Watched parts of a couple of episodes. Saw the usual Japanese as victims in concentration camps story line. Nothing to watch after that apology crap.
Burns also featured survivors of the Bataan Death March. The Japanese didn’t seem like victims there.
I know a bunch of those folks. You owe them an apology. They withstood with the greatest dignity an imprisonment that’d left you a quivering hunk of useless protoplasmic excrement.
I flipped to the series at a truly random time. The show was in the throes of Japanese internment. I thought it was the height of atrocious luck on my part, but I lost all desire to see more, and I managed to avoid melancholy over anything I might have missed. It struck me as a Ken Burns agenda piece. You can have my part of it.
We must be watching different documentaries. None of the episodes insinuated that the ‘japanese’ were the victims in concentration camps. In fact Burns and company never even used the term concentration; it’s called internment camps, and most of these were nisei americans. Regardless, it did happen and what’s wrong with including that storyline if some of the soldier’s profiled had families that were interned? Japanese americans served with distinction and honor in both campaigns of the pacific (their service in the pacific as part of the M.I.S. continues to be one of the more amazing untold stories of the pacific war). Same thing with the Black Americans; yes it points out the racism they went through but it also shows how they fought valiantly and were accepted by their comrades.
This documentary spends plenty of time documenting the cruelty and savagery of the japanese soldiers in places like bataan and in the island hopping campaigns. In fact, as we progress along the pacific island hopping campaign, we are constantly being reminded that these are fanatical people (even highlighting the mass suicides of japanese civilians on saipan and the japanese soldiers that would kill them if they did not commit suicide). The point is that invading japan would be astronomical in terms of casualties, therefore the atomic bomb was totally justified (not exactly a liberal viewpoint IMHO).
Maybe it’s just me but this documentary does an excellent job of pointing out the intricacies of what went on in that time period. It also shows that the World War 2 generation was indeed the greatest; our current spoiled generation would have a hard time comprehending the brutality and savagery these brave men and women had to go through to liberate the world from evil.