This is Nauru, a small island country in the Pacific that was occupied by the Japanese during the war:
Yeah, that’s all of it. In 1940 there were about 3,000 Nauruans. And then the Japanese invaded.
The first task was to build an airstrip on the best land in the country. Nauruans did the work and the Japanese beat those who didn’t work hard enough.
The Japanese brought in a lot of soldiers plus Japanese and Korean workers to mine the phosphate on the island for use fertilizing Japanese fields. They were having some problems feeding everyone.
So the first thing they did was to put the 39 lepers in Nauru on a boat and drown them.
Then they deported half the Nauruan population to other pacific islands where many of them died. They left those who were usefully employed. One way the remaining Nauruans made themselves useful was in eking every calorie possible out of the Nauruan soil (they were good at it). One way the Japanese increased yields further was to grow vegetables in human feces, which in a tropical climate led to horrific smells, an infestation of flies, and a dysentery epidemic. More people died.
By the end of the war when Nauruans finally returned from exile, there were only about 1400 Nauruans left.
The Japanese occupation killed over half of Nauru.
The worst part? The Japanese occupation of Nauru was fairly benign by Japanese standards. And yet Nauru lost more people as a percentage of the population than any other country occupied by an Axis power.
Nazi Germany is rightly remembered as one of the most evil regimes in history. I do not believe in ranking tragedies since each one is equally horrible for the people involved. The Holocaust was a crime against humanity and I wouldn’t insult the memory of those the Germans murdered by saying someone else had it worse.
I’ll just say the Japanese were no better, and more people died as a result of Japanese aggression than German. The main difference is that Germany got very creative in its killing technology while the Japanese primarily relied on the tried and true of shooting and starving. The Japanese used them quite effectively.
ADDENDUM: Thanks foe the upvotes and great comments! Since this answer has gotten some attention I thought I’d include this list of war deaths by country from Wikipedia. China lagged behind the USSR in total numbers killed but the numbers are still shocking.
Also to address the few “what about” comments:
The USA had racial segregation at home that prevented many citizens from voting or even receiving proper health care, and our military was segregated during the war. We locked up our citizens of Japanese ancestry without due process of law. We introduced nuclear weapons to the world. We should not be proud of any of this.
The UK and Commonwealth countries displayed a catastrophic disregard for the well being of their colonial subjects, notably in the little known Bengal Famine, and in their finest hour they still kept order in colonial outposts using methods that would have felt familiar to many German occupation forces.
Stalin’s crimes are legendary. Many of those Soviet deaths would have happened whether there was war or not.
For all that, when people died at US or British/Commonwealth hands it was a regrettable side effect of war. When people died at Soviet hands it was the necessary cost of revolution (at least in Stalin’s eyes). War is dirty business and no one emerged from WW2 with clean hands.
When people died under German or Japanese rule it was either intentional or inconsequential as long as the deaths were “inferior” races. If the deaths were German or Japanese they were reasons for revenge. If the deaths were POW’s in Japanese hands they were deserved because surrendering deprives people of the right to life.
When people died at Allied hands it was regrettable. When people died at Japanese or German hands it was desirable. Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were evil regimes that viewed the people of enemy nations as things to be used and discarded rather than human beings. They were equally horrible.
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