Japanese War Crimes

[Peter H]

From Hellfire,Cameron Forbes.

Map of the Thai-Burma Death Railway

Allied POWs working there were told it was Japan's equivalent of building the Panama Canal

[Peter H]

From Forbes.

Senior Engineer Renichi Sugano in proud pose on engine C5631..it transported generals to the joining ceremony..and now stands in the entrance hall of the militaristic Yushukan Museum in Tokyo..

Death rates on this project here:
http://www.btrma.org.au/articles/forcesstory2.htm

[Peter H]

A strange display

From: http://blogs.yahoo.co.jp/torakyojin88/f ... l?m=lc&p=8

[Peter H]

From: http://bbs.tiexue.net/default.htm?ListU ... 6-0-1.html

Killings in China

[Peter H]

More..

[Peter H]

More..

[Peter H]

From: http://pegasus.phys.saga-u.ac.jp/peace/jwar/jparmy.htm

[Peter H]

From: http://www.geocities.jp/pipopipo555jp/1 ... /n-099.htm

[Peter H]

From: http://www.geocities.jp/pipopipo555jp/1 ... sakuin.htm

[David Thompson]

THE MYSTERY IN BORNEO AT 'THE MASSACRE PLACE'
By BARBARA CROSSETTE, Special to the New York Times

MANDOR, Indonesia— In this almost-forgotten corner of Borneo, someone - no one seems to know who - has succeeded in muting a memorial to the victims of one of World War II's least publicized atrocities.

In 1943-44, thousands of people from what is now the Indonesian province of West Kalimantan were brought here to be executed by Japanese occupation forces, relatives of the victims say. They were among about 1.2 million Indonesians to die nationwide at the hands of Tokyo's troops, according to most accounts.

Slamet Bratanata, a former Cabinet minister who is now a leader of the unofficial opposition to President Suharto, said Japanese occupation of Indonesia could legitimately be described as ''genocidal'' in that whole sectors of society seemed to be picked out for execution.

Here in Mandor, 50 miles north of the city of Pontianak, J. F. Caloh, a member of the board of rectors of Panca Bhakti University in Pontianak, guided a visitor to the site where up to 20,000 people may have been put to death by firing squad or the sword. Among them, he said, was the cream of Pontianak's middle class: scholars, doctors, former government officials, business leaders - anyone who might one day have opposed Japanese rule.

A Special Meaning

For Mr. Caloh, now nearing 60, this place has a special meaning. When he was 15, both his parents died here. He remembers how they were taken at midnight from his home. He and his brothers and sisters never saw their mother and father again. The children were moved to foster homes ''to be raised up Japanese,'' he said.

A year later, the Japanese occupation newspaper, the Borneo Shimbun, announced that their parents had been executed. Their father had worked for a Japanese company. Their mother, Mr. Caloh said, ''was just a housewife.''

Documenting their fate, and telling the world beyond Borneo about what happened to their generation, has become his preoccupation. ''Almost nobody knows about what happened here during the war,'' he said. ''In a few years, the Japanese tried to kill all they thought would oppose them.''

Just over a year ago, Mr. Caloh noticed that a disturbing change had taken place on a memorial marking the execution spot.

When Allied forces came to Borneo in 1945, the remains of victims scattered throughout the jungle were collected and buried in mass graves covered by open-sided wooden shelters looking like country churches in a jungle landscape.

The clearing where the killing took place was fenced and left as a memorial. A plaque of wood fastened to a boulder said simply, in the Indonesian language, ''The Massacre Place.''

In 1975 the Suharto Government erected a larger memorial that, unlike the massacre site, could be seen from the main road. A sculptor from Bandung was commissioned to create a stone relief mural telling the story of the atrocities.

Mr. Caloh and others say they are certain that a group of Japanese tourists had also seen the inscription on the boulder and had protested at some level of government. The Japanese are now Indonesia's largest investors and creditors. 'Place of Mass Burial'

Mr. Caloh said he believes the provincial governor ordered the inscription on the boulder changed, possibly after an order from Jakarta. The stone now says ''Place of Mass Burial,'' with no hint of the cause of death. [ In Jakarta, a spokesman for the Japanese Embassy said he had not heard of any complaints about the Mandor memorial. He added that Japanese diplomats were aware of similar monuments in other parts of Indonesia, which they visited from time to time, but never objected to. ] Aliaswat Saleh, chairman of the Pontianak Chamber of Commerce and Industry, said officials had told him that his recent report to them of the change in the inscription was the first they had heard of it. Mr. Aliaswat lost an aunt, Uray Buri, in the executions.

''We were quite surprised that the words had changed,'' Mr. Aliaswat said. ''Now it seems nobody knows how it happened.''

http://www.nytimes.com/1987/02/03/world ... nted=print

[Peter H]

Law and politics : Australia's war crimes trials in the Pacific, 1943-1961 by Caroline Pappas 1998
http://unsworks.unsw.edu.au/vital/acces ... works:3260

From Chapter 5,page 11

Allied War Crime Trial Statistics,Japanese

Number of trials,Guilty,Death,Life,Acquitted,Other

US--474,1229,163,162,180,0
UK--306,811,265,55,107,2
Aust--296,644,148,39,280,0
Neth--448,969,236,28,55,14
France--39,198,63,23,31,1
Philippines--72,133,17,87,11,27
China--605,504,149,83,350,29

Total---2240,4488,1041,315,1014,73

[Peter H]

WWII vet finally gets Bronze Star for his part in 1945 arrest of Japanese leader


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... =sec-metro

In September 1945, Wilpers was stationed in Japan as a first lieutenant and member of the 308th Counter Intelligence Corps detachment. According to his commendation, dated Feb. 4, 2010, the Army succeeded in arresting Tojo because of Wilpers's "initiative, ingenuity, and courage."

"Captain Wilpers prevented [Tojo] from taking his own life thereby assuring that he would live and stand trial for his ignominious war crimes," the citation reads. "Had Captain Wilpers not acted with courage and initiative, Hideki Tojo would have succeeded in avoiding trial and possible execution for his acts."

In January 1947, Wilpers's commanding officer at the time of the arrest recommended Wilpers for the Bronze Star Medal for his actions Sept. 10-11, 1945. The paperwork describes how Wilpers located Tojo's Tokyo residence and broke in after hearing a gunshot.

Once inside, Wilpers found that Tojo -- who knew his arrest was imminent -- had shot himself in the chest. Wilpers reportedly secured Tojo's weapons and found a Japanese physician who, "faced with Captain Wilpers' .38 caliber revolver," administered first aid until U.S. medical officers could arrive....

[alexWong]

NANKING MASSACRE
Agence France-Presse in Kyoto
May 17, 2010







Young Japanese infantryman Sawamura turned numb when he was ordered to bayonet a Chinese peasant as fellow soldiers looked on and taunted him. "You captured him, so you get rid of him," his lieutenant barked, yanking the 21-year-old soldier towards his writhing victim days after Japanese troops overran the city of Nanking in December 1937.
"I stumbled forward and thrust the blade into his body until it came out on the other side," said Sawamura, now 94. "We were told not to waste bullets. It was training for beginners. I have told myself for the rest of my life that killing is wrong," said the veteran of the Imperial Japanese Army, who declined to give his surname, in an interview at his home in Kyoto.

Sawamura is one of a fast- dwindling number of Japanese former soldiers who took part in the Nanking massacre, considered by historians the worst wartime atrocity by the Japanese army in China.
Historians generally estimate about 150,000 people were killed, thousands of women raped and thousands of homes burned down in an orgy of violence until March 1938 in what was then the capital of the Chinese Nationalist government.
In a joint study by a Japan-China history research committee released this year, China said the true number was above 300,000 victims, while Japanese scholars estimated that anywhere between 20,000 and 200,000 were killed.
Sawamura - who spends his days tending his pot-plants and decorating his house with his grandchildren's pictures - is one of the last Japanese alive who played a part in the massacre in the city now called Nanjing .
Few veterans have ever spoken about what in Japan remains largely a taboo subject, and most have taken their stories quietly to their graves.
But this year, in a last-ditch effort to keep their dark memories alive, Japanese activist Tamaki Matsuoka released a documentary in which veterans speak for the first time on film about the mass killings and rapes.
Torn Memories of Nanjing recently aired at the Hong Kong International Film Festival and may soon screen at the Sydney Film Festival.
For more than a decade Matsuoka, a retired schoolteacher and long the bete noire of Japan's nationalists, interviewed hundreds of Chinese survivors of the bloodbath and some 250 Japanese veterans who were there. Today only three of those soldiers survive, including Sawamura.
"Even if outsiders watch the film, I also want Japanese people to watch it and learn the facts," Matsuoka said.
But despite her efforts, few in Japan may see the documentary, which has only been shown in three cinemas here so far.
Japan's wartime history remains a touchy subject in the country and a flashpoint in relations with its East Asian neighbours, who have often complained Japan has not sufficiently atoned for its crimes. Japanese school textbooks frequently gloss over details of the crimes, sparking the ire of China and other affected countries. Some government officials have labelled the Nanking massacre a Chinese fabrication.
Although the atrocities are well documented in the rest of the world, mostly through accounts of victims and foreigners who lived in Nanking at the time, Japanese testimonies have been frequently discounted or hushed up. The clutch of war veterans who have publicly testified have often been harassed by right-wing nationalist groups or accused by the war dead's families of treason and slandering the soldiers' memories.
Matsuoka said she is fighting for a cause that has at times been life-threatening and often seemed fruitless. She has been harassed by nationalists who have protested at her events and hurled insults, and some conservative magazines label her a Chinese spy.
Some of the soldiers themselves at first shooed her away or acted senile when they were questioned, she said. Angry wives pushed her out of their homes or prevented their husbands from talking about violating women.
It took her a decade to gain their trust and to persuade them to talk on camera, she said. In the end some entrusted her with photos and war memorabilia, including a postcard of soldiers grinning next to a mound of skulls and another showing them playing with the heart of a victim.
"In Japan there is the saying that `the nail that stands up must be beaten down'. But I'm a nail that's sticking out so far that no one can hit it down anymore," Matsuoka chuckled.
The testimonies she gathered are powerful.
Another Japanese veteran, former navy sailor Sho Mitani, 90, recounted how the sight of corpses rotting in coagulated blood sparked in him a mix of curiosity and disgust.
"We were living in an age where we were taught that Chinese were not human," he said in the film. "The army used a trumpet sound that meant `Kill all Chinese who run away'. We were taught from childhood in schools that Chinese were like insects."
Mitani said it took him a decade to find the courage to openly give his witness account of scores of Chinese being mowed down by gunfire as they tried to flee across the Yangtze River.
He said he chose to speak out when Tokyo's conservative governor Shintaro Ishihara in a 1990 magazine interview denied the Nanking massacre as a "lie".
"I told myself `Now that's wrong', because it really happened," said Mitani, who said he witnessed killings through a telescope from a navy destroyer. "I had to tell the truth."

[PFLB]

In my opinion this is the best book on the IMTFE out there, at any rate, the best book from an international criminal legal perspective and in English. Historians be warned, it is essentially a legal commentary and critique.

http://www.amazon.com/Tokyo-Internation ... 329&sr=1-3

[stonelifter]

May I recommend Knights of Bushido by Lord Russell of Liverpool. It is not an 'in-depth study' but it is good foundation material giving an overview of both culture and events. I believe it is now back in print.
http://www.greenhillbooks.com/booksheet ... shido.html

I read this back in the early seventies along with its companion "The Scourge of the Swastika" which documented Nazi war crimes. I might suggest a little-known book called "The Fall of Hong Kong" by Tim Carew. Not a long book but it covers the atrocities committed by Japanese troops against civillians and soldiers on Hong Kong. The colony was defended mainly by men of the Middlesex Regiment, the Winnipeg Grenadiers ( who won the only VC) and both Sikh and Rajput units who fought to the death knowing their fate if captured. Although told from the British standpoint, the descriptions of battle ring true when compared with other andecdotal accounts. Try as I might, I have been unable to find anything written on the fight for Hong Kong by Japanese sources. As such, the allegations made in the book stand unrefuted

>>>>>>>>>
i read knights of bushido and the scourge of the swastika as a schoolboy in the 60''s.This was of course during the post-war years when political correctness had not taken over. We were caned at school, and could buy one shilling 'War Comics ' which depicted the horrors of war and famous battles in pictures..One book I remember was "The Camp on Blood Island," with a lurid picture of an allied prisoner about to be beheaded by a ferocious looking Jap.
Later in life, I was interested to note they were hard to come by in the 80's.
Especially the JAPANESE war crimes seemed to have disappeared from public attention. Library searches on" war crimes and atrocities " turned up plenty on German crimes, but very little on the Japanese crimes.
Perhaps as the Japanese 'economic miracle ' was in full spate, and the cold war still went on. This meant Japan was needed as an ally to prevent the Russian Bear from storming in to the area with Communism etc.
Some sort of discreet censorship was in place.
Then with the decline of Communism and of Japanese economic performance, the pendulum had swung. The new economic partners were the Chinese, and with the increasingly strident Chinese American population of University graduates clamouring for justice, Japanese war crimes started finally to be given the publicity they deserved.