If the influence of deeply rooted negative racial beliefs is added to the brutality involved in sending soldiers destined to kill each other on a massive scale, the frame of conventions and rules of warfare is far more likely to be intentionally broken. on both sides.
In the 1930s Japanese soldiers underwent a process of physical and moral brutalization as a basic standard procedure in hard military training.
The pre-war Navy was obsessed with creating a small elite corps of flyers and the selection criteria were strictly exclusive . Less than one percent of YOKAREN applicants (Naval Aviator Preparatory Course Trainee) passed the initial written exam, and many of the fortunate few who made the initial cut would then be weeded out during rigorous physical exams. The few selected that remained were sent into basic training.
Each day began with a wake up call at 5a. m., followed by a forced immersion in cold water. Recruits rushed out to the parade ground, bowed in the direction of the imperial palace, recited an oath of loyalty to the emperor, and were led through a routine of punishing calisthenics. Everywhere, throughout the day they were expected to run, not walk.
Meals were spartan, consisting of rice with barley, or miso soup and pickled vegetables, occasionally some fish or meat
Parade ground drills and basic combat training alternated with classroom instruction in math, science, engineering, reading and writing. Everyone had to maintain a minimum grade average or face expulsion, and class position was always determined by academic rank. They slept in hammocks hung on the walls of their huts.
Takeshi Maeda, who would go on to fly a torpedo bomber at the Battle of Midway, spent hours in Tokyo Bay rowing an open boat in all weather conditions with fellow students.
Maheda remembered that because of friction between my body and the seat, my pants were covered with blood. After your flesh became infected and produced yellow pus … I would go to the infirmary, and there they healed my wounds by applying ointment and gauze.
The next day, when I did a training on a cutter, the same thing would happen again, my old wounds would reopen, which was very painful >>.
Brutality was a key factor behind this hard training.
The recruits were subjected to relentless brutality from upperclassmen, instructors and officers. Any infraction, short, wrong answer, or complaint brought immediate punishment, ranging from a casual slap across the cheek to a sudden punch in the face to a savage beating with a baseball bat.
A recruit could be forced to stand on tiptoes for an hour or more, or stand rigidly at attention when a petty officer repeatedly hit him in the face, or bend over wgjhis tormentor repeatedly beat them on the buttocks with a stick.
Kicks and punches often continued after a man fell to the ground.
Neither moaning nor tears were allowed. Often an entire team was subjected to a brutal beating for someone’s alleged transgressions. If any bones were broken, the injured man was sent to the hospital; and once healed, he would be re inducted with the subsequent class.
Saburo Sakai, who went on to become the most famous fighter pilot of the Pacific War, was once dragged out of his hammock in the middle of the night and beaten in front of his shocked classmates as they rubbed the sleep from their eyes .
The NCO forced Sakai to bend down:
with this he would swing a large wooden stick and with every ounce of force he had he would slam it against my upturned bottom .
The pain was terrible, the force of the blows incessant. There was no choice but to grit my teeth and fight desperately not to cry out. At times, I counted up to forty terrible blows on the buttocks. I often fainted from the pain. However, the loss of consciousness was not a way out. The non-commissioned officer threw a bucket of cold water on my prostrate form and yelled at me to resume the position, after which he continued his discipline until he was satisfied that I would fix the mistake in my own way >>. After seeing one of his classmates subjected to a similar beating, Takeshi Maeda remembers feeling a wave of bitterness: How could a human being hit another with a baseball bat? >>.
Another veteran of the Japanese Imperial Army, Masayo Enamoto, also recalled that his instructors used to beat him and his classmates so much during basic training that their arms ached, and by the end of the day they have no energy left to hit them. As a consequence, the instructors found a new way of maintaining discipline – self-punishment. Enamoto recalls: “Once the instructors got tired of beating us, they would put us in front of each other and slap each other .
So all of us recruits, comrades together, started slapping each other instead of being slapped by the instructor. Gradually, I felt that I would have missed out on something if, at night, I had not been beaten at least once >>.
Such brutal training with the influence of deeply rooted racial beliefs would bear the bitter fruit of its
Masayo Enamoto recalls: << I was taught that we should look down on the Chinese. They were one rank lower than the Japanese and that we should have treated them like animals. This was something that I was taught in the army, and I believed it, and as a result we had a lot of evil >>.
Enamoto began his training in China by shooting prisoners. He and his comrades would tie Chinese to the poles, and then use them to target practice.
<>. The emotional state of him while shooting these helpless human beings was simple: << I felt as if I was only killing animals, like pigs. And when the team leader asked who liked to go first, I always raised my hand. And I thought this was the way for the Japanese Imperial Army to do things. I was just totally convinced >>. Enamoto was an ambitious young man and when he learned of the Japanese conquering Manchuria, he enlisted and was keen to please . No matter what the task was, he wanted to be the “first in everything”. Even after he was appointed non-commissioned officer and military instructor his way of thinking did not change at all:
<< Once, while I was training my students, I entered the house of a Chinese farmer and I cut him with a knife from the chest to the stomach. I tore that farmer to pieces and showed the young soldiers that the Chinese were beasts and that they had to do similar things >>.
Enamoto as well as many Japanese soldiers systematically raped Chinese women:
<< We went to Chinese villages as part of the operations, singly or together, and then if we saw any women, we raped them >>. Women also became objects of heinous sadism. Enamoto once chose not to rape a woman but, after having doused her with gasoline, he set her on fire by burning her alive.
The “operations” of the Japanese in China were the infamous “Sanko” pacification actions -The policy of the three all (Chinese: Sānguāng Zhèng cè, Japanese: Sankō Sakusen) was a Japanese scorched earth policy adopted in China during the second world war, the three “everything” were “kill all, burn all, loot all” (Japanese: 殺し尽くし・焼き尽くし・奪い尽くす, Hepburn: koroshi tsukushi-yaki tsukushi-ubai tsukusu, Chinese: 殺光、燒光、搶光 ). This policy was planned in retaliation against the Chinese for the Communist-led Hundred Regiment Offensive in December 1940. Contemporary Japanese documents referred to the policy as “The Burn to Ash Strategy” (Scorched Earth, Jinmetsu Sakusen) -.
Hajime Kondo took part in the Sanko actions and painted an astonishing picture of the mentality of the Japanese soldiers who fought in this brutal struggle :
“We had the feeling that in the enemy district we could do anything. We weren’t told officially we could do anything, but we learned it from our senior colleagues. Basically it was all connected to the emperor system. We were brought up to kill Communists and everyone in this province was Communist, so these people should have been killed for the emperor. This was the thinking of ordinary soldiers >>.
This attitude “of killing all Communists” was reminiscent of the behavior of German soldiers in the war against the Soviet Union.
Hitler had declared that Germany’s war in the East must be of a “different kind” from that fought in the West.
It was to be a war of extermination against subhumans. And the comparisons do not end there: for all those who have heard German veterans speak about their attacks on Russian villages suspected of hiding “partisans”, Masayo Enamoto’s testimony sounds tremendously familiar: << when one entered a village, first what was stealing all valuables. Then people were killed, then the village was set on fire and everything burned >>.
As previously written, all women were also raped but unlike the German allies (who raped Russian women even if in explicit violation of racial laws), the Japanese did so on a far greater scale and without such racial scruples.
After the war, Enamoto was one of the few Japanese soldiers who held into account for their actions. He was imprisoned first by the Russians, then by the Chinese.
He was tried with other soldiers but, surprisingly, the Chinese did not execute confessed murderers and rapists like him.
Instead, in the late 1950s, they were allowed to return to Japan.
When he was asked, during the interview, if he felt a sense of guilt, his response was shocking: << I didn’t feel any sense of guilt then. Why didn’t he have any guilt then? Because I am fighting for the emperor. He was a god. In the name of the emperor we could do whatever we wanted against the Chinese. Therefore I had no sense of guilt >>.
Sources:
John Dower, War without mercy, pp 3-15
Ian W. Toll, Pacific Crucible. War at sea in the Pacific, 1941-1942, pp 95-96.
Laurence Rees, Horror in the East, pp 27, 35-36, 50-53.
Pic: Hajime Kando, right, takes time from the war in China where he committed rape and murder.
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