Excess death rates in the three months after Japan's 1945 surrender

raharris1973

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What were excess death rates in the three months after Japan's 1945 surrender in the area that had been Japanese occupied, compared with excess death rates in the three months prior to Hiroshima?

The atomic bomb, and the end of the war, saved millions of Asian lives, some say. At the same time, from a reading of "In the Ruins of Empire" by Ron Spector, it appears that throughout the Japanese occupied territories, a lot of killing and dying continued unabated as different groups immediately fought for control of national destinies. Did the rate of excess mortality fall sharply throughout all regions of Asia in the 3 months after VJ Day compared to the 3 months before VJ Day?

If the overall trend in violence was downward, did this trend specifically apply to places like the Dutch East Indies, Indochina, Malaya, Burma, Philippines, Korea and China, or were one or more of those areas exceptions?

in another thread Don Philippson provides a figure for the daily death rate in China before V-J Day:

"3. Casualties continued throughout the stalemate after the
capture of Okinawa:
-- About 25 USN warships sunk every month, mainly by
kamikaze attack.
-- About 5,000 Chinese civilian deaths every day in
occupied China. "

Anybody know if or how daily civilian deaths every day went down in China after V-J Day?

On the one hand, Japanese offensive operations, especially air operations, stopped, and the Chinese did not need to continue their Hunan offensive. Additionally, at least in some specific places, the end of the naval war and related blockades probably made food more available in the days after Japanese surrender. Eventually, Soviet operations in Manchuria stopped too. So this must have saved some lives.

On the other hand, you had the beginnings of the Chinese Civil War and many mutual retribution killings, although this was interrupted by some ceasefires. Also, the economic dislocation and immiseration of many Chinese would not have gone away overnight. Some robbery, looting, rapine by the Soviets in Manchuria was fatal for the victims as well.

I suspect that in Korea, civilian death probably increased after VJ Day, sure, bombings stopped and the heavy campaigning in the northeast stopped, but Koreans got to more easily compete, to the death, in politics after Japanese authority was eliminated.
 
I would assume that the overall death rate in areas under Japanese control plummeted dramatically after the surrender. In the lead up to the end roughly 400,000 people across the Pacific were dying each and every month from Manchuria to the Solomons [Giangreco pp. xi]. At that rate, one month more of continued hostilities would have produced fully double the combined deaths of Hiroshima and Nagasaki for the occupied territories alone (not to suggest that this justified the bombings - it didn't).
 
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Wendigo

Banned
I would assume that the overall death rate in areas under Japanese control plummeted dramatically after the surrender. In the lead up to the end roughly 400,000 people across the Pacific were dying each and every month from Manchuria to the Solomons [Giangreco pp. xi]. At that rate, one month more of continued hostilities would have produced fully double the combined deaths of Hiroshima and Nagasaki for the occupied territories alone.

Those people that were dying every month were they dying mostly from Japanese brutality or disease/starvation?
 
Those people that were dying every month were they dying mostly from Japanese brutality or disease/starvation?

Everything. It is the death toll for the Pacific War in general, most of which was tragically comprised of civilians, many of whom were murdered by the Japanese. There is no further breakdown other than the figure itself but I would suspect that war crimes comprised a large part of it.
 

raharris1973

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What was the bigger deal in alleviating the death rate, an end to war crimes by specifically, or the benefits in nutrition and medical care that probably became available from trade and aid from the outside world to people in Japanese occupied territories when the war ended.
 
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