Japanese Devils

14 veterans of the Imperial Japanese Army talk about their experiences in China, which most of the time means the crimes and/or atrocities they committed or were at least complicit in. Enomoto Masaya remembers the following episode: ‘We came across a village full of women. We stripped them and made them lie down along the side of the road. After we raped them we stuffed petrol-soaked rags inside their vaginas and burned them. It was a message to the enemy, but it was also entertainment for us’. Or take Yuasa Ken who was involved in experiments on live Chinese prisoners as a member of unit 731; he describes how they murdered their human guinea pigs: ‘When we finished with one, we injected oxygen into his blood to kill him, but it didn’t work: He just puffed up in purple blotches. So we gave him an overdose of anaesthetic’.