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PainRack wrote:There is considerable contention amongst Japanese historians over whether the squalor of the camps was due to neglect, rather than outright cruelty. No one outside of Japan really believes this but still.....

it doesn't really matter if it was neglect or outright cruelty the condition of the prison camps were below what is reasonable treatment for POW's.
Neglect is just as illegal as intentional cruelty.

Hamel wrote:My history books spoke of the Rape of Nanking (didn't include the word 'rape') and some vague stuff about POW torture, but didn't go into the gruesome details

Just for some basic numbers (most of which I'm recalling from sources I haven't read in a few months, so they may be off a bit...the books I remember these coming from are Downfall and Ghost Soldiers, along with my own research due to my grandfather having been part of the German occupation force after V-E Day):

Germany killed roughly 12 million civilians in the concentration camps. 6 million were Jewish and 6 million non-Jewish.

Japan killed 10 million civilians in China alone. When their other wartime territories (Manchuria, French Indo-China, the Phillippines, etc.) are included, the number rises to approximately 20 million.

An Allied POW in a German camp had somewhere around a 4% chance of dying over the course of the entire war.

An Allied POW in a Japanese camp had a much higher chance of death (somewhere between 40-60%, IIRC).

Many people have heard of the bombing of Tokyo off the USS Hornet right after Pearl Harbor. All the crewmen captured by the Japanese were executed for attempting to assassinate the Emperor.

American naval pilots, if captured, were routinely tortured for information, then bound and thrown overboard to drown, or beheaded and the bodies thrown overboard.

A common torture for people believed to be spies was to have a hose forced down the throat and into their stomach. It would be turned on until the abdomen was visibly swollen. A Japanese interrogator would then jump on their abdomen. Often internal organs would be burst from the pressure.

One point (sort of) to Japanese credit: the Bata'an Death March was somewhat accidental. The general in charge of arranging transport of American POWs greatly underestimated the number of survivors at Corregidor. However, he was not allowed to requisition extra vehicles or supplies for political reasons. Along the route of the Death March, there was an average of one body roughly every 500 yards.

Nathan F wrote:

PainRack wrote:

I don't hold this against the entire Japanese people, but it's a different story with the Japanese government. They have yet to issue any sort of an apology, they ignore that it ever happened. I am possibly mistaken, but to my knowledge, WW2 barely gets a footnote, yet the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima is heavily touched on.

Not really. WW2 is more the war started in 1937, the Americans started the war, we retialated in Pearl Harbor, then a huge jump until 1945 where Hiroshima and Nagasaki was bombed.

The AMERICANS started the War?! Roosevelt cut off the Japanese oil supply from the US after the invasions of China, and the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor after that to hopefully cripple the American fleet and secure their control of the Pacific, which worked for a little while.

Where did you learn that the Americans started the war?

And do tell me what kind of 'symbolic' reparations have been given.

Oei, asshole, I was replying to his point about Japanese revision of WW2. Their version of WW2 , is not Japan started WW2, Hiroshima and Nagasaki gets bobmed. Instead,the JAPANESE TAUGHT, as in written in THEIR history books that AMERICA started the war. GOD.


As for symbolic reperations, some cash has been paid over to former sex slaves. Although they still deny that they were "forced".

Sea Skimmer wrote: Humans are not beaten hundreds of times of steel pipes because of neglect, people are not starved and worked to death though mere neglect. Humans are not experimented on or exposed to biological weapons before being executed through neglect.

Right, so, that's why nobody outside of Japan even believes in this. But Japanese historians, especially the conservatives ones have succeeded in twisting this into their version of history. Unhappy over this? Go nuke japan.

PainRack wrote:Oei, asshole, I was replying to his point about Japanese revision of WW2. Their version of WW2 , is not Japan started WW2, Hiroshima and Nagasaki gets bobmed. Instead,the JAPANESE TAUGHT, as in written in THEIR history books that AMERICA started the war. GOD.

Listen here, you have no right to start the flames, you made it sound like that was what you believed. You gave no hint that you were simply passing on what is taught in Japanese schools.

PainRack wrote:

Nathan F wrote:I don't hold this against the entire Japanese people, but it's a different story with the Japanese government. They have yet to issue any sort of an apology, they ignore that it ever happened. I am possibly mistaken, but to my knowledge, WW2 barely gets a footnote, yet the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima is heavily touched on.

Not really. WW2 is more the war started in 1937, the Americans started the war, we retialated in Pearl Harbor, then a huge jump until 1945 where Hiroshima and Nagasaki was bombed.

Why is it so hard to understand that PainRack meant it from the Japanese point of view? Why would he say "we" if he did not intend for it to be from the Japanese point of view? I think that's a major hint, since the last time I checked the history books, Singapore did not bomb Pearl Harbor...

IRG CommandoJoe wrote:Why is it so hard to understand that PainRack meant it from the Japanese point of view? Why would he say "we" if he did not intend for it to be from the Japanese point of view? I think that's a major hint, since the last time I checked the history books, Singapore did not bomb Pearl Harbor...

At least I got it.

Not to mention you pointed it out earlier, and people still didn't get it.

Go back and read his original post. I don't believe PainRack is lying about his intent.

IRG CommandoJoe wrote:

PainRack wrote:

Nathan F wrote:I don't hold this against the entire Japanese people, but it's a different story with the Japanese government. They have yet to issue any sort of an apology, they ignore that it ever happened. I am possibly mistaken, but to my knowledge, WW2 barely gets a footnote, yet the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima is heavily touched on.

Not really. WW2 is more the war started in 1937, the Americans started the war, we retialated in Pearl Harbor, then a huge jump until 1945 where Hiroshima and Nagasaki was bombed.

Why is it so hard to understand that PainRack meant it from the Japanese point of view? Why would he say "we" if he did not intend for it to be from the Japanese point of view? I think that's a major hint, since the last time I checked the history books, Singapore did not bomb Pearl Harbor...

Saying it in the first person implies that he was speaking from the Japanese perspective. Heck, how am I supposed to know he's not a Japanese national living in Singapore?

Because it is on topic with what you were saying about how the Japanese government never acknowledges the atrocities of WWII. Then PainRack said that it isn't the case, that they just simply warp it so that America was the one who started the war. It would be off topic for PainRack to come out of the clear blue and say America started the war, since he quoted that particular phrase about the Japanese government mostly ignoring the WWII atrocities.

I'd just like to say that, seeing as though I have educated a few people who hadn't heard about this before, my trouble in typing that up has been justified.

Sigh, I was quoting to this

but to my knowledge, WW2 barely gets a footnote, yet the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima is heavily touched on.

Not really. WW2 is more the war started in 1937, the Americans started the war, we retialated in Pearl Harbor, then a huge jump until 1945 where Hiroshima and Nagasaki was bombed.

I did not make it manifestly clear that this was what the Japanese taught in history, but it would have been seriously off-topic, as well as out of the blue to have me quote that passage and begin off with "not really".


Next time, I'll make the point brillantly clear, okay?

Japan has officially changed historical textbooks by changing the "invade" China into a modest "enter-leave". The comic artist Yoshinori Kobayashi who published "On Taiwan" totally denied the facts of forced sex slaves and recruits, to make it worse, he even made it seem like those who were forced were actually serving the Japanese Empire in honor. The war criminals of WWII have been listed in the Yasukuni Shrine since 1978 and been visited/worshipped by right-wing governmental officials for years. IIRC, the Prime Minister of Japan is forbidden to worship in the Shrine, but the former minister has already visited there 3 times.

To be fair I've read that not much people care about the Shrine besides some old soldiers or right-wings, which might indicate that the denial mainly comes from the government. Quite unfortunate, however.

Trogdor wrote:I am senior in High School, I've taken all the advanced history courses and paid attention, especially to anything involving WWII, and I've heard very little of this. My current history book rambles on about how our embargo crippled the Japanese war effort against China and in the Pacific, but says little, if anything about Japanese cruelty to their POWs, does mention US imprisoning Japanese Americans, though. To read my history book you'd think that the Japanese had absolutly no choice but to attack us. Damned textbook companies in America have gone from making us look unrealistically virtous to unrealistically bad in a pretty short period of time.
(Note: by the unrealitically virtous stuff, I refer to old textbooks' overly positive views of stuff like Manifest Destiny, not WWII).

We weren't taught it from the actual syllabus. We'd finished being taught everything that needed to be taught one year. We had one of those great teachers who teaches you to think rather than just memorise the facts. So when we has some time, we'd have massive class debates, a popular one was morality and such. One day we did the bobming of Hiroshima, and to make us continually challenge our beliefs, first he told us of Japanese atrocities and how much a land invasion of Japan would have cost in lives etc. Then he'd tell stuff from the other side. Great teacher, we learned a lot from just his rambling.