I think probably the most reputable book that I've read is called "Horror in the East" by Rees.

Also, I don't see why people are so shocked and deny it. Every single other army trapped in a similar situation has done the exact fucking same thing. The Chinese people had not much of a resisting army. The Communists were busy waiting out the war so they could seize power. The Nationalists were trapped by their own corruption and lack of supplies. The only method of resistance left was guerilla warfare. Chinese resistance would disguise themselves as farmers concealing weapon in farmcarts. They would ambush resting troops. They did this because this was the only reliable way to resist occupation; they had no big armies, to help them resist. The response from the occupying Japanese was increasing frustration, and an increasing inability to distinguish civilian from resistance. And then the same thing always happens. In Vietnam in the 1960s, the Vietnamese used the same tactics as the Chinese, and the Americans did the exact same atrocities. My Lai, was the site of rape, murder, burning of homes, destruction of food. The atrocities were terrible, but many claim it was not very widespread. It was widespread, just distributed among many small villages around Vietnam. The frustration of the American forces "fighting with an arm tied behind their back" and being assaulted by an enemy that skirmished, then disappeared. The same thing has happened right now in Iraq. The American forces are trying to cope with Iraqi insurgents who use children, women and others as attackers, and the media points the finger at them for attacking "innocents" when they try to defend themselves. Right now a few marines are being courtmarshalled for killing civilians in addition to the Abu Ghraib scandal.

The truth is, this is what war is. It is murder of innocents, it is rape and it is senseless. From war's beginnings on the plains of African, to the Pagan tribes, to the Greeks, Romans and Persians, through the Chinese Empire to the conquest of America, the World Wars to today, war is nothing more than that. The idea of gentlemanly warfare is an illusion created by war movies and propaganda made to make us (all of us, whether we be British, American, Japanese, Chinese, German) believe that our side is waging war for the right reasons, and that the other side, is evil. War is nothing more than evil directed in a direction to serve the will of those in power. The propaganda department, and all of our nations have propaganda departments, basically just tries to sell us all that it is not evil we wage, but justice. Just like a car salesman tries to sell you a lemon car, telling you it is nicer than it really is. When we deny the crimes, we are not lying to others, so much as we are lying to ourselves. We are fooling ourselves into thinking that we are somehow better. That we are more sophisticated. Take a look at the world around you. What you see on the outside, is just a macrocosm of what you are. Man is not some divine grace that blesses this earth with civilization and beauty. Man is nothing more than brutality, greed, selfishness, hatred with only small pieces of grace and decency mixed in to redeem him.

During World War II, some would have you believe it is the last good war, if you were on the Allies side. But all sides committed atrocities. Americans executed POWs, bombed civilian homes purposefully, dropped the atomic bombs, in the Pacific alone. The Russians raped, pillaged and murdered towards Berlin, and would have done the same towards Tokyo, had the bombs not been dropped. The British firebombed Germany relentlessly in a terror strategy. There are no good guys in a war. There is only evil. War in any shape or form is a coalescing of the evils of man, disguised with claims to freedom, God or other excuses. It might at times be a necessary evil. But make no mistake, it is always evil, and it is always an evil inside of us.