72 years (and 13 hours) ago...

[Belsnickel]

(08-06-2017, 07:36 PM)samhain Wrote: Imperial Japan gets by unnoticed to a lot of people due to the fact that they were carrying out atrocities at the same time that the Nazis were.  They Holocaust was such a wholesale and well-publicized event that the actions of the Japanese go by the wayside.  

Make no mistake, Imperial Japan was every bit as evil as Nazi Germany.  Read a book called The Rape of Nanking, and you'll understand.  Some of the things the Japanese did to the Chinese make ISIS look like kid stuff.  Just remorseless brutality (including crimes perpetrated against pregnant women, the elderly, infants) and literal killing in mass numbers purely for sport.  They bred soldiers to be brainwashed killing machines from childhood.

After reading this book, I have to say I changed my mind about the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings.  It was an extreme measure, to be sure.  It's something that should be avoided at all costs I the future, no doubt.  However, condsidering the crimes committed by Imperial Japan and their extensive efforts to cover these crimes up all the way into the 2000's, I have little sympathy for them as a nation with respect to that event.  Their ideology needed to be met with extreme violence (Much like the Nazis, perhaps even radical Islam) and rooted out, and it was.

I have to say, one of my biggest issues with Japan today is their refusal to acknowledge what they did. I love a lot of things about Japan, e.g., the food, the stationery and pens, the porn. Their inability to recognize what happened in their past makes it difficult for them to truly move on as a culture.