20 Japanese War Crimes during World War II Because of this narrative, violence is usually viewed as unnatural, uncivilized, and unacceptable as part of modern society. However, this line of thinking ignores the universality of violence and its existence beyond factors of time and space, and modern societies try to dismiss the possibility of violent behavior, which is depicted as shocking and impossible within the limits of modernity. Instead, violence is suggested as being premodern. The German sociologist Teresa Koloma Beck consequently argues that “the equalization of violence and pre-modernity lacks to see, that the human capability to use vio lence and the simultaneously existing vulnerability by violence are part of the conditio humana, and can neither be overcome by culture nor by progress.”41 To be violent, one does not require specific training or equipment, especially because the human body is not entirely robust against violence. Actions against vulnerable bodies cause asymmetric relationships in which the strong demand control over the weak. Therefore, violence creates a hierarchy between per- petrators and victims by establishing control, domination, and sometimes even political rule.42 When societies are established, rules about who may use vio lence often occur because only by limiting violence (usually through law and order) can a society be established as a functional and coexisting order. Although we consider violence an interruption of such an order, we must accept that at the same time, such units often use violence to establish them- selves. In this regard, it seems ironic that violence is controlled by the threat of using violence. This dilemma divides humans between those who can use violence as a regulative force that stabilizes society or as a disruptive force that creates chaos.43 As Teresa Koloma Beck highlights, the existence of stability in such an order is dependent on the rationality of modern subjects who accept being nonviolent, not just because the state demands it, but because they willingly accept violence as unsuitable in their present orders. In addition to violence securing the integrity and autonomy of the state, philosophical and political values become established and render violence increasingly obsolete.44 How- ever, a society that comes to this conclusion usually establishes a dichotomy between condemning violence enacted by citizens and increasing the state’s potential for violence to control its subjects.45 Before we can analyze the vio lence of the Japanese soldiers during the Second World War in its specific space-time continuum, it is important to accept that violence is a possible action or reaction for any human being, regardless of age, sex, nationality, or profession. Research on violence is often a sociology of cause rather than a sociology of violence, focusing rather on the why than on the how of this “constitutive problem of social order.”46 The aforementioned German sociologist Trutz von Trotha emphasized this lack of study, pointing not only to the fact that clas- sical works by Durkheim, Marx, Simmel, or Weber do not provide a clear
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