Any explanation for Japanese war crimes leading up to and during the Second World War is a very complicated and multifaceted affair, with a number of factor all simultaneously contributing. As a nation-state, the Japanese Empire of the late 19th and early 20th century is a fascinating topic, and its evolution toward such a horrific end in equal parts horrifying and intriguing. What could possess an military, a government, and a culture to undertake such rampant inhumanity – especially when couched under the banner of a so-called “Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere” whose purported aim was to enhance the lives of all East Asians against the ravages of Western colonialism?

The idea of “War Crimes” is a very broad topic, and it’s going to be helpful to break it down into subsections for ease-of-operations, even though there is a lot of overlap. For our purposes, let’s go with the broad topics as laid out in the International Military Tribunal of the Far East (IMTFE) – Asia’s equivalent to the Nuremburg Trials: unprovoked attacks on neutral states, mass killings (especially of non-combatants), human experimentation and the related charge of use of illegal biological weaponry, illegal chemical warfare, torture and illegal execution of POWs, and forced labor and prostitution.

But first, some background….

The Empire of Japan (EoJ) had emerged as the rising star of East Asia following the substantial reforms of the Meiji Era, known as the Meiji Restoration (明治維新 , 1868-1912). Under the Meiji Emperor government’s reformations, Japan emerged from its isolationist and feudal period hearkening back to the Tokugawa Period beginning in 1600, during which the shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu and his successors made such decrees as the Sakoku (lit. “closed country” )Edict of 1635, which stipulated that, among other things:

1. No Japanese ships may leave for foreign countries.

2. No Japanese may go abroad secretly. If anybody tries to do this, he will be killed, and the ship and owner/s will be placed under arrest whilst higher authority is informed.
3. Any Japanese now living abroad who tries to return to Japan will be put to death.
   […]
4. If any deportees should try to return or to communicate with Japan by letter or otherwise, they will of course be killed if they are caught, whilst their relatives will be severely dealt with, according to the gravity of the offence.

The Meiji Restoration did a number of things. It restored de facto imperial rule of Japan (as opposed to the Shogunate that had ruled in all but name since the late 12th century after the victory of Minamoto Clan over the Taira Clan in 1185, and later succeeded by the shogun’s wife’s clans, the Hojo.) This was accompanied by a widespread effort toward governmental centralization under the imperial government (as opposed to the regional control of the feudal daimyo (landlord) class, ostensibly under the final command of the shogun)

The Meiji Restoration also acknowledged that Japan had fallen far behind Western powers in the intervening centuries of isolationist policies – a fact that had been made all-too-clear with the arrival of the American Commodore Matthew Perry and his fleet of gunships that had singlehandedly been able to force open Japanese ports to foreign trade as of 1854.

This tied directly into the subsequent drive toward near-total military reformation in the Western model, following the 1868 Charter Oath in which the Meiji Emperor proclaimed that “knowledge shall be sought all over the world, and thereby the foundations of imperial rule shall be strengthened.” What this ultimately amounted to was a rejections and phasing out (by force if necessary) of the Edo Era remnants: the shogunate, the daimyo, and the samurai class… in favor of a modern, westernized military and societal organization to better compete with the European and American empires. This culminated in the Satsuma Rebellion (Seinan Senso) of 1877, wherein the samurai army under the leadership of Saigo Takamori was crushed by the newly formed Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) using Western weapons and tactics. The age of the samurai had decisively come to an end.

Yet for all that, the class and their ethos (that of Bushido, the “Way of the Warrior”) lived on in a romanticized form in popular ideology, both military and civilian – much in the way the idea of the American “cowboy” far outlived its actual heyday and far outgrew its actual roots. This would infuse the military ideology of the IJA well into the 20th century, and unto its final dissolution in 1945, and would prove instrumental in the horrors that were to follow.

The adoption of Western ideas and military also necessitated a rapid industrialization under the auspices of military necessity (using, for instance the slogan in the early 20th c. 富国強兵 – “Enrich the Country, Strengthen the Military”)

OK, so I hope I’ve laid enough groundwork for how Japan emerged into the 20th century from a backwards feudal power into an up-and-coming regional and global imperial power. Let’s get into the different aspects of what they’d prosecute against Asian and the world over the course of the first half of the 20th century…

#Expansionsism/Unprovoked Attacks Against Neutral Powers

Unfortunately for Japanese ideas of becoming an industrial power, it was remarkably ill-equipped resource-wise for the task. The archipelago is remarkably resource-poor in the things that are essential for industrial and military production suiting early 20th century needs. It had few iron deposits, and those that it did have were often of very poor quality, necessitating extensive and costly refinement in order to render even minimal amounts of usable steel. At least as troubling was the island nation’s lack of fuel to power their modern war machines: coal, and later petroleum.

The most obvious target from which to seize resources was literally right next door: the Korean Peninsula and the region of Manchuria directly to its north. China had been the suzerain of the Kingdom of Joseon – a policy that had been inherited and continued by its latest (and last) imperial government, the Qing. Korea wad large depositis of both coal and iron, making it an ideal economic target for the resourced-starved island empire, and also served a strategic interest; as the Prussian general and advisor to Japan, Jakob Meckel pointed out to the Meiji court, Korea – situated as it was just 120 miles from the western coasts of Kyushu and Honshu – stood as “a dagger pointed at the heart of Japan” for any imperial power that seized control of it. Though this hadn’t posed much of an issue in the prior several centuries under Chinese Ming and then Qing rulership – concerned as both had been with pursuing their own largely isolationist ideologies – the threat was still real enough; the two faied invasions of the Japanese home islands under the banners of the Yuan Emperor Kublai Khan in the late 13th century would echo in Japanese ears – even going so far as to name their last and most desperate self-defense strategy toward the end of the Second War War, the kamikaze pilots, so named as a reference to the typhoons (“divine winds”) that had twice saved Japan from the Mongol onslaught.

By this point, and in spite of its own efforts at modernization along the Western standard, the Qing Dynasty of China had stalled out, and fallen well behind their island neighbor (a truly embarrassing state of affairs, as the Chinese had traditionally regarded the archipelago to be little more than a lowly band of pirates and bandits hardly worth notice). But Japanese interest in control over Korea (as stipulated in the 1876 Japan-Korea Treaty that opened Korean ports to unrestricted Japanese trade) greatly infringed on that old state of affairs between the peninsula and the Chinese Empire. Sino-Japanese friction over control of Korea would finally boil over in 1894 with the outbreak of the First Sino-Japanese War – a conflict that would confirm what the Japanese and the rest of the world had long suspected: the that had utterly outclassed their mainland counterpart, and that Qing China was a dead empire walking. The Qing was already laughed at by world powers as the “Sick Man of Asia” following its international embarrassment at the hands of the British during the two Opium Wars, and with the conclusion of the First Sino-Japanese War less than a year after its outbreak and with near total Chinese capitulation under that Treaty of Shimonoseki, resulting in the Joseon Empire being removed from Chinese vassalage (ostensibly to “independence”, but in reality directly into the Japanese orbit), as well as the cession of Formosa (Taiwan), the Penghu archipelago, and the Liaodong Peninsula directly to Japanese Imperial administration. As had been the case with many other up-and-coming world powers (a contemporary would be the US itself in the Spanish-American War in 1898), the relative ease of this initial victory would whet the appetite of that nascent empire toward further conquests.

This is the modus operandi that would compel Japanese society – as led by its military – toward the invasion and occupation of Korea and China: that it was, largely by virtue of its ease and accessibility, as well as the obvious Japanese supremacy of both arms and spirit, Japanese right and responsibility to unify the whole of East Asia under its “benevolent” dictatorship.