Thank you for posting the article, and this link. Family lost Australian friends who were coastwatchers, who volunteered to sit up in a concealed hide in a tree top or cave in S. Pacific to observe and radio in japanese ship traffic. Their life expectancy was 3 days because the japs triangulated the radio signal. One of my uncle’s friends was captured and beheaded by a jap officer, who remains nameless. Perhaps it was espionage, but the man was defending his way of life and bravely volunteered. Throughout the Phillipines there were examples of such brave people, who had good reason to despise the “superior” japanese with the false sense of bushido. MacArthur in post war japan, was in a position of dealing with the rising chi-coms under Mao (who had abandoned the former “united front” with the Kuomintang to fight the japanese, once the war was over), and in order to keep defeated japan in US influence vs. chi-coms... went easy on so called lesser war criminals. It doesn’t make it right, nor does it in any way correctly answer for the atrocities such as was done to US, Australian, Dutch and many others by the Japanese Co-Prosperity Sphere (their word for the Empire).
Recall that Gen. Patton was castigated for hiring ex-nazis to run essential govt. functions (power companies, water, etc.) and were it not for US cultivating nazi spy rings, there would have been nothing to fight off the Soviets in post war occupied Germany. So much for “winning the peace”.