TOKYO, Aug. 15 (Xinhua) -- As Japan marks the 81st anniversary of its surrender in World War II, thousands of old military medical records preserved in Japan are offering rare documentary evidence of atrocities committed by Japanese soldiers during the war of aggression against China -- records that the Japanese military once ordered destroyed.
Hidden for decades in iron containers beneath the ground and later painstakingly copied by hand, the files contain soldiers' own confessions of killing civilians, burning villages and bayoneting children. Japanese scholars said the records not only document wartime crimes, but also expose how militarist ideology normalized violence while the military sought to erase evidence of its responsibility.
RECORDS THAT SURVIVED
On Aug. 15, 1945, Japan announced the acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration, agreeing to unconditional surrender. In the days surrounding the defeat, the Japanese military ordered the destruction of large quantities of confidential documents, including the medical records of Japanese troops who had invaded China and received treatment at the Kohnodai Army Hospital in Ichikawa City, Chiba Prefecture -- now the Kohnodai Hospital, National Center for Global Health and Medicine.
"The military wanted to burn documents that could reveal war crimes and serve as evidence for future accountability," Tomio Hosobuchi, professor emeritus at Saitama University, told Xinhua.
Fortunately, the hospital's then-director preserved the medical records, citing their value as "precious historical materials," Hosobuchi said. The records were sealed in iron barrels and buried underground, allowing them to survive till now.
The original documents are now housed at a psychiatric medical institution in Chiba City. Their complete photocopied collection is preserved in the archives of Asai Hospital in Togane City, also in Chiba Prefecture.
PATIENTS' CONFESSIONS
Inside the archive, thousands of yellowed photocopies of medical records document the psychological conditions of Japanese soldiers hospitalized during the war.
One medical record reviewed by Xinhua contains the following statement by a former soldier: "I killed six civilians in Shandong Province; the memory frequently haunts my dreams, leaving me unable to find peace."
The soldier continued: "The experience of killing young children, in particular, causes me profound anguish when I think of my own children of the same age."
Before enlistment, this soldier had worked at a post office in Yamagata Prefecture. After Japan launched its full-scale invasion of China, he was deployed to northern China and was admitted to the Kohnodai Army Hospital in August 1938 after developing "mental illness."
Hosobuchi explained that some Japanese soldiers developed numbness in the limbs, tremors and other psychological symptoms after experiencing battlefield terror or severe mental trauma. During the war, such conditions were broadly classified as "war neurosis," and the Kohnodai Army Hospital specialized in treating these patients, admitting approximately 10,000 individuals.
Why did the military want the files erased? Eri Nakamura, associate professor at Sophia University, believes that many cases of "war neurosis" were linked to soldiers' own "use of violence or direct participation in acts of perpetration." "After Japan's defeat, the military feared these records would become evidence of war responsibility, so it ordered them destroyed," she added.
Nakamura showed Xinhua another medical record of a Japanese soldier. It contained a personal account describing how he had bayoneted a 12-year-old child to death: "That child was so pitiful; the scene of the stabbing keeps lingering in my mind, and the image flashes back whenever I have an episode."
Nakamura noted that expressions such as "pitiful" were exceptionally rare in wartime records because Japanese soldiers had generally been conditioned to regard killing as legitimate and to deny the humanity of their victims. Moreover, wartime censorship discouraged any discussion of atrocities committed during the war; consequently, soldiers were not only reluctant to speak of the grim reality of "killing" but also subconsciously rationalized their own acts of perpetration even while seeking psychiatric treatment.
NORMALIZING VIOLENCE
Hosobuchi said numerous files explicitly record atrocities committed by the Japanese military, including accounts such as "burned down the entire village" and "I even killed infants."
More strikingly, Hosobuchi noted, descriptions like "total annihilation" or "the village was burned" were often recorded not as causes of the soldiers' psychological illness but as "military achievements."
The reason, he argues, lies in the militarist education promoted by wartime Japan.
People were intensely indoctrinated with the ideology of "hakko ichiu," or "all the world under one roof," Hosobuchi said, referring to the imperial slogan that envisioned Japanese domination over Asia and eventually the world.
"Under that ideology, ruling and subjugating other peoples was presented as something natural. Many were driven to the battlefield by precisely this way of thinking," Hosobuchi added.
This militarist atmosphere not only distorted soldiers' perceptions of war and killing, but also drove the Japanese military to go to great lengths to cover up the existence of "war neurosis."
According to Nakamura, acknowledging widespread psychological trauma would have made soldiers aware of war's destructive impact on themselves, undermined morale and exposed the vulnerability of the state, so the Japanese military deliberately concealed it from the public; in effect, this was a form of "image management."
As Japanese military deaths mounted during the war, public willingness to continue fighting steadily weakened, Hosobuchi added. "In order to sustain the war, the Japanese military became even more deliberate in concealing the reality."
WARNING FOR FUTURE GENERATIONS
The medical records have acquired profound historical significance precisely because they escaped destruction.
Nakamura said they provide documentary proof that Japanese troops committed numerous atrocities in China while also revealing the institutional mechanisms that made such violence possible.
"These atrocities occurred because the Japanese military carried out training designed to make people capable of perpetrating violence," she said. "Its purpose was to eliminate soldiers' psychological resistance to killing."
For Hosobuchi, the files are more than historical evidence; they are a warning.
"War causes people to lose their humanity," he said. "I hope future generations will understand the cruelty of war through these preserved records, remember the suffering it brought, and prevent such tragedies from ever happening again." ■