On August 15, 1945, Emperor Hirohito of Japan announced to all of Japan: "Accept the Potsdam Proclamation and unconditional surrender." Japan is a country that pays attention to a "culture of shame", but its culture of shame is not "knowing shame and then being brave" as Chinese called it, but avoidance. Japan was defeated, and Japan did not have the ability to cover up this result in front of the whole world, and some officers felt extremely ashamed of the defeat in their hearts and chose to kill themselves to escape reality.
Two days before and after Japan declared defeat, many Japanese officers committed suicide by cutting their stomachs, including Ōnishi Takijiro and Anda Twenty-three. Some citizens could not stand on their knees, bowed their heads and sobbed, although the weather was clear that day, everyone felt dull in their hearts, Okamura Ninji was the chief leader of the Japanese army invading China, in the face of the emperor's announcement of surrender, did he cut his stomach and commit suicide, or did he react to it?
Okamura Ningji was born prematurely on May 15, 1884, from a declining samurai family in Tokyo, and Okamura Ningji had an older brother who died prematurely, and his father named him "Ning" in his name, plus the "second" of his second son, and named him Okamura Ningji.
Okamura learned Chinese characters at the age of 4, entered the Army Non-Commissioned Officer School at an early age, and became classmates with itagaki Seishiro, Doihara Ken and other invading Officers who invaded China. He couldn't wait to go to war while he was in school and wanted to bring what he learned to the battlefield.
In 1915, he came to China, and at this time he was only an intelligence officer around Sun Chuanfang. During the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, he put forward the infamous "Three Lights Policy," in which the houses in North China were robbed of grain and burned if they could not be grabbed, with the aim of cracking down on the anti-Japanese materials of the anti-Japanese army and people.
Before Japan declared defeat, japan's attitude wavered, sometimes sending telegrams in the morning saying not to surrender and to continue fighting, and in the afternoon to say an armistice. Many Japanese officers were distracted by the Japanese government's telegrams, but they were vaguely aware of the possibility of surrender. On the day that Japan declared defeat, most Japanese officers calmly accepted that they were ready to go home and did not kill themselves, so what about Okamura Ninji's reaction?
Okamura Ninji, who had an army of 1.05 million in his hands, received a secret telegram from the Emperor a few days before the surrender, and Okamura Ninji "would rather be crushed by jade than for waquan", refused to surrender Japan, and decided to continue fighting. Although Okamura Ninji had long known that the emperor was ready to surrender, from the moment he actually heard the news of the surrender, he felt: "Like a thunderbolt on a sunny day." ”
On May 3, 1946, the Tokyo Trial began, and on November 26, 1944, Okamura became commander-in-chief of the Chinese Dispatch Army and became a military war criminal. In court, 149 Japanese war criminals were sentenced to death. Okamura Ningji was a very difficult Japanese to deal with in the War of Resistance Against Japan, and he only swept through the anti-Japanese base areas in North China, causing 2.7 million Chinese people to die at his hands.
War criminals of the same level as him, and also his old classmates Itagawa Seishiro and Kenji Doihara, were sentenced to death, but he, such a "number one war criminal", accidentally escaped the death penalty, which caused an uproar in the court. He died of a heart attack in Tokyo on September 2, 1966, at the age of 82.