This was How cruel were the Japanese in WW2

 Very cruel. They literally had a game, where they tossed Chinese babies in the air and impaled them on their bayonets. Japanese soldiers had this game wherein the one who killed the most civillians in one night, won. The rapes, tortures and murders of men, women, elders and infants were unprecedented in modern history.

Even the Germans didn’t engage in the kind of mass-civillian torture like the Japanese did. (The Germans were generally considered more evil though, because they denied an entire ‘race’ the basic right to exist and killed them with industrial efficiency, the epitome of emptiness and lack of any empathy)

The Rape of Nanking, as it is called, was one of the worst atrocities in human history. Nanking was at that time the capital of China. The massacre the Japanese inflicted on the citizens of that city is beyond belief and any comprehension. I will not include any pictures here, because they are too disturbing, but they are available on Google Images. However I don’t recommend anyone looking at them: they include extremely graphic imagery, decapitated heads, decapitations in full display, mass graves, crying babies amidst the bodies of their families, and so on.

The Japanese however, were far more sadistic. They would tie someone up very tightly and throw them into a bamboo forest. If you didn’t know, bamboo grows very fast and is very sharp. So the poor victim would be impaled very slowly and with excruciating pains. They would also pierce bamboo splinters through someones nails, Yikes.

And then the rapes. There were so many rapes in Korea, Indonesia, the Philippines and China. Entire generations of women and girls were traumatized and violated.

The Japanese Imperial Army committed horrible crimes against humanity during the Second World War, that I hope will never be committed again. Maybe we’ll learn from these mistakes we as humans made to prevent them in the future.

Edit: thank you for the upvotes! I do want to state however that I distance myself from some of the views expressed in the comments on this answer. I do not think the Japanese today are responsible for the crimes some their ancestors committed, nor that they should be blamed or feel guilty, and I don’t believe at all that the Japanese are inherently cruel or evil. Every nation can do terrible things under certain circumstances.