In this thread, Kamakiri states that “Today, denial is official policy” of the Japanese regarding WWII.
I said “May I ask what they are denying in japan?” and didn’t get a response.
I bumped my own question, and still no response.
So, rather than continue to hijack that thread, what are the Japanese denying?
That they lost the war?
That atomic bombs were dropped on their country?
That they provoked the US into the war with Pearl Harbor?
What?
Thanks.
The biggest things that are denied as I understand it:
In addition, some in Japan deny that they should have lost - that if only a few small things had been different (usually at Midway) then everything would have changed and Japan could have won the war. They just got unlucky. This ignores the facts in evidence.
Eating POWs and enslaving women as prostitutes come to mind.
Mostly that they were “forced” into WWII and Pearl harbor by the USA and it’s various Embargoes and Sanctions vs Japan. But yes, the atrocities are also downplayed- a few 'regrettable individual unsanctioned actions only".:rolleyes::dubious:
They certainly downplay the use of “comfort women” and the activities of Unit 731.
Dave Barry’s book Dave Barry Does Japan talks about his going to a Hiroshima memorial, and he said the bombing was treated almost like a natural disaster. There was no talk about why the US might have bombed Hiroshima.
Contrary to popular belief, Japan has apologized on quite a number of occasions for their actions in World War II. During the last twenty-five years Japan has averaged about one formal or public apology every ten months.
It is entirely possible Japan has not, say, specifically apologized for a given event, since one could cite a thousand or more horrible events during the war, but so far as I am aware it is extremely unusual for the government of a sovereign country to specifically apologize for one event. Sex slavery - “comfort women” - has been the subject of, I believe, seven public and formal apologies. Indeed, I would venture that Japan has probably apologized for World War II more than most countries have ever apologized for anything. The United States of America has never formally apologized for anything, to the best of my recollection. despite having things it could justifiably apologize for. (ETA: Actually, it has once I can find: during the Reagan administration, an apology was signed into law for interning Japanese-Americans.)
Nor is DrDeth’s characterization of the nature of Japanese apology true or fair. Japan has, repeatedly and openly, using words like “invasion,” “victims” and “aggression” in characterizing its actions, stated its responsibility for the war and professed its intent to follow a pacifist path in response to what it did.
The idea that Japan is not sufficiently apologetic for World War II is bizarrely pervasive and yet quite wrong. You will be very, very hard pressed to find a country that has apologized more times for something, but it is rather trivially easy to find a thousand examples of apologies owed by OTHER countries that won’t deliver them.
I am not talking about Official apologies, but Imperial “apologists” which exist in Japan just like Southern Apologists exist in the USA.
I do not disagree with the above.
If I may speculate, while the Holocaust is seen as the ultimate evil act undertaken as official government policy, the German legal ban in Nazi related symbols, slogans, and materials helps to create the idea or assumption that the current government and people of Germany are attempting to reject, refute, or in some way to “move on” from it’s 1933-1945 attitudes and policies.
Contrast to that, when a high level Japanese government official goes to a shrine/memorial and shows reverence to the members of the Imperial Japanese military war dead, some people feel that that action appears to somehow show that the government somehow still values those old Imperialist attitudes or grudges. Speaking for myself, I don’t see it that way. Practically speaking, I don’t know if there is anything Japan could do to fully placate everyone who remains passionately angry about Japan’s actions in WW2.
I think Japan has the worst of both worlds right now; on the one hand not fully grasping its WWII history head-on (there are still visits to Yasukuni and also textbooks that are questionable in their coverage of WWII)…on the other hand having too much pacifism, SDFs instead of a normal military, and prohibitions on normal military action.
The right thing to do would be to tackle all atrocity/history issues head-on, while also boosting defense spending, abolishing Article 9 and having normal national defense.
And the notion that abolishing Article 9 would lead to a return of aggression has always been a Slippery Slope fallacy.
Then when a new government comes in they say that the “statement” is not “binding government policy”.
Saw the documentary ‘Nanking’
It has interviews with surviving Japanese Soldiers, some who, while admitting the massacre and the rapes, insist they did nothing wrong.
George Bush was ill at a government dinner in Japan. I have wondered if he had contemplated his air crew friends who were cannibalized.
But how the help does one apologize for that? The fellows who were caught were hanged.
The U.S. has also formally apologized for the syphilis study at Tuskegee and for overthrowing the Kingdom of Hawaii.
Which strangely, the USA didnt do, and is racist as all fuck.
I thought we did that to make the joint safe for the Dole Company. Am I mistaken?
I knew one Japanese guy who said that
1: The emperor had no idea what was going on and even if he did he couldn’t do anything about it.
2: Luckily nothing really untold happened. Everything bad was the result of only a few bad apples.
3: The war wasn’t really their fault.
Mostly mistaken, but no doubt that was part of it- as I posted before:
*The citizens of Hawaii asked to become a US territory. You’re not talking about Queen Liliʻuokalani who abrogated the Constitution, tried to bring back an absolute monarchy and brought in race-based rights, where only Native Hawaiians (as opposed to Hawaiian natives) would have any rights at all- and income was to be from lotteries & opium sales to her “subjects”?
In other words, a non-democratic racist based regime? Not surprising that the mixed and white island born natives staged a bloodless* counter-coup and re-instated the Constitution. Note that her native subjects didnt care to support her, not one raised a hand. In fact “Her ministers, and closest friends, were all opposed to this plan; they unsuccessfully tried to dissuade her from pursuing these initiatives,…”
Ok, one policeman was wounded. But he got better.
Not that I trust Wikipedia for shit, butherearelinks that agree with my idea of how things happened.
They came off better than the Indians, at any rate.
The WWII period appears constantly in various TV dramas, especially NHK’s daily 15-minute daily soap opera “Renzoku Terebi Shosetsu” which has stories that generally run for 6 months at a time, often covering someone’s life from childhood or teenage through middle or old age, and often covering large parts of the 20th century. The war years appear from the point of view of ordinary Japanese civilians, and invariably the politics of the war, how and why it started, who was in the right and so on are never discussed. There is usually one older person in the story who is reflexively gung-ho pro Japan; very occasionally there are anti-government types who appear and who are in imminent danger of prison. But most people in the story regard the war as a major unpleasant inconvenience, with privation and hunger, where they have to stop whatever they were doing in their life just to survive. Often offspring and/or husbands go off to war and either get killed or come back (but they never talk about what they did during the war). That’s the worst that usually happens.
So Dave Barry’s description about Hiroshima seems to be not far off from the general perception of the war as a huge disaster from which they pluckily and sometimes heroically recovered.
Part of the reason for this, I think, is that Japanese people identify very closely as individuals with their country. Japan is still a very homogeneous country, where the identification as Japanese is still both ethnic and political. Unlike the US, where it can be fairly easy to dissociate oneself emotionally from the government (e.g. “I didn’t vote for them, and I don’t approve, so it’s not my fault.”), in Japan the government’s actions reflect on everyone. So it is more difficult for them to admit that their government was evil.