Morbid Fact Du Jour for December 18, 2014

Today’s Undeclared Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

In 1933, the Japanese army invaded China.  What they thought would be a “3 month war” continued for eight years.  In addition to the ruthless Chinese general Chiang Kai-shek, who commanded immense armies and had Anglo-American financial and technical support in his fight against the Japanese, Japan also faced the twentieth century’s greatest guerrilla leader, the wily Mao Tse-tung, who himself controlled part of China, commanded large forces, and enjoyed the support of the peasants.

With Chiang’s forces, the Japanese faced a traditional army of uniformed soldiers carrying out traditional operations. But Japanese army strategists had no appreciation for the strength of Mao’s brilliant guerrilla tactics. Whereas the Japanese Army pursued a ruthless policy of slaughter known as the “Three Alls” (“Kill All, Loot All, Burn All”), Mao insisted on decorous “rules” when dealing with the Chinese peasants:

All actions are subject to command.
Do not steal from the people.
Be neither selfish nor unjust.
Replace the door when you leave the house.
Roll up the bedding on which you have slept.
Be courteous.
Be honest in your transactions.
Return what you borrow.
Replace what you break.
Do not bathe in the presence of women.
Do not without authority search those you arrest.

The Japanese Spirit Warriors soon became frustrated with the “unfair” tactics of the guerrillas in their midst. “Massacres of civilians were routine,” one soldier later recalled. “They cooperated with the enemy, sheltered them in their houses, gave them information. We viewed them as the enemy. During combat all villagers went into hiding. We pilfered anything useful from their houses or, in winter, burned them for firewood. If anyone was found wandering about, we captured and killed them. Spies! This was war.”

Countries avoid a declaration of war so they may claim “the laws and customs of war did not apply and need not be observed.” Japan never declared war on China. Instead, the fighting was euphemized as an “incident”. Chinese troops were not “soldiers” but “bandits”  One of the customs of war Japan was able to flout in this “incident” against “bandits” was acknowledgement that captured Chinese soldiers were prisoners of war. A 1933 army infantry textbook assured IJA officers that when they took prisoners, “If you kill them there will be no repercussions.”  In a 1937 directive, the army vice chief stated: “In the present situation in order to wage total war in China, the empire will neither apply, nor act in accordance with, all the concrete articles of the Treaty Concerning the Laws and Customs of Land Warfare and Other Treaties Concerning the Laws and Regulations of Belligerency.”  The same directive ordered “staff officers in China to stop using the term ‘prisoner of war.’” As Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Herb Bix pointed out, Hirohito himself “supported the policy of withholding a declaration of war against China and ratified and personally endorsed the decision to remove the constraints of international law on the treatment of Chinese prisoners of war.” Thus Chinese soldiers taken in battle were “denied the status of prisoners of war upon the same pretext and many of them were massacred, tortured, or drafted into Japanese labor camps.”

Culled from: Flyboys

Morbid Trinket Du Jour!

Okay, so it’s not a REAL conjoined fetus skull… but it’s the next best thing and I think it would look fabulous on my bookshelf.  (One day maybe I’ll have a real house with more than just bookshelves for furniture, and then I can say something like, “It would look splendid on my escritoire” or something.)  Anyway, it would make a fine last-minute gift for that hard-to-shop-for aunt, don’t you think?

Available from the ever-marvelous Gorey Details.

Fetus Du Jour!

So last week a friend who had never been to Chicago visited and I made it my duty to show her the town. Of course, that meant going to some of the “touristy” places like the Museum of Science and Industry. Since Body Worlds wasn’t in town (the only reason I’d ever gone there before), I wasn’t expecting to see anything particularly morbid, so I was delighted to find a huge collection of fetuses on display.  The ranged in development from blastocyst to full-term and they were collected in the 1930s (supposedly from “natural causes”).  I only had my iPhone with me, but I still tried to capture some of the glory of these little suspended animations.  Check out this eyeless little guy!