Group items tagged

Japanese troops killed remnant Chinese soldiers in violation of the laws of war, murdered Chinese civilians, raped Chinese women, and destroyed or stole Chinese property on a scale that will never be known. The violence and destruction was extensive, despite the efforts of some Japanese to minimize the scale.

Japanese soldiers were products of a transitional society, neither traditional nor modern, and that the declining norms against violence that restrained them in Japan disappeared once they arrived in China.2

The Japanese Imperial Army had suffered a long-term decline of discipline. In the climate of more liberal trends in the 1920s Taisho period, officers responded by demanding absolute obedience of recruits through inhumane means. That in turn, it is argued, led to the need for those recruits to transfer aggression elsewhere. The poor Chinese were a convenient outlet once aggression in China began.