Japan's formal war on China began in 1931, and Japan occupied parts of China - two-thirds of the country at its peak - until the end of the war in 1945. Historians estimate deaths resulting from the Japanese occupation at 10 million to 30 million, including deaths from massacre, attack, forced starvation and germ warfare. Japanese soldiers routinely killed civilians in brutal ways. They raped women and turned them into sex slaves. Japanese doctors performed medical experiments without anesthesia. Prisoners were subjected to amputation and frozen alive. Epidemics were unleashed on Chinese and POW populations through germ warfare experiments. But the incident which stands out most in the Chinese mind for its unbridled brutality is the Nanjing Massacre.
