BRUTALITY AND LABOR IN CHINA DURING THE JAPANESE OCCUPATION

BRUTALITY AND LABOR IN CHINA DURING THE JAPANESE OCCUPATION

Japanese used dead Chinese for bayonet practice

The Japanese were brutal colonizers. Japanese soldiers expected civilians in occupied territories to bow respectfully in their presence. When civilians neglected to do this they were viciously slapped. Chinese men who showed up late for meetings were beaten with sticks. Chinese women were kidnaped and turned into “comfort women”---prostitutes who serviced Japanese soldiers.

Japanese soldiers reportedly bound the legs of women in labor so they and their children died in horrible pain. One woman had her breast cut off and others were burned with cigarettes and tortured with electric shock, often for refusing to have sex with Japanese soldiers. The Kempeitai, the Japanese secret police, were notorious for their brutality. Japanese brutality encouraged local people to launch resistance movements.

The Japanese forced Chinese to work for them as laborers and cooks. But they generally were paid and as a rule not beaten. By contrast, many workers were dragooned by the Chinese Nationalists and forced to work as laborers under backbreaking conditions, often for no pay. Some 40,000 Chinese were sent to Japan to work as slave laborers. One Chinese man escaped from a Hokkaido coal mine and survived in the mountains for 13 years before he was discovered and repatriated to China.

In occupied China, members of the imperial army’s Unit 731 experimented on thousands of live Chinese and Russian POWs and civilians as part of Japan’s chemical and biological weapons program. Some were deliberately infected with deadly pathogens and then butchered by surgeons without anaesthetic.