Hidden Horrors: Japanese War Crimes in World War II
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This landmark book documents little-known wartime Japanese atrocities during World War II. Yuki Tanaka’s case studies, still remarkably original and significant, include cannibalism; the slaughter and starvation of prisoners of war; the rape, enforced prostitution, and murder of noncombatants; and biological warfare experiments. The author describes how desperate Japanese soldiers consumed the flesh of their own comrades killed in fighting as well as that of Australians, Pakistanis, and Indians. He traces the fate of sixty-five shipwrecked Australian nurses and British soldiers who were shot or stabbed to death by their captors. Another thirty-two nurses were captured and sent to Sumatra to become “comfort women”—sex slaves for Japanese soldiers. Tanaka recounts how thousands of Australian and British POWs were massacred in the infamous Sandakan camp in the Borneo jungle in 1945, while those who survived were forced to endure a tortuous 160-mile march on which anyone who dropped out of line was immediately shot. This new edition also includes a powerful chapter on the island of Nauru, where thirty-nine leprosy patients were killed and thousands of Naurans were ill-treated and forced to leave their homes. Without denying individual and national responsibility, the author explores individual atrocities in their broader social, psychological, and institutional milieu and places Japanese behavior during the war in the broader context of the dehumanization of men at war. In his substantially revised conclusion, Tanaka brings in significant new interpretations to explain why Japanese imperial forces were so brutal, tracing the historical processes that created such a unique military structure and ideology. Finally, he investigates why a strong awareness of their collective responsibility for wartime atrocities has been and still is lacking among the Japanese.
List of Illustrations
Foreword by John W. Dower
Preface to the Second Edition: Crime and Responsibility: War, the
State, and Japanese Society
Acknowledgments
Author’s Note
Introduction: The War Crimes Tribunals and POWs
Chapter 1: The Sandakan POW Camp and the Geneva Convention
Chapter 2: The Sandakan Death Marches and the Elimination of
POWs
Chapter 3: Rape and War: The Japanese Experience
Chapter 4: Judge Webb and Japanese Cannibalism
Chapter 5: Japanese Biological Warfare Plans and Experiments on
POWs
Chapter 6: Japanese Atrocities on Nauru during the Pacific War: The
Murder of Australians, the Massacre of Lepers, and the Ethnocide of
Nauruans
Chapter 7: Massacre of Civilians at Kavieng
Conclusion: Japanese Atrocities in the Asia-Pacific War
Notes
Index
Tanaka offers a stunning review of Japanese atrocities, mostly against Chinese and Australian POWs, with some accounts of atrocities against Americans in Japan and the Philippines. More prominent are the needless murders of POWs and civilians in Sandakan and Kavieng and aboard the Japanese destroyer Akikaze. Throughout the book, Tanaka uses reliable reports and testimonies from the Australian War Crimes Commission as his sources, but there is a wide variety of secondary Japanese, British, and US sources. The essential focus is the present Japanese notion of victimhood and ignorance of the aggression and cruelty done in the name of the emperor…. Tanaka does an outstanding job presenting the development of emperor ideology that changed traditional Bushidō from the ‘way of the warrior’ to the dangerous cult of emperor worship. This very challenging book is expertly written and very welcome in POW studies.
Summing Up: Essential. All levels/libraries.
How can we understand the inhumanity of war? Yuki Tanaka's book remains the most searingly honest attempt to make sense of the cruelty of the Japanese military forces during the Asia-Pacific War. Drawing attention to the relationship between atrocity and the everyday lives of ordinary people, it is a warning to us all.
Yuki Tanaka writes with compelling authenticity and refreshing candor on Japanese atrocities during World War II. His eagerly anticipated second edition of Hidden Horrors provides a seminal and authoritative analysis. This scholarly contribution is welcome and constitutes compulsory reading for any who take the subject matter seriously.
For years, Yuki Tanaka's book has been essential, harrowing reading on the effects of Japanese imperialism on Asia in the mid-twentieth century. This revised edition draws on new thinking and research to make its powerful case with even more clarity.
Praise for the first edition:
In a shocking brief . . . Japanese historian Tanaka challenges the idea of Japan as a victim in WWII. The core of his thesis is that in the aftermath of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905, an ‘Emperor ideology’ based on the ‘family state’ came to dominate Japan. Responsibility was seen as unlimited, while rights existed only in a collective context; this set the stage for various tragedies and atrocities.
Praise for the first edition:
A scholar's harrowing . . . briefing on largely unpunished and long-ignored atrocities committed by Japan's military during WW II. Drawing on hitherto untapped archives, Tanaka documents a series of appalling war crimes that, with few exceptions, have escaped notice in standard histories of the global conflict. . . . After reviewing the frightful particulars of his case studies, moreover, the author offers anecdotal evidence of similar behavior by other belligerents, eventually concluding, however, that Japanese barbarity was sui generis. . . . Shocking annals that bear gruesome witness to the darker realities of what historian John W. Dower (who contributed a thoughtful foreword to the American edition) called a war without mercy.
Product Details
- Title : Hidden Horrors: Japanese War Crimes in World War II
- Authors:
- Tanaka, Yuki
- Dower, John W.
- Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
- Publication Date: 2017
- ISBN: 9781538102701
Yuki Tanaka was research professor at the Hiroshima Peace Institute of Hiroshima City University until his retirement in 2015. He is the author of Japan’s Comfort Women and the co-editor of Bombing Civilians.