Posted on 05/14/2013 6:16:40 AM PDT by SandRat
An outspoken nationalist mayor said the Japanese military's forced prostitution of Asian women before and during World War II was necessary to "maintain discipline" in the ranks and provide rest for soldiers who risked their lives in battle.
The comments made Monday are already raising ire in neighboring countries that bore the brunt of Japan's wartime aggression and have long complained that Japan has failed to fully atone for wartime atrocities.
(Excerpt) Read more at azstarnet.com ...
During my college years I was visiting a friend at home, his father, then a Doctor and a former WWII Bomber Pilot flying out of Africa (think Catch 22) and later England remarked:
"Had someone told me 30 years ago, that some day I would be sitting in my living room watching a Japanese TV and have two German cars in my garage, I would have said they were crazy. Sometimes I wonder if we really won that damn war."
Tyrannical Government. How many here think that Zero wouldn’t be just as bad if he had total power? Spoils of war to the victors. Only one of many atrocities committed by the Japanese during WWII.
Yup, and I’ve heard the saying that “Japan used to invade China every time there was nothing good on TV..”
What no comfort boys? How discriminatory! /s
This cannot end well.
Reminds me of the 1990 Texas governor's race between Clayton (Claytie) Williams and Ann (Ma) Richards.
Claytie was a proud Texas Aggie who made a ton of money in the oil patch and then donated large sums to his alma mater (the alumni center there is named in his honor). Claytie then decided to run for governor and in the process made statements somewhat similar to those from the Japanese mayor.
Claytie told a crude joke about rape, "If it's inevitable, just relax and enjoy it." Then he chuckled about visiting the famous Chicken Ranch brothel in LaGrange and the "Boy's Town" red light district in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico -- explaining that "boys will be boys" and "sometimes, it's necessary for Aggies to get serviced."
Texans were not amused. Claytie went into the race with a two to one lead in the polls and still managed to lose to the old liberal cow by 11 points -- in a heavily conservative Republican state -- despite having outspent his opponent more than two to one (with much of the funds coming out of Claytie's own pocket).
When a crowd of supporters urged Claytie to try again in four years, he told them, "I may be an Aggie, but I am not crazy."
Claytie remains a politically radioactive to this day.
"up to 200,000 women, mainly from the Korean Peninsula and China, were forced to provide sex for Japanese soldiers in military brothels."
A former US serviceman who helped liberate the Philippines told me that the Japanese had prostitutes to service their soldiers. He bore witness. He didn't know that the women had been pressed into this "service" from conquered lands.
"China's Foreign Ministry criticized the mayor's comments and saw them as further evidence of a rightward drift in Japanese politics under Prime Minister Shinzo Abe."
"Rightward drift"??? No. A DOWNWARD drift.
The people of Osaka had better dump this Hashimoto creep.
I would not make that conclusion. Do you employ the same logic regarding the democratically elected Nazi party and the German people ?
Do you employ the same logic regarding Stalinist Russia and the russian people ?
Do you employ the same logic regarding the slave owning southerners and the southern US people ?
The Nazis used women in concentration camps without paying them. They killed far more people under their care than the Japanese, who targeted only the populations that rebelled against them. You could say wartime Japanese rules of engagement were medieval, because those were medieval rules of engagement. The Nazis, however, engaged in futuristic rules of engagement, rules under which people who hadn't even shown signs of wanting to rebel were killed along with everyone they were related to. The Nazi impulse to clean the world of humans they considered vermin was unappeasable - Jews were able to submit to Christians, Muslims and what have you by converting. The Nazis would only be satisfied when the Jews were converted into heaps of ash. The Nazis can say they were sorry, but the "sorry" doesn't really cut it when you've systematically wiped out tens of millions out people way outside of even medieval rules of conflict.
Japanese soldiers in China were taught the 3 alls
Kill All
Burn All
Loot All
Here’s the new DADT talking points.
So were Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So solly.
These were medieval rules of war, applied against rebellious areas. The Nazis never explicitly mentioned these rules, but did carry them out. In addition, they killed tens of millions of civilians who were just minding their own business, simply because they were Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, etc. There's a reason why the Germans are far more vilified than the Japanese - subject populations could appease the Japanese Imperial Army by not making waves, whereas the only way a Jew or other member of a German-designated vermin class could appease the Germans was by committing suicide.
Red China and North Korea are playing with fire. If they rouse the monster they may not be the only ones to be sorry.
he Bataan Death March about Japanese morals. They have none.
I would not make that conclusion. Do you employ the same logic regarding the democratically elected Nazi party and the German people ?
Do you employ the same logic regarding Stalinist Russia and the russian people ?
The Germans were forced to face their past and have responded accordingly. National Socialism, the swastika, and the Nazi salute are against the law today in Germany, as is Holocaust denial. The Germans were white anti-Communists so there was no reason to hold back on them.
The Communists and the Japanese, however, have been protected by political correctness (the former because they're commies, the latter because they're not white) and have never faced up. Several of the former Soviet bloc countries are governed by their former Communist parties. In Japan there is no law against historical revisionism or the old militarist ideology.
Do you employ the same logic regarding the slave owning southerners and the southern US people ?
Most people do. Though it never ceases to amaze me how only white Southerners count as "Southerners." If Southerners owned slaves, then the slaves they owned were just as Southern. Somehow that point never comes across (just as the idea of Blacks as fundamentalist chrstians never comes across).
And why isn't China's nationalistic sabre-rattling evidence of a "rightward drift" in China?
Oh, that's right. They're the "People's" Republic of China, and their governed by the Chinese "Communist" Party. So they can never be accused of being right wingers. They could call themselves the "master race" and try to conquer the world and as long as they're "Communist" they can do no wrong.
The people of Osaka had better dump this Hashimoto creep.
Hey! Hashimoto was good!
Here we go again.
In a country of millions that is lead by a few thousand, with a very small group at the top making the decisions, it’s wrong to assume that the entire population would want to go to war were it not for the effects of brainwashing of and lies told to the general public. This deceit can and does go on for centuries.
Very, very sad news for some. WWII was a cooked up scheme that you will NOT read the details of in any history book used in schools. The details of which high-powered finance people backed which leaders, what lies the they told them, etc., will tell the truth to the person who really wants to know it.
Am I revulsed by various actions by troops in wWII ? Yes.
But I know that there was a short chain of advisors leading from the political leaderships to powerful financial interests who were AND REMAIN the warped vermin themselves who think nothing of starting such heinous wars.
These are good points. The Nazis sometimes get a pass because they treated their Western prisoners better than the Japanese did their prisoners (though the Eastern Front was a different story). However, I don't think every single victim of Japanese atrocities was either an enemy soldier or an active rebel. The Koreans were neither, and I doubt every single person in Nanking was "rebelling."
The Nazis can say they were sorry, but the "sorry" doesn't really cut it when you've systematically wiped out tens of millions out people way outside of even medieval rules of conflict.
Nazis are never sorry. The people of modern Germany have behaved better. However, it is certainly true that all those everyday "non-Nazi" Germans who claimed they had no idea what was going on were lying.
Political correctness is another reason.
subject populations could appease the Japanese Imperial Army by not making waves
I'm not so sure about that. Japan's ideology (to its credit) was not anti-Semitic (though there were anti-Semites in the Japanese government under the influence of Nazi propaganda), but I'm pretty sure the Japanese regarded the Chinese as "sub-human."
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