WHEN in the course of human Events, it becomes necessary….
And Speaking of Mass Formation Psychosis: The Pre-Nuked Japanese as Seen in the Nanking March
byVanderleunonJanuary 4, 2022
“Here We have the triumphant Victory March of the victorious Imperial Army through the devastated streets of Nanking looked upon by the few living relatives of those killed by the thousands, todays equivalent would like the British Army doing a victory parade in the streets of Derry accompanied by the Orange order to celebrate the Derry massacre.
“If you look at the Nanking massacre information on the internet you will be taken aback by the many entries from the Japan media side which do not recognise any undue killings over and above military operational casualties , In fact the whole period in Japan is only referred as the Nanking INCIDENT.”
Nanking, the treatment of P.O.W.’s and Unit 731, Biological Warfare Project, is what I refer to when someone argues against the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. To really drive the point home, I emphasize the fact we had to bomb them TWICE!
Nations as well as men can go bat-shit crazy. Most folks know about Nazi Germany, but Japan was much crazier. Whatever the Nazis did, the Japanese did far worse. Auschwitz was a slightly restricted summer camp compared to what the lunatic Japanese militarists did to everyone they got their hands on. See here, but not after eating:
One can make the argument that not every German believed in Nazi propaganda, that not every German agreed with the SS. One can make no such argument regarding Japan. Every one of them, from young kids to mature adults, bought into the nightmarish and totalitarian program of bushido and the religion of Shinto—emperor worship. After the 1945 Battle Okinawa Japanese leadership knew the war was lost. So it commanded every citizen of Japan to arm himself with bamboo stakes to as to meet any invading US troops with swarms of millions dedicated to dealing and accepting death. The US Marines in just one planned landing site would have had to deal with thousands of rabid schoolgirls and schoolboys charging at them. Hundreds of thousands would have died in service to their emperor.
Thus the necessity of the nuclear bombs. It took the fires of Hell to remove the horrors in the Japanese soul.
gwbnycJanuary 4, 2022, 9:21 AM
IIRC children were thrown from cliffs by parents on Okinawa rather than suffer the humiliation of defeat. The island was considered homeland, as much a part of the country as the mainland.
Yep. Bat-shit crazy they were. Killing of children, mass suicide, Kamikaze pilots, burning Catholic nuns to death with gasoline, practicing swordplay on American POWS, Bataan Death March and on and on.
ghostsniperJanuary 4, 2022, 10:04 AM
Far better than letting them become victims of the white devils that would soon be storming their shores to torture, rape, kill, and eat them. Every gov’t treats their citizens as disposable.
That’s exactly what the Japanese government told its citizens. It also said that black American soldiers would eat them alive for food.
As for your statement that “Every gov’t treats their citizens as disposable.” I would have never believed this about the American government. But I do now.
TerryJanuary 5, 2022, 8:38 AM
” I would have never believed this about the American government. But I do now.”
I believe now also. But I came to the conclusion in the early sixties.
Every American should read this book about the Dulles brothers:
a cousin married a death march survivor, she was his nurse immediately after the war
CallmelennieJanuary 4, 2022, 9:28 AM
Why mere hundreds of thousands, Mike. Seems as if the numbers would have been measured in millions .. no matter what we did. We might have set up a impermeable blockade of the Japanese Home Island, but then millions of them might have starved.
My theory about why the atom bomb led to Japanese surrender is that it ALLOWED this society to surrender. This nation had devolved into the most extreme Honor based culture ever seen. They were so terrified of the pathological levels of shame which would accrue from the cowardice of surrendering to other men whom they had deemed inferior in terms of courage and honor, they would have endured anything
Then along comes something so horrible and immense that it was basically outside human civilization. It was an unprecendented natural cataclysm. There would be no dishonor or cowardice to bow down to such a thing, any more than it would be to flee to higher ground after a tsunami warning. And, of course once the Emperor made this proclamation, they all fell in line
You are correct about the total numbers of dead. I was just using one landing site. And your theory on the effect of the nuclear bombs on the Japanese makes perfect sense in the context of post-1880 Japan. But some of the Japanese militarists wanted to sacrifice every Japanese. Even as Hirohito was preparing his surrender speech, groups of assassins were trying to head him off. This is a type of mass insanity that only death can stop.
GregJanuary 4, 2022, 5:43 PM
My late father-in-law , 7th Marine veteran of Okinawa, always thanked God for the atomic bomb.
CallmelennieJanuary 4, 2022, 9:41 AM
Ive seen this very movie on cable .. 10 years ago. It definitely shows Japanese atrocities. such as marching Chinese POWs to the banks of a river, the Yellow River I think, and then opening up on them with machine guns.
It also deals with the rapes of Chinese women but not in a graphic way .. it deals the fear that the women had of being raped, and the devastating emotional aftermath of same. I doubt that this is a Japanese film. I seem to recall it was made in China, perhaps Taiwan
Rape has always been part of warfare, but the Japanese made it official policy. Tens of thousands of Korean women, for just one example, were sent to Japan as “comfort women” to provide services to the soldiers. The thousands of children born of these horrific unions were shunned by both Japanese and Korean societies, their lives were ones of terrifying misery.
Boat GuyJanuary 4, 2022, 10:43 AM
It’s been written before that the current Japanese history of WWII is “One day, for no particular reason, the Americans dropped an atomic bomb on Japan.”
H (science denier)January 4, 2022, 1:38 PM
Here is a little ditty from my formative years (no, not the “if you ain’t Cav, you ain’t shit” one) based on the old Pepsodent jingle:
You’ll wonder where the yellow went,
When the napalm hits the Orient.
And that’s what it took to get them to stop, on a somewhat grander scale, of course. Never forget they’d have done the same to us, and likely worse, if they had possessed the means.
They would have done to us what they did to American POWs in the Bataan Death March. But they had no intention of invading our shores, as the Japanese militarists believed it was not necessary. After Pearl Harbor, so they fantasized—except Yamamoto, who had planned Pearl Harbor, had lived in the US and had no illusions about American industrial might——the US would negotiate and agree not to interfere in the Japanese “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere”.
Fat chance. FDR and the US Military adopted US Grant’s “unconditional surrender” policy. One hundred sixty-one thousand American dead later—along with 3,000,000 of the so-called “super race” of Japanese—Japan surrendered “at US discretion”. That is, unconditionally.
H (science denier)January 6, 2022, 5:17 AM
I never suggested they intended to invade mainland United States. Nuke Pearl Harbor and some of the west coast ports, they wouldn’t have to. Granted they lacked B-29’s for a delivery system, but there’s more than one way to thermonuclearly incinerate a cat.
Imagine the Pacific theater with Pearl and the west coast ports taken out right at the first. Then imagine Hitler declaring war as he did a few days later.
Pearl Harbor was a tactical victory for Japan, but a massive strategic defeat—a defeat that led directly to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. She was years from anything like a nuclear bomb, and such a fantasy never entered into her military equations.
Germany’s declaration of war upon the US on December 11, 1941 also insured Germany’s destruction. The declaration was unnecessary, and made the war a world war.
“The reality is that war with the United States had been included in Hitler’s agenda for years, that he had deferred hostilities only because he wanted to begin them at a time, and under circumstances, of his own choosing, and that the Japanese attack fitted his requirements precisely. It had been an assumption of Hitler’s since the 1920s that Germany would at some point fight the United States.”
Germany did not have the strategic reach to threaten the US mainland. Japan did, though in a limited fashion. She would have been met, as it is rumored to have been said by Yamamoto himself, that “You cannot invade mainland United States. There would be a rifle behind each blade of grass.”
This is the reason why FDR in early 1942 placed 100,000 Japanese “Americans” into camps. No Germans were treated likewise, because there was no threat from a German invasion.
It is worth the time to try and understand the Japanese view on World War II—if that is even possible for a gaijin. It is, as you would have guessed, rather different from ours. Take the US sponsored assassination of Yamamoto in April, 1943—an operation aptly called “Operation Vengeance”. To Americans, Yamamoto—who had lived in the US—was a monster who had planned the Pearl Harbor attack and who deserved to be hunted down and killed. To the Japanese, he was a war hero .
Here is the death of Yamamoto from the Japanese point of view. He comes across as a saint who experiences an apotheosis at the end.
I have been doing this job for like a few weeks and my last weekly payment was exactly
𝙁𝙞𝙣𝙙 𝙤𝙪𝙩 𝙝𝙤𝙬 𝙃𝙀𝙍𝙀….__𝐅𝐮𝐥𝐖𝐨𝐫𝐤𝟎𝟏.𝐓𝐤
kyo ritendoJanuary 4, 2022, 2:19 PM
am i supposed to give two shits for a bunch of chins who got a taste of japanese hospitality? kill a billion more and i still would not care. the chinese people are a cancer on the world.
A bit harsh perhaps, but probably true—at least as far as the Chinese government goes. Of course, they say the same about Americans. No doubt that if China disappeared tomorrow the world would be better off.
35,ooo,ooo Chinese died in World War II, by the way. “Japanese hospitality” at its finest.
Kevin in PAJanuary 5, 2022, 3:35 AM
I would argue that the Chinese Communist Party and not the people of China are the problem.
With respect to the Japanese and the atrocities they committed in Nanking and elsewhere on the mainland and throughout the war, they were fighting the communists in China.
The communists in China teach their citizens that Mao was responsible the defeat of the Japanese invaders. Ha! Commie propaganda. The truth is that Mao was hiding in the hills of Central China and organizing guerrilla war fighters to defeat the clans that opposed Communism on the mainland. Meanwhile Chang Kai Shek, alien with Western nations in an effort to fight the Japanese and defeat the communists under Mao. He underestimated Mao’s power and ultimately fled to the Island of Formosa (commonly known as Taiwan – the Portuguese translation – “beautiful flower”…and it is). Chang was treated like a dog by the Western powers and thus, today hangs in the balance, as Chinese communists rattle their sabers and threaten to retake the “renegade province”.
If one wishes to see just how cheap life is, go to Asia. It may open your eyes. The Japanese, Chinese, Koreans, Viet, Thai, etc. have a very different view of life than Westerners.
As a practitioner of Japanese martial arts, I had the privilege of speaking with Kenzo Mabuni (heir to the Seito Shito-Ryu Karate system), before he passed. He was a young man raised under the banner of Bushido (code of the warrior) in pre-war Japan. His comments when asked about the war were quite interesting; He said, “when we were young we were taught to believe that war was the way. We learned that was not true.”
Yes, the Japanese learned and they came around to our side in global affairs, especially as it relates to China’s communists. Japan is an amazing country. Clean, orderly, polite and respectful, with great food. China, on the other hand, firmly under the control of commies for more than 80 years is filthy, chaotic, bitter, frenetic, obsessive, materialistic, and lashing out at all of its neighbors, antagonizing Japan, U.S., Aussie-land, India, Philippines, and others.
While I don’t ascribe to the sentiment expressed by Kyo Ritendo, above, I understand it.
“I would argue that the Chinese Communist Party and not the people of China are the problem.” Undoubtedly true. But that is also undoubtedly true about the rulers of most governments in History concerning the people over whom they rule. It seems that throughout time and space the men who rise to the top are just the sort of men who should never be trusted with power. The people in China have as much say over government policy as the people in North Korea have over theirs. But then, how much control over the US government do the vast majority on the American people have? China is controlled by a few old men in the Politburo who are absolutely immune from any influence other than from the other old men in the Politburo.
Chiang Kai-shek might have had good intentions, but he was hobbled by the corruption in his own military and government, by the war with Japan, by the conflicting opinions of his US advisors, and by the near impossible logistics of American supplies reaching those parts of China under Nationalist control. This is the great tragedy of 20th century China, that from hindsight—always 20 / 20—the West could have made a effort to destroy the forces of Mao, to “strangle the Bolshevik baby in his crib.” Mao’s forces numbered only 7000 in 1935.
“If one wishes to see just how cheap life is, go to Asia.” I would expand that to include Africa and Latin America. Life in those places is worth only what those in power say it is. The concept of Natural Law is not practiced there. The idea that every life has inherent value is a particular vanity of Western Civilization. At their very best all nations in History only managed, from time to time, to care for the lives of only their own people. China murdered 100,000,000 million Chinese in the 20th century alone. Even in America, “the land of the free and the home of the brave”, we have slaughtered 50,000,000 children in the wombs of our own women.
Your comment comparing Japan and China made me smile. Who would choose to live in China rather than Japan? China acts like a rabid, filthy and deranged animal, “red in tooth an claw”—which she is.
Sid VJanuary 4, 2022, 5:04 PM
Never forget.
The Japs eventually came around though. My father took shrapnel to the head and other body parts courtesy of the Chicoms on a cold February day in 1951 on the Korean Peninsula. He was subsequently flown to Tokyo where he was operated on by a Japanese brain surgeon who saved his life. And I’ve been more than happy to work for a Japanese auto company for the last 17 years. Beautiful country too, having spent a week there in 2002. Any country that has conveyor belt sushi restaurants on every block is OK in my book.
Casey KlahnJanuary 4, 2022, 5:30 PM
Everything written upthread is true, and I echo the sentiments.
The Japanese are now our right flank in our next war with China.
Just so. People write about China as if she can operate independently of other realities. Nope. In war your enemy has a vote. Japan, India and Taiwan have a vote. As does the US Navy.
Gordon ScottJanuary 4, 2022, 7:13 PM
I have been told that the atrocities were a Japanese Army thing, and not practiced nor approved of by the Japanese Navy. I don’t know if that’s true.
There are folks who argue that Japan had a working atomic bomb, which was tested offshore of Korea a few days after Hiroshima. They say there was a massive complex in the north of Korea, that produced this. After the war, folks who knew simply kept silent, for obvious reasons. I don’t know, but the argument is persuasive.
China recieved a tiny fraction of what Russia and the UK received in Lend/Lease materials–about two percent. Had the communists around FDR not been so influential, the Chinese army could have accomplished a lot more, including ending the Maoist revolt.
Liberty ships deliver more than DC-3’s. What port would that Lend/Lease (singularly a Anglo-American pact) ‘material have docked at in Mainland China during WWII?
Read a book.
Gordon ScottJanuary 5, 2022, 1:14 PM
I did read a book, John, about Lend/Lease, interestingly. Lend/Lease was expanded to the USSR and China after the declaration of war. Neither paid back any real amount; the USSR aid was written down to two cents on the dollar. The UK finished paying off Lend/Lease in about 2006. Nice, eh?
As for getting stuff to China, had the need and priority been there, ways would likely have been found. We sacrificed a lot of lives and material on the Arctic sea routes. We also built the Alaska Highway to get things to and from Alaska during the war. Could US engineers have punched a road through? I don’t know, but I do know both the British and the Japanese were stunned at US civil engineering.
It was the Japanese Army that ran the show, with the navy acting only in support of the army. If fact the entire China mission was done on the sole authority of the army. There was no civilian control to speak of. The Japanese Army and the navy were often at loggerheads with each other, fighting for control of resources and such. The end of World War II still saw more than one million Japanese soldiers on duty in China.
While it is possible that Japan was working on a nuclear bomb in Korea, it is unlikely in the extreme. Resources, experimentation, knowledge, technical capacity and infrastructure were not at the level necessary to construct and test a bomb. Some Japanese scientists, however, well understood the theories behind nuclear fission.
The difficulty of supplying Chiang Kai-shek and his nationalist army probably goes beyond what FDR’s pro-Soviet advisors imagined at the time. Chiang was at war with both the Chinese communists under Mao, the Japanese Army, some of his own officers, and the US advisors surrounding him. Most supplies had to come through Burma, itself a minor sideshow to the Pacific War. And you are right: Mao could have been destroyed had that been a goal of the US under FDR. This was yet another one of History’s tragic “What ifs?”
FDR deserves credit for many of his actions during the war, but deserves much blame for not understanding the USSR and how she had infiltrated the top echelons of the US government. Much of post-war misery was due to the policies FDR undertook before he died.
NoriJanuary 5, 2022, 1:27 PM
James Bradley,the son of one of the men who raised the flag on Mt Suribachi,wrote a book in 2003 called “Flyboys”. It chronicles what happened to 9 young American Navy and Marine aviators who were shot down attempting to destroy the vital Japanese radio transmitters on Chichi Jima,about 150 mi north of Iwo Jima. The War Dept knew their fate,but kept it classified til 1997. All but one were captured and taken to Chichi Jima for interrogation,and eventually decapitated.
That’s not the worst of it. Two of these young men were dissected by the island’s Japanese doctor,who carefully saved both men’s livers,and one’s thigh muscle. Their livers were carefully diced and threaded on bamboo skewers,grilled with teriyaki and served to the Japanese officers along with copious sake.
Gruesome and unsettling,the book also recounts that at the time this was happening in Feb-March of 1945,our Air Force was napalming Tokyo. Almost as many Japanese were incinerated in Tokyo as died a few months later in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.
The book is a riveting read,with maps and photos of the islands and the handsome young aviators,before their capture.
The one who was miraculously rescued was 20 yr old Lt.(jg) George H.W. Bush,who was shot down in late ‘44 doing a bombing run over Chichi’s radio towers.
Wow. Quite a story. History is funny that way: why some die; why some don’t. I have no answers.
Annie RoseJanuary 8, 2022, 8:12 AM
In my village of 45,000 in the burbs north of Chicago, the atrocities by the Japanese have not been forgotten by some and became a very contentious point a few years back. We have a major Korean Cultural Center and our sister city is in Korea. Our local politicians, who are woefully ignorant of any history, traveled to South Korea for a visit, and we have welcomed a delegation from that country several times.
Our town was then gifted a very large, life-sized Comfort Woman statue, and asked to display it prominently in front of our village hall. Comfort Women were those Korean girls who were forced to have sex with occupying Japanese soldiers and often raped to death. Our stupid village board thought this statue was a fine idea, because what American town hall wouldn’t want a statue dealing with Korean rape prominently displayed among the petunias?
Even after my husband, the fire chief (and an avid student of history) pointed out to them that perhaps one of our major businesses in town, a Japanese business, might object to this political statement, and maybe we shouldn’t get in the middle of this political dispute, or that rape survivors might be horrified having to see it, they continued to plan its installation and the dedication ceremony. The board poo-pooed the idea of anyone might object to a simple statue….until they received a very official visit from the Japanese consulate in Chicago, who delivered a very formal letter explaining that placement of the statue would be viewed as an extreme insult to the country of Japan and that the prominent, long-standing Japanese business in our village would leave our town, taking the much-needed tax revenue and jobs for our locals with it, to another more welcoming town, should we display the statue.
The South Korean government evidently has a mission to place these Comfort Women statues wherever there are Japanese interests, as a form of protest and rubbing the Japanese noses in it, because Japan has never really apologized for these atrocities and for many decades denied them.
There is also not far from our town, in another town, a very large, private Japanese school for the children of Japanese CEOs. We have a lot of Japanese and a lot of Koreans, along with many first-generation people from around the world. So here we are in our small, no nothing, multi-cultural Mayberryish American town with two groups who rabidly hate each other—with good reason.
The village board backed down. The Comfort Woman statue sits in storage on a shipping pallet, wrapped up and hidden in the bowels of a village building, as the Korean Cultural Center, where it should be displayed, refuses to accept its return. Atrocities should be remembered, but more importantly, the consequences for those performing those atrocities should be swift and just; something we would do well to remind our current leaders.
Real World Address for Donations, Mash Notes and Hate Mail
Gerard Van der Leun
1692 MANGROVE AVE
APT 379
Chico, Ca 95926
Green Pants Interior by Klahn
Who Am I? by Carl Sandburg
My head knocks against the stars.
My feet are on the hilltops.
My finger-tips are in the valleys and shores of universal life.
Down in the sounding foam of primal things I reach my hands and play with pebbles of destiny.
I have been to hell and back many times.
I know all about heaven, for I have talked with God.
I dabble in the blood and guts of the terrible.
I know the passionate seizure of beauty
And the marvelous rebellion of man at all signs reading “Keep Off.”
My name is Truth and I am the most elusive captive in the universe.
Duty, Beauty, Liberty, Country, Honor, Family, Faith — Plus a few simple easy to follow rules for guys
Men saw the stars at the edge of the sea
They thought great thoughts about liberty
Poets wrote down words that did fit
Writers wrote books
Thinkers thought about it
Take it where you find it
Can’t leave it alone
You will find a purpose
To carry it on
Mainly when you find it
Your heart will be strong
About it
Many’s the road I have walked upon
Many’s the hour between dusk and dawn
Many’s the time
Many’s the mile
I see it all now
Through the eyes of a child
Take it where you find it
Can’t leave it alone
You will find a purpose
To carry it on
Mainly when you find it
Your heart will be strong
About it
[Chorus]
Lost dreams and found dreams
In America
In America
In America
Lost dreams and found dreams
In America
In America
In America
And close your eyes
Leave it all for a while
Leave the world
And your worries behind
You will build on whatever is real
And wake up each day
To a new waking dream
Take it where you find it
Can’t leave it alone
You will find a purpose
To carry it on
Mainly when you find it
Your heart will be strong
About it
[Chorus]
Change, change come over
Change come over
Talkin’ about a change
Change, change
Change come over, now
Change, change, change come over
I’m gonna walk down the street
Until I see
My shining light
I’m gonna walk down the street
Until I see
My shining light
I’m gonna walk down the street
Until I see
My shining light
I’m gonna walk down the street
Until I see
My shining light
I see my light
See my light
See my shining light
I see my light
See my light
See my shining light
![Noted in Passing: Thursday [Updates as they happen]](https://americandigest.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Gregory-Crewdson-Untitled-Beer-Dreams-from-Twilight-1998-1024x817.jpeg "Noted in Passing: Thursday [Updates as they happen]")
![UPDATED FROM JUNE: Casey Klahn Goes Walkabout on China at War [Bumped for the discussion in the comments]](https://americandigest.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Little_Big_Horn-917x1024.jpeg "UPDATED FROM JUNE: Casey Klahn Goes Walkabout on China at War [Bumped for the discussion in the comments]")
Gerard Van der Leun
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Nanking, the treatment of P.O.W.’s and Unit 731, Biological Warfare Project, is what I refer to when someone argues against the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. To really drive the point home, I emphasize the fact we had to bomb them TWICE!
Good point…
Nations as well as men can go bat-shit crazy. Most folks know about Nazi Germany, but Japan was much crazier. Whatever the Nazis did, the Japanese did far worse. Auschwitz was a slightly restricted summer camp compared to what the lunatic Japanese militarists did to everyone they got their hands on. See here, but not after eating:
http://www.cnd.org/NJMassacre/page1.html
One can make the argument that not every German believed in Nazi propaganda, that not every German agreed with the SS. One can make no such argument regarding Japan. Every one of them, from young kids to mature adults, bought into the nightmarish and totalitarian program of bushido and the religion of Shinto—emperor worship. After the 1945 Battle Okinawa Japanese leadership knew the war was lost. So it commanded every citizen of Japan to arm himself with bamboo stakes to as to meet any invading US troops with swarms of millions dedicated to dealing and accepting death. The US Marines in just one planned landing site would have had to deal with thousands of rabid schoolgirls and schoolboys charging at them. Hundreds of thousands would have died in service to their emperor.
Thus the necessity of the nuclear bombs. It took the fires of Hell to remove the horrors in the Japanese soul.
IIRC children were thrown from cliffs by parents on Okinawa rather than suffer the humiliation of defeat. The island was considered homeland, as much a part of the country as the mainland.
Yep. Bat-shit crazy they were. Killing of children, mass suicide, Kamikaze pilots, burning Catholic nuns to death with gasoline, practicing swordplay on American POWS, Bataan Death March and on and on.
Far better than letting them become victims of the white devils that would soon be storming their shores to torture, rape, kill, and eat them. Every gov’t treats their citizens as disposable.
That’s exactly what the Japanese government told its citizens. It also said that black American soldiers would eat them alive for food.
As for your statement that “Every gov’t treats their citizens as disposable.” I would have never believed this about the American government. But I do now.
” I would have never believed this about the American government. But I do now.”
I believe now also. But I came to the conclusion in the early sixties.
Every American should read this book about the Dulles brothers:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17286725-the-brothers
These two monsters created the D**p St*te.
Ordered it.
-with sake beforehand.
a cousin married a death march survivor, she was his nurse immediately after the war
Why mere hundreds of thousands, Mike. Seems as if the numbers would have been measured in millions .. no matter what we did. We might have set up a impermeable blockade of the Japanese Home Island, but then millions of them might have starved.
My theory about why the atom bomb led to Japanese surrender is that it ALLOWED this society to surrender. This nation had devolved into the most extreme Honor based culture ever seen. They were so terrified of the pathological levels of shame which would accrue from the cowardice of surrendering to other men whom they had deemed inferior in terms of courage and honor, they would have endured anything
Then along comes something so horrible and immense that it was basically outside human civilization. It was an unprecendented natural cataclysm. There would be no dishonor or cowardice to bow down to such a thing, any more than it would be to flee to higher ground after a tsunami warning. And, of course once the Emperor made this proclamation, they all fell in line
You are correct about the total numbers of dead. I was just using one landing site. And your theory on the effect of the nuclear bombs on the Japanese makes perfect sense in the context of post-1880 Japan. But some of the Japanese militarists wanted to sacrifice every Japanese. Even as Hirohito was preparing his surrender speech, groups of assassins were trying to head him off. This is a type of mass insanity that only death can stop.
My late father-in-law , 7th Marine veteran of Okinawa, always thanked God for the atomic bomb.
Ive seen this very movie on cable .. 10 years ago. It definitely shows Japanese atrocities. such as marching Chinese POWs to the banks of a river, the Yellow River I think, and then opening up on them with machine guns.
It also deals with the rapes of Chinese women but not in a graphic way .. it deals the fear that the women had of being raped, and the devastating emotional aftermath of same. I doubt that this is a Japanese film. I seem to recall it was made in China, perhaps Taiwan
Rape has always been part of warfare, but the Japanese made it official policy. Tens of thousands of Korean women, for just one example, were sent to Japan as “comfort women” to provide services to the soldiers. The thousands of children born of these horrific unions were shunned by both Japanese and Korean societies, their lives were ones of terrifying misery.
It’s been written before that the current Japanese history of WWII is “One day, for no particular reason, the Americans dropped an atomic bomb on Japan.”
Here is a little ditty from my formative years (no, not the “if you ain’t Cav, you ain’t shit” one) based on the old Pepsodent jingle:
You’ll wonder where the yellow went,
When the napalm hits the Orient.
And that’s what it took to get them to stop, on a somewhat grander scale, of course. Never forget they’d have done the same to us, and likely worse, if they had possessed the means.
They would have done to us what they did to American POWs in the Bataan Death March. But they had no intention of invading our shores, as the Japanese militarists believed it was not necessary. After Pearl Harbor, so they fantasized—except Yamamoto, who had planned Pearl Harbor, had lived in the US and had no illusions about American industrial might——the US would negotiate and agree not to interfere in the Japanese “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere”.
Fat chance. FDR and the US Military adopted US Grant’s “unconditional surrender” policy. One hundred sixty-one thousand American dead later—along with 3,000,000 of the so-called “super race” of Japanese—Japan surrendered “at US discretion”. That is, unconditionally.
I never suggested they intended to invade mainland United States. Nuke Pearl Harbor and some of the west coast ports, they wouldn’t have to. Granted they lacked B-29’s for a delivery system, but there’s more than one way to thermonuclearly incinerate a cat.
Imagine the Pacific theater with Pearl and the west coast ports taken out right at the first. Then imagine Hitler declaring war as he did a few days later.
Pearl Harbor was a tactical victory for Japan, but a massive strategic defeat—a defeat that led directly to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. She was years from anything like a nuclear bomb, and such a fantasy never entered into her military equations.
Germany’s declaration of war upon the US on December 11, 1941 also insured Germany’s destruction. The declaration was unnecessary, and made the war a world war.
“The reality is that war with the United States had been included in Hitler’s agenda for years, that he had deferred hostilities only because he wanted to begin them at a time, and under circumstances, of his own choosing, and that the Japanese attack fitted his requirements precisely. It had been an assumption of Hitler’s since the 1920s that Germany would at some point fight the United States.”
Germany did not have the strategic reach to threaten the US mainland. Japan did, though in a limited fashion. She would have been met, as it is rumored to have been said by Yamamoto himself, that “You cannot invade mainland United States. There would be a rifle behind each blade of grass.”
This is the reason why FDR in early 1942 placed 100,000 Japanese “Americans” into camps. No Germans were treated likewise, because there was no threat from a German invasion.
It is worth the time to try and understand the Japanese view on World War II—if that is even possible for a gaijin. It is, as you would have guessed, rather different from ours. Take the US sponsored assassination of Yamamoto in April, 1943—an operation aptly called “Operation Vengeance”. To Americans, Yamamoto—who had lived in the US—was a monster who had planned the Pearl Harbor attack and who deserved to be hunted down and killed. To the Japanese, he was a war hero .
Here is the death of Yamamoto from the Japanese point of view. He comes across as a saint who experiences an apotheosis at the end.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_aevBLinEvY
Where’s Indiana Jones when you need him.
I have been doing this job for like a few weeks and my last weekly payment was exactly
𝙁𝙞𝙣𝙙 𝙤𝙪𝙩 𝙝𝙤𝙬 𝙃𝙀𝙍𝙀….__𝐅𝐮𝐥𝐖𝐨𝐫𝐤𝟎𝟏.𝐓𝐤
am i supposed to give two shits for a bunch of chins who got a taste of japanese hospitality? kill a billion more and i still would not care. the chinese people are a cancer on the world.
A bit harsh perhaps, but probably true—at least as far as the Chinese government goes. Of course, they say the same about Americans. No doubt that if China disappeared tomorrow the world would be better off.
35,ooo,ooo Chinese died in World War II, by the way. “Japanese hospitality” at its finest.
I would argue that the Chinese Communist Party and not the people of China are the problem.
With respect to the Japanese and the atrocities they committed in Nanking and elsewhere on the mainland and throughout the war, they were fighting the communists in China.
The communists in China teach their citizens that Mao was responsible the defeat of the Japanese invaders. Ha! Commie propaganda. The truth is that Mao was hiding in the hills of Central China and organizing guerrilla war fighters to defeat the clans that opposed Communism on the mainland. Meanwhile Chang Kai Shek, alien with Western nations in an effort to fight the Japanese and defeat the communists under Mao. He underestimated Mao’s power and ultimately fled to the Island of Formosa (commonly known as Taiwan – the Portuguese translation – “beautiful flower”…and it is). Chang was treated like a dog by the Western powers and thus, today hangs in the balance, as Chinese communists rattle their sabers and threaten to retake the “renegade province”.
If one wishes to see just how cheap life is, go to Asia. It may open your eyes. The Japanese, Chinese, Koreans, Viet, Thai, etc. have a very different view of life than Westerners.
As a practitioner of Japanese martial arts, I had the privilege of speaking with Kenzo Mabuni (heir to the Seito Shito-Ryu Karate system), before he passed. He was a young man raised under the banner of Bushido (code of the warrior) in pre-war Japan. His comments when asked about the war were quite interesting; He said, “when we were young we were taught to believe that war was the way. We learned that was not true.”
Yes, the Japanese learned and they came around to our side in global affairs, especially as it relates to China’s communists. Japan is an amazing country. Clean, orderly, polite and respectful, with great food. China, on the other hand, firmly under the control of commies for more than 80 years is filthy, chaotic, bitter, frenetic, obsessive, materialistic, and lashing out at all of its neighbors, antagonizing Japan, U.S., Aussie-land, India, Philippines, and others.
While I don’t ascribe to the sentiment expressed by Kyo Ritendo, above, I understand it.
“I would argue that the Chinese Communist Party and not the people of China are the problem.” Undoubtedly true. But that is also undoubtedly true about the rulers of most governments in History concerning the people over whom they rule. It seems that throughout time and space the men who rise to the top are just the sort of men who should never be trusted with power. The people in China have as much say over government policy as the people in North Korea have over theirs. But then, how much control over the US government do the vast majority on the American people have? China is controlled by a few old men in the Politburo who are absolutely immune from any influence other than from the other old men in the Politburo.
Chiang Kai-shek might have had good intentions, but he was hobbled by the corruption in his own military and government, by the war with Japan, by the conflicting opinions of his US advisors, and by the near impossible logistics of American supplies reaching those parts of China under Nationalist control. This is the great tragedy of 20th century China, that from hindsight—always 20 / 20—the West could have made a effort to destroy the forces of Mao, to “strangle the Bolshevik baby in his crib.” Mao’s forces numbered only 7000 in 1935.
“If one wishes to see just how cheap life is, go to Asia.” I would expand that to include Africa and Latin America. Life in those places is worth only what those in power say it is. The concept of Natural Law is not practiced there. The idea that every life has inherent value is a particular vanity of Western Civilization. At their very best all nations in History only managed, from time to time, to care for the lives of only their own people. China murdered 100,000,000 million Chinese in the 20th century alone. Even in America, “the land of the free and the home of the brave”, we have slaughtered 50,000,000 children in the wombs of our own women.
Your comment comparing Japan and China made me smile. Who would choose to live in China rather than Japan? China acts like a rabid, filthy and deranged animal, “red in tooth an claw”—which she is.
Never forget.
The Japs eventually came around though. My father took shrapnel to the head and other body parts courtesy of the Chicoms on a cold February day in 1951 on the Korean Peninsula. He was subsequently flown to Tokyo where he was operated on by a Japanese brain surgeon who saved his life. And I’ve been more than happy to work for a Japanese auto company for the last 17 years. Beautiful country too, having spent a week there in 2002. Any country that has conveyor belt sushi restaurants on every block is OK in my book.
Everything written upthread is true, and I echo the sentiments.
The Japanese are now our right flank in our next war with China.
Just so. People write about China as if she can operate independently of other realities. Nope. In war your enemy has a vote. Japan, India and Taiwan have a vote. As does the US Navy.
I have been told that the atrocities were a Japanese Army thing, and not practiced nor approved of by the Japanese Navy. I don’t know if that’s true.
There are folks who argue that Japan had a working atomic bomb, which was tested offshore of Korea a few days after Hiroshima. They say there was a massive complex in the north of Korea, that produced this. After the war, folks who knew simply kept silent, for obvious reasons. I don’t know, but the argument is persuasive.
China recieved a tiny fraction of what Russia and the UK received in Lend/Lease materials–about two percent. Had the communists around FDR not been so influential, the Chinese army could have accomplished a lot more, including ending the Maoist revolt.
Liberty ships deliver more than DC-3’s. What port would that Lend/Lease (singularly a Anglo-American pact) ‘material have docked at in Mainland China during WWII?
Read a book.
I did read a book, John, about Lend/Lease, interestingly. Lend/Lease was expanded to the USSR and China after the declaration of war. Neither paid back any real amount; the USSR aid was written down to two cents on the dollar. The UK finished paying off Lend/Lease in about 2006. Nice, eh?
As for getting stuff to China, had the need and priority been there, ways would likely have been found. We sacrificed a lot of lives and material on the Arctic sea routes. We also built the Alaska Highway to get things to and from Alaska during the war. Could US engineers have punched a road through? I don’t know, but I do know both the British and the Japanese were stunned at US civil engineering.
It was the Japanese Army that ran the show, with the navy acting only in support of the army. If fact the entire China mission was done on the sole authority of the army. There was no civilian control to speak of. The Japanese Army and the navy were often at loggerheads with each other, fighting for control of resources and such. The end of World War II still saw more than one million Japanese soldiers on duty in China.
While it is possible that Japan was working on a nuclear bomb in Korea, it is unlikely in the extreme. Resources, experimentation, knowledge, technical capacity and infrastructure were not at the level necessary to construct and test a bomb. Some Japanese scientists, however, well understood the theories behind nuclear fission.
The difficulty of supplying Chiang Kai-shek and his nationalist army probably goes beyond what FDR’s pro-Soviet advisors imagined at the time. Chiang was at war with both the Chinese communists under Mao, the Japanese Army, some of his own officers, and the US advisors surrounding him. Most supplies had to come through Burma, itself a minor sideshow to the Pacific War. And you are right: Mao could have been destroyed had that been a goal of the US under FDR. This was yet another one of History’s tragic “What ifs?”
FDR deserves credit for many of his actions during the war, but deserves much blame for not understanding the USSR and how she had infiltrated the top echelons of the US government. Much of post-war misery was due to the policies FDR undertook before he died.
James Bradley,the son of one of the men who raised the flag on Mt Suribachi,wrote a book in 2003 called “Flyboys”. It chronicles what happened to 9 young American Navy and Marine aviators who were shot down attempting to destroy the vital Japanese radio transmitters on Chichi Jima,about 150 mi north of Iwo Jima. The War Dept knew their fate,but kept it classified til 1997. All but one were captured and taken to Chichi Jima for interrogation,and eventually decapitated.
That’s not the worst of it. Two of these young men were dissected by the island’s Japanese doctor,who carefully saved both men’s livers,and one’s thigh muscle. Their livers were carefully diced and threaded on bamboo skewers,grilled with teriyaki and served to the Japanese officers along with copious sake.
Gruesome and unsettling,the book also recounts that at the time this was happening in Feb-March of 1945,our Air Force was napalming Tokyo. Almost as many Japanese were incinerated in Tokyo as died a few months later in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.
The book is a riveting read,with maps and photos of the islands and the handsome young aviators,before their capture.
The one who was miraculously rescued was 20 yr old Lt.(jg) George H.W. Bush,who was shot down in late ‘44 doing a bombing run over Chichi’s radio towers.
Wow. Quite a story. History is funny that way: why some die; why some don’t. I have no answers.
In my village of 45,000 in the burbs north of Chicago, the atrocities by the Japanese have not been forgotten by some and became a very contentious point a few years back. We have a major Korean Cultural Center and our sister city is in Korea. Our local politicians, who are woefully ignorant of any history, traveled to South Korea for a visit, and we have welcomed a delegation from that country several times.
Our town was then gifted a very large, life-sized Comfort Woman statue, and asked to display it prominently in front of our village hall. Comfort Women were those Korean girls who were forced to have sex with occupying Japanese soldiers and often raped to death. Our stupid village board thought this statue was a fine idea, because what American town hall wouldn’t want a statue dealing with Korean rape prominently displayed among the petunias?
Even after my husband, the fire chief (and an avid student of history) pointed out to them that perhaps one of our major businesses in town, a Japanese business, might object to this political statement, and maybe we shouldn’t get in the middle of this political dispute, or that rape survivors might be horrified having to see it, they continued to plan its installation and the dedication ceremony. The board poo-pooed the idea of anyone might object to a simple statue….until they received a very official visit from the Japanese consulate in Chicago, who delivered a very formal letter explaining that placement of the statue would be viewed as an extreme insult to the country of Japan and that the prominent, long-standing Japanese business in our village would leave our town, taking the much-needed tax revenue and jobs for our locals with it, to another more welcoming town, should we display the statue.
The South Korean government evidently has a mission to place these Comfort Women statues wherever there are Japanese interests, as a form of protest and rubbing the Japanese noses in it, because Japan has never really apologized for these atrocities and for many decades denied them.
There is also not far from our town, in another town, a very large, private Japanese school for the children of Japanese CEOs. We have a lot of Japanese and a lot of Koreans, along with many first-generation people from around the world. So here we are in our small, no nothing, multi-cultural Mayberryish American town with two groups who rabidly hate each other—with good reason.
The village board backed down. The Comfort Woman statue sits in storage on a shipping pallet, wrapped up and hidden in the bowels of a village building, as the Korean Cultural Center, where it should be displayed, refuses to accept its return. Atrocities should be remembered, but more importantly, the consequences for those performing those atrocities should be swift and just; something we would do well to remind our current leaders.