Not so. Locals in some places were initially of that view it is true, but a taste of Japanese occupation soon changed their minds.
In others (notably the Phillipines) the locals far preferred the existing Western “colonialists”, whose promises they tended to believe and with good reason, over the Japanese; and once again a taste of Japanese occupation soon convinced them of the correctness of this view.
In others (notably China) the Western powers, though imposing unequal treaties and stomping all over them in the 19th century, were by the mid 20th century seen as far more benign; and the Japanese behaved there in such a manner as the Chinese have not forgotten to this day (see the “Rape of Nanjing” or Nanking as it was then romanized). The western Colonialists never did that in China, even at their worst.
As colonizers, the Japanese behaved with a brutality towards the locals that the Western colonizers of the time would in general never have dreamed of displaying. While their propaganda stressed “Asia for the Asians”, and some locals initially believed it, experience soon taught that they were far worse than the colonizers they displaced - they were hated wherever they went.
As CalMeachan said, people fail to remember that the Holocaust was more than just Jews. They’ve killed many others in trying to create “the perfect race”. Blonde hair, blue eyes, something like that. Hitler himself was not even of that perfect race he spoke of, and yet that’s what he wanted.
To continue what XT was saying about the Japanese, they would probably have had more fame and seen for what they’ve done. But because of the Holocaust, they were viewed as suicidal pilots and nothing more.
They’re kamikaze pilots. They stay fly, till they die!
Afternoon good people, a curious debate.
My pennysworth: abhorent and abomnibable, the Molotoff Rippentrop pact must stand as the most obscene irony of the previous century, almost enough to make me despair of our species.
You cannot unmake Hitler or the National Socialists, it’s like denying the existance of prime numbers, Felix Domesticus is no Tiger.
Wihout his hatred of the ‘other’, whether of race, religion, hue or culture, I don’t believe that the little corporal could have become Fuherer.
Maybe a more apposite question might be how might the Nazi party have continued without a certain A.Hitler?
Very much so. In John Dower’s War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War which is an excellent study of the way racial attitudes on both sides combined to make the fighting in the Pacific brutal on a level not seen outside of the Eastern Front during WW2 he notes that what made Japanese racism particularly insidious was that it was omni-directional; everyone was inferior to the Yamato people. Western racism tended to have particular targets; there was no overwhelming sense that for example the Americans or the British were a superior race to everyone else. Blacks and Asians might be viewed as inferior, but there wasn’t a sense that for example the French or the Swedes were inferior races. While Yellow Peril racism had a long history in the US, attitudes towards the Chinese were recast now that they were allies against Japan.
It’s a lot more complicated than that. Racial attitudes towards Japan during the war were harsh to a degree that simply didn’t exist towards the Germans. There also wasn’t something to as easily pin as the cause of Japanese brutality during the war as there was of German brutality in the form of Nazism. Polling done after Japan’s surrender found it was a very common attitude in the US to wish we had dropped more atomic bombs on them before they capitulated. The Tokyo War Crimes trials and associated trials were much more extensive than the trials at Nurnberg. While only 23 were charged at Nurnberg,