Japanese War Memorial, Ban Kat, Chiang Mai

[Mr Brown]

I saw mentioned in Dr. Bob's cemetry thread about a nearby Japanese war memorial in Chiang Mai. Not saying this is the one but as it's right on my wifes' hometown's doorstep, I'd thought I'd go and take some snaps. Ban Kat is approx 22 km from Chiang Mai; take the 108 road to get there.

There isn't much to say about Ban Kat, it is the onion bowl of the North but thats about it. I've tried to research why 18,000 Japanese bodies were found in the backyard of the school here, all I can gather is that they died of malnutrition. I also believe they were invovled in activities to the West in Burma and as far as India. I was also impressesed by how well the gardens were maintained, to get to the memorial you have to ride through the school premises

Hopefully someone could translate the Thai inscriptions for us all. If someone could do the Japanese under the bell that would be great

On the approach



The bell, I presume you ring it in memory of the dead, underneath was Japanese inscriptions; are they names?







Thai inscription on the bell; I could get a good enough shot for translation









The next part of the memorial









Memorial design; not sure what its supposed to signify, presume its a sun atop







And that's it, heres the lake on the other side of the memorial

[Begbie]

Don't know Ban Kat. Which major town does the road go to ?

[Bobcock]

The one says something about 18,000 Japanese soldiers on their way to do war in India.

[Beadle]

Couldn't bring myself to pay respects to those Bastards.

[robuzo]

Yes, in answer to your first question about the Japanese inscription they are names. They appear to be names of families, since there are women's names included on every square.

Otherwise, the longer Japanese inscriptions note the donation of land, on two occasions (in 2536 and 2544) by the principals of the school (is there a school nearby?) to the foundation that created the site.

The vertical monument says "18,000 heroes at rest", and to the left it says they are the Japanese and Thai soldiers who fought at Imphal (where the Imperial Japanese and Bose's Indian National Army were soundly defeated by Indian and British troops). There is a phrase qualifying some aspect of the role of the Thais ("accompanying Thai soldiers" perhaps) but the photo is too fuzzy for me to make out the word.

[The Gentleman Scamp]

RIP - they did not die in vain, for Japan is advanced, polite and educated whereas Bangkok is filthy, the people are greedy and childish and the beaches are filthy and Issan is SHIT - unless you're into blue fucking plastic pipes and pink tissues.

[robuzo]

I'm not sure that means they didn't die in vain, Senor Scamp. As many Japanese are willing to admit, the smartest thing they ever did was to surrender to the US. It is difficult to imagine that Japan would have achieved such impressive prosperity (much of which has been squandered, sadly) had they won or fought the Allies to a standstill.

As to honoring these dead soldiers, most were conscripts without a lot of choice about what they were doing. It shouldn't be too hard to feel sorry for them.

[DrB0b]

I saw this article about the Japanese War Memorial on the Chiang Mai Citylife website;

As the Allies advanced through Burma and western Thailand and the Japanese withdrew, a massive field hospital was set up in Ban Kad, a few kilometres west of Sanpatong District, not far south of Chiang Mai city. There, hundreds of Japanese soldiers died of wounds, disease and malnutrition. By the time the last men still able to walk left for Bangkok, around 400 bodies had been dropped into a well in what is now the grounds of Ban Kad Wittayom School.

Dropping bodies into wells is not a sign of disrespect, it is a military manoeuvre. Bodies of humans or animals have been disposed of in this way almost since warfare began. They poison the water, which will then be useless to the advancing foe.

Far from showing disrespect or uncaring amnesia, a group of Japanese Buddhists (among which was a former senior Japanese Army officer) worked with Thai Buddhists to build a memorial on the site which was completed 17 years ago. Every year since, on or about the end of WW2 hostilities in Asia, 24th July, a party of Japanese make a pilgrimage to the memorial, a priest conducts a ceremony of remembrance, gives a sermon and traditional songs are sung.

This year, Abbot Hidenobu Fuji led 11 pilgrims in reverence and gave a sermon on the theme of putting an end to hate all over the world. The assembly, joined by 100 pupils from Ban Kad School, the local Consul General of Japan and a small number of invited westerners, then sang a traditional Japanese song, ‘We Are Waiting For You to Come Home’.

Keeping records is not a priority for a retreating army, and one of the most painful aspects for bereaved Japanese families is not knowing where the mortal remains of their loved ones lay. The names on the memorial inscriptions are thus the names of the donors, not those whose losses are being mourned.

On this occasion, the party then moved to the bell tower, built more recently on the same site, where Abbot Fuji ceremonially struck the huge iron bell imported from Kyoto, into which is cast a poem. The poem hopes that all Buddhist orphans be granted good luck, happiness and that they will thrive for ever.

An hour later, everyone assembled in the school hall, where after traditional dance performances, the visiting party from Japan presented scholarships to 52 pupils from needy families. Over the following few days, they visited Mae Hong Son and Khun Yuam, other significant places in the history of the war in this area, and over 200 more scholarships were presented.

Much of the local organisation of these events was carried out by Konishi Makoto of the ETOU Foundation, which runs a small cultural centre and library in Chiang Mai. It can be described as a similar, though tiny, version of the Alliance Francaise, and functions on a very low budget.

Konishi is well aware that the theme of Remembrance Day, November the 11th, has broadened enormously since the two world wars; and now marks the loss of all nationalities and faiths, military and civilian, in all conflicts around the world, and focuses on prayers and hopes for peace. He was pleased to hear that several German nationals have attended on 11th November at the Foreign Cemetery and hopes that like-minded people of any nationality will attend at Ban Kad next year.

ChiangMai Citylife - - Get to know Chiang Mai better with these in-depth articles about Chiang Mai, Thailand.

[Beadle]

As to honoring these dead soldiers, most were conscripts without a lot of choice about what they were doing. It shouldn't be too hard to feel sorry for them.

They were trained to torture, rape and murder.

Very hard for anyone that knows their history to feel sorry for them.

18,000 heroes at rest

Heroes?

[terry57]

Couldn't bring myself to pay respects to those Bastards.

I tend to agree 150% with beadle. They where the nastiest bunch of bastards man ever layed eyes on and I can never figure why the fok the munters where ever allowed to have any war graves outside of Japan.

I have no problem with the new generation but those conts fighting the emperors war can go get foked.

[robuzo]

Heroes?

勇士. Their word not mine.

[Fast Eddie]

As many Japanese are willing to admit, the smartest thing they ever did was to surrender to the US. It is difficult to imagine that Japan would have achieved such impressive prosperity (much of which has been squandered, sadly) had they won or fought the Allies to a standstill.

I'm not sure they had a lot of choice. Winning or fighting to a standstill weren't really on the cards. Surrender or be annihilated were the options given in the Potsdam declaration. Surrendering before Hiroshima and Nagasaki might have been a bit smarter.

[robuzo]

As many Japanese are willing to admit, the smartest thing they ever did was to surrender to the US. It is difficult to imagine that Japan would have achieved such impressive prosperity (much of which has been squandered, sadly) had they won or fought the Allies to a standstill.

I'm not sure they had a lot of choice. Winning or fighting to a standstill weren't really on the cards. Surrender or be annihilated were the options given in the Potsdam declaration. Surrendering before Hiroshima and Nagasaki might have been a bit smarter.

They were being smart without realizing at the time it is what I mean, of course. If their leaders had been truly smart they wouldn't have picked a fight with the US, especially considering they had by that point already fought more or less to a standstill in China. They had also taken a whipping in Mongolia at the hands of the Soviets which convinced them that fighting a land war from Manchuria against the USSR- which is what their Nazi German allies wanted them to do- was a losing proposition. Much of the Navy high command also thought that attacking Britain and the US was a losing proposition, but having been given no option by the political leadership they staked their game on a longshot which ultimately failed.

The Japanese leadership couldn't get their heads around the idea that Japan was actually going to lose, which was obvious months before the a-bombs were dropped. Their hubris, combined with what was probably an honest (if insane) belief in the Japanese myth of divine protection, kept them hoping for a miracle like the kamikaze that saved them from the Mongols. Surrender or annihilation were pretty much the only choices on offer, and as difficult as it may be to understand now, there were plenty in the Japanese high command who would have opted for the latter. I think that many of them, judging their enemy according to themselves, fully expected to be brutalized and enslaved. Instead a miracle did actually occur, but it was a miracle that began with defeat and humiliation.

By the way, people wishing to believe that the sick, starving and otherwise beleaguered Japanese troops couldn't be convinced to surrender on the battlefield should read this man's story: Guy Gabaldon - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[Beadle]

If their leaders had been truly smart they wouldn't have picked a fight with the US

It may have succeeded if the attack on Pearl Harbor had successfully and completely destroyed the American Navy as planned.

An attack on the US was a necessary gamble given Japanese colonial aspirations in Asia.

[robuzo]

If their leaders had been truly smart they wouldn't have picked a fight with the US

It may have succeeded if the attack on Pearl Harbor had successfully and completely destroyed the American Navy as planned.

Whereas it resulted in the US improvising a carrier-based naval strategy, instead of using battleships to fight the last war, which is what military planners have a tendency to do with terrible results for the actual soldiers.

Oddly enough, despite wiping out most of the British and American battlewagons at the beginning of the war (and having had a fairly easy time doing so), the Japanese still insisted on wasting valuable resources on their super-battleships, Yamato and Musashi. Guess they were trying compensate for something.

An attack on the US was a necessary gamble given Japanese colonial aspirations in Asia.

Amazingly, the Japanese seem to forget what they were getting up to in Asia at the time, and have a tendency to try to claim that they were given no choice but fight because they were being starved for resources. . .which they needed in their attempt to try to conquer China. As to their stated goal of "liberating" Asia, aside from being total bollocks in terms of their motives, the British, French, and Dutch empires in Asia were already on their last legs, and the Chinese (not to mention the Vietnamese and Filipinos later) pretty clearly didn't want Japanese "help". In their view of themselves as the "master race" of Asia destined to rule the inferior peoples the Japanese were hardly different from their Nazi allies.

This doesn't prevent me from feeling sympathy for the common foot soldier or sailor, or for the loyal professional military men on the Axis side. Some conscript boy from the backside of Japan given no choice but to fight against people he has been convinced by superiors are the mortal enemy of his motherland is hardly in a position to be expected to be a conscientious objector. Conscientious objectors didn't fare too well in Japan in those days, by the way, nor did their families.

[The Gentleman Scamp]

Couldn't bring myself to pay respects to those Bastards.

I tend to agree 150% with beadle. They where the nastiest bunch of bastards man ever layed eyes on and I can never figure why the fok the munters where ever allowed to have any war graves outside of Japan.

I have no problem with the new generation but those conts fighting the emperors war can go get foked.

Maybe you have a point, I am possibly biased because of this bird I've been seeing, but maybe her wonderfulness has nothing to do with her nationality.

And I will add to this that 'nastiest bunch of bastards' can be applied to anybody pro-actively involved in war, whatever their nationality. The world populous is made up of 90% mix of nasty bastards and potential nasty bastards and that's all there is too it.

[Beadle]

And I will add to this that 'nastiest bunch of bastards' can be applied to anybody pro-actively involved in war, whatever their nationality.

After more than 60 years of silence, World War II's most enduring and horrible secret is being nudged into the light of day. One by one the participants, white-haired and mildmannered, line up to tell their dreadful stories before they die.
Akira Makino is a frail widower living near Osaka in Japan. His only unusual habit is to regularly visit an obscure little town in the southern Philippines, where he gives clothes to poor children and has set up war memorials.
Mr Makino was stationed there during the war. What he never told anybody, including his wife, was that during the four months before Japan's defeat in March 1945, he dissected ten Filipino prisoners of war, including two teenage girls. He cut out their livers, kidneys and wombs while they were still alive. Only when he cut open their hearts did they finally perish.
These barbaric acts were, he said this week, "educational", to improve his knowledge of anatomy. "We removed some of the organs and amputated legs and arms. Two of the victims were young women, 18 or 19 years old. I hesitate to say it but we opened up their wombs to show the younger soldiers. They knew very little about women - it was sex education."
Why did he do it? "It was the order of the emperor, and the emperor was a god. I had no choice. If I had disobeyed I would have been killed." But the vivisections were also a revenge on the "enemy" - Filipino tribespeople whom the Japanese suspected of spying for the Americans.
Mr Makino's prisoners seem to have been luckier than some: he anaesthetised them before cutting them up. But the secret government department which organised such experiments in Japanese-occupied China took delight in experimenting on their subjects while they were still alive.
A jovial old Japanese farmer who in the war had been a medical assistant in a Japanese army unit in China described to a U.S. reporter recently what it was like to dissect a Chinese prisoner who was still alive.
Munching rice cakes, he reminisced: "The fellow knew it was over for him, and so he didn't struggle when they led him into the room and tied him down. But when I picked up the scalpel, that's when he began screaming. I cut him open from the chest to the stomach and he screamed terribly, and his face was all twisted in agony.
"He made this unimaginable sound, he was screaming so horribly. But then finally he stopped.
"This was all in a day's work for the surgeons, but it really left an impression on me because it was my first time." The man could not be sedated, added the farmer, because it might have distorted the experiment.
The place where these atrocities occurred was an undercover medical experimentation unit of the Imperial Japanese Army. It was known officially as the Anti-Epidemic Water Supply and Purification Bureau - but all the Japanese who worked there knew it simply as Unit 731.
It had been set up as a biological warfare unit in 1936 by a physician and army officer, Shiro Ishii. A graduate of Kyoto Imperial University, Ishii had been attracted to germ warfare by the 1925 Geneva Protocol banning biological weapons. If they had to be banned under international law, reasoned Ishii, they must be extremely powerful.
Ishii prospered under the patronage of Japan's army minister. He invented a water filter which was used by the army, and allegedly demonstrated its effectiveness to Emperor Hirohito by urinating into it and offering the results to the emperor to drink. Hirohito declined, so Ishii drank it himself.
A swashbuckling womaniser who could afford to frequent Tokyo's upmarket geisha houses, Ishii remained assiduous in promoting the cause of germ warfare. His chance came when the Japanese invaded Manchuria, the region in eastern China closest to Japan, and turned it into a puppet state.
Given a large budget by Tokyo, Ishii razed eight villages to build a huge compound - more than 150 buildings over four square miles - at Pingfan near Harbin, a remote, desolate part of the Manchurian Peninsula.
Complete with an aerodrome, railway line, barracks, dungeons, laboratories, operating rooms, crematoria, cinema, bar and Shinto temple, it rivalled for size the Nazis' infamous death camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau.
The numbers of prisoners were lower. From 1936 to 1942 between 3,000 and 12,000 men, women and children were murdered in Unit 731. But the atrocities committed there were physically worse
than in the Nazi death camps. Their suffering lasted much longer - and not one prisoner survived.
At Unit 731, Ishii made his mission crystal clear. "A doctor's God-given mission is to block and treat disease," he told his staff, "but the work on which we are now to embark is the complete opposite of those principles."
The strategy was to develop biological weapons which would assist the Japanese army's invasion of south-east China, towards Peking.
There were at least seven other units dotted across Japanese-occupied Asia, but they all came under Ishii's command. One studied plagues; another ran a bacteria factory; another conducted experiments in human food and water deprivation, and waterborne typhus.
Another factory back in Japan produced chemical weapons for the army. Typhoid, cholera and dysentery bacteria were farmed for battlefield use.
Most of these facilities were combined at Unit 731 so that Ishii could play with his box of horrors. His word was law. When he wanted a human brain to experiment on, guards grabbed a prisoner and held him down while one of them cleaved open his skull with an axe. The brain was removed and rushed to Ishii's laboratory.
Human beings used for experiments were nicknamed "maruta" or "logs" because the cover story given to the local authorities was that Unit 731 was a lumber mill. Logs were inert matter, a form of plant life, and that was how the Japanese regarded the Chinese "bandits", "criminals" and "suspicious persons" brought in from the surrounding countryside.
Shackled hand and foot, they were fed well and exercised regularly. "Unless you work with a healthy body you can't get results," recalled a member of the Unit.
But the torture inflicted upon them is unimaginable: they were exposed to phosgene gas to discover the effect on their lungs, or given electrical charges which slowly roasted them. Prisoners were decapitated in order for Japanese soldiers to test the sharpness of their swords.
Others had limbs amputated to study blood loss - limbs that were sometimes stitched back on the opposite sides of the body. Other victims had various parts of their brains, lungs or liver removed, or their stomach removed and their oesophagus reattached to their intestines.
Kamada, one of several veterans who felt able to speak out after the death of Emperor Hirohito, remembered extracting the plague-infested organs of a fully conscious "log" with a scalpel.
"I inserted the scalpel directly into the log's neck and opened the chest," he said. "At first there was a terrible scream, but the voice soon fell silent."
Other experiments involved hanging prisoners upside down to discover how long it took for them to choke to death, and injecting air into their arteries to test for the onset of embolisms.
Some appear to have had no medical purpose except the administering of indescribable pain, such as injecting horse urine into prisoners' kidneys.
Those which did have a genuine medical value, such as finding the best treatment for frostbite - a valuable discovery for troops in the bitter Manchurian winters - were achieved by gratuitously cruel means.
On the frozen fields at Pingfan, prisoners were led out with bare arms and drenched with cold water to accelerate the freezing process.
Their arms were then hit with a stick. If they gave off a hard, hollow ring, the freezing process was complete. Separately, naked men and women were subjected to freezing temperatures and then defrosted to study the effects of rotting and gangrene on the flesh.
People were locked into high-pressure chambers until their eyes popped out, or they were put into centrifuges and spun to death like a cat in a washing machine. To study the effects of untreated venereal disease, male and female "logs" were deliberately infected with syphilis.
Ishii demanded a constant intake of prisoners, like a modern-day Count Dracula scouring the countryside for blood. His victims were tied to stakes to find the best range for flame-throwers, or used to test grenades and explosives positioned at different angles and distances. They were used as targets to test chemical weapons; they were bombarded with anthrax.
All of these atrocities had been banned by the Geneva Convention, which Japan signed but did not ratify. By a bitter irony, the Japanese were the first nation to use radiation against a wartime enemy. Years before Hiroshima, Ishii had prisoners' livers exposed to X-rays.
His work at Pingfan was applauded. Emperor Hirohito may not have known about Unit 731, but his family did. Hirohito's younger brother toured the Unit, and noted in his memoirs that he saw films showing mass poison gas experiments on Chinese prisoners.
Japan's prime minister Hideki Tojo, who was executed for war crimes in 1948, personally presented an award to Ishii for his contribution in developing biological weapons. Vast quantities of anthrax and bubonic plague bacteria were stored at Unit 731. Ishii manufactured plague bombs which could spread fatal diseases far and wide. Thousands of white rats were bred as plague carriers, and fleas introduced to feed on them.
Plague fleas were then encased in bombs, with which Japanese troops launched biological attacks on reservoirs, wells and agricultural areas.
Infected clothing and food supplies were also dropped. Villages and whole towns were afflicted with cholera, anthrax and the plague, which between them killed over the years an estimated 400,000 Chinese.
One victim, Huang Yuefeng, aged 28, had no idea that by pulling his dead friend's socks on his feet before burying him he would be contaminated.
All he knew was that the dead were all around him, covered in purple splotches and lying in their own vomit. Yuefeng was lucky: he was removed from a quarantine centre by a friendly doctor and nursed back to health.
But four relatives died. Yuefeng told Time magazine: "I hate the Japanese so much that I cannot live with them under the same sky."
The plague bombing was suspended after the fifth bacterial bombing when the wind changed direction and 1,700 Japanese troops were killed.
Before Japan surrendered, Ishii and army leaders were planning to carry the war to the U.S. They proposed using "balloon bombs" loaded with biological weapons to carry cattle plague and anthrax on the jet stream to the west coast of America.
Another plan was to send a submarine to lie off San Diego and then use a light plane carried on board to launch a kamikaze mission against the city. The war ended before these suicidal attacks could be authorised.
As well as Chinese victims, Russians, Mongolians, Koreans and some prisoners of war from Europe and the U.S. also ended up in the hands of Ishii, though not all at Unit 731.
Major Robert Peaty, of the Royal Army Ordnance Corps, was the senior British officer at Mukden, a prisoner-of-war camp 350 miles from Pingfan. Asked, after the war, what it was like, Peaty replied: "I was reminded of Dante's Inferno - abandon hope, all ye who enter here."
In a secret diary, Peaty recorded the regular injections of infectious diseases, disguised as harmless vaccinations, which were given to them by doctors visiting from Unit 731. His entry for January 30, 1943, records: "Everyone received a 5cc typhoid-paratyphoid A inoculation."
On February 23, his entry read: "Funeral service for 142 dead. 186 have died in 5 days, all Americans." Further "inoculations" followed.
Why, then, after the war, were nearly all the scientists at Unit 731 freed? Why did Dr Josef Mengele, the Nazi 'Angel of Death' at Auschwitz, have to flee to South America and spend the rest of his life in hiding, while Dr Shiro Ishii died at home of throat cancer aged 67 after a prosperous and untroubled life?
The answer is that the Japanese were allowed to erase Unit 731 from the archives by the American government, which wanted Ishii's biological warfare findings for itself.
In the autumn of 1945, General MacArthur granted immunity to members of the Unit in exchange for research data on biological warfare.
After Japan's surrender, Ishii's team fled back across China to the safety of their homeland. Ishii ordered the slaughter of the remaining 150 "logs" in the compound and told every member of the group to "take the secret to the grave", threatening death to anybody who went public.
Vials of potassium cyanide were issued in case anyone was captured. The last of his troops blew up the compound.
From then on, a curtain of secrecy was lowered. Unit 731 was not part of the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal. One reference to "poisonous serums" being used on the Chinese was allowed to slip by for lack of evidence.
Lawyers for the International Prosecution Section gathered evidence which was sent directly to President Truman. No more was heard of it.
The Americans took the view that all this valuable research data could end up in the hands of the Soviets if they did not act fast. This was, after all, the kind of information that no other nation would have had the ruthlessness to collect.
Thus the Japanese were off the hook. Unlike Germany, which atoned for its war crimes, Japan has been able to deny the evidence of Unit 731. When, as now, it does admit its existence, it refuses Chinese demands for an apology and compensation on the grounds that there is no legal basis for them - since all compensation issues had been settled by a treaty with China in 1972.
Many of the staff at Unit 731 went on to prominent careers. The man who succeeded Ishii as commander of Unit 731, Dr Masaji Kitano, became head of Green Cross, once Japan's largest pharmaceutical company.
Many ordinary Japanese citizens today would like to witness a gesture of atonement by their government. Meanwhile, if they want to know what happened, they can visit the museum that the Chinese government has erected in the only building at Pingfan which was not destroyed.
It does not have the specimens kept at Unit 731: the jars containing feet, heads and internal organs, all neatly labelled; or the six-foot-high glass jar in which the naked body of a Western man, cut vertically in two pieces, was pickled in formaldehyde.
But it does give an idea of what this Asian Auschwitz was like. In the words of its curator: "This is not just a Chinese concern; it is a concern of humanity."

Read more: Doctors of Depravity | Mail Online

[The Gentleman Scamp]

I did read that and it was appalling, not that I am surprised, I have known for some time what human beings are capable of doing to other human beings.

Some Japanese people of this generation suffer taunts from other Asians at school/college/uni such as "You killed my grandfather", which is pretty lame, would you not agree?

I guess it depends who's side you are on... All I know is that my J girl had nothing whatsoever to do with the death of some Korean pillock's grandad.

[The Gentleman Scamp]

The answer is that the Japanese were allowed to erase Unit 731 from the archives by the American government, which wanted Ishii's biological warfare findings for itself.

Now there's a surprise.

Yuefeng told Time magazine: "I hate the Japanese so much that I cannot live with them under the same sky."

I guess you would, but is that attitude the way forward for humanity?

Many ordinary Japanese citizens today would like to witness a gesture of atonement by their government.

That's good to know, but many will skip that part as it doesn't fuel their hatred.

Munching rice cakes, he reminisced: "The fellow knew it was over for him, and so he didn't struggle when they led him into the room and tied him down. But when I picked up the scalpel, that's when he began screaming. I cut him open from the chest to the stomach and he screamed terribly, and his face was all twisted in agony.
"He made this unimaginable sound, he was screaming so horribly. But then finally he stopped.

I have a good imagination and this was horrible to read, but again - it's not just the Japanese that can be that emotionally detached and evil.

Some appear to have had no medical purpose except the administering of indescribable pain, such as injecting horse urine into prisoners' kidneys.

It's a shame such procedures are not inflicted on those in this world who deserve it.

Others had limbs amputated to study blood loss - limbs that were sometimes stitched back on the opposite sides of the body.

This was the only part that made me laugh, it spoiled the flow and yes I felt bad after I had recomposed myself.

"This is not just a Chinese concern; it is a concern of humanity."

Indeed it is.

[Bobcock]

Sad to think, but probably guaranteed, that at this moment, somewhere in this world, someone is being tourtered in ways that will make us feel ill.

[Jet Gorgon]

Yes, in answer to your first question about the Japanese inscription they are names. They appear to be names of families, since there are women's names included on every square.

Otherwise, the longer Japanese inscriptions note the donation of land, on two occasions (in 2536 and 2544) by the principals of the school (is there a school nearby?) to the foundation that created the site.

The vertical monument says "18,000 heroes at rest", and to the left it says they are the Japanese and Thai soldiers who fought at Imphal (where the Imperial Japanese and Bose's Indian National Army were soundly defeated by Indian and British troops). There is a phrase qualifying some aspect of the role of the Thais ("accompanying Thai soldiers" perhaps) but the photo is too fuzzy for me to make out the word.

Yes, surprised at the chick names, but the Japs likely kicked out a bunch of poor folk and sent them over to settle, like they did in Manchukuo (Manchuria).
Pretty sloppy translation there, Robo , and yes, as noted in the OP, the land donated for the memorial is on school property.

Yes, that kanji is fuzzy, but from context, it obviously means "together with".

The other two slab texts are this (I dunno the foundation name and can't find my Nelson kanji dictionary to look it up). Funny they didn't put the Jap or Western years as dates, too. I'm writing the Thai names as they are phonetically written in Jap.

The first pic says:
In 2536 (1993 AD), BaanKhad school principal Seri Suwanapetchi gave permission for this land be used by (dunno, some foundation) to build a memorial to the Japanese killed here in WWII.

In 2544 (2001), school principal Ponpan Chaiwan (or could be the school name, but differs from above) permitted the XXX foundation to build a memorial on this land for the 10,800 Japanese killed here during WWII.

[Jet Gorgon]

Unit 731.

Yep, know all about it. Studied at HeiDa in Harbin. Many bldgs and areas were off limits to us foreigners in the 1980s. As were the public executions at the stadium.

Sad to think, but probably guaranteed, that at this moment, somewhere in this world, someone is being tortered in ways that will make us feel ill.

Yep, every minute of every day.

[The Gentleman Scamp]

I can't get post #17 out of my mind.

[Rural Surin]

If their leaders had been truly smart they wouldn't have picked a fight with the US

It may have succeeded if the attack on Pearl Harbor had successfully and completely destroyed the American Navy as planned.

An attack on the US was a necessary gamble given Japanese colonial aspirations in Asia.

....as opposed to the much more humane European colonial visions in Asia.

[Jet Gorgon]

I can't get post #17 out of my mind.

I can give you website names to read more info...post 17 just kisses the top of the iceberg.