That is, from 1936 to 1945 what percentage of the males of military age perished? The figures I can find are that 3% of the entire population died during the war years, and that about 25% of the official armed forces died; but I don’t have a breakdown for the population by age group.
One source I read claimed that the Japanese manga Astro Boy, in which a scientist builds an android replacement for his dead son, was an allegory for Japan seeking solace in postwar development and technological advancement for the extinction of much of a generation.
I’m assuming you mean “Lost Generation” in the sense of the “Greatest Generation” cohort in Japan that bore the brunt of the WWII casualties, not the demographic “Lost Generation” born 1883-1900 that essentially fought WWI.
The pre-war populations of Germany and Japan were roughly similar (69 million vs. 71 million), and Germany lost roughly 4.3 million military killed and missing.
By comparison, Japan’s military killed and missing was 2.5 million. So not quite half what Germany lost- you could extrapolate from there.
Of course, there may have been differences in how those numbers were concentrated within specific age groups, but I’m not sure where that information would be readily found.
I’m not an expert on this, but it seems to me that Japan fought a lot less “maneuverable” ground battles. Where Germany was fighting on a large land mass, and could move large numbers and then keep sending troops in to reinforce (and get killed) in battles like Stalingrad, or the relentless push to Berlin by the Russians, or the fight against the D-Day invaders, much of the Japanese ground forces were pretty much stuck where they were, limited by ship transport on a dangerous sea? The continental battles in China and southeast Asia (from the small amount I’ve read) were more like guerilla wars that pitched battle meatgrinders?
I think the terminology “Lost Generation” is a bit much if you’re talking about just deaths. Even including civilians, I found a top figure of 3.1 million killed out of their total population. However, if you want to include the physically and emotionally scarred, it had to be many, many millions.
FYI: Further searching showed that the USSR actually suffered the most deaths, a whopping 22 - 27 million of them.
The sovereign nation with the highest *percentage * of its population lost was Poland, at 18%.
Drilling down into sub-categories, after WWI, Japan colonized the Pacific islands it took from the German Empire, moving In thousands of Japanese nationals. WWII saw 44% of these killed.
As per the rest of the thread, yes, they had a large number of deaths, but it wasn’t particularly worse than many other combatants, and much less than some countries.
The wiki article on has a useful chart graphing military and civilian casualties of all combatant nations both as raw totals and as a percentage of 1939 population which does a good job of visualizing where Japan is on the spectrum.
Regarding the “lost generation” that occurred after WWI to that which occurred during WWII, the reason it is generally associated with the First World War as opposed to the Second is that war deaths were extremely high, and the proportion of military vs civilian deaths were overwhelmingly military, meaning males, resulting in a noticeable disparity between the sexes. The split between military vs civilian deaths in WWII was a much more even split, with civilian deaths exceeding military deaths in some countries. In Japan civilian deaths were estimated between 600,000 and 900,000, and a majority of those would be women and children.
The endnote for the wiki article on Japanese casualties (^AB) is particularly long, informative, well sourced and worth a read. A couple of things to note in regard to deaths from starvation and disease in the Japanese military from there:
Overall, perhaps two thirds of all Japanese military dead came not from combat, but from starvation and disease.[454] In some cases this figure was potentially even higher, up to 80% in the Philippines[455] and a staggering 97% in New Guinea.[456]
John W. Dower maintains that “only one third of the military deaths occurred in actual combat, the majority being caused by illness and starvation”.[441] According to Dower over 300,000 Japanese POW were missing after being captured by the Soviets. Japanese figures as of 12/31/1948 listed 469,074 missing personnel in Soviet hands, while at the same time the Soviets admitted to holding 95,000 Japanese prisoners thus leaving 374,041 surrendered Japanese personnel who were unaccounted for and presumed dead.[462] According to Dower "Known deaths of Japanese troops awaiting repatriation in Allied(non-Soviet) hands were listed as 81,090 by U.S. authorities.[462][463]
This is a good reference, although I notice that Filipino losses are not included on the graph, with one estimate of 57,000 military and 500,000-1,000,000 civilians. Their 1939 population was 16,000,303, meaning the dead were between 3.1% to 6.2% of the 1939 population.
The rates of malaria and other tropical diseases were high among Allied military personnel as well, and this shows the difference between being able to provide the necessary medicine and medical personnel (although not consistently throughout the entire war) by the Allies and being cut off without these lifesaving resources by the Japanese, as well as the compounding factor of starvation.
At that exchange rate, the Allies could have fought until Japan was reduced to a nation consisting entirely of women, children, white-haired old men and the disabled.