Part Two: The Slavery Loving Fascist who Built Modern Japan

it to Netflix right now. Thank you. That's that's That's totally not something I would ever say, because Girl Girlfriends was a better show than Friends. Um, but you know, let's just accept that Sophie said that and move on to Christopher Wong. Christopher, how are you doing? In part two of this episode? Doing doing? Doing as well as you can be? Preparing to just talk about Japanese war crimes for an hour. I resisted the urge to open this by saying, what's manning my cheery is because I

thought that might be distasteful. Yeah, anyway, let's dive back in. Yeah, all right, so we're about to start talking about the Japanese forced labor system, and I think the best way to introduce this is by I'm going to read part of the introduction to a book called Asian Labor and the Wartime Japanese Empire, Unknown Histories, which is this Basically, there's a conference on sort of Japanese war crimes, Japanese force, labor, tree, tree the war, and they all that all the sort

of papers in that are like combined into this book, and the introduction goes, Grief and despair find little place in most historical accounts that are absent from most of the source material historians use. The hundreds of thousands who died were sons, husbands and fathers, or sometimes daughters, wives and mothers, and had families awaiting their return. Deaths often

went unrecorded. Coolie is too sick to work, replaced in death houses where they spent their final hours and accumulated filth, but in vomit and the excrement produced by those who had died before them. Without food or medicine, and certainly without hope, their corpses were thrown into unbarked graves, or burned or abandoned in forests, or tossing the rivers. We welcomed behind the bastard people now it's it's really hard to pin down the exact number of people who were

forced to work around the Japanese Empire. And this is you know, this is a running theme of of this this episode, is that right before Japan was occupied the end of WORLDAR two, they destroyed all of their records. Like I mean this and this word like this is not just records in Japan, like this word goes all the way down the command chain, the destroying records just everywhere they can find them. So most of what we have our estimates, and you know, the estimates estimates are

not good. The Indonesian government estimates that four point one million Indonesians were forced to work for Japan's in the war. I mean, you know, it's just just to get us into the scale if they like. There there's there's an individual railroad called the Taye Burma Railroad just alone that uses a hundred and eighty thousand possibly there's many as two hundred seventy thousand people, and you know the yeah, the number in in China five seems to have been

about three million. But you know that that's the only period we have even sort of okay numbers about before that. We just don't know. And you know, this is also happening in Korea. Ten thousand Koreans are scripted into the army. There's seven hundred thousand New York restripted to forced labor. And Kishi is going to import a lot of those

people like to Japan to do forced labor. Everywhere the Japanese Empire goes, they're they're doing this and you know, and we've talked about last episode about how sort of the starts with Kishi talking about you know, Kishi's like, okay, well, well we'll put the world, we'll put the prisoners award to work. And then it expands to just like you know, people who are vagrants and people don't have jobs, and then it's like anyone who opposes us, and by by

by nine one, the Japanese Army is doing just slave raids. Yeah, but between two the Japanese Army burns tens of thousands of Chinese villages and they put the survivors in concentration camps and they put about they put about a hundred thousand people into these force labor camps, and of these conscripts of them die this scripts yeah sure, yeah, you know, and I said it's like that's thirty is kind of being dragged down by the fact that there are some

places where the conditions aren't as bad. Um Yeah, you know, and you're like, you know, we can we talk about a place where it was really bad. Um. So. One of the centers of Kishi's five year plan in Manchuria is these coal mines in Fushan, and you know, these these are the coal mines that are like fueling all of these on industrial developments. And the replacement rate for these workers between four was out of every four forty workers total they had, they had to replace twenty five

thousand of them every year. And you know a small number of these people just like escaped, but almost every one else and this is you know, a very small percentages of escape. Almost everyone else. Almost all the people either died on the job or Japanese arm just executed them forend subordination, because you know, this is something the Japanese Army starts to do in this period, is that they just you know, they just start randomly killing people.

And like these these people we talked about a bit about the conditions they die. A lot of these people die from dysentery and they die from cholera because you know these camps like that, there's there's no medical facilities at all, right, so you know when you get sick, they just like they lay you on a cotton. You die. And you know when a lot of these people are dying from over work, that die from starvation, and you know, and then also like the Japanese army, like they're really

creative about like how they kill people. So I mean you have like the classic like they beat people, they stab people, they shoot, they light them on fire. They also like they told them off boats. They like they drown people in submarines. What's the thing I've never found another like recorded thing and people do is like the force boat people to a submarine and just sink it.

Oh god, really they if they're burning a whole submarine, they really want to stead Yeah, and like like this is a this is the thing, like particularly we'll get more in to this in a bit, Like particularly like that that that's the way they kill like comfort women because yeah, they don't want any record of them existing, so we'll we'll we'll we'll put them in a submarine and things. It's it's a way of disappearing, Okay, well, yep, yep,

that's that's a bomber. Yeah. So so all all of those numbers, that's that's just for you know, physical labor um. Japan is also running something called the comfort Women's system. And you know, the comfort women's system is this the academic and legal term for Japan's military sex slavery system. And so you know, if you read academic accounts, you read journalistic accounts, you read like legal accounts, they talk about comfort women and comfort stations and use all of these.

You know, it's like pretty little euphemisms developed by Japan specifically so that in their in their in their their communications about it, they can sort of obscure what's actually happening here. And this is the point where it becomes useful that I am the longer in a demi and I'm not a lawyer, which means I don't have to use any of these. What this is is it an enormous, bureaucratic, organized system of military sexual slavery, ran of army rape rooms.

And the first the first of yeah, it's it's it's bad stuff. The first of these these sort of military rape stations is set up in Shanghai after the Japan launches an attack on Shanghai, and I think thirty two is one of their sort of They had these like periodic sort of fights with with with the Chinese governments basically up until thirty seven, when like the actual war starts. And I want to go into what happened here, because you know, most accounts a sort of Japanese sexual atrocities

in East Asia. Give this, give this, like this whole the ninety two attack like one line, and so I want to read this passage from the book Chinese Confort Women testimonies for Imperial Japan's sex slaves. The soldiers immediately kidnapped good looking local women and kept them in military barracks and sex slaves. At the same time, the troops continue to assault women in near by villages. Reportedly, over

one thousand local women were raped in their homes. Not even pregnant women, young girls, or elderly women were spared. Within the same reason and region. In the autumn of nineteen five, more than a hundred Japanese soldiers attacked an area where the Chinese Resistance Force was active. Carrying machine guns, the troops drove the villagers into a large yard, dragged all the women out of the crowd and raped them

in the presence of their family members. Several soldiers ripped the clothes off a woman who was six months pregnant tighter to a table in the yard. They took photographs while violating her, and then cut her admen open and plucked the fetus out with a band. Neet and and this that is before the start of the war. Nope, yeah, this is this is that that's that's that's five. Now the rape stations as a sort of you know, and okay,

I will say one other thing. There's some indication that the Navy had been using like sort of organized rape stations like before n two. It this is another one of those things where the documentation is really hard because you know, I mean, the army is not just going to tell you they are running like a sex slave station. Most people who do sex slave stuff don't like to

talk about it all that much. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, even like even you know, like they're doing it all the time, but like even even like like slave owners in the South didn't really like to talk about like that, the fact that that's what they were doing a lot of the time. It's yeah, it's one of those leads you to one of those are we the Batties kind of moments. Yeah. Yeah, it's something that even even the

people who do it know is wrong. Yeah. When I talk about the fact that I'm forcing myself on these children that I basically own, I feel like kind of a monster. Yep. You know it's funny, like I have actually read accounts of Japanese soldiers who dreamed the war We're like way to wear the baddies, and it never involved this. It was always about like like they would be sent into into the Philippines and you know, and this all there are like they're given the American the

Stanate of American life. Well you'll begree to deliberators. And they get there and you know, they're like hacking Filipino like soldiers to death with bandits and they're like wait, but it's never this ship. It's yeah. Now, rape stations don't come into widespread use until after eight, which is after the rape and Nunjing, And you know that's another atrocity that like probably deserves an episode, and that because Kishi isn't directly involved in it, we don't really have

time to talk about it. The short version of it is. So the Japanese army have been expecting to just like blow their way through all of China in like three days, and instead they fight the Battle of Shanghai, which is you know, it's called the nickname of it is down ground in the Shanghai. They find this incredibly brutal battle, like they lose sixty troops and the army just goes berserk.

And you know, China's capital in the war have been at Nunjing and Johanna takes a city and they kill in the number of dead civilians and prisoners of war was it's generally held to me about two dred thousands. And they also rape somewhere between twenty and eighty thousand people. Jesus Christ. Yeah, it's it's really bad. And like you say, they raped, and then the number is the population of a small city. Yeah. Again, you're in the A Leagues

in terms of the crimes against humanity, my friend. Yeah, yeah, And you know, and I say this, like, you know, even with all the stuff we're about to talk about, like these sort of just random rapes where like the Japanese army goes into a village and rapes they have one than leaves like that's still that's still gonna be

happening throughout the entire war. And you know, I mean like and and to some extent you can talk about the fact that like sexual violence is always a part of war, but like the Japanese army is like rape heavy by army standards, and then they're also doing the sex slavery stuff and you know, yeah, and and and something. You know, and I think this is there's sort of like the there there's a thing that you read a

lot about how the military sex slavery system is. Actually it's well, you know, it's it's about like the Japanese army trying to get the rape under control after after Nunjing, and like, well it doesn't work if that's his attention. And the second thing is, you know, it's kind of true.

But you know when I say the Japanese army wanted to get the rape under control, like what I mean is that they want the rape to happen through the army of bureaucracy in army facilities at you know, created by the army, and at times the army is allowed and they also like I want to regularly try to regulate things in a way that the soldiers don't get STDs, you know, but you know, and and and they succeed in that to some extent, like they they succeed in

bringing the rape directly into the military command chain. Yeah, and you know, before I move on, I want to mention there's this enormous primarily Japanese just like intellectual sort of network and right wing outrage machine that like this is their thing, this in denying the rape and nunging like their thing, like the Japanese war crimes deniers. And then they make all these arguments how like no, no no, no, these weren't. These weren't sex slaves, these were pay aid prostitutes.

They're not you know, you know that the rape rooms are just sort of brothels, and it's not it is you know, there are people who do the whole is

about stopping right, not committing it. And it is like very very important to understand that every single one of these peoples are full of ships like these are these are sort of like intellectually like these people are like like they're they're they're incredibly similar to like the sort of like European Western Holocaust and ires like everything they say is lies and the reason they're lying about it, and you know, the reason they have to do this

is because just of of the absolute raw horror of of what I'm about, Like the stuff that I'm about to read, Um, this is this is a testimony. I'm going to read a testimony taken from the UN Human Rights Commission who get a report on the sex slavery system, and then ninety six this is this is the report

of a Korean woman. Well she's she's not a woman, she's a child when this happenste child, Yeah yeah, I mean I was just curious, like yeah, yeah, sorry, yeah, yeah, that it would mitigate any I would just you know, yeah, well yeah. So so the reason I didn't say it was so that this is this is at the beginning of it is one day in June, at age thirteen, I had to prepare my lunch for my parents, who are working in the field, so I went to the

village well to fetch water. A Japanese garrison soldiers surprised me there and took me away so that my parents never knew what happens to their daughter. I was taken to the police station in a truck, where I was raped by several policemen. When I shouted, they put socks in my mouth and continued to rape me. The head of the police station hit me in my left eye because I was crying. That day, I lost eyesight in

the left eye. After ten days or so, I was taken to the Japanese Army garrison barracks in Hassan City. They were around four hundred other Korean young Korean girls there, and we had to serve over five thousand Japanese soldiers of sex slaves every day, up to forty men per day. Each time I protested, they hit me, stuffed rag in my mouth, one held a match stick to my private parts until I obeyed him. My private parts were using

with blood. Jesus Christ. One Korean girl who was with us demand to know why we had to serve so many up to forty men per day. To punish her for questioning, the Japanese company commanded Yamamoto ordered her beaten with a sword while we were watching. They took off her clothes, tied her legs and hands, and rolled her over a board with nails until the nails were covered with blood and pieces of her flesh. In the end,

they cut off her head. Another Japanese another Yamamoto, told us it was it's easier to kill you all, easier than killing dogs. He also said, since those Korean girls are crying because they have not eaten yet, boiled the human flesh and make them eat it. One of the Korean girls caught venereal disease from being raped so often, and as a result, over fifty Japanese soldiers were infected. In order to stop the disease from spreading and to quote sterilize the Korean girls, they stuck a hot iron

bar in her private parts. Once they took forty of us a truck far away with to a pool filled with water and snakes. The soldiers beat several girls, shoved them into the water, heaped earth on the pool, and buried them alive. I think over half the girls who were at the barracks were killed twice. I tried to run away, but both times we were caught. After a few days, they tortured even more. We were tortured even more, and I was hit on my head so many times

that all the scars still remain. They tattooed me on the inside of my lip, my chest, my stomach, and my body I fainted. When I woke up, I was on a mountain side, presumably left for dead. Of the two girls with me, only one had survived. A fifty year old man you lived in the mountains found us,

gave us some clothes and something to eat. He helped us travel back to Korea, where I returned scarred, buried, with difficulties in speaking at the age of eighteen, after five years of serving as a sex slave for the Japanese Jesus God, yeah, it is. There are hundreds and hundreds of pages of testimony like this. Yeah, I'm you know, it is my job to read about crimes against humanity, and that's um, that's one of the roughest things I've ever heard. Yeah, like I the only thing I've ever read.

I don't think that's it's the worst account of rape I've ever read. The only thing you've ever read? Definitely, Yeah, that was like like even comparable to it was like it was accounts of like what like Haitian slave owners would do so like their slaves and that stuff. Yeah, those guys are, like, I think, more creative. But I heard some accounts from ZD women who were enslaved by

isis that you know, it was less inventive. It was more with them just a case of neglect, like not letting these women clean themselves and like them just getting these horrible infections as they continue to be um. But I don't think I've ever heard a case that's that because it's not just like it's not just like v

lent and horrific. It's like creatively innovatively like a lot of like it's it's far more than just you know, obviously rape is very seldom just like about a sexual appetite, but it's it's so it's very clearly, so much more than just these are soldiers who are horny. There's like there's a lot of very frightening things going on in that. Yeah,

I mean I think part of it. You know, I was talking last episode about the theory of the declining rate of pleasure, and you know, I think of something like this with violence to where, you know, because the other thing that that reminds me this terms of inventiveness that I've read about was accounts of like what the the Salvadorian National Guard did during like during the Civil

War in the eighties and and that stuff. It's like, you know, you get to a point when you're in a war where like you've seen so much violence that you know, you become sensitized to it, and it becomes this sort of constant race to like find something you can do that's moore violence that will like stop bothm opposing you. But but this isn't even like that. These guys just like enjoy this, Yeah, because there's no that's not there's not none of that that is like an

attempt to scare people out of resistance. That's just yeah, it's like serial killer ship. You know, it's the you know, you've done so many other depraved things and now you're getting creative with it out of almost boredom. Um. It sounds like there's an element of that of just like, well, fuck it, we haven't been stopped yet. Let's try let's escalate this, let's let's let's go a little further, let's

try something harder. I don't know how much of that is is boredom, how much of it is like disensitization, but like, yeah, I mean, fuck you could you you could have done a whole episode on on on that specific Uh yeah, yeah, Like I think you know what one of the things that that the like the sources talk about is how this it's you know, part it's about power, but it's about like power on a sort of civilizational level that it's like, you know, like what

what what's happening here is that the Japanese soldiers are like, you know, like we we can like like we can rape these women. And that's you know, this is this is our way of like raping the entire Chinese nation.

It's this way of part of it is it's about it is kind of about like the sort of demonstration of of sort of violent superiority in that like a lot of what some of the goals are are about just sort of like like this weird like like a massive's supposed to be this like emasculation of like the Chinese resistance where it's like like you know, if you're a Chinese man, like he's like, hey, look what we can do to your women, And it's just you know, because this, this is like this is the way these

people think because you know, this is like yeah, this is it's um okay, like I I yeah, I don't know what else. I mean. I think pretty much everyone listening is going to have the same reaction, which is just kind of like numb horror. So maybe here's ads. I I'm not I'm not an arrogant man when it comes to what we do, but I I don't think anyone in the podcasting game can compete with us for the sheer awkwardness of our ad transitions. We like the

cheese stand alone, We're back, uh and uh. I'm sure all those ads really, uh really wiped that horror from people's minds. So let's just let's let's barrel straight ahead and U uh yeah, let's let's that's barrel ahead. Yeah. So and this is another place where it's it's very hard to pin down numbers because Japanese Empire, you know, like they they they shorty, they should destroy every record that they can, and they kill huge numbers of these

women to keep them quiet. But the estimated number of women in slave of the Japanese Empire is about four hundred thousands UM. The newer scholarships suggested about half of them are Chinese. UM. There's also at the very least tens of thousands and probably almost certainly over a hundred over a hundred thousands from Korea and past that it gets, you know, it gets even harder to you know, get numbers because the records and the survivors are both hard defines.

But you know, we know that this this is happening like that. The levels of violence and the abductions in the Philippines are similar to this. Um. I yeah, it's just basical. Basically everywhere the Japanese Empire goes like this is this is this is what they're doing. They're they're they're enslaving the people they conquer. Um. You know, we talked about how the victim in that last story is thirteen. The victims tend to range from about eleven twenty four,

and the most common is between thirteen and nineteen. Because you know, these people are also pedophiles. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean I think that I think I've told this story a couple of times. But there was a moment where I was hanging out in Budapest with a friend of mine, kind of in the center of town. They've got all these statues of these these magyar kings on horseback with swords and axes and stuff, these like warrior

legendary warrior kings. And my buddy turns to me and says, I wonder how many of them didn't funk little kids. And that's not a Hungarian thing. That's like literally any any culture, Like when you go back to the Conquering War leaders, it's like, yeah, I mean most of them are fucking fourteen year olds, just like half of your favorite rock stars in the eighties. It's not great. Yeah,

And I think this, yeah, it's yeah. This then this, I think is this, This is just sort of pure expression of power, and I think it's part of why

and this is folding into a bigger thing. We don't have to go out, but like why, I think it's so oxy that like our cultural discussions of pedophiles always focus on what's much rarer, which is like adults like going after molesting like little bitty kids four and five year olds, when like the vast majority pedophilia is is grown men who the most people would not say they're a pedophile who go out of the way to fuck

teenage girls. That's most of it. That was Epstein, you know anyway, sorry rant over No, Yeah, And I think like this, this, this is just sort of like what having absolute physical like the the ability to murder anyone you want, Like this is what that does to eat and you know, one of the other things that's very common here is that a lot of the women and children, and again I want to emphasize, like these are children who resisted, you know, like these are these are fucking

fourteen and nineteen year olds, and you know they're either beaten, stabbed, or just decapitated. And you know, they decapitate kids in front of their families constantly. There's also, um, so almost everyone involved in this, all the women, all the children, become addicted to opium or some some other who yep

yep um. And you know, there's also you know, we've sort of we sort of alluded to this, like there's everyone gets venereal diseases because it turns out that when you're getting raped by forty men a day, you get ferneurial diseases. And the army, the army injects like the

sick with what almost certainly was the mercury based antibiotic salvarsan. Yeah, don't ye, no, it's it's yeah, it's you know, and they're doing this not because they care like at all that these women are like disease, like you know that they're get are getting sick, Like they're doing this because they want to keep down this credit disease among the soldiers, and you know, this is this is where you start to get to just I mean the horror of the

shoes that doesn't end because you know, these people have to deal with addiction, they have to deal with disease. And again the people who survived this um yeah, yeah, you know they have they have this like this unspeakable

try literally like people lose the ability to talk. Yeah, it doesn't Yeah, and then you know, to make it worse, the communities are taken from like a lot of the time, they don't want them back because you know, like these women are seen to have been defiled by the Japanese and so you know, has been a bunch of times. I mean there's there's versions, yeah, recently with Isis. Yeah,

it had a lot of times throughout history. Yeah, Like I like I read a story about someone who's accounts I almost included in here and then cut because it

was too long. But like, so she she comes back to her village and like the the only person in her entire village who will like talk to her is the person she was supposed to be married to, and like that guy is like a genuinely good guy, but like he can't take it and he goes and joins the army and then like dies somewhere fighting the Japanese Northern China, and so you know, and you have these these and this this is also part of why that

the records aren't aren't that like well known, because you know, the survivors, there's a huge cultural thing about like you know,

you like you know, we we we can. We've been talking a lot in Last Fear about how hard it is for any rape survivors just like talk about in the open and like this is so much harder, and there's all these political constraints on it, and yeah, and this stuff, you know, like this stuff is not that well known in the West, and it leads to situations like so something that happened like a couple of years ago Stephanie Kelton, who was bringing his economic advisor is

probably the most famous like modern monetary theory person like went to Japan and advised a group of like of liberal determocratic party lawmakers and some of those people were like in fascist groups that were like founded by n Jane Denihlists. And you know, this stuff happens because that's just the absolute horror that that happened here. Just people

don't know about it. It's not like the Pacific. Isn't the theater that people talk about much other than sort of island hopping and like, yeah, that's the Japanese prisoners of war. Yeah. Now, now Keis she's rolling this while he's in Manchuqua is sort of interesting. So Mentuqua merely, and I'm using this as an enormous scare quote merely has forty two sex slave stations, which is is kind of low for a reason that size. So though again Kishi like she just like less has happened, She's like

fine with it. He's almost certainly is diverting economic resources to it. But the reason it's so low compared to a lot of other places is that she's Yakuza buddies are doing like exactly the same ship in their brothels. Like it's it's it's it's not it's not quite as bad, but you know, they're also kidnapping a bunch of women

and like repeatedly raping them. But but you know, because because because the yakuzo is like so heavily in control of the sex trade, there's less of the sort of straight up military taking control of it, and you know, and the yaks and stuff, Kish like Kish's fucking like these are all like all the people doing this are like his personal friends, and like he's you know, Kishi's in these brothels constantly while these in Manchuria, and you know, she so he gets pulled out in Manchuria thirty nine

to become the Vice Minister of Commerce in order to plan what's called the new Economic Order. And you know, this is I talked about in the first episode that that the sort of the third phase of Japanese imperialism I called Tokyo imperialism three Tokyo drift. And this really, I think is where that starts, or I mean when I starts. But this is the sort of finality of it.

You know, like all of the sort of abuse you have like happening in the colonies, Like you know that this this all the stuff that creates fascism in Mensu call, all the stuff that like, you know, all the sort of fascism in the Japanese army, all of that fascism that's been in this sort of puppet state, you know, it all comes home and you know and you get you get Kishi going there seven, and that that fuses these sort of like Tokyo Edge highly educated fascist like

Tokyo bureaucrats with with this sort of military like fascism, and those guys take control of Japan. And that's how you get you know that, that that's how you get sort of full scale fascists in Japan. And you know, in neteen fourne when the stuff is being implemented, like the political party is just like dissolved themselves, and you know they're like, okay, well there's there's no point of

parties anymore. We're just gonna work with atial terranism. And you get inside of Japan, like you get these I don't know it'scard them. I guess it's like you know,

the the these sort of like mass fascist groups. So the Concordy Association, I've been that group in Bencheria and she she is sort of involved and helped setting up the Imperial Rule Assists Association, which is you know, this is like this is this is the New Orders version of this, and you know it's it's supposed to be this like sort of mass fashioned organization to build, but it's the bureaucracy, and it's about sort of building sport

for the war. And meanwhile, she she is just sort of like she she's kind of like dicking around with his planning models. So, you know, his his big thing in this period. He wants to he wants to turn He basically wants to turn Japan into into a version of Entaria, where it's the the entire economy, the whole society is built towards just fueling what the army is doing. And he's he's creating these things called control associations, which

are you know, it's on an industry level. Everyone in control association is like forced to work together, like all the companies, all the unions, and he so he the head of each control association is called the fearer. Okay, that sounds good, not a word with any kind of let's move on, let's move right on. Yeah, you know.

And the funny part about this is that I'm like, I'm about nine sure for the way it's like they are literally so they're they're speaking Japanese normally, and then when they have to address the guy, they say the word fewer in German, like they just they say fearer in German it's like when we want to it's like using the word shopping freud, you know, some German words.

Yeah yeah, and you know, and this fearer is supposed to you know, they're supposed to control like the entire production process right there there there are the people who set the prices of the people who they set quantities of that distribution, They set the organization production process. And these these are the like the people like Kishi who are the kind of like boring bureaucrats who do all

of the war machine stuff. And this like really pisss off the bought you in, like the big business people because they're like, oh wait, hold on, what do you mean everything is run by the state now, And so they accuse, uh, they accused Kishi of communism, and so Kishi like like like half of his allies like I'll get arrested because on accusations of being communists, and he's like forced to resign, and so you know, they're there's there there's like there's like an eight month period when

he's out of power, when you can be like, okay, everything that happened in this eight month period in nineteen forty was not Kishi's fault, but then you know, his his old friend Deki Tojo becomes a prime minister in actet one, and he brings Kishi back as the Minister of Commerce and Industry just in time for Kishi to sign the declaration of war with the US, right like I guess technically speaking it was it was written before.

I guess, I guess they did technically hand it to the US for Pearl Harbor, like right before Kish sort of goes back to work, like trying to turn Japan it's just like a national defense state. And you know he at this time around though, he makes he makes two decisions. One is that he's going to work with the corporations because weirdly, these corporations are like the only

resistance left to him. And the second one is that he's like, Okay, I don't have enough bureaucratic power, so I'm going to just like merge every single Japanese agency like together to form a super agency called Ministry, Musicians, Munitions. And at this point, she she she she is just running the economy like he he's the guy, He's the guy running the entire logistics network for all of the

soldiers doing all the horrible things. Jip like he's he's the guy running the entire economy making this work cool. But you know, and I say this, like Kishi kish I think it is very different than like you're sort of classical ashes beercrat. Like the image of it is someone like like aikman like Hannah rent Coins, but like the banality of evil to do these guys who was like, well, okay,

they're kind of just doing their job. And like Kishi Kishi is not that Kishi Kishi is running the war machine because he like deeply, deeply sincerely believes that like this is what's good for Japan and so you know. But the other thing, he's also a bereacrat. So he's also kind of like he spends the war just sort of like he's like shuffling ministries around. He's like shuffling,

but he's doing all this sort of bereacratic stuff. And as the war starts to end, she she looks at the situation as as like the US just like absolutely obliterates the Champanese Navy in Midway, and he goes, oh, fuck, how can I get out of the war crimes tributal And his plan is that he's going to bring down like Prime Minister Chocho's cabinet by resigning and doing his

complicated stuff. Like you know, this works, like Kishi Kishi is able to force Totor to resign and Kishi forms this like sort of nominally this group like nominally opposed to the Guard. But you know, but like the whole goal of this is basically just like it's it's him saying to MacArthur, like, please don't shoot me, and it works. She she's taking prisoner by the occupation government and is inevitably thrown in in the infamous Ugomo prison. In is

suspected class A war criminal. If the word justice like meant literally anything in this world other than just being a cruel joke to torment survivors, she would have hung from a rope in nineteen and that would have been the end of this two part episode. Unfortunately, we live in hell and Kesh is going to be back in part three with friends of the show, The Dullest Brothers, in order to build the entire modern Japanese political system. Hell yeah, there we go. There we swish in our

favorite sign care well, favorite Ron Hubbard. But they're pretty great. Um fucking a. That's that's beautiful. Oh well, Chris, I am excited to hear from our old friends, the Dullest brother um, but we're going to have to wait until Thursday for that because this is I'm not excited to hear from our old friends. It's gonna be great to non problematic guys who were never friends with any Nazis.

That's the thing everyone remembers about the Dulles brothers is the degree to which they were not close friends with Nazis. So yeah, follow us at cool Zone Media, at Bastard's Pod on Twitter and Instagram and allegedly allegedly and Chris, do you want to give them your Twitter handle? Yeah, I'm at me hr three on Twitter allegedly allegedly, I'm all allegedly better known as the ice must be a story guy. Yeah, that's that that that is your legal name.

And it happened. And in happy news, I just found a whole Reddit threat of people talking about how they appreciate how cute Anderson is. So yeah, oh yes, no, Anderson's huge on Reddit. You're here, John Anderson. Good for you, all right, motherho back Thursday, come back Thursday, and we will we will wrap you in our warm, slightly gropy embrace of podcast Bye,