How many people did Imperial Japan kill in WW2?

How many people did Imperial Japan kill?

  • 1-5 million

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • 5-10 million

    Votes: 1 3.1%
  • 10-15 million

    Votes: 8 25.0%
  • 15-20+ million

    Votes: 18 56.3%
  • Impossible to estimate

    Votes: 5 15.6%

  • Total voters
    32

Wendigo

Banned
How many people did Imperial Japanese forces kill in WW2 whether through starvation, shooting, stabbing, torture, slave labor etc?

Were the IJA vicious enough bloodletters that they were able to rack up an estimated 10 million+ body count over the course of the war in Asia?

Or were some of the deaths due to negligence?

It's estimated that on average throughout the entire war from 1937 to 1945 over 200,000 Chinese were dying EVERY month. How much of this should we attribute to purely collateral damage and how much can we attribute to deliberate intentional murder by Japanese forces?

Was the Japanese military far more murderous than the Wehrmacht/Waffen SS?
 
While a 100% estimate is impossible because the records are quite sketchy, a ballpark figure can be arrived at. Matthew White gives the Japanese at directly murdering 11 million civilians and that is probably a decent figure if we exclude knock on effects like famine and such caused by Japanese actions in non-Japanese territory (like the Bengali famine). The margin of error on that figure is, however, pretty damn big.

By comparison, the approximate figure for Nazi Germany that counts only the cold-blooded murder of helpless victims outside of battle but excludes famines comes out to 15.5 million. There is a margin of error there too, albeit much smaller then the Japanese since the Germans actually kept some disturbingly thorough records, but it seems that the Japanese are either slightly behind or roughly equal to the Nazis.
 
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the numbers of Chinese killed or who died as a result of the "Kill All, Burn All" strategy is staggeringly high, with estimates running as high as 20 million just in China alone and not counting those who died in the post World War II Chinese Civil War. The US National World War II museum gives that estimate. Toss in the deaths from famine in India and Indochina, those worked to death building the Burma Railway, various atrocities in Indonesia and the Philippines (nearly 100,000 died in the Battle of Manila) and we could be looking as many as 25 million or more.

Problem is that the Chinese government has every incentive to inflate the Chinese death tool for internal political reasons (being angry at Japan is useful as a unifying mechanism) so who can tell what the real numbers are. But they are certainly competitive at least with the death toll at the feet of the Nazis.

http://www.nationalww2museum.org/le...ory/ww2-by-the-numbers/world-wide-deaths.html

and that doesn't even count how many Japanese died as a result of Japanese Militarism
 
I would imagine that the numbers are difficult to calculate. If one or two million Chinese peasants were dying silently every year of starvation or easily preventable illness even without the pressure of the invasion, can they be realistically counted towards the IJA's murder count? Of course, some of them would have received aid and development if the KMT regime were left in peace, but how do you determine that number? This is why the death toll due to Japanese goes between roughly 10 and 20 million, with some saying that the figure is as high as 30 million.

Also, while modern Japanese nationalists like to make ridiculous claims like "the Nanjing Massacre was Chinese on Chinese," it is true that there was a lot of bandit violence in China. Again, can the Japanese be faulted for this, and if so, how much was caused due to the state of disorder caused by the Japanese, and not endemic to civil war-era China?

Atrocious as it may sound, I do not feel that Imperial Japanese occupation of China should be reduced to "rape and plunder" even though it did happen a lot. Unlike the Nazis, the Japanese did not have a unified occupation policy and at least in theory were trying to bring peace, order, and development to East Asia. A lot of people in the establishment actually believed this narrative, so you had leftists doing well-intended fieldwork research on Manchurian peasants, Japanese colonial children learning Chinese to better communicate with their native peers, and Japanese-established authorities doing their jobs well enough that when the KMT came back to Wuhan the locals complained that "the dogs (fearsome but maintained law and order) are gone but the pigs (corrupt KMT officials) have come back"—all while the IJA was indeed doing all sorts of brutal things on the battlefield and in the countryside.

EDIT: My understanding is that Japanese occupation of the Southeast Asian countries was nothing short of horrid. The Chinese and Koreans were at least connected to Japan by virtue of their shared Confucian and Buddhist cultures, but SE Asians were seen as literally inferior, to be used and expended for their labor and natural resources. I wouldn't be surprised if over 5 million people died there due to the Japanese.
 
Between direct and indirect action of the Japanese and their minions, I would not be at all surprised over 20 million died. From the start of the Army and rampaging junior officers forcing their ways, way too many died. :(
 
I put 5-10 million due to having a bit of a fuzzy memory on the statistics. But from what I remember, the death rate was higher in China than the GEACPS due to Japan actively trying to be as destructive as possible without destroying useful infrastructure to destroy Chinese resistance. Ergo, China would have suffered a larger famine than the GEACPS due to being a target of harsher tactics. And really, I find it hard to believe that Japan killed more than 15 million due to its resources always being strained past their limits.
Of course, I could be wrong.
 
Even towards the end of the war, I recall reading that the Japanese were still killing thousands a month, is this true? It was obviously deliberate but how? Starvation or working to death I guess :(
 
Even towards the end of the war, I recall reading that the Japanese were still killing thousands a month, is this true? It was obviously deliberate but how? Starvation or working to death I guess :(

From what I remember, and I might be wrong, it was in many ways. Deliberate murder to just not feeding persons. Right up to the very end.
 
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