60 years ago today, eight Japanese officials convicted of war crimes by the International Military Tribunal of the Far East were hanged at Sugano Prison in Tokyo. Among the eight were wartime Prime Minister Hideki Tōjō and General Seishirō Itagaki (like Tōjō a veteran of the Kwantung Army) who was convicted for his actions in Manchuria and China.
Whatever there is to say about the fairness of the International Tribunal, I don’t think enough is said (outside of China) about the atrocities and hardships inflicted on the Chinese people by the Japanese imperial armies. Every once in awhile I get emails from this wingnut group based in Japan who wants to tell “the real story” of what happened in China between 1931 and 1945. They spout off about things like the Nanjing Massacre was a myth, the comfort women “volunteered” (as if separating the word ‘forced’ from the word ‘prostitution’ matters anyway), or that Japanese ‘atrocities’ were fabricated by Chinese nationalists, etc.
Now Chinese museums, no strangers to fabricating history, do have a tendency to histrionics whenever possible. But many of the atrocities of the Japanese against China have been pretty well documented and independently confirmed (to the extent