Whoa.... be careful there pal. A rational explanation of the truth often doesn’t go well with the knee-jerk brigade. (Great explanation by the way)
Oh, I’m aware of that, and thank you much.
It is IMO rather difficult to come up with a logical explanation of why it was wicked aggression for the Japanese to conquer territories from the European (and American, FTM) powers that they themselves had conquered from the natives 50 to 100 years earlier. Sauce for the goose and all that.
The utter blindness to this fact of most Americans and Europeans of the time can be seen perhaps most dramatically in the famous Marseillaise scene of Casablanca. Here was everybody getting all indignant about the wicked German invasion of France, when Casablanca was itself located in someone else’s country that the French had moved into only in 1907.
Why is it admirable for the French to conquer Morocco, but evil for the Germans to conquer France? Arguably it’s the other way around, since the Germans were at least picking on people their own size and technology.
What was wicked was the incredibly brutal and racist way the Japanese went about their conquest. Often blamed, rather ethnocentrically, I think, on Nazi influence. Japanese history and culture needs no lessons from anybody on how to be brutal, domineering and corrupt.
By no means all there was to Japanese culture, of course, anymore than it was to German society.