Inferno - Max Hastings [273]
It was like that for more than two months. One day the interpreter took me to Songmu’s place. He was not there. I saw another two officers whom I had never met. I wanted to leave and call Mr. Songmu but one of the officers stopped me and closed the door. They said they wanted to marry me. When I resisted, they slapped my face—one was about twenty years old, the other about fifty. Both of them raped me that day. I told Mr. Songmu what happened. He just grinned and said it was a little thing. I was so angry. I had a good feeling about him until then, but from that day I started to hate him very much. A week later the interpreter asked me again to see Mr. Songmu, but I said I didn’t want to see him any more. He said that if I refused, the soldiers would kill me and my family and all the villagers. So I had to see Mr. Songmu again, and after that not only he but also other officers raped me very often. Once three officers came, and one held my arms and another my legs while the third raped me, and they all laughed wildly. It was like that until the end of the war.
If Japanese conduct in victory had been barbaric, amid defeats it became progressively more murderous. The principal victims of their Asian rampages were not the British, Australians or Americans, whose pride and prestige were more vulnerable than their citizens, but the native inhabitants of the societies over which Tokyo assumed hegemony, China foremost among them. “Terrible things were done by Japan in China,” says the modern Japanese writer Kazutoshi Hando, but many of his compatriots still decline to acknowledge this.
Not only Japanese nationalists, but also some modern Western historians, argue that the United States provoked Japan into war in 1941. They suggest that conflict between the two nations was avoidable, and propound a theory of moral equivalence, whereby Japanese wartime conduct was no worse than that of the Allies. But the Japanese waged an expansionist war in China, massacring countless civilians, for years before President Roosevelt imposed economic sanctions. A contemporary Japanese nationalist later sought to justify his nation’s policies by asserting: “America and Britain had been colonising China for many years. China was a backward nation … we felt Japan should go there and use Japanese technology and leadership to make China a better country.” The record shows that Japanese conduct in China was both wholly self-interested and shamelessly barbaric. But sufficient numbers of Japanese remained convinced of their nation’s “civilising mission” and of the legitimacy of their claims upon an overseas empire to render their government implacably opposed to withdrawal from China, even when Japan began to lose the war and to ponder negotiating positions. While European imperialism was indisputably exploitative, the Japanese claimed rights to pillage Asian societies on a scale and in a fashion no colonial regime had matched.
American enthusiasm for the Nationalist regime, and for China’s potential as an ally, persisted until 1944, when the Japanese launched their last major conventional offensive of the war, Operation Ichigo. This was designed to eliminate American bomber airfields in China and open an overland route to Indochina. It conclusively exposed the impotence of Chiang Kai-shek’s army, whose formations melted away in its path. Vast new areas of central and southern China were overrun—almost bloodlessly for the Japanese, though emphatically not for