Japanese war crimes - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Japanese war crimes occurred during the period of Japanese imperialism. Other names, such as the Asian Holocaust and Japanese war atrocities, are also used for these war crimes. Some war crimes were committed by military personnel from the Empire of Japan in the late 19th century, although most took place during the first part of the Shōwa Era, the name given to the reign of Emperor Hirohito, until the military defeat of the Empire of Japan, in 1945.
Historians and governments of many countries officially hold Japanese military forces, namely the Imperial Japanese Army and the Imperial Japanese Navy, responsible for killings and other crimes committed against many
millions of civilians and prisoners of war (POWs).
Contents
2.1 Japanese military culture and imperialism
3.1 Mass killings
3.2 Experiments on humans and biological warfare
3.3 Use of chemical weapons
3.4 Preventable famine
3.5 Torture of POWs
3.6 Cannibalism
3.7 Forced labour
3.8 Comfort women
Major incidents
Alexandra Hospital massacre
Andaman Islands
Banka Island Massacre
Batu Lintang POW/internment camp
Bataan Death March
Burma Railway
Changjiao Massacre
Changteh Chemical Weapon Attack
Comfort women
Hell Ships
Japanese human experimentations
Kaimingye germ weapon attack
Laha Massacre
Manila Massacre
Nanking Massacre
Parit Sulong Massacre
Panjiayu Massacre
Sandakan Death Marches
Sook Ching Massacre
Three Alls Policy
Tol Plantation Massacre
Wake Island massacre
War crimes in Manchukuo
Two Japanese officers, Toshiaki Mukai and Tsuyoshi Noda competing to see who could kill (with a sword) one hundred people first. The bold headline reads, "'Incredible Record' (in the Contest To Cut Down 100 People—Mukai 106 – 105 Noda—Both 2nd Lieutenants Go Into Extra Innings"
Contest to kill 100 people using a sword - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Because of the sheer scale of suffering caused by the Japanese military during the 1930s and 1940s, it is often compared to the military of Nazi Germany during 1933–45. The historian Chalmers Johnson has written that:
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It may be pointless to try to establish which World War Two Axis aggressor, Germany or Japan, was the more brutal to the peoples it victimised. The Germans killed six million Jews and 20 million Russians [i.e. Soviet citizens]; the Japanese slaughtered as many as 30 million Filipinos, Malays, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Indonesians and Burmese, at least 23 million of them ethnic Chinese. Both nations looted the countries they conquered on a monumental scale, though Japan plundered more, over a longer period, than the Nazis. Both conquerors enslaved millions and exploited them as forced labourers — and, in the case of the Japanese, as [forced] prostitutes for front-line troops. If you were a Nazi prisoner of war from Britain, America, Australia, New Zealand or Canada (but not Russia) you faced a 4 % chance of not surviving the war; [by comparison] the death rate for Allied POWs held by the Japanese was nearly 30 %.[7]
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