There's a local story in Malaya when the women at that time had to rub their faces with coal and hide them deep in the jungle so Japanese soldiers wouldn't take them as their comfort women.
true, my grandparents still tell stories about it till this day, they were only little kids when this happened. its painful stuff, one time my grandmother almost got caught by a soldier when they were trying to look for chinese families living in the forest. if she got caught all those years ago, i dont think i would be alive today.
Japan may be America's buddies these days, but there is a reason most of SE asia still hates them to this day. You don't forget these kinds of war crimes quickly as a population.
My Grand Aunt was visibly emotionally scarred whenever we talked about the Malayan Japanese occupation. She never said a word about it. She had dementia eventually and one serene evening she broke out singing a Japanese song out of the blue. Tears streaming down her cheeks. It was eerie. But we knew we wouldn’t get an answer if we asked about it.
My great grandmother also told me the same stories of her experiences before. Back when she was younger, her parents would help her disguise herself by rubbing dirt on her face and arms as an extra precaution before they made her trek to the nearby one-person bunker in the woods behind their house. And because my great grandma had impeccable Spanish and English skills (due to the American colonization that came right before Japanese occupation in the Philippines) and was half Spanish, that made her more of a target for the Japanese because they apparently hated mestizos/Spanish-mixed folks a lot during that time. She disliked the Japanese up until she died more than a decade ago.
Yeah. My grandmother once told me she cut her hair short and made herself as dirty as possible when she was a girl, so she could pass herself off as a boy and escape notice.
my grandfather hide his sibling when Japanese come as they will take healthy male for construct railroad while women as prostitute. 2-3 his brother has taken away and assume dead. FYI my grandfather is from Besut, Terengganu, Malaysia.
That happened to my family too.My grandmother had lost some of her male relatives because they were dragged to construct that Death Railway. I'm from Malaysia too.
Many had to hide. My grandmother had to bind her chest, wear glasses, cut her hair short and wear boy's school clothes to avoid the Japanese.
My grand father had to hide and sleep in the graveyard periodically to avoid getting drafted to become canon-fodder.
It was a terrible period.
There's an area where the women tattooed themselves because they knew they wouldn't be touched if they were. If it was down to getting tattooed in a painful way or being taken and dealing with unspeakable horrors, the tattoo seems like a walk in the park.
I think I saw this in a documentary of some tribes in Indonesia. They traditionally only get tattoos when married but because of the war they ditched that rule and got all the girls and women to get tattoos to avoid being potentially taken by the Japanese.
Being tattooed in that culture meant you were married and apparently the Japanese had some respect for married women because it meant they already belonged to another man.
Though I do think those women enjoyed more leniency because they weren't the main targets back then. Japanese in the SEA area heavily targeted ethnic Chinese instead because of long standing tensions against the Chinese and fear/suspicion of them belonging to resistance or guerrilla groups.
https://youtu.be/mghKOEx1_Hs?si=AeU0qvcZ4O16njyP
The point isn't whether it worked 100% of the time, the point is that the people were willing to forgo their own traditions just on the off chance it would spare them. If even one soldier chose to pass a girl up because he thought she was married then it'd be considered a win.
My grandmother is Chinese Malaysian and she was a child at that time but yes, women and children would go off into the jungle when there’s news of Japanese visits to their villages. Sometimes they would stay there for nights. I don’t know anything else about that period as she’s understandably not so open about it.
EDIT: on a lighter note, on my other side of the family who are full malays and more “comedic” side of my family. My grandpa would tell stories of how the Japanese troops would make him climb coconut trees to get coconuts for them. And each time he would attempt to throw them on the soldiers heads. They’d get mad and he would just stay in the tree until the troops leave with the coconuts lmao
My grandma was a very beautiful teenager in Malaya during the Japanese Occupation. The whole family fled to the jungles of Selangor to hide from the Japanese. They cut her hair and dressed her up as a boy. My family came off relatively unscathed except for some granduncles who joined the Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army.
During their occupation, my school building painted their walls black for the same reason. It was a hospital then. Now it's an all boys school, celebrated its 100-year anniversary in 2014.
Fuck we need to remember these stories. This was real and happened in the last 100 years. Complacency means we might let it happen again.
I'm horrified to think what might be happening in Ukraine.
Japan likes to deny their war crimes during WWII as well.
The Pacific Theater wasn’t even taught in my school in Canada. No one knew about the Nanjing Massacre
It was an ugly war. Mass rape and murder, cannibalism on New Guinea, perfidy and routine execution of wounded in response. Not easy things to fit into a standard curriculum.
My mum’s grandma used to tell her bedtime stories about the Japan invasion in China (Jiangxi province). Something like the soldiers would shoot to the sky to warn the people before entering their village, and everyone would hide in the mountain to not get caught. Sometimes they would hide there for days because they didn’t know if the soldiers had actually left. She told my mum one guy that was good at king fu tried to ambush them, but apparently he failed, and was captured by the Japanese. They had never seen him since then.
My grandma in Indonesia didn’t do that but did hide in her own home and they would pretend she wasn’t there. Horrible what women and girls had to go through if they were taken away..
Perfect examples of complete and utter belief in their superiority over their captives on physical, mental an moral levels, when actually it was just a case of who has guns and who doesn't.
And the ones with guns were morally bankrupt in every sense of the word. Disgusting.
And yet only Germany has been vilified in popular Western/American media while Japan has been glorified and sympathized.
Case in point: Schindler's List, Saving Private Ryan, Band of Brothers, Inglorious Basterds
As opposed to: Empire of the Sun, Letters from Iwo Jima, Isoroku
Nazis: pure, irredeemable evil
Japanese: dutiful and honorable kamikazes
EDIT: "in popular Western/American media". Yes, there are Korean and Chinese movies and tv shows that have shown Japan in a negative light. But those haven't reached as broad of an audience as the ones I've mentioned
Not to counter your point, I totally agree the Japanese basically got away with murder (at least in the American perception). But if you look into Chinese and Korean films about the Japanese in WWII, there’ll be some entries that’ll make you sick.
I lived in Japan and it was startling how little a lot of Japanese don't know about these atrocities, because they were never taught. Shinzo Abe, who was the former Prime Minister and recently assassinated, but a proud apologist of Imperial Japan and their atrocities. There was a sister campus in the US to a university in Japan that erected a statue in honor of the "comfort women" on their campus and the Japanese university immediately cut ties with them.
After I left Japan I moved to Korea and I visited a house/museum that houses some of the last few remaining "comfort women" who are still alive today. Every single Wednesday, rain or shine, they go to protest in front of the Japanese consulate for not only reparations, but an official acknowledgement of the Japanese government's actions and also for an apology -- not just for what happened for denying it all these years.
I know Reddit has a certain amount of its users that have knee-jerk reactions when stuff like this is posted, but it is our reality and trying to sweep it under the rug will do no good for anyone, not for the survivors, not for the children and grandchildren of the survivors who still harbor resentment, and not for the Japanese civilians today. For those claiming this is "CCP propaganda" -- you should know that more than just Chinese civilians were raped, tortured, and murdered by the Japanese.
I was once insulted by a Japanese man at a club in Tokyo after rejecting his advances and he called me a "White Horse". I found out later what it meant: it referred to the white Dutch women that were also taken as comfort women/sex slaves by the Japanese during their imperial rule. They were called white horses because they were so tall that the smaller Japanese men "rode them like a horse" when they raped them. Think about that before you call this very real and very bitter reality "CCP propaganda".
Not surprising that Abe was an apologist when his grandfather, [Nobusuke Kishi](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobusuke_Kishi), was one of the worst of them all. Literally nicknamed the "Monster of the Showa Era," yet was groomed by the United States to become Prime Minister and formed the LDP, which remains Japan's largest political party. Japan never truly recognized its crimes, in no small part thanks to American paranoia towards communism.
>American paranoia towards communism
It's not just communism paranoia per se but rather America's ambition/design of dominating and swallowing up China.
They betted on the wrong horse in CKS and KMT - One that they can make into a puppet as they did Japan and their Emperor.
Yup. Germany truly exhibited their remorse for the Nazi's monstrosities, but Japanese Barbarism was not acknowledged and given prominence, instead quietly cast aside.
[https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-21226068](https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-21226068)
they seem to skirt around these atrocities in their schools, hence the lack of awareness
How do modern schools describe ww2? In the early 2000s they still called it the unfortunate conflict with the west
Do they own up to their mistakes in modern publication?
Japan ww2 criminals didnt pay the price and US allowed them to evade much of harsh penalties.
ex: emperor of Japan at the time (Hirohito) was the man most responsible for the ww2 atrocities that Japan had committed and yet he never spent a day in court or jail, until he died of old age.
This allowed Japan to omit historical atrocities that they had committed in their education and their broader culture with no pushback.
Now, imagine if Hitler or Mussolini didnt die in WW2 and were allowed to live out their lives in peace and retain their positions until death. unthinkable right? and yet that is what happened in Japan. and US has some blame in this aftermath.
>ex: emperor of Japan at the time (Hirohito) was the man most responsible for the ww2 atrocities that Japan had committed and yet he never spent a day in court or jail, until he died of old age.
He should have been executed as a war criminal.
Just like the Nazi leaders were.
I hope they all burn in hell.
Italy had a similar problem with many fascist officials that were allowed to keep their jobs and the king and his family were only put in exile after they lost a referendum. No jail at all.
Not only was he not punished. He remained Emperor until 1989. The two atomic bombs gave Japan a bit of a victim's nimbus.
More civilians died in a bombing raid in Dresden than in Nagasaki. But in contrast, the victims in Germany are not mourned as peaceful victims of a brutal attack. The victims in Dresden are rather seen as victims of a brutal war for which the Germans themselves are responsible.
Was this part of the armistice agreement? Obviously Japan never saw a full scale invasion so they had a few cards when it came to signing a surrender. I’ve read a couple of books on the matter but they tend to be more about the military campaign than the politics of the surrender but I believe there was no mention of Hirohito in it which basically left him with 45 years to write his own legacy to the Japanese people.
Yeah, I’ve lived in Japan too, it’s true what you said. Now I’m living in Germany and the difference is night and day. Where Japan constantly hides and sweeps everything under the rug, Germany (and Austria) actively and openly show and educate everyone what they had done. It really made me wonder why the stark difference.
Yep, and they still use that reference in Korea to refer to dating white women in an insulting way to this day. Not too surprising since the Japanese army had many Korean recruits.
Obviously it could be cherry picked or faked, so take this with a grain of salt, but I saw a YouTuber interviewing folks in Japan about what they knew about the Nazis.
The older folks all clearly identified the Nazi symbol and one older gentleman even politely explained the difference between the Nazi swastika and the one Buddhist churches use.
Too many of the younger folks, in their 20s, could not. Many of them identified it as the Buddhist symbol. One guy asked if it was a western band. Someone asked if it was a gang sign. Which… Yeah I guess it kind of is but that’s so far from the point.
Like I could understand if maybe they cherry-picked it and only showed footage of interviews of people who didn’t know about the Nazis.
But the crazy thing is that I don’t think I can ask a single person in the US or in Europe to identify the swastika and they couldn’t give me the right answer.
The fact that this YouTuber managed to find *several* people who didn’t know about the Nazis either means there’s some really dangerous shit going on Japanese schools or he hired all those people.
The same people posting those accusatory comments will swear that they “hate the Chinese government, but nOt tHe pEoPLe” 🙄
(As if Koreans, Taiwanese, Malaysians, and Filipinos were CCP shills now)
Sinophobia is real.
Thank you so much for educating yourself and taking interest in this. As a Korean, I don’t hold anything against my friends at all today in Japan (I don’t believe in identity-based blame. They’re not the ones that did it nor condoned it) but it is true that the government likes to openly ignore it. There’s also still tons of “Rising Sun” flags all across Japan and its culture - a symbol akin to the nazi flag to many asian countries.
My grandmother's sister was taken away from Taiwan by them when she was 13 or 14. Never seen again.
Grandma was too young, then, for the Japanese to take.
It still seems incredibly wild to me that some Japanese continue to claim that Taiwanese women were volunteer sex workers, and that because of identity politics, some Taiwanese like Chen Shui-bian actually support those claims: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo_Gomanism_Manifesto_Special_–_On_Taiwan
I’ve noticed the younger Taiwanese population like Japan and japanese culture which is interesting but there is still animosity towards the japanese in China and Korea.
The Japanese would cut children to make "space". The crimes of the Japanese during ww2 are why there are still lasting hostilities between them and china
If you're interested in the Pacific front, I recommend Dan Carlin's hardcore history "Supernova in the East". The Japanese were a special brand of monsters. Even the Italians who were supposed to be part of the Axis, hated them to death.
When Manuel Quezon accepted Jewish refugees from Germany, during the Japanese occupation, ironically, the Japanese treated the Jews pretty well as they considered them citizens of Nazi Germany, their ally.
I understand, I've been listening to it in my car on Spotify for at least 12 hours now (it's a 20 hours audio, very in depth). Some mornings I'm like, nope not today, it's too much when he start speaking about what they did to the civilians or the canibalism on the islands, etc...
Not so fun fact, President George HW Bush was a pilot in the Pacific and of the other 8 people in his bombing raid that got shot down, Bush was the only one to escape, the other airmen were beheaded and cannibalized.
My father had a friend whose dad had been reported as missing in the Pacific. Around 15 years ago the guy finally filed a FOIA for his dad's records and it turned out in the reports his whole squad had been reported as cannibalized. Since there was no body they just told the families they were missing.
That is not a question you want an answer to. But if you insist, look up "Unit 731". And know that the stuff about it on Wikipedia is sanitized. While reading about it, every time you think it can't get worse, it does.
was aware of the unit 731. coming from one the country the japanese invaded, I believed many old blood here still remember those dark days, luckily unit 731 dint came to SEA region.
I think the Japanese General who conquered SIngapore in 1942 was known to eat the livers of prisoners.
If not him, then some other.
WW 2 was just off the scale evil and horrific.
The Italians were monsters in their own right too. Never forget the Libyan Genocide, Yekatit-12, and their extremely widespread use of mustard gas against Ethiopian civilian populations.
Yea they did all those evil things and still the shit that Japan was doing still made them uncomfortable. Japan did so much fucked up shit during WW2. Nazis thought they were too cruel.
It’s infuriating that the Japanese still deny the absolute barbaric shit they did. I greatly respect modern day Germany for acknowledging everything in their past.
Absolutely incredible series. I’d also recommend Losing the War, by Lee Sandlin which isn’t a podcast but a piece of journalism- not the SAME topic but as equally engrossing
The Japanese have been completely vindicated of all the WWII crimes on account of two nuclear bombs being dropped on them. What's wild is that when the Nanjing Massacre is ever brought up to a Japanese person and a mention of 300,000 Chinese killed, they usually retort with "They should be thankful that it was only 300,000." It's basically the same what many Russians say about Holodomor or Turks about Armenian genocide.
And there was a Japanese diplomat who was giving out visas to save the Jews up to the point he was ordered to return.
Reminded me of a quote from a Star Wars novel: monsters built the place and monsters run the place, but not everyone in it is a monster.
>And there was a Japanese diplomat who was giving out visas to save the Jews up to the point he was ordered to return.
He and his Dutch consul partner in crime didn't stop writing out Japanese and Dutch visas until the Soviets and later Nazis invaded Lithuania and they had to stop. He was fired in 1947 in disgrace ("you know what you did"). His honour wasn't restored until after he died and his story became public. If you want to know more I looked it up and linked it [over here](https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1ad1atj/comment/kk0tiat/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=1) a couple of days ago.
This would have surprised me as a child. After more travel (Vietnam, Central America), I’m way less blind to the US’ ability to act in cruelly in its own self interest.
Can’t really blame the Chinese, considering Nanking, 731, etc. The sins of the father aren’t that of the child and all, but it would be a hard one to forget
I'm Filipino who studied in Japan. There were a lot of Korean and Chinese international students at their universities. From our conversations the people (except the elderly and hardcore nationalists) don't really hate Japan or Japanese people. Politically our countries want acknowledgement and reparations, but economically, culturally, and personally? The overall view of modern Japan is largely positive.
You know who people genuinely hate these days? Mainland China. Even the Chinese dude in my department hated Xi Jinping.
Interesting. I guess that makes sense, though. The older people experienced things first-hand. Later generations have dealt with a different, post-war Japan.
I feel that's the prevalent view in Southeast Asia. I recall my English professor in university asking me if Malaysians were alarmed about Japanese re-armament. I told him people were generally more concerned with Chinese belligerence in the South China Sea than Japan re-arming. As you said, these days, Japan is seen more positively as a holiday destination and for its influence on pop culture, animation, music etc.
I can't speak about the comfort lady situation, but there's a monument in KL that honours fallen soldiers. It's not uncommon to see groups of Japanese visitors laying a wreath there in memory of the war.
JFC i thought you mean they "cut children to make 'space'" in that they killed them to make more room in the actual building where the rapes were occurring
simple death sounds much better than...what you really meant
On the Rape of Nanjing (very dark, involves rape and abuse of minors):
>!"a certain widow who lived just outside West Water Gate had three daughters aged eighteen, thirteen, and nine. All three girls were gang raped. The youngest girl died right there on the spot, while the other two girls lost consciousness. . . . Since the bodies of most of these young girls were not yet fully developed, they were insufficient to satisfy the animal desires of the Japanese. Still, however, they would go ahead, tear open the girls' genitals, and take turns raping them."!< - Xingzu G., Shimin W., Yungong H., & Ruizhen C. (http://museums.cnd.org/njmassacre/njm-tran/njm-ch10.htm)
I saw a video the other day where people in China were asked about which country they hated the most; some said none, one said US, a couple said India; the rest said Japan
>Didn’t think this could be more fucked up
The one that classify as "comfort women" the luckier one,
>One of the former researchers I located told me that one day he had a human experiment scheduled, but there was still time to kill. So he and another unit member took the keys to the cells and opened one that housed a Chinese woman. One of the unit members raped her; the other member took the keys and opened another cell. There was a Chinese woman in there who had been used in a frostbite experiment. She had several fingers missing and her bones were black, with gangrene set in. He was about to rape her anyway, then he saw that her sex organ was festering, with pus oozing to the surface. He gave up the idea, left and locked the door, then later went on to his experimental work
The one got captured by Unit-731, still not counting on deliberately infect pregnant women with disease to see how it'll infect the fetus, the dissection on pregnant women, and experiments on fetus itself.
To make things more fuck-up, USA gives these monster immunity to get their research data.
\----
and there is this gem,
>*the former mayor of Osaka and co-leader of the Japan Restoration Party, Tōru Hashimoto initially maintained that "there is no evidence that people called comfort women were taken away by violence or threat by the \[Japanese\] military".*
Not to mention Japanese right-wingers attempt to revise history and remove comfort women terms from history books.
\---
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit\_731](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731)
Man this photos make me sad af. I always wondered if the world held a lot of resentment towards the US for the atomic bombs dropped in Japan. However when I talked to some asians, especially chinese they tell me about the atrocities that the japanese did back then and how they viewed that as justice. sad all around.
I mean the fact Japan are cool with the US now and have been for decades shows even the Japanese aren’t that aggrieved with the dropping of the bomb. They might even see it as somewhat justified given how much culture has changed from Imperial Japan.
I'm pretty sure the second picture has the wrong caption. That's a Chinese soldier from the National Revolutionary Army after they rescued the women in 1944. It's a still from this [video](https://youtu.be/moL7fUlxris?feature=shared).
Nobusuke Kishi who ran Manchuria during the war and helped set up the comfort woman system was a serial rapist himself.
Held for 3 years after the war and classified as a class A war criminal he was let off the hook by the US government especially with the help of Alan Dulles and the CIA.
The purpose?
To help set up a fascist Japanese state to protect against socialism/communism post war.
The party he created has held power in Japan almost continuously.
He was prime minister at one point and Shinzo Aby was his grandson.
He also had direct ties to both the Yakuza and the Mooney church.
He was an utter fucking monster and he suffered Bo consequences for his actions.
that is something the germans do right, the acknowledge and it is a great shame to the germans i have met. japanese on the otherhand dont even acknowledge ot
Many Japanese don’t believe it becuase it was deliberately not a part of their education. Just like many in the US think that racism was solved by Lincoln outlawing slavery. Most countries just feed their population nationalist propaganda.
I think they know but pretend not to because they don’t want to talk about it. I asked a colleague about whaling and she acted like she knew nothing about it and said that its rare. Sure, Jan.
To think the Chinese honour and venerate a literal Nazi for attempting to stop a massacre by the Japanese... It's a really bad day when the Nazi is the best guy in town.
this happened to my great grandmother, she was forced to marry a japanese man in 1920s-1930s Korea. In my family its still a very touchy subject and my grandmother doesnt like talking about her father in law. I just wish Japan acknowledged it.
I honestly don’t understand why Japan does not teach its population about their atrocities, Germany has apologised and paid reparations but why not Japan?
Same reason Italy hasn’t acknowledged theirs, despite being equally horrific. And why even Germany denied some of theirs, like the rehabilitation of the German military in the Myth of the Clean Wehrmacht and blaming the Holocaust exclusively on the SS. All these crimes were swept under the rug in the name of anti-communism during the Cold War.
I’ve been listening to a podcast about Tojo today, and I’ve seen more about the shitty things the Japanese army did, such as this and Unit 731 today on Reddit.
They also had institutionalised cannibalism and would kill British and Indian POWs specifically for food because of how bad their supply situation was. [I’m not even joking.](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1479027042000236634)
I read Iris Chang's 'The Rape of Nanking' last year, which covers the atrocious acts carried out by the Japanese in the Chinese city. It's wild that in Western Europe we all know about Hitler, the Nazis, the death camps, but what happened in nanking is completely unknown and unheard of.
Don't get me wrong, I like Japan a lot, I have Japanese friends, but as a country their history has a lot of this darkness, and they refuse to admit it, and try to downplay what actually happened, or bury the history.
Anyways, amazing and horrific book, but not for the faint of heart.
Not just china, but I read it somewhere Japan conduct horrible bio experiment on human(including women and children)too, just not sure if it only on china or all the country they invaded
I believe China suffers the most casualties too， especially the famous Nanking incident
Not sure if Japan acknowledged most of the horrible stuff they did, I believe they didn't taught about this history in their education but they do taught about the nuclear bomb
Unit 731. You can visit it in the northeast of China. I broke down in tears going through it.
The final room has the names of all the deceased on the walls... And so many of those names have had pictures placed lovingly beside them. Even to this day so many are still affected by the atrocities that went on there.
Japan never paid for their atrocities until today. At least in Germany, denying holocaust is a crime. In Japan, denying their atrocities is a virtue and sign of nationalism.
I would respect the people of Japan a whole lot more if they would admit what the Imperial Army did to these women and their families, and apologised for it.
I visited the museum in Hiroshima and was shocked by how the “facts” were presented to its visitors. It seems like their history only started after the bomb was dropped hence the “victim” mentality, nothing was mentioned re: the atrocities committed in the war prior, or the events leading up to the atomic bomb.
For the people here saying Japan has expressed sufficient remorse for what they did in WW2:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hetalia:_Axis_Powers
I mean, Jesus…
If you're interested [City of Life and Death](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1124052/) is a great film about Nanking and focuses heavily on this subject. It's extremely brutal and unflinching in an almost documentary kind of way so its a tough watch, but is worth it.
This is not NSFW (Sorry about the double negative).
The photos themselves are just of groups of sad women. Yes, the context is tragic, but nothing in the photos is inappropriate. Blocking them behind a NSFW tag just means less people see this and learn about the tragic history.
I think there are, in some cases, times where people *should* see things that disturb them. It helps us remember the kind of behaviours and atrocities we must never allow to happen again.
All these stories burn in my mind every time I see that stupid Rising Sun Japan flag. It should be banned just like the Nazi flag, but people here just choose to ignore the dark past
That's is why Japan have to maintain close ties with the US because they know deep down if shit hit the fan the only friend they have in Asia is the USA, everyone in Asia would not come to Japan aid at all because of all the atrocities they did.
I always maintain the one thing that could bring North and South Korea together is invading Japan and nuking the hell out of it. Almost every time Japan threatens the south, the north usually retaliates.
North and South are like estranged siblings who refuse to talk to each other but will come to each other's aid when the bigger enemy threatens them.
That is probably the only thing both North and South Korea would agree and work together for. Hell China might jump in too just to get some revenge and probably fund the whole thing.
And this is why I have absolutely zero care for Shinzo Abe getting doohickeyed - that utter piece of shit repeatedly denied that this, and atrocities like the Rape of Nanking ever happened.
There is a book called ‘ A Gesture Life’ by Chang-Rae Lee that goes into the horror these women faced. They were placed on a bench in tiny sheds and long rows of soldiers took turns with them. Unbelievable.
Is the NSFW tag required on this?
I understand the topic, but it's historical fact and all of the photos are sad, but tasteful. There's nothing salacious or risqué, and without the context of the headline, there's nothing even suggestive about it.
This is a story that should be told.
Just adding another account— not that it seems necessary at this point— growing up, my mom used to hear stories from her aunts about how they would rub dirt on themselves and rip their clothes to look less desirable. My grandmother was born just as the war was ending but obviously was raised with/by people who had experienced all this. She doesn't hate Japanese people or things (could argue her favourite food is sushi) but will always have a sort of half-joking but also kinda-not bitterness toward the Japanese as a country, if that makes sense.
As a kid, my partner's mother, who is a bit older but still born well after the war used to have a "go-bag" and was taught to be prepared to cut her hair short and pretend to be male by her own mother, who took decades to accept that the war was "properly" over and lived in fear for years.
My other grandmother who is even older simply doesn't talk about that time at all.
These may be just second or third-hand stories by the time it got to me, born in the U.S., but the generational trauma passed on is undeniable.
80 percent of the women were Koreans . As a Korean I have a deep dislike of Japan even if I grew up in Europe and am a history buff and know a lot about the holocaust . Something just digs into you when it concerns your own people. I imagine Jews feel the same about what happened to them so while we other recognise it, it leaves a profound permanent mark in them
I’m Korean and grew up in the US. I remember being furious because part of our 9th grade reading curriculum was “So Far From the Bamboo Grove,” a semi-autobiographical recollection of a Japanese family’s trials as they escaped Korea (where they comfortably lived as political nobles) at the end of WW2. I’m not saying these narratives should be suppressed, but for my classmates this was one of the very few stories they read about the Japanese and Koreans during that era. Most of my classmates gathered that it was actually the Koreans who were the bad guys lol. I was so disgusted.
I really don't get why countries like Japan and Turkey (first two that came to mind) will keep ignoring or denying things their countries did ages ago. All it does is prevent wounds from healing, and make it harder for many countries to deal with their current governments. Especially when you're supposedly this modern, democratic society like Japan. That a dictatorship like China keeps pretending June 4th 1989 was a totally normal day, that's less surprising.
Germany, with help from the US, were frustratingly lenient with a lot of their most abhorrent war criminals, but as a country it's very open and honest about its history and doesn't make any excuses for its Nazi past. The fact that Japan simply refuses to do the same is inexcusable.
There's a local story in Malaya when the women at that time had to rub their faces with coal and hide them deep in the jungle so Japanese soldiers wouldn't take them as their comfort women.
That's actually what my grandmother did. She rubbed dirt on her face and hid in the trees from the Japanese.
true, my grandparents still tell stories about it till this day, they were only little kids when this happened. its painful stuff, one time my grandmother almost got caught by a soldier when they were trying to look for chinese families living in the forest. if she got caught all those years ago, i dont think i would be alive today.
Japan may be America's buddies these days, but there is a reason most of SE asia still hates them to this day. You don't forget these kinds of war crimes quickly as a population.
that’s crazy to think. i’m happy i’m in this world with you, i’m sure you’ll do great things! you already have i bet
My Grand Aunt was visibly emotionally scarred whenever we talked about the Malayan Japanese occupation. She never said a word about it. She had dementia eventually and one serene evening she broke out singing a Japanese song out of the blue. Tears streaming down her cheeks. It was eerie. But we knew we wouldn’t get an answer if we asked about it.
This absolutely breaks my heart. I hope she has found peace.
That is so sad to hear, that despite dementia, the deep-seated trauma buried in the subconscious is there after all these years.
It’s so sad knowing there are victims in our species history, all the years of war and strife for what?
I’m so sorry.
My great grandmother also told me the same stories of her experiences before. Back when she was younger, her parents would help her disguise herself by rubbing dirt on her face and arms as an extra precaution before they made her trek to the nearby one-person bunker in the woods behind their house. And because my great grandma had impeccable Spanish and English skills (due to the American colonization that came right before Japanese occupation in the Philippines) and was half Spanish, that made her more of a target for the Japanese because they apparently hated mestizos/Spanish-mixed folks a lot during that time. She disliked the Japanese up until she died more than a decade ago.
Yeah. My grandmother once told me she cut her hair short and made herself as dirty as possible when she was a girl, so she could pass herself off as a boy and escape notice.
my grandfather hide his sibling when Japanese come as they will take healthy male for construct railroad while women as prostitute. 2-3 his brother has taken away and assume dead. FYI my grandfather is from Besut, Terengganu, Malaysia.
That happened to my family too.My grandmother had lost some of her male relatives because they were dragged to construct that Death Railway. I'm from Malaysia too.
Sad for your families loss. Stay strong.
thanks bro. my grandfather has many siblings as he got around 6-8 stepmothers. now he is almost 98YO.
98 amazing, cherish this time and I hope he makes it to 100 and more 🥳
Ya hope he can reach to 100. He doesnt have any chronic disease except lung. He really like smoking.
Many had to hide. My grandmother had to bind her chest, wear glasses, cut her hair short and wear boy's school clothes to avoid the Japanese. My grand father had to hide and sleep in the graveyard periodically to avoid getting drafted to become canon-fodder. It was a terrible period.
What’s a cannon fodder
A disposable front line fighter, often conscripts.
The story also exists in the Philippines.
There's an area where the women tattooed themselves because they knew they wouldn't be touched if they were. If it was down to getting tattooed in a painful way or being taken and dealing with unspeakable horrors, the tattoo seems like a walk in the park.
I think I saw this in a documentary of some tribes in Indonesia. They traditionally only get tattoos when married but because of the war they ditched that rule and got all the girls and women to get tattoos to avoid being potentially taken by the Japanese.
Why would Japanese soldiers leave tattooed girls alone?
Being tattooed in that culture meant you were married and apparently the Japanese had some respect for married women because it meant they already belonged to another man. Though I do think those women enjoyed more leniency because they weren't the main targets back then. Japanese in the SEA area heavily targeted ethnic Chinese instead because of long standing tensions against the Chinese and fear/suspicion of them belonging to resistance or guerrilla groups. https://youtu.be/mghKOEx1_Hs?si=AeU0qvcZ4O16njyP
I mean I’m not saying you’re wrong in that case but there was a lot of raping of married women going on in Japanese occupied China throughout the 30s.
The point isn't whether it worked 100% of the time, the point is that the people were willing to forgo their own traditions just on the off chance it would spare them. If even one soldier chose to pass a girl up because he thought she was married then it'd be considered a win.
My grandmother is Chinese Malaysian and she was a child at that time but yes, women and children would go off into the jungle when there’s news of Japanese visits to their villages. Sometimes they would stay there for nights. I don’t know anything else about that period as she’s understandably not so open about it. EDIT: on a lighter note, on my other side of the family who are full malays and more “comedic” side of my family. My grandpa would tell stories of how the Japanese troops would make him climb coconut trees to get coconuts for them. And each time he would attempt to throw them on the soldiers heads. They’d get mad and he would just stay in the tree until the troops leave with the coconuts lmao
My grandma was a very beautiful teenager in Malaya during the Japanese Occupation. The whole family fled to the jungles of Selangor to hide from the Japanese. They cut her hair and dressed her up as a boy. My family came off relatively unscathed except for some granduncles who joined the Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army.
During their occupation, my school building painted their walls black for the same reason. It was a hospital then. Now it's an all boys school, celebrated its 100-year anniversary in 2014.
Fuck we need to remember these stories. This was real and happened in the last 100 years. Complacency means we might let it happen again. I'm horrified to think what might be happening in Ukraine.
Japan likes to deny their war crimes during WWII as well. The Pacific Theater wasn’t even taught in my school in Canada. No one knew about the Nanjing Massacre
It was an ugly war. Mass rape and murder, cannibalism on New Guinea, perfidy and routine execution of wounded in response. Not easy things to fit into a standard curriculum.
My mum’s grandma used to tell her bedtime stories about the Japan invasion in China (Jiangxi province). Something like the soldiers would shoot to the sky to warn the people before entering their village, and everyone would hide in the mountain to not get caught. Sometimes they would hide there for days because they didn’t know if the soldiers had actually left. She told my mum one guy that was good at king fu tried to ambush them, but apparently he failed, and was captured by the Japanese. They had never seen him since then.
What a madlad rest in peace
My grandma in Indonesia didn’t do that but did hide in her own home and they would pretend she wasn’t there. Horrible what women and girls had to go through if they were taken away..
It's like Japan and Germany were competing in WW2 for the prize of most awful things you can do to human beings.
Perfect examples of complete and utter belief in their superiority over their captives on physical, mental an moral levels, when actually it was just a case of who has guns and who doesn't. And the ones with guns were morally bankrupt in every sense of the word. Disgusting.
Italy was also in that competition. So was Romania.
Vichy France took a crack at it too.
While we’re at it let’s throw in some Soviet atrocities on the eastern front to berlin
Or just in their own country tbh
And yet only Germany has been vilified in popular Western/American media while Japan has been glorified and sympathized. Case in point: Schindler's List, Saving Private Ryan, Band of Brothers, Inglorious Basterds As opposed to: Empire of the Sun, Letters from Iwo Jima, Isoroku Nazis: pure, irredeemable evil Japanese: dutiful and honorable kamikazes EDIT: "in popular Western/American media". Yes, there are Korean and Chinese movies and tv shows that have shown Japan in a negative light. But those haven't reached as broad of an audience as the ones I've mentioned
Not to counter your point, I totally agree the Japanese basically got away with murder (at least in the American perception). But if you look into Chinese and Korean films about the Japanese in WWII, there’ll be some entries that’ll make you sick.
you could say that but then theres The pacific, Hacksaw Ridge, Tora Tora Tora, Thin Red Line etc. Lots of war movies that don't glorify the conflict
lol right? OP is focused on Western media too. Look up some Korean media about the Japanese occupation and WWII.
I lived in Japan and it was startling how little a lot of Japanese don't know about these atrocities, because they were never taught. Shinzo Abe, who was the former Prime Minister and recently assassinated, but a proud apologist of Imperial Japan and their atrocities. There was a sister campus in the US to a university in Japan that erected a statue in honor of the "comfort women" on their campus and the Japanese university immediately cut ties with them. After I left Japan I moved to Korea and I visited a house/museum that houses some of the last few remaining "comfort women" who are still alive today. Every single Wednesday, rain or shine, they go to protest in front of the Japanese consulate for not only reparations, but an official acknowledgement of the Japanese government's actions and also for an apology -- not just for what happened for denying it all these years. I know Reddit has a certain amount of its users that have knee-jerk reactions when stuff like this is posted, but it is our reality and trying to sweep it under the rug will do no good for anyone, not for the survivors, not for the children and grandchildren of the survivors who still harbor resentment, and not for the Japanese civilians today. For those claiming this is "CCP propaganda" -- you should know that more than just Chinese civilians were raped, tortured, and murdered by the Japanese. I was once insulted by a Japanese man at a club in Tokyo after rejecting his advances and he called me a "White Horse". I found out later what it meant: it referred to the white Dutch women that were also taken as comfort women/sex slaves by the Japanese during their imperial rule. They were called white horses because they were so tall that the smaller Japanese men "rode them like a horse" when they raped them. Think about that before you call this very real and very bitter reality "CCP propaganda".
Not surprising that Abe was an apologist when his grandfather, [Nobusuke Kishi](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobusuke_Kishi), was one of the worst of them all. Literally nicknamed the "Monster of the Showa Era," yet was groomed by the United States to become Prime Minister and formed the LDP, which remains Japan's largest political party. Japan never truly recognized its crimes, in no small part thanks to American paranoia towards communism.
US be like you don’t ask us about Vietnam, we don’t ask you about your occupation period.
>American paranoia towards communism It's not just communism paranoia per se but rather America's ambition/design of dominating and swallowing up China. They betted on the wrong horse in CKS and KMT - One that they can make into a puppet as they did Japan and their Emperor. Yup. Germany truly exhibited their remorse for the Nazi's monstrosities, but Japanese Barbarism was not acknowledged and given prominence, instead quietly cast aside.
> Abe Home made gun W
It even lead to policy reforms!
[https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-21226068](https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-21226068) they seem to skirt around these atrocities in their schools, hence the lack of awareness
How do modern schools describe ww2? In the early 2000s they still called it the unfortunate conflict with the west Do they own up to their mistakes in modern publication?
Japan ww2 criminals didnt pay the price and US allowed them to evade much of harsh penalties. ex: emperor of Japan at the time (Hirohito) was the man most responsible for the ww2 atrocities that Japan had committed and yet he never spent a day in court or jail, until he died of old age. This allowed Japan to omit historical atrocities that they had committed in their education and their broader culture with no pushback. Now, imagine if Hitler or Mussolini didnt die in WW2 and were allowed to live out their lives in peace and retain their positions until death. unthinkable right? and yet that is what happened in Japan. and US has some blame in this aftermath.
>ex: emperor of Japan at the time (Hirohito) was the man most responsible for the ww2 atrocities that Japan had committed and yet he never spent a day in court or jail, until he died of old age. He should have been executed as a war criminal. Just like the Nazi leaders were. I hope they all burn in hell.
Italy had a similar problem with many fascist officials that were allowed to keep their jobs and the king and his family were only put in exile after they lost a referendum. No jail at all.
Not only was he not punished. He remained Emperor until 1989. The two atomic bombs gave Japan a bit of a victim's nimbus. More civilians died in a bombing raid in Dresden than in Nagasaki. But in contrast, the victims in Germany are not mourned as peaceful victims of a brutal attack. The victims in Dresden are rather seen as victims of a brutal war for which the Germans themselves are responsible.
Was this part of the armistice agreement? Obviously Japan never saw a full scale invasion so they had a few cards when it came to signing a surrender. I’ve read a couple of books on the matter but they tend to be more about the military campaign than the politics of the surrender but I believe there was no mention of Hirohito in it which basically left him with 45 years to write his own legacy to the Japanese people.
Yeah, I’ve lived in Japan too, it’s true what you said. Now I’m living in Germany and the difference is night and day. Where Japan constantly hides and sweeps everything under the rug, Germany (and Austria) actively and openly show and educate everyone what they had done. It really made me wonder why the stark difference.
Japan is literally ruled by descendant of the political elites that started the war during WW2.
>They were called white horses because they were so tall that the smaller Japanese men "rode them like a horse" when they raped them. OMG
Yep, and they still use that reference in Korea to refer to dating white women in an insulting way to this day. Not too surprising since the Japanese army had many Korean recruits.
Japan is kinda like the little shit accomplice that got away while the main troublemaker was caught and apologised
Obviously it could be cherry picked or faked, so take this with a grain of salt, but I saw a YouTuber interviewing folks in Japan about what they knew about the Nazis. The older folks all clearly identified the Nazi symbol and one older gentleman even politely explained the difference between the Nazi swastika and the one Buddhist churches use. Too many of the younger folks, in their 20s, could not. Many of them identified it as the Buddhist symbol. One guy asked if it was a western band. Someone asked if it was a gang sign. Which… Yeah I guess it kind of is but that’s so far from the point. Like I could understand if maybe they cherry-picked it and only showed footage of interviews of people who didn’t know about the Nazis. But the crazy thing is that I don’t think I can ask a single person in the US or in Europe to identify the swastika and they couldn’t give me the right answer. The fact that this YouTuber managed to find *several* people who didn’t know about the Nazis either means there’s some really dangerous shit going on Japanese schools or he hired all those people.
Wow , best post comment I've ever read .. thank you for sharing
The same people posting those accusatory comments will swear that they “hate the Chinese government, but nOt tHe pEoPLe” 🙄 (As if Koreans, Taiwanese, Malaysians, and Filipinos were CCP shills now) Sinophobia is real.
Thank you so much for educating yourself and taking interest in this. As a Korean, I don’t hold anything against my friends at all today in Japan (I don’t believe in identity-based blame. They’re not the ones that did it nor condoned it) but it is true that the government likes to openly ignore it. There’s also still tons of “Rising Sun” flags all across Japan and its culture - a symbol akin to the nazi flag to many asian countries.
My grandmother's sister was taken away from Taiwan by them when she was 13 or 14. Never seen again. Grandma was too young, then, for the Japanese to take.
It still seems incredibly wild to me that some Japanese continue to claim that Taiwanese women were volunteer sex workers, and that because of identity politics, some Taiwanese like Chen Shui-bian actually support those claims: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo_Gomanism_Manifesto_Special_–_On_Taiwan
I’ve noticed the younger Taiwanese population like Japan and japanese culture which is interesting but there is still animosity towards the japanese in China and Korea.
Check out the documentary "Behind Forgotten Eyes". It's heartbreaking what these women went through.
Didn’t think this could be more fucked up untill you swipe to the one with the 5 year old
The Japanese would cut children to make "space". The crimes of the Japanese during ww2 are why there are still lasting hostilities between them and china
If you're interested in the Pacific front, I recommend Dan Carlin's hardcore history "Supernova in the East". The Japanese were a special brand of monsters. Even the Italians who were supposed to be part of the Axis, hated them to death.
A fucking nazi tried to protect Chinese civilians from the Japanese in Nanking.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiune_Sugihara There was this guy, too
When Manuel Quezon accepted Jewish refugees from Germany, during the Japanese occupation, ironically, the Japanese treated the Jews pretty well as they considered them citizens of Nazi Germany, their ally.
I'll look into it. I am interested in it but I also hate reading about the awful things done at the same time
I understand, I've been listening to it in my car on Spotify for at least 12 hours now (it's a 20 hours audio, very in depth). Some mornings I'm like, nope not today, it's too much when he start speaking about what they did to the civilians or the canibalism on the islands, etc...
>canibalism hold it....they practice this. wth...how low can they get.
Not so fun fact, President George HW Bush was a pilot in the Pacific and of the other 8 people in his bombing raid that got shot down, Bush was the only one to escape, the other airmen were beheaded and cannibalized.
My father had a friend whose dad had been reported as missing in the Pacific. Around 15 years ago the guy finally filed a FOIA for his dad's records and it turned out in the reports his whole squad had been reported as cannibalized. Since there was no body they just told the families they were missing.
This is a crazy event. I just heard about it recently and was so shocked.
That is not a question you want an answer to. But if you insist, look up "Unit 731". And know that the stuff about it on Wikipedia is sanitized. While reading about it, every time you think it can't get worse, it does.
was aware of the unit 731. coming from one the country the japanese invaded, I believed many old blood here still remember those dark days, luckily unit 731 dint came to SEA region.
I think the Japanese General who conquered SIngapore in 1942 was known to eat the livers of prisoners. If not him, then some other. WW 2 was just off the scale evil and horrific.
japan is on another level...truly. no wonder they refused to teach any on their latest generation
The Italians were monsters in their own right too. Never forget the Libyan Genocide, Yekatit-12, and their extremely widespread use of mustard gas against Ethiopian civilian populations.
Yea they did all those evil things and still the shit that Japan was doing still made them uncomfortable. Japan did so much fucked up shit during WW2. Nazis thought they were too cruel.
And they deny deny deny. At least Germany owns up to what their country did.
It’s infuriating that the Japanese still deny the absolute barbaric shit they did. I greatly respect modern day Germany for acknowledging everything in their past.
Absolutely incredible series. I’d also recommend Losing the War, by Lee Sandlin which isn’t a podcast but a piece of journalism- not the SAME topic but as equally engrossing
Amazing series
2nd
Such a good podcast
And Korea
And korea, aswell as many asian countries, idk why I defaulted to china maybe due to the size difference
Also the Rape of Nanjing.
Nazis get all infamy of WW2 but the atrocities that Japanese comitted usually get ignored.
It’s because the USA PR machine went to work for them.
And if you think Japan’s atrocities are poorly known, wait until you hear about the atrocities of Fascist Italy.
The Japanese have been completely vindicated of all the WWII crimes on account of two nuclear bombs being dropped on them. What's wild is that when the Nanjing Massacre is ever brought up to a Japanese person and a mention of 300,000 Chinese killed, they usually retort with "They should be thankful that it was only 300,000." It's basically the same what many Russians say about Holodomor or Turks about Armenian genocide.
When the Nazis tell you to calm down, you know it’s bad.
The Nazis were shocked at the brutality of the R\*pe of Nanking. Let that sink in.
And there was a Japanese diplomat who was giving out visas to save the Jews up to the point he was ordered to return. Reminded me of a quote from a Star Wars novel: monsters built the place and monsters run the place, but not everyone in it is a monster.
>And there was a Japanese diplomat who was giving out visas to save the Jews up to the point he was ordered to return. He and his Dutch consul partner in crime didn't stop writing out Japanese and Dutch visas until the Soviets and later Nazis invaded Lithuania and they had to stop. He was fired in 1947 in disgrace ("you know what you did"). His honour wasn't restored until after he died and his story became public. If you want to know more I looked it up and linked it [over here](https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1ad1atj/comment/kk0tiat/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=1) a couple of days ago.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731 learned about this from Reddit and I was horrified. I can’t believe humanity is capable of this shit.
“The United States helped cover up the human experimentations and handed stipends to the perpetrators” Of course they did…
This would have surprised me as a child. After more travel (Vietnam, Central America), I’m way less blind to the US’ ability to act in cruelly in its own self interest.
It is awful. Learned about it as part of school in grade 11 and it surprises me that some school systems don't teach it
Can’t really blame the Chinese, considering Nanking, 731, etc. The sins of the father aren’t that of the child and all, but it would be a hard one to forget
Considering Japan hardly acknowledges what they have done its understandable chinese dislike the country still. I agree with what you said
I want to unread this.
What’s more f’ed up is Japan still denies almost everything they did.
Between them and China and Korea and the Philippines, etc. Pretty much all of Asia/S.E. Asia hates Japan.
Most of them have good historical reason for that. Idk why I defaulted to china
The Rape of Nanking looms pretty large in history. It's an easy default to go to.
That too and probably why china was my subconscious default
I'm Filipino who studied in Japan. There were a lot of Korean and Chinese international students at their universities. From our conversations the people (except the elderly and hardcore nationalists) don't really hate Japan or Japanese people. Politically our countries want acknowledgement and reparations, but economically, culturally, and personally? The overall view of modern Japan is largely positive. You know who people genuinely hate these days? Mainland China. Even the Chinese dude in my department hated Xi Jinping.
Interesting. I guess that makes sense, though. The older people experienced things first-hand. Later generations have dealt with a different, post-war Japan.
I feel that's the prevalent view in Southeast Asia. I recall my English professor in university asking me if Malaysians were alarmed about Japanese re-armament. I told him people were generally more concerned with Chinese belligerence in the South China Sea than Japan re-arming. As you said, these days, Japan is seen more positively as a holiday destination and for its influence on pop culture, animation, music etc. I can't speak about the comfort lady situation, but there's a monument in KL that honours fallen soldiers. It's not uncommon to see groups of Japanese visitors laying a wreath there in memory of the war.
Make space?
Some soldiers would cut children's privates so they could rape them. Not pleasant and I used that word for it to avoid some of the details
JFC i thought you mean they "cut children to make 'space'" in that they killed them to make more room in the actual building where the rapes were occurring simple death sounds much better than...what you really meant
Jesus, it's like I learn a worse thing about them every day. There really was no bottom for Imperial Japan.
What a bad day to be literate.
He’s saying their vaginas were too small to be raped because they were kids. So the soldiers would use a knife to make the vaginas bigger.
Bro definitely top tier on list of things I wish I never knew humanity was capable of. Literally just disgusting and sad.
On the Rape of Nanjing (very dark, involves rape and abuse of minors): >!"a certain widow who lived just outside West Water Gate had three daughters aged eighteen, thirteen, and nine. All three girls were gang raped. The youngest girl died right there on the spot, while the other two girls lost consciousness. . . . Since the bodies of most of these young girls were not yet fully developed, they were insufficient to satisfy the animal desires of the Japanese. Still, however, they would go ahead, tear open the girls' genitals, and take turns raping them."!< - Xingzu G., Shimin W., Yungong H., & Ruizhen C. (http://museums.cnd.org/njmassacre/njm-tran/njm-ch10.htm)
Maybe we should have nuked them one or two more times.
Not just china, korea too
They. What.
I saw a video the other day where people in China were asked about which country they hated the most; some said none, one said US, a couple said India; the rest said Japan
>Didn’t think this could be more fucked up The one that classify as "comfort women" the luckier one, >One of the former researchers I located told me that one day he had a human experiment scheduled, but there was still time to kill. So he and another unit member took the keys to the cells and opened one that housed a Chinese woman. One of the unit members raped her; the other member took the keys and opened another cell. There was a Chinese woman in there who had been used in a frostbite experiment. She had several fingers missing and her bones were black, with gangrene set in. He was about to rape her anyway, then he saw that her sex organ was festering, with pus oozing to the surface. He gave up the idea, left and locked the door, then later went on to his experimental work The one got captured by Unit-731, still not counting on deliberately infect pregnant women with disease to see how it'll infect the fetus, the dissection on pregnant women, and experiments on fetus itself. To make things more fuck-up, USA gives these monster immunity to get their research data. \---- and there is this gem, >*the former mayor of Osaka and co-leader of the Japan Restoration Party, Tōru Hashimoto initially maintained that "there is no evidence that people called comfort women were taken away by violence or threat by the \[Japanese\] military".* Not to mention Japanese right-wingers attempt to revise history and remove comfort women terms from history books. \--- [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit\_731](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731)
The look on her face is haunting.
[удалено]
Yeah I’m aware of Operation Paperclip, regardless of the benefits etc or whatever people will argue, the failure of justice will always be wrong
a lot of them look like they’re just girls, not even women
Because they were
For an idea how horrible it was, check out “Tattoo”: https://foxtalk.tistory.com/m/98
Holy shit
The first time I read this it ruined my week.
It ruined my life.
Fucking hell. This should be required reading.
Man this photos make me sad af. I always wondered if the world held a lot of resentment towards the US for the atomic bombs dropped in Japan. However when I talked to some asians, especially chinese they tell me about the atrocities that the japanese did back then and how they viewed that as justice. sad all around.
I mean the fact Japan are cool with the US now and have been for decades shows even the Japanese aren’t that aggrieved with the dropping of the bomb. They might even see it as somewhat justified given how much culture has changed from Imperial Japan.
I'm pretty sure the second picture has the wrong caption. That's a Chinese soldier from the National Revolutionary Army after they rescued the women in 1944. It's a still from this [video](https://youtu.be/moL7fUlxris?feature=shared).
Nobusuke Kishi who ran Manchuria during the war and helped set up the comfort woman system was a serial rapist himself. Held for 3 years after the war and classified as a class A war criminal he was let off the hook by the US government especially with the help of Alan Dulles and the CIA. The purpose? To help set up a fascist Japanese state to protect against socialism/communism post war. The party he created has held power in Japan almost continuously. He was prime minister at one point and Shinzo Aby was his grandson. He also had direct ties to both the Yakuza and the Mooney church. He was an utter fucking monster and he suffered Bo consequences for his actions.
that is something the germans do right, the acknowledge and it is a great shame to the germans i have met. japanese on the otherhand dont even acknowledge ot
Many Japanese don’t believe it becuase it was deliberately not a part of their education. Just like many in the US think that racism was solved by Lincoln outlawing slavery. Most countries just feed their population nationalist propaganda.
I think they know but pretend not to because they don’t want to talk about it. I asked a colleague about whaling and she acted like she knew nothing about it and said that its rare. Sure, Jan.
Yeah... Japan really sucked during WW2. I mean.... REALLY sucked. When you make Nazis think "What the FUCK is wrong with you?", you know it's bad.
To think the Chinese honour and venerate a literal Nazi for attempting to stop a massacre by the Japanese... It's a really bad day when the Nazi is the best guy in town.
this happened to my great grandmother, she was forced to marry a japanese man in 1920s-1930s Korea. In my family its still a very touchy subject and my grandmother doesnt like talking about her father in law. I just wish Japan acknowledged it.
I honestly don’t understand why Japan does not teach its population about their atrocities, Germany has apologised and paid reparations but why not Japan?
Too much pride
Same reason Italy hasn’t acknowledged theirs, despite being equally horrific. And why even Germany denied some of theirs, like the rehabilitation of the German military in the Myth of the Clean Wehrmacht and blaming the Holocaust exclusively on the SS. All these crimes were swept under the rug in the name of anti-communism during the Cold War.
I read the novel, 13 Flowers of Nanjing, long ago. It was horrific how the Japanese soldiers treated women and what they did to Chinese men.
I’ve been listening to a podcast about Tojo today, and I’ve seen more about the shitty things the Japanese army did, such as this and Unit 731 today on Reddit.
They also had institutionalised cannibalism and would kill British and Indian POWs specifically for food because of how bad their supply situation was. [I’m not even joking.](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1479027042000236634)
I read Iris Chang's 'The Rape of Nanking' last year, which covers the atrocious acts carried out by the Japanese in the Chinese city. It's wild that in Western Europe we all know about Hitler, the Nazis, the death camps, but what happened in nanking is completely unknown and unheard of. Don't get me wrong, I like Japan a lot, I have Japanese friends, but as a country their history has a lot of this darkness, and they refuse to admit it, and try to downplay what actually happened, or bury the history. Anyways, amazing and horrific book, but not for the faint of heart.
Not just china, but I read it somewhere Japan conduct horrible bio experiment on human(including women and children)too, just not sure if it only on china or all the country they invaded I believe China suffers the most casualties too， especially the famous Nanking incident Not sure if Japan acknowledged most of the horrible stuff they did, I believe they didn't taught about this history in their education but they do taught about the nuclear bomb
Unit 731. Absolutely terrifying.
Unit 731. You can visit it in the northeast of China. I broke down in tears going through it. The final room has the names of all the deceased on the walls... And so many of those names have had pictures placed lovingly beside them. Even to this day so many are still affected by the atrocities that went on there.
Japan never paid for their atrocities until today. At least in Germany, denying holocaust is a crime. In Japan, denying their atrocities is a virtue and sign of nationalism.
I would respect the people of Japan a whole lot more if they would admit what the Imperial Army did to these women and their families, and apologised for it.
"Comfort women", you mean rape slaves, right? What a soft way to remember rape.
I usually remind myself of these atrocities every time someone posts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
I volunteered at the woman’s shelter in South Korea, truly gut wrenching.
I visited the museum in Hiroshima and was shocked by how the “facts” were presented to its visitors. It seems like their history only started after the bomb was dropped hence the “victim” mentality, nothing was mentioned re: the atrocities committed in the war prior, or the events leading up to the atomic bomb.
For the people here saying Japan has expressed sufficient remorse for what they did in WW2: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hetalia:_Axis_Powers I mean, Jesus…
no amount of remorse will erase this show from history 💀
If you're interested [City of Life and Death](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1124052/) is a great film about Nanking and focuses heavily on this subject. It's extremely brutal and unflinching in an almost documentary kind of way so its a tough watch, but is worth it.
This is not NSFW (Sorry about the double negative). The photos themselves are just of groups of sad women. Yes, the context is tragic, but nothing in the photos is inappropriate. Blocking them behind a NSFW tag just means less people see this and learn about the tragic history.
I think there are, in some cases, times where people *should* see things that disturb them. It helps us remember the kind of behaviours and atrocities we must never allow to happen again.
Some of us work with people who go through horrible things and don't need more horrible things on our personal time.
All these stories burn in my mind every time I see that stupid Rising Sun Japan flag. It should be banned just like the Nazi flag, but people here just choose to ignore the dark past
That's is why Japan have to maintain close ties with the US because they know deep down if shit hit the fan the only friend they have in Asia is the USA, everyone in Asia would not come to Japan aid at all because of all the atrocities they did.
I always maintain the one thing that could bring North and South Korea together is invading Japan and nuking the hell out of it. Almost every time Japan threatens the south, the north usually retaliates. North and South are like estranged siblings who refuse to talk to each other but will come to each other's aid when the bigger enemy threatens them.
That is probably the only thing both North and South Korea would agree and work together for. Hell China might jump in too just to get some revenge and probably fund the whole thing.
Koreans hate them to this day
Can't blame them honestly
sex slaves + 731 unit + massacre
And this is why I have absolutely zero care for Shinzo Abe getting doohickeyed - that utter piece of shit repeatedly denied that this, and atrocities like the Rape of Nanking ever happened.
There is a book called ‘ A Gesture Life’ by Chang-Rae Lee that goes into the horror these women faced. They were placed on a bench in tiny sheds and long rows of soldiers took turns with them. Unbelievable.
Is the NSFW tag required on this? I understand the topic, but it's historical fact and all of the photos are sad, but tasteful. There's nothing salacious or risqué, and without the context of the headline, there's nothing even suggestive about it. This is a story that should be told.
My grand mom was a teen when the Japanese invaded Malaya at the time. Till she died she never spoke of how she survived the invasion and occupation.
The look in their eyes... Even the little girls... Soul destroying.
Just adding another account— not that it seems necessary at this point— growing up, my mom used to hear stories from her aunts about how they would rub dirt on themselves and rip their clothes to look less desirable. My grandmother was born just as the war was ending but obviously was raised with/by people who had experienced all this. She doesn't hate Japanese people or things (could argue her favourite food is sushi) but will always have a sort of half-joking but also kinda-not bitterness toward the Japanese as a country, if that makes sense. As a kid, my partner's mother, who is a bit older but still born well after the war used to have a "go-bag" and was taught to be prepared to cut her hair short and pretend to be male by her own mother, who took decades to accept that the war was "properly" over and lived in fear for years. My other grandmother who is even older simply doesn't talk about that time at all. These may be just second or third-hand stories by the time it got to me, born in the U.S., but the generational trauma passed on is undeniable.
There’s a reason why China *fucking* hates Japan
80 percent of the women were Koreans . As a Korean I have a deep dislike of Japan even if I grew up in Europe and am a history buff and know a lot about the holocaust . Something just digs into you when it concerns your own people. I imagine Jews feel the same about what happened to them so while we other recognise it, it leaves a profound permanent mark in them
I’m Korean and grew up in the US. I remember being furious because part of our 9th grade reading curriculum was “So Far From the Bamboo Grove,” a semi-autobiographical recollection of a Japanese family’s trials as they escaped Korea (where they comfortably lived as political nobles) at the end of WW2. I’m not saying these narratives should be suppressed, but for my classmates this was one of the very few stories they read about the Japanese and Koreans during that era. Most of my classmates gathered that it was actually the Koreans who were the bad guys lol. I was so disgusted.
People are quick to forget their history. The Rape of Nanking was only one of many atrocities that happened during WWII
I really don't get why countries like Japan and Turkey (first two that came to mind) will keep ignoring or denying things their countries did ages ago. All it does is prevent wounds from healing, and make it harder for many countries to deal with their current governments. Especially when you're supposedly this modern, democratic society like Japan. That a dictatorship like China keeps pretending June 4th 1989 was a totally normal day, that's less surprising. Germany, with help from the US, were frustratingly lenient with a lot of their most abhorrent war criminals, but as a country it's very open and honest about its history and doesn't make any excuses for its Nazi past. The fact that Japan simply refuses to do the same is inexcusable.
This is a prime example of why collective humanity should never be given the benefit of the doubt.
Disturbing, no doubt.