Horror in the East Rees,

Horror in the East Rees, Lawrence. Horror in the East: Japan and the Atrocities of World War II. London: BBC Books, 2001. One perplexing question for many contemporary observers of the events of World War II was how the relatively human and democratic Japanese government, army, and people collectively evolved from an apparently civilized nation that treated prisoners of war with compassion during the first World War, into a fighting machine that created such terrible death and destruction in its wake, towards China and American POWs.

Japan once fought side-by-side with America; later it became America's embittered foe and embraced a fascistic system of values, along with Italy and Germany, its old enemies. Historian Lawrence Rees attempts to answer this question in his book entitled Horror in the East: Japan and the Atrocities of World War II.

Rees answers this question of this rapid devolution of Japanese society by suggesting that, similar to the Nazis, the Japanese army subjected its citizens to a kind of totalitarian mentality and indoctrination that was 'totalizing' in the way it gripped every citizen's consciousness. The Japanese were not extraordinary people, as the rhetoric of the time suggested, neither extraordinarily good as the national military's propaganda machine stated, nor evil like the American military cartoons of the Japanese suggested.

Rather, the common Japanese soldiers were all too ordinary and subject to social and political pressures that caused the soldiers to behave in horrific ways. Rees begins his chronology of events in the 1930s, as the conflict began to escalate between China and Japan, resulting in what would be called by later historians "The Rape of Nanking." Rees' first chapter, entitled "The China Solution; Dealing with the West" outlines how both nations suffered tremendous privation during the worldwide depression of the 1930s.

Japan began to fall increasingly under the control of leaders from the army and navy, who inspired the population with visions of building an empire, modeled on the ideal of the Emperor Hirohito as a kind of god incarnate on earth. In the past, Japan had often cycled between periods of openness to Western ideals, and closed periods where there was an advocacy of a return to uniquely Japanese traditions and ideals. The 1930s proved to be an example of such an inward-looking period.

The elected Japanese legislature could not summon similar confidence in democracy, in the hearts of the populace. Also, moderate Japanese politicians found it almost impossible to control the military within the framework of existing institutions. Finally, the invasion of China made use of initially effect techniques such as mass slaughter of civilians and rape as a means of control over a frightened population, techniques that would become part of the Japanese fighting machine over the entire course of the war.

During World War II, as the military mindset began to increasingly penetrate the country, the treatment of the prisoners of the Japanese began to deteriorate. One of the most important parts of Rees' analysis, is that he does not seek to condemn the Japanese army as evil, as was tempting to do when its atrocities were first revealed to the world. Instead, he stresses how the cultural conditioning of the army encouraged ordinary young men to cast aside their moral values in the name of improving the state.

These young men were encouraged to believe.