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Shortly after Pearl Harbor, the Japanese Imperial Army invaded the Dutch East Indies, now known as Indonesia. A deceitful campaign promoting Asian brotherhood recruited and coerced young Indonesian men to support the Japanese occupation with the sinister outcome that several million of them were worked to death or summarily killed as expendable slave laborers, orromusha, as they were called. While many romusha disappeared from the record, nine hundred were known victims of a brutal and immoral medical experiment perpetuated by an increasingly desperate Imperial Japan. In anticipation of a land assault, the Japanese needed a means to protect their troops from tetanus, and they used these nine hundred men as human guinea pigs to test an insufficiently vetted vaccine. Within days, all nine hundred suffered the protracted, agonizing death of acute tetanus. With the Allied forces poised for victory, the Japanese needed a scapegoat for this well-documented incident if they were to avoid war-crimes prosecution. They brutally tortured Achmad Mochtar, a native Indonesian and renowned scientist, along with his colleagues at the Eijkman Institute in Batavia (now Jakarta), until Mochtar signed a confession to the murders in exchange for the liberty of his fellow scientists. The Japanese beheaded Mochtar weeks before the war ended.War Crimes in Japan-Occupied Indonesiaunravels the deceit of the Japanese Army, the reasons for the mass murder of the romusha, and Mochtar's heroic role in these tragic events. The end result finds justice for Mochtar and reveals the true extent of one of the least recognized war crimes of World War II.

In October 1946, Colonel Presley Rixey arrived by destroyer at Chichi Jima to repatriate 22, 000 Japanese who had been bypassed during the war in the Pacific. While waiting for a Marine battalion to arrive, the colonel met daily with a Japanese commission assigned to assist him. When asked what had happened to American prisoners on the island, the Japanese hatched a story to hide the atrocities that they had committed. In truth, the downed flyers had been captured, executed, and eaten by certain senior Japanese officers. This is the story of the investigation, the cover-up, and the last hours of those Americans who disappeared into war's wilderness and whose remains were distributed to the cooking galleys of Chichi Jima. Rixey's suspicion of a cover-up was later substantiated by a group of Americans returning from Japan who had lived on Chichi Jima for generations. It would take five months of gathering testimony to uncover all the details. Thirty war criminals were eventually tried at Guam in 1947, five of whom met their fate on the gallows.

Prior to and during the Second World War, the Japanese Army established programs of biological warfare throughout China and elsewhere. In these “factories of death,” including the now-infamous Unit 731, Japanese doctors and scientists conducted large numbers of vivisections and experiments on human beings, mostly Chinese nationals. However, as a result of complex historical factors including an American cover-up of the atrocities, Japanese denials, and inadequate responses from successive Chinese governments, justice has never been fully served. This volume brings together the contributions of a group of scholars from different countries and various academic disciplines. It examines Japan’s wartime medical atrocities and their postwar aftermath from a comparative perspective and inquires into perennial issues of historical memory, science, politics, society and ethics elicited by these rebarbative events. The volume’s central ethical claim is that the failure to bring justice to bear on the systematic abuse of medical research by Japanese military medical personnel more than six decades ago has had a profoundly retarding influence on the development and practice of medical and social ethics in all of East Asia. The book also includes an extensive annotated bibliography selected from relevant publications in Japanese, Chinese and English. Jing-Bao Nie is an Associate Professor at the Bioethics Centre, Dunedin School of Medicine, University of Otago, New Zealand, and honorary adjunct professor at Hunan Normal and Peking Universities, China. Nanyan Guo is an Associate Professor at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies, Kyoto, Japan. Mark Selden is a Research Associate in the East Asia Program at Cornell University, USA and a coordinator of The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus. Arthur Kleinman is the Esther and Sidney Rabb Professor of Anthropology, Department of Anthropology, Faculty of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Medical Anthropology and Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, USA. Introduction: Medical Atrocities, History and Ethics Arthur Kleinman, Jing-Bao Nie and Mark Selden Part I: Japan’s Medical War Crimes and Post-War Trials 1. Unit 731 and the Japanese Imperial Army’s Biological Warfare Program Tsuneishi Keiichi 2. The Legacies and Implications of Medicine-Related War Crimes Trials and Post-War Politics Suzy Wang 3. Research on Humans at the Khabarovsk War Crimes Trial: An Historical and Ethical Examination Boris G. Yudin Part II: Guilt and Responsibility: Individuals and Nations 4. Data Generated in Japan?s Biowarfare Experiments on Human Victims in China, 1932-1945, and the Ethics of Using Them. Till Bärnighausen 5. Discovering Traces of Humanity: Taking Individual Responsibility for Medical Atrocities Nanyan Guo 6. On the Altar of Nationalism and the Nation-state: Japan’s Wartime Medical Atrocities, the American Cover-up and Postwar Chinese Responses Jing-Bao Nie Part III: Ethics and Historical Memory: Parallel Lessons from Germany and USA 7. Bioethics and Exceptionalism: A German Example of Learning from Medical Atrocities Ole Döring 8. The Racial Hygienist Otmar von Verschuer’s Relation with the Confessing Church and His Post-War Rehabilitation Peter Degen 9. America’s Memory Problems: Diaspora, Civil Society and the Perils of \"Chosen Amnesia\" David B. MacDonald 10. Japanese and American War Atrocities, Historical Memory and Reconciliation Mark Selden Part IV: Annotated Bibliography 11. Annotated Bibliography: Primary Sources and Secondary Literature in Japanese, Chinese and English Nanyan Guo and Jing-Bao Nie Appendices Suzy Wang 　 \"[I]t is essential reading for those interested not only in the ethics of human experimentation but also in the ways in which basic humanitarian values become compromised by nationalism and double standards of morality... I can best sum up the merit of this book by quoting its dedication page: 'To all victims of medical atrocities for whom justice has never been fully served'. Beyond doubt, this volume does much to honour this dedication through its meticulous scholarship and its unwavering assertion of the inalienable worth of every human being.\" - Alastair V. Campbell; Asian Bioethics Review March 2012 Volume 4, Issue 1 \"The book has a number of strengths, not least in drawing together a wide and varied expertise on the subject. The research based on freshly harvested archival materials is particularly compelling... [T]his is an extremely important volume which serves to remind us of the aspects of the Asia Pacific war that remain to be fullt addressed and acknowledged. The book should be of interest to academics, students and the general reader and deserves to be read widely.\" - Caroline Rose, University of Leeds, UK; Pacific Affairs: Volume 85, No. 2 - June 2012 \"Japan’s Medical Atrocities succeeds in discussing many issues related to the inhumane and immoral medical experiments on defenseless Chinese victims duringWorldWar II, and the disappointing lack of justice brought to bear on Dr. Ishii Shiro and most of his colleagues after the war.\" - John E. Van Sant, Ph.D., Department of History, University of Alabama-Birmingham, USA; Journal of the History of Medicine \"Nie et al. have done a valuable service in making the story of Japense human experimentation widely accessible and ensuring that English speakers do not easily dismiss it as an aberrant history. Japan's Wartime Medical Attocities demonstrates with painful clarity that, much more than merely someone else's problem, Japan's wartime medical history must serve as a lesson in past crimes, historical truth and hustice for all.\" - Frederick R. Dickinson; Japan Review, Vol. 24 (2012) \" a valuable and finely written multidisciplinary exploration of a hidden chapter of contemporary history. It sheds light on the medical atrocities committed by the Japanese Government, its army, and its scientific community from the late 1930s through World War II, mainly in China.[…] A remarkable aspect of the book is that it alternates views, specifically focusing on the Japanese case with observations regarding other situations, namely, the German and the American ways of dealing with the legacy of wartime atrocities. […] The thoughtful insights and observations the book contains go well beyond the case of Japan. They are a valuable contribution to the overall debate on memory of past atrocities, justice, and the politics of reconciliation. \" - Paolo De Stefani, Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics

A young girl learns of her mother's survival of the Tokyo Firebombing of March 9-10, 1945, through the eyes of her brother's spirit.

Japan’s Occupation of Java in the Second World War draws upon written and oral Japanese, Indonesian, Dutch and English-language sources to narrate the Japanese occupation of Java as a transnational intersection between two complex Asian societies, placing this narrative in a larger wartime context of domestic, regional, and global crisis. Japan’s occupation of Java is here revealed in a radically new and nuanced light, as an ambiguous encounter revolutionary in the degree of mutual interests that drew the two sides together, fascinating and tragic in its evolution, and profound in the legacies left behind. Mark structures his study around a diverse group of Japanese and Indonesians captivated by the wartime vision of a ‘Greater Asia.’ The book is not only the first transnational study of Japan’s wartime occupation of Java, but the first to focus on the Second World War experience in transnational terms ‘on the ground’ anywhere in Asia. Breaking new ground interpretatively, thematically and narratively, Mark’s monumental study is of vital significance for students and scholars of modern Asian and global history.

The Tokyo Tribunal (1946-1948) tried Japanese leaders for war crimes committed during the Second World War, but behind the scenes, old legal traditions contended with new legal ethics and refigured cultural perceptions of how to bringing about justice.

This unique volume provides a detailed analysis of Australia's 300 war crimes trials of principally Japanese accused conducted in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. Part I contains contextual essays explaining why Australia established military courts to conduct these trials and thematic essays considering various legal issues in, and historical perspectives on, the trials. Part II offers a comprehensive collection of eight location essays, one each for the physical locations where the trials were held. In Part III post-trial issues are reviewed, such as the operation of compounds for war criminals; the repatriation of convicted Japanese war criminals to serve the remainder of their sentences; and reflections of some of those convicted on their experience of the trials. In the final essay, a contemporary reflection on the fairness of the trials is provided, not on the basis of a twenty-first century critique of contemporary minimum standards of fair trial expected in the prosecution of war crimes, but by reviewing approaches taken in the trials themselves as well as from reactions to the trials by those associated with them. The essays are supported by a large collection of unique historical photographs, maps and statistical materials. There has been no systematic and comprehensive analysis of these trials so far, which has meant that they are virtually precluded from consideration as judicial precedent. This volume fills that gap, and offers scholars and practitioners an important and groundbreaking resource.

Patrick Brode has produced a fascinating study of government hesistancy surrounding war crime prosecutions inCasual Slaughters and Accidental Judgements, a history of Canada's prosecution of war crimes committed during the Second World War.

This is the first English-language book to record the experiences and testimonies of Chinese women abducted and detained as sex slaves in Japanese military \"comfort stations\" during Japan's 1931-45 invasion of China.