WHY WERE THE JAPANESE SO CRUEL IN WORLD WAR II? WAR THAT THE WORLD WILL NOT FORGET

Before and during World War II, Japanese forces murdered millions of civilians and prisoners of war. Why?

On Feb. 16, 1942, Japanese troops herded 23 Australian women into the surf from a beach on Bangka Island in the Dutch East Indies (present-day Indonesia). All but one of the women were army nurses, captured after Japanese bombers sank the ship on which they were attempting escape from Singapore. 

The nurses wore uniforms clearly emblazoned with the Red Cross. When the captives reached waist-deep water, machine-gun fire echoed across the beach ad jungle-covered hills. Screams and splashing accompanied the bursts of gunfire. Then, as abruptly, the firing stopped, and the beach fell silent. Miraculously, one of the nurses was still alive. Wounded in the torso, 26-year-old Vivian Bullwinkel floated in the sea, her head tilted to one side to gulp air as the surf pushed her gently toward the beach.

Minutes earlier the Japanese soldiers had murdered dozens of wounded Allied troops—the very patients Bullwinkel and her fellow nurses had been tending before their ship was blown from under them. Marching the wounded from the beach out of sight around a headland, the Japanese strode from patient to patient, another survivor later recalled, shooting some and driving their long bayonets deep into others. Returning to the beach, the murderers wiped their bayonets clean of blood before turning their attention to the nurses.

Wherever Japanese soldiers deployed during the 1930s and 1940s, they perpetrated barbaric—and well-documented—crimes against humanity. Examples are legion: widespread massacres of Chinese civilians in places like Nanking; the gang rape and murder of captured British and Chinese nurses following the fall of Hong Kong; the murder of Dutch and Indonesian civilians and wounded Allied prisoners throughout the Dutch East Indies; the machine-gunning of Allied sailors who survived the sinking of their ships; the beheadings of downed Allied airmen; and the thousands of British, Australian, Dutch and American prisoners who perished during forced labor in steaming Southeast Asian jungles or in mines in Japan and Korea. A telling statistic: While just 4 percent of Allied prisoners in German hands perished during the war, 27 percent of those captured by the Japanese died. On an even larger scale, the total number of civilians and prisoners murdered by the Japanese from the 1937 invasion of China through the end of World War II has been estimated to be as high as 20 million.

Such grim statistics beg questions: Why was the Japanese military so deliberately brutal toward defeated enemies and the civilian populations of conquered lands? What were the causes of such behavior? Can we ever understand why they committed crimes that go so far beyond generally accepted military conduct?

Japan’s wartime barbarism had its roots in the nation’s feudal history. From the early 17th century until the 1868 Meiji Restoration, a hereditary military dictatorship known as the Tokugawa shogunate ruled Japan, isolating it from the rest of the world. For more than two centuries the samurai—a class of military nobility whose bushido (“way of the warrior”) code demanded rigid loyalty to their liege lord and suicidal bravery in battle—governed society, demanding and receiving their subjects’ unquestioning obedience.

After the opening of Japan to Western commerce in the 1850s, the threat of subjugation by the technologically advanced Western powers exposed Japan’s inherent military and economic backwardness. Progressive samurai moved to restore imperial rule and, at the same time, modernize Japan’s industry and military. With the restoration of Emperor Meiji as a constitutional monarch, the military loyalty of most samurai shifted from the shogun to the emperor, making him a focus of national veneration. Japan’s victory in the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–95) and stunning defeat of Tsarist Russia (1904–05) marked Japan’s emergence as a significant military power and confirmed in Japanese minds the nation’s right to build an overseas empire in Asia.

Japan initially maintained friendly relations with the West—particularly with Britain, which had done much through treaties to help Japan create a world-class navy. But after World War I Japanese thinkers, seeing racism in the attitudes of the Western powers, disparaged the League of Nations, which existed, in the words of leading nationalist scholar Shumei Okawa, “[to] preserve the status quo and further the domination of the world by the Anglo-Saxons.” Okawa argued that “Japan would strive to fulfill her predestined role of champion of Asia.”

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