/edu/ - Education

So I read The Rape of Nanking a couple weeks ago and something that kinda bothered me, that it wasn't only slightly alluded to in the book, was the mindset of the preparators

From what I've gathered, Prior to 1895, Japan as a whole pretty much had an inferiority complex towards China. China had won every single war with Japan up until that point (if you exclude that time the Mongols tried to invade with collaborating Chinese troops.) the fact that Chinese philosophies, culture, architecture etc heavily influenced Japan in question was well known. Many of Japan's late 20th century generals and even the more nationalistic ones in the 20th had great admiration for things such as Chinese poetry and literature. They couldn't get around the fact that China was essentially Japan's big brother in cultural and military terms for the vast majority of the two's existence.
However, after the first sino-jap war, in which the jap navy completely crushed the Qing navy, the illusion of Qing China being the superior older brother to Japan was completely dissolved in the eyes of the world. Japanese officers witnessed firsthand the miserably poor and awful starvation-tier conditions Chinese civilians lived under in the late stages of the Qing Dynasty. All their respect and apprehension of what they perceived to be a mysteriously powerful China.
so the fact that Japan had emerged as the dominant Eastern power after 2,000 years of Chinese dominance went straight to their fucking heads.(to say the least)
so the biggest reason is that the Japanese soldier was intentionally brainwashed and hammered into a fearless bloodthirsty wild animal by his superiors. Japanese officers in general were largely raised in sheltered, isolated military academies and believed in total racial holy war in which the entire population should die before surrender and had a strange form of contempt for their own civilian population because they weren't soldiers. (better to die as a shattered jewel; one hundred million shattered jewels.) The enlisted ranks were starved, humiliated and beaten to a pulp, sometimes even to death by their officers for even the smallest mistakes and infractions. they were bombarded with totalitarian propaganda from their first day out of their mothers' womb that they were the chosen heavenly master race, all their enemies were demonic insects with no exceptions, and that their only purpose in life was to slaughter and then die themselves as an expendable meat shield for their God-emperor. If that's how Japanese troops saw themselves, how much decency do you think they'd show to even their own civilians, much less foreign ones? (huge amounts of rape and murder were inflicted by Japanese soldiers to the native Okinawan population during that battle.)

is this an accurate estimation ?