The way Hiroshima reminded no one of the monstrous crimes of WW2 in Japan - Personal Opinion

The way Hiroshima reminded no one of the monstrous crimes of WW2 in Japan.

When one inquires people today about Japan during WW2, the first thing that they will say is that it was so awful that US was subjecting Japan to two atomic bombs and causing so much pain to that country. But what is nearly completely left out of the general historical consciousness and is seldom brought up by the media was that prior to and during WW2, the Imperial Japan was a tyrannical, bloodthirsty, genocidal nation, bent on expansion, killing, looting and raping any and everything they could get their hands on in the name of their beloved and divine leader, Emperor Hirohito. Between 1937 and its capitulation Japan and its emperor had caused the death of a maximum of 20,000,000 estimated people and most of them were Chinese. Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Malaysia, Philippines, Indonesia, Singapore, Burma, East Timor and China were also attacked and occupied by Japan.

The Japanese terror and madness, involving inhuman and atrocious events against the locals, resembled the Nazi Germany in Europe. The Japanese racially and cultural discriminated the Chinese as the historical enemies, in a similar manner as the Germans did with Jews, Slavs and other groups of people. The Chinese were subhuman to the Japanese hence you could do anything you needed to them, and the Japanese did. To illustrate this, in 1937 Japanese imperialists had invaded Nanjing, the capital of Chinese republic and began a spurt of six weeks of destruction, massacres and rapes of the local Chinese population. There was an instance where the Japanese had competitions among themselves which pitted them against each other, which one could decapitate the most Chinese civilians, or could rape the most Chinese women, etc. With Japanese killing up to 300,000 individuals, raping up to 80,000 women, and leaving Nanking in heaps of rubble, it was all in the name of their beloved emperor Hirohito. The number of people killed at Nanjing alone was greater than the total number of people killed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki together, yet how many people are aware of Nanjing nowadays who have been aware of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

Toshiaki Mukai and Tsuyoshi Noda are two Japanese officers who challenge each other on who would be able to kill (with a sword) one hundred Chinese people first. The headline is bold, and it states, "Incredible Record" (in the Contest to Decapitate 100 People) Mukai 106 -105 Noda, Both 2nd Lieutenants Go Into Extra Innings.

The Japanese even engaged in rape on large scale where their army was engaged in their occupation. It is approximated that the Japanese army used hundreds of thousands of comfort women or forced sex slaves all throughout their empire and military bases. These women would be raped every day, and even tens of times a day. Many of the women were literally raped to death at the hands of the Japanese soldiers and officials. The Japanese also made gruesome medical experiments on thousands of innocent individuals who were women and children or prisoners of war by the notorious unit 731 of the Japanese army. And what appears to be unbelievable but has been widely recorded is the fact that the Japanese army engaged in cannibalism on mass scale and consumed their POW. Indeed, his US bomber narrowly escaped being devoured by the Japanese after landing near one of their posts when former US president, George Bush senior almost met his death. His crew were not so lucky. Their Japanese captors took them into their camps and slaughtered them, then cooking the human flesh to the officers as dinner, removing the livers and thigh muscles of the humans with the use of surgeons.

The unit 731 members holding one of their test subjects.

The vast majority of this suffering, death and destruction the Japanese people caused has been nuked off of popular memory, and is now only recalled by historians, history buffs and those people that have lived in the Asian and south east Asian countries that Japan occupied during the WW 2. The atrocities committed by the Germans during the WW2 are well known to everyone today. Even the majority of people are aware of the Russian atrocities during the WW2. But, when you mention to anyone about the Japanese war crimes committed during the WW2, which were no better than the German/Russian, you will just hear that something happened to Hiroshima was awful. To bring this out of context, consider this; had the people in the present day celebrated as the allied bombing of Dresden, in Germany in 1945, but had known absolutely nothing about the war crimes perpetrated by the Nazis during WW2, they would have treated Germany and the German people as the victims of WW2.

To put it straight, bombing a city with a nuclear bomb, and killing all civilians, regardless of whether they are guilty or not, is a war crime. But it was that war crime that Japan used to cleanse and delete its own plethora of war crimes, the unimaginable suffering it caused to China, Korea and virtually all the South East Asian nations and the unimaginable millions of people it killed out of the stage of history and historical memory.

Bibliography - 

Herbert P. Bix, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan. Theodore Harold White, In Search of History. Duncan Anderson, Nuclear Power, The End of the War Against Japan. Robert Harvey, The Undefeated: Rise, Fall and Rise of Modern Japan.

.