Robert Evans and Christopher Wong dissect Nobusuke Kishi's rehabilitation, exposing his role as a fascist architect who leveraged the Second Sino-Japanese War to build a war machine funded 50-55% by Yakuza drug trafficking. They detail how Kishi utilized "rehabilitation centers" for forced labor, enforced racial hierarchies via "raceball cards," and oversaw Unit 731's biological experiments while personally engaging in serial rape. Ultimately, the hosts reveal Japan operated as a cartel blending bureaucracy, organized crime, and state-sponsored atrocities to fuel imperial expansion. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Christopher's Money Memo00:05:23
This is an iHeart podcast.
Guaranteed human.
On a recent episode of the podcast Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Budginista Aliche to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
What would that look like in our families if everyone was able to pass on wealth to the people when they're no longer here?
We break down budgeting, financial discipline, and how to build real wealth, starting with the mindset shifts too many of us were never ever taught.
If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more.
Listen to Money and Wealth with John O'Brien from the Black Effect Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
You know the famous author Roll Dahl.
He thought up Willie Wonka and the BFG.
But did you know he was a spy?
Neither did I. You can hear all about his wildlife story in the podcast, The Secret World of Roald Dahl.
All episodes are out now.
Was this before he wrote his stories?
It must have been.
What?
Okay, I don't think that's true.
I'm telling you, the guy was a spy.
Binge all 10 episodes of The Secret World of Roald Dahl.
Now on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hi, I'm Iris Palmer, host of the Against All Odds podcast.
Every week, I'm sitting down with exceptional people who have broken barriers even when the odds were stacked against them.
Like Chef Victor Villa of VS Tacos.
You know the taquero from the Bad Bunny halftime show?
It was great.
It was a big moment.
It was special.
And I felt like I was really representing my family, you know, my brand, my city.
I was representing all taqueros, not only of like, you know, the U.S., but of Mexico and beyond.
All the taqueros of the world.
Listen to Against All Odds on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
Today's Financial Literacy Month, we are talking about the one investment most people ignore: building a business around the life you actually want.
It was just us making happen whatever he said was going to happen and then it happened.
On those amigos, entrepreneurs like Amirica Sam and Joe Hoff get real about money, taking risk, and while your dream might be the smartest move.
At the end of my life, what am I really going to care about?
And the conclusion I came to is what I did to make the world a better place in whatever way.
Listen to those amigos on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
Well, Sophie, I don't know if I agree with you that a Kamala Harris-themed erotic vampire anime would be successful, but I guess we all have different opinions on things.
Oh, I didn't notice the audience had come in here.
I'm Robert Evans.
This is Behind the Bastards.
It's a podcast about the worst people in all of history.
Sophie and Christopher and I were just having a conversation about mangas that we think would be successful.
So, Christopher, I don't know.
What do you think?
Erotic Kamala Harris vampire anime?
I mean, I can see it.
Look, okay.
You know, the advantage you get, you get out of anime, right?
Everyone's eyes, enormously large.
You cannot lose.
You cannot lose with this.
Yeah, absolutely.
The eyes are too big.
Science says that we find the big eyes cute.
Cannot go wrong.
Cannot go wrong.
Well, other things you can't go wrong with are a classic Behind the Bastards reverse episode where one of my Sophie, are we allowed to call them indentured servants?
No.
We're one of my indentured podcast guests, in this case, Christopher.
Also, no.
Well, okay, Sophie, I guess.
One of our team members, one of the members of our squad.
Sophie, there is no I in team, but several of the letters that are also in Indentured Servant are in the word team.
So Robert, that was worse than that was worse than the fake laugh you did at the start of this episode.
Christopher Wong, who is on our team, a valued member of the cool zone media squad.
I'd prefer junta, the cool zone media junta.
I've always felt we were more of a regime.
Oh, God.
You know, your webcam being broken and me not being able to look you in the eyes when I'm angry really upsets me.
I know, I know.
That's part of why I haven't fixed it.
Christopher, what are we going to learn about today on this podcast?
Before we formally start, Robert, how do you feel about Operation Paperclip?
Oh, you know, so when World War II ended, right, same kind of feeling that I got when like the last Lord of the Rings movie finished, or like when Firefly got canceled, and I'm like, ah, but I wanted more.
I wanted more from these kooky Nazis and their crimes.
And then the U.S. government and the Russian government in two separate operations were like, don't worry, Robert.
We're going to give those guys future jobs.
So you can keep following the careers of Albert Speer, Werner von Braun, a bunch of other Nazis, including that guy the CIA hired, and see what they do after the war.
It's like, you know what it's like?
It's like that TV show Joey after Friends got canceled.
That's what Operation Paperclip is for the Nazis.
And I personally, as a fan of both Joey and World War II history, I think that's great.
What's Joey's last name?
Tribiano, something like that.
Last job.
Japan's Imperial Triumphalism00:14:49
Tribiani?
Wow.
Yeah, more or less.
I'm sorry.
It's been a long time since I watched an episode of Friends.
Look, it's been like 15 years.
Come on.
Oh, wow.
Well, Robert, you are going to love part two of this.
And I'm going to start out at this episode.
I'm going to make an incredibly bold claim.
And we'll see if you agree with it after the second part of this episode.
I maintain that the rehabilitation of Nobusuke Kishi, who is the subject of today's episode, is the single worst example of the U.S. rehabilitating a war criminal after the end of the war.
It's the worst one.
I'm excited because this is a new war criminal for me, which is always a huge day in Robert Edwards' land.
Yeah.
Yeah.
All right.
So Nobusuke Kishi was born on November 13th, 1896, in a village in Yamagachi Prefecture, Japan.
Now, Kishi is born in an incredibly important time in Japanese history, right, just literally right at the beginning of the second phase of Japanese imperialism.
So to get us to the second phase, after the restoration of the emperor and the Meiji Restoration of 1868, Japan rapidly starts importing European technology, European organizational principles, European ideology, and European racism in order to do a rapid quote-unquote modernization campaign in order to compete with the European nations.
Now, Japan was not exactly like an egalitarian paradise before they started doing this.
And, you know, the consequence of this is that, you know, they take the colonialism like a fish to water.
And this starts what I'm going to call the three phases of Japanese imperialism.
You have Imperialism 1, Imperialism 2, Imperialism Harder, and Imperialism 3, Tokyo Drift.
I'm very frustrated that you didn't do an Imperialism 2 electric boogaloo.
But we'll discuss that at your next performance evaluation.
I will endeavor to get better references when I name phases of imperialism after bad movie titles.
Yeah.
So Imperialism 1 basically starts right as the Meiji Restoration happens.
And it lasts roughly from about 1868 to the start of the Sino-Japanese War in 1894.
And this is the phase that everyone ignores because it's, you know, this phase of imperialism is very, very local or it's happening inside Japan itself.
But it's extremely important to understand like everything that's going to happen next.
We're going to talk about it for a little bit.
And no, so the defining characteristics of this first phase are the horrifically violent assimilation of the Inui people in Hokkaido, the annexation of the Ryoku Islands.
You might not know what those are.
The biggest one is Okinawa.
You probably know what that is.
Yeah.
Half of my family spent half of their lives there.
Yeah.
Yep.
Very nice place.
Very, very bad things happen to the people who live there.
Yeah.
There's a monument at the north of the island called Peace Prayer Park because when the U.S. took the island, the Japanese occupiers told them, like, hey, you're all going to get murdered and raped by U.S. troops.
You should just kill yourselves now.
And so a shitload of Okinawans just flung themselves off the cliffs.
And now there's a very nice monument there.
It's a lot of bad things have gone down in Okinawa.
Yeah.
Yeah, this is the Japanese Empire just sending enormous numbers of people to their deaths is running theme of this episode.
Yeah, it is remarkable when you're telling a story that takes place, when you're telling a story about colonialism in Asia and the U.S. is not the specific bad guy at this point in the story.
That's how bad the Empire of Japan got.
Yeah, like this is the thing.
The Americans don't become the bad guys in this story until two years into the occupation, which is like, I can't, I don't know if another time ever the U.S. has like military occupied another country and it took two years for them to become like the bad guys.
Yeah.
We got faster.
Don't worry, guys.
Yeah, yeah.
We've improved our game.
That's what Taylorism brings you.
Yep.
Yeah, actually, Nobu Sika Kishi, a lot of this got cut, but Kishi, big fan of Taylorism, absolutely loves it.
And yeah.
Him and our cops.
Yep.
Yep.
It's great stuff.
And, you know, there's one more thing that happens.
And this is, I think, the least well-known of the stuff that happens in Japan in this period, which is that there's this just mass destruction and looting of thousands and thousands of these local non-Shinto shrines like in Japan itself.
They had this giant culture conf campaign that just annihilates like all of the sort of like local non-like Shinto religions.
And all of this violence is about sort of, it's about annihilating any other culture in Japan and forcing everyone to sort of assimilate to the new Japanese nation state.
And this is what 19th and 20th century nationalism is.
It's this attempt to impose a single national language and culture on a bunch of people who, up until this point, like the only thing most, a lot of these people have in common is that like armed men show up every year and take stuff from them, they give to the same king.
And like other than that, they have different cultures, different languages.
And in order to get rid of those days, that used to be all government was, was armed men taking your stuff and giving it to the king.
And one day, when libertarianism wins, we'll get back to that.
Yeah, I wonder how long it would take for the CEOs to just literally start appointing themselves monarchs.
I don't know.
You know, there's that the Twitter account run in part by the Kent State gun girl, the Liberty Hangout account as like a libertarian conservative account like four years ago.
And in about a year and a half, was like unironically advocating the establishment of a monarchy.
That's why I made that joke.
It's like literally a thing that's happened.
It's incredible.
Yeah.
Okay, continue.
Yeah, you know, and all the violence that, you know, we've been talking about the violence in Okaido, the violence in the Ryuku Islands, and the violence in Japan itself.
Like this is, this is the crucible in which Japanese nationalism is formed.
And, you know, and like the rest of the 20th century nationalisms, the only place that that goes is imperialism to imperialism harder.
And this phase begins in 1894 when Japan launches a war against China, basically over control of the Korean Peninsula.
And they just like, they just smashed the Chinese army.
We talked about this war a little bit from the Chinese side in our Zhang Zongchang episode.
But, you know, from the Japanese perspective, this war makes Japan like the premier power in East Asia.
They're the big Asian power.
And, you know, and Kishi is born the year after Japan wins the Sino-Japanese War.
And when he's eight years old, Japan wins its next major war, which is the Russo-Japanese War.
Yeah.
Japan, like, yeah, Japan beats Russia so badly.
It's the longest wars in the world.
Oh, it's amazing.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Oh, man.
The Russians are so like start the war with such a like, ah, we're going to win us an easy victory against these savages and then lose their entire North Fleet.
Just their asses handed to them.
Like one of the biggest ass whoopings of the entire century military.
It's kind of funny because it's like...
Okay, so like, you know, they sailed this, they sailed the second fleet from like all the way around Europe, around Africa, and, you know, it gets Troy too.
But the first fleet, like the reason that fleet gets destroyed is so there, there is exactly one guy in the entire Russian Navy who has any idea what he's doing.
His name is Makarov.
He's a guy who had to be icebreaker.
Like he actually knows what he's doing.
And he's a big pistol from him.
Yeah, he's a cool guy.
And then at max range, just like a random Japanese cannon shot just like killed him in the entirety of like Russians like high command.
And that was it for the Russian Navy because there's no one else in the whole Navy that wasn't just like a random aristocratic appointment.
It's it's a God.
Yeah, it's it's great because you know it takes a lot to stand out as a Russian naval disaster.
Because the Russian Navy has pretty comprehensively been a shit show.
We could talk about the Kursk or the fact that their only aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov, keeps lighting its dry dock on fire.
We could talk about a lot of stories of the Russian Navy, but please, we should probably continue.
We'll do a whole Russian Navy episode.
Yeah, you know, and like in Russia, like they lose this war so badly, it causes a revolution.
And, you know, but in Japan, this is like, you know, this is when Japan like becomes one of the great powers.
It's no longer this like minor regional power.
Like it's one of the great powers.
And, you know, everybody's going to take him seriously after this.
Yeah.
Beat the biggest land empire in Europe.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, and the other thing is like, you know, they beat a European power.
Yeah.
Like that, that's a huge deal in this period.
And like there's a lot of people who will support the Japanese empire like out of like anti-imperialism, basically.
It's like they're a non-white empire.
We have to.
Yeah.
And this is, you know, trying to explain that to, I don't know, somebody in Nanjing.
Yep.
Yep.
Oh, boy.
Don't worry.
It's an anti-imperialist empire that's shot your family to death.
Anyway, yeah.
Yeah, it's bad stuff.
But, you know, like the product of this is like Kishi's growing up in the period like when Japan becomes like a superpower.
You know, they're like a minor great power.
Like they're not like Germany or like, I don't know, like the UK or France at this point, but you know, they're still a great power.
And, you know, and this is, this is, this is going to be sort of important because this is the sort of, this is the sort of like era of nationalism, an era of sort of like triumphalism that the Kishi's coming up in.
And Kishi is going to be one of, if not the main architect of Imperialism 3, Tokyo Drift, when that phase starts in 1937, and that's the fascist phase.
So we're going to, yeah, we're going to, we're going to work our way up to that throughout the course of this.
Now, Kishi's great-grandfather was actually like, yeah, you know, this is another source of the sort of like nationalism, patriotism he comes up in is.
He was like famous enough for doing like anti-shogun stuff before the restoration, that like when he dies there's like a bunch of articles on newspaper about it.
But you know he dies in 1902 and after he dies the Kishi family business goes under and this starts off this just really weird set of family drama and, oh god, Kishi's family is wild.
Um, so Kishi's older brother is uh Sato Ichiro and you know he becomes a vice admiral of the navy.
His younger brother, Sato Isaku, is the third longest serving prime minister in Japanese history.
Uh Kishi spoiler alert is also going to become prime minister and he's like kind of distantly related to a third Japanese prime minister, Yoshida Shiguru, which is extremely funny and reasons that we'll get into in the second episode.
Like, like these people are like they're like the Japanese bushes, except like the Satos are just like they're just random people, like they're not like rich, like they're just yeah it's it's, it's really opportunity shit yeah yeah, like it's like they.
They just like for one generation actually, and you know, after the, after Kishi, they're gonna keep, they're gonna be staying in politics.
But like that, one generation, just like, just ran Japanese politics for like half a century.
Yeah, it doesn't seem like that's ever a good idea.
Yeah it's, it's not great.
Um, perhaps running, perhaps politics isn't such a great idea, but that's a cop out anyway.
Yeah now, because the sort of the family business imploded.
Uh, Kishi's uncle Matsuke goes to like studying medicine in Tokyo and becomes a professor, like obstetrics yeah, and you know.
So Matsuke doesn't have any sons and so he adopts Kishi's younger brother Isaku to, to to marry his daughter.
And, and again I want to point out okay, Matsuke is Kishi's uncle right, that means that Isaku is marrying his first cousin and okay, that seems good.
Kishi also marries his cousin.
Like this is like not like a normal thing in this period.
Like people don't marry their first cousins like that often, and like both of the people in this family directly.
People knew a while ago, people knew a long time before this, that like yeah, that's not really a great idea, the half don't aren't looking so good.
Yeah like, they do it anyways, and it's, it's a it's, it's a great, it's a great sign of where this is going.
So, so Kishi stays with Matasuke when he's like very little and his uncle realizes that Kishi is extremely smart and you know like he hires a home tutor to help Kishi pass his like incredibly selective entrance exams for this middle school, and then he hires one to teach him English.
And you know it's this whole thing where he's a child prodigy and his uncle's like i'm gonna raise him and you know like Matasuke like, like deeply, genuinely loves Kishi.
Uh, like one of his biographers described it quote, treating his uncle like a son, Matasuke showered as much affection on Nobusuke as did his own parents.
Now, unfortunately for Kishi and unfortunately for like all of East Asia uh, in in, in the middle of Kishi's second year of middle school, Matasuke dies of pneumonia and Kishi sent off to live with one of his other aunts and you know like this is, this is like pretty.
He's still like young kid at this point and this is like this is really bad for him emotionally.
And you know the the second family that he gets sent to live with is like way less nice to him.
And so you know he still gets support for his academic career, but he has his like he he, he has his weird young age trauma which, like a couple, like one of his biographers like points this out and and is like, yeah, he has all the things that you need for a great leader.
He has he's.
He has a good family, he has a, he has a family that wants to do education and he has trauma.
And I was like, Do you understand where this is going?
It's very weird.
Yeah.
And Kishi, you know, I said, Kishi is a genius.
Like, he's at the top of his class in middle school.
He graduates top of his class again in high school.
And in 1918, he's accepted into the incredibly prestigious Tokyo Imperial University.
Now, what Kishi is in college, he starts to formally intellectually encounter the new Japanese far right.
And he becomes particularly enamored with like the Ur-Japanese fascist Ikikita, who Kita's a weird guy.
He has a lot of sort of eclectic ideas, but like his big thing is that he wants the emperor to seize power in a coup, like dissolve the parliament to create a fascist state.
And, you know, Kishi, Kishi's kind of soft on the like coup part.
And Kita has some ideas about like, well, okay, so you're going to coup the government, right?
And then you have a fascist state and the fascist state's going to like kind of do research redistribution.
And Kishi's like, eh, he's kind of soft on that part.
But like, you know, the fascist state part, he's, he's incredibly in favor of.
Bureaucratic Fascist Planning00:04:48
And yeah, so at this point in time, there's no evidence that it could possibly be a bad thing.
Yeah, yeah.
This is, you know, this is, yeah, this is, this is, this is pretty much a leading.
Promising new political theory.
Yeah, yeah.
Now, yeah.
So, so when he graduates from university in 1920, there's a couple of weird things about it.
So like, okay, so not, he's at the top of his class, right?
But like, not only is he at the top of his class, he, he has the highest test scores that anyone has ever seen.
Like in the history of this university, he has the best test scores.
And then he also, like, he takes a civil service exam, but like, he takes it as like, you know, you're supposed to spend like four or three or four-ish years in college.
He just takes it as a second year and passes.
And so, you know, he has this whole arc where he's basically like, you know, for most of his career, he's seen this just like prodigy.
And it's like sort of true.
And we'll get into, you know, it not being true when the war machine starts to come apart.
But yeah, you know, in this period, he makes what looks at the time like a really weird decision.
You know, Kishi's, yeah, he's a prodigy.
Like he could easily have entered like the home office, like the home ministry.
And, you know, he would have had this very easy career, like very safely, could have become vice minister or like a governor.
And instead, he joins the Ministry of Commerce, which at this point is like a fairly minor like government, government industry.
And he does this because specifically, like he really, really wants to be in charge of Japan's industrialization process.
And, you know, this is, this is going to be Kishi's like big thing over his career is he's, he's a, he's a planning bureaucrat.
He, he's, you know, he, yeah, like, while, while, while, when he gets to the Ministry of Commerce, he starts, you know, he does, he does all this research.
They send him all over the world to like look at different people's planning models.
And like, he gets obsessed with like 19, late 1920s German planning stuff, which, you know, looks kind of weird given what's about to happen in the German economy.
But yeah, and he starts advocating this thing called industrial rationalization, which is, you know, this is, this is like economic state planning.
But, you know, the way this is sort of different from like the Russian model is that like he wants to still have corporations, but he wants the corporations to sort of be run by government bureaucrats.
I mean, they're still like capitalists, but like he wants them to be run by government bureaucrats and he wants them to be sort of run for the state interests.
And, you know, and this is the other thing about this part.
Like anytime someone says state interest and they're like a bureaucrat in 1930s Japan, what they mean is like building a war machine.
And so, you know, you get these like weird, you get these weird passages where it's like you read this person sounds like a socialist.
And then you read like two more paragraphs and it's like, oh, right.
They want a bunch of state control so they can build like the largest army the world has ever seen and overrun all these Asia.
The state is a gun to these people.
Yeah.
For sure.
It's not entirely different with like a lot of the ways the Nazis would talk about the state.
Like the state in the state is a race too.
Like it's, it's, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And, you know, and Kishi, the way Kishi thinks about this is that, you know, he's going to chart like a third path between liberal capitalism and communism.
And this position, it becomes held by a group called, they're sort of innocuously called the reform bureaucrats.
And the thing that's important to understand about the reform bureaucrats that lots of people like don't get when they study this is that the reform bureaucrats, like all of them, including Kishi are fascists.
But the thing that's different about them and the thing that's, you know, makes it sort of obscures their fascism is that unlike most fascists, the way they're trying to do fascism is to just work through the bureaucracy.
And so, you know, basically like they have, they have this strategy of they're going to work for bureaucracy and work from the inside out.
And, you know, Kishi's aided in this by the fact that his boss, Yoshino Shinji, is the head of the Ministry of Commerce and Industry.
And he basically just like gives Kishi free reign to do whatever he wants.
And so Kishi goes, okay, we're going to start doing war planning.
And, you know, he wants to take over like state control of major industries so they can do sort of economic planning for military stuff.
And this gains him a lot of connections and support in the fascist sections of the army.
Now, Kishi allies with what's called the control faction of the army, which is founded by someone you all probably name, at least recognize, Hideki Tojo, which, yeah, yep.
He's a director who failed to shoot himself in the heart.
Yep.
It's great.
I love that stuff.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And, you know, what's sort of weird about the control faction is that like they're founded kind of ironically like to stop another faction of the army like from doing fascism.
And, you know, this, this confuses a lot of people because that is confusing.
Yeah.
Do you know what else is confusing, Robert?
The fact that no one has developed a system that's been capable of dethroning global capital.
That is confusing.
Yeah, it is.
It is confusing.
The Confounding Control Faction00:04:29
A lot of people say they've got the answer, but nobody's got it.
It's true.
Nobody's true.
I was going to say confusing that people don't buy our products and services.
It is that we chill on here.
Because maybe the answer to dethroning capitalism is to participate in it.
Don't think about that too much.
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Manchukuo and Anarchists00:14:54
All right, we're back.
All right, Chris, let's continue forward.
Yeah, so yeah, we're going to talk about the absolute mess that is Japanese fascism.
So we've talked about the control faction.
The control faction is formed to stop the Imperial Way faction of the army from doing terrorism.
And these guys, these guys hate each other.
Like the Imperial Way spends like a good part of the early 30s just like murdering the shit out of control faction officers.
And both of them are just like purging each other from the army.
And this whole thing is part of what a British analyst called the period of government by assassination.
And this period starts when a group of fascists, this is one of the, there's a million fascist groups in Japan.
This is one of the smaller ones like assassinates the prime minister in 1931.
And after that, everyone just goes, oh, wait, hold up.
We can just kill ministers.
And so, you know, they killed this just enormous number of government officials.
They killed a bunch of politicians.
They killed businessmen.
Like, they killed two more finance ministers.
And like they do, like they do so, there are so many coup attempts that like you, you could literally just do an entire podcast series that is just the coup attempts they attempt in these like five years.
Because it's like every different faction and every like possible coalition of these factions has their own coup attempt.
And, you know, finally, this period sort of ends when the Imperial Way and their ally try to do like one last giant coup in 1936 called the February 26th incident.
And they get kind of close.
Like they take a bunch of government ministries.
Like they almost kill the prime minister.
They almost kill the defense minister.
I think they do kill the defense minister.
But they lose.
And after that, Japan, the Japanese government is just like, okay, we're just going to kill you all.
And so they do this like mass execution of like every fascist leader they can get their hands on, including Ichikida, who is not involved in this in any way, but just like on principle, they were like, okay, the one thing all the fascists agree around is that they like you.
So we're like, we're just going to assassinate you.
And so, well, they don't say something.
They put him on trial on a show trial and convict him and killed them all.
And a lot of people, including people who are like pretty reliable fascism scholars, like Robert Paxton, will look at this trial and go, oh, well, okay, this is as if like, I don't know, like Mussolini's March of Rome had failed.
And like, this is the end of fascism in Japan.
Yeah.
And I think they're wrong.
And the reason I think they're wrong is that if they're looking for the fascist revolution in Japan itself, and the fascist revolution doesn't happen in Japan, it happens in Manchuria.
Now, we have talked about Manchuria before on this show, during the Zongzhongchong episodes.
It's, you know, it's like the Northeast China equivalent, New England, that like, you know, it borders Russia, borders Korea.
It's really close to Japan.
Also, it borders Mongolia.
You know, there's a lot of industry there.
And, you know, it's the base of Zhang's boss, who's also named Zhang, Zhang Juling.
And, you know, he's the warlord that Japan had been backing during the whole warlord periods of the Civil War era.
But both Zhangs lose the war against Chinese nationalists.
And, you know, like when we last left Manchuria in 1928, like a bunch of pissed off Japanese officers had just like bombed Zhang Juling's train.
And after that, Manchuria sort of falls into the hand of the nationalists and becomes technically part of the Chinese Republic.
And this is where, okay, things have always been weird in Manchuria.
This is where things get even weirder.
In 1929, an anarchist revolution breaks out in Shimmin Prefecture that calls itself the Korean People's Association in Manchuria.
Now, Shimmin's right on the border between Manchuria and Korea.
And this anarchist revolution is driven in large part by this enormous million, like 2 million people.
Koreans have fled the Japanese occupation in the Japanese occupation of Korea into Manchuria.
And it's a weird project because you have a bunch of anarchists and you also have a bunch of Korean nationalists working with each other because the thing both of them agree on is that they hate the Japanese.
And the anarchists sort of take the lead.
They form a bunch of these councils.
They start organizing the economy around mutual aid.
And they start to set up this education system.
They do all this stuff.
And then everyone immediately starts trying to kill them.
And so as is anarchist tradition, the Soviets start immediately assassinating people.
These guys have another disadvantage, which is that the Japanese army also starts assassinating them.
And eventually this whole sort of anarchist prefecture, sort of mini-territory collapses in 1931 when the incident that I would consider the actual sort of fascist coup in Japan starts, which is the Mukten incident that triggers this full-scale Japanese invasion of all of Manchuria.
Now, the Mukten incident's extremely weird.
Basically, what happened is that a group of officers in the Kwantung Army, which is the, Japan has this army in Manchuria that's there to like protect their railroads, basically, because Japan like technically owns all the land the railroads are on.
They have some other concessions.
And so they have this army that's just like in Manchuria that they can legally have.
And the office, some of the officers of that army basically look at the situation, they look at what's happening.
The rest of China, they look at the anarchist revolution and they're like, okay, we need to take over Manchuria like entirely.
But, you know, they have no, they don't have like an actual pretext.
So they stage a false flag attack on their own railroad and use the attack as like a pretense to start a full-scale invasion in Manchuria.
And yeah, it's, it's bad.
It's, and the other fun part about this story that we'll talk more about Yakuza later, but like those guys, so they, they go to like the Japanese government.
The Japanese government is like, you cannot do this.
And so they go to some like right-wing industrialists try to get funding and they won't do it.
And the people who will fund them are the Yakuza.
And so they have like 30 million yen just like from the Yakuza that the Yakuza are like, here, yeah, use this to take over Manchuria.
And so they do.
And, you know, the civilian government in Japan doesn't want this, but they basically have no choice because the invasion is like incredibly popular among the Japanese public.
And, you know, one of the reasons it's popular is that it, you know, there's very, I mean, there is some fighting, but Shenkai-shek and the nationalists are, you know, they're deep in their civil war with Mao and the communists in China.
And they're just like, okay, Japan, you can just have this.
And so they let them have this without a fight.
And the consequence is that the Kwantung Army, which is, you know, it's chocked full of Imperial Wei followers.
There's a whole, like, the whole army is just a bunch of different people and different fascist groups.
These guys wind up ending up in charge of setting up a new state in Manchuria called Manchukuo.
And the product of this is you get just an extremely weird state with like 16 different versions of fascism.
And, you know, this is supposed to be like an independent state.
And it like kind of is a little bit.
Like they installed Pu Yi, who's like the last emperor of China as like the emperor of Manchukuo, like this new state.
And, you know, they have all this propaganda about like the state's going to have, it's going to restore the kingly way.
And there's going to be like a direct relationship between the emperor and the will of the people.
And there's going to be these like autonomous agrarian villages ruled by landlords and everyone's going to like live in harmony.
And did that, did that happen?
So the strongest group in this like sort of new fascist utopia is called the Konkori Association.
And they're this like, they're this like fascist pan-Asian group that, you know, they have this whole line about like, okay, we're doing ethnic harmony and like all the races are going to work together.
We're going to work together to like expel the like the white imperialists.
And the reason they take this line is that like the actual Chinese people there don't want the Manchurian, they don't want the Manchukuo government there because they're like, okay, all of the officers in this thing and all of the like government officials are Japanese.
Like this is, this is just a Japanese occupation.
But, you know, you have this sort of this, this fascist like mass organization and their goal is to build popular support for this because, you know, the Japanese can't really just purely hold this on military force at this point.
So they have this puppet government and for about two years, they will rule, they, they rule like relatively unopposed.
But in 1933, the Communist Party sort of at the at the like behest of the USSR, the USSR is like, okay, you guys need to do this.
And so the CCP goes, okay.
And what they do is they start like this series of insurrections launched at like driving the Japanese out.
And the Japanese respond by slaughtering entire villages.
Very kingly way, very, very, very harmony between the races.
There's, you know, there's individual villages where they walk in, they kill, they kill 2,500 people in like a single massacre.
And, you know, between 1932 and 1940, they kill 60,000 people trying to suppress the communists.
And they move 5.5 million people, mostly real people, into these 10,000 of these hamlets, which I think if anyone studied the Vietnam War and you remember strategic hamlets from that, like this is that.
Like these hamlets have, they have three mire, they have three meter high walls, they have barbed wire, they have forced labor.
And so, you know, this is this is this is the state of like this is the state of like the kingly way in in in sort of fascist Manchukuo.
Yeah, and it's you know, I mean, one of the things that I think is and that you were getting at earlier, when people talk about kind of the rise of the the OG fascists, um, it tends to be very Eurocentric, but there's very much an open exchange of ideas that the Japanese are a part of that's that's going, but that includes concentration camps.
And it's not just and to that point, the Japanese are probably there, they're not really, I would doubt their inspiration as the German concentration camps or anything that a fascist is, well, that a recognized, like what we can traditionally consider a fascist power zone.
They were probably looking back at the Spanish and the British, would be my guess.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And the United States, possibly, because the Spanish, the concentration camp concept kind of originated from a Spanish general who deployed it in Cuba, but he got the idea from embedding with the U.S. military after the Civil War.
And anyway.
Yeah.
Well, and you can trace it sort of more directly too, because like all of that stuff, you know, it boomerangs back to the Philippines during the American occupation there.
And like, you know, that's one of the things.
This is one of the reasons that that stuff, like all the stuff the U.S. does in the Philippines, that is like in large part, like that's a big part of the reason why this sort of Japanese vision of fascism is popular to some extent in East Asia, because, you know, okay, before they like really openly start to massacre everyone, you know, it's popular because, I mean, Japan seed as like the only power, you know, the only non-white power in the East that can that can resist just the app, I mean, just the just incredible genocides,
the just like absolute horror that, that, that, that is happening just across the rest of East Asia.
Awesome.
It's great.
And yeah, so Kishi starts becoming interested in Manchukuo around 1934.
And partly he's interested in it because of the fascism, but his big interest in Manchukuo is the natural resources and the sort of industrial base it has.
And through his sort of position in the government bureaucracy, he's able to start working on the first Manchukuo five-year plan.
Now, Manchukuo sort of weirdly, you know, the fascist officers who are in the Japanese army there, they want this whole thing to be like an independent state that's like free from the corruption of liberalism and capitalism and stuff and whatever that like, you know, makes Japan like in peer and like the loose relation to the empire.
And Kishi looks at this and goes like, okay, wait, but we want this state to help run our war machine.
And, you know, and he, he, he, he, yeah, this five-year plan is, it's this giant like war mobilization thing to create this sort of, they call it the national defense state.
It's basically like it's turning the entire society, the entire state, the entire economy into a war economy.
And his plan to do this is he's going to bring in Nissan and have Nissan run like every war industry in Manchukuo.
Well, Nissan almost makes an acceptable truck.
So almost, you know, almost, you know, it verges on being as good as a ram.
Look, Nissan cars are all right, but don't don't use them for agricultural work.
Get it to coma.
Now, if you're telling me they wanted to put Toyota in charge of everything, that seems like a flawless plan.
I'll bet Toyota has never been involved in any kinds of crimes against humanity.
You know, there's like a fun, there's a fun thing here where, so, so the, there's these things in Japan called the Zaibatsu and Zabatsu.
And, you know, there are these like giant mega culmrates, like the people who own like Toyota or one of the conglomerates, Nissan's another one of them.
And like the army and most of the fascists like hate these guys because they see these like giant capitalist things as like, oh, this is like a Western thing.
It's like unpure.
They're like these corrupt bureaucrats and they get in the way of us and the emperor.
So like Kishi has to like do this incredibly elaborate dance to convince all of the fascist officers in Manchukuo that like, no, no, no, Nissan's not like Toyota.
They're not like the other conglomerates.
They're not like Mishibishi.
They're a new conglomerate and they're going to do fascism for us.
And this works eventually.
And Kishi gets transferred fully to Manchuria in 1937 and all of his stuff gets approved.
Basically, because he's moving in there and proposing this five-year plan, which is enormously expensive, by the way.
But the reason that he's able to do this is right as he's getting in there the second Sino-Japanese war starts, which is part of World War II, kind of its own thing.
I don't know.
There's a lot of running arguments about why World War II starts.
They had a war that was in its brutality and death toll.
Yeah.
Comparable to World War II at the same time World War II was going on.
You know, occasionally Americans noticed it.
There's some good Woody Guthrie songs that thank the mighty Chinese vets.
But there's this whole thing, like, I mean, like, in China, like a lot, like, it's like that whole war is called the anti-Japanese war or the war resistance.
That's what they call it.
Yeah.
Yeah, you know, because like that, like, you know, for most of the time this is happening, they, they, for about three or four years, China is just fighting the entire Japanese army by itself.
And, you know, this is, yeah, we'll, we'll, we'll get into the stuff that the Chinese government is going to sort of suffer in this.
But, you know, but the consequence of this for Kishi is that, like, he gets just total economic power and sort of political power.
I'm entering.
He can just, you can do literally whatever he wants.
And the thing that he wants to do, so, okay, so his big thing is his big major thing is he wants to implement the five-year plan to, you know, turn this into a war economy.
The second thing he wants to do is just get absolutely wasted literally every single night.
Officers Wasting Every Night00:02:43
Like he, Kishi.
Okay, well, that's scans.
Look, if you're going to be war criming, you're not going to be sober.
Yeah, no.
Yeah.
And then, like, you know, like all of the sort of Japanese officers and Japanese bureaucrats like go clubbing.
But like, even the other, like, the, the other, even like the Yakuza.
And vice versa.
I know every now and then I go out clubbing, get a little drunk with my friends, commit a couple of war crimes.
Yeah, but this is padlock and apartment gate closed with a button.
Anyway.
Robert.
For what?
This is not imaginedly.
Continue.
God.
The thing with Kishi is that, like, okay, so everyone's doing this at beta at the time.
Kishi is literally going to clubs and getting wasted every single night.
Even the Yakuza people are like, what are you doing?
It's like.
I have to take a second here to tell a story about the absolute chattest Japanese officer I've ever heard of.
So when I was in, I've been to Okinawa a couple of times because my parents lived there for years and years and years, both when they were kids and then later as adults.
And look, I'm not trying to like whitewash the problems with American bases.
There's a big, very active and I think very righteous movement to try to remove the bases on Okinawa.
We're going to talk about the origin of that too.
Yeah, I had no say in any of that.
My parents just lived there.
But so I went on this tour of like sites from World War II on Okinawa.
And one of the stories they told us was about this Japanese officer who when the Americans invaded Okinawa, he was at a brothel, just like had been drunk and fucking for days.
And the Americans advanced quickly enough that by the time he sobered up, he found himself several miles behind the American lines and alone hung over and having just fucked himself silly, snuck past the American lines, made it back to his unit, and then proceeded to lead them in battle for weeks, which is incredible chat energy.
You know, I say this though, like, like, this is just, that's just the default condition of the Japanese officer corps in this whole war.
Like, that's like, this is what they're doing all of the time.
If it weren't for the millions of dead, it would be a real dude's rock situation.
Yeah.
Like, you know, like, we're not saying these dudes rock.
No, these dudes, in fact, do not rock.
Do not rock.
And I'm going to emphasize this by like how cringe Kishi actually is.
Like, okay, so there's a quote of Kishi where he describes himself as, and this is a direct quote, quote, playboy of the Eastern world.
Like, he just calls himself this.
All right, okay.
Yeah.
You know, he also spends just like an enormous amount of time in the brothels.
Cartel, Brothels, and Dope00:15:29
Do we have a picture of this man?
I feel like I need a visual of somebody who would dare to give themselves that title.
Unfortunately, most of the pictures of him are from like when he's old.
Yeah.
Dick pills.
Look, if you're gonna be, if you're gonna, if you're gonna be fucking like a Japanese imperial law officer, you're gonna need dick pills.
Look, there's no shame in it.
All I'm saying is.
Performance enhancers.
Like the best athletes, like Lance Armstrong.
Fuck like.
Yes.
All I'm saying is Kishi probably needed dick pills.
I'm sure he did.
If you're going to be the Lance Armstrong of lecherous Japanese military officers, you're going to use some, you're going to dope.
And that's fine.
That's fine.
And that's why we sell dope.
Dick dope.
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Okay, this man isn't.
This man is not like, okay, it.
Okay.
That's all I'll say is he is not it.
Okay.
But Sophie, I think if there's one reason why men join imperial militaries and travel to foreign lands to do violence, it's because it's easier for them to get laid that far.
Fair enough.
Because they're not, you know, people who are like really pulling it in back home generally don't invade foreign countries.
I mean, fair enough.
The Nazis, not a lot of guys who were like knocking it out of the park with the, with the, with the exception of, oh shit, what was his name?
The guy Hitler had killed on the night of long knives.
The one haughty.
Ernst Rome.
Yeah, the one haughty.
Ernst Rome was pulling it down, and it's baffling that he became a Nazi.
But anyway, whatever.
I mean, this man does have like a decent, like, no, he doesn't.
I take it right.
I guess I've gotten known.
I've got a lot of this discussion on our side podcasts.
How fuckable was this war criminal?
Yeah, I mean, like, coming out on the iHeartRadio Network in July of 2020.
You just went back in time, but that's dope.
I know.
Sophie.
Robert.
I know.
Chris, would you like to continue this podcast?
We've derailed you enough.
Sophie's derailed you enough.
I will fight you.
Continue.
Yeah, well, I'd like to see you try.
Robert is actually like, Robert is kind of onto something on the like, the reason you go to do imperialism is so you can just like have sex constantly.
Get laid.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, boy, the British did it.
Yeah, yeah.
And this is why the Japanese are doing it.
And this is where we should mention that Kishi is an inveterate rapist, like serial mass rapist.
Yeah, so those brothels I was talking about.
So maybe a strong word.
Well, yeah.
So there's like a small number of people in there who like are sex workers.
Like 80 to 90% of those people were just like kidnapped from Japan and like brought there by force.
And yeah.
And so, you know, this is, you know, and Kishi's going there like every like one or two days, right?
He's at one of these brothels.
And you know, okay, even if like somehow, like by like some miracle, he somehow only had consexual sex there, he's also just like one, he's like, he has one of the weirdest like sex things I've ever heard of, which is that like every time like he was served a meal, he would demand to have sex with the raitress.
Okay.
Gross.
Yeah.
It's weird.
Yeah.
You know, and like those, those people, like, those women like absolutely did not consent to that, which means he is like, this man, yeah, he is like raping people like basically every day.
He's going so far as to say that in most situations, you can't properly consent to a man occupying your country with armed force.
Yeah.
Now, I will say, I will say, so, so, because, because Kishi is a racist, like inveterate racist, he will only sleep with Japanese women, but those people were also brought there by force by the Yakuza.
And Kishi, so, so while he's in prison in 1948, he has, he has an interview and his description of this time is, quote, I came so much it was hard to clean it all up.
Like, he has, like, he has, he has a, he has a guy, like, he has a specific guy.
He's like a specific maid whose job it is to clean up his sheets every night.
Oh, dude.
Like, yeah, he's, you know, he's got a come serve it.
That's yeah.
This is like a thing.
This is like a lot of the, like, the weird Japanese sex fascists, like, there's, like, a person who has to clean up all their shit.
Like, there's, I'm blanking on, I'm blanking on this name.
Like, there's that famous fascist Japanese poet who's like, like the Japanese Nobel laureate, who's just a fascist and like kills himself in the 60s or something when his coup fails.
Like, that guy also, yeah, like, there's, there's a person who had to fucking like clean out his sheets and like his robes and shit.
Also, check out my upcoming punk band album, Weird Japanese Sex Fascists.
Yeah.
Oh, there's going to be more.
Don't worry.
We have not yet reached the weirdest of the Japanese sex fascists.
That's coming next episode.
Yeah.
A lot of you know quotes in this episode already.
Yeah.
You know, but I mean, like, so like the fact that he's raping women like every day, I think like this helps explain what otherwise I think is kind of an almost unexplainable thing that we're going to talk about in a bit.
Just like the amount of violence that we're about to see.
But, you know, so the other thing that's happening here, Kishi's going to brothels, like it's not, it starts out as just like Kishi's like a sadistic rapist, but he also is doing official business there.
And his official business is that he's networking with local Yakuza bosses.
And this is where we get to sort of like formally introduce the third piece of the sort of fascist triad in Japan.
So, you know, you have, you have fascist army officers.
You have people like Kishi who are bureaucrat, technically civilian bureaucrats, but, you know, are also fascist and working through the sort of planning agencies there.
And the third wheel is organized crime.
Now, the Yakuza, they're, you know, a lot of organized crime winds up sort of backing fascists, but the Yakuza are different from, you know, say like the Italian mafia in that they're like fanatically right-wing.
They have been basically since the 1870s.
And they're like, these are like, the Yakuza are a lot of people who invented fascism in Japan.
Like they're like, they're like the first proto-fascist groups are these like giant Yakuza organizations.
And they're, I mean, they're really tied in with the state.
There's this story about how, like, so one of the, one of the first giant Yakuza fascist groups was called the Dark Ocean Society.
And these guys, you know, that they're triads, like they're doing drug stuff, but like the Japanese Ministry of the Interior asked them to like, this is in like 1910, they asked them to help like Japan stage an incident that will let them invade Korea.
And so like these guys, like, they have like, they have like special forces training.
Oh, no.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, you know, it's what it's what you do when you're young.
Look, everyone's got to do a little bit of invading Korea.
It's yeah, yeah.
Well, as long as you don't take it too far, it's fine.
Oh, boy.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, we're going to get to taking it too far.
But, you know, like the thing that's wild about like these guys, like they like break into the imperial palace and assassinate the empress of Japan of Korea.
Okay.
Like, yeah, like these are further than I took it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like the like the Yakuza, like they have, they have military training, they have intelligence training.
They're, they're an incredibly efficient political source, like sort of biopolitical operation.
And when Kishi meets with them, they basically just agree to solve all of Kishi's funding problems.
And, you know, they can do this because the Japan, like, the Yakuza has an enormous amount of money.
Like, yeah, the Yakuza in Manchukuo has like an enormous amount of money.
And the reason they have this money is because they run the drug trade.
Like, they run basically the entire column.
That's a good way to make money.
Yeah.
And, you know, and Kishi, Kishi basically like offers to like formally let them into the Japanese state.
And, you know, the everything he's offering them is like, hey, you guys want to do fascism?
Like, if you fund me, I will do so much fascism.
And the Yakuza is like, hell yeah.
And, you know, this is the thing I don't think people understand about the Japanese Empire.
Like, it's a cartel.
Like, the whole thing is a cartel.
It's like a cartel with like an army and a bureaucracy strapped to it.
And this is especially true in Manchukuo, where, you know, with Yakuza backing, like, this project is like almost self-financing.
Like, you know, by the mid-1930s, 20%, like fully 20% of the Japanese population is addicted to either opium or heroin or one of the other drugs that the Yakuza are running.
And this means that, you know, when the Yakuza really start to formally ally with the sort of state government, and, you know, the state government people are also doing drug running, but there's this like full-scale emergence.
And by that point, 50 to 55% of all state revenue in Manchukuo is just from the drug trade.
And, you know, like the Kwanjong Army, like, they literally like they start, they, they, they launch invasions of parts of China so they could take over opium and heroin factories.
And they just, they just like start making heroin and opium like for the Yakuza because this whole thing is just a cartel.
Yeah.
I mean, everything is when you get right down to it.
Yeah.
And the British are like, this is a podcast cartel.
It's true.
And like any other cartels, we're actively engaged in battling the Mexican military in the foothills of northern Mexico, you know?
Look, I keep saying Japan is China's Mexico.
And as a result, we are also fighting the Japanese military in order to aid in the spread of podcasts across the aisles.
They actually have taken no efforts to stop us.
So it's been very hard to start those fights, but we're working on it.
We're working on it.
Look, you can always get into a gun battle with the feds.
If you believe.
Yeah, if you believe, sometimes you have to force yourself into being an armed cartel.
Sometimes the state says what you're doing isn't illegal and there's no need for us to have an armed conflict.
But, you know, that's what separates the cartels from the people not committing organized criminal activity.
So the sort of final stage of this is that, so Kishi's successor in 1941 has this idea.
Manchukuo just like persistently has labor shortages.
And his plan is, oh, wait, hold on.
We can use the opium problem to solve our labor problem.
And so they start, he sets up this like these series of these, what are supposed to be drug rehabilitation centers.
And, you know, about 2 million drug addicts show up to work because they show up to these drug rehabilitation centers because people like don't want to be addicted.
And what the censors actually are is you walk into the center and you walk out the back of the center and then you're in a forced labor camp.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, they got them.
They got them.
Yeah, it's great.
It's great.
And then they tricked him.
And then, so there's like 200,000 people who are brought by their families.
They show up and they're not physically fit to work.
So the Japanese government injects them with what they call an opium detox supplement.
And the opium detox supplement is actually amphetamine.
That's a bunch of amphetamines.
It's great.
They don't detox.
And it's funny.
We just recorded the episodes.
They're running the week we record this about like the Nazis and drugs.
But yeah, when meth first came out in Nazi Germany, it was obviously invented in Japan, but when meth first like got popular in Nazi Germany, it was advertised as a treatment for opiate addiction.
Yep.
Which I guess, yeah, if you get horribly addicted to meth, you won't do as much opium.
Yeah, well, you know, what the Japanese government wants out of this is that like, okay, so these people can't physically move and we need a drug that can allow them to like move so they can be our slaves.
And yeah, so that's the solution to that.
Racial Theory and Skulls00:10:24
And yeah, so, you know, not wanting to be outdone in the sort of forced labor department, in August 1937, Kishi signs this bill that lets him just enslave prisoners of war.
So it starts with POWs and in 1938, it gets expanded.
And, you know, by the time you get to the expansion, it's like anyone doesn't have a job or like anyone they define as a bandit, which is like a bandit is just anyone who doesn't like the government.
And so, you know, but by 1938, it's, okay, we can enslave just anyone we see on the street.
And the people who aren't technically enslaved, Kishi pushes this thing that he calls unifying wages, which means forcing like everyone in, you know, everyone in Manchukuo, including like just the other random capitalists who are still there, to lower all of their wages down to like follow his planning model.
And when I say lowering wages, what I mean is that he figured, you know, Kishi's thing is that he's a bureaucrat, right?
He's all about efficiency.
He's all about rationality.
And the thing that he has rationally and efficiently decided is that you should pay Japanese Chinese workers exactly enough they don't starve.
And I guess it's better than paying them so little that they do starve.
Well, that starts to happen too.
Yeah.
And then, you know, like he's going to get it.
Yeah.
And then the way did the wages keep going down because they need to bring labor costs down.
That, you know, because that's the other way they're funding all of this is by just not paying people.
Now, Kishi, you know, and labor in Manchukuo had already basically been a bunch of Yakuza people, like a bunch of Yakuza people are in the factory.
And if you take a step out of line, they beat you.
Now, Kishi, Kishi's like, okay, we're going to rationalize this.
And Kishi's rationalization means that, you know, instead of it being independently the Yakuza forcing these people to work for like nothing, he's going to bring, you know, he's going to bring them into the state.
And so, you know, he's going to replace the pair of militaries with militaries.
The Yakuza and the MPs are going to get replaced with, you know, bureaucrats, regular police.
And the final thing this means is conscripting or enslaving like Chinese male farm workers to work in work camps and then forcing their families and children to work in the fields in their place.
Yeah.
Wow.
And this is where the race science starts.
Because, you know, Japan has its own race science that they kind of develop by themselves and they kind of import from Europe.
And, you know, this is part of their tailorism, like labor discipline rationalization process is they start doing these quote-unquote scientific tests for body shape, for cranial size, for nose structure.
And they turn these measurements into these like, they're basically like racial baseball cards with like numerically ranked raceballs on them.
Sure.
Yeah, yeah, raceball cards.
Yeah.
And there'll be like different points for like how much like what the shape of your skull is, like how big your nose is.
And these give you like more or less points.
And hold up the raceball card and you next to a migrant worker and you're like, okay, so which, how, how highly does this person score?
And I'm going to read a quote from the book, Absolute Erotic, Absolute Grotesque, which is a history of this period.
Hell of a title.
Yeah, it's great.
It's an incredibly wild book.
It's like half about fascism and half about the way that it's sort of the way that it's driven by what this like 30s Marxist Japanese sociologist calls the declining rate of pleasure, which is about how like, and you know, and I think this thesis actually fits what happens in the Japanese Empire is that this is already a really violent place.
And in order to sort of extract more pleasure out of like sex, right?
They start getting, they start going to stuff that's more and more violent.
And this isn't just like a sort of like porn thing or it's like the porn gets more extreme.
Like no, no, like they constantly have to seek out like more, like increasingly more violent ways of like raping people.
And this is like, you know, this is one of the sort of psychoses that like drives this whole like expansion project.
And the other one, the other psychosis is racism.
So yeah, I'm going to, I'm going to read this quote.
Excellent.
The SRM, which is the state railway company, studies classified coolies into three types, the Shandong type, the Hubei type, and the Manchurian type.
Consistently making up over 70% of all North Chinese immigrant laborers, Shangdong coolies were profiled as a, quote, thick skull type representing a low level of culture and capacity.
Quantities confirmed by their strong backs and powerful grip.
Their biometrics of large jaw, a cranial circumference of 55 centimeters, facial length of 1.35 to 1.4 times the line of the lower jaw, prominent cheekbones, stupidity, big teeth, a bridge of the nose that indicated docility, submissiveness, and barbarity added up to, quote, a type perfectly suited for physical labor.
Hubei coolies were a little smarter than those from Shandong, thanks to their anthropologically superior cranial shape.
Owing to this racial profile, Hubei coolies were seen as the best for semi-skilled labor of carpentry, plastering, and bricklaying.
Wow.
I want one of those.
I want that meme of the two hands meeting in the middle that's like Western racists, Japanese racists, and in the middle, exactly the same shit.
Yep.
Like it's.
You know, what if one of the things I was realizing as I was reading is the extent to which Japan is basically just like Japan is just like it's like it's it's East Britain.
Like they have cousin Marying.
They have all this weird pedophile stuff.
They have this giant empire.
They have like all the skull measurement cranial stuff.
They're both from this island.
They both have this just like incredibly weird like sort of set of psychoses embedded in their like in international culture that like it's it's a bummer that like one of the chunks of Asia that most successfully resisted being colonized and being oppressed by European powers did it that way.
By basically by becoming like the British Empire, but slightly different.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And like you can compare it.
Yeah, you can compare it to like, yeah, like Ethiopia, which like for a long time sort of like successfully like repelled, repelled etons, repelled sort of colonial forces.
And they like don't do this.
Yeah, that's not the only way to do things.
Yeah, yeah.
They're like, you know, there were other ways.
It's just the Japanese were like, imperialism, what if we did it?
And, you know, and I think part of this is that like, you know, in order to be able to do forced labor, right?
Like it is actually kind of hard to get human beings to like make other, like compel other human beings by force to do things.
And, you know, and this sort of necessitates developing this like this sort of like European style race science in order to just like keep the forced labor system alive.
And, you know, this is this racism and this Yamada race theory, it's not confined to sort of just like lower rank government people.
Like Kishi, Kishi is an inveterate racist.
Like he goes on, like everyone who worked around him at the time would talk about he would just like stop in the middle of like a beating and go on this rant about how all Chinese people are like lawless bandits and capable of following rules and all of this.
Yeah.
You know, his solution to that is like, well, okay, so Chinese people like inherently can't follow laws because of racial stuff.
So the only way you can get them to do things is by like treating them like a dog and just beating them, which is, you know, not how you're supposed to street dogs.
But, you know, and this, this just like all-pervasive racism is a big part of how you get everything that happens next.
So the Japanese like atrocities in Manchukuo are so bad that we don't have time to talk about Unit 731, which is Japan's.
Yeah, well, that's going to be a whole thing.
That's Japan's kind of Dr. Mangala mixed with Auschwitz.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They test, yeah.
I mean, they do a bunch of like... Auschwitz, but whatever.
You get what I'm saying.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's like basically like they're doing biological weapons testing on like live Chinese and Russian prisoners.
Like A-grade crimes against humanity.
Yeah, and Kishi.
The Scotty pippin of crimes against humanity.
You know, if I don't know basketball, I assume he was right, Sophie.
Sure.
He was the best point guard of all of the touchdown footballer.
You're doing great.
Birdie serving bicycle.
Yeah, nil.
Hockey.
Absolutely.
Brett Fafra.
Okay.
Really got me with the Brett phone, bro.
Parts of that were me joking.
Parts.
All right.
Please, Chris, continue.
So, so unit 731 is operating under Kishi's jurisdiction.
Like, yeah, it's operating in Manchukuo while he's there under jurisdiction.
And we don't have time to talk about that.
That needs its own episode.
What we are going to talk about next time is Japan's forced labor system.
Oh, yeah.
Now, that sounds, you mean by forced labor, I assume you mean like Jedi, right?
Like it's, it's, we're going to talk about Star Wars now.
We're going to pivot.
I mean, I think, I think the Japanese would have benefited from just having the ability to mind control people.
And, you know, I guess militaries would have.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And, you know, I guess the Jedi do like kidnap children and like educate them into a religious cult.
Yeah.
So, you know, and they, they also, they also employed an enormous child slave soldier army.
So yeah, it is Star Wars shit.
Chris, let us know how many Star Wars fans are in your DMs after that comment.
Oh, very brave.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, all right then.
So we'll be back.
We'll be back tomorrow because this is a motherfucking three-parter.
A mother fucking three-parter.
There's just so there's just so much shit to say.
There's a lot of shit to say about piece of shit.
Anyway, you can find us.
Yeah.
You can find us.
Look, do it yourself.
We're not going to do the work for you.
Find us.
Come on.
I mean, I...
Track us down in the world.
Hunt us like animals.
You can follow bastards at bastards pod on Instagram and Twitter and at CoolZone Media on Instagram and Twitter.
If you guys want to.
All right.
Well.
Yeah.
I'm not going to do personal handles.
You can find us.
Yeah.
Hunt us down like animals.
Hunt us.
That's the episode.
Hunt Us Like Animals00:02:21
On a recent episode of the podcast Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Budgetista Aliche to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
What would that look like in our families if everyone was able to pass on wealth to the people when they're no longer here?
We break down budgeting, financial discipline, and how to build real wealth starting with the mindset shifts too many of us were never ever taught.
If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more.
Listen to Money and Wealth with John O'Brien from the Black Effect Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
You know the famous author Roald Dahl.
He thought up Willy Wonka and the BFG.
But did you know he was a spy?
Neither did I. You can hear all about his wildlife story in the podcast, The Secret World of Roald Dahl.
All episodes are out now.
Was this before he wrote his stories?
It must have been.
What?
Okay, I don't think that's true.
I'm telling you, the guy was a spy.
Binge all 10 episodes of The Secret World of Roald Dahl now on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hi, I'm Iris Palmer, host of the Against All Odds podcast.
Every week, I'm sitting down with exceptional people who have broken barriers even when the odds were stacked against them.
Like chef Victor Villa of VS Tacos.
You know the taquero from the Bad Bunny Halftime show?
It was great.
It was a big moment.
It was special.
And I felt like I was really representing my family, you know, my brand, my city.
I was representing all taqueros, not only of like, you know, the U.S., but of Mexico and beyond.
All the taqueros of the world.
Listen to Against All Odds on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
If a baby is giggling in the back seat, they're probably happy.
If a baby is crying in the back seat, they're probably hungry.
But if a baby is sleeping in the back seat, will you remember they're even there?
When you're distracted, stressed, or not usually the one who drives them, the chances of forgetting them in the back seat are much higher.
It can happen to anyone.
Parked cars get hot fast and can be deadly.
So get in the habit of checking the back seat when you leave.