Imperial Japan’s War Criminals: Instruments of Death
Yasuji Kaneko: The Soldier Who Raped and Killed in China
10m
He was not a general or commander, but an ordinary soldier of the Imperial Japanese Army — one who turned cruelty into routine.
Born in 1920, Yasuji Kaneko fought in North China as part of the 10th Independent Mixed Brigade. There, he took part in the enslavement, torture, and murder of Chinese civilians.
Kaneko raped countless women, burned villages, and executed prisoners with his own hands — crimes he later described in chilling detail, admitting that he “murdered more than 100 people by torture.”
Decades later, he confessed publicly, not to seek forgiveness, but to expose the brutality that ordinary men inflicted in the name of the Emperor.
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In December 1937, during the Japanese invasion of China, two officers of the Imperial Japanese Army — Lieutenant Toshiaki Mukai and Lieutenant Tsuyoshi Noda — turned mass killing into a grotesque game.
They competed to see who could behead 100 people first using their swords, a so-called “friendl...
