This essay argues that while white powers and Islamic societies historically treated plunder and rape as natural elements of war, the Japanese military fought by excluding both.
Through examples from the Maya, Iran, Haiti, the Soviet Army, and the U.S. occupation, it sharply explores the true nature of conquest and rape, the purity of Japan, and the deeper structure of modern warfare.

2019-06-18
The Islamic teachings believed by those Bedouins lay down that plunder in wartime is only natural, and merely say that the spoils should be divided fairly.
The same is true of Christians.

From the following book, I send all of the chapters I have introduced thus far and all of those I will introduce hereafter especially to Alexis Dudden, an unbelievable idiot, a vile and malicious low creature, who is said to be a professor at an American university.
The Japanese military that did not take part in plunder.
War has only come into being with its public face of protecting national interests and its hidden face of plunder and rape.
Plunder and rape were incentives for soldiers who risked their lives, a natural reward.
Thomas Lawrence, known as Lawrence of Arabia, wrote in his autobiography that without that, soldiers would not move.
He led Bedouin soldiers in the assault on Damascus under Ottoman Turkish rule, but the Bedouins attacked villages everywhere they went.
Unless they fully indulged themselves in plunder and rape there, they would not move on.
When they attacked a large city, lines lamenting, “So we shall be held up for another two weeks,” appear again and again.
The Islamic teachings believed by those Bedouins lay down that plunder in wartime is only natural, and merely say that the spoils should be divided fairly.
The same is true of Christians.
In the thirteenth century, when the Crusaders attacked and brought down Constantinople, the capital of Eastern Orthodoxy, a history book records that “as was customary, the soldiers were permitted three days of plunder.”
At the end of the Qing dynasty, the Boxer Rebellion broke out.
Troops from eight countries, including Japan, Britain, the United States, France, Germany, and Russia, were dispatched and liberated the foreign legations in Beijing that had been surrounded by the Boxers and Qing forces.
The brave fighting shown in the siege by Japanese Lieutenant Colonel Shibagoro moved Queen Victoria, who conveyed her words of praise to Minister Kaoru Hayashi at the time.
After the fighting ended, General Waldersee of Germany, the supreme commander of the Eight-Nation Allied Forces, entered Beijing.
In his report to Kaiser Wilhelm II, he wrote, “I permitted all national armies three days of plunder.
After that, I permitted plunder for the purpose of making private property of it for the officers and soldiers.
The detailed quantity of China’s losses from this destruction and plunder will never be fully ascertained.”
Chinese history textbooks say of the severity of this plunder that, in addition to the loss of cultural treasures such as the disappearance of the Yongle Encyclopedia, “the gold, silver, and treasury vaults of the Ministry of Finance were all stolen and burned.”
This occurred at the entrance to the twentieth century.
Germans and Englishmen gladly joined in the plunder.
Among them, the Russian army was the worst, with General Linevich himself going around plundering.
Most astonishing of all is that the three days of plunder were for the state, and after that there was separate plunder for the personal benefit of the soldiers.
The white powers carried this out as though it were the most natural thing in the world.
During the Iraq War after the beginning of the twenty-first century, the museum in fallen Baghdad was plundered and precious cultural assets of Sumerian civilization were taken away.
Many of the stolen items were later found at American airports and ports.
They had been stolen and carried home by American soldiers and journalists.
The DNA of plunder is firmly built into their blood.
For the honor of Japan, it should be said that the Japanese military did not take part in the plunder of Beijing.
It protected the Forbidden City and secured the gold reserves, but this was for the purpose of preserving the finances of the Qing dynasty.
The area controlled by the Japanese military was kept orderly, and many Chinese fled there to escape the brutality of the whites.
What is almost inseparable from such plunder is rape.
The so-called Nanjing Massacre, jointly created by Chinese and Americans, had only massacre and plunder, and since that would be strange without rape, they forcibly turned it into a story in which “2,000 people were raped every night in the Nanjing Safety Zone.”
That is because it fit the shape of war as they imagine it.
But rape should not be depicted as such a merely accompanying act.
Looking at history, it was rather regarded as the most effective means of conquest.
The tragedy of the Maya.
Take the Maya, for example.
Their culture possessed advanced architecture and astronomy.
Yet now not even a fragment of it survives.
The Maya now lived in the jungle near the Guatemalan border, practicing slash-and-burn agriculture, but recent settlement policies had led them to establish several villages.
In one such village near Chiapas, I once interviewed a girl who looked almost entirely Japanese.
In the sixteenth century, Spaniards invaded, many Maya were killed, and the women were violated.
Her ancestors fled into the jungle, and for five hundred years thereafter preserved Maya blood.
They remained pure Maya.
She said that she “resented” such ancestors.
If her ancestors had not fled and had instead been violated by Spaniards, they could have become mestizos with white blood.
“If that had happened, I could have gone proudly into the city and even gone to the Hard Rock Café in Mexico City.”
Because they had pointlessly preserved pure Indian blood, she said, she would end her life in such a place.
I tried to console her by saying there was nothing wrong with being yellow, but it did not seem to console her at all.
The interpreter at that time was a mestizo with quite a strong amount of white blood, and after this interview she said reflectively, “Even we superior mestizos.”
“When a baby is born, we worry terribly.”
Even “superior mestizos” have some percentage of Maya blood mixed in.
Sometimes it appears as though through an atavistic return.
“If a child is born with strongly Indian features, he cannot get into a good school.
He will also lose good job opportunities.”
The Hard Rock Café she had mentioned earlier, she said, “won’t let you in if you look even a little Indian.”
The Maya, with that once-brilliant culture, perished, and the descendants of that people now show even disgust at being Maya.
In fact, I once heard a similar story during my time as Tehran correspondent.
The sister of a taxi driver who used to come and go from the bureau had given birth.
My assistant Masud immediately asked, “I see.
What color was it?”
The driver answered happily, “White.”
Only then did my assistant ask again whether it was a boy or a girl.
When I questioned him about that, he said, “It is difficult to answer for you, but Iran is an Aryan people, and even the country’s name comes from that.
But in the Battle of Nahavand, Sassanian Persia was defeated and came under the rule of dark-skinned Arabs.”
That meant that some of the blood of the Arabs whom they despised had entered them.
Then in the thirteenth century, Hulagu, the younger brother of Kublai, invaded and established the Ilkhanate.
Its rule continued for more than a hundred years, but “at that time the Mongols thoroughly defiled Persian blood.”
The expression “defiled the blood” struck me slightly, but in short, Mongoloid blood had mixed into an Aryan people.
And from time to time it appears.
A yellow child with narrow eyes is born.
The same as with the mestizo interpreter.
That is why, he said, when a baby is born, the first thing they ask is its color.
When I asked whether there were really such cases, he nodded.
Such people are discriminated against even by their own families, and they can neither find decent jobs nor make good marriages.
“In Iran, the lowest occupation is that of a baker.
They bake bread in a charcoal-heated jar.
It is known for being hot, harsh, and low paid.
And almost all of those craftsmen are recognizably descendants of Hulagu at a glance.”
Even among the same Iranians, hatred and discrimination arise over the blood of the conqueror.
When the number is small, it ends as a minor prejudice, but when the degree is large, it is easy to imagine that it creates problems even for national cohesion and centripetal force.
Haiti is a good example.
France brought in black slaves and established sugar and coffee plantations there.
But in the time of Napoleon they ceased to be profitable and were abandoned.
It then became independent as the first black state.
One might think that, springing from the oppressed condition of slave origins, it would boast strong unity, but from its founding to the present there has continued unbelievably cruel mutual slaughter among Haitians themselves.
The reason is that about 30 percent of the population is white mixed-blood, the so-called mulattoes, and they take pride in their white blood, revere their ancestral France, and adopted French as the national language.
The French also gave them conveniences such as education.
Though they look the same, they look down on pure blacks, and conflict has arisen from that.
A movement to unite in protest against white selfishness and make them atone for the history of slavery and colonialism cannot arise, however much one might expect it to.
Rape is not something done merely in passing after plunder.
Rape robs a people of its ethnic purity, and through that it contains a destructive force that can bring about extinction like that of the Maya or eternal confusion like that of Haiti.
In the last war, when the Soviet army made up of Slavs and Tatars crossed the Elbe and entered German territory, it deliberately made rape something its soldiers were to do first.
Antony Beevor’s Berlin: The Downfall goes into detail about this, but about two million women throughout Germany were violated by the Soviet army.
As is often quoted, at Dahlem House, a convent that also served as a maternity home, everyone was violated, from nuns and pregnant women to accompanying women.
The very violation of a maternity ward that Britain had spread as propaganda in the First World War was actually carried out by the Soviet army.
The statistics are most solid for Berlin, where 130,000 women were violated, and of these, 92,000 were treated in two city hospitals.
Of these, 20,000 had illegal pregnancies, many underwent abortions, but about 2,000 gave birth.
Japan’s purity.
The first thing demanded by the American forces that entered Japan was also women.
As a sexual breakwater, women from the licensed quarters literally offered themselves up to deal with the American soldiers.
In Burma and Singapore, the Allied forces simply took over Japanese comfort stations and continued to use them for Allied soldiers.
But the American soldiers who entered Japan were not satisfied with only the comfort facilities the Japanese government had prepared.
They broke into ordinary homes and hunted for women.
They were the same as Chiang Kai-shek’s soldiers.
There were also cases in which family members who tried to reason with the invading American soldiers were assaulted and killed.
The number of Japanese killed during the American occupation reached 2,536, according to the Procurement Agency, and it is said that many of these cases were connected with rape.
At this time, Mark Gayn, a correspondent for the Chicago Sun who came to Japan, wrote in Japan Diary that “the Japanese tried to resist Allied occupation rule by using women as weapons.”
It is rare to find a journalist so arrogant and so shameless.
That is the true face of their war.
But in Japan’s case, it fought a completely different kind of war from theirs.
As noted earlier, it did not carry out cruel reprisals, and the Japanese excluded from war the plunder and rape that were habitual for them.
From the Shanghai Incident to the retreat to Nanjing, Chiang Kai-shek’s army, just as at Jinzhou mentioned earlier, broke into private homes, took what could be taken, violated women, set fires, and fled.
After the fall of Nanjing, Chiang Kai-shek’s army fled to Jiujiang upstream on the Yangtze, and the way they encamped there is depicted in Tatsuzo Ishikawa’s Wuhan Operation.
They requisitioned private homes in Jiujiang and procured food at will, and the residents were turned into refugees in their own city.
When the Japanese army approached, Chiang Kai-shek’s troops broke the Yangtze embankments, flooded the city, scattered cholera bacteria in the wells, and fled.
The epidemic prevention and repair of the embankments were done by the Japanese army.
A photograph of Japanese soldiers marching toward Nanjing in pursuit of them, smiling and holding chickens they had bought from farmers, was published in the Asahi Shimbun.
For a long time, this was displayed at that 300,000 Victims Memorial Hall in Nanjing as “a picture of Japanese soldiers plundering chickens.”
For them, plunder was something so natural that they never doubted it.
The Asahi Shimbun, which had provided the photograph, also kept silent about it all along.
But when it became known that this was not true, the photo was quietly removed in December 2007, the seventieth anniversary of the Nanjing Incident.
To that extent, Japanese behavior lies beyond the limits of their understanding.
This installment continues.