Japanese Atrocities

Asian Holocaust

Nanjing Massacre (1937-1938) also known as “the Rape of Nanjing”, caused approximately

300,000 deaths and 80,000 women sexually assaulted in a month invasion (Tongxuan, 2016).

The city of Nanking was destroyed, the Chinese army, and the innocence, including women,

babies and elders were massacred mercilessly by the Japanese military. December 13th, the

first-day Japanese soldiers captured the Nanking city in 1937, was officially set by China

government as the national memorial day. More than just mourning the victims of the

massacre, the exist of the memorial day is also to remind the people about war crimes

committed by the Japanese army and the determination of the Chinese people to safeguard

the human dignity (Siqi & Hui, 2016). The Chinese city government organized a series of

activities for the national memorial day, including setting up memorial walls in the city’s

subway stations for civilians to leave notes. The approaches of the Chinese government had

become one of the main reason why the Chinese still care about the Nanjing Massacre so

much.

Around 7,000 Koreans were killed during the major uprising of 1919 alone (Chen). Korean

forced labour begins in 1939 to 1945 under Japanese rule. The Japanese brought in Korean

forced labour to their country, they were maltreated and many of them dead in Japan (Drea,

Bradsher, Hanyok, Lide, Petersen, & Yang, 2006). Another event caused a large number of

Korean casualties in Japan was the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A large

number of Koreans worked in the industrial factories in both cities at that time, and there

were at least 70,000 Korean victims died in this accident (Hippin, 2005).

Until now, Japan still refuses to admit and apologize for the war crime they committed in

World War II. Deep-rooted suspicious were planted in the Chinese and Korean’s. The

Chinese and Korean always take precautions on Japan’s motion and intention, even to the
Prime Minister annually visit Yasukuni Shrine event, worrying that it will reform its military

government.

Comfort Women

Hundreds of thousands of young women, a majority from Korea, China, and Philippines,

were forced by the Japanese military into sexual slavery in the World War II period. The

comfort women were abducted to act as Japanese military prostitution and provide comfort to

those Japanese soldiers. Many women believed that they get a job offer from the

advertisement posted by the Japanese army, not knowing that they were being pressed into

sexual slavery. Young women were trafficked from their own country to everywhere by the

Japanese military, or sometimes captive in the domestic comfort station.

Wednesday Demonstration, officially named “Wednesday Demonstration demanding Japan

to redress the Comfort Women problem”, happen on every Wednesday in front of the

Japanese Embassy in Seoul since January 1992 (Jo, 2014). Until Korea and Japan consider

the rights and dignity fully restored to the victims, the Korean Council will keep protesting.

Medical and Biological Warfare

China is the victim of large-scale biological warfare attacks during the Japanese wartime.

Unit 731 under the Japanese military conducted research by experimenting on humans.

Japanese military launched germ warfare attacks to the innocent civilian, by dropping plague

bombs to Chinese cities to test if the virus will outbreak and how fast it will contagious

(Kristof, 1995). Under the name of medical research, the Japanese military placed diseased

prisoners in the same room with the healthy one to observe how the virus spread.

The Unit 731 also undertaking vivisection in human, to inject or infect victims with bacteria

and viruses, then study the effects of disease on the human body, after that they will cut the
victims open to see how the disease affected the body. To study blood loss, people had their

limbs amputated, some were cut into two pieces, vertically. Anesthesia was not used on the

victims before the experiment carry out because Unit 731 believe that it will affect the results

(Tsuchiya, 2006).

Japanese military conduct research on the medical and biological weapon because they

believe that it will make a great weapon, but it was banned in Geneva Convention 1925

(Harigel, 2001). That is why the research was conducted secretly in Harbin, the nearest

Chinese city to Russia.

References
CCTV (Director). (2016). In memory of the more than 300,000 dead in Nanjing Massacre
[Motion Picture].
Chen, C. P. (n.d.). Korea. Retrieved April 02, 2017, from World War II Database:
http://ww2db.com/country/korea
Drea, E., Bradsher, G., Hanyok, R., Lide, J., Petersen, M., & Yang, D. (2006). Researching
Japanese War Crimes Records. Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government
Records .
Harigel, G. G. (2001). Chemical and Biological Weapons: Use in Warfare, Impact on Society
and Environment. Santa Barbara: Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.
Hippin, A. (2005, August 2). The end of silence: Korea’s Hiroshima. The Japan Times .
Jo, H.-g. (2014, January 10). 22nd Anniversary of Wednesday Demonstration: "We've Waited
22 Years Not a Word of Apology from Japan". Retrieved from The Kyunghyang
Shinmun:
http://english.khan.co.kr/khan_art_view.html?code=710100&artid=20140110152043
7
Kristof, N. D. (1995). Unmasking Horror - A special report.; Japan Confronting Gruesome
War Atrocity. Morioka: The New York Times.
Siqi, C., & Hui, Y. (2016, December 14). Nanjing Massacre remembered. Global Times .
Tsuchiya, T. (2006, August). The Imperial Japanese Medical Atrocities and Its Enduring
Legacy in Japanese Research Ethics. Ethical Lessons from Unit 731’s Human
Experiments .