World War II Database

Contributor: C. Peter Chen

ww2dbaseYasuji Kaneko was born in Urayasu, Chiba Prefecture, Japan in 1920. In Nov 1940, at the age of 20, he joined the Japanese Army as a volunteer, and he was immediately assigned to China. He received training in Qingdao, Jinan, and Yanzhou in Shandong Province, China as a heavy machine gun crewman. Later in life, he detailed the cruelty of members of his unit toward the Chinese, including beating Chinese forced laborers to death, raping women, and massacring civilians. On 27 Aug 1943, he and his fellow soldiers received orders to destroy levees so that river water would flood into the city of Linqing, Shandong Province China; he reported that some of the soldiers from another unit released Vibrio cholerae, the bacteria that caused cholera, into the flood waters. He was captured at the end of the war in Korea by the Soviets, and was held in a prisoner of war camp in Siberia. Between 1950 and 1956, he was held by the Chinese communists at the Fushun War Criminals Management Center in Liaoning Province, China. He returned to Japan after 1956. In 1996, he admitted the various crimes he committed during the war. He passed away in 2010.

Yasuji Kaneko Timeline