If states were people, Japan would become a real superstar of the world stage - bright, tireless, infinitely creative, slightly crazy, but no less attractive. Which is not surprising: the Japanese - a nation, in fact, deeply notorious and stifled to a slight suffocation by the norms of decency and everyday ritualism - have invested a lot of effort and money in creating their own charming image. From impressive advances in automotive and robotics to insane volumes of pop culture exports, coupled with an almost magical ability to make anything cute and cartoonish. The industry of computer games without their contribution would not at all be a multifaceted self-sufficient titan, which it is now, but a scanty rudiment on the digital IT body. In a word, the West is delighted with Japan. But the closest neighbors, the same China and South Korea,the Japanese are hated. And there is a reason.
Nothing of my own
The inhabitants of the Land of the Root of the Sun are firmly convinced that there is only one great culture - the Japanese. The Chinese, on the other hand, are just uncouth barbarians, always screaming, crowding and smashing everything around, and the Koreans are Chinese who want to become like the Japanese. After such statements, you literally feel like you are imbued with sympathy, don't you? In response, in China they like to say that the Japanese did not come up with anything of their own, except for perversions. And the position of the inhabitants of the Celestial Empire is not difficult to understand. Whichever of the foundations of the nation you stick, you will find Chinese roots everywhere. Statehood, legal system, architecture, clothing, religion, writing, poetics, music, visual arts - everything is borrowed.
In fairness, the Japanese themselves have the right to accuse the Chinese of stealing, who are fixated on their previous merits and have forgotten that in the new world everything is decided not by the old man's authority, but by technology and the "carrying capacity" of the economy. Whatever Japanese industry has spawned, the Chinese immediately copy it. It began in the 1980s and continues to a lesser extent. Household and heavy appliances, electronics, automobiles, passenger transport, various junk trifles - in a matter of months, everything gets into the Chinese conveyor stream. The Japanese do not engage in unprofitable hatred of their neighbors, but they cannot deny themselves the pleasure of boasting superiority.
The Japanese treat the Chinese in about the same way as a hereditary intellectual treats a grimy gypsy scurrying underfoot. And the Chinese, for whom their own comfort is paramount, are incredibly annoyed by Japanese stiffness and soulless politeness. Would a normal person behave like that? But in general, mutual dislike is rather anecdotal in nature.
The situation is different with Korean-Japanese relations. Koreans hate the Japanese with every fiber of their souls and regularly remind of this with massive demonstrations, fights and pogroms. Suffice it to recall how in 2008 radicals beat two pheasants to death with hammers (which activists considered a symbol of the Japanese imperial court) in front of the Japanese embassy in Seoul. By the way, innocent birds suffered for nothing. They turned out to be endemic to the Korean Peninsula, not found in Japan, and nicknames could not be symbols of popular hatred.
Such a violent bias is more than justified: at the beginning of the 20th century, Japan did not particularly stand on ceremony with the inhabitants of its colonies, which Korea, in particular, was from 1910 to 1945. A classic dual situation. On the one hand, the overwhelming majority of Japanese interventionists were skilled professionals and engineers who left the legacy of an emancipated Korea with a strong economy and educational system. On the other hand, this is a weak atonement for harsh methods of government, draconian reprisals against dissent and a policy of eradicating traditional culture. The Chinese suffered at the hands of the Japanese militarists no less, but the Koreans, for whom nationalism is the basis of the state ideology, remembered the offense very strongly. Let us and we remember what "feats" the soldiers of the valiant and great Imperial army performed.
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Without a declaration of war
On December 7, 1941, the Japanese suddenly attacked the American military bases in Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, the British colony of Malaya and bombed Singapore and Hong Kong, thereby unleashing a war on the Pacific Front. It would seem nothing special, in 1941 the whole world was already at war. But no. An attack without a declaration of war or an ultimatum is a serious war crime. The assertion that all means are good in war is nonsense and an allegorical speech of idealists. In reality, everything is much more complicated. The procedure for entering a conflict and conducting hostilities was regulated back in 1907 by the international Hague Convention. Japan, on the other hand, declared war on the United States and Great Britain only a day after the attack, according to international law, striking not enemy troops, but non-combatants - personnel serving military bases. Moreover, the Japanese military tried to do everything possible to maximize the damage.
Japan is not just a recidivist war criminal. She is an unrepentant recidivist criminal.
Chemical weapon
The Hague Declaration, like the prohibition on the use of chemical weapons prescribed in it, meant absolutely nothing for Japan. The first poisonous swallow of vile tactics was the use of tear gas by units of the imperial army in 1937 during the Second Sino-Japanese War. In 1938, heavy artillery was used: phosgene, chlorine, chloropicrin and lewisite, a year later - mustard gas.
According to Professor Yoshiaki Yoshimi, co-founder of the Center for Research and Documentation on Japan's Military Responsibility, between August and October 1938, Emperor Hirohito authorized 375 cases of poison gas use. In 1941, in the Battle of Zaoyang and Yichang, the Japanese army fired 1,500 shells with chloropicrin and 1,000 with mustard gas at Chinese soldiers, and the area was overflowing with civilians who simply had nowhere to run. Of the 3 thousand Chinese military, more than 1, 6 thousand were killed, and it was not possible to assess the casualties among civilians.
Mass killings
In battle, the Japanese never distinguished between soldiers and civilians. Everyone was an enemy. Everyone went to the expense. The scale of the unfolding genocide exceeded all reasonable limits. According to the most sober estimates, in 1937-1945, the Japanese military killed from 3 to 10 million people - Chinese, Koreans, Indonesians, Vietnamese, residents of Malaysia and the Philippines. One of the most egregious cases is the infamous Nanking Massacre of 1937-193, 1980, during which the Japanese killed more than 350,000 civilian Chinese and disarmed soldiers with inhuman cruelty. For the descendants of the samurai, it was common to hack defenseless people with swords, rape, kill and torture. At the same time, throughout the operation in Nanjing, the Japanese did not shoot - they took care of the cartridges. Almost all of the victims died from bladed weapons or from beatings.
First of all, the military was taken out of the city and stabbed with bayonets 20 thousand boys and young guys, future soldiers of China. After the massacre began in the city itself. Real madness was happening: living people ripped open their stomachs, ripped out their hearts, gouged out their eyes, leaving them to die of blood loss. Buried alive. Every Chinese woman they met (be it a decrepit old woman or a nursing baby) was raped and killed, killed and raped, killed while they were being raped. Crazed by impunity, the Japanese competed to see who would kill more people. A certain samurai named Mukai won, on whose conscience 106 lives.
The Japanese army acted on the basis of three principles of "clean": "burn clean", "kill everyone clean", "plunder clean". And all because …
… not Japanese - not human
The Japanese considered captivity an indelible shame, which only death can atone for, so during World War II, the official policy of the government was that every prisoner deserves execution. Of course, not immediately, but only after he tells the noble samurai all the information that his meager barbaric mind can only recall, and, if health permits, will work for the prosperity of the empire. Former Japanese officer Uno Shintaro said that torture was an inevitable necessity to obtain information.
Particular cruelty of the backing masters fell to the lot of the pilots of the anti-Hitler coalition, captured on land and at sea. The Enemy Pilot Act killed hundreds of Allied pilots. In the period from 1944 to 1945 alone, 132 people were executed. Often shot down, but the surviving pilots did not even have time to fall into the hands of the military - crowds of aggressive locals literally tore the unfortunate to pieces.
Of course, not all were expended. More than 10 million prisoners of war and the civilian population of the occupied territories of Asia became "romush" - slaves in forced labor, which led to many deaths. The Death Road alone, the famous railroad linking Thailand and Burma, took over 100,000 people.
Consolation stations
Another "achievement" in the treasury of war crimes of militaristic Japan is the creation of so-called comfortable houses or "comfort stations". Although you can't tell by the name, these were not at all nice houses in the pastoral, where kind aunties in aprons fed the exhausted soldiers with tea and stroked them with infinite maternal understanding on their lousy heads. It was a vast network of brothels.
It so happened that the Japanese soldiers simply could not imagine a single military operation without outraging local residents. In order to somehow reduce the degree of anti-Japanese sentiment in the occupied territories, and at the same time provide their people with the opportunity to "rest" without the risk of bringing a magnificent bouquet of Venus to their homeland, in 1932 the Japanese command launched an initiative to create "comfortable houses."
First, they were opened in Manchuria and China, and then soldier's brothels began to appear in all territories of the presence of the Imperial Army - in Korea, Vietnam, Malaysia, Burma, Indonesia, and the Philippines. According to the official version, the twilight workers went to the "station" voluntarily, but in fact, most women got there through compulsion or abduction. According to various estimates, from 50 to 300 thousand women passed through brothels, some of whom - a huge part - did not even have time to celebrate their majority. Physically and morally crippled, poisoned with antibiotics, they were forced to “comfort” 40 men a day. Three of the four Ianthas ("women for pleasure") did not leave the walls of the brothels alive. As the New York Times wrote in 2007, “Violence, direct and indirect, was used in the recruitment of these women. What happened thereit was serial rape, not prostitution."
Experiments on humans
But compared to the fate of the "logs", the stories described above may not seem so gloomy.
All in the same black for the Chinese people in 1932, with the personal approval of Emperor Hirohito, a special division of the Japanese armed forces under the command of Shiro Ishii was created, which received the faceless name "Detachment 731". Later, researchers gave it a much more sonorous name - Devil's Kitchen. The main task of the detachment was to develop bacteriological weapons. There is real horror behind these words. The horror of the most disgusting sense that even the bloody doctor Mengele did not dream about. Subordinates of Ishii set up experiments on people - captive Chinese, South Koreans, Thai, Russians. They put into practice everything that could be seen by the inflamed mind of a maniac: they infected people with the most terrible diseases, after which they indifferently watched their course. They followed, dissecting the victim alive without anesthesia. They shocked people, strangled them in pressure chambers,scalded with boiling water or frozen limbs, removed organs from the peritoneum to the brain, deliberately keeping the person conscious. The subjects were called "logs," a consumable. Not a single non-Japanese left the unit. And most importantly, almost none of the experimenters received the punishment they deserved. In exchange for developing bioweapons, they managed to escape the trial.
Japanese sweet meat
And finally, the disgusting cherry on the cake of torture, cruelty and senseless death. According to numerous testimonies compiled by the Australian War Crimes Section of the Tokyo Tribunal, Japanese soldiers "committed acts of cannibalism against prisoners." We ate people. Of course, not out of boredom. On such a radical step, the Yamato descendants were pushed by the interruption of the supply lines of the units and the famine that followed. But this does not cancel the crime. One of the prisoners of war in British India told the tribunal: “I was looking at this from behind a tree and saw some Japanese cut flesh from his [Allied pilot's] arms, legs, thighs and buttocks and carried it away to their location. They cut them into small pieces and fried them. " Sometimes the flesh was cut off from the still living people, after which they were thrown into a ditch, where they slowly and painfully died. Most of the events described fall on a short period between 1937 and 1945 - from the moment of the victory of aggressive militarism over the precepts of the enlightened rule of Emperor Meiji to the surrender of Japan in World War II. But even amid the atrocities and madness perpetrated by the imperial soldiers, the spirit of the samurai homeland continued to captivate the minds. Many kamikaze, for example, were Koreans, voluntarily - just voluntarily! - who decided to sacrifice themselves for the Land of the Rising Sun. There is something to love about Japan. But there are more than enough reasons to dislike the Japanese.the spirit of the samurai homeland continued to captivate the minds. Many kamikaze, for example, were Koreans, voluntarily - just voluntarily! - who decided to sacrifice themselves for the Land of the Rising Sun. There is something to love about Japan. But there are more than enough reasons to dislike the Japanese.the spirit of the samurai homeland continued to captivate the minds. Many kamikaze, for example, were Koreans, voluntarily - just voluntarily! - those who decided to sacrifice themselves for the Land of the Rising Sun. There is something to love about Japan. But there are more than enough reasons to dislike the Japanese.