No responsible government that believes in protecting human rights would conduct a poll asking whether human rights afforded should or should not depend on nationality or race. That’s my point.
I didn’t know that. Great. Only at least two Fillipinas had to die before he was sentenced to death.
My personal take is that my uncle was a Japanese POW, working on the Burma railway, one of a minority of survivors. This big man weighed just 6 stone (86 lbs) on his return to the UK and that was after a long voyage on a hospital ship. He was haunted all his life by what happened to him, and although it was rarely explicitly talked about it has been a cause of family pain. In 1971 Emporer Hirohito came to britain on an official state visit. This led to a great deal of public anger from people who felt that he should not be forgiven for what happened. Veterans turned their backs on his carriage on the London streets and satirical magazine Private Eye featured him on the cover with the vituperative line “There’s a nasty nip in the air”. My Uncle had a breakdown. Shorlty before his death his lifelong back pain was finally diagnosed as being the result of having a vertabra cracked by the butt of a Japanese guard’s gun
Tales of Japanese atrocities have been around in British (and Australian) popular culture. There’s the film Bridge over the River Kwai. I have never been able to watch this. It was a favourite of Christmas schedules for some reason and I presume I inherited my aversion from my parents. We also had the long running popular series Tenko about female captives after the fall of Singapore. Americans I should think would be aware of films Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence and the Empire of the Sun.
As the old captives die the memory is fading but in many UK familes scratch the surface and the anger still burns .
They only tried the top 20 or so Nazis at the Nuremberg Trials IIRC.
So these crimes didn’t go unpunished.
They were not so great if you were Jewish, Polish or Russian.
I think it was largely down to the military culture at the time and xenophobia. These soldiers were expected to die, no chance of surrender, and lived in an environment where they endured brutal, repressive treatment themselves. Combined with the attitude that other races were worth less than themselves it is sadly no suprise that people became capable of monstrosities. Brutality breeds brutality.
On the American side there was certainly a significant amount of racism, helped by the government and media of course, but at least some of this is also due to the actions of the Japanese themselves. How many atrocities comitted by your enemy do you have to witness before you start thinking they’re animals? And when you know a soldier is probably going to try and blow himself up with a grenade if you take him prisoner, why not just shoot him now and protect yourself?
The anger still burns in Japan too. Just a few weeks after meeting my father-in-law to be, he sat me down after several drinks and began to tell me how bad life for him and his family was after the US started bombing his city (N.B. no one in his family was injured). I have no idea why he wanted to talk about this macabre subject in what should be a happy occasion of his daughter’s wedding with me. I have no doubt the bombing was scary and terrible for him, but I also have no idea why he took me aside to tell me about that during the first few times we met. Does he blame me, an Australian, for bombing his city? I think he does, in some small place in his heart even though I’m pretty sure no Australian ever bombed his city.
My paternal grandfather was permanently disabled in the Japanese bombing of Darwin (in Australia). He died at a fairly early age in his 50s, probably as a result of bombing injuries.
It’s something that my father-in-law-to-be had, and has, no knowledge of. I don’t even think he knows that Japan ever bombed Australia.
Just to add on to this, there were actually numerous subsequent trials at Nuremberg of various other groups of Nazis, as well as trials of concentration and extermination camp officials at the different sites of the camps themselves.
In the Edo-Tokyo museum in Tokyo, which traces the history of the settlement of Edo and then Tokyo, there is one big wall panel on what is described as the “rise of militarism” in Japan in the 1920s and 1930s. This is followed by another big wall panel on the Doolittle bombing raid and another two-to-three big wall panels on the firebombing of Tokyo. The Doolittle raid and firebombing panels had specific locations of where the various (largely ineffectual) bombs of the raid struck as well as video/city maps of the devastated aftermath of the firebombing and twisted metal wreckage of some buildings and cars that were damaged during it. Following panels discussed in detail the black markets that arose following the bombings and during the beginning phase of the occupation to keep people from starving.
While the nature of the museum itself precludes any real or wide look at what was going in and around Japan at the time or the reasons for WWII, it was striking reading the English translations of the panels’ narratives. Particularly the rise of militarism one and how they compared to the depth and detail provided by the other panels. It was so vague and general about what was going on, why militarism was rising, and even what exactly militarism was in the context of that time. This panel featured some medals and campaign ribbons of Japanese military personnel as well as some propaganda posters of the time.
I just finished reading With the Old Breed in Peilelu and Okanawa, by Eugine Sledge:
It’s a famous first-person memoir of one marine’s account of the war in the Pacific. [It was partly used for the mini-series The Pacific ]
I highly recommend it as an indication of how American Marines thought about the Japanese soldiers they were fighting, and just how savage and brutal that combat became.
I’d be interested in knowing if any similar first-person accounts have survived by Japanese soldiers on the other side … of course, most of those soldiers died, as the battles typically were fought to near-extinction.
Yes, there are definitely two sides to that aspect - I’m not excusing anybody of anything, but in my experience with WWII veterans and their stuff, trophies taken from the Germans were knives and guns; trophies taken from the Japanese were more likely to include skulls. WTF, y’all?
ETA - Malthus snuck in - I’ve read Fires on the Plain, which is a novel based on the experiences of the author who survived the ugly fighting in the Phillipines near the end of the war. It’s ghastly. The funny thing is, I read it in a Japanese Literature class where almost every single author killed himself after a miserable awful life, and then there’s this guy who survived real horrors and died peacefully after a long life.
France?
France?
In Sledge’s memoir, he recounts that after one battle, he saw a marine extracting gold teeth from a Japanese soldier with his combat knife - who was wounded in the spine, but not actually dead [Eventially, another marine, unhappy about all the screaming, shot the Japanese soldier in the head].
I find it hard to imagine an American soldier in the war against Germany doing the same, or rather that his fellow-soldiers would tolerate it.
Thanks - I’ll check it out. I’ve never read anything actually written by the Japanese participants in WW2 fighting - only by their enemies and victims.
While there was rampant racism on both sides, the actions of the Japanese early in the war sealed their fate. After the attack on Pearl Harbor before a declaration of war and the treatment of Western POWs…American/ANZAC soldiers vowed in their mind that they would NEVER surrender to the Japanese again no matter what…and extended that vow to the Japanese as well.
Then you add in suicide tactics…and…well…if the Japanese don’t value their own lives…why should we? If they want to die…well, let’s oblige them.
WWII in the Pacific was intensely cruel. However, The Japanese set the tone. It didn’t have to be as insane as it was.
Absolutely. While racism of course existed and was potent, it was I think the experiences of ordinary soldiers in combat which set the tone. The Japanese simply would not surrender or make any of the usual concessions to mitigate the inherent brutality of combat; in return, their enemies hated, feared and loathed them, and treated them as a species of dangerous animal to be exterminated.
Holy shit. Republicans are a Buddhist cult.
To their credit, however, they did not extend those feelings to Japanese civilians when they were encountered. (At least in reference to US/British/ANZAC forces. I am not well versed enough concerning the Chinese and other enemies of Japan to make any comment on their treatment of civilians one way or the other.)
There were over 200 defendants in the Nuremburg trials. The first bunch of 22 were the big players, which is probably what you were thinking of, but the trials went on for some time.
Hundreds more Nazis were tried at other trials, many of them executed or given long sentences. The Auschwitz trial, for instance, held in Krakow in 1947, tried 41 former Auschwitz officers, only one of whom was acquitted and 21 of whom were promptly hanged. At the Munthausen trial 61 more were tried, all convicted, most hanged.
Yeah but why are there so many dicks? Why to the rest of them let this happen? Its not like they filtered for the sociopaths like they did at the extermination camps in Germany, it was the common run of the mill soldiers.
I read a story about the Rape of Nanking where two Japanese soldiers had a contest to see how many Chinese babies they could skewer on their bayonets. I couldn’t imagine standing by watching someone harm the baby of my worst enemy never mind do it myself. It would literally take watching my own children be killed to drive me to that and I don’t think I would do it with the sort of frivolity those soldiers showed, I would know that I was doing something my soul would never recover from.
I think it might have something to do with the difference between the rounding up and extermination of a historically persecuted minority versus war atrocities by a society that never made sense to us to begin with.
I’ve been to Japan and there seems to be a different morality among the Japanese. Some of that stuff is truly twisted.
Having your country split in half for half a century can make you reflective. The price the Japanese paid was the reconstruction of their country by the Americans and the preservation of their monarchy.
This isn’t a partisan issue. This goes fore everybody: please avoid further comments like this.
Maybe…once you’ve convinced yourself your enemy are subhumans not even worthy to live, you become a dick.
Another culture in the Western hemisphere comes to mind.
Why is there always a need to draw imagined parallels to one’s own culture and try to draw some purse-lipped moral equivalence? The Japanese were uniquely cruel in their own way, to an extent that it shocked even the Nazis on the scene. This isn’t racist and it isn’t a chest-thumping statement of Western superiority. It’s simply a statement of fact. Why not just leave it at that?
ETA: I was assuming Musicat was trying to make some kind of statement about the US in Afghanistan or something or other, but on reflection s/he probably meant the Nazis. Still – we get it. Japanese bad, Germans also bad. Noone disputing that. It’s not a racial issue.