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To: jmacusa

I understand. You are correct.

Likewise, my Dad served at the Battles of Normandy and Okinawa as a gunner’s mate on an LST. He told us kids more than once, “If you weren’t scared, you weren’t there.”

And he quickly took a liking to my wife who I met in the Navy while stationed in southern Japan. And after spending 4 years in Japan and many more watching Japanese samurai shows on NHK and meeting many Japanese people on a one-to-one basis, I know something about the Japanese character and they are very honorable and good.

I agree about the attrocities committed by the Japanese. The terror inflicted by the leaders and officers is as bad as it was in Nazi. Germany. You’re right, we cannot forgive that.

From the standpoint of your average foot soldier, I think the Japanese were very similar to Americans. They didn’t want to be there and they fought valiantly for their cause.

Japan was like Germany in World War II. If you complained or didn’t strictly obey orders, you were shot. The kamikaze pilots were mostly young kids (the veteran pilots were all dead by that point) and were they forced to get in those airplanes and crash them to their deaths.

The Clint Eastwood directed movies on Iwo Jima, produced and acted by American and Japanese people, shows maybe the truest account of this terrible war.


40 posted on 11/27/2016 4:28:07 PM PST by poconopundit (`)
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To: poconopundit

Japan and it’s people were an entirely different culture, almost completely unknown to most Americans and their method of warfare and the code of Bushido were unknown to the American soldier who fought them. The American military had never before fought an enemy who had no compunction what so ever in killing himself if it meant he killed you in the process and for whom surrender was unthinkable. Surrender for the Japanese soldier was beyond unthinkable. It meant that not only had he dishonored himself, his comrades, the Emperor and his family but it meant he dishonored his ancestors as well. It meant that for all intents and purposes he was a dead man, a ghost. And if you know Japanese culture their attitudes and belief of ghosts is very different then ours is in the West.

The Japanese soldier was taught that for him the moment of supreme honor was when he vanquished his enemy in battle and died a glorious death, much as the chrysanthemum, the emblem of the Japanese throne, does when it blooms. This is why so many Allied prisoners of war suffered so horribly in Japanese captivity. The Japanese believed that all these Western soldiers had surrendered like cowards, denying them of their glory in battle. It didn’t help all these Allied soldiers, sailors and Marines who sported tattoos because at one time in Japanese history criminals were branded with tattoos indicating the offense that person had committed and you know the Japanese are a very fastidious people. So in seeing this the average Japanese soldier saw that not only were these Westerners cowards, they were criminals as well. To them it must have seemed like a great insult.


41 posted on 11/27/2016 6:18:53 PM PST by jmacusa (Election 2016. The Battle of Midway for The Democrat Party.)
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