History has its own life, it is like a person, both easy-going and self-respecting. ——Yu Qiuyu
Every war, especially a world war, can bring deep calamity to the participating countries, and even more so, to the destruction of each country. So far, it can be said that the Second World War was the largest war in human history, involving 61 countries and 2 billion people, causing at least 5,500 deaths worldwide.
Japan was one of the three fascist giants of the Second World War, and launched the war of aggression against China and the War of the Pacific, which brought a painful disaster to the people of the Asia-Pacific region. China made a great contribution in World War II. But from the perspective of human and property damage, China was undoubtedly one of the countries with the worst losses in World War II. During the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, the total number of Chinese military and civilian casualties totaled 35 million, of which about 18 million were killed, and 480 million were Chinese at that time, with a casualty ratio of 7.3% and a death rate of 3.75%. Direct economic losses amounted to $100 billion and indirect economic losses amounted to $500 billion.
In World War II, Japan acted as an aggressor and plundered many wealth and cultural relics from China and the Southeast Asia region. Japan did not repay the war and made these plunders the cornerstone of its post-war take-off. Japan did not pay compensation to China, and the compensation to Nanyang was only in the form of loans, but it enabled Japan to open up the Nanyang market. So what were the number of Japanese casualties in World War II?
According to an investigation by the Japan Economic Stability Headquarters, Japan killed 1,140,429 people in the Pacific Theater and 414,879 in the Navy. He Yingqin recorded in his "Eight Years of War of Resistance" that the number of japanese casualties in the Chinese battlefield was 2,418,028, of which the death toll was 483,208. According to statistics from both sides, the Japanese army died a total of 2,038,516 people during World War II.
Although the statistical standards of various countries in the total number of casualties after the war were different, the final determination of the total number of casualties was also different, and there were some differences in the statistics of China and Japan, but the difference was not large. The approximately 2.1 million Japanese soldiers killed in World War II enshrined in the Yasukuni Shrine are also considered by many to be a more realistic figure. Combined with the civilian casualties caused by the U.S. bombing of the Japanese mainland, about 400,000 people, the truest death toll in Japan is less than 2.6 million. Of the 2.1 million soldiers who died, 29,000 were recruited from Taiwan, according to the National Human History.
The real Japanese death data is indeed unacceptable to more people, after all, Japan committed countless unforgivable crimes in World War II, and there are at least millions of innocent people who died in the Japanese army, which is really unfair. However, through many investigations, Japan did only have so many casualties during World War II, which is really lamentable.
For those countries that experienced World War II, the most important thing is peace, and the cruelty of war is also something that these countries do not want to experience again, and we should also cherish the peaceful life now.