Terry -
Why shot?
I'm guessing they were convicted of war crimes. War criminals were not offered the "honorable" soldier's death of being shot. They were hanged like the commoners who were criminals.
stay safe.
It's not clear to me from my reading of Iris Chang's "The Rape of Nanking," which I got out of the library and already returned. She just says they were shot at one point.
I tell you true, it was difficult reading that book word for word, and I might have missed the whole story of the outcome. She's a good writer, it's just the subject matter was occasionally too much for me. She has a section in that book regarding the postwar trials, and more information on our two "contestants" might appear there. It is perfectly possible that they were shot "extralegally" or even out-of-hand by the Chinese. The Chinese had their own "War Crimes" tribunals, by the way.
I have commented elsewhere on other examples of Japanese atrocities, for examples, the Bataan Death March and their medical experimental center, "Unit 731" in China, where live un-anesthetized vivisection of humans occured.
There is a theory outlined in "Total War"(ISBN-10: 0394471040; ISBN-13: 978-0394471044) that the ordinary Japanese soldier, since he was released from the direct rigid societal strictures of the Japanese culture and in army service, went hog-wild on the battlefield and conquered areas, which resulted in so many of the atrocities committed in the Pacific Theatre and elsewhere.
This kind of explanation occurs in other sources as well.
Not that atrocities did not occur in all war theatres, nor only in World War II, nor only by the Japanese, nor only in modern times, but they seem to have made an art of it in "The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere."
Naturally, there are "apologists" and "deniers" of these kinds of events, but there is too much evidence in the form of personal testimony, movies, photographs, etc (like the printed news reports I cited previously), to allow plausible deniability. The Japanese themselves, in their history books, merely refer to it as "the Nanking Incident" without going into any details.
Ms. Chang wrote her book to bring this behavior to the fore, in the form of masses of undeniable evidence.
Hard to read, sometimes even hard for me to thumb through because of the photographs.
Terry
Edited for spelling, some syntax, and to capture text.
