Part Two: The Slavery Loving Fascist who Built Modern Japan exposes Japan's WWII atrocities, citing 4.1 million Indonesian and 3 million Chinese forced laborers alongside the bureaucratic "comfort women" system that enslaved up to 200,000 women. Hosts detail horrific conditions in Fushan coal mines and Shanghai rape stations, debunking deniers who claim these were voluntary transactions like Holocaust denial. The segment concludes by introducing Kishi, a key architect of modern Japan who orchestrated Tojo's resignation to evade Class A war criminal prosecution, revealing how fascist structures enabled systemic violence and shaped the nation's post-war trajectory. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Money Control with Tiffany00:02:11
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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.
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Readers, Katie's finalists, publicists.
We have an incredible new episode this week for you guys.
We have our girl Hillary Duff in here, and we can't wait for you to hear this episode.
They put on Lizzie McGuire 2 a.m. video on demand.
This guy's playing.
2 a.m.
2 a.m.
Whatever time it is.
Lizzie McGuire and I'm like, wild, wild bad.
It was like a first closet moment for me where I was like, they're like, I don't feel like she's hot like the rest of them.
No, no, no.
I was like, she's beautiful.
I'm appreciating her in a different way than these boys are.
I'm not like.
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You know the famous author Roald Dahl.
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Was this before he wrote his stories?
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I'm telling you, I was a spy.
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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.
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Japanese Military Rape Stations00:16:32
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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.
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Ah, welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the only podcast where Sophie was just telling me how much she thinks it would be a good idea to reboot the TV show Friends.
But instead of being the cast of friends, all of the characters are famous medical malpractice committers from history.
And it's a show about them trying to get away with maiming their patients.
I think it's a bold idea for a TV show, Sophie.
I think we should pitch it to Netflix right now.
Thank you.
That's totally not something I would ever say because Girlfriends was a better show than Friends.
But, you know.
Let's just accept that Sophie said that and move on to Christopher Wong.
Christopher, how are you doing in part two of this episode?
Doing as well as you can be preparing to just talk about Japanese war crimes for an hour.
That's good.
You know, I resisted the urge to open this by saying what's manning my Cheerias because I thought that might be offensive.
Distasteful.
Yeah.
No.
Anyway, let's dive back in.
This one's dark.
Continue.
Yay.
Yeah.
All right.
So we're about to start talking about the Japanese forced labor system.
And I think the best way to introduce this is by, I'm going to read part of the introduction to a book called Asian Labor in the Wartime Japanese Empire, Unknown Histories, which is this, basically there's a conference on sort of Japanese war crimes, Japanese sort of forced labor during the war.
And all the sort of papers in that are like combined into this book.
And the introduction goes, Grief and despair find little place in most historical accounts and are absent from most of the source material historians use.
The hundreds of thousands who died were sons, husbands, and fathers, or sometimes daughters, wives, and mothers, and had families awaiting their return.
Deaths often went unrecorded.
Coolies too sick to work were placed in death houses where they spent their final hours in accumulated filth, mud, and vomit, and the excrement produced by those who had died before them, without food or medicine and certainly without hope.
Their corpses were thrown into unbarked graves or burned or abandoned in forests or tossed into rivers.
Wee!
Welcome to Behind the Bastard.
Show about bad people.
Now, it's really hard to pin down the exact number of people who were forced to work around the Japanese Empire.
And this is, you know, this is a running theme of this episode is that right before Japan was occupied the end of World War II, they destroyed all of their records.
Like, I mean, this order, like, this is not just records in Japan.
Like, this order goes all the way down the command chain.
They're destroying records just everywhere they can find them.
So most of what we have are estimates.
And, you know, the estimates, estimates are not good.
The Indonesian government estimates that 4.1 million Indonesians were forced to work for Japan during the war.
I mean, you know, just to get a sense of the scale of this, like, there's, there's an individual railroad called the Tai Burma Railroad just alone that uses 180,000 or possibly as many as 270,000 people.
Yeah.
And, you know, the number in China between 1941 and 1945 seems to have been about 3 million.
But, you know, that's the only period we have even sort of okay numbers about.
Before that, we just don't know.
And, you know, this is also happening in Korea.
110,000 Koreans are constructed into the army.
There's 700,000 who are constructed to forced labor.
And Kishi is going to import a lot of those people to Japan to do forced labor.
Everywhere the Japanese Empire goes, they're doing this.
And, you know, and we've talked about in the last episode about how sort of this starts with Kishi talking about, you know, Kishi's like, okay, well, we'll put the war, we'll put the prisoners of war to work.
And then it expands to just like, you know, people who are vagrants and people who don't have jobs.
And then it's like anyone who opposes us.
And by 1941, the Japanese army is doing just slave raids.
Yeah, between 1941 and 1942, the Japanese army burns tens of thousands of Chinese villages.
And they put the survivors in concentration camps.
And they put about 100,000 people into these forced labor camps.
And of these conscripts, like 30 to 40% of them die.
They die from dissolution.
That's not a bad guy.
I lose more conscripts.
Yeah, sure.
Yeah, you know, and I say this, like, that's 30, the 30 to 40% is kind of being dragged down by the fact that there are some places where the conditions aren't as bad.
Yeah, you know, and here, like, you know, we talk about a place where it was really bad.
So one of the centers of Kishi's five-year plan in Manchuria is these coal mines in Fushan.
And, you know, these are the coal mines that are like fueling all of Nissan's industrial development.
And the replacement rate for these workers between 1938 and 1944 was out of every 40,000 workers total they had, they had to replace 25,000 of them every year.
And, you know, a small number of these people just like escaped.
But almost everyone else, and this is, you know, a very small percentage of them escaped, almost everyone else, almost all the 25,000 people either died on the job or Japanese army just executed them for insubordination.
Because, you know, this is something the Japanese army starts to do in this period is that they just, you know, they just start randomly killing people.
And like these, these people, we've talked a bit about the conditions.
They die.
A lot of these people die from dysentery and they die from cholera because, you know, these camps, like they, there's there's no medical facilities at all right, so you know, when you get sick, they just like they lay you on a cot and you die, and you know, and a lot of these people are dying from overwork, they're dying from starvation, and you know.
And then also like the Japanese army, like they're really creative about, like how they kill people.
So I mean you have like the classic like they beat people, they stab people, they shoot, they light them on fire, they.
They also like they throw them off boats, they like they drown people in submarines, Which is the thing I've never found.
Another like recorded thing of people doing is like they'll force a bunch of people into a submarine and just sink it.
Oh god.
Wow.
If they're burning a whole submarine, they really want your ass dead.
Yeah.
And like this is a this is a thing, like particularly, we'll get more into this in a bit, like particularly like that, that's a way they kill like comfort women because yeah, they don't want any record of them existing.
So, oh, we'll take, we'll put them in a submarine and it's a way of disappearing.
Okay, well, yep, yep.
That's that's a bummer.
Yeah.
So all of those numbers, that's just for, you know, physical labor.
Japan is also running something called the comfort women's system.
And, you know, the comfort women's system is the academic and legal term for Japan's military sex slavery system.
And so, you know, if you read academic accounts, you read journalistic accounts, you read like legal accounts.
They talk about comfort women and comfort stations and use all of these, you know, these like pretty little euphemisms developed by Japan specifically so that in their communications about it, they can sort of obscure what's actually happening here.
And this is the point where it becomes useful that I am no longer an academic and I'm not a lawyer, which means I don't have to use any of these.
What this is, is a enormous bureaucratic organized system of military sexual slavery ran out of army rape rooms.
And the first, the first of, yeah, it's bad stuff.
The first of these, these sort of military rape stations is set up in Shanghai after Japan launches an attack on Shanghai in 1932.
As one of their sort of.
They have these like periodic sort of fights with with, with the, the Chinese government, basically up until 1937 when like, the actual war starts.
And I I want to go into what happened here because you know, most accounts of sort of Japanese sexual atrocities in East Asia give this, give this like this whole 1932 attack, like one line, and so I want to read this passage from the book Chinese Comfort Women, testimonies from Imperial Japan's sex slaves.
The soldiers immediately kidnapped good-looking local women and kept them in military barracks as sex slaves.
At the same time, the troops continued to assault women in nearby villages.
Reportedly, over 1,000 local women were raped in their homes.
Not even pregnant women, young girls or elderly women were spared.
Within the same reason in region, in the autumn of 1935, more than a hundred Japanese soldiers attacked an area where the Chinese resistance force was active.
Carrying machine guns, the troops drove the villagers into a large yard, dragged all the women out of the crowd and raped them in the presence of their family members.
Several soldiers ripped the clothes off a woman who was six months pregnant and tied her to a table in the yard.
They took photographs while violating her And then cut her abdomen open and pluck the fetus out with a bayonet.
Yeah.
And this, that is before the start of the war.
Yeah.
We're not even warring yet.
Yeah.
Nope.
Yeah.
This is, this is, that's, that's, that's 1932 or 1935.
Now, the rape stations as a sort of, you know, and okay, I will say one other thing.
There's some indication that the navy had been using like sort of organized rape stations like before 1932, but this is another one of those things where the documentation is really hard because, you know, I mean, the army is not just going to tell you they are running like a sex slave station.
Yeah, most people who do sex slave stuff don't like to talk about it all that much.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, even like, even, you know, like they're doing it all the time, but like even, even like slave owners in the south didn't really like to talk about like that, the fact that that's what they were doing a lot of the time.
No.
It's yeah.
It's one of those leads you to one of those are we the baddies kind of moments.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's something that even the people who do it know is wrong.
Yeah.
Yeah.
When I talk about the fact that I'm forcing myself on these children that I basically own, I feel like kind of a monster.
Yep.
You know, and it's funny.
Like I have actually read accounts of Japanese soldiers who dreamed the war were like, wait, are we the baddies?
And it never involved this.
It was always about like they would be sent into the Philippines and, you know, and the soldiers are like, they're given the standard American line of, well, you'll be greeted as liberators.
And they get there and, you know, they're like hacking Filipino like soldiers to death with bayonets.
And they're like, wait.
But it's never this shit.
It's, yeah.
Now, rape stations don't come into widespread use until after 1937, 1938, which is after the rape in Nanjing.
And, you know, that's another atrocity that like probably deserves an episode.
And that because Kishi isn't directly involved in it, we don't really have time to talk about it.
The short version of it is.
So the Japanese army had been expecting to just like blow their way through all of China in like three days.
And instead they fight the Battle of Shanghai, which is, you know, the nickname of it is Stout and Ground on the Shanghai.
They fight this incredibly brutal battle.
Like they lose 60,000 troops and the army just goes berserk.
And, you know, China's capital in the war have been at Nanjing and Japan takes a city and they kill the number of dead civilians and prisoners of war is it's generally held to be about 200,000 and they also rape somewhere between 20,000 and 80,000 people.
Jesus Christ.
Yeah, it's really bad.
If you say they raped and then the number is the population of a small city, yeah, that's again, you're in the A-legs in terms of the crimes against humanity, my friend.
Yeah, yeah.
And, you know, and I say this, like, you know, even with all the stuff we're about to talk about, like, these sort of just random rapes where like the Japanese army goes into a village and rapes everyone, then leaves, like, that's still, that's still going to be happening throughout the entire war.
And, you know, I mean, like, and to some extent, you can talk about the fact that like sexual violence is always a part of war, but like the Japanese army is like rape heavy by army standards.
And then they're also doing the sex slavery stuff.
And, you know, yeah.
And something, you know, and I think this is, there's sort of like, there's a thing that you read a lot about how the military sex slavery system is actually it's well, you know, it's, it's about like the Japanese army trying to get the rape under control after after Nanjing.
And like, well, it doesn't work if that's his intention.
And the second thing is, you know, it's kind of true.
But, you know, when I say the Japanese army wanted to get the rape under control, like what I mean is that they want the rape to happen through the army bureaucracy in army facilities at, you know, created by the army.
And at times the army is allowed.
And they also like want to regulate, try to regulate things in a way that soldiers don't get STDs.
You know, but, you know, and they succeed in that to some extent.
Like, they succeed in bringing the rape directly into the military command chain.
Yeah.
And, you know, before I move on, I want to mention there's this enormous, primarily Japanese, just like intellectual sort of network and right-wing outrage machine that, like, this is their thing.
This and denying the rape and non-jing are like their thing.
They're like the Japanese war crimes deniers.
And they may make all these arguments of how, like, no, no, no, these weren't sex slaves.
These were paid prostitutes.
Like, they're not.
You know, or, you know, that the rape rooms are just sort of brothels.
And it's not, you know, they're the people who do the whole is about stopping rape, not committing it.
And it is like very, very important to understand that every single one of these peoples are full of shit.
Like, these are, these are sort of like intellectually, like, these people are like, like, they're incredibly similar to like the sort of like European Western Holocaust deniers.
Like, everything they say is lies.
And the reason they're lying about it, and, you know, the reason they have to do this is because just of the absolute raw horror of what I'm about, of like the stuff that I'm about to read.
This is a testimony.
I'm going to read a testimony taken from the UN Human Rights Commission who did a report on the sex slavery system in 1996.
This is the report of a Korean woman.
Well, she's, she's not a woman.
She's a child when this happens.
This is her recollection.
13.
Oh, geez.
Child.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, I was just curious.
Like.
Yeah, yeah.
Sorry.
Yeah.
Not that it would mitigate any of that.
I was just curious.
No.
Yeah.
Well, yeah.
So sorry.
The reason I didn't say it was.
So this is the beginning of it is.
One day in June, at age 13, I had to prepare my lunch for my parents who were working in the field.
So I went to the village well to fetch water.
A Japanese garrison soldier surprised me there and took me away so that my parents never knew what happens to their daughter.
I was taken to the police station in a truck where I was raped by several policemen.
When I shouted, they put socks in my mouth and continued to rape me.
The head of the police station hit me in my left eye because I was crying.
That day, I lost eyesight in the left eye.
After 10 days or so, I was taken to the Japanese army garrison barracks in Hesan City.
There were around 400 other young Korean girls there, and we had to serve over 5,000 Japanese soldiers as sex slaves every day, up to 40 men per day.
Each time I protested, they hit me, stuffed rags in my mouth.
One held a matchstick to my private parts until I obeyed him.
My private parts were oozing with blood.
Jesus Christ.
One Korean girl who was with us demanded to know why we had to serve so many, up to 40 men per day.
To punish her for questioning, the Japanese company commander Yamamoto ordered her beaten with a sword.
While we were watching, they took off her clothes, tied her legs and hands, and rolled her over a board with nails until the nails were covered with blood and pieces of her flesh.
In the end, they cut off her head.
Jesus.
Another Japanese, another Yamamoto, told us it's easier to kill you all, easier than killing dogs.
He also said, since those Korean girls are crying because they have not eaten yet, boil the human flesh and make them eat it.
One of the Korean girls caught venereal disease from being raped so often, and as a result, over 50 Japanese soldiers were infected.
In order to stop the disease from spreading and to, quote, sterilize the Korean girls, they stuck a hot iron bar in her private parts.
Once they took 40 of us on a truck far away to a pool filled with water and snakes, the soldiers beat several girls, shoved them into the water, heaped earth on the pool, and buried them alive.
I think over half the girls who were at the barracks were killed.
Violence and Inventiveness in War00:04:37
Twice I tried to run away, but both times we were caught after a few days.
They tortured even more.
We were tortured even more, and I was hit on my head so many times that all the scars still remain.
They tattooed me on the inside of my lip, my chest, my stomach, and my body.
I fainted.
When I woke up, I was on a mountainside, presumably left for dead.
Of the two girls with me, only one had survived.
A 50-year-old man who lived in the mountains found us, gave us some clothes and something to eat.
He helped us travel back to Korea, where I returned, scarred, buried, and with difficulties in speaking at the age of 18 after five years of serving as a sex slave for the Japanese.
Jesus God.
Yeah, it is.
There are hundreds and hundreds of pages of testimony like this.
Yeah, I mean, you know, it is.
It's my job to read about crimes against humanity.
And that's, that's one of the roughest things I've ever heard.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like, I, the only thing I've ever read, I don't think I've, that's, it's the worst account of rape I've ever read.
The only thing I've ever read that was like, yeah, that was like like even comparable to it was like, was accounts of like what like Haitian slave owners would do.
Yeah.
So like their slaves and that stuff.
Yeah.
I, you know, those guys are like, I think more creative, but I heard some accounts from Yazidi women who were enslaved by ISIS that, you know, it was less inventive.
It was more with them just a case of neglect, like not letting these women clean themselves and like them just getting these horrible infections as they continued to be.
But I don't think I've ever heard a case that's that.
Yeah.
Because it's not just like, it's not just like violent and horrific.
It's like creatively, innovatively, like a lot of it's, it's far more than just, you know, obviously rape is very seldom just like about a sexual appetite, but it's, it's so, it's very clearly so much more than just these are soldiers who are horny.
There's like, there's a lot of very frightening things going on in that.
Yeah.
I mean, I think part of it, you know, I was talking last episode about the theory of the declining rate of pleasure.
And, you know, I think there's something like this with violence too, where, you know, because the other thing that reminded me of this term inventiveness that I've read about was accounts of like what the El Salvadorian National Guard did during like during the Civil War in the 80s.
And that stuff, it's like, you know, you get to a point when you're in a war where like you've seen so much violence that, you know, you become sensitized to it.
And it becomes this sort of constant race to like find something you can do that's more violent that will like stop people from opposing you.
But this isn't even like that.
These guys just like enjoy this.
Yeah, because there's no, that's not, there's none of that that is like an attempt to scare people out of resistance.
That's just, it's like serial killer shit, you know?
It's the, you know, you've done so many other depraved things and now you're getting creative with it out of almost boredom.
It sounds like there's an element of that of just like, well, fuck it.
We haven't been stopped yet.
Let's try, let's escalate this.
Let's, let's, let's go a little further.
Let's try something harder.
I don't know how much of that is boredom, how much of it is like desensitization, but like, I mean, fuck, you could, you, you could have done a whole episode on that specific.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like, I think, you know, one of the things that the like the sources talk about is how this, it's, you know, it's part, it's about power, but it's about like power on a sort of civilizational level that it's like, you know, like what's happening here is that the Japanese soldiers are like, you know, like we can like, like we can rape these women and that's, you know, this is, this is our way of like raping the entire Chinese nation.
It's this way of sort of part of it is it's about.
is kind of about like the sort of demonstration of, of sort of violence superiority in that like a, a lot of what some of the goals are, are about just sort of like, like this weird, like, like a mass, it's supposed to be this like emasculation of like the Chinese resistance where it's like, like, you know, if you're a Chinese man, like he's like, Hey, look what we can do to your women.
And it's just, you know, because this, this is like, this is the way these people think because you know, this is like, yeah, this is, it's, um, okay.
Demonstrating Superiority Through Brutality00:04:33
like I I yeah, I don't know what else to say about it.
I mean, I think pretty much everyone listening is gonna have the same uh reaction, which is just kind of like numb horror yeah, uh.
So maybe here's ads yeah ads I I, I.
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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 financial education is not always about like i'm gonna get rich, that's great.
It's about creating an atmosphere for you to be able to take care of yourself and leave a strong financial legacy for your family.
If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more.
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If you're watching the latest season of the Real Housewives Of Atlanta, you already know there's a lot to break down.
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Drew Pinky has financial issues.
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Will Farrell's Big Money Players and iHeart Podcast presents soccer moms.
So I'm Leanne.
This is my best friend Janet.
Hey, and we have been joined at the hip since high school.
Absolutely.
Now a redacted amount of years later, we're still joined at the hip.
Just a little bit bigger, hips, wider.
This is the podcast.
We're recording it as we tailgate our youth soccer games in the back of my Honda Odyssey with all the snacks and drinks.
Sidebar.
Why did you get hard seltzer instead of beer?
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Just hit off.
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Microphones?
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Cuts through the defense like a hot knife through sponge cake.
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I love this team, and I'm really trying to be a figure in their lives that they can rely on.
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Look, money is something we all deal with, but financial literacy is what helps turn income into real wealth.
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Banality of Evil in Fascism00:14:04
And I'm sure all those ads really wiped that horror from people's minds.
So let's just barrel straight ahead.
And yeah, let's barrel ahead.
Yeah.
So this is another place where it's very hard to pin down numbers because Japanese Empire, you know, like they destroy, they destroy every record that they can and they kill huge numbers of these women to keep them quiet.
But the estimated number of women enslaved by the Japanese Empire is about 400,000.
The newer scholarship suggested about half of them are Chinese.
There's also, at the very least, tens of thousands and probably almost certainly over 100,000 from Korea.
And past that, it gets even harder to get numbers because the records and the survivors are both hard to find.
But we know that this is happening that the levels of violence and the abductions in the Philippines are similar to this.
It's just basically everywhere the Japanese Empire goes, like this is, this is what they're doing.
They're enslaving the people they conquer.
You know, we talked about how the victim in that last story is 13.
The victims tend to range from about 11 to 24.
And the most common is between 13 and 19 because, you know, these people are also pedophiles.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, and I think that I think I've told this story a couple of times, but there was a moment where I was hanging out in Budapest with a friend of mine, kind of in the center of town.
They've got all these statues of these, these Magyar kings on horseback with swords and axes and stuff, these like warrior, legendary warrior kings.
And my buddy turns to me and says, I wonder how many of them didn't fuck little kids.
And that's not a Hungarian thing.
That's like literally any culture.
Like when you go back to the conquering war leaders, it's like, yeah, I mean, most of them were fucking 14-year-olds, just like half of your favorite rock stars in the 80s.
Yep.
It's not great.
Yeah.
And I think this.
Yeah.
It's yeah.
This, then this, I think, is, this is just sort of pure expression of power.
And I think it's part of why, and this is folding into a bigger thing.
We don't have to go out, but like, why I think it's so toxic that like our cultural discussions of pedophiles always focus on what's much rarer, which is like adults like going after and molesting like little bitty kids, four and five year olds, when like the vast majority of pedophilia is grown men who the most people would not say are a pedophile who go out of the way to fuck teenage girls.
That's most of it.
That was Epstein.
You know?
Anyway, sorry, rant over.
No, yeah, I think like this, this is, this is just sort of like what having absolute physical, like the ability to just murder anyone you want.
Like, this is what that does to you.
And, you know, one of the other things that's very common here is that a lot of the women and children, and again, I want to emphasize, like, these are children who resisted, you know, these are fucking 14 to 19 year olds.
And, you know, they're either beaten, stabbed, or just decapitated.
And, you know, they decapitate kids in front of their families constantly.
There's also, so almost everyone involved in this, all the women, all the children become addicted to opium or some other drugs.
Who would not?
Yep.
Yep.
And, you know, there's also, you know, we've sort of alluded to this, but like there's everyone gets venereal diseases.
Yeah.
Because it turns out that when you're getting raped by 40 men a day, you get venereal diseases.
And the army, the army injects, like the sick with what almost certainly was the mercury-based antibiotic, Salversan.
Yeah, it doesn't seem like mercury would help.
No, it's, it's, yeah.
You know, and they're doing this not because they care like at all that these women are like disease, like, you know, they're getting sick.
Like they're doing this because they want to keep down the spread of disease among the soldiers.
And, you know, this is, this is where you start to get to just, I mean, the horror of this just like doesn't end because, you know, these people have to deal with addiction.
They have to deal with disease.
Again, the people who survived this.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, they, they have, they have this, like, this unspeakable.
Like literally, like, people lose the ability to talk.
Yeah.
It's incomprehensible.
Yeah.
In a lot of ways.
And then, you know, to make it worse, the communities are taken from, like, a lot of the time, they don't want them back because, you know, like, these women are seen to have been defiled by the Japanese.
And so, you know, it's happened a bunch of times.
I mean, there's versions of that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Recently with ISIS, yeah, it had a lot of times throughout history.
Yeah.
Yep.
Like, I, like, I read a story about someone whose account I almost included in here and then cut because it was too long.
But like, so she, she comes back to her village and like the only person in her entire village who will like talk to her is the person she was supposed to be married to.
And like that guy is like a genuinely good guy.
But like he can't take it.
And he goes and joins the army and then like dies somewhere fighting the Japanese in northern China.
And so, you know, and you have these, and this is also part of why the records aren't, aren't that like well known because, you know, the survivors, there's a huge cultural thing about like, you know, like, you know, we've been talking a lot in the last few years about how hard it is for any rape survivors to just like talk about in the open.
And like this is so much harder.
And there's all these political constraints on it.
And yeah, and this stuff, you know, like this stuff is not that well known in the West.
And it leads to situations like something happened a couple of years ago, Stephanie Kelton, who was Bernie's economic advisor and was like probably the most famous like modern monetary theory person, like went to Japan and advised a group of like of Liberal Democratic Party lawmakers.
And some of those people were like in fascist groups that were like founded by non-Jing denialists.
And this stuff happens because the absolute horror that happened here just people don't know about it because it's not like the Pacific isn't a theater that people talk about much other than sort of Island Hopping and like, yeah, that's sort of Japanese prisoners of war.
Yeah.
Now, now Kishi's role in this while he's in Manchukuo is sort of interesting.
So Manchukuo merely, and I'm using this as enormous scare quotes, merely has 42 sex slave stations, which is kind of low for a region that size.
Though again, Kishi like Kishi just like lets this happen.
Kishi's like fine with it.
He he's almost certainly is diverting economic resources to it.
But the reason it's so low compared to a lot of other places is that Kishi's Yakuza buddies are doing like exactly the same shit in their brothels.
Like it's not, it's not quite as bad.
But you know they're also kidnapping a bunch of women and like repeatedly raping them.
But but you know because because, because the yakuza is like so heavily in control of the sex trade, there's less of the sort of straight up military taking control of it.
And you know, and the yakuza stuff Kishi, like Kishi's fucking, like these are all like all the people doing this are like his personal friends and like he's, you know Kishi's, in these brothels constantly while he's in Manchuria, and you know he.
So he gets pulled out of Manchuria 1939 to become the vice minister of Commerce in order to plan what's called the New Economic Order.
And you know this is.
You know I talked about in in the first episode that the, the sort of the third phase of of Japanese imperialism I call Tokyo Imperialism 3, Tokyo Drift, and this really, I think is is, is where that starts, or I mean not starts, but this is the sort of finality of it.
You know, like all of the sort of abuse you have like happening in the colonies, like, you know, all the stuff that creates fascism in Manchukuo, all the stuff that like, you know, all the sort of fascism in the Japanese army, all of that fascism that's been in this sort of puppet state, it all comes home.
And, you know, and you get Kishi going there in 1937, and that fuses these sort of like Tokyo, highly educated fascists, like Tokyo bureaucrats with this sort of military, like fascism, and those guys.
take control of Japan.
And that's how you get.
You know that that, that's how you get sort of full-scale fascism in Japan.
And you know, in 1940 1941, when this stuff is being implemented, implemented like the political parties just like dissolve themselves and you know they're like okay well there's, there's no point of parties anymore, we're just gonna work with totalitarianism.
And you get inside of Japan, like you get these I don't know how to describe them, I guess it's like you know the the the, these sort of like mass fascist groups.
So the Kokori Association had been that group in Manchuria and Kishi is sort of involved and helped setting up the Imperial Rural Assistance Association, which is, you know this, is like this, this is the NEW Order's version of this and you know it's, it's supposed to be this like sort of mass fascist organization build.
It's a bureaucracy and it's about sort of building support for the war and meanwhile Kishi is just sort of like Kishi's kind of like dicking around with his planning models.
So you know his, his big thing in this period is he wants to, he wants to turn he, basically he wants to turn Japan into, into a version of Manchuria, where it's the, the entire economy, the whole society is built towards just fueling what the army is doing.
And he says, he starts creating these things called control associations, which are, you know, so on the industry level.
Everyone in control association is like forced to work together, like all the companies, all the unions and he, so the the the he he, the.
The head of each control association is called the fearer.
Okay, that sounds good.
Not a word with any connotation.
Yeah, let's move on.
Let's just move right on.
And the funny part about this is that I'm about 90% sure, from the way it's described, that they're speaking Japanese normally.
And then when they have to address the guy, they say the word Führer in German.
Like they just, they say Führer in German.
It's like when we want to, it's like using the word Schabenfreude, you know, some German words.
Yeah, yeah.
And, you know, and this Führer is supposed to, you know, they're supposed to control like the entire production process, right?
They're the people who set the prices, they're the people who...
They set quantities, they set distribution, they set the organization production process.
And these are the like the people like Kishi who are the kind of like boring bureaucrats who do all of the war machine stuff.
And this like really pisses off the sort of Zeibatsu and the big business people because they're like, oh, wait, hold on.
What do you mean everything's run by the state now?
And so they accuse Kishi of communism.
And so Kishi, like, like, like half of his allies, like, all get arrested because on accusations of being communists, and he's, like, forced to resign.
And so, you know, there's like, there's like an eight-month period when he's out of power when you can be like, okay, everything that happened in this eight-month period in 1940 was not Kishi's fault.
But then, you know, his old friend Hideki Tojo becomes the prime minister in 1941 and he brings Kishi back as the minister of commerce and industry just in time for Kishi to sign the declaration of war with the U.S. right like, I guess, technically speaking, it was written before, I guess they did technically hand it to the US in Fort Pearl Harbor, like right before Kishi sort of goes back to work, like trying to turn Japan into just like a national defense state.
And, you know, this time around, though, he makes he makes two decisions.
One is that he's going to work with the corporations because weirdly, these corporations are like the only resistance left to him.
And the second one is that he's like, okay, I don't have enough bureaucratic power.
So I'm going to just like merge every single Japanese agency together to form a super agency called Ministry of Musicians, Munitions.
And at this point, Kishi, Kishi is just running the economy.
Like he is the guy, he's the guy running the entire logistics network for all of the soldiers doing all the horrible things Japanese Empire.
He's the guy running the entire economy, making this work.
Cool.
But, you know, and I say this, like, Kishi, I think, is very different than your sort of classical fascist bureaucrat.
Like, the image of it is someone like Eichmann, like Hannah Rent Corn.
Like the banality of evil to do these guys who it's like, well, okay, they're kind of just doing their job.
And like, Kishi, Kishi is not that.
Kishi is running the war machine because he like deeply, he deeply, sincerely believes that like this is what's good for Japan.
And so, you know, but the other thing, he's also a bureaucrat.
So he's also kind of like, he spends the war just sort of like, he's like shuffling ministries around.
He's like shuffling, he's doing all this sort of bureaucratic stuff.
And as the war starts to end, Kishi looks at the situation as like the U.S. just like absolutely obliterates the Japanese Navy at Midway.
And he goes, oh, fuck, how can I get out of the war crimes tribunal?
And his plan is that he's going to bring down like Prime Minister Tojo's cabinet by resigning and doing this complicated stuff.
And like, you know, this works.
Like, Kishi is able to force Tojo to resign.
And Kishi forms this like sort of nominally, this group like nominally opposed to the government.
But, you know, but like, and the whole goal of this is basically just like, it's him saying to MacArthur, like, please don't shoot me.
And it works.
Kishi's taken prisoner by the occupation government and is inevitably thrown in the infamous Sugomo prison in 1946 as a suspected class A war criminal.
Now, if the word justice like meant literally anything in this world other than just being a cruel joke to torment survivors, Kishi would have hung from a rope in 1948 and that would have been the end of this two-part episode.
Unfortunately, we live in hell, and Kishi is going to be back in part three with friends of the show, The Dulles Brothers, in order to build the entire modern Japanese political system.
Kishi's Plot to Topple Tojo00:04:09
Hell yeah.
There we go.
There we go.
Swish.
Bringing in our favorite sidekick.
Wow, that's great because that's Jason L. Ron Hubbard, but they're pretty great.
Fucking A. That's beautiful.
Yeah.
Oh, well, Chris, I am excited to hear from our old friends, the Dulles Brothers.
But we're going to have to wait until Thursday for that because this is.
I am not excited to hear from our old friends.
It's going to be great.
Alan Reed, two non-problematic guys who were never friends with any Nazis.
That's the thing everyone remembers about the Dulles Brothers is the degree to which they were not close friends with Nazis.
So yeah, follow us at CoolZone Media at Bastards Pod on Twitter and Instagram.
Allegedly.
Allegedly.
And Chris, do you want to give them your Twitter handle?
Yeah, I'm at it mechr3 on Twitter.
Allegedly.
I'm allegedly better known as the I Smost Be Destroyed guy.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That is your legal name.
And in happy news.
And in Happy News, I just found a whole Reddit thread of people talking about how they appreciate how cute Anderson is.
So yay.
Oh.
Oh, yes.
No, Anderson's huge on Reddit.
You're huge on Anderson?
Good for you, Katie.
All right, motherfuckers.
Good job.
Come back Thursday.
Come back Thursday, and we will wrap you in our warm, slightly gropey embrace of podcast.
Bye.
On a recent episode of the podcast, Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Budgeta Alicia 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.
Readers, Katie's finalists, publicists, we have an incredible new episode this week for you guys.
We have our girl Hillary Duff in here, and we can't wait for you to hear this episode.
They put on Lizzie McGuire 2 a.m. video on demand.
This guy's 2 a.m.
2 a.m.
Whatever time it is.
Lizzie McGuire and I'm like wild back to her way.
It was like a first closet moment for me where I was like, they're like, I don't feel like she's hot like the rest of them.
No, no, no.
I was like, she's beautiful, but I'm appreciating her in a different way than these boys are.
I'm not like.
Listen to Las Co Triestas on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You know the famous author Roll 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 Roal 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, I 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 US, 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.