Read "The Knights of Bushido."

I rented "The Great Raid" (evaluation was on this site) at Blockbuster a while back. The movie was based on fact and included the liquidation of a pow camp by the burning alive of American prisoners of war by a special Japanese military police unit. The story was about a ranger unit which, along with a special pathfinder unit and Philipine guerillas rescued American prisoners who were intended to be burned alive by their military police guards also. In the accompanying documentary tracks someone (Dale Dye?) described how the Japanese actors who had to portray the Japanese troops in the movie had to be convinced that the part of the plot representing atrocities was indeed factual. They could not believe these were true because they had never heard of such things growing up in Japan. It finally took the film's expert on the WWII Japanese military (who is Japanese) to convince these Japanese actors that those atrocities had indeed been committed so that they would continue to work with the film crew.