These "innocents" that you speak of were also the source and supporters for a military that was conducting
this type of "warfare." And I use that term "warfare" quite loosely.
Historians outside Japan estimate that at least five million captive foreign civilians and prisoners of war were brutally murdered by the Japanese military between 1937 and 1945. To that figure, can be added hundreds of thousands of victims who were slowly murdered by starvation, disease, and beatings in Japanese prisoner of war and internment camps, and hundreds of thousands of women who were brutally raped by Japanese soldiers. The appalling rape figure includes two hundred thousand women in Japanese-occupied countries who were forced into sexual slavery in Japanese Imperial Army brothels. Finally, we cannot forget the terrible fate of hundreds of prisoners of war who were murdered by the Japanese Army's infamous Unit 731 in the course of horrible biological experiments.
Innocent? Ummm, not so much.
Randy