Another point, we also only have Neo-Nazis to remind of us the Nazis, there are no ‘Neo-Japanese-War-Machiners’
While the racism (at several levels) probably plays a part in the situation, I suspect that another aspect is a much larger factor: the Nazi extermination camps were massive, well organized, and directed from the highest levels of the Nazi hierarchy. As bad as Nanking, Manila, Bataan, and other events were, they tended to be issues of local authorities either wielding or losing control over specific situations.
Except for brief references to the start of the exterminations, most Americans, today, are no more and no less aware of the Einsatzgruppen, Babi Yar, the Massacre at Lidice, or (until it was revealed to have been a Soviet artrocity) the massacre at Katyn Forest, than they are aware of the Japanese atrocities.
However, the extermination camps are something different, having been built for the express purpose of systematically murdering innocent people. People are simply not that historically aware and they are more likely to know of something as central to Nazi administration as the death camps when they are totally ignorant of either Japanese or German local atrocities.
Even today Hitler and the NAZIs tend to eclipse all others. It would be equally valid to ask why so many horrendous actions done by Stalin or Mao are “off the radar”. If it was just about racism then wouldn’t Stalin and the U.S.S.R. be considered in a similiar light to the NAZIs? I know some of the Germans might have thought the slavic folks to be less than human but I suspect most Americans thought of them as “white”.
Marc
Then there are those of us who had older relatives who served in the Pacific theater or were prisoners as missionaries and did indeed hear of the war crimes, and know people who to this day will not buy Japanese cars.
It was also in our history books, although much more time was given to studying the Holocaust, maybe because the victims were often eloquent and articulate. In Asian culture there seems to be less dwelling on the past to outsiders (IMO) so you don’t get the detailed stories from the Asian Elie Wiesels and Anne Franks, although they’re probably out there.
Yes, quite right.
I do struggle to reconcile modern Germany with Nazi atrocities, as well.
I agree, but also there was the fact that the World found out about the Nazi atrocities first, the Nurmemburg trials made them very public.But the time we started the trials for the Japanese war criminals, the world had become a little jaded.
Wel, the current “War-crimes denier” PM of Japan comes pretty damn close.
You don’t understand. My point is not that they were regarded as evil because of racism; my point is that their evil was ( in comparison to the Nazis ) shrugged off because of racism. They weren’t expected to behave in a civilized fashion, or regarded as people the in same way the Germans were.
Very interesting. So why the disparity?
I don’t think it’s even close to right to play off the Japanese army’s nastiness as breakdowns in command. Unit 731 was organized and authorized at the highest levels. The “Comfort” Woman program was authorized and organized by the military command (recent protestations of the PM and Mayor Ishihara, among others, notwithstanding). Nanking was overseen by two commanders who either failed spectacularly, or, in my opinion, provided leadership and issued orders that led directly to the rape, mass-murder, destruction, and looting that happened in the area.
The behavior of Japanese troops rarely received censure. In a very few cases, a scapegoat was appointed to take the blame for those in higher positions who had ordered their actions. This is typical in Japanese organizations to this day. Some abuses, like the beheading contest between two Japanese officers, were well reported in the Japanese media as positive PR back home. While in the past many people tried to pretend that Emperor Hirohito was isolated from the military command, it is now apparent that he knew most of what was happening and had more authority over the war command than he was given credit for in the past.
In contrast with the Germans, who seemed to document and file everything, the Japanese avoided documentation of the worst abuses and later made a concerted effort to destroy any records relating to their war crimes. The Japanese language and culture encourages euphemism and sometimes outright obfuscation anyway, so there is often plausible deniability in what records do survive. This is one of the reasons there is very little internal corroboration for many of these incidents and why the equivalent of Holocaust denying is shrugged off as “allowed under the principles of free speech”. Heck, there’s even a textbook (in it’s second or third edition now) written by a far-right group that glosses over Japan’s military history, actively casts doubt on whether anything bad was ever done by Japanese forces, argues that the wrongful death count in Nanking was actually as low as 4,000, not 300,000 or so, paints Japan as the victim of WWII, and was approved by the Bureau of Education not once, but twice.
Some of the excuses given for the Nanking massacre were that Matsui was ill, was not physically present in the area, and his authority was possibly undermined by the presence of prince Asaka, Hirohito’s uncle. However, no real attempt was made by either Matsui or Asaka to stop the atrocities until news began to leak out and be reported in the outside world, and an organized effort to screen mail and non-Chinese leaving the region for photographic or written evidence of what was happening.
While sources dispute who actually gave the order—Asaka or a member of his command—soldiers were instructed to kill all POWs in custody. Even in the unlikely event that this was a “mistake” neither Matsui nor Asaka later tried to prevent it from happening or countermanded this order. Hirohito had received reports of what was going on, and did not recall either Asaka or Matsui until after the whole thing had wound down. As is typical when anything goes wrong, the more expendable Matsui was given the majority of the blame for the incident and Asaka was never charged with any war crimes, though he was almost certainly more culpable than Matsui.
If there were breakdowns in authority, they were due to flaws in the command structure from the top all the way down. Nanking is just the shining example. The Emperor and the war council were aware of pretty much all of these problems and either didn’t care to do something about it, or actually wanted things to happen as they did. It’s not like they didn’t have the authority or the ability to do something about it.
To this day the government tries to pretend that nothing ever happened and that if it did, it wasn’t the fault of anyone in authority. It’s bullshit and to everyone besides the Japanese the attempts to cover it up are terribly transparent. But they keep pretending. The ianfu (comfort women) cases have been drawn out over decades. The most recent thing I saw on it was that after something like 20 years of appeals in one case the court reported that the statute of limitations had passed, so the case would not be reviewed further. More than one lawyer has commented that the courts are just hoping that all the women die. They’d like to just forget about the thousands of teenaged girls who were kidnapped from their homes, beaten, tortured, and raped repeatedly over the course of months or years.
The madness of Unit 731 brings to mind the atrocities occurring presently in North Korea’s Camp 22.
Minor note:
When we rounded up the Japanese and Americans of Japanese descent in the Western US and shipped them off to camps in the interior, we interned them.
When we firebombed Tokyo and many other cities to ruins, and then dropped nuclear weapons on them, we caused many to be interred[sup][/sup].
[sup][/sup]placed in the ground; buried.
I’m assuming that your italicization of the word ‘interned’ is a suggestion that there exists a double standard between how our society remembers the Japanese camps and wartime acts versus those of the US. Is that a correct assumption?
If so, I am interested in your views on that double standard.
Thanks
And none of the actions you have described were formally established by the government. One thing to recall about the Japanese military was that it was, to a large extent, internally feudal, and many actions were undertaken by local or district commanders on thier own initiative.
I am not suggesting that the atrocities were any less horrible.
I am not suggesting that any of the atrocities were “accidents.”
I am not suggesting that only low-level officers participated in the decisions that resulted in atrocities.
I am pointing out that Hirohito did not pass a resolution through the wartime cabinet ordering the massacres and rapes and savage destruction in Nanking. Similarly, there was no direct order from Hitler, rubberstamped in the Reichstag, and passed down to the line commanders in Kiev ordering the Babi Yar massacres–which is why relatively fewer Americans are aware of that atrocity.
In contrast, we have documentation and memoirs detailing the Wannsee Conference where the Holocaust was plotted and ordered and we have millions of documents establishing that the continued operation of the death camps was a deliberate action by the government…
I believe itis not. The point made was that an earlier post accidentally used interred (meaning buried) in discussing the internment of Japanese Americans.
Germany was totally defeated and destroyed, their land was taken by force - down to the last square inch. What they have done was evident when their land was taken. They had nothing to bargain with in war crimes trials and all the ugly truth came out. So we have full evidence and full trials.
Japan surrendered with no invasion of their mainland, part of that surrender was Japan could keep it’s current government and land, IIRC they were given some immunity from war crimes compared to the Germans as a condition of their surrender. Here we have little evidence and partial trials.
Woops, my bad. Ignorance fought.
Might a factor be that some of the Nazi camps were liberated by Americans, who documented it but also came home with those stories and images internalised, whereas Nanking etc. mostly happened off-camera as far as American eyewitnesses went?
Combination of factors: Nazi’s had the programatic extermination machine going, many of the atrocities were against other Asians, post-1949 China turned “red” and became the enemy.
Movies like bridge over the river kwai, Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, any WW2 flick featuring Japanese (Seabees, Up Periscope, etc) almost all universally showed sadistic Japanese soldiers. In fact, as a casual viewer, IMHO Japanese soldiers are probably more demonized that German soldiers in war flicks.
Rape of Nanking was certainly well known for anyone over a certain age. The Nanking memorial was the one place in all of China that my mother wanted to see when she visited. The museum is built over/around a mass grave, and you walk through part of the excavation and see an awful lot of human bones - including those that are obviously young children. I’m 45 and remember seeing pictures of the Rape of Nanking in elementary school history books.
Iris Chang wrote a sensationalist book that at least got the attention of a new younger generation. I say sensationalist in that she went for the biggest number of victims possible over a long time frame, versus what the Nationalists, Communists, eyewitnesses and research done in the aftermath of WW2 found. IMHO I think she does a grave injustice to the tragedy by taking such a “big number” approach. IMHO it is no less the Nanking Massacre or a huge tragedy if the number is 100,000 or 300,000 civilian victims. It gives plenty of room for Japanese nationalists to fault the data and question the entire event. Here is a link of such a site. If one bothers to do pre-internet research, you’ll find it wildly lower than what is on the net now. Most Rape of Nanking hits nowadays basically is either Iris Chang or the movie “Rape of Nanking.”
Noted Sinologist Simon Leys wrote quite convincingly in the 1970’s about the “massacre inflation” that took place. I don’t have a hard copy but it’s well worth looking up for anyone truely interested in better understanding the Rape of Nanking. Simon Leys visited Nanking in the 1970’s as part of his research.
BTW, some posters must have missed Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s apology here. The apologies are never enough but most Statesmen don’t make full apologies (cough cough The Deciderer cough cough)
Americans were shocked and angered by the Rape of Nanking. It’s one of the reasons that the United States embargoed oil and scrap metal to Japan.
A major problem is that our media and educational institutions are dominated by liberals, and liberals just don’t care about atrocities committed by non-whites or by leftists. They’re more interested in bashing whites for being racist.
I note that the Communists killed at least seven or eight times as many people as the Nazis, but it’s the Nazis we keep hearing about. This is obviously an extremely distorted and lopsided view of the history of the twentieth century, and yet hardly anybody ever seems to notice it.