Japanese war criminal admitted corpse mutilation

A Japanese World War II soldier mutilated a Chinese woman's corpse by ramming a bamboo batten up her vagina "until it reached her intestines," according to his confession published by the State Archives Administration on Tuesday.

The shocking admission from Kesao Nogami, who served in east China from 1937 until his capture in August 1945, comes in the 29th of a series of 31 handwritten confessions from Japanese war criminals being released online by the archives as China marks the 70th anniversary of the end of WWII.

In the confession, Nogami also detailed how he slaughtered civilians, deployed poison gas against Chinese troops and raped seven women.

His mutilation of the corpse of a half-naked 50-year-old peasant came in Anhui Province in February 1938.

Three months later, Nogami wrote, he used a rifle to beat unconscious a man who was then trampled to death by other Japanese soldiers.

The war criminal also confessed to "spreading poison gas toward 500 Kuomintang troops" in Jiangxi Province in March 1939, and to participating along with other Japanese troops in murdering "40 peaceful peasants, including women, men in their 30s and 40s, old people and three children aged about 10" in Shandong Province in February 1945.

In Beijing, between January 1941 and February 1944, Nogami raped five Chinese women eight times and two Korean women 10 times, he confessed. Endi