Yes, it does.
Japan certainly committed war crimes and atrocities to foreigners during the war. But they were not the equivalent of Nazi Germany (or even Fascist Italy). Tojo was not a dictator in the same league as Hitler or Stalin. He was a Prime Minister who was elected into office (and peacefully removed from office in 1944). Japan held elections during the war. There was no domestic reign of terror in Japan - during the entire war only fifty-seven people were executed in Japan (far fewer than the United States during the same period).
So the question is why a regime that was relatively sane at home turn so crazy when it crossed its borders?
The Yasukini Shrine was founded in 1869 and it dedicated to the memory of all Japanese soldiers who have died on duty since 1853. So calling it a place where war criminals are worshipped is a bit deceitful.
Nope but some of the Japanese that visit there are.
I know a few people outside the United States and a lot of them don’t consider these things war crimes (and a lot of people inside the US consider these things war crimes).
So your point is that carpet bombing and nuking cities is a war crime. Sure, I understand the argument.
I think that carpet bombing Dresden and the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki can be justified in a war. Its hard but I can present an argument.
Please present an argument for the Rape of Nanking?
OK I hear you, its not the only thing that happening at the shrine but they do in fact worship war criminals, don’t they? They do it at a shrine right?
If I deceived anyone who read my post into believing that that Japan created a shrine dedicated just to war criminals where people go to worship, then I apologize, that was not my intent.
No. Stop thinking about a Shinto shrine the same way you’d think about ‘heaven/hell’ Western or karma-based religions. Shinto itself doesn’t have a ‘worship’ concept as most Westerners would understand it. Quite frankly it’s almost a stretch to call religion (particularly Shinto-ism) in Japan as anything resembling ‘religion’. Shinto in particular is not a religion in the sense of ‘a faith-based set of beliefs’. Rather, it’s a set of traditions and customs, based primarily on respect for all living things, nature and family. There is no holy text, no holy objects, no set prayers. I’m not even sure there is the concept of ‘sin’. There are concepts about being impure - but as noted previously, souls enshrined at Yasukuni are believed to be absolved of all earthly deeds upon enshrinement.
Japan’s lunatic right (the guys that drive around in the obnoxiously loud trucks with loudspeakers) has tried to hijack the Shrine for its own agenda, which greatly confuses the issue. But the Shrine itself is for respecting and remembering those that died in the service of the emperor: that’s why it was built, decades before WWII. Visiting is in part for paying respects to the dead and remembering the horrors of war - which is why so many foreign dignitaries visit. If you think foreign dignitaries are capable of visiting the shrine without ‘worshiping’ war criminals, why would you think Japanese aren’t?
Your overall point (that Japan was not a totalitarian state and Tojo was not a dictator) is correct, but I think you’re being a little too generous here. Tojo was appointed by the Emperor and the Peace Preservation Law and Kempeitai made things difficult for those who would oppose the government. A lot of the relative domestic peace was caused by people keeping their heads down and not rocking the boat, not because the government was particularly tolerant.
I would attribute the confusion to the fact that the shrine has a sort of hybrid semi-official existence. The private organization running it is pretty closely tied to the Japanese right and pushes a revisionist view of history. So I don’t think it’s really accurate to say that the right has “hijacked” the shrine. The shrine isn’t a neutral party here. But I also think that the Japanese public’s view of the shrine is shaped more by the historical, official role of the shrine than by any of the shrine’s current political activities.
It’s really not. The kami of the class-A war criminals wasn’t worshipped until 1969.
Difficult? That’s understating things. The Kempeitai… now there’s a word I’d forgotten for years. They loved to torture suspects. They also managed the forced conscription of citizens and the “discipline” of rebellious peasants. It has always appeared to me that Japan was not far off from a classic totalitarian state, at least the way my Japanese language instructor-slash-amateur Japanese historian loved to describe them. (No doubt why he said his grandfather immigrated here.)
Offtopic: But I suppose the Japanese had it better than those in other countries where the Kempeitai set up shop. I remember my Japanese language instructor (who also apparently doubled as an amateur Japanese history instructor) telling me about how no one wanted to talk about the massacres of Chinese people by this group in places like Singapore.
It wasn’t rape. They were comfort girls.
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Wars are horrible and nations resort to it too easily. We are a great example of that. The decisions of the politicians boil down to the battle field where the enemy actions are taken on a more personal basis. When you are terrified and your comrades are getting killed around you, you go a bit crazy. All wars are horrible on the battlefield. Young scared soldiers will do terrible things. It is not new.
It is a small step from shooting a person to death on a battlefield and cruel treatment. The whole enterprise is cruel .
Mai Lai was a horror. It was not unique. We are as capable as any other nation of atrocities. The torture of Iraqi prisoners (Abu Grebe) was another horror perpetrated by us.
The military is a totalitarian state. They act beyond civilian restraints.
17. What did people in Germany know about the persecution of Jews and other enemies of Nazism?
Answer: Certain initial aspects of Nazi persecution of Jews and other opponents were common knowledge in Germany. Thus, for example, everyone knew about the Boycott of April 1, 1933, the Laws of April, and the Nuremberg Laws, because they were fully publicized. Moreover, offenders were often publicly punished and shamed. The same holds true for subsequent anti-Jewish measures. Kristallnacht (The Night of the Broken Glass) was a public pogrom, carried out in full view of the entire population. While information on the concentration camps was not publicized, a great deal of information was available to the German public, and the treatment of the inmates was generally known, although exact details were not easily obtained.
As for the implementation of the “Final Solution” and the murder of other undesirable elements, the situation was different. The Nazis attempted to keep the murders a secret and, therefore, took precautionary measures to ensure that they would not be publicized. Their efforts, however, were only partially successful. Thus, for example, public protests by various clergymen led to the halt of their euthanasia program in August of 1941. These protests were obviously the result of the fact that many persons were aware that the Nazis were killing the mentally ill in special institutions.
As far as the Jews were concerned, it was common knowledge in Germany that they had disappeared after having been sent to the East. It was not exactly clear to large segments of the German population what had happened to them. On the other hand, there were thousands upon thousands of Germans who participated in and/or witnessed the implementation of the “Final Solution” either as members of the SS, the Einsatzgruppen, death camp or concentration camp guards, police in occupied Europe, or with the Wehrmacht.
18. Did all Germans support Hitler’s plan for the persecution of the Jews?
Answer: Although the entire German population was not in agreement with Hitler’s persecution of the Jews, there is no evidence of any large scale protest regarding their treatment. There were Germans who defied the April 1, 1933 boycott and purposely bought in Jewish stores, and there were those who aided Jews to escape and to hide, but their number was very small. Even some of those who opposed Hitler were in agreement with his anti-Jewish policies. Among the clergy,* Dompropst* Bernhard Lichtenberg of Berlin publicly prayed for the Jews daily and was, therefore, sent to a concentration camp by the Nazis. Other priests were deported for their failure to cooperate with Nazi antisemitic policies, but the majority of the clergy complied with the directives against German Jewry and did not openly protest.
**[List of Questions] [1-18] [19-29] [30-36] **
Source: Copyright The Simon Wiesenthal Center
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Plenty of Germans were aware of what the Nazi’s were doing to the Jews. Let’s not make things up, in order to change history regarding what the Japanese were capable of doing. Nazi’s and Japanese were equally evil.
I don’t know if it was posted earlier in the thread or not, but John Dower’s War Without Mercy is a great book on this topic. It also examines at great length American cruelty in the Pacific theater. link to Amazon
Yes, atrocities happen in most any war and by all sides.
There is a difference between isolated incidents and a policy of mistreatment.
The Nanking Massacre, “Comfort Women” (basically institutionalized rape), general treatment of POWs (Bataan Death March being just one example) and Unit 731 in particular makes the Nazis seem like nice guys.
Trying to dress up Tojo as part of a liberal democracy elected to office by the people and losing a re-election is beyond absurd. Tojo was a general in the IJA and the army minister prior to being appointed prime minister by Hirohito. He was forced to resign after the fall of Saipan on 18 July 1944. The was no election to replace him, his appointed successor was http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuniaki_Koiso, also a general in the IJA. How was his term in office?
Really? I wrote about this before, but…Not to downplay Nanking and the Bataan Death March…but you really think those events are worse than the attempt at exterminating an entire ethnic group?
Think about the infrastructure needed. Think about the scale. Nazi had Final Solution operations stretching from into Russia, all the way to the Atlantic Coast, from the Baltics to the Balkans. You needed bureaucrats and planners and administrators. You had to build and maintain transportation networks connecting the death factories. You had to build and maintain facilities for workers working at the death plants, plus holding areas for the victims before they were killed, you had to arrange for management and removal of human remains.
There is a massive gulf of difference between the cruelty of Japan’s military during the war and Nazi genocide. One is crude brutality, born of a mix of superiority complex and racism, coupled with the horrors of war. One analogy: ‘gook’ is the well-known deragatory term used by US marines to refer to Asians enemy soldiers, particulary during the Korean and Vietnam Wars; the idea being that it’s easier to kill lots of the other side if you come to view the enemy as sub-human). Contrast that with the structural, mass killing with the aim of wiping out an entire group of people from the earth.
As awful as Japan’s actions may have been, Japan did not have a continent-wide network of concentration camps. Nanking and the treatment of POWs was almost a primal brutality - contrast that with the cold, chilling efficiency of the Nazis: the construction of the death factors, the organizational and transportation structures put in place, and the entire administrative efficiency with which the whole thing was managed… there is no quantitative or qualitative equivalent in Japan or any other part of history.
Fine then call it honor, venerate, whatever.
Cuz the foreign dignitaries aren’t going there for the same reason that Japanese people go there.
I don’t know about “nice guys” but its not a stretch to say that the Japanese don’t really get as much criticism as they deserve for what they did.
Sure, the Rape of Nanking was worse than anything that anything the Germans did to any European city.
Sure, the German’s didn’t conscript comfort women for their military brothels.
Sure, the Germans didn’t treat their POWs as poorly as the Germans.
Sure, Unit 731 was far more cold calculating and deliberate than Mengele ever was.
BUT the holocaust is a pretty tough act to follow.