Free Horror in the East: Japan and the Atrocities of World War II by Laurence Rees

Imperial Army committed in Nanking.Britain and the USA, angry at Japan’s actions, discussed amongst themselves what should be their best response.Furious at the sinking of the USS Panay , Roosevelt even contemplated a naval blockade of Japan using American and British warships.But the plan was never put into effect — the British were not prepared to antagonize the Japanese to that extent.
    Whilst at a high political level the Western democracies did little to prevent Japanese aggression in China, Western public opinion was certainly changed by knowledge of what became popularly known as the ‘Rape of Nanking’.In one of the first examples of film reporting influencing world opinion, newsreels brought pictures of the suffering inside Nanking to cinema screens all over Britain and America.A typical scene from one newsreel shows a weeping father hugging the corpse of his young child while the commentary intones, ‘That man carries the body of his child, clinging dumbly to the forlorn hope that life still inhabits its shattered little body.’Not surprisingly, this emotional reporting had an enormous impact on the sensibilities of the audience.‘We found the Japanese doing things in the world that we didn’t think were correct,’ says Gene La Rocque, then a student at the University of Illinois.‘For one, the Japanese were raping Nanking, and that was shown in a dramatic way on the movie screen.’All of this confirmed the prejudices about the Japanese held by Americans like La Rocque: ‘The Japanese kind of looked like monkeys to us.They were not a very friendly, but also not a very intelligent group of people.In Illinois, where I grew up, in the mid-West of the United States, the Japanese were looked down upon.First of all they were of smaller stature.They were not as big as we were and they looked very funny in caricature.Our concept of the Japanese prior to Pearl Harbor was that they were a weak, not very sophisticated people — so foreign to us.After all, the head of the country was supposed to have been a descendant of God and we thought how primitive that situation was....We were racist, of course we were racist, but that again comes from the fact that they didn’t want to become part of our community in any way.They were foreigners to us, a culture we didn’t understand, a language we couldn’t understand.They were inscrutable.’
    The prevalence of racist views such as these was to have a major impact on how Western nations chose to deal with Japan during the 1930s, and would later influence the way the war itself was conducted.It is often hard for people born long after the war fully to grasp just how pervasive these kind of racist ideas were in the Western world.But in the 1930s there were still men and women alive in the United States who had participated in the brutal, virtually genocidal wars against the Native Americans.Less than sixty years before, in 1879, the state constitution of California had withheld the vote from ‘all natives of China, idiots, and insane persons’ 6 and racism against black Americans was still endemic.Racism was not merely the prejudice of the uneducated, it was official and — as the Nazis were attempting to prove — scientific.(It is instructive to note that, such was Hitler’s racism, he never fully explored the potential of the alliance with Japan.He did not consider it a partnership of equals, though he fully understood its political necessity.His preferred ideal was always a partnership with the British — fellow Aryans — rather than the Japanese.)
    The British took their racial beliefs one stage further, with many believing not just that the Japanese were inferior to them, but that they themselves were inherently better than anyone else in the world.‘The British had an inborn feeling of superiority,’ says Anthony Hewitt, who was a British officer serving in Hong Kong in the 1930s.‘It didn’t matter where you came from, whether you were a dustman or you