I used to be friends with a very wealthy elderly man. He used to be a bush pilot in Alaska back in the Thirties, and when he was an officer in WWII, he was assigned to be the Provost Marshal for the Hiroshima Prefecture after the invasion. When they dropped the bomb, they sent him to manage the situation in Korea.
It was his job to get the surrendered Japanese out of Korea before the Koreans turned on them and tried to kill them.
This guy hated the Japanese. He wouldn’t even discuss them if the subject came up, but would turn his back and walk away.
When I asked his friend why, he said that the guy had confided in him many of the awful things he had seen actual evidence of under the Japanese rule there.
To me, the Japanese are an extraordinary contradiction. A culture so capable of understanding real beauty and gentleness, but capable of such terrible ferocity and inhumanity all packaged together.
I lived in the Philippines for several years, and the Japanese were not kindly considered there. I was in the Boy Scouts, and my troop marched the route of the Bataan Death March every year, a fifty mile hike. There are many monuments along the way, and I read several detailed military histories of that area when I was twelve, and it blew my mind.
I had a very, very difficult time trying to imagine people doing that to each other. Before that, I had never completely considered that men would do those things to each other.
To me, the brutality I read about paled every other thing I had been exposed to in my life up to then. Even though I have also read extensively on the Holocaust, there was a strangely alien brutality with what the Japanese did. The Germans seemed...well...mechanized and impersonal somehow.
The Japanese, in my readings, seemed to take a very personal and physical participation in their cruelty. I had lived for several years in Japan before we went there, and I had no idea the Japanese were capable of that.
“To me, the Japanese are an extraordinary contradiction. A culture so capable of understanding real beauty and gentleness, but capable of such terrible ferocity and inhumanity all packaged together.”
Contradiction, yes. Allow me to join your incomprehinsibilty of the Japanese.
I found a photo of my father in a Reader’s Digest book about WW2. My father is leading a string of Filipino men who have a Japanese man trussed to a pole and the pole is across the shoulders of two men. I asked my father about that photo and he admitted it was him and that he saw that done to many japanese soldiers. But he wouldn’t say no more about it. He didn’t talk about the war. I learned from my mama what he told her before. He was in the Alutian Islands when the Japanese killed themselves on Attu. Thank God for our soldiers who will go through those kind of times for us.