Oh boy, todays the day. 

It’s Japanese war crimes day. 

Let’s find out about them.

That was just the beginning, and that was a special Haiku I wrote for you all to mark the occasion. The occasion is that we forget everything we thought we knew about Japan and learn about the many, well, some of the many atrocities they have committed. After that beautiful Haiku It’s all down hill from here. 

We’ve been alluding to this episode a little bit, nothing seriously I don’t think just an underlying Japan is more horrible than they appear and I wanted to finally find out about it! 

Let’s start with the SEX SLAVES OF THE IMPERIAL JAPANESE ARMY *Trigger warning, SA*
Historians estimate that as many as 200,000 civilian women were forcibly conscripted in Japanese-occupied countries between 1931 and 1945 and forced to serve as sexual slaves in Japanese Army brothels. 
They were referred to as "comfort women". 
And the majority of these women were conscripted in China and Korea, but this practice occurred in every country occupied by the Imperial Japanese Army. 
Mind boggling as it is, successive Japanese governments have refused to admit that Japanese Army troops committed these terrible crimes against women.
Records of what the women were subjected to are scant; there are very few survivors and an estimated 90 percent of “comfort women” did not survive the war. 
Though military brothels existed in the Japanese military since 1932, they expanded widely after one of the most infamous incidents in imperial Japan’s attempt to take over the Republic of China and a broad section of Asia which is referred to as the Rape of Nanking also known as the Nanjing Massacre
Basically the Japanese were waiting for anything to happen to invade and occupy the whole of China. In July 1937, tensions between Chinese troops and Japanese troops who were engaged in military exercises on occupied Chinese territory produced an exchange of firing near Peking (now Beijing). The Japanese used this incident as an excuse to wage all out war against China. 
On December 13, 1937, Japanese troops began a six-week-long massacre that essentially destroyed the Chinese city of Nanking. Along the way, Japanese troops raped between 20,000 and 80,000 Chinese women.
There was also a mass slaughter of the Chinese and some pretty horrific war crimes including masses being buried alive the Japanese who were competing with eachother to invent new and more horrible ways to kill the chinese.. I’m not really going to go into much more of the Nanjing masscare on this other than setting up for the comfort women, that may be for a further why the Japanese arn’t really that good episode 
So, the mass rapes horrified the world, and Emperor Hirohito was concerned with its impact on Japan’s image. As legal historian Carmen M. Agibay notes, he ordered the military to expand its so-called “comfort stations,” or military brothels, in an effort to prevent further atrocities, reduce sexually transmitted diseases and ensure a steady and isolated group of prostitutes to satisfy Japanese soldiers’ sexual appetites.
So there you have it. Japan was trying to fix the rape problem with what is to follow
“Recruiting” women for the brothels/ “comfort stations” amounted to kidnapping or coercing them. Women were rounded up on the streets of Japanese-occupied territories, convinced to travel to what they thought were nursing units or jobs, or purchased from their parents as indentured servants. These women came from all over southeast Asia, but most were Korean or Chinese.
Once they were at the brothels, the women were forced to have sex with their captors under brutal, inhumane conditions. Though each woman’s experience was different, their testimonies share many similarities: repeated rapes that increased before battles, agonizing physical pain, pregnancies, sexually transmitted diseases and bleak conditions.
Here is one example from the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), and it is the story of a courageous Dutch girl who survived the sexual slavery forced on her by the Japanese Army that occupied Java in 1942. From "Horror in the East" by Laurence Rees, published by the BBC in 2001.
Jan Ruff was in her late teens when Java was surrendered to the Japanese invaders on 8 March 1942. The Dutch civilian population was rounded up by the Japanese and interned in camps where the living conditions were often as bad as in the prisoner of war camps. 
The interned women were fed so little by the Japanese that they were forced to eat snails and rats to survive. They were arbitrarily beaten or forced to stand in the sun for hours by the Japanese guards whenever thee felt
After two and a half years in an internment camp, conditions for Jan Ruff took a dramatic turn for the worse when Japanese officers entered the camp and ordered all girls over the age of seventeen to line up for inspection. 
The Japanese officers then physically examined each girl as if she was an animal put up for auction at a cattle sale. When the line had been reduced to ten girls, the Japanese officers ordered these girls to pack a suitcase and get into a truck. Protests by their mothers were ignored. 
The truck was then driven to a large house in Semarang, the capital of Middle Java. This house was surrounded by a high fence and guarded by Japanese soldiers. Jan discovered the terrible nature of the ordeal she was about to endure when the Japanese told the girls that they would live in this house and be required to provide sexual services to the Japanese military. 
Jan felt at the time as if her whole world had collapsed. In response to their protests, the girls were told that the Japanese would treat them in any way that they pleased.
The Japanese photographed each girl and assigned her a Japanese name. The photographs were then posted on the verandah for scrutiny by Japanese soldiers.
The rest of this part is pretty graphic so i’m going to omit that part but I will leave in one quote to get the point across Jan says
"By raping me the Japanese took away everything from me - my self-respect, my dignity, my possessions, my family. I really wonder how I coped. It's amazing how strong you can be. My strong belief in God, and my faith and prayer helped me through".
Jan Ruff only broke her silence when the war ended and she was reunited with her family. Her parents were devastated when told what the Japanese had done to her. She had wanted to become a nun, but when she told a Catholic priest that she had been forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese Army, he informed her that it would not be appropriate for her to become a nun. She felt dirty and ashamed when the priest said this to her, and his words cast a dark shadow over her life until 1992 when she heard that her terrible experience had been shared by as many as two hundred thousand women in countries invaded by the Japanese between 1931 and 1945.
When Jan Ruff discovered that these female victims of gross sexual abuse by the Imperial Japanese Army were demanding an apology from the Japanese government, and that the Japanese government was refusing to acknowledge this vile behaviour of the Japanese Army with a public apology, she decided to tell her own story and join the battle to compel the Japanese government to make a full and public apology.
It can be fairly said that whenever a Japanese Prime Minister, including Junichiro Koizumi, pays homage to Japan's war dead, including Japan's worst war criminals, at the infamous Yasukuni Shinto Shrine in Tokyo, it is equivalent to a slap in the face for every women forced into sexual slavery by the Imperial Japanese Army.
So…The end of World War II did not end military brothels when it came to Japan. In 2007, Associated Press reporters discovered that the United States authorities allowed “comfort stations” to operate well past the end of the war and that tens of thousands of women in the brothels were forced to have sex with American men until Douglas MacArthur shut the system down in 1946.
By then, between 20,000 and 410,000 women had been enslaved in at least 125 brothels. In 1993, the UN’s Global Tribunal on Violations of Women’s Human Rights estimated that at the end of World War II, 90 percent of the “comfort women” had died.
After the end of World War II, however, documents on the system were destroyed by Japanese officials, so the numbers are based on estimates by historians that rely on a variety of extant documents. As Japan rebuilt after World War II, the story of its enslavement of women was downplayed as a distasteful remnant of a past people would rather forget.
For decades, the history of the “comfort women” went undocumented and unnoticed. When the issue was discussed in Japan, it was denied by officials who insisted that “comfort stations” had never existed.
Then, in the 1980s, some women began to share their stories. In 1987, after the Republic of South Korea became a liberal democracy, women started discussing their ordeals publicly. In 1990, the issue flared into an international dispute when South Korea criticised a Japanese official’s denial of the events.
In the years that followed, more and more women came forward to give testimony. In 1993, Japan’s government finally acknowledged the atrocities. Since then, however, the issue has remained divisive. The Japanese government finally announced it would give reparations to surviving Korean “comfort women” in 2015, but after a review, South Korea asked for a stronger apology. Japan recently condemned that request—a reminder that the issue remains a matter of present foreign relations in past history.
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That’s pretty dark and it doesn’t get much better… let’s move onto Cannibalism

Turns out cannibalism of allied prisoners y the Japanese military was not a rare occurrence, and cannibalism practised by the Japanese military was not necessarily related to shortage of normal food.
In "The Knights of Bushido", Lord Russel of Liverpool cites examples of Allied prisoners of war being murdered and portions of their bodies served up at dinner parties attended by senior Japanese Army and Navy officers. 
Captured American pilots were not only more likely to be murdered but the eating of their flesh was made into something of a festive occasion in the Japanese officers' mess. Lord Russell includes the actual text of a Japanese document headed "Order regarding eating flesh of American flyers". 
Let’s star with THE KOKODA TRACK
Between 21 July and 26 August 1942, the Japanese landed 13,500 troops at the villages of Gona and Buna on the northern coast of Australia's Territory of Papua. Ten thousand of these troops were tough, jungle-trained combat veterans. The task facing this Japanese army was to cross the rugged Owen Stanley Range and capture the Australian administrative capital Port Moresby which was located on the southern coast of Papua. 
Port Moresby was at this time the last Allied base on the island of New Guinea, and its capture by Japanese troops would enable Japan to strike deeply with its bombers into the Australian mainland and intercept the vital lines of communication between the United States and Australia. The Japanese did not realise that the only path across the steep ridges and valleys of the Owen Stanley Range was a very narrow dirt path called the Kokoda Track. In the expectation that their troops would quickly brush the Australians aside, the Japanese allowed only ten days rations for the crossing of the mountains.
The initial defence of the Kokoda Track was undertaken by about five hundred militia troops of the Australian 39th Infantry Battalion. These Australian militia troops were poorly armed, equipped and supplied, and the Japanese outnumbered them initially by at least ten to one. Many of the Australians were only eighteen and they lacked both combat experience and adequate training. Despite these serious disadvantages, the Australians forced the Japanese to fight for every foot of their advance along the Kokoda Track.
The young militia soldiers of the 39th Battalion blocked the Japanese advance along the Kokoda Track for five weeks and inflicted heavy losses on the enemy.
On 26 August 1942, the exhausted and starving militia troops were finally joined on the northernmost ridge of the Owen Stanleys at Isurava by the first of three battalion from the 2/14th Brigade. These were combat toughened Australian troops who had returned from the Middle East. 
Despite these reinforcements, the Australians were still outnumbered on the Kokoda Track by five to one, and were forced to carry out a bloody fighting withdrawal in which both sides suffered very heavy casualties. 
The Japanese advance ground to a halt on a ridge where they could actually see the lights of Port Moresby. The Japanese supply lines were in chaos, and the surviving Japanese troops were starving and exhausted. Unable to proceed, and denied reinforcements because of the critical situation facing the Japanese on Guadalcanal, the Japanese were ordered to abandon the capture of Port Moresby and retreat to their beachheads on the northern coast. They were closely pursued by fresh reinforcements from Australia.
An especially abhorrent aspect of the heavy fighting on the Kokoda Track during the Australian fighting withdrawal is the failure of any Australian taken prisoner by the Japanese to survive capture. The Japanese are known to have frequently murdered prisoners of war, singly and in batches, on little if any provocation. 
Resistance appears to have been especially effective in provoking murderous instincts in the Japanese military. The Japanese were infuriated by the strong resistance to their advance put up by the Australians on the Kokoda Track. They had suffered heavy losses, and the Australian fighting withdrawal had seriously disrupted their timetable for crossing the mountains and had caused their own troops to run short of food. In those circumstances, the Japanese would not want to waste their own food on prisoners of war whom they had been taught to despise. The circumstances point to a strong probability that all captured Australians were immediately executed by the Japanese. Even more horrifying, is the evidence that the Japanese killed and ate captured Australians when they had not exhausted their own food supplies.
As the Australians pursued the retreating Japanese along the Kokoda Track, they came upon evidence that the Japanese had been eating captured Australian soldiers. After a fierce clash with the Japanese at Templeton's Crossing, an Australian patrol was forced to withdraw and leave behind six Australian dead and four wounded.
Reinforcements arrived on the following day, and the Australians were able to attack again and capture the Japanese position. The Australians troops were horrified to find that the Japanese had been eating both the wounded and dead Australians who had been left behind on the previous day. Corporal Bill Hedges describes the ghastly scene:
"The Japanese had cannibalised our wounded and dead soldiers..We found them with meat stripped off their legs and half-cooked meat in the Japanese dishes (pots)".
One of Corporal Hedges closest comrades was among the butchered bodies. He said: "I was heartily disgusted and disappointed to see my good friend lying there, with the flesh stripped off his arms and legs; his uniform torn off him."
Shortly afterwards, the Australian corporal was appalled to discover that the Japanese had not resorted to cannibalism because of starvation. He said:
"We found dumps with rice and a lot of tinned food. So they weren't starving and having to eat flesh because they were hungry."
The quotations by Corporal Hedges come from "Horror in the East" by Laurence Rees, a BBC publication (2001). This book is essential reading for anyone hoping to try to understand Japanese war atrocities.
According to the testimony of a surviving Pakistani corporal — who was captured in Singapore and housed as a prisoner of war in Papua New Guinea — Japanese soldiers on the island killed and ate about one prisoner per day over the course of 100 days.
officers ordered troops to eat human flesh to give them a “feeling of victory.”
And one Indian prisoner of war said that “the Japanese started selecting prisoners and every day one prisoner was taken out and killed and eaten by the soldiers. I personally saw this happen and about 100 prisoners were eaten at this place by the Japanese.”
“The remainder of us were taken to another spot 50 miles away where 10 prisoners died of sickness. At this place, the Japanese again started selecting prisoners to eat. Those selected were taken to a hut where their flesh was cut from their bodies while they were alive and they were thrown into a ditch where they later died.”



Next up: CAPTURED AMERICAN PILOTS
"The Knights of Bushido" Lord Russell relates the story of a young American pilot who was captured, murdered, and eaten by Japanese officers on the island of New Britain. The story is told by Havildar Chandgi Ram who had been shipped to New Britain with other Indian Army prisoners of war and forced to work as a slave labourer for the Imperial Japanese Army.
"On 12 November 1944, I was digging a trench for the Japanese in the Totabil area of New Britain. About 1600 hours, a single-engined United States fighter plane made a forced landing about a hundred yards away from where I was working. The Japanese from Go Butai Kendebo Camp rushed to the spot and seized the pilot, who could not have been more than twenty years old, and had managed to scramble out of the plane before the Japs could reach him.
"About half an hour from the time of the forced landing, the Kempei Tai (the Japanese military secret police) beheaded the pilot. I saw this from behind a tree and watched some of the Japanese cut flesh from his arms, legs, hips and buttocks and carry it off to their quarters. I was so shocked at the scene and followed the Japanese just to find out what they would do with the flesh. They cut it in small pieces and fried it.
"Later that evening, a senior Japanese officer, of the rank of major general, addressed a large number of officers. At the conclusion of his speech, a piece of fried flesh was given to all present who ate it on the spot."
Lord Russell also provides extracts from the testimony of Major Matoba before a military tribunal on Guam after the Japanese surrender. Major Matoba describes a number of occasions on which the flesh of murdered prisoners of war was consumed in the Japanese officers' mess. This disgusting behaviour took on the character of a festive occasion, with the flesh being washed down with sake. Very senior army and navy officers attended the officers' mess when human flesh was consumed and Major Matoba claims that they encouraged this vile behaviour.

WWII and the Suzuki Unit
Deployed to the humid mountain jungles of the Bukidnon Region in 1945, the Suzuki Unit was tasked with combating native and American resistance to the Japanese occupation of the area. At the beginning, they had some food rations. And when they ran low, they managed to forage for food and also steal some from local villages.
However, many of the soldiers got sick and died, sometimes due to diseases like malaria and other times from violent bouts of diarrhea.
One big challenge for them was the humidity. They were simply sweating too much. Every exertion they made — foraging, marching, building shelter — was costing them calories, water, and protein. The only way to save his men, Ainoda argued in his defense, was to feed them some kind of meat.

“Whenever possible, we avoided killing by eating the bodies of people who died from illness or were killed in action or were executed for crimes,” Ainoda said. However, officials were suspicious about the true motive behind this cannibalism. Their suspicions were all but confirmed by the testimony of Rikimi Yamamoto, another soldier who’d joined the Suzuki Unit.
“We frequently ate human meat as our dinner,” he testified. “Boiled it with vegetables and ate it. The meat was brought into camp by patrols who had cut it up and dressed it. Sometimes the meat was dried and sun-cured. Since no other meat was available, we had to eat human flesh. For this reason, Filipinos were captured and butchered. I was so hungry I ate it, although I would have preferred pork.”
Although Ainoda was adamant that he had no other choice, the graphic testimony from his prosecutors reads like something from a horror movie:
“When Lieutenant Alejandro Sale captured the Suzuki [U]nit, he found human bones [and] human flesh in the process of cooking, human skulls and fragments of the human body around the premises of the camp of the Suzuki [U]nit in and around the houses occupied by the members of the [U]nit and it can therefore be concluded that the killing of Filipinos and the eating of their flesh were of common knowledge to all the members of the [U]nit who were encamped together in one place…”
Ultimately, Ainoda and nine of his men were sentenced to death for their horrific crimes.
There’s no question that this description of World War II cannibalism is horrifying. But perhaps even more disturbing is the fact that some historians believe hunger was just an excuse for this behavior.
As Tanaka told one interviewer in 1992, the real motive in most cases may have been “to consolidate the group feeling of the troops.”
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Now these are just a few, very few of war crimes commtied by Japan and like I said, there will probably be more of these in our future but I just wanted to touch on quickly, on something
I know I, for one, was a little bit shocked to learn that Japan was so… bad.. I guess for lack of a better term at the moment. I know there is a better one but that’s what you’re getting
As we saw in the episode, Japan loves to do evil things but pretend like it it doesn’t do evil things. I was going to cover Japanese textbook censorship in this episode as well, and lets be honest once I started looking into this there was a TON of fucked up Japenese war crimes I could have included but didn’t have enough time for. But I didn’t have enough time for that. So with that brief mention of what I could have covered but didn’t, we will probably save those for another episode on why the Japenese are actually horrible.