Behind the Bastards - Part One: The Slavery Loving Fascist who Built Modern Japan

Episode Date: September 21, 2021

Mia Wong is joined by Robert Evans to discuss Nobusuke Kishi. FOOTNOTES: Machiavelli’s Children Leaders and Their Legacies in Italy and Japan by Richard J. Samuels Chinese Comfort Women Testimonies from Imperial Japan’s Sex Slaves by Peipei Qiu, with Su Zhiliang and Chen Lifei Yakuza Japan's Criminal Underworld by David E. Kaplan and Alec Dubro Asian Labor in the Wartime Japanese Empire: Unknown Histories By Paul H. Kratoska The Prime Ministers of Postwar Japan, 1945-1995 Their Lives and Times Edited by Akio Watanabe  Absolute Erotic, Absolute Grotesque:The Living, Dead, and Undead in Japan's Imperialism, 1895-1945 By Mark Driscoll Zengakuren: Japan's Revolutionary Student by Stuart J. Dowsey Planning for Empire Reform Bureaucrats and the Japanese Wartime State by Janis Mimura Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern by Prasenjit Duara https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F1994%2F10%2F09%2Fworld%2Fcia-spent-millions-to-support-japanese-right-in-50-s-and-60-s.html https://www.e-flux.com/journal/100/268783/the-imperial-ghost-in-the-neoliberal-machine-figuring-the-cia/ https://asiatimes.com/2020/08/inside-story-of-us-black-ops-in-post-war-japan/ https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.economist.com%2Fessay%2F2015%2F08%2F15%2Fthe-unquiet-past https://lausan.hk/2021/japans-colonial-legacy/ https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2020/07/13/commentary/japan-commentary/assassination-attempt-nobusuke-kishi/ https://www.awf.or.jp/pdf/h0004.pdf   Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science, and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated

two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Well, Sophie, I don't know if I agree with you that a Kamala Harris themed erotic vampire anime would be successful, but I guess we all have different opinions on things. Oh, I didn't notice the audience had come in here. I'm Robert Evans. This is Behind the Bastards. It's a podcast about the worst people in all of history. Sophie and Christopher and I were just having a conversation about mangas that we think would be successful. So, Christopher, I don't know. What do you think, erotic Kamala Harris vampire anime? I mean, I could see it. Look, okay,

the, you know, the advantage you get, you get out of out of out of anime, right? Everyone's eyes enormously large. You cannot lose. You cannot lose with this. Yeah, absolutely. The eyes are too big. Science says that we find the big eyes cute. Cannot go wrong. Cannot go wrong. Well, other things you can't go wrong with are a classic Behind the Bastards reverse episode where one of my, Sophie, are we allowed to call them indentured servants? No. We're one of my indentured podcast guests, in this case, Christopher Wong. Also, no. Well, okay, Sophie, I guess you were able to make this later. One of our team members, one of the members of our squad. Sophie, there is no I in team, but several of the letters that are also an indentured servant are in the

word team. So Robert, that was worse than the fake laugh you did at the start of this episode. Christopher Wong, who is on our team, a valued member of the cool zone media squad. I'd prefer a junta, the cool zone media junta. I've always felt we were more of a regime. Oh God, you know, your web cram being broken and me not being able to look you in the eyes when I'm angry really upsets me. I know. I know. That's part of why I haven't fixed it. Christopher, what are we going to learn about today? Well, on this podcast, before we formally start, Robert, how do you feel about Operation Paperclip? Oh, you know, so when World War Two ended, right? Same kind of feeling that I got when like the last Lord of the Rings movie finished or like

when Firefly got canceled. And I'm like, ah, but I wanted more. I wanted more from these kooky Nazis and their crimes. And then the US government and the Russian government in two separate operations were like, don't worry, Robert, we're going to give those guys future jobs. You can keep following the careers of Albert Spear, Werner von Braun, a bunch of other Nazis, including that guy the CIA hired and see what they do after the war. It's like, you know what it's like? It's like that TV show Joey after Friends got canceled. That's what Operation Paperclip is for the Nazis. And I personally, as a fan of both Joey and World War Two history, I think that's great. What's Joey's last name? Trubiano, something like that. Trubiani. Wow. Yeah, more or less.

I'm so proud of you. It's been a long time since I watched an episode of Friends. Look, it's been like 15 years. Come on. Oh, wow. Robert, you are going to love part two of this. And I'm going to start out at this episode. I'm going to make an incredibly bold claim. And we'll see if you agree with it after the second part of this episode. I maintain that the rehabilitation of Nobisuke Kishi, who is the subject of today's episode, is the single worst example of the US rehabilitating a war criminal after the end of the war. It's the worst one. I'm excited because this is a new war criminal for me, which is always a huge day in Robert Evans' land. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So Nobisuke Kishi was born on November 13, 1896, in a village in Yamaguchi Prefecture, Japan.

Now, Kishi is born in an incredibly important time in Japanese history, right, just literally right at the beginning of the second phase of Japanese imperialism. So, to get us to the second phase, after the restoration of the emperor and the major restoration of 1868, Japan rapidly starts importing European technology, European organizational principles, European ideology, and European racism in order to do a rapid quote unquote modernization campaign in order to compete with the European nations. Now, Japan was not exactly like an egalitarian paradise before they started doing this. And the consequence of this is that they take the colonialism like a fish to water. And this starts what I'm going to call the three phases

of Japanese imperialism. You have imperialism one, imperialism two, imperialism harder, and imperialism three, Tokyo drift. I'm very frustrated that you didn't do an imperialism two electric boogaloo. But we'll discuss that at your next performance evaluation. I will. I will endeavor to get better references when I name phases of imperialism after bad movie titles. Yeah. So imperialism one basically starts right as the major restoration happens. And it lasts roughly from about 1868 to the start of the Sino-Japanese War in 1894. And this is the phase that everyone ignores because it's, you know, this phase of imperialism is very, very local or it's happening inside Japan itself. But it's extremely important to understand

like everything is going to happen next. We're going to talk about it for a little bit. And now, so the sort of the defining characteristics of this first phase are the horrifically violent assimilation of the Inui people in Hokkaido, the annexation of the Ryoku Islands. You might not know what those are. The biggest one is Okinawa. You probably know what that is. Yeah. My half of my family spent half of their lives there. Yeah. Yeah. Very nice place. Very, very bad things happened to people who lived there. Yeah. Yeah. There's a monument at the north of the island called Peace Prayer Park because when the when the U.S. took the island, the Japanese occupiers told them like, hey, you're all going to get murdered and raped by U.S. troops.

You should just kill yourselves now and so a shitload of Okinawans just flung themselves off the cliffs. And now there's a very nice monument there. It's a lot of bad things have gone down in Okinawa. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. This is the Japanese Empire just sending enormous numbers of people to their deaths is running FEMA this episode. Yeah. It is remarkable when you're telling a story that takes place when you're telling a story about colonialism in Asia and the U.S. is not the specific bad guy in the story. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Like that's how the empire of Japan got. Like, yeah, like this is the thing with like the Americans don't become the bad guys in this story until two years into the occupation, which is like I'm trying to I can't I don't know if like another

time ever the U.S. has like military occupied another country and it took two years for them to become like the bad guys. It's yeah. We got faster. Don't worry, guys. Yeah. Yeah. We've improved our game. That's what Taylorism brings you. Yep. Yeah. Actually, Kishi, we a lot of this got cut, but Kishi, big fan of Taylorism, absolutely loves it. Yeah. Him and our cops. Yep. Yep. It's great stuff. And you know, there's one more thing that happens and this is I think the least well known of the stuff that happens in Japan in this period, which is that there's this just mass destruction and looting of thousands and thousands of these local non-shinto shrines, like in Japan itself. They had this giant like culture conflict that just like annihilates like all of the sort

of like local non-shinto religions. And you know, all of this violence is about sort of it's about annihilating any other culture in Japan and forcing everyone to sort of assimilate to the Japanese nation state. And you know, this is this is what 19th to 20th century nationalism is, is this attempt to impose like a single national language and culture on a bunch of people who, you know, up until this point, like the only thing most a lot of these people have in common is that like armed men show up every year and take stuff from them. They give the same king and like other than that, you know, they have different cultures and languages and, you know, in order to get rid of days that used to be all government was was armed men taking your stuff and giving it to the king.

And one day when libertarianism wins, we'll get back to that. I wonder. Yeah. I wonder how long it would take for for the CEOs to just literally start to point to themselves monarchs. I don't know. You know, there's that the the the the Twitter account run in part by the Kent State gun girl, the Liberty Hangout account. Yeah. Libertarian conservative account like four years ago and in about a year and a half was like an ironic re-educating the establishment of a monarchy. That's why I made that joke. It's like literally a thing that's incredible. Yeah. Okay. Continue. Yeah. You know, and all the violence of, you know, we've been talking about the violence in Hokkaido, the violence in the islands, the violence in Japan itself. Like this is this is

the crucible in which Japanese nationalism is formed. And, you know, and like like like the rest of 20th century nationalisms, the only place that that goes is imperialism to imperialism harder. And this this phase begins in 1894, when Japan launches a war against China basically over controlling Korean Peninsula. And they just like they just smashed the Chinese army. We talked about this war a little bit from the Chinese side in our Zhang Zongchang episode. But, you know, from the Japanese perspective, this war makes Japan like the premier like power in East Asia, like they're the big Asian power. And, you know, and Kishi is born the year after Japan wins a sign of Japanese war. And when he's eight years old, Japan wins its next major war, which is the Russo

Japanese war. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Japan like Japan beats Russia so badly. It's amazing. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, man. The Russians are so like start the war with such a like, we're going to win us an easy victory against savages and then lose their entire north fleet. Just just just their asses hand to them. All like one of the biggest ass whoopings of the entire century military. It's it's it's kind of funny because it's like, okay, so like, you know, they sell this, they sell the second fleet from like all the way around Europe, around Africa, and, you know, it gets destroyed too. But the first fleet like the reason that fleet gets destroyed is so there is exactly one guy in the entire Russian Navy who has any idea what he's doing. His name is Makarov.

Like he's he's the guy who had to be icebreaker. Like like he actually knows what he's doing. And also got a pretty good pistol from him. Yeah. He's a cool guy. And then like at like at max range, just like a random Japanese cannon shot, just like killed him in the entirety of like Russian high command. And that was it for the Russian Navy because there's no one else in the whole Navy that like wasn't just like a random aristocratic appointment. It's it's it's it's it's it's great because, you know, it takes a lot to stand out as a Russian naval disaster because the Russian Navy has pretty comprehensively been a shit show. We could talk about the Kursk or the fact that their own the aircraft carrier, the admiral Kuznetsov keeps lighting its dry

dock on fire. We can talk about a lot of stories of the Russian Navy. But please, we should probably continue. We'll do a whole Russian Navy. Yeah. Yeah, you know, and like like in Russia, like they lose this war so badly, it causes a revolution. And, you know, but in Japan, this is like, you know, this is when Japan like becomes one of the great powers. It's no longer this like minor regional power, like it's one of the great powers. And you know, yeah, everybody's got to take him seriously after the biggest land empire in Europe. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and everything is like, you know, they beat a European power. Yeah. Like that's a huge deal in this period. And like, there's a lot of people who will support the Japanese Empire, like out of like anti imperialism,

basically. It's like they're a non white empire. We have to. Yeah. And this is yeah, you know, trying to explain that to, I don't know, somebody in Nanjing. Yep. Yep. Oh, boy. Don't worry. It's an anti imperialist empire that's shot your family to death anyway. Yeah. Yeah. It's bad stuff. And but, you know, like they're the product of this is like Kishi Kishi is growing up in the period like when Japan becomes like a superpower, you know, they're like a minor great power, like they're not like Germany or like, like, I don't know, like the UK or France at this point. But you know, they're still a great power. And, you know, and this is this is this is going to be sort of important because this is the sort of this is the sort of like era of nationalism and

era of sort of like triumphalism that the Kishi is coming up in. And Kishi is going to be one of, if not the main architect of imperialism, three Tokyo drift when that phase starts in 1937. And that's the fascist phase. So we're going to we're going to we're going to we're going to work our way up to that, throughout the course of this. Now, Kishi's great grandfather was actually like, yeah, you know, this is another source of the sort of like nationalism and patriotism he comes up in is he was like, famous enough for doing like anti shogun stuff, if we're the restoration that like when he dies, there's like a bunch of articles on newspaper about it. But you know, I mean, he dies in 1902. And after he dies, the Kishi family business goes under. And this starts

off this just really weird set of family drama. And Kishi's family is wild. So Kishi's older brother is Sato Ichiro. And, you know, he becomes a vice admiral, the Navy, his younger brother, Sato Isaku, is the third longest serving Prime Minister in Japanese history. Kishi's spoiler alert is also going to become Prime Minister. And he's like, kind of distantly related to a third Japanese Prime Minister, Yoshida Shiguru, which is extremely funny and reasons that we'll get into in the second episode. Like these people are like, they're like the Japanese Bushes, except like the Sato's are just like, they're just random people, like they're not like rich. Like they're just, yeah, it's, it's, it's really opportunity shit. Yeah. Yeah, like it's

like they, they just like for one generation, actually, you know, after the after Kishi, they're going to keep, they're going to be staying politics, like that one generation, just like just ran Japanese politics for like half a century. Yeah, it doesn't seem like that's ever a good idea. Yeah, it's, it's not great. Perhaps running perhaps politics isn't such a great idea, but that's a little bit of a cop out. Anyway, yeah. Now, because the sort of the family business imploded, Kishi's uncle,

Matsusuke, goes to sort of like study medicine in Tokyo and becomes a professor of obstetrics. Yeah. And, you know, so Matsusuke doesn't have any sons. And so he adopts Kishi's younger brother, Isaku, to, to, to marry his daughter. And again, I want to point this out. Okay. Matsusuke is Kishi's uncle, right? That means that Isaku is marrying his first cousin. And okay, that seems Kishi, Kishi also marries his cousin. Like this is like not like a normal thing in this period. Like people don't marry their first cousins, like that often in like both of the people in this family directly. People knew a while ago. People knew a long time before this that like, yeah, that's not really a great idea. The haps are looking so good.

They do it anyways. It's a, it's a great sign of where this is going. So, so Kishi stays with Matsusuke when he's like very little and his uncle realizes that Kishi is extremely smart. And, you know, like he hires a home tutor to help Kishi pass this like incredibly selective entrance exams for this middle school. And then he hires one to teach him English. And, you know, it's this whole thing where he's a child prodigy and his uncle's like, I'm going to raise him. And, you know, like Matsusuke like, like deeply genuinely loves Kishi. Like one of his biographers described it, quote, treating his uncle like a son. Matsusuke showered as much affection on Nobusuke as did his own parents. Now, unfortunately for Kishi,

and unfortunately for like all of East Asia, in the middle of Kishi's second year of middle school, Matsusuke dies of pneumonia and Kishi sent off to live with one of his other aunts. And, you know, like this is, this is like pretty, he's still like a young kid at this point. And this is like, this is really bad for him emotionally. And, you know, the second family that he gets sent to live with is like way less nice to him. And so, you know, he still gets support for his academic career, but he has his like, he has his weird young age trauma, which like a couple, like one of his biographers like points this out and is like, yeah, he has all the things that you need for a great leader. He has, he has a good family. He has a, he has a family that wants to do education

and he has trauma. And I was like, do you understand where this is going? It's very weird. Yeah. And, you know, yeah, and Kishi, you know, it's like Kishi, Kishi's a genius. Like he's, he's at the top of, he's at the top of his class in middle school. He graduates top of his class again in high school. And in 1918, he's accepted into the incredibly prestigious Tokyo Imperial University. Now, what Kishi is in college, she starts to formally intellectually encounter the new Japanese far right. And he becomes particularly enamored with like the Ur Japanese fascist Ikikida, who he is a weird guy that he has a lot of sort of eclectic ideas, but like his big thing is that he wants the emperor to seize power in a coup, like dissolve the parliament to create a

fascist state. And, you know, Kishi, Kishi's kind of soft on the like coup part. And Kita has some ideas about like, well, okay, so you're going to coup the government, right? And then you have a fascist state and the fascist state's going to like kind of do research, redistribution. And Kishi's like, eh, he's kind of soft on that part. But like, you know, the fascist state part, he's, he's incredibly in favor of. And, you know, I mean, at this point in time, there's no evidence that it could possibly be a bad thing. Yeah, yeah. This is, you know, this is, yeah, this is, this is, this is, this is pretty miscellaneous. A promising new political theory. Yeah. Yeah. Now, yeah. So, so when he graduates

from university in 1920, there's a couple of weird things about it. So like, okay, so not, he's at the top of his class, right? But like, not only is it top of his class, he has the highest test scores that anyone has ever seen. Like in the history of this university, he has the best test scores. And then he also like, he takes a civil service exam, but like, he takes it as like, you know, you're supposed to spend like four or three or four years in college. He just takes it as a second year and passes. And so, you know, he has this whole arc where he's basically like, you know, he, but for most of his career, he's seen as just, this just like prodigy. And it's like sort of true. And we'll get into, you know, it not being true

when the war machine starts to come apart. But yeah, you know, in this period, he makes what looks at the time like a really weird decision. You know, he's a prodigy, like he could easily have entered like the home office, like the home ministry. And you know, he would have had this very easy career, like very safely could have become a vice minister or a governor. And instead, he joins the ministry of commerce, which at this point is like a fairly minor like government government industry. And he does this because specifically, like he really, really wants to be in charge of the of Japan's industrialization process. And, you know, this is going to be key. She's like big thing over his career is he's, he's a please planning bureaucrat. He, he's, you

know, he, you know, like, well, well, well, well, when he gets to the ministry of commerce, he starts, you know, he does, he does all this research, they send him all over the world to like look at different people's planning models. And like he gets obsessed with like 19 late 1920s German planning stuff, which, you know, looks kind of weird given what's about to happen in the German economy. But yeah, and he starts advocating this thing called industrial rationalization, which is this is this is like economic state planning. But, you know, his the way this is sort of different from like the Russian model is that like, he wants to sell off corporations. But he wants the corporations to sort of be run by government bureaucrats. I mean,

they're still like capitalists, but like he wants it to be run by government bureaucrats. And he wants them to be sort of run for the state interests. And you know, and this is the other thing about this part, like, anytime someone says state interest, and they're like a bureaucrat 1930s Japan, what they mean is like building a war machine. And so, you know, you get these like weird, you get these weird passages where it's like you read this person sounds like a socialist, and then you read like two more paragraphs, and it's like, Oh, right, they want a bunch of state controls, they can build like the largest army the world has ever seen in over the state is a gun to these. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, it's not entirely different with like a lot of the ways the Nazis

would talk about this state like the state in the state is a race to like it's it's yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, in Kishi, the way Kishi thinks about this is that, you know, he's gonna chart like a third path between liberal capitalism and communism. And this position, it becomes held by a group called the sort of innocuously called the reform bureaucrats. And the thing that's important to understand about the reform bureaucrats that lots of people like don't get when they study this is that the reform bureaucrats, like all of them, including Kishi are fascists. But the thing that's different about them and the thing that's, you know, makes it sort of obscures their fascism is that unlike most fascists, the way they're trying to do fascism is to just work

through the bureaucracy. And so, you know, that basically like they have the strategy that they're going to work for bureaucracy, they work for the inside out. And, you know, Kishi's aided in this by the fact that his boss, Yoshino Shinji, is the head of the Ministry of Commerce and Industry. And he basically just like gives Kishi free reign to do whatever he wants. And so Kishi goes, okay, we're gonna start doing war planning. And, you know, he wants to take over like state control of major industries so they can do sort of economic planning for military stuff. And this gains him a lot of connection to support in the fascist sections of the army. Now, Kishi allies with what's what's called the control faction of the army, which is founded by

someone you probably all probably named or at least recognize Hideki Tojo, which yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. A man who failed to shoot himself in the heart. Yep. That's great. We love this stuff. Yeah. Yeah. You know, what's sort of weird about the control faction is that like they're founded kind of ironically like to stop another faction of the army like from doing fascism. And, you know, this this confuses a lot of people. Yeah, that is confusing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Do you know what else is confusing, Robert? The fact that no one has developed a system that's been capable of dethroning global capital. That is confusing. Yeah, it is. It is confusing. A lot of people say they've got the answer, but nobody's done it.

It's true. Nobody's done it. Yeah. I was I was. Yeah. What? I was going to say confusing that people don't buy our products and services. It is that we chill on here. Because maybe the answer to dethroning capitalism is to participate in it. Don't think about that too much. Think about these ads. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in

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today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we're back. All right, Chris, let's continue forward. Yeah, so yeah, we're going to talk about the absolute mess that is Japanese fascism.

So we talked about the control faction. The control faction is formed to stop the imperial way faction of the army from doing terrorism. And these guys, these guys hate each other. Like the imperial way spends like a good part of the early thirties, just like murdering this shit out of control faction officers. And both of them are just like purging each other from the army. And this whole thing is part of what I've already shown in the list called the period of government by assassination. And this period starts when a group of fascists, this is one of the, there's a million fascist groups in Japan. This is one of the smaller ones, like assassinates the prime minister in 1931. And after that, everyone just goes, oh, wait,

hold on, we can just kill ministers. And so, you know, they killed this just enormous number of government officials that kill a bunch of politicians, they kill businessmen, like they killed two more finance ministers. And like they do, like they do so there are so many coup attempts that like you could literally just do an entire podcast series that is just the coup attempts they attempt in these like five years, because it's like every different faction and every like possible coalition of these factions has their own coup attempt. And, you know, finally there's this period sort of ends when the imperial way and their allies try to do like one last giant coup in 1936 called February 26th Incidents. And they get kind of close,

like they take a bunch of government ministries, like they almost killed the prime minister, they almost killed the defense minister. I think they do kill the defense minister, but they lose. And after that, Japan, the Japanese government is just like, okay, we're just going to kill you all. And so, they do this like mass execution of like every fascist leader that can get their hands on, including Ike Kida, who is not involved in this in any way, but just like on principle, they were like, okay, the one thing all the fascists at Guru Anas that they like you, so we're just going to assassinate you. And so, well, they don't assassinate me, they put them on trial on a show trial and convicted them and killed them all.

And a lot of people, including people who are like pretty reliable fascism scholars like Robert Paxton, will look at this trial and go, oh, well, okay, this is like, this is as if like, I don't know, like recently, these marcher movement failed. And like, this is the end of fascism in Japan. And I think they're wrong. And the reason I think they're wrong is that if they're looking for the fascist revolution in Japan itself, and the fascist revolution doesn't happen in Japan, it happens in Manchuria. Now, we have talked about Manchuria before on this show, during the Zhangzhuang episodes, it's like the Northeast China equivalent to New England that like, you know, borders Russia, borders Korea, it's really close to Japan,

also borders Mongolia, you know, there's a lot of industry there. And, you know, it's the base of Zhang's boss who's also named Zhang, Zhang Zhuling. And, you know, he's the warlord that Japan had been backing during the whole warlord periods of the Civil War era. But both Zhangs lose the war against Chinese nationalists. And, you know, like when we last left Manchuria in 1928, like a bunch of piss off Japanese officers had just like, bombed Zhang Zhuling's train. And, you know, after that, Manchuria sort of falls into the hand of the nationalists and becomes technically part of the Chinese Republic. And this is where, okay, things have always been weird in Manchuria. This is where things get even weirder. In 1929, an anarchist revolution breaks

out in Shimin Prefecture that calls itself the Korean People's Association in Manchuria. Now, Shimin's like right on the border with between Manchuria and Korea. And this anarchist revolution is driven in large part by this enormous, there's millions, like two million people, like Koreans have fled the Japanese occupation in, you know, the Japanese occupation of Korea in Manchuria. And, you know, it's a weird project because you have a bunch of anarchists and you also have a bunch of Korean nationalists working with each other. Because the thing both of them agree on is that they hate the Japanese. And, you know, the anarchists sort of take the lead. They form a bunch of these councils, they start organizing the economy around mutual aid,

and, you know, they sort of set up this education system, they do all this stuff, and then everyone immediately starts trying to kill them. And so, as is like anarchist tradition, the Soviets start immediately assassinating people. If these guys have another disadvantage, which is that the Japanese army also starts assassinating them, and eventually this whole sort of anarchist, like, prefecture, sort of mini-territory collapses in 1931 when, you know, the incident that I would consider the actual sort of fascist coup in Japan starts, which is the Mukden incident that triggers this full-scale Japanese invasion of all of Manchuria. Now, the Mukden incident's extremely weird. Basically, what happened is that a group of

officers in the Kwantung army, which is the... Japan has this army in Manchuria that's there to, like, protect their railroads, basically, because Japan, like, technically owns all the land the railroads are on. They have some other concessions. And so, they have this army that's just, like, in Manchuria that they can legally have. And the officers... Some of the officers of that army basically look at the situation, they look at what's happening, the rest of China, they look at the anarchist revolution, and they're like, okay, we need to take over Manchuria, like, entirely. But, you know, they have no... They don't have, like, an actual pretext. So, they stage a false flag attack on their own railroad and use the attack as, like, a pretense

that started a full-scale invasion of Manchuria. And, yeah, it's bad. And the other fun part about this story that... We'll talk more about Yakuza later, but, like, those guys... So, they go to, like, the Japanese government. The Japanese government is like, you cannot do this. And so, they go to some, like, right-wing industrialists trying to get funding and they won't do it. And people who will fund them are the Yakuza. And so, they have, like, 30 million yen just, just, like, from the Yakuza that the Yakuza are like, here, yeah, use it to take over Manchuria. And so, they do. And, you know, the civilian government in Japan doesn't want this, but they basically have no choice because the invasion is, like, incredibly popular among the

Japanese, like, public. And, you know, one of the reasons it's popular is that it... You know, there's very... I mean, there is some fighting, but Chiang Kai-shek and the nationalists are, you know, they're deep in their civil war with Mao and the communists in China. And they're just, like, okay, Japan, you can just have this. And so, they let them have this without a fight. And the consequence is that the Kwantung Army, which is, you know, it's chocked full of imperial way followers. The whole army is just a bunch of different people in different fascist groups. These guys wind up ending up in charge of setting up a new state in Manchuria called Manchukwa. And the product of this is you get just an extremely weird state with, like, 16 different

versions of fascism. And, you know, this is supposed to be, like, an independent state. And it, like, kind of is a little bit... Like, they installed Puyi, who's, like, the last emperor of China as, like, the emperor of Manchukwa, like, this new state. And, you know, they have all this propaganda about, like, the state's gonna have... It's gonna restore the kingly way. And there's gonna be, like, a direct relationship between the emperor and the will of the people. And there's gonna be these, like, autonomous agrarian villages ruled by landlords. And everyone's gonna, like, live in harmony. And did that happen? So the strongest group in this, like, sort of new fascist utopia is called the Concordia Association. And they're this, like, fascist Pan-Asian group

that, you know, they have this whole line about, like, okay, we're doing ethnic harmony and, like, all the races are gonna work together. We're gonna work together to, like, expel, like, the white imperialists. And the reason they take this line is that, like, the actual Chinese people there don't want the Manchukwa government there because they're, like, okay, all of the officers in this thing and all of the, like, government officials are Japanese. Like, this is just a Japanese occupation. But, you know, you have this sort of, this fascist, like, mass organization. And their goal is to build popular support for this because, you know, the Japanese can't really just purely hold us a military force at this point. So they have this puppet government and,

you know, for about two years, they rule, like, relatively unopposed. But in 1933, the Communist Party sort of at the, like, behest of the USSR, the USSR was like, okay, you guys need to do this. So the CCP goes, okay. And what they do is that they start, like, a series of insurrections, launched at, like, driving the Japanese out. And the Japanese respond by slaughtering entire villages. It's very kingly way, very, very, very harmony between the races. There's, you know, there's individual villages where they walk in, they kill 2,500 people in, like, a single massacre. And, you know, between 1932 and 1940, they kill 60,000 people trying to suppress the Communists. And they move 5.5 million people, mostly rural people, into these, like,

the 10,000 of these hamlets, which I think if anyone studied the Vietnam War, and you remember strategic hamlets from that, like, this is that, like, these hamlets, they have 3 meters high walls, they have barred wire, they have forced labor. And so, you know, this is the state of, like, this is the state of, like, the kingly way in sort of fascism and Chukot. Yeah. And it's, you know, I mean, one of the things that I think is, and that you were getting at earlier, when people talk about kind of the rise of the, the OG fascists, it tends to be very Eurocentric. But there's very much an open exchange of ideas that the Japanese are a part of that's, that's going, but that includes concentration camps. And it's not

just, and to that point, the Japanese are probably, they're not really, I would doubt their inspiration is the German concentration camps or anything that a fascist is, well, that a, a, a recognize, like, what we can traditionally consider a fascist power's done, they were probably looking back at the Spanish and the, the British, which might be, I guess. Yes. Yeah. In the United States, possibly, because the, the, the Spanish concentration camp concept kind of originated from a Spanish general who deployed it in Cuba, but he got the idea from embedding with the U. S. Military after the Civil War, anyway. Yeah. Well, and, you know, um, you can trace it, sort of more directly to you because, like, all of that stuff,

you know, it boomerangs back to the Philippines during the American occupation there. And like, you know, that's one of the things... This is one of the reasons... That stuff, like all the South U.S. and the Philippines, that is, like, in large part... Like, that's a big part of the reason why this sort of Japanese vision of fascism is popular, to some extent in East Asia, because, you know, okay, before they, like, really openly start to massacre everyone, you know, it's popular because, I mean, Japan's seed is, like, the only power, you know, the only non-Mai power in the East that can resist just the apt... I mean, just incredible genocides that just, like, absolute horror that is happening just across the rest of East Asia. Awesome. It's great. And yeah, so Kishi

starts becoming interested in Manchukua around 1934, and partly he's interested in it because of the fascism, but his big interest in Manchukua is the natural resources and the sort of industrial base it has. And through his sort of position in the government bureaucracy, he's able to start working on the first Manchukua five-year plan. Now Manchukua, sort of weirdly, you know, the fascist officers who are in the Japanese army there, they want this whole thing to be, like, an independent, like, state that's, like, free from the, like, corruption of liberalism and capitalism and stuff from whatever, that, like, you know, it makes Japan, like, impure and, like, delusional relation to the empire. And Kishi looks at this and goes, like, okay, wait, but we want this state

to help run our war machine. And, you know, and he, yeah, this five-year plan is this giant, like, warm mobilization thing to create this sort of, they call it the national defense state. It's basically, like, it's turning the entire society, the entire state, the entire economy, into a war economy. And his plan to do this is he's going to bring in Nissan and have Nissan run, like, every war industry in Manchukua? Well, Nissan almost makes an acceptable truck. So, you know, almost, you know, it, it, it, it verges on being as good as a ram. Look, Nissan cars are, are, are all right, but don't, don't use them for agricultural work. Get a Tacoma. Now, if you're telling me they wanted to put Toyota in charge of everything, I would say that seems like a

flawless plan. I'll bet Toyota has never been involved in any kinds of crimes against humanity. You know, there's, there's, there's, there's like a fun, there's a fun thing here where, so, so the, there's these things in Japan called the Zabatsu and Zabatsu and, you know, they're these like giant mega conglomerates, like the people who own like Toyota or one of the conglomerates, Nissan's another one of them. And like the army and most of the fascists like hate these guys because they see these like giant capitalist things as like, oh, this is like a Western thing. It's like un-pure. They're like these corrupt bureaucrats and again, the way of us and the emperor. And so like, Shishi has to like do this incredibly elaborate dance to convince all

of the, the, the fascist officers in, in, in Manchukua that like, no, no, no, Nissan's not like Toyota, like they're, they're not like the other conglomerates or not like Mitsubishi. They're a new conglomerate and they're, they're gonna, they're gonna do fascism for us. And this works eventually. Um, and Kishi gets transferred fully to Manchuria in 1937 and all of his stuff gets approved basically because he's moving in there and proposing this five-year plan, which is enormously expensive by the way, but, but the reason, the reason that he's able to do this is is, Rides is getting in there at the second Sino-Japanese war starts, which is part of World War II, kind of, kind of its own thing. I don't know. There's a lot of running arguments.

Yeah, they had a, they had a war that was in its brutality and death toll. Yeah. Comparable to World War II at the same time World War II was going on. You know, I, occasionally Americans noticed it. There's some good Woody Guthrie songs that thank the mighty Chinese vets, but, um, yeah. You know, I mean, like, there's this whole thing, like, you know, I mean, like, like in China, like a lot, like it's like that whole war is called the anti-Japanese war, the war resistance, because that they call it. Yeah. Yeah. You know, because like that, like, you know, for most of the, the time this is happening, they, they, they, for about three or four years, China is just fighting the entire Japanese army by itself.

Mm-hmm. And, you know, this is, yeah, we'll, we'll, we'll get into, uh, the stuff that, that the Chinese government is going to sort of suffer in this. But, you know, but the consequence of this for Kishi is that, like, he gets just total economic power and sort of political power, I mean, sure. You can just, you can do literally whatever he wants. And the thing that he wants to do, so, okay, so his big thing is his big major thing is he wants to implement the five-year plan to, you know, turn this into a war economy. The second thing he wants to do is just get absolutely wasted literally every single night. Like, he, Kishi. Okay. Well, that scans. Look, if you're going to be war-criming,

you're not going to do sober. Yeah. No, he, yeah. And like, you know, it, like, all, all of the sort of Japanese officers and Japanese bureaucrats, like, go clubbing, but like, even the other, just like the, the other, even like the Yakuza people. I know every now and then I go out clubbing, get a little drunk with my friends, commit a couple of war crimes. Yeah, but this is padlock and apartment gate closed with a, but anyway. Horror. What? Allegedly. This is not about you. Continue. Gosh. The thing with Kishi is that like, okay, so everyone's doing this a bit at the time. Kishi is literally just going to clubs and getting wasted every single night. Hell yeah. And like, even the Yakuza people are like, what are you doing? Oh, like, it's like,

I have to take a second here to tell a story about the absolute shattest Japanese officer I've ever heard of. So when I was in, I've been to Okinawa a couple of times because my parents lived there for years and years and years, both when they were kids and then later as adults. And like, I'm not trying to like, whitewash the problems with American bases. There's a big, very active and I think very righteous movement to try to remove the bases on Okinawa, but we're going to talk about the origin of that too. Yeah, I had, I had no say in any of that. My parents just lived there. But so I went on this tour of like sites from World War Two on Okinawa. And one of the stories they told us was about this Japanese officer who when the Americans invaded

Okinawa, he was at a brothel just like had been drunk and fucking for days. And the Americans advanced quickly enough that by the time he sobered up, he found himself several miles behind the American lines and alone hung over and having just fucked himself silly, snuck past the American lines, made it back to his unit and then proceeded to lead them in battle for weeks, which is incredible chat energy. I have to say. You know, I say this to like, like, this is just, that's just the default condition of the Japanese officer corps in this whole war. Like that, that's like, like, this is, this is what they're doing all of the time. If it weren't for the millions of dead, it would be a real rock situation.

Yeah, like, you know, we're not saying these dudes rock. No, these dudes, in fact, do not rock. Do not rock. And I'm going to emphasize this by like how cringe Kishi actually is. Like, okay, so there's a quote of Kishi where he, he described, he describes himself as, and this is a direct quote, quote, playboy of the Eastern world. Like he just calls himself this. All right, bro. Okay. Yeah. You know, he also spends just like an enormous amount of time in the brothels. Do we have a picture of this man? I feel like I need a visual of somebody who would dare to give themself that title. Unfortunately, most of the pictures of him

are from like when he's old. Yeah. Dick pills. Look, if you're gonna be, if you're gonna, if you're gonna be fucking like a Japanese imperial officer, you're gonna need dick pills. Look, there's no shame in it. All I'm saying. Performance enhancers. Like the best athlete. It's like Lance Armstrong. Fuck like, yes. All I'm saying is Kishi probably needed dick pills. I'm sure he did. If you're gonna be the Lance Armstrong of lecherous Japanese military officers, you're gonna use some, you're gonna dope. And that's fine. That's fine. And that's why we sell dope, dick dope. Here's some ads. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were

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It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, this man is not like, okay, it. Okay, that's all I'll say is he is not it. Okay, but Sophie, I think if if there's one reason why men join imperial militaries and travel to foreign lands to do violence, it's because it's easier for them to get laid that way. Fair enough because they're not they're not, you know, people who are like really pulling it in back home generally don't invade foreign countries. I mean, fair enough that the Nazis still not a lot of guys who were like knocking it out of the park with the with the with the exception of a oh shit. What was his name? The guy Hitler had killed in the night of long nights. The one hot.

Ernst Rome. Yeah, the one. Yeah, Ernst Rome was pulling it down and it's baffling that he became a not. But anyway, whatever. I mean, this man does have like a decent like, no, he doesn't. I take it back. I guess I've got known. I've got. Yeah, Sophie. We can continue this discussion on our side podcasts. How fuckable was this war criminal? Yeah, I mean, coming out on the iHeart radio network in July of 2020. You just went back in time, but that's dope. I know, Sophie. Robert. I know. Chris, would you like to continue this podcast? We've derailed. Well, you know, Sophie's derailed you enough. I will fight you continue. Yeah, well, I'd like to see you try. Robert is actually like Robert is kind of on to something on the like the reason

you go to do imperialism is so you can just like have sex constantly get laid. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. And this is why Japanese are doing it. And this is where we should mention that Kishi is an inveterate rapist. Like, yeah, like serial mass rapist. Yes. So those brothels I was talking about. So maybe a strong word. Well, yeah. So there's like, there's like a small number of people in there who like our sex workers, like 80 to 90% of those people were just like kidnapped from Japan and like brought there by force. And yeah. And so, you know, and this is the you know, and Kishi's going there like every like one or two days, right? He's at one of these brothels. And you know, okay, even if like somehow like by like some miracle, he somehow only had

consensual sex there. He's also just like what he's like, he has one of the weirdest like sex things I've ever heard of, which is that like every time like he was served a meal, he would demand to have sex with the waitress. Okay. Um, yeah, it's weird. Yeah, you know, and like those those people, like those women like absolutely did not consent to that, which means he is like this man. Yeah, he is like raping people like basically every day. So far as to say that in most situations, you can't properly consent to a man occupying your country with armed force. Yeah. No, I will say, I will say so. So because because Kishi is a racist, like inveterate racist, he will only sleep with Japanese women. But those people were also brought there by force by

by the Yakuza. So while he's in prison in 1948, he has an interview and his description of this time is quote, I came so much, it was hard to clean it all up. Like he has, like he has a guy, like he has a specific guy, he's like a specific maid whose job it is to clean up his sheets every night. Oh, dude. Like, yeah, he's, yeah. Oh my God. And you know, he's gotta come serve it. That's that's yeah. This is like a thing. This is like a lot of the like the weird Japanese sex fascists. Like there's like a person who has to clean up all their shit. Like there's this I'm blanking on I'm blanking on his name. Like there's that famous like fascist Japanese poet who's like like the Japanese Nobel laureate who's just a fascist and like kills himself in the 60s or

something when when his coup fails. Like that guy also. Yeah. Yeah. Like there's there's a person who had to fucking like clean out his sheets and like his robes and stuff. Also check out my upcoming punk band out. Weird Japanese sex fascists. Yeah. Oh, there's gonna be more. Don't worry. We're we have not yet reached the weirdest of the Japanese sex fascists. That's that's coming next episode. Yeah. A lot of great quotes in this episode already. Yeah. You know, but I mean like so like the fact that he's raping women like every day, I think like this helps explain what otherwise I think is kind of an almost unexplainable thing that we're going to talk about in a bit. Just like the amount of violence that we're about to see. But you know, the other

thing that's happening here, Kishi's going to brothels like it's not it starts out as just like Kishi's like a sadistic rapist, but he also is doing the official business there. And his official business is that he's networking with the local Yakuza bosses. And this is where we get a sort of like formally introduce the third piece of the sort of fascist triad in Japan. So, you know, you have you have fascist army officers, you have people like Kishi, who are technically civilian bureaucrats, but, you know, are also fascist and working through the sort of planning agencies there. And the third wheel is organized crime. Now, the Yakuza are there. You know, a lot of organized crime winds up sort of backing fascists, but the Yakuza are different from,

you know, say like the Italian mafia in that they're like fanatically right wing. They have been basically since the 1870s. And they're like, these are like the Yakuza are a lot of people who invented fascism in Japan. Like they're like they're like the first proto fascist groups are these like giant Yakuza organizations. And they're, I mean, they're really tied in with the state that there's this story about how like one of the one of the first giant Yakuza fascist groups is called the Dark Ocean Society. And these guys, you know, that they're triads, like they're doing drug stuff, but like the Japanese Minister of the Interior asks them to like, this isn't like 1910, they ask them to help like Japan stage an incident that will let them invade Korea.

And so like these guys, like they have like, they have like special forces training myself. Oh, yeah. I mean, you know, it's what you do when you're young. Look, everyone's got to do a little bit of invading Korea. It's yeah, yeah. As long as you don't take it too far, it's fine. Oh, boy. Yeah. Well, yeah, we're going to get to taking it too far. But you know, like the thing is, like these guys, like they like break into the imperial palace and assassinate the emperors of Korea. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like the Yakuza, like they have, they have military training. They have intelligence training. They're, they're incredibly efficient political source, like sort of private political operation. And when Kishi meets with them, they basically

just agree to solve all of Kishi's funding problems. And you know, they can do this because the Japanese, like the Yakuza has an enormous amount of money. Like the Yakuza in Manchukawa is like an enormous amount of money. And the reason they have this money is because they run the drug trade. Like they run basically like the entire opening. That's a good way to make money. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, and Kishi, Kishi basically like offers to like formally let them into the Japanese state. And you know, and the other thing he's offering them is like, Hey, you guys want to do fascism? Like if you fund me, I will do so much fascism. And the Yakuza is like hell yeah. And you know, and this is the thing I don't think people understand about the Japanese empire.

Like it's a cartel. Like the whole thing is a cartel. It's like a cartel with like an army and a bureaucracy strapped to it. And this is especially true in Manchukawa, where, you know, with Yakuza backing, like this project is like almost self financing. Like, you know, but by, by, by the mid 1930s, 20%, like fully 20% of the Japanese population is addicted to either opium or heroin or one of the other drugs that the Yakuza are running. And this means that, you know, when the Yakuza really start to form the ally with, with the sort of state government, and you know, the state government, people are also doing drug running, but you know, there's just like full scale emergence. And by that point, 50 to 55% of all state revenue in Manchukawa is

just from the drug trade. And you know, like the Kwantung army, like they literally like, they start, they launch invasions of parts of China so they can take over opium and heroin factories. And they just, they just like start making heroin and opium like for the Yakuza, because this whole thing is just a cartel. Yeah. I mean, everything is when you get right down to it. Yeah. In the British are like, this is a podcast cartel. It's true. And like any other cartels, we're actively engaged in battling the Mexican military in the foothills of, of, of northern Mexico, you know, like I keep, like I keep saying Japan is China's Mexico. And, and as a result, we are also fighting the Japanese military in order to aid in the

spread of podcasts across the aisles. They actually have taken no efforts to stop us. So it's been very hard to start those fights, but we're working on it. We're working on it. Look, you can, you can always get into a gun battle with the fence. If you believe. Yeah. If you believe, sometimes you have to force yourself into being an armed cartel. Sometimes the state says what you're doing isn't illegal and there's no need for us to have, have an armed conflict. But, you know, that's what separates, uh, uh, you know, the cartels from the people not committing organized criminal activity. So the, the, the sort of final stage of this is that so Kishi's successor in 1941 has this idea. And you know, I mean, Chico just like persistently

has labor shortages and his plan is, oh, wait, hold on. We can use that. We can use the opium problem to solve, solve our labor problem. And so they, they start, he sets up this like these series of these, uh, what are supposed to be drug rehabilitation centers and, you know, about two million like drug addicts show up to work because they show up to these drug rehabilitation centers because people like don't want to be addicted. And what the centers actually are is you walk into the center and you walk on the back of the center and then you're in a forced labor camp. Oh yeah. They got them. They got them. Yeah, it's great. It's great. And then, and then yeah, they tricked them. And then so there's like 200,000 people who like are brought by their

families like they show up, but like they're not physically fit to work. So the Japanese government injects them with what they call an, an opium detox supplement. And the opium detox supplement is actually in Fetamine. Oh, I mean, it's great. It'll detox you from opium. And it's funny, we just recorded the episodes that they, they're running the week we, we record this about like the Nazis and drugs. But yeah, when meth first came out in Nazi Germany, it was obviously invented in Japan, but when meth first like got popular in Nazi Germany, it was advertised as a treatment for opiate addiction, which I guess, yeah, if you get horribly addicted to meth, you, you won't do as much opium. Yeah. Well, you know, and what, what the Japanese government

wants out of this is that like, okay, so these people can't physically move and we need a drug that can allow them to like move so they can be our slaves. And yeah, so that, that, that's, that's their solution to that. And yeah, so, you know, not wanting to be outdone in, in the sort of forced labor department in, in August of 1937, Kishi signs this bill that lets them just enslave prisoners of war. So it's sort of, it starts with POWs and then 1938, it gets expanded. And, you know, by the time you get to the expansion, it's like anyone doesn't have a job, or like anyone they define as a bandit, which is like a bandit is just anyone who doesn't like the government. And so, you know, but 1938, it's, okay, we can enslave just anyone we see on the street.

And the people who aren't technically enslaved, Kishi pushes this thing that he calls unifying wages, which means forcing like everyone in, you know, everyone in Manchukuo, including like just the other random capitalists are still there, to lower all of their wages down to like follow his planning model. And when I say lowering wages, what I mean is that he figured, you know, Kishi's thing is that he's a bureaucrat, right? It's all about efficiencies, all about rationality. And the thing that he's rationally and efficiently decided is that you should pay Japanese, Chinese workers exactly enough they don't starve. I guess it's better than paying them enough so little that they do starve. Well, that starts to happen too. Yeah. And then, you know, like, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

And then the way to the wages keep going down, because they need to bring labor costs down, you know, because that's the other way they're funding all of this is by just not paying people. Now, Kishi, you know, and labor in Manchukuo had already basically been a bunch of Yakuza people, like, like a bunch of Yakuza people are in the factory. And if you take a step out of line, they beat you. Now, Kishi, Kishi's like, okay, we're going to rationalize this. And Kishi's rationalization means that, you know, instead of it being independently, the Yakuza, forcing people to work for like nothing, he's going to bring, you know, he's going to bring them into the state. And so, you know, he's going to replace the paramilitaries with militaries, the Yakuza and the

MPs are going to get replaced with, you know, bureaucrats, regular police. And the final thing this means is conscripting or enslaving like Chinese male farm workers to work in work camps, and then forcing their families and children to work in the fields in their place. Wow. And this is where the race science starts. Because, you know, Japan, Japan has its own race science that they kind of develop by themselves, and they kind of import from Europe. And, you know, this is part of their like Taylorism, like labor discipline, rationalization process is they start doing these, quote unquote, scientific tests for body shape,

for cranial size, for nose structure. And they turn these measurements into these like, they're basically like racial baseball cards with like numerically ranked stats on them. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Raceball cards. Yeah. They'll be like different points for like, how much like what the shape of your skull is, like how big your nose is, and these give you like more or less points. And you like, you hold up, you hold up the raceball card and, you know, you next to a migrant worker and you're like, okay. So which, how highly does this person score? And I'm going to read a quote from the book, Absolute Erotic, Absolute Cortesque,

which is a history of this period. Hell of a title. Yeah, it's great. It's an incredibly wild book. It's like half about fascism and half about the way that it's sort of, the way that it's driven by what this like 30s Marxist, like Japanese sociologist calls the declining rate of pleasure, which is about how like, and you know, and I think this is actually fist what happens to Japanese empire is that, you know, this is already a really violent place. And, you know, in order to sort of extract more pleasure out of like sex, right, they start getting, they start going to stuff as more and more

violent. And this isn't just like a sort of like porn thing or it's like the porn is more extreme. Like no, no, like they constantly have to seek out like more like increasingly more violent ways of like raping people. And this is like, you know, this is one of those sort of psychoses that like drives this whole like expansion project. And the other one, the other psychosis is racism. So yeah, I'm going to, I'm going to read this quote. Excellent. The SRM, which is the state railway company, studies classified Coolies into three types, the Shandong type, the Huawei type and the Manchurian type. Consistently making up over 70%

of all North Chinese immigrant laborers, Shandong Coolies were profiled as a quote, thick skull type representing a low level of culture and capacity, quantities confirmed by their strong backs and powerful grip, their biometrics of large jaw, a cranial circumference of 55 centimeters, facial length of 1.35 to 1.4 times the line of the lower jaw, prominent cheekbones, stupidity, big teeth, a bridge of the nose that indicated docility, submissiveness, and barbarity added up to quote, a type perfectly suited for physical labor. Huawei Coolies were a little smarter than those from Shandong thanks to their anthropologically superior cranial shape. Owing to this racial profile, Huawei Coolies were seen as the best for semi-skilled labor of

carpentry, plastering, and bricklaying. Wow. I want one of those. I want that meme of the two hands meeting in the middle that's like Western racists, Japanese racists, and in the middle, exactly the same shit. Yep. One of the things that I was realizing as I was reading this is the extent to which Japan is basically just like, Japan is just like, it's East Britain. They have cousin marrying. They have all this word pedophile stuff. They have this giant empire. They have all the skull measurement, cranial stuff. They're both from this island. They both have this just like incredibly weird

set of psychoses embedded in their international culture. It's a bummer that one of the chunks of Asia that most successfully resisted being colonized and being oppressed by European powers did it that way. By becoming the British Empire, but slightly different. Yeah. Yeah. And you can compare it to like Ethiopia, which for a long time successfully repelled detains, repelled colonial forces. And they don't do this. Yeah. It's not the only way to do things. Yeah. There were other ways. It's just the Japanese were like, imperialism, what if we did it? And I think part of this is that in order to be able to do forced labor, it is actually kind of hard to get human beings to

make other, like compel other human beings by forced to do things. And this necessitates developing this sort of like European style race science in order to keep the forced labor system alive. And this racism and this Yamato race theory, it's not confined to sort of just like lower rank government people. Like Kishi, Kishi is an inveterate racist. He goes on, everyone who worked around him at the time would talk about he would just like stop in the middle of like unbeating and go on this rant about how all Chinese people are like lawless bandits and capable of following rules and all of this. Yeah. And his solution to that is like, well, okay, so Chinese people like inherently can't follow laws because of racial stuff. So the only

way you can get them to do things is by like treating them like a dog and just beating them, which is not how you're supposed to treat dogs. But you know, and this just like all pervasive racism is a big part of how you get everything that happens next. So the Japanese atrocities in Minchukua are so bad that we don't have time to talk about Unit 731, which is Japan's. Yeah, well, that's gonna be a whole thing. That's Japan's kind of Dr. Mengele mixed with Auschwitz. Yeah, yeah, they test. Yeah, they do a bunch of like that Auschwitz, but whatever you give it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's like basically like they're doing biological weapons testing on like live Chinese and Russian prisoners. Yeah, like a grade crimes against humanity. Yeah. And Kishi,

the Scotty Pippen of crimes against humanity. You know, if I don't know basketball, I assume he was good, right, Sophie? Sure. He was the best point guard of all of the touchdown footballer. You're doing great. Birdie serving bicycle. Yeah, no hockey. Absolutely. Brett Favre. Okay. Really gobbling with the Brett Favre. Parts of that were me joking. Parts. All right, please, Chris, continue. So Unit 731 is operating under Kishi's jurisdiction. Like, yeah, it's operating in Minchukua while he's there under jurisdiction. And we don't have time to talk about that. That needs its own episode. What we are going to talk about next time is Japan's forced labor system. Oh, yeah. Now, that sounds you mean by forced labor,

I assume you mean like Jedi, right? Like it's it's we're going to talk about Star Wars now. We're going to pivot. I mean, I think I think the Japanese would have benefited from just having the ability to mind control people. And you know, I guess I guess militaries would have. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, I guess the Jedi do like kidnap children and like educate them into religious cult. Yeah. So, you know, and they also they also employed an enormous child slave soldier army. So yeah, it is Star Wars shit. Chris, let us know how many Star Wars fans are in your DMs after that comment. Very brave. Yeah. Yeah. Well, all right then. So we'll be back. We'll be back tomorrow because this is a motherfucking three parter. A motherfucking

three parter. There's just so there's just so much shit to say. There's a lot of shit to say about piece of shit. Anyway, anyway, you can find it. There you go. Yeah, you can find us. Look, do it yourself. We're not going to do the work for you find it. Come on. I mean, I track us down in the world hunt us like animals. You can follow bastards at bastard's pod on Instagram and Twitter and that cool zone media and Instagram and Twitter. If you guys want to. All right. Well, yeah, yeah, I'm not going to do personal handles. You can find us. Yeah, hunt us down like animals. That's the episode. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you,

hey, let's start a coup. Back in the 1930s, a marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the US and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sorted tale of ambition treason and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to let's start a coup on the I heart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you find your favorite shows. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the I heart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever

you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut that he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the I heart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.