Yuki Tanaka Military History Books sku-55989668 Hardcover

Yuki Tanaka's Hidden Horrors: Japanese War Crimes in World War II is a hardcover, Edition 2, listed in Military History Books as sku-55989668. Its case studies cover cannibalism, the killing and starvation of prisoners of war, sexual violence and murder of noncombatants, and biological warfare experiments.

Tanaka describes soldiers consuming the bodies of comrades and of Australians, Pakistanis, and Indians. He recounts the killing of sixty-five shipwrecked Australian nurses and British soldiers, and the capture of another thirty-two nurses who were sent to Sumatra as sex slaves for Japanese soldiers.

The book also covers the massacre of thousands of Australian and British POWs at Sandakan in 1945 and the 160-mile march imposed on survivors, during which anyone who fell out of line was shot. A new chapter addresses the killing of thirty-nine leprosy patients on Nauru and the mistreatment and forced displacement of thousands of Nauruans.

Tanaka examines these acts in their social, psychological, and institutional context without dismissing individual or national responsibility. A substantially revised conclusion considers the history of Japanese imperial military ideology and the lack of collective awareness of wartime responsibility in Japan.