Walkers Carrying Flame from Atomic Bombing

In 1931, the Japanese Military forces first invaded Northeast China, known as Manchuria, then escalated the aggression against China to an all-out war by staging the Marco Polo Bridge Incident in July 7, 1937, and eventually launched the Pearl Harbor surprise attack that touched off the Pacific War or World War II in Asia. By early 1942, all Asian peoples except the Indians groveled at the feet of the Japanese army. However, no Asian peoples had suffered from Japanese tyranny as the Chinese had. For fourteen years, the Japanese wreaked havoc upon the Chinese: no less then 35 million Chinese were killed and hundreds of billion dollars worth of properties were destroyed and plundered; and millions of laborer were forced to work to death or simply murdered, which among other crimes and atrocities have characterized the Chinese Holocaust.

The Forgotten Holocaust in Asia

During the fourteen years of war, the Japanese had created hundreds of massacres, large and small in China, but it was the Rape of Nanking that has caught the attention of the world since it occurred. In recent years, Japanese germ warfare Unit 731 and "comfort women" also have stood out as the major war crime issues that have aroused the American public, which are outlined in the following.

The Rape of Nanking

On the outset of China's out-all resistance war against Japan in July 1937, the Japanese military command and Emperor Hirohito believed that within three months the Chinese would be defeated and sue for peace. As it turned out, the ill-equipped Chinese troops fought in the Shanghai alone that lasted for three months. The Japanese army spared no time after it seized Shanghai on November 12, 1937, and marched toward Nanking, the capital of China. In entering Nanking on December 13, 1937, the Japanese troops ran a mock and indulged themselves in the orgy of killing, burning, and raping. According to the testimonies given by Dr. Searle M. Bates, formerly Professor of History at Columbia University in New York, and Rev. John Magee, formerly Chapain of Yale University as well as several American missionaries all staying at Nanjing during the Rape of Nanking, the massacre was most serious for the first six to seven weeks and in a lesser degree continued well into the early summer of 1938. Some official documents of German Embassy at Nanjing corroborated with other eyewitness accounts that the massacre had lasted at least until the middle of March, 1938. As stated in the verdict of the Tokyo Trial conducted after the war, there were for more that 200,000 people were slaughtered in the first six weeks of the Rape of Nanking. Japanese and German sources all confirmed that "no less than 300,000 innocent people were killed at Nanking and its vicinities" as confirmed by none other than the Japanese Foreign Minister Hirota Koki in his January 17, 1938 telegram to the Japanese Embassy at Washington (the telegram is in the custody of the National Archives at Washington). All this evidence should be strong enough to settle the issue that there were more than 300,000 people killed in the Rape of Nanking.

Another controversial issue is how many women being raped in the Rape of Nanking. The verdict of the Tokyo Trial conforms that "in the first month of occupation, no less than 20,000 cases of rape occurred," which is corroborated by German sources. Westerners remaining at Nanjing estimated that for the entire period of the Rape of Nanking, 80,000 women may have been raped by the Japanese army.

Unit 731

Unit 731 was a Japanese secret biological warfare detachment devoted to human experiments and manufacturing biological weapons. It was inaugurated at Harbin in northern Manchuria in 1932 by the order of Japan's highest military command with the approval of Emperor Hirohito whose sea was attached to the 1936 order to Unit 731. It had four branches in northern Manchuria and one at Dalian in the south. As war progressed, Unit 731 had branches in all over China and later at Singapore and Rangoon in Southeast Asia. All of them were engaged in human experiments. A recent estimate by several scholars, notably Prof. Sheldon H. Harris whose book The Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare 1932-45 and the American Cover Up, gives the deaths resulting from human experiment numbering 20,000 victims of all nationals, though most Chinese, but Japan's employing germ warfare against the Chinese must have caused 270,000 deaths.

It should be borne in mind that American Admiral William D. Leahy, Chief of Staff to President Roosevelt, rejected the development of biological warfare as most unethical as Adolf Hitler rejected to engaged in it in spite of Japanese urge. Not until 1995, did the news relating to Unit 731 began to leak out. Instead of Senator Dianne Feinstein's urge, the U.S. government has not opened its archives on Unit 731 which alone can tell the whole truth of Unit 731.

Comfort Women

Publicly licensed prostitution system had long existed in Japan and as early as 1876 it was introduced to Korea. During the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905), military prostitution came to Manchuria with the Japanese army. After the Mukden or "September 18" Incident of 1931, military brothels and opium dens were the hallmarks of Japan's rule in Manchuria. In the 1941 military exercise of the 700,000 men Kwantung Army (primarily preparing for invasion of Siberia), Korea was required to provide 20,000 women for it; so it came the ratio of 35 soldiers to one "comfort woman." During the Sino-Japanese War and later in the Pacific War, at least 200,000 "comfort women" mostly Korea (but there were Chinese, Taiwanese, Filipinos, Dutch, and even a few Americans) were conscripted to serve as sex slaves of the widely scattered Japanese army. When the war came to an end, "comfort women" suffered the worst: they were deserted by the Japanese army, as a very few of them managed to return home alive.

After decades of denials to the existence of "comfort women" by the Japanese government, the issue came to light when massive documents proving its existence were unearthed in January 1992 that forced Prime Ministed Miyazawa (the current Minister of Treasury) to admit the truth, but not to assume responsibility. On April 19, 1996, the United Nation's Human right Commission adopted a resolution condemning sexual slavery, In August 1996 Japan set up a private "The Asian Women's Fund" to distribute "consolation money" of $20,000 to each of the approximately 160 South Korean, 107 Filipino and 33 Taiwanese former "comfort women, " but except for 4 Philippine "comfort women" all of them outright rejected the Japanese offer; they want the Japanese government to take upon itself the responsibility. On August 7, 1998, Ms. Gay J. McDongall of the UN Human Right Commission submitted her report which demands that the Japanese government take the responsibility to compensate the victimized "comfort women." As late as May 25, 2000, 158 members of the Legislative Yuan of the Republic of China on Taiwan wrote to President Juro Saito of Japan's House of Councillors to endorse an opposition bill aimed at compensating sex slaves during WWII.

We must never forget the thousands who died at the criminal hands of the
vicious terrorists. Today, they CONTINUE to have weapons of mass destruction!
Including nuclear weapons! With these weapons they continue their
terroristic crimes as part of their drive to enslave the world and all
its people and resources at the point of a gun.
I speak, of course, of the most horrible criminals that
have ever existed in all of history, the U.S. imperalist
ruling class, the ONLY criminals to ever have dropped
nuclear weapons on civilian populations.
STOP THEM BEFORE THEY KILL AGAIN!

"It was totally unnecessary to nuke Hiroshima and Nagasaki to do it...On the mainland, they were in full retreat. There was not need to invade, let alone nuke them. A blockade would have starved them into surrender in short order."

Starve them?!?!?! Oh yeah, that would have been really cool. Would you have killed 10 million??

More to the point, there was absolutely no guarantee that the Japanese would ever stop fighting. Most of the warlords of Imperial Japan were prepared to send kids to fight to the death. While clearly they were looking for a way out of the war, they were looking for a way out that would allow them to remain the leading military power of Asia, perhaps to retake their colonies when the time was right. If you like to see conditional surrender, look at Iraq.

Only when it was clear to the warlords that the entire Japanese nation could be wiped out in a flash of light did they realize that there was no hope for the future of Japanese imperial aggression. And even then, it took them a while to get around to surrendering unconditionally.

MOREOVER, the war was ended before the USSR could occupy Japan. Soviet troops were speeding across northern Asia to take Japan at the end of the war. It also became clear to the USSR that they could not add Japan as a new territory to their empire...

If we went your route, here is what would have happened: Millions of Japanese would die of starvation. The USSR would have occupied half of Japan, sending its people into a hell to not escape for 40 years. The people of Japan who suffered during the blockade and invasion would hold a far worse grudge against the US than they do now.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki only showed what COULD have happened to all of Japan. Your strategy would have made it REALLY HAPPEN.

"Only when it was clear to the warlords that the entire Japanese nation could be wiped out in a flash of light did they realize that there was no hope for the future of Japanese imperial aggression. And even then, it took them a while to get around to surrendering unconditionally."

Would it not have been more human to just kill the Japanese ruling class?

Most governments do not like using assassination, since all leaders are vulnerable to this. IE, if leaders in America started assassinate anyone who opposed them, other countries could try to assassinate members of the American ruling class, which is not that hard to do.

No, the atomic bombs were totally unnecessary as Japan lost her colonial territories by Juky 1945, and was prepared to surrender. The US did not warn the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki before the atomic bombings on 6 and 9 August 1945, so the US has that to answer for that one.