Nanking Massacre

Soldiers being soldiers.

One of the things to consider is that the Imperial Japanese military, particularly in the Chinese theater, were generally stretched very thin, and many groups often fell out of communication and supply for extended periods of time where they were for the most part, left on their own. Battered, fatigued, heavily armed soldiers left to their own devices in a chaotic warzone with no supervision and expecting little opposition often lead to human tragedies, as history tells us time and time again.

Many of the war crimes committed by Japanese forces were often against standing official orders. Even punishments, up to and including execution of perpetrators of various war crimes, including rape, arson, and murder, did not always rein in the troops.

There are various reasons for this but a combination of being unable to consistently maintain and reinforce chain of command, discipline in the ranks, and little recourse for the victims meant that war criminals generally had a free hand to act.

Their long, brutal campaign against an opponent that they had long standing ethnic tensions with only added fuel to the fire. Many Japanese soldiers had been fighting a long, exhausting, and bloody campaign against a tenacious enemy they had expected to defeat quickly and easily. They regularly faced partisans/resistance fighters that would hide among the civilian populace, using guerrilla attacks and civilians themselves occasionally taking up arms spontaneously. And the Chinese populace in general were extremely uncooperative and did not often have pleasant interactions with Japanese military forces.

Combined with a lack of supervision and lack of consequence for crimes, this ended up becoming an environment where Japanese soldiers often felt justified committing horrific acts upon both prisoners of war as well as civilians under the guise of 'pacifying' rebels or guerrilla fighters hiding among the populace, which was generally inhospitable to the invaders.

>Why did the Japanese carry out the Nanking Massacre?

They felt like it.

Does one need a reason to rape?

This. It's communist propaganda.

Essentially, whereas the German atrocities were more often than not carried out in a top-down function: namely, the government was fully complicit in the atrocities (Eimsatzgruppen etc), the Japanese atrocities were more often than not carried out as a result of a lack of government control over its troops and disorganization.

In 1931, during the Mukden incident, a Japanese colonel essentially unilaterally invaded Manchuria from Korea without orders from the government, and was promoted for his audacity despite his expectation that he would be executed. This revived the ancient Japanese idea of "gekokujo," literally meaning "the weak over the strong." The idea was that local "daimyo," or lords, could overthrow or overrule those who were supposedly superior to them, such as the shogun. This idea was revived, as many lower officers in the Japanese military envisioned themselves following in the colonel's (now general) footsteps. As a result, often times senior officers would have little idea what was happening on the ground, or if they did they were either unable or unwilling to do anything about it.

For instance, during the Bataan Death March, General Honma had a plan to feed and move American prisoners from the Bataan peninsula to camps. But he had arrangements for only 25,000 prisoners, not the 100,000 that actually surrendered. Japanese logistics here were overwhelmed, and the soldiers guarding the prisoners essentially were left to their own devices to move them from point A to point B. Japanese military discipline was notably savage, with officers and NCOs physically abusing their underlings on down to the general enlisted. Many of these troops took out their frustration by beating and killing the prisoners. Honma, who was forced to retire by the high command for being too friendly with the Filipinos and concerned with preserving the lives of his troops, claimed he was busy laying siege to Corregidor rather than overseeing the march.

I literally don't understand how Japs can deny Nanking when the primary sources we have for it happening are from the soldiers who took part in it.

In another instance, another Class A war criminal, General Yamashita, had difficulties managing the conclusion of operations in British Malaya after the capture of Singapore. He turned a bit of a blind eye to the Sook Ching massacres of Singaporean ethnic Chinese, although he did notably intervene after some Japanese troops broke into one of the hospitals and killed some patients (by having the offender executed and going to the hospital to apologize). He too was tried and convicted of not controlling his troops and preventing massacres, in what has become known as the Yamashita standard of command responsibility.

Worst of all was the China theater, which was additionally fueled by ethnic animosity between the Chinese and the Japanese, In the infamous Rape of Nanking, the general in charge of the South China Area army, Iwane Matsui, was fully aware of "abominable actions" happening in Nanking under his watch, and publicly denounced atrocities in a speech he made during the massacre. But he did not or was not able to rein in his troops, However, Iris Chang contends that he was used as a fall guy for Crown Prince Asaka, who was also in charge of troops during the massacre.

Nor was this solely relegated to the army. While you had several notable instances of humanity, such as the Japanese destroyer Ikazuchi picking up over 400 survivors of Allied ships (for comparison, the ship itself held little over 200 crew), you also had instances like the Japanese submarine I-8 forcing survivors to walk the plank and proceeding to machinegun them in the water. These totally polar moments suggest that the IJN too suffered from incredibly poor command-control and that officers on the ground more or less had the final call of who lived and who died.

Sources:

Dower, Embracing Defeat

Chang, the Rape of Nanking

Records of the International Military Tribunal of the Far East

Mason, a History of Japan

That's actually a really good explanation, user, thank you. Any ideas why the japanese were so brutal with american troops in the pacific?

Not him but they just assumed we'd do the same to them so it's all fair

I remember something about how Japanese civilians committed suicide en masse after the Americans took over Okinawa. There was a sentiment, fostered and abetted by propaganda, that the Americans were going to brutalize them.

There are any number of factors that would go into that, from being drilled the pseudo bushido values that surrender is dishonourable and disgusting, to believing the Americans would do the same, to the systematic brutal treatment of the soldiers by their own superior officers and having nobody to take out their anger and frustration on besides PoWs and civilians (Japanese seemed to believe that half-starving and brutalising their own troops would make them Spartans, instead it just created malnourished chimps)

>malnourished chimps
kek

Something that's worth mentioning too is that this loss of control over the Japanese army was not just on the lower levels, it went all the way to the top, the government of Japan itself could not control its military and had become a puppet of the generals. The concept of "gekokujou" was pervasive throughout the military command structure, based on a twisted interpretation of Warring States samurai warrior values that taught that disobeying your leaders if your disobedience would lead to greater success or glory.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gekokujō

Thanks to this the you have privates disobeying squad leaders, sergeants disobeying lieutenants, captains disobeying generals, and generals disobeying government officials, all in the name of greater glory. The war in the Pacific was basically caused because the IJA and IJN were basically making decisions on how to lead the nation and would often ignore direct orders from the civilian government, or even have politicians assassinated. The decision between invading Siberia versus invading Southeast Asia was made as the result of a pissing match between the Army and the Navy, in which the Army got their asses kicked by the USSR.

>suffered from incredibly poor command-control and that officers on the ground more or less had the final call of who lived and who died.
That definitely seems to be the case. It's generally pretty alarming how little control the Japanese government had over events on the ground. Everything I've seen seems to show that their involvement in mainland Asia was continually escalating incidents sparked by local commanders that would go out of their way to ensure that they'd get themselves in too deep to make it so the government couldn't just order them to back down. The only time the IJA was really reigned in was after Khalkhin Gol, and all that happened then was the IJA shifted its attention south to Indochina.

Posts like these are the only reason this board has value

DO IT AGAIN PRINCE CHICHIBU

You should not be using Iris Chang as a source considering she was a racist lunatic who likely distorted a lot of shit because she really, really hated the Japanese and saw them as being evil down to the genetic level and that evil was basically hardwired into the Japanese psyche.

>t. Minamoto Kawasaki-kun

Japan or I should say the Japanese are what I would call them polite niggers. Sure these zipperheads may be nice and polite but deep down they are like monkeys ready to pounce ready to Chimp out at any moment. Hence I say they are polite niggers.

They pretty much told the Okinawans the American's would brutalize them due to the heavy losses they took due to Okinawa's defenses along with general propaganda. The typhoon of steel smashing half the island wasn't doing anything for their image either.
A lot of Okinawan's hid in the limestone cave systems or just threw themselves and their kids off of cliffs when they saw the Americans coming.
Ironically enough, one of the reasons a good number survived and were talked out of suicide is that the Japanese American's from the camps and Hawaii of all places were used as translators to get people to come out and not suicide. One of the translators even found his own brother who'd been living there during an interrogation session.

>take over city in brutal slog that leaves said city a smoking, stalingrad style ruin, everything destroyed
>leave all the soldiers there with nothing but the surviving women and children in a giant pile of rubble with nothing to do all day, for months.
shit I wonder what will happen

Yeah. The Marco Polo bridge was a prime example of this. The government in Tokyo wanted to not get involved into China because they though it would be (correctly) a shit show.

However, the local generals at the time let their troops get provoked (or stage the attack) so they could go into China. Even after those same generals thought they should go all out and just retain what they go, the situation kept getting escalated until there was 3 million Japanese troops in China bogged down in a war of attrition.

She's been called out by plenty of historians for distorting shit (I don't think anyone would consider David Kennedy some kind of Nanking revisionist or something) and tried to say that a Japanese historian who's hated by the ultranationalist right was a member of the ultranationalist right.

And she was nuts. Like she seriously believed that her Nanking work came about because of the CIA recruiting her and now dark forces were conspiring to take her down so she killed herself.

Nanking massacre never happened !