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Paper short abstract

This presentation examines autobiographic accounts of violence by ordinary Japanese soldiers in wartime China collected in the “War Experience Library” in Nara. Reconstructing micro-level situations through these records, it reassesses the diverse forms of Japanese military violence during the war.

Paper long abstract

What violent acts did the Japanese military actually commit in China during the Second Sino-Japanese War? In popular discourse, both in China and the West, this issue is often framed by portraying the “Japanese people” as a collective entity, emphasizing their “innate” brutality. However, there is also a view that responsibility for the war lies only with a segment of Japanese militarists, and that ordinary citizens and soldiers were also victims. Yet, many ordinary soldiers did commit atrocities in China during the war.

What were these acts of violence by ordinary soldiers? This presentation will examine them through soldiers' recollections, diaries, and last wills collected in the “War Experience Library” at the Nara Prefectural Library and Information Center. How were acts of violence expressed and explained in these personal accounts? How did these soldiers, having returned to everyday life in Japan, perceive, or fail to perceive, the inhumane acts committed during that former “extraordinary” period? This micro-level examination will reveal a variety of individual cases of violence that are difficult to capture when portraying the “Japanese people” as a collective.

The violence examined here likely took diverse forms, including violence against the Chinese people, but also violence within the Japanese military itself. Furthermore, the definition of violence may differ depending on the individual who recorded it. While a considerable amount of prior research exists on wartime violence, I believe there is still a need for, and value in, advancing empirical research on the diversity and causes of these acts.

Of course, postwar recollections, diaries, and last wills are secondary historical sources. Yet, understanding the reality of violence often necessitates reliance on such materials. While aiming to conduct a renewed qualitative examination of the nature of the violence recorded, this presentation also considers the methodological framework of this autobiographical, micro-level approach.

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Paper short abstract

The paper examines causes and consequences of internal violence in the Japanese Army during the Asia-Pacific War. Using a wide range of sources and a perspective of institutional history, it aims to analyse structural causes and factors that contributed to the mistreatment of Japanese soldiers.

Paper long abstract

During the Asia-Pacific War, the Japanese military exhibited a wide range of violent behaviour. In consideration of the magnitude of crimes and the implementation of coercive policies directed towards populations in the occupied territories and colonies, along with POW’s, it is unsurprising that the prevalence of quotidian forms of violence within the Imperial Japanese Army has hitherto received comparatively less scholarly attention. These encompassed instances of psychological and physical abuse by superiors and comrades, including beatings, extra drill or dangerous missions, and frequently resulted in bodily harm, desertion, suicide and murder. As the number of cases rose in absolute terms during the war – in view of the total war and mass mobilisation – and endangered both the cohesion of troops and the functioning of the army, the leadership in Tōkyō attempted on repeated occasions to combat the causes of internal violence, though without significant success.

The proposed paper will discuss the causes and consequences of internal violence within the Japanese army. To this end, a broad corpus of sources, including policy papers, official reports, court martial judgements and statistics, will be evaluated from a perspective of institutional history. Its objective is to ascertain the most significant factors within military structures that contributed to misconduct by officers and soldiers, as well as to the failure of countermeasures. The aforementioned factors encompassed structural weaknesses, including the commander-centred nature of the military justice system, the absence of effective supervision, the discrepancy between social and military hierarchies, and the deviation in patters of action and logic among the actors involved. Consequently, the paper also aims to contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of the violent conduct and the functioning of the Japanese Army between 1937 and 1945.

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Paper short abstract

This paper asks what factors contributed to the proliferation of sexual violence by Japanese soldiers during the Asia-Pacific War. It particularly studies what role military justice and the practices of military lawyers played in its containment, or why they failed to do so.

Paper long abstract

Japanese Legal Officers (hōmu-kan) ran the Legal Departments of the various armies and fleets that went to war during the Asia-Pacific War. They conducted the courts-martial and military commissions that tried Japanese soldiers as well as POWs and civilians, respectively. While ostensibly upholding the rule of law, their remit was first and foremost to protect the interests of the army, enforce discipline among soldiers and intimidate the civilian population into cooperating with the army. Thus, “military necessity” was an overriding factor that determined which crimes were prosecuted and which were simply ignored.

Sexual violence was rampant during the campaigns of the Japanese army and navy in the various theatres of the Asia-Pacific War. Whether the military leadership sought to contain it, and under what circumstances, was very much dictated by the circumstances of the war and by this so-called “military necessity”. Courts-martial played here an important role which, however, is little understood until now, due to the lack of sources until recently and the resulting dearth in research about Japanese military justice during the war.

This paper focuses on sexual violence as a particular common occurrence to demonstrate through the judgements of courts-martial, what factors and circumstances contributed to its proliferation or relative containment. However, only a fraction of cases of sexual violence made it into court. The paper thus also consults autobiographic sources of individual lawyers and reflects on the circumstances in which they worked in order to better understand which cases were prosecuted and why – more often – they were dropped.

Apart from better understanding the proliferation of sexual violence during the war, this paper thus also offers a concrete insight into the daily workings of the Japanese military justice system and the habitus of the people that ran it in the different theatres of the Asia-Pacific War.

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Paper short abstract

Using a micro-history of Panay Island, this presentation examines the dynamics of violence and irregular warfare in the Philippines between 1942 and 1945. It argues for the benefits of a multi-perspective approach, suggesting that military violence be viewed as a process rather than an event.

Paper long abstract

Beginning in July 1943, Japanese forces on Panay Island in the Philippines launched a series of subjugation operations aiming to suppress ongoing guerrilla resistance. During these operations, thousands of civilians were killed, and numerous villages were burned, crops razed, and livestock slaughtered as part of a comprehensive scorched-earth strategy that exacerbated the ongoing hardships of wartime occupation. This was a significant radicalisation compared to earlier campaigns in the island which had avoided attacks directed at the civilian population in furtherance of pacification efforts to win their compliance, if not their support. In this respect, the radicalisation of Japanese anti-guerrilla strategy on Panay was a microcosm of escalating irregular warfare in the Philippines during the Asia-Pacific War. Over the course of the occupation, military strategy in the islands shifted from an emphasis on appeasement and collaboration to the indiscriminate use of force and violence, culminating in the Manila Massacre of February 1945. This shift has typically been explained by the deteriorating wartime context prevailing in the final months of occupation in the Philippines. However, a micro-history of the unfolding conflict on Panay Island, an underrepresented area within the history of the Asia-Pacific War, suggests a more complicated interplay of factors centred on the inter-relational dynamics of violence and irregular warfare. This presentation demonstrates this dynamic, drawing upon surviving Japanese military and Philippine guerrilla wartime sources to highlight the importance of analysing military violence as part of a dynamic process of interaction, reaction, and response between belligerents rather than as a singular event.