Japanese War Guilt Debate

[MKSheppard]

My uncle could never bring himself to admit that what he did during the War was as bad as anything the Nazis ever dreamed up. He did, however, decide that military service was not something he was proud of.

[/quote]



not one round of chemical weapons was ever used in the pacific against
Japan, and this guy's dumbfuck uncle equates it to the Death Camps?

Fucking idiot, he was.

[Howedar]

Better them than us.

[Howedar]

War is hell, as they say. They'd have done the same, were they in a position to.

[phongn]

The warhead for a third operational bomb was available, but the weapon was not assembled. Production would proceed slowly for a few months and then rapidly accelerate towards the end of 1945.

[phongn]

There were contingency plans to use 6 atom bombs on the invasion beaches alone. We also had plans for poisoning the rice harvest via aerial assault and using gas warfare. One editorial at the time was entitled: "You CAN cook them with gas"

I knew the Americans used German advisors post-war, but I never thought they used them that early.

Or maybe were merely used British advisors. Who was it that was actively contemplating chemical warfare retaliation for use of the V-weapons?

[Striderteen]

My uncle could never bring himself to admit that what he did during the War was as bad as anything the Nazis ever dreamed up. He did, however, decide that military service was not something he was proud of.

not one round of chemical weapons was ever used in the pacific against
Japan, and this guy's dumbfuck uncle equates it to the Death Camps?

Fucking idiot, he was.[/quote]

I'd agree...using chemical weapons to take out a bunch of fanatics who won't surrender is very different than using them on defenseless innocents. Doesn't stop some people from being squeamish about them, though.

[Sea Skimmer]

]

Impossible. We only had enough uranium for three bombs: the Trinity test, Little Boy, and Fat Man.

They where for Operation Coronet aginst Honshu. That operation was to be launched around the end of February 1946. By then we would have had many more bombs. And with nearly twice as many Japanese troops on Kyushu as expected, its very likely we'd use them and gas after such a hard and bloody fight. Of course Japan would also very likely use gas and they had considerable stocks on hand.

As for the deaths of millions of US troops, quite impossibul. However losses would have been heavy and we expected somthing like five fleet carriers to go down.

[weemadando]

The Japanese HAVE admitted what they have done. However their culture is one in which emotion is seen as a great flaw, as such they show very little visible remorse. It doesn't mean it isn't there. Lets not forget that from birth the Japanese of the time were raised in a fashion that promoted such atrocities. There was a childrens chant: "Kick a dog, kick a rock, kick a chink." Soldiers were often ordered to perform the purges and never questioned what they were doing. They viewed rape as just something to pass the time, as the Chinese and others were not human.

Its despicable, but it has been admitted and it is a great source of national guilt.

[Howedar]

And thats why the textbooks in Japan are being rewritten to remove the Japanese atrocities of WW2.

Well okay, so long as its part of their culture...

[weemadando]

And thats why the textbooks in Japan are being rewritten to remove the Japanese atrocities of WW2.

Well okay, so long as its part of their culture...

And thats why Americans are re-writing text-books to protect children from the horribleness of the real-world. Its political correctness in another form.

[Illuminatus Primus]

The American text books do not censure the controversy or either sides of the A-Bombing, talk about the internment camps, mention the immoral firebombing of Dresden, and expound on the American genocide of the Native Americans.

Americans have awknowledged their war crimes--and even if they hadn't--what the fuck does that have to do with the Japanese censoring their history books?

[weemadando]

The Japanese censoring of books is an act of political correctness, and a residual part of the denial of their culture and history that was spawned by the US occupation.

[Gandalf]

Do German textbooks mention their past atrocities in much detail?

[Striderteen]

As for the deaths of millions of US troops, quite impossibul. However losses would have been heavy and we expected somthing like five fleet carriers to go down.

We expected them to go after our carriers as they had in previous battles, so we had pretty much all the naval units with heavy antiaircraft capability (i.e. battleships and cruisers) tasked to protect the flattops.

Unfortunately, Plan Ketsu-Go had most of their kamikaze aircraft and ALL of their naval kamikazes (motorboats, submarines, minisubs and manned torpedoes) targetting the troop carriers -- they estimated that they would sink at least three-fifths of the transports before they even reached the shore, and actual losses would probably have been much higher since our defenses were in the wrong place.

[Gandalf]

Personally, I support the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, while I don't think it was the right thing to do, it was probably the least of possible evils. After all, the Japanese did some fairly evil stuff (mentioned earlier in the thread, I would like to add the bombing of Darwin, a city in northern Australia).
And before people start flaming me, I'd like to say yes I do know it's wrong to kill civilians and the such, but unfortunately sometimes these things are necessary.

Your double post has been removed

[The Yosemite Bear]

Do German textbooks mention their past atrocities in much detail?

Not as per a docudrama (Based on an actual incident) called "The Nasty Girl", where a German teen in the late Seventies tried to find out about her home town's activities during the war...

[Stuart Mackey]

Thosee bloody nips.


The emperor should've been shot, along with his family, and the entire nip government.

I suggest you cool it with the rascist remarks some of us who are proud of our heritage may get offended by it. I had Grand uncles and Grand aunts and great grandfathers who fought for Japan in both World War I and WW2.

What good whould it do to kill off the emperor and the entire Japanese government? If we had done that, The Japanese people will be wanting thier vengeance on the people who destroyed thier Emperor and the Japanese may even begin to recontinue the war dragging the US into an earlier Vietnam. The best way to bring Japan to a stable democracy is to allow the Emperor to contine to reign under as a constitutional Monarch and to have the Japanese write a new constitution forever denouncing war.

Your Preceious Hirihito was no pasifist puppet, this image is largly a image crated by MacAurther in 1946 onwards. It was Hirohito who sanctioned the war in China, it was Hirihito who allowed the assult on the western powers in 1941 and it was the High commnd, notably Tojo, who lied their asses of to get him excused from the war crimes trials
As to the actions of the Japanese people, there is no precise way to judge the effects of killing of Hirihito, but there is reason to beleie that they were quite ready to revolt against the Japanese government oafter ay least a decade of repression and lies and a disaterous defeat in war.

[Axis Kast]

Thats all well and good, but you neglect that the nips were trying to surrender before that, on the condition that they keep the Emperor, and it wasn't the nukes that caused them to actually accept unconditionl surrender, it was the fire bombing of Tokyo after the second bomb.

The fact that you feel it necessary to refer collectively to the Japanese as “nips” speaks volumes of your inability to approach the issue on anything of an objective level.

The nuclear weapons were part of an entire range of events that compelled Japan’s surrender – not least of which included firebombing and the potential for Soviet invasion of Hokkaido. It must be said however that the atomic bombs represented the zenith of then-modern warfare. One plane with the ability to decimate entire cities and lay to extensive waste vast regions or staging grounds.

"I may be a criminal lunatic, but I'm an American criminal lunatic."--The Joker

Glocksman, what’s the context of that quote?

As for the deaths of millions of US troops, quite impossibul. However losses would have been heavy and we expected somthing like five fleet carriers to go down.

It was estimated that up to 500,000 men would have been killed during the first few hours of Operation: Olympic alone. And this is from a book written by somebody I would call a Japanese apologist, who had every reason to take the lowest possible figures.


It’s impossible to look at the textbook issue and come to a mutually satisfactory conclusion. You all seem to imply that we should force the “evil” Japanese to admit to atrocities no different than those of any other nation, and in doing so tarnish the image of ancestors whose cultural significant is beyond our easy comprehension. Don’t make the mistakes of a victors’ judgment.

[Glocksman]

My sig quote?

It's from a DC/Marvel crossover where Batman teams with Captain America during WW2

Joker had just found out that he had unwittingly handed the US Atomic Bomb to the Red Skull and was pissed and said that right before they tried to kill each other.

[Saurencaerthai]

All I have to say is that there was no excuse for what Unit 731 did.

[Glocksman]

All I have to say is that there was no excuse for what Unit 731 did.

What makes that even worse is that the US brought the commanding officer to the US and granted him immunity from prosecution in exchange for 'information'.

The SOB should have been hung like the murderer that he was, not lecturing to the US Army on biological warfare.

[HemlockGrey]

I was debating a friend on the morality of the atomic bombs(he had just read 'Hiroshima' in English, and the teacher is a big anti-atomite). He pointed to the lives lost; I pointed to the lives saved.

He then asked why Operation Olympic was even necessary; why we couldn't simply ignore the Japanese, let them get food, etc.

I questioned how letting them stay in such an enviroment was ethically superior, along with a few other things. What would you have said?

[Jeremy]

I have heard the stories and personally I wouldn't be terribly troubled with ending the Japanese culture.

I am upset that we let the Japanese get off so easy, to be honest I would have taken all the children from their families and raised them in western ideology to put an end to that damned culture. What can you really do to punish such people but erase from existence their beliefs?

[Axis Kast]

I was debating a friend on the morality of the atomic bombs(he had just read 'Hiroshima' in English, and the teacher is a big anti-atomite). He pointed to the lives lost; I pointed to the lives saved.

He then asked why Operation Olympic was even necessary; why we couldn't simply ignore the Japanese, let them get food, etc.

I questioned how letting them stay in such an enviroment was ethically superior, along with a few other things. What would you have said?

The United States War Department had begun planning for possible war with Japan c. 1920, the results of which were a published case study and strategic blueprint entitled “War Plan: Orange.” American government was on the offensive against the Empire by 1935; a string of embargoes and prohibitions were promulgated then or not long after. The Japanese, even when ‘left alone” by the West, were purely expansionistic.

Some ask whether or not “ultimate victory” was preferable. Certainly it was. While I think too much is often made of the Imperial Army High Command and its willingness to fight to the last man, we cannot but recognize that giving the Japanese a chance to “get back on their feet” would have been fruitless. By August 1945, the war had expanded to include the Soviet Union. Without an atomic bomb to end the war decisively, the Soviets looked ready to island-hop themselves over to Hokkaido. It would have meant a joint occupation of the Home Islands with a distinctly Korean or German flavor. American national-security prohibited such allowances.

Your friend asks the argument, “Why war?” by extension. It’s akin to arguing that Pearl Harbor was a military target and war was thus unnecessary because national survival was not visibly at stake. Had we let Japan “off the hook,” they’d have been gobbled up by the Soviet advance – not to mention made ready to fight once more within a few years’ time unless the same crippling embargoes were imposed. Remember Germany and their ability to “sanction skip” after Chamberlain.

I have heard the stories and personally I wouldn't be terribly troubled with ending the Japanese culture.

That's your point of view. Keep in mind you are essentially condemning anything save Western culture. I say again: the Japanese are victimized themselves as having lost a war. They are no more - or less - guilty than any other nation or people.

[Howedar]

They are guilty or innocent not because they lost (or won) the war, but because of the atrocities they committed.