I was recently looking into Japan’s involvement in WW2 and some of the things they did were pretty disgusting, some even worse than the Nazis. I looked up about the rape/massacre of Nanjing and also Unit 731. The Japanese were so cruel to the Chinese. Why was this? Was it because they viewed the Chinese the way how the Nazis viewed the Jews and Slavs?
No, not at all. While Nazi ideology explicitly called for the extermination of Jewish and Slavic people, there was never the same amount of racial hatred against the Chinese in Japanese mainstream politics (although I’m sure some obscure far-right figure probably did advocate for the extermination of the Chinese at some point). The attitude held by a majority of Japanese politicians across the political spectrum was instead distinctly paternalistic.
The Han Chinese, and to various degrees the geopolitical entities which came to power in the Chinese mainland over the years, had long held onto the belief that they were the hereditary primary claimants to ‘Han Culture’ (a vague and nebulous term which encompasses the Chinese writing system, Confucian values, philosophy etc.). The Japanese adopted some elements of ‘Han Culture’ liberally, and while there was significant tension over the political relationship between geopolitical bodies in China and Japan, the idea that China was Japan’s cultural ‘big brother’ was widely accepted by Japanese politicians of the time [My pre-modern Japanese history is very shaky, so feel free to come yell at me here if I’ve completely mischaracterised pre-1868 Sino-Japanese relations]. However, the rapid modernisation of Japan after the Meiji Restoration in 1868 led to increasing Japanese confidence, and with it, a reevaluation of the Sino-Japanese cultural relationship. I can’t really address the intellectual side of things, but in the Japanese political sphere, there was an emerging consensus that the Japanese people had become the natural primary claimant of ‘Han Culture’ following the inability of China to resist western imperialistic incursions. There remained significant respect for the Han Chinese as the progenitor of ‘Han Culture,’ but at the same time, a newfound sense of Japanese cultural superiority. The Han Chinese had forfeited the mandate of both political and cultural leadership in Asia, it was widely said - it was now the Japanese people's turn to lead.
These attitudes naturally led many Japanese to consider the Chinese their cultural and racial inferiors, especially after Japanese victory in the Sino-Japanese War of 1895. Politicians claimed it was their duty to ‘civilise,’ ‘guide’ and ‘liberate’ China from western imperialism, without any trace of irony. There was little disagreement that China needed Japanese guidance, even among left-leaning liberals. There was however, significant disagreement over how Japan should guide Chinese modernisation. Paternalism existed on a broad spectrum: Consuls in China advocated for a more benign sort of economic aid to China (which had the unsaid side-effect of tying the Chinese economy to Japan’s), while younger hothead officers of the Kwantung Army in Manchuria called for the puppetry of China under Japanese ‘tutelage’ (there was no mention when this tutelage would end). Such disputes over the direction of paternalism meant that there was no firm ‘China policy’ from the government in Tokyo - what emerged instead was a rather haphazard development of Japanese involvement within Chinese territory prompted by zaibatsu, civilian, governmental and military interests. As Japanese economic and political investments became entrenched in Manchuria and along the Chinese coast, it became increasingly harder for successive Japanese governments to disengage from a increasingly nationalistic and confrontational China. Eventually, it was the pressure from military and civilian groups to retain Japanese interests rather than some sort of racial hatred which drew Japan into conflict with China in 1937, although the racial perception of Chinese inferiority did contribute to the widespread belief in Japan that it would be a quick and easy victory.
The atrocities committed by the Japanese certainly had an racial element to it, but there were also a host of other contributing factors. The callousness and brutality of Japanese military training, which in turn bred a sense of fatality and indifference among servicemen; the unexpectedly strong Chinese resistance, which angered many Japanese soldiers; poor discipline and the unwillingness of officers to control their men; and a frustration over the Chinese refusal to accept Japanese military, political and cultural superiority - all these factors led to the widespread occurrence of wartime atrocities in China. Many of these cases were spontaneous and unauthorised, rather than some pre-mediated policy of racial extermination (note that I’m only referring to military and civilian massacres - the rape of Chinese, Korean and Japanese women through the ‘comfort women’ system was instutionalised by the Japanese Imperial Army). The Nazi emphasis on racial purity and racial superiority with its horrific consequences never had the same degree of influence on Japanese perceptions of the Chinese. While racial attitudes certainly played a role, there were other equally important factors which contributed to the numerous cases of Japanese atrocities during the Second Sino-Japanese War.
Much of this answer is drawn from the many articles in The Japanese informal empire in China, 1895-1937 (1987), which illustrates the various forms of paternalism adopted by different spectrums in Japanese society. Also of interest: The Nanjing Massacre in history and historiography (2000) and Li Yang's "Reflections on postwar nationalism: Debates and challenges in the Japanese academic critique of the “comfort women” system," (2020).