Japanese War Crimes in World War II

Between 1937 and 1945, Japanese military forces committed atrocities across Asia and the Pacific. Some of them are so brutal that it is almost impossible to comprehend them.

Japan is famous for its long history of samurai warfare, but little is said about the international events between World War I and World War II, part of the longer history of Japan's wars. This article examines the atrocities committed in those years and the trials that followed.

The atrocities described here were committed by some military personnel. They are no reason to face these cases with racial hatred; after all, Japan is currently one of the most peaceful nations in the world. No matter how much Japan and many try to forget or ignore, it is important to remember the horrible crimes in our history to ensure that they never happen again.

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The Nanjing Massacre

The Nanjing Massacre was an episode of murder and mass rape committed by Japanese troops against the residents of Nanjing, the capital of China during the Second Sino-Japanese War. Chinese sources count more than 300,000 dead; the International Military Tribunal for the Far East found that at least 200,000 people were killed, and historians continue to debate the exact figure.

During the capture of the city, some soldiers competed to see who could kill more people. Many Chinese women were abducted and used as sex slaves. The tribunal recorded about 20,000 rapes in the first month of the occupation, and some estimates go as high as 80,000.

Initially, the women were killed immediately after being raped, often through explicit mutilations. Young children were captured and raped as well.

These atrocities lasted more than two months. After World War II, General Iwane Matsui and other commanders responsible for the attack were tried and sentenced to death by the Allied tribunal. Prince Yasuhiko Asaka, who sanctioned the killing of captives, was granted immunity as a member of the imperial family and never stood trial.

Comfort Women

In addition to what happened in Nanjing, during the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Pacific War, the Japanese forced tens of thousands of women into sexual slavery. Most historians estimate the total at between 20,000 and 200,000. They were called comfort women, most of whom were Korean.

They were sent throughout East Asia to work in brothels catering to the Japanese armed forces. The brothels operated long hours, and the women rarely received time off; most were abused repeatedly every day for years.

In December 2015, Japan and South Korea reached an agreement in which Tokyo apologized and paid 1 billion yen, about 9 million dollars, into a South Korean foundation for the surviving victims. Of the 47 women still alive at the time, 34 accepted payments. The agreement was effectively abandoned in 2019, after the foundation was dissolved.

Unit 731

Unit 731 (Nana-san-ichi Butai) operated under the cover name Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department of the Kwantung Army, in the Pingfang district of the former puppet state of Manchukuo, in northeast China.

The site was a facade to hide human experiments on civilians and prisoners of war, including Chinese, Russian, Mongolian, Korean and even Allied prisoners. Common criminals, captured enemies and anti-Japanese partisans were also used as test subjects.

Among the experiments of Unit 731, prisoners were infected with venereal diseases so doctors could study how the disease progressed in the human body. Vivisection without anesthesia showed how diseases affected the organs, and some prisoners were raped by the guards.

Some prisoners were used in freezing experiments to study the effects of cold, others were exposed to grenades, flamethrowers and biological weapons, and many were left without water and food. No prisoner is known to have survived the program, whose history is told in more detail in our article on Unit 731 and its human experiments.

The Burma Railway

During the occupation of Southeast Asian territories, the Japanese decided to build a railway connecting Thailand and Burma. The railway would cross an incredibly dense jungle and would be built largely by hand.

The Japanese gathered 60,000 prisoners of war and more than 200,000 local workers and forced them to work day and night through monsoons and suffocating heat. The workers were given only rice to eat.

The injured and sick were left to die. The dangers included dengue, cholera, tropical ulcers and a severe vitamin B deficiency that led many to paralysis. Around 12,000 Allied prisoners and at least 90,000 local workers died before the railway was finished.

The Bataan Death March

The atrocities in Bataan, Philippines, began in April 1942 when the region surrendered to Japan. Unprepared for the large number of prisoners of war, the Japanese ordered all 75,000 of them to march through the jungle toward Camp O'Donnell.

This march became known as the Bataan Death March. The Japanese soldiers, who saw surrender as a sign of weakness, relentlessly beat the captives. Some fell behind due to lack of water, the heat of the jungle, or exhaustion.

The stragglers were decapitated or simply left to perish. Estimates of the deaths during the march vary from 5,000 to 18,000 Filipinos and 500 to 650 Americans; thousands more died of disease and starvation in the prison camp at Camp O'Donnell.

The Bangka Island Massacre

As Singapore fell in February 1942, Japanese planes bombed the sea in an effort to sink as many fleeing transport ships as possible.

One of these ships, the Vyner Brooke, had 65 Australian nurses, 53 of whom swam to the small Bangka Island after the transport sank.

The Japanese soldiers gathered as many people as possible, including wounded military personnel, Allied soldiers and some of the nurses. They then set up a machine gun on the beach, ordered everyone into the shallow waters and mowed them down. Only one nurse, Vivian Bullwinkel, survived; she was shot but lived to testify at the Tokyo tribunal after the war.

The Sandakan Death March

Considered the worst military atrocity in Australia's history, the Sandakan Death March is little known outside of that country. The incident occurred at the end of World War II when the Japanese were retreating.

They abandoned the Sandakan prisoner of war camp in Borneo, forcing the soldiers interned there to march through the jungle to Ranau with them until they perished from hunger or disease. Around 2,400 Allied prisoners died at Sandakan and Ranau, almost all of them Australian; only six Australians survived, all of whom had escaped.

The lack of food affected even the Japanese; some committed suicide and resorted to cannibalism, and such things happened in various places during the war. Testimonies collected after the war describe cases in which flesh was cut from prisoners while they were still alive.

The Attack on Pearl Harbor

On December 7, 1941, in the early morning, the Japanese bombed the American base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii before any declaration of war. The raid killed 2,403 Americans, wounded 1,178 and sank or damaged 18 ships.

Many of the dead were teenagers; some were firefighters and family members. The attack occurred because the United States had frozen Japanese assets and cut off oil exports, and the Imperial Navy hoped to cripple the American Pacific Fleet before it could interfere with the conquest of Southeast Asia.

Pearl Harbor made Americans furious, and almost four years later American bombers destroyed the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with atomic bombs, killing well over 100,000 people.

Attacks on the American mainland: Japanese submarines shelled an oil field near Santa Barbara, California, and a coastal fort in Oregon, and a seaplane dropped incendiary bombs on an Oregon forest. Balloon bombs launched by Japan later drifted across the Pacific and killed six civilians in Oregon in May 1945, the only deaths caused by enemy action on the American mainland. The scare known as the Battle of Los Angeles, in February 1942, turned out to be a false alarm.

The I-8 Submarine Massacre

The crew of the Japanese submarine I-8 committed two atrocities during World War II. First, they sank the Dutch freighter Tjisalak and took the survivors hostage.

The men were beaten with hammers and wrenches, cut with swords and thrown into the sea; the officers were murdered below deck. Only five or six of the roughly 100 people aboard survived.

The same crew later sank the American freighter Jean Nicolet, again taking over 100 prisoners and attacking them with clubs and blades. The submarine crash-dived with about 30 bound men on deck; only about 23 were rescued.

The Battle of Manila

In 1945 in Manila, Philippines, the Japanese army was ordered to retreat by General Tomoyuki Yamashita. Ignoring this order, naval troops under Admiral Sanji Iwabuchi stayed in the city and fought street by street.

They raped, shot, mutilated and decapitated Filipinos until the Allies killed almost all of the more than 16,000 Japanese soldiers in the city. At least 100,000 Filipinos died.

Remembered today as a national tragedy, the Battle of Manila cost Filipinos, in addition to thousands of human lives, the destruction of countless and irreparable historical treasures, colleges, churches, convents, universities, and historical monasteries.

Operation Sook Ching

After taking control of Singapore in February 1942, the Japanese decided to eradicate any Chinese in the city who could oppose Japanese rule, including military personnel, leftists, communists and those with weapons.

Thus began the Sook Ching Operation, known in Japanese as Dai Kenshō, or great inspection. The operation resulted in several massacres of groups of ethnically Chinese men, typically by machine gun.

Japanese figures for the operation ranged from about 6,000 to 25,000 deaths, but postwar estimates are far higher: most historians put the number of victims between 40,000 and 50,000, with some Singaporean accounts claiming up to 100,000.

The Occupation of Nauru

The Japanese occupied Nauru, a small equatorial island east of Papua New Guinea, from 1942 until the end of World War II. During this period, they committed a series of atrocities, including the execution of several Australian officials. The five Australians who remained on the island, including the administrator, were killed after an American air raid in March 1943.

At the time, Nauru was home to a leper colony. In July 1943, the Japanese put 39 patients on a fishing boat, towed it out of sight of the island and opened fire until the boat sank, killing everyone on board. They also deported about 1,200 native Nauruans to the Truk Islands.

Mortality among the deportees was extremely high, and hundreds died of starvation or disease before the survivors returned home after the war. The killing of the leprosy patients is considered the occupation's worst crime.

The Palawan Massacre

The Palawan prisoner of war camp in the Philippines was a hellish place. According to survivor accounts, two American soldiers had their left arms broken with a pipe just for eating a papaya to avoid starving to death.

On December 14, 1944, the Japanese forced all 150 Americans in the camp into the air-raid trenches they had dug. They then doused the entrances with gasoline and set them on fire.

Some tried to escape by swimming in a nearby bay and were shot. Others tried to hide among the rocks near the bay but were found and killed. In the end, 139 men were killed and only 11 Americans survived that night.

Other attacks and war crimes by the Japanese

Hong Kong - In December 1941, Japanese troops invaded Hong Kong. On Christmas Day, soldiers entered St. Stephen's College, which was being used as a hospital, killed about 100 wounded men and staff, and mutilated the bodies of two doctors. Other medics were killed during the fighting despite wearing Red Cross armbands.

The Andaman Islands - In Port Blair and the surrounding islands, the Japanese tortured local leaders and suspects. In January 1944, they shot 44 Indian civilians at the Homfreyganj massacre on suspicion of spying.

The pig-basket atrocity - Prisoners captured in eastern Java were crammed into bamboo baskets used to transport pigs and hauled away in open trucks under the tropical sun.

The Alexandra Hospital massacre - In Singapore, Japanese soldiers entered a British military hospital and killed up to 50 patients and staff, including men on the operating table. About 200 of those who surrendered were bound and locked overnight in small, airless rooms; the survivors were bayoneted the next morning.

The Laha massacre - On Ambon Island, in Indonesia, more than 300 Australian and Dutch prisoners of war were executed near Laha airfield. Most were bayoneted, clubbed or beheaded, and many were buried in mass graves.

The execution of captured airmen - Hundreds of Allied airmen were executed after capture, often following sham trials. At Fukuoka, 33 American airmen were killed, 15 of them beheaded after Japan announced its intention to surrender on August 15, 1945.

Attacks on Chinese cities - Beyond Nanjing, Japanese aircraft bombed the wartime capital, Chongqing, in 268 raids that killed more than 10,000 civilians. Other cities, such as Wuhan and Shanghai, were also attacked.

Treatment of minorities - Japan forced the Ainu, the indigenous people of Hokkaido, off their land and banned their language and customs through assimilation policies. Koreans were conscripted for labor and military service, and Korean women made up a large part of the comfort women system.

What is Japan's punishment for these crimes?

After World War II, Japan was subjected to a trial for the crimes committed during the war by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE). This tribunal was created by the Allies to judge Japanese military and political leaders for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Between 1946 and 1948, it heard evidence against 28 defendants.

As a result of the trial, many Japanese military and political leaders were sentenced to death or long prison terms. Seven defendants, including former prime minister Hideki Tojo, were hanged in December 1948, and sixteen others received life sentences. General Tomoyuki Yamashita was tried separately by an American military commission in Manila and hanged in February 1946 for atrocities committed by his troops in the Philippines, including the Manila massacre.

In addition to the IMTFE trial, Japan was also required to pay reparations for the damages caused during the war to other countries. Under the 1951 San Francisco peace treaty and the bilateral agreements that followed, it compensated several countries it had occupied, among them the Philippines, Burma, Indonesia and South Korea.

Not everyone faced justice: the United States granted immunity to Shirō Ishii and other Unit 731 researchers in exchange for their data, so many of the men behind the experiments never stood trial. Japan adopted a constitution in 1947 that renounced war as a sovereign right and limited the country to self-defense forces, leaving Japan without an army in the conventional sense.