The War Is Over,We Are Friends Again

[Montcalm]

This phrase popped in my head this week-end,it was said in a WWII tv movie about women being taken prisoners by the Japs when they invaded China,you probably saw the movie i'm talking about.

Anyway after they get the shit beaten out of them,and some women were told to let Japs soldiers fucked them if they wanted a *Better life* long story short when the war is over the Japanese prison camp commander says *The war is over,we are friends again* then he leaves.

So my point is,is that kind of attitude the reason why Japan does not want to admit any wrong doing during WWII?

[Chris OFarrell]

This phrase popped in my head this week-end,it was said in a WWII tv movie about women being taken prisoners by the Japs when they invaded China,you probably saw the movie i'm talking about.

Anyway after they get the shit beaten out of them,and some women were told to let Japs soldiers fucked them if they wanted a *Better life* long story short when the war is over the Japanese prison camp commander says *The war is over,we are friends again* then he leaves.

So my point is,is that kind of attitude the reason why Japan does not want to admit any wrong doing during WWII?

No. Its just pride.

The Japs had a HUGE ego and superiority complex. Their easy victories in the first year of the war truly made them feel invulnerable. They saw every other race as beneath them. Then they got their asses handed to them, two cities Nuked and the Emperor himself telling everyone to surrender. You've probably heard how the Japanese treated POWs. Because they believed that you either won the battle or died honourably in trying. If you surrendered, you were forfeit of all honour. Which was why they were willing to have irregular civilian troops charge the US marines as they came ashore with pitchforks and sticks. Because death with honour was seen as better then life without.

So when their nation effectively lost its honour, they simply had no idea WHAT to do, who they were or what it meant for them. Over time, they transformed everything off THEIR shoulders and onto everyone else’s, simply because they could not deal with it. Western nations will look it in the face and move on, regardless of it they liked it or not. Look at Germany today. They have accepted WW2 and the horrors they performed. The Japanese simply gilt trip everyone else.

A friend of mine went to several WW2 museums in Japan and the couple of places in Hiroshima that dealt with THAT event. Its almost scary how its all about glorifying their martial tradition. War criminals are lauded as great leaders and military commanders. In Hiroshima they vilify the US and nuclear weaponry, your almost beaten over the head with the horrors of the attack and how evil the US was for dropping the weapon on civilians.

Not that the Japanese will even ACKNOWELDGE what THEY did to civilians all over half the frigen Asia/Pacific area that grossly exceeds the total death toll of both attacks combined. Its a major cultural problem, their inability to confront and accept responsibility. Its also something that frankly still makes places like China nervous. You might scoff at the idea that Japan poses any threat to the PRC, but they lost an absurd amount of people in WW2 at their hands. Read about the Rape of Narking, which the Japanese try to pretend was a minor event…and you might start to understand.

[Alyrium Denryle]

Chris hit it on the head. Also remember the japanese also have inherited family honor. The shame of world war two is transfered to an entire family line. So it isnt as if they can say "that was my grand dad, this is me" it is more like "Grandfather shamed us all by his actions" and they have a hard time dealing with that

[HemlockGrey]

In Hiroshima they vilify the US and nuclear weaponry, your almost beaten over the head with the horrors of the attack and how evil the US was for dropping the weapon on civilians.

Yeah, I've been there. The entire museum seems to be geared towards making American visitors feel like shitstains while totally disregarding the political and military situation that necessitated the use of the bomb.

And the worst part is that it loudly decries the atom bombs as atrocious war crimes...and yet the Japanese people tend to clamp their hands over their ears and sing REAAAAL loud whenever Japanese atrocities in China are mentioned.

That said, there ARE Japanese who fully accept that Japan did some baaad shit back in WWII.

And this attitude is not wholly unique to Japan; how many in America know of the disasterous population concentration attempts in the Phillipines (not on Luzon, that worked out fairly well, but on the other major island, where thousands died)?

[Falkenhayn]

The Atomic bomb was about helplessness. It wasn't so much the defeat they couldn't handle. They were prepared to commit nations suicide (whether the population was entirely willing or not...) over that.

It was the notion that there would be no final, glorious battle to the death. Any preparation they made was nullified by the fact that we could obliterate them a city at a time until we ran out of Japanese or they gave up. They could summon up all the fighting spirit they wanted, and as long as that one B-29 got through, it didn't matter a damn.

Two bombs in a week destroyed any notion that this was some kind of one hit wonder, and most certainly showed that the US government, when taken in tandem with the fire bombing campaing, had the required ruthlessness to do it. There was simply no reason for Hirohito to believe otherwise. When given the choice of surrender or war against an enemy who, apparently, can obliterate you at a pitiful cost, even he was smart enough to chose rightly.

[Darth Wong]

Oh come on, every nation whitewashes its past. There were German exchange students at my university in Waterloo who commented that they were shocked at how people in North America went into such graphic detail about what evil the Nazis did; their schools "preferred not to dwell on it", which is just another way of saying that they try to sweep it under the carpet.

And America still celebrates Columbus Day, even though the guy was a fucking mass-murderer whose men cut infants out of the bellies of living women in order to crush their skulls in front of them whenever the natives got out of line and needed to be reminded who was in charge. Ever hear about that? Nope, all you hear is this "he discovered the New World" shit.

To claim that societal shame and whitewashing are somehow uniquely Japanese traits is fucking absurd.

[Chmee]

If you wage war, you inevitably do things that don't fit with your own view of national identity and morality ... brutal, terrible, barbaric things. That's why you're supposed to try to actually AVOID fighting wars.

Japan was worse than many, given the circumstances of the period ... but to fight wars is to commit war crimes, whether it's Nanjing or Dresden.

[Fleet Admiral JD]

According to What they Didn't Teach You About World War II, Some Japanese textbooks say that the war began and ended with the atom bombs. Very little to no mention of Pearl Harbor or any experimentation, such as when they took a B-2 crew and replaced their blood with seawater to see what would happen.

[wolveraptor]

I like to think that modern Historians and teachers are trying not to ignore it so much. I wasn't taught a white-washed version of WWII in my middle school days. We covered American concentration camps for the Japanese, how the creators of the Atomic bomb pleaded for it not to be used. Still, it was still "Hitler is teh evill!!!!one11one"

America has an advantage in that its population is not so single-minded, at least not IMHO. Japan, on the other hand, is one of the most homogenous nations on the planet. 98% Japanese. They all have the same cultural background, which teaches them to be ashamed of their WWII surrender and atrocities. Like others have said before me, they couln't deal with it.

America, on the other hand, has Japanese americans (for example) still living here, who won't just let you slip shit under the rug.

[Gil Hamilton]

It's the inevitable end result of mindless patriotism and nationalism causing subservience and pack mentality in people. I remember watching a video in Sociology on an experiment being done in the early sixties by a researcher named Stantley Milgram. Milgram was a psychologist who became fascinated with interviews of Nazi war criminals who willingly participated in the holocaust. Time after time, they'd interview members of the SS who by all appearances would be normal generally decent individuals, not monsters, who commited horrible atrocities during the war. The response "I was just following orders" kept coming off. This seemed very inconsistant to Milgram. He wanted to answer the question; what happened? Why did regular individuals who weren't psychopaths or monsters go along with it?

So Milgram made an experiment. He put an ad in the newspaper in an open call for adult individuals to come in for five dollars to be part of an experiment. The volunteers, all normal everyday Americans responding to the ads (not monsters), were to be "teachers" and would give questions to a learner in another room who they could hear. They were even walked by the learner being hooked up to an electric generator. Then they were parked in a room and a researcher would explain the experiment. They were to ask the "learner" in the other room questions. When the "learner" got one wrong, the "teacher" would depress a switch that would deliver electric shocks to the learner, then increase the voltage by 15v (with 450v max). This would continue until the "teacher" quit. At 75 to 120 volts there would be sounds of discomfort, then screams, then silence in the 330v range. The "teachers" were told that silence was considered to be a wrong answer and to administer the shocks. Meanwhile, the researcher would goad, command, and instruct the "teacher" on and convince him to continue.

By the time of the end of the experiment, not a single individual stopped before 300v. In fact, 65% of them continued to the full 450v. Despite severe distress on the "teacher", all of them obeyed the researcher well after most psychologists at the time, when they heard about the experiment, claimed that any decent human would stop. Of course, in reality, the electric generator was bogus and the "learner" was a talented actor, but the experiment was so convincing and stressful that it was actually made illegal and considered a massive breach of ethics to conduct.

In 1974, Milgram would write about the experiment:

The legal and philosophic aspect of obedience are of enormous import, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations. I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects’ strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects’ ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.

Like the Standford Prison Experiment of that era, it demonstrated that normal everyday decent individual, when put under certain situations, will knowingly and willingly commit horrors on their fellow man, knowing full well they are cause pain, due to the unfortunate human trait that humans tend to become sheep and obey orders no matter when faced with a perceived authority.

This is what happened in Germany and Japan more often than not. Germans were whipped into a blind flurry of patriotism, religous furver, nationalism and thus you get the SS. The Japanese army took it one step further, accounts from China and other places (like Korea, for instance) not only did they do that, but officers actively abused the men in their command with the express purpose of stirring them up and frustrating them, then turning them loose on the population. It's little wonder they became monsters.

[Gil Hamilton]

EDIT: And incidently, it's why I've always called anyone who says "My country, right or wrong" a fool, and will continue to do so. Blind patriotism is one of the most abhorrent things in human history and has caused untold misery throughout time.

[SyntaxVorlon]

On this topic precisely I'm reading a book called "War without Mercy" which talks about both sides of the table as far as the pacific war is concerned. In talking about war crimes on both sides it made conjecture about how Japan would have tried war criminals in the US had it one. It would probably have tried and hanged FDR and several other admirals for the Tokyo firebombing alone.
At the time both sides were decrying the atrocity of bombing civilians but both sides were doing it. In 39 FDR was talking about the inhumanity of bombing unfortified civilian centers, by 44 the US was making raids on civilian centers and in March 45 killed close to 100,000 in a raid on Tokyo and left 1,000,000 homeless destroying 16 square miles.

The whole war makes me sick now. What the Germans did, what the Japanese did, what the Americans did, what the Brits did, what the aussies did...
All of it disgusts me to the core.

[Enforcer Talen]

I remain impresed with the intesnity and inventiveness of the art of killing.

[Chris OFarrell]

Oh come on, every nation whitewashes its past. There were German exchange students at my university in Waterloo who commented that they were shocked at how people in North America went into such graphic detail about what evil the Nazis did; their schools "preferred not to dwell on it", which is just another way of saying that they try to sweep it under the carpet.

Yes but not to the same extent here. Especially in a WW2 context.

Germany fully acknowledges its past. They acknowledge the Holocaust and what they did. Look at Auschwitz a few months ago on the 60th anniversary of its liberation. The Germans were there in force to reflect of what they did and acknowledge *what they did*. They have tried to give compensation to the survivors of such horrors, they publish in their textbooks every detail so they don't forget it. EVERYTHING about Nazism is just about illegal, you can be arrested for giving the Nazi salute to someone, Nazi parties are completely illegal. There are no monuments to Nazi war criminals. Places like Auschwitz are kept standing PRECISLY as a constant reminder to everyone.

Japan on the other hand tries hard to forget and whitewash from the highest level on down. Their courts and Government refuse to even THINK about compensation. I recall a few years back a group of Korean women tried to sue for compensation for being used as sex slaves by the Imperial Japanese Army, they were blocked at every single level. Japanese textbooks often moan on about stuff like being bombed with nuclear weapons, but they cut out a lot of what THEY did and the things they did.

http://archives.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/asia ... .textbook/

The frigen PM approves revisionist history. If anything, the young people in Japan SHOULD be taught what they did given their parents ability to pretend it didn’t happen. They SHOULD get the *facts*, period.

I don't doubt that most cultures try to forget what they did. No-one can be expected to go about their day moaning and whipping themselves for what happened fifty years ago....but by the same token, everyone should know EXACTLY what happened, especially if your culture and country launched a war of pure conquest and aggression.

[Stark]

Chris, how many of those arguments can be directed at the Allies? THEY have largely whitewashed their involvement in atrocities (particularly the US's 'la-la-la' attitude) but WE WON so it doesn't matter. Noone talks about the RUSSIAN atrocities, noone CARES about all the German and Japanese civilians killed, maimed, starved or made homeless. At my school there was nary a mention of UK/US concentration camps.

Even the use of nuclear weapons - while justified in many eyes - is the very DEFINITION of an atrocity, justifiable only by what it prevented. It's just like whipping POWs around the walls of an ancient fortress, or sitting on a pile of bloody skulls Assyrian-style - being horribly brutal today to stop the war tomorrow.

I'm certainly not supporting the Japanese stance: but comparing them to Germany is unfair. The US government is hardly educating its people about all the terrible things its done: quite the opposite. 'Lets just not talk about Vietnam', 'firebombing Tokyo, good idea' etc. The UK also wants to just walk away and forget. I think it's fairer to say that Germany has done more than any other belligerant nation in WW2 to acknowledge their crimes, because as far as I know no other nation has done squat.

[Falkenhayn]

On this topic precisely I'm reading a book called "War without Mercy" which talks about both sides of the table as far as the pacific war is concerned. In talking about war crimes on both sides it made conjecture about how Japan would have tried war criminals in the US had it one. It would probably have tried and hanged FDR and several other admirals for the Tokyo firebombing alone.
At the time both sides were decrying the atrocity of bombing civilians but both sides were doing it. In 39 FDR was talking about the inhumanity of bombing unfortified civilian centers, by 44 the US was making raids on civilian centers and in March 45 killed close to 100,000 in a raid on Tokyo and left 1,000,000 homeless destroying 16 square miles.

The whole war makes me sick now. What the Germans did, what the Japanese did, what the Americans did, what the Brits did, what the aussies did...
All of it disgusts me to the core.

I have said book.

FDR recieved a letter opener made from the polished thigh bone of a Japanese officer.

[Maraxus]

Starke, thats odd. I've learned all of those things in my history classes. Maybe its because i have an exceptional teacher, but things like Stalin's purges or the firebombings of Dresden were never whitewashed with me.

[Stark]

Starke, thats odd. I've learned all of those things in my history classes. Maybe its because i have an exceptional teacher, but things like Stalin's purges or the firebombings of Dresden were never whitewashed with me.

I'm not specifically referring to education (but then, I'm in AU, and everything at my highschool had a depressingly AU bias) but statements made and attitudes held by government. While it's ridiculous that the Japanese government wants to sweep it all under the carpet, I don't feel that the Allies have gone as far as Germany to admit their wartime actions either. I don't think I'm being very clear

[Thirdfain]

Starke, thats odd. I've learned all of those things in my history classes. Maybe its because i have an exceptional teacher, but things like Stalin's purges or the firebombings of Dresden were never whitewashed with me.

Yeah, I came out of my history class with a pretty detailed knowledge of the Dresden bombing, the friebombing of Tokyo, and the Japanese-American camps in the USA. In fact, I didn't learn much about the actual war until college when I took a course on it.

I'd argue that the American education system HARDLY whitewashes these issues- the Japanese camps in the US, in particular. Odd, because those were far and away the least objectionable of the wartime 'atrocities' the Allies commited in WW2....

[Broomstick]

And America still celebrates Columbus Day, even though the guy was a fucking mass-murderer whose men cut infants out of the bellies of living women in order to crush their skulls in front of them whenever the natives got out of line and needed to be reminded who was in charge. Ever hear about that?

Yeah, actually, I DID hear about that, starting about junior high school. But then, I was a weird kid who actually paid attention in class.

And just a nitpick - Columbus himself wasn't the "mass-murderer" - he never actually reached the mainland, and never stayed long. Probably killed a bunch of natives by exposing them to European diseases, but at least in his case that wasn't intentional.

It was the later conquistadors like Cortez who did the raping, murdering, pillaging, etc. Which is not to stay that Columbus wouldn't have done it as well, under different circumstances - he might or might not - but that wasn't what happened.

Unless you have a cite for Columbus and his crews engaging in this sort of activity?...

[His Divine Shadow]

To claim that societal shame and whitewashing are somehow uniquely Japanese traits is fucking absurd.

What about Canada? Got some death camps or something hidden away? Wars started?

[Montcalm]

To claim that societal shame and whitewashing are somehow uniquely Japanese traits is fucking absurd.

What about Canada? Got some death camps or something hidden away? Wars started?

We never had any death camps in Canada,our history has some bad events but we never tried to exterminate the natives like Americans did.

[His Divine Shadow]

We never had any death camps in Canada,our history has some bad events but we never tried to exterminate the natives like Americans did.

Oh sure, you say that but as you say it I am seeing mental images of natives being marched into camps by red clad mounties.

[Coyote]

Wasn't there some question about Canadian authorities rounding up Italians in the early stages of World War Two and puttinmg them in internment camps in Newfoundland? Suposedly some 700 families or so, rather like the Japanese internment in the US in WW2..... I heard it mentioned but have not been able to come across any evidence yet.

But this is not a "oh, yeah, well your country is just as 3\/1|_!!!11oneone"...

The thing I find unfortunate about WW2 history as it is taught in schools these days it that it is really just a big comparison between the US internmant camps, the Holocaust, and then two big damn bombs, and that's it. It doesn't seem as though there is a lot of understanding about the social movements and government rationales for getting into the war in the first place.

I don't mean lurid tales of battlefield bloodshed, but the political maneuverings of the gov't's, the comprehension of what happened-- for example, does anyone in a modern History class really comprehend why the atom bombs were dropped, or what the internment camps on all sides were really motivated by?

It just seems like "atrocity dick waving", which is macabre at best.

[Darth Wong]

It just seems like "atrocity dick waving", which is macabre at best.

Well unfortunately, that is baically what started this thread. "Oh no, the Japanese did really bad things during WW2! And they don't like to talk about it! They're STILL EEEEEVIL!!!"