The Forgotten Holocaust
The majority of the population when asked the question, “Could a genocide on the scale of the holocaust take place without the world acknowledging it?” The common answer would be that a killing of that size would be impossible to hide; but for the Japanese it was not. The crimes of mass murder and human experimentation committed by the Japanese Imperial army were horrendous; with a death toll comparable to the Holocaust, along with the unimaginable crimes committed by the notorious Unit 731, this was one of the most undocumented genocides in history.
History of the Japanese Imperial Army Between the years of 1867-1945 the Japanese Imperial Army grew to an enormous size of around six million troops (Rummel). An army of this size had never been organized, which is why the entire continent of Asia feared that the Japanese would have the power to take over Asia. In previous genocides, the groups committing the killings …show more content…
They instilled fear into all who lived in the countries that they invaded. The countries that were enslaved, attacked and taken over included: China, Indonesia, Korea, Philippines, and India. Even Japan’s citizens were enslaved by their own military (Lind). The countries that Japan attacked became devastated as massive amounts of their population were wiped out. The Japanese killed over a million people in both Japan and Indonesia, also enslaving over 6 million from each country. Countries such as Korea, Philippines, India, and Manchuria (a large geographic region in northeast Asia) all suffered well over 250,000 casualties (Lind). It is believed that the final death toll of these massacres was between 4,000,000 and 8,000,000, although it is nearly impossible to know exactly how many due to a lack of records kept by the countries effected (Lind). A killing of this magnitude is certainly comparable to the holocaust of World War II with the Jewish