Especially to the Chinese. I just finished watching “John Rabe” on Netflix, about where a Nazi was disgusted by the Japanese atrocities (you know you got it bad if he’s writing Hitler to tell the Japanese to cool it). Besides the movie’s Rape of Nanking, there were the Zhejiang-Jiangxi Campaign massacres and Unit 731. Don’t look that last one up if you have a weak stomach.
While Hitler is synonomous with WWII atrocities, the Japanese sure gave him a run for his money in China. And elsewhere, too, like the Bataan Death March, Burma Road, and the Manila Massacre (more casualties than the Tokyo firebombings or atomic bombs). Never mind the hell ships and comfort women.
I recall some of their POW mistreatment comes from their Bushido code about the contempt of surrendering. But how does one explain all the civilian massacres and atrocities that occurred?
Did they have their own version of Mein Kampf? Seeing the similarities, did they have an Axis deal: “you eliminate the Jews, we’ll depopulate China”
Their Bushido-Shinto ideology played a large part. In Japan unlike Germany the war atrocities were committed not by a government with a new ideology but simply a rehashing of the old.
I’d chalk it up partly to the common soldier finding an outlet after a life filled with suppression and rigorously enforced obedience, like murderous raping Catholic schoolgirls. Also, I think it’s largely agreed that “bushido” as it was promoted at the time was largely a 20th century quasi-fascist invention.
Japan has historically been a very xenophobic and racist culture. Once you’ve convinced yourself your enemy are subhumans not even worthy to live, and you’re a dick, you go nuts.
The interesting contrast between the German and Japanese atrocities is that the German stuff was much more hidden. People have the impression that the holocaust was openly known to everyone, but the Germans took great pains to tell the population that they were shipping undesirables off to newly conquered territory to the east, to live seperately from Germans.
Whereas the the Japanese, their atrocities were rarely hidden. Entire military units would make a contest out of beheading prisoners. They’d round up women and children into a tall building and set it on fire and watch them jump from the roof in desperation. Their newspapers would cover these incidents and it would be celebrated back home.
Not to downplay the evil of the Germans at all, but the Japanese never get their due - I consider them to be as evil or more than the Germans, but you almost never hear about it, whereas you’ve heard about the holocaust at least 100,000 times in your life.
In addition to that, the official policy in Japan is dangerously close to the equivelant of holocaust denialism, whereas at least the Germans are thoroughly ashamed and sorry for what they did.
I’ve often wondered about that. Clearly the fighting in the Pacific was a lot more brutal and hellish than in Europe. And it seemed like the Allies also viewed the ‘Japs’ as something less than human. Not to mention we were still pretty sore over Pearl Harbor.
But I suspect that we let a lot slide after seeing the effects of Fat Man and Little Boy.
I have never lived in Japan, and I have no idea if/how the culture is different now than it was in the 20s and 30s. But most soldiers took their own lives rather than be taken hostage. And one US hostage who was in a Japanese POW camp says that once the war was over and the Japanese government told the soldiers to stop fighting, that they released tons of Red Cross aid that had been sent for the POW camp but the Japanese had refused to let them use. So medical aid had been buiding up, and the Japanese just decided to store it rather than give it to the POWs.
I have no idea. Japanese military culture (I have no idea if civilian culture was as evil as military culture) during the 30s and 40s was barbaric and inhumane. I wonder who has studied it to find out why.
My understanding of the Germans is that even though the SS and Gestapo were evil, the German troops themselves weren’t too bad. I have no idea about the Russians.
I read the Korean guards in war camps were vicious too, but part of that was because the Japanese treated them like shit, then they took it out on the prisoners.
The story now is that most civilians did not approve of the extreme militarism and fascism, and that the government was in the control of that sort of extremist minority. Oh, and you never see depictions of WWII soldiers outside of Japan, except after the war is over (so they can be portrayed as POWs, poor things). People who lived through the war only remember the hardships they suffered (and TV dramas frequently cover that period in exactly that way).
Now, I am “married” (quotes because it’s still not legal where I live) to a Japanese person for almost 20 years, and know and care about a fair number of individual Japanese people. And I have to say that the run of averagely educated Japanese are still xenophobic and feel superior to other cultures, with the possible exception of the U.S. and France, and maybe Britain. Better-educated Japanese or those who have lived abroad seem more broad-minded in some ways. But cultural exclusivism seems to me to be endemic.
In my opinion, the reason Japanese military behavior in WWII is not as punishable as what the Germans did is that it is less specific - they treated everyone that way. The Nazis went after specific groups, including Jews, Gypsy/Roma, and homosexuals. The Japanese military regarded everyone as beneath contempt, and treated them accordingly. Also, the Japanese atrocities happened abroad; there is a common feeling among Japanese that what you do away from home “doesn’t count” (e.g. if you are a businessman who travels, if you screw a prostitute abroad it doesn’t count as infidelity). Many of the Nazi atrocities were done right there in Germany, making civilian deniability less plausible.
So there you are. I don’t think you can say much about whether atrocities were trumpeted and celebrated at home, frankly I doubt that happened much, but I admit to being biased towards hoping that it’s not true.
Roddy
Jewish influence is and has long been strong in US media. Chinese influence … not so much. The weird thing though is that US soldiers were brutally tortured and killed in Japanese prison camps, used as slave labor, etc., much more systematically brutal than the Germans. But I guess everybody was kinda sick of war when Japan surrendered, so they let it slide. I don’t believe any group has come close to torturing and killing American prisoners on the scale that the Japanese did it … but somehow, it doesn’t seem to matter. (A relative of mine who was a Japanese POW wrote a book about his treatment at the hands of the Japanese … a real eye-opener for me.)
Japan was also a feudal country until after the war. Up until the opening of Japan in the 19th century it was as shitty being a Japanese peasant as a European peasant 500 years earlier. It wasn’t any too pleasant in 19th century Germany either, but Bismarck moved them along much quicker.
This is going to sound very “life is cheap over there,” but I do think there are some differences between collective and individualist cultures. In the West, we really do emphasize the value and rights of the individual. In collective cultures, the individual is less important than the group. i think in some situations, this can manifest itself as cruelty.
I read an interesting theory (on Pol Pot) that Buddhist ideas can sometimes lead to incredible cruelty. Basically, Buddhism teaches that life is suffering which should be overcome by realizing the true nature of existence. If life is all suffering, it doesn’t seem so bad to add a little extra suffering. It’s all an illusion anyway, right?
No kidding. I’ve read one or two Buddhist-oriented childrens’ books over here that posed things like:
Q. Why is that man a beggar? (picture of a kid pointing at a decrepit old man with no legs sprawled out on the street)
A. Because he did something bad in a past life, and he deserves it.
Q. Why did little Johnnie die? (Picture of a kid standing over her classmate’s coffin)
A. Because he did something bad in a past life, and he deserves it.
Q. Why are those people poor?
A. Because they did bad things in a past life, and they deserve it.
Obviously paraphrased a bit (and OK, it was a Falun Gong book so it may have been a bit strident on the Buddhist philosophy). Nonetheless, the ideas have an audience here, at the least.
My first mentor in the frequency control industry was the son of a man who was a police official in one of the Dutch colonies; I regret that I don’t remember the exact one. At any rate, the Japanese over-ran the place early in the WW2 years; my friend, who was just a child at the time, and his father were placed in a prison camp while his mother (and a sister, IIRC) were in another. The family were prisoners for a three year period. To his dying day, my friend would never speak of his treatment by the Japanese who ran the camp. He did tell me once that the presence of the Japanese in our industry brought back nightmares; he said if he encountered three or more in the hall of a hotel, his blood pressure went up alarmingly, he broke into a sweat and his vision dimmed. If he were in an elevator, he told me, and Japanese men entered with him, he had to fight to control a panic attack. I once asked him if he hadn’t learned to forgive and forget; I was trying to sort of make him laugh his way out of one of his panic attacks and I’ll never forget his answer: “No, and I never will.” I can’t imagine what he must have seen and/or endured.
His family did, late in his life, receive a few thousand dollars in compensation but it in no way compensated him.
No. Although attempts were made on the part of Japanese intellectuals to come up with a Japanese ideology that could compete with Western liberalism, the general public and military leadership didn’t care.
The closest thing Japan had to a fascist ideologue, Kita Ikki, was executed by the Japanese government in 1936 after his supporters in the Japanese army (the “Imperial Way” faction) attempted a coup to implement his ideas.
I’ve never heard a good explanation for why the Japanese committed the atrocities they did.
I don’t think this is true. The beheading contest (which possibly never took place), was reported in Japan as victories in hand-to-hand combat, not the killing of prisoners. I don’t know about the fire story, but it’s hard for me to believe that Japanese government censors would allow such stories through.
Completely untrue. The Code of Bushido allowed for honorable surrender and required proper treatment of those taken prisoner. Nothing in Shinto promoted atrocities either. Moreover, Bushido was the way of the warrior class, the Samurai, not the common conscripted soldier. The Imperial Rescript to Soldiers and Sailors issued on the creation of the Imperial Japanese Army during the Meiji restoration in 1882 was a hodge-podge of half-digested Bushido, Buddhism, and Confucianism. Even still, the Japanese were noted for their humane treatment of Russian prisoners in the Russo-Japanese War of 1905. The decent into utter barbarism happened after that and has little at all to do with proper Bushido or Shinto. A good read on the topic is Soldiers of the Sun: The Rise and Fall of the Imperial Japanese Army.
It’s a difficult question. I don’t think I can answer the OP as I wasn’t alive during the war and reliable historical sources are difficult to come by and sometimes conflicting, but I can make some comments based on my experiences. I think there is something in the culture that fosters a fear and hatred of non-Japanese people. I don’t consider myself a Japan-basher and I hope you don’t see me as one, but there is plenty of evidence that things haven’t changed much since the WWII days in terms of culture.
In 2007, the Japanese government conducted a poll asking whether non-Japanese people deserved the same human rights as Japanese people. 41% of Japanese people answered in the negative.
(one might be asking why would a government be conducting a poll on such an issue, as if such things like human rights are decided on the basis of a popularity contest, but there you have it.)
The “life is cheap” in Asia meme has some currency, I don’t want to comment on it much, other than to say that if you are not Japanese there’s a possibility your life is even cheaper.
There’s the case of Hiroshi Nozaki who was charged a couple of years ago with illegal disposal of body parts. It seemed his live-in Fillipina girlfriend died of natural causes at his apartment and he cut up the body and stuffed it into a subway locker. Not charged with murder, though. And this was the second time he’d been caught doing this. Of course this is a cherry picked example, and the actions of a crazy person, but the criminal charges against him are instructive.
On the issue of looking down at other races/nationalities, you could always have a look at the current ‘trainee’ scheme Japan has adopted to help teach poor foreign trainees a trade, develop skills and return to their country with marketable skills.
Except a lot of them end up dying from, what the courts have determined is, overwork. How much do you have to be overworked in order to die? I shudder to think.
That’s not true. First, just to clarify, the question concerned foreigners living in Japan. Secondly, the question of “deserving” didn’t come into it. Respondents were given the choices of “The human rights of non-citizens should be protected as if they were Japanese” and “it’s inevitable (shikata ga nai) that non-citizens won’t have the same rights as Japanese.” The use of shikata ga nai in the second answer, IMHO, gives me an impression of “right or wrong, it’s the way it is.” Interestingly, when you look at respondents’ answers when segregated by age, you get a clear trend towards acceptance. 72% of those in their 20s and 30s chose the first answer, compared to only 46-50% of those over the age of 60.