War Crimes In Japan Occupied Indonesia

Shortly after Pearl Harbor, the Japanese Imperial Army invaded the Dutch East Indies, now known as Indonesia. A deceitful campaign promoting Asian brotherhood recruited and coerced young Indonesian men to support the Japanese occupation with the sinister outcome that several million of them were worked to death or summarily killed as expendable slave laborers, or romusha, as they were called. While many romusha disappeared from the record, nine hundred were known victims of a brutal and immoral medical experiment perpetuated by an increasingly desperate Imperial Japan. In anticipation of a land assault, the Japanese needed a means to protect their troops from tetanus, and they used these nine hundred men as human guinea pigs to test an insufficiently vetted vaccine. Within days, all nine hundred suffered the protracted, agonizing death of acute tetanus. With the Allied forces poised for victory, the Japanese needed a scapegoat for this well-documented incident if they were to avoid war-crimes prosecution. They brutally tortured Achmad Mochtar, a native Indonesian and renowned scientist, along with his colleagues at the Eijkman Institute in Batavia (now Jakarta), until Mochtar signed a confession to the murders in exchange for the liberty of his fellow scientists. The Japanese beheaded Mochtar weeks before the war ended. War Crimes in Japan-Occupied Indonesia unravels the deceit of the Japanese Army, the reasons for the mass murder of the romusha, and Mochtar's heroic role in these tragic events. The end result finds justice for Mochtar and reveals the true extent of one of the least recognized war crimes of World War II.

This collection of memoirs by the Japanese military police (the Kenpeitai) of World War II is often infuriating and frustrating (these disciplined and fanatical former officers freely terrorized and repressed the native populations of Southeast Asia for such crimes as Marxism, Islam, and nationalism). Yet they are documents of great historical significance. The men are self-deceiving and self-glorifying rather than apologetic or self-critical, but the reader is allowed a rare glimpse of what a mind or mind-set justifies to itself during a state of war. These memoirs (only certain Indonesian sections are published here) clarify obscure motives and historical moments of the events during the Pacific War and the Japanese occupation.

"War Crimes: Japans' World War II Atrocities" demands a prominent place in military history. Mr. Thurman and his daughter, Christine Sherman, bring to life the atrocities which the tribunal was formed to prosecute. War crimes remain a part of world history, and the world should know about them.

Shortly after Pearl Harbor, the Japanese Imperial Army invaded the Dutch East Indies, now known as Indonesia. A deceitful campaign promoting Asian brotherhood recruited and coerced young Indonesian men to support the Japanese occupation with the sinister outcome that several million of them were worked to death or summarily killed as expendable slave laborers, or romusha, as they were called. While many romusha disappeared from the record, nine hundred were known victims of a brutal and immoral medical experiment perpetuated by an increasingly desperate Imperial Japan. In anticipation of a land assault, the Japanese needed a means to protect their troops from tetanus, and they used these nine hundred men as human guinea pigs to test an insufficiently vetted vaccine. Within days, all nine hundred suffered the protracted, agonizing death of acute tetanus. With the Allied forces poised for victory, the Japanese needed a scapegoat for this well-documented incident if they were to avoid war-crimes prosecution. They brutally tortured Achmad Mochtar, a native Indonesian and renowned scientist, along with his colleagues at the Eijkman Institute in Batavia (now Jakarta), until Mochtar signed a confession to the murders in exchange for the liberty of his fellow scientists. The Japanese beheaded Mochtar weeks before the war ended. War Crimes in Japan-Occupied Indonesia unravels the deceit of the Japanese Army, the reasons for the mass murder of the romusha, and Mochtar’s heroic role in these tragic events. The end result finds justice for Mochtar and reveals the true extent of one of the least recognized war crimes of World War II.

The question of national responsibility for crimes against humanity became an urgent topic due to the charge of ethnic cleansing against the previous Yugoslav government. But that was not the first such urging of legal and moral responsibility for war crimes. While the Nazi German regime has been prototypical, the actions of the Japanese military regime have been receiving increasing prominence and attention. Indeed, Peter Li's volume examines the phenomenon of denial as well as the deeds of destruction. Certainly one of the most troublesome unresolved problems facing many Asian and Western countries after the Asia Pacific war (1931u1945) is the question of the atrocities committed by the Japanese Imperial Army throughout Asia and the Japanese government's repeated attempts to whitewash their wartime responsibilities. The psychological and physical wounds suffered by victims, their families, and relations remain unhealed after more than half a century, and the issue is now pressing. This collection undertakes the critical task of addressing some of the multifaceted and complex issues of Japanese war crimes and redress. This collection is divided into five themes. In "It's Never Too Late to Seek Justice," the issues of reconciliation, accountability, and Emperor Hirohito's responsibility for war crimes are explored. "The American POW Experience Remembered" includes a moving account of the Bataan Death March by an American ex-soldier. "Psychological Responses" discusses the socio-psychological affects of the Nanjing Massacre and Japanese vivisection on Chinese subjects. The way in which Japanese war atrocities have been dealt with in the theater and cinema is the focus of "Artistic Responses." And central to "History Must not Forget" are the questions of memory, trauma, biological warfare, and redress. Included in this volume are samples of the many presentations given at the International Citizens' Forum on War Crimes and Redress held in Tokyo in Decem

Japanese war crimes committed in Asia and the Pacific between 1931 and 1945 concerned few Americans in the decades following World War II. Japan’s crimes against Asian peoples had never been a major issue in the postwar United States, and—with the notable exceptions of former U.S. prisoners of war held by the Japanese—even remembrance of Japanese wartime atrocities against Americans dimmed as years passed. American attitudes about Japanese war crimes changed markedly following the 1997 publication of Iris Chang’s The Rape of Nanking.2 Chang’s moving testament to the Chinese victims of the sack of Nanjing in 1937 graphically detailed the horror and scope of the crime and indicted the Japanese government and people for their collective amnesia about the wartime army’s atrocious conduct. The bestselling book spurred a tremendous amount of renewed interest in Japanese wartime conduct in China, Korea, the Philippines, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific. The Rape of Nanking raised many issues that demanded further explanation. Why were the Japanese not punished as severely as the Nazis for their crimes? Did the United States suppress evidence of the criminal responsibility of activity by the emperor to ensure a smoothly running occupation of Japan? Did the U.S. government protect Japanese medical officers in exchange for data on human experimentation? Chang also charged the U.S. government with “inexplicably and irresponsibly” returning confiscated wartime records to Japan before microfilming them, making it impossible to determine the extent of Japan’s guilt.3 Others were convinced that the U.S. government retained highly classified documents that would prove Japanese guilt beyond doubt and implicate the highest levels of Japanese government and society in the crimes. These issues led concerned parties to investigate Japanese wartime records among the holdings at the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in College Park, Maryland, and at other U.S. government agencies. Thorough documentation of Japanese war crimes and criminal activities among these holdings seemed unavailable, leading to speculation of an official cover-up. Suspicions that the U.S. government was deliberately concealing dark secrets were fueled when, instead of finding the records they sought, researchers encountered a card stating the records had been “withdrawn for security reasons,” as well as when they received a notice that requested information could not be located.

'[Reveals] the full horror of a warped version of Bushido. It is not a pleasant read, but a necessary one.' Russ Lockwood, Magweb 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 his view, much if not all of the horror that plagued East Timor in 1999 and in the 24 preceding years could have been avoided had countries like Australia, Japan, the United Kingdom, and especially the United States, not provided Indonesia with valuable political, economic, and military assistance, as well as diplomatic cover.

From 1946 to 1949, the Dutch prosecuted more than 1000 Japanese soldiers and civilians for war crimes committed during the occupation of the Netherlands East Indies during World War II. They also prosecuted a small number of Dutch citizens for collaborating with their Japanese occupiers. The war crimes committed by the Japanese against military personnel and civilians in the East Indies were horrific, and included mass murder, murder, torture, mistreatment of prisoners of war, and enforced prostitution. Beginning in 1946, the Dutch convened military tribunals in various locations in the East Indies to hear the evidence of these atrocities and imposed sentences ranging from months and years to death; some 25 percent of those convicted were executed for their crimes. The difficulty arising out of gathering evidence and conducting the trials was exacerbated by the on-going guerrilla war between Dutch authorities and Indonesian revolutionaries and in fact the trials ended abruptly in 1949 when 300 years of Dutch colonial rule ended and Indonesia gained its independence. Until the author began examining and analysing the records of trial from these cases, no English language scholar had published a comprehensive study of these war crimes trials. While the author looks at the war crimes prosecutions of the Japanese in detail this book also breaks new ground in exploring the prosecutions of Dutch citizens alleged to have collaborated with their Japanese occupiers. Anyone with a general interest in World War II and the war in the Pacific, or a specific interest in war crimes and international law, will be interested in this book.

Approximately three million Japanese died in a conflict that raged for years over much of the globe, from Hawaii to India, Alaska to Australia, causing death and suffering to untold millions in China, southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands, as well as pain and anguish to families of soldiers and civilians around the world. Yet how much do we know of Japan's war?In a sweeping panorama, Haruko Taya and Theodore Cook take us from the Japanese attacks on China in the 1930s to the Japanese home front during the devastating raids on Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, offering the first glimpses of how this violent conflict affected the lives of ordinary Japanese people.'Oral History of a compellingly high order.' Kirkus Reviews'This book seeks out the true feelings of the wartime generation [and] illuminates the contradictions between official views of the war and living testimony.' Yomiuri Shimbun