Granted, we were better equipped to afford to be humane, but we were nonetheless.
But the treatment of allied POW's by other powers was reprehensible, and the Japanese stand out in that regard.
I lived in Japan for several years as a young kid, and them lived in the Philippines for a few more.
The Filipinos remembered the brutality of the Japanese quite well, and the Bataan Death March route had white markers along its route which our Boy Scout Troop hiked each year.
I read some years later about the famous journey the USS Astoria made to Japan in 1939 carrying the ashes of the highly respected Japanese ambassador Hirosi Saito who had died while in the USA. (You can read about it here: The Saito Cruise 1939
US-Japanese relations were quite difficult at that time, but this was a special case.
IIRC, even though this was a diplomatic mission, there was a lot of military tension on both sides.
When they prepared to go ashore, Captain Turner selected the biggest, brawniest sailors he could find to serve as the armed honor guard for the delivery of the ashes, and even (to the chagrin and irritation of the Marine Corps detachment aboard) took the biggest Marines and made them wear sailors uniforms (you can see below, wearing the flat hats!) 
Anyway, it was a big to-do, the crew was treated on liberty by the Japanese quite well, but in the formal dinner party of all the ships officers held with prominent Japanese Naval officers, there was real tension and barely disguised (sometimes not disguised) hostility by the Imperial Japanese Navy representatives towards their American counterparts. But to the point of our discussion of Japanese women...one US Navy officer later said (I have to paraphrase, I don't have it exactly) "I could never understand how the Japanese women could be so beautiful and sweet, and the Japanese men could be such sons-of-bitches!"
Well, on August 9, 1942, Japanese sent the USS Astoria to the bottom of Ironbottom Sound during the Battle of Savo Island. Quite an ironic turnaround there.
Anyway, I remember that I really liked the Japanese people I met in Japan, as a young pre-teen, I thought they were really nice. And when I got to the Philippines, I saw them viewed quite differently, so I began reading about the Pacific war, and read a thick, green, dense book about the American POW experiences captured by Japan. I was astonished, reading about how they would force water into someone with a garden hose, then stomp on them, things like that.
And I clearly remember the conflict in my brain as a kid: "How can those be the same people?"