I am constantly baffled by the Japanese lack of contrition for their war atrocities compared to the German contrition for their role in the war. The Prime Minister still goes to pay homage at ememorials to Japanese war criminals; they refuse to apologize for forcing young women into prostitution to service their soldiers; their textbooks still don’t mention the rape of Nanking or any of the atrocities they committed during the war; the list goes on. Is this all a matter of “we got nuked so we paid our debt to the world in the form of two mushroom clouds hanging over our cities” or “it was war and sh*t happens during war” or some combination of the two or are they just getting away with murder?
How does denial or downplaying one’s guilt constitute “getting away” with something? If there are living war criminals who are being officially shielded, one could say they’re getting away with it, but I don’t see how this applies to the Japanese people generally.
What’s “baffling” about it? Japanese culture is generally less prone to voluntarily losing face in public than is Western culture. And today’s lack of contrition is quite understandable; at this point in 2006, a lot of Japanese very rightly feel they have nothing to apologize for. The vast majority of Japanese were either not born before 1945 or were small children, so why should they be ashamed of anything? Does every country in the world have to live in a cloud of guilt?
That is not precisely true. The Prime Minister pays homage at war memorials which sometimes include, among many, many soldiers, some who committed war crimes. The Japanese seem to feel it’s more important to honor the millions of men who died just doing their duty than to avoid doing so in order to snub those among the dead who were criminals. I can see your point, but they have a valid point too.
As Bryan has already pointed out, nobody is “getting away with” anything. The people who planned and executed the war on Japan’s behalkf were mostly hanged or imprisoned.
I think it’s valid to criticize if Japanese students are not taught the entire truth about the war, but I have never seen a systematic study done proving to what extent that is true; I’ve only ever heard anecdotes. Furthermore, I’d suggest that what you’re describing is true of most countries. How many American students learns about how American troops slaughtered Filipino women and children by the thousands? Did the carpet bombing of Laotian civilians on the Plain of Jars make it into your sophomore history textbook? Why single out the Japanese for being a little positive in their history curriculum?
While I do think contrition is an important part of the long term healing process of a nation after war, you’re correct here. The large majority of the Japanese population are post-war, and had nothing to do with the war.
It is important to learn from the past mistakes of one’s country though.
The German reaction to their history in the decades following WWII is nearly unique. Other nations that commit war crimes typically react with flat-out denial.
Turkey being a case in point.
I don’t want to turn this into a pit thread but couldn’t they just remove the names of the war criminals from the war memorial? Couldn’t they just admit that the Rape of Nanking and the Comfort Woman phenomenon existed and to the extent that everyone else thinks they occurred? I mean it is illegal to deny the holocaust in about a dozen countries (this includes saying that the holocaust was 1 million Jews instead of over 5 million Jews) yet there are still government officials in Japan who deny the war crimes happened the way it happened (they say thinigs like “of course some civilians died when we invaded Nanking but nothing like what people say happeed, it was just a vary brutal invasion”).
After a bit of research its not as bad as I thought (there was some form of apology for all of these incidents although they always seemed to have little caveats attached like" we are sorry that it happened but such things happen in a war") but why the dichotomy between the treatment of the war crimes in Europe versus the war crimes in Asia?
Some Japanese consider the war criminals to be matyrs and still revere Hirohito, noone in Germany seems to think very highly of Hitler.
Based on info from this Board, vast numbers of Japanese Youth do not even know that Japan was the agressor State in the War.
It’s gonna come as a hellava suprise to some skateboard punks in Tokyo if China ever decides to even the score…
Check out that shrine’s English homepage. You’ll discover that the people who run it think that those war criminals are heroes.
I recall Dave Barry had a chapter in his book “Dave Barry Does Japan”, in which he speaks seriously about the Hiroshima memorial and expresses his dismay that no mention whatsoever is made of the events that led the USA to bomb Hiroshima.
I think the more surprising thing is how different are the reputations of the Germans and the Japanese in the minds of most people in the Anglosphere. To this day, in many American and British minds, the word German is closely associated with the word Nazi. For decades, (at least up until I got the German-American magazine in high school German class in the '90s, though possibly still), in polls asking Americans to name a famous German, the number one answer was always far and away Adolf Hitler. German exchange students visiting my high school in South Carolina in '96 were routinely called Nazis. TV shows about German war crimes have practically made whole networks (I’m looking at you, History Channel). A couple years ago Spiegel Magazine did a special edition on Germany’s image overseas, and a stunning proportion of Americans and Brits said they never even wanted to set foot in the country, because of what happened in WWII.
In comparison, Japan gets off scot free. Few Americans or Brits associate that country with their horrendous war crimes; most have probably never heard of the Rape of Nanking or the Bataan Death March or any other number of atrocities. Honestly, the only thing many people think of when they think of Japan and WWII is the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – and maybe that is why they don’t get much blame otherwise. :dubious:
I bet the Japanese think they’re pretty healthy already.
They do eat all that fish. That’s lean, healthy protein right there…
Seriously, they likely do, because anyone responsible for the Japanese atrocities of that time is likely either dead or invalid at this point. We can’t blame a 20 year old Japanese college student for the actions of his anscestors. The real damage is that they won’t get the chance to learn from their past mistakes, possibly repeating them in the future.
I’ve never heard any reasonable person “blame” 20 year old Japanese college students for anything, the criticism is towards the Japanese goverment, or perhaps certain conservative elements of the goverment, that insist on unreasonable actions like honouring specific individuals who have been specifically named by the rest of the world as war criminals, or making a conscious effort to distort or downplay the less savoury aspects of Japanese history during WW2 in textbooks and such.
I think a partial explanation may be that many more of the guilty Japanese were put on trial than the Germans were.
From 1946–51 some 5,600 Japanese personnel were prosecuted in more than 2,200 trials. More than 4,400 Japanese personnel were convicted and about 1,000 were sentenced to death.
This was not the main trials, the equivalents of Nuremberg. They were in addition to the main Japanese War Crime tribunal the so-called “Tokyo Trials ”
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Twenty-five Japanese military and political leaders were charged with Class A crimes, and more than 300,000 Japanese nationals were charged with Class B and C crimes, mostly over prisoner abuse. The crimes perpetrated by Japanese troops and authorities in the occupation of Korea and China (Manchukuo) were not part of the proceeding. China held 13 tribunals of its own, resulting in 504 convictions and 149 executions.
In contrast, the Nazi regime was put on trial in two tribunals in Nuremberg, Germany from 1945 to 1949. The first tribunal indicted 24 major Nazi war criminals, and resulted in 19 convictions (of which 12 led to death sentences) and 3 acquittals. The second tribunal indicted 185 members of the military, economic, and political leadership of Nazi Germany, of which 142 were convicted and 35 were acquitted. In subsequent decades, approximately 20 additional war criminals who escaped capture in the immediate aftermath of World War II were tried in West Germany and Israel.
There was Soviet summary justice going on in Germany that make this number discrepancy less than this post makes it seem. Additionally the Nazi regime, unlike the Japanese, was completely destroyed before surrender (meaning fewer documents, fewer baddest of the bad survivors and people in a position to “flip” on the worst). Still, it is fair to say that after the war the Japanese by and large were punished more thoroughly and in greater numbers for War crimes than the Germans were.
That does not make it OK for a Japanese person to say we were never signatories to the Geneva Convention, our cultural view of prisoners was different than the West’s and we have nothing to apologize for. OTOH what if they were to say: **virtually any Japanese person (save the Emperor himself) who was known to have committed an atrocity and was captured was punished after the war – so get off my back, we “did our time”? ** I know its not healthy or “right” but that attitude might be at least be more understandable, re the OP, from a Japanese person than a German one.
How contrite is the average American about slavery?
No one in my history classes ever discussed the Japanese internment camps, which weren’t even all that far away from where I grew up. I found out at 14 when my mom (who lived in post-war Japan as a kid) handed me a copy of Farewell to Manzanar. If our textbooks don’t discuss the darker side of WWII, how can we expect others to do so?
While I agree that the Japanese people would do well to learn their history more thoroughly (as would we all), it’s hardly suprising to me that it isn’t taught more objectively.
The civilians who died at Hiroshima - and they were overwhelmingly civilians - didn’t bomb Pearl Harbor or invade China. Sure, they were the civilian backbone of the country that did, but the Hiroshima memorial isn’t there to trumpet Japan’s war record, it’s to memorialize a huge number of people who were killed in a bombing that marks the beginning of a new and rather dark era in human history.
The Vietnam War Memorial - one of the most remarkable and heartbreaking things I have ever seen in my life - doesn’t have a plaque that counters the 58,000 names of fallen Americans by going into how the U.S. restarted and prolonged a terrible war and killed millions of Vietnamese and Laotian people in a pointless imperialist crusade. Nor should it. The memorial is there to remember America’s lost sons, not act as a set of moral scales, and it’s just fine as it is. The U.S. is damn near as responsible for that horror as Japan is for WWII but what sort of monster would demand that grieving Americans, crying over their lost sons, take a few extra lessons on why William Westmoreland was Kissinger’s bobo for murdering Vietnamese kids? Let people mourn their dead.
There’s no doubt Japan was on the wrong side of the war and picked the wrong friends and committed many atrocities, but this obsession with picking at them and demanding an endless stream of apologies is pointless and stupid. As **astro ** points out, few Americans are all that apologetic about slavery. Canadians generally don’t give a shit about the Indians we killed and displaced. The British killed God only knows how many people in their insatiable quest for empire and blood, but they spend precious little time begging for forgiveness for it all. You don’t see the Belgians spending a lot of time thrashing themselves over murdering all those Africans.
Learning history is important, I will heartily agree. Feeling sorry for it isn’t.
May not be contrite at this point, but we are all well aware of it. It is a major part of High School History curriculum and we are reminded regularly about the horrors of slavery. If you read the Op it was more than just the title you know.
The Japanese do not acknowledge much of there wrong doing in WWII. I do not believe anyone denies that the US was involved in this very deplorable action.
You might have at least used the plight of Native Americans as that gets far less coverage in school.
Jim
That’s totally apples and oranges. The average American knows that once slavery was legal, that it existed, and that it was bad. We do not try to rewrite history. We do not try to pretend it never happened.