It seems to me that, for the most part, the average person in North America is largely ignorant to the extent of war crimes committed by Imperial Japan during the World War II era while being significantly more knowledgeable regarding those committed by Nazi Germany.
Why is that?
Granted, said crimes are well known to scholars and those with more than a passing interest in 20th century history, but why is that if I ask the average person, “World War II, war crimes, what comes to mind?” The immediate answer is “Nazis, Concentration Camps, and the Holocaust.” and very few people are familiar with the Rape of Nanking or the Manila Massacre, for example?
The cynical answer is that the victims of Nazi atrocities were frequently white Europeans.
The victims of Japanese atrocities were sometimes white Europeans, but mostly other residents of East Asia.
I’m not sure US society in the 1940s cared what happenned to the Chinese.
Another factor is that the communication that happens between European authors and journalists and US citizens is probably more … I’m missing the word for it, but more effective and plentiful, than communications channels between the Asian press communities and US citizens.
The Germans were so well organized and documented in the horror and terror that they stand out above the Japanese.
Nazis made better movie bad guys. It helped that even to today you can separate out and condemn Nazis without appearing racist.
We have a large Jewish population in the US who would quite honestly prefer if Americans, Germans and the rest of the world never forget what the Nazis did.
Who has been proclaiming the atrocities of the Japanese for the last 60+ years in the US & Europe.
There is a guilt factor, the Rape of Nanking was terrible but we only interred the Japanese in large numbers.
Latent racist factor, the Japanese atrocities were done to those that did not look like typical Americans, Jew look more like typical Americans so therefore Nazi atrocities resonate more with white America.
Well those are the 5 reasons I come up with, I am sure there are many more and some scholarly works to support it. Keep in mind that Americans do not seem to know much about any atrocities except the Nazi atrocities.
Many of the war crimes committed by the Japanese were against China. During the post-war anti-communist period it was important to redeem the Japanese as a bulwark against the Chinese communists, so there was less emphasis placed on the crimes of the Japanese.
It was to our geopolitical interests not to emphasize the Rape of Nanking, so we never really played it up as a war atrocity as much as it deserved after WWII … the Japanese Army essentially butchered 300,000 Chinses civilians more or less by hand, plus there was all the raping … but at least we never tried to dismiss it as an “incident” as the Japanese have so shamefully done.
I think a likely possibility is that most historical events are generally unknown to the average person. It’s more a case of explaining why a small handful of events are the exceptions.
I have a hard time reconciling the mass barbarism of the Rape of Nanking with how I perceive Japan today as a one of the most sophisticated and modern societies in the world.
Germany has also been very open about the atrocities that were committed during WWII. A German politician claiming the Holocaust is a fabrication of the lying Jews would be quickly ostracized.
In contrast, many top political figures in Japan (including the Prime Minister and the Gov of Tokyo) continue to publicly claim that the Rape of Nanking, the Comfort Women, Unit 731, etc., never happened or are wildly exaggerated. Frequently the events are brushed aside as “Communist lies” and the people of Japan who press for publicly facing up to them as “liberals who want children to hate their home country.”
[ul][li]plague fleas, infected clothing, and infected supplies incased in bombs were dropped on various targets, the resulting cholera, anthrax, and plague were estimated to have killed around 400,000 Chinese[/ul][/li][quote] Disbanding and the end of World War II
… After Imperial Japan surrendered to the Allies in 1945, Douglas MacArthur became the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers, rebuilding Japan during the Allied occupation.
At the end of the war he secretly granted immunity to the physicians of Unit 731 in exchange for providing America with their research on biological warfare. The United States believed that the research data was valuable because the allies had never publicly conducted or condoned such experiments on humans due to moral and political revulsion. The U.S. also did not want other nations, particularly the Soviet Union, to acquire data on biological weapons, not to mention the military benefits of such research. …
[/quote]
[ul][li]vivisection without anesthesia[/li][li]limbs amputated in order to study blood loss[/li][li]limbs that were removed were sometimes reattached to the opposite sides of the body[/li][li]human targets were used to test grenades[/li][li]flame throwers were tested on humans[/li][li]male and female prisoners were deliberately infected with syphilis and gonorrhea via rape[/li][li]prisoners were hung upside down to see how long it would take for them to choke to death[/li][li]prisoners had air injected into their arteries to determine the time until the onset of embolism[/li][li]prisoners had horse urine injected into their kidneys[/li][li]prisoners were deprived of food and water to determine the length of time until death[/li][li]prisoners were placed into high pressure chambers until death[/li][li]prisoners were exposed to extreme temperatures and developed frostbite to determine how long humans could survive with such an affliction, and to determine the effects of rotting and gangrene on human flesh[/li][li]experiments were performed to determine the relationship between temperature, burns and human survival[/li][li]prisoners were placed into centrifuges and spun until death[/li][/ul]
Another proud moment in American history, brought to you by the Cold War.
1 : The vivid remembrance of the Holocaust is the exception, not the rule; historical amnesia over genocide and mass atrocities is normal. So, to a large degree I give credit to the Jewish community in managing to keep people from conveniently forgetting it - and you’ll note, there’s no shortage of Holocaust deniers and revisioners.
2 : Racism; not only were the Japanese victim’s mostly Asian, but the Japanese themselves, as non-whites, were held to a far lower standard. The extremely racist America of the time expected no better of them.
The people of Japan today are three generations removed from the ones who raped Nanking, and their culture has gone through massive changes what with the total defeat of their armed forces in World War II and the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They still have a problem with foreigners/outsider “gaijin” but they’re not nearly as militaristic and violent as they used to be.
Not completely true. True, the Japanese Army was demonized in the popular press of the time as bucktoothed, subhuman monsters. But their behavior prior to WWII in places like Nanking made such demonization not only possible, but absolutely REASONABLE. It wasn’t just prejudice that made Americans see the Japanese Army as composed of bestial rapists and murderers, it was simple historical fact. Sorry, Der Trihs, the Japanese Army deserved every bit of calumny they got – they simply were, as a group, fucking EVIL. I’m sure there are exceptions to the rule, but that was quite a rule they established.
> I have a hard time reconciling the mass barbarism of the Rape of Nanking with
> how I perceive Japan today as a one of the most sophisticated and modern
> societies in the world.
Why is reconciling these two things any harder than reconciling present-day Germany with everything done by the Nazis?
I don’t disagree with any of the general answers put forth, especially the list that What Exit? put forth.
I do think that Evil Captor’s complaint about the lack of attention to the Rape of Nanking post-war is a bit misleading. It implies, to me at least, that he’s claiming that nothing was ever done about it, but the Rape of Nanking was a large part of the reasoning behind the US Oil Embargo against Japan that was a large part of Japan’s reasons for starting the greater war, then.
I also think that the Korean War had an effect of normalizing the average American view of the Japanese: A lot of troops were spending time, especially liberty and recovery time, in the Japanese islands, and were finding that they could get along with the Japanese people they’d met then fairly easily. With the German war crimes it’s easy to sanitize the German people by saying that the war crimes were performed by isolated groups within the general population: The Nazis and the SS, especially. There is, with the exception of small units like the one that Elendil’s Heir mentions, no easy, outwardly identifiable, minority upon which the blame of the Japanese war crimes can be saddled.
I also suspect in the past twenty years or so, there is some reluctance to produce Japanese boogeymen from the war years, because of the US’ treatment of Japanese immigrants, especially compared to the treatment of German immigrants. Especially when I think that the actions of the German-American Bund make a far better justification for the kind of racial/ethnic identification that got the Japanese interred.*
Just another couple of factors I think affect the situation.
*I’m well aware that there were Japanese-American spies for the Home Islands, but that doesn’t change that I believe that the German American Bund provided more than enough tar to cover all German descended immigrants, assuming that one accepts that the logic for interring the Nisei was valid.
