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