Horror in the East: Japan and the Atrocities of World War II (7 page)

The younger Chinese moved forward when he was ordered to and lay on the operating table.
The older man resisted and Dr Yuasa went over and helped push him towards a second operating table in the room.
‘I had never beaten anyone before, but because of my military indoctrination I was able to push him.
I still remember, I held my feet strongly on the ground and pushed and then the farmer gave up and went forward.
We had to demonstrate our greatness in front of the Korean soldiers [considered ‘inferior’ members of the Imperial Army] who were there.
Then I was very proud.’
Once on the operating table the farmer was forcibly injected with anaesthetic and then the ‘operation’ began.
‘One of the doctors punched the farmer’s thigh — that meant the anaesthetic was working.
The first operation was removing an appendix because there were many appendix cases amongst Japanese soldiers — we didn’t have any antibiotics and there were quite a few cases of soldiers dying as a result of that operation.
The medical officer doing this operation was not very experienced and a healthy appendix is quite slippery, so I think he had to make the incision three times.
After that his intestine was removed, then his arms were amputated and then the doctor practised injecting him in his heart.’
Right to the end of this gruesome procedure the farmer kept breathing until ‘eventually another officer and myself tried to hold his neck’ whilst he was injected with the drugs that finally killed him.
After the middle-aged farmer died, the younger Chinese was assaulted in a similar way.
Altogether, during his time in China, Dr Yuasa participated in around six of these human vivisection experiments at his hospital on a total often healthy Chinese men.
None of the victims survived.

Dr Yuasa and his colleagues always used general anaesthetic on their Chinese victims, but elsewhere the Japanese conducted human experiments without anaesthetic of any kind.
Once, at another Japanese military hospital in China, Dr Yuasa attended a lecture and suddenly heard the head of the medical division announce, ‘I will show you something good’.
He took them to the nearby prison, and there, in front of the assembled doctors, two Chinese men were shot in the abdomen so that the Japanese could ‘practise removing the bullet’ in field conditions, without anaesthetic.
‘I think they died of great pain during that operation,’ says Dr Yuasa.
‘I still remember their sort of cry, but I didn’t pay much attention because we actually treated them as materials — we called them
maruta
[’timber’ or ‘logs’].’

Doctors like Ken Yuasa murdered Chinese during conventional operations.
At his research camp in Manchuria General Ishii (and later Kitano Masaji) of Unit 731 killed the local population in more advanced experiments.
As Sheldon Harris, who has conducted ground-breaking work into the activities of Unit 731, recorded:

’They researched human reactions to plague, typhoid, paratyphoid A and B, typhus, smallpox, tularemia, infectious jaundice, gas gangrene, tetanus, cholera, dysentery, glanders, scarlet fever, undulant fever, tick encephalitis, ‘songo’ or epidemic hemorrhagic fever, whooping cough, diphtheria, pneumonia, berysipelas, epidemic cerebrospinal meningitis, venereal diseases, tuberculosis, salmonella, frostbite, and countless other diseases that were endemic to the communities and surrounding regions that fell within the responsibility of a Unit 731 branch Water Purification Unit.
No one has been able to catalogue completely all the maladies that the various death factories in Manchuria visited on human guinea pigs.’
¹⁵

Horrific stories like this emphasize how impossible it is to overestimate the atmosphere of cruelty in which the Japanese conducted their war in China.
The context of this war would, in turn, contribute to the brutal storm that broke upon Allied servicemen once the Pacific War began.
Indeed, probably the greatest single Western misconception about the war against the Japanese is that it began, for all parties, in December 1941 with the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
For the Japanese, the war against the Western Allies was but a part of their overall struggle for supremacy in Asia, a conflict that had begun in Manchuria.
For the Imperial Army, the war in Asia lasted from 1931 to 1945 — it was not merely the four-year struggle against the Western nations that began in 1941.

Thus it is a grave mistake to try to understand why the Japanese behaved as they did in the Pacific War without understanding the conditioning that soldiers of the Imperial Army received during the war in China that both preceded it and then carried on alongside it.
At the turn of the twenty-first century, particularly since the publication of Joanna Bourke’s intriguing work
An Intimate History of Killing
, it has become fashionable to emphasize how much men can
enjoy
killing — and there is clearly much insight to be gained by shining a light on to this darker side of the male psyche.
But the revelation that throughout history men have taken pleasure in combat does not ultimately help us to understand how a nation that behaved so well to its prisoners in the First World War was, less than twenty years later, using its captives for bayonet practice and human experiments.
One answer to this paradox lies in knowledge of how the German army behaved during the Second World War.
After the war in the Soviet Union began in June 1941, there were some units that served first in the West, then in the East and then back in the West again.
Interviews with veterans who went back and forth like this demonstrate that it was possible for the same soldier to behave ‘chivalrously’ in the West and then bestially in the East.
The identical unit could happily treat prisoners with respect in the West, yet shoot their captives without remorse in the East.
And the reason they could behave in such a schizophrenic way was their contrasting beliefs about their enemies.
In western Europe they faced nations who they believed were ‘civilized’, whilst in the East they confronted a ‘Judeo — Bolshevik’ mass of ‘subhumans’.

All of which leads to the inescapable conclusion that the overwhelming reason that the Japanese treated the Chinese so badly was that they believed them to be utterly inferior — mere ‘beasts’.
And whilst the Japanese rapidly discovered that defeating these ‘beasts’ was going be tougher than they had thought (Hitler also underestimated the Red Army, to his cost), which led to frustration, which led to still greater brutality, it remains the case that the pre-condition without which these appalling crimes could not have been committed was the Japanese loathing of the Chinese which preceded the war.

During the 1930s, while the Japanese conducted their barbarous campaign in Asia, both the Western democracies and the emerging Western fascist states debated how best to deal with this growing Asian super-power.
How they chose to react to the Japanese aggression was to be a crucial reason why the Pacific War occurred when it did.
It is a story of racism, military incompetence and overweening self-confidence — and is the subject of
Chapter 2
.

DEALING WITH THE WEST

          
B
y taking control of Manchuria in 1931 the Japanese solved one pressing problem — the need for ‘living space’; but they created another — the antagonism of the Western democracies.
The call of the hard-line militarists for Japan to throw off all contact with the West may have been seductive, but it was impractical.
Japan had few natural resources of its own and relied largely on oil imports from the United States to fuel not just the Imperial Army but the whole commercial operation of the country.
Japan simply did not possess the raw materials necessary to endure total isolation in the modern machine age.
Yet from the moment that the Imperial Army took Manchuria it was politically inconceivable that the Japanese would give up their new-found Garden of Eden.
But without compromise over Manchuria, the anger of the West could not be calmed.
Resolving these contradictory positions without eventual armed conflict was, from the first, a delicate and problematic task given the suspicion and distrust that existed on all sides.

The prevailing view of many in the Japanese elite was expressed by Prince Fumimaro Konoe, who was to be prime minister three times before the end of the war.
For years Konoe had been calling on Japan to reject what he took to be the hypocritical values of the Western democracies.
In an essay written in 1933, he condemned Western nations who

’brandish the Covenant of the League of Nations and, holding high the No-War treaty as their shield, censure us!
Some of them even go as far as to call us public enemies of peace or humanity!
Yet it is they, not we, who block world peace.
They are not qualified to judge us....As a result of our one million annual population increase, our national economic life is extremely burdened.
We cannot wait for a rationalising adjustment of the world system.
Therefore we have chosen to advance into Manchuria and Mongolia as our only means of survival.’
¹

It was Neville Chamberlain who, during 1933 and 1934 (years before he became infamous as the appeaser of Hitler), first mooted one possible solution — the recognition of the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo in exchange for ‘a permanent friendship with Japan.’
²
There was no consensus in the British cabinet for such a dramatic diplomatic step, and the plan was dropped.
This strangled initiative is significant for two reasons: it shows that Chamberlain personally was prepared to appease not just the Nazis but the Japanese, and it demonstrated the willingness of British politicians to discuss possible solutions to the problem of Japanese expansion outside the unified approach of the League of Nations.

There were officials in the State Department in Washington who favoured a similar rapprochement with Japan over Manchuria, but they were outnumbered by those who either thought that such a policy would only encourage greater Japanese aggression in Asia or (and this group included the new President, Franklin Roosevelt) did not wish to be overly ‘distracted’ by events in China from the urgent task of rebuilding the economy and dragging the United States from the Depression.
This unwillingness to engage with the problems caused by Japan’s isolation from the League of Nations is symbolized by US behaviour at the naval disarmament conference which opened in London in 193S — no agreement of any sort was reached with Japan and it was assumed that the early raft of naval treaties, outlining the extent to which each country’s navy could grow relative to the other, had simply lapsed.

In 1936 the attitude of the Japanese government and military hardened in the wake of the rebellion of February of that year.
In August two documents,
The Fundamentals of National Volicy
and
Foreign Volicy
Guidelines
³
for the first time named the United States and Britain as possible enemies, along with the Soviet Union and China.
The basic assumption of both these documents, discussed and approved by the Japanese cabinet, was that Japan must maintain its position on the Asian mainland, defend itself from any possible threat from the Soviet Union to the north, and, at some uncertain point in the future, try to obtain more territory in the Pacific.
At first sight this list of priorities represents confidence verging on hubris within the Japanese ruling class.
How could one small nation hope to defy both of its giant neighbours, China and the Soviet Union, whilst also stating as a foreign policy goal further expansion to the east and south?
The truth is that these foreign policy documents were an attempt to paper over differences that were still not resolved within the Japanese military.
One faction thought that the greatest threat to Japan was posed by the Soviet Union; another, predominantly the Imperial Navy, believed that the lapsing of the naval treaties (which had restricted the expansion of the fleet) meant that the priority should be to solve Japan’s problems by moving out into the Pacific.

Although these fundamental questions about Japan’s potential enemies remained unresolved, there was consensus within the Japanese government and military as to which country was their greatest potential friend — Nazi Germany.
Both countries had in the early 1930s turned their back on democracy; both felt cheated by those older Western nations that had seized colonies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and now, hypocritically as they saw it, denied newer nations the chance to do the same; both countries were rearming at a frantic pace; both countries felt threatened by the Soviet Union and by the creed of communism, and crucially, whilst both dreamt of expansion their territorial ambitions did not clash.
It was natural, then, that Japan joined an ‘anti-Comintern Pact’ (an alliance against the spread of communism) with Germany in November 1936, thus demonstrating to the world that her strongest friends in the West were the new fascist nations of Germany and Italy.

By June 1937, with the fall of prime minister Hayashi and the appointment of Prince Fumimaro Konoe in his place, the fissure that divided Japan from the Western democracies grew all but unbridgeable.
Liberated, as he saw it, from the shackles of the League of Nations, and having already flouted with relative impunity the non-aggression treaties signed by his more liberal countrymen, Konoe had openly been calling for Japan to ape the aggressive expansionist policies of sympathetic states in Europe.
‘Italian officials preach with great boldness and frankness why Italy must expand,’ said Konoe in a speech in November 193S.
‘German politicians openly proclaim in the Nazi program why Germany requires new territory.
Only Japan lacks this frankness.’
⁴

One month after Konoe’s appointment, war broke out in China in the wake of the Marco Polo bridge incident.
The full force of modern Western technology was unleashed by Japan on the Chinese population.
Towns and cities were indiscriminately bombed, and countless women and children died.
The photographs of the carnage caused by the bombs and shells that fell on Shanghai railway station became iconic representations of the cruelty of the Japanese.
In September 1937, in the wake of the Shanghai bombing, the American government condemned the Japanese action (in a statement that now has a hypocritical ring to it, given that eight years later the Americans were to bomb Japan on a far greater scale): ‘The American government holds the view that any general bombing of an extensive area, wherein there resides a large population engaged in peaceable pursuits, is unwarranted and contrary to principles of law and humanity.’
⁵