Japanese War Crimes

The war crimes trials at Nuremberg and Tokyo meted out the Allies' official justice; Lord Russell of Liverpool's sensational bestselling books on the Axis' war crimes decided the public's opinion. The Knights of Bushido, Russell's shocking account of Japanese brutality in the Pacific in World War II, describes how the noble founding principles of the Empire of Japan were perverted by the military into a systematic campaign of torture, murder, starvation, rape, and destruction. Notorious incidents like the Nanking Massacre and the Bataan Death March emerge as merely part of a pattern of human rights abuses. Undoubtedly formidable soldiers, the Japanese were terrible conquerors. Their conduct in the Pacific is a harrowing example of the doctrine of mutual destruction carried to the extreme, and begs the question of what is acceptable—and unacceptable—in total war.

In December 1937, in the capital of China, one of the most brutal massacres in the long annals of wartime barbarity occurred. The Japanese army swept into the ancient city of Nanking and within weeks not only looted and burned the defenseless city but systematically raped, tortured and murdered more than 300,000 Chinese civilians. Amazingly, the story of this atrocity- one of the worst in world history- continues to be denied by the Japanese government.

In the wake of World War II, the Allied forces charged 28 Japanese men with crimes against humanity. Correspondents at the Tokyo trial thought the evidence fell most heavily on 10 of the accused. In December 1948, five of these defendants were hanged, while four received sentences of life in prison. The tenth was a brilliant philosopher-patriot named Okawa Shumei. His story proved strangest of all. Among all the political and military leaders on trial, Okawa was the lone civilian.

In December 1937, the Chinese capital, Nanjing, falls and the Japanese army unleash an orgy of torture, murder, and rape. Over the course of six weeks, hundreds of thousands of civilians and prisoners of war are killed. At the very onset of the atrocities, the Danish supervisor at a cement plant just outside the city, 26-year-old Bernhard Arp Sindberg, opens the factory gates and welcomes in 10,000 Chinese civilians to safety. He becomes an Asian equivalent of Oskar Schindler, the savior of Jews in the Holocaust.

1937年，日本軍は中国での戦線を拡大し，戦争の泥沼に突き進んだ．その一大汚点としての南京事件．殺戮・略奪・強姦の蛮行はいかなるプロセスで生じ，推移し，どんな結果を招いたのか．

一九九一年の金学順さんの告発に衝撃をうけた著者は関係文書を丹念に収集分析し，九五年刊行の『従軍慰安婦』で「慰安婦制度」の主体が軍であったことを明らかにした．しかし「軍慰安婦」たちの苦難を否定する声は今も後を絶たない．

敗戦直後，GHQ占領下に開所したスガモプリズン．外の世界が大きく移り変わるなか，戦犯たちは獄中で何を思い，何を見つめていたのか．戦争裁判の実態，刑務所管理の構造，戦犯の自治や言論活動，そして朝鮮人・台湾人戦犯の問題．