Piss off. Actually, rather than a hood I like to wear the flayed skin of morons.
WWI and the Russo-Japanese War? Well, they weren't exactly running rampant throughout Asia and the Pacific at that time with hundreds of millions at their feet, were they? Different circumstances. Despite your pathetic comments, you still haven't disproved that at the time they regarded non-Japanese as subhuman. It's well documented and well known.
Dude, that kind of thing leads to people getting kicked and banned in these parts.
Second, you aren't really adding anything to the discussion by just repeating some lines out of OTL historybooks. The OP is clearly trying to ask
how the Japanese can be made to behave better.
I would say that the atrocities were brought on not mainly by cultural factors but by the situation that Japan found itself in in trying to assert itself in East Asia. It tried to be a hegemon; the subject countries didn't like Japan acting like a hegemon; they resisted; Japan started killing people in gruesome ways. China's population, unlike Korea or Taiwan, was huge and couldn't be controlled easily and this led to massive frustration on the part of the Imperial Japanese Army, so they thought that terror and killing to lead to victory; this was similar to the actions of the Mongol and Manchu armies of antiquity whose success would create powerful Chinese dynasties. The fact that the Japanese were a rather insular, self-righteous people at the time didn't help.
Now there are a couple things to take note of regarding the Japanese and China.
- though the Japanese educational and military institutions taught fervent nationalism and the need to be able to slaughter enemies, they did not see the Chinese as subhuman the way the Germans did the Slavs. Indeed, the whole war with China IOTL was painted as an operation to defeat the KMT warlords and restore order to China, not to make it Japanese.
- Classical Chinese culture enjoyed inherent prestige in Japan. Japanese students had to learn Confucian values, ancient Chinese language, and history. Many of the Japanese officers who would later commit war crimes were themselves educated like this. They saw their own country as the ideal representation of Sinosphereic culture and believed it was natural that, being more advanced than China, should take the responsibility of modernizing it as a patron state.
Of course, ideals and reality are two different things. The Japanese were certainly imperialists like any other, this is not to be forgotten. However, the attitude is still important - Japanese did not want to exterminate the Chinese or destroy China even if their actions, as seen by the Chinese themselves, would appear to threaten to do so. It was unlike the German fantasy to enslave the Slavs, raze Leningrad, and make a lake of Moscow. What Japan probably wanted was to be a modern day Mongol or Manchu invader, it wanted to conquer the center of civilization and create its own empire there.
Opposing this hairbrained dream was the unstable but dominant KMT in China. From 1911 to 1930 or so, China was split up among warlords who all wanted to rule the country. The fall of the Manchu dynasty and various modernization movements took China in a different direction than Japan - they wanted a republic, not a new monarchy, whereas Japan had renewed its 2000 year-old dynasty with the intent of strengthening the solidity of the country as it entered the world stage. So in this there were differences in thought.
More importantly, the actual interests Japan had in China were not altruistic but imperialistic. Japan wanted China's resources. It wanted to split off as much of the former Manchu territory as it could to make China weaker and more controllable. It wanted the local governments (yes, multiples) to listen to its orders. During the warlord era, Japan was supporting various warlords such as Yan Xishan and Zhang Zuolin against each other. When Zhang Zuolin became too powerful, the Japanese had him killed and this led to the takeover of Manchuria.
When the KMT was consolidating its power and annihilating the CCP in Jiangxi and on the Long March routes, the Japanese were concerned that the KMT was unifying China, and this China was not going to be one that would listen to orders. The Xi'an Incident whereby Chiang Kai-shek agreed to make peace with the CCP was the last straw and a year later Japan invaded. Now one direct cause of the invasion and brutality as it happened seems to have been the fact that China was finally unifying and so had to be beat down to for Japan to have a chance at hegemony. The subsequent brutal behavior was also conducted in desperation to control the angry Chinese population that found itself united in fury against Japan.
So for Japanese troops
not to act brutally, you could change the evolution of Chinese politics. One might
- not have the Japanese kill Zhang Zuolin, as a result of them having a better relationship. When Japan invades, it will be to help Zhang, not to annex the country.
- have Chiang Kai-shek be killed in the Xi'an incident, whether by design (Mao really wanted him dead) or by accident in the confusion. This could lead to complete fragmentation of the KMT into a renewed warlord period. Japan would not have to face a single unified army in its invasion, and its troops and commanders would have an easier time facing the enemy and negotiating with warlords one at a time. However, this would still lead to a Vietnam-like scenario, even if there would not be as many horrendous atrocities committed by Japanese. In fact, the Japanese might see the warlords working for them commit warcrimes and feel the need not to act that way.
- Have the USSR be more of a threat to China and Japan. This could be interesting. Suppose that the Bolsheviks get lucky in the Russian civil war and have extra energy and troops left over in the Far East. They want to curb Japan's advances so they decide to take Manchuria (at the same time they can weed out those pesky White Russian emigres). Chinese warlords and Japan alike are naturally not down with this and the Sino-Soviet war begins. The Japanese help Zhang Zuolin in Manchuria and other warlords against underground Communist revolts. This is all happening in the mid or late-1920s. The Soviet Union ships arms and supplies through Chinese Turkestan to CCP insurgents fighting various KMT-aligned warlords and Zhang's Fengtian clique. Japan is seen by the KMT, Zhang, and many nationalist Chinese as an ally against Russia. Japan does not feel as threatened by the prospect of a unified Nationalist Chinese state as it does by an inevitably hostile Soviet China, so an alliance grows.
While I like this scenario, it has a major problem, namely, it does not allow for a war with the USA as the OP requests, nor does Japan do the invading of China.
Therefore, I would suggest we take the first and last scenarios and combine them, giving both a solid anti-Communist Fengtian ally to Japan and making the KMT go full commie and become a true Soviet ally, scaring the Japanese into having no trouble backing Zhang all the way. Japan, using Fengtian Manchuria as a base, invades China much as it did in OTL, though the invasion is not as ambitious because Japan needs to keep an eye on Russia. The USA creates an embargo and in a couple years something like Pearl Harbor happens. Because Japan still sees its arch enemy as Russia and wants a negotiated settlement to the war with America, it refrains from doing terrible things to POWs and Japanese generals create more humane rules of engagement. After all they are in China to help the anti-Communist Fengtian unify China, not conquer the place. Some My Lai-style killings happen in China and elsewhere, but nothing like Nanjing or Unit 731 is undertaken. Japan still loses the war, although perhaps in better condition, and China is a total mess as Fengtian and CCP/KMT forces duke it out.
There, no atrocities.
