Japanese reparations for the Chinese holocaust

I believe the Japanese will never pay reparations for the atrocities committed in China, unless China were to invade Japan. Please don’t misunderstand me, as I don’t advocate Chinese military action against Japan. The fact is that Japanese are extremely concerned about maintaining “face” at virtually any cost. Indeed, Japanese leaders glibly deny the historical abuses, despite extensive documentation.

To acknowledge the “Rape of Nanjing” would require the Japanese to deal with their many injustices between 1890 and 1945, including the invasion of the Korean peninsula. Ironically, western powers initially swallowed the Japanese claims that there was no such thing as a Korean language, culture or history. There were no diplomatic protests of the Japanese prohibition of Korean names, speech and festivals. There is now a large museum just south of Seoul to ensure this history isn’t forgotten. Just as the Japanese have their Holocaust Museum in Hiroshima, the Chinese should have theirs in Nanjing. It could include accounts of Korean sex slaves who Japanese still claim were voluntarily servicing the Japanese military in China.

Indeed, acknowledging any of the pre-1946 abuses would force Japanese discussion of the many others. For example, western prisoners of war and captive populations, including the Chinese, were used for medical experiments to learn how much of various poisons could be survived before humans died and to verify the natural progression of painful diseases, untreated by medicine. (This data was considered to be so useful by the American military that it was apparently obtained in exchange for limiting the number of Japanese who were brought to trial after WWII.) Other known Japanese abuses involved forced labor camps in S.E. Asia, such as to build the railroad from Thailand to Burma (Myanmar) across the River Kwai and death marches, such as on the Philippine island of Palawan. Undoubtedly, there were other human rights abuses, too.

While most modern Japanese have an internationalist perspective on the world, during the period of imperialist expansion, the military government engaged in overt propaganda to control its population. During the genocide of Nanjing, the Japanese kept careful records of the numbers of Chinese they killed, but it is telling that they used the “counter”* for logs, instead of the one for people. Obviously, the Japanese military had dehumanized their Chinese victims, denying their status as human beings through