Just when you think you'd heard the worst of it ...

[Stand By]

My God. The ones who died within 10 minutes of baling out of the B-29 were the lucky ones.
Horrendous.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/wor...riments-in-Japan-according-to-new-museum.html

http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1995-05-28/news/1995148003_1_japan-kyushu-university-fukuoka

 

[p51]

So many things like this happened and the people who did these horrible crimes did not meet justice anywhere near the way they did in Nuremberg. The US Government actually signed away rights for US citizens to sue the Japanese government after the war as well, from what I've read. Many served no time at all.
I had uncles who fought in the Pacific who brooded over all this to their dying days.

 

[Stanley Doble]

Is this really news to anybody? Such atrocities were common in Japanese held areas, to civilians and military POWs. The best you could hope for was neglect and starvation. I guess nobody talks about these things anymore. At one time they were common knowledge.

 

[Stand By]

Well this was news to me. I've known greatly for most of my life of the reams of appalling atrocities meted out to the millions of Chinese and all our poor POWs (try reading The Last Highlander - now there's a book!) and all those poor unfortunates unlucky enough to be caught up in their swathe and the rest of it … but vivisection? LIVE vivisection ?!?! And to the USAAF … it beggars belief. It's the stuff of pure evil.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Is this really news to anybody? Such atrocities were common in Japanese held areas, to civilians and military POWs. The best you could hope for was neglect and starvation. I guess nobody talks about these things anymore. At one time they were common knowledge.

Indeed. Americans who were paying attention had a pretty good idea of what they could expect from Japan as far back as 1937. That such things are no longer common knowledge has more to do with postwar revisionism than with historical reality.

 

[Stand By]

I knew the Nazis were doing lots of this kind of thing but not the Japanese.
I'd have pushed the bomb release on Fat Man myself. Anything to put a swift end to horrendous things.

 

[Stanley Doble]

For some reason Nazi atrocities are exaggerated while Japanese atrocities are covered up.

 

[V.C. Brunswick]

The difference between Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan was that the latter was... shall we say... a little less diligent when it came to paperwork. The Nazis hanged themselves with their own almost OCD-like documentation of their activities.

 

[LizzieMaine]

There were also political expediencies which prevented full prosecution of those responsible in Japan. If there had been any justice, Hirohito should have come to his finish at the end of a rope in 1946, but politics prevented this.

 

[Stand By]

The difference between Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan was that the latter was... shall we say... a little less diligent when it came to paperwork. The Nazis hanged themselves with their own almost OCD-like documentation of their activities.

I know, right?! So it continually amazes me that these holocaust-deniers are even out there and even have conferences (as Iran did) and claim that the numbers are grossly exaggerated and are only in the tens or hundreds of thousands, not millions.
As if. The evidence is right there. Nobody keeps accounting books better than the Germans - they love order like that. And as you say, it rather worked against them.

 

[Stand By]

For some reason Nazi atrocities are exaggerated while Japanese atrocities are covered up.

And it's incongruous that the Germans are seen to both admit and atone for what they did and teach their own inglorious part of history in their own schools - while they don't do much of either in Japan, if at all. I've always found that odd.

 

[ChiTownScion]

"Five were sentenced to death, four received life prison terms and the rest received shorter sentences.

Two years later, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the military governor of Japan, commuted all the death sentences and reduced most of the prison terms. By 1958, every one of the people involved in the case had been released."

The Great American Hero. His selling out of his own countrymen is the biggest atrocity in this story.

 

[LizzieMaine]

The Great American Hero. His selling out of his own countrymen is the biggest atrocity in this story.

Yup. It's a damn shame that a Bonus Marcher couldn't have shot him off his horse in 1932.

 

[V.C. Brunswick]

Which was rather incongruous in that on one hand the Nazis went through great lengths to conceal their "Final Solution" from the rest of the world*, even when the war was still going favourably for them, yet kept meticulous records.

*They even produced a propaganda film claiming that the Jews were well-treated in their custody.

 

[hatguy1]

"Five were sentenced to death, four received life prison terms and the rest received shorter sentences.

Two years later, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the military governor of Japan, commuted all the death sentences and reduced most of the prison terms. By 1958, every one of the people involved in the case had been released."

The Great American Hero. His selling out of his own countrymen is the biggest atrocity in this story.

I got into some research on Mac a year or so ago. How he got away with a lot of things he did throughout his career - all the stuff he did in the P.I. BEFORE the war (where did his loyalties really lie), campaigning for president while still remaining on active duty (again where did his loyalties really lie), wearing his P.I. field marshal's laurels on his U.S. service cap, a whole LOT of the things he did in Japan, etc just to name a few - until ol' Harry S. canned him amazed me.

 

[ChiTownScion]

........... a whole LOT of the things he did in Japan, etc just to name a few - until ol' Harry S. canned him amazed me.

I do love it how that gutsy little former artillery captain took the great general to the woodshed.

 

[p51]

I'm pretty sure my Grandfather was among the bonus marchers and I doubt he had a lot of love for Dugout Doug, especially since he sent two sons to the Pacific to fight for him.

That such things are no longer common knowledge has more to do with postwar revisionism than with historical reality.

Indeed, but the problem is that people like us DO know these things while the general public for the most part has no idea.
The fact that revisionist history of the WW2 years being taught in Japan borders on satire in that it's so far from any facts, chills my blood.
At least the Germans embrace the reality of their history in the 30s and 40s. We have collectively given Japan a pass, for some reason and they've taken serious advantage of it.
My high school girlfriend went to Japan to teach English for a year or two and I ran into her after she came back (long after we'd amicably broken up) and she told me how they taught history there for the 40s era. It sets my blood boiling every time I think on it, that they teach kids that Japan was exerting their lawful rights in the Pacific rim when the horrible round eyes came a'calling and crsuhed their nation.
No mention of the horrific things they did, it was all about our fire bombing and dropping of nukes on them.

 

[TimeWarpWife]

Even the likes of Himmler and Goering tried to save their own worthless lives by making deals with the Allied forces at the end of the war. Naturally, both were denied, but it would have never crossed the minds of the Japanese - from a private to a General - to bargain for their lives. That would have brought dishonor on their families and their emperor. If people have no regard for their own lives, they certainly aren't going to have any for someone else's. Politics or not, for acts of murderous barbarism on this scale not to be punished is absolutely unconscionable and immoral.

 

[DesertDan]

Yep. Read up on the Japanese Hell Ships sometime.

 

[bentusian]

And look up "Unit 731"

Nevertheless,
http://nation.time.com/2013/05/20/sorry-but-japan-still-cant-get-the-war-right/