Wartime horror in Japanese confession
Print Edition
JAPANESE soldiers burned Chinese civilians, including women and children, to death in WWII, according to a war criminal whose confession to scores of murders and rapes was published by the State Archives Administration yesterday.
In the ninth of a series of 31 confessions from Japanese war criminals published on the SAA website as China marks the 70th anniversary of the end of the war, Kiyoshi Shimosaka detailed his brutality in China between 1940 and his capture in August 1945.
According to his confession, Shimosaka, born in Hiroshima Prefecture, Japan in 1919, together with one companion, barricaded a 30-year-old Chinese woman and her two sons, who were aged just 7 and 4, in a house in Hubei Province’s Suixian County in central China and set it alight. The family died in the blaze.
Shimosaka also said his companions killed three captives “in order to see how sharp the katana (a Japanese sword) was.”
He also confessed to arresting a man aged around 30 and a woman of similar age in July 1940 in Hubei’s Jingmen County.
Shimosaka threatened them with a bayonet and forced them to have sex, and “during the sexual intercourse, a companion bayoneted them in the back and killed them.”
In August 1944 in Yichang County, companions used eight residents as “live targets” in shooting and bayoneting training of 50 cadets of the regiment, killing them all, he wrote.
The SAA is publishing a confession a day in the run-up to commemorations of the end of the war on September 3. The handwritten documents come complete with translations and abstracts in both Chinese and English.
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