Posted on 06/23/2020 1:46:23 PM PDT by RomanSoldier19
he rival governments of China and Taiwan have both lashed out at Japan after it renamed an administrative area overseeing a disputed set of islands in the East China Sea.
Lawmakers in the southwestern Japanese city of Ishigaki voted Monday to change the name of the East China Sea administrative area of Tonoshiro to Tonoshiro Senkaku by October 1. The change was said to prevent confusion with the similarly named Tonoshiro district in downtown Ishigaki but adds a reference to the Japanese name for the contested isles, which are also claimed by China and Taiwan. Both nations expressed frustration with Japan's move.
(Excerpt) Read more at newsweek.com ...
Hilarity will ensue.
Toshiro Mifune, the samurai John Wayne! Love it!
Considering the Chinese have a pretty bad historical track record fighting the Japanese, the possibility of a confrontation seems interesting, to say the least.
Although I don’t pretend to any detailed expertise in this area, my impression is that the Japan self-defense navy is larger and more capable than most people realize.
Part of me thinks McArthur should have told the Japs in 1950, that if they wanted China this time, we wouldn’t stop them.
Hey there again, FRiend dfw.
A couple years back I stumbled across an e-book titled “Ways That Are Dark: The Truth About China” by Ralph Townsend.
Evidently, it’s been reprinted. I’ve included the Amazon link for it:
www.amazon.com/Ways-that-are-dark-truth/dp/B0006QY4WSck reference:
Townsend wrote this very pro-Japan polemic in the 1930s, before Pearl Harbor. He wound up doing some time during the war in retaliation for his unpopular views.
Basically, Townsend argued that Japan had legitimate commercial interests in China — as legitimate as any of the Western powers. Japanese aggression in China was basically a response to the general lawlessness of China’s warlord era.
It was definitely not the version you get in today’s history books.
There seems to be no question the US pursued pro-China, anti-Japan policies in the years before Pearl Harbor.
But Townsend’s book has led me to ask some tough questions — what did the US gain from supporting China?
This doesn’t condone Japan’s aggression throughout the Pacific region or the brutality of its armed forces.
But, as a student of history, I now have to ask — could war have been averted if the US hadn’t favored China?
I’m not pretending that I have any answers. But just putting this question on the table tends to shift one’s perspective.
Damn good question.
Japan really became a problem in the context of the Axis.
A German-run Europe, An Italian-run Africa, and a Japanese-dominated Asia, would have presented big problems to the US. Isolated, not much of a threat, but combined, it was going to be a big problem if we didn’t take care of it.
But the question is, if we were hands-off towards Japan, would the hardline militarists, like Tojo, ever gotten into the position of power that they did? Tojo basically advocated Japanese domination of the entire Pacific, and not just Asia.
dfwgator ~ Damn good question.
Anti-American State Department?
Some things never change.
And when you really think about, China is trying to do the same thing the Japanese did with the “Greater East-Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere”
From the Japanese standpoint the 4 Power, Washington Navy & 5 Power treaties looked like the west UK, & US were ganging up on Japan. They viewed the 5:5:3 capital ship ratio in the 5 Power treaty as ominous and insulting.
The agreements forced the US to scrap 15 old battleships and two new ones, along with 13 ships under construction. Britain had to scrape ships too—indeed, more warships were “lost at Washington” than at any battle in history. Anyway we wanted carriers and the rest is history.
Does anyone live on the islands in dispute?
Yes, the Treaties are what broke up the British-Japanese Mutual Admiration Society, when Britain threw Japan under the bus.
I think you’re overestimating how much we pushed for carriers, given how many of our carriers at the start of the war were post-treaty-system collapse.
In any case, the point is that US actions in the Pacific during the interwar period were not ‘pro-China’ as much as they were ‘f**k the Japanese.’ Which in turn led to them launching the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Thanks for that contribution.
I’m just working from memory here, but I know that the US Navy staff was drafting the first of many editions of War Plan Orange during the early 1920s.
Are you familiar with British journalist Hector Bywater? He wrote a rather prophetic book titled “The Great Pacific War” that predicted a US-Japan confrontation at sea during the early 1930s.
I don’t have my copy in front of me, but if memory serves, the Japanese fired the first shots in a surface attack on the US Asiatic fleet — not unlike the way the Japanese touched off their war with Czarist Russia with a destroyer torpedo raid on the fleet at Port Arthur.
Bywater’s book remains a good read. He was only partially successful in forecasting the impact of air power. His Pacific War was essentially a battleship confrontation in the Alfred Thayer Mahan tradition. The climax of his book came in a bloody Jutland-style gunfight, with the US winning.
One rather odd side note — Bywater’s Japanese enemy treated their American prisoners like fellow samurai. Of course, we know things turned out in 1941-45. But Bywater only had the past as his guide, and the Japanese treated their German prisoners from the 1914 siege of the concession port of Tsingtao quite well. I believe their conduct during the war with Russia was much the same.
What a godawful war we had to fight in reality. And the supreme irony may have been how quickly MacArthur — love him or hate him — managed to get things straightened out during the occupation. From the standpoint of 75 years, it’s easy to ask “how could people as civilized as the Japanese have gone so wrong?” I have only tentative answers.
I don’t know we’ve been silly about China since the days of the clipper ships. There’s been some ups & downs with China. However the lure of the size of that market, the exotic appeal, missionary zeal all combined to prevent a hard sober policy look at China. That only occurred when. Mao came to power and that’s because there was no other choice.
They would have been idiots if they *hadn’t* been working on war plans against all plausible comers.
You’re largely correct on Bywater, and he did predict the Japanese predilection for one great decisive battle - as they had learned worked well at Tsushima - correctly. The US Navy had read his book and the intel reports coming out of Japan, not to mention learning from exchange officers, and the intelligent COs of the day made sure to avoid giving the Japanese the decisive battle they wanted.
The reason why the good treatment of POWs did not continue through WW2 was because Japan was extremely offended by the various naval treaties and being thrown under the bus by their idol, the British. They regarded themselves as a Great Power, like Britain or other European powers, and being treated like they were some second rate slobs incensed them. They decided that if they were not recognized as a Great Power, they were going to drop the unnecessary societal trappings of European Great Powers that they’d adopted and return to traditional ways. In feudal Japan, war captives were abused, starved and worked to death; thus WW2 captives were treated traditionally.
Admiral King is known to have remarked to British officers more than once during WW2 that if Britain hadn’t thrown the Japanese under the bus at every naval treaty, the Pacific war might not have actually happened. He hated the British, but he had a point.
As for the last point, different civilizations have different standards. And life has always been cheap in Asia.
In the interwar period, the US actually took some *anti*-Chinese actions that benefited a European power’s China holdings in order to get that power to do something to disadvantage Japan. As best I can tell, there was no love lost between the Chinese and the US Department of State or Department of War - the Chinese were often seen as tools to further an anti-Japanese agenda.
It’s also worth noting that among the other reasons MacArthur was able to sort out Japan so quickly is because of their utter demoralization. We literally brought the hammer of an angry god down on two of their cities and when they surrendered rather than lose another, we promptly killed *their* god by revealing that their emperor was but a man and forcing him to admit thus to his followers.
Most people don’t adapt well to a single, huge sudden change. Getting hit with “they’re erasing our cities” then “We somehow lost the war despite the Mandate of Heaven” followed by “Everything you believed for your entire life is a lie” in very quick succession absolutely broke many Japanese.
Thanks for your very insightful posts.
My father was in Kunming with the USAAF — a weather man — in 1945. While he had a certain sympathy for the poor Chinese peasants, his comment was much like yours: “Life was cheap there.”
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