>This sounds like a joke.

Your own quote of the article includes the word starvation. I fail to see the joke there.

>"Meanwhile many other PoWs capture by Japan were tortured and being experimented on."

Perhaps you missed the heading in the article entitled "Human experimentation."

>There's some evidence that Japanese torture camps were the most brutal torture camps ever, in the history of the world.

There's actually a mountain of evidence:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731

> this sounds like a joke… “with no bathtubs”

Maybe from an American POV. This is an article by NHK by a Japanese reporter and likely a spin of a similar story for a Japanese audience. In Japanese culture, being able to bath is up there with being able to eat.

I can't remember his name now, but many years ago, I read the autobiography/memoir of a Japanese-Canadian internee transported and held by the Canadian government. One thing I do remember is his offence at the inability to bathe, and how it made him feel like cattle, with a lack of concern towards such little human niceties by the jailers. I recall similar themes of affront from the indignity and dehumanization over being unable to bathe, from the memoirs of gulag prisoners, and for that matter, Holocaust victims. It's really a very basic issue; do you see someone as human enough to bother to let them bathe?