The Buck,
Foreign language posts are also not allowed on this board. Please review the forum rules before proceeding, as continually violating our forum rules will result in loss of posting privileges.
My appologies. I shall reframe from posting in a different language.
Since The Buck is no longer around to give an answer, I’ve tried to find out what he said. As far as I can tell:
Dare-ni mukatte mono itten-dayo? = Who do you think you’re talking to?
[http://www.helsinki.fi/~vzkomula/jap.htm]
Mochiron = Of course
[dummies - Learning Made Easy]
Baka yamero-yo = Don’t act stupid
[http://www.helsinki.fi/~vzkomula/jap.htm]
(and the politeness level seems to be informal male)
Well, I’m sorry I asked.
Note that some few of our Members object strongly to the term “Jap” considering it a racial slur along the lines of “nigger”. I disagree, especially when the word in used in a WWII context. I wonder what they’d think about "“Dirty American Devil”. 
:dubious:
I’m not really sure what you’re getting at with those smilies. I personally think they’re both offensive. “Jap” is more excusable since it’s sometimes used by people who think it’s just a contraction and don’t know of its history as a racial slur.
And then there’s “Jap” the racial slur, and “JAP” meaning “Jewish-American Princess.” The first time I heard someone use the term JAP, I got really confused, as the person referred to wasn’t at all Japanese.
Why was The Buck banned?
Trolling. And now you, his sock, are banned.
Hmm. I’m 30 and grew up in Australia and where I grew up there was still very strong anti-Japanese sentiment for a lot of my childhood. People would bitch about having to buy Japanese appliances for instance.
I also love anime and some Japanese hip-hop. I guess that makes me a Japanophile.
I find that t-shirt mildly nauseating because it’s sort of poking fun at things that were definitely and very viscerally a part of the history of where I grew up. Everyone knew about the Japanese treatment of POWs, and the Kokoda death march.
I probably wouldn’t make a big fuss about someone wearing it (supposing I had already read the explanation of what it meant), but I could never wear it myself.
You mean DAD? The D-word?
I experienced that too, but since it mostly came from a relative who’d spent several years in a Japanese POW camp, I thought it was reasonably understandable.
The holocaust was conducted as secretively as possible by a small percentage of the German population, whereas the Japanese tendency towards rape, torture (pretty extreme stuff, too - setting kids on fire in front of their parents just for amusement and such), and murder was widespread, accepted, and even celebrated openly amongst the populace. Which is worse is something of a personal taste, I guess - but ever since I’ve learned about it, what the Japanese did always struck me as worse than the holocaust.
My Dad will not eat Sushi, and isn’t really a big fan of any type of rice- he refers to it all as “Prisoner of War Food”.
None of our family were involved in the War In The Pacific during WWII- everyone who enlisted and fought was in Europe, North Africa, or India- but Dad spent years growing up with friends of his dad, who had been in the Pacific and had nothing nice to say about the Japanese.
FWIW, I have a few Soviet Russian odds and ends- a Soviet Officer’s Belt that I often wear, a Ushanka with a Russian Officer’s cap badge on it, as well as a Nagant M1895 revolver and holster, and M91/30 cartridge pouches. Everyone who’s seen them generalls comments on how nifty the stuff is (“Where did you find a WWII Russian Service revolver?” people often ask, unaware that the Nagant M1895 is one of the most numerous handguns ever produced)
I think the reason we don’t tend to have the same reaction to Soviets or Japanese is that years of (now quaint) Communist Scares and so on have basically meant most people see J. Stalin & Co as being nothing more than cartoonesque Bond Villains, whilst I think that the Anti-Japanese Propaganda during WWII was too effective, and people of my dad’s generation grew up with the Japanese soldiers being treated as 2-D stereotypes in War Picture Library and Commando comics (wherein Japanese soldiers all wore glasses and said “Aaaaiiieee!” when they got shot by stereotypical US/British/Australian troops with nicknames like “Dutch”, “Sapper”, or “Bluey”).
Personally, I find The Forgotten War (the war in India/Burma/Malaysia) to be a fascinating subject, and on on which far too many people are sadly uninformed… you’d be surprised how many people don’t know that Indian troops fought valiantly in WWII- on both sides.
For many reasons the pre-war prejudice against the Japanese was de-emphasized within a few years of the end of WWII. The horrors they perpetrated were mostly not well publicized during or after the war. The events at Nanking were published in newspapers and were relatively common knowledge at the time, years before the war in the Pacific, but were overshadowed by the interest in the European theater. I find that ironic, considering that at least one Nazi, John Rabe, who was in Nanking and helped save thousands of Chinese from the general massacre, was sickened by what he saw, to the point of risking his life to smuggle out film documenting what happened, and sending letters of appeal to Hitler asking him to cease any association with Japan.
I think that there were a few things that contributed to the amnesia regarding the Japanese campaigns and the lack of continuing prejudice regarding their war crimes. The Japanese were seen as “other.” There was a lot less association between the US and the Japanese than with any of the European countries and almost no exchange of knowledge and culture with the general public. There weren’t anime otaku and martial artists in the late 1930s – early 1950s. Contrast that with Germany, with people who looked a lot like a bunch of Americans, with hundreds of years of culture and art that was well known to anyone with European ancestry. Because of both a lack of knowledge about the full extent of their actions and the “other” factor, the Japanese atrocities just weren’t that shocking. It sticks with you a lot longer if your neighbor kills 15 people and buries them in his back yard than it does if some guy across town—with a different color of skin from you and a completely different lifestyle from you—does the same thing.
Between a tendency to prejudice against people who look different and Pearl Harbor as a catalyst, neither the government or the media in the US needed a hard sell campaign to get the people behind a war effort against the Japanese. After the war, in fact, the US had a vested interest in promoting the Japanese as not really all that bad, especially since Japan was being used as a buffer against the emerging Soviet empire. A few years of negative propaganda was quickly undone by a prolonged positive spin campaign.
There’s always been a very significant language barrier, with wacky translations or archaic language equivalents often obscuring both meaning and the feeling of the original language. Unlike the Germans, who seemed to document practically everything related to the Holocaust and who made little effort to conceal it, at the end of the war, much of the Japanese documentation of their war crimes was destroyed and not many of the remaining documents were translated. (Internal scholarship of war crimes has been shitty at best too, with publishers often refusing to print books that actually tell what happened, while the Ministry of Education has [twice] approved a textbook that is not far removed from a Holocaust denier’s shading of the facts and disregarding evidence that doesn’t fit the thesis.)
People weren’t really exposed to official stories regarding the things the Japanese did: like Unit 731’s biowarfare research, vivisection and practice surgery without anesthetic; Nanking, systematic rape and torture of women and mass killings of men and children; the abduction and forced prostitution of women from captured territories; POW starvation, torture, and summary execution in flagrant disregard of any international agreement. Mengele published a book about his “studies,” Hitler had his rantings on some college reading lists, and there were Holocaust deniers and continuing ties with Israel to keep the German side of things fresh in people’s memories. Nothing like that regarding the Japanese came to public consciousness until probably the publishing of The Rape of Nanking.
Lacking sources and interest from the public, news agencies focused on the German atrocities and there wasn’t a big influx of Chinese, Malaysians, or Filipinos who integrated with the public and spread stories of what happened under the Japanese, unlike the large numbers of Jews from all over Europe and various Europeans who fled the war or who emigrated to the US afterward. Without personal connections to the past or being taught about it as part of history classes or common knowledge, things are quickly forgotten.