“I have worked with the Japanese and I have yet to find a single one who is not trustworthy, kind and caring. So carpet bombing them is a repulsive idea.”
I suspect you were not around them personally in 1943. They were vile. I direct you to the horrors and sport murdering in Nanking, their behavior in Manchuria at Unit 731 and it’s gruesome human experiments, the utter brutality with which they treated POWs. The hell ships. The slave labor, forced rape and slavery of Korean woman, rampant beheadings of anyone they pleased. The brutality of Kempeitai, even some covered up instances of cannibalism on POWs. It wasn’t just their leaders, the animal mentality was widespread.
The reason the ones you met are so nice are because they utterly got their asses handed to them as wages of their prior cruelty and finally learned their lesson.
They were repulsive during the war and had their old ways beaten out of them.
“The reason the ones you met are so nice are because they utterly got their asses handed to them as wages of their prior cruelty and finally learned their lesson.”
But I totally disagree they “had their asses handed to them” (except for the total war defeat). On the contrary, the priority of the governorship of MacArthur had been to treat the post war Japanese with kid gloves, to not humiliate them to avoid repeating a situation like post WWI Germany where hurt feelings led to rising nationalism. For example Japanese textbooks were allowed even up until now to never mention the imperial Japanese atrocities.
So no, if the Japanese are (seem ?) nice and decent, it’s NOT because they were taught that over one or two generations (who could believe that, except leftist social engineering fanatics???). It’s just because they are fundamentally so.