September 22, 2021 • 37 mins
Mia Wong is joined again by Robert Evans to continue to discuss Nobusuke Kishi.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Ah, Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the only podcast
where Sophie was just telling me how much she thinks
it would be a good idea to reboot the TV
show Friends, but instead of being the cast of Friends,
all of the characters are famous medical malpractice committers from history,
(00:28):
and it's a show about them trying to get away
with maiming their patients. I think it's a bold idea
for a TV show, Sophie. I think we should pitch
it to Netflix right now. Thank you. That's that's That's
totally not something I would ever say, because Girl Girlfriends
was a better show than Friends. Um, but you know,
let's just accept that Sophie said that and move on
(00:49):
to Christopher Wong. Christopher, how are you doing? In part
two of this episode? Doing doing? Doing as well as
you can be? Preparing to just talk about Japanese war
crimes for an hour. I resisted the urge to open
this by saying, what's manning my cheery is because I
thought that might be distasteful. Yeah, anyway, let's dive back in. Yeah,
(01:15):
all right, so we're about to start talking about the
Japanese forced labor system, and I think the best way
to introduce this is by I'm going to read part
of the introduction to a book called Asian Labor and
the Wartime Japanese Empire, Unknown Histories, which is this Basically,
there's a conference on sort of Japanese war crimes, Japanese force, labor, tree,
(01:37):
tree the war, and they all that all the sort
of papers in that are like combined into this book,
and the introduction goes, Grief and despair find little place
in most historical accounts that are absent from most of
the source material historians use. The hundreds of thousands who
died were sons, husbands and fathers, or sometimes daughters, wives
and mothers, and had families awaiting their return. Deaths often
(01:58):
went unrecorded. Coolie is too sick to work, replaced in
death houses where they spent their final hours and accumulated filth,
but in vomit and the excrement produced by those who
had died before them. Without food or medicine, and certainly
without hope, their corpses were thrown into unbarked graves, or
burned or abandoned in forests, or tossing the rivers. We
welcomed behind the bastard people now it's it's really hard
(02:25):
to pin down the exact number of people who were
forced to work around the Japanese Empire. And this is
you know, this is a running theme of of this
this episode, is that right before Japan was occupied the
end of WORLDAR two, they destroyed all of their records.
Like I mean this and this word like this is
not just records in Japan, like this word goes all
the way down the command chain, the destroying records just
everywhere they can find them. So most of what we
(02:47):
have our estimates, and you know, the estimates estimates are
not good. The Indonesian government estimates that four point one
million Indonesians were forced to work for Japan's in the war.
I mean, you know, it's just just to get us
into the scale if they like. There there's there's an
individual railroad called the Taye Burma Railroad just alone that
uses a hundred and eighty thousand possibly there's many as
(03:08):
two hundred seventy thousand people, and you know the yeah,
the number in in China five seems to have been
about three million. But you know that that's the only
period we have even sort of okay numbers about before that.
We just don't know. And you know, this is also
happening in Korea. Ten thousand Koreans are scripted into the army.
(03:29):
There's seven hundred thousand New York restripted to forced labor.
And Kishi is going to import a lot of those
people like to Japan to do forced labor. Everywhere the
Japanese Empire goes, they're they're doing this and you know,
and we've talked about last episode about how sort of
the starts with Kishi talking about you know, Kishi's like, okay, well,
well we'll put the world, we'll put the prisoners award
to work. And then it expands to just like you know,
(03:50):
people who are vagrants and people don't have jobs, and
then it's like anyone who opposes us, and by by
by nine one, the Japanese Army is doing just slave raids. Yeah,
but between two the Japanese Army burns tens of thousands
of Chinese villages and they put the survivors in concentration
camps and they put about they put about a hundred
thousand people into these force labor camps, and of these
(04:13):
conscripts of them die this scripts yeah sure, yeah, you know,
and I said it's like that's thirty is kind of
being dragged down by the fact that there are some
places where the conditions aren't as bad. Um Yeah, you know,
and you're like, you know, we can we talk about
(04:33):
a place where it was really bad. Um. So. One
of the centers of Kishi's five year plan in Manchuria
is these coal mines in Fushan, and you know, these
these are the coal mines that are like fueling all
of these on industrial developments. And the replacement rate for
these workers between four was out of every four forty
workers total they had, they had to replace twenty five
(04:54):
thousand of them every year. And you know a small
number of these people just like escaped, but almost every
one else and this is you know, a very small
percentages of escape. Almost everyone else. Almost all the people
either died on the job or Japanese arm just executed
them forend subordination, because you know, this is something the
Japanese Army starts to do in this period, is that
they just you know, they just start randomly killing people.
(05:15):
And like these these people we talked about a bit
about the conditions they die. A lot of these people
die from dysentery and they die from cholera because you
know these camps like that, there's there's no medical facilities
at all, right, so you know when you get sick,
they just like they lay you on a cotton. You die.
And you know when a lot of these people are
dying from over work, that die from starvation, and you know,
and then also like the Japanese army, like they're really
(05:36):
creative about like how they kill people. So I mean
you have like the classic like they beat people, they
stab people, they shoot, they light them on fire. They
also like they told them off boats. They like they
drown people in submarines. What's the thing I've never found
another like recorded thing and people do is like the
force boat people to a submarine and just sink it.
Oh god, really they if they're burning a whole submarine,
(05:58):
they really want to stead Yeah, and like like this
is a this is the thing, like particularly we'll get
more in to this in a bit, Like particularly like
that that that's the way they kill like comfort women
because yeah, they don't want any record of them existing,
so we'll we'll we'll we'll put them in a submarine
and things. It's it's a way of disappearing, Okay, well, yep, yep,
(06:21):
that's that's a bomber. Yeah. So so all all of
those numbers, that's that's just for you know, physical labor um.
Japan is also running something called the comfort Women's system.
And you know, the comfort women's system is this the
academic and legal term for Japan's military sex slavery system.
And so you know, if you read academic accounts, you
(06:41):
read journalistic accounts, you read like legal accounts, they talk
about comfort women and comfort stations and use all of these.
You know, it's like pretty little euphemisms developed by Japan
specifically so that in their in their in their their
communications about it, they can sort of obscure what's actually
happening here. And this is the point where it becomes
useful that I am the longer in a demi and
I'm not a lawyer, which means I don't have to
(07:02):
use any of these. What this is is it an enormous, bureaucratic,
organized system of military sexual slavery, ran of army rape rooms.
And the first the first of yeah, it's it's it's
bad stuff. The first of these these sort of military
rape stations is set up in Shanghai after the Japan
launches an attack on Shanghai, and I think thirty two
(07:22):
is one of their sort of They had these like
periodic sort of fights with with with the Chinese governments
basically up until thirty seven, when like the actual war starts.
And I want to go into what happened here, because
you know, most accounts a sort of Japanese sexual atrocities
in East Asia. Give this, give this, like this whole
(07:43):
the ninety two attack like one line, and so I
want to read this passage from the book Chinese Confort
Women testimonies for Imperial Japan's sex slaves. The soldiers immediately
kidnapped good looking local women and kept them in military
barracks and sex slaves. At the same time, the troops
continue to assault women in near by villages. Reportedly, over
one thousand local women were raped in their homes. Not
(08:04):
even pregnant women, young girls, or elderly women were spared.
Within the same reason and region. In the autumn of
nineteen five, more than a hundred Japanese soldiers attacked an
area where the Chinese Resistance Force was active. Carrying machine guns,
the troops drove the villagers into a large yard, dragged
all the women out of the crowd and raped them
in the presence of their family members. Several soldiers ripped
(08:26):
the clothes off a woman who was six months pregnant
tighter to a table in the yard. They took photographs
while violating her, and then cut her admen open and
plucked the fetus out with a band. Neet and and
this that is before the start of the war. Nope, yeah,
this is this is that that's that's that's five. Now
(08:47):
the rape stations as a sort of you know, and okay,
I will say one other thing. There's some indication that
the Navy had been using like sort of organized rape
stations like before n two. It this is another one
of those things where the documentation is really hard because
you know, I mean, the army is not just going
(09:08):
to tell you they are running like a sex slave station.
Most people who do sex slave stuff don't like to
talk about it all that much. Yeah. Yeah, I mean,
even like even you know, like they're doing it all
the time, but like even even like like slave owners
in the South didn't really like to talk about like that,
the fact that that's what they were doing a lot
of the time. It's yeah, it's one of those leads
(09:31):
you to one of those are we the Batties kind
of moments. Yeah. Yeah, it's something that even even the
people who do it know is wrong. Yeah. When I
talk about the fact that I'm forcing myself on these
children that I basically own, I feel like kind of
a monster. Yep. You know it's funny, like I have
actually read accounts of Japanese soldiers who dreamed the war
(09:53):
We're like way to wear the baddies, and it never
involved this. It was always about like like they would
be sent into into the Philippines and you know, and
this all there are like they're given the American the
Stanate of American life. Well you'll begree to deliberators. And
they get there and you know, they're like hacking Filipino
like soldiers to death with bandits and they're like wait,
but it's never this ship. It's yeah. Now, rape stations
(10:15):
don't come into widespread use until after eight, which is
after the rape and Nunjing, And you know that's another
atrocity that like probably deserves an episode, and that because
Kishi isn't directly involved in it, we don't really have
time to talk about it. The short version of it is.
So the Japanese army have been expecting to just like
(10:37):
blow their way through all of China in like three days,
and instead they fight the Battle of Shanghai, which is
you know, it's called the nickname of it is down
ground in the Shanghai. They find this incredibly brutal battle,
like they lose sixty troops and the army just goes berserk.
And you know, China's capital in the war have been
at Nunjing and Johanna takes a city and they kill
(10:59):
in the number of dead civilians and prisoners of war
was it's generally held to me about two dred thousands.
And they also rape somewhere between twenty and eighty thousand people.
Jesus Christ. Yeah, it's it's really bad. And like you say,
they raped, and then the number is the population of
a small city. Yeah. Again, you're in the A Leagues
(11:23):
in terms of the crimes against humanity, my friend. Yeah, yeah,
And you know, and I say this, like, you know,
even with all the stuff we're about to talk about,
like these sort of just random rapes where like the
Japanese army goes into a village and rapes they have
one than leaves like that's still that's still gonna be
happening throughout the entire war. And you know, I mean
like and and to some extent you can talk about
the fact that like sexual violence is always a part
(11:44):
of war, but like the Japanese army is like rape
heavy by army standards, and then they're also doing the
sex slavery stuff and you know, yeah, and and and something.
You know, and I think this is there's sort of
like the there there's a thing that you read a
lot about how the military sex slavery system is. Actually
it's well, you know, it's it's about like the Japanese
(12:05):
army trying to get the rape under control after after Nunjing,
and like, well it doesn't work if that's his attention.
And the second thing is, you know, it's kind of true.
But you know when I say the Japanese army wanted
to get the rape under control, like what I mean
is that they want the rape to happen through the
army of bureaucracy in army facilities at you know, created
by the army, and at times the army is allowed
(12:26):
and they also like I want to regularly try to
regulate things in a way that the soldiers don't get STDs,
you know, but you know, and and and they succeed
in that to some extent, like they they succeed in
bringing the rape directly into the military command chain. Yeah,
and you know, before I move on, I want to
mention there's this enormous primarily Japanese just like intellectual sort
(12:48):
of network and right wing outrage machine that like this
is their thing, this in denying the rape and nunging
like their thing, like the Japanese war crimes deniers. And
then they make all these arguments how like no, no no, no,
these weren't. These weren't sex slaves, these were pay aid prostitutes.
They're not you know, you know that the rape rooms
are just sort of brothels, and it's not it is
you know, there are people who do the whole is
about stopping right, not committing it. And it is like
(13:10):
very very important to understand that every single one of
these peoples are full of ships like these are these
are sort of like intellectually like these people are like
like they're they're they're incredibly similar to like the sort
of like European Western Holocaust and ires like everything they
say is lies and the reason they're lying about it,
(13:31):
and you know, the reason they have to do this
is because just of of the absolute raw horror of
of what I'm about, Like the stuff that I'm about
to read, Um, this is this is a testimony. I'm
going to read a testimony taken from the UN Human
Rights Commission who get a report on the sex slavery system,
and then ninety six this is this is the report
of a Korean woman. Well she's she's not a woman,
(13:54):
she's a child when this happenste child, Yeah yeah, I
mean I was just curious, like yeah, yeah, sorry, yeah, yeah,
that it would mitigate any I would just you know, yeah,
well yeah. So so the reason I didn't say it
was so that this is this is at the beginning
of it is one day in June, at age thirteen,
(14:17):
I had to prepare my lunch for my parents, who
are working in the field, so I went to the
village well to fetch water. A Japanese garrison soldiers surprised
me there and took me away so that my parents
never knew what happens to their daughter. I was taken
to the police station in a truck, where I was
raped by several policemen. When I shouted, they put socks
in my mouth and continued to rape me. The head
of the police station hit me in my left eye
(14:38):
because I was crying. That day, I lost eyesight in
the left eye. After ten days or so, I was
taken to the Japanese Army garrison barracks in Hassan City.
They were around four hundred other Korean young Korean girls there,
and we had to serve over five thousand Japanese soldiers
of sex slaves every day, up to forty men per day.
Each time I protested, they hit me, stuffed rag in
(15:00):
my mouth, one held a match stick to my private
parts until I obeyed him. My private parts were using
with blood. Jesus Christ. One Korean girl who was with
us demand to know why we had to serve so
many up to forty men per day. To punish her
for questioning, the Japanese company commanded Yamamoto ordered her beaten
with a sword while we were watching. They took off
(15:20):
her clothes, tied her legs and hands, and rolled her
over a board with nails until the nails were covered
with blood and pieces of her flesh. In the end,
they cut off her head. Another Japanese another Yamamoto, told
us it was it's easier to kill you all, easier
than killing dogs. He also said, since those Korean girls
are crying because they have not eaten yet, boiled the
(15:41):
human flesh and make them eat it. One of the
Korean girls caught venereal disease from being raped so often,
and as a result, over fifty Japanese soldiers were infected.
In order to stop the disease from spreading and to
quote sterilize the Korean girls, they stuck a hot iron
bar in her private parts. Once they took forty of
us a truck far away with to a pool filled
(16:02):
with water and snakes. The soldiers beat several girls, shoved
them into the water, heaped earth on the pool, and
buried them alive. I think over half the girls who
were at the barracks were killed twice. I tried to
run away, but both times we were caught. After a
few days, they tortured even more. We were tortured even more,
and I was hit on my head so many times
that all the scars still remain. They tattooed me on
(16:24):
the inside of my lip, my chest, my stomach, and
my body I fainted. When I woke up, I was
on a mountain side, presumably left for dead. Of the
two girls with me, only one had survived. A fifty
year old man you lived in the mountains found us,
gave us some clothes and something to eat. He helped
us travel back to Korea, where I returned scarred, buried,
(16:45):
with difficulties in speaking at the age of eighteen, after
five years of serving as a sex slave for the
Japanese Jesus God, yeah, it is. There are hundreds and
hundreds of pages of testimony like this. Yeah, I'm you know,
it is my job to read about crimes against humanity,
(17:05):
and that's um, that's one of the roughest things I've
ever heard. Yeah, like I the only thing I've ever read.
I don't think that's it's the worst account of rape
I've ever read. The only thing you've ever read? Definitely, Yeah,
that was like like even comparable to it was like
it was accounts of like what like Haitian slave owners
(17:27):
would do so like their slaves and that stuff. Yeah,
those guys are, like, I think, more creative. But I
heard some accounts from ZD women who were enslaved by
isis that you know, it was less inventive. It was
more with them just a case of neglect, like not
letting these women clean themselves and like them just getting
(17:49):
these horrible infections as they continue to be um. But
I don't think I've ever heard a case that's that
because it's not just like it's not just like v
lent and horrific. It's like creatively innovatively like a lot
of like it's it's far more than just you know,
(18:09):
obviously rape is very seldom just like about a sexual appetite,
but it's it's so it's very clearly, so much more
than just these are soldiers who are horny. There's like
there's a lot of very frightening things going on in that. Yeah,
I mean I think part of it. You know, I
was talking last episode about the theory of the declining
rate of pleasure, and you know, I think of something
(18:31):
like this with violence to where, you know, because the
other thing that that reminds me this terms of inventiveness
that I've read about was accounts of like what the
the Salvadorian National Guard did during like during the Civil
War in the eighties and and that stuff. It's like,
you know, you get to a point when you're in
a war where like you've seen so much violence that
(18:52):
you know, you become sensitized to it, and it becomes
this sort of constant race to like find something you
can do that's moore violence that will like stop bothm
opposing you. But but this isn't even like that. These
guys just like enjoy this, Yeah, because there's no that's
not there's not none of that that is like an
attempt to scare people out of resistance. That's just yeah,
(19:17):
it's like serial killer ship. You know, it's the you know,
you've done so many other depraved things and now you're
getting creative with it out of almost boredom. Um. It
sounds like there's an element of that of just like, well,
fuck it, we haven't been stopped yet. Let's try let's
escalate this, let's let's let's go a little further, let's
try something harder. I don't know how much of that
is is boredom, how much of it is like disensitization,
(19:41):
but like, yeah, I mean, fuck you could you you
could have done a whole episode on on on that
specific Uh yeah, yeah, Like I think you know what
one of the things that that the like the sources
talk about is how this it's you know, part it's
about power, but it's about like power on a sort
(20:02):
of civilizational level that it's like, you know, like what
what what's happening here is that the Japanese soldiers are like,
you know, like we we can like like we can
rape these women. And that's you know, this is this
is our way of like raping the entire Chinese nation.
It's this way of part of it is it's about
it is kind of about like the sort of demonstration
of of sort of violent superiority in that like a
(20:25):
lot of what some of the goals are are about
just sort of like like this weird like like a
massive's supposed to be this like emasculation of like the
Chinese resistance where it's like like you know, if you're
a Chinese man, like he's like, hey, look what we
can do to your women, And it's just you know,
because this, this is like this is the way these
people think because you know, this is like yeah, this
(20:46):
is it's um okay, like I I yeah, I don't
know what else. I mean. I think pretty much everyone
listening is going to have the same reaction, which is
just kind of like numb horror. So maybe here's ads.
(21:10):
I I'm not I'm not an arrogant man when it
comes to what we do, but I I don't think
anyone in the podcasting game can compete with us for
the sheer awkwardness of our ad transitions. We like the
cheese stand alone, We're back, uh and uh. I'm sure
(21:35):
all those ads really, uh really wiped that horror from
people's minds. So let's just let's let's barrel straight ahead
and U uh yeah, let's let's that's barrel ahead. Yeah.
So and this is another place where it's it's very
(21:55):
hard to pin down numbers because Japanese Empire, you know,
like they they they shorty, they should destroy every record
that they can, and they kill huge numbers of these
women to keep them quiet. But the estimated number of
women in slave of the Japanese Empire is about four
hundred thousands UM. The newer scholarships suggested about half of
(22:15):
them are Chinese. UM. There's also at the very least
tens of thousands and probably almost certainly over a hundred
over a hundred thousands from Korea and past that it gets,
you know, it gets even harder to you know, get
numbers because the records and the survivors are both hard defines.
But you know, we know that this this is happening
(22:37):
like that. The levels of violence and the abductions in
the Philippines are similar to this. Um. I yeah, it's
just basical. Basically everywhere the Japanese Empire goes like this
is this is this is what they're doing. They're they're
they're enslaving the people they conquer. Um. You know, we
talked about how the victim in that last story is thirteen.
(22:57):
The victims tend to range from about eleven twenty four,
and the most common is between thirteen and nineteen. Because
you know, these people are also pedophiles. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
I mean I think that I think I've told this
story a couple of times. But there was a moment
where I was hanging out in Budapest with a friend
of mine, kind of in the center of town. They've
(23:18):
got all these statues of these these magyar kings on
horseback with swords and axes and stuff, these like warrior
legendary warrior kings. And my buddy turns to me and says,
I wonder how many of them didn't funk little kids.
And that's not a Hungarian thing. That's like literally any
any culture, Like when you go back to the Conquering
(23:39):
War leaders, it's like, yeah, I mean most of them
are fucking fourteen year olds, just like half of your
favorite rock stars in the eighties. It's not great. Yeah,
And I think this, yeah, it's yeah. This then this,
I think is this, This is just sort of pure
expression of power, and I think it's part of why
and this is folding into a bigger thing. We don't
have to go out, but like why, I think it's
(23:59):
so oxy that like our cultural discussions of pedophiles always
focus on what's much rarer, which is like adults like
going after molesting like little bitty kids four and five
year olds, when like the vast majority pedophilia is is
grown men who the most people would not say they're
a pedophile who go out of the way to fuck
(24:20):
teenage girls. That's most of it. That was Epstein, you
know anyway, sorry rant over No, Yeah, And I think
like this, this, this is just sort of like what
having absolute physical like the the ability to murder anyone
you want, Like this is what that does to eat
and you know, one of the other things that's very
common here is that a lot of the women and children,
(24:41):
and again I want to emphasize, like these are children
who resisted, you know, like these are these are fucking
fourteen and nineteen year olds, and you know they're either beaten, stabbed,
or just decapitated. And you know, they decapitate kids in
front of their families constantly. There's also, um, so almost
everyone involved in this, all the women, all the children,
(25:01):
become addicted to opium or some some other who yep
yep um. And you know, there's also you know, we've
sort of we sort of alluded to this, like there's
everyone gets venereal diseases because it turns out that when
you're getting raped by forty men a day, you get
ferneurial diseases. And the army, the army injects like the
(25:25):
sick with what almost certainly was the mercury based antibiotic salvarsan. Yeah,
don't ye, no, it's it's yeah, it's you know, and
they're doing this not because they care like at all
that these women are like disease, like you know that
(25:46):
they're get are getting sick, Like they're doing this because
they want to keep down this credit disease among the soldiers,
and you know, this is this is where you start
to get to just I mean the horror of the
shoes that doesn't end because you know, these people have
to deal with addiction, they have to deal with disease.
And again the people who survived this um yeah, yeah,
you know they have they have this like this unspeakable
(26:06):
try literally like people lose the ability to talk. Yeah,
it doesn't Yeah, and then you know, to make it worse,
the communities are taken from like a lot of the time,
they don't want them back because you know, like these
women are seen to have been defiled by the Japanese
and so you know, has been a bunch of times.
I mean there's there's versions, yeah, recently with Isis. Yeah,
(26:30):
it had a lot of times throughout history. Yeah, Like
I like I read a story about someone who's accounts
I almost included in here and then cut because it
was too long. But like, so she she comes back
to her village and like the the only person in
her entire village who will like talk to her is
the person she was supposed to be married to, and
(26:51):
like that guy is like a genuinely good guy, but
like he can't take it and he goes and joins
the army and then like dies somewhere fighting the Japanese
Northern China, and so you know, and you have these
these and this this is also part of why that
the records aren't aren't that like well known, because you know,
the survivors, there's a huge cultural thing about like you know,
(27:12):
you like you know, we we we can. We've been
talking a lot in Last Fear about how hard it
is for any rape survivors just like talk about in
the open and like this is so much harder, and
there's all these political constraints on it, and yeah, and
this stuff, you know, like this stuff is not that
well known in the West, and it leads to situations
like so something that happened like a couple of years
(27:33):
ago Stephanie Kelton, who was bringing his economic advisor is
probably the most famous like modern monetary theory person like
went to Japan and advised a group of like of
liberal determocratic party lawmakers and some of those people were
like in fascist groups that were like founded by n
Jane Denihlists. And you know, this stuff happens because that's
(27:54):
just the absolute horror that that happened here. Just people
don't know about it. It's not like the Pacific. Isn't
the theater that people talk about much other than sort
of island hopping and like, yeah, that's the Japanese prisoners
of war. Yeah. Now, now Keis she's rolling this while
he's in Manchuqua is sort of interesting. So Mentuqua merely,
(28:16):
and I'm using this as an enormous scare quote merely
has forty two sex slave stations, which is is kind
of low for a reason that size. So though again
Kishi like she just like less has happened, She's like
fine with it. He's almost certainly is diverting economic resources
to it. But the reason it's so low compared to
a lot of other places is that she's Yakuza buddies
(28:36):
are doing like exactly the same ship in their brothels.
Like it's it's it's it's not it's not quite as bad,
but you know, they're also kidnapping a bunch of women
and like repeatedly raping them. But but you know, because
because because the yakuzo is like so heavily in control
of the sex trade, there's less of the sort of
straight up military taking control of it, and you know,
(28:56):
and the yaks and stuff, Kish like Kish's fucking like
these are all like all the people doing this are
like his personal friends, and like he's you know, Kishi's
in these brothels constantly while these in Manchuria, and you know,
she so he gets pulled out in Manchuria thirty nine
to become the Vice Minister of Commerce in order to
plan what's called the new Economic Order. And you know,
(29:18):
this is I talked about in the first episode that
that the sort of the third phase of Japanese imperialism
I called Tokyo imperialism three Tokyo drift. And this really,
I think is where that starts, or I mean when
I starts. But this is the sort of finality of it.
You know, like all of the sort of abuse you
(29:39):
have like happening in the colonies, Like you know that
this this all the stuff that creates fascism in Mensu call,
all the stuff that like, you know, all the sort
of fascism in the Japanese army, all of that fascism
that's been in this sort of puppet state, you know,
it all comes home and you know and you get
you get Kishi going there seven, and that that fuses
these sort of like Tokyo Edge highly educated fascist like
(30:01):
Tokyo bureaucrats with with this sort of military like fascism,
and those guys take control of Japan. And that's how
you get you know that, that that's how you get
sort of full scale fascists in Japan. And you know,
in neteen fourne when the stuff is being implemented, like
the political party is just like dissolved themselves, and you
know they're like, okay, well there's there's no point of
(30:22):
parties anymore. We're just gonna work with atial terranism. And
you get inside of Japan, like you get these I
don't know it'scard them. I guess it's like you know,
the the these sort of like mass fascist groups. So
the Concordy Association, I've been that group in Bencheria and
she she is sort of involved and helped setting up
the Imperial Rule Assists Association, which is you know, this
(30:44):
is like this is this is the New Orders version
of this, and you know it's it's supposed to be
this like sort of mass fashioned organization to build, but
it's the bureaucracy, and it's about sort of building sport
for the war. And meanwhile, she she is just sort
of like she she's kind of like dicking around with
his planning models. So, you know, his his big thing
in this period. He wants to he wants to turn
(31:06):
He basically wants to turn Japan into into a version
of Entaria, where it's the the entire economy, the whole
society is built towards just fueling what the army is doing.
And he's he's creating these things called control associations, which
are you know, it's on an industry level. Everyone in
control association is like forced to work together, like all
the companies, all the unions, and he so he the
(31:28):
head of each control association is called the fearer. Okay,
that sounds good, not a word with any kind of
let's move on, let's move right on. Yeah, you know.
And the funny part about this is that I'm like,
I'm about nine sure for the way it's like they
are literally so they're they're speaking Japanese normally, and then
when they have to address the guy, they say the
word fewer in German, like they just they say fearer
(31:49):
in German it's like when we want to it's like
using the word shopping freud, you know, some German words.
Yeah yeah, and you know, and this fearer is supposed
to you know, they're supposed to control like the entire
production process right there there there are the people who
set the prices of the people who they set quantities
of that distribution, They set the organization production process. And
these these are the like the people like Kishi who
(32:10):
are the kind of like boring bureaucrats who do all
of the war machine stuff. And this like really pisss
off the bought you in, like the big business people
because they're like, oh wait, hold on, what do you
mean everything is run by the state now, And so
they accuse, uh, they accused Kishi of communism, and so
(32:30):
Kishi like like like half of his allies like I'll
get arrested because on accusations of being communists, and he's
like forced to resign, and so you know, they're there's
there there's like there's like an eight month period when
he's out of power, when you can be like, okay,
everything that happened in this eight month period in nineteen
forty was not Kishi's fault, but then you know, his
(32:52):
his old friend Deki Tojo becomes a prime minister in
actet one, and he brings Kishi back as the Minister
of Commerce and Industry just in time for Kishi to
sign the declaration of war with the US, right like
I guess technically speaking it was it was written before.
I guess, I guess they did technically hand it to
the US for Pearl Harbor, like right before Kish sort
(33:13):
of goes back to work, like trying to turn Japan
it's just like a national defense state. And you know
he at this time around though, he makes he makes
two decisions. One is that he's going to work with
the corporations because weirdly, these corporations are like the only
resistance left to him. And the second one is that
he's like, Okay, I don't have enough bureaucratic power, so
I'm going to just like merge every single Japanese agency
(33:34):
like together to form a super agency called Ministry, Musicians, Munitions.
And at this point, she she she she is just
running the economy like he he's the guy, He's the
guy running the entire logistics network for all of the
soldiers doing all the horrible things. Jip like he's he's
the guy running the entire economy making this work cool.
(33:54):
But you know, and I say this, like Kishi kish
I think it is very different than like you're sort
of classical ashes beercrat. Like the image of it is
someone like like aikman like Hannah rent Coins, but like
the banality of evil to do these guys who was like, well, okay,
they're kind of just doing their job. And like Kishi
Kishi is not that Kishi Kishi is running the war
machine because he like deeply, deeply sincerely believes that like
(34:17):
this is what's good for Japan and so you know.
But the other thing, he's also a bereacrat. So he's
also kind of like he spends the war just sort
of like he's like shuffling ministries around. He's like shuffling,
but he's doing all this sort of bereacratic stuff. And
as the war starts to end, she she looks at
the situation as as like the US just like absolutely
(34:38):
obliterates the Champanese Navy in Midway, and he goes, oh, fuck,
how can I get out of the war crimes tributal
And his plan is that he's going to bring down
like Prime Minister Chocho's cabinet by resigning and doing his
complicated stuff. Like you know, this works, like Kishi Kishi
is able to force Totor to resign and Kishi forms
this like sort of nominally this group like nominally opposed
(34:59):
to the Guard. But you know, but like the whole
goal of this is basically just like it's it's him
saying to MacArthur, like, please don't shoot me, and it works.
She she's taking prisoner by the occupation government and is
inevitably thrown in in the infamous Ugomo prison. In is
suspected class A war criminal. If the word justice like
(35:20):
meant literally anything in this world other than just being
a cruel joke to torment survivors, she would have hung
from a rope in nineteen and that would have been
the end of this two part episode. Unfortunately, we live
in hell and Kesh is going to be back in
part three with friends of the show, The Dullest Brothers,
in order to build the entire modern Japanese political system.
Hell yeah, there we go. There we swish in our
(35:45):
favorite sign care well, favorite Ron Hubbard. But they're pretty great.
Um fucking a. That's that's beautiful. Oh well, Chris, I
am excited to hear from our old friends, the Dullest
brother um, but we're going to have to wait until
Thursday for that because this is I'm not excited to
(36:05):
hear from our old friends. It's gonna be great to
non problematic guys who were never friends with any Nazis.
That's the thing everyone remembers about the Dulles brothers is
the degree to which they were not close friends with Nazis.
So yeah, follow us at cool Zone Media, at Bastard's
(36:26):
Pod on Twitter and Instagram and allegedly allegedly and Chris,
do you want to give them your Twitter handle? Yeah,
I'm at me hr three on Twitter allegedly allegedly, I'm
all allegedly better known as the ice must be a
story guy. Yeah, that's that that that is your legal name.
(36:48):
And it happened. And in happy news, I just found
a whole Reddit threat of people talking about how they
appreciate how cute Anderson is. So yeah, oh yes, no,
Anderson's huge on Reddit. You're here, John Anderson. Good for you,
all right, motherho back Thursday, come back Thursday, and we
will we will wrap you in our warm, slightly gropy
(37:12):
embrace of podcast Bye,
Ah, Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the only podcast
where Sophie was just telling me how much she thinks
it would be a good idea to reboot the TV
show Friends, but instead of being the cast of Friends,
all of the characters are famous medical malpractice committers from history,
(00:28):
and it's a show about them trying to get away
with maiming their patients. I think it's a bold idea
for a TV show, Sophie. I think we should pitch
it to Netflix right now. Thank you. That's that's That's
totally not something I would ever say, because Girl Girlfriends
was a better show than Friends. Um, but you know,
let's just accept that Sophie said that and move on
(00:49):
to Christopher Wong. Christopher, how are you doing? In part
two of this episode? Doing doing? Doing as well as
you can be? Preparing to just talk about Japanese war
crimes for an hour. I resisted the urge to open
this by saying, what's manning my cheery is because I
thought that might be distasteful. Yeah, anyway, let's dive back in. Yeah,
(01:15):
all right, so we're about to start talking about the
Japanese forced labor system, and I think the best way
to introduce this is by I'm going to read part
of the introduction to a book called Asian Labor and
the Wartime Japanese Empire, Unknown Histories, which is this Basically,
there's a conference on sort of Japanese war crimes, Japanese force, labor, tree,
(01:37):
tree the war, and they all that all the sort
of papers in that are like combined into this book,
and the introduction goes, Grief and despair find little place
in most historical accounts that are absent from most of
the source material historians use. The hundreds of thousands who
died were sons, husbands and fathers, or sometimes daughters, wives
and mothers, and had families awaiting their return. Deaths often
(01:58):
went unrecorded. Coolie is too sick to work, replaced in
death houses where they spent their final hours and accumulated filth,
but in vomit and the excrement produced by those who
had died before them. Without food or medicine, and certainly
without hope, their corpses were thrown into unbarked graves, or
burned or abandoned in forests, or tossing the rivers. We
welcomed behind the bastard people now it's it's really hard
(02:25):
to pin down the exact number of people who were
forced to work around the Japanese Empire. And this is
you know, this is a running theme of of this
this episode, is that right before Japan was occupied the
end of WORLDAR two, they destroyed all of their records.
Like I mean this and this word like this is
not just records in Japan, like this word goes all
the way down the command chain, the destroying records just
everywhere they can find them. So most of what we
(02:47):
have our estimates, and you know, the estimates estimates are
not good. The Indonesian government estimates that four point one
million Indonesians were forced to work for Japan's in the war.
I mean, you know, it's just just to get us
into the scale if they like. There there's there's an
individual railroad called the Taye Burma Railroad just alone that
uses a hundred and eighty thousand possibly there's many as
(03:08):
two hundred seventy thousand people, and you know the yeah,
the number in in China five seems to have been
about three million. But you know that that's the only
period we have even sort of okay numbers about before that.
We just don't know. And you know, this is also
happening in Korea. Ten thousand Koreans are scripted into the army.
(03:29):
There's seven hundred thousand New York restripted to forced labor.
And Kishi is going to import a lot of those
people like to Japan to do forced labor. Everywhere the
Japanese Empire goes, they're they're doing this and you know,
and we've talked about last episode about how sort of
the starts with Kishi talking about you know, Kishi's like, okay, well,
well we'll put the world, we'll put the prisoners award
to work. And then it expands to just like you know,
(03:50):
people who are vagrants and people don't have jobs, and
then it's like anyone who opposes us, and by by
by nine one, the Japanese Army is doing just slave raids. Yeah,
but between two the Japanese Army burns tens of thousands
of Chinese villages and they put the survivors in concentration
camps and they put about they put about a hundred
thousand people into these force labor camps, and of these
(04:13):
conscripts of them die this scripts yeah sure, yeah, you know,
and I said it's like that's thirty is kind of
being dragged down by the fact that there are some
places where the conditions aren't as bad. Um Yeah, you know,
and you're like, you know, we can we talk about
(04:33):
a place where it was really bad. Um. So. One
of the centers of Kishi's five year plan in Manchuria
is these coal mines in Fushan, and you know, these
these are the coal mines that are like fueling all
of these on industrial developments. And the replacement rate for
these workers between four was out of every four forty
workers total they had, they had to replace twenty five
(04:54):
thousand of them every year. And you know a small
number of these people just like escaped, but almost every
one else and this is you know, a very small
percentages of escape. Almost everyone else. Almost all the people
either died on the job or Japanese arm just executed
them forend subordination, because you know, this is something the
Japanese Army starts to do in this period, is that
they just you know, they just start randomly killing people.
(05:15):
And like these these people we talked about a bit
about the conditions they die. A lot of these people
die from dysentery and they die from cholera because you
know these camps like that, there's there's no medical facilities
at all, right, so you know when you get sick,
they just like they lay you on a cotton. You die.
And you know when a lot of these people are
dying from over work, that die from starvation, and you know,
and then also like the Japanese army, like they're really
(05:36):
creative about like how they kill people. So I mean
you have like the classic like they beat people, they
stab people, they shoot, they light them on fire. They
also like they told them off boats. They like they
drown people in submarines. What's the thing I've never found
another like recorded thing and people do is like the
force boat people to a submarine and just sink it.
Oh god, really they if they're burning a whole submarine,
(05:58):
they really want to stead Yeah, and like like this
is a this is the thing, like particularly we'll get
more in to this in a bit, Like particularly like
that that that's the way they kill like comfort women
because yeah, they don't want any record of them existing,
so we'll we'll we'll we'll put them in a submarine
and things. It's it's a way of disappearing, Okay, well, yep, yep,
(06:21):
that's that's a bomber. Yeah. So so all all of
those numbers, that's that's just for you know, physical labor um.
Japan is also running something called the comfort Women's system.
And you know, the comfort women's system is this the
academic and legal term for Japan's military sex slavery system.
And so you know, if you read academic accounts, you
(06:41):
read journalistic accounts, you read like legal accounts, they talk
about comfort women and comfort stations and use all of these.
You know, it's like pretty little euphemisms developed by Japan
specifically so that in their in their in their their
communications about it, they can sort of obscure what's actually
happening here. And this is the point where it becomes
useful that I am the longer in a demi and
I'm not a lawyer, which means I don't have to
(07:02):
use any of these. What this is is it an enormous, bureaucratic,
organized system of military sexual slavery, ran of army rape rooms.
And the first the first of yeah, it's it's it's
bad stuff. The first of these these sort of military
rape stations is set up in Shanghai after the Japan
launches an attack on Shanghai, and I think thirty two
(07:22):
is one of their sort of They had these like
periodic sort of fights with with with the Chinese governments
basically up until thirty seven, when like the actual war starts.
And I want to go into what happened here, because
you know, most accounts a sort of Japanese sexual atrocities
in East Asia. Give this, give this, like this whole
(07:43):
the ninety two attack like one line, and so I
want to read this passage from the book Chinese Confort
Women testimonies for Imperial Japan's sex slaves. The soldiers immediately
kidnapped good looking local women and kept them in military
barracks and sex slaves. At the same time, the troops
continue to assault women in near by villages. Reportedly, over
one thousand local women were raped in their homes. Not
(08:04):
even pregnant women, young girls, or elderly women were spared.
Within the same reason and region. In the autumn of
nineteen five, more than a hundred Japanese soldiers attacked an
area where the Chinese Resistance Force was active. Carrying machine guns,
the troops drove the villagers into a large yard, dragged
all the women out of the crowd and raped them
in the presence of their family members. Several soldiers ripped
(08:26):
the clothes off a woman who was six months pregnant
tighter to a table in the yard. They took photographs
while violating her, and then cut her admen open and
plucked the fetus out with a band. Neet and and
this that is before the start of the war. Nope, yeah,
this is this is that that's that's that's five. Now
(08:47):
the rape stations as a sort of you know, and okay,
I will say one other thing. There's some indication that
the Navy had been using like sort of organized rape
stations like before n two. It this is another one
of those things where the documentation is really hard because
you know, I mean, the army is not just going
(09:08):
to tell you they are running like a sex slave station.
Most people who do sex slave stuff don't like to
talk about it all that much. Yeah. Yeah, I mean,
even like even you know, like they're doing it all
the time, but like even even like like slave owners
in the South didn't really like to talk about like that,
the fact that that's what they were doing a lot
of the time. It's yeah, it's one of those leads
(09:31):
you to one of those are we the Batties kind
of moments. Yeah. Yeah, it's something that even even the
people who do it know is wrong. Yeah. When I
talk about the fact that I'm forcing myself on these
children that I basically own, I feel like kind of
a monster. Yep. You know it's funny, like I have
actually read accounts of Japanese soldiers who dreamed the war
(09:53):
We're like way to wear the baddies, and it never
involved this. It was always about like like they would
be sent into into the Philippines and you know, and
this all there are like they're given the American the
Stanate of American life. Well you'll begree to deliberators. And
they get there and you know, they're like hacking Filipino
like soldiers to death with bandits and they're like wait,
but it's never this ship. It's yeah. Now, rape stations
(10:15):
don't come into widespread use until after eight, which is
after the rape and Nunjing, And you know that's another
atrocity that like probably deserves an episode, and that because
Kishi isn't directly involved in it, we don't really have
time to talk about it. The short version of it is.
So the Japanese army have been expecting to just like
(10:37):
blow their way through all of China in like three days,
and instead they fight the Battle of Shanghai, which is
you know, it's called the nickname of it is down
ground in the Shanghai. They find this incredibly brutal battle,
like they lose sixty troops and the army just goes berserk.
And you know, China's capital in the war have been
at Nunjing and Johanna takes a city and they kill
(10:59):
in the number of dead civilians and prisoners of war
was it's generally held to me about two dred thousands.
And they also rape somewhere between twenty and eighty thousand people.
Jesus Christ. Yeah, it's it's really bad. And like you say,
they raped, and then the number is the population of
a small city. Yeah. Again, you're in the A Leagues
(11:23):
in terms of the crimes against humanity, my friend. Yeah, yeah,
And you know, and I say this, like, you know,
even with all the stuff we're about to talk about,
like these sort of just random rapes where like the
Japanese army goes into a village and rapes they have
one than leaves like that's still that's still gonna be
happening throughout the entire war. And you know, I mean
like and and to some extent you can talk about
the fact that like sexual violence is always a part
(11:44):
of war, but like the Japanese army is like rape
heavy by army standards, and then they're also doing the
sex slavery stuff and you know, yeah, and and and something.
You know, and I think this is there's sort of
like the there there's a thing that you read a
lot about how the military sex slavery system is. Actually
it's well, you know, it's it's about like the Japanese
(12:05):
army trying to get the rape under control after after Nunjing,
and like, well it doesn't work if that's his attention.
And the second thing is, you know, it's kind of true.
But you know when I say the Japanese army wanted
to get the rape under control, like what I mean
is that they want the rape to happen through the
army of bureaucracy in army facilities at you know, created
by the army, and at times the army is allowed
(12:26):
and they also like I want to regularly try to
regulate things in a way that the soldiers don't get STDs,
you know, but you know, and and and they succeed
in that to some extent, like they they succeed in
bringing the rape directly into the military command chain. Yeah,
and you know, before I move on, I want to
mention there's this enormous primarily Japanese just like intellectual sort
(12:48):
of network and right wing outrage machine that like this
is their thing, this in denying the rape and nunging
like their thing, like the Japanese war crimes deniers. And
then they make all these arguments how like no, no no, no,
these weren't. These weren't sex slaves, these were pay aid prostitutes.
They're not you know, you know that the rape rooms
are just sort of brothels, and it's not it is
you know, there are people who do the whole is
about stopping right, not committing it. And it is like
(13:10):
very very important to understand that every single one of
these peoples are full of ships like these are these
are sort of like intellectually like these people are like
like they're they're they're incredibly similar to like the sort
of like European Western Holocaust and ires like everything they
say is lies and the reason they're lying about it,
(13:31):
and you know, the reason they have to do this
is because just of of the absolute raw horror of
of what I'm about, Like the stuff that I'm about
to read, Um, this is this is a testimony. I'm
going to read a testimony taken from the UN Human
Rights Commission who get a report on the sex slavery system,
and then ninety six this is this is the report
of a Korean woman. Well she's she's not a woman,
(13:54):
she's a child when this happenste child, Yeah yeah, I
mean I was just curious, like yeah, yeah, sorry, yeah, yeah,
that it would mitigate any I would just you know, yeah,
well yeah. So so the reason I didn't say it
was so that this is this is at the beginning
of it is one day in June, at age thirteen,
(14:17):
I had to prepare my lunch for my parents, who
are working in the field, so I went to the
village well to fetch water. A Japanese garrison soldiers surprised
me there and took me away so that my parents
never knew what happens to their daughter. I was taken
to the police station in a truck, where I was
raped by several policemen. When I shouted, they put socks
in my mouth and continued to rape me. The head
of the police station hit me in my left eye
(14:38):
because I was crying. That day, I lost eyesight in
the left eye. After ten days or so, I was
taken to the Japanese Army garrison barracks in Hassan City.
They were around four hundred other Korean young Korean girls there,
and we had to serve over five thousand Japanese soldiers
of sex slaves every day, up to forty men per day.
Each time I protested, they hit me, stuffed rag in
(15:00):
my mouth, one held a match stick to my private
parts until I obeyed him. My private parts were using
with blood. Jesus Christ. One Korean girl who was with
us demand to know why we had to serve so
many up to forty men per day. To punish her
for questioning, the Japanese company commanded Yamamoto ordered her beaten
with a sword while we were watching. They took off
(15:20):
her clothes, tied her legs and hands, and rolled her
over a board with nails until the nails were covered
with blood and pieces of her flesh. In the end,
they cut off her head. Another Japanese another Yamamoto, told
us it was it's easier to kill you all, easier
than killing dogs. He also said, since those Korean girls
are crying because they have not eaten yet, boiled the
(15:41):
human flesh and make them eat it. One of the
Korean girls caught venereal disease from being raped so often,
and as a result, over fifty Japanese soldiers were infected.
In order to stop the disease from spreading and to
quote sterilize the Korean girls, they stuck a hot iron
bar in her private parts. Once they took forty of
us a truck far away with to a pool filled
(16:02):
with water and snakes. The soldiers beat several girls, shoved
them into the water, heaped earth on the pool, and
buried them alive. I think over half the girls who
were at the barracks were killed twice. I tried to
run away, but both times we were caught. After a
few days, they tortured even more. We were tortured even more,
and I was hit on my head so many times
that all the scars still remain. They tattooed me on
(16:24):
the inside of my lip, my chest, my stomach, and
my body I fainted. When I woke up, I was
on a mountain side, presumably left for dead. Of the
two girls with me, only one had survived. A fifty
year old man you lived in the mountains found us,
gave us some clothes and something to eat. He helped
us travel back to Korea, where I returned scarred, buried,
(16:45):
with difficulties in speaking at the age of eighteen, after
five years of serving as a sex slave for the
Japanese Jesus God, yeah, it is. There are hundreds and
hundreds of pages of testimony like this. Yeah, I'm you know,
it is my job to read about crimes against humanity,
(17:05):
and that's um, that's one of the roughest things I've
ever heard. Yeah, like I the only thing I've ever read.
I don't think that's it's the worst account of rape
I've ever read. The only thing you've ever read? Definitely, Yeah,
that was like like even comparable to it was like
it was accounts of like what like Haitian slave owners
(17:27):
would do so like their slaves and that stuff. Yeah,
those guys are, like, I think, more creative. But I
heard some accounts from ZD women who were enslaved by
isis that you know, it was less inventive. It was
more with them just a case of neglect, like not
letting these women clean themselves and like them just getting
(17:49):
these horrible infections as they continue to be um. But
I don't think I've ever heard a case that's that
because it's not just like it's not just like v
lent and horrific. It's like creatively innovatively like a lot
of like it's it's far more than just you know,
(18:09):
obviously rape is very seldom just like about a sexual appetite,
but it's it's so it's very clearly, so much more
than just these are soldiers who are horny. There's like
there's a lot of very frightening things going on in that. Yeah,
I mean I think part of it. You know, I
was talking last episode about the theory of the declining
rate of pleasure, and you know, I think of something
(18:31):
like this with violence to where, you know, because the
other thing that that reminds me this terms of inventiveness
that I've read about was accounts of like what the
the Salvadorian National Guard did during like during the Civil
War in the eighties and and that stuff. It's like,
you know, you get to a point when you're in
a war where like you've seen so much violence that
(18:52):
you know, you become sensitized to it, and it becomes
this sort of constant race to like find something you
can do that's moore violence that will like stop bothm
opposing you. But but this isn't even like that. These
guys just like enjoy this, Yeah, because there's no that's
not there's not none of that that is like an
attempt to scare people out of resistance. That's just yeah,
(19:17):
it's like serial killer ship. You know, it's the you know,
you've done so many other depraved things and now you're
getting creative with it out of almost boredom. Um. It
sounds like there's an element of that of just like, well,
fuck it, we haven't been stopped yet. Let's try let's
escalate this, let's let's let's go a little further, let's
try something harder. I don't know how much of that
is is boredom, how much of it is like disensitization,
(19:41):
but like, yeah, I mean, fuck you could you you
could have done a whole episode on on on that
specific Uh yeah, yeah, Like I think you know what
one of the things that that the like the sources
talk about is how this it's you know, part it's
about power, but it's about like power on a sort
(20:02):
of civilizational level that it's like, you know, like what
what what's happening here is that the Japanese soldiers are like,
you know, like we we can like like we can
rape these women. And that's you know, this is this
is our way of like raping the entire Chinese nation.
It's this way of part of it is it's about
it is kind of about like the sort of demonstration
of of sort of violent superiority in that like a
(20:25):
lot of what some of the goals are are about
just sort of like like this weird like like a
massive's supposed to be this like emasculation of like the
Chinese resistance where it's like like you know, if you're
a Chinese man, like he's like, hey, look what we
can do to your women, And it's just you know,
because this, this is like this is the way these
people think because you know, this is like yeah, this
(20:46):
is it's um okay, like I I yeah, I don't
know what else. I mean. I think pretty much everyone
listening is going to have the same reaction, which is
just kind of like numb horror. So maybe here's ads.
(21:10):
I I'm not I'm not an arrogant man when it
comes to what we do, but I I don't think
anyone in the podcasting game can compete with us for
the sheer awkwardness of our ad transitions. We like the
cheese stand alone, We're back, uh and uh. I'm sure
(21:35):
all those ads really, uh really wiped that horror from
people's minds. So let's just let's let's barrel straight ahead
and U uh yeah, let's let's that's barrel ahead. Yeah.
So and this is another place where it's it's very
(21:55):
hard to pin down numbers because Japanese Empire, you know,
like they they they shorty, they should destroy every record
that they can, and they kill huge numbers of these
women to keep them quiet. But the estimated number of
women in slave of the Japanese Empire is about four
hundred thousands UM. The newer scholarships suggested about half of
(22:15):
them are Chinese. UM. There's also at the very least
tens of thousands and probably almost certainly over a hundred
over a hundred thousands from Korea and past that it gets,
you know, it gets even harder to you know, get
numbers because the records and the survivors are both hard defines.
But you know, we know that this this is happening
(22:37):
like that. The levels of violence and the abductions in
the Philippines are similar to this. Um. I yeah, it's
just basical. Basically everywhere the Japanese Empire goes like this
is this is this is what they're doing. They're they're
they're enslaving the people they conquer. Um. You know, we
talked about how the victim in that last story is thirteen.
(22:57):
The victims tend to range from about eleven twenty four,
and the most common is between thirteen and nineteen. Because
you know, these people are also pedophiles. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
I mean I think that I think I've told this
story a couple of times. But there was a moment
where I was hanging out in Budapest with a friend
of mine, kind of in the center of town. They've
(23:18):
got all these statues of these these magyar kings on
horseback with swords and axes and stuff, these like warrior
legendary warrior kings. And my buddy turns to me and says,
I wonder how many of them didn't funk little kids.
And that's not a Hungarian thing. That's like literally any
any culture, Like when you go back to the Conquering
(23:39):
War leaders, it's like, yeah, I mean most of them
are fucking fourteen year olds, just like half of your
favorite rock stars in the eighties. It's not great. Yeah,
And I think this, yeah, it's yeah. This then this,
I think is this, This is just sort of pure
expression of power, and I think it's part of why
and this is folding into a bigger thing. We don't
have to go out, but like why, I think it's
(23:59):
so oxy that like our cultural discussions of pedophiles always
focus on what's much rarer, which is like adults like
going after molesting like little bitty kids four and five
year olds, when like the vast majority pedophilia is is
grown men who the most people would not say they're
a pedophile who go out of the way to fuck
(24:20):
teenage girls. That's most of it. That was Epstein, you
know anyway, sorry rant over No, Yeah, And I think
like this, this, this is just sort of like what
having absolute physical like the the ability to murder anyone
you want, Like this is what that does to eat
and you know, one of the other things that's very
common here is that a lot of the women and children,
(24:41):
and again I want to emphasize, like these are children
who resisted, you know, like these are these are fucking
fourteen and nineteen year olds, and you know they're either beaten, stabbed,
or just decapitated. And you know, they decapitate kids in
front of their families constantly. There's also, um, so almost
everyone involved in this, all the women, all the children,
(25:01):
become addicted to opium or some some other who yep
yep um. And you know, there's also you know, we've
sort of we sort of alluded to this, like there's
everyone gets venereal diseases because it turns out that when
you're getting raped by forty men a day, you get
ferneurial diseases. And the army, the army injects like the
(25:25):
sick with what almost certainly was the mercury based antibiotic salvarsan. Yeah,
don't ye, no, it's it's yeah, it's you know, and
they're doing this not because they care like at all
that these women are like disease, like you know that
(25:46):
they're get are getting sick, Like they're doing this because
they want to keep down this credit disease among the soldiers,
and you know, this is this is where you start
to get to just I mean the horror of the
shoes that doesn't end because you know, these people have
to deal with addiction, they have to deal with disease.
And again the people who survived this um yeah, yeah,
you know they have they have this like this unspeakable
(26:06):
try literally like people lose the ability to talk. Yeah,
it doesn't Yeah, and then you know, to make it worse,
the communities are taken from like a lot of the time,
they don't want them back because you know, like these
women are seen to have been defiled by the Japanese
and so you know, has been a bunch of times.
I mean there's there's versions, yeah, recently with Isis. Yeah,
(26:30):
it had a lot of times throughout history. Yeah, Like
I like I read a story about someone who's accounts
I almost included in here and then cut because it
was too long. But like, so she she comes back
to her village and like the the only person in
her entire village who will like talk to her is
the person she was supposed to be married to, and
(26:51):
like that guy is like a genuinely good guy, but
like he can't take it and he goes and joins
the army and then like dies somewhere fighting the Japanese
Northern China, and so you know, and you have these
these and this this is also part of why that
the records aren't aren't that like well known, because you know,
the survivors, there's a huge cultural thing about like you know,
(27:12):
you like you know, we we we can. We've been
talking a lot in Last Fear about how hard it
is for any rape survivors just like talk about in
the open and like this is so much harder, and
there's all these political constraints on it, and yeah, and
this stuff, you know, like this stuff is not that
well known in the West, and it leads to situations
like so something that happened like a couple of years
(27:33):
ago Stephanie Kelton, who was bringing his economic advisor is
probably the most famous like modern monetary theory person like
went to Japan and advised a group of like of
liberal determocratic party lawmakers and some of those people were
like in fascist groups that were like founded by n
Jane Denihlists. And you know, this stuff happens because that's
(27:54):
just the absolute horror that that happened here. Just people
don't know about it. It's not like the Pacific. Isn't
the theater that people talk about much other than sort
of island hopping and like, yeah, that's the Japanese prisoners
of war. Yeah. Now, now Keis she's rolling this while
he's in Manchuqua is sort of interesting. So Mentuqua merely,
(28:16):
and I'm using this as an enormous scare quote merely
has forty two sex slave stations, which is is kind
of low for a reason that size. So though again
Kishi like she just like less has happened, She's like
fine with it. He's almost certainly is diverting economic resources
to it. But the reason it's so low compared to
a lot of other places is that she's Yakuza buddies
(28:36):
are doing like exactly the same ship in their brothels.
Like it's it's it's it's not it's not quite as bad,
but you know, they're also kidnapping a bunch of women
and like repeatedly raping them. But but you know, because
because because the yakuzo is like so heavily in control
of the sex trade, there's less of the sort of
straight up military taking control of it, and you know,
(28:56):
and the yaks and stuff, Kish like Kish's fucking like
these are all like all the people doing this are
like his personal friends, and like he's you know, Kishi's
in these brothels constantly while these in Manchuria, and you know,
she so he gets pulled out in Manchuria thirty nine
to become the Vice Minister of Commerce in order to
plan what's called the new Economic Order. And you know,
(29:18):
this is I talked about in the first episode that
that the sort of the third phase of Japanese imperialism
I called Tokyo imperialism three Tokyo drift. And this really,
I think is where that starts, or I mean when
I starts. But this is the sort of finality of it.
You know, like all of the sort of abuse you
(29:39):
have like happening in the colonies, Like you know that
this this all the stuff that creates fascism in Mensu call,
all the stuff that like, you know, all the sort
of fascism in the Japanese army, all of that fascism
that's been in this sort of puppet state, you know,
it all comes home and you know and you get
you get Kishi going there seven, and that that fuses
these sort of like Tokyo Edge highly educated fascist like
(30:01):
Tokyo bureaucrats with with this sort of military like fascism,
and those guys take control of Japan. And that's how
you get you know that, that that's how you get
sort of full scale fascists in Japan. And you know,
in neteen fourne when the stuff is being implemented, like
the political party is just like dissolved themselves, and you
know they're like, okay, well there's there's no point of
(30:22):
parties anymore. We're just gonna work with atial terranism. And
you get inside of Japan, like you get these I
don't know it'scard them. I guess it's like you know,
the the these sort of like mass fascist groups. So
the Concordy Association, I've been that group in Bencheria and
she she is sort of involved and helped setting up
the Imperial Rule Assists Association, which is you know, this
(30:44):
is like this is this is the New Orders version
of this, and you know it's it's supposed to be
this like sort of mass fashioned organization to build, but
it's the bureaucracy, and it's about sort of building sport
for the war. And meanwhile, she she is just sort
of like she she's kind of like dicking around with
his planning models. So, you know, his his big thing
in this period. He wants to he wants to turn
(31:06):
He basically wants to turn Japan into into a version
of Entaria, where it's the the entire economy, the whole
society is built towards just fueling what the army is doing.
And he's he's creating these things called control associations, which
are you know, it's on an industry level. Everyone in
control association is like forced to work together, like all
the companies, all the unions, and he so he the
(31:28):
head of each control association is called the fearer. Okay,
that sounds good, not a word with any kind of
let's move on, let's move right on. Yeah, you know.
And the funny part about this is that I'm like,
I'm about nine sure for the way it's like they
are literally so they're they're speaking Japanese normally, and then
when they have to address the guy, they say the
word fewer in German, like they just they say fearer
(31:49):
in German it's like when we want to it's like
using the word shopping freud, you know, some German words.
Yeah yeah, and you know, and this fearer is supposed
to you know, they're supposed to control like the entire
production process right there there there are the people who
set the prices of the people who they set quantities
of that distribution, They set the organization production process. And
these these are the like the people like Kishi who
(32:10):
are the kind of like boring bureaucrats who do all
of the war machine stuff. And this like really pisss
off the bought you in, like the big business people
because they're like, oh wait, hold on, what do you
mean everything is run by the state now, And so
they accuse, uh, they accused Kishi of communism, and so
(32:30):
Kishi like like like half of his allies like I'll
get arrested because on accusations of being communists, and he's
like forced to resign, and so you know, they're there's
there there's like there's like an eight month period when
he's out of power, when you can be like, okay,
everything that happened in this eight month period in nineteen
forty was not Kishi's fault, but then you know, his
(32:52):
his old friend Deki Tojo becomes a prime minister in
actet one, and he brings Kishi back as the Minister
of Commerce and Industry just in time for Kishi to
sign the declaration of war with the US, right like
I guess technically speaking it was it was written before.
I guess, I guess they did technically hand it to
the US for Pearl Harbor, like right before Kish sort
(33:13):
of goes back to work, like trying to turn Japan
it's just like a national defense state. And you know
he at this time around though, he makes he makes
two decisions. One is that he's going to work with
the corporations because weirdly, these corporations are like the only
resistance left to him. And the second one is that
he's like, Okay, I don't have enough bureaucratic power, so
I'm going to just like merge every single Japanese agency
(33:34):
like together to form a super agency called Ministry, Musicians, Munitions.
And at this point, she she she she is just
running the economy like he he's the guy, He's the
guy running the entire logistics network for all of the
soldiers doing all the horrible things. Jip like he's he's
the guy running the entire economy making this work cool.
(33:54):
But you know, and I say this, like Kishi kish
I think it is very different than like you're sort
of classical ashes beercrat. Like the image of it is
someone like like aikman like Hannah rent Coins, but like
the banality of evil to do these guys who was like, well, okay,
they're kind of just doing their job. And like Kishi
Kishi is not that Kishi Kishi is running the war
machine because he like deeply, deeply sincerely believes that like
(34:17):
this is what's good for Japan and so you know.
But the other thing, he's also a bereacrat. So he's
also kind of like he spends the war just sort
of like he's like shuffling ministries around. He's like shuffling,
but he's doing all this sort of bereacratic stuff. And
as the war starts to end, she she looks at
the situation as as like the US just like absolutely
(34:38):
obliterates the Champanese Navy in Midway, and he goes, oh, fuck,
how can I get out of the war crimes tributal
And his plan is that he's going to bring down
like Prime Minister Chocho's cabinet by resigning and doing his
complicated stuff. Like you know, this works, like Kishi Kishi
is able to force Totor to resign and Kishi forms
this like sort of nominally this group like nominally opposed
(34:59):
to the Guard. But you know, but like the whole
goal of this is basically just like it's it's him
saying to MacArthur, like, please don't shoot me, and it works.
She she's taking prisoner by the occupation government and is
inevitably thrown in in the infamous Ugomo prison. In is
suspected class A war criminal. If the word justice like
(35:20):
meant literally anything in this world other than just being
a cruel joke to torment survivors, she would have hung
from a rope in nineteen and that would have been
the end of this two part episode. Unfortunately, we live
in hell and Kesh is going to be back in
part three with friends of the show, The Dullest Brothers,
in order to build the entire modern Japanese political system.
Hell yeah, there we go. There we swish in our
(35:45):
favorite sign care well, favorite Ron Hubbard. But they're pretty great.
Um fucking a. That's that's beautiful. Oh well, Chris, I
am excited to hear from our old friends, the Dullest
brother um, but we're going to have to wait until
Thursday for that because this is I'm not excited to
(36:05):
hear from our old friends. It's gonna be great to
non problematic guys who were never friends with any Nazis.
That's the thing everyone remembers about the Dulles brothers is
the degree to which they were not close friends with Nazis.
So yeah, follow us at cool Zone Media, at Bastard's
(36:26):
Pod on Twitter and Instagram and allegedly allegedly and Chris,
do you want to give them your Twitter handle? Yeah,
I'm at me hr three on Twitter allegedly allegedly, I'm
all allegedly better known as the ice must be a
story guy. Yeah, that's that that that is your legal name.
(36:48):
And it happened. And in happy news, I just found
a whole Reddit threat of people talking about how they
appreciate how cute Anderson is. So yeah, oh yes, no,
Anderson's huge on Reddit. You're here, John Anderson. Good for you,
all right, motherho back Thursday, come back Thursday, and we
will we will wrap you in our warm, slightly gropy
(37:12):
embrace of podcast Bye,
Behind the Bastards News
Host
Robert Evans
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