Yes, the Japanese horribly mistreated their POW's. Yet that was not an indication of some inherent flaw within the Japanese race, but instead an outflow of the Japanese Warrior Code.
That is not correct. The Japanese Bushido tradition required that ANY person who surrenders be treated humanely. It was dishonorable to surrender but that was not grounds for abuse, not even to enemy combatants. The Bushido tradition absolutely celebrated honorable conduct towards civilians. That which was done in China, the Philippines, and to western civilian captives in Malaysia and on Wake Island was about as far from Bushido as one could get, and the people who implemented the policy wholly lacked any honor even by the prevailing cultural standards of Meiji Japan. That the Japanese had descended so far into barbarism as to celebrate events such as occurred in Nanking simply demonstrates how far the Japanese had deviated from any of their own moral traditions.
The Japanese knew it was morally wrong to do so. Many Japanese, especially those in the IJN, noted as much in their diaries and in their postwar testimonies. That is why so many Japanese perps worked so hard to cover up their actions. They knew at the time that it was wrong by Japanese standards and they also knew that it was wrong by western standards, and they knew that if Japan lost the war they would be judged on account of it. Plenty of Japanese knew what the west expected in re treatment of prisoners and civilians, and they even knew enough of western military history to understand that a mechanism existed to free the Japanese empire of the burden of caring for and feeding prisoners. They simply chose to ignore their own moral teachings, ignore what they knew of the west's attitudes, and ignore the fact that the likely outcome of a prolongued war was Japanese defeat.
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