This was How cruel were the Japanese in WW2

This was How cruel were the Japanese in WW2

“It was better to kill yourself than to let the Japanese get their hands on you.” The Imperial Japanese Army was perhaps the most violent and bloodthirsty military in modern history. Their cruelty far overshadowed anything the Nazis did. Every country in Asia, and every inhabited territory across the Pacific that was occupied by the soldiers of the rising sun, suffered horribly.

Above is propaganda. The reality was horrifyingly different.

Part of the reason for such brutality went along with the Japanese mindset. People have to realize that the Japanese then were not the Japanese of today. They were very warlike and committed to victory at all costs. The Japanese military combined the Bushido spirit with ultra-nationalism, which in turn transformed into a bloody ideology intended to inflict maximum suffering against all perceived enemies. For example, the Japanese Army did not believe in surrender. To do so was the ultimate shame, and those that surrendered were now demoted to subhuman status. All occupied peoples and POWs were lower than dogs. The Chinese, whom the Japanese always considered inferior, were called “logs” by members of Unit 731. They called them logs because you could chop them, burn them, and break them, which is exactly what they did to countless Chinese civilians. Japanese soldiers would toss Chinese infants up in the air and catch them with bayonets. Other soldiers gang raped women to death and gave other children poisoned candy. Bombs dropped from Japanese aircraft contained rats and other items with deadly diseases like anthrax all over civilian populations in China. The violence inflicted by the Imperial Japanese army was so extreme that political envoys from Nazi Germany, a nation that was also run by brutality, were absolutely horrified.

As the war dragged on to 1944-45, Japan was losing. In desperation the Japanese Army not only became more desperate but also more violent. Many US soldiers were aware of how they treated the few POWs they even bothered to take in. Many wounded Japanese soldiers pretended to either be dead or wanting assistance in order to detonate their grenades at US soldiers offering help. And then of course there's the kamikaze.

Finally, after two atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the Soviet Union invaded Manchuria, Japan surrendered. But even then there were still a few Japanese units so fanatical in their dedication that they continued to terrorize local populations in the Philippines well into the 1970s. They only stopped when their former general came in person and told them to lay down their arms.

I always try to tell people that the Second World War destroyed the evil Japan and in its place created the new good Japan that wants nothing to do with war.