#Japanese war crimes

[frida-kahl-of-the-rocky-horror]

History repeats itself

[dirjoh-blog]

The International Military Tribunal for the Far East-aka The Tokyo War Crimes Trial.

Most people will have heard of the Nuremberg Trials, but few have heard of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE), or Tokyo War Crimes Trial. The Nuremberg trials are often criticized because of the low number of convictions of Nazi War criminals. The conviction rate of International Military Tribunal for the Far East was even lower. Most surprisingly the Japanese Emperor,…

[kosmicpowers]

I know I usually talk about USA, Europe and Israel imperialism/colonization/war crimes but the horrific shit Japan did NEVER gets enough coverage.

Don't forget what they did.

some japanese ww2 atrocities you might not have heard of:

germ warfare in harbin

extensive human experimentation (that the us covered up)

operation sook ching (singapore)

bataan death march (philippines)

romusha slave labor in southeast asia

[hellyeahheroes]

Why Did Japan Join the Nazis? (Give, You Know, the Nazis Explicitily Hated Non-Aryans) by Today I Found Out

[xoheisse]

This is off topic for my account, but I want to help spread this important information.

Korean women are experiencing massive sexual violence by men.

tw : rape, abuse, crime

Secret Man's Telegram rooms were discovered in over 70% of South Korean schools where female students' faces were photoshopped into porn using AI.

A feminist in South Korea has mapped out schools where deepfake child pornography was created by male students using photos of girls on Telegram.

South Korean journalists who wrote articles about telegram deepfake child sex crimes are also being blackmailed with deepfakes by the perpetrators.

They also speak aggressively and disrespectfully about Ukrainian and Japanese women.

updates!

[captain-price-unofficially]

Japanese personnel in protective suits carry a stretcher through Yiwu, China, during Unit 731’s germ warfare tests. June 1942.

[troythecatfish]

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by ZIRAFA (@zirafamedia)

[victusinveritas]

So the guy on the left gets ten point for being against Israeli apartheid and settler colonialism... And loses like five points for the Imperial Japanese flag...

[sekisho-seiichi]

春日神社、芝山

Inscription on memorial to the war dead at Kasuga Shrine, Shibayama, Chiba Prefecture, donated to the shrine by Ishii Shiro.

I think I might get the dubious honour of being the first person to post about this in English. The small town of Shibayama, literally next door to Tokyo's Narita Airport, under its former name of Kamo was the hometown of Ishii Shiro and his family, and during the war years he recruited a large number of people from the village to work at Unit 731 in the interests of maintaining loyalty and secrecy. Today little trace of that history remains, unsurprisingly, but at a small local Shinto shrine named Kasuga Shrine we find one piece of literal hard evidence, in this inscription on a memorial stone for war victims which clearly states it wad donated to the shrine by Ishii Shiro.

The big text reads 忠魂碑, approximately "for the consolation of the loyal spirits", and then in the smaller text on the left we clearly see 醫學博士石井四郎, "professor/doctor of medicine Ishii Shiro" (the first two characters are unsimplified forms of 医学, this was almost certainly erected long before the end of ww2.).

Photos are mine from when I went to have a look around immediately after arriving into Narita Airport one day.

[eclipsesalign]

Y'know the universe has thrown a lot of things at me but I don't think anything will ever top the experiences i had as a 12 year old roleplaying hetalia.

How do I explain to people that I became best friends with a 14 year old and their boyfriend over a dead art/social media app (Framecast) because I got into hetalia after seeing a poster of it on pinterest and how we became such good friends over the matter of a year that I told them my full legal name, my address, my phone number, and literally facetimed them multiple times

How do I tell people that I used to roleplay the nations of Japan, Hungary, South Italy, Belarus, Hungary, Seychelles, and then my own hetalia oc: Mongolia (Because I am Mongolian and there is no canon mongolia character)

How do I even think about the fact that that best friend made a Malaysia oc and we made them girlfriends and had dramatic roleplays over the fact that gay marriage isn't legal in either country and also had an entire roleplay arc featuring their 2p counterparts (TLDR: 2ps are evil AU versions of hetalia characters) where for some fucking reason my friend wrote a fic and drew art of their oc being raped by their 2p version. And also how we roleplayed our ocs having sex using wattpad messaging

And how the fuck do they deal with the fact that they did so much insanely shitty stuff and then, after I got sick of their shit and blocked them on everything, went on to repeatedly try to text me with new numbers and also went on to write at least 2 different wattpad stories about me???

[thewingedwolf]

a lot of my free time is spent listening to a podcast run and researched by a professor of genocide studies who went into those studies specifically bc in an attempt to escape the violence of his angry, alcoholic father he signed up to go off to war in afghanistan only to realize that the whole war and war in general is a) stupid & boring and b) a series of horrific war crimes that had made the civilian population deeply suspicious of him even tho His Morals Were In The Right Place (tm). when he got home and threw himself into being anti violence, joining anarchist orgs & studying theory & trying to understand why he was sent to the other side of the world to be traumatized for no good reason while traumatizing the local population with his very presence, his shithead father died & he found out that his father was Like That bc their family was chased out of armenia because of genocide and it kicked off a cycle of violence & anger in the men of his family. he absolutely lost his shit, got his degree in genocide studies, and moved to armenia (do not ask me how he convinced his wife to do this with him. he’s really open about every other aspect of his life except his wife and kids which is imo very valid).

all that to say, he has this interesting perspective of war in that he has this cultural trauma of being the victim of a horrific crime while also himself being the perpetrator of imperialism & serving in an area that had recently been the site of several horrific war crimes (really similar to tim o’brien, who served in my lai several months after the massacre but didn’t know the massacre had happened & pieced together what happened from the horrified whispers of the civilians & brags from soldiers). it makes him both hyper critical of soldiers who do terrible things & empathetic to soldiers who are forced from home to do terrible things & angry on behalf of civilians who are victims of war crimes. i have ragged on him for being Very Midwestern about certain things but his research is interesting & sad & well done, & it’s really made me think about my own place in The Greater World & every time the internet loses its mind over some aspect of history i am violently reminded that most people just look at history and go “but MY SIDE was justified actually” when that’s such a BABY IDEA OF HOW HISTORY AND WAR WORKS.

[dirjoh-blog]

Hisao Tani: The General Behind the Horrors of the Nanjing Massacre

In the annals of history, certain names become etched with a unique infamy, their legacies stained by actions that go beyond the brutality of war and enter the realm of sheer atrocity. Lieutenant General Hisao Tani of the Imperial Japanese Army is one such figure. While many factors shaped the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945), Tani’s leadership during the Nanjing Massacre—also known as the…

[carbone14]

Des soldats japonais massacrent à la baïonnette des prisonniers chinois – Massacre de Nankin – Nankin – Chine – Janvier 1938

©United States Library of Congress

[alpaca-clouds]

Japanese history is complicated

Something that often gets lost in western discourse about Japanese history is, that it is kinda complicated. Like, really complicated. Like, fuck, German history is easy compared to Japanese history. And it is kinda lost.

When western folks look at Japan, many will just see it as this "mysterious oriental nation, where futuristic technology and mystic rituals mix". And that will be about it.

If the people looking at it are American, they might also go: "BUT PEARL HARBOR!" or maybe, just maybe, they will also go: "Japan did a lot of horrible things during World War II." Which is something that gets often not acknowledged enough. Because, yes, Japan did horrible things during World War II. Horrible, horrible things. Massacres. Rape. Concentration camps. Enslavement. You name it. Japan did a lot of bad, that some self-proclaimed Japan fans tend to either forget or idealize.

If you look at it from an anti-colonialist perspective, you might also find that Japan's actions leading up to the second world war, leading up to other things that had happened before, were very much informed in reaction to western colonialism in the Pacific. Japan very much tried to play the western colonial game - because the only alternative would've been to be colonialized themselves. Which is no excuse for all the horrible things commited during WWII, but it is an explaination.

But if you go even further back - much further - you will find it even more complicated. Because a long, long time ago Japan itself was colonialized. I spoke about that in the Princess Mononoke post yesterday, but it is something that is lost on many people: Japan was colonialized by Korea around 600 AD. And while historical records of the time are rare, you will find a lot of the same things happening during this time, that had happened later during western colonialization of other nations as well.

Japan before this point in time was an island chain with several indigenous cultures living there. These cultures were mostly distinct, but shared some common believes, mainly that they all had different kinds of spiritualist religions. Which means, that there are spirits living in nature.

Quite a few of these people also believed in one or multiple mountain gods, that were often reveared as the highest deities of their cultures.

And here comes the thing that western people often do not think about. How Buddhism, like Christianity in the west, was spread around Asia not always in a peaceful way. Because Buddhist people from China and Korea came to Japan and they wanted to spread Buddhism - and also lay claim to the Japanese land. And so they did.

In hindsight the Japanese propaganda talks about the Taika reform of the 7th century as "uniting Japan", but technically it was more in terms of conquering Japan and enforcing a unity on it, trying to eradicate the indigenous cultures and religions and forcing Buddhism on them.

What we now know as Shinto is, what remaines of the Indigenous believes. Mostly that of the Yamato people.

From this came an upper class, that consisted of those early people to convert to Buddhism and some of the Koreans settling in Japan then. And if you have watched any samurai movie, you know how the conflicts between that upper class and everyone else shaped Japanese history.

Now you might say: "But that happened more than 1000 years ago! What has this to do with the now?" And the answer is simply, that history is - as I have said before - nothing that can be neatly divided into eras. Rather it is a continuous thing, where things influence the future, even for more than a thousand years.

And because of this... It is complicated.

No. Nothing about this was inevitable. History is no line of dominos destined to fall. But if you look at it, you will come to understand each and every step of the way. People made decisions. They made bad decisions. But those decisions were influenced by the past.

[demons]

The AP's [C. Yates] McDaniel stayed in Nanking a day longer before boarding a destroyer for Shanghai. On December 16, his last day in the ruined Chinese capital, he saw more corpses and passed a long line of Chinese men with their hands tied. One of them broke away from the group, dropped on his knees, and begged McDaniel to save him from death. "I could do nothing," McDaniel wrote. "My last remembrance of Nanking--dead Chinese, dead Chinese, dead Chinese."

"What The World Knew" Part II, The Rape of Nanking Iris Chang

[horizonboundtrainer]

When you say the word fascism May won't be thinking about the Nazis at all btw. What comes to mind is something more akin to the kind of horrors carried out by Imperial Japan. Because realistically what happens across the world is far less salient than atrocities carried out in your own neck of the woods. Hoenn still remembers the Kantonian invasion. She does too and she will break your legs if you're dumb enough to want a repeat of history.

( People keep forgetting this but like... The irl japanese empire might have killed more civilians than the entire holocaust depending on which estimate you consider the most reliable. It's just one of those historic facts the us and europe doesn't consider important enough to teach in schools. Japanese fascism has some overlap w/ the kind you see in the usa and europe but its very much its own thing w/ distinct features and the level of normalization the nutjobs here dream of )