Prisoners of War. 1937-1945
The official position of the Japanese government was that the war in China was an “incident” rather than a formally declared war and that international conventions regarding the treatment of captured Chinese soldiers did not apply. The Japanese made no effort to establish POW camps for captured Chinese. In a manual published by the Japanese Infantry Academy, it was noted that “…the Chinese system of residency registration is imperfect, and most soldiers are homeless anyway and seldom registered. Thus no problems will arise if we kill them or deport them.”
When the commander of a Japanese battalion, Major General Kaiko-Sha, captured over 14,000 Chinese troops near the Chang Jiang River he ordered his men to machine gun all of them, an event which took two full days to complete and which he recorded in his diary.
Other Chinese troops in the early days of the war shed their uniforms after deserting, hoping to hide within the civilian population. The Japanese, aware of the deception, resolved the problem by executing soldiers and civilians alike. Similar massacres took place in Singapore, where Chinese troops served under the British, as well as other captured territories.
Because the Japanese neither considered surrendering Chinese troops to be prisoners of war nor officially recorded the taking of prisoners it is impossible to accurately estimate the number of Chinese murdered as a result of Japanese policy. At least 5,000 were murdered following the surrender of Singapore, as witnessed and reported by surviving European prisoners. Many more who were not killed at the time of capture died while serving as slave labor. After the surrender of Japan, a total of 56 Chinese prisoners were released.
Japanese treatment of all prisoners of war was inhumane and has been well documented, but their treatment of the Chinese who fell into their hands has been less reported and was clearly worse than that of Europeans. The constraints of international law towards the treatment of Chinese prisoners were removed by a directive signed by Emperor Hirohito in August 1937.