Can someone tell me what was wrong with the Imperial Japanese Army in the Second World War? Did even the freaking Nazis go around bayoneting patients on operating tables?
I suspect it has something to do with the almost unbelievable, our-of-control level of nationalism in Imperial Japan. I can't think of a single other country that has ever reached that level of fanaticism save
maaayyybe Nazi Germany.
Combined with
gekokujo and a history of military success, it created a situation in which soldiers could blatantly disregard orders and take extremely aggressive action (assassinating Chinese warlords, harassing Korea, assassinating the Korean queen in a brutal palace invasion, even starting wars) and either get away with it
or even be rewarded for it if this "patriotic disobedience" resulted in territorial gains and national glory for Japan. Like the
Mukden Incident, in which Kwantung Army officers conspired to start a war with China by framing the Chinese for a bombing (they got their wish). The Kwantung Army was
notorious for this, and was pretty eager to drag Japan into war whether or not they had orders to. And the conspirators, like Ishiwara Kanji, were rewarded with fame and promotions. Because the government didn't do much to curb insubordination, and because disobedient patriots were often rewarded and glorified, these sorts of things just kept happening. Like the
assassination of Prime Minister Inukai in 1932. The assassins turned themselves in and had so much popular sympathy that they got a slap on the wrist.
Members of the military had actually killed the [fornicating] Prime Minister and gotten away with it. The law barely applied to nationalists anymore, so four years later, 1,500 soldiers stormed government buildings and residences in Tokyo in a major coup attempt to kill as many political opponents as possible. Most of the government survived and cracked down on the rebels, but the precedent for
gekokujo had already been set, and in the new government, the military basically had veto power over the government.
Add a heavy dose of imperialism and "Japanese Man's Burden" to this tradition of patriotic treason, plus militant nationalism, a worship of a warrior ethos, violent racism against the Chinese and Koreans, a long record of nobody stopping Japanese aggression, and factors like those mentioned by others above, and you get frequent and horrific atrocities.
.
