First from this archived link.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210427113131/https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090608205614AAEC9b2

I will quote the content.Why do most people think the cause of Japanese warcrimes in WW2 was Japanese racism?

I keep hearing most people that the Japanese motivation for their attrocities was racism.I have to disagree!If you read Japanese history,it was common for samurai serving under 1 warlord to commit attrocities against other soldiers and civilians of an enemy warlord! When civil wars happened among the Japanese, whether you are a civilian or soldier,you were often tortured, raped(if you are a girl) and probably killed if you got captured in war!You see, attrocities against civilians and POWs have always been a part of Japanese culture HUNDREDS OF YEARS BEFORE WW2!So why do most people put racism as the motiviation for the attrocities the Japanese did in WW2?

1 month ago (Tiebreaker)

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As for the Japanese military capturing local women native to lands they conquered and forcing them to be sex slaves(comfort women)....I keep hearing people say they do this out of racism!But the Imperial Japanese military was already kidnapping Japanese women and forcing them to be in sex slaves as early as the beginning of the Meiji Era!So why do most people act as Japanese military only raped nonJapanese women!

Update: By the Way Iam not Japanese.Iam Chinese.And IAM PISSED OFF at how Americans.Chinese,Koreans,and most people keep saying that Japanese committed warcrimes because they WERE RACIST!THIS IS COMPLETE ******* BULLSHIT!THe reasons for Japanese attrocities is because the Japanese culture's way of waging war durng WW2 was still stuck in the Medieval Japan;s mentality of TOTAL WAR and ruthlessness towards your enemies!

Update 2: Read the civil wars of Japans history(especially Japan's war of unification in the 1600s).You will find how vicious Japanese warriors acted in war and how cruel they acted even towards other Japanese(especially civilians)!

Now I discovered the link because of a post someone made on a Discord room. Which I will quote.

Years ago I wrote this.

https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090608205614AAEC9b2

Be sure to read the whole thing because it forms the basis of my question.

In addition to the details I wrote in the above link years ago, as I read Warriors of the Rising Sun and The Boxer's Rebellion (can't remember the author's name) recently and it showed that the early Imperial Japanese Army was incredibly well-behaved. To the point not only was rapes and mass murder practically nonexistent and captured enemy prisoners of war were treated properly (as the book's chapters on the Russo-Japanese War and World War I shows)...... But the Japanese army even went out of its way to stop a warcrimes committed by their allies.

Several incidents in the Boxer Rebellion were mentioned in which Japanese officers threatened to have their troops shoot French and Russian soldiers if they didn't stop raping and looting the local Chinese populace. Some Japanese officers even fought duels to avenge victims with European officers who were allowing atrocities in the Boxer War and there were bar fights between disgusted Japanese grunts and other European armies over the issue of treatment of the local Chinese populace. In fact in The boxer Rebellion, the Japanese even still saw the Chinese as a model of civilization as opposed to most Western armies minus the British and Americans (both who were still pretty racist but saw Chinese human enough to forbid warcrimes and even occasionally intervened stop European armies from committing them ).

I remember there was even a blog about German soldiers immigrating to Japan after the end of the first World War because htey were that impressed with how organized and comfortable Japanese war prisons and POW camps were.

Also I discovered a few sites about Japanese victims of the comfort women institution. One example below.

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/world/2007-07/06/content_911759.htm

To add ot this and saldy I can't quote sources right now because I lost the websites, the Japanese miltiary was also abusive to civilians during intervals of the war. Particularly there were widespread incidents in certain militarized zones in mainland Japan were soldiers were beating up store owners and stealing property. In zones they conquered, they were quite snobbish to Japanese living in those foreign countries, often treating them like second class citizens and not pure blooded Japanese (with a few incidents of jumping by Japanese soldiers looking to throw a fit of these local foreign-born Japanese). During he final parts of the war, the Japanese army even committed mass murders of entire Japanese populations, wiping out towns from the face of existence. As seen during the Battles in Okinawa and other Japanese islands outside of the mainland.

I already doubted the notion that Japanese warcrimes were primarily because of extreme racism years ago. Because a quick reading of Medieval Japan shows so much brutality already committed between JAPANESE towns, often far eclipsing whats been done at Rape of Nanking and the Bataan Death March.

But the fact the Japanese Army wasn't initially the mass murdering machine it the first half of its existence also dispels the notion Japanese culture was so intrinsically bigoted that it had institutionalized racism as the norm which inspired mass executions of PoWs, forced slave labour,, and Unit 731.

What do you think? Even assuming the Imperial Japanese Army was always brutal from the start, the fact not just Medieval Japanese history but even during World War 2 Japanese civilians were victims of abuse from the Japanese really makes it dubious the claim that the comfort women's systematic rapes and mass looting of conquered towns by the Imperial Army was because of racism and darwinist doctrine.

I'm assuming he's being the same poster as the one who made the archived link from the now defunct Yahoo Answers.

That said my first gut instinct was to call it a Japanese apologism and utter BS. But when I googled some of the details I was surprised how a lot of it has a grain of truth such as Japan's performance in the Boxer Rebellion.

One historical account reported that Japanese troops were astonished by other Alliance troops raping civilians. Roger Keyes, who commanded the British destroyer Fame and accompanied the Gaselee Expedition, noted that the Japanese had brought their own "regimental wives" (prostitutes) to the front to keep their soldiers from raping Chinese civilians.

And

Yes you are correct. I have read Robert B. Edgerton's book Warriors of the Rising Sun and he goes into this in some detail.

In the Boxer Rebellion, for example, the Japanese Army was particularly noted for being the only expeditionary force to provide medical care and food to Chinese refugees (I am sure it must have helped to be the only other Asian force among the other White armies).

The Russians and the Germans in particular just brutalized and terrorized civilians (the Japanese in WWII weren't the first to brutalize China, but they were definitely worse), yet they didn't really engage in much effective fighting. The US Marines and the Japanese really did all the work to put down the rebellion.

Same thing in the Russo-Japanese War, where the Japanese were less brutal and indiscriminate than the Russian troops, while also being noted for taking good care of Russian prisoners.

And I can't find the exact post but one person did quote something about a platoon of Japanese soldiers in the Boxer Rebellion aiming rifles at German soldiers about to rape Chinese women and threatening them to stop warcrimes or else they'll get shot by said Japanese unit in the Discord. Can't find the post (was it deleted?) but he quoted a book and in it also says there were other incidents in China where Japanese soldiers also stopped French, Russian, Italian, and Austrians from looting and pillaging CHinese neighbhorhoods.

Now I AM NOT PRO-JAPANESE. My auntie is from the Philippines and has stories of relatives experiencing the war firsthand. She grew up learning about the Japanese brutal behavior. But that said I was so surprised at the amount of sources other posters stated int he Discord chat and especially more so when I did some research on Wikipedia. The person who made the Yahoo Answer posts does post BS levels, but I still can't believe that even on Wikipedia some of his proclamation can be found like the aforementioned Boxer Rebellion stuff and the Nanking-level warcrimes being the norm during Japan's Samurai Civil Wars.

So what is the reality I ask from you experts? Would you say there is a grain of truth as far as WW2 to what the poster on Discord who also posted on Yahoo Answers? Or is it complete baloney (even though the person says he's Chinese and thus cannot be a Japanese war criminal apologist)?

I saw this post which provoked the question up.

​

I mean meaning to ask this for a while at Dutch and history subs but haven't had the time.

​As you pointed out the Japanese occupation was far worse than the centuries of Dutch rule. But as a neutral bystander with neither East Asian/SouthEast Asian nor Dutch ancestry, I ask. Why did the Indonesians immediately choose to rebel against the Dutch after the war? To the point as early as the first half of 1945 Indonesian insurgents were already killing Dutch civilians *DESPITE THE PRESENCE OF THE BRITISH ARMY* (who defeated the Japanese in Indonesia)?

​I mean shouldn't the horrific occupation of the Japanese means Indonesians be happy they're back and at least hesitatingly let them resume the colonialism? I apologize if this was offensive but I been wondering for a while. As the Japanese were literally using similar Nazi style policies minus full genocide, I was surprised the Dutch were not welcomed back with open arms.

Really I'm quite curious because its pretty much a universal cliche that 4 years of Japanese rule was far worse than 5 centuries of Dutch rules is an often stated maxim when you read about Indonesian history or even not anything specific to Indonesia but just read about the Japanese campaigns of the Pacific Theater focusing on Japan. So why did the Indonesians responded automatically with armed rebellion as the quoted texts state when the Dutch came back rather than seeing them as heroes to be respected or even welcomed with open arms? Unlike the Philippines here despite American colonial abuses, the Pinoy people didn't simply welcomed America with open arms and were releived at the end of Japanese occupation, but loved the American army so much that to this day even as relationship is more strained in recent years, even the most anti-American Filipino will speak about the American army's liberation for the Philippines with fondness and see America during this time period as noble heroes who saved the Philippines. So why the opposite in Indonesia esp since everybody in the history community absolutely agrees the Japanese were 100 fold X worse than the Dutch ever were? Why were the people not alleviated their far less brutal colonial rulers returned over the Japanese unlike the PH islands?

Was the Kingdom of Thailand a client state of the Empire of Japan during World War II ?

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