22nd August 1945:

 22nd August 1945:

Japanese troops at Mui Wo, Lantau Island, Hong Kong arrested and executed civilians Lam Tsah and Lam Kuan in retaliation of an attack on Japanese troops on 19 Aug 1945. Company commander Yasuo Kishi personally executed Lam Kuan.

Between 1937 and 1945, Japanese military aggression spread across East Asia and the Pacific region like a hideous stain. Slaughter, looting, rape, and other forms of appalling brutality, accompanied the conquerors as each country fell victim to the Japanese war machine.

Historians outside Japan estimate that at least five million captive foreign civilians and prisoners of war were brutally murdered by the Japanese military between 1937 and 1945.

 To that figure, can be added hundreds of thousands of victims who were slowly murdered by starvation, disease, and beatings in Japanese prisoner of war and internment camps, and hundreds of thousands of women who were brutally raped by Japanese soldiers.

The appalling rape figure includes two hundred thousand women in Japanese-occupied countries who were forced into sexual slavery in Japanese Imperial Army brothels. 

Finally, we cannot forget the terrible fate of hundreds of prisoners of war who were murdered by the Japanese Army's infamous Unit 731 in the course of horrible biological experiments.

Evidence of that brutality, racism, and fanaticism can be seen in the mass slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians and prisoners of war after the fall of the Chinese capital Nanking (now called Nanjing) in 1937; in the thousands of Allied prisoners of war murdered during the infamous Bataan Death March and Sandakan Death March; in the murders of American Navy airmen captured by the Japanese at the Battle of Midway; in the mass slaughter of Australian prisoners of war after their surrender on the islands of New Britain, Ambon and Timor; in the forced conscription of 200,000 foreign women, mostly Chinese and Korean, to be sex slaves in Japanese Army brothels; in the slaughter from March 1943 of all merchant seaman survivors after their ships had been sunk; and in the order by the Japanese Army to the civilian population of the island of Saipan in the Mariana Islands to kill themselves and their children rather than endure the shame of being captured.