Preface to the Korean edition

A culture that has suppressed the sense of guilt
Chapter 1: Doctors and War
Chapter 2: The Road That Isn't a Road
Chapter 3: Soldiers with Sick Hearts
Chapter 4: Handling War Criminals
Chapter 5: Tanbai Admits His Guilt
Chapter 6: A Grief-stricken Heart
Chapter 7 Overadaptation
Chapter 8: Escape into Obedience
Chapter 9: The Wicked Man Without Guilt
Chapter 10 Brainwashing
Chapter 11: From 'A War Ordered to Be Waged' to 'A War Waged on One's Own'
Chapter 12: Empathy
Chapter 13: De-brainwashing
Chapter 14: Good Consciousness
Chapter 15: Father's War
Chapter 16: The Distortion of Inherited Emotions
Chapter 17: To Reclaim Your Emotions

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Don't talk about the 'banality of evil' before reading this book!
The definitive psychological analysis of group crime perpetrators.
Strongly recommended by Kim Dong-chun, Woo Seok-gyun, and Jeong Hee-jin!

Nazi war criminals were convicted at the Nuremberg Trials and, after a long pursuit, were captured and punished.
West Germany initially turned a blind eye to its own crimes, but began actively teaching Nazi history in the 1980s after Chancellor Willy Brandt apologized to Poland.
Author Masaaki Noda, a psychiatrist, points out that if German society had not repented for its past, European countries would not have allowed German unification. In contrast, in Japan, only soldiers who were left behind on the battlefield were executed and sent to concentration camps, while major war criminals were not properly punished, and society as a whole turned a blind eye to the past, and soldiers who pursued militarism simply transformed into 'corporate men' who pursued materialism.
My father, who 'lived his life as a proud, authoritarian man', served in the war as a military doctor, but never told me anything about the war.
The author researched his father's war and interviewed veterans his age, seeking a path to restoring humanity.

Watching the trial of Eichmann, who murdered Jews, Hannah Arendt explained his seemingly sincere and ordinary atrocities with the concept of the “banality of evil.”
Psychologist Milgram is known for proving the banality of evil through experiments in which ordinary people obeyed authority and administered strong electric shocks to others without hesitation.
In this book, Chapter 8 analyzes the significance of the Milgram experiment and applies it to the Japanese military.
However, throughout this book, the author's analysis is not directed at the psychology of individuals who submit to authority, but at Japanese society and culture, which instrumentalizes people and numbs their emotions within a vertical hierarchy.
'The mechanism of forcing children into competition from a young age, heightening aggression on the borderline between envy and humiliation, and turning it into organizational power' is similar to modern Korea.

In the '15 Years' War' against China, which had a much larger territory and population than Japan, and on the premise of plunder without food and material supplies, and in the Pacific War fought in Southeast Asian countries and Pacific islands, war was no longer 'a fight between soldiers with guns.'
Rather than regular warfare, massacres and torture of unarmed civilians were commonplace, and even in regular units other than Unit 731, military doctors routinely vivisectioned peasants, and rookie soldiers practiced bayonet fighting on live prisoners.
However, the incidence of 'war neurosis' in the Japanese military was extremely low compared to that of the US military in the Vietnam War or the Soviet military in the Afghanistan War (Chapter 17).
However, there were soldiers who were dying like mummies from 'war malnutrition (page 104)', a type of anorexia.
In a Japanese society that emphasizes 'spiritualism' to overcome all adverse conditions and does not acknowledge mental wounds, the patients' suffering manifested as physical symptoms.

The war criminals the author interviewed were conscientious people who had the courage to confess to war crimes and participate in the anti-war peace movement, but they also performed vivisections with their own hands, tortured women, and massacred children during the war, yet they suffered no post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or nightmares.
In the diaries of soldiers who exposed the Nanjing Massacre, there are records of them being intoxicated by the beautiful natural scenery and showing their appetite for things like fried beef without any emotional disturbance while massacring 20,000 prisoners (pp. 451-452).
People with distorted emotions tend to get easily lost in sentimentality or have sudden emotional outbursts instead of feeling deep emotions.
The author asks the perpetrators brutally persistent questions about how they felt at the time and whether they remember the faces of the victims they killed, and calmly conveys the process of them being reborn as 'humans who can be hurt' and 'humans who feel sorrow' in a dry and restrained style.

The original book, 『War and Conflict』, was published in 1998, and a translation was published in 2000 under the title 『War and Humans』.
This book, War and Guilt, was translated by Seo Hye-young, who refined the expressions and added explanations based on the paperback version published in 2022, and includes a preface to the Korean version newly written by the author focusing on his activities related to Korea, as well as a review of the 2022 paperback version containing his thoughts and feelings while communicating with readers.

In the preface to the Korean edition, he reflects on his encounters with countless Koreans, including Koryo-saram in Central Asia, ethnic Koreans in China, North Korean defectors, Koreans in Sakhalin, Koreans in Japan and Koreans in Japan, and Koreans in North America, and hopes that Koreans scattered around the world as a result of the Korean diaspora resulting from Japan's invasion of the Korean Peninsula will engage in deep exchanges with one another and create a culture that transcends the diaspora.
The starting point is to properly understand the past and then talk to each other based on that.
“This book analyzes the inner workings of the Japanese imperial militarism, which modeled itself after Western imperialism and invaded and ruled the Korean Peninsula, China, and the people of South Asia, to what extent it devastated the people’s spirit, and how difficult it is to regain the spirit of interaction with others.” While there is an abundance of information and analysis on the Nazis, discussions of Japanese militarism are extremely rare.
Modern and contemporary Korean history is inseparable from Japanese militarism.
Korean readers sometimes encounter aspects of themselves as they delve into the psychology of the perpetrators.

Feminist scholar Jeong Hee-jin focuses on how militaristic culture shaped masculinity, saying, “This book proves that masculinity is not a reality but a norm.
He strongly recommended the book as “a must-read for South Korea, the world’s most armed nation, covering a wide range of areas, including violence against women and military power,” and Woo Seok-gyun, the chairman of the steering committee of the Korean Health and Medical Workers’ Union, said, “It starts from the psychoanalysis of war criminals and moves on to the psychoanalysis of Japanese society.”
He praised it as “a masterpiece that is shocking, moving, and full of hope.”
Professor Kim Dong-chun of Sungkonghoe University, who has shed light on modern Korean history through books such as “War and Society” and “Why the Republic of Korea?”, recalled a conversation with the author in the past where they talked about the massacre of civilians during the Korean War, and expressed the painful thought, “Perhaps Korea, which has no guilt, is even more seriously ill than Japan, which has no guilt.”


How could ordinary people commit such atrocities as psychopaths?
A distorted portrait of us created by militaristic culture!

The Milgram experiment exposed the human weakness of conforming to a group and hiding behind powerful authority, thereby reserving one's own judgment and conscience.
"War and Guilt" delves deeply into the psyche of each Japanese war criminal, a world that is difficult to explain solely through such universal human weaknesses.
Why did they feel no guilt at all? Why did they show no empathy for the victims? How did they adapt so well to military service and, even after defeat, remain diligent workers?

From a young age, war criminals were brainwashed with the ideology of the imperial system in their families, villages, and schools, and were trained as military youth.
From the time their identity was formed, they internalized the logic of the strong sacrificing the rest for the emperor and the country, and they came to treat people only from the perspective of efficiency and calculation (p. 358).
In the process of growing up, they became 'humans who cannot feel hurt' and 'humans who cannot feel sadness', unable to feel their own emotions and even less able to empathize with the emotions of others.
For example, the author interviews Dominaga, who lost five family members, including his parents and grandparents, at a young age, and diagnoses that the young boy's sense of helplessness and the authoritarian and violent culture that did not try to care for that helplessness raised a young man who was "sucked into war without any reflection or doubt."
So, I believe that unless we can create a culture that embraces the sorrow of others, there will be no peace (p. 249).


Dominaga, who had not felt his own pain as pain since he was young, is ordered to behead a Chinese prisoner and commits murder for the first time in his life, but is only concerned with looking presentable in front of his colleagues and subordinates.
And when he succeeded in cutting off the neck in one go, he said, 'I felt like I was now a proper soldier' ​​(p. 220).
Yuasa, who was forced to perform vivisection as a military doctor, is obsessed with not losing face in front of his colleagues, rather than feeling any aversion to such acts or sympathy for the farmer who became his "practice material" (p. 38).
Only relationships with people of the same class and interests as you are important.


The transformation of Tsuchiya (Chapters 12-13), a kind young man who grew up in a particularly loving family, is chilling.
He first encounters water torture in the military police, where even poor and uneducated young men can get opportunities, and tries to quit, but changes his mind after being promoted, and later becomes the 'god of the special police (police in charge of politics and ideology)', fabricating all kinds of incidents and becoming a 'torture master' who inflicts the maximum amount of pain just enough to not kill.

While the war criminals featured in this book mostly committed atrocities while performing their duties, Nagatomi, who voluntarily committed all sorts of evil deeds, is a textbook example of how sadistic masculinity is formed.
The violent home environment and school education that forced a weak and sensitive boy to become a 'strong man' easily transformed into sadism.
'His emotions take on an ideological order.
Emotions related to honor and shame become exaggerated, while the sorrows and joys of oneself and others become indifferent.
'Unable to establish an equal relationship with others, human relationships always become hierarchical (p. 279).'

Why do their images seem so familiar? The pathological phenomena of Korean society, where a military culture has taken root after colonial experience, the Korean War, and military dictatorship, are no different from those of Japan.
The massacre of civilians in modern Korea is similar to the suppression of anti-Japanese forces in Manchukuo.
Imori, who suppressed freedom as a judge in Manchukuo and was imprisoned in the Fushun War Prisoners' Camp, took the lead in promoting Marxism, and after returning to Korea, transformed into an extreme right-wing commentator, is also a familiar character to us.
The author criticizes people like Imori, who manipulate themselves and view others as objects of manipulation, as forming the elite class of Japan (p. 296).
They brainwash themselves by changing their thoughts conveniently according to the situation.

After the war, war criminals whose emotions were numb finally had a chance to reflect on themselves in the war criminal management centers in China.
Chinese people who collaborated with the Japanese were executed without mercy, but under Premier Zhou Enlai's policy of leniency, Japanese war criminals were treated humanely (p. 142).
The Fushun War Criminals Management Center, which was featured in the movie “The Last Emperor” and which held the puppet Manchukuo Emperor Puyi, was the center of efforts to reform the ideology of war criminals.
The Chinese authorities compared the confessions of war criminals with the accusations of victims, and examined whether the war criminals admitted their crimes and showed genuine remorse. In 1956, most of the war criminals were released without prosecution, and even those who had been sentenced to life imprisonment were all repatriated by 1964 (p. 148).
Many of the Chinese returnees, who struggled to make a living amid accusations that they had been brainwashed by communist countries, continued to testify about war crimes and visit China to apologize to the victims, seeking atonement until the very end.
Of course, elites who over-adapt to society's expectations, like Imori, ultimately took a different path.


What was different about the very few people who kept their conscience until the end?
Social and personal conditions to prevent loss of humanity

This book also contains stories of people who were caught up in an immoral war but kept their conscience until the end.
Military doctor Ogawa (Chapters 2-3) and soldier Onoshita (Chapter 14) are such people who show hope for humanity.
How could they remain uncompromising and maintain a healthy mind in a situation where even relatively good people committed war crimes without a guilty conscience?

There were several monk-soldiers who refused orders to behead prisoners for bayonet practice.
The Milgram experiment also shows that people who pursue religious values ​​higher than worldly order refuse to follow immoral commands.
Ogawa, too, was able to protect himself amidst the madness of war by pursuing Christian values.
This does not mean that religious people are more moral than non-religious people.
Mainstream Japanese Christianity compromised with militarism and justified the war.
Only those who recognize the gap between religious values ​​and reality and struggle and practice to overcome that contradiction can protect their conscience through the power of religion.

Above all, the reason why Ogawa and Onoshita were able to avoid corruption was because they treated people with sincerity and not as a means to an end.
Born in colonial Manchuria, Ogawa loved Manchuria and its people.
He could have become an officer as a military doctor to atone for the sins committed by Japan and endure more suffering, but he deliberately enlisted as a common soldier, and even after the war, he stayed with the sick Japanese soldiers and Chinese who needed him.
I collected the bodies of Japanese soldiers executed as war criminals under the Chinese Nationalist Party and read their suicide notes, condemning the country and their superiors for sending them into a senseless war.
After returning to his country, he lived by providing medical services, but when the ruling class that started the war not only drove young people to their deaths, but also deified the remains of the war dead by enshrining them in the Yasukuni Shrine and using them for political purposes, he could no longer bear it and took to the streets.

After Onoshita learned that the Japanese army was nothing more than a band of robbers who looted, set fire to, and raped, he distanced himself from his comrades.
He treated all people equally, without any sense of superiority or inferiority.
In China, I learned Chinese, in Negros Island in the Philippines, I learned Visayan, and in Vietnam, I learned Vietnamese, and I hoped to live with them.
After returning to his country, he refused to receive a military pension and to receive monetary compensation for his past as a member of a gang of robbers, despite pressure and criticism from the right wing due to his poor financial situation.

The author presents several options for not submitting to immoral authority.
First, it is to criticize and monitor the state, which is a powerful authority, so that it does not go in the wrong direction.
In that respect, the role of the media is important.
Meanwhile, conscientious objection to military service is permitted.
However, this method has limitations, as it is difficult to allow conscientious objection when the country is in crisis.
A third option is to become someone who refuses to obey inhumane orders.
It is about following an authority (religious authority) that transcends the secular authority of the state, or looking critically at one's own situation and taking responsibility for one's own actions.
Historically, denominations and churches have often compromised with those in power, so it is important to be aware of one's own responsibility, regardless of whether one is religious or not (pp. 236-239).