On This Day in History: September 2

Japan Surrenders in WWII

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I’ve been to Japan. Nice place. Nice people. Except when they weren’t. In World War II, Japan was a dick. As bad as the fucking Nazis. But after Japan signed the surrender on the deck of the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay on September 2, 1945, the Americans said we need you to be our allies in the fight against communism so we’re gonna forgive a lot of that nasty shit you did. 

--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: September 2, 1945--

The Japanese Army tortured, and raped, and murdered millions of Chinese civilians, and wasn’t too nice to the other nations it conquered during the war. The army saw those who surrendered as without honor and beat and starved their prisoners. The Japanese also had this horrible thing called Unit 731. 

Unit 731 was a chemical and biological warfare research program that was one giant fucking war crime. Well-funded by the Japanese government, the program used live human subjects for testing in horrific experiments and deployed biological weapons against Chinese cities and towns. It’s estimated the program was responsible for killing half a million people. And what happened to those sick fucks who ran Unit 731? Immunity. That’s what happened. Because the U.S. wanted the research. The Soviets put the Unit 731 researchers they captured on trial, but ‘murica did not.  

There was also the matter of “comfort women,” which is a sanitized term for women forced into sexual slavery by the Imperial Japanese Army to be raped by its soldiers. Close to 200,000 women were forced into such slavery, most of them from China, Korea, and the Philippines, but they also enslaved Japanese women. Some also came from the Netherlands and Australia, being  captured in regions Japan invaded.

The idea of the comfort women was to provide brothels for the Japanese soldiers to reduce all the raping those soldiers were doing because it was making them look bad to the lands they’d just conquered. Except then they forced women into working in those “brothels” as sex slaves and their soldiers kept on raping anyway, so not such a good idea after all. 

Few even knew about the existence of comfort women until the 1990s, because Tokyo War Crimes Trials hushed it up. Supreme Allied Commander of the occupation of Japan, General Douglas MacArthur, saw to it that the issue of comfort women was swept under the rug during the trials. Americans mostly cared about revenge for Pearl Harbor, and didn’t give a shit about Asian women forced into sexual slavery. With the Cold War just beginning, the course of the trials was shaped by MacArthur and trial prosecutor Joseph Keenan to ensure that Japan became an acceptable ally to America in the global fight against communism. As a result, much of the war atrocities committed by Japan were hidden from the historical record for decades. 

The brothels were still in use for a year after the war. Tens of thousands of occupying American soldiers also used them. 

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