As we all know, in the 1930s, China and neighboring Japan engaged in a fourteen-year-long death-defying struggle. In this war, China paid an extremely painful price to resist Japanese aggression, with more than 35 million casualties and various economic losses of up to 600 billion US dollars.
Did Japan, as the aggressor, earn it? Materially speaking, they do make a lot of money, and the resources that have been taken away from China are simply countless. But from other aspects, they also have losses, after all, both sides of the war are going to die, there is no reason why only we lose soldiers, they are unscathed.
According to the Japanese side's own statistics, they killed a total of about 2 million soldiers during World War II. However, most of these people died in the Pacific Theater, and only about 450,000 people died in China, far less than the number of Chinese sacrifices.
At the end of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, due to the pressure of the Pacific Theater and the lack of logistical materials, the Japanese offensive against China weakened slightly, and the Chinese army seized this rare opportunity and began to organize an effective counteroffensive.
In some of the battles fought in southern China, the New Fourth Army discovered two very special phenomena. First, many Japanese soldiers would carry a small bag with them, which contained not items for eating and wearing, but many small wooden plates with carved characters. Second, they will tie a few hands on the belt, which makes people creepy to see.
What is this little wooden card for? Are broken hands a spoil of war? The soldiers of the New Fourth Army were puzzled and talked about it until after the interrogation of the Japanese prisoners of war, and they did not know the truth.
It turned out that these small wooden cards were spirit cards, the tablets of the ancestors of these Japanese soldiers. The Japanese are also superstitious, believing that the ancestral tablets can provide protection for future generations, so Japanese soldiers will carry them with them after they go out on expeditions, hoping that the ancestors can bless them with peace. As for the men, they were not the spoils of war, but the stumps of their comrades.-
The Japanese army has a tradition that as long as conditions permit, the ashes of the war dead must be brought back to the mainland for burial. Usually after a big battle, the survivor will dispose of the body of his teammate who died in the battle, then bring his ashes back to his hometown, if the conditions of the battle do not allow, then take a part of his body, and then burn it into ashes to bring to his family.
In many old photos, we can see that Japanese soldiers often hang a box or altar on their chests, but in fact, it contains the ashes of their comrades-in-arms, and if the soldiers of the same village can return alive, they will be responsible for handing over the altar of ashes to the families of the dead and letting them offer sacrifices.