Another Japan. The cruelty of the Japanese samurai How the Europeans fired at the Japanese

Most likely, it will be: Japanese cuisine, high technology, anime, Japanese schoolgirls, hard work, politeness, etc. However, some may not remember the most positive moments. Well, almost all countries have dark periods in their history that they are not proud of, and Japan is no exception to this rule.

The older generation will certainly remember the events of the last century, when Japanese soldiers who invaded the territory of their Asian neighbors showed the whole world how cruel and merciless they could be. Of course, a lot of time has passed since then, however, in the modern world there is an increasing tendency towards deliberate distortion of historical facts. For example, many Americans fervently believe that they were the ones who won all historical battles, and strive to instill these beliefs in the whole world. And what are pseudo-historical opuses like “Rape Germany” worth? And in Japan, for the sake of friendship with the United States, politicians try to hush up inconvenient moments and interpret the events of the past in their own way, sometimes even presenting themselves as innocent victims. It got to the point that some Japanese schoolchildren believe that the USSR dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

There is a belief that Japan became an innocent victim of US imperialist policy - although the outcome of the war was already clear to everyone, the Americans sought to demonstrate to the whole world what a terrible weapon they had created, and defenseless Japanese cities became only a “great opportunity” for this. However, Japan was never an innocent victim and may have truly deserved such a terrible punishment. Nothing in this world passes without a trace; the blood of hundreds of thousands of people who were subjected to brutal extermination calls for vengeance.

The article brought to your attention describes only a small fraction of what happened once and does not pretend to become the ultimate truth. All the crimes of Japanese soldiers described in this material were recorded by military tribunals, and the literary sources used in its creation are freely available on the Internet.

— A short excerpt from Valentin Pikul’s book “Katorga” well describes the tragic events of Japanese expansion in the Far East:

“The tragedy of the island has been determined. On Gilyak boats, on foot or on pack horses, carrying children, refugees from Southern Sakhalin began to get out through the mountains and impassable swamps to Aleksandrovsk, and at first no one wanted to believe their monstrous stories about samurai atrocities: “They kill everyone. They show no mercy even to small children. And what unchrists! First he will give you some candy, pat him on the head, and then... then your head will hit the wall. We gave up everything we had to earn just to stay alive...” The refugees were telling the truth. When earlier bodies of Russian soldiers mutilated by torture were found in the vicinity of Port Arthur or Mukden, the Japanese said that this was the work of the Honghuz of the Chinese Empress Cixi. But there were never Honghuzes on Sakhalin, now the inhabitants of the island saw the true appearance of the samurai. It was here, on Russian soil, that the Japanese decided to save their cartridges: they pierced military or combatants who were captured with rifle cutlasses, and cut off the heads of local residents with sabers, like executioners. According to an exiled political prisoner, in the first days of the invasion alone they beheaded two thousand peasants.”

This is just a small excerpt from the book - in reality, a complete nightmare was happening on the territory of our country. Japanese soldiers committed atrocities as best they could, and their actions received full approval from the command of the occupying army. The villages of Mazhanovo, Sokhatino and Ivanovka fully learned what the real “way of Bushido” is. The maddened occupiers burned houses and people in them; women were brutally raped; they shot and bayoneted residents, and cut off the heads of defenseless people with swords. Hundreds of our compatriots fell victims to the unprecedented cruelty of the Japanese in those terrible years.

— Events in Nanjing.

Cold December 1937 was marked by the fall of Nanjing, the capital of Kuomintang China. What happened after this defies any description. Selflessly destroying the population of this city, the Japanese soldiers actively applied the favorite policy of “three to nothing” - “burn everything to the point,” “kill everyone to the point,” “rob to the point.” At the beginning of the occupation, about 20 thousand Chinese men of military age were bayoneted, after which the Japanese turned their attention to the weakest - children, women and the elderly. Japanese soldiers were so mad with lust that they raped all women (regardless of age) in the daytime right on the city streets. When finishing the bestial intercourse, the samurai gouged out the eyes of their victims and cut out the hearts.

Two officers argued who could kill a hundred Chinese faster. The bet was won by a samurai who killed 106 people. His opponent was only one corpse behind.

By the end of the month, approximately 300 thousand residents of Nanjing were brutally killed and tortured to death. Thousands of corpses floated in the city river, and the soldiers leaving Nanjing calmly walked to the transport ship right over the dead bodies.

— Singapore and the Philippines.

Having occupied Singapore in February 1942, the Japanese began to methodically capture and shoot “anti-Japanese elements.” Their blacklist included everyone who had at least some connection to China. In post-war Chinese literature, this operation was called "Suk Ching". Soon it moved to the territory of the Malay Peninsula, where, without further ado, the Japanese army decided not to waste time on inquiries, but simply to take and destroy the local Chinese. Fortunately, they did not have time to implement their plans - in early March the transfer of soldiers to other sectors of the front began. The approximate number of Chinese killed as a result of Operation Suk Ching is estimated at 50 thousand people.

Occupied Manila had a much worse time when the command of the Japanese army came to the conclusion that it could not be held. But the Japanese could not just leave and leave the inhabitants of the Philippine capital alone, and after receiving a plan for the destruction of the city, signed by high-ranking officials from Tokyo, they began to implement it. What the occupiers did in those days defies any description. Residents of Manila were shot with machine guns, burned alive, and bayoneted. The soldiers did not spare churches, schools, hospitals and diplomatic institutions that served as refuges for unfortunate people. Even according to the most conservative estimates, Japanese soldiers lost at least 100 thousand lives in Manila and its environs.

— Comfortable women.

During the military campaign in Asia, the Japanese army regularly resorted to the sexual “services” of captives, the so-called “comfort women”. Hundreds of thousands of women of all ages accompanied the aggressors, subjected to constant violence and abuse. The morally and physically crushed captives could not get out of bed due to terrible pain, and the soldiers continued their fun. When the army command realized that it was inconvenient to constantly carry hostages of lust with them, they ordered the construction of stationary brothels, which were later called “comfort stations.” Such stations have appeared since the early 30s. in all Japanese-occupied Asian countries. Among the soldiers they received the nickname "29 to 1" - these numbers indicated the daily proportion of service to military personnel. One woman was obliged to serve 29 men, then the norm was increased to 40, and sometimes even rose to 60. Some captives managed to go through the war and live to an old age, but even now, remembering all the horrors they experienced, they cry bitterly.

- Pearl Harbor.

It is difficult to find a person who has not seen the Hollywood blockbuster of the same name. Many American and British WWII veterans were unhappy that the filmmakers portrayed the Japanese pilots as too noble. According to their stories, the attack on Pearl Harbor and the war were many times more terrible, and the Japanese surpassed the most brutal SS men in cruelty. A more truthful version of those events is shown in a documentary called “Hell in the Pacific.” After the successful military operation at Pearl Harbor, which claimed a huge number of lives and caused so much grief, the Japanese openly rejoiced, rejoicing in their victory. Now they won’t tell this from TV screens, but then the American and British military came to the conclusion that Japanese soldiers were not people at all, but vile rats who were subject to complete extermination. They were no longer taken prisoner, but were killed immediately on the spot - there were often cases when a captured Japanese exploded a grenade, hoping to destroy both himself and his enemies. In turn, the samurai did not value the lives of American prisoners at all, considering them despicable material and using them to practice bayonet attack skills. Moreover, there are cases when, after problems with food supplies appeared, Japanese soldiers decided that eating their captured enemies could not be considered something sinful or shameful. The exact number of victims eaten remains unknown, but eyewitnesses of those events say that Japanese gourmets cut off and ate pieces of meat directly from living people. It is also worth mentioning how the Japanese army fought cases of cholera and other diseases among prisoners of war. Burning all prisoners in the camp where the infected were encountered was the most effective means of disinfection, tested many times.

What caused such shocking atrocities by the Japanese? It is impossible to answer this question unequivocally, but one thing is extremely clear - all participants in the events mentioned above are responsible for the crimes committed, and not just the high command, because the soldiers did this not because they were ordered, but because they themselves liked to cause pain and torment. There is an assumption that such incredible cruelty towards the enemy was caused by the interpretation of the military code of Bushido, which stated the following provisions: no mercy to the defeated enemy; captivity is a shame worse than death; defeated enemies should be exterminated so that they cannot take revenge in the future.

By the way, Japanese soldiers have always been distinguished by their unique vision of life - for example, before going to war, some men killed their children and wives with their own hands. This was done if the wife was sick, and there were no other guardians in the event of the loss of a breadwinner. The soldiers did not want to condemn their family to starvation and thereby expressed their devotion to the emperor.

Currently, it is widely believed that Japan is a unique Eastern civilization, the quintessence of all that is best in Asia. Judging from the standpoint of culture and technology, perhaps this is so. However, even the most developed and civilized nations have their dark sides. In conditions of occupation of foreign territory, impunity and fanatical confidence in the righteousness of his actions, a person can reveal his secret, hidden for the time being. How spiritually have those whose ancestors selflessly stained their hands with the blood of hundreds of thousands of innocent people changed, and will they not repeat their actions in the future?

We are all accustomed to seeing this country as a mystery country, a fairy tale country, where little funny people live and use high-tech devices. Fuji, sakura, rock garden, haiku, Shinto, anime - such associations arise in the average person when he hears “Japan”. Many do not stop and continue the associative series: Hiroshima, nuclear bomb, tragedy, mourning.
Here, in fact, is Hiroshima. In Japan, it is considered its own little Holocaust (it cannot be capitalized, since there cannot be one Holocaust or another, for “obvious reasons”) and not only in Japan, the topic of nuclear bombing is quite popular to this day, which is why it is still being promoted, “So that everyone knows what we went through then.” Images immediately come to mind: sensual Japanese people floating colorful lanterns across the water in memory of the victims.
Intelligent people also remember the girl who failed to make a thousand paper cranes and died of cancer. Today, for the sake of political correctness, the Japanese are methodically taught to forgive the Americans, but at the same time they are hammered into it over and over again that due to defeat in the war they lost the Kuril Islands. Even the Hiroshima Museum states that "after the atomic bombing, Stalin treacherously attacked Japan, as a result of which legitimate Japanese territories were torn away". The fact that it was Truman who “dropped” the bomb is not something that is being hushed up, it’s just that the attention of ordinary Japanese is being focused on this less and less often, which undoubtedly produces some results: 25% of Japanese schoolchildren believe that the Soviet Union dropped the atomic bomb on their country. Well, as you wanted, for membership in the elite club “Golden Billion” you have to pay some membership fees.
I don’t blame Harry Truman at all for what he did, because the situation really demanded it, no matter how cynical it may sound. Moreover, in his Potsdam diary he wrote:

“We have developed the most terrible weapon in the history of mankind... These weapons will be used against Japan... so that military installations, soldiers and sailors will be the targets, not women and children. Even if the Japanese are wild - merciless, cruel and fanatical, then we, as leaders of the world, for the common good, cannot drop this terrible bomb on either the old or the new capital.”

Many now think that Japan became an innocent victim of US imperialist policy, they say, the Americans wanted to show what they had, and Japan was just a “convenient testing ground.” However, this is not quite true. It's not even true that Japan was an innocent victim. And now I will try to prove it to you.

Let's start from afar. We Europeans learned about this wonderful country at the beginning of the 17th century, at which time trade and the expansion of European culture began. In the mid-19th century, Americans (and Europeans) indirectly influenced the beginning of the so-called Meiji Restoration (translated as “enlightened government”), which led to major changes in social and political structures. In particular, Japan had a normal army, and not medieval military squads, which, although they could cut off a good hundred European soldiers, were helpless against “magic” bullets. The army of Napoleonic France served as the basis for the creation of the armed forces, and the model for the fleet was, not unreasonably, the British fleet. True, after the defeat of France in the war with Germany in 1870–1871. The Japanese quickly reorganized the army in a new manner, and the Prussian army was taken as the basis.
Actually, then they had a “test of the pen”, namely the Sino-Japanese War and the Russian-Japanese War. Next - participation in the First World War. It is important to remember that at this time Japan as a state actively desired recognition as such on the world political stage. Like, we are non-local guys, we haven’t fully settled in here, but that’s okay - we’ll play by your rules, i.e. according to European ones. This, for example, explains their rather soft attitude towards Russian prisoners of war in the Russo-Japanese War. It is known that there were no complaints about the mistreatment of Russians by the Japanese in the camps where tens of thousands of Russian soldiers and sailors captured in 1904-1905 were kept.
The situation changed greatly after the First World War. The Entente powers tried to limit Japan's military power through various military treaties (for example, the size of the Japanese fleet could not be more than 60% of the size of the American fleet, and the construction of new ships was frozen for 10 years). This greatly upset Japanese politicians, and post-war Japan began military construction with triple activity. The large-scale global economic crisis fueled chauvinistic sentiments (well, just like the Treaty of Versailles in Germany in those years) and the desire of the most militant part of the Japanese officers to solve their problems through external expansion. The influence of the generals of the army and navy immediately increased, and these were descendants from the samurai dynasties, who became greatly impoverished during the army reforms and they had been accumulating irrational anger for quite a long time. Around this moment, a rather dark page in the history of Japan begins. A history of cruelty.

Far East

It begins, perhaps, with expansion in the Far East (however, they hated the Koreans and Chinese for a long time - they knew it well). Here is an excerpt from Valentin Pikul’s book “Katorga”:

The tragedy of the island was determined. On Gilyak boats, on foot or on pack horses, carrying children, refugees from Southern Sakhalin began to make their way to Aleksandrovsk through the mountains and impassable swamps, and at first no one wanted to believe their monstrous stories about samurai atrocities:
- They kill everyone. They show no mercy even to small children. And what unchrists! First he will give you some candy, pat you on the head, and then... then your head will hit the wall. We gave up everything we had to earn just to stay alive...
The refugees were telling the truth. When earlier bodies of Russian soldiers mutilated by torture were found in the vicinity of Port Arthur or Mukden, the Japanese said that this was the work of the Honghuz of the Chinese Empress Cixi. But there were never Honghuzes on Sakhalin, now the inhabitants of the island saw the true appearance of the samurai. It was here, on Russian soil, that the Japanese decided to save their cartridges: they pierced military or combatants who were captured with rifle cutlasses, and cut off the heads of local residents with sabers, like executioners. According to the exiled political prisoner Kukunian, in the first days of the invasion alone they beheaded two thousand peasants.

Now we see the true appearance of the Japanese samurai.
Moreover, in Japanese historical literature, the massacre of the inhabitants of these villages who rebelled against their oppressors, carried out by the interventionists in the Amur region in the villages of Mazhanovo and Sokhatino, received detailed coverage. The punitive detachment that arrived in these villages on January 11, 1919, on the orders of its commander, Captain Maeda, shot all the residents in these villages, including women and children, and the villages themselves were burned to the ground. This fact was later recognized without any hesitation by the command of the Japanese army itself. In March 1919, the commander of the 12th brigade of the Japanese occupation army in the Amur region, Major General Shiro Yamada, issued an order to destroy all those villages whose residents were in contact with the partisans. And what the Japanese occupiers did in these villages during the purge can be judged from the information below about the atrocities of Japanese punitive forces in the village of Ivanovka. This village, as reported in Japanese sources, was unexpectedly surrounded by Japanese punitive forces on March 22, 1919. First, Japanese artillery rained heavy fire on the village, causing fires to start in a number of houses. Then, Japanese soldiers burst into the streets, where women and children were running around crying and screaming. First, the punitive forces looked for men and shot them or bayoneted them on the streets. And then those who remained alive were locked in several barns and sheds and burned alive. As a subsequent investigation showed, after this massacre, 216 village residents were identified and buried in the graves, but besides this, a large number of corpses charred in the fire remained unidentified. A total of 130 houses burned to the ground. Referring to the “History of the Expedition in Siberia in 1917-1922”, published under the editorship of the Japanese General Staff, the Japanese researcher Teruyuki Hara wrote the following on the same occasion: “Of all the cases of “complete liquidation of villages,” the largest in scale and most cruel was the burning of the village of Ivanovka. In the official history of this burning it is written that this was the exact execution of the order of the brigade commander Yamada, which sounded like this: “I order that this village be punished with the utmost consistency.”
Cutting off heads with swords and bayonets, as we will later see, is the main national pastime of Japanese soldiers. However, the Japanese have fully enjoyed themselves with the Chinese, Koreans and Filipinos.

Nanking

In December 1937, the capital of Kuomintang China, Nanjing, fell. “And then it began.” Japanese soldiers began to practice their popular policy “three clean” - “burn clean”, “kill everyone clean”, “rob clean”.
The Japanese began by taking 20 thousand men of military age out of the city and bayoneting them so that in the future they “could not take up arms against Japan.” Then the occupiers moved on to exterminating women, old people, and children. Mad samurai completed sex with murder, gouged out eyes and tore out the hearts of still living people. Witnesses say that the sexual ecstasy of the conquerors was so great that they raped all the women in a row, regardless of their age, in broad daylight on busy streets. At the same time, fathers were forced to rape their daughters, and sons were forced to rape their mothers.
The Chinese woman, Li Siuying, was a 19-year-old girl at the time. She miraculously survived after being raised at bayonets in Nanjing and left to die. At the hospital it was then discovered that the soldiers had pierced the stomach, killing the child inside.

In December 1937, a Japanese newspaper describing the exploits of the army enthusiastically reported on a valiant competition between two officers who bet who would be the first to kill more than a hundred Chinese with their sword. The Japanese, as hereditary duelists, requested additional time. A certain samurai Mukai won, killing 106 people. His opponent had one less corpse on his account.

One of the Japanese veterans, Ashiro Atsuma, still shudders from the memories of when he crushed the Chinese like cabbage. And now Ashiro travels to China every year to beg forgiveness from the souls of his victims. But the majority of veterans who are found among relatives in almost every Japanese family are not going to repent to anyone for their faithful service to their emperor. When Atsuma's unit left Nanjing, it turned out that the transport ship could not get to the shore of the river bay. He was disturbed by thousands of corpses floating along the Yangtze. Atsuma recalls:

- We just had to use the floating bodies as a pontoon. To board the ship, we had to walk over the dead.

By the end of the month, about 300 thousand people were killed. Terror exceeded all imagination. Even the German consul, in an official report, described the behavior of the Japanese soldiers as “brutal.”
Although immediately after the war some Japanese soldiers were tried for the Nanjing massacre, since the seventies the Japanese side has pursued a policy of denying the crimes committed in Nanjing. But you can’t judge someone for denying such a “trifle”; this isn’t the Holocaust, again.

Here is a small selection of photographs from Nanjing in those days. For those who “don’t know the details” (clickable).

Operation Suk Ching

After the Japanese occupied the British colony of Singapore on February 15, 1942, the occupation authorities decided to identify and eliminate “anti-Japanese elements” in the Chinese community. This definition included Chinese participants in the defense of the Malay Peninsula and Singapore, former employees of the British administration, and even ordinary citizens who had made donations to the China relief fund. The execution lists also included people whose only guilt was that they were born in China (a normal situation for the Japanese, who consider themselves rulers of the world). This operation was called “Suk Ching” in Chinese literature (from Chinese as “liquidation, cleansing”). All Chinese men aged eighteen to fifty years living in Singapore passed through special filtration points. Those who, in the opinion of the Japanese, could pose a threat were taken in trucks outside populated areas and shot with machine guns.
Soon, Operation Suk Ching was extended to the Malay Peninsula. There, due to a lack of human resources, the Japanese authorities decided not to conduct inquiries (why bother) and simply destroy the entire Chinese population. It’s good that we didn’t have time; in early March, the operation on the peninsula was suspended, since the Japanese had to transfer troops to other sectors of the front.
The exact number of deaths is unknown, but the lower estimate is approximately 50,000, which was voiced during the post-war tribunals.

In response to all these atrocities, the Americans and British came to the conclusion that the Japanese soldier was not a man at all, but a rat to be destroyed. The Japanese were killed even when they surrendered with their hands up, because they were afraid that they were holding a grenade somewhere in order to blow up the enemy with it. The samurai believed that captured Americans were waste human material. They were usually used for bayonet attack training. When the Japanese experienced food shortages in New Guinea, they decided that eating their worst enemy could not be considered cannibalism. It is now difficult to calculate how many Americans and Australians were eaten by the insatiable Japanese cannibals. One veteran from India recalls how the Japanese carefully cut off pieces of meat from people who were still alive. Australian nurses were considered a particularly tasty catch by the conquerors. Therefore, the male staff working with them was ordered to kill nurses in desperate situations so that they would not fall alive into the hands of the Japanese. There was a case when 22 Australian nurses were thrown from a wrecked ship onto the shore of an island captured by the Japanese. The Japanese attacked them like flies to honey. After raping them, they were bayoneted, and at the end of the orgy, they were driven into the sea and shot. Asian prisoners suffered an even sadder fate, since they were valued even less than the Americans. When there was an outbreak of cholera in one of the concentration camps, the Japanese did not bother with treatment, but simply burned the entire camp along with the women and children. When outbreaks of disease arose in a particular village, fire became the most effective means of disinfection.

Causes

Still, it is worth recognizing that more than one general and more than one colonel were guilty of abusing prisoners and civilians - this was a common practice.
War crimes researcher Bertrand Russell (yes, that same one) explains Japanese mass crimes, in particular, by a certain interpretation of the Bushido code - that is, the Japanese code of conduct for a warrior. No mercy to the defeated enemy! Captivity is a shame worse than death. Defeated enemies should be destroyed so that they do not take revenge, etc. For example, before leaving for the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905, some soldiers killed their children if there was a sick wife in the house, and there were no other guardians, because they did not want to condemn the family to starvation. They considered this behavior to be a sign of devotion to the emperor. According to Tomikura and other authors, such actions were considered praiseworthy, since killing a child and a sick wife was seen as an expression of devotion and sacrifice towards one's country and Emperor Meiji.

An original civilization?

Concluding the article, I would like to note this. They often say that Japan is a kind of unique civilization, that they are people from another planet, and so on. Well, we can agree. Japan was in self-isolation for quite a long time, so we, brought up in the spirit of Eurocentrism, cannot understand them. This also explains the fact that so far their land is, in general, scarce in terms of talent. Judge for yourself, they adopted their entire original state system from the Chinese, and also copied their writing from the Chinese. As we have already found out, during the Meiji period, social structures were adopted from European ones, as well as the army and navy. Science was almost all done by Europeans. Japanese mathematicians can be counted on one hand. Although the Japanese received Nobel Prizes in physics and chemistry, this is so – a gift from the kind Europeans “here, now you are with us.” Industrial espionage – there’s no need to even talk about it here. What can really be credited to the Japanese is respect for traditions, religion, the cult of ancestors and the fairly stable social system that they built thanks to the help of the United States and Europe. Although, I admit, I may be incompetent in this matter.
By the way, as everyone knows, after the Second World War, Japan was prohibited from having its own armed forces (that same 9th article of the constitution). And all this time, only small self-defense forces existed in Japan. However, now this is just a formality, because the size of the army has already reached 250 thousand, and the military budget has grown to 44 billion dollars - one of the largest in the world, by the way. Moreover, in 2006, the Ministry of Defense was established and the self-defense forces were officially transformed into the armed forces. Something to think about, yes. Especially for us, if we remember about the Kuril Islands. But we still won’t give them away. At least without a fight - that's for sure!

Nowadays there is a lot of talk about helping the Japanese, almost suggesting that they should be settled in Russia. They really look harmless. These are such positive, cheerful sweethearts who honor their culture and history. They idolize the Japanese army. All over the country there are monuments to heroes of various wars. And here are the deeds of these heroes:

"... Let us remember the tragedy of the Chinese city of Nanjing, which took place in December 1937. The Japanese, having captured the city, began by taking 20 thousand men of military age out of the city and bayoneting them so that in the future they “could not raise arms against Japan “Then the invaders proceeded to exterminate women, old people, and children. The maddened samurai gouged out the eyes and tore out the hearts of people who were still alive. The murders were carried out with particular cruelty. The firearms that were in service with the Japanese soldiers were not used. , people were burned, buried alive, women’s bellies were ripped open and their insides were turned out, small children were killed, and then not only adult women, but also little girls and old women were brutally killed.

Witnesses say that the sexual ecstasy of the conquerors was so great that they raped all the women in a row, regardless of their age, in broad daylight on busy streets. At the same time, fathers were forced to rape their daughters, and sons were forced to rape their mothers. In December 1937, a Japanese newspaper describing the exploits of the army enthusiastically reported on a valiant competition between two officers who bet who would be the first to kill more than a hundred Chinese with their sword. A certain samurai Mukai won, killing 106 people against 105.

In just six weeks, about 300 thousand people were killed and more than 20,000 women were raped. Terror exceeded all imagination. Even the German consul, in an official report, described the behavior of the Japanese soldiers as “brutal.”

Almost the same thing happened in Manila. In Manila, several tens of thousands of civilians were killed: thousands of people were shot with machine guns, and some were burned alive by dousing them with gasoline in order to save ammunition. The Japanese destroyed churches and schools, hospitals and residential buildings. On February 10, 1945, soldiers who broke into the building of the Red Cross hospital committed a massacre there, not sparing doctors, nurses, patients and even children. The same fate befell the Spanish consulate: about 50 people were burned alive in the diplomatic mission building and bayoneted in the garden.

The atrocities, survivors reported, were countless. Women's breasts were cut off with sabers, their genitals were pierced with bayonets, and premature babies were cut out. Men trying to save their belongings from burning houses were burned in the fire - they were driven back into the burning buildings. Few escaped death.

According to the most conservative estimates, the number of civilians killed during the massacre in Manila is more than 111 thousand people.

When the Japanese experienced food shortages in New Guinea, they decided that eating their worst enemy could not be considered cannibalism. It is now difficult to calculate how many Americans and Australians were eaten by the insatiable Japanese cannibals. One veteran from India recalls how the Japanese carefully cut off pieces of meat from people who were still alive. Australian nurses were considered a particularly tasty catch by the conquerors. Therefore, the male staff working with them was ordered to kill nurses in desperate situations so that they would not fall alive into the hands of the Japanese. There was a case when 22 Australian nurses were thrown from a wrecked ship onto the shore of an island captured by the Japanese. The Japanese attacked them like flies to honey. After raping them, they were bayoneted, and at the end of the orgy, they were driven into the sea and shot. Asian prisoners suffered an even sadder fate, since they were valued even less than the Americans.

One can, of course, say that all these horrors are in the past, that they have nothing to do with today’s Japanese - cultured and civilized people. But, alas, experience shows that culture and civilization are by no means a barrier to inhuman cruelty and barbarity. Despite the fact that after the war a number of Japanese soldiers were convicted of the Nanjing massacre, since the 1970s the Japanese side has pursued a policy of denying the crimes committed in Nanjing. Japanese school history textbooks simply write vaguely that “many people were killed” in the city.

War criminals are considered national heroes in modern Japan; monuments are erected to them, and schoolchildren are taken to their burial sites. Their memory is publicly honored by the country's top officials. What can I say - in the Tokyo cemetery there is a monument to the employees of Unit 731 of a secret Japanese military laboratory, where for 12 years the detachment developed bacteriological weapons using bacteria of plague, typhus, dysentery, cholera, anthrax, tuberculosis, etc. and tested them on living people.

More than 5 thousand prisoners of war and civilians became “experimental subjects”. Well, the definition of “experimental subjects” is purely ours, European. The Japanese preferred to use the term "logs". The detachment had special cells where people were locked. Individual organs were cut out from the living body of the experimental subjects; they cut off the arms and legs and sewed them back, swapping the right and left limbs; they poured the blood of horses or monkeys into the human body; exposed to powerful X-ray radiation; left without food or water; scalded various parts of the body with boiling water; tested for sensitivity to electric current. Curious scientists filled a person's lungs with large amounts of smoke or gas, and introduced rotting pieces of tissue into the stomach of a living person.

And these non-humans are worshiped by the Japanese today. They bring flowers to their graves, bring their children to them so that they can learn from these “heroes” the notorious “greatness of the Japanese spirit.” The same one that reporters today admire when transmitting materials from devastated Japan, amazed that the Japanese talk about their dead relatives with a smile, without tears or trembling in their voices.

But they would hardly have been surprised if they had known that before leaving for the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905. some soldiers killed their children if there was a sick wife in the house, and there were no other guardians, because they did not want to condemn the family to starvation. They considered this behavior to be a sign of devotion to the emperor.

According to Tomikura and other authors, such actions were considered praiseworthy, since killing a child and a sick wife was seen as an expression of devotion and sacrifice towards one's country and Emperor Meiji.
And during the Second World War, Japanese newspapers wrote about similar manifestations of “greatness of spirit.” Thus, the wife of a Japanese pilot, who was not accepted into the suicide squad because he had five children, was set as an example to other subjects of the emperor. Seeing her husband's grief, the wife, wanting to help his grief, drowned all five children in the bathing pool, and hanged herself. The obstacles to entering the kamikaze were removed, but at that moment, as luck would have it, Japan capitulated.

Absolute inhumanity, both towards “friends” and “strangers,” was and remains one of the main “virtues” in Japan and is referred to as “a strong, unshakable spirit.”

It should also be noted that the Japanese are by no means ready to be content with technical, economic, scientific and cultural expansion. They dream of revenge, of territorial conquests, of “restoring historical justice.”

So, is it reasonable to invite people with such morals and such traditions to live with us?

Japanese atrocities - 21+

I present to your attention photos taken by Japanese soldiers during World War II. Only thanks to quick and tough measures, the Red Army was able to very painfully tear out the Japanese army on Lake Khasan and the Khalkhin Gol River, where the Japanese decided to test our strength

Only thanks to a serious defeat, they pinned their ears and postponed the invasion of the USSR until the Germans captured Moscow. Only the failure of Operation Typhoon did not allow our dear Japanese friends to organize a second front for the USSR.

Trophies of the Red Army

Everyone has somehow forgotten about the atrocities of the Germans and their lackeys on our territory. Unfortunately.

Typical example:

Using Japanese photos as an example, I want to show what a joy it was to see the Imperial Japanese Army. It was a powerful and well-equipped force. And its composition was perfectly prepared, drilled, fanatically devoted to the idea of ​​domination of their country over all other monkeys. They were yellow-skinned Aryans, as other long-nosed, round-eyed top men from the Third Reich reluctantly admitted. Together they were destined to divide the world into smaller ones for their own benefit.

The photo shows a Japanese officer and soldier. I especially draw your attention to the fact that all officers in the army had swords without fail. The old samurai families have katanas, the new ones, without traditions, have an army sword of the 1935 model. Without a sword, you are not an officer.

In general, the cult of edged weapons among the Japanese was at its best. Just as officers were proud of their swords, so soldiers were proud of their long bayonets and used them wherever possible.

In the photo - practicing bayonet fighting on prisoners:

It was a good tradition, so it was applied everywhere.

(well, by the way, this also happened in Europe - the brave Poles practiced saber cutting and bayonet techniques on captured Red Army soldiers in exactly the same way)

However, shooting was also practiced on prisoners. Training on captured Sikhs from the British Armed Forces:

Of course, the officers also flaunted their ability to use a sword. especially honing the ability to remove human heads with one blow. Supreme chic.

In the photo - training in Chinese:

Of course, the Untermenschi had to know their place. In the photo, the Chinese greet their new masters as expected:

If they show disrespect, in Japan a samurai could blow the head off any commoner who, as it seemed to the samurai, greeted him disrespectfully. In China it was even worse.

However, low-ranking soldiers also did not lag behind the samurai. In the photo, soldiers admire the agony of a Chinese peasant who was gored by their bayonets:

Of course, they chopped off heads both for training and just for fun:

And for selfies:

Because it is beautiful and courageous:

The Japanese army especially developed after the storming of the Chinese capital - the city of Nanjing. Here the soul unfolded like a button accordion. well, in the Japanese sense it’s probably better to say like a fan of sakura flowers. In the three months after the assault, the Japanese massacred, shot, burned, and various other things, more than 300,000 people. Well, not a person, in their opinion, but a Chinese one.

Indiscriminately - women, children or men.

Well, it’s true, it was customary to cut out the men first, just in case, so as not to interfere.

And women - after. With violence and entertainment.

And children, of course

The officers even started a competition to see who could cut off the most heads in a day. Just like Gimli and Legolas - who kills the most orcs. Tokyo Nichi Nichi Shimbun, later renamed Mainichi Shimbun. On December 13, 1937, a photo of Lieutenants Mukai and Noda appeared on the front page of the newspaper under the headline “The competition to be the first to cut off the heads of 100 Chinese with a saber is over: Mukai has already scored 106 points, and Noda has 105.” One point in the “bounty race” meant one victim. But we can say that these Chinese are lucky.

As mentioned in the diary of an eyewitness to those events, the leader of the local Nazi party, John Rabe, “the Japanese military chased the Chinese throughout the city and stabbed them with bayonets or sabers.” However, according to Hajime Kondo, a veteran of the Japanese Imperial Army who participated in the events in Nanjing, the majority of the Japanese “believed that it was too noble for a Chinese to die from a saber, and therefore more often stoned them to death.”

Japanese soldiers began to practice their popular “three to three” policy: “burn the clear,” “kill the clear,” “rob the clear.”

Another selfie. The warriors tried to document their bravery. Well, due to prohibitions, I can’t post photos of more sophisticated amusements, such as stuffing cola into a raped Chinese woman. Because it's softer. The Japanese man shows what kind of girlfriend he has.

More selfies

One of the brave athletes with booty^

And these are just the results of some outsider^

Then the Chinese could not bury all the corpses for a long time.

It took a long time. There are a lot of dead, but there is no one to bury them. Everyone has heard about Tamerlane with the pyramids of skulls. Well, the Japanese are not far behind.

Whites got it too. The Japanese did not bother with prisoners.

These were lucky - they survived:

But this Australian doesn't:

So if the brave Japanese crossed our border, one could imagine that they would be worthy comrades of the Germans. The photo shows the result of the work of the German Einsatzkommando.

Because - just look at the photo

Marching from Shanghai

In August 1937, the Japanese entered Shanghai and were opposed by a larger Chinese army. However, having suffered heavy losses (approximately 70 thousand people out of 300 thousand), the Japanese were still able to take the city. Poorly equipped elite units of the Chinese army lost 60% of their personnel in the urban meat grinder. In one battle, 25 thousand junior officers trained between 1929 and 1937 were lost. The Central Army was never able to recover from such losses. The rest of the Chinese army was poorly trained, illiterate peasants of yesterday.

Japanese losses were also high, so the decision was made not to expand military operations. However, on December 1, it was decided to take the capital of the Republic of China, Nanjing. The fierce Japanese advanced on the city, led by General Iwane Matsui, who commanded the front. The Chinese, however, understood that the fall of Nanjing was inevitable, so the best units were withdrawn from there in advance, and the government was evacuated. Meanwhile, it was officially reported that the city would heroically defend itself. There were 100 thousand untrained soldiers left in the capital, some of whom had seen the cruelty of the Japanese in Shanghai. To stop the population from fleeing the city, soldiers were ordered to guard the port. The army blocked roads, destroyed boats and burned surrounding villages, preventing a large-scale evacuation.

"Competition to kill 100 people with a sword." (wikimedia.org)

The Japanese moved decisively. According to a Japanese journalist assigned to the imperial army at this time, “the reason that the advance towards Nanjing is quite rapid is the tacit understanding among the soldiers and officers that along the way they can rob and rape as and whomever they want.” Perhaps the most famous of the atrocities was a killing contest between two Japanese officers, which appeared in Tokyo's Tokyo Nichi Nichi Shimbun and the English-language Japan Advertiser. The competition consisted of two officers trying to kill a hundred people as quickly as possible, using only swords, and competing with each other to achieve the result on speed. It was covered by the Japanese press as a sporting event with daily reports on points scored.

Assault on Nanjing

Fifteen Europeans who remained in Nanjing during the capture of the city organized a Security Zone, which, by prior agreement, was not attacked by the Japanese military - there were no Chinese soldiers in this zone. The head of the committee that managed the Security Zone was the German businessman Jon Rabe, chosen, among other things, because he was a member of the NSDAP, and the Anti-Comintern Pact was concluded and was in force between Germany and Japan. Foreigners tried their best to save the lives of local Chinese. However, 15 people (there were 22 foreigners in total at the beginning of the massacre) can do little when the number of victims runs into the thousands. Nevertheless, they managed to save about 200 thousand Chinese.

A Japanese soldier with the Chinese he killed. (wikimedia.org)

During the assault, the Chinese found themselves in the thick of it: the Japanese launched artillery fire and aerial bombardment, during which the meager remnants of the Chinese army, called upon to defend the city, fled. At noon on December 9, the Japanese military scattered leaflets over the city, demanding its surrender within 24 hours and threatening destruction if it refused. The Japanese expected a response to their ultimatum, but none came. General Iwane Matsui waited another hour after the deadline expired and then ordered the city to be stormed. The Japanese army attacked from several directions simultaneously. The Japanese, led by Prince Asaka, began clearing the city.

Atrocities

As already mentioned, the number of victims varies among sources. Japanese historians, depending on the time period and geographical limitations they accept in each case, give a wide range of estimates of the number of civilian deaths - from several thousand to 200,000 people. A 42-part Taiwanese documentary published between 1995 and 1997 entitled An Inch of Blood For An Inch of Land estimates that 340,000 Chinese died in Nanjing as a result of the Japanese invasion: 150 000 from bombing and artillery shelling during the five days of the battle itself and 190,000 during the massacres. These studies are based on materials from the Tokyo Trial.

A Japanese soldier killed a baby. (wikimedia.org)

Jon Rabe's diary, which he kept during the battle for the city and its occupation by the Japanese army, describes numerous cases of Japanese cruelty. Entry dated December 17:

“Two Japanese soldiers climbed over the wall and were about to break into my house. When I showed up, they said that they allegedly saw two Chinese soldiers climbing over the wall. When I showed them the party badge, they disappeared in the same way. In one of the houses on a narrow street outside the wall of my garden, a woman was raped and then wounded in the neck with a bayonet. I managed to call an ambulance and we sent her to the hospital... They say that last night, about 1,000 women and girls were raped, about a hundred girls in Jinling College alone... You hear nothing but rape. If husbands or brothers intervene, they are shot. All you see and hear is the cruelty and atrocities of the Japanese soldiers.”

Victims of the massacre. (wikimedia.org)

Case #5 from the missionary's film: On December 13, 1937, about 30 Japanese soldiers killed 9 out of 11 Chinese in house number 5 in Xinlongkou. A woman and her two teenage daughters were raped, with the Japanese stuffing a bottle and a cane into her vagina. The eight-year-old girl suffered a stab wound, but she and her sister survived. Two weeks after the murders, they were discovered by an elderly woman (seen in the photo). The bodies of the dead are also visible in the photograph.

The number of raped people, according to historians, averages 20 thousand, excluding children and old women. Girls were simply dragged out of their homes and gang-raped. After this, they were most often abused in the most sophisticated ways: many died from having their genitals torn apart with bayonets, bottles or bamboo sticks. The book “Nanjing Massacre” by Chinese-American writer Iris Chan describes cases in which the Japanese forced entire families to commit incest, forced celibate monks to rape women under threat of death, and in a group they themselves raped a girl who was preparing for childbirth.

On February 10, 1938, German Embassy Secretary Rosen wrote to the Foreign Office about the film made by Reverend John Magie, recommending its purchase. Excerpts from his letter, kept in the Political Archives in Berlin:

“On December 13, about 30 Japanese soldiers came to a Chinese household at Xingliugu #5 in the southeastern part of Nanjing and demanded to be let in. The door was opened by the landlord, a Mohammedan named Ha. They shot him with a revolver, and then Mrs. Ha, who, after killing Ha, begged them on her knees not to kill anyone else. Mrs. Ha asked them why they killed her husband and was also killed. Ms. Xia was pulled from under a table in the guest room, where she had tried to hide with her one-year-old child. She was stripped and raped by one or more men and then bayoneted in the chest and had a bottle shoved into her vagina. The child was killed with a bayonet. Some soldiers then moved to the next room, where Ms. Xia's parents, ages 76 and 74, and her two daughters, ages 16 and 14, were present. They were about to rape the girls when the grandmother tried to protect them. The soldiers shot her with a revolver. Grandfather grabbed her body and was killed. The girls were raped, the eldest by 2-3, and the youngest by 3 men. The older girl was then stabbed to death and a cane was shoved into her vagina. The youngest was also stabbed to death, but escaped the terrible fate of her sister and mother. Then the soldiers bayoneted another sister, aged 7-8, who was also in the room. The last to be killed in the house were two children Ha, 4 and 2 years old. The older one was stabbed to death, and the younger one’s head was cut off with a sword.”

Pregnant women were specifically targeted and their bellies were pierced with bayonets, often after rape. Tang Junshan, a survivor of the massacre, said:

“The seventh and last one in the front row was a pregnant woman. The soldier decided that he could rape her before killing her and, separating her from the group, dragged her about ten meters to the side. When he tried to commit rape, the woman resisted desperately... The soldier sharply hit her in the stomach with a bayonet. She let out a final moan as her intestines spilled out. Then the soldier stabbed the fetus, its umbilical cord was clearly visible, and threw it aside.”

During the “campaign,” the Japanese followed a scorched earth tactic. On August 6, 1937, Emperor Hirohito personally approved the army's proposal to remove obstacles limiting freedom of action regarding Chinese prisoners of war within the framework of international law. The directive also recommended that staff officers cease using the term "prisoners of war" itself.

Immediately after the fall of Nanjing, the Japanese began a manhunt for Chinese soldiers, during which thousands of young people were detained. Many of them were driven into the Yangtze River, where they were shot with machine guns. On December 18, perhaps the largest massacre of prisoners of war took place on the banks of the Yangtze, which became known as the Straw String Gorge Massacre. Japanese soldiers spent most of the morning tying the prisoners' hands together; at dusk they divided the Chinese into four columns and opened fire on them. Unable to escape, the prisoners screamed and fought in despair. It took about an hour for the sounds of the killing to subside, and then the Japanese continued to finish off the survivors with bayonets. Most were thrown into the river. It is believed that 57,500 Chinese died in this massacre.

Torture of the Chinese. (wikimedia.org)

The Japanese herded 1,300 Chinese - soldiers and civilians - to the Taiping Gate and killed them there. The victims were first blown up with mines, and then doused with fuel and burned. Those who survived after this were bayoneted. American journalist Tillman Durdin, who worked for The New York Times, traveled through Nanjing before leaving the city. He heard constant machine gun fire and witnessed the Japanese gunning down 200 Chinese within ten minutes. Two days later, in his report for The New York Times, the journalist reported that the streets were littered with corpses, including women and children.

Japanese soldiers practice bayonet fighting against the Chinese. (wikimedia.org)

In terms of property destruction, a third of the city was destroyed by fires caused by arson. It was reported that Japanese troops threw torches at both new government buildings and residential buildings. The areas outside the city walls were also seriously damaged. The soldiers robbed both rich and poor. The lack of resistance from the Chinese meant that they could take whatever they wanted, which resulted in widespread looting and pillaging.

End of the massacre

On December 13, the massacre began; a few days later, on December 18, 1937, Imperial General Iwane Matsui began to understand the scale of rape, murder and looting in the city. He became increasingly alarmed by what was happening. The general was reported to have told one of his civilian aides: “I now realize that we have, unwittingly, brought about the saddest effect. When I think about the feelings of many of my Chinese friends who left Nanjing and the future of the two countries, I can only feel depressed. I’m very lonely and I can’t even rejoice at this victory.”

The few Europeans remaining in Nanjing tried to save the Chinese population. An international committee was created, headed by Jon Rabe. The committee organized the Nanjing Security Zone, in which about 200 thousand people took refuge.

Bodies of Chinese killed in Nanjing. (wikimedia.org)

At the end of January 1938, the Japanese army forced all refugees from the Nanjing Security Zone to return to their homes, immediately declaring that “order had been restored.” After the start of the weixin zhengfu (collaborationist government) in 1938, order did return to Nanjing, and Japanese atrocities were seriously reduced.

Japanese soldiers bury Chinese prisoners of war alive. (wikimedia.org)

On November 12, 1948, Iwane Matsui and Japanese Foreign Minister Koki Hirota, along with five other "Class A" war criminals, were sentenced to death by hanging. Eighteen other defendants received lesser sentences. General Hisao Tani was sentenced to death by the Nanjing War Crimes Tribunal. Prince Asaka escaped punishment because he was guaranteed immunity under the terms of the surrender.

There is no clear explanation of what made the Japanese like animals. Historian Jonathan Spence writes: “Japanese soldiers, expecting an easy victory, instead fought for months and suffered far more serious losses than expected. They were tired, angry, frustrated and tired. There was no one to protect Chinese women; men were either absent or powerless. The war, still undeclared, had no clear and measurable goals. Perhaps they considered all Chinese, regardless of gender or age, to be suitable victims."