ABSTRACT
The extreme ill-treatment of POWs by the Japanese was a historically specific phenomenon that occurred between the so-called China Incident and the end of World War II. Prior to the China Incident, Japanese POW policy and practice were comparatively humane. The absence of a developed liberal concept of universal human rights in Japanese society had a corresponding effect on the everyday Japanese concept of the rights of others as individuals. The “other” was conceived of in national, social, and organic terms as a “sibling,” owing similar duties to the national family-state. One of the most important changes was the reinterpretation—or more plainly, corruption—of the ethical code of bushido in order to subordinate it to the emperor ideology and the new military ideology. The inculcation of trainee officers in the emperor ideology at the military college gave them a much distorted understanding of bushido.
