A book by a US historian claiming Imperial Japanese Forces killed 30 million people across Asia in the early 20th century has faced a fierce backlash in Japan, with conservative scholars denouncing it as propaganda and the author receiving death threats.
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Japan’s Holocaust, published last year, argues that Japanese expansionism between 1927 and 1945 led to atrocities surpassing the death toll caused by Nazi Germany in Europe. The book, which its author Bryan Rigg began researching during his PhD at Yale in 1993, has sold 6,000 copies to date, with a Korean translation in the works and Chinese publishers expressing interest.
The book’s central claim – that at least 30 million people were killed during Japan’s “reckless campaigns” across Asia and the Pacific – is compounded by the assertion that then-Emperor Hirohito not only knew of the atrocities but “actually ordered them”.
Rigg chronicles mass civilian murders, the systematic use of rape as a weapon of war, and the starvation and destruction inflicted on millions in China, Korea, Southeast Asia and the Pacific, which he describes as “overwhelming and undeniable”.
“To this day, the refusal by some Japanese voices to acknowledge this history adds a new layer of injustice to the memory of those who perished,” Rigg, who also wrote Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers, told This Week in Asia.
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