That disturbing paradox applies to the Germans as well. How a people who appreciate the arts and value education almost more than anyone else can perpetrate the Holocaust and wage WWII is both discouraging and perplexing.
The Japanese attitude toward their own cruelty in China and through out the Pacific is likewise a puzzle. It only makes sense if we assume that they truly considered the Chinese and others as a sort of non-human species, entitled to no more respect than one would give an insect. I saw a good example of this in the WWII documentary "World at War". A very cultured Japanese prince, notable for his sardonic grin, and memorable for appearing in a top hat in pictures of the formal surrender on the Missouri, said that when he heard news that an atomic bomb had been dropped on Japan, he wondered if we we truly civilized.
Actually, if you have ever seen the the movie with Spencer Tracy in “The Nuremberg Trials” he has an equivalent moment.
He just spent the day watching the films that had been taken when the concentration camps were liberated, and goes out to have dinner at a beer hall with a German war widow. He has difficulty reconciling all these jolly people singing songs in German and pounding their steins on the table with the the people who had created and run the camps.
It bugged him out.
In war we are not civilized. Nobody is civilized. When you have to stick a bayonet into another human’s throat or drop an atomic bomb on them, you have to hang the cloak of civilization on the hook for some period of time. It may be 10 seconds. It may be the rest of your life. We ask people to kill on our behalf, and sometimes people need killing.
I read an account of a submarine that shot Japanese soldiers in the water after their ship had been sunk. They were within swimming distance of land, and would have ended up fighting and killing American troops if they survived.
Everyone knew it.
So they took care of it there instead of letting them get ashore and fight. Given the no-holds barred nature of the warfare in the Pacific, I found it very difficult to judge them.
One thing I find historically interesting is Japan’s behavior in the Russo-Japanese War & the few land actions that occurred for them against German Far Eastern interests in WWI contrasted with their behavior in WWII. What happened? From what I can find to read that claims to be definitive on Japan’s behavior in those two previous conflicts says was quite honorable and within western norms.