Posted on 12/07/2016 1:10:16 AM PST by Ethan Clive Osgoode
A Japanese university has opened a museum acknowledging that its staff dissected downed American airmen while they were still alive during World War Two.
The move is a striking step in a society where war crimes are still taboo and rarely discussed, although the incident has been extensively documented in books and by US officials.
A gruesome display at the newly-opened museum at Kyushu University explains how eight US POWs were taken to the centre’s medical school in Fukuoka after their plane was shot down over the skies of Japan in May 1945.
There, they were subjected to horrific medical experiments - as doctors dissected one soldier’s brain to see if epilepsy could be controlled by surgery, and removed parts of the livers of other prisoners as part of tests to see if they would survive.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
It also dispels the notion that only whites are racists as the Japaneses were just a bad, if not worse, than anything Americans have ever done.
That's the problem I have with Japs. They are hoping that time will march on, and eventually everyone will forget, and they can keep denying their past crimes and pretend they never happened. Because the present generation of Japs actively promote this deception, they are NOT innocent.
I have a couple of sabers that Dad brought back from Okinawa. I had the same thought but ultimately decided not to. They're a reminder of what Dad endured at Saipan and Okinawa.
I lived in Japan for several years, and came to see their sensitivity and appreciation of beauty.
I lived in the Philippines for several years after that, and got to see the monuments along the path of the Bataan Death March, and learned a lot about that...and saw what vicious beasts they were to their prisoners.
Years later, when I saw the movie “Judgment at Nuremberg” with Spencer Tracy playing the part of the judge overseeing the Nuremberg Trials, they have a scene where he and a German woman go to a beer hall frequented by locals. They are having a joyful, great time, pounding their steins on the table, drinking and singing.
Spencer Tracy’s character is looking around at all this, and is thinking to himself “How can these be the same people responsible for the horrible, unspeakable things that I saw evidence of in the courtroom today?”
The cognitive dissonance was off the chart. I think I understand, at least a little bit of that. I have often wondered how people as polite, kind, and sensitive as the Japanese I knew, could have joyously bayoneted infirm prisoners, set them afire, dissected them alive, eaten them, shoved rubber hoses down their throats to fill them with water just so they could stomp them to see it come out.
Doing it sadistically for fun.
I fully understand war can turn people into beasts, but the Japanese seemed to be both beast and sadist in equal measure in war.
I am reading a book now called “The Aviators” that discusses the lives of Eddie Rickenbacker, Charles Lindbergh, and Jimmy Doolittle. When Lindbergh went out to the South Pacific to evaluate planes and ended up flying 50 combat missions and shooting down a plane, he was appalled at the treatment of the Japanese bodies by Americans. Cutting heads off and putting them on spikes, etc. His sensibilities seemed to be completely offended. Even more so when he saw our aviators shooting Japanese in parachutes as they floated to the ground. And he was completely repulsed by the actions of the Army to eradicate the Japanese from the caves they holed up in...flamethrowers, drums of gasoline poured in, etc.
He told people that he thought this treatment of the Japanese was racist. (I lost some respect for him when I read this)
When he voiced his reaction to seeing these things, he was told time and time again by everyone from the bottom to the top: “They do it to our men, and far worse.” The Japanese seemed to have a particular penchant for sadism.
I've read some bizarre posts on FR over the last 18 years....
This one may take the cake...
Not just the psychos in charge fault, but the culture and society.
The japanese officer corps during ww2 could be very brutal to enlisted men, such as slapping or beating a subordinate. This was passed down by the enlisted guards to the allied POWs by beating them brutally for any or no reason.
Local liberals have learned not to engage me on the “horrors of Nagasaki and Hiroshima “.
I beat them to death with the Jap treatment of the “lesser species”.
I actually made one throw up in public, right in front of her liberal posse.
As soon as we older ones die out the Japanese will win and all their evils will be forgotten.
Sad but true.
lol.
The landlord and the heating company and the electricity company and the phone company and shop rite wouldn’t have cared about my reasons :)
My uncles and pop were in WWII and Korea and saw action.
One special one to my heart was at the bulge.
Hope you’re well!
I know your father really really meant well, but wow that would have hurt seeing.
HIS FATHER!! sorry.
I gave a memorial for one of our heroes on the Enterprise and let their family know how close we were to becoming Japanese slaves. He was on an amazing ship and a true hero.
Pray America woke
Yes, I am glad you posted this. The Japanese were vicious and neither the gender or sex of the POWs mattered when they decided to punish us.
Many people do not know the Japanese put virtually every Caucasian they could find into a number of concentration camps in the Philippine Islands, for example. American historians often are not aware. My mother and my newborn brother, my father and I and thousands of Americans throughout the southeast asian area were in camps for almost 4 years. And, yes, there were atrocities for minor infractions. We were starving to death even as others died from starvation in our camp when the American Army rescued us. They are my heros to this day.
Books are published. You should read one. The Japanese were almost universally fanatically cruel.
I think there are only a few survivors from the two camps f within which my family was imprisoned. No one from the US gov has given two hoots about the US government’s responsibility for disallowing us to leave the PI just prior to Dec 7, 1941, either. Not one time over the 75 years since our release.
Don’t ever think the government cares. It doesn’t.
My father was on a destroyer and was in the most fierce battles from Leyate through the surrender. He was a true hero and I had no idea while he lived.
Our perspective of what should have been done versus what was done has to be informed by what was going on at the time. By the time of VJ Day, we could already see the outlines of the next war against aggressive Communism as sponsored by Stalin and the Soviet Union. In Europe there was the exhaustion of resources and the masses of 'displaced peoples' (DPs) that kind of locked the borders where the Armies stopped.
In Asia, within months, the last-minute entry of the Soviet Union was causing 'problems' in Korea & Manchuria while the Chinese Red Army moved almost immediately against their internal rivals of the Chinese Nationalists. The need for rapid 'pacification' of Japan became a priority while also modification of its society to destroy the Bushido / oligarchic culture within Japan.
History is always all kind of shades of gray and what comes in war's aftermath frequently has many of the darker shades. An example of horrible acts from Europe at this time was the forced repatriation to the Soviet Union of hundred of thousands of people who had no desire to go when they KNEW that they were looking at prison at best.
Great. So the japs were stealing our ideas back then before China did.
The war prosecutions of both Germans and Japanese made no sense.
Germans still get imprisoned today at 111, but MANY nazis ended up working in America for defense!!
a LOT more than were executed.
The Japanese got off way to easily.
I dont want an apology. I want ANY alive, no matter how old, to go to jail.
THEY DISSECTED OUR MEN ALIVE!!!!!!!!
Peoria, cool.
I agree.
Not that I agree with the actions, but the occurrences and why they occurred. I try hard not to judge people in the past by today’s standards.
The Japanese were very close to having their own A-Bomb ,, we were totally in the dark as we thought they needed the huge infrastructure we had in Oak Ridge...
Yes, the Japs got what they deserved.
My great uncle was in the Bataan Death March as well. His throat was slit from ear-to-ear, but he survived the war. He hated Japs and MacArthur to his grave. The Japanese were much worse than the Germans, and their sadism was not confined to concentration camps. They tortured and killed their own almost as easily as the enemy.
Having toured Germany and having many Japanese friends cured me of ever thinking “it could never happen here.” When savages rule, no society is exempt from barbarity. Our own society turns a blind eye as innocent babies are dissected daily in the sterile environs of the abortionist, and academics use the results of the slaughter without regard to morality or ethics. We have been granted an undeserved reprieve, but the tyrannical impulse grows in each generation.
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