Pacific War - War Crimes

War Crimes

Japanese soldiers killed millions of civilians and prisoners of war from surrounding nations. At least 20 million Chinese died during the Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945).

Unit 731 was one example of wartime atrocities committed on a civilian population during World War II, where experiments were performed on thousands of Chinese civilians and Allied prisoners of war. In military campaigns, the Japanese army used biological weapons on Chinese, killing around 400,000 Chinese civilians. The Rape of Nanking is another example of atrocity committed by Japanese soldiers on a civilian population.

According to the findings of the Tokyo tribunal, the death rate of Western prisoners was 27.1%, seven times that of POWs under the Germans and Italians. The most notorious use of forced labour was in the construction of the Burma–Thailand Death Railway.

A widely publicised example of institutionalised sexual slavery are "comfort women", a euphemism for the 200,000 women who served in the Japanese army's camps during World War II. Some 35 Dutch comfort women brought a successful case before the Batavia Military Tribunal in 1948. To this day, Japan still denies these war crimes; then-Prime Minister Shinzō Abe claimed in 2007, "The fact is, there is no evidence to prove there was coercion."

The Three Alls Policy (Sankō Sakusen) was a Japanese scorched earth policy adopted in China, the three alls being: "Kill All, Burn All and Loot All". Initiated in 1940 by Ryūkichi Tanaka, the Sankō Sakusen was implemented in full scale in 1942 in north China by Yasuji Okamura. According to historian Mitsuyoshi Himeta, the scorched earth campaign was responsible for the deaths of "more than 2.7 million" Chinese civilians.