WAR CRIMES IN JAPAN-OCCUPIED INDONESIA | A CASE OF MURDER BY MEDICINE

Immediately following Pearl Harbor, Japan wrenched the meagerly defended Netherlands East Indies, now known as Indonesia, from the hands of its Dutch colonialists. Suddenly, one of the world’s largest nations was at the service of the Japanese Imperial Army. A highly successful campaign recruited young Indonesian men to support the Japanese war efforts, but hidden behind the façade of Asian brotherhood was a sinister truth―during the brief 40 months of Japanese occupation, as many as several million Indonesians were worked to death or summarily killed as expendable slave laborers known as the romusha.