I've seen some pretty horrible things in my time, but this video I recently watched has got to be the worst thing I've ever seen in my life. I'm posting it here to make people aware of history that is sometimes forgotten or overlooked, and so we can prevent these unimaginably evil atrocities from ever being comitted again.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAp8bSdE5MQ

This shit is pretty gross. So I don't recommend anyone with a weak stomach watching it...

I can't get the video going. Can anyone tell me, briefly, so I can look more into it?

EDIT: And no, I'm not just being a pussy

look up unit 731 on wiki

Already knew about it. While they never did anything on quite as large a scale as the Holocaust, the Japanese made up for it with sickening brutality and cruelty.

I'd also seen a video about the frost-bite unit of 731 somewhere else. They had a woman who's arms were frozen and I forgot how but her skin ended up getting ripped off.

Christ, this is brutal.
And you're right, this must be overlooked to quite a desgree because I've never heard anyone talking about this.

I've thought about this before. Everyone is so busy banging on about the Holocaust that Japan has gotten off comparatively lightly.

Lightly?

As soon as I hit Submit, I knew someone would come along and post that.

Now that it's out of the way, let me clarify that I do not mean that. I mean that since the war, Japan hasn't suffered quite as much continued stigma as the Germans have.

Yeah I knew what you meant, but I had an urge to post the Hiroshima mushroom cloud. If you think about it, the Japanese still suffered the effects of the bomb for years after the war ended, but you're right in saying that they aren't nearly as berated for their war crimes as the Nazis. Same goes for Stalin, Pol Pot, and just about everyone except Hitler.

Two minutes in, and I'm already bugged by the mispronunciation of "Amaterasu". Specifically, it is NOT "Ameratsu."

By three minutes, I'm sick of the repetition of the same ideas.

Thirteen minutes, and I'm bored. The guy just said the phrase "dissected alive and without anesthesia" three times in a row. I GET THE DAMN POINT.

Funny thing is, repetition of a single simple phrase is a popular and highly effective tactic of propagandists. "Four legs good, two legs bad" and all that jazz. This, coupled with the self-acknowledged "dramatization" leads me to wonder just how much of this is true.

I've read all about it from several sources and I have no reason to doubt it. It doesn't surprise me in the least that the Japanese would have done something like this, they were horribly brutal during the war.

There is alot of repitition and what not but even so, I could barely stomach to listen to it and imagine that shit. I couldnt even finish the fucking video.

It did not shock me, but is still fucking horrible. And unfortunately goes all but unmentioned when talking about war atrocities.

Yeah, there are many documentaries concerning this unit. I remember watching one not long ago on the History Channel

Just horrible. Why is Japan so damn sick?

I dunno. Japan's history comes in three eras;

1) Bloodthirsty samurai.
2) Psychotic torture-mad soldiers.
3) Pedophiles.

Okay, just wrong. Plain and simple.

Perhaps the most sickening and evil acts ever carried out. Nazi Germany killed in volumes, but from what I know, never so brutally. They got close but the Japanese take the crown for being the most callous nation and for showing the least empathy in regards to war crimes, of any nation.

Maybe my post can be viewed as an over statement made by someone who is too easily disgusted. I retort by saying; can you really over state those events? The fact that most people here haven't heard about them before, is an indicator that these events have been terribly understated.

it's just the human race that can create these horrible things. We are the real animals...and we cannot learn after each disgrace like this one...we are terrible...

The Hiroshima bombings weren't done just to end the war. It was also due to the fact that, at the time, the japanese had to be dealt with in one way or another. The japanese had been taught to think of Japan as superior to every other country, and had a culture that embraced this belief and enforced it more so than most other cultures in the world.

The reason they did the stuff they did to the other asians was largely because they thought they were superior to everyobdy else in every way, and as such had the divine right to act in whatever way they pleased towards anyone who wasn't japanese.

This comes of the fact that Japan has been one of the most isolated (more advanced) societies in the world throughout the course of history. Throughout their long time of isolation, they were taught that Japan was the divine nation on Earth, and that the emperors in Japan were some sort of half-gods.

These kind of beliefs hadn't gone away by the second world war. They simply thought that, with a half-god emperor and being the chosen people and thus superior to everyone else, they had the right to do whatever they wanted and couldn't loose (since they were the chosen people).

The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings were not only used to end the war, but also to set an example proving that the japanese didn't have the right to do whatever they wanted, that the japanese weren't superior in any way, and that the japanese could (and would) loose if they didn't surrender.

After the second world war, the japanese culture started changing a lot. They are still quite xenophobic by nature, but they sterted being a lot more open to other cultures and to foreigners. In a way, they modernized their system a lot, just because they finally realized that they actually didn't stand a chance in competing against the western world any more, by the way of military might at least, and that the isolationist outlook of the past wasn't at all viable to keep alive anymore.

So in a way, the nuclear bombings were a big wake-up call, in a "Holy shit, we actually AREN'T invincible and almighty" kind of way.

This is at least the picture I can get after having a father who lived in Japan for a couple of years and knowing a couple of japanese people who've moved here to Sweden.

I believe that condemning an entire culture or people for deeds that a nation's government was responsible for is stupid though. Especially if the government has changed completely since that time. I can also promise you that no nation in the world is innocent. There are only varying degrees of guilt in this matter. I would go as far as say that every nation in the world is guilty of something that is really, really fishy and which in most people's eyes would make the government deserve proper punishment. For most countries though, this doesn't happen.

Indeed, the US is no exception. Granted, it's no Unit 731, but we've got those wonderful private military prisons at Guantanomo and throughout the Middle East where we treat people like shit because they aren't officially "prisoners of war," and therefore not protected by the Geneva convention. Or what about the Japanese internment camps during WW2? Happy fun magical rainbow times, there.

Then, of course, there's the obligatory treatment of the Native American tribes. Our own dear president Andrew Jackson collected their noses during one battle so he could keep track of how many he had killed. I especially liked the touch of giving the displaced tribes blankets infected with smallpox in order to get rid of them while giving the appearance of a humanitarian gesture.

Speaking of collecting body bits, do I even need to discuss the things American troops did in Vietnam? It wasn't a war so much as it was a calculated massacre.

I actually stumbled upon Unit 731 when I was doing research for a project I was doing related to the Holocaust. I was looking around the Wiki and got to Unit 731 in a couple of clicks.

I guess people don't realize there was also a holocaust in Japan.

Indeed, the experiments of 731 are not at all highly documented and verified by multiple sources including those who actually performed them as well as victims, you've definitely got it figured out.

If you do please do not forget to go into the atrocities/torture/war crimes committed by the North Vietnamese and its Communist allies.

http://www.rjsmith.com/war_myth.html#atrocity

I honestly question how some of you would like "war" to be fought.

Very brutal in terms of what was done at that horrific facility. Faved it on Youtube

Damn.

Anyone interested in this should check out the movie Men Behind the Sun. It's suprisingly well made (in formal/structural terms) for what's essentially a piece of sickening exploitative paracinema.

I was hoping someone would mention this film. The atrocities displayed are horrific, but the film is beautiful in respect of conveying them.

Interesting though quite disturbing so far. Video's really slow to load so have only seen half of it so far, waiting for other half to load. Can't help but wonder how this era of Japanese history is taught in Japanese schools today, if at all.

The Japanese were brutal man. Psychotic. Really sad stuff.

Japan and China both have their history of brutal human cruelty, the latter is definitely much worse throughout time.

Considering they recently fired a General simply for writing and winning an essay in which he suggested "Japan should cast off the widely held views of its World War II culpability – and "regain its glorious history.""

I would say no and make a guess they are still a bit "touchy" about that time period.


http://www.thestar.com/News/World/article/542864

Link about the General.

Japan is actually very evasive when it comes to world war 2. They deny that camps like the one in the Bridge on the River Kwai existed (when in reality that was one of the better ones), and still refuse to acknowledge war crimes. The general in the article probably went too far in saying that, though.

Sure, the US didn't need to set up such a unit, all they had to do was to grant immunity from prosecution to the same criminals who had tortured hundreds of Allied soldiers and get all the information they needed on chemical and biological warfare from the japanese themselves.

You guys are getting oversensitive about this subject. Japan in that period was experiencing its colonial expansion, much like many other countries like the US, England, France and Germany a few decades before. Japan was about 50 years late, and so had more powerful means of destruction, does that make the japanese more cruel/evil than other countries? Many europeans and americans committed very similar atrocities with far less advanced means of destruction. And to this guy:



Please get your facts straight, and read some books from direct witnesses of Nazi, and even russian, concentration camps, and think twice before jumping on quick conclusions, just because you saw an oh-so-shocking video on youtube.

For something that should be archived in all seriousness, the sound effects and sound bytes from "Friday the 13th" are just a tad bit hokey for my taste. And if it's in fact true that the Americans gave immunity to Hirohito and the rest of his ghouls, that's just even more ridiculous, seeing as the Americans relished (and still do) in hanging every person they could who was involved in the Nazi party, no matter what position they held or what so-called "crimes" they may have committed.

That depended entirely on how much rocket, nuclear, and other weapons knowladge they had.

Yes, that according to me , is one of the most reprehensile decisions made by US personnel (be it the CIA or the armed forces). The same thing was done to some of the Nazi doctors carrying out human experimental research in Germany. Equally atrocious is use of Nazi spy network to gather intelligence information during the initial days of the Cold War. These actions are way more shocking than any of alleged violations carried out in Guantanamo Bay or Abu Grahib.


He just needs to read about Josef Mengele.

We were gearing up for the possibility of a war with a nation that had the potential eclipse anything we had seen before. I will not even attempt to pretend I have any idea what it was like living under the fear of a war with the Soviet Union and the nuclear Armageddon it was thought could have been brought on by it.

I see no wrong in exploiting Nazi Germany's vast knowledge on the communist super power.

Of course I also support extraordinary rendition and the torture of insurgents we capture in Iraq/Afghanistan. So to say I am biased is a grave understatement

Anyways here is an interesting article about the Nazi Spy stuff

http://www.commondreams.org/views01/0508-05.htm

I seem to recall one claim of Mengele putting people in a vacuum chamber, although I am not sure if it is true.