Here in the US I haven’t really noticed any lingering hatred for Japan (or Germany for that matter), but just 50 years ago Japan was probably the worlds most aggressive military and the worst human rights abuser on the planet. Is there alot of lingering hatred for Japan in places like Korea, China, the Phillipines, Burma, etc?
Nitpick: You mean seventy years ago… fifty years ago, Japan was a beaten nation and sixty years ago, it was on its last legs as a military power. It was in the '30s that it experienced its greates moments of modern military power.
Horse puckey. They were making Godzilla movies.
There was quite a bit of anti-Japanese sentiment in the States back in the eighties, as I recall. Mostly because they had the audacity to make cars and consumer electronics that were not only better than the stuff we were making, but cheaper too. However, IIRC, there was a fair bit of lingering war hysteria that got stirred up along with it.
When I was in high school (this would be the early '90s) a Japanese friend of mine was at the local gaming store, looking at thier collection of Pogs (Anyone remember Pogs? 'Cause I sure as hell don’t. What were they for, anyway?) and found one that had a big mushroom cloud on it and the words “Made in America, Tested in Japan.”
He was not pleased.
I think any lingering hatred would have at least been balanced out by the sympathy Japan has gotten for being the only nation to have suffered atomic explosions against its people.
Its sparse military abilities for the latter part of the century probably helped dissolve old views of Imperial Japan, too.
And Hello Kitty. Definitely can’t forget the influence of Hello Kitty. And hentai.
They were round pieces of cardboard with a picture on one side and a blank white reverse side. You stacked them in a pile and then used a metal pog to slam them down on the pile and whatever was flipped over, you kept.
Wash, lather, repeat until one side had all the pogs.
They were also called milkcaps.
(I never played but I have an odd memory for some things and they were popular amongst the more inane of my peers in late elementary and early middle school)
Yeah, I meant 70-80 years ago. I’m still living in the 80s for some reason.
My poor, saintly father, WW2 veteran, gentle soul, and otherwise thoroughly level-headed fella, still has a giant blind spot in terms of both Germany and Japan. It’s uncanny.
But then, you said “global,” so never ye mind.
So did my gramma, right up until she died. My grandfather was killed in Pearl Harbor and left her with a six month old baby (my father) so she was understandably a little bitter. Plus, they had been stationed in China when the Japanese were in control and she had lots of old photos of atrocities (stacks of headless cadavers and such, it sounds gruesome but I think the photos weere sold as postcards). She’s probably spinning in her grave now that I’m taking classes in Japanes.
I don’t know about global hatred, but there’s still plenty of hostility from Korea and China.
[hijack]like to hear about your grandmother’s experience in China [/hijack]
As a Jap…anese person, I’ve never detected any hatred based on my nationality. I’ve even spoken to older people (probably born shortly after the war, not before it) who haven’t expressed anything special towards Japan.
I’ve also befriended plenty of Americans with the same experience. If anyone is going to still hate Japan, it’s China.
What I meant by ‘on a global level’ was hatred from any part of the globe. Maybe I should’ve said ‘any hatred from other countries’.
In the 80s, my political science teacher at a JC was a former Pacific POW. I used him as an oral source for a history paper, and he admitted that there was somethng lingering. He pointedly did not drive a Japanese car.
A friend of mine says that among Chinese people of the WWII generation you can still find people who are fairly convinced that the Japanese are the devil.
Truthfully, I don’t know a whole bunch about it since she didn’t really talk about it much. And she died out in Honolulu a couple of years ago (she moved out there to be “closer” to my grandfather, who died in 1941!) so I can’t ask her directly. (totally off topic but I have to boast: my grandfather helped a lot of people escape the sinking ship, the Oklahoma, but couldn’t get out himself. They actually named a ship after him that’s just been recently decomissioned.) I’ll ask my dad exactly when and where they were stationed.
I mostly just remember these big, old leather bound scrapbooks. They were fascinating and really scary to me because there were pictures of executions and other things (only slightly less gruesome since they were black and white). Truthfully, one of the things I remember most were pictures of bound feet that had been unbound.
<hijack> tremorviolet, can I email you for more information about that? I’m deeply interested in collected first person accounts of the attack. Thanks. I’ll explain all in the email, if you’re interested.
</hijack>
Sho’, I’ll remember to check that email address. Don’t know if I can help you much tho’, I’m not all that up on the family lore and my father was too young to remember any of it.
Btw, continuing the completely off-topic hijack, the second account on this page is about my grandfather.
Though people have little trouble remembering the Rape of Nanking they seem to forget that Korea was under Japanese rule for almost half a century. And no we didn’t enjoy it. In fact they tried to simply destroy the korean identity by forcing Koreans to exclusively speak japanese and change our last names, which is a HUGE deal in a confucian society. They also kidnapped our best artists and scholars to work in Japan, and stole whatever historical treasures they could get their hands on. Not to mention that they transformed our imperial palace into a zoo as either a deliberate insult or to lower morale in the resistence. At least that was after assassinate the last of our royal family.
Yes, I would have to say there is lingering hatred.
IIRC one of the reasons for people in Korea and China still hating Japan is the way Japan hasn’t acknowledged its role in those countries in the same way Germany faced up to, and renounced its past. (Plus an emphasis on the atomic bombs lets Japan portray itself as a victim of WWII, rather than one of the aggressors)
The history taught in Japanese schools (from what I’ve heard anyway) doesn’t mention the atrocities, and there seem to be growing moves (I don’t know how widespread) to paint a glorious and positive picture of that era with it’s conquests and militarism (I’ve heard of anime that are being made showing brave Japanese solders “liberating” their fellow Asians)
China and Korea protest at an official level, (and China, at least, makes propaganda,) over things like this.