Chinese → English transcript

Countless guns and cannons were thrown into the vast sea,

and tanks were blasted into pieces. Once- arrogant weapons of war,

under the judgment of peace, met their final fate.

In September 1945,

after Japan’s surrender, the U.S.

military oversaw an unprecedented,

large- scale destruction of weapons.

Weapons of the Japanese army that once lorded it over others became scrap

iron in history. The footage we restore and colorize today comes from the U.S.

National Archives. It documents the entire process of the U.S.

military entering Japan and supervising the destruction of Japanese weapons.

The destruction process was like an efficient industrial assembly line,

except the product turned into scrap iron.

Under American orders and supervision,

Japanese soldiers who once thought themselves invincible now became the buriers of

their own tools of war. On the ship, Japanese soldiers lined up,

passed their guns one by one,

and finally threw them into the deep sea.

And among the most striking scenes was Japanese soldiers, with their own hands,

taking one cannon after another that had once symbolized

the empire’s military might, pushing them step by step to the ship’s rail,

then pushing them into the sea.

The cannons tumbled into the water, smashing up a spray of waves,

then were quickly swallowed by the sea,

leaving only rings of spreading ripples.

This silent fall was more declarative than any explosion, as an era sank

without a sound.

Other heavy equipment was dealt with just as thoroughly.

Tanks and armored vehicles were brought together and blown up with explosives.

Military trucks,

fully loaded with towering piles of ammunition boxes and soldiers’ helmets,

carried load after load to the docks, then were emptied into ships to be dumped.

The entire coastline of Japan seemed to become the collective

graveyard of this giant war machine.

According to historical records,

from September 1945 to April of the following year, the U.S.

military dumped about 800,000 tons of captured Japanese ammunition

and weapons into the seas around Japan.

Destroying them was to prevent militarism from rising from the ashes.

Making Japanese soldiers handle these weapons with their own hands carried an

even stronger symbolic meaning.

They not only physically destroyed the tools of aggression,

but through their actions personally buried

that sinful chapter of their country’s aggressive history.

What we are seeing is not only the destruction of metal,

but also the physical evidence of a history of aggression.

The weapon wreckage settled

on the seabed has become one of history’s deepest warnings.

Any empire that indulges in constant warmongering will eventually be buried

beneath the ruins of its own ambition.