The War Crimes
Japan and Japanese citizens, mostly military forces, carried out a campaign of terror during World War II that is unsurpassed in bestiality and savagery in modern times. On top of combat losses, Asian and Allied nations lost millions of non-combatant dead to all causes: bombardment of cities, slave labor, massacres, summary executions, medical experiments, germ and gas warfare, beheading, beating and rape, stabbing, gun shot, hanging, torture, boiling alive, impaling on bayonets, burning alive, starvation, medical neglect, etc. Japanese businesses and the Kwantung Army cooperated in the operation of the Opium Monopoly Bureau to finance Japan's war machine with the creation of millions of Chinese addicts. At least 200,000 women were forced to serve as sex slaves. Allied POW survived World War II at a 2% rate in Nazi camps, but POW held by the Japanese died at a 30% rate. Of all the belligerents, only the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics treated POW with the same brutal indifference as Japan. In 1945, Japanese leaders ordered the death of all remaining POW, "leaving no trace". The Japanese reign of terror began in earnest in 1931. The nightmare did not end until late 1945, only after allied forces entered territories held by the Japanese, often days, weeks and even months after atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (August 1945).
Japan's War Crimes: Bibliography
Betrayal in High Places 1946-1950, James MacKay, Tasman Archives (NZ), Aukland, 1996.
Prisoners of the Japanese: POWs of World War II in the Pacific, Gavan Daws, William Morrow, New York, 1994.
The Comfort Women: Japan's Brutal Regime of Enforced Prostitution in the Second World War, George Hicks, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 1994.
Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare 1932-1945 and the American Cover up, covers operations of Unit 731 and related activities, Sheldon H. Harris, Routledge, New York, 1994.
Unit 731: Testimony, Hal Gold, New Yenbooks, Tokyo, 1996.
Sinister Twilight (Arrow, UK), by Noel Barber. Documents the fall of Singapore to the Japanese, by re-imagining the crucial events of the period.
The Naked Island, by Russell Braddon, (Penguin/Atheneum; o/p). Southeast Asia under the Japanese: Braddon's disturbing yet moving first-hand account of the POW camps of Malaya, Singapore and Siam displays courage in the face of appalling conditions and treatment; worth scouring secondhand stores for (according to review in Australia).