From: "micky wong" <micky.wong@canrem.com>
Subject: comfort girls?
Reply-To: "micky wong" <micky.wong@canrem.com>
Organization: Canada Remote Systems
Distribution: soc
Date: 30 Dec 92 09:14:13 EST


For today's Japanese youth who was not prepared by their government and
the Japanese miniistry of education, about Japan's war atrocities during
the WWII, I copied the following from Time's Almanac.

To provide netters a background of Japan's aggression to China and
the Rape of Nanking.


Copyright Time Inc. Magazine Company and Compact Almanac

Times Magazine, September 4th 1989
WORLD WAR II, Page 44
A Distant Mirror
As Berlin goes to war, Tokyo continues to march through Asia
By Howard G. Chua-Eoan

    Deceit. Terror. The compulsion to perfect an impossible master
plan. Nazi Germany's plunge into madness may have convulsed Europe,
but Imperial Japan had set out on the same course eight years
earlier in East Asia. The war there was already raging in September
1939, and no end was in sight.

    On Sept. 18, 1931, a Japanese army lieutenant meticulously
wired 42 cubes of yellow blasting powder and buried the load in the
earth 5 ft. from railroad tracks north of the Manchurian city of
Mukden (now Shenyang). The explosives would throw a lot of dirt but
cause little damage to the rail line. After all, the South
Manchurian Railroad was Japanese-owned and linked the empire's
economic outposts in predominantly Chinese Manchuria. All the army
wanted was an "incident."

    At approximately 10:20 p.m., a plunger was depressed and the
cache detonated. Soon after, a Japanese patrol checking the site
reported that it had been fired upon by Chinese troops, even though
the local warlord, an ally of China's Generalissimo Chiang
Kai-shek, had kept his soldiers in their barracks to avoid clashes.
At 11:30 p.m., Japan's Manchuria-based Kwantung army began
attacking Chinese positions. By dawn they were joined by planes
from the imperial colony of Korea. Quickly, Mukden was effectively
under the empire's control. In the following months, the
resource-rich region, more than thrice the size of prewar Poland,
would be annexed. As for the railway, a train passing over the
tracks 20 min. after the blast reported only a slight bump.

    Actually, the Mukden Incident of 1931 was not the first time
Japan's Kwantung army had tried to seize Manchuria. In 1928 the
army assassinated the Chinese warlord who ruled the region in hopes
of grabbing the territory outright. But the Japanese government
squashed any further moves and hushed up the army's involvement in
the killing. In 1931, Tokyo again tried to stop the army. But
renegade officers arranged for a geisha to distract and delay the
envoy sent by the central government. Overtaken by events and well
aware that the Manchurian offensive had won acclaim for the
militarist factions in Tokyo, the Japanese government caved in to
the army's visions of manifest destiny -- and to its foolhardy
insistence on heeding the lessons of World War I at any cost.

    Though the empire found itself on the winning side in 1918,
its military planners were deeply worried about the consequences
of total war. They had witnessed the collapse of the Kaiser's
formidable forces and knew that large navies and armies were no
longer enough. A country had to be able to involve all its economic
forces in a protracted war -- especially one against the Soviet
Union, the foe Japan believed it was destined to battle for
domination of northeast Asia. The military men knew that while the
Japanese archipelago was woefully short of natural resources,
neighboring territories were not. First Manchuria, then the rest
of the old imperial Chinese realm became the focus of Japan's rush
toward autarky. And that quest for security would lead deeper and
deeper into war.

    The fall of Manchuria was followed by the Fake War, an extended
period of posturing by the Chinese and Japanese. But in January
1932, as the League of Nations debated Tokyo's aggression, a
Japanese cruiser, four destroyers and two aircraft carriers
anchored in the Yangtze River off the international city of
Shanghai. They had come on the pretext of protecting Japanese
citizens from attacks by Chinese mobs. In response, Nationalist
forces moved into the Chinese suburb of Chapei and skirmished with
patrolling Japanese marines. With his men giving way to the larger
Chinese forces, Admiral Koichi Shiozawa ordered planes from his
carriers to drop 30-lb. bombs over densely populated Chapei. It was
the first wholesale air attack on civilian targets in history.
Thousands of people, many of them women and children, were maimed
and killed.

    Condemned by the League, Japan quit the organization and found
itself increasingly isolated. In its quest to prepare for a Soviet
war, the empire continued to nibble at China and estranged itself
from the U.S., Chiang's chief supporter and, embarrassingly for
Tokyo, the source of most of Japan's strategic materials. National
self-strengthening took on fanatical proportions. The state
religion built around animist Shinto beliefs was transformed into
full-fledged emperor worship. And despite shortages in food and
electricity due to the military allocations, the Empire of the
Rising Sun believed it was destined to shine over all of East Asia.
"Manchuria alone is not enough," wrote navy Lieut. Commander Tota
Ishimaru in 1936. "With it alone Japan cannot go on."

    To buttress its military strategy, Japan forged ties with
another international outcast -- Germany. In 1936 they signed a
pact to oppose Communism that included secret protocols to come to
the other's aid during a war with the Soviet Union. With Berlin
balancing out Moscow, Tokyo accelerated its conquest of China with
another "incident." On July 7, 1937, a Japanese soldier stationed
near Beijing's Marco Polo Bridge left his post to urinate. His
superiors announced that he had been abducted by a nearby Chinese
garrison and began shelling the unit. Japanese forces soon overran
eastern China.

    Plans were then drawn to carry the battle up the Yangtze from
Shanghai, take the Nationalist capital of Nanking (now Nanjing) and
force Chiang to surrender. In one month the Imperial forces had
shattered Chinese defenses, trapping 300,000 Nationalist troops and
forcing hundreds of thousands of the city's 1 million people to
flee. On Dec. 12, 1937, Nanking fell. For the next six weeks, the
area's remaining population would be subjected to the worst
atrocities yet seen in modern warfare. More than 200,000 men, a
fourth of them civilians, were immolated, bayoneted or tortured to
death, and 20,000 women were raped.

    But the terror did not bring victory. Though forced to flee
his capital, Chiang, in an uneasy alliance with Mao Zedong's
Communist guerrillas, continued to resist from the southwestern
hill city of Chungking (now Chongqing). The China Incident would
drag on for years, sucking up much needed funds and prompting Japan
to begin looking to Southeast Asia and the Pacific as alternative
sources of material, which set it on a collision course with the
U.S. The Imperial Navy's reckless attacks on neutral ships moored
near Nanking during the siege (including the U.S. gunboat Panay,
which sank with the loss of two American sailors), further isolated
Japan from the West. Summing up his feelings about the Japanese,
Colonel Joseph W. Stilwell, the U.S. military attache in Beijing,
wrote in his diary in 1937, "The bastards."

    In May 1939 the Kwantung army began another adventure, clashing
with troops of the People's Republic of Mongolia, a client of
Moscow's. Quickly, the Soviet Union sent assistance, and in the
next four months the Japanese army lost 17,450 men to the vastly
superior mechanized units of Soviet General Georgi Zhukov. But just
when Japan could have used Berlin's help, Hitler announced a
nonaggression pact between Berlin and Moscow.

    Japan's leaders were furious, and for months the country's
foreign policy wavered between an independent course and adherence
to the alliance. When Berlin and Moscow swiftly began to carve up
Poland on Sept. 1, Japan reacted coldly, simply stating, "The
empire will not intervene in the war in Europe." Tokyo recalled its
pro-German Ambassador to Berlin. A German-Japanese trade agreement
scheduled to be signed in October 1939 was canceled, and Emperor
Hirohito even announced that his country would "follow a
conciliatory line with regard to Britain and America."

    But Tokyo's Asian and Pacific ambitions prevented any detente
with Washington. And soon, Germany's crushing victories in Europe
were earning Berlin great prestige in Japan. By the time Paris fell
in June 1940, slogans like "Don't miss the bus" were popular. In
fact, immediately after signing the Soviet pact, German Foreign
Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop was playing on Japanese anxieties,
telling Tokyo's emissaries that turning away from Berlin and toward
London and Washington would only hem in the empire. "The Western
democracies," warned Ribbentrop, "would quickly form an extensive
world coalition which would oppose any expansion by Japan and, in
particular, would again wrest her from her position in China."

    Won over by emotion and ambition, the country formed an
ultra-nationalist Cabinet, and on Sept. 27, 1940, the fiery Foreign
Minister Yosuke Matsuoka forged the Tripartite Agreement with
Berlin and Rome, thus creating the Axis. "Japan," said Matsuoka,
"should push boldly forward, hand in hand with Germany," not
hesitating even to commit "double suicide" with Berlin if
necessary. Warned that Japan's economy would collapse without
severe cutbacks in the military budget, Army Minister Hideki Tojo,
a former Kwantung commander who would become the empire's wartime
Premier, was livid. Said he: "We simply have to sacrifice
everything in the interest of strengthening our armed forces."

    Almost alone among the upper military echelon, Admiral Isoroku
Yamamoto counseled against being dragged further into war,
especially against the U.S. In the first months of such a conflict,
he said, "I will run wild and win victory upon victory. But then,
if the war continues, I have no expectation of success." But by
September 1941 a decision had been made to prepare to fight
America, and as commander of the Imperial Navy, Yamamoto dutifully
drew up the plans. "I expect to die on the deck of my flagship,"
he said. "In those evil days you will see Tokyo burnt to the ground
three times."

    By Nov. 26, 1941, Yamamoto's strike force of six aircraft
carriers, two battleships and a host of cruisers, destroyers and
submarines would set sail from Japan for the Kuriles, then deep
into the Pacific toward Hawaii. Shortly after 6 a.m. on Dec. 7,
dozens of Japanese Zeros would take off from the carriers, head
south and within 90 minutes sight the coast of Oahu -- and Pearl
Harbor. Japan, its fortunes yoked with Germany's, was launched on
the road to double suicide.

Copyright Time Inc. Magazine Company and Compact Almanac


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