In the aftermath of World War II, the Allied intent to bring Axis crimes to light led to both the Nuremberg trials and their counterpart in Tokyo, the International Military Tribunal of the Far East. Yet the Tokyo Trial failed to prosecute imperial Japanese leaders for the worst of war crimes: inhumane medical experimentation, including vivisection and open-air pathogen and chemical tests, which rivaled Nazi atrocities, as well as mass attacks using plague, anthrax, and cholera that killed thousands of Chinese civilians. In Hidden Atrocities, Jeanne Guillemin goes behind the scenes at the trial to reveal the American obstruction that denied justice to Japan’s victims. Responsibility for Japan’s secret germ-warfare program, organized as Unit 731 in Harbin, China, extended to top government leaders and many respected scientists, all of whom escaped indictment. Instead, motivated by early Cold War tensions, U.S. military intelligence in Tokyo insinuated itself into the Tokyo Trial by blocking prosecution access to key witnesses and then classifying incriminating documents. Washington decision makers, supported by the American occupation leader, General Douglas MacArthur, sought to acquire Japan’s biological-warfare expertise to gain an advantage over the Soviet Union, suspected of developing both biological and nuclear weapons. Ultimately, U.S. national-security goals left the victims of Unit 731 without vindication. Decades later, evidence of the Unit 731 atrocities still troubles relations between China and Japan. Guillemin’s vivid account of the cover-up at the Tokyo Trial shows how without guarantees of transparency, power politics can jeopardize international justice, with persistent consequences.

Now in a significant new edition, this landmark book documents little-known wartime Japanese atrocities during World War II, including cannibalism; the slaughter and starvation of prisoners of war; the rape, enforced prostitution, and murder of noncombatants; and biological warfare experiments.

Based on classified documents and interviews, argues that American acts of violence against millions of Vietnamese civilians during the Vietnam War were a pervasive and systematic part of the war.

This book assesses the role aesthetic factors play in shaping what forms of mass violence are viewed as international crimes.

Hiding in Plain Sight tells the story of the global effort to apprehend the world’s most wanted fugitives. Beginning with the flight of tens of thousands of Nazi war criminals and their collaborators after World War II, then moving on to the question of justice following the recent Balkan wars and the Rwandan genocide, and ending with the establishment of the International Criminal Court and America’s pursuit of suspected terrorists in the aftermath of 9/11, the book explores the range of diplomatic and military strategies—both successful and unsuccessful—that states and international courts have adopted to pursue and capture war crimes suspects. It is a story fraught with broken promises, backroom politics, ethical dilemmas, and daring escapades—all in the name of international justice and human rights. Hiding in Plain Sight is a companion book to the public television documentary Dead Reckoning: Postwar Justice from World War II to The War on Terror. For more information about the documentary, visit www.pbs.org/wnet/dead-reckoning/. And for more information about the Human Rights Center, visit hrc.berkeley.edu.

This landmark book documents little-known wartime Japanese atrocities during World War II. Yuki Tanaka’s case studies, still remarkably original and significant, include cannibalism; the slaughter and starvation of prisoners of war; the rape, enforced prostitution, and murder of noncombatants; and biological warfare experiments. The author describes how desperate Japanese soldiers consumed the flesh of their own comrades killed in fighting as well as that of Australians, Pakistanis, and Indians. He traces the fate of sixty-five shipwrecked Australian nurses and British soldiers who were shot or stabbed to death by their captors. Another thirty-two nurses were captured and sent to Sumatra to become “comfort women”—sex slaves for Japanese soldiers. Tanaka recounts how thousands of Australian and British POWs were massacred in the infamous Sandakan camp in the Borneo jungle in 1945, while those who survived were forced to endure a tortuous 160-mile march on which anyone who dropped out of line was immediately shot. This new edition also includes a powerful chapter on the island of Nauru, where thirty-nine leprosy patients were killed and thousands of Naurans were ill-treated and forced to leave their homes. Without denying individual and national responsibility, the author explores individual atrocities in their broader social, psychological, and institutional milieu and places Japanese behavior during the war in the broader context of the dehumanization of men at war. In his substantially revised conclusion, Tanaka brings in significant new interpretations to explain why Japanese imperial forces were so brutal, tracing the historical processes that created such a unique military structure and ideology. Finally, he investigates why a strong awareness of their collective responsibility for wartime atrocities has been and still is lacking among the Japanese.

Why are some genocides prominently remembered while others are ignored, hidden, or denied? Consider the Turkish campaign denying the Armenian genocide, followed by the Armenian movement to recognize the violence. Similar movements are building to acknowledge other genocides that have long remained out of sight in the media, such as those against the Circassians, Greeks, Assyrians, the indigenous peoples in the Americas and Australia, and the violence that was the precursor to and the aftermath of the Holocaust. The contributors to this collection look at these cases and others from a variety of perspectives. These essays cover the extent to which our biases, our ways of knowing, our patterns of definition, our assumptions about truth, and our processes of remembering and forgetting as well as the characteristics of generational transmission, the structures of power and state ideology, and diaspora have played a role in hiding some events and not others. Noteworthy among the collection’s coverage is whether the trade in African slaves was a form of genocide and a discussion not only of Hutus brutalizing Tutsi victims in Rwanda, but of the execution of moderate Hutus as well. Hidden Genocides is a significant contribution in terms of both descriptive narratives and interpretations to the emerging subfield of critical genocide studies. Contributors: Daniel Feierstein, Donna-Lee Frieze, Krista Hegburg, Alexander Laban Hinton, Adam Jones, A. Dirk Moses, Chris M. Nunpa, Walter Richmond, Hannibal Travis, and Elisa von Joeden-Forgey

This study of friendly fire on civilians during the London Blitz and the attack on Pearl harbor exposes the unknown horror behind these iconic WWII events. The London Blitz and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor have ascended to the level of myth for Britain and America. Yet both of these artfully constructed narratives of heroic resistance to aerial bombardment conceal the massacre of citizens by the very militaries charged with protecting them. In Britain, thousands of civilians were killed when the army shelled London and other cities to prevent residents from fleeing the German bombs. At Pearl Harbor, American warships fired their heavy guns at the city of Honolulu with devastating results. Simon Webb begins this volume with an overview of bombing and anti-aircraft guns from the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871 through to the First World War. He then reveals the casualties which friendly fire from heavy artillery inflicted upon British and American civilians during World War Two. In the case of the British, these deaths were a deliberate part of a shockingly cynical policy. There were times during the German bombing of London when more people were being killed by British shells than by enemy bombs.

The Rohingya are a Muslim group who live in Rakhine state (formerly Arakan state) in western Myanmar (Burma), a majority Buddhist country. According to the United Nations, they are one of the most persecuted minorities in the world. They suffer routine discrimination at the hands of neighboring Buddhist Rakhine groups, but international human rights groups such as Human Rights Watch (HRW) have also accused Myanmar's authorities of being complicit in a campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya Muslims. The Rohingya face regular violence, arbitrary arrest and detention, extortion, and other abuses, a situation that has been particularly acute since 2012 in the wake of a serious wave of sectarian violence. Islam is practiced by around 4% of the population of Myanmar, and most Muslims also identify as Rohingya. Yet the authorities refuse to recognize this group as one of the 135 ethnic groups or 'national races' making up Myanmar's population. On this basis, Rohingya individuals are denied citizenship rights in the country of their birth, and face severe limitations on many aspects of an ordinary life, such as marriage or movement around the country. This expose of the attempt to erase the Rohingyas from the face of Myanmar is sure to gain widespread attention.

From 1932 to 1945, in a race to develop germ warfare capability for the Imperial Japanese military thousands of Japanese doctors, nurses and scientists willingly took part in what was known at the time as "the secret of secrets": horrifying experiments on innocent Chinese men, women and children, as well as experiments on American prisoners of war. An elite group known as Unit 731, led by Dr Shiro Ishii (Japan’s answer to Joseph Mengele), infected thousands of prisoners with virulent strains of typhoid, plague, cholera and other epidemic diseases. Germ warfare campaigns were launched against China, cities and towns were hit with biological bombs. Yet after the war, General Douglas MacArthur struck a deal with these doctors, shielding them from accountability for their crimes. Provocative, compelling and alarming, A Plague Upon Humanity exposes one of the most shameful chapters in human history – the story of Japan’s deadly biological warfare programme, and how it was hidden from the history of World War Two.