Random Horrific Japanese Crimes In WWII That History Forgot (20 items)

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  (#15) Operation Sook Ching

  After seizing control of Singapore in February 1942, the Japanese decided to root out any Chinese in the city who might oppose Japanese rule, including military personnel, leftists, communists, and those with weapons. So began Operation Sook Ching, which is Chinese for “purge through cleansing.” In Japanese, the name was Operation Dai Kensho, or “great inspection.” The operation resulted in multiple massacres, typically by machine gun, of groups of ethnically Chinese men.

  The official Japanese number for the operation was 5,000 casualties, although according to a Japanese reporter in Singapore in 1942, the number was around 50,000. 
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  (#5) A Contest To Slay 100 People With A Saber

  On the way to Nanking, two Japanese army officers entered into a friendly competition with one another: Who would be the first to slay 100 people with a saber during the conflict? The bloodshed began on the road, as the Japanese army advanced to Nanking, and continued through the destruction of the city.

  The contest was covered by a Japanese newspaper - here's a translation of one particularly chilling paragraph: "Noda: 'Hey, I got 105. What about you?' Mukai: 'I got 106!' ...Both men laughed. Because they didn’t know who had reached 100 kills first, in the end someone said, 'Well then, since it’s a drawn game, what if we start again, this time going for 150 kills?'"
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  (#10) The Massacre Of Enemy Airmen

  The Japanese took little mercy on captured airmen from Allied bomber planes. 

  One particularly tragic incident saw frenzied Japanese soldiers beheading Allied airmen the day Japan surrendered, and after they had heard the emperor announce Japan's surrender.
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  (#6) Bataan Death March

  • Event

  The atrocities in Baatan, Phillipines, began in 1942, when the region was surrendered to Japan. The Japanese, unprepared for the huge number of POWs, ordered all 75,000 of them to march through the jungle, a march that became known as the Bataan Death March.

  Japanese soldiers, who saw surrender as a sign of weakness, beat the captives ceaselessly. Some fell behind due to lack of water, the heat of the jungle, or exhaustion. The stragglers were beheaded or simply left to perish. An estimated 2,500 Filipinos and 500 Americans perished on the march. About 26,000 more Filipinos succumbed to disease or starvation in the prison camp.

   
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  (#4) Unit 731

  Unit 731 was a top-secret Japanese military unit responsible for medical and chemical weapons research that defies belief. Among other things, the unit field-tested so-called “plague bombs” by dropping disease-infected devices over cities to see whether they would cause outbreaks. They did, and as many as 3,000 Chinese civilians (if not more) perished from these diseases.

  At Japan's notorious base in Pingfang, China, doctors put people in pressure chambers to see how much pressure the human body could withstand before exploding. They also infected civilians with diseases and then dissected them to examine the effects of the disease. Other atrocities include leaving POWs outside to freeze until they perished in order to investigate potential cures for frostbite, and amputating subjects' limbs to learn about blood loss.
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  (#2) Comfort Women

  Over the course of the Sino-Japanese conflict and WWII, the Japanese army forced as many as 200,000 women into prostitution. Called “comfort women," these predominantly Korean women were sent throughout East Asia to work in brothels catering to the Japanese military. The brothels operated long hours and women were rarely granted time off, meaning they endured forced relations repeatedly every day for years.

  In 2015, the prime minister of Japan officially apologized for the practice and agreed to pay a sum of 1 billion yen, or about $9 million, to the 46 surviving comfort women.

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