Talk:Japanese war crimes - Misplaced Pages

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Types of torture used in the Japanese occupation of Singapore was nominated for deletion. The discussion was closed on 25 May 2010 with a consensus to merge. Its contents were merged into Japanese war crimes. The original page is now a redirect to this page. For the contribution history and old versions of the redirected article, please see its history; for its talk page, see here.

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Gratuitous violence warning banner

I physically vomited after skimming this article. Can a warning banner be placed on it please?

Japanese imperialism should be distinct from Japanese militarism

In this article the hyperlink 'Japanese imperialism' in the opening para redirects to 'Japanese Militarism'. The two are different and nor does the article on the latter claims to use the terms synonymously. Please make the necessary changes.

Removal of content

I've reverted two edits by @NmWTfs85lXusaybq that removed large chunks of this article. If there is concenses to remove them then we should go forward with that but since these removals were done with an edit summary that claimed to only move content around and didn't mention content removal I felt that it should be discussed here. Dr vulpes 21:22, 10 April 2023 (UTC)

I mentioned some paragraphs have been reordered and merged, with the removal of the redundant content. If you have any concern about this, I can make edits step by step. NmWTfs85lXusaybq (talk) 21:27, 10 April 2023 (UTC)

Yeah that might be best, I see that you've consolidated the article a bit but didn't include the references which are important. Maybe just removing the quotes from the article would tighten it up enough. Dr vulpes 21:33, 10 April 2023 (UTC)

Sorry for the confusion caused by my edits. I will write more detailed summary. I'm trying to remove some of these content to balance regional aspects of victims, according to WP:PROPORTION. A reference will be kept if it does help. NmWTfs85lXusaybq (talk) 21:48, 10 April 2023 (UTC)

Fatalities

The source for the upper limit of the fatalities count, 30,000,000 , in the fatalities section of the key info box is a Mark Felton YouTube video. This video doesn’t contain any source for that number. The number is sourced later from an interview by Mark Felton and a book. The mark felton interview also does not include any source for the claim. Can the source Felton uses to ce come to that number be found? Removed the interview citation since there is already a second citation anywayDogsrcool420 (talk) 17:25, 1 May 2023 (UTC)

Agree on this point. It was added very recently without reference on early May 2023. Could be fabricated and the figure of 30 million casualties have been propaganda point by the Chinese media recently citing source from Wiki. 2406:3003:2073:3202:C455:7510:F8E3:9F9B (talk) 07:24, 11 June 2023 (UTC)

Mark Felton is a leading scholar on the subject (and he has a PhD in history). See Mark Felton, Japan's Gestapo: Murder, Mayhem and Torture in Wartime Asia (Casemate Publishers, 2009) and Felton, "The Perfect Storm: Japanese military brutality during World War Two." The Routledge History of Genocide (Routledge, 2015) pp. 105-121. His You-tube and interviews are based on his published reliable sources. Rjensen (talk) 09:44, 11 June 2023 (UTC)

I checked the cited material and Felton didn’t provide a source for the 30,000,000 claim or give any explanation of how it was reached. The Hawaii edu source used for the lower estimate gives information about how the numbers were reached. If you have citations from Felton’s work where he does provide an a source for the number or more depth of how he reached that number then feel free to add that instead. Dogsrcool420 (talk) 09:54, 11 June 2023 (UTC)

Also: I checked the route ledge history of genocide and while the work as a whole is reliable the specific number claim also contains no source or explanation beyond stating it even though the claims before and after are sourced. This isn’t to say that this number itself is inaccurate, but that the citations were insufficient and conflicted with the more reliable citation used previously. If the page number was incorrect and there was a better explanation to the claim than add it with the correct page number Dogsrcool420 (talk) 10:01, 11 June 2023 (UTC)

So far, we have no RS for the claim and we should be very careful about this. Dogsrcool420 raised a good point. — Sadko (words are wind) 12:32, 21 June 2023 (UTC)

I looked over the listed sources and agree with @Dogsrcool420, the claim is dubious and I feel it should be removed. Lostsandwich (talk) 22:29, 23 June 2023 (UTC)

The claim has been reasserted with a different source and no explanation. Since consensus looks like it's on the remove side, I'm going to take it out until someone can verify in detail, hopefully with multiple sources. Also, I feel like the casualty count relies too much on Rummel his "Democide," which is not a mainstream concept. It's possible that the article could have a strongly constructed narrative bias. --IronMaidenRocks (talk) 20:11, 1 July 2023 (UTC)

Here's a source that says 30,000,000 million in mainland China alone:

American Museum of Asian Holocaust WWII (1931-1945). Chinese American Forum. 2002;18(2):42. Accessed July 1, 2023. https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=f6h&AN=8632131&site=eds-live&scope=site --IronMaidenRocks (talk) 20:55, 1 July 2023 (UTC)

A user added a new source for the 30,000,000 figure without description of the text. It's not a publically available source. Anyone have it on Jstor or something? I don't appreciate that a user is circumventing discussion. Here is the source: Carmichael, Cathie; Maguire, Richard (2015). The Routledge History of Genocide. Routledge. p. 105. ISBN 9780367867065. User Salfanto added the source with little explanation, even though the information it was sourcing was in contest on the talk page and had been removed several times. IronMaidenRocks (talk) 07:35, 4 August 2023 (UTC)

The line used in the contested source is "Japanese troops killed up to, according to some estimates, 30 million people during the war, most of them civilians." In my view, this fails verification, as I believe this figure is used for the number of people killed in the war overall, and not the number of people killed as a result of war crimes. Loafiewa (talk) 10:08, 6 August 2023 (UTC)

Sounds like it. Even the article from the Chinese forum doesn't specify that the number was killed by Japanese war crimes. I think it's dubious to claim that all civilian deaths in a war are due to war crime. Such diffuses the meaning of war crimes and distracts from the targeted and systematic nature of Japanese war crimes. --IronMaidenRocks (talk) 02:55, 7 August 2023 (UTC)

provided sources to books. just in case google is down.

(https://archive.org/details/imperialjapanswo00unse/page/84/mode/2up) ~ 8.2 million civilian deaths in China alone.

https://books.google.ca/books?id=6rvlCAAAQBAJ&pg=PA15&source=gbs_selected_pages&cad=3#v=onepage&q=30%20million&f=false) 30 million, most of them civilians, puts total death toll to at least 15 million.

"Japanese troops killed up to, according to some estimates, 30 million people during the war, most of them civilians." how is killing a civilian not a war crime? LilAhok (talk) 04:20, 7 August 2023 (UTC)

Your tone with "google being down" is beyond what I'm going to accept here. It does not say 30 million people killed by Japanese war crimes. Have you read the discussion above? The previous posts before yours are discussing whether killed civilians implies war crimes. Furthermore, a vague, offhand remark with no known context in one book doesn't feel like enough to justify such an exceptional claim in regard to a sensitive subject. My impression here is that no editor involved has read the full text, but merely searched for something like "30,000,000 casualties of Japanese war crimes" and picked a source that looks like it fit. Shoehorning existing information is not how we should source things; it's from the source or nothing. --IronMaidenRocks (talk) 21:55, 7 August 2023 (UTC)

I found several articles that say Rummel says 30 million, but I can't find their sources. Maybe it's just Misplaced Pages feedback, or maybe he says it elsewhere in the cited document. That seems dubious, given that Rummel decisively gives 10 million as the upper limit, and explains why in some detail. The fact that Rummel here was used as a source for the 30 million casualties claim on Misplaced Pages, apparently for a long time, makes me think we're really reaching here. --IronMaidenRocks (talk) 05:48, 8 August 2023 (UTC)

I don't think we're going to find more information on the 30 million. I think consensus here is that the claim is dubious. We know a few people have said that figure, but we don't know why they said it. Considering that the casualty rate puts the Asian Holocaust into a comparison with the Jewish Holocaust, and potentially many other reasons related to pov or article interpretation, we could safely call the casualty figure "over 3 million" in the infobox. Although, I think casualty rates in infoboxes enables users to scroll to a figure and move on, rather than reading and gaining some nuance from the article. I think articles about genocide should limit themselves from a reliance on statistics to show the gravity of crimes against humanity, because even numerically small genocides are terrible. They should not be statistically compared for which is "worse," although doing so is human nature. --IronMaidenRocks (talk) 20:55, 8 August 2023 (UTC)

Looking over the article again, while Felton doesn't include sources, he is an accredited historian. I don't think he needs sources for Misplaced Pages's critera, he is the source. He's also sourced later in the article anyway for saying the same thing. But it is a bit dubious to use him alone for such an extraordinary claim. I want to change some of the wording, because so far he is the singular credible source here. But saying things like "some historians" when we mean "Mark Felton" and "as high as" when we mean "without evidence, Mark Felton said as high as" seems to violate some POV style points. IronMaidenRocks (talk) 04:41, 21 August 2023 (UTC)

I agree. Felton is a credible source but because we don’t currently have any source of him explaining the claim it should be accurately cited and contextualised like you describe Dogsrcool420 (talk) 17:23, 21 August 2023 (UTC)

So we need to find a source of him saying it in order to add it into the info box? Salfanto (talk) 15:15, 13 November 2023 (UTC)

User Conflicts on Page

Discussion hidden per user request
User:LilAhok is approaching edit war with myself and several other editors in the history. They even posted the edit war template post on User talk:Yaujj13's page, which I'm not sure was justified in this situation, but I don't know the whole story. LilAhok also did not sign their message so that it looks, to me, like an automated message from Misplaced Pages. For me, I'm just trying to get them to explain the context of the extraordinary claim mentioned in the above section of discussion, but they've so far refused to do so or to enter the talk page. Instead, these users are fighting in the edit summaries. I also want to point out that the user violated talk page consensus and undid my edit referencing an unrelated policy to anything I had said in my edit description. I said that the source had no description and was in contest, they said that I was saying the source needed to be available on the internet. I don't understand. --IronMaidenRocks (talk) 19:12, 4 August 2023 (UTC) @User:LilAhok I'm not sure if that's you, but please don't make revert edits while not signed in. --IronMaidenRocks (talk) 03:04, 7 August 2023 (UTC) WP:AVOIDUNCIVIL - follow the wikiepdia guidelines and maintain civility. please, avoid making baseless accusations. LilAhok (talk) 03:25, 7 August 2023 (UTC) I think it looks odd when an IP address with one edit arrives just in time to reinforce your edit, takes the extra effort to manually restore the material, and references the same misapplication of the same rule. Especially when such a tactic leads an editor into a backfoot defense on "you can't accuse me, it's against the rules." Why not just say that it wasn't you? "You are mistaken, it wasn't me" seems a lot more direct than accusing me of accusing you of something. --IronMaidenRocks (talk) 22:52, 7 August 2023 (UTC) i added justifications to my edit, and Yaujj13 is currently arguing with other users in the admin board with other users for edit warring and POV pushing across multiple articles. i provided contradictory evidence from the sources Yaujj13 provided. I am not in an edit war with "several users." I'm not even in an edit war with you. if you want to accuse me of engaging in edit wars with several users. provide proof. otherwise, avoid making inapproriate accusations. review WP:EW - "An edit war occurs when editors who disagree about the content of a page repeatedly override each other's contributions" how is one reversal considered edit warring? I reversed one of your edits, and stopped. again, your justification for removing the sourced info was "removed fatalities section per discussion. New source has no description or clarification for a contested idea and is not easily accessible." info that is not easily accessible is not a valid justification for removal. that is the reason for my reversal of your edit. Also, this isn't the appropriate forum to accuse someone of edit warring. You've made baseless accusations that violates WP:IDENTIFYUNCIVIL. LilAhok (talk) 04:36, 7 August 2023 (UTC) I'm not going to argue with you. I'm not accusing you of starting an edit war or being in the wrong, I was addressing the situation in the article with multiple reverts happening at once, and you're the one doing most of the reverts of bold changes. Perhaps some of my wording comes off as offended, because I thought your edit summaries were aggressive and insulting. I think, in general here, your behavior is manipulative and your tone is way off base for what I'm willing to accept from an interaction with anyone. Let me know if we need to bring this to dispute resolution, because we are going no further with policy lawyering and disrespectful tone. I'm sure we could both be more civil, but quoting the WP tag at me twice while possibly violating it in turn is not helping. --IronMaidenRocks (talk) 22:00, 7 August 2023 (UTC) WP:AVOIDUNCIVIL - avoid using "you" as well as attacking users with baseless accusations. i will remove this header, as it is not productive to the article. take any disputes you may have with me to the appropriate forums. LilAhok (talk) 01:18, 8 August 2023 (UTC) Please do not delete talk page discussion. See the bottom of WP:TALK. Thank you. I hope we can turn this discussion into something more productive, but I do not think it is good to erase that there has been user conflict here. I am not trying to blame UserLilAhok who has requested I not use the 'you' pronoun, I just felt disrespected. But we can move passed that. Per UserLilAhok's comfort I'm invoking WP:COLLAPSENO ~~IronMaidenRocks (talk) 20:25, 8 August 2023 (UTC)\|}

Discussion hidden per user request

User:LilAhok is approaching edit war with myself and several other editors in the history. They even posted the edit war template post on User talk:Yaujj13's page, which I'm not sure was justified in this situation, but I don't know the whole story. LilAhok also did not sign their message so that it looks, to me, like an automated message from Misplaced Pages. For me, I'm just trying to get them to explain the context of the extraordinary claim mentioned in the above section of discussion, but they've so far refused to do so or to enter the talk page. Instead, these users are fighting in the edit summaries. I also want to point out that the user violated talk page consensus and undid my edit referencing an unrelated policy to anything I had said in my edit description. I said that the source had no description and was in contest, they said that I was saying the source needed to be available on the internet. I don't understand. --IronMaidenRocks (talk) 19:12, 4 August 2023 (UTC)

@User:LilAhok I'm not sure if that's you, but please don't make revert edits while not signed in. --IronMaidenRocks (talk) 03:04, 7 August 2023 (UTC)

WP:AVOIDUNCIVIL - follow the wikiepdia guidelines and maintain civility. please, avoid making baseless accusations. LilAhok (talk) 03:25, 7 August 2023 (UTC)

I think it looks odd when an IP address with one edit arrives just in time to reinforce your edit, takes the extra effort to manually restore the material, and references the same misapplication of the same rule. Especially when such a tactic leads an editor into a backfoot defense on "you can't accuse me, it's against the rules." Why not just say that it wasn't you? "You are mistaken, it wasn't me" seems a lot more direct than accusing me of accusing you of something. --IronMaidenRocks (talk) 22:52, 7 August 2023 (UTC)

i added justifications to my edit, and Yaujj13 is currently arguing with other users in the admin board with other users for edit warring and POV pushing across multiple articles. i provided contradictory evidence from the sources Yaujj13 provided. I am not in an edit war with "several users." I'm not even in an edit war with you. if you want to accuse me of engaging in edit wars with several users. provide proof. otherwise, avoid making inapproriate accusations.

review WP:EW - "An edit war occurs when editors who disagree about the content of a page repeatedly override each other's contributions" how is one reversal considered edit warring? I reversed one of your edits, and stopped.

again, your justification for removing the sourced info was "removed fatalities section per discussion. New source has no description or clarification for a contested idea and is not easily accessible." info that is not easily accessible is not a valid justification for removal. that is the reason for my reversal of your edit.

Also, this isn't the appropriate forum to accuse someone of edit warring. You've made baseless accusations that violates WP:IDENTIFYUNCIVIL. LilAhok (talk) 04:36, 7 August 2023 (UTC)

I'm not going to argue with you. I'm not accusing you of starting an edit war or being in the wrong, I was addressing the situation in the article with multiple reverts happening at once, and you're the one doing most of the reverts of bold changes. Perhaps some of my wording comes off as offended, because I thought your edit summaries were aggressive and insulting. I think, in general here, your behavior is manipulative and your tone is way off base for what I'm willing to accept from an interaction with anyone. Let me know if we need to bring this to dispute resolution, because we are going no further with policy lawyering and disrespectful tone. I'm sure we could both be more civil, but quoting the WP tag at me twice while possibly violating it in turn is not helping. --IronMaidenRocks (talk) 22:00, 7 August 2023 (UTC)

WP:AVOIDUNCIVIL - avoid using "you" as well as attacking users with baseless accusations. i will remove this header, as it is not productive to the article. take any disputes you may have with me to the appropriate forums. LilAhok (talk) 01:18, 8 August 2023 (UTC)

Please do not delete talk page discussion. See the bottom of WP:TALK. Thank you. I hope we can turn this discussion into something more productive, but I do not think it is good to erase that there has been user conflict here. I am not trying to blame UserLilAhok who has requested I not use the 'you' pronoun, I just felt disrespected. But we can move passed that. Per UserLilAhok's comfort I'm invoking WP:COLLAPSENO ~~IronMaidenRocks (talk) 20:25, 8 August 2023 (UTC)|}

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