Hidden Horrors: Japanese War Crimes in World War II (1996) By Yuki Tanaka
 
Originally published in 1993 in Japan as SHIRAREZARU SENSO HANZAI (Unknown war crimes: What Japanese forces did to Australians). Although many of Japan's war crimes were publicized and the perpetrators prosecuted, "In the postwar milieu, where defeated Japan was immediately subordinated to US authority and soon thereafter resuscitated as America's rearmed and preeminent cold-war ally in Asia, sanitizing the Japanese past quickly became a collaborative Japanese-American undertaking. Certain egregious Japanese war crimes were covered up to serve American interests. As the cold war replaced the old war, policies of forgetting rather than remembering soon became promoted bilaterally, since dwelling on Japan's recent aggression and atrocious war conduct was hardly conducive to eliciting support for its remilitarization.
 
This present study breaks from the postwar and cold war mold in several ways. It addresses the issue of 'ordinary' Japanese war crimes through a series of excruciatingly detailed case studies. The atrocities analyzed here involve captured Caucasians.
 
HIDDEN HORRORS dwells not on victimization, but on victimizing. It seeks to understand the atrocities of ordinary fighting men not in popular mythic terms of abiding 'cultural' legacies (such as bushido) but rather in more precise historical, political, sociological, and psychological terms. Few recent books have been as relentless as this in recreating the horror of Japanese war crimes. For many readers, however, the greatest shock may lie in discovering that many of the individuals who committed these atrocities were simply ordinary men in extraordinary circumstances. 
 
Hard Cover with Dust Jacket
267 pages
In Good Condition