Any WWII buffs?

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Ah true but I took a class last fall dealing South Africa and Asia/Japan since 1945 from of social history perpestive. Many believe the Emperor should have been trialed but this would caused massive repercussions such as a strong opposition to the American occupation of Japan. Like I said before their own government is split on apologizing for their past war crimes. Germany doesn't even mention WWII in Europe in their history books for different reasons but they will mention Hitler did good for their economy before the war. I look at the past now from a social historian view who bases my evidence not on facts like high school history but more of why these events occurred in the first place. Spite what the Japanese did, I'll still forgive them because one I didn't served during the Pacific War and two everyone is a human being and choose what we can do and not do.

And to Prof:
Incendiary Bombs were strategic mission based weapons so the U.S. Navy would not have accessed to them at all. Only U.S. Army Air Force would because they had strategic missions. However, they could be used for pre-invasion bombings but the Japanese pretty much were dug in well so not much effect there.


Napalm was a tactical mission based weapon which the Navy had access to in the first place more than likely when carrier task forces began attacking the Japanese Home Islands.


They were used but the enemy was well prepared and well dug in as well. Look at Iwo Jima nothing was destroyed because everything was underground and this was the same deal with Okinawa.

Holocaust scholar right here. *raises hand tentatively*

Well then you realize that the fire bombing of Tokyo killed more people than Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. Yes we're saw the same to the Japanese. The problem is that Japan went back to the Samurai Code which caused much problems to us than anything. In the end though it was a total war on all aspects of warfare. We even killed Japanese POWs out of anger towards what they did to us. U.S. soldiers and marines would even collect dead Japanese soldiers skulls and used for things. We even cut gold teeth out of their dead. Yes the Japanese did cruel things to us and in returned we did the same to them. People have the ability to choose but that ability can be easily manipulated toward an evil cause when the person is good.

No.
"It's a cultural thing" does not cut it when you are talking about the organized butchery of hundreds of thousands of people. There is no social-historical perspective that can change the evil implicit in such acts. There is no excuse for rape, torture, and murder, ever.

That is cool to know here.

Yes, but those actions were alway committed by individual men. It's a damned shame those men were never punished for their actions, but there was never any tacit approval from higher up the command chain. No American General ever ordered his troops to go rape and murder the inhabitants of an entire city, or to execute any prisoners they felt like killing, and if they had their soldiers would have refused those orders. The Japanese Officers did issue such orders and their men carried out those orders. That is unforgivable.

Hello

What if the excuse was from the U.S. and our government? Do we tell not write about it because then their own nation would be shocked and demanded the truth like with the case with Germany as well? Do we make the Germans to admitted to the Holocaust and the likewise for Japan? There is more than meets the eye a good amount of the time.

The Tokyo War Trials had those who ordered such actions killed or imprisoned for life. A little military thing here, if you believe an order is immoral then you can choose to not obey it. Also those in charged are the true evil when it comes to such actions. The Japanese soldiers were forced to do it but they still had a choice to do it, Watch Letters from Iwo Jima and it will break your ideas of cruelty and evil the Japanese were. Thus there is always two sides to a story in the end.

Well, in training. Got interested about, say, two years ago. And it's a big subject. For an aspie.

If such acts were committed I would be glad to see those who committed them (or those who ordered them to be committed) brought to justice no matter whose side they were on.


Considering that the entire Japanese High Command and most of their Officer Corps were complicit in some way or another with crimes against humanity, I doubt a tenth of those deserving received punishment.


Indeed, and any who refused such immoral orders are definitely on the side of the angels. The fact is though, when presented with that choice, many chose wrongly; and when it comes to murder "I was just following orders" is not a viable excuse.

I have not seen the film but it's definitely on my watch list (Along with its companion piece). However I never claimed All Japanese soldiers were cruel or evil. armed combat is what it is, but those who executed unarmed prisoners or committed crimes against civilians certainly were evil.

The Japanese soldiers have slowed began to tell their tales about these inhumane acts but their government wants to censored it for some reasons. The Japanese government must fear repercussions towards them or something about its past to the public. I know because there was a film done Nanjing by the Japanese who interviewed the actually soldiers who were there and the government looked down on the film.

Well, I was wrong about Turkey... Got confused with WWI...

All six powers committed war crimes. Some were more spectacular than others, but we're better off admitting that everyone had their fingers in the pie.

Japan was responsible for the horrific Rape of Nanking, where thousands of Chinese civilian women were dragged out into a town square and simply raped. The Japanese also performed ghastly medical experiments on American POWs, most of them involving deliberate infection with diseases like yellow fever and plague (WWII really was the "Lead Age" of medical ethics). There was also the whole Bataan Death March thing. Yeah, war is hell.

I think Americans avoid talking about Japanese war atrocities because we feel bad about going overboard with our frankly racist demonization of all things Japanese during the war. It's kind of like how the German government always tries to be extra sweet to Jews these days. It's the joy of guilt!

Just bringing up the rapes of thousands of women in Nanjing is one of the many atrocities committed there. I have also read of them spraying crowds with gasoline and lighting them on fire, and marching thousands of young boys and men to the outskirts to be shot. I also have a book with photos and Japanese news paper clippings- a few charming examples of Japanese soldiers brutality include-

Photos: (I should add that all are either gruesome enough or obscene enough that I think posting them here would violate the ToS)
Burying hundreds of people alive
Mutilating womens bodies in countless obscene ways
Using civilians for bayonet and target practice
Mass be headings and display of the heads
Among others...

However those here that have argued about how implicit the Japanese might have been should be interested to know that much of these was in fact reported back in Japan. I have a photo of a newspaper talking about two Japanese officers who engaged in a be heading spree to see who could kill one hundred men first, though their tallies as reported were 105 and 106.

Additionally to that, as many as 25,000,000 Chinese disappeared from certain regions of China. And don't get me started on what they did to Korean women...

All told, most realistic estimates of the Nanjing massacre, or Rape of Nanjing, are of at least 400,000, and at most 1,000,000. All done in about two months time. So who is worse, really, the Germans, who's population was kept in the dark, or the Japanese in WW2?

In fact, various western powers *including* Nazi Germany's diplomats in Nanjing set up an International Safety Zone- check out the story of John Rabe, the hero of Nanjing, who also happened to be a member of the German Nazi party. Irony, at its best, no?

Absurd. The interning of the Japanese is hardly one of the prouder moments in american history but doesn't even come close to a "war crime" Paranoid? Absolutely! They were loyal americans and showed zero signs of loyalty to imperial Japan. Idiotic? You Bet! The conditions in the internment camps bred exactly the sort of discontent the government was trying to avoid, but to compare it to the systematic murder of eleven million people is just... ridiculous.