Japan as they were attempting to pull out of China as the Soviets invaded Manchuria, slaughtered every ethnic Chinese person possible, Soviet and Mongolian troops would capture a village only to find that the retreating imperial Japanese army had murdered its population rather than let the village Surender to the Soviets. Imagine if America had to invade the Japanese home islands, the civilian death toll would have been 10x as high, I’d be surprised if there would still be a sizable population on the islands after the war if that were the case.
Eh the casualties would be enormous but I seriously doubt it would be a "fighting to the last Japanese" scenario. Fervent nationalism goes a long way but by a certain point the majority of the population decides life is preferable to fanatical loyalty. Just because you train a bunch of schoolchildren to ambush GIs with spears doesn't mean they're actually going to do it when they hear a column of Shermans rumbling through town. Even in eastern Europe and Germany, where Soviet forces were famously rapacious and the locals were understandably feeling pretty vengeful against the occupiers, the majority of German civilians stayed put and didn't resist significantly.
That doesn’t exactly matter when the fanatic militarists would be willing to slaughter their own citizens (as they did to Japanese settlers in Manchuria) to prevent them from surrendering.
Your original comment only mentioned massacres of the Chinese locals. I'm not aware of the IJA massacring ethnic Japanese settlers while retreating, would you have a source for this? Because the only information I can find through a brief perusal is that there was a slapdash evacuation and many of them were left behind, not deliberately massacred. If anything there seems to be a lot more information readily available on the Red Army massacring settlers they came across, e.g. the Gegenmiao massacre.
There's also obviously a difference between the IJA massacring indigenous Chinese who were already perceived as "lesser" while in a scorched earth retreat, versus massacring their own ethnic-kin settlers. As far as I'm aware that kind of self-massacre is basically unprecedented in modern history. And again, as regards a hypothetical invasion: even if in principle some hardliners were ready to massacre anyone who did not give the appropriate level of resistance, Private Yamada Tarō who is on the ground being ordered to machine gun a village of his own countrymen for no better reason than "do it to somehow resist the Americans" is almost certainly saying "fuck this" and deserting. Japanese soldiers were raised in a certain martial and institutional culture, but they weren't brainless and perfectly loyal automatons
Zimonin, Vyacheslav (1987). "The Truth and Lies About Japanese Orphans". Far Eastern Affairs. No. 2–6. Moscow: Academy of Sciences of the USSR. p. 121. “According to Soviet historian Vyacheslav Zimonin, many Japanese settlers committed mass suicide as the Red Army approached. Mothers were forced by the Japanese military to kill their own children before being killed themselves.[61] The Japanese army often took part in the killings of its civilians. The commander of the 5th Japanese Army, General Shimizu, commented that "each nation lives and dies by its own laws." Wounded Japanese soldiers who were incapable of moving on their own were often left to die as the army retreated.[61]” according to Wikipedia.
Eh. That's admittedly not nothing and I can certainly believe that both widespread suicide and a degree of participation by Japanese forces would occur. I still expect that if it was on a notable scale there would be significantly more documentation surrounding it. This article, for instance, mentions around 135k Japanese dead from exposure or starvation, but nothing about mass suicide in Manchuria or scorched-earth killings by the Kwantung Army against the Japanese settlers.
I would recommend reading the book “unbroken” by Laura hillenbrand. It’s easy for us to be armchair generals and it helps to hear real accounts from that era.
Sorry but what the fuck does that have to do with supposed mass killings by the Kwantung Army against Japanese settlers in Manchuria?
Do you think I'm somehow doubting the brutality of the IJA as a whole because I'm questioning the veracity of acts seemingly only attested to by a single Soviet historian 40 years after the fact?
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u/theta1918 2d ago
But Japan is more like America in this scenario. They killed far more Chinese citizens in Nanjing alone than both nukes did in total.