Japan treated the 80,000 Russian POWs well in the 1905 Russo-Japanese war and was commended by the International Red Cross for its treatment of Russian POWs. This was apparently driven by Japan's desire to be seen as a nation equal to western powers. In the previous 1894 Sino-Japanese war, Chinese prisoners and civilians had been treated rather badly and massacred at Port Arthur. A fact which the Japanese Army and government obscured for it's own internal reasons as well as negative international opinion. 5,000 German troops captured in 1914 also received good treatment and had a low death rate (approx 1%) for three years of captivity.

Japan's treatment of it's own captured soldiers and sailors for those three conflicts is a more complex story. The ideals of the Japanese military emphasized death before dishonor in all of it's wars, but their policy was often flexible. In Japan's civil wars prisoners were either executed or pardoned depending on political expediency. In the Sino-Japanese war, propaganda was produced demonizing the Chinese for cruelty and warning troops against surrender, but almost no troops (only 11, 10 porters and a soldier with a head wound) actually found themselves in a situation where it would have been required to surrender.

In the Russo-Japanese war about 2,000 Japanese troop were captured during the war and repatriated at the end of it. These cases were all investigated by postwar military councils to make sure they did their full duty before being captured. Soldiers could expect to have to apologize and endure insults, but were seldom harshly punished, and only a few officers were forced to resign or cashiered. However, informal administrative punishment could be very unpleasant, and out of the service some former prisoners were ostracized by their communities and forced to move elsewhere. Stories circulated regarding the disgraceful fates of dishonored soldiers and their families and these set the stage for the later official and unofficial prohibitions against surrender in the WWII era.

Source: Drea, Edward J. Japan's Imperial Army: Its Rise and Fall 1853-1945