The Japanese soldiers were so cruel during WWII that it beggers belief.
There is a tendency in fiction of authors trying to be impartial when depicting historic conflicts. In the 2007 film Letters from Iwo Jima we follow a sympathetic group of Japanese soldiers trying to survive in the final days of the war. They’re caught between an oppressive government, insane officers, and American soldiers more than willing to commit war crimes.
It’s a great film. And a lot of it is historically accurate. But it leaves out a lot of context in order to make its protagonists sympathetic.
It leaves out the “comfort women”, the countless women forced into sexual slavery by the Japaneae military. It leaves out the beheading contest held among officers that ran in public newspapers. It leaves out the abuse of prisoners. The crimes of Unit 731. The 50,000 Chinese killed each day in the lead up to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, most of whom were civilians.
We use the Axis powers of WWII as a visual shortcut for evil. We depict them as cartoonist, mustache twirling villains who kick puppies for fun.
And at first glance you might think that this is a bit unfair. An exaggeration made by the winners of the conflict against the losers.
But you have to understand, they were worse. In real life they were an evil almost beyond our comprehension. An evil that has to be censored in media because the truth is so extreme that few can believe it.
But it is the truth.