Japanese War Crimes

TaKeN · 21 Apr 2009 at 13:26

They did some sick sick horrific things, makes me sick thinking about the poor people who were subjected to their 'experiments'

platypus · 21 Apr 2009 at 13:26

Thermaltake said:
I just read it on wikipedia aswell, pure shame! unbelievable how so many people had this mindset...so scary how the common person can be brainwashed like this?

Yes what they did during the course of the war was a travesty. But when you are brought up from birth to believe that you are the chosen race, and anything else is inferior by birth it is understandable how these mindsets come about.

Trusty · 21 Apr 2009 at 13:29

Yeh absolutely! Then you think about the mindset of the people that imprinted this mindset at the start. Some very odd individuals.

slambo69 · 21 Apr 2009 at 13:30

platypus said:
And yet you live in a country whos own armed forces and allies are happy to use torture, intimidation and illegal means to get information they need and it's ok?

Hence why I said on such a scale, plus Ive not read any use of torture by the British which seems half as bad as some of the Japanese methods - its just not cricket.

Vonhelmet · 21 Apr 2009 at 13:30

redporshe said:
What they did was disgusting. But with these atrocious acts along with similar activities from the nazis brought advancements in the understanding of the human body. Without these medicine may not be as advanced as it is today.

Ummm... Care to offer anything that can back that up?

MotherMayI · 21 Apr 2009 at 13:32

slambo69 said:
Well, I'm proud to say my relatives and my country were from the side that didnt commit torture, unjustified imprisonment and mistreatment of pow's on such a huge scale.

Because the Allies did nothing under handed, or morally dubious.. Grow up. Not saying it was on anywhere near the same scale, but like the atomic bombs, very questionable things were done.

smelf1 · 21 Apr 2009 at 13:32

what you also need to remember is that most of the higher ranked doctors etc from unit 731 were let off when they agreed to pass on their findings etc to the Allies. Also a good few became top doctors and medical staff in Japan after the war.

slambo69 · 21 Apr 2009 at 13:35

MotherMayI said:
Because the Allies did nothing under handed, or morally dubious.. Grow up. Not saying it was on anywhere near the same scale, but like the atomic bombs, very questionable things were done.

Well we have seen examples of Japanese cruelty, can you perhaps list some from Britains use? Or am I not grown up enough to understand?

Dugganator · 21 Apr 2009 at 13:37

smelf1 said:
what you also need to remember is that most of the higher ranked doctors etc from unit 731 were let off when they agreed to pass on their findings etc to the Allies. Also a good few became top doctors and medical staff in Japan after the war.

I heard they got let off for sharing there findings but never really found out how this was done. I guess it was all secret but you have to ask again yourself what did the japs find out that was worth that much to the americans. Must have been something but was it worth the price of letting these men get away with what they did.

rypt · 21 Apr 2009 at 13:38

slambo69 said:
Well we have seen examples of Japanese cruelty, can you perhaps list some from Britains use? Or am I not grown up enough to understand?

Carpet bombing ..

Yes the technology for other types of bombing was not there, however with the way the bombers were used you were lucky if the bomb landed within 3-5miles of the target ...
Meaning that when the Brits (and Americans) bombed cities such as Hamburg and Berlin they were doing no better than the Germans in the Blitz of London.

aardvark · 21 Apr 2009 at 13:42

i know lots of chinese people and they still really really hate the japanese for what they did during the war - even young chinese totally hate the japs.

Dugganator · 21 Apr 2009 at 13:44

rypt said:
Carpet bombing ..

Yes the technology for other types of bombing was not there, however with the way the bombers were used you were lucky if the bomb landed within 3-5miles of the target ...
Meaning that when the Brits (and Americans) bombed cities such as Hamburg and Berlin they were doing no better than the Germans in the Blitz of London.

But then again both sides were using this tool of war. Once again I think its about the torture methods used. You would have been better off saying the atomic bomb being used. As only the americans used this weapon. As far as I'm aware still we (Britain) didnt have death camps torturing prisonier to further science or the war efforts or just for fun in ww2. I stand back though to be clearly corrected in due course.

smelf1 · 21 Apr 2009 at 13:45

Duggan said:
I heard they got let off for sharing there findings but never really found out how this was done. I guess it was all secret but you have to ask again yourself what did the japs find out that was worth that much to the americans. Must have been something but was it worth the price of letting these men get away with what they did.

I am very interested in WW2 so have done a lot of research etc. I have to look for it again but i found somewhere that had the names of the senior doctors etc from unit 731 and what they ended up doing after the war.

Most of their "research" as they called it was in demand as they used those means that normal doctors could not use. Hence they could get real world disease/damage etc and see its actual live effect.

They also did testing with babies and children where they tied them to posts at different distances from hand grenades and other devices and tested the damage it done at the different distances.

MotherMayI · 21 Apr 2009 at 13:47

slambo69 said:
Well we have seen examples of Japanese cruelty, can you perhaps list some from Britains use? Or am I not grown up enough to understand?

To be honest, I dont know a huge amount - All I am saying is that they did happen, and looking at the two sides as black and white is stupid. We have been credited with the construction of the first concentration camps in the Boer War and in South Africa, we dropped the first nuclear weapons (well, the Allies as a collective), we fire bombed Dresden and various other cities to the ground, and so on. While these arent as immediately horrific as some of the crimes by the Axis powers, they are still very, very questionable uses of military power.

Tefal · 21 Apr 2009 at 13:48

vonhelmet said:
Ummm... Care to offer anything that can back that up?

they did learn a lot about how to treat frostbite and gangrene from some of their experiments and used the knowledge to help their troops.

But most of the research was based around perfecting biological weapons.

platypus · 21 Apr 2009 at 13:50

Duggan said:
As far as I'm aware still we (Britain) didnt have death camps torturing prisonier to further science or the war efforts or just for fun in ww2. I stand back though to be clearly corrected in due course.

These people believed they were the superior race, and therefore to learn about the human body they performed their tests on non Japanese people, because to the Japanese these people, the Chinese especially, weren't people.

In their mindset it is exactly the same as us performing animal testing. They didn't do it 'just for fun', they did it because from centuries old that is how the Japanese people have been brought up. That they are descended from the Gods, and superior to any other race.

Tefal · 21 Apr 2009 at 13:50

Duggan said:
. I guess it was all secret but you have to ask again yourself what did the japs find out that was worth that much to the americans.

bio-warfare, America was worried about the soviets getting the information, and also knew that nobody else would ever really carry out these type of experiments so the data would put them well ahead of everybody in bioweapons.

Glaucus · 21 Apr 2009 at 13:54

War especillay world wars are sickening. These things will happen in world wars.
Although it is totally sickening and disgusting, you have to remember most of the people who commited teh atrocities are dead and that the new generations are not he same.
I still know some Polish people who still hate and blame Germany.

MotherMayI said:
And they dropped atomic bombs on two densely populated civilian cities of no military value..

.. Oh no, wait - That was the Allies.

At least get your facts right.. :rolleyes:

A number of military camps were located nearby, including the headquarters of the Fifth Division and Field Marshal Shunroku Hata's 2nd General Army Headquarters, which commanded the defense of all of southern Japan. Hiroshima was a minor supply and logistics base for the Japanese military. The city was a communications center, a storage point, and an assembly area for troops

The city of Nagasaki had been one of the largest sea ports in southern Japan and was of great wartime importance because of its wide-ranging industrial activity, including the production of ordnance, ships, military equipment, and other war materials.

Nope I can see how you think they had no military significance.

gjrc said:
also it is now widely accepted that the dropping of the bombs did not hasten the end of the war with Japan, they were a country already on the brink of defeat.

It is widely accepted that it would have taken 100s of thousands of troops to conquer Japan.

Mik3 · 21 Apr 2009 at 13:54

None of it it taught in Japanese schools, they are taught that they where the victims and not the aggressors, if you don't learn from history your doomed to repeat it.

Dugganator · 21 Apr 2009 at 14:02

Mik3 said:
None of it it taught in Japanese schools, they are taught that they where the victims and not the aggressors, if you don't learn from history your doomed to repeat it.

I've heard this also but of course I dont know if this is true.