Japan as of 1905. In the 1800s the country suffered extreme poverty and plenty of peasant uprisings. In the 1890s, their new Emperor began an aggressive modernization and things were much better but lets say this made Japan uneasy and they took Korea.
China was variable and I can’t easily sum it up. Plenty of problems, much from the European powers and Japan.
A previous generation of Japanese military behaved a lot more honorably (at least towards prisoners of war).
By various accounts, Russian prisoners were treated quite well by the Japanese during the 1905 war.
By the '30s, the pro-conquest, manifest racial destiny crowd in Japan had degraded standards of behavior markedly.
The valid Korean complaint is mainly just that they were entitled to their own national self determination. Korea is definitely a distinct nation with its own unique language, history and its own though heavily Chinese-influenced culture (like Japan). The Japanese, asserting this right for themselves, denied it to Korea.
But, once you start looking for massive atrocities by the Japanese beyond harshly denying Korean national self determination and identity, and treatment of Koreans as second class citizens in the Japanese Empire, you’re generally going to have to exaggerate or take the tack of blaming the generally bad conditions and short life expectancy in poor countries (ie almost all countries in human history till recently) on the rulers.
China v Japan from 1931 and particularly 1937 to 1945 was pretty different. In part because China was so much relatively larger and stronger to stall Japan’s attempt to dominate by military force in a large, long war. That war caused a huge number of civilian deaths the way wars in poor countries always did (and do, a few million dead in the wars in Congo in recent years, mainly because of famine, disease, displacement, etc not massacres, but those people still didn’t get to live their lives). So did internal Chinese unrest in the preceding period but it wasn’t Japan’s business to get involved, nor its true intent to ‘restore order’, but to dominate.
Separately the Japanese conducted the war in a very brutal way. First wrt prisoners. They held a few dozen Chinese military prisoners in 1945, after contending often successfully with giant Chinese armies for 8 yrs of relatively continuous combat and off and on before that. Some of the huge number of Chinese soldiers captured had been released or recruited into pro-Japanese ‘puppet’ forces. But most had been murdered after surrendering or their surrender was not accepted. And in many cases civilians were murdered. Sometimes that was in suppression and reprisal against partisans. Sometimes there was no military reason. But the scale is not as clear as for German actions. Versions told in China are not necessarily reliable.
That doesn’t make the actual Japanese actions OK, but it’s a complicating factor that the quantitative facts are not as clear as in case of Germany. And I don’t see how a comparison like this could be made on anecdotes, especially when they aren’t strictly accurate. Again, Japanese papers did not celebrate atrocities at Nanking. The killing they reported, including ‘contest’, was supposedly of Chinese soldiers in combat. The underlying reality was many prisoners and civilians murdered but that’s not what was reported. It’s not clear the Japanese public was more aware of atrocities than the German public.
FTR, no Nazi death camp was in Germany. They were all in Poland.
Most were in Poland. The Nazis also operated one near Minsk and another in Croatia( this also doesn’t include the Ustaše run camps at Jadovno and Jasenovac ).