Culture of Cruelty

From the magazine Military History.

The article starts out by talking about how the Japanese murdered 23 Australian women who were nurses in the Dutch East Indies, machine-gunning them to death on Feb. 16, 1942. They then went ahead to murder men in the hospital. They also had gang raped and murdered British and Chinese nurses in Hong Kong.

Such behavior is not civilized, of course, and the article tries to explain how the Japanese soldiers got that way, looking back first to the samurai and how they operated. Their code of bushido 'demanded rigid loalty to their liege lord and suicidal bravery in battle.'

The article notes that the Emperor was declared to be a divine being in 1890, thus establishing the need for 'unquestioning obedience of not only him but also his representatives in the government and military.'

The article talks about how barbaric the Japanese soldiers were in their invasion of China and then brings up the Rape of Nanking, saying 80,000 women were raped and some 300,000 citizens were murdered.

There were two groups in Japan. One was the Imperial Way Faction (Kodoba), which consisted of military officers and philosophers. They wanted to return Japan to a 'golden way' when the samurai would rule everyday life and the Emperor would have absolute power.

Another group wanted to purify politics, reject democracy, and plan for any future conflict that would need to unify the military and industry. It was this group that pushed Japan into war, but they adapted a number of tenets from the Imperial Way and they altered the bushido code to establish any form of surrender as being unacceptable.

There was an belief that Japan was meant to rule the entire world, and that the Japanese were seen as racially dominant to everyone else. This affected how they treated prisoners as they felt surrender was unacceptable and anyone who did surrender was not worth treating as human.

The Japanese soldiers themselves were brought up under a very brutal training system. Their officers were supposed to infallible, and any order they gave had to be objected as if it had come from the Emperor himself.

Thus, they could order the soldiers to do anything, even reprehensible things, and the soldiers would obey without question. The article goes on to say that, from the Japanese viewpoint, the war was actually a racial one.

So, basically, anyone they conquered, soldier or otherwise, was beneath them and you could do anything you wanted to them.



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