Does anyone know how man Chinese POWs the Japanese had by the end of the war? They only released 56 of them, and I need to know how many they kept. I looked online but couldn't find anything.
Japanese POW camps also had high death rates, many were used as labour camps. According to the findings of the Tokyo tribunal, the death rate of Western prisoners was 27.1% (American POWs died at a rate of 37%), seven times that of POW’s under the Germans and Italians[157] The death rate of Chinese was much larger as, according to the directive ratified on 5 August 1937 by Hirohito, the constraints of international law were removed on those prisoners.[158] Thus, if 37,583 prisoners from the UK, 28,500 from Netherlands and 14,473 from USA were released after the surrender of Japan, the number for the Chinese was only 56.[159] According to a joint study of historians featuring Zhifen Ju, Mark Peattie, Toru Kubo, and Mitsuyoshi Himeta, more than 10 million Chinese were mobilized by the Japanese army and enslaved by the Kōa-in for slave labor in Manchukuo and north China. The U.S. Library of Congress estimates that in Java, between 4 and 10 million romusha (Japanese: “manual laborer”), were forced to work by the Japanese military. About 270,000 of these Javanese laborers were sent to other Japanese-held areas in South East Asia. Only 52,000 were repatriated to Java, meaning that there was a death rate of 80%. According to Mitsuyoshi Himeta, at least 2.7 million died during the Sankō Sakusen implemented in Heipei and Shantung by General Yasuji Okamura.
About 30 MILLION Chinese died at Japanese hands, along with 4 million Indoneseans, almost 2 million Indians, a million Vietnamese, and hundreds of thousands of others. At the end of the war, of course, prisoners held in Japan were released. There were something over 30,000 Americans, and all of 56 Chinese.
So there were about 10+ million Chinese POWs and only 56 were left? Why do the Nazis get all the bad rep and the Japs get nothing.
There is the possibility that it might be a matter of perception. It should be remembered that the ratio between Chinese deaths and Chinese population must be kept in mind. There were about 12 million deaths of Chinese extraction, both military and civilian, that doesn't mean 10+ million POWs really. Not that it makes that big a difference to those on the receiving end, but China had a population of about 450 million as WW2 occurred, and sadly for we in the west we tend to think of the non-Judeo/Christian Asians as "uncultured" and non-respectful of life in the same manner as the Judeo/Christian west. Consequently it isn't outside the realm of possibility that the "history books" ignore the total numbers of Asian deaths at the hands of the Japanese. It is also not out of the realm of possiblity that when most of the books were written, the Japanese were our stalwart allies against the "godless commies" (China included now) in the Cold War. I haven’t ever looked at the POWs of Chinese decent which the Japanese kept in captivity, but I wouldn’t be surprised that those were either ranking officers, or related to the Sun, Kung, Chaing or Soong families. These persons would have had "worth" beyond their lives alone. I also wonder if the Imperial Japanese even took many prisoners during the conflict if they weren’t high ranking officers or high ranking civilian persons? If they aren’t taken prisoner to start with, it is difficult for them to survive the experience is it not? Just a guess on my part you understand.
