Book excerpt: SADISTS OF THE RISING SUN focuses on the unique cruelty and capacity for slaughter displayed by Japan, from the beginning of the 1930s, with the origins of its atrocity-focused incursions into East Asia, until the devastation of its cities and incineration of its population by firestorms in 1945. During that period, Japan determinedly undertook the twentieth-century's supreme mission of Imperially-sanctioned butchery, combining the bacteriological obliteration of entire cities with the cannibalism, sexual torture and crucifixion of prisoners of war, the mass-bayoneting and violation of East-Asian urban populations, and the arbitrary overhaul and eradication of human life, in an ambitious project of annihilation conceived by its emperor, Hirohito, and put into operation by dedicated atrocity-advocates such as Shiro Ishii, the director of the Unit 731 experimentation-centre in colonized Manchuria, where the legendary 'body without organs' evisceration initiative was undertaken, alongside other unprecedented explorations into the extreme zones of the human body and its sensations. This illustrated document, based on extensive investigation and incorporating rare and disturbing photographic images, extensively analyses Unit 731 and its legacy, along with other projects of extermination, erasure and sexual mass-subjugation which haunt and define Japan and its cities to the present day.