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In 1940, Yoshio Suzuki, who dreamed of "serving the country and being loyal to the monarch", came to Laiwu, Shandong Province, when he was just 20 years old, and his goal was to become an officer.
For this reason, he has to show himself in front of his superiors, that is, to kill, and the more people he kills, the better!
In his memories of his later years, he recounted the numerous crimes he committed in the process of recruiting "flower girls" several times!
Training of recruits
In more than four months of recruit training, Suzuki has always been ranked first, and he demands the best in all disciplines.
And when it comes to the last level, when it comes to assassinating real people, he is still the most brave, or rather murderous.
The living people used to train the recruits were Chinese people captured by the little devils from the surrounding villages, and Suzuki had a class of more than 20 people, and they were divided into three peasants.
They were covered in scars and tied to a large wooden stake standing in the playground, and each recruit was checking his bayonet in his hand, hoping to be the first to go up and kill one alive.
Because stabbing a living person is completely different from a person who stabs to death, when a living person is stabbed to death, he will yell hard, blood will gush out, his eyes will be filled with resentment, and his eyes will seem to rush out of his sockets!
The horrific scene scared some people, but unlike Suzuki, he was excited by it, and he was the first to stand up.
"It's like killing a pig!" because from childhood to adulthood, everyone has taught me that Chinese are useless lazy worms, and it doesn't hurt to kill them!"
More than five months later, in September 1941, Suzuki took part in the extermination of the "collaborating villages" around Laiwu.
Every four or five kilometers they reach a village, and then they rush into it and kill everyone they see.
When the raid on a village was over, the whole brigade continued to move forward, and when they saw four or five independent houses three or four hundred meters away, the captain gave the recruits a small task to go to the front and burn those houses!
Suzuki volunteered, and in order to express himself, he rushed to the front and was the first to kick open the door of the private house.
I saw a Chinese woman in her twenties lying under the covers, holding a baby who was only one or two months old in her arms.
The woman was holding the child in her arms, leaning against the wall next to the bed, her eyes full of fear!
Suzuki picked the quilt to the ground with a bayonet, and he thought to himself: "How can such a lazy stupid pig as the Chinese have offspring?"
He cursed: "Stinky Chinese pigs! We have worked tirelessly to come here to fight, and it has been very hard! You are enjoying happiness here!"
Then he picked up his rifle and gave the woman and the child a few blows, and the woman soon became weak, and after being beaten by Suzuki like this, she screamed a few times and then collapsed.
He ran outside, threw all the straw and dry wood he could see around the house, and set the whole house on fire.
An old Chinese lady ran over and tried to save the woman and the child, but Suzuki was displeased and kicked the old lady away.
A woman's screams were heard in the room, and a woman who had just become a mother died in the house with her child.
The old Chinese lady was desperate, and after scolding the little devils a few words, she rushed straight into the burning house and died together!
When Suzuki returned to the ranks, the veterans offered him a "compliment."
"We could hear the woman's cry from a few hundred meters away, and the flame, it would be even better at night, it must be a beautiful firework!"
Kill women who resist
In December 1941, Suzuki's brigade set out again, this time in an area of more than 30 kilometers around Zhanggaoka, and Suzuki served as a guard at the brigade headquarters at this time.
As he marched to a village, Suzuki saw a group of veterans escorting seven or eight Chinese women, all of whom were undressed.
"Looking at it from afar, I thought it was a group of big white pigs!"
The women had been subjected to inhuman abuse, and Suzuki knew that it was the work of the veterans, and that the women's home should be the comfort station set up by the brigade.
A veteran stopped Suzuki and a few other recruits, and said with a little joking: "You guys, pick a woman and take them away and stab them to death!
Suzuki and the others were stunned, not that they didn't want to, but that there was no such order, and the guards had different tasks.
"It doesn't matter which team you belong to, the veteran's orders are authority!
This is true of the Japanese army, where the instructions of the veterans are the greatest authority, and Suzuki picks up a woman whom he looks "the ugliest".
The woman had been beaten to the point of being unhuman, her face was red and swollen, bloody, and there was a large abrasion on her body that was oozing blood.
When the woman was pulled away, she thought that Suzuki was going to do something to her, instinctively screaming and struggling, Suzuki felt irritated, so she lifted off all the skin that the woman had bruised.
The woman fell to the ground in pain, and the veterans next to her were urging Suzuki, "Get on the bayonet, poke her, her breasts!"
Suzuki pulled out the bayonet and stabbed the bayonet half a meter long into the woman's body, and the blood "creaked" out, leaving Suzuki covered in it.
The knife was stuck in it, and he felt as if he was stuck in the bone, so he spun the bayonet and slashed horizontally.
The woman screamed repeatedly, and several women around her were also frightened and fell to the ground, shivering at Suzuki.
A thirty-centimeter wound appeared on the woman's stomach, revealing her stomach and intestines, and black bile flowed out along with blood.
"One more stab! another stab!"
It was like a crazy killing party, and Suzuki gave the woman a few more knives, and after a great deal of pain, the woman's breathing stopped.
The rest of the recruits did the same, killing all the women they picked, and there were a few more fresh corpses on the road by the field.
Because of this cruelty, Suzuki continued to rise through the ranks of the army, and worked his way up to the ranks.
When Zhangqiu was training recruits, in order to let the recruits experience a more realistic battlefield, he directly loosened the original Chinese and let the recruits fight with them.
Some of these innocent Chinese were peasants captured during the sweep, some were prisoners captured on the battlefield, and there were criminals who petty theft, puppet army dogs whose work could not satisfy the Japanese army.
If the recruits met the Chinese soldiers, it was often difficult for the recruits to deal with them, and there was once a soldier of the Eighth Route Army who beat the recruits to the ground and fled.
Seeing this, several recruits rushed up to fight with it, and this brave Eighth Route Army soldier died a heroic death, and Suzuki used this as an example to admonish the recruits to strengthen their training and not let the "cunning" and "stubborn" Chinese succeed.
The crimes are so numerous that they are difficult to make amends
In December 1944, Suzuki, who was already a military officer, led a team of about 15 people to attack a village with the military police.
It was a village that the Japanese army considered "hostile", and all adult men were taken away and killed by the gendarmerie, and Suzuki and his men were on guard.
Suzuki and his men were annoyed by such a boring errand, and they wanted to have some fun, and the women left in the village became a source of fun.
Suzuki once disliked the abuse of women, but two years after arriving in China, he began to seek thrills from comfort stations.
He has a fiancée in Japan, and he has been waiting for Suzuki to return to get married, and this longing and intimacy makes Suzuki gradually sink.
Suzuki was holding a pistol and rummaging through the houses looking for young Chinese women, but everywhere he went, he could only see the old ladies with plaster on their faces.
A few impatient Japanese devils made a move on the old lady, Suzuki didn't want to do that, he felt that he was a person with pursuits, he must be young, as "latest" as possible!
Finally, in a pigsty, Suzuki and his subordinates found a group of women in their twenties, and a beautiful girl was targeted by Suzuki, and was carried into the next room by Suzuki in a trembling way.
Suzuki was disgusted by the strong smell of pigs, and he pointed a pistol at the woman, forcing her to take off her clothes and step into the water tank to take a bath.
It was winter, and the woman was frozen blue and purple, and after being pulled out, she shivered on the bed, and she didn't feel or react to Suzuki's aggression at all.
Suzuki was furious, feeling insulted, and began to slap the woman hard, asking her to give some feedback.
"Cheap Chinese! Damn it!"
The woman was whipped and convulsed, and Suzuki left the place satisfied, not killing the woman, because this is a so-called "enemy area" and is not worried about being reported.
On a march more than two months later, Suzuki and his men saw several Chinese women farming in the fields.
At this time, the veterans in the team will disappear in an instant, and they all rush up to relax, and Suzuki is also attracted and chases after him on horseback.
Women naturally can't run away from these devils like wolf dogs, and they are caught one after another, and a woman in her forties is a waste after being caught by Suzuki.
Suzuki felt sick to this woman her mother's age after the incident, so she raised her pistol and killed the woman.
And such massacres happened several times a week when Suzuki was in the position of military cao and detachment leader.
In 1945, Suzuki's most painful year was when he became a prisoner of the Soviet army and was sent to Siberia to "dig potatoes", and this "digging" was five years.
In 1950, he was escorted to Lushun and became a member of the war criminals management center, and in his recollection, the Chinese were much better than the Soviets, and they could live like people.
In 1956, Yoshio Suzuki, who had committed numerous crimes, was exempted from prosecution and released in court, and Suzuki was grateful for the tolerance of the Chinese and cried bitterly on the spot.
In September of this year, Suzuki returned to Japan, married his fiancée after 16 years of absence, and lived a happy life as an ordinary person.
In his later years, he devoted himself to telling people about his sins, not shying away from accusing the Japanese government of its mistakes, hoping to be forgiven by the Chinese, but for those victims, this regret was of little use.
References:
Chapter 1 Fushun is my second hometown (Yoshio Suzuki)
Science Network - The Bloody Atrocities of the Japanese Invasion of China as Seen in the Confessions of Japanese Army Veterans - Chen Manrong's blog post