6. Narratives Without Guilt: The Self- Perception of Japanese Perpetrators

Many former POWs who survived one of the many Japanese camps during World War II must have considered the “charges against the Japanese brought forward [at] the Tokyo War Crimes Trials [as] chilling.” Many prisoners of the Imperial Japanese Army did not survive the Second World War and in Japan’s POW camps a massive number of soldiers died in comparison with those POW camps ran by other Axis powers. The judgment at Tokyo mentioned that only 4% of the 235,000 Allied, i.e. American and British, POWs lost their lives in German or Italian captivity, while 27% of the 132,000 men that were caught by the Japanese Army died. From a US perspective the numbers are even more shocking, as 9 out of every 10 dead POWs died in Japanese captivity during the war. There are horror stories like those of the eyewitnesses of the Bataan Death March, due to which more than 70,000 US and Filipino soldiers were forced to march for days, without any supply of food, to reach the trains that would bring them to Camp O’Donnell to the north. Other POWs, especially from Britain and Australia, were forced to build the Thai-Burma Railway, on which the present chapter will focus, and many of those who were forced to work on this project died during the war. Reports about the treatment of the prisoners highlight the cruelty used by the Japanese soldiers, who forced their prisoners