By Philip Yeung
Never forget. Never forgive. A forgotten Holocaust: Japan's Bushido Butchery
On 13 December 1937, in Nanking, hell's gate opened. For six weeks, deranged Japanese soldiers unleashed rivers of blood and a tsunami of sadistic torture and murder.
Every Chinese must not forget that God-awful day, when the Reign of Terror began. Bloodthirsty Japanese soldiers threw babies into the air and bayoneted them as they fell.
Hundreds of thousands of women were repeatedly raped, many before their husbands and children. Girls were raped by Japanese soldiers before their parents. Fathers were forced to rape their own daughters.
Pregnant women had their bellies sliced open. One nine-year-old girl was raped by 20 Japanese beasts, then was paled with a bamboo spear. She died a horrific death. Teenage girls had their pelvises shattered.
Enemy soldiers held beheading contests to see how fast they could chop the heads off Chinese victims. These beastly acts so horrified the Nazis stationed in Nanjing that they frantically appealed to their headquarters to stop the butchery. It was evil to the nth degree.
Up north, inside the notorious 731 Unit, Japanese scientists dissected Chinese alive with no anesthesia for biological experiments. They took out organs one by one to see how long a body could survive.
A three-day-old baby was frozen to death to test the survival of frostbite.
Prisoners of war were used to test flame throwers and grenades.
Arms were frozen and smashed with hammers.
Prisoners were tied to stakes, with infected fleas thrown over their bodies. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese died from plague bombs developed by the notorious unit.
In Nazi camps, 4% prisoners died. In Japanese ones 30% perished. Captured Chinese soldiers were instantly decapitated. Over 200,000 women were seized as sex slaves or comfort women, many raped 40 times a day.
This is the glory of Japanese militarism on full display. And yet, the West has not uttered a word in condemnation. They view the Japanese as harmless, polite, submissive people.
The truth is: during the war, the Japanese had disqualified themselves as members of the human race.
On a sunny afternoon in spring 1997, a beautiful, educated young Chinese lady quietly waltzed into the University of Toronto library. She came to launch her new book, The Rape of Nanking, which detailed the world's most subhuman atrocities.
World War II had two mass killing machines: one German, the other Japanese. But the fate that has befallen these two evil-doers is a stark contrast. The 35 million Chinese dead souls are doomed to wander homeless for all eternity, uncompensated, unmourned, and unknown. They were victims without a voice.
Ideology intersected with geopolitics to make them voiceless victims.
First, the massive Western media championed the Jewish cause. They coined an unforgettable name for the Nazi atrocities, "the Holocaust"—a Greek word meaning "whole-burned". Six million Jews were systematically exterminated. In contrast, over thirty-five million Chinese died, but the slaughter has no name—genocide, mass murder, extermination---none of it captures the utter horror.
It is not just the sheer number of victims, but the individualized, unspeakable cruelties that are unique in human history and far more horrible than the Holocaust.
Until Iris Chang came along, little was written in English about the extreme Japanese cruelties against their Chinese victims.
The Germans industrialized mass murder. But the Japanese even industrialized the sex slavery of 200,000 comfort women. The Japanese treated the Chinese worse than animals in slaughterhouses. Without the notoriety of a name, their butchery never enters global consciousness.
Confucius was right: "The beginning of wisdom is to correctly name a thing." I hereby label the Japanese horrendous war crimes: Bushido Butchery.
Unlike the Germans, the Japanese have escaped the consequences of their horrific atrocities. Never forced to face the truth, they lied, denied, whitewashed, and covered up that darkest chapter.
German war crimes were meticulously documented and shown on screens across the world.
An avalanche of Hollywood movies, libraries of books detailed their evil deeds, with the unforgiving Jewish lobby relentlessly hunting down Nazi war criminals to the ends of the earth.
Not so the Japanese. The 35 million slaughtered Chinese victims have no voice. Their stories remained buried with the painful memories of the dead. The book launch of "The Rape of Nanking" was attended by only a handful of Chinese-Canadian immigrants.
Iris Chang was severely traumatized by the unspeakable war crimes, plunging her into fatal depression. Hate mail and death threats from Japanese right-wing extremists followed. At age 36, she took her own life, a young mother and wife. She died a martyr.
Two brutal aggressors, two different treatments. The Germans were put through a baptism of fire and crucified for their crimes. The Japanese are welcome into American homes as US friends and allies.
Geopolitics intervened. Hot on the heels of the Second World War, a vicious Cold War unfolded. China found itself on the wrong side of the ideological divide. The Americans and the rest of the West were too busy demonizing communism to care about what happened to hundreds of millions of nameless slaughtered Chinese. Few know. Even fewer care. They have zero visibility.
What's more, by joining the American alliance, Japan has been reaping the rewards of being a US client state, enjoying post-war economic revival, with its national image undamaged. Instead of Schindler's List for Nazi Germany, the Japanese got romanticized in Madame Butterfly.
Japan signed a sweetheart mutual defense treaty with the US, coming under America's protective umbrella. A former deadly foe has been co-opted into a trusted ally. To the Americans, there is no score to settle.
Now, there is a role reversal: The aggressor has become the accuser. As a US client, Takaichi feels emboldened to reassert Japan's imperial ambitions, claiming that if Taiwan is under attack, then Japan is under attack.
Mamasan, don't flatter yourself. Who wants to invade a chain of islands in the earthquake zone, frequently visited by tsunamis? Isn't that why Japan has repeatedly invaded China down the centuries, and not vice versa?
Unfortunately for Chinese victims, a third factor inserted itself. When Japan surrendered, China's civil war began. Chiang Kai-shek was too busy fighting the communists. He chose to wave off any demand for Japanese war compensation to win over an ally to his cause. He sold tens of millions of Chinese war victims down the river.
In Japanese relationships, there are only superiors or inferiors. To them, fellow Asians, including Chinese, are beneath their contempt as an inferior race. White Americans are their superiors.
Japan never considers that it had been defeated by China, only by the US atomic bombs. It is that America they fear and obey.
China's spectacular rise has unnerved Japan. With an aging population and a feeble economy, Japan wants to outcompete the Chinese to reclaim its regional supremacy.
Their dark deeds have been marginalized by other pressing geopolitical concerns. China must lose no time in using AI to generate videos of Japanese atrocities based on historical evidence and share them on social media. Movies must be made, books written, and articles penned.
China needs an all-out propaganda campaign to nail the Japanese to the cross. Failing that, Japanese imperial ghosts will come back to haunt humanity.
Takaichi now wants to put Japan's pacifist constitution to bed.
How utterly outrageous! The unpunished mass murderer is now lecturing their victims and itching to go to war.
This time, mere retraction and apology are not enough. To snuff out Japanese imperial resurgence, China needs a take-no-prisoners approach.
Japan is installing missiles within striking distance of Taiwan and has held joint military exercises with the Philippines. The only language they understand is military muscle.
The Chinese are economic miracle makers, but they have failed miserably in one important department: propaganda to generate stories that change hearts and minds. American propaganda has demonized China, turning this pacifist country into a military menace.
Forget stilted diplomatic speeches. Forget Confucius Institutes. Hire Hollywood to do the job. Without an effective propaganda apparatus, the Chinese Renaissance is incomplete.
This year, make December 13 the biggest Day of National Mourning for the dead souls of Nanking.
China must take action to make sure that history will never repeat itself:
1. Tighten the economic squeeze. Ban Japanese cars and seafood imports, Japan-bound tourism, or the export of rare earths.
2. Re-open demands for full compensation to victims and their surviving families.
3. Take out missile installations on islands near Taiwan. Trump has no stomach for a military tit-for-tat with China. He still dreams of winning his Nobel Peace Prize.
4. Intercept military vessels between Taiwan and the Japanese outlying islands. Impose a sea blockade in that vital passage.
5. Initiate a UN official reconfirmation of Japan's status as a defeated nation, and reopen deliberations on the future status of the Ryukyu Islands.
Mere retraction or apology is not enough. Hit them where it hurts. Make Japan pay the full price of defeat.
Like Iris Chang, I expect death threats from Japanese ultra-right extremists. Let them come. There are 1.4 billion of us. Besides, we have bigger bombs this time, though I must say I will miss my sushi.
The above opinion piece is dedicated to the memory of Iris Chang, the late author of The Rape of Nanking.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of DotDotNews.
Read more articles by Philip Yeung:
Opinion | Japan's Mamasan breaks Sun Tzu's cardinal rule
Opinion | Is Japan's Takaichi another Liz Truss-like lettuce?
Opinion | Europe, time to unload your China-phobia
Opinion | Cry my beloved city—how the West has wronged China over HK!
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