Japanese_Imperialism

Japanese Imperialism and its effects on civilians during World War 2 During World War 2, Japan expanded an immense distance over the period of 6 months of war. Japan expanded over many countries, including, Manchuria (north east china), The Philippines, Most of China, and many more countries. The atrocities that Japan had committed against civilians during WW2 are some of the worst that the world has seen in the history of war. Japanese war crimes occurred during the period of Japanese imperialism, Primarily during the Second Sino-Japanese war and of course World war 2. Some war crimes took place during the late 19th century and were committed by military personal of the Empire of Japan, Although most took place during the Shower era. By the late 1930s, the rise of militarism in Japan created at least superficial similarities between the wider Japanese military culture and that of Nazi Germany's elite military personnel, such as those in the Waffen-SS. Japan also had a military secret police force, known as the Kempeitai, which resembled the Nazi Gestapo in its role in annexed and occupied countries. As in other dictatorships, irrational brutality, hatred and fear became commonplace. Perceived failure, or insufficient devotion to the Emperor would attract punishment, frequently of the physical kind. In the military, officers would assault and beat men under their command, who would pass the beating on to lower ranks, all the way down. In POW camps, this meant prisoners received the worst beatings of all, partly in the belief that such punishments were merely the proper technique to deal with disobedience. The Japanese military during the 1930s and 1940s is often compared to the military of Nazi Germany during 1933–45 because of the sheer scale of suffering. Much of the controversy regarding Japan's role in World War II revolves around the death rates of prisoners of war and civilians under Japanese occupation. “It may be pointless to try to establish which World War Two Axis aggressor, Germany or Japan, was the more brutal to the peoples it victimised. The Germans killed six million Jews and 20 million Russians [i.e. Soviet citizens]; the Japanese slaughtered as many as 30 million Filipinos, Malays, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Indonesians and Burmese, at least 23 million of them ethnic Chinese. Both nations looted the countries they conquered on a monumental scale, though Japan plundered more, over a longer period, than the Nazis. Both conquerors enslaved millions and exploited them as forced labourers—and, in the case of the Japanese, as [forced] prostitutes for front-line troops. If you were a Nazi prisoner of war from Britain, America, Australia, New Zealand or Canada (but not Russia) you faced a 4% chance of not surviving the war; [by comparison] the death rate for Allied POWs held by the Japanese was nearly 30%.” (Chalmers Johnson 1975). between 1937 and 1945, the Japanese military murdered from nearly 3,000,000 to over 10,000,000 people, most likely 6,000,000 Chinese, Indonesians, Koreans, Filipinos, and Indochinese, among others, including Western prisoners of war. This genocide was due to a morally bankrupt political and military strategy, military expediency and custom, and national culture. in China alone, during 1937-45, approximately 3.9 million Chinese were killed, mostly civilians, as a direct result of the Japanese operations and 10.2 millions in the course of the war. The most infamous incident during this period was the Nanking Massacre of 1937-38, when, according to the findings of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, the Japanese Army massacred as many as 300,000 civilians and prisoners of war, although the accepted figure is somewhere in the hundreds of thousands. In Southeast Asia, the Manila massacre, resulted in the death of 100,000 civilians in the Philippines. It is estimated that at least one out of every 20 Filipinos died at the hand of the Japanese during the occupation. In the Sook Ching massacre, Lee Kuan Yew, the ex-Prime Minister of Singapore, said during an interview on with National Geographic that there were between 50,000 and 90,000 casualties while according to Major General Kawamura Saburo, there were 5000 casualties in total. There were other massacres of civilians e.g. the Kalagong massacre. Special Japanese military units conducted experiments on civilians and POWs in China. One of the most infamous was Unit 731 under Shirō Ishii. Victims were subjected to vivisection without anaesthesia, amputations, and were used to test biological weapons, among other experiments. Aesthesia was not used because it was believed to affect results. During World War 2, Germany committed major crimes against humaity, but, just by looking at statistics we see that, Japan, was by far much more brutal than any other country during the war. The impact of civilians was enormous, with a total Japanese civilian death total of 52 million, across, the Asian pacific, dwarfing all other countries.