Page 51 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

38 Nightmare Japan

10
nations around the globe have lengthy histories of war crimes, Tanaka
provides readers with a litany of Japanese atrocities committed primarily
in the South Pacific and China. The specific crimes he recounts include
the mistreatment of prisoners of war, the testing of biological warfare
agents upon living human subjects, and the sporadic practice of
cannibalism, an activity for which only two soldiers were actually
convicted (132). Additionally, Tanaka reminds readers that those guilty
of war crimes are often themselves the victims of war crimes (134):

The case of cannibalism in the South Pacific clearly demonstrates that some
Japanese soldiers were perpetrators of war crimes in their murder, mutilation,
and cannibalism of enemy soldiers, POWs, and local civilians, but they also
were victims of a war crime in that they were abandoned and starved by their
high command. (134)

Thus, ‘[i]n literal terms, Japanese soldiers were obviously the physical
perpetrators of such atrocities’, but ‘[i]n psychological and ideological
terms, they were also the victims of an emperor system that legitimised
such atrocities’ (204), as well as a military establishment that effectively
‘cut off’ entire platoons from necessary resources in the name of winning
the war for imperial Japan.
Although details regarding Japanese war crimes were largely
withheld from the Japanese population in the years following the end of
World War II, depictions and conceptualisations of the Japanese as a
monstrous ‘other’ inform many western prejudices against Japan. During
the 1980s, for instance, US popular culture representations of Japan
portrayed the nation as an economic force powered by maniacally-driven
labourers that posed a significant threat to US cultural and economic
hegemony. As well, US popular culture both preyed upon and
exacerbated Orientalist fears of Japan and its ever-increasing economic
might as a neo-colonialist force that threatened the illusory notions of
‘The American (sic) Way’ in their imagined quest to ‘buy up’ US

10 One need only recall recent U. S. atrocities in Iraq (crimes perhaps best exemplified by the
sexual abuse of prisoners in the Abu Griab prison), the genocidal policies carried out in
Rwanda and Bosnia, and the U. S. bombing at Mai Lai to note the extent to which such
abhorrent behavior continues to this very day.