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

cause further sexual humiliation to the poor woman.
    During a break in the march Kondo heard older soldiers whispering ‘What should we do?’as both the woman and her child were clearly becoming weaker.‘Suddenly one of the soldiers stood up,’ he says, ‘and grabbed her baby and threw it over a cliff which was thirty to forty metres high.Then instantly the mother of the baby followed, jumping off the cliff.And when I saw what was happening in front of me I thought what a horrible thing to do.I felt sorry for them for a while, but I had to carry on marching.’
    Whilst the murder of a small child in this way may not have been a frequent occurrence, the crime of rape, as we have seen, was commonplace — so much so that the rigid system of hierarchy within the Imperial Army, with the senior soldiers bullying the more junior, was even carried over into the way the abuse of the Chinese women was conducted.‘Rookies were too tired to rape,’ says Kondo.‘The rookies were treated so badly, made to carry heavy loads, and the other soldiers were so mean to us, that I could never think of women.’But in an admission of startling honesty, he confessed that once he was deemed ‘senior’ enough he too was invited to participate in group rape.‘The soldiers caught a woman and one by one they committed rape.And I was in my third year as a soldier and one of the fourth-year soldiers summoned me and said, “Kondo, you go and rape.”You couldn’t turn it down.’
    The insight offered by Hajime Kondo’s description of the circumstances surrounding the rape he committed is significant, for it demonstrates the institutionalized nature of the crime.For these Japanese soldiers, rape had become more than an act of sexual violence; it had become a kind of bonding exercise between comrades, a reward to be offered to junior soldiers once they had proved their worth.Military training is built around acts of initiation, the receiving of symbolic rewards like a beret once a difficult period of training has been completed.Clearly, for the soldiers in Hajime Kondo’s unit, and probably for many thousands of other soldiers in the Imperial Army fighting in China, being invited to participate in a group rape became just such an act of initiation — a demonstration by the senior members of the squad that after years of training a junior soldier was finally thought worthy of truly ‘belonging’ to the unit.
    Officially, rape was a crime in the Japanese army.But only a handful of those who committed the offence were ever held to account for their actions, not only because many of the soldiers killed their victims after the crime, but also because senior officers must have either turned a blind eye to what was happening or indeed condoned it.A similar situation occurred during the training of recruits, where much of the brutal bullying and punishment was administered not ‘officially’ by the NCOs or officers, but by other more senior soldiers of the same rank.Professor Edward Drea makes an insightful comparison with political parties in Japan, who use ‘go betweens’ (in Japanese nakadachi) ’to deal with unsavory elements that the politicians cannot officially have links with for reasons of avoiding confrontations and maintaining group solidarity’. 12 Thus it is simply not accurate, as some Japanese apologists claim, that the rapes encouraged in this institutionalized way by senior soldiers within each squad were the actions of men going against firm orders that preached the contrary.From the moment they entered training the recruits learnt first to fear the more senior members of the squad and then to imitate them.This was the only way they could avoid entering an ever-increasing spiral of vicious bullying.Just as no sane recruit would have complained to an officer about being bullied by a more senior soldier, so it would have been rash in the extreme for a relatively junior soldier like Hajime Kondo to refuse to take part in a group