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The moment a Chinese man is executed by a Japanese soldier during the Nanking Massacre; Nanjing, China, December 1937
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The moment a Chinese man is executed by a Japanese soldier during the Nanking Massacre; Nanjing, China, December 1937.
The Japanese Imperial Army, if not the entire nation of Japan at that time, stricty adhered to what is known as Bushido, or 'the warrior way of life'. Essentially, they were brainwashed into believing that the Japanese people were the dominant race and that the nation of Japan was invincible.
The Bushito mentality is what permitted the Japanese to justify carrying out the atrocious acts that they did, without having to suffer from any moral or ethical reprocussions.
Through committing these atrocious acts (murding, raping, and even sometimes cannibalizing) they would gain the strength of their enemies.
It's some pretty backwards stuff, but surprisingly not.much different from the mentality of modern lslamic radicals.
Oh, I'm well aware of Bushido...it just blows my.mind that they regressed from what we would all agree to as "civilized" warfare during WW1 and the Russo-Japanese to the borderline
rape/pillage/brutality they were indulging in during the Second Sino-Japanese war in the space of about 20 years.
Japan lacked the control mechanism that western armies had. To punish a soldier for committing.these acts against their ideological foe would be
counter productive. Prince Yasuhiko I believe was completely responsible for the downward spiral in Nanjing. The Japanese army expected an easy
victory, which turned into a long, bloody slog.
With the order to kill all captives, he set loose a very bitter, exhausted, but bloated army onto the populace of Nanjing. The war was still undeclared,
lacking purpose, and Japan recognised no international law.
General Matsui was deeply upset and knew.full well what his soldiers were.doing, but he was absolutely incompetent. In fact the foreign
ministry had warned the army numerous times to stop it.
Japan lacked the control mechanism that western armies had. To punish a soldier for committing these acts against their ideological foe would be counterproductive. There weren't a lot of cases were soldiers where punished by their own command for atrocities they commited. Even in the US army executions were rarely carried out if a white soldier had commited rape or murder.
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