Horror in the East: Japan and the Atrocities of World War II by Laurence Rees Read Free Book Online Page A

instead.Once, in the countryside looking for Chinese soldiers, he and his comrades came upon ‘a woman who was about twenty-seven or twenty-eight.We had some petrol and we covered her in it and set fire to her so she died.’When asked to explain how it was possible that he could do such a thing, he replied: ‘We were going to battle and we thought we were probably going to die, so it’s a strange word to use but I think we were looking for some sort of entertainment.’
    After the war, Enomoto was one of the few Japanese soldiers held to account for their actions, imprisoned first by the Russians and then by the Chinese.And once he had fallen into the hands of his enemies one wartime crime in particular returned to haunt him.‘I went into this village and there was a girl aged about fifteen there.And I went up to her, and then her father appeared, so I killed him.I wanted to rape her and so I thought, well, if he was her father he probably wouldn’t be very happy if I was raping his daughter, so I shot him.I didn’t have very long to do it all in.As I said, I’d just arrived in the village.She cried and she was shaking.She may have known what was going to happen to her and she was shaking.So then I raped her and killed her there and then after raping her.But what happened was that there was a young boy who caused me problems later.He was hiding and I thought he was just a young child so I thought it would be OK, but when the war trials took place he appeared and he recognized me, and that led to problems for me.’Astonishingly, the Chinese did not execute confessed murderers and rapists like Masayo Enomoto after the war.Instead, in the late 1950s they allowed them to return to Japan.(One consequence of this policy is that veterans like him are free to speak of their crimes without risk of further prosecution.)
    Enomoto’s crimes are terrible indeed, but the most shocking part of his interview was the moment when he was asked about his own sense of guilt:
    ’During the operations there were many times when you raped women.Did you not feel guilty about what you were doing?’
    ’I didn’t feel any sense of guilt then,’ he replied.
    ’Why?Why didn’t you have any sense of guilt then?’
    ’Because I was fighting for the emperor.He was a god.In the name of the emperor we could do whatever we wanted against the Chinese.Therefore I had no sense of guilt.’
    Time and again when we pressed Japanese veterans to explain similar acts of barbarism or cruelty they would respond in the same way.‘We were doing it for the emperor — he was a god,’ became as familiar an exculpatory phrase as the German ‘We were acting under orders.’In a way, such an attempt to escape individual culpability is understandable.These Japanese soldiers had been trained never to think for themselves — only to show unquestioning loyalty through their NCOs and officers to the emperor himself.They had been taught that every military operation they took part in was for the glory of their sacred emperor.
    Hajime Kondo, who during the Sanko ‘pacification’ actions believed that ‘if you kill a person then it’s good for the emperor’, also has powerful memories of the atrocities he and his colleagues committed against women and children.‘When soldiers went into the village and entered the houses, they first searched for any valuables to take, then they searched for women,’ he says.‘Once, my comrades found a woman in her thirties and then a group rape took place.Normally when group rape happened the victims were killed.But this time she and her baby were not killed but taken with us to the next base camp.Then she was taken with us on the march the next day.’The woman was stripped, and made to march over mountainous territory naked apart from her shoes.Kondo believes her clothes were taken from her because this made it difficult for her to escape, but it is hard to believe that the soldiers were not also motivated by a desire to