Japanese war crimes in World War II
Japanese war crimes during World War II took place in China , the Pacific Rim, Southeast Asia, and the Indonesian archipelago. Millions of civilians and prisoners of war were deliberately murdered. These war crimes are also known as the "Asian Holocaust" and took place around the same time as the crimes of National Socialism in Europe.
Sometimes Japanese war crimes are also included, which were committed in the course of the occupation of Manchuria since 1931 and the incorporation of Korea before the Second World War .
introduction
At the beginning of the 20th century, the Japanese Empire was the only industrial nation in Asia and, compared to its neighbor China, played a major role in world politics. In 1905 they emerged victorious from the Russo-Japanese War and fought both on the side of the Entente cordiale in the First World War and on the side of the White Army in the Russian Civil War . The Imperial Army did not lose a single significant battle (as it has done for over a hundred years). The resulting sense of superiority mixed with Japan's growing need for raw materials into increasing nationalism. Through previous wars and conflicts (including with China), the empire had already managed to incorporate important areas ( Taiwan , South Sakhalin , Korea ). In the Versailles peace treaty , large parts of the German colony of German New Guinea were awarded.
On September 18, 1931, Japanese officers carried out an explosive attack on the Mukden Railway in Manchuria (see Mukden incident ). The Chinese were blamed for the attack, and it served as an excuse to invade Manchuria permanently, in addition to the Japanese troops already in northeast China. At this time the first war crimes occurred ( Pingdingshan massacre ).
The crimes occurred for different reasons. They often took place on the orders of the Japanese Empire or were carried out on site by soldiers of the Imperial Japanese Army . During Japanese invasions into the cities that surrendered, there were major massacres such as in 1937 at Nanking ( Nanjing massacre ) or in the course of fighting such as 1945 in Manila on instructions from Tokyo. In other cases, specific ethnic groups were targeted by mass murders, such as the Chinese of the Malay Peninsula in the Sook-Ching massacre , or entire areas were preventively depopulated in the fight against partisans . After the first American air raid on Japan, the Doolittle Raid , some of the pilots crashed over a part of China occupied by the Imperial Japanese Army and were hidden by the population. As a result, the Japanese Air Force and special forces deployed biological warfare agents in retaliation in Zhejiang and Jiangxi provinces . It is estimated that 250,000 civilians were killed. According to other sources, over a million civilians were killed in the search and retaliation.
In addition, millions of people died in forced labor camps and in starvation disasters caused by the Japanese occupation system (especially in Indonesia and Indochina ).
Furthermore, numerous human tests were carried out by Japanese army units (for example Unit 731 ) , including the testing of biological and chemical weapons on living people. Other of these crimes were racially motivated, such as the Sook Ching massacre. This was due to the fact that during the Meji period in Japan the idea arose that one's own race was superior to all others. The other Asiatic peoples were perceived as inferior to their own and only served for their benefit.
Definitions
The definition of Japanese war crimes varies from country to country. According to the Nuremberg Charter, war crimes can be defined as "violations of the laws or customs of war" caused by the unscrupulous conduct of a government or military armed forces against enemy civilians or enemy combatants.
Military personnel of the Japanese Empire have been tried in court for perpetrating a number of human rights violations against civilians and prisoners of war across East Asia and the western Pacific region. These events culminated during the Second Sino-Japanese War of 1937-1945 and the Asian and Pacific actions of World War II (1941-1945).
In Japan itself, the individual events or details of war crimes are often denied by Japanese nationalists such as Tsukurukai (Society for History Textbook Reform). Such organizations and their activities are the subject of controversy in historical revisionism , especially in the “textbook dispute” .
International right
Although the Japanese Empire has not signed the Geneva Conventions , which have established the standard definitions of war crimes since 1864, it is nonetheless bound by international and Japanese law with regard to war crimes. Many of the crimes committed by the Imperial Armed Forces were also punishable under the Japanese Code of Martial Law, which was either ignored or not enforced by the Japanese authorities. The Empire of Japan also violated provisions of the Treaty of Versailles, such as Article 171, which prohibits the use of poison gas (chemical weapons). Likewise, other international agreements such as the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907, which contain the protection of prisoners of war and were also signed by Japan, were disregarded. According to the historian Akira Fujiwara, the Japanese Emperor Hirohito personally ratified the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 on August 5, 1937 , having his Army Chief of Staff, Prince Kanin, remove a sentence on the treatment of Chinese prisoners in order to restrict this convention bypass.
International treaties of Japan
In Japan, the term “Japanese war crimes” usually refers to cases brought against those responsible for the Japanese Imperial Army by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, also known as the Tokyo Trials , after the end of the Pacific War. The Tokyo trials made no allegations against war crimes committed by officers, NCOs or soldiers according to the B and C classifications of war crimes. These proceedings were dealt with separately in courts-martial or military commissions throughout Asia.
The Japanese government takes the position that Japan is not a signatory to the Geneva Conventions and has therefore not violated international law. It also believes that the Allied States have not violated the Geneva Convention in actions against Japanese civilians and prisoners of war, including the internment of ethnic Japanese, the bombing of Tokyo and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki .
The Japanese government signed the Kellogg-Briand Pact in April 1929 , in which, in particular, the war of aggression waged out of national interests was declared contrary to international law. As a result, Japan was charged with "crimes against peace" for its actions from 1937 to 1945. This charge was introduced at the Tokyo Trials to enable the prosecution of so-called "Class A war criminals," all of whom were charged with crimes against peace. The division into A-, B- and C-class war criminals goes back to the London Agreement of the Allies of August 1945. The so-called main war criminals, the political-military leadership of Japan, were classified as class A war criminals, all of whom were to be charged with “crimes against peace” before an international tribunal. B- and C-class war criminals, on the other hand, were usually tried for conventional war crimes (murder, rape and mistreatment of prisoners of war or non-combatants as well as other violations of the Hague Land Warfare Regulations , customary war law and the like) before the conventional military courts of the Allies or the Asian states, which The scene of the respective crimes were charged. However, no convictions for such crimes have been recognized by the Japanese government, as the Kellogg-Briand Pact does not contain a writ of enforcement clause that provides for penalties in the event of breach of contract.
By signing the unconditional surrender of the Japanese armed forces on September 2, 1945, the Japanese government accepted the conditions of the Potsdam Declaration of July 26, 1945. According to Article 10 of the declaration, the Japanese nation will neither be destroyed nor the Japanese people enslaved. but war criminals would be severely punished. Democracy and human rights should be introduced in Japan.
Japanese law
Japan had waged the Asia-Pacific War (1931–1945) in East and later in Southeast Asia as an all-out war largely without regard to international norms of martial law. The military confrontation with China was conducted by both sides without a formal declaration of war, which both the Japanese term for the conflict from 1937 as a "Chinese incident" deliberately differentiated from a war with its implications under international law and a formal legal non-application of the international law of war Hague Agreement and Geneva Convention legitimized.
War crimes were pursued - also selectively - only in the first phase of the occupation. This led to the Tokyo Trial of Category A War Criminals, which ran from 1946 to 1948. The legal processing was dominated by political and strategic considerations, especially by the leading occupying power, the USA. With the escalating Cold War and the “counter-course”, the long-term goal of which was the inclusion of the former enemy Japan in the western camp, the interest of the Americans in further broaching or even pursuing Japanese war crimes evaporated. Accordingly, after the verdicts of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East in 1948, no follow-up trials, which were originally planned to be analogous to Nuremberg, were scheduled. The suspects already detained for these follow-up trials were released without trial. Since the Japanese criminal law did not contain an offense of war crimes, the Japanese judicial authorities did not initiate prosecution of war criminals even after the restoration of full state sovereignty with the peace treaty of San Francisco in 1952. Nonetheless, in accordance with Article 11 of the San Francisco Peace Treaty, Japan recognized the verdicts of the Tokyo trials . With the end of the occupation, the rehabilitation of the executed war criminals by the Japanese state was officially sealed - the authorities have since recognized them as persons who died in the public service , legally protected by the “ Law on Financial Assistance for Survivors and War Disabled ”.
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzō Abe has endorsed the position that Japan accepted the Tokyo Tribunal and its judgments as a condition for ending the war, but that its judgments have no relation to domestic law. According to this view, those convicted of war crimes are not criminals under Japanese law. According to Shinzo Abe, they stood before a court for crimes against peace and humanity that sentenced them according to a concept that the Allies only created after the war and that is not enshrined in law.
Historical and geographical expansion
Outside of Japan, different societies use different timeframes in determining Japanese war crimes. For example, in North and South Korea, the annexation of Korea by Japan in 1910 is considered a war crime because of the deprivation of civil liberties and exploitation against the Korean people. The dissolution of the independence movement of March 1st in 1919 by the use of force or the assassination of Queen Myeongseong by the Gen'yōsha because the empress was involved in attempts to reduce Japanese influence in Korea are considered there also as a war crime. In comparison, the United States did not have a military conflict with Japan until 1941, so that in the United States only the period 1941–1945 is considered for Japanese war crimes.
An aggravating factor for the international definition of Japanese war crimes is that only a minority of the population of the Asian and Pacific countries conquered by the Japanese cooperated with the occupying power. She served for a variety of reasons, such as economic hardship, coercion, or antipathy towards other imperialist powers, even in the Japanese armed forces. Many Koreans served in the imperial armed forces. The ethnic Chinese living on Formosa were recruited into the Formosa Army, which was part of the Japanese Imperial Army. The Indian National Army under Subhas Chandra Bose is perhaps the best-known example of a movement against European imperialism that was founded to aid the Japanese military during World War II. Outstanding individual examples of nationalists in other countries are the later Indonesian President Suharto , who also served in the Japanese imperial troops, or the Burmese nationalist leader Aung San , who initially formed the Burma National Army unilaterally with the Japanese and who opposed them in the spring of 1945 Japanese turned. In some cases, Koreans were also responsible for war crimes committed by the Japanese Empire. They were used as commanders and guards in prisoner-of-war camps. The Dutch tribunal judge and scholar B. V. A. Roling stated in the Tokyo studies that the "Korean guards were far more cruel than the Japanese". For political reasons, many war crimes committed by non-Japanese serving in the Imperial Forces were not investigated or prosecuted after 1945. In South Korea, it is alleged that such war criminals made their fortune by participating in exploitative activities with the Japanese military and that former employees covered up some "Japanese war crimes" to avoid prosecution.
It has been argued that acts against people subject to Japanese sovereignty could not be counted as "war crimes". The question of Japanese de jure sovereignty over countries like Korea and Formosa in the years before 1945 is a matter of controversy. Through the Treaty of Shimonoseki of April 17, 1895, which provided in particular the cession of Taiwan , the Pescadores Islands and the Liaodong Peninsula in Manchuria to Japan, as well as the Japan-Korea annexation treaty of August 22, 1910, Japanese control over them became Territories accepted and internationally recognized.
The legality of the Japan-Korea annexation treaty is being disputed today in North and South Korea, as this treaty was not signed of their own free will from their perspective.
There are claims that war crimes continued to be committed after the Japanese Empire officially surrendered on August 14, 1945. According to the testimony of Captain Hoshijima Susumi, Allied prisoners of war who survived the death marches of Sandakan (North Borneo) were killed two weeks after the emperor signed the deed of surrender.
background
Japanese military, culture and imperialism
Especially during the imperialist phase of Japan, the military culture before and during the Second World War had a major influence on the behavior of the Japanese armed forces. Centuries ago the samurai in Japan was taught to be unconditionally obedient to his master and to be fearless in battle. After the Meiji Restoration in 1868 and the collapse of the Tokugawa Shogunate , the emperor became the focus of military allegiance. During the so-called "Age of Empire" in the late 19th century, Japan followed the example of the other world powers in the developing world, namely with the development of an empire. This objective was also aggressively pursued by the German Empire.
As with other imperialist powers, Japanese popular culture became increasingly chauvinist by the late 19th century and into the 20th century. The rise of Japanese nationalism was seen from 1890 in part in the adoption of Shinto as the state religion, including its anchoring in the education system. Amaterasu is the most important deity of Shinto. She personifies the sun and light and is considered the founder of the Japanese imperial family, which made the emperor believed to be divine. This fact justified the demand that the emperor and his representatives must be obeyed without question.
Victory in the first Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895) marked Japan's rise to the status of a great military power.
Unlike the other great powers, Japan did not sign the Geneva Convention. Still, an imperial proclamation of 1894 stated that Japanese soldiers should make every effort to win the war without violating international law. According to historian Yuki Tanaka, during the First Sino-Japanese War, the Japanese armed forces published that 1790 Chinese prisoners would be harmed if they sign an agreement never to again take up arms against Japan. After the Russo-Japanese War from 1904 to 1905, in accordance with the Hague Convention, all 79,367 Russian prisoners of war were released from the Empire and paid for their work. The behavior of the Japanese military during World War I (1914–1918) was at least as humane as that of other armies, so that even some German prisoners of war who were imprisoned in Japan settled in Japan after the war.
The events of the 1930s and 1940s
From the late 1930s onwards, the rise of militarism in Japan created at least superficial similarities between the broader Japanese military culture and the culture of the military elite (Waffen-SS) in Nazi Germany. Japan also had a military secret police like the Kempeitai , which resembled the Gestapo in its role in annexed and occupied countries. The brutality of the Kempeitai was especially notorious in the Korean colony and the occupied territories. The Kempeitai was abhorred on mainland Japan, especially during World War II, when under Prime Minister Hideki Tojo (formerly commander of the Kempeitai of the Japanese army in Manchuria 1935–1937) the Kempeitai used their power extensively to maintain the loyalty of the Japanese to the war to ensure. Under Tojo, the Kempeitai Japan transformed into a police state. Inadequate devotion to the emperor often meant corporal punishment. Beating imperial soldiers in the lower ranks was commonplace, but the most brutal blows were given to soldiers in Japanese captivity.
crime
Because of the sheer extent of the suffering, the Japanese military during the 1930s and 1940s is often compared to the military of Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945. Much of the controversy over Japan's role in World War II revolves around the death rates of prisoners of war and civilians under Japanese occupation. The historian Chalmers Johnson wrote:
It may be pointless to determine which Axis aggressor has harassed the populations of the occupied territories more brutally: Germany or Japan. The Germans killed six million Jews and 20 million Russians (Soviet citizens); the Japanese have killed 30 million Filipinos, Malay, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Indonesians and Burma (at least 23 million of them were ethnic Chinese). Both states plundered the occupied lands that they had conquered on a monumental scale; although the Japanese looted for a longer period of time than the Nazis. Both conquerors enslaved and exploited millions of people as slave laborers - and in the case of the Japanese also as prostitutes for the front troops. If a soldier from England, America, Australia, New Zealand or Canada (not Russia) fell into German captivity, he had a four percent chance of not surviving the war; In comparison, the death rate for allies captured by Japanese prisoners of war was nearly 30 percent.
At the Tokyo trial, the death rate among prisoners of war from Asian countries held by Japan was found to be 27.1 percent.
The death rate of Chinese prisoners of war was much higher because the Hague Conventions, ratified by Emperor Hirohito on August 5, 1937, removed the restrictions of international law on the treatment of Chinese prisoners of war. After Japan surrendered, only 56 Chinese prisoners of war were officially recorded by the Japanese authorities. After March 20, 1943, the Japanese Navy was ordered to execute all prisoners of war who are detained at sea.
Mass killings
The first known of these massacres was the Pingdingshan massacre on September 16, 1932, in which Japanese soldiers and police forces to pacify Manchukuo after the occupation of Manchuria believed the village of Pingdingshan to be a militia base and therefore rounded up around 3,000 residents and at their feet of Pingdingshan Mountain in southern Fushun. To cover up the crime, the bodies were burned and 800 houses in the village were set on fire. As early as January 29, 1932, Japanese aircraft bombed Shanghai in the course of the battle for Shanghai . 18,000 civilians died in the process and during the subsequent occupation.
After the Japanese attack on China in 1937, the massacres started again, but this time on a much larger scale. Exactly five months after the incident at the Marco Polo Bridge , Japanese troops reached the Chinese capital Nanjing on December 8 and surrounded the city. Five days later the city was occupied. The Nanjing massacre lasted six weeks . The nature of the killings varied. Civilians (including children and toddlers) and prisoners of war were bayonet stabbed, shot, beheaded, drowned and buried alive by the thousands. A total of 200,000 to 300,000 people were murdered in the massacre. Other massacres among numerous similar crimes were the Panjiayu massacre or the Changjiao massacre , in which around 30,000 civilians were killed.
During their campaign of conquest in Southeast Asia, the Japanese military leadership planned organized mass killings in advance, of which the Sook Ching massacre of the ethnic Chinese of the Malay Peninsula from February 18 to March 4, 1942 is the best known. Around 50,000 ethnic Chinese were led through Singapore and massacred on the beaches. In total, around 90,000 Chinese were killed during the Sook Ching massacre on the Malay Peninsula. On April 19, 1942, the last American and Filipino troops surrendered in the Philippines. The Bataan death march took place . The prisoners of war had to march in the blazing sun all day without a break and without water. Anyone who stopped on the march or fell over from exhaustion was stabbed to death with a bayonet. Anyone who ran to streams or springs was shot. A total of around 16,500 American and Filipino prisoners of war died on the Baatan death march. The number of civilians killed who had to accompany the march is unknown.
After American troops landed on Luzon , the Philippine capital Manila became a battlefield. During the fighting, the Japanese carried out the Manila massacre on instructions from Tokyo during the last three weeks of February 1945 , in which around 100,000 civilians were murdered. There were numerous other massacres of the civilian population, for example the Kalagon massacre , in which the inhabitants of Kalagon (Burma) were massacred by members of the Japanese Imperial Army on July 7, 1945. Women and children were raped and tortured. The residents were put together in groups of five and blindfolded to the nearby well, where they were stabbed with bayonets and the bodies sunk into the 22 wells. An estimated 1,000 villagers died in this massacre. For this massacre, four Japanese soldiers were tried as war criminals before the tribunal in Rangoon in 1946 .
As an empirical researcher, Rudolph Joseph Rummel , professor of political science at the University of Hawaii , dealt primarily with war, genocide and political mass murder. Chapter 3 of Statistics of Japanese Democide states that between 1937 and 1945 the Japanese military murdered at least three million (perhaps over ten million) people. Six million people, including Chinese, Indonesians, Koreans, Filipinos, and Indochinese, including Western prisoners of war, have probably died. "This democide was due to a morally bankrupt political and military strategy as well as to military expediency and custom and national culture." According to Rummel, 10.2 million people were killed between 1937 and 1945 in the course of the war, including China as a direct result of the Japanese Operations killed around 3.9 million (mostly civilians).
Allied soldiers massacre
In addition, the following incidents in which Allied soldiers were massacred are recorded:
- St. Stephens College Massacre on December 25, 1941: A few hours before the British units surrendered during the Battle of Hong Kong on Christmas Eve, Japanese soldiers entered St. Stephens College, which was used as a hospital. Two doctors who tried to speak to the soldiers were later found murdered and mutilated. The Japanese killed some of the wounded British, Canadian and Indian soldiers. The staff and the wounded were then imprisoned. A second Japanese unit that came later maimed and killed Canadian prisoners. The nurses were raped and murdered. The next morning about 100 bodies were burned in the yard.
- Parit Sulong - On January 22, 1942, 110 Australian and 40 Indian soldiers were captured by the Japanese in Parit Sulong on the west coast of Malaysia . The prisoners of war were beaten and kicked with rifle butts. They were locked in an overcrowded shed and denied food, water, and medical care. At sunset the prisoners of war were shot or stabbed with a bayonet. The corpses were cremated. Only two soldiers escaped the massacre.
- Laha massacre - 14 days after Ambon surrendered on February 3, 1942, the Japanese Navy arbitrarily selected more than 300 Australian and Dutch prisoners of war and executed them at or near Laha airfield.
- Alexandra Hospital Massacre . February 14, 1942. Following the victory in Singapore, Japanese troops approached Alexandra Hospital, where wounded British and Malay soldiers were being treated. The British lieutenant who met them was stabbed with bayonets. The doctors and nurses and some of the patients were then massacred. The other 200 wounded soldiers, including those with amputated limbs, had to march to nearby barracks. Anyone who fell was stabbed to death. The next morning the remaining men were also killed, many of them hacked to pieces. Five lost limbs but survived.
- Bangka Island Massacre - The Bangka Island Massacre took place on February 16, 1942 when Japanese soldiers shot and killed 22 Australian military nurses. There was only one survivor.
- Bataan Death March - The 1942 Bataan Death March was a war crime committed by Japanese soldiers against American and Filipino prisoners of war in the early stages of the Pacific War during World War II in the Philippines. The prisoners were forced to march north to the railway loading station at San Fernando, nearly 100 km long and six days. Anyone who stopped or fell over on the march from exhaustion was punished with death by shooting, head or stabbing with a bayonet. Of the original 70,000 prisoners of war, 16,500 were killed or died of exhaustion during the march.
- Wake Island Massacre - On December 23, 1941, the Japanese captured 1,603 men in the Battle of Wake. 1150 civilians were among the prisoners. These were taken to the mainland in POW camps. However, about 100 American civilian employees remained on wake. On October 5, 1943, Admiral Sakaibara saw an American airstrike launched from an aircraft carrier as an indication that an invasion was imminent and ordered the killing of the remaining 98 Americans.
- In November 1943, an American submarine sank a Japanese ship of hell on which there were 548 British and Dutch prisoners of war. According to three Japanese guards who, like the rest of the crew, were picked up by a nearby mine sweeper, around 280 prisoners survived, all of whom were subsequently killed. The massacre was kept secret by the British government for decades so as not to affect relations with Japan.
- SS Tjisalak massacre - On March 26, 1944, the Dutch freighter SS Tjisalak was torpedoed and sunk by the Japanese submarine I-8. The 105 survivors of the freighter crew were then fished out of the water and brutally massacred by the Japanese. Five crew members survived the massacre.
- Palawan Massacre - On December 15, 1944, 143 American prisoners of war were massacred by the Imperial Japanese Army. The Japanese poured buckets of gasoline on the prisoner-of-war camp shelters and set them on fire. The prisoners of war escaping from the burning shelters were shot, beheaded, stabbed with bayonets or beaten to death amid the laughter of Japanese officers. Only 11 American prisoners of war survived the massacre.
- Death marches from Sandakan : In 1942 and 1943 3,600 Indonesian slave laborers and 2,400 Australian and British prisoners of war were brought to Sandakan in northern Borneo to build an airfield there. Even critically ill prisoners were forced to work, and many starved or killed. In January 1945 the first death marches began . Those who no longer had the strength to carry the heavy loads were killed. The second marches began on May 29th. The marches continued until there were hardly any survivors. On July 9th, the Japanese officers decided to starve the sick prisoners and take the rest of them one last march to Ranau, where the last prisoners were massacred. The camp was destroyed and an attempt was made to remove all traces of its existence. Only six Australian soldiers who managed to escape survived.
Scorched Earth Strategy
Many of the crimes committed in China and other areas are related to the jinmetsu (sōtō) sakusen ( Japanese 燼 滅 (掃 討) 作 戦 , literally: "(cleansing) operation cremation and extermination") - China's policy of triple annihilation ( Chinese 三光 政策 , Pinyin sānguāng zhèngcè , English called Three Alls Policy - “burn everything down, slaughter and plunder”) - of the Japanese armed forces in the Second Sino-Japanese War .
The historian Mitsuyoshi Himeta reports that from 1942 to 1945 a policy of triple extinction (Japanese: Sanko Sakusen ) was practiced in China , which was responsible for the deaths of more than 2.7 million Chinese civilians. This scorched earth strategy was sanctioned by Emperor Hirohito himself and pursued under the direction of the Japanese armed forces until the end of the war. This policy was developed in retaliation against Chinese communists after the Hundred Regiments Offensive .
The name "Sanko Sakusen," based on the Chinese term, was first popularized in Japan in 1957 when a former Japanese soldier was released from the Fushun War Crimes Detention Center and a controversial book called The Three Alls: Confessions of Japanese War Crimes published in China (reprint: Kanki Haruo, 1979). This book features some of the Japanese war veterans who committed war crimes under the leadership of General Okamura Yasuji . After receiving death threats from Japanese militarists and ultra-nationalists, publishers were forced to stop publishing the book.
The Sanko Sakusen was initiated by Major General Ryūkichi Tanaka in 1940 and operated in full by General Yasuji Okamura in northern China in 1942. Their strategic goal was the complete wiping out of the communist bases in the contested provinces of Hebei, Shandong , Shensi, Shanhsi and Chahaer. For this purpose, the corresponding areas were divided into “pacified”, “half pacified” and “unsettled” areas. On December 3, 1941, the Sanko Sakusen, issued by the High Command of the Imperial Japanese Army under order number 575, found the approval of the policy. Okamura's strategy included campaigns of extermination and retaliation by the Japanese army, which typically involved burning entire villages, indiscriminately murdering anti-Japanese forces or suspects, and furaging and looting all food and fuel . Thousands of kilometers of walls and trenches, watchtowers and roads were built by Chinese slave laborers. These operations were aimed at the annihilation of all men between the ages of fifteen and sixty who were suspected of being enemies. In communist-controlled areas of China, the population fell from 44 to 25 million as a result of the Sanko Sakusen strategy through the death or flight of residents.
Use of chemical and biological weapons
During the Second Sino-Japanese War , several Japanese army units conducted extensive research into weapons of mass destruction and used them on numerous occasions in China. These units used chemical and biological weapons both against enemy troops and specifically for the mass killing of civilians in several operations .
According to the historians Yoshiaki Yoshimi and Seiya Matsuno, Emperor Hirohito gave Yasuji Okamura permission to use chemical weapons during these battles. During the Battle of Wuhan from August to October 1938, the Emperor legitimized the use of poison gas in 375 different missions against 1.1 million Chinese soldiers, 400,000 of whom died during the battle. Article 23 of the Hague Convention (1899 and 1907) and Article V of the Treaty relating to the use of submarines and harmful gases in warfare of February 6, 1921 condemned the use of poison gas by Japan. During the Battle of Changsha in the fall of 1939, the Imperial Japanese Army also used poison gas in large quantities against Chinese positions. Another example is the Battle of Yichang in October 1941, in which the 19th Artillery Regiment supported the 13th Brigade of the 11th Army by bombarding the Chinese forces with 1,000 yellow gas grenades and 1,500 red gas grenades. The area was overcrowded with Chinese civilians whose evacuation was banned by the Japanese army. Of the approximately 3,000 Chinese soldiers in the area, 1,600 soldiers were severely affected by the effects of the gas.
At the end of 1941, Japanese troops released around 3,000 Chinese prisoners of war after they had previously been infected with typhus. This caused an epidemic among both Chinese troops and the population. On May 5, 1942, a large-scale act of revenge by Japanese troops began for the so-called Doolittle Raid , in which about 50 Japanese were killed, which in turn was a retaliation for the attack on Pearl Harbor . Regular army units of the Japanese army withdrew from the areas designated for the action in the Chinese provinces of Zhejiang and Jiangxi , while troops from Unit 731 moved into these areas and began to contaminate all lakes, springs and rivers with anthrax. At the same time, the Japanese Air Force dropped the warfare agent over cities or sprayed it over residential areas. 250,000 people were murdered in the course of this action. In further acts of revenge, the Japanese army used cholera , typhus , plague and dysentery agents.
During the Battle of Changde , Japanese forces used massive biochemical weapons to break Chinese defenses. In November 1941, members of Unit 731 dropped plague- infested fleas from planes over Changde for the first time . In the epidemic that followed, 7,643 Chinese died. When Japanese troops attacked Changde in 1943 and encountered unexpectedly fierce resistance, they tried by all means to break this offensive, which lasted six weeks. Plague outbreaks occurred during the battle, affecting both Chinese soldiers and civilians. According to several Japanese soldiers from Unit 731 (including Yoshio Shinozuka), they had sprayed plague pathogens in the form of sprayable warfare agents from aircraft in and around Changde. At the same time, other army units (including unit 516) began using poison gas on a massive scale , which was shot down mainly with artillery shells both on Chinese positions in the surrounding area and in the city. The gas used was most likely mustard gas and lewisite , among others . 50,000 Chinese soldiers and 300,000 civilians died in the course of the battle. How many of them died from biological and chemical weapons cannot be determined.
All actions of these army units were top secret, and by the end of the war almost all evidence was destroyed. In many cases of poison gas deployments, the sequence of events could only be uncovered in retrospect through Chinese reports and statements by Japanese soldiers responsible. Only a few dozen bioweapons are documented in total, but it is widely believed that the majority of the seemingly common disease outbreaks in China during this period were actions by the Japanese military.
Human trials
During the Second World War, about 20,000 Japanese doctors performed experiments on humans. The victims were mainly Chinese, but also Filipino, Indonesian and Vietnamese civilians and American, British and Australian prisoners of war. The first experiments began in Manchuria before the Second World War.
From 1937, units of the Japanese army began to test biological and chemical weapons on living people, as well as to carry out further experiments. One of the most notorious units was the 731 unit under the command of Shirō Ishii , a Japanese microbiologist and lieutenant general. People were infected with pathogens, test subjects from various stages of the disease were taken and they were dissected alive and fully conscious, as it was feared that an anesthetic would falsify the results. Vivisections have also been performed on pregnant women, children, and infants. In these experiments 3500 people were murdered by “Unit 731” alone.
To research frostbite, the prisoners were treated outdoors at freezing temperatures. The bare arms were soaked in water at regular intervals until they were frozen solid. The arm was then amputated and the doctor repeated the process on the upper arm up to the shoulder. After both arms were amputated, this procedure was repeated on the legs until only the head and torso remained. The victim was then used for experiments with plague and pathogens.
One of the most notorious cases of human experimentation occurred in Japan itself. At least nine of the 12 crew members survived the crash of an American B-29 bomber on Kyūshū on May 5, 1945 . The crew under Lieutenant Marvin Watkins belonged to the 29th Bomb Group of the 6th Bomb Squadron. Lieutenant Watkins was taken to Tokyo for interrogation while the other survivors were assigned to the Department of Anatomy at Kyushu University in Fukuoka , where they were subjected to vivisections and bestial experiments. Lieutenant Watkins was the only one who survived captivity. On March 11, 1948, 30 people from Kyūshū University, including several doctors, were indicted before the Allied War Crimes Tribunal. The cannibalism charges were dropped, but 23 people were found guilty of vivisection or wrongful removal of body parts. Five were sentenced to death, four to life imprisonment, and the rest to temporary prison terms. In 1950, the Military Governor of Japan General Douglas MacArthur commuted all death sentences to prison terms and significantly reduced most prison terms. All those convicted of vivisecting the eight American bomber crew members were released by 1958.
Starting in 1943, white people's susceptibility to epidemics was tested on American prisoners of war in order to prepare for the later use of biological weapons in the USA, for the transport of which balloon bombs had been developed until 1945 , which were supposed to reach North America via the jet stream .
In 2004, Yuki Tanaka and Yoshimi discovered some documents in the Australian National Archives, showing that cyanide gas was tested on Australian and Dutch prisoners of war in November 1944 on the Kai Islands, Indonesia.
In 2006, former Japanese Imperial Navy medic Akira Makino stated that as part of his training, he was ordered to vivisect approximately 30 civilian prisoners in the Philippines between December 1944 and February 1945. The operations involved the amputation of limbs. Ken Yuasa, a former military doctor in China, has also opened up on similar cases where he was forced to participate in vivisections.
Famine in occupied countries
The Japanese occupation ruthlessly exploited the occupied territories, terrorizing the population and using them to meet their demand for raw materials. This included the forced labor of millions of people and the logistical confiscation of food from entire countries. The starving civilian population was denied any humanitarian aid. In connection with the concentration camps , in which locals had to do forced labor , and the strong, mostly arbitrary system of oppression that was directed against resistance groups, this led to several famine disasters that claimed millions of lives. In Vietnam alone, about two million people died in the famine of 1944–1945 , which corresponds to about 10% of the total population. A later UN report speaks of around four million dead in Indonesia as a result of starvation and forced labor.
The sheer number of civilians murdered and the associated removal of the corpses posed an enormous logistical challenge. Many Chinese were divided into so-called "funeral teams," a terrible experience that later evoked traumatic memories.
Torture of prisoners of war
Torture of prisoners of war was used by the Japanese imperial forces, mostly in an effort to gather military intelligence quickly, with the tortured being frequently executed afterwards. Former Japanese officer Uno Shintaro, who served in China during the war, stated “that torture of prisoners was the primary means and an inevitable need for intelligence gathering. After the interrogations and torture, the prisoners were murdered and buried to cover up the crime. I believed and acted like this because I believed what I was doing. We just did our duty as directed. We did it in the interest of our country, as a filial obligation to our ancestors. We never really respected the Chinese people on the battlefield. When you win, the losers look really miserable. We concluded that the Japanese breed was superior. "
cannibalism
Many written reports and testimony were collected by the Australian War Crimes Section of the Tokyo Tribunal and investigated by District Attorney William Webb. The investigation revealed that the Japanese occupation forces were practicing cannibalism against Allied prisoners of war in many parts of Asia and the Pacific. In many cases this was inspired by the ever-increasing Allied attacks on Japanese supply lines and the death and illness of Japanese soldiers as a result of starvation. Historian Yuki Tanaka wrote: "However, cannibalism was often a systematic activity carried out by entire groups under the command of officers." Japanese soldiers often participated in the murder of prisoners of war in order to secure a share of the corpses. For example, Havildar Changdi Ram, an Indian prisoner of war, testified that the Kempeitai beheaded an Allied pilot on November 12, 1944. He saw, hidden behind a tree, how some Japanese soldiers cut out the meat from his arms, legs, hips and buttocks, carried it to their quarters to cut it into small pieces and to fry it.
The Indian prisoner of war Lance Naik Hatam testifies that in New Guinea one prisoner was selected by the Japanese, killed and eaten by the soldiers every day. He saw that about 100 prisoners in this camp suffered the same fate in this way. The rest of the prisoners were taken to a camp 80 km away, where 10 prisoners died of disease. In this camp there was also a daily selection of prisoners. In some cases, the meat was cut from living people who were then thrown into a ditch, where they later died.
The most senior officer charged with cannibalism was Lieutenant General Yoshio Tachibana. He was accused that in August 1944 a prisoner of the US Navy was beheaded on Chichi Jima (Bonin Islands) on his orders and that his body fell victim to cannibalism. Since military and international law did not specifically address cannibalism, that charge was dropped and he was convicted of murder and attempted "preventing an honorable burial". Tachibana was sentenced to death and hanged.
Forced labor
The Japanese military used Asian civilians and prisoners of war for forced labor. Most of the forced laborers were Korean, Taiwanese, or Chinese. According to a joint study by historians Zhifen Ju, Mitsuyoshi Himeta, Toru Kubo and Mark Peattie, more than ten million Chinese civilians have been mobilized for forced labor by the Koa-in (Japanese Asia Development Board).
According to a 1947 investigation by the Japanese Ministry of Finance, 724,789 Koreans were forced to work in Japan between 1939 and the Japanese surrender. According to a document from the Japanese parliament from 1944, 16,113 Koreans were also deported for forced labor on the then Japanese island of Karafuto (Sakhalin) and 5931 Koreans in the Southeast Asian countries occupied by Japan. In addition to these official data, there were many other Korean forced laborers, which is why an exact number of the total Korean forced laborers and the dead can no longer be determined today. The number of deaths is estimated at over 60,000 forced laborers. According to a 1945 report by the Japanese governor, 92,748 forced laborers were deported from Taiwan to Southeast Asian countries and 8,419 forced laborers to Japan for arms production. Due to a decision by the Japanese government, forced laborers were brought to Japan from China between 1944 and 1945. According to the Japanese Foreign Ministry in 1946, 38,935 Chinese were distributed to 15 construction companies and 15 mining companies and four other companies throughout mainland Japan. In addition to the Chinese civilian population, Chinese prisoners of war were also forced to work. According to the Japanese Foreign Ministry, 6,830 Chinese forced laborers have died.
Under the Japanese colonial rule, Koreans and Taiwanese received Japanese citizenship. In the official sense, they were not foreigners, but in reality they were mostly treated as foreigners and discriminated against. Many Koreans and Taiwanese were used as soldiers and laborers for the Japanese military alongside forced labor. About 4.5 million Koreans were forced to work on the Korean Peninsula between 1939 and 1945. In northeast China (Manchuria), Chinese prisoners of war were forced to work by the Japanese railway company (Mantetsu) as early as the 1930s and from 1937 also Chinese prisoners of war.
From June 1942 to October 1943, the Japanese Army had the Thailand-Burma Railway, also known as the Burma Railway or Thai-Burma Railway , from 65,000 prisoners of war from Australia, the Netherlands and England, as well as more than 300,000 Asian slave laborers from Malaysia, Burma, Indochina , Vietnam and Thailand. Around 94,000 civilians and 14,000 prisoners of war were killed during the construction of the almost 415 km long rail link.
The US Library of Congress estimates that between four and ten million romusha (Japanese: manual labor) in Java were forced to work by the Japanese military. Of the approximately 270,000 Javanese workers who were used for forced labor in the Japanese-occupied territories of Southeast Asia, only 52,000 returned to Java, representing a death rate of 80 percent.
In the British military trials in Singapore , 111 Japanese soldiers were charged with the mistreatment and murder of prisoners of war, but not the mistreatment and murder of the Asian slave laborers. Of these 111 Japanese soldiers, 33 were Koreans who had been forced to serve as guards for the prisoners of war. 32 Japanese and nine Koreans were sentenced to death.
The Japanese government has paid reparations to several Asian countries such as the Philippines , Burma , Indochina and South Vietnam , but individual forced laborers have not been compensated by the Japanese government or by the companies. Several foreign governments, including China and Indonesia, have declared that they will forego reparations. The Japanese government refuses to offer compensation to individual forced laborers. Koreans and Chinese are now using Japanese citizens' groups to litigate the Japanese government and companies. Since the Japanese government has banned all processes of forced labor, Chinese lawyers are now asking Japanese companies in writing to apologize for this and to hold talks with the lawyers about the compensation of the forced laborers. Citing the Xinhua news agency , the China Internet Information Center reports on a list of 20 Japanese companies that have been contacted by Chinese lawyers: "According to media reports, the list includes several famous [sic!] Japanese companies such as Mitsubishi , Sumimoto [sic! ] and Nippon Mining . Some of them have already started negotiations with Chinese forced laborers. ”Of the total of 40,000 Chinese who were kidnapped to Japan between 1944 and 1945 and forced to do hard labor, around 700 Chinese are still alive (as of March 2009).
Comfort women
The term " comfort women " (ian-fu) is a euphemism for women who were forced into prostitution in Japanese military brothels during World War II. The Asia-Pacific War was also not the first time women were abused by the Japanese army. When the Japanese attacked Siberia in 1918, the Japanese army took prostitutes with them from Japan. With the invasion of China in 1932, the recruitment of young women as comfort women was systematized. The women recruited were mostly between the ages of 14 and 25, unmarried and most of them had no education. Each woman had about 30 to 40 soldiers on duty every day. Many died of illness, torture or starvation before the war ended. Thousands of comfort women were murdered in the last weeks of the war, only about 30 percent survived the war. It is estimated that 100,000 to 300,000 girls and women are affected. In Japan there is talk of 10,000 to 200,000 victims. However, the People's Republic of China today reports 200,000 victims in their country alone. Most of the victims came from Korea and Taiwan, but also from other occupied territories such as Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and China. Some of the women also came from Japan, the Netherlands and Australia.
In 1992, historian Yoshiaki Yoshimi published the research material in the archives of Japan's National Institute for Defense Studies . Yoshimi claimed that there was a direct link between imperial institutions such as the Kōa-in and the Comfort Stations (military brothels). On January 12, 1993, the publication of Yoshimi's findings in the Japanese media caused a sensation, forcing the government, represented by Cabinet Chief Koichi Kato, to acknowledge some of the facts on the same day. On January 17, 1993, while on a trip to South Korea , Prime Minister Miyazawa Kiichi presented a formal apology for the victims' suffering. On July 6, 1993 and August 4, 1993, the Japanese government admitted in a statement that the “military brothels were operated in response to the demands of the military at the time” and that “the Japanese military was involved, directly or indirectly, in the establishment and administration of the Military brothels and the transfer of comfort women involved ”and that the women“ in many cases were recruited against their will by coaxing and coercion. ”
The controversy resumed on March 1, 2007, when Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe apologized for the proposals of the US House Committee to ask the Japanese government to recognize and apologize for the role of the Japanese imperial military in World War II over sexual slavery , refused. In Shinzo Abe's opinion, there is no evidence that the women were forced into the military brothels. Abe's comment provoked negative reactions abroad. For example, on March 6, 2007, the New York Times wrote:
They weren't commercial brothels. Explicit and implicit violence was used in the recruitment of girls and women. Prostitution was not pursued in the military brothels, instead serial rapes took place there. The involvement of the Japanese army is documented in Japan's National Institute for Defense Studies . A senior official from Tokyo more or less apologized for these horrific crimes in 1993 ... Yesterday he reluctantly accepted the 1993 quasi-apology, but only as part of a pre-emptive statement that his government would reject the call for an official apology made in the United States Congress is pending. America is not the only country interested in Japan belatedly assuming full responsibility. Korea, China, and the Philippines are angry even after years of Japanese ambiguity on the subject.
On April 17, 2007, Yoshiaki Yoshimi and Hirofumi Hayashi reported finding seven documents from the Tokyo Trials, which stated that the Imperial Japanese military forces - for example the Tokkeitai (Navy Military Police) - daughters of men who were the Kempeitai (Army Military Police) forced people to work in brothels on the front lines in China, Indochina and Indonesia. Originally these documents were published at the war crimes trials. One of these documents quotes a lieutenant who reports that he set up such a brothel and used it himself. Another source reports Tokkeitai members arresting women off the street, forcing them to undergo medical examinations and then taking them to brothels.
On May 12, 2007, Taichiro Kaijimura published 30 documents sent to the Tokyo Tribunal by the Dutch government reporting forced mass prostitution in a 1944 incident in Magelang.
In other cases, some East Timorese victims testified that they were repeatedly raped by Japanese soldiers before their first menstruation.
Jan Ruff-O'Hearn (now residing in Australia), a Dutch-Indonesian “comfort woman”, was raped by Japanese soldiers “day and night” over a period of three months when she was 21. Jan Ruff-O'Hearn believes that the Japanese government has failed to take responsibility for its crimes. The Japanese government now wants to rewrite history so that it does not have to pay compensation to the victims.
In 1971, a Japanese woman was the only woman to have published her testimony (as of July 2007). Under the pseudonym Suzuko Shirota, she published her memoirs of how she was forced to work for the Japanese Imperial Army in Taiwan as a former comfort woman.
After 1945 many documents were destroyed so that those involved could not be called to account as war criminals. Many women were murdered by the Japanese military or prevented from returning to their home countries. Those who came to the Allied camps were able to return to their homeland after a while. Many of them kept silent about their past out of shame or were stigmatized and marginalized. Forced prostitution was not an issue in the war crimes trials.
On June 26, 2007, the Foreign Affairs Committee of the US House of Representatives passed a resolution that Japan should apologize and recognize in a clear and unequivocal manner that it had to accept historical responsibility for its military coercion of women into sexual slavery during the war . Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe regretted the decision of the House of Representatives, which passed the resolution on July 30, 2007.
Looting
Many historians can provide evidence that the Japanese government and individual military personnel were involved in widespread looting during the period from 1895 to 1945. The looting comprised all kinds of valuable goods from banks, custodians, temples, churches, other commercial real estate, mosques, museums and private households including private land. During the occupation of Nanking, the Japanese looted department stores and robbed civilians of everything they had, including jewelry, coins, pets, food, clothing, works of art, including worthless items such as cigarettes, eggs, fountain pens and buttons.
The so-called Yamashita gold, also known as the Yamashita treasure, was amassed by the looting of the Japanese armed forces during the Second World War in Southeast Asia; the booty is said to have been hidden in caves, tunnels and underground facilities in the Philippines. The treasure was named after the Japanese general Yamashita Tomoyuki , who was also called the "Tiger of Malaya". Although reports of people claiming to have hidden the treasure have emerged, its existence in the Philippines, which has attracted treasure hunters from all over the world for more than 50 years, is controversial among most experts. Rumor has it that the treasure was the subject of a complex lawsuit filed in a state court in Hawaii in 1988 involving Filipino treasure hunter Rogelio Roxas and former President of the Philippines Ferdinand Marcos .
Celebrities who studied the existence of Yamashita's gold also include Sterling and Peggy Seagrave. In their book on Yamashita's gold, the Seagraves claim that the looting was organized on a large scale by yakuza gangsters like Kodama Yoshio and that the highest levels of Japanese society, including Emperor Hirohito, were implicated. The Japanese government intended to use the booty from Southeast Asia to fund Japan's war effort. The Seagraves further claim that Emperor Hirohito appointed his brother Prince Yasuhito Chichibu to head a secret organization called Kin for this purpose. It is also alleged that many of those who knew the locations of the hidden loot were killed during the war or later executed or imprisoned by the Allies for war crimes. General Yamashita himself was executed in Manila on February 23, 1946 for war crimes.
According to various reports, the loot was initially concentrated in Singapore and later brought to the Philippines. After the end of the war, the Japanese hoped to bring the treasure from the Philippines to the main Japanese islands by ship. As a result of the advanced Pacific War in 1943, the Japanese suffered increasingly heavy losses on their merchant ships from Allied submarines and aircraft, and some ships that were supposed to bring the spoils back to Japan were also sunk.
The Seagraves, Lansdale, and Santa Romana claim that US military intelligence, with the support of Emperor Hirohito and other high-ranking Japanese figures, deposited much of the gold loot in 176 reliable banks in 42 different countries. These gold deposits were created under numerous aliases in order to keep the identity of the real owners secret. These gold investments were used to fund US intelligence operations around the world during the Cold War. These rumors have inspired many hopeful treasure hunters, but most experts and Philippines historians believe that there is no credible evidence for this.
In 1992, Imelda Marcos claimed that Yamashita's gold made up a large part of her husband Ferdinand's fortune.
War crimes trials
The prosecution of Japanese war criminals was announced in the Allied Potsdam Agreement. After the capitulation of Japan, the alleged major war criminals were arrested at the instigation of the American commander-in-chief and governor in Japan, General Douglas A. MacArthur. Over 100 people of the so-called A-class war criminals were arrested, above all the former Prime Minister General Hideki Tojo. They were judged in the Tokyo trial.
In addition to the Tokyo trial, there were numerous trials against Japanese war criminals of the so-called B and C classes. In the trials of B- and C-class war criminals between October 1945 and April 1951, a total of around 5700 members of the Japanese military were indicted in 2244 trials. The death penalty was imposed on 984 defendants and 920 were carried out. 1,018 people were found not guilty, the remaining defendants generally sentenced to prison terms, some of which were suspended or waived. The circle of convicted war criminals also included 178 ethnic Taiwanese and 148 ethnic Koreans. In contrast to the Tokyo trial, in many trials against war criminals of the B- and C-class no thorough factual determination was made, so there were often mix-ups, false accusations and wrong judgments. Some of the accused did not even have defense counsel or interpreters at their side. Compared to the Tokyo trial, fair trial standards were far less respected.
Tokyo trials
All Japanese A-class war criminals have been indicted by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE) in Tokyo. The court was composed of 11 allied nations (Australia, Canada, China, France, Great Britain, India, the Netherlands, New Zealand, the Philippines, the Soviet Union and the United States of America). Of the A-class suspects arrested, 28 men were tried at the IMTFE in Tokyo. Nine civilians and 19 military personnel were charged, including four former prime ministers (Hiranuma, Hirota, Koiso and Tojo), three former foreign ministers (Matsuoka, Shigemitsu and Togo), four former war ministers (Araki, Hata, Itagaki and Minami) and two former ministers of the Navy (Nagano and Shimada), six former generals (Doihara, Kimura, Matsui, Muto, Sato and Umezu), two former ambassadors (Oshima and Shiratori), three former economic and financial leaders (Hoshino, Kaya and Suzuki) , an imperial adviser (Kido), a radical theorist (Okawa), an admiral (Oka) and a colonel (Hashimoto).
Of the 28 accused, Yosuke Matsuoka and Osami Nagano died of natural causes during the trial. The defendant Shumei Okawa had a nervous breakdown on the first day of the trial, after which he was admitted to a psychiatric hospital and released as a free man in 1948. The remaining 25 defendants were all found guilty, many of them on multiple counts. Seven convicts were sentenced to death by hanging, 16 war criminals were sentenced to life imprisonment and two to temporary prison terms. Three of the 16 war criminals sentenced to life imprisonment died in prison between 1949 and 1950. The remaining 13 war criminals were paroled between 1954 and 1956, only about eight years in prison for their crimes against millions of people.
Hirohito and all members of the Imperial Family involved in the war, such as Prince Chichibu, Prince Asaka, and Prince Takeda Higashikuni, were exonerated and spared from law enforcement by General MacArthur. This decision has been criticized by many historians (according to John Dower, with the "full support of MacArthur headquarters, law enforcement indeed functions as a defense for the emperor"). Even Japanese activists who advocate the ideals of the Nuremberg and Tokyo Charter and who have worked to document and publicize the atrocities of the Showa regime can “take the American decision to exonerate the emperor from the responsibility of the war, which then In the freshness of the Cold War, publicly accused war criminals such as future Prime Minister Kishi Nobusuke embraced, not defended. ”Herbert Bix,“ MacArthur's truly extraordinary move to save Hirohito from trial as a war criminal had a lasting and deeply distorting effect on Japanese understanding of the lost war. "
Other legal proceedings
Military tribunals were held in the United States, United Kingdom, China, USSR, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, France, the Netherlands, and the Philippines between 1946 and 1951. The B- and C-Class war crimes were charged. Around 5,700 people have been indicted in Japan and more than 2,200 have been indicted in war crimes tribunals outside Japan. The criminal offenses according to Article 5 of the IMTFE Statute provide for three groups of offenses: "Crimes against peace", "War crimes" and "Crimes against humanity", which largely correspond to the types of offense in the IMT Statute for Nuremberg. The B-Class defendants were personally charged with these offenses. The defendants of the C-class, mostly senior officers, were accused of planning and arranging or preventing these crimes.
The presiding judges came from the United States, China, Great Britain, Australia, the Netherlands, France, the Soviet Union, New Zealand, India and the Philippines. In addition, China has initiated a number of criminal proceedings against Japanese people. Of the more than 4,400 Japanese convicted, around 1,000 were sentenced to death.
The Nanjing War Crimes Tribunal was established in 1946 by the Chiang Kai-shek government of China and brought proceedings against B- and C-class war criminals. Four officers of the Imperial Japanese Army were tried and sentenced to death for crimes during the Second Sino-Japanese War: Lieutenant General Hisao Tani, Company Commander Captain Gunkichi Tanaka, and Lieutenant Toshiaki Mukai and Tsuyoshi Noda, who competed against each other to see who was the first 100 Would kill people with a sword ( Hyakunin-giri Kyōsō ). Iwane Matsui was tried in the Tokyo trial; Prince Kotohito Kan'in , Kesago Nakajima and Heisuke Yanagawa had been dead since 1945, Isamu Cho had committed suicide, and Prince Asaka was granted immunity by General Douglas MacArthur as a member of the imperial family, making Hisao Tani the only senior officer responsible for the massacre was charged by Nanking . He was found guilty on February 6, 1947 and executed by firing squad on March 10. The two officers involved in the killing competition and Captain Gunkichi Tanaka were also sentenced to death and executed. According to official estimates by the Tokyo International Military Tribunal, 200,000 people were killed in the Nanjing massacre.
In December 1949, 12 members of the Japanese Kwantung Army who were involved in the development of biological weapons were indicted in the war crimes trial in Khabarovsk, Soviet Union. Among the defendants were the last commander of the Kwantung Army, Yamada Otozo, and five other generals of the Kwantung Army. The majority of the defendants were medical professionals or biologists. All 12 accused have been sentenced to between two and 25 years in prison for war crimes related to the development, production and use of chemical and biological weapons in the Chinese scene of World War II.
The largest single criminal case dealt with the Laha massacre of 1942. 93 persons in the former Japanese armed forces were charged with the execution of more than 300 Allied prisoners of war. Among those convicted was the ethnic Korean Lieutenant General Hong Sa-ik , who was responsible for organizing prisoner-of-war camps in the Philippines. In 2006, the South Korean government pardoned 83 of the 148 Korean war criminals detained.
The Yokohama War Crimes Trials were negotiations against Japanese people who had committed crimes against the customs of war in the Pacific War without being Category A war criminals. The courts were military tribunals (military commission) based on the American model. The "Regulations" of the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP) for war crimes trials of December 5, 1945 were applied. They were called up under the aegis of the "Legal Section, Yokohama" of the 8th US Army. Of the 474 negotiations scheduled by the US Army in Asia, 319 took place in Yokohama.
The Guam War Crimes Trials were negotiations against members of the Imperial Japanese Army who had committed crimes against the customs of the war during the Pacific War. The courts were US-style military tribunals. Although the Navy also applied the "Regulations" of the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP) for war crimes trials of December 5, 1945, they reserved the right to adjust them if necessary. The trials came to an end by May 21, 1949. In a total of 47 hearings against a total of 123 accused, 113 convictions and ten acquittals were made. 30 convicts were sentenced to death. Ten of these death sentences were carried out; excluding the commuted death sentences, there were 16 life sentences.
The war crimes trials in China were negotiations against Japanese B- and C-class war criminals who had committed crimes against the customs of war in the Second Sino-Japanese War between 1937 and 1946. These were proceedings that were convened under the direction of the Chinese national government before 1949. These trials are to be distinguished from the US courts-martial, which atoned for crimes against American aviators in Shanghai.
In Manila, the war crimes trials were organized by the American colonial power until December 31, 1946, then by Filipino military tribunals against Japanese C- and B-class war criminals or their helpers for war crimes committed during the Japanese occupation of the Philippines.
Post-war events and reactions
Parole for war criminals
By 1950 most of the Allied war crimes trials were over; Thousands of convicted war criminals have been held in prisons in Asia and across Europe, in the countries where they were convicted. Many of the Allied tribunals had not yet carried out some death sentences. However, by introducing a probation system, some tribunals reconsidered their judgments without foregoing control over the fate of the imprisoned war criminals, even after Japan and Germany regained their status as sovereign states.
Intense and broadly supported action for an amnesty for all imprisoned war criminals only emerged when attention focused on the majority of "normal" B- and C-class war criminals in Japan and reconsidered the issue of criminal liability as a humanitarian issue has been.
On March 7, 1950, MacArthur issued a directive that reduced sentences by a third for good behavior and gave the courts the power to suspend life imprisonment after serving 15 years on probation. Some of the prisoners have been paroled earlier because of poor health.
The Japanese popular response to the Tokyo trial found expression in calls for war criminals to be mitigated and in agitation for parole. Shortly after the San Francisco Peace Treaty came into force in April 1952, a movement began for the release of Class B and Class C war criminals. The emphasis on the "injustice of the war crimes tribunals" and the "misery and hardship of war criminals' families" quickly garnered the support of more than ten million Japanese. In light of this massive surge in public opinion, the Japanese government commented that “the public opinion in our country is that war criminals are not criminals. Rather, they are gaining great sympathy as victims of war, and the number of people affected by the war crimes trial system has steadily increased. ”The war criminals probation movement was driven by two groups: those who had“ a sense of the outside world Compassion ”for the prisoners, and the war criminals themselves, who had called for their own version as part of an anti-war peace movement. The movement, driven by "a feeling of compassion," called for freedom for war criminals regardless of how this is achieved.
On Sept. 4, 1952 President issued Harry S. Truman , the Executive Order 10393 establishing a body for reduced sentences and probation of war criminals. According to this, the Japanese government could suspend or reduce the sentences imposed on Japanese war criminals in military courts.
On May 26, 1954, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles rejected a proposed amnesty for the imprisoned war criminals, instead agreeing to “change the rules of the game” by reducing the eligibility period from the required 15 years to 10 years.
By the end of 1958, all Japanese A-, B- and C-class war criminals had been released from prison and politically rehabilitated, including Hashimoto Kingorō, Hata Shunroku, Minami Jirō and Oka Takazumi and Araki , who had been paroled in 1954 and 1955 Sadao, Hiranuma Kiichiro, Hoshino Naoki, Kaya Okinori, Kido Koichi, Hiroshi Oshima, Shimada Shigetarō and Suzuki Teiichi. Sato Kenryo is considered one of the convicted war criminals who, according to some Japanese personalities, including Judge BVA Röling, received his well-deserved prison sentence and was only released on parole in March 1956, as the last Japanese A-class war criminal. On April 7, 1957, the Japanese government announced that the last ten great Japanese war criminals would be granted a pardon, with the majority approval of the courts responsible for sentencing.
Official apology
The Japanese government believes that legal and moral positions regarding war crimes are separate. While maintaining that Japan has not violated any international law or treaty, the Japanese government has officially recognized the suffering caused by the Japanese military and numerous apologies have been issued by the Japanese government. For example, on August 15, 1995, on the 50th anniversary of the end of the Second World War , Prime Minister Murayama Tomiichi stated in the so-called Murayama Declaration that “Japan's colonial rule and aggression caused enormous damage and suffering to the people in many countries, especially those of the Asian nations, created “. He also expressed "his deep feelings of remorse" and declared his "heartfelt apology". This declaration is officially the attitude of the Japanese government to the war past to this day.
In a joint communiqué by the Government of Japan and the Government of the People's Republic of China on September 29, 1972, Japanese Prime Minister Tanaka Kakuei also stated in the preamble: “The Japanese side feels deeply responsible for the serious damage that Japan inflicted on the Chinese people in the war has and contemplates himself ”.
In April 2005, Prime Minister Jun'ichirō Koizumi said in a speech at the Asia-Africa Summit: “In the past, Japan has caused terrible harm and suffering to people of many peoples, especially in Asian countries, through its colonial rule and aggression. “He feels“ deeply remorse ”for his war past. It is not the first time Japan has apologized for its war crimes in World War II. Koizumi's statements are consistent with Japan's earlier statements. But it is the first time in over a decade that a Japanese prime minister has spearheaded it in a speech at an international meeting. Koizumi's speech was seen as an attempt to dampen anti-Japanese sentiment in China and South Korea. These were boiled up after Japan approved a textbook that critics say played down Japanese war crimes.
On the 60th anniversary of the capitulation of his country, the Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi apologized for the suffering caused by Japan in World War II. At the same time he showed himself willing to work with his Asian neighbors (namely China and South Korea) for peace and development in the region. Japan had caused "enormous damage and suffering," said Koizumi in a statement in many countries, especially in Asia, through colonial rule and invasive wars. Koizumi's words of apology are a repetition of what he said at the April 2005 Asia-Africa summit in Jakarta; the Kyodo news agency viewed the fact that he was referring directly to China and South Korea as an attempt to improve relations, which had recently been heavily strained.
However, the official apologies are widely viewed as inadequate or just a symbolic exchange for many of the survivors of such crimes or for the families of the dead victims. As part of his first trip abroad to the PR China, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said at the press conference following the visit on October 8, 2006, in response to questions from the press: “In the sixty years since the end of the war, our country has made its way on the basis of deep regrets for the people The fact that Japan in the past caused great harm and suffering to the people in the countries of Asia and left scars on these people. I have assured that this feeling will be shared by the people who have lived these sixty years and myself. This will not change in the future either ”. At the same press conference, Prime Minister Abe also commented on the question of Koizumi's controversial visits to Tokyo’s Yasukuni Shrine - the shrine where the war dead of Japan (including convicted war criminals) are blessed - and that he had explained his view. “When asked whether I went to or would like to visit Yasukuni Shrine, I said that I would not comment as it has become a diplomatic and political matter. I will not elaborate on it. ”Many people harmed by Japanese war crimes claim that no apology was given for certain acts, or that the Japanese government merely expressed“ regrets ”or“ remorse ”.
On March 2, 2007, the subject was raised again by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who denied that the Japanese military had forced women into sexual slavery during World War II. In Shinzo Abe's opinion, there is no evidence that the women were forced into military brothels. This negative reaction has provoked the Asian and Western countries. It supports the opinion of those who accuse Tokyo of failing to fully atone for the atrocities of the war. Due to the heated discussion on the controversial issue, Prime Minister Abe was finally forced to make an apology, but did not retract his previous remarks.
On October 31, 2008, the chief of staff of the Japanese Air Defense Forces, Toshio Tamogami, was released with a severance payment of 60 million yen (approximately US $ 670,000). In a published study, Toshio Tamogami made the point that Japan was not an aggressor in World War II, but that the war brought prosperity to China, Taiwan and Korea. He further argues that the behavior of the Japanese Imperial Army was not violent and that the Great East Asian War was viewed positively by many Asian countries, but they criticize the war crimes trials. On November 11, Tamogami defended his controversial justification for the Japanese war before the House of Lords Committee on Foreign Affairs and Defense. Tamogami believes that the personal apology made by former Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama in 1995 was only "a tool to suppress free speech". However, there is also the opinion in Japanese society that Murayama's apology was not enough. Rather, the Japanese Prime Minister or the Emperor must conduct the Dogeza . In this context, reference is also made to Willy Brandt's kneeling at the monument to the Jewish victims of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1970 as an example of a powerful and effective act of apology and reconciliation.
John Borneman, professor of anthropology at Cornell University, cites Aktion Brandt as an example, "an apology is a non-material or purely symbolic exchange in which the perpetrator voluntarily lowers his own status as a person". Borneman continues: As soon as this type of apology is given, the injured person must be ready to forgive and seek reconciliation, otherwise the apology has no effect. The injured party may refuse the apology for a number of reasons, one of which is sufficient to prevent reconciliation, because “by keeping the memory of the wound alive, refusals prevent an affirmation of mutual humanity by instrumentalizing the energy contained in the status of one permanent sacrifice is embedded ".
The reasoning that a nation is reluctant to accept Japan's conciliatory gestures is due to the fact that Japan does not feel profound repentance and does not sincerely apologize. As long as Japan does not openly acknowledge its mistakes, sincerely apologize and provide compensation, no matter how loudly Japan complains about the suffering it has experienced, the international community will not understand it.
Reparation
It is a widespread perception that the Japanese government did not accept legal responsibility for the compensation and, as a direct result of that refusal, failed to compensate the individual victims of the Japanese atrocities. In particular, there are a number of prominent human and women's rights organizations that still see a moral or legal responsibility in Japan for the individual compensation of the victims, especially towards the girls and women who were forced into military brothels by the Japanese military in the occupied countries were.
The Japanese government officially accepts the requirement for financial compensation for victims of war crimes under the Potsdam Declaration. The details of this compensation have been regulated in bilateral agreements with individual countries, except with North Korea , since Japan recognizes South Korea as the only legitimate government on the Korean Peninsula. The Asian countries involved either abandoned their claims to compensation or Japan paid them out under specific agreements to be used for the individual compensation. In some cases, such as with South Korea and Indonesia, the compensation was not paid to the victims but was used for political projects and other works. Because of this, large numbers of individual victims in Asia have received no compensation.
Therefore the Japanese government takes the position that the right way for the further demands are the respective governments of the applicants. As a result, every single claim for compensation brought in Japanese courts has been refused acceptance. Such was the case relating to a lawsuit brought by a former British prisoner of war who unsuccessfully tried to sue the Japanese government for additional compensation. As a result, the British government later paid additional compensation for all British prisoners of war. In Japan, there have been complaints that the international media only found that the former prisoners of war were seeking compensation and did not clarify that it was additional compensation (on top of that previously paid by the Japanese government).
All requests before US courts for additional compensation for former soldiers who were prisoners of war in Japan were rejected because international agreements with the USA precluded further individual claims for compensation for forced labor performed in the war.
The Basic Treaty between the Republic of Korea and Japan was signed on June 22, 1965. During the contract negotiations, the Japanese government proposed to pay financial compensation to the individual Korean victims, in line with the payments made to the Western prisoners of war. The South Korean government insisted that Japan (instead of making the cash payments to the victims) provide the South Korean government with the funds for the country's economic development. South Korea received $ 800 million in grants and loans from Tokyo in reparations. In the mid-1970s, under then-President Park Chung-hee, the South Korean government, within the framework of provisional law, paid only a portion of the reparations to some war victims. It was only in 2004 that the South Korean government published the content of the negotiations, although the Japanese public had known about it since the contract was signed. After the South Korean government announced the dates of the trial, a number of claimants sued the government for payment of individual victim compensation. Since the compensation laws for the affected Koreans were abolished on December 31, 1982, there were no legal grounds for compensation, so the claims were dismissed.
In 1972, China and Japan normalized relations with a treaty and assured each other that they would look to the future. The Chinese government waived reparation payments, while the Japanese granted large loans as development aid. Although the Chinese government has waived moral or legal responsibility for the compensation, critics point out that Japan has recognized in treaties the transfer of Japanese colonial assets to the respective governments. Consequently, individual victims could be compensated from the proceeds of such transfers. However, it is denied by Japan to have acquired large shares of other Japanese assets during the colonial period through looting, as was the case in the case of works of art stolen or collected by the Nazis throughout Europe during World War II.
In 1995 the Japanese government set up the Asian Women's Fund as a private fund to pay out financial compensation to the women affected. The fund, headed by then Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama, was co-financed by donations from the Japanese public. The Japanese government had donated around 750 million yen (around 6.75 million euros), around 565 million yen (around 5 million euros) came from private donors. This money was used to support 364 former comfort women in Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines and the Netherlands. However, the government insisted that the money was intended for "medical and social assistance" and not as compensation. In addition, they received an unofficial written apology signed by the incumbent Prime Minister. Many former forced prostitutes refused to apply for this compensation due to the unofficial nature of the fund. Many expect and seek direct apology and compensation from the Japanese state. However, the Japanese government takes the position that the peace treaty problem has been resolved after the war. At the beginning of 2005, the liquidation of the fund was announced in March 2007. In Indonesia, the former comfort women could not be identified, so the Indonesian government was able to use the 380 million yen (about 3.40 million euros) from the Asian Women's Fund to build 69 social facilities for seniors.
The reality is that without an honest and straightforward apology from the Japanese government, the majority of the comfort women who survived would not accept these funds.
Intermediate adjustment
The term intermediate settlement (or intermediate intermediate settlement) was applied to the dismantling and redistribution of Japanese industry, especially military-industrial assets, to allied countries. It was carried out under the supervision of the Allied occupation forces. This redistribution was done as an interim settlement because it did not rely on a final settlement through bilateral treaties that settled all existing issues of compensation. By 1950, the assets to be redistributed were 43,918 machine products valued at 165,158,839 yen (1950 prices: approximately $ 11 million). Of these product assets, 54.1 percent went to China, 11.5 percent to the Netherlands, 19 percent to the Philippines and 15.4 percent to the United Kingdom.
Compensation under the San Francisco Contract
On April 28, 1952, Japan regained full sovereignty under the San Francisco Peace Treaty of September 8, 1951. The Treaty of San Francisco ended World War II in the Pacific region diplomatically, and Japan gave up its role as the imperial supremacy in Asia. At the same time it regulates the compensation of the former Allied civilians and prisoners of war who suffered from the Japanese war crimes. Japan committed itself to reparations payments, on which it later concluded agreements with the Philippines, Indonesia, Burma and Vietnam.
Compensation from Japanese foreign assets
Japanese international assets refer to all assets in the colonized or occupied countries owned by the Japanese government, corporations, organizations and individuals. According to Article 14 of the San Francisco Treaty, the Allies confiscate all Japanese foreign assets with the exception of those in China, which were dealt with under Article 21. It is anticipated that Korea will also exercise its Article 21 rights under Japan's international assets in 1945.
| Country / Region | Value in yen | Value in US $ |
|---|---|---|
| Korea | 70,256,000,000 | 4,683,700,000 |
| Taiwan | 42,542,000,000 | 2,846,100,000 |
| Northeast China | 146,532,000,000 | 9,768,800,000 |
| North china | 55,437,000,000 | 3,695,800,000 |
| Central South China | 36,718,000,000 | 2,447,900,000 |
| Other countries | 28,014,000,000 | 1,867,600,000 |
| total | 379,499,000,000 | 25,300,000,000 |
Compensation for allied prisoners of war
Japan undertook, under Article 16 of the San Francisco Peace Treaty, to indemnify members of the Allied Powers and those of countries that were neutral during the war for the undue hardships they suffered while Japanese prisoners of war. Japan can also choose to make the equivalent of these foreign assets available to the International Committee of the Red Cross , which the national agencies of the Red Cross then distribute fairly on this contractual basis for the benefit of former prisoners of war and their families. The categories of assets in Article 14 (a) 2 (II) (ii) to (v) of the present Agreement as well as the assets of Natives of Japan who are resident in Japan at the time of the conclusion of the Agreement will be excluded from the transfer. Similarly, the transfer provisions of this article do not apply to the current 19,770 shares of Japanese financial institutions owned by the Bank for International Settlements. Accordingly, the Japanese government and private individuals paid £ 4,500,000 to the Red Cross.
Former Allied prisoners of war later filed compensation suits against Japan, citing Article 16 of the San Francisco Peace Treaty. In 1998, a Tokyo court denied compensation to the former Allied prisoner of war on the grounds that Japan had already paid £ 4,500,000 to the Red Cross under the San Francisco Treaty and that the Red Cross was responsible for making the compensation.
According to historian Linda Goetz Holmes, many of the funds used by the government of Japan were not Japanese funds, but relief funds whose aid money was confiscated from the Yokohama Specie Bank by the governments of the United States, Britain and the Netherlands in the last year of the war .
Compensation for the countries occupied from 1941 to 1945
China waived reparations and is a special case insofar as Japan reached at least one type of compensation agreement with most of the other main victims of the East Asia-Pacific War. The basis for this was the peace treaty of San Francisco, negotiated by the American side with great leniency towards Japan, which stated in Article 14 that the country “has to pay reparations to the Allies for the damage and suffering caused in the war”. At the same time, however, the US restricted the obligation, because "assuming that a viable economy can be maintained, Japan's resources are currently insufficient to pay reparations for the damage and suffering mentioned above in full while at the same time repaying other debts".
Against this background, Japan was able to reject the first claims made by Indonesia in 1951/52 in the amount of 18 billion US dollars and the Philippines in the amount of 8 billion US dollars, since the 8 billion US dollars were already about three times the Japanese budget 1954 corresponded. In the spring of 1955, Japan signed a reparations agreement with Burma for US $ 250 million. In 1956, Japan entered into a reparations agreement with the Philippines of $ 500 million over 20 years, and an additional $ 30 million for technical services. This agreement also set an additional $ 20 million in compensation for war widows and orphans. Further reparation agreements with Indonesia (1958), Laos (1958), Cambodia (1959) and South Vietnam (1959) followed. In the 1960s, other states such as Malaysia and Singapore were added. With a few exceptions, there was no individual compensation, but indirectly through global agreements to the countries concerned. At the same time, Japan renounced its property abroad under Article 14 of the Peace Treaty.
| country | Amount in yen | Amount in US $ | Date of the contract |
|---|---|---|---|
| Burma | 72,000,000,000 | 200,000,000 | 5th November 1955 |
| Philippines | 198,000,000,000 | 550,000,000 | May 9, 1956 |
| Indonesia | 80,388,000,000 | 223,080,000 | 20th January 1958 |
| South Vietnam | 14,400,000,000 | 38,000,000 | May 13, 1959 |
| Cambodia | 1,500,000,000 | 4,164,000 | March 2, 1959 |
| Laos | 1,000,000,000 | 2,776,000 | October 15, 1958 |
| total | 367,348,800,000 | 1,018,940,000 |
The last payment was made to the Philippines on July 22, 1976.
In the period from 1955 to 1976, Japan's reparations were approximately $ 635 million, or $ 7.10 per capita of the Japanese population. By comparison, reparations between 1945 and 1953 were US $ 4,292 million for eastern Germany (US $ 233.80 per capita) and US $ 529 million (US $ 11.40 per capita) for western Germany. .
With regard to these reparations, however, even the Japanese Ministry of Finance admits: “In the reparation negotiations, Japan succeeded in reducing the actual reparation costs considerably through tenacious and years-long insistence on its own position. In addition, since the conclusion of the reparations agreements was delayed, Japan, which was then in a phase of high economic growth, found it easy to pay the reparations from the overall situation. The delay also meant that rebuilt Japan could use the reparations payments and free economic aid as a convenient spring bed in its economic re-expansion into Southeast Asia. "
Compensation issue in Japan
The amount of the reparations payments to Asian states, which have been considered complete since April 1977, amounted to a little more than one trillion yen. There is a considerable gap between expenditure on reparations to Asian states and expenditure on supporting some of the Japanese war victims. Japanese citizens who “had a special relationship with the state” during the war, ie former soldiers and employees of the Japanese military as well as their surviving dependents, continue to receive generous support from the Japanese state. This support is paid to 950,000 former soldiers and 880,000 surviving dependents (as of March 1995). More than half of them are members of the "Association of the Survivors of Japanese War Victims" founded in 1947. This association has a great influence on the Japanese public and forms a not inconsiderable pool of votes for the Liberal Democratic Party . From 1952 to 1994, 39 trillion yen in support payments were made to their representatives. In 1988, payments peaked; Since then, the number of recipients has been falling, and currently around 2 trillion yen (as of 1994) are spent on this purpose each year.
Civilian war victims and soldiers recruited into the Japanese military or other military workers from the former colonies of Japan, Taiwan and Korea are excluded from this support system. Thus the actual victims of the Japanese war of aggression in Asia were not beneficiaries of the reparations. Since 1990, around 50 compensation claims have been filed in Japanese courts by former comfort women, forced laborers, members of the military or prisoners of war. The majority of the plaintiffs are South Koreans or Koreans living in Japan. Today the Japanese government is also investigating the damage that has occurred and the involvement of military and other government organizations in the acts of damage. The official position of the government of Japan only includes recognizing a moral responsibility for the damage disputed in these proceedings. Any legal responsibility is negated with reference to a comprehensive and final clarification of all reparation issues through bilateral agreements and the lack of subject capacity of the individual in international law.
Coming to terms with the past in Japan
To this day Japan is accused of denying or relativizing its own war crimes in the second Sino-Japanese war. However, the controversial cases of the Japanese imperial era are publicly debated in the media, with the various political parties and ideological groups taking quite different positions. Japan is a democracy with absolute freedom of expression and speech, accordingly a variety of historical views is socially acceptable. A law prohibiting re-employment or a law equivalent to the Federal Compensation Law does not exist in the Japanese legal system. Therefore, denial of Japanese war crimes is not prosecuted in Japan, while Holocaust denial is a criminal offense in Germany, Austria and some other European countries. The 1948 UN Genocide Agreement, which has now been ratified by 126 states, has not yet been ratified by Japan.
Until the 1970s, such debates were treated as a marginal topic in the media. In the Japanese media, center and left opinions tend to dominate the newspaper editorials, while the right tends to dominate the tabloids. The war crimes debates were featured prominently in the editorials of some tabloids calling for the overthrow of "imperialist America" and reviving the worship of the emperors. In November 1971, to commemorate the normalization of relations with China, the Asahi Shimbun , a major liberal daily newspaper, published a series of articles on Japanese war crimes in China, including the Nanking massacre . This series of articles opened the floodgates for the war crimes debates that have continued since then. The 1990s are generally considered to be the period when such issues as the Nanking massacres, the Yasukuni shrine , the comfort women , the correctness of the school history books and the validity of the Tokyo trials were also discussed on television.
The maintenance of the institution Tennō was an important constant in American occupation policy. With the exemption of the Tennō from charges, a central area of Japanese injustice during the Second World War was systematically hidden. The fact that the Tennō as responsible for all political decisions including warfare in the Japanese Empire was not legally and politically held accountable is an important reason why Japanese courts did not prosecute and convict war crimes in Japan. It contradicts the elementary notion of justice if the highest commander cannot be called to account, but at the same time the soldiers carrying out orders are to be tried. This perception still represents a psychological barrier for the Japanese judiciary to come to terms with war crimes. The politically motivated exoneration of the emperor and the maintenance of the Tenno system by the American occupying power is seen as the most important obstacle to a thorough coming to terms with the past .
The Japanese do not remember a Holocaust today, but a military conflict. The Japanese do not agree on the question of when this war began. There was the war against China, the war against the European colonial powers in Southeast Asia and the USA. When to date the beginning of these wars, whether they are viewed independently or as a coherent conflict, is a matter of political standpoint. Some Japanese, mostly members of the pacifist left, cite the beginning of the war in 1931, the year in which Japan transformed Manchuria into a puppet state. According to the Japanese left, that was the beginning of the Japanese policy of imperialist aggression, which led to the incursion into China in 1937 and the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 . So these Japanese are talking about a fifteen year war.
Right-wing nationalists have a different point of view. For them, the events in China in the 1930s are not a war, but rather unfortunate "incidents" that arose out of Japan's legitimate interest in defending itself against Soviet and Chinese communism. They see the attack on Pearl Harbor as an inevitable act of self-defense against the attempt by the USA and other colonial powers to crush Japan. Finally, the Southeast Asian War was a campaign to liberate Asia. In this political context, the war in China is called the "China Incident" and that against the West is called the "Greater East Asian War". This view of things is by no means exclusive to extreme marginalized groups. Indeed, many prominent Liberal Democratic Party politicians tend to hold such views.
Another focus in Japanese coping with history is the history book (atarashii rekishi kyokasho) published in 2000 by the Society for the Creation of New History Books, which represents a revisionist view of Japan. The textbook was approved by the Ministry of Education in 2001 and sparked major debates in Japan as well as in China and South Korea. Many Japanese historians and teachers protested the contents of the new history book and its treatment of Japanese actions in war. Radio China International reported that the government of the People's Republic of China was "very outraged and disappointed with the new Japanese history book for 2002 created by right-wing Japanese scholars". According to the Japanese Ministry of Education, the authors were urged for the new edition to change euphemistic representations of the colonization of Korea by Japan and the Nanking massacre. Japanese civil rights groups stated that the offending book chapters had not been significantly changed, and that some passages were even more falsified than before. The new history book was also denounced in the anti-Japanese demonstrations of 2005 in China and South Korea for glossing over Japanese aggression during the Second Sino-Sino War with China and the colonization of Korea.
The 1988 film Men Behind the Sun (also: Hei Tai Yang 731 or Black Sun 731) by Tun Fei Mou (T. F. Mous), produced in Hong Kong , features the Japanese unit 731 stationed in Manchuria during World War II. The film is criticized in the same controversy as the Japanese war crimes, such as the Nanking massacre. It was not until August 2002 that the Tokyo District Court found that Unit 731 and the war crimes it had committed actually existed.
Two directions can be observed in the Japanese public. On the one hand there is the right wing, called Uyoku , for the political extreme right in Japan, whose nearly one hundred thousand activists and several hundred groups are also referred to by this term (or right-wing organizations ). About 800 of these groups are organized in the umbrella organization All-Japanese Conference of Patriotic Associations , which has worked closely with the Yakuza throughout its history . The term “ultra-nationalism” is also used synonymously to characterize the ideology of this movement. The lowest common denominator of the current Uyoku ideology generally consists of: Militarism, explicitly in the demand for an enlargement of the Japanese military as well as the expansion of its powers (these are currently severely restricted by Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution), in connection with this are also denied Japanese war crimes and demanded the deletion of relevant passages from Japanese school books. Their political opponents, including mostly people and organizations who criticize Japan publicly or who are not respectful and cautious about issues such as the Japanese war crimes in World War II, controversies about the Yasukuni Shrine, the institution or the people of the Japanese imperial family, Japanese claims in The Kuril conflict and southern Sakhalin express are deliberately intimidated. On the other hand, there are civic groups and left-wing intellectual groups that campaign for the clarification and public disclosure of war crimes and failures of Japanese politicians and people. For example, a group of high school teachers trying to research the Nanking atrocities and bring them to the public. There are also many citizens' initiatives that have set themselves the goal of compensating war victims.
The word "coming to terms with the past" did not exist in Japan until 1992. It first appeared in a series of leading articles in a Japanese magazine and was translated as kako no kokufuku ( 過去 の 克服 ), which means “to overcome the past”. A psychiatrist who interviewed several former Japanese war criminals states, "In Japanese culture the emergence of guilt has been suppressed." The same author continues: "Even in post-war Japanese the paralysis of feelings persists." like a not to be underestimated part of the Japanese general population suffer from a lack of empathy for the victims of the Japanese war of invasion. Hans W. Vahlefeld describes the relationship between the Japanese and their past as follows:
The past is present only with others; Japanese buried them. While Germans have been searching their way under the historical burden of guilt and atonement since the war, the Japanese shy away from looking back and live in the present as if there had never been a yesterday. For them, coming to terms with the past is not a wound that keeps bleeding.
Controversial reinterpretations outside of Japan
Outside of Japan, too, some activists are attempting controversial reinterpretations of Japanese imperialism. For example, the views of former South Korean officer and far-right author Man Ji-Won have sparked controversy in Korea and elsewhere. Ji-Won has praised Japan for “modernizing” Korea, claiming that only around 20% of Korean women were forced to serve as comfort women in the Japanese military, while the remaining 80% did so voluntarily for payment. He also says that most of the claims made by old women who were former comfort women or sex slaves in the Japanese military during World War II are false. His remarks outraged women and the public. In East Asia, such views are widely regarded as offensive and defamatory of the women concerned.
The nature, legitimacy and legacy of the Japanese annexation of Korea, particularly its controversial role in modernizing the Korean Peninsula, is a hotly debated topic. In a seminar hosted by the Asia-Pacific Research Center , the professor Rhee Young-Hoon from Seoul National University made controversial statements. He stated that, despite the human rights issues, the Korean economy had grown rapidly under Japanese rule, introducing the basis of modern capitalism to Korea by the Japanese, which later became part of the foundation of the modern Korean economy.
Later investigation of war criminals
The official investigations and investigations into Japanese war criminals are still ongoing. During the 1990s, the South Korean government began investigating individuals who allegedly made their fortune by working with the Japanese military during World War II. In South Korea, it is alleged that during the Cold War, many of these individuals, their co-workers, or their relatives, with the wealth they acquired while working with the Japanese military, helped cover up war crimes in order not to incriminate themselves. Their families were also able to use the wealth they had acquired to finance their higher education.
Private individuals and non-governmental institutions have also made their own investigations.
Following further investigation, it is alleged that the Japanese government deliberately destroyed reports on the Korean comfort women. Some women cited Japanese inventory logs and worker lists drawn up on the battlefield as evidence of this claim. For example, the comfort women were forced to register as a nurse or secretary on the workers' lists.
Many argue that due to the fact that the Japanese government is trying to cover up many incidents of war crimes in former Japanese-occupied Korea that would otherwise lead to severe international criticism, sensitive information is often difficult to obtain. 731 medical experiments were carried out on many Koreans and other Asians by the Japanese unit. Among the victims who died in the camp were at least 25 from the former Soviet Union, Mongolia and Korea. Although there are testimonies from some of the surviving victims about Unit 731, the Japanese government has refused to allow Korea to see these documents to this day (as of 2010).
The investigation and solving of other Japanese war crimes are made difficult by cover-ups by the Japanese government and other countries such as the UK. Britain and Japan tried to keep one of the war crimes of World War II secret. In order to maintain good relations with Japan, the British government decided in 1949 not to bring charges against Japanese commanders for the massacre of around 280 British and Dutch prisoners of war in 1943. Britain and the United States worked hard to ensure that Japan remained an ally after the war, as a bulwark against communism in the Asian region.
Tamaki Matsuoka's documentary Torn Memories of Nanjing also includes interviews with Japanese war veterans who admit to having raped and killed Chinese civilians.
Scientific reception of the events
The topic is mostly classified under the term war crimes worldwide . In the meantime, however, the terms Asian Holocaust (German: "Asian Holocaust") and Japanese war atrocities ("Japanese war atrocities ") have become commonplace, especially in English-language literature .
See also
literature
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- CA Bayly & Harper T. Forgotten Armies. The Fall of British Asia 1941-5 (London: Allen Lane) 2004.
- Bix, Herbert. Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan. New York: HarperCollins, 2000.
- Bergamini, David. Japan's Imperial Conspiracy, William Morrow, New York, 1971.
- Brackman, Arnold C .: The Other Nuremberg: the Untold Story of the Tokyo War Crimes Trial. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1987. ISBN 0-688-04783-1 .
- Chang, Iris. The Rape of Nanking, Perseus books LLC, 1997, ISBN 0-465-06835-9 .
- Cook, Haruko Taya; Theodore F. Cook (1993). Japan at War: An Oral History. New Press, ISBN 1-56584-039-9 .
- Dower, John W. Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II. New York: New Press, 1999.
- Dower, John W. (1987). War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War. New York: Pantheon, ISBN 0-394-75172-8 .
- Endicott, Stephen and Edward Hagerman. The United States and Biological Warfare: Secrets from the Early Cold War and Korea, Indiana University Press, 1999, ISBN 0-253-33472-1 .
- Frank, Richard B. (1999). Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire. New York: Penguin Books.
- Gold, hal. Unit 731 Testimony, Charles E Tuttle Co., 1996, ISBN 4-900737-39-9 .
- Handelman, Stephen and Ken Alibek. Biohazard: The Chilling True Story of the Largest Covert Biological Weapons Program in the World — Told from Inside by the Man Who Ran It, Random House, 1999, ISBN 0-375-50231-9 .
- Harries, Meirion; Susie Harries (1994). Soldiers of the Sun: The Rise and Fall of the Imperial Japanese Army. New York: Random House, ISBN 0-679-75303-6 .
- Harris, Robert and Jeremy Paxman. A Higher Form of Killing: The Secret History of Chemical and Biological Warfare, Random House, 2002, ISBN 0-8129-6653-8 .
- Harris, Sheldon H. Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare 1932-1945 and the American Cover-Up, Routledge, 1994, ISBN 0-415-09105-5 .
- Holmes, Linda Goetz (2001). Unjust Enrichment: How Japan's Companies Built Postwar Fortunes Using American POWs. Mechanicsburg, PA, USA: Stackpole Books.
- Horowitz, Solis: The Tokyo Trial . International Conciliation 465 (November 1950), pages 473-584.
- Kratoksa, Paul (2005): Asian Labor in the Wartime Japanese Empire: Unknown Histories. ME Sharpe and Singapore University Press, ISBN 0-7656-1263-1 .
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- Latimer, Jon: Burma: The Forgotten War . London: John Murray, 2004, ISBN 0-7195-6576-6 .
- Lord, of Liverpool Russell (2006): The Knights of Bushido: A Short History of Japanese War Crimes. Greenhill Books, ISBN 1-85367-651-9 .
- Maga, Timothy P. (2001): Judgment at Tokyo: The Japanese War Crimes Trials . University Press of Kentucky, ISBN 0-8131-2177-9 .
- Minear, Richard H. (1971): Victor's Justice: The Tokyo War Crimes Trial . Princeton, NJ, USA: Princeton University Press.
- Neier, Aryeh. War Crimes: Brutality, Genocide, Terror and the Struggle for Justice . Times Books, Random House, New York, 1998.
- Piccigallo, Philip R. (1979): The Japanese on Trial: Allied War Crimes Operations in the East . 1945–1951. Austin, Texas, USA: University of Texas Press.
- Dieter Pohl : War of Extermination. The campaign against the Soviet Union 1941–1944 in a global context. In: Access to the 06th bulletin of the Fritz Bauer Institute , autumn 2011 ISSN 1868-4211 pp. 16–31
- Rees, Laurence: Horror in the East . published 2001 by the British Broadcasting Company.
- Seagrave, Sterling & Peggy: Gold warriors: America's secret recovery of Yamashita's gold . Verso Books, 2003, ISBN 1-85984-542-8 .
- Sherman, Christine (2001): War Crimes: International Military Tribunal . Turner Publishing Company, ISBN 1-56311-728-2 .
- Tsurumi, Kazuko (1970): Social change and the individual: Japan before and after defeat in World War II . Princeton, USA: Princeton University Press, ISBN 0-691-09347-4 .
- Williams, Peter: Unit 731: Japan's Secret Biological Warfare in World War II . Free Press, 1989, ISBN 0-02-935301-7 .
- Yamamoto, Masahiro (2000): Nanking: Anatomy of an Atrocity . Praeger Publishers, ISBN 0-275-96904-5 .
Web links
- Battling Bastards of Bataan
- Cannibalism . Dan Ford, Japan at War, 1931-1945
- History of Japan's biological weapons program Federation of American Scientists, April 16, 2000
- Nanking 1937 , Princeton University, November 9, 1997 (February 20, 2010 memento on the Internet Archive )
- Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group (IWG) US National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).
- The Other Holocaust
- RJ Rummel, Statistics Of Japanese Democide: Estimates, Calculations, And Sources University of Hawaii, November 23, 2002
- Steven Butler, A half century of denial: the hidden truth about Japan's unit 731 in US News & World Report July 31, 1995 ( Memento November 19, 2006 in the Internet Archive )
- Borneman, John. Can Public Apologies Contribute to Peace? An Argument for Retribution (PDF). Cornell University. ( Memento from March 4, 2009 in the Internet Archive )
Individual evidence
- ↑ China Weekly Review October 22, 1938.
- ↑ Japanese War Criminals World War Two ( Memento from February 16, 2009 in the Internet Archive )
- ^ Pacific Theater Document Archive . War Crimes Studies Center, University of California, Berkeley. Archived from the original on July 18, 2009. Retrieved January 5, 2011.
- ↑ Kafala, Tarik: What is a war crime? , BBC News. October 21, 2009. Retrieved January 5, 2011.
- ↑ Bibliography: War Crimes . Sigur Center for Asian Studies, George Washington University. Retrieved January 5, 2011.
- ^ A b Ralph Blumenthal: The World: Revisiting World War II Atrocities; Comparing the unspeakable to the unthinkable . In: The New York Times , March 7, 1999. Retrieved July 26, 2008.
- ↑ The Perilous Fight on pbs.org.
- ↑ Nelson 2002, pp. 226-228.
- ↑ Chang 1997, p. 189
- ↑ Louis de Jong [2002]: III Starvation in the Indies . In: The collapse of a colonial society. The Dutch in Indonesia during the Second World War , translation J. Kilian, C. Kist and J. Rudge, introduction J. Kemperman (= Verhandelingen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 206), KITLV Press , Leiden, The Netherlands 2002, ISBN 90-6718-203-6 , pp. 227-281.
- ^ Nürnberger Tribunal (October 1, 1946) Judgment: The Law Relating to War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity Yale Law School, accessed June 5, 2010
- ↑ New History Textbook (Chapter 4 & 5) ( Memento from September 6, 2005 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 468 kB) 2005 version, May, 2005, pages 57, 62, 70-74, accessed on June 6, 2010
- ↑ Wai Keng Kwok, 2001, Justice Done? Criminal and Moral Responsibility Issues In the Chinese Massacres Trial Singapore, 1947 (Genocide Studies Program Working Paper No. 18, Yale University; MS Word ; 143 kB), page 27, accessed June 7, 2010
- ↑ Chang, Maria Hsia; Barker, Robert P. (2003) Victor's Justice and Japan's Amnesia in Peter, Li. Japanese War Crimes: The Search for Justice. Transaction Publishers. Page 44, ISBN 0-7658-0890-0
- ↑ a b Fujiwara: Nitchū Sensō ni Okeru Horyo Gyakusatsu, Kikan Sensō Sekinin Kenkyū 9 - 1995, page 22
- ↑ Trial Watch International Military Tribunal for the Far East (Tokyo) ( memento of November 9, 2007 in the web archive archive.today ) accessed on June 7, 2010
- ^ Philipp Osten, The Tokyo War Criminal Trial and Japanese Law , Berliner Wissenschaftsverlag, 2003, ISBN 3-8305-0376-8
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- ↑ Buruma, Ian: Inheritance of Guilt , Dealing with the Past in Germany and Japan, Munich, Vienna 1994
- ↑ Jin-woo, Lee Writer angers comfort women ( February 20, 2010 memento in the Internet Archive ) The Korea Times April 15, 2005, accessed June 30, 2010
- ↑ Hildi Kang (2001): Under the Black Umbrella: Voices from Colonial Korea, 1910-1945 . Cornell University Press, ISBN 0-8014-7270-9 .
- ^ List of Japanese Collaborators Released The Korea Times, April 29, 2008, accessed June 30, 2010
- ^ A b Government to Seize Assets of Collaborators in Colonial Era The Korea Times, May 2, 2007, accessed June 30, 2010
- ↑ a b Korean WWII sex slaves fight on BBC News, August 9, 2005, accessed July 1, 2010
- ^ A b The Seoul Times Ex-sex slave narrates: Japan Boiled Comfort Woman to Make Soup and Japanese Army Ran Comfort Woman System.Retrieved July 1, 2010
- ^ Yoshimi Yoshiaki: Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery in the Japanese Military During World War II (Asia Perspectives: History, Society, and Culture). Columbia University Pr; Edition: New Ed (July 2002), ISBN 0-231-12033-8 .
- ↑ - Archives give up secrets of Japan's Unit 731 . The files include full descriptions of 318 cases, including at least 25 victims from the former Soviet Union, Mongolia and Korea, August 3, 2005, accessed June 29, 2010
- ↑ Lee, Min (March 31, 2010) New film has Japan vets confessing to Nanjing rape Associated Press, accessed May 2, 2010
- ^ Scarred by history: The Rape of Nanking . In: BBC News Online , December 13, 1997. Retrieved July 26, 2008.
- ^ David Sanger: Japanese Edgy Over Emperor's Visit to China . October 22, 1992. Retrieved July 26, 2008.