Submitted by Jupitair t3_z4vw6p in todayilearned
The Arisan Maru
On October 24, 1944, the Arisan Maru was transporting 1,781 U.S. and Allied military and civilian POWs when it was hit by a torpedo from a U.S. submarine (either USS Shark or USS Snook), at about 5:00 p.m.; it finally sank about 7:00 p.m. No POWs were killed by the torpedo strikes, and nearly all were able to escape from the ship's holds, but the Japanese did not attempt to rescue any of them from the sea. Only nine of the prisoners aboard survived the event. Five escaped and made their way to China in one of the ship's two life boats. They were reunited with U.S. forces and returned to the United States. The remaining four were later recaptured by Imperial Japanese naval vessels, with one of them dying shortly after they reached land.
Hell ships
> Many men lost their minds and crawled about in the absolute darkness armed with knives, attempting to kill people in order to drink their blood or armed with canteens filled with urine and swinging them in the dark. The hold was so crowded and everyone so interlocked with one another that the only movement possible was over the heads and bodies of others.
In May 1942, the Japanese began transferring its captured POWs by sea. Prisoners were often crammed into cargo holds with little air, ventilation, food, or water, for journeys that would last weeks. Many died due to asphyxia, starvation or dysentery. Some POWs became delirious and unresponsive in their environment of heat, humidity and lack of oxygen, food, and water. These transports carried a mixture of POWs and regular Japanese troops and cargo, and thus were not eligible to be marked as non-combatants. As a result, such vessels could be attacked by Allied submarines and aircraft, meaning they were at risk of being sunk before they even reached their destination. More than 20,000 Allied POWs died at sea when the transport ships carrying them were attacked by Allied submarines and aircraft.
That’s the stuff of nightmares.
How about being an allied solider and your own allies torpedo the hell ship you are on. Then start machine gunning down the survivors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_transport_ship_Buyo_Maru_(1919)
It's like they were ships embodying some sort of fiery perdition.
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Japanese culture. Of course, now we are supposed to pretend it is entirely different. See also: Germany, where running death camps on an industrial scale is now completely dismissed as stuff other people did, nothing to do with us.
Say what you will about Germany, but their genocidal past is worked through super intensely at school. The concept of „Vergangenheitsbewältigung“ rests on making clear that is was in fact Germans committing the holocaust.
We definitely doing better then others ehh screw that we doing better then everyone. Still the fact that there are people from the Afd and all sorts of deniers makes me think denazification didn't go far enough.
I went on a school band trip to Germany about fifteen years ago. We had these special shirts made that were in our school colors, with a Canadian flag on one sleeve and a German flag on the other. Our teachers handed them out to some of the German students and teachers we were playing for and while they put them on, we noticed every German person wearing the shirt crossed their arms in such a way the German flag was covered but the Canadian flag was left uncovered.
We thought we'd offended them by not having the flag be more prominent, but as it was explained to us by one of the German teachers, it's still considered somewhat taboo to wear the German flag openly as a private citizen.
You don’t know much about Germany, do you?
I know that after holding a few trials after the war, almost everyone that was imprisoned for involvement in the Holocaust was freed, because the German population thought that it was not a crime. Consider, as a random example, Victor Capesius. Sentenced to nine years to make it look like Germany was tough on the Holocaust. Released after two and a half, because they didn’t really think it was a crime. Robert Mulka, Hoess’s deputy. Sentenced to 14 years (and not until 1964, because no could be bothered to prosecute him until then), released after four. And so on, and so on. Germany did not want to prosecute people who were the senior management of the Holocaust, and then when forced by international opinion to pretend to be outraged gave sentences that they never intended should be served. Klaus Dylewski, sentenced to five years (for “aiding and abetting murder on 32 separate occasions, 2 involving the murder of at least 750 people"), but only served three. Germany thought mass murder was not deserving of serious punishment.
Thank God Israel tried Eichmann rather than west Germany. A Bonn court would have given him a medal and a pension.
Bro you are shifting goal posts. You initially stated something about the nowadays culture, but in this comment you are referring to post-war Germany. Don't you know that in the meantime 80 years passed and bascially all people from then are dead now?
You obviously never spoke with anyone from Germany, since even illiterate people from here are aware about the failed denazification process. But actually, we are even working up this by now and are far away from seeing us from finished.
I hope you have the same critical perspective, thinking about the crimes I am sure your ancestors committed.
None human is free of the guilt for what happened, when we could have interfered. It's part of our shared history and we have to live with the absence of all those people killed.
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I don't know what you're saying. Japan was treated, and seen better in the West, as compared Germany. Japan's current growing problem is with eastern countries. Those same countries have dark history they are trying to cover up.
He’s talking about how every time you critique something online that a Japanese person is doing, people come out of the woodwork to go “Oh, but they’re japanese, they obviously took that into account because of their culture,”
For example, food health and safety and those Nagashi Somen rivers.
Shit like this is why I hate it when people try to gloss over Japan's atrocities in WW2. They committed acts as bad, if not worse than the Nazis
Comparing Auschwitz to Unit 731… I can’t even think of an apt comparison but the Japanese torture experimentation was definitely much much worse
The Nazis also carried out wide-scale experiments on human captives.
I would be risking getting shot with a follow up torpedo by an enemy submarine to save war prisoners,
Individual acts were just as bad, but the scale of German atrocity does not compare to Japan’s.
The scale doesnt compare only because the US forced surrender
No. The scale doesn’t compare because the Japanese didn’t do a Holocaust.
There were no extermination camps. There is a difference between raging ruthless war + working prisoners to death vs. raging ruthless war + working prisoners to death + doing a Holocaust. 3 is worse than 2.
Do you seriously have to learn this in 2022?
Google rape of nanking. Imperial Japan were slaughtering and raping conquered citizens, and also dropping plague from airplanes. You sound emotional and biased
Yeah I know the history quite well. I’m trying to teach you something you don’t know:
The Holocaust happened.
The Japanese were ruthless. The Americans were ruthless. The Germans did A HOLOCAUST.
That was an extra evil. One MORE than the others.
the fact you are comparing Japan to america in ww2 tells me everything. Later weeb
Oh, you probably don't know that America firebombed Japanese cities. Not their factories. Not their munitions depots. Their urban centers. Why? To kill civilians. As many as 100,000 dead mostly women, children, and elderly in one day.
Everybody was ruthless in the war. The Soviets were plenty ruthless too.
But the Germans did a Holocaust. No one else did a holocaust.
So you can't make equivalences between Japan and Germany. Yes, Japan killed 15 million Chinese. Yes, the Germans killed 20 million Soviets.
But the Germans did a Holocaust. No one else did a holocaust.
Honestly I'm not sure how a ranking system of atrocities works here but Imperial Japan should still rank pretty high on any system. A quick Google of 'comfort women' can educate on how Imperial Japan created 'the largest ever case of government-sponsored human trafficking and sexual slavery in modern history'. They also came up with and almost implemented the bestest strategy ever which involved convincing the civilian populace to soak up bullets in the event of a land invasion. The idea was the Americans would give up after killing so many civilians.
If you are looking for American atrocities though, I'd suggest focusing on the Japanese Internment Camps or the fact that they snapped up every evil scientist they could find afterwards. Pretty much everyone dropped some bombs on civilian targets in WW2.
>Honestly I'm not sure how a ranking system of atrocities works here but Imperial Japan should still rank pretty high on any system.
Agreed. But absent a deliberate program of mass extermination, I think the Japanese can't rank above the Nazis. Singling out the Nazis specifically for the Holocaust is to identify the unique cruelty of a program of mass killing of civilians based on race as something apart from the horrors of colonialism and the indiscriminate murder and rape of war.
>Pretty much everyone dropped some bombs on civilian targets in WW2
Here, numbers make a difference. Allied firebombings of German and Japanese cities were devastating in a way that The Blitz wasn't. 40,000 Britons died over an 8 month period of German bombing, but in Dresden 20,000 died in one night. What happened there happened in no Allied city. What the Americans did to Japan, deliberately using incendiary bombs in their mostly wooden cities, was an atrocity with few comparisons. Killing 100,000 people in a day is worse than killing 3,000. It just is. it's extermination, not intimidation.
>A quick Google of 'comfort women' can educate on how Imperial Japan created 'the largest ever case of government-sponsored human trafficking and sexual slavery in modern history'
The forced prostitution under the Japanese empire is an incomparable evil. But the coercion of poor women into prostitution during wartime did not end in Korea in 1945. After the liberation of Korea, for example, and during the Korean War, US soldiers became the new customers of the very same brothels and the very same sex workers, with the South Koreans turning a blind eye. The US more or less set up a similar "military brothel" system in Vietnam, with thousands of women, many under the age of 18, coerced, tricked, or otherwise forced into prostitution by hunger and economic hardship. I can make this comparison, but I can still say the Japanese system was far worse.
I see no point to this response. Everyone above explained Imperial Japan maxed out the atrocity score but you keep agreeing but using whatabiutism to diminish this.
> Singling out the Nazis specifically for the Holocaust is to identify the unique cruelty of a program of mass killing of civilians based on race as something apart from the horrors of colonialism and the indiscriminate murder and rape of war.
Directly from the Imperial Japan war crimes Wikipedia entry "Rummel, a professor of political science at the University of Hawaii, estimates that between 1937 and 1945, the Japanese military murdered from nearly three to over ten million people, most likely six million Chinese, Indians, Koreans, Malaysians, Indonesians, Filipinos and Indochinese, among others.
> The forced prostitution under the Japanese empire is an incomparable evil.
Then literally proceeds to immediately compares it to another very different atrocity. Full stop, Imperial Japan did some incredibly fucked up things even in the context of the historical period. That doesn't mean modern Japan is a horrible place or that many other regimes haven't committed different and novel atrocities. Hell even putting the Nazis on a special tier ignores Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao, and all of the creative African leaders who I don't feel like looking up right now.
Nazis atrocities were worse than the Imperial Japanese, because of the unique evil of the Holocaust. The Holocaust is a unique evil in the history of the earth.
Why are you trying to take the Nazis off the hook?
Wow, straight to a thinly veiled attempt to call me a Nazi. Freaking Godwin's law.
Nazis are bad, I absolutely despise anti-Semitism and specifically any Nazi ideology should be considered abhorrent. I have not once said anything pro-Nazi just explained their regime is not the only one that did horrible shit and your rating scale is irrational.
But to call the Holocaust a unique evil means you have zero grasp of history a bunch of western centric biases. Genocide is one of the favorite tools of totalitarian regimes and all are abhorrent. Honestly, by focusing only on the Holocaust you are the one who is letting the Nazis off the hook. The Holocaust resulted in 7 million Jewish casualties, the Nazis also killed 3.5 million Soviets, 3 million Poles, 500K Romani, and a bunch of other undesirables.
Where did all of this disagreement begin? With me saying the Holocaust sets the Nazis apart from the Japanese in terms of the atrocities they inflicted.
What are you arguing here? All wars are created equal? All genocides are interchangeable? Auschwitz is just like Nanking?
WW2 didnt start in 1939, the Japanese had been war criming their way through southern China for almost a decade by the time the war went global. They absolutely committed crimes as equally as heinous as the nazis, you just don't give a shit about them because they weren't jewish and never bothered to learn about their victims.
You really don’t know what the Holocaust was huh?
Like imagine a factory of death. Trains come in, lives turn to bodies, bodies turn to ash.
Who else ran a factory of death?
The Holocaust isn’t special because they were Jews. It was special because it was so uniquely evil to build death camps and incinerators and plan the extermination of a race from a continent.
I know what it was, and I know now that you haven't studied any of the atrocities done in Manchuria. You ever thought about tossing babies in the air to bayonet, as a game? You ever line up 100s of prisoners, to have a beheading competition among your fellow army officers?
Yeah those are horrible.
And I know all about it.
Those were widespread incidents but on par with the brutality of most colonial enterprises.
Show me the tracks they laid to ship all of a continents’ minorities to incinerate them.
Holy shit my great uncle was on the Snook. He was on leave when it sank.
Edit: the Wikipedia entry is wrong. It was clearly the USS Shark. You can view the USS Shark’s Wikipedia page but it was sunk shorty after it sank the Maru and it attacked it alone.
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So they were only in the hold for two hours trying to kill eachother, drinking eachothers blood but most of them escaped the hold?
Yea kinda contradicting if you couldn’t move how are you swinging around a canteen full of pee and why do the pows have knives ? Not saying it’s not true just sounds odd
They should be thankful they only got nuked twice
My great grandfather died in one of those ships. The Japs even had a Red Cross on the ship when it was sunk by the English as they didn’t believe it. After the war and lots of things I am not aware of, they did apologize for it. All I know is they he didn’t had a chance as he was chained and was relocated from the Burma railway tracks, which in itself was hellish as well.
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