ans such as Slavs whom they regarded as untermenschen and the total elimination of the Jews through the genocide of the Holocaust.
The ruling militaristic clique which seized power in Japan in the 1930s believed in Japan's unique destiny to rule its Asian neighbors. The war began in part because Japan refused to accept the limits on its territorial expansion which the Western powers resisted and in part due to Japan's crowded conditions, the adverse effects of the Great Depression and the desire by its rulers to control the raw materials of Southeast Asia. However, they also believed, according to Dower, in "the divine origins of the Japanese people" [which dated back to the Emperor Jinnu, 660 B.C.], whom most Japanese believed directly descended from the gods. As a largely homogenous island population, which resisted successfully all foreign threats, and had modernized itself after Commodore Matthew Perry's entry into Tokyo harbor in 1854, Japan's leaders in the 1930s viewed themselves as members of the leading race in the world, shido minzoku, which "looked down on all other colored races."
China, which had only recently began to unify under Chiang Kai-Shek, felt the full brunt of Japanese expansionism in the late 1930s. During the Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945), the Chinese were among the first peoples to experience massive bombing of civilian populations. The Chinese also, together with Russian, Korean and other political prisoners and POWs, were the victims of bestial and horrific medical and other experiments carried out first in Manchuria and later in China itself by Japan's infamous Unit 731. Dower estimated that during the Sino-Japanese War (which overlapped with World War II), as many as 15 million Chinese lost their lives.
After prevailing in bitter fighting for Shanghai, several
Japanese armies approached the Nationalist capital, Nanking. Japanese bombers wreaked havoc by carpet bombing the crowded city. ...