Japanese war crimes are rightly notorious. But many people who have not investigated them closely make the mistake of seeing scattered terrible atrocities as typical rather than exceptional.
Most examinations of Japanese war crimes focus on half a dozen or so infamous events. But our latest co-authored book Twelve Japanese War Criminals and One Who Got Away (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2026) seeks to understand the crimes by looking at a wider range of cases.
In researching the book, we used trial records, war crimes investigation records that were not presented in court and captured Japanese documents, as well as memoirs from both Japanese soldiers and their victims.
So, what do we learn by shifting the focus away from the broad picture to the individuals who committed crimes?
Not everyone committed war crimes
First, the majority of our subjects were not serial offenders. They went through most of the war uneventfully, at least as far as public records show, until they encountered the fateful circumstances in which they transgressed.
Our biographies highlight the fact that most of the Japanese army, most of the time, did not commit war crimes. More than seven million soldiers served in the Japanese army, whereas only 5,700 were brought to justice at the end of the war.
Even allowing for the many who may have committed crimes but who died in battle or from disease, or otherwise avoided arrest at the end of the war, only a tiny proportion of Japanese soldiers were ever implicated in acts that were criminal under international law.
Indeed, the Australian judge William Webb, who presided at the Tokyo Trial of Japanese leaders, commented, “We know that there are tens of thousands of kind-hearted Japanese. We would assume in the army itself, in the navy, in the air force, many Japanese behaved very well.”
Culture is not the explanation
Second, we find little or no evidence to support the ideological or cultural explanations often put forward to explain Japanese war crimes. There is no evidence in the trial records, or anywhere else, that the criminals we researched were driven by emperor-worship, or the Japanese military code of bushido, or acute racism, or that they were embittered by harsh treatment within the Japanese military or at the hands of westerners.
Instead, the great majority were ordinary people who made bad decisions in the challenging context of war. This does not, of course, mean they were blameless. As we have said, most military personnel did not commit war crimes, indicating that there were opportunities to avoid egregious acts. Those who committed war crimes chose to do so and are accountable for what they did.
We tell the story of a POW camp doctor on the Thailand-Burma railway. At the start of the war, he was a middle-aged paediatrician in a provincial Japanese city, but he was conscripted and sent to provide medical care to Allied soldiers set to work on the Thailand-Burma Railway. In his first camp, he did sterling work to keep the prisoners safe from cholera and malaria. He was later promoted to manage a camp hospital near Kanchanaburi. There he had responsibility for 2,000 POWs who had been shipped from worksites with injuries or tropical diseases.
He had few medical supplies and was assisted by a single deputy and a handful of Japanese soldiers allocated to him as orderlies. As new patients arrived, he discharged others who were only partly recovered. Moreover, he was under orders from the railway construction teams to ensure that prisoners were available to fill the work parties.
In carrying out this duty, he sent dozens, perhaps hundreds, of ill and weakened men to their deaths.
For this breach of medical ethics, the doctor was sentenced to death after the war. He seems to be a sad victim of circumstances, but in his hospital role he refused to cooperate with the many capable medical officers among the prisoners. We do not know why he would not work with them, but it seems likely that he did not want his lack of competence to be exposed.
The Japanese army was harsh in enforcing respect for seniors in the military hierarchy, but at the same time, personnel at every level were encouraged to be resourceful and to take initiative according to their judgment of the local circumstances.
At times, we show, local judgment led to local catastrophe.
Opportunists
Whereas some of our characters, like this doctor, are pathetic figures dragged into impossible situations, a few made the most of the war at the expense of others.
In occupied Jakarta, a Japanese pimp became rich by managing interned women in a military brothel. An expert swordman revelled in the opportunity to use his blade on a man sentenced to death in New Guinea. Colonel Tsuji Masanobu, the ‘one who got away’, relished the opportunity to embellish his already fearsome reputation by needlessly ordering the summary execution of captives in Singapore and the Philippines.
Like all armies, the Japanese military attracted patriots who wanted to serve their country and men who appreciated the hierarchical certainties of military structure. A minority, however, enjoyed the licence to kill, delighting in the chance to cultivate a reputation for savagery. Such men were sometimes accomplished self-publicists who veiled their cruelty in a pretence of valour and fidelity to military values.
Self-promotion
This self-promotion sometimes won them powerful sponsors. Tsuji was supported in the early part of the war by Japan’s prime minister, Tōjō Hideki. He escaped justice after the war thanks to protection from China’s Guomindang government and the American military intelligence agency attached to the occupation government in Japan. The official protection he received is reflected in the fact that the investigation files that must have existed to record evidence against him have disappeared from both the British and American archives.
Tsuji eventually became a member of parliament, re-elected several times, despite public attacks from a former military colleague disgusted by his wartime record. Tsuji’s case suggests striking parallels with reports of Australian war crimes in Afghanistan.
Our research does not question the abundant evidence that the Japanese military committed many war crimes. It does, however, refute the common misconception that these crimes arose out of unique features of Japanese culture or Japanese military culture, or that all arose from the same general causes.
Rather, these crimes were a consequence of the circumstances of war which forced some people into difficult, terrible decisions for which they were rightly held to account, and which enabled a handful of others wilfully to commit acts of great evil.
