I am not excusing or belittling what the Japanese did. I would add this to what has been said here:
• I think probably no one is going to go apesh^t if I say that the Japanese killed between 4 and 10 million “innocents”. You pick a number a number at the high end of that range, that is still approximately half the number the Nazi’s killed – victims that can be attributed to “War crimes.”
• Further, the bulk of Japanese innocent slaughter took place in China. The Kuomintang and Communists each probably killed more Chinese than the Japanese, immediately before, during and after the occupation and that makes it very hard to devise close to accurate numbers and it lets a certain moral relativism & compassion fatigue creep in.
• I think the United Nations (Read the West) was at War with the “Red Chinese” within a half-decade of Nuremberg and this further colored the West’s view of the Victims of Japanese aggression, just as Histories began to be written and films began to be made.
• I think that most standard Histories “blame” the Nazi’s for starting World War II. Sure there was a sneak attack at Pearl and that was huge. But the world-wide conflagration started when Germany Invaded Poland 9/01/39.
Not saying that Racism or Immediacy or anything listed before this wasn’t part of the “Why” on this, it was. These were some other factors.
I disagree with one point made earlier though and I have said it on the SDMB before: There is a common belief that the Nazi’s had Nuremberg and that the Japanese were never brought to account for their war crimes by and large. This belief stands History on its head.
From 1946–51 some 5,600 Japanese personnel were prosecuted in more than 2,200 trials. More than 4,400 Japanese personnel were convicted and about 1,000 were sentenced to death.
This was not even the main trials, the equivalents of Nuremberg. They were in addition to the main Japanese War Crime tribunal the so-called “Tokyo Trials ”
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Twenty-five Japanese military and political leaders were charged with Class A crimes, and more than 300,000 Japanese nationals were charged with Class B and C crimes, mostly over prisoner abuse. The crimes perpetrated by Japanese troops and authorities in the occupation of Korea and China (Manchukuo) were not part of the proceeding. China held 13 tribunals of its own, resulting in 504 convictions and 149 executions.
In contrast, the Nazi regime was put on trial in two tribunals in Nuremberg, Germany from 1945 to 1949. The first tribunal indicted 24 major Nazi war criminals, and resulted in 19 convictions (of which 12 led to death sentences) and 3 acquittals. The second tribunal indicted 185 members of the military, economic, and political leadership of Nazi Germany, of which 142 were convicted and 35 were acquitted. In subsequent decades, approximately 20 additional war criminals who escaped capture in the immediate aftermath of World War II were tried in West Germany and Israel.
There was Soviet summary justice going on in Germany that make this number discrepancy less than this post makes it seem. Additionally the Nazi regime, unlike the Japanese, was completely destroyed before surrender (meaning fewer documents, fewer baddest of the bad survivors and people in a position to “flip” on the worst). Still, it is fair to say that after the war the Japanese by and large were punished more thoroughly and in greater numbers for War crimes than the Germans were.
