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

Episode Date: September 22, 2021

Mia Wong is joined again by Robert Evans to continue to discuss Nobusuke Kishi.   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. Ah, welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the only podcast where Sophie was just telling me how much she thinks it would be a good idea to reboot the TV show Friends. But instead of being the cast of Friends, all of the characters are famous medical malpractice committers from history. And it's a show about them trying to get away with maiming their patients. I think it's a bold idea for a TV show, Sophie. I think we should pitch it to Netflix right now. Thank you again. That's totally not something I would ever say because Girl Friends was a better show than Friends.

Let's just accept that Sophie said that and move on to Christopher Wong. Christopher, how are you doing in part two of this episode? Doing as well as you can be preparing to just talk about Japanese war crimes for an hour. That's good. I resisted the urge to open this by saying what's manning my churias because I thought that might be offensive. Yeah, all right. So we're about to start talking about the Japanese forced labor system. And I think the best way to introduce this is by I'm going to read part of the introduction to a book called Asian Labor in the wartime Japanese Empire Unknown Histories, which is this. Basically, there's a conference on Japanese war crimes, Japanese forced labor

during the war. And all the papers in that are combined into this book. And the introduction goes, grief and despair find little place in most historical accounts that are absent from most of the source material historians use. The hundreds of thousands who died were sons, husbands, and fathers, or sometimes daughters, wives, and mothers and had families waiting their return. Deaths often went unrecorded. Cooley is too sick to work, replaced in deathhouses, where they spent their final hours in accumulated filth, mud and vomit and the excrement produced by those who had died before them. Without food or medicine and certainly without hope, their corpses were thrown into unmarked graves or burned or abandoned in forests or tossed in

the rivers. Weee, welcome to Behind the Bastards. And show about bad people. Oh, yeah. Now, it's really hard to pin down the exact number of people who were forced to work around the Japanese Empire. And this is a running theme of this episode is that right before Japan was occupied at the end of World War II, they destroyed all of their records. This is not just a record in Japan. This order goes all the way down the command chain. They're destroying records just everywhere they can find them. So most of what we have are estimates. And, you know, the estimates are not good. The Indonesian government estimates that 4.1 million Indonesians were forced to work for Japan during the war. I mean, you know, just to get a

sense of the scale of this, like there's an individual railroad called the Thai Burma Railroad just alone that uses 180,000 or possibly as many as 270,000 people. Yeah. And, you know, the number in China between 1941 and 1945 seems to have been about 3 million. But, you know, that's the only period we have even sort of okay numbers about. Before that, we just don't know. And, you know, this is also happening in Korea. 110,000 Koreans are conscripted into the army. There's 700,000 who are conscripted to forced labor. And Kishi is going to import a lot of those people like to Japan to do forced labor. Everywhere the Japanese Empire goes, they're doing this. And, you know, and we've talked about last episode about how sort of this starts with Kishi talking about,

you know, Kishi is like, okay, well, we'll put the war, we'll put the prisoners of war to work. And then it expands to just like, you know, people who are vagrants and people who don't have jobs. And then it's like anyone who opposes us. And by 1941, the Japanese army is doing just slave raids. Yeah. But between 1941 and 1942, the Japanese army burns tens of thousands of Chinese villages. And they put the survivors in concentration camps. And they put about, they put about 100,000 people into these forced labor camps. And of these conscripts, like 30 to 40% of them die. Okay. That's not a bad ratio. I lose their conscripts. Yeah, sure. Yeah, you know, and I say this, like that's 30, the 30, 40% is kind of being dragged down

by the fact that there are some places where the conditions aren't as bad. Yeah, you know, and here, like, you know, we talked about a place where it was really bad. So one of the centers of Kishi's five-year plan of Manchuria is these coal mines in Fushan. And, you know, these are the coal mines that are like fueling all of Nissan's industrial development. And the replacement rate for these workers between 1938 and 1944 was out of every four, the 40,000 workers total they had, they had to replace 25,000 of them every year. And, you know, a small number of these people just like escaped. But almost everyone else, and this is, you know, a very small percentage of them escaped almost everyone else, almost all the

25,000 people either died on the job or Japanese Army just executed them, for instance, coordination, because, you know, this is something the Japanese Army starts to do in this period is that they just, you know, they just start randomly killing people. And like these people, and we talked about a bit about the conditions, they die, a lot of these people die from dysentery and they die from cholera, because, you know, these camps, like there's no medical facilities at all, right? So, you know, when you get sick, they just like, they lay you on a cot and you die. And, you know, a lot of these people are dying from overwork, they die from starvation, and, you know, and then also, like the Japanese Army, like, they're really creative about,

like, how they kill people. So, I mean, you have like the classic, like they beat people, they stab people, they shoot them, they light them on fire. They also, like, they throw them off boats, they like, they drown people in submarines. Which is the thing, I've never found another, like, recorded thing of people doing, like, they'll force people into a submarine and just sink it. Oh, god. Wow. If they're burning a whole submarine, they really want their ass dead. Yeah, I'm like, like, this is a thing, like, particularly, we'll get more into this in a bit, like, particularly, like, that's a way they kill, like, comfort women, because, yeah, they don't want any record of them existing. So, oh, well, we'll put them in a

submarine and drop them. So, they're putting a bunch of people in these things. It's a way of disappearing. Yeah. Okay, well. Yep. Yep. That's a bummer. Yeah. So, all of those numbers, that's just for, you know, physical labor. Japan is also running something called the comfort women system. And the comfort women system is the academic and legal term for Japan's military sex slavery system. And so, you know, if you read academic accounts, you read journalistic accounts, you read, like, legal accounts, they talk about comfort women and comfort stations and use all of these, you know, these, like, pretty little euphemisms developed by Japan, specifically so that in their communications about it, they can sort of obscure what's

actually happening here. And this is the point where it becomes useful that I am no longer an academic and I'm not a lawyer, which means I don't have to use any of these. What this is, is a enormous bureaucratic organized system of military sexual slavery ran out of army rape rooms. And the first, yeah, it's bad stuff. The first of these sort of military rape stations is set up in Shanghai after, Japan launches an attack on Shanghai in 1932 as one of their sort of, they had these, like, periodic sort of fights with the Chinese government basically up until 1937 when, like, the actual war starts. And I want to go into what happened here because, you know, most accounts of sort of Japanese sexual atrocities in East Asia give this,

give this, like, this whole 1932 attack, like, one line. And so I want to read this passage from the book Chinese Comfort Women Testimonies for Imperial Japan's Sex Slaves. The soldiers immediately kidnap good-looking local women and kept them in military barracks of sex slaves. At the same time, the troops continued to assault women in nearby villages. Reportedly, over 1,000 local women were raped in their homes, not even pregnant women, young girls, or elderly women were spared. Within the same region in the autumn of 1935, more than 100 Japanese soldiers attacked an area where the Chinese resistance force was active. Carrying machine guns, the troops drove the villagers into a large yard, dragged all the

women out of the crowd, and raped them in the presence of their family members. Several soldiers ripped the clothes off a woman who was six months pregnant and tied her to a table in the yard. They took photographs while violating her, and then cut her abdomen open and plucked the fetus out with a bayonet. And this, that is before the start of the war. Yeah, we're not even warring it yet. Nope. Yeah, that's 1932 and 1935. Now, the rape stations as a sort of... Okay, I will say one other thing. There's some indication that the Navy had been using sort of organized rape stations like before 1932, but this is another one of those things where the documentation is really hard,

because, you know, the Army is not just going to tell you they are running a sex slave station. Yeah, most people who do sex slave stuff don't like to talk about it all that much. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, even like, they're doing it all the time, but even slave owners in the south didn't really like to talk about the fact that that's what they were doing a lot of the time. No, it's one of those are we the baddies kind of moments? Yeah, yeah. It's something that even the people who do it know is wrong. Yeah. Yeah, when I talk about the fact that I'm forcing myself on these children that I basically own, I feel like kind of a monster. Yep. You know, and it's funny, like I have actually read

accounts of Japanese soldiers who dreamed the war were like, wait, are we the baddies? And it never involved this. It was always about like, they would be sent into the Philippines and, you know, and the soldiers are like, they're given the American, the standard American light of what you'll be greeted as liberators and they get there and, you know, they're like hacking Filipino soldiers to death with bayonets and they're like, wait, but it's never this shit. It's, yeah. Now, rape stations don't come into widespread use until after 1937, 1938, which is after the rape of Nanjing. And, you know, that's another atrocity that like probably deserves an episode and that because Kishi isn't directly involved in it,

we don't really have time to talk about it. The short version of it is so the Japanese army had been expecting to just like blow their way through all of China in like three days. And instead they fight the battle of Shanghai, which is the nickname of it is Stalingrad on the Shanghai. They fight this incredibly brutal battle, like they lose 60,000 troops. And the army just goes berserk. And, you know, China's capitalism in the war had been at Nanjing and Japan takes the city and they kill the number of dead civilians and prisoners of war was, it's generally held to be about 200,000. And they also rape somewhere between 20,000 and 80,000 people. Jesus Christ. Yeah, it's it's really bad. Yeah. When you say they raped and then the number

is the population of a small city. Yeah. Yeah. Again, you're in the A leagues in terms of the crimes against humanity, my friend. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, and I say this like, you know, even with all the stuff we're about to talk about, like these sort of just random rapes where like the Japanese army goes into a village and rapes have one that leaves like that's still that's still going to be happening throughout the entire war. And, you know, I mean like, and to some extent you can talk about the fact that like sexual violence is always a part of war, but like the Japanese army is like rape heavy by army standards. And then they're also doing the sex slavery stuff. And, you know, yeah. And in something, you know, and I think this is

there's sort of like there's a thing that you read a lot about how the military sex slavery system is actually it's well, you know, it's about like the Japanese army trying to get the rape under control after after nunging and like, well, it doesn't work if that's the tension. And the second thing is, you know, it's kind of true. But, you know, when I say the Japanese army wanted to get the rape under control, like what I mean is that they want the rape to happen through the army of bureaucracy in army facilities at, you know, created by the army and at times the army is allowed. And they also like want to regulate try to regulate things in a way that soldiers don't get STDs, you know, but, you know, and they succeed in that to some extent, like

they succeed in bringing the rape directly into the military command chain. Yeah. And, you know, before I move on, I want to mention that there's this enormous primarily Japanese just like intellectual sort of network and right wing outrage machine that like this is their thing, this and denying the rape and nudging or like their thing or like the Japanese war crimes deniers. And they make all these arguments how like, no, no, no, these weren't these weren't sex slaves. These were paid prostitutes. Like they're not, you know, or, you know, that the rape rooms are just sort of brothels and it's not, you know, they're the people who do the whole is about stopping rape, not committing it. And it is like very, very important to understand

that every single one of these people are full of shit. Like these are these are sort of like intellectually like these people are like, like they're incredibly similar to like the the sort of like European Western Holocaust deniers, like everything they say is lies. And the reason they're lying about it. And, you know, the reason they have to do this is because just of the absolute raw horror of one about like the stuff that I'm about to read. This is this is a testimony about I'm going to read a testimony taken from the UN Human Rights Commission who did a report on the sex slavery system in 1996. This is this is the report of a a Korean woman. Well, she's she's not a woman. She's a child when this happens.

13. Oh, geez. Child. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I was just curious, like, yeah. Yeah. Sorry. Yeah. Not that it would mitigate any. I was just no. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, yeah. So sorry, the reason I didn't say it was so this is this is the beginning of it is one day in June at age 13. I had to prepare my lunch for my parents who are working in the field. So I went to the village well to fetch water. A Japanese garrison soldier surprised me there and took me away so that my parents never knew what happens to their daughter. I was taken to the police station in a truck where I was raped by several policemen. When I shouted, they put socks in my mouth and continued to rape me. The head of the police station hit me in my left eye because I was crying. That day I lost

eyesight in the left eye. After 10 days or so, I was taken to the Japanese Army garrison barracks in Heisun City. There are around 400 other Korean young Korean girls there and we had to serve over 5,000 Japanese soldiers as sex slaves every day up to 40 men per day. Each time I protested, they hit me stuffed rags in my mouth. One held a matchstick to my private parts until I obeyed him. My private parts were oozing with blood. Jesus Christ. One Korean girl who was with us demanded to know why we had to serve so many up to 40 men per day. To punish her for questioning, the Japanese company commander Yamamoto ordered her beaten with a sword. While we were watching, they took off her clothes, tied her legs and hands and rolled her over a board with nails until

the nails were covered with blood and pieces of her flesh. In the end, they cut off her head. Jesus. Another Japanese, another Yamamoto, told us it's easier to kill you all, easier than killing dogs. He also said, since those Korean girls are crying because they have not eaten yet, boil the human flesh and make them eat it. One of the Korean girls caught venereal disease from being raped so often and as a result, over 50 Japanese soldiers were infected. In order to stop the disease from spreading and to quote sterilize the Korean girls, they stuck a hot iron bar in her private parts. Jesus. Once they took 40 of us on a truck far away to a pool filled with water and snakes, the soldiers beat several girls, shoved them into

the water, heaped earth on the pool and buried them alive. I think over half the girls who were at the barracks were killed. Twice I tried to run away, but both times we were caught after a few days. They tortured even more. We were tortured even more and I was hit on my head so many times that all the scars still remain. They tattooed me on the inside of my lip, my chest, my stomach and my body. I fainted. When I woke up, I was on a mountainside, presumably left for dead. Of the two girls with me, only one had survived. A 50-year-old man who lived in the mountains found us, gave us some clothes and something to eat. He helped us travel back to Korea where I returned, scarred, buried him with difficulties in speaking at the age of 18. After five years of

serving as a sex slave for the Japanese. Jesus, God. Yeah, it is. There are hundreds and hundreds of pages of testimony like this. Yeah, I mean, you know, it is my job to read about crimes against humanity and that's one of the roughest things I've ever heard. Yeah, yeah. The only thing I've ever read, I don't think that's the worst account of rape I've ever read. The only thing I've ever read that was like, yeah, that was like, like even comparable to it was like, it was accounts of like what like Haitian slave owners would do. Yeah. So like their slaves and that stuff. Yeah. Those guys are like, I think more creative, but. I heard some accounts from Yazidi women who were enslaved by ISIS that, you know, it was less inventive. It was more with them, just a case of neglect, like

not letting these women clean themselves and like them just getting these horrible infections as they continue to be. But I don't think I've ever heard a case that's bad. Yeah. Because it's not just like it's not just like violent and horrific. It's like creatively, innovatively, like a lot of yeah, like it's it's far more than just, you know, obviously, rape is is very seldom just like about a sexual appetite. But it's it's so it's very clearly so much more than just these are soldiers who are horny. There's like, there's a lot of very frightening things going on in that. Yeah. I mean, I think part of it, you know, second last episode about the theory of declining rate of pleasure. And, you know, I think it's something like this with violence too, where, you know, because the

other thing that that reminded me of this terms of inventiveness that I've read about was accounts of like what the El Salvadorian National Guard did during like during the Civil War in the 80s. And that stuff, it's like, you know, you get to a point when you're in a war where like you've seen so much violence that, you know, you become sensitized to it and it becomes the sort of constant race to like, yeah, find something you can do that's more violent that will like stop people from opposing you. But but this isn't even like that. These guys just like enjoy this. Yeah, because there's no, that's not, there's none of that that is like an attempt to scare people out of resistance. That's just, yeah, it's like serial killer shit, you know, it's the,

you know, you've done so many other depraved things. And now you're getting creative with it out of almost boredom. It sounds like there's an element of that of just like, well, fuck it, we haven't been stopped yet. Let's try. Let's escalate this. Let's let's let's go a little further. Let's try something harder. I don't know how much of that is is boredom. How much of it is like, desensitization, but like, yeah, I mean, fuck you could you could have done a whole episode on on on that specific. Yeah. Yeah. Like I think, you know, one of the things that that the like the sources talk about is how this it's, you know, it's part it's about power, but it's about like power on a sort of civilizational level that it's like, you know, like what's happening here

is that the Japanese soldiers are like, you know, like, we can like, like we can rape these women and that's, you know, this is this is our way of like raping the entire Chinese nation and it's this way of sort. And part of it is it's about it is kind of about like the sort of demonstration of sort of violent superiority in that like a lot of what some of the the goals are about just sort of like, like this weird like, like a mass, it's supposed to be this like emasculation of like the Chinese resistance where it's like, like, you know, if you're a Chinese man, like, he's like, Hey, look what we can do to your women. And it's just, you know, because this is like, this is the way these people think. Because, you know, this is like, yeah, this is it's

okay. Like, I yeah, I don't know what else to say about it. I mean, I think pretty much everyone listening is going to have the same reaction, which is just kind of like numb horror. Yeah. So maybe here's ads. I I I'm not a I'm not an arrogant man when it comes to what we do. But I I don't think anyone in the podcasting game can compete with us for the sheer awkwardness of our ad transitions. I know, we like the cheese stand alone. 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

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really wiped that horror from people's minds. So let's just let's let's barrel straight ahead. And yeah, let's let's barrel ahead. Yeah. So this is another place where it's very hard to pin down numbers because Japanese Empire, you know, like they destroy every record that they can and they kill huge numbers of these women to keep them quiet. But the estimated number of women enslaved by the Japanese Empire is about 400,000. The newer scholarship suggested about half of them are Chinese. There's also, at the very least, tens of thousands and probably almost certainly over 100,000 from Korea. And past that, it gets, you know, it gets even harder to, you know, get numbers because the records and the survivors are both hard to find.

But yeah, you know, we know that this this is happening like the levels of violence and the abductions in the Philippines are similar to this. I yeah, just basically everywhere the Japanese Empire goes like this is this is this is what they're doing. They're they're they're enslaving the people they conquer. You know, we talked about how the victim in that last story is 13. The victims tend to range from about 11 to 24. And the most common is between 13 and 19, because, you know, these people are also pedophiles. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that I think I've told this story a couple of times, but there was a moment where I was hanging out in Budapest with a friend of mine kind of in the center of town, they've got all these statues of these these

Magyar kings on horseback with swords and axes and stuff. These like warrior legendary warrior kings. And my buddy turns to me and says, I wonder how many of them didn't fuck little kids. And that's not a Hungarian thing. That's like literally any any culture. Like when you go back to the the the conquering war leaders, it's like, yeah, I mean, most of them were fucking 14 year olds, just like half of your favorite rock stars in the 80s. Yep. It's not great. Yeah. And I think this yeah, it's yeah, this then this I think is this this is just sort of pure expression of power. And I think it's part of why and this is folding into a bigger thing. We don't have to go out. But like, why I think it's so toxic that like our cultural discussions of pedophiles always focus on

what's much rarer, which is like adults, like going after and molesting like little bitty kids, four and five year olds when like the vast majority of pedophilia is grown men who the most people would not say are a pedophile who go out of the way to fuck teenage girls. That's most of it. That was Epstein, you know. Yeah. Anyway, sorry, rant over. No, yeah. I think like this this this is just sort of like what having absolute physical like the ability to murder anyone you want, like this is what that does to you. And you know, one of the other thing that's very common here is that a lot of the women and children and again, I want to emphasize like these are children who resisted, you know, like these these are fucking 14 to 19 year olds

and, you know, they're either beaten, stabbed or just decapitated. And, you know, they decapitate kids in front of their families like constantly. There's also so almost everyone involved in this all the women, all the children become addicted to opium or some some other drug. Yeah, I mean, that's who would not. Yep. Yep. And, you know, there's also, you know, we sort of we sort of alluded to this, like there's everyone gets venereal diseases. Yeah. Because it turns out that when you're getting raped by 40 men a day, you get venereal diseases. And the army, the army injects like the sick with what almost certainly was the mercury based antibiotic salverson. Yeah. Doesn't seem like mercury would help. No, it's it's yeah.

You know, and they're doing this not because they care like at all that these women are like diseased, like, you know, they're getting sick, like they're doing this because they want to keep down the spread of disease among the soldiers. And, you know, this is this is where you start to get to just I mean, the horror of this just like doesn't end because, you know, these people have to deal with addiction, they have to deal with disease. And again, the people who survive this. Yeah. Yeah, you know, they have they have this this unspeakable trope literally, like people lose the ability to talk. Yeah, it's in comprehensible. Yeah. In a lot of ways. And then, you know, to make it worse, the communities are taken from like a lot of the time they don't

want them back. Because, you know, like these women are seen to have been defiled by the Japanese. And so, you know, what happened a bunch of times. I mean, there's there's versions. Yeah. Yeah. Recently with ISIS. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of times throughout history. Yep. Like I like I read a story about someone whose accounts I almost included in here and then cut because it was too long. But like she she goes back to her village and like the only person in her entire village who will like talk to her is the person she was supposed to be married to. And like that guy is like a genuinely good guy. But like he can't take it. And he goes and joins the army and then like dies somewhere fighting the Japanese and Northern China. And so, you know, and you have

these and this this is also part of why that the records aren't aren't that like well known. Because you know, the survivors, there's a huge cultural thing about like, you know, like, you know, we've been talking a lot in less few years about how hard it is for any survivors to just like talk about in the open. And like this is so much harder. And there's all these political constraints on it. And yeah, and this stuff, you know, like this stuff is not that well known in the West. And it leads to situations like something happened a couple of years ago, Stephanie Kelton, who was was brain's economic advisor is probably the most famous like modern monetary theory person, like went to Japan and advised a group of like of liberal democratic

party lawmakers. And some of those people were like in fascist groups that were like founded by non Jane denialists. And, you know, the stuff happens because that's just the absolute horror that that happened here. Just people don't know about it because it's not like the Pacific isn't the theater that people talk about much other than sort of island hopping and like, yeah, that's our Japanese prisoners of war. Yeah. Now, now Kishi's role in this while he's in Manchukwa is sort of interesting. So Manchukwa merely, and I'm using this as an enormous scare quotes, merely has 42 sex slave stations, which is kind of low for a region that size. Although again, Kishi like Kishi just like less this happened. Kishi's like fine with it. He he's

almost certainly is diverting economic resources to it. But the reason it's so low compared to a lot of other places is that Kishi's Yakuza buddies are doing like exactly the same shit in their brothels. Like it's not it's not quite as bad. But you know, they're also kidnapping a bunch of women and like repeatedly raping them. But but you know, because because because the Yakuza is like so heavily in control of the sex trade, there's less of the sort of straight up military taking control of it. And you know, and the Yakuza stuff Kishi like Kishi's fucking like these are all like all people doing this are like his personal friends. And like he's, you know, Kishi's in these brothels constantly while he's in Manchuria. And

you know, so he gets pulled out of Manchuria in 1939 to become the vice minister of commerce in order to plan what's called the new economic order. And you know, this is, you know, I talked about in the first episode, that the sort of the third phase of Japanese imperialism, I call Tokyo imperialism, three Tokyo drift. And this really, I think is where that starts. Or I mean, not starts, but this is the sort of finality of it, you know, like all of the sort of abuse you have, like happening in the colonies, like, you know, all the stuff that creates fascism in Manchukuo, all the stuff that like, you know, all the sort of fascism in the Japanese army, all of that fascism that's been

in this sort of puppet state, it all comes home. And you know, and you get you get Kishi going there in 1937. And that that fuses these sort of like Tokyo edge to Kylie educated fascist like Tokyo bureaucrats with with this sort of military like fascism. And those guys take control of Japan. And that's how you get, you know, that that's how you get sort of full scale fascism in Japan. And you know, in 1940, 1941, when the stuff is being implemented, like the political parties just like dissolve themselves. And, you know, they're like, Okay, well, there's no point for parties anymore, we're just going to work with authoritarianism. And you get inside of Japan, like, you get these, I don't know how to describe them, I guess it's like, you know, the the the

the sort of like mass fascist groups. So the Kakori Association had been that group in Benchuria. And Kishi is sort of involved in help setting up the Imperial Rural Assistance Association, which is, you know, this is like this is the this is the New Order's version of this. And, you know, it's supposed to be this like sort of mass fascist organization to be able to bureaucracy and it's about sort of building support for the war. And meanwhile, Kishi is just sort of like, she's kind of like, dicking around with his planning models. So, you know, his big thing in this period is he wants to he wants to turn, he basically he wants to turn Japan into into a version of Benchuria where it's the entire economy, the whole society is built

towards just fueling what the army is doing. And so he started creating these things called control associations, which are, you know, some of the industry level, everyone in control associations is like forced to work together. Like all the companies, all the unions. And he so the head of each control association is called the Führer. Okay, that sounds good. Not a word with any connotation. Let's move on. Let's just move right on. Yeah. And the funny part about this is that I'm like, I'm about 90% sure for the way it's described that like they are literate. So there's they're speaking Japanese normally. And then when they have to address the guy, they say the word Führer in German, like they just they say

Führer in German. Look, it's like when we want to, it's like using the word Schadenfreude, you know, some German words. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, this Führer is supposed to, you know, they're supposed to control like the entire production process, right? They're they're they're the people who set the prices of the people who they set quantities, they set distribution, they set the organization production process. And these are the like, the people like Kishi, who are the kind of like, boring bureaucrats who do all of the war machine stuff. And this like really pisses off the the sort of Zebatsu and the like the big business people, because they're like, oh, wait, hold on, what do you mean everything's run by the state now? And so they accuse

they accuse Kishi of communism. And so Kishi, like, like, like half of his allies, like, all get arrested because on accusations of being communists, and he's like forced to resign. And so, you know, there's like a there's like an eight month period, when he's out of power, when you can be like, okay, everything that happened in this eight month period in 1940 was not Kishi's fault. But then, you know, his his old friend Hideki Tojo becomes the prime minister in 1941. And he brings Kishi back. As the the minister of commerce and industry, just in time for Kishi to sign the declaration of war with the US, right, like, I guess, technically speaking, it was it was written before, I guess, I guess I did technically hand it to the USA for Pearl Harbor,

like, right before Kishi sort of goes back to work, like, trying to turn Japan, it's just like a national defense state. And, you know, human this time around, though, he makes he makes two decisions. One is that he's going to work with the corporations, because weirdly, these corporations are like the only resistance left to him. And the second one is that he's like, okay, I don't have enough bureaucratic power. So I'm going to just like merge every single Japanese agency, like, together to form a super agency called Ministry of Musicians, munitions. And at this point, Kishi, Kishi is just running the economy. Like, he is the guy he's the guy running the entire logistics network. For all of the soldiers doing all the horrible things,

Japanese emperor, like, he's he's the guy running the entire economy making this work. Cool. But, you know, and I say this, like, Kishi, Kishi, I think it is very different than like, your sort of classical fascist beer crowd, like the image of it is someone like like Aikman, like Hannah Arendt coins, but like the banality of evil to do these guys who was like, well, okay, they're kind of just doing their job. And like Kishi, Kishi is not that Kishi Kishi is running the war machine because he like deeply deeply sincerely believes that like this is what's good for Japan. And so, you know, but the other thing he's also a bureaucrat. So he's also kind of like he spends the war just sort of like, he's like shuffling ministries around, he's like

shuffling, but he's doing all this sort of bureaucratic stuff. And as the war starts to end, Kishi Kishi looks at the situation as like the US just like absolutely obliterates the Japanese Navy in midway. And he goes, oh, fuck, how can I get out of the war crimes tribunal? And his plan is that he's going to bring down like Prime Minister Tojo's cabinet by resigning and doing his complicated stuff. And like, you know, this works like Kishi Kishi is able to force Tojo to resign. And Kishi forms this like sort of nominally, this group like nominally opposed to the government. But you know, but like the whole goal of this is basically just like, it's him saying to MacArthur, like, please don't shoot me. And it works. Kishi Kishi's taking prisoner by the

occupation government and is inevitably thrown in the infamous Sugumo prison in 1946 is suspected class A war criminal. If the word justice like meant literally anything in this world other than just being a cruel joke to torment survivors, Kishi would have hung from a rope in 1948. And that would have been the end of this two part episode. Unfortunately, we live in hell. And Kishi is going to be back in part three with friends of the show, the dullest brothers, in order to build the entire modern Japanese political system. Hell yeah. There we go. There we go. Swish. Yep. In our favorite side car. Well, no, that's that's just not Elron Hubbard, but they're pretty great. Fucking a that's that's beautiful. Yeah. Oh, well, Chris, I am excited

to hear from our old friends, the dullest brothers, but we're going to have to wait until Thursday for that because this is not excited to hear from our classic. It's going to be great. All family reunion to non problematic guys who were never friends with any Nazis. That's the thing everyone remembers about the dullest brothers is the the the degree to which they were not close friends with Nazis. So yeah, follow us at cool zone media at bastards pod on Twitter and Instagram allegedly allegedly. And Chris, do you want to give them your Twitter handle? Yeah, I'm at it me chr three on Twitter allegedly allegedly allegedly better known as the ice must be the short guy. Yeah. Yeah. That's that that is your legal name. And in happy and in

happy news, I just found a whole Reddit thread of people talking about how they appreciate how cute Anderson is. So yay. Oh, oh, yes. No, Anderson's huge on Reddit. You're huge on Anderson. Good for you. All right, motherfuckers. Good job. Come back Thursday. Come back Thursday and we will we will wrap you in our our warm, slightly gropey embrace of podcast. Bye. 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 Boland. 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.