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Dr Strangelove
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The German government has formally owned up to its war crimes and has worked together with its neighbors to make a better life for all. The Japanese have been very evasive about their guilt. My understanding is that Japanese textbooks still imply that the war and the atrocities committed by Japanese troops weren't really entirely Japan's fault, shoving a major part of the blame off on Western imperialism. You also have to consider that the Japanese occupation of some parts of Asia was much longer than Germany's occupation of its conquered territories. Japan occupied Taiwan and Korea for 60 years.
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Q Cubed
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t3h y3ll0w p3ril
Apr 1999
time: 23:30
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quote:
The Chinese and Koreans realize that we responded to Japan when we were attacked, not because we were so outraged at what one bunch of "inscrutable orientals" did to another bunch. Korea had been under Japanese slave-labor exploitation and cultural genocide for three decades before Pearl, and our overall response in China wasn't a hell of a lot, either. They realize that we acted in our interests. We still treat the RoK like at best a junior partner in that security arrangment, when it's mostly their meat, and entirely their land, that will go into the grinder if the **** hits the fan. When the RoK army was what it was back in the days of "Whitey" Paik, that made some sense. With the state of training, professionalism and competence of the modern RoK armed forces, it really doesn't, but we have always treated them as lessers - something the Koreans have dealt with from the origins of the Chinese and later Japanese empires, so it tends to rub. |
right on the money.
quote:
Third, the general culture in East Asia tends to lead to the formation of more powerful and longer-lasting grudges than in other parts of the world. Confucianism creates a strong group identity, which leads to a certain amount of xenophobia in most East Asian societies. It also introduces the idea that responsibility can be passed down from generation to generation, which allows grudges to fester. It should also be remembered that the bad blood between Japan, Korea and China didn't suddenly crop up after WWII; the atrocities of WWII only served to strengthen the prejudices and anger that had already existed. Take WWII out of the picture and the Koreans would probably still be pissed about Hideyoshi's invasion. |
also, right on the money.
look, when japan thinks what it did to korea: brutal modernization by gunpoint (korea was already starting on a slower path towards modernizing); forcibly using korean slave labor in japanese factories; raping korean women; turning koreans into untouchables within their own country; trying to stamp out the entire tradition of korean culture; and numerous other things between the years of 1905 and 1945 as a favor... don't you think that would irk a good many koreans?
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Sikander
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Boulder, Colorado, United Snakes of America
Jan 2000
time: 22:30
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quote:
Originally posted by Q Cubed
look, when japan thinks what it did to korea: brutal modernization by gunpoint (korea was already starting on a slower path towards modernizing); forcibly using korean slave labor in japanese factories; raping korean women; turning koreans into untouchables within their own country; trying to stamp out the entire tradition of korean culture; and numerous other things between the years of 1905 and 1945 as a favor... don't you think that would irk a good many koreans? |
And this pattern was carried out in Taiwan, Okinawa, Saipan etc., basically everywhere the Japanese Empire encountered other cultures. The Japanese like to point to Western Imperialism in order to detract from their own crimes, but Western Imperialism at its worst only occasionally looked worse than typical Japanese Imperialism.
Anyway, as someone who had lived in both Japan and Germany (though I consider myself an expert in neither) I tend to agree with what seems to be the consensus point, that there is a very different quality to whatever remorse for WW2 exists in these countries. As an observer who didn't live through WW2 observing Germans who didn't live through it either I find the German guilt to be overblown. As for the Japanese, I feel that they were perhaps overlooked in this respect by the Allies (and mainly of course the Americans), and less capable of taking charge of such an endeavor themselves, for a number of reasons.
Part of what took place can be seen as a natural cultural expression on the part of the Japanese. Certainly the average Japanese soldier was much more likely to have committed a warcrime than the average German soldier. Japanese militarism in the 20th century was much less a departure from the continuum of Japanese cultural tradition than Nazism was from the German stream. The Nazis were simply more exceptional, and thus easier to repudiate and villify. The Japanese had no such easy out, as they could not or were not allowed to blame the Emporer for what had taken place in his name.
The Japanese also have tended to be a much more insular people historically than the Germans. This fact has a momentum that even today is easy to see. It means that the Japanese of the WW2 era were quite ignorant of the world around them in comparison to the Germans. Few spoke other languages, and combined with a lower literacy rate in general this meant that much of their information came from Japan itself, which then was not exactly a hotbed of scholarship. A lot of what they consumed was pure propoganda. Of course the Nazis were skilled propogandists as well, but many Germans grew up in a time when journalistic standards were higher, and in any event many Germans had traveled to neighboring states or had met people who were traveling from those states. In essence they were much more wired into their neighborhood than the Japanese.
This insularity made the Japanese much more prone to believe their own propoganda and all that that entailed. It still does for that matter, for though the Japanese are certainly more "wired" into the world than they were 60 years ago, they are less so than one might expect for such a wealthy and trade connected people. This has made it that much harder to fight the momentum of the wartime (or even pre-war) propoganda that made Japan's enemies into inhuman devils and Japan's actions into the rational actions of a race of heroes beset on all sides by inhuman devils.
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VetLegion
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TCO, Spiffor is expaining it so even a kid could understand.
Germans maybe haven't lived up to whatever absolute moral standards your majesty has, but relative to everyone else in the world, they have been outstanding.
And in this thread specificaly, they are discussed in relation to the Japanese.
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25-08-2003 05:24
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