![]() Therefore the Japanese forces found only seven Caucasians - five Australian officials and two European missionaries – and no Australian troops when they landed. Most employees of the BPC and staff of the Australian administration had left Nauru in February 1942, six months before the Japanese attack. ![]() ![]() Four days later, 100 Japanese soldiers led by Lieutenant Nakayama Hiromi landed on Nauru and occupied the island. On 22 August 1942, eighteen Japanese planes bombed Nauru, and that night the cruiser Ariake bombarded the island from 3,000 meters offshore. Located between New Britain and Tarawa, the small island (just 21 square kilometers with a coastline of 30 kilometers) was thus left untouched until August 1942. In contrast, it seems that the Japanese did not initially consider Nauru strategically vital. In January the following year, New Britain and New Ireland fell to Japanese forces. The same day, they also landed on Makin and Tarawa (today, the main atoll of the Republic of Kiribati). Shortly after the outbreak of the Pacific War with the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese forces invaded and occupied the US territory of Guam on 10 December 1941. In 1923, the League of Nations placed Nauru under Australian trusteeship, with the United Kingdom and New Zealand as co-trustees. BPC took over the rights to phosphate mining and started exporting phosphates to Australia and New Zealand to be used for producing munitions and as fertilizer. In 1919, Australia, the United Kingdom and New Zealand signed the Nauru Island Agreement, establishing the British Phosphate Commission (BPC). In 1914, following the outbreak of World War I, Nauru was captured by Australian troops. In 1900, phosphate was discovered on Nauru, and in 1906 the Pacific Phosphate Company started mining the reserves under an agreement with Germany. The central Pacific island of Nauru was annexed by Germany in 1888 and incorporated into Germany’s Marshall Islands Protectorate. The Capture and Occupation of Nauru by the Japanese It demonstrates how war brings not only devastating physical breakdown, but also serious moral and cultural destruction even to a small nation like Nauru. This paper examines three forgotten examples of war crimes committed by Japanese forces on the Micronesian island of Nauru, against Nauruans and Australians. It may also be due to the fact that these small island nations hold limited political influence on the world stage, whatever the reasons, their claims as victims of Japanese war crimes have been long neglected. One of the reasons for the lack of research is that researchers see little value in analyzing them because of the relatively small number of victims. Yet very little research has been carried out so far on these cases, in particular on small islands in the Southwest Pacific. Japanese troops committed equally brutal war crimes throughout the Pacific islands, against Allied soldiers and civilians as well as local inhabitants. This is primarily thanks to continuous and comprehensive investigation by a small group of Japanese historians who specialize in Japanese war crimes, as well as contributions by international researchers. As a result, we now have considerable knowledge about war crimes committed in many parts of Asia. Over the last few decades, there has been extensive research on various atrocities committed by the Japanese Imperial Forces in China and various parts of Southeast Asia during the Asia-Pacific War: massacres, torture, rape, sexual slavery, and ill-treatment of prisoners of war (POWs) and medical experiments on prisoners. Japanese Atrocities on Nauru during the Pacific War: The murder of Australians, the massacre of lepers and the ethnocide of Nauruans
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