8 Japanese War Crimes during World War II First of all, violence is still present in modern societies even if we tend to believe that so-called postmodern nation-states have been able to overcome violence simply because war has not affected them in the last seven decades.60 As Steven Pinker highlighted, violence is of interest to anyone who seeks to learn about human nature.61 Although he also argues that we must take a closer look at the numbers to see if violence is increasing or decreasing, he makes it clear that all suffering, whether it affects one person or many, deserves our sympathy.62 It consequently seems redundant to discuss numbers and dates it is far more important to discuss violence itself, especially because the history of war is the history of or ga nized violence meant to kill.63 War itself is often considered a form of ordered, or ga nized, and collective violence that re- establishes a space-time continuum and creates a struggle for its control.64 Within a specific space-time continuum, however, violence can also take a form that is no longer bound by existing law and order and thus become indefinite. The possibility of otherwise criminal acts having no punishment in war creates a new space-time continuum that imposes no limitations on the violence used within it. Consequently, war also creates specific group identities: soldiers, men, Japanese people, etc. Such group identities are often dichotomous among exist- ing enemy groups and often seek to violently extinguish each other. Of course, we must accept that no theoretical approach toward violence can explain its complexity,65 but it is important to understand the processes that enable the acts of common soldiers and ordinary men within con- flict. The question of why they act so violently can then be at least partially answered and help prevent similar violent scenarios in the future. People in general seem to have three options during a violent conflict such as war: they can try to escape, they can suffer, or they can participate.66 Noncombatants are the victims in such circumstances because they may not be able to escape war and be doomed to suffer this has been the case in many past wars, and it will most likely be in the future as well. The question that remains, how- ever, is about the atrocities and cruelties that some wars are particularly well known for. The Rape of Nanjing, to name just one example, stands out because its violence was so indefinite that it exceeded all known and usually accepted limits of violence, despite the conflict being part of a war. The Ger- man sociologist Trutz von Trotha (1946–2013) connected levels of extreme violence or cruelty to the social preconditions of the perpetrators when he stated that [c]ruelty is a mirror of the living conditions and achievements of a society. It appears to be as old as humanity itself and crosses societal and cultural boundaries. No society can say that it does not allow cruelty to exist, even if societies differ to an extreme in the amount of space they give to cruelty and which forms are practiced in these particular spaces.67