War Crimes, the Co-Prosperity Sphere, and Japan's Path to Pearl Harbor and Defeat

In Manchuria, Japan established Unit 731 under General Shiro Ishii to conduct biological warfare research, experimenting with biological and chemical weapons on living prisoners — euphemistically called 'maruta,' or logs — through vivisections and lethal experiments without anesthesia. A parallel system of 'comfort stations' organized military sexual slavery on behalf of the Japanese army, recruiting an estimated tens of thousands of women from Korea, China, the Philippines, and Indonesia, often by force or deception. Massive forced labor was also imposed on Allied prisoners of war and Asian civilians, most infamously on the Burma-Siam 'Death Railway,' and Allied prisoners endured death marches such as the Bataan Death March of 1942. Japan's government offered only a belated and partial acknowledgment of these crimes in later decades, notably through the 1993 Kōno Statement on the 'comfort women' system and the 1995 Murayama Statement acknowledging Japanese aggression and colonialism.