Japanese Atrocities and Shinton Creed
HUNTER, EDWARD
Japanese Atrocities and Shinton Creed By Edward Hunter For.!,. Correspond*** i* CMm o.d J*»«n Per last leWer* New Yec* Ftsf SINCE publication at long last of the detailed, eye-witness accounts of...
...The State Department warned Americans who returned from the Far East recently on the Gripsholm not to reveal any atrocities...
...the peasants, workers, farmers, intellectuals, businessmen and newspapermen whom you might find anywhere in Japan—the type of Jap to whom you would naturally apply the word "typical...
...There can only be a psychological explanation when a people, whenever they have the opportunity, engage normally in such excesses as rounding up women to rape en masse—and then mistreat and murder with the bayonet, or even to rape and tie in batches to ht doused with kerosene and set aflame—alive...
...There lurks in the Jap civilization all the traits of a primitive island tribe...
...Hsu) few people would listen...
...The Japs, too, told them to keep their mouths shut...
...Many of them are still hospitalized...
...Correspond*** i* CMm o.d J*»«n Per last leWer* New Yec* Ftsf SINCE publication at long last of the detailed, eye-witness accounts of the atrocities inflicted by the Japs on tne American neroes or Bataan, howmany persons have you heard ask, if such things really could be true...
...That is because its contents are as horrifying as photos of advanced cases of a loathsome disease...
...We must know it as fact—there have been too many eye-witnesses and too many who have experienced the atrocities and yet managed to live and escape—that Japanese armies uoimallu engage in bestial and savage practives whenever they have the upper hand...
...It is being shown "for adults only"—in the cheapest and tawdriest box ofhee fashion...
...rpilAT is the explanation for these strange twin {/* characteristics of the Jap: first, his belief in a tribal religion that makes every one of them feel that ht in set aside from all other peoples on earth by actual godhood in his veins, with an emperor who is head priest and god...
...unnamed foreigners standing behind them...
...On* of the numerous unfortunate results has been the lth#l imposed on our own American soldiers, and the soldiers of our Allies, by permitting a popular assumption to remain undisputed that "all armies commit atrocities," and that therefore there isn't any basic difference between what the Japs are doing and what we do ourselves...
...There was a natural balance in its way of life...
...At present he is the Fsr h.«*i editor of the New York Pott...
...A few days ago Powell underwent another operation on the stumps of his legs...
...There is a film—"Ravaged Earth" —that has been showing in various theatres in New York and other cities, that shews accurately and graphically just what takes place when the Japs descend upon a city...
...And let me stress the fact that the Japanese army is not a thing apart from the Japanese public...
...k w^v« 0fr.«!/< nf na that to stomach such ghoulish facts as atrocities would debase uc, injure our own healthy viewpoints as regards humanity...
...They merely dressed up in pants and silk hats, and learned to copy the mechanics of the other peoples of the- earth, without acquiring any of the softening spiritual qualities that went along with that development...
...It is the same pathetic evasion that prompted so many of us a few years ago to discourage our children from playing with toy guns...
...IN that film there is a fleeting glance of a ceremony— * of Chiang Kai-shek and "JUissimo" amUi a few...
...That is what happened, for instance, when the Jap army took Nanking...
...Jap doctors would come into his cell at Shanghai and laugh at his sufferings...
...There are atrocities—and atrocities...
...the second horrible aspect is the Jap atrocity...
...Thst was the story Hunter tried to tell...
...Our public did not want to believe things like that— our State Department did its damndest to keep them from knowing, for its official policy was to suppress the news that atrocities had Keen inflicted on Americans...
...With other peoples, when they passed the stagei of the primitive tribe, they dropped the customs of the tribe...
...Mack in 1*32...
...Here he depicts the psychology of the Japanese and whv the West has been unable to comprehend it fully...
...I don't mean merely to read about them, but to accept them—as facts— not as we accept gruesome stories on the horror hour on the radio, but as realities, clashing against our peace of mind, as they clashed *¦ against the bodies of our own men and women and children...
...Hunter was s correspondent in the Far East for many years for the New York Sun snd the International News Service, a* weti as editing several English-language newspapers in China and Japan...
...These at unities were real, hnnever, snd the Jspsnese who committed Ihem on helpless Chinese, now commit them with even more fiendish glee on while men...
...But by continuing past ill tune, that UtUrice became lost to the Japanese—distorted and fiendish—during then contact with first Chinese and then with occidental civilization That is the explanation for the Jap behavior—it ii something that Freud would have been sble to explain, both in its religious and social aspects...
...Many people pride themselves on being "liberal", in their approach to the whole thing, and thought that while there probably have been some atrocities—there always are atrocities, and that under the mass psychosis of war, atrocities will alwaya exist, and that all armies are of course guilty, our own included...
...What could that have to do with us...
...He has been undergoing similar painful operations at intervals during the past year and a half...
...They remained as before, and because they had dragged on for so many, many centuries after they should have faded away, they becsme vicious, ghoulish...
...Every sort of influence hss been exerted—by the Japanese for apparent reasons, and by our State Department for appeasement reasons— to keep the American public from finding out what sort of an actual enemy we have in the Japanese individual...
...You then have the answer to tht glib and falsely liberal statement that all armies act the same...
...So "nice people" don't go to see this picture...
...Because of of the representative form of Japanese conscription, the Japanese army IS the Japanese public—in uniform...
...Maybe we are not able to stomach such brutal facts...
...The impression it gave was opposite to the truth...
...That the Japanese emperor, for example, is different at heart and intent than a Japanese admiral or a Japanese general...
...Ask yourself, realizing the extent and character ef such excesses, whether you believe that any American boy could perpetrate such horrors...
...People don't like the subject...
...it merely showed the atrocities the Chinese suffer...
...How many persona have you heard remark that it was all obviously exaggerated, some sort of a publicity campaign for the Victory Bond drive, or intended to prepare us for possible heavy losses in the Marshalls invasion...
...But we better get over that...
...The Japr hsve never even passed that stag...
...The events there were grim harbingers of the shape of things to come...
...Both belong to the phenomenon that ia the present-day Jap...
...It was natuial for a small, superstitious tribe of 2,000 years ago to act the way it did and to believe in primitive beliefs...
...Anyway, until very recently, it did not seem to have any actual meaning to ourselves...
...In a world that was crying loudly for peare...
...It was only aftei the Gripsholm touched at Lourenrc Marques on Portuguese Mozambique—when it was beyond the power of the Japanese Foreign Office and our State Department to further suppress the truth—that it became known that J. B. Powell was near death, reduced to a mere tM) pounds in Weight, with his two feet cut off at the ankles as the result of gangrene contracted in a Jap cell...
...But lo most persons, it was just s story • limit some yellow people torturing other yellow people—somewhere off in some primeval wilderness away from rivilizstinn...
...tha* almost without exception, the Americans who returned on that vessel had to go to hospitals on their arrival, or undergo prolonged medical care at home, as a result of Jap mistreatment...
...IT has not hitherto been published, for exsmple...
...As a result, almost the only information that appeared in our press when the Gripsholm arrived on that second journey was uon-commital, Or indicated that conditions had been as fair as might be expected...
...One of those unnamed foreigners, however, is now at the Harkness Pavilion of the Medical Center where he has been hospitalized for a year and a half...
...Powell had been the brave editor of the Shanghai Weekly Review—he had been fired as Chicago Tribune correspondent because he insisted on warning that the Japs intended to make war on us...
...The State Department succeeded in suppressing all that information, not only by helping Tokyo scare the Americans into silence, but by making it virtually impossible to interview them...
...and, second, the semi-sexual, semibarbaric state of mind of the isolated island tribe...
...Between Pearl Harbor and his repatriation on the Gripsholm in mid I'M/, the only information vou could obtain about him at State Department (ircles, was that he was believed to be in healthly condition...
...i Bushido * A THOCITIES are an old si..., to Edward *¦ Hunter, veteran Far East ' correspondent...
...Before we are capable of fully analyzing our Japanese foe, and deciding a durable policy as regards him, we must know—not suspect or go on the assumption— but actually KNOW that he normally commits deeds the like of which cannot be conceived by any American except perhaps the rare and isolated sex maniac...
...That was the only sort of information allowed to seep out...
...Let me stress the .word "normally...
...These things did not die away after Peary opened Japan to the world...
...It hasn't been a successful film, from a box office viewpoint...
...These traits have only been covered up by a veneer of mechanical civilization...
...A specific inquiry, just after the Gripsholm sailed from Shanghai, elicited the information from the State Department that he was okay...
...There can only rn a negative reply...
...realities limited in their extent only by the physical power we possess < to stop the enemy...
...Jap atrocities are revolting, vicious and calculatedall at the same time...
...They're all in the pink of condition...
...they're a little ashamed to be seen going to it...
...Maybe such horriblle facts cannot penetrate a normal, civilized American mind...
...Hunter waslending out stories to the world about (he atrocities being committed by Japanese troops...
...Jap officers and officials—some of them Americaneducated—would do the same...
...The Jap god-emperor is one terrible aspect of this condition...
...Hunter was hearing the first muffled drums of war deep in the heart of Manchuria...
...No greater or more dangerous hoax has been attempted on our American public than this State Department line that there is a difference between Jap militarists and"other Japs...
...Environment and education create the individual—and Jap environment and education have been fundamentally distorted and perverted, spiritually and socially, down the centuries...
...Maybe there is no use explaining such matters as Japanese atrocities to people of such good will as our American public...
...And it thus is proven to be untrue that in dealing with the Japs, we are dealing with facts and circumstances natural to all peoples...
Vol. 27 • February 1944 • No. 8
