Just when you think you'd heard the worst of it ...

[Stearmen]

There were also political expediencies which prevented full prosecution of those responsible in Japan. If there had been any justice, Hirohito should have come to his finish at the end of a rope in 1946, but politics prevented this.

I agree with you, Hirohito should have been executed. In spite of revisionist history that claims he was a puppet, he started the war and he ended it. The latter is why MacArthur allowed him to live, it was incredible how almost all the people immediately transitioned to peace, after being such bitter enemy's! It would not have happened with out the Emperor. One strange cultural difference happened when the American delegation went to meet with Hirohito. As they were being driven to the Palace, they noticed all the Japanese solder's lining the roads had their backs turned. The Americans were deeply offended at what they perceived as an insult. They had to be told that surrender was the greatest shame for all the Japanese forces, and they felt they were no longer worthy to look into the eyes of the victors! Still, I did not cry when the little man died!

 

[Stand By]

Well, I can say i've learned a lot here! Thanks to all. I had no idea the historical revisionism was this rampant! It's very unsettling!

 

[Stand By]

Just googled Unit 731and done some quick reading … now I totally get the anger and revulsion at Dugout Doug! Ho. Lee. $hit!!! I had NO idea …. and there's so much to read on Unit 731 (and the photos … Jesus!!!) and I know that the more I do, the more unforgivable and damning I will find both him and his decisions to give these evil monsters a free pass. I'm sorry but it's just unforgivable.

 

[Monsoon]

....he started the war and he ended it.

Which is a reason why the US didn't dump a nuke on Tokyo. They knew that Hirohito was the only one that could really end the war.

 

[Big J]

Wow!
Very surprised to see this thread.
I agree fully with pretty much all of the comments here.
If I voice any of those here in Japan I get called an 'anti-Japan racist'.
From the very start of the occupation the Japanese leadership resented defeat (GHQ was called 'go home quickly'), and these attitudes persist today since most politicians are descendants of war-time politicians.
I took my daughters out of the state school system when they brought home elementary school books that taught them that Hiroshima was bombed out of the blue, with no context at all.
MacAthurs anti-communist 'reverse course' got a lot of war-criminals off the hook and set them up in politics, where they set Japan up as a virtual one-party state since the end of the occupation, with a constant overt agenda of returning to pre-defeat social values (eg, staffing the ministry of education with former secret police).
This has largely been met with a tepid response from the Japanese public, and constrained Japanese post war politicians to making the occasional comment.
The current administration is of particular concern in that it's expressed goal is to overturn the post war order.
Politics is out of bounds on the lounge, but if you search the net, I'm sure you'll be outraged by the revisionism at the highest levels here these days.

 

[Big J]

The difference between Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan was that the latter was... shall we say... a little less diligent when it came to paperwork. The Nazis hanged themselves with their own almost OCD-like documentation of their activities.

Actually, you raise an interesting point.
German genocide was largely conducted as a matter of policy requiring documentation as a function of implementing that policy, much of which was used as evidence against them.
Japanese atrocities were born out of institutional racism. There was very little genocide as policy, and as a result, little supporting documentation. What documentation that existed was almost totally destroyed in the two weeks between surrender and occupation. Occasionally documents are found (I can think of three documents that refer to the system of abducting women to use as sex-slaves, in the Japanese government library) but all such documents get 'lost', 'misplaced', or accused of being forgeries.
Eye-witness testimony to war crimes (including that of former Prime Ministers) is officially labelled as being unreliable due to the age of the person involved.

 

[bentusian]

Thanks for your observation and in-sights, Big J.
I think north-east Asian politics has become all the more complex due to China rising and Fukushima incident.

 

[Big J]

Thanks for your observation and in-sights, Big J.
I think north-east Asian politics has become all the more complex due to China rising and Fukushima incident.

For sure! Just like in Europe, a lot of WW2 loose-ends were subordinated to Cold War imperatives. The end of the Cold War saw some of these surface in Europe with the disintegration of Yugoslavia, and more recently, Greece asking Germany for reparation.
About 20 years late, but these unsettled WW2 issues are really coming out now in Asia. China is much more self-confidant, and 20+ years of on/off recession has really undermined Japanese belief in the benefits of post-war peace and democracy.

 

[Stand By]

Glad for your perspectives there, Big J.
And I hear you about Japan (I sent you an interesting article by Stratfor via PM) and one can get a good sense about Japan's changing mood when it wants to remove the D from JDF - Japanese Defense Force (something that was an agreed criteria after WWII).
And yes, the economy can be a very destabilizing thing (it led to two world wars, after all) and Japan's debt is an eye-watering 245% to GDP. To put that into perspective, Zimbabwe's (the economic basket case of Africa) is 200% !!! So one can see how these things can happen and lead on to big trouble ...

 

[Otter]

Monsoon, I agree with you on the decisions behind not dropping a "big one" on Tokyo. By that point in the war most of the Japanese population was , for want of a better word, weaponised.
If operation Olympic, invasion of the Home Islands, had happened then the civil population were expected to join their defence units and use bamboo spears to at least take a white devil with them. Allied casualties were expected to be in the high hundreds of thousands, with around one hundred and fifty thousand killed outright.
Had Hirohito been killed nobody could have called that off, he was still revered as a living God.

 

[Stanley Doble]

I don't want to get into a a big thing so will just say, if revisionism has covered up Japanese racism it has gone the opposite way with Germany. A lot of wartime documents ended up in the Soviet sphere and have only been available to western historians for a few years. David Irving has done more original research than anyone else. Ironically, he gets called a holocaust denier even though he is the guy who documented it and proved it really took place, although not in the way we have been led to believe by mainstream media.

 

[Monsoon]

Anyone interested in this subject needs to check out "Hell To Pay - Operation Downfall" by DM Giangreco. They weren't gonna surrender.

 

[Big J]

I agree with Monsoon, Standby, and Otter.
The Emperor was the only one who could call an end to it, since whether he held real power or not when it came to all of the wartime decisions like bombing Pearl Harbor, the Japanese masses believed that he was the ultimate authority. When the military found out that he had recorded two copies of his surrender speech, they invaded the Imperial Palace, and the Emperor was forced to hide in a cupboard for a number of hours.
If the politicians and generals held the real power, then they had their collective legs taken out from under them when the Emperors surrender speech was broadcast.
There's an academic in Hawaii who wrote a really great paper that pretty much just laid out how the Japanese stumbled into war blind of the consequences due to a system of collective responsibility avoidance at all levels. As a result of this, no one disagreed with any propositions others put forward, and there was a systemic lack of accountability. Everybody was acting upon what they perceived the expectations of others to be.
Most famously, when the Emperor was informed at the planning stage of the Pearl Harbor attack, he simply read everyone a poem, and left the room. In his postwar conversations, he expressed disappointment that his poems cautionary message was not heeded, whilst the politicians and military present at that time took his poem to be direct endorsement of the attack.

With such a culture of poor communication and chronic avoidance of accountability, it is very easy to believe that a mainland invasion of the Japanese home islands would have seen the half-starved masses of Japanese either forced onto US troops with Japanese bayonets at their backs, or blowing themselves up with hand grenades as they did in Okinawa and Saipan, but on the scale of hundreds of thousands a day.

For Japanese revisionists, a constant thorn in their gullet is that US occupation was humane, and brought food and democracy (votes for women for the first time) when the leaders had been telling the people that the Americans were inhumane beasts. At the same time, they suffer cognitive dissonance regarding the Japanese occupation of Asia, which was brutal as hell.
That is to say, the US occupation of Japan was the polar opposite of Japan's occupation of Asia, and yet the US in occupation was everything the Japanese wish to believe themselves to have been in Asia, but were not.

*Caveat, most Japanese people today don't really think about any of this, and just like you or me, just want to get on with their lives; go to work, feed the kids, whatever. I'm talking about revisionist nutbags above.

 

[bentusian]

Thanks for yet another informative contribution, Big J. Are you doing a degree on this subject?

For Japanese revisionists, a constant thorn in their gullet is that US occupation was humane, and brought food and democracy (votes for women for the first time) when the leaders had been telling the people that the Americans were inhumane beasts.

That kinda explains the Japanese obsession with American culture in the post-war era, which in turn put them on the top of the line in this particular fashion industry we're interested in..

 

[Big J]

Thanks for yet another informative contribution, Big J. Are you doing a degree on this subject?



That kinda explains the Japanese obsession with American culture in the post-war era, which in turn put them on the top of the line in this particular fashion industry we're interested in..

Nah, I already got my PhD doing this sort of stuff.
The most interesting thing for me is how opinions vary across the age demographic.
Those with living memory of the war are the most anti-war, anti-nationalistic, and pro-American.
The generation that grew up in the rubble includes some of Japan's most unapologetic revisionists.
The generation that grew up during the 60's is more anti-American because of Japan's role for US forces during Vietnam.
The generation that grew up in the 70's got rich. They don't really care one way or another.
The generation that grew up in the 80's has an overwhelming sense of mis-placed entitlement; Japan's economy became #2, and they were expecting to become #1! They were fed a steady drip-drip of 'We lost the war, but won the peace' messages.
The generation that grew up in the 90's knows only the bursting of the Japanese economic 'bubble', and a sense of malaise.
The generations of this century know nothing but the fact that Japan had an empire, and had a great economy and standard of living, but now
that's all gone, and asian neighbors haven't forgotten that Japan done them wrong. In a sense, the post-2000 popularity of revisionist figures and thinking represents a huge indulgence of 'what if' wishful thinking as an expression of insecurity about Japan's economic, political, and military place in the world.

 

[newsman]

The difference between Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan was that the latter was... shall we say... a little less diligent when it came to paperwork. The Nazis hanged themselves with their own almost OCD-like documentation of their activities.

To some extent I think this is true. OCD is a good description.

But the Japanese were different than us (at least we thought they were) and over there (far away) and Americans had more in common with Europe than Asia at the time. So I think it was easier to identify with.

While I think people paying attention knew there were deadly serious issues in dealing with Japan....it was easier to understand and get information regarding Europe's issues than Japans.

Rumors about this Japanese unit and it's studies have been around for 60 years at least. I don't think anyone should be surprised by this type of thing.

Even today. You want to be captured by Americans, French, English...and not troops from Russia, Iran, etc.

 

[Stanley Doble]

I thought Japan still had one of the highest standards of living in the world and was practically as well off as ever, just not doing as well compared to China and Singapore?

 

[Big J]

I thought Japan still had one of the highest standards of living in the world and was practically as well off as ever, just not doing as well compared to China and Singapore?

Mmm, not really. If you look behind the facade it's like a developing nation going backwards instead of forwards.

 

[Stanley Doble]

Mmm, not really. If you look behind the facade it's like a developing nation going backwards instead of forwards.

Like the US since 2000?

 

[Big J]

Like the US since 2000?

Ahh, I don't want to get political. Maybe best to just say that there is an immense gap between the image that Japan works very hard indeed to present to the world, and the everyday reality for most Japanese people.
Maybe you've heard of 'Paris Syndrome'?
Well, many foreigners have an opposite kind of 'Tokyo Syndrome' when they arrive in Japan and all of thier preconceptions are disproved.