During the Chosun-Japanese war from 1592 to 1598, Japanese forces committed cannibalism, which can be confirmed in the records written after the war. In this war, the biggest in Korean history, almost one third of Chosun people(5 million people) were killed in battles, massacre and famine.
At the end of the war, several groups of Japanese forces were surounded by the allied forces of Chosun(Korea) and Ming(China) in seashore castles on the southeastern coast of Korea for more than a year. Starved, they ate bodies of thousands of Chosun and Chinese soldiers killed in the battle.
Despite of the harsh famine caused by Japanese invasion, Chosun people(Koreans) didn't do such kind of things. Strongly influenced by Confucianism putting an emphasis on morality, that kind of horrible thing was very rare among Chosun people in times of famine and war.
Youngshim Park(83 years old), one of the surviving comfort women living in North Korea, told in an recent interview that Japanese soldiers killed a Korean girl refusing to have sex with them and forced her to eat the body of the slained girl. She was taken by a Japanese policeman and sent to Nanjing, China in 1938.
http://news.naver.com/news/read.php?mod ... enu_id=102
She is on the far right in this photo that was taken in Burma in 1944. She was pregnant at the time. The laughing man on the far left is, I suppose, a Chinese soldier who liberated them from Japanese forces.
http://blog.naver.com/chakane09/120002624329
Her interview caused a big turmoil in Korean society two months ago, aggravating the relationship between both countries.
IMO, there's something in Japanese ego that is related to cannibalism. Unlike cases of cannibalism in surrounded Leningrad and by an Uruguayan rugby team stucked in the Andes in 1972, Japanese cannibalism has a root in their culture rather than mere starvation. There are few cases in which soldiers of a civilized country ate the bodies of killed enemies.