Posted on 08/12/2015 4:16:55 AM PDT by Homer_J_Simpson
That's true, and I think that is the Civil War equivalent of LeMay's carpet-bombing of Japan in WWII. The method is the same, and the purpose is the same; the only difference is the technology.
everybody forgets the Koreans
Knoteye; I mentioned them yesterday. The Japanese treated their Korean slaves worse than the plantation owners generally treated their slaves, and that's saying something. Moreover, 4th and 5th generation Koreans in Japan, the descendants of the Korean slaves, are still considered aliens in Japan.
http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/imt_jack02.asp
Statement by Justice Jackson on War Trials Agreement; August 12, 1945
There are some things I would like to say, particularly to the American people, about the agreement we have just signed.
For the first time, four of the most powerful nations have agreed not only upon the principles of liability for war crimes of persecution, but also upon the principle of individual responsibility for the crime of attacking the international peace.
Repeatedly, nations have united in abstract declarations that the launching of aggressive war is illegal. They have condemned it by treaty. But now we have the concrete application of these abstractions in a way which ought to make clear to the world that those who lead their nations into aggressive war face individual accountability for such acts.
The definitions under which we will try the Germans are general definitions. They impose liability upon war-making statesmen of all countries alike. If we can cultivate in the world the idea that aggressive war-making is the way to the prisoner’s dock rather than the way to honors, we will have accomplished something toward making the peace more secure.
This, too, is the first time that four nations with such different legal systems have tried to knit their ideas of just criminal procedure into a cooperative trial. That task is far more difficult than those unfamiliar with the differences between continental and Anglo-American methods would expect. It has involved frank and critical examination by the representatives of each country of the other’s methods of administering justice. Our discussions have been candid and open-minded.
The representatives of the United Kingdom have been headed by the Lord Chancellor and the Attorney General. The Soviet Republic has been represented by the Vice President of its Supreme Court and by one of the leading scholars of Soviet jurisprudence. The Provisional Government of France has sent a judge of its highest court and a professor most competent in its jurisprudence.
It would not be a happy forecast for the future harmony of the world if I could not agree with such representatives of the world’s leading systems of administering justice on a common procedure for trial of war criminals.
Of course, one price of such international cooperation is mutual concession. Much to which American lawyers would be accustomed is missing in this instrument. I have not seen fit to insist that these prisoners have the benefit of all of the protections which our legal and constitutional system throws around defendants.
To the Russian and French jurist, our system seems unduly tender of defendants and to be loaded in favor of delay and in favor of the individual against the state. To us, their system seems summary and to load the procedure in favor of the state against the individual.
However, the continental system is the one the Germans themselves have employed and understand. It does not seem inappropriate that a special military commission for the trial of Europeans in Europe, for crimes committed in Europe, should follow rather largely although not entirely the European procedures. The essentials of a fair trial have been assured.
Another price of international cooperation is slow motion. No doubt Russia acting alone, or the United States, or any one country acting alone, could try these defendants in much shorter time than we can do it when we consult with each other and move along together. Our associates, for example, have a claim as good as ours to have the trial proceed in a language which they understand.
This requires a trial rendered into four languages-German, Russian, French, and English. This will be a dreary business, and there is no use trying to dodge that fact. It is a tedious prospect for me and for representatives of all the governments which will engage in it.
But I do not think the world will be poorer even if it takes a month or so, more or less, to try these men who now are prisoners and whose capacity for harm already has been overcome.
I do think the world would be infinitely poorer if we were to confess that the nations which now dominate the western world hold ideas of justice so irreconcilable that no common procedure could be devised or carried out.
The danger, so far as the moral judgment of the world is concerned, which will beset these trials is that they come to be regarded as merely political trials in which the victor wreaks vengeance upon the vanquished. However unfortunate it may be, there seems no way of doing anything about the crimes against the peace and against humanity except that the victors judge the vanquished.
Experience has taught that we can hardly expect them to try each other. The scale of their attack leaves no neutrals in the world. We must summon all that we have of dispassionate judgment to the task of patiently and fairly presenting the record of these evil deeds in these trials.
We must make clear to the Germans that the wrong for which their fallen leaders are on trial is not that they lost the war, but that they started it. And we must not allow ourselves to be drawn into a trial of the causes of the war, for our position is that no grievances or policies will justify resort to aggressive war. It is utterly renounced and condemned as an instrument of policy.
I therefore want to make clear to the American people that we have taken an important step forward in this instrument in fixing individual responsibility of war-mongering, among whatever peoples, as an international crime. We have taken another in recognizing an international accountability for persecutions, exterminations, and crimes against humanity when associated with attacks on the peace of the international order.
But I want to be equally clear that to make these advances fully effective through international trials is a task of difficulty and one which will require some public patience and some understanding of the wide gulf which separates the judicial systems of the nations which are trying to cooperate in the effort.
Source:
United States Department of State Bulletin.
August 12, 1945
Washington, DC : Government Printing Office, 1945.
Ironic, considering the fact that Japanese and Koreans are racially, genetically, identical.
In fact, it's pretty clear, it seems to me, that the Japanese came originally from Korean stock.
There was a book published in 1982, entitled The Japanese and the Jews, which made a case for a number of similarities between the two cultures.
Which brings back another memory...I remember the one time I went with my parents, back in the late 60s, to a delicatessen and/or bakery (I was 14, what did I know) which if I remember was across the street from the US Embassy in Tokyo, which at the time was the only place in all of Japan where one could get...real cheesecake. A whole cake cost Y1800, which was $5 at the time, though compared to the usual prices of food at the commissary and O-club restaurants, that was an incredibly expensive luxury. (The commuting costs of getting to Tokyo didn't help.) How times have changed, and how the world has changed, in a short lifetime.
In this context, it’s the name of a pilot.
I have been saying this for a long time, and finally it is in print. The Japs were crazy to not take Hawaii when they had their chance in Dec 41.
I hope that we can all grasp, at least in some small degree, the outpouring of raw emotion produced by the end of the war.
Words are great, but they don’t quite communicate that emotion as well as the film footage. If I can find the time, I want to post links to as much of that as I can find in the coming days.
I’m trying to get my mind around how the timeline of celebrations unfolded. I’ve found some VJ Day footage that is labeled August 12th. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwfqdzzZPx0, which came from here: https://archive.org/details/gov.archives.arc.23976 ...It’s incredibly stirring listening to Stars and Stripes Forever and seeing the pure joy on the faces of the people!)
And yesterday’s Times showed celebrations taking place already on the 10th and the 11th?
Yet, V-J Day is remembered as being on the 14th, correct?
I noticed that. he’s been mentioned before in these daily history pages.
My first knee jerk reaction is that the Japs didn't have the sea lift capability to do it, any more than the Germans had the ability to cross the English Channel and invade England when England stood nearly alone against them, or any more than the ChiComs have had the ability to invade and occupy Taiwan over the last sixty plus years.
“Take Hawaii”
You mean invade or something
nah. Getting their attack fleet there without being stopped was a huge undertaking, taking an invasion force with them would have been doubly difficult.
It becomes official on the 14th but it’s pretty much a done deal as far as people are concerned
The big End of the War headline will be Aug 15. The actual date of VJ day doesn’t seem to be nailed down as clearly as VE day was. Maybe because there is still fighting going on here and there and the surrender signing doesn’t take place until Sept. 2.
He was a great pilot, but I really think the atomic bomb is a bigger thing, global-influence-wise.
Much that was destroyed by the Communists in China is preserved in Taiwan, with this emphasis on the mainland past sometimes occurring to the displeasure of many Taiwanese. But that is another history thread. :-)
Invasion: Pearl Harbor
http://www.combinedfleet.com/pearlops.htm
http://turtledove.wikia.com/wiki/Japanese_Invasion_of_Hawaii_%28Days_of_Infamy%29
“”Ironic, considering the fact that Japanese and Koreans are racially, genetically, identical.””
You can pretty much say the same thing about all the European wars
To the best of my understanding, Christianity is not widely practiced in Japan today. The Japanese have a flexibility about religion in general – there is a saying that Japanese are Shinto when born, Christians when they get married and Buddhist when they die.
There were many conversions to Christianity in the decades after Westerners began coming to Japan in large numbers after 1853. Some scholarship contends that it was the result of a widespread Japanese belief that Christianity was part of the recipe for being a modern, perhaps including being a powerful, nation. (Certainly missionary efforts were a big part of the story.) But it didn't really take as the decades passed. The same thing may be going on in China now, where Christianity is also spreading by leaps and bounds. (The Chinese government certainly does not react as if it thinks this is a promising development.)
But any way you slice it, the average Japanese is much more pacific, even to the extent of naively so, than in 1931. The peaceful rebirth of Germany and Japan has been one of the miracles of the postwar era.
I don't know if it approaches the prewar idea of 國體，which from appearances (I read Chinese but not Japanese) seems to indicate the idea of "national body." But modern Japan does have this idea of nihonjinron, this discussion of Japanese distinctiveness. But it's my feeling that any country has a similar phenomenon.
The general theory is that the Jomon era Japanese are emigrants from the south Pacific, but that they were conquered or subsumed by warriors from Paekche in Korea, who came to Japan with their horses--or maybe not, cf. here. One of the pieces of circumstantial evidence is the odd nature of the Japanese language: verb tenses, sentence structures, and "old" nouns are very much polysyllabic like most South Pacific languages, but the later nouns are based on Chinese monosyllables--and most kanji symbols have at least two readings, a monosyllabic "on" reading, and a polysyllabic "kun" reading. For example, 故郷, which means "hometown," can be read "furusato" or "kokyo," with the former most likely being the word that was used before Chinese writing was brought to Japan, and the latter being the Japanese attempt at sounding the symbols the way the Chinese did.
Well, maybe. But there’s way more difference between an Italian and a Norwegian than there is between a Japanese and a Korean.
They still don’t like each other much it seems sometimes
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