He wants to defend nippons honoru in the sanctity of the japanese general thread not debate the Japan/anime haters here.
If I were given the unenviable task of defending the IJA's conduct in the Second Sino-Japanese War, if not the greater sphere of World War 2 itself, I would focus on what China rather than Japan did, even if Tu Quoque is not an effective argument to make against war crimes and massacres, at least when it comes to the courtroom.
When the "incident" escalated into full blown war (by design, it's a whole other discussion) the Japanese and Chinese already had no bones about killing the fuck out of each other, war crime or not, they were already in no prisoners mode. The Chinese and their National Revolutionary Army acted as ruthlessly, if not necessarily as sadistically, as the Japanese did in plenty of cases, such as the 1938 Yellow River Floods, where around half a million people were killed by the NRA demolishing the levees and flooding the provinces to stop the Japanese advance.
Though, this did work, and would not be the last artificial flood in that war.
When it comes to the other side even the Japanese don't try and deny things they did rather than just keep silent and they didn't get nearly the buck breaking Germany got.
I wouldn't put it past them to do it. Granted, the Chinese love to inflate numbers in war, but I don't recall an instance where they exaggerated atrocities. Perhaps it wasn't FOAH JIRRION DEFF IN BATTER but what happened during and after can be taken as close enough
The numbers are probably inflated, but for multiple reasons. Firstly because the RoC depended on foreign support and the sympathy of the international community to even have a hope of resisting the Imperial Japanese Army in the field, and so of course they'd pump the numbers as much as they can to secure that lifeline. It's not special, that happens in most wars in some way.
The other main reason is that the National Revolutionary Army and its affiliate warbands practiced the time honored tactic of shedding their uniforms when retreating and blending in amongst the population, often refugees fleeing from the Japanese themselves. This is what is known as a "war crime" for the exact reason that it gives justification to what happened, whether it was a decision made whatsoever in good faith, but what could you expect of the NRA? Their best trained and equipped soldiers were demolished in the long and brutal fighting of the Battle of Shanghai in a doomed effort to call upon international support by throwing everything into one decisive engagement. What remained in the first year and change of the war spent the entire time up through Nanjing and for some time past it getting their teeth kicked in, the best of them were long defeated, and what was left was practically an insurgent mob organized by whoever did whatever they could to keep them in the field. So it's completely unknown how many civilians were actually soldiers themselves, were willfully hiding soldiers, or had nothing to do with anything.
The point I think everybody can agree upon though, which was the original one made in the first place, is that you do not want to be on the losing side of a war when it's a Chink versus Chink deathmatch.
