The Rape of Japanese Men and Women After World War II

by Jonas E. Alexis & Thomas Goodrich

Alexis: In response to the previous article, I received a number of messages from a reader posting the claim that “court history is mostly correct, with omissions, following Perry/Tokyo in 1856 were Rothschild, silk for arms traders, selling outdated British ships and artillery to Japan to start an east war to distract Balkin war.”

I simply could not hold my laughter precisely because “court history” has been largely wrong, particularly when it comes to examining World War II. I sent that reader just a number of scholarly sources to peruse in order to contextualize what was happening in Asia at the dawn of the twentieth century,[1] but I doubt that he will check them out.

There is no doubt that some people take these issues on an emotional level. But emotion is not part of our thinking cap. While emotion can be a good virtue, if used properly, when it comes to truth, facts, historical evidence, and ultimate destiny, emotion should take a back seat.

Some people do not know that you are not just a historian. Your father was a United States Marine during the Pacific War, 1941-1945. For people who want to learn more about what the Allied forces did after the war, unpack the story for us here. Show us what “court historians” have failed to meticulously document.

Goodrich: Just as the Allied air forces were targeting cities and civilians in Germany, so too was the US air force incinerating the women and children of Japan. As was the case with his peers in Europe, cigar-chewing, Jap-hating Gen. Curtis Lemay had no qualms whatsoever of targeting non-combatants.

Once his air armada moved with striking distance of the Japanese home islands, the American air commander sent his B-29 bombers to attack Japan with high explosives and phosphorous bombs. Virtually all Japanese urban centers suffered utter destruction but it was the larger cities that were forced to endure the hell of “firebombing.”

In one raid on Tokyo alone, in one night, an estimated 75,000 to 200,000 people, mostly women, and children were burned to death. Only the incineration of Dresden, Germany, with an estimated death toll of between 200,000-400,000, was greater.

In January 1945, Gen. Douglas MacArthur forwarded to President Roosevelt a Japanese offer to surrender that he had just received. Roosevelt spurned the request. Seven months later, the new American president, Harry Truman, received virtually the same offer from the Japanese. This time, the Americans accepted.

Had the Japanese surrender been accepted when first offered, well over one million people, American and Japanese, would not have died needlessly. Had peace been made in January, 1945, there would have been no battle blood-bathes as occurred at Iwo Jima and Okinawa. There would have been no firebombing murder of hundreds of thousands of women and children in Tokyo, Yokohama, Osaka, and every other major Japanese city.

And, perhaps most important of all, had the Japanese peace offer been accepted earlier there would have been no horrific use of atomic weapons against the women and children of Japan and no stigma or shame attached to we Americans forever for the use of such hideous and hellish weapons.

The fiery deaths of civilians in Tokyo and other cities and the vaporization of 200,000 mostly women and children in Hiroshima and Nagasaki remains an evil black smear on the human soul for all time to come; they provide a clear and terrible testament to man’s inhumanity to man.

The unbridled assaults against the helpless civilians of Japan were also a graphic comment on the powerful price of propaganda. From beginning to end, American political and military leaders hoped to punish the Japanese like no other people in history had been punished.

Hence, the refusal to accept Japan’s surrender in January 1945, and the refusal to accept the surrender several times later on. The argument made by President Truman and his apologists that the atomic bombs were used to “end the war sooner” and thereby save both American and Japanese lives, was a lie; it was a lie then and it is a lie to this very day.

In fact, Truman deliberately prolonged the war until the bombs were tested, assembled, delivered, and ready for use against Japan.  When the first device exploded as planned at Hiroshima and vaporized an estimated 80,000-100,000 civilians, Truman was eager to use another such bomb against another civilian target, Nagasaki.

Had Truman a hundred nuclear weapons in his arsenal—rather than the mere two that he used—it seems clear he would have happily dropped them all on the women and children of Japan.

“The only language they seem to understand is the one we have been using to bombard them,” argued the American president. “When you have to deal with a beast you have to treat him like a beast. It is most regrettable but nevertheless necessary.”

Another argument for the use of the atomic bombs when Japan was willing, even eager, to surrender, was an attempt to impress the Soviet Union with American might. If such a line of reasoning was indeed true, as many later pointed out, then the weapons could have just as easily been used against isolated military targets, and not urban areas filled with women and children.

Certainly, one strong reason for using the weapon, though never mentioned then, and seldom mentioned even now, was hate. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were merely a more dramatic and devastating continuation of the no-quarter policy that had been in effect since December 7, 1941.

The bombs were used against a much-hated enemy simply because the Americans wanted to use them. Weapons that would kill tens of thousands in a flash, then kill tens of thousands more in the most hideous and painful ways imaginable made perfectly good sense at the time; it certainly made sense to Truman and millions of Americans then, and sadly, it still makes perfectly good sense to millions of Americans even now, seventy years later.

“The Dirty Japs began the war,” as the reasoning ran then, and still runs now, “the Dirty Japs fought the war in the most inhumane way possible, and so it is thus fitting that these dirty yellow rats should suffer like no other people ever suffered;” or, as one American historian phrased it more delicately:

“[T]he widespread image of the Japanese as sub-human constituted an emotional context which provided another justification for decisions which resulted in the death of hundreds of thousands.”

Nevertheless, with the war clearly won, and with pangs of conscience beginning to reassert themselves among some, a few voices felt that the dropping of the terrible new weapon was a display of sadistic savagery, pure and simple.

“The use of the atomic bomb, with its indiscriminate killing of women and children, revolts my soul,” former US president, Herbert Hoover, wrote shortly after the news reached him. Added the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral William Leahy:

“It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were almost defeated and ready to surrender. . . . [I]n being the first to use it, we . . . adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages.”

And even Dwight David Eisenhower—a man who himself knew more than a little about the mass murder of a helpless enemy—suddenly found a mote of pity when he registered his complaint against the use of the hideous new weapon. “The Japanese were ready to surrender. . . ,” the general wrote. “It wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.”

Mercifully, for everyone concerned, the Allied powers soon accepted the Japanese surrender seven months after it was originally offered and World War Two, the most savage and evil conflict in history, was over.

And while this was in progress, the “world’s worst peace” was claiming its European victims in their millions. None suffered more in war, none suffered more in “peace”, than German females. Of all the numerous war crimes committed by the Allies during World War Two, the massive rapes committed against the helpless women and children was perhaps the most monstrous.

Of course, an untold number of German women and children did not survive the violent, nonstop assaults.  One million?  Two million?  Ten million?  Since no one in power cared, no one in power was counting.

And while this monstrous crime was enveloping the women of Europe, a similar spiritual slaughter was transpiring in Asia.

Because the great bulk of the fighting in the war against Japan was fought on the water, in the air, or across islands either uninhabited or sparsely populated, rape is a word seldom mentioned in American war diaries or official reports during the years 1941-1944.

When US forces invaded the Japanese island of Okinawa, however, this changed.  Almost immediately, and in spite of the bloody fighting, US soldiers began the sexual assault on the females of the island. In one prefecture alone, during a ten-day period, over one thousand women reported being raped.

Since most victims would never come forward and voluntarily suffer such shame in a society where modesty and chastity were prized above all else, the number of rapes was undoubtedly much greater than reported.

Incidents like the following became common:

Marching south, men of the 4th Marines passed a group of some 10 American soldiers bunched together in a tight circle next to the road. They were “quite animated,” noted a corporal who assumed they were playing a game of craps. “Then as we passed them,” said the shocked marine, “I could see they were taking turns raping an oriental woman. I was furious, but our outfit kept marching by as though nothing unusual was going on.”

So pervasive was the crime, and so frightened were the people, that hundreds of Okinawa women committed suicide by swallowing poison or by leaping from the steep cliffs of the island.

With their nation’s surrender in August 1945, Japanese officials were so concerned about the mass rape of their wives and daughters by the victors that they rounded up tens of thousands of girls from poorer families throughout the nation and all but forced them into prostitution at various brothels, or “comfort stations.”

Although such stop-gap measures did prevent wholesale rape on a German scale, this was small consolation to the women and children who had to endure the sanctioned sex attacks.  Earning anywhere from eight cents to a dollar a day, a girl working in the “rape stations,” as they more commonly were called, might be brutally raped and sodomized from 15 to 60 times a day.

“They took my clothes off,” remembered one little girl. “I was so small, they were so big, they raped me easily. I was bleeding, I was only 14. I can smell the men. I hate men.”

Despite hundreds of thousands of American and Australian occupation soldiers using the rape stations, thousands more preferred taking their sex violently.  In the days, weeks and months after the surrender, numerous atrocities were committed as the victors laid claim to the “spoils of war.”

In the Spring of 1946, American GI’s cut the phone lines in Nagoya and raped every woman they could get their hands on, including children as young as ten.  In another city, US soldiers broke into a hospital and spent their time raping over 70 women, including one who had just given birth.  The mother’s infant was flung to the floor and killed.

Had Allied occupation commander, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, spent even half the time on stemming rape as he spent censoring news from Japan or running down real or imagined Japanese war criminals, the attacks would have been curtailed.  But, like his opposite in Europe, Gen. Eisenhower, he did not.

As an American historian, John W. Dower acknowledged:

“Once you recognize that soldiers rape–including ‘our’ guys, our fathers, uncles, grandfathers, sons, husbands, boyfriends, grandsons–then you understand the tremendous resistance [by authorities] to recognizing mass rapes during wartime as the atrocity it has always been and still is.

As the preceding pages have hopefully demonstrated if, for no other reason than sexual violence and rape, the women of the world should lead the way in demanding an end to war for all times to come. Until that happy day arrives, women and children have been, and will surely always remain, war’s greatest victims.

When it comes to propaganda, we suspected our enemies of it, but we never figured we were using propaganda. We felt like our country was too honest to use propaganda on us, and we honestly were not conscious that they were.

So wrote Katharine Phillips, an American Red Cross worker during World War Two.  Hardly concealed in Katherine’s words written long after the war, is the fear, the dread fear, that perhaps the inhuman evil that her generation was told to hate a thousand times over during four years of war may not have been so evil or so inhuman after all.

Just as with every other war known to man, World War Two had also been a war of words, a war of poisonous words; a war of deceit, treachery, hate, and lies in which trusting, unsuspecting people were lashed once again into a frenzy of murderous madness by outrageously vicious and vile propaganda.

True, some angry words are perhaps needed in times of war to awaken and impassion the laggards among us to work and slave-like ants to win such a contest; but equally true, some of that same propaganda, in the hands of evil men behind desks far removed from danger, contribute to outright murder of the most heartless and cold-blooded kind, encourage rape on a massive, historical scale, add to the agonizing death by fire of uncounted millions of women and children, and engender enough hate, misery, and pain to make a planet groan.

For many, like Katherine, it took years before they came to realize that the very people they had been programmed to despise, dehumanize, and ultimately exterminate like vermin were but after all, very frail, very frightened, very human, and finally . . . were very much like themselves.

For many Americans like Ms. Phillips, such an epiphany came long after the war. For a fortunate few, however, even in the midst of the terrible inferno itself, reality sometimes shattered the hate-filled propaganda unexpectedly.

The sudden re-humanization of the Japanese came as a shock to some. While sifting through a blackened, blown-out cave on Iwo Jima, one marine was “horrified” when he discovered some childish and brightly-colored paintings strewn among the wreckage. After poring over the artwork, the soldier was stunned.

“The Japanese soldiers had children . . . who loved them and sent their artwork to them,” the incredulous marine suddenly realized, just as American children would send pretty pictures to their equally proud fathers.

Rummaging through pockets of the fallen enemy, other Americans were startled when they found newspaper clippings of baseball teams back home in Japan, just as any normal American soldier would carry.

Or they discovered inside enemy helmets photos of beautiful Japanese movie stars just as many US marines folded pin-ups of Betty Grable or Rita Hayworth in theirs; or they unwrapped delicate letters from home with pictures of girlfriends inside, or they stumbled upon a torn photo amid the debris of battle of a now-dead soldier laughing and rolling on the ground with puppies in his back yard back home.

For some Americans, the abrupt realization that there were more similarities between them and their enemy than not was life-altering. Occasionally, in even more startling ways, the realization of shared humanity came when a dead soldier’s diary was discovered:

Sept. 30, 1942 (still on Guadalcanal) We took a short rest in the grove, when we found a figure of a man in a bush. Had he escaped from a crashing plane or infiltrated the sea? Two or three soldiers chased and caught him after five min or so. He was a young American soldier.

He got a bayonet cut on his forehead and was bleeding. He sat down on the ground leaning on coconut trunks and had his hands tied behind his back. He looked thin, unshaven, and wore a waterproofing overcoat.

He pleaded with me to help him, ‘General, Help me! ‘General, Help me!’ He thought I was a senior and an officer of higher rank. In the rain, I stood hesitant about what to do with this American soldier.

It was impossible for me to set him free. We couldn’t take him with my party. . . . We had not roughed him up after capturing him, but the moment I had deported him, the men of the HQ treated him violently. I thought later I should have released him.

I regretted what I had done to him. He didn’t make me feel any hatred as an enemy. It was a strange feeling for me. He looked quite young and mild-mannered and didn’t look strong or ferocious at all. He was gentle but fully composed and never disgraced himself. I can’t say what befell this young soldier. I am sure he was not a soldier who would easily leak out a military secret. And I am afraid he never returned to his camp.

With the dawn of peace, men and women of goodwill finally find the strength and courage to revisit the awful crucible they had recently passed through. Some, in shame, cast off the old prejudice and hate that they once had so eagerly embraced, and seek a reckoning, a new and honest understanding of the past that they had played a part in.

Such was the case of Edgar Jones. A veteran himself, first in Europe, then in the Pacific, Jones struggled mightily to make sense of the many senseless things he had seen, heard, and perhaps even done. When he was through, when he truly understood what had occurred, the veteran exploded in anger . . . and honesty.

We Americans have the dangerous tendency in our international thinking to take a holier-than-thou attitude toward other nations. We consider ourselves to be more noble and decent than other peoples, and consequently in a better position to decide what is right and wrong in the world.

What kind of war do civilians suppose we fought, anyway? We shot prisoners in cold blood, wiped out hospitals, strafed lifeboats, killed or mistreated enemy civilians, finished off the enemy wounded, tossed the dying into a hole with the dead, and in the Pacific boiled the flesh off enemy skulls to make table ornaments for sweethearts, or carved their bones into letter openers.

We topped off our saturation bombing and burning of enemy civilians by dropping atomic bombs on two nearly defenseless cities, thereby setting an all-time record for instantaneous mass slaughter.

As victors we are privileged to try our defeated opponents for their crimes against humanity; but we should be realistic enough to appreciate that if we were on trial for breaking international laws, we should be found guilty on a dozen counts. We fought a dishonorable war because morality had a low priority in battle.

The tougher the fighting, the less room for decency, and in Pacific contests we saw mankind reach the blackest depths of bestiality.

Fortunately, the passionate, heartfelt words of Edgar Jones now speak for millions more around the world. Alas, if only such words as his could be emblazoned across the sky in fiery letters before each and every rush to war and before each and every “holy crusade” to slaughter an “inhuman” enemy, then certainly the human race and the globe it lives on would be so much better because of it.

References

• Weingartner, James J. (February 1992). “Trophies of War: U.S. Troops and the Mutilation of Japanese War Dead, 1941-1945”. Pacific Historical Review 61 (1): 53–67. JSTOR 3640788. Archived from the original on 2011-08-10.
• Harrison, Simon (2006). “Skull Trophies of the Pacific War: transgressive objects of remembrance”. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 12.
• Thayer, Bradley A. (2004). Darwin and international relations: on the evolutionary origins of war and ethnic conflict. University Press of Kentucky. ISBN 978-0-8131-2321-9.
• Johnston, Mark (2000). Fighting the Enemy. Australian Soldiers and their Adversaries in World War II. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press.
• Dower, John W. (1986). War Without Mercy. Race and Power in the Pacific War. London: Faber and Faber. pp. 64–66. ISBN 0-571-14605-8. Retrieved 24 January 2011.
• Ferguson, Niall (2007). The War of the World. History’s Age of Hatred. London: Penguin Books. ISBN 978-0-14-101382-4. Retrieved 24 January 2011
• Mutilation of Japanese war dead
• Main article: American mutilation of Japanese war dead “My Guadalcanal” by Genjirou Inui (online diary of  Genjirou Inui, a young Japanese officer)

Further reading

• Paul Fussell “Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War”
• Bourke “An Intimate History of Killing” (pages 37–43)
• Fussel “Thank God for the Atom Bomb and other essays” (pages 45–52)
• Aldrich “The Faraway War: Personal diaries of the Second World War in Asia and the Pacific”
• Hoyt, Edwin P. (1987). Japan’s War: The Great Pacific Conflict. London: Arrow Books. ISBN 0-09-963500-3.
• Charles A. Lindbergh (1970). The Wartime Journals of Charles A. Lindbergh. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.. ISBN 0-15-194625-6.
• External links
• One War Is Enough War Correspondent EDGAR L. JONES 1946
• American troops ‘murdered Japanese PoWs’
• The US Sailor with the Japanese Skull by Winfield Townley Scott
• Eerie Souvenirs From the Vietnam War Washington Post July 3, 2007, By Michelle Boorstein
• 2002 Virginia Festival of the Book: Trophy Skulls
• War against subhumans: comparisons between the German War against the Soviet Union and the American war against Japan, 1941-1945 The Historian 3/22/1996, Weingartner, James
• Racism in Japanese in U.S. wartime propaganda The Historian 6/22/1994 Brcak, Nancy; Pavia, John R.
• MACABRE MYSTERY Coroner tries to find the origin of the skull found during the raid by deputies The Pueblo Chieftain Online.
• Skull from WWII casualty to be buried in a grave for Japanese unknown soldiers Stars and Stripes
• HNET review of Peter Schrijvers. The GI War Against Japan: American Soldiers in Asia and the Pacific during World War II.
• February 1, 1943 Life Magazine of Japanese skull .p.27
• The May 1944 Life Magazine picture of the week (Image)

Truman quote:

‘The only language [the Japanese] seem to understand is the one we have been using to bombard them. When you have to deal with a beast you have to treat him as a beast. It is most regrettable but nevertheless true.’

US President Harry S Truman, 11 August 1945, in a letter justifying his decision to drop the atomic bomb on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

[1] Alexander Pantsov, The Bolsheviks and the Chinese Revolution, 1919-1927 (New York and London: Routledge, 2000); Vera Mackie, Feminism in Modern Japan: Citizenship, Embodiment and Sexuality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Goldberg Ruthchild, Equality, and Revolution: Women’s Rights in the Russian Empire, 1905-1917 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010); Joshua Blackeney, Japan Bites Back: Documents Contextualizing Pearl Harbor (Non-Aligned Media, 2015). Other sources that I could have given him include Lorenz M. Lüthi, The Sino-Soviet Split: Cold War in the Communist World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008); Michael Y. L. Luk, The Origins of Chinese Bolshevism: An Ideology in the Making, 1920-1928 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Yuki Tanaka, Japan’s Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery and Prostitution During World War II and the U.S. Occupation (New York and London: Routledge, 2002 and 2010); Takemae Eiji, Inside GHQ: The Allied Occupation of Japan and Its Legacy (New York: Continuum, 2003).

Jonas E. Alexis, Senior Editor

Jonas E. Alexis has degrees in mathematics and philosophy. He studied education at the graduate level. His main interests include U.S. foreign policy, the history of the Israel/Palestine conflict, and the history of ideas. He is the author of the book, Kevin MacDonald’s Metaphysical Failure: A Philosophical, Historical, and Moral Critique of Evolutionary Psychology, Sociobiology, and Identity Politics. He teaches mathematics in South Korea.

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