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A set of photos in TIME related to that
http://world.time.com/2012/12/13/the-na ... years-ago/

What caught my eye was:

Chinese prisoners are used as live targets in a bayonet drill by their Japanese captors during their occupation of Nanjing.

Who of the other armies involved did something like this? I don't know.

Stas Bush wrote:Who of the other armies involved did something like this? I don't know.

I think the Imperial Japanese Army will be unique in what its official policies were. Such behavior may have occured in other nations' armies, but they weren't celebrated the way the Japanese celebrated their brutality at the time. And for all the (admittedly valid) complaints about Americans getting a slap on the wrist for war crimes, at least their own government was willing to bring them to court martial.

Then there's the Japanese policy towards rape, which remains a problem, as Todeswind can tell you. What other nation reacted to "our soldiers were seen raping women," with "force women to serve in military brothels, so they can be raped without making a scene"?

Also, the Japanese went out of their way to be as sadistic as possible. Collaborated stories like people being buried alive, being "vivisected" aka dismembered alive etc...It is possible only the SS comes close and matches these atrocities but not in an event of such magnitude iirc.

I have difficulty believing that they were taught to be sadistic and murderous. It's easier to believe they were natural-born killers. But then, look at Japan now. Things change. What scares me is the idea that I could be like these men, if I was born in their place and time.

hongi wrote:I have difficulty believing that they were taught to be sadistic and murderous.

You may want to take a look at the IJA's training regimen, which was really to a large extent an exercise in sadism and retarded extremism.

Commonly ignored or unknown, but Japan actually executed a bunch of people over Nanjing. They did it though because of the complete collapse of discipline to the point that apparently at least a few instances existed of enlisted men killing officers who tried to stop them from going berzerk. Some charges did include rape and murder, but the basic point was, the army had completely disintegrated for the better part of a week and actually failed to carry out important orders to pursue the retreating nationalists. They didn't really give a damn about killing the Chinese, they cared about how much time was wasted doing it. The fight to reach Nanjing was also pretty intensive, more so I think then it is usually given credit for. Both sides suffered very heavily in the Shanghai street fighting, large areas of the city were flattened in house to house infantry battles in which neither side had enough air or artillery support, and Japanese losses approached the 100,000 mark - almost one third of the force committed. Those kind of losses cannot help but have an effect on troops. All the more so ones who were in many cases hastily mobilized reservists right from the Japanese mainland. Compound this with the fact that a good number of IJA officers did want a rampage, because they wanted to smash the center of the Chinese state and generally punish the Chinese for daring to oppose them in the north, when Japan hadn't actually planned such a big war, and well, the result is shear horror.

Stuff like bayoneting live people tied to trees happened all over south Asia in 1942. It wasn't taught directly, but the Japanese system, starting from grade school and throughout military training was based on teaching people that they were superior, while treating them like complete brutalized shit. The level of dehumanization was intensive to say the least, and on top of it the IJA had a high ratio of enlisted men to officers, so control of the men was bound to be loose in the first place. This is very bad in a system already so focused on physical punishment. End result, they took it out on everyone they met and had already been drilled to think of as inferior. Chinese didn't exactly play nice with Japanese prisoners either, far from it.

As Sea Skimmer pointed out, everybody seems to forget that the Shanghai campaign was a very exhaustive campaign for the Japanese, with Chiang committing his german trained divisions, the elite of his army into the fray.


Such a campaign had it effects on law and order amongst the Japanese soldiers. We can point to the Malayan campaign to illustrate the "lighter" side of Japanese occupation. A systematic execution of sympathizers(read terrorist) for the KMT and CCP.

PainRack wrote:As Sea Skimmer pointed out, everybody seems to forget that the Shanghai campaign was a very exhaustive campaign for the Japanese, with Chiang committing his german trained divisions, the elite of his army into the fray.

What is your point?

That Nanjing was an outlier. However, it does not seem to be the case as Chinese POWs were simply exterminated even until war's very end.

The SCOPE of the Nanjing massacre was an outlier. Not frowned upon by the Japanese, but the sheer.... randomness, brutality and scale of the massacre was thankfully singular.