Japanese used Chinese civilians for bayonet training

Japanese World War II soldiers conducted bayonet training on live Chinese civilians, according to a war criminal whose confession to scores of murders and rapes was published by the State Archives Administration (SAA) on Tuesday.

In the eighth of a series of 31 confessions from Japanese war criminals being published on the SAA website as China marks the 70th anniversary of the end of WWII, Fukuo Uezono detailed his brutality in China between 1939 and his capture in August 1945.

According to the 1954 confession, Uezono bayoneted a Chinese peasant to death during training in September 1940 in Pinglu County, Shanxi Province. Another nine Chinese civilians were also murdered by Japanese troops during the exercise, Uezono wrote.

He also confessed to assisting an interpreter and other personnel in torturing two peasants in Anyi County, Shanxi, in July 1939 by hanging them, bloating them with water, beating and burning them, eventually killing both captives.

Uezono arrested a peasant and gave the instruction to suffocate him to death in April 1943 in Henan Province, and he was involved in the murder of at least four more peasants at other times, according to the confession.

Between December 1942 and June 1945, Uezono committed 18 rapes in Shandong. One of the women was killed afterwards, he wrote.

The SAA is publishing a confession a day in the run-up to commemorations of the end of the war on Sept. 3. The handwritten documents come complete with translations and abstracts in both Chinese and English.

The confessions detail crimes including murder, enslavement and poisoning of Chinese people, as well as the use of biological and chemical weapons on live human subjects. Endi