[Mase]

The Battan Death March should be mandatory curriculum in Japan, and here, as should what happened in Nanking and the many POW camps. My young teen son read Unbroken this summer and was shocked by the inhumanity of the Japanese. I was going to give him the book on Nanking to read as a follow up, but decided that can come later. He's reading King Rat instead.

WWII is hardly spoken of in our schools today and it's been ignored for the most part in Japan. But they all manage to learn about the US internment of Japanese and Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I despise public education.

[silverleaf]

I suggest your son watch the History Channel series “ Secrets of the Axis”
It’s sure an eye opener on the ties between Japan and Germany in the 1920’s and how the Japanese Secret Societies actually provided a model for the German organization that became the Nazi party
Also on the biological warfare program Japan developed and used against China ( largest in human history, tested on Chinese and US POWs) and planned to use vs California when they had a long range delivery system ( they were close)

A good book for his age about North Korea would be “The Aquariums of Pyongyang” most told from the perspective of a young boy who grew up in that system, was imprisoned in gulag when his family lost favor, eventually escaped as a young man

[hanamizu]

I was born right after the war, so I did not live through it so my knowledge is 2nd hand. I believe the American public’s hatred during the war was towards the Japanese, not the Germans. It may well have been racial (although we didn’t have problems with the Chinese), but the fact is the Japanese attacked us, not (Animal House not withstanding) the Germans. Before Pearl Harbor there was the attack on USS Panay. The Japanese conducted the Death March. Beheadings of POWs shocked us. The execution of some of Dolittle’s pilots, the rape of Nanking, and the list goes on and on.

We didn’t like the Germans and thought Hitler was nuts, but for the most part, until the very end of the war, they followed the rules for POWs (at least our POWs). People forget that information about the Holocaust only came out after the war was over. After the war the enormity of the Holocaust caused the public to rightfully hate the Germans for what they did.

[poconopundit]

My wife is Japanese and we nightly watch NHK television where my wife explains important points in documentaries we see.

Speaking of the Battan Death March, there was a well-done documentary this week (anniversary of Hiroshima bombing week) where a famous TV talent and her mother traveled back to the Philippines where her grandfather died in the War.

The film tracked the destruction of the Japanese Army geographically. They digitized the US Army's handwritten daily reports of "Jap Deaths" by various army divisions.

The film showed the steady progress of the US Army by a time-lapse painting of red dots on a map of the main Philippines island where 320,000 Japanese were steadily killed. An estimated 15,000 Americans were killed during this campaign and that doesn't include the many thousand Americans killed on the Battan Death March

The documentary made visits to several places along this march to talk to Filipino people and see various sites where Japanese soldiers had occupied and died.

Here are some observations on the content:

• Other than testimonies from a few Filipinos about forced prostitution, there was very little coverage of Japanese oppression of Filipinos. However, an estimated one million Filipinos lost their lives during the War.
  
  
• The strongest condemnation was put on the military leaders of Japan who basically told the Japanese Army to "make it on your own" with no resupply of ammunition or food. (Yet I suspect after the US won the Battle of Leyte Gulf, it probably would have been a suicide mission to resupply the Philippines given our submarines and air superiority. The Japanese were also in an oil supply crisis.)
  
  
• Many Japanese had to retreat into the jungle and eat whatever food they could find. And their strong indoctrination and group think did not allow them to surrender.
  
  
• While the film did a good job of relating the Philippines as a personal tragedy to Japanese families, it skirted over discussing the atrocities the Japanese committed in the Philippines.

Finally, I'll note that I never heard of the American conquest of the Philippines until a Filipino told me about it on an on-line computer forum. The US State Department stated that war "resulted in the death of over 4,200 American and over 20,000 Filipino combatants", and that "as many as 200,000 Filipino civilians died from violence, famine, and disease".

As I watch the steady influence of American Fake News on Japanese news coverage, I believe the people of Japan are as prone as ever to propaganda. Like so many Americans, they live in a mental prison of what the cultural masters teach them they "must" believe.