You know “Japs” is a racist term, right?
Is that why you use racial slurs like “Japs”?
Susanann, “Japs” is indeed a slur. Avoid it in the future when you are posting here.
Actually, I figured Musicat was referring to the U.S., and our own period of institutionalized racism. If we’re talking about seeing another culture as less than human and that making us into “dicks,” what better example than slavery in the U.S.? (Apologies if that’s not what you meant, Musicat.)
I guess we aren’t on the same wavelength. I was attempting to compare the Eastern hemisphere (Japanese treatment of foreigners as “sub-humans”) with the Western (Germany’s “sub-humans,” as expressed in Mein Kampf), and didn’t want to Godwinize the thread by saying Nazi or Hitler. I shouldn’t have worried.
There must be a parallel there somewhere.
Here’s an idea: maybe China was to Japan pretty much what Russia was to Germany.
Damn big and scary. Just look at the map. Better get them before the giant awakens and comes after you, right?
Full of people sufficiently backwards in wealth and literacy that you could easily picture as being naturally inferior, or with a little bit of propaganda, barely human. Doesn’t matter if a few of them die, right? It could even do the survivors a fair bit of good - maybe they could learn a bit from our superior culture.
Consisting of people with a mutually unintelligible language and culture, who also had the insolence to fight back furiously. At a time when the typical Japanese soldier had probably never seen a foreigner before. Japan was a country with zero immigration and only had contact with other countries in the ports.
Also, pretty much the place you have to go to expand. A weak target just too good to pass on. You could convince yourself of a lot of things if you saw an opportunity to grab some Lebensraum for your country.
After China, the brutalized troops took the same mindset elsewhere. After all, it worked well enough in China, didn’t it?
I’m pretty sure we’ve been over this before and as I recall, the term’s only a racial slur in the US. It’s a very common term here in Australia, for example, often in reference to Japanese cars (“Jap Imports”), for example.
Oops…sorry about that.
But yeah, I don’t think there’s any risk of Godwinizing this thread…
Googling around, it looks like the Japanese killed no less than 90,000 Filippinos between 1941 and 1945; maybe twice that many.
And the United States killed at least 34,000 or as many as 1,000,000 Filippinos (although I’ve always read that 600,000 was the high end estimate) between 1899 and 1902.
The numbers are in dispute, but I do feel confident that the average American is every bit as ignorant and unwilling to acknowledge national responsibility for the Philippine-American War as we make a big stink about how the average Japanese citizen is for the Second World War in Asia.
Krauts or Frogs are not racial slurs in the US, I guess?
I don’t live in the US so I don’t know. I know I hear the term “Frogs” applied to the French a lot in a good-natured way here, on about the same level as “Pom” is applied to the British.
Japanese prisoners were generally very forthcoming when interrogated, both because they had expected harsh treatment from their captors and being taken captive was the most shameful act possible. Revealing more intelligence than name, rank and serial number couldn’t bring further shame than they had already incurred. I should also note that Japanese military discipline at the time was extremely harsh; beatings were a common form of punishment for even minor infractions. Once reaching the rear area prisoner cages, there’s a good chance a Japanese POW was treated better than he was as a soldier.
Typically only as jokes, not seriously.
When discussing treatment of prisoners by their guards, perhaps it’s relevant to wonder who the guards *were *- well, the dregs. An army in a desperate war seems likely to send any personnel worth a damn into the fray. Any generalizations based on the behavior of people who could actually be spared for guard duty are going to be skewed.
Nah. More like what Africa was to Europe in the late 19th century. China had been on the ropes for the better part of a century, and AFAIK the Japanese looked on China with contempt.
Furiously? With a few notable exceptions – nah. China had no choice but to roll over to Japanese aggression time and time again. China’s collective insolence was in its inexplicable refusal to die.
Doesn’t seem like that would apply to things like the Bataan Death March, though, when the prime troops were on location and the empire didn’t yet face any serious counterattacks.
1.) This board is based on the U.S. and we see it as a slur. Though there may be posters in Australia, the admins generally go by American standards as far as racial slurs.
2.) Susannan is an American, so she knows it’s a slur.
It would be interesting if a Japanese Doper would post on the subject.
They lost. If Japan and Germany won, we would be talking about American atrocities. Every thing they did would have been white washed . Every thing we did would have been horrible.
Not to hijack, but though I would avoid it myself I’d not consider it a racist term on the level of, say, the N word or various ugly terms for Hispanics. More of a nationalistic label – not at all pretty, but I confess on reading some of the things in this thread I found myself muttering the same thing as Japanese-American Sen. Daniel Inouye as he witnessed the bombing at Pearl Harbor: “You goddamn Japs . . .”
You know, I consider this kind of statement on par with Holocaust denial. Yes, I said it, and I said it about you. That’s the ilk I consider you to be falling into when you make statements like that.
Only one person mentioned this so far but, to my not-incredibly-knowledgable eye, the atom bomb muddied the moral high ground considerably in discussing the conduct of the Japanese military.
I mean, yeah they fought to the death and all, no quarter given, but we melted their children. Twice!
The firebombing campaign was not so nice either.
I just think it makes it hard to discuss the Japanese moral failings, when we had quite a few of our own. Now, maybe in reality its absurd to conflate the two. But, its just that Hiroshima came to overshadow everything else in the popular conscciousness.