The Rape of Hong Kong

One day after Pearl Harbor was attacked, the Imperial Japanese Army invaded Hong Kong. The plans for this invasion were drawn up largely by the officer who would become the Iwo Jima garrison commander, Imperial Japanese Army Major General Tadamichi Kuribayashi. Months before the attack, he was assigned as Chief of Staff for General Takashi Sakai’s 23rd Army stationed in China. During this time, they conducted war games under secret orders, and planned the Hong Kong invasion to coincide with the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Kuribayashi was also responsible for disseminating instructions from an Imperial conference, which took place in Tokyo on 5 November 1941, which implored forces under his and General Takashi Sakai’s command to “behave themselves” since “the eyes of the world would be watching.” The Japanese government wanted its troops invading southern China not to repeat “the excesses committed by the Japanese soldiers on the Chinese mainland.” Kuribayashi knew what his government was asking him to command his troops to do—they were not to practice the crimes they had perpetrated during the Rape of Nanking. However, Sakai and Kuribayashi would fail miserably at passing this directive on to their troops.

One hour after Pearl Harbor was assaulted, the 23rd Army lurched toward The British Crown Colony of Hong Kong on the southern coast of China under the operational code name of Hara-Saku (Haller Work), hitting it from the rear and pushing 12,000 British, Canadian, Indian and Chinese troops toward the sea. Although British Prime Minister Winston Churchill publicly encouraged the garrison to fight to the end, he knew his command could not offer any relief to Hong Kong.

The Allied troops would be mortally exposed if a Nationalist army to the north did not attack quickly. It was hoped that they could hang on long enough for the Chinese Nationalists under Chiang Kai-Shek’s general Yu Hanmou, commander of Seventh War Zone (12th Army Group), to hit the IJA 23rd Army from the rear. In order to launch a proper attack to help the beleaguered defenders of Hong Kong, Hanmou needed until January. It was unclear whether the combined British forces could hold out all of one month.

The 23rd Army was comprised of three divisions, the 18th, 38th and 104th numbering 48,000 men. Kuribayashi issued orders and coordinated several units as Sakai’s Chief-of-Staff when the attack was launched on 8 December sending an initial 15,000 men across the border. Kuribayashi was in charge of the “Hong Kong capture operation.” He played a prominent role with the 38th Division as it penetrated the peninsula.

Since Hong Kong had an estimated one million refugees who had escaped the attacks Japan had unleashed throughout China and Manchuria, the people knew what awaited them. Families hid their daughters in basements, attics or closets, and then locked the whole family in their tiny home. Historian Ted Ferguson wrote: “Women skulked out of sight of the troops and wore dingy black as a form of protective coloring; to reduce their attractions still further they hunched their backs, daubed their faces with mud and wore sanitary pads irrespective of the time of the month.” As a result, General Sakai had his staff post a “reassurance proclamation” throughout the Kowloon peninsula which declared: “We protect Chinese property. The war in Hong Kong is a war against the Whites.” As his troops’ actions would soon prove, these were hollow words.

On 18 December, Kuribayashi helped conduct the amphibious assault of Hong Kong Island after his forces pushed Allied troops to retreat off the mainland. Ramped boats gathered on the shores of the mainland and the Japanese sent their battle-hungry troops across Victoria Harbor in two waves, totaling 7,500 men. Within a week of landing on the island, the Japanese had deployed at least 20,000 men to destroy the British colony.

By 25 December (known as Black Christmas to the Allied troops), Hong Kong was in Japanese hands. As the British raised the white flag over Victoria Barracks, the Japanese marched in screaming “Banzai! Banzai!” Kuribayashi had helped deliver a devastating “blow to the British in Asia [and helped] …deprive Chiang Kai-shek’s [China] of a window to the world,” according to Chi Man Kwong at Hong Kong Baptist University.

After leading a march through Victoria’s center on 28 December, Sakai and Kuribayashi gave their victorious troops a three-day “holiday” during which these commanders allowed them to rape, pillage and plunder the city. This was what Sakai had done in China, most notably at the battle of Jinan, where his men slaughtered thousands of civilians in May 1928.

Kuribayashi stayed with the 23rd for 18 months of occupational duties during the oppression of the Chinese in this region. His troops slaughtered at least 50,000 civilians and committed 10,000 rapes all under his command—it was disturbingly reminiscent of the Rape of Nanking. But this was only the beginning of the terror the Japanese would inflict on the people of Hong Kong and the surrounding regions.

During the occupation, the Japanese raped, killed and resettled tens of thousands of natives (Hong Kong’s population dwindled from 1.6 million in 1941 to just 600,000 in 1945 due to forced evacuations, resettlement, executions and starvation). Right after the IJA’s takeover of Hong Kong, the 23rd Army “chopped off a few hundred heads a day for some time” according to historian Philip Snow. Guidelines adopted by the 23rd Army, and approved by Kuribayashi, provided for the “immediate suppression of hostile influences”; namely, all Communist or Nationalist elements were to be “imprisoned or liquidated” as Snow further notes.

By New Year’s Day 1942, a former playing field in Hong Kong was piled high with the corpses of Chinese who had been bayoneted or shot. The Japanese military police, or Kempeitai, in Kowloon at King’s Park were relentless, using citizens, as Snow continues, “for shooting and bayonet practice and even beheading some.” By the end of January, corpses littered Hong Kong’s coast line. Unlike Nanking, there was no International Safety Zone to protect helpless citizens.

Snow explains that after taking Hong Kong, the 23rd Army proved to be a disastrous city administrator. “The colony lay prostrate in the absence of any firm order. The streets were a mess of corpses and shell-holes and severed lines, and the harbor was clogged with the sunken hulks of two hundred vessels.”

Civil management was no better. The IJA “systematically looted the city because it stored useful resources such as food, motor vehicles, medical and scientific equipment, but it was in a rather ‘orderly manner’ because it was organized by the 23rd Army.” The pilfering of the city had catastrophic consequences when food and medical supplies grew scarce.

After Hong Kong’s fall, Kuribayashi continued his activities as Chief of Staff for the 23rd Army, which controlled Guangdong province, the southernmost of the mainland provinces that channel most of South China’s trade. It has one of the longest coastlines of any province and encompasses the cities of Hong Kong, Shenzhen and Guangzhou (also known as Canton). It was also the site of numerous crimes, including forced prostitution, rape, murder, inhumane medical experimentation and pillage. It does seem the 23rd Army had meetings to control the “rape-epidemic.” Months into the occupation, they arrested some soldiers newly guilty of such crimes (there seems to have been little or no effort to punish those who had already committed such transgressions). To avert future rapes and reduce the incidence of venereal disease among the soldiers, the 23rd Army established brothels and looked for “non-family women to staff them. Posters appeared on the streets advertising for ‘comfort women,’ some hundreds of whom were recruited…[from] Guangdong province,” writes Snow. Kuribayashi helped establish these prostitution houses, not because of his concern for the “Chinese victims of rape by [his] soldiers but because of [his] fear of creating antagonism among the Chinese civilians.” Since they needed more than the local women to “service” all the men, Kuribayashi’s staff imported an additional 1,700 Japanese prostitutes from Canton in what would become “the largest and most elaborate system of trafficking in women in the history of mankind and one of the most brutal.”

At the same time, POW camps became the site of death and suffering against international accords. Kuribayashi and Sakai made sure, from the moment the Allied troops surrendered, to inflict the “maximum humiliation on the 10,000-odd British and Canadian soldiers who had fallen into Japanese hands.” They were beaten, forced to bow to Chinese citizens, required to collect trash in the streets and garrisoned in some of the worst parts of the city.

“[E]very opportunity was taken to drive home the message that the ethnic tables had been turned.” They were put under Colonel Esao Tokunaga, who was “gross, cruel and sadistic” and subjected his prisoners to starvation diets until all were racked by “wound sepsis, dysentery and diphtheria… [and] deficiency diseases such as pellagra and beriberi.”

As the occupation continued, cultural erasure was enforced. Japanese leadership under Sakai and Kuribayashi made Japanese the colony’s official language, renamed several areas using Japanese names and enforced religious festivals honoring Emperor Hirohito and the Imperial forces. Failure to comply was severely punished. A massive monument was constructed called The Tower of Triumph designed to honor the Japanese dead and glorify “Japanese power.” Chinese leaders were forced to attend the ceremony, donate money and display their conversion to Japanese values.

By the summer of 1942, order seemed to have been somewhat restored to Hong Kong and an organized return to a functioning city resumed until it was liberated when Japan formally surrendered on September 16, 1945. Nonetheless, the crimes of the 23rd Army will forever haunt Hong Kong. The Rape of Hong Kong mirrored the Rape of Nanking and showed that crimes against humanity was a modus operandi of Imperial Japanese armies and leaders. For information about Imperial Japan's horrible behavior during World War II, see "Japan's Holocaust" at https://www.amazon.com/Japans-Holocaust-History-Imperial-Murder/dp/1637586884/ref=sr_1_1?crid=I03H6A9D44LO&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.J3ELneAjmUBtQTOR3kRl0qaVpIwkeWMwl66s6ceVokcoB1lfD7kBhmAwfbXhySM0EohqAaH__terST6h9QsvMA.Rsv6kTNUnVU76-BORkTLpW2w8iI-DUKJHz92uF5_DQI&dib_tag=se&keywords=Japan%27s+Holocaust&qid=1703694878&s=books&sprefix=japan%27s+holocaust%2Cstripbooks%2C102&sr=1-1