Basic training was designed to destroy their individuality. Recruits were constantly insulted and beaten by their NCOs to toughen them up and to provoke them, in what might be called the knock-on theory of oppression, to take their anger out in turn on the soldiers and civilians of a defeated enemy. All of them had also been indoctrinated since elementary school to believe that the Chinese were totally inferior to the ‘divine race’ of Japanese and were ‘below pigs’.
