If I asked you to name as many movies and video games as you can where Nazis are the
bad guys, you could probably come up with at least a dozen before you even had to take
a breath.
But if I were to ask you to do the same for Japan, you'd probably struggle.
Aside from the greatest movie ever made and maybe one of the Call of Duties, they really
aren't portrayed as evil in our popular media.
There actually is one Call of Duty, but if you're not a die hard fan I bet you can't
even name it.
This is despite the fact that they killed just as many people as the Nazis during World
War 2.
Why is that?
As with most stories about World War 2, we need to go back several decades to get the
full picture.
We're going to start the clock in 1868 with the Meiji Restoration, when the Emperor of
Japan became the supreme leader of the government.
Before that, it flip-flopped between the Shogun and the Emperor – who am I kidding, we've
all seen bill wurtz's video, and if you haven't you should, because I'm going
to reference it several times.
In 1890 the Meiji Constitution was adopted, which set up a western-style government, with
a parliament, a prime minister, and a monarch – very similar to what Great Britain has
today.
For several decades prior to this, Japan was a closed-off, isolated country.
But now they wanted to burst onto the world stage, quite literally with a bang.
China had always been the dominant power in Asia and since Japan borrowed so much of their
language and culture from China, they kind of felt like a little brother.
China is to Japan what Great Britain was to the United States.
And like a younger brother, when they matured a bit, they decided to test their strength
against the elder, which resulted in the First Sino-Japanese war in 1894.
To sum it up into a single sentence, this war was over who would control Korea and Japan
won.
They had beaten their older brother in their first real fight.
However, Japan also captured the Liaodong Peninsula, just north of Korea.
It previously belonged to China, who was leasing Port Arthur to Russia.
Now that the Japanese controlled it, they offered to extend the lease with Russia if
Russia recognized Korea as belonging to Japan.
Russia refused, wanting to exert its own influence on Korea.
So in 1904, the Russo-Japanese War started when Japan surprise attacked the Russian navy
in Port Arthur.
This is apparently a recurring strategy for Japan.
Long story short, Japan won, which was a pretty big deal.
This was the first time an Asian power had defeated a European power since the Mongols.
Ten years later, World War 1 began and I'm not entirely sure it should be called a World
War since it was almost entirely fought in Europe.
German-held territories in the Pacific, of which there were many, all fell to the Allied
forces in the first six months or so.
The rest of the war would go on for another four years.
Japan was one of those Allied forces, having captured several islands and ports from the
Germans.
So when it came time to negotiate the Treaty of Versailles, they got to sit at the table
with everyone else.
Can you ever find him?
There he is.
Yeah, Japan didn't take too kindly to being relegated to the end of the table and basically
forgotten, because, you know – Japan is all about the respect.
They had just beaten China, and Russia, and now Germany.
They felt like they should be treated with the same respect as all of the other world
powers.
And much like a younger brother with a chip on their shoulder, when they felt disrespected
by their allies, they stomped off to their room and plotted their revenge.
Japan's role in World War 1 was fairly minimal.
There was some action in the first few months, but then they mostly played a support role.
Their manufacturing and military industries took off during the war, because they were
one of the only allied nations not digging trenches in their backyard.
So the economy was booming and the population soared.
But then the war ended and people stopped buying Japanese goods… and then the Great
Depression hit, and people stopped buying Japanese goods even harder?
Japan had convinced itself that it was the target of a global conspiracy to crash its
economy.
Things were going great during the war and now that the world was at peace, things were
making a turn for the worst – which is the opposite of what you'd expect.
So nationalism began to take hold, much like it did in European countries at the time.
Why is the economy bad?
Because of terrible trade deals, a global conspiracy against us, and a lack of the respect
that we deserve.
This should sound familiar, but draw whatever parallels you like.
Japanese schools began pushing conformity, obedience, and ultra patriotism.
Many school teachers were former soldiers and ran their classrooms like boot camp.
There were even a few teachers who killed themselves out of shame for messing up words
to patriotic songs.
Again, draw whatever parallels you like.
But perhaps worst of all, was the indoctrination of the idea of Japanese racial superiority.
The Nazis recognized the Japanese as the Asian master race – which is why they entered
into an alliance with them.
The Japanese still saw the Chinese as somewhat of an older brother, but Koreans… were the
red-headed stepchild.
Now Japan had a new problem.
In order to feed their expanding population, they would need more land and I wish this
was a joke… but they actually called it manifest destiny and invaded China in 1931.
Except it wasn't actually China, it was Manchuria, which was kinda sorta part of China…
kinda…
Maybe I can help?
Please.
You're right, Most carefully worded historical resources will call the Japanese offensive
between 1931 and 1932 the "Invasion of Manchuria" not the "Invasion of China" because "China"
was not one unified political entity at the time.
With the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1912 the country had split into numerous states
ruled by warlords called cliques, who fought both with and against each other in shifting
alliances.
The Republican Kuomintang under Chiang Kai Shek and the Socialist Chinese Communist Party
united to fight the warlords but soon started fighting each other beginning the Chinese
Civil War.
The Fengtian clique ruled most of the area we call Manchuria and it was this state the
Japanese invaded in 1931 because of the vast economic and military ties they had in the
region.
The "Invasion of China" is a name reserved for the offensive in 1937 because it was the
first time Japan had invaded territory actually controlled by the Republic of China politically.
However both invasions were done under fabricated incidents of Chinese aggression such as the
Mukden incident and the Marco Polo bridge incident respectfully, betraying Japanese
obvious military interest in crushing Chinese rule in the area.
If you'd like to learn more, check out my history of China series over at the Suibhne
channel when you're done here As he said, in 1937, the Marco Polo Bridge
Incident occurred, which was the beginning of the Second Sino-Japanese War.
And depending on who you ask, the beginning of World War 2.
There are obviously dozens, if not hundreds, of battles to talk about here – but battle
history isn't really my thing, so let's just focus on two.
The Battle of Shanghai started in August 1937.
While Japan still viewed China as an elder civilization and held them in somewhat high
regard, they expected Shanghai to fall quickly.
China was broken and fighting amongst itself – Japan was clearly superior, at least in
their minds.
But it didn't, the Chinese held out for three months until November 1937 when they
retreated to Nanking.
The Japanese pursued them for all 200 miles absolutely obliterating anyone or anything
along the way.
The city of Suzhou, which is on the road between Shanghai and Nanking, went from 350,000 people
to just 500.
Single cities in China suffered as many casualties as entire countries in Europe.
If you remember Bill Wurtz's video, here's where he talks about the Japanese advance.
And Japan invaded more and more and more and more of China and was planning to invade the
entire East.
Did you catch it?
I bet you didn't, because you probably had annotations turned off.
Here it is again, with them turned on.
And Japan invaded more and more and more and more of China.
And they did some rapes.
What a wonderfully lighthearted way to put that.
And as an annotation, which means it wasn't much more than an afterthought.
So let's talk about Nanking, which was the capital of China at the time.
Chiang Kai-shek pulled the government and air force out of the city and ordered the
skeleton crew of troops to hold Nanking at all cost.
It was pretty clear to the soldiers that he had left them for dead.
But being the capital of China, it was still a fairly important political prize for Japan,
so the Emperor appointed his uncle, Prince Asaka, to lead the charge.
This becomes incredibly important later.
The siege and battle for Nanking lasted four days in the beginning of December 1937 – remember,
Shanghai lasted 3 months.
The Chinese soldiers in the city either ran, surrendered, or tore off their military uniforms
and looted stores, homes, and sometimes random people on the street in order to steal their
clothes and hide among the civilian population.
The Japanese who entered the city had a completely different mindset.
They felt humiliated after Shanghai and were looking for revenge.
At the same time, they were absolutely disgusted by the soldiers who were surrendering.
One of the main tenets of the Japanese warrior code, or Bushido, is death before dishonor.
There is nothing more shameful than surrendering.
Among Western military powers, there was 1 surrender for every 3 dead.
Among the Japanese, there was one surrender for every 120 dead, they just didn't do
it.
This was compounded by the fact that the Chinese outnumbered the Japanese 7 to 2.
Journals from Japanese soldiers at the time wondered why are they surrendering?
Even unarmed they could overpower us.
The Chinese were cowards in the eyes of the Japanese and the only explanation they could
come up with was that they were subhuman.
Once they took the city, things only got worse.
Prince Asaka, or one of his subordinates, issued a "kill all captives" order.
The stated reason was to preserve food.
Where have we heard that one before?
All 90,000 Chinese soldiers, now prisoners of war, were killed.
Every military aged male in the city was killed.
In fact, almost everybody in the city was killed.
If I asked you to list one hundred ways to kill a person, you still wouldn't come close
to what the Japanese did.
Prisoners were used for bayonet and machine gun practice.
Officers ordered new recruits to kill unarmed prisoners in order to break them in and desensitize
them to war.
Those are just the nice ways, I hope you're not eating right now, because it's about
to get a whole lot worse.
Chinese were lined up in rows and beheaded.
They even made contests out of it, where officers would compete to see who could behead 100
Chinese the fastest.
These contests were reported in Japanese newspapers in the same way you'd read about a baseball
game.
After they were beheaded, the row behind them would push them into the mass grave that they
dug themselves… and then they were beheaded and pushed in by the row behind them.
And that's if you were lucky.
There are cases of the Chinese being forced to bury their own countrymen up to the neck
alive, and then being buried up to the neck alive themselves.
Bodies were used to fill in trenches so that tanks could drive across.
People were forced to drink kerosene and then shot so they exploded.
People were forced to walk out on the ice.
Babies were impaled on bayonets or thrown into boiling pots of water.
Yes, that is a real picture, you wouldn't have believed me otherwise – it's blurred
for obvious reasons though.
Basically every way you could possibly think of to kill a person and then some.
At least 200,000 people were killed, which was half of the population of Nanking at the
time.
This is why the event is known as the Nanking Massacre.
But it's also known, perhaps more appropriately, as the Rape of Nanking.
Do you have any notion of what happens when a city is sacked?
The Japanese raped every woman they could find.
I hope you have a strong stomach, because between 20,000 to 80,000 women were raped.
Why does that number have such a large range?
Because after women were raped by anywhere from 15 to 20 soldiers each, they were killed
and then their bodies were left in the street with bayonets stuck in them.
Again, blurred for obvious reasons, I'm not making this up.
Why were they killed?
Well, rape was explicitly forbidden in the Japanese military, but dead women tell no
tales.
Asian cultures value female chastity and purity, so many surviving women never spoke about
it or just killed themselves out of shame.
To this day, no woman will admit that their child may have been born to a Japanese soldier
and infanticide was rampant during the occupation.
And if you think that's the worst of it, you're still wrong.
At gun point, Chinese fathers were forced on their own daughters, sons on their mothers,
basically every combination that you've all looked up on pornhub.
I'm so done trying to understand millennials.
There were rape contests as well, but honestly, even I have my limits, so we're done talking
about this.
You might be thinking: How have I never heard about this, this must have been carried out
in secret or something.
No, this was front page news at the time.
There were a number of foreigners in the city, including reporters, businessmen, and ambassadors
– it was the capital of China after all.
These foreigners established the Nanking Safety Zone, a two and a half square mile area reserved
for civilians that was supposed to be safe from the Japanese military.
Many former Chinese soldiers hid in the zone and were subsequently captured, so the military
justified regularly raiding the zone.
It eventually sheltered 250,000 refugees and was maintained by two dozen foreign nationals
led by John Rabe.
The official Nazi Party representative in Nanking.
Nazi Germany was allied with Japan, so he had every reason to portray Japan in a positive
light.
But he didn't.
His letters and journals from the time tell the gruesome story of how thousands of women
were raped and thousands more were murdered.
Last night up to 1,000 women and girls are said to have been raped...
You hear nothing but rape.
If husbands or brothers intervene, they're shot.
What you hear and see on all sides is the brutality and bestiality of the Japanese soldiers.
(Dec 17, 1937) He would walk the streets and night and stop
rapes in progress – like a Nazi Batman… but his only superpower was his swastika armband.
The idea of a "good guy Nazi" is just so weird that you couldn't make it up if
you tried.
Upon his return to Germany, the Gestapo ordered him to never speak of Nanking again.
He is celebrated as the Oskar Schindler of Nanking and there are multiple memorials to
him in the city today.
This lasted for six weeks.
Reporters were barred entry to the city the entire time, and it didn't take long for
foreign governments to figure out why.
Then the stories started coming out.
There are very few media depictions of this incident, but this one, called Flowers of
War, came out in 2011 and starred Christian Bale.
They definitely put some coin into this one so it's worth giving a watch.
Had I not read about this event prior to seeing the movie, I would have thought it was an
exaggeration.
They even go through the effort to recreate several of the iconic photographs of the massacre,
including this one, which we saw earlier.
To Wurtz's credit, he does mention the Rape of Nanking in his "history of the entire
world."
Japan is finally conquering the East and they're so excited they rape Nanking way too hard.
They should probably just deny it.
We'll get to the denial later, but this event, combined with the "accidental"
sinking of the USS Panay in Nanking during the evacuation turned US opinion against Japan.
But the final straw was when Japan invaded Indochina in 1940.
The United States decided to cease all shipments of oil and other goods to Japan as well as
ban them from using the Panama Canal.
Japan's response to this was…
But then Japan spits on them in Hawaii and challenges them to war.
And they say yes.
An event he leaves out of his history of the entire world, despite how important it is
– and despite the fact that it wasn't just Pearl Harbor.
They attacked dozens of islands in the Pacific all on the same day in order to secure their
own sources of oil.
I made a video about this.
Pearl Harbor was where the US Pacific Fleet was based, so it's the one that got the
most press.
The attack was designed to stall US response long enough for Japan to fortify its other
positions.
Which worked actually… for a little while.
I'm not going to get into the specific battles of the war, but I do want to talk about the
prisoners of war.
As I said before, the Japanese rarely, if ever, surrendered – but for western militaries,
surrender is a perfectly acceptable option.
At the beginning of this video, if you were able to name any movies about Japan in World
War 2, one of them was probably the 1957 movie Bridge on the River Kwai, starring Obi-wan
Kenobi, and maybe you knew about the 2014 movie Unbroken.
Both of these movies are about the hells on Earth that were Japanese POW camps.
Of American POWs in Nazi Germany, one out of every 25 prisoners died in a camp.
Of American POWs in Japanese camps?
One in three.
They surrendered, in the eyes of the Japanese, they were dishonorable cowards and they are
enemies of Japan.
You will be treated accordingly.
The infamous Bataan Death March in 1942 was the forced relocation of 60,000 to 80,000
American and Filipino POWs over 70 miles.
It's often referred as the POW Trail of Tears, which is an apt comparison because
just as many people died.
In an act of perpetual defiance, the march is repeated annually at White Sands Missile
Range in New Mexico.
So let's end the war.
Bonus Round, United States versus Japan, fight.
Finish him.
I don't want to get into whether or not it was right to use the bombs.
But I will say that destroying cities wasn't all that new.
We'd been firebombing cities for a while at that point, this was Tokyo – again, I
made a video about this.
So if I were to tell you that this was done by a single bomb, you'd probably think I
was lying.
And rightly so, because that one's actually Tokyo, the first one was Hiroshima.
The point is that you couldn't tell the difference.
So when we told Japan "we are in possession of the most destructive explosive ever devised
by man" their response was: "Yeah, sure you are buddy."
Because we had been levelling cities for some time.
So we dropped a second one and forced an unconditional surrender without having to invade mainland
Japan.
The United States installed a new government, inspired by the United States government.
Whoa wait.
And they did some rapes?
Rapes did occur in occupied Japan.
But to use the same "whoops, and they did some rapes" tone to suggest that it was
anywhere near the same scale as Nanking is just intellectually dishonest.
It was measured in the hundreds, not the tens of thousands.
This, along with playing up the horrors of the atomic bomb, helps paint a sympathetic
picture of Japan as a victim of the war rather than an aggressor.
Along with a few other subtle narrative changes.
Like that the war was to free Asia from western imperialism, not world domination.
And Pearl Harbor was just a reaction to being backed into a corner, not an aggressive land
grab.
Those really are the versions of history being taught in Japan today.
And that's only recently, for decades after the war, Japanese schools didn't even teach
that Japan and the US were at war – or who won.
But there's something else I want to say about that segment.
The United States installed a new government, inspired by the United States government.
No we didn't.
Firstly, it's much more inspired by the constitutional monarchy that Great Britain
has, but secondly, there's very little new about it – all of the positions are the
same.
The Emperor is still the Emperor, the parliament still exists, even the Prime Minister – the
current-day Prime Minister is the 63rd Prime Minister.
We've only had 45 presidents.
The position goes all the way back to the Meiji Restoration.
And while all of the positions remained the same, so did many of the faces.
The 56th Prime Minister of Japan was previously being held as a Class A war criminal.
To put that into perspective, there is nothing higher than Class A – if Hitler were captured
alive, he would have been a Class A war criminal.
This is why Nazis are always the bad guys in our World War 2 media and not Japan.
Nazis don't exist anymore… or at least they're not in charge anymore.
There is a clear disconnect between Nazi Germany and present-day Germany.
But if you make Imperial Japan the bad guys, you are by extension making current-day Japan
the bad guys.
Everything about the government, and most people in it, were the same.
Many Class B and C war criminals, including the lower level officers and soldiers, were
tried by the Nanking War Crimes Tribunal.
Many of the foreign nationals who administered the Nanking Safety Zone testified against
them.
The two lieutenants who participated in that 100 beheadings contest were tried there and
their defense was… and I wish I was joking here…
"It was only like, 70 people."
Weirdly that didn't work and they were found guilty and executed.
One of the lower level generals was also tried, but blamed the massacre on Koreans…
Which also didn't work and he was executed.
But most of the Class A war criminals were tried in Tokyo by the International Military
Tribunal for the Far East.
Or IMTFE for short.
While the IMTFE found that the Nanking massacre was "secretly ordered or willfully committed"
– they weren't allowed to prosecute the top commander, who, if you remember, was Prince
Asaka.
The entire Imperial family was given immunity from prosecution by Douglas MacArthur.
This infuriated the Chinese, but at least they could go after the other high-level officials…
Until 1949, when Mao seized control of mainland China and the Bamboo Curtain fell on Asia…
is that racist?
It feels racist.
Then the Korean War happened and the West needed a non-communist ally in Asia, so the
IMTFE just… sort of stopped.
This was when the future Prime Minister was let off the hook and was allowed to continue
being a politician.
As long as he was pro-American.
While present-day Germany paid war reparations, Japan never really had to, and since the chief
culprits of the Rape of Nanking never stood trial, Sino-Japanese relations were sour for
decades.
Eventually the government of both Communist China and the Republic of China "forgave"
Japan in order to open up trade relations, which infuriated Chinese citizens.
Japan has never formally apologized for any of its war crimes.
The United States helped with that cover-up narrative.
How do you convince millions of citizens that the people they just fought a few years ago
are now our friends?
Mostly by repeatedly apologizing for and playing up the horrors the atomic bombs.
Because you know, two wrongs make a right.
They cancel each other out.
If you look at history, we have bombed the masculinity out of an entire continent.
We dropped two atomic bombs on f***ing Japan and they've been drawing Hello Kitty and
s*** ever since.
As funny as that is, he's also not wrong.
Hello Kitty, Keroppi, more recently Gudetama were all created by Sanrio to play into the
victimization and pacification of Japan.
They are all designed to look vulnerable.
All of these characters are so cute and defenseless and you just wanna hug them and protect them,
oh m- It's also known as Kawaii culture and really grew during the 70s and 80s but
continues today.
Until the cold war ended and the stories came out.
Japanese soldiers who no longer feared prosecution talked openly about what they did.
Books were published, like Iris Chang's The Rape of Nanking, movies were made like
Flowers of War and Unbroken.
And still Japan, officially anyway, denies their part in the tragedy.
Saying it was all just Soviet and Chinese propaganda – which is kind of true by the
way, even some blaming the United States for it, which…
Saying that it was only 3000 people who were killed – even though there are single mass
graves with more bodies than that.
Or that it was Chinese looters or that all the women who were raped were actually paid
prostitutes or "comfort women" – which is the same reason Japanese-Korean relations
are still on the rocks.
The Japanese government thinks that apologizing for the sins of the past would be an insult
to veterans – those responsible have already been prosecuted, how many times must they
apologize?
Once would be nice, you know, for starters.
Having any sort of academic or political discussion on Japanese war crimes in Japan usually results
in career suicide.
And more often than not, death threats.
Whenever a Japanese politician makes the mistake of apologizing in a personal capacity, not
an official one.
They either retract it shortly afterwards or are voted out.
The current Prime Minister of Japan, Shinzo Abe made that mistake in 2006.
And now repeatedly claims that comfort women were not forced into sexual slavery but were
private entrepreneurs.
On a visit to the Yakusuni Shrine, which memorializes over a thousand convicted war criminals, fourteen
of which are Class A, he said: "The men convicted by the Allied tribunals
are not war criminals under the laws of Japan."
Japanese denial of their war crimes, and especially Nanking, is akin to denying that the Holocaust
happened.
The most successful historical revisions are those that only tell one side – but in recent
years, we've finally started to hear the other sides of this story and it's important
to listen.
The saying goes "those who do not learn from their history are doomed to repeat it."
You no longer have the luxury of saying you did not learn, because now, you know better.
I promised I'd make this video almost two years ago, and here it is… finally.
Big thanks to Suibhne for helping me with this video, make sure to check out his channel
and videos on China.
I'd also like to thank my legendary patrons Eric and Hamzah.
If you'd also like me to butcher the pronunciation of your name or at least have your name up
on screen, head over to patreon.com/knowingbetter.
In the mean time don't forget to… uh… no, nope, not saying that.
We're going generic on this one, click that subscribe button.
Also follow me on twitter and facebook and join us on the subreddit.
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