Cannibalism: One Of The Most Gruesome Japanese War Crimes
Wikimedia CommonsTwo Australian soldiers pose with human remains recovered from a Japanese encampment.
One of the grimmest Japanese war crimes was cannibalism. A shockingly large number of cases of Japanese cannibalism were documented during World War II, though it took a long time for them to come to light.
Japanese historian Toshiyuki Tanaka — whose work was initially deemed ″too sensitive” to publish in Japan — found more than 100 cases of Japanese Imperial Army soldiers cannibalizing enemy troops and civilians.
Though the Japanese soldiers were sometimes cut off from supply lines and starved, Tanaka found that they often had plenty of food. Rather, they cannibalized prisoners to celebrate a victory or to bond with their unit.
“I think it was to get a feeling for victory, and to give the soldiers nerves of steel,” Tanaka told the Independent in 1992. He added that it helped units bond “because the whole troop broke the taboo (of cannibalism) together.”
Tanaka wasn’t the only one to report on this grisly Japanese war crime. American and Australian soldiers also described encountering evidence of cannibalism when battling Japanese troops during World War II.
“The Japanese had cannibalised our wounded and dead soldiers… We found them with meat stripped off their legs and half-cooked meat in the Japanese dishes,” Australian Corporal Bill Hedges later said of the gruesome sight. “We found dumps with rice and a lot of tinned food. So they weren’t starving and having to eat flesh because they were hungry.”
One of the most infamous examples of Japanese cannibalism involving American soldiers came in September 1944, when a group of U.S. pilots were shot down during the bombing of Chichijima Island. Almost all of them were captured, tortured, and executed, after which the Japanese troops cannibalized their flesh in the so-called Chichijima Incident.
Only one of the downed pilots managed to evade capture and death that day — 20-year-old future U.S. President George H.W. Bush.
