Dubbed As Inhumane Analysis

In “A Perspective on the War Crimes,” Shigetoshi Iwamatsu argues that the tragedies at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were unparalleled war crimes and unnecessary acts of cruelty. He advocates the elimination of nuclear arms and opposes nuclear energy sources. The argument for defining the use of the atomic bombs as “without parallel in world history” is largely Iwamatsu’s belief that they were an unneeded extreme, likely motivated by racism.

During world war two, the Imperial Japanese army forced an estimated 200,000 women into sexual slavery. This is just one of the many atrocities committed by Japan during world war two. Even though many say that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were inhumane, the US was completely justified because the future casualties were minimized and Japan and its allies committed atrocious war crimes.

The order for the military to put Japanese in imprisonment takes away from their constitutional rights and is discriminating against the Japanese race. The

War can be loud and visible or quiet and remote. It affects the individual and entire societies, the soldier, and the civilian. Both U.S. prisoners of war in Japan and Japanese-American citizens in the United States during WWII undergo efforts to make them “invisible.” Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken hero, Louie Zamperini, like so many other POWs, is imprisoned, beaten, and denied basic human rights in POW camps throughout Japan. Miné Okubo, a U.S. citizen by birth, is removed from society and interned in a “protective custody” camp for Japanese-American citizens. She is one of the many Japanese-Americans who were interned for the duration of the war. Louie Zamperini, as a POW in Japan, and Miné Okubo, as a Japanese-American Internee both experience efforts to make them “invisible” through dehumanization and isolation in the camps of WWII, and both resist these efforts.

The United States put Japanese people in camps, stealing their rights, and placed them in inhumane facilities that no human being should be forced to withstand.

When the Nazi’s arrested Jews and sent them to concentration camps, the conditions were terrible. The men, women, and children in the camps were not treated with the rights they deserved, since they were forced into harsh labor, placed in killing centers where gas chambers were used to effectively and quickly murder thousands of Jews a day, and experimented on to find new medicines and so the German scientists could find out how much pain and torture they could endure until death. In America, over 120,000 Japanese-Americans were relocated into camps during the period of World War II. Even though these Americans were not treated as harshly as the Jews in concentration camps, they lost

Mrs. Wen, in her testimony of the Japanese atrocities at Nanking in 1937, she writes “ Japanese troops arrived, all of them armed with guns, knives, force me to take off my pants, I would be killed if I didn’t, I personally watched as the Japanese troops massacred many people” (Doc A). In stating this, the author means that the Japanese soldiers went through every house and shooting every civilian they could and raping women without hesitation. Mr. Taketa, in his testimony about life in Japan before the atomic bomb was dropped, he claims that “the Japanese people were forced to endure poverty and suffering” (Doc D). The author means that Japan’s government starve their people to death and let them suffer, as part of their culture. Furthermore, the Japanese were known by their way of killing their prisoners. These brutalities by the Japanese soldiers were considered inhumane. Thus, President Truman should have dropped the atomic bombs on Japan because the cruel actions of the Japanese needed to be stopped, and save innocent

When authors write about World War II, most set their stories in Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich, but few would give a moment of thought to the atrocities perpetrated by the Imperial Japanese Army in East Asia and the Pacific region. However, Laura Hillenbrand has brought us this heavily neglected side of the tragedy. By following the vicissitudes of a USAAF lieutenant named Louis Zamperini in her bestseller “Unbroken”, she pays tribute to all ex-POWs and soldiers that lost their lives on the Asian battlefield.

Although World War Two began in 1939, the United States did not enter the conflict until 1941. The country's entrance into the war was caused by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. After the attack the government had suspicion that the Japanese Americans were spies. So, congress passed the Executive order 9066, stating all Japanese Americans would be relocated to detainment camps.They remained in these camps for two years. Japanese Americans faced many difficulties in the detainment camps.

September 1, 1939, World War II began. For the first two years America did not get involved in the war. America just helped out a couple of the allied countries by giving them weapons. On December 7, 1941, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. There are some theories of why The U.S. got bombed, but America does not know for sure; immediately after the attack Franklin D. Roosevelt (the President of the U.S. during the time) declared war. February of 1942, America put all Japanese, even Japanese-American in internment camps. Due to the political, social, and military threat to the United States all people with Japanese ancestors needed to be interned during World War II.

The Japanese soldiers had no sense of remorse or sorrow for the prisoners instead they pushed them to their breaking point. Many prisoners collapsed which proved fatal because if you fell behind you became a practice dummy for the Japanese to sharpen their bayonet skills and techniques of killing on you. On one occasion, a prisoner was falling behind in the rear so tanks that followed lined themselves up to run over the victim and squish him into the pavement to make it look as if he were from a cartoon. Since the Japanese could

Moreover, the Japanese’s treatment of prisoners affected how Americans saw them. The Americans believed the Japanese were brutal human beings. The Americans saw them as that because during the Bataan Death March, if you stopped marching, the Japanese would kill you with a bayonet or rifle. Then, if you tried to help someone who fell, you would get beaten or stabbed. Also for a sport, Japanese soldiers would fracture sculls with rifle butts. Mostly, the prisoners would receive almost to no food or water and they were forced to walk 65

The conflict between the Allies and the Axis was a horrific and deadly one, which consisted of genocide and mass bombings. Innocent citizens were killed with the estimated sixty million casualties, which lead to the question as to the morality of the different actors—Germany, Japan, England and America— in WWII. In order to truly assess their guilt, meaning their moral innocence, each country will be measured upon the morality of their intent and execution of the different controversial mass killings that Germany (the Holocaust), Japan (Nanking), and the Allied forces (Dresden and Hiroshima) took part in. This hierarchy of evil can be judged upon how Japan’s tyranny and the Allies’ area bombing compare to the genocide performed by Germany. Similarly, these countries will be judged on the whether these different acts were premeditated versus in response to another act, as well as the proportionality to which these acts were carried out. This measurement of evil places each party on an overall scale, which depicts the total guilt that each country or countries deserve. WWII exemplifies that while war is an unavoidable aspect of human nature, there is no such thing as a just war. Similarly, while there is a definite hierarchy of morality between the different actors of WWII, each of the countries at play are immoral in their intent and execution of the attacks on opposing countries.

Since the end of WWII, numerous changes had taken place in both Germany and Japan in terms of historical consciousness regarding the war crimes and atrocities they had committed during the war. From the perspective of the war crimes, the Third Reich and Imperial Japan were somehow similar, since both countries had slaughtered POWs and innocent civilians, conducted human experimentations, enslaved POWs, and so on. Despite the similarities between these two former axis powers, in recent years, we frequently hear news about Japan’s neighboring countries blaming Japan on the absence of an official apology for its wartime atrocities and the understatement of its wartime historical issues and war crimes in Japanese history textbook. In contrast, we seldom hear about any complaints towards Germany on its unsolved historical issues or any requests for Germany to apologize, simply because Germany had done more than enough to reconcile with the victimized countries. This situation reflects a fundamental difference in the historical consciousness between

At the conclusion of the Second World War, the Japanese Imperial Army had left the majority of East and Southeast Asia in smouldering ruins. The nation itself, was still recovering from the devastation of the atomic bomb and the cultural shock of surrender when the American occupation troops arrived in Japan in September of 1945. As a consequence of surrender, Japan was forced to adopt a new constitution with strict limitations including the renunciation of the right to wage war as well as the right to