A lot of it is pretty horrific.
One thing which interested me is that during WWI, the Japanese were on the Allied side against Germany. The German prisoners they captured were treated so well that many of them stayed in Japan after the war.
20 years later they turned into mainly monsters.
I had a Japanese friend who was here in America in 1986 for a year. He said that no one in Japan really talks about WWII and what they did (Pearl Harbor, prison camps, brutality, etc.) to the enemy.
There are no AMVETS or VFW clubs in Japan . . . their veterans are shamed . . . they don’t want to talk about the war because of the devastation that they created and the fact that they lost so unceremoniously.
I took him to our USS Cod, docked in Cleveland’s downtown Naval port. When I pointed out the numerous Japanese flags pasted on the side of the submarine, he was very quiet.
Nice article but it barely scratches the surface. They need to talk about all of the horrors that regime inflicted: the atrocities against the Filipinos, the Chomorros, the Vietnamese, the Okinawans and of course, all of its prisoners. A major crime the Japanese should address was the one done against itself - what people can survive when they blindly sacrifice a huge portion of their young men to suicidal tactics? Besides the moral aspects, think of the genetic loss for all time. It’s a sort of self-genocide.
For many Japanese, World War Two began on August 6, 1945.
Before that, Japan was engaged in a Pacific-wide armed struggle to liberate their fellow Asians from British & American imperialism, and to bring to their fellow Asians all the benefits of incorporation into the “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere”. For this, the Chinese, Koreans, Philippinos and Vietnamese have been most ungracious in their lack of gratitude for the sacrifices made by the brave soldiers of the Empire of Japan.
;^)
I know that the Japanese are very smart and hardworking. But there is a hubris at the core of their being that says that they are superior to everyone else on the planet. I do not blame them for this. It is a Shakespearean tragic flaw in their character.
My understanding is they teach their children that nothing unusual happened December 7, 1941. I’ve seen young people from Japan who could tell you the exact time “Little Boy” went off and the names of the Enola Gay’s crew, but knew nothing about that date. And we were a half-hour drive from Pearl Harbor at the time.
Chinese and North Korean atrocities have been more recent.
Here are some Japanese atrocities that not everyone might be familiar with, some only revealed fairly recently.
http://compunews.com/gus/massacres.htm#pacific
The Japanese “scholar” who tries to deny the atrocities committed by the Japanese in Nanking as “Chinese propaganda” has to ignore the hundreds of reports, photos, and even movies recorded and published by western missionaries and diplomats.