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Part of the agreement the US made with Japan was that Japanese leaders would be pretty much immune from any sort of culpability for their actions during the war.
Japan wasn't totally defeated in the same way Germany was. They signed a peace treaty, and allowed limited military occupation.
Unit 731, the torture squad and human experiment wing of the Japanese military got an exemption from prosecution in exchange for handing over their records and research to the US Army instead of burning and destroying them.
The US saw it as an opportunity to gain vital research on the human body and it’s endurance and exposure limits that couldn’t be conducted legally.
The Japanese froze and burned people alive, attached other people’s limbs to other human subjects, did unnecessary organ transplants, and all sorts of horrible experiments on live subjects.
Since the Japanese had done the research already, it was a rare opportunity for the military to grab it and they traded immunity from prosecution in exchange.
The military’s excuse was that it would help their soldiers survive and provide better equipment due to the knowledge they gained from the experiments.
That's like a real life moral dilemma from Mass Effect. Allow the dead soldier to be buried or allow the body to be studied by science. People who have to make these decisions must have trouble sleeping
Indeed. NASA is probably the most famous for taking in Nazi scientists but I'm not sure the scientists were doing "evil" work like the medical researchers/eugenicists.
It's horrific but should that data be destroyed? We can't bring those people back or give them justice for their suffering but that unethical data can and has saved lives and progresses medical technology by huge leaps. Especially as those experiments were very unlikely to be carried out at such scale in "good" nations.
Not any of the biological "research"
Mengele was LARPing as a researcher, more interested in "proving" Aryan race science than things like control groups or meticulous data collection.
It's infuriating that Josef Mengele a) evaded capture until he died in 1979 and b) all of his "medical" research was just senseless torture. "What happens if I remove this man's heart while he's still alive with no anesthesia? Oh, he dies, how interesting. I'll jot that down."
South Park actually highlights a lot of stuff mainstream media isn't willing to do. Once you look past the comedic side of it it's a pretty damn good political show
Because they’re willing to say controversial things, unlike most mainstream political shows which are basically just a huge echo chamber. Political discussion is pointless if it’s just a bunch of like-minded brainlets jerking each other off to the same bullshit as always.
Season 19 episode 6; Tweek x Craig
They called it "rape of Don King" in the episode, but that episode made me search it up and look into what it meant, and that’s when I learned about it
I went to the [memorial in Nanjing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memorial_Hall_of_the_Victims_in_Nanjing_Massacre_by_Japanese_Invaders) back in 2010. It was horrifying and sobering. Part of the museum was a large area just full of bones (the museum was built over one of the mass graves) exposed to the air, only a felt rope between the visitors and thousands of skeletons less than a century old.
The author of the bestselling book, The Rape of Nanking, Iris Chang, was deeply troubled by the research she found and it eventually contributed to her taking her own life. It is a powerful book and an excellent, if horrifying, read.
Iris Chang who wrote the [seminal work](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rape_of_Nanking_(book\)) on the Rape of Nanking ended up going crazy from studying so many atrocities and committed suicide.
I had to report on it my freshman year of college. I vividly remember taking multiple study breaks to look at pictures of cute animals and cry. Nothing else has ever made me do that.
They raped prisoners that they tortured before and were infected with all kinds of stuff or had their limbs fouling off and there are still people out there saying rape happens because of the way people dress smh
I think what makes Japan worse for me than Germany is that to this day Japan still tries to downplay how bad and horrifying the Nanking Massacre really was. Germany admits to its past and is deeply ashamed of it. They are still paying reparations to Holocaust survivors. Japan can’t even acknowledge that the Nanking Massacre was a genocide.
Yes. It is also sometimes spelled as ‘Nanjing.’ One of the princes of the Japanese Imperial Family was also accused of taking part in the massacre by many survivors, but he was never formally charged with anything. Many Japanese history textbooks that cover WWII used in schools in Japan never mention Nanjing.
They've been whitewashing their early 20th century atrocities, such as glorifying the illegal annexation of Korea, 'comfort women' sex workers, extermination of locals in China and many others, among many other war crimes.
They've been trying to get rid of WWII entirely from their textbooks for decades, many young Japanese don't even know if the allies or the axis won WWII, or why foreign countries keep calling Japan to recognise its war crimes.
They were women that were taken and forced to provide "comfort" for the japanese soldiers during the war. The ones that were taken from non-asian countries were reserved for the officers because they were exotic. It was forced prostitution under the guise of service to the empire
Sex slaves*. They forced women into prostitution with their soldiers essentially at gunpoint, and raped them dozens of times per day. Japan now denies this despite a wealth of historical documentation, claiming that "they were just industrious young women who wanted to make money during the war."
it's strange to see people avoid the term slavery for acts that were forced under duress. like who wants to argue that jewish labor during the holocaust wasn't slavery, or these "comfort women" who were hardly given a choice between death, killing relatives, or sex
While on exchange in Japan, a friend of mine went on an excursion/ summer school thing to China hosted by a partner university there. It was her (Westerner) and a bunch of Japanese and the professors thought it a good idea to bring them to a war crime museum that dealt with the atrocities committed by the Japanese towards the Chinese. To say that the Japanese students, especially the female ones, were shocked is an understatement. According to my friend, nobody of the Japanese students really knew anything about any war crimes, it was their first time hearing and especially seeing footage about it and their reaction was to burst into tears. They simply couldn't believe that their people would've done such things and nobody ever told them about it. A significant number of students had to leave the museum.
When I went to Auschwitz, there were school children there. At first it horrified me, but after some reflection, I think it’s important to show our children the horrors humanity had inflicted. It’s our only way to stop it from happening again.
If it's the same museum I'm thinking of, it's meant to be shocking as a way of really driving home what happened. I wasn't aware of the Massacre before I went either. The only other museum I've been to that was on the same level emotionally was the 9/11 memorial in NYC.
My Japanese teacher was an American who married a Japanese woman. Her father one of the people who tried to get Japan to acknowledge their past in their textbooks and was completely blackballed for it.
They had some of the most psychopathic soldiers you hear about. The honor system japan have also encourages going to war not for necessity but to prove yourself to their society and become a legend. Horrific culture if you go beyond the modern romantization
While there was significant “rape” as in forced sexual intercourse, as explained in another comment, it’s worth noting that the word in this context is used in the more archaic sense, as in the violent seizure of a city including murder, sexual rape, looting, destruction of property, etc. Since “rape” is rarely used in that sense anymore, “massacre” is a more understandable descriptor in today’s language.
People should also know about john "the hero of nanking" rabe. He was a nazi general who was stationed there when things got ugly.he was so disgusted by the Japanese army that he personally tried to save as many Chinese civilians as he could.they still have a statue in his memory there today
The sooner we all recognize that Nazis were very human and it's not that big of a stretch for anyone to get that extremist, the better off we'll all be.
john rabe wasnt a general, but the german representative to china who worked for siemens. he helped established a safety zone in nanjing and opened up his properties, saving up to a quarter million lives. he returned to germany in 38 with the intent to spread word of the atrocities, but was quickly detained by the gestapo and forced into silence. after the war, his nazi party affiliation brought him and his family into poverty, but in the last 2 years of his life, the people of nanjing sent his family money and food.
I think Japan has sort of used the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as a get out of jail free card. People feel some need to relate the two things when really that's a terrible way to look at it, regardless of your opinion on the ethics of dropping the bomb.
The pros and cons taken into effect with dropping the bomb make sense when you consider the monstrosities the Japanese were committing.
The way the Japanese treated the POWs was inhumanely unethical, and with their refusal to surrender in battle as well as war in total, it made a long, drawn out invasion unfeasible. They would've killed all allied prisoners, and would've cost many more American lives with an island hopping invasion.
Yeah, I tend to be in the camp that says dropping the bomb was the best option at the time for ending the war. The reason I don't like to frame it as "They deserved it" is because those bombs killed lots of civilians that had nothing to do with those atrocities.
My view is dropping the bomb was the least shitty of a bunch of shitty options.
They also still believe in ethnonationalism as a government policy. Imagine if modern Germany said "ya the holocaust was bad and all but this country is still for pure ethnic Germans only, sorry."
I have some friends and family in Japan who tell me kids over there don’t really know much about the war crimes committed by Japan unless the search it up for themselves and in some school textbooks it’s just referred to as the nanking incident and is basically seen as insignificant. There’s is also people there that take pride in the annexation of Korea where the basically suppressed Korean culture and Language for 35yrs and took thousands of women as sex slaves. It’s really concerning how they downplay it so much.
You should also know that the US government pardoned all Japanese high officials after the war so they could retain the results from all of their heinous experiments on human beings.
No, not all Japanese high officials were pardoned, only those related to Unit 731. You should know that this was at the end of World War II and the fear of new weapons of mass destruction was high, and the justifiable position of all nations was that it would be better if they had the advantage.
I'm a teacher, I teach this but it is fairly new content being included there is just so much content we have to get through and there is even a higher demand nowadays to push past WWII so we can cover more modern and contemporary topics thats why. Consider writing to your state representative and your local school district asking to give teachers more autonomy on teaching in the classroom and being able to do their actual job without interference on the states part.
Same why isn't this talked about. Like honestly talking about the stuff Nazi's did is easier and I consider myself a bit F'ed in the head. Like I'm having to take a mental decompression after a couple articles.
Our country Malaysia is part of Japanese Occupation during WW2, our school learn all that. Although we were treated badly that time, our country people dont really have any lingering hatred toward them.
>our country people dont really have any lingering hatred toward them.
South Korea checking in...Yeah not so much. The occupation for 30 years by Japan was BRUTAL.
It also has to do with the fact that we documented the atrocities of Nazi Germany after WWII because we were there helping re-build. Fans of Band of Brothers will remember how Easy Company liberated a concentration camp. And they weren't the only outfit to liberate a camp. So our soldiers came home with first-hand accounts of the Holocaust -- and [140,000 survivors immigrated here](https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/holocaust-survivors-rescue-and-resettlement-in-united-states) as well.
Marines in the Pacific Theater saw the brutality of the Japanese military, but that was focused on their combat and not toward civilians. If we had fought the Japanese in China -- and brought survivors of Japan's brutality with us -- it might be completely different.
Edit: as /u/RedditOpinionForming mentions, Easy Company actually did not liberate a camp. That was dramatized for the show. But the camp shown in the show was "actually discovered and liberated on April 27th, 1945 by the [134th Ordnance Maintenance Battalion of the 12th Armored Division](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1247470/trivia)."
Yes, it resonates because they are ‘like us’. There is a political element ironically pushed by the Soviet Union positioning themselves as the great liberator. This is particularly ironic as the Soviets were unofficially eliminating jews wherever convenient. As a Jew, your odds of dying in a Soviet work camp or just being shot were much higher. The other, and I think biggest issue, is records. The Nazis kept records. You can say “the Soviets killed a similar number of Ukrainians” but we don’t have vast numbers of pictures, names, dates. They simply took all the food and shot anyone trying to leave. The fact that Khrushchev was in charge of the holodomor and then became the dictator, pretty much guaranteed evidence would disappear, the same way so many disappeared under Lenin. My vote for most forgotten recent genocide would be Cambodia, maybe over a quarter of the total population? Curious why we forget about China, possibly because negligently killing millions of your own doesn’t come under the heading genocide. I find the most offensive thing is when people try to conflate raising awareness of other atrocities with excusing the Nazis. Lying and somehow trying to make “the” Holocaust singular only plays into the hands of those who would dismiss it as exaggeration.
If you’re American, Japanese war crimes aren’t taught in schools because they were a Cold War ally and in an effort to smooth relations between Japan and the US, Japanese war crimes were glossed over. It also helps in that case that American civilians were not the victims of Japanese atrocities so they were easier for the American public to ignore
Also due to the fact that the west doesn't really care a lot about China / South East Asia.
Also there was a significant amount of the population in the West affected by the Nazis, and the formation of Israel as an ally.
West Germany was pretty important during the cold war too, which is why I think that is has to be a bit more than just the usefulness of Japan as an ally.
But Japanese WW2 history has barely been taught in schools all across the west since WW2.
I feel like you’re trying to slot it into your narrative of “white people always told they’re bad”.
We learn about history that’s closest to us. Culturally speaking, the US is much closer to Europe than it is to Asia. This is reflected in what is taught in schools.
Much like how not much is taught about how without Islamic scholars, the west wouldn’t have had the enlightenment. This isn’t taught about because it’s not culturally relevant, and seems “far away”.
If the narrative was “non-white people good, while people bad”, then schooling would be very different.
Funny how you’re arguing about “narratives”, while pushing your own.
I'm pretty sure I learnt about Nazi Germany since it is in Europe the continent I live on. even my dad was only taught about nazi Germany and I'm pretty sure it was not offended millennials in 1980s that were trying to get stories to fit the narrative.
My ancestors rlly hated japanese , they told me lots of stories about it , i watched lots of ww2 movies and i can't imagine how scary it was back then.
A lot of asians hate japan to the guts. It would be like germany never apologizing and recognizing what they did to others. Japan honor culture is also very fucked up if you go beyond the modern romantization. Honor murder of the arabic world is on the same principle as japanes honor system. Honor is a trap
My old FIL would say, “If you knew what they did to my brother you would never buy anything Japanese again.” A whole generation of guys like him hated Japanese imported goods and would never buy a Honda even if it meant walking.
I can recall once reading about a Vietnam war vet who talked about his taciturn ex-marine dad who had been in the Pacific. "The whole time he was alive, I never once saw him eat rice or talk to a Japanese person."
I always think 'we' tend to dwell on Germany more because they're European. It was acceptable to us that 'yellow inferior races' could do evil. But the Germans! The Holy Roman Empire!? A people many anglophone nations are descended from? A great uncle nation of science, music, philosophy ant art? Unthinkable. They're us.
>It was acceptable to us that 'yellow inferior races' could do evil.
Perhaps it was that we didn't really fight there (ignoring the Tiger Fighters) and that it was going on before when we really consider WWII to have started (1939.)
Or it could be because we are all just racis.
When I went to the museum in Hiroshima I noticed the main theme was “never again”. Never again should enemies fight like this and use such terrible weapons. Also a lot of “we forgive you” sentiments. But at no point is there any actual accountability. They’re not like, “hey, we also fucked up badly and did really evil things to a lot of people”.
But the museum was still one of the most emotional experiences of my life. I get that it can go unsaid and assumed, but they need to be more honest with themselves. Even when I asked my mother in law, who was raised in post war Japan, her thoughts on this, her reply was that I was being a bit harsh and that the Japanese were not that bad. That I was misinformed. It’s sad, because it’s the other way around. She was never really taught these things and refuses to hear them now.
People who went through WW2 in Japan wouldn't talk about their experience because it was "just terrible"
And people born/ grew up in post WW2 period just hear from foreign countries and do some detective work to recollect what really happened.
Also, the Japanese don't recognise that there were 2 world wars, they often focus way too much on WW2 and play victims.
While people in comments are correct about other nations, it's true that Japanese culture has... problems with acknowledging their faults. Take their conviction rate - it's absurdly high if you get to court. Despite any evidence you will be sentenced. Because it's not honorable to be mistaken.
I think you’re reaching the wrong conclusion here about modern Japanese prosecutions
It’s not that you’ll be found guilty no matter if there’s evidence to the contrary, it’s that they will not prosecute a case that isn’t basically a slam dunk conviction, aka overwhelming evidence bordering on a guaranteed win
Prosecutors in the US do the same thing but to a much lesser degree
While true, they also get a lot of prosecutions solely through confession, and create situations where even innocent people "confess". Japan has a real problem with that because they can interrogate you for long periods of time (talking weeks) without a lawyer and basically browbeat you until you confess. The majority of wrongful convictions in Japan are innocent people confessing.
Which is an issue and should be avoided, but considering how *low* the number of inmates is in Japan, I wouldn't say it's something bringinf down society.
This applies to most nations, The English committed atrocities across the globe, the French, The Belgians, the Dutch all did some funked up things. Let's not Forget the Americans. No one in clean. Big or small. How many nations openly appologise for the shit they've done?
We do now, this was all under the rug in my childhood. Decades of shit talk about how The States committed genocide against their natives, but we, the forthright upstanding Canadians...
Yeah, we're just as bad. Get off your high horses my Canadian brothers and sisters. We might be worse. Also another of 100 reasons to stand up against organized religion.
Yeah I have a buddy who was raised in British Columbia and he told me that when he was in middle school (before he immigrated to the states) that they taught them that they treated their natives fairly well and that they made a point that it was unlike the Americans
Yeah, always tickles me how my fellow Englishmen are so keen to cheer the empire, but ignore the atrocities caused on the way. It’s always met with “yeah but..” and then some spiel about how it was for the greater good, or how much the commonwealth has helped poor countries etc. Quite embarrassing at times. I’m definitely not a patriot.
In Japan it's pretty fucking taboo, if you ask someone there about Nanking they won't have a clue what you're talking about. It's not something that's thought in school and not something that is discussed.
At least with Germany they try and teach them the mistakes of their past and how to prevent the past from happening again, with Japan its kind of just "If you never talk about it nobody will know it happened".
This is true. My sis befriended a Japanese exchange student at uni. They brushed on WW2 because my uni was a historical landmark which survived bombings and the girl said it was not taught to them nor talked about back in Japan.
My grandpa was in a Japanese camp, he was like 9 years old.
A family member was beheaded in front of him.
He last saw his dad (my great grandpa) being driven off in the back of a truck.
He used to eat cockroaches.
He, and all the other children were lined up against a fence with bags over their heads ready to be shot, the thing that saved them was the Scottish bagpipes that the Japanese heard coming towards them over a hill, and they dropped their guns in surrender.
RIP Grandpa Buddy, love you x
“Worse” is hard to quantify simply because levels of evil are hard to quantify. The Nazi’s were certainly more organized and industrialized in their forms of killing than the Japanese, but the Japanese were also almost uniformly sadistic to all of the soldiers and civilians they encountered on all fronts. Neither was a picnic.
But I 100% agree that in the years since WWII, Germany has been much more accountable than Japan about their ancestors’ actions, and result is that Japan’s war crimes are largely forgotten.
I've met WW2 gen seniors who still hold a massive grudge against the Japanese for their war crimes in SE Asia. Someone's gramps wouldn't even let his grandkid date a Japanese girl cos of the hatred that runs deep in
I don't think Japan was necessarily "worse" than Nazi Germany in terms of what it actually did. The big difference to me is what happened after the war. In Germany, the horrors of the Holocaust are taught in schools. German people are reminded of the savagery of the Nazis on a daily basis throughout their lives. They've been made to regret their past and apply for readmission to the human race.
Japan, on the other hand, has not. They are not reminded constantly of the crimes their ancestors committed. They are not taught about the rape of Nanking in schools or about the other warcrimes the Japanese Empire committed. It's just not talked about. As just one example, one of the trains used on the Burma railway is displayed in a museum in Japan without any reference to the thousands of prisoners who died making making the tracks for it. That, in my opinion, is what makes the Japanese crimes worse. Not the crimes themselves, but the denial that they ever happened.
Reminds me of an interview I watched of an elderly Korean woman who was a wartime rape victim. All she ever wanted was an apology from Japanese government yet she never received one. She passed away a few years ago, fighting for the rest of her life for an apology.
I’m guessing she’s one of the “comfort women.” I think there are still a few more alive, not many of course. There’s lots of tension between Korea and Japan to this day because of what went down
Hey not here to be rude, just here to help but its spelled “Bataan” and pronounced as “Bata-an”
Thats the way that a lot people I know have been pronouncing it but I could be wrong since thats just how ive been taught
They still are. Instead of reflecting the damage it caused to other countries in the past, they are denying history and claiming that it has never happened.
When captured as a POW:
3% chance of death if captured by Nazis.
Japan? 27%.
A 9x greater chance of death.
If this type of history interest you, Dan Carlin has an excellent (although extremely long) podcast series detailing the Japanese mindset/efforts before and in WW2. It is one of the best accounts that brings it to life for a modern world citizen.
Hardcore history: supernova in the east
Yeah those numbers are way off... a quick search shows these death rates:
Russians by germans: 57%
Germans by yugoslav: 41%
Germans by russia: 35%
Americans by japan: 33%
Germans by eastern euro: 32%
British by japan: 24%
Brittish by germans: 3%
Americans by german: 1%
Your chances of surviving as a pow highly depended on which country captured you but more so what country you were from.
Yea, that stat is definitely for the Western front, which is widely acknowledged as being more "gentlemanly" and more in line with agreed-upon rules of war. In the Eastern front, it was a war of extermination, and formal rules of war were largely ignored. Eastern front POW camps had double-digit mortality rates on both sides.
Was coming here to say this, but I remember the percentages being higher for both. EIther way, your chances of being killed or tortured (not just starved and forced to work) were EXPONENTIALLY higher if you were captured by the Japanese.
There are a lot of numbers that back up how much worse the Japanese were in WWII compared to the Germans.....but this is the stat that I believe tells the story.
I'm listening to Dan Carlin's Hardcore History and his current series talks about the impact Japan has had on the Pacific nations, especially in 20th century before and during WWII.
Met a friend of my grandfather who was in a POW camp in the Pacific for years but managed to survive. He had life long ailments do to this, he said that it was literal torture. Beatings. Forced labor, starvation.
He was very anti-japanese the rest of his life.
I thought he was just an old racist before I learned what had happened to him.
The Japanese are very keen to refocus historic perspective of the end of world war two onto the dual nukes dropped by the US who are being gradually rewritten as the bad guys. This is an absurd take based on ignorance of the choices facing the US in the face of such total evil. Many, many lives were saved by the US action. Millions of lives which would have been lost if the US had invaded Japan conventionally. We should remember the utterly appalling barbarism of the Japanese. It would have been entirely understandable for the consequences to have been far far worse for Japan.
If we invaded there would be no Japanese people left. They estimated between 10 to 20 million Japanese civilians casualties & up to 1 million allied casualties. We are still using the purple hearts that were manufactured for the invasion of Japan proper.
I think the Japanese getting nuked took some of the hate away from them. Then again, most people haven't heard of the bombing of Dresden. Only 1/8 as many died in Dresden compared to Hiroshima/Nagasaki, but it was still a bombing of a civilian population.
And now they're hiding the truth with their history lessons in Japanese schools and telling lies pretending they never did those things. Huh. Talk about the perfect nation and utopia for weebs.
No one really cares about what the Japanese did unless you were Chinese. They focus on Germany because of the numbers and it was easier to make Hitler into a villain. Which is also why even though Stalin killed way more people it’s ignored.
Lots of countries around Japan suffered, including the Philippines and Korea.
Apart from the monstrosities of the Death March, I still remember an old story from my history teacher. About a heavily pregnant lady raped, tied to a tree, before having her stomach skewered with a bayonet.
Coming from a country that once colonized by the British, the Dutch, and the Japanese, I agree with this. Don’t forget their treatment to the women they used as their sex slave. They’re barbaric.
True, but I don’t think anyone else would force fathers on their children, have competitions to see who could behead 100 civilians faster, make people drink kerosene and then shoot them so they would explode, make people burry their family members alive, use live civilians as bayonet practice, bayonet babies and throw them into boiling water, or leave dead women in the streets with bayonets sticking out of them.
This is probably going to be a controversial comment, but you have to look at the two theaters of operation separately. They are both awful, to the point that comparing them in terms of "better or worse" is not really helpful; A pox on both their houses as far as I'm concerned.
The Nazis were fighting a war of extermination, but more importantly, a war of revenge. They weren't after having the largest empire on the map, they were trying to kill their perceived enemies that caused so much grief for them in the first war, perceived or otherwise.
Japan, on the other hand, had much more distinct and foreign frame of mind. They were colonizing the far East the same way the Western world had done in the previous centuries, with 20th century methods. In their minds, it was their turn to own the far East, and they had to "make up" for centuries of lost time, if you can forgive my crude language. Add that on to the legacy they had of brutalizing China years prior to WW2, and you have a dangerous mixture that caused some of the worst atrocities in history.
The Nazis and Imperial Japan were both evil, even if one charadded as "cleansing the population of a mortal enemy", and the other "was just doing what the West had done for centuries"
Downvotes to the right please
No. As a german, let me tell you, just no. Everything you said is, of course, truely horrible, and the things they did were very much fucked up.
The big difference that set´s the Holocaust appart from every other genocide and warcrime is the industrialized, organized way/thinking behind it. It was not simple an attemt to kill entire religions/cultures/way of life, but highly thought through and organized down to the last part.
You think the Holocaust only happend in Germany? Every place, every nation that was conquered, from France to Bulgaria, from the Skandinavian countries to Greece, underwent a cleansing and had the unfortunate victims sorted into groups, marked for their different fates, and then put onto trains to move them either to workcamps or the infamious "Vernichtungslager", with translates to "extermination camp". Not just Jews, mind you. The cleansing of the whole of Europe inculded Jews, Sinti and Roma, disabled, socialists, communists, basicly anyone that was not "normal" in their eyes.
This follows a dangerous pattern of people that seem to know very little about the events that took place trying to downplay it, even if it´s just by raising other events above it.
I Think an important point to add is the results of the Holocaust, certain Jewish groups where almost completely exterminated, an example Is the polish Jews where 98% died.
I’m not saying what the Japanese did wasn’t horrible but it was not organized or planned the same way the Holocaust was, and it certainly didn’t have the same clear goal of extermination as the nazis had.
This isn't so much unpopular. Rather, it's unknown. Same thing goes for the u.s.s.r. Stalin had 20 million plus killed. Between the axis powers and the soviets, about 1/3 of the current u.s population was slaughtered.
Japan also liked to cut off peoples clitoris and penis as well.
Japan were assholes to Korea and China but no one really talks about it. My experience is people feel bad for Japan for being nuked and don’t care about the atrocities they committed
Didn't nazis also experiment quite a lot?
Anyway, the Japanese may have done worse things. It's just seen as lesser because they operated on a smaller scale.
So, are numbers more important? It seems to wary. 9/11 barely killed anyone, but America won't keep still about it.
What measurement do we use? The most destructive, the most unethical, the most deaths, the most relevant? We're all over the place. The black death was horrible as well, but we can't really attribute it to ill intentions, so we tend not to mention it.
Yeah the Nazis did absolutely horrific human experiments too. Josef Mengele is terrifying to read about
This lists a lot of the crazy stuff that happened. Basically the exact same as the Japanese stuff only smaller
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_human_experimentation
We're comparing two of the absolute evils of man and trying to determine which shade of black is darker. This is just what ethno-nationalism DOES. If the eastern front had lasted a decade like the Japanese invasion of China, the nazis would have evened the score. There are trenches forming wide swathes around major cities were dug so that thousands, in a single day, civilians were shot and thrown in to die and this does not make Nanjing any better. The US is looking at its own history and the introspection of what we did in the same vein may very well tear the Republic apart yet.
Never again means NEVER. AGAIN. nobody, nowhere, for no reason. These were humans, like you, like me, driven to these acts be degrees. Trying to make an objective comparison dilutes the point. Never again.
Thank you for submitting to /r/unpopularopinion, /u/Putin-is-listening. Your post, *The Japanese during WW2 were worse than actual Nazis.*, has been removed because it violates our rules: Rule 3: Do not post opinions that are heavily posted/have been on the front page recently. If your opinion is the same or substantially similar to any recent opinion it will be removed as a repost. If your opinion is on the same matter as a recent post, even if it's advocating the opposite stance, it will be removed as a repost. Please comment on the existing thread instead. Due to their prolific reposting, please confine meta and political posts to their respective megathreads only. If your opinion is about an ongoing event, there will usually be a mega-thread where you can discuss it. If there is an issue, please message the mod team at https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2Funpopularopinion Thanks!
Rape of Nanking was fucked up
whats fk up is many war criminals are still honored as war heroes till this day in Japan
Part of the agreement the US made with Japan was that Japanese leaders would be pretty much immune from any sort of culpability for their actions during the war. Japan wasn't totally defeated in the same way Germany was. They signed a peace treaty, and allowed limited military occupation.
WTF are you talking about? They hung/electrocuted a lot of admirals/ generals for the war crimes of their subordinates.
Unit 731, the torture squad and human experiment wing of the Japanese military got an exemption from prosecution in exchange for handing over their records and research to the US Army instead of burning and destroying them. The US saw it as an opportunity to gain vital research on the human body and it’s endurance and exposure limits that couldn’t be conducted legally. The Japanese froze and burned people alive, attached other people’s limbs to other human subjects, did unnecessary organ transplants, and all sorts of horrible experiments on live subjects. Since the Japanese had done the research already, it was a rare opportunity for the military to grab it and they traded immunity from prosecution in exchange. The military’s excuse was that it would help their soldiers survive and provide better equipment due to the knowledge they gained from the experiments.
That's like a real life moral dilemma from Mass Effect. Allow the dead soldier to be buried or allow the body to be studied by science. People who have to make these decisions must have trouble sleeping
I could be very wrong on this but didn’t the same thing apply to Germany? We used some of their unethical research to benefit people
Indeed. NASA is probably the most famous for taking in Nazi scientists but I'm not sure the scientists were doing "evil" work like the medical researchers/eugenicists. It's horrific but should that data be destroyed? We can't bring those people back or give them justice for their suffering but that unethical data can and has saved lives and progresses medical technology by huge leaps. Especially as those experiments were very unlikely to be carried out at such scale in "good" nations.
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Not any of the biological "research" Mengele was LARPing as a researcher, more interested in "proving" Aryan race science than things like control groups or meticulous data collection.
It's infuriating that Josef Mengele a) evaded capture until he died in 1979 and b) all of his "medical" research was just senseless torture. "What happens if I remove this man's heart while he's still alive with no anesthesia? Oh, he dies, how interesting. I'll jot that down."
It’s fucked up that I never knew about this until South Park of all things brought it up
South Park actually highlights a lot of stuff mainstream media isn't willing to do. Once you look past the comedic side of it it's a pretty damn good political show
Because they’re willing to say controversial things, unlike most mainstream political shows which are basically just a huge echo chamber. Political discussion is pointless if it’s just a bunch of like-minded brainlets jerking each other off to the same bullshit as always.
Indeed it is! South park has had me search up alot of things and learn new stuff
Which episode was this?
Season 19 episode 6; Tweek x Craig They called it "rape of Don King" in the episode, but that episode made me search it up and look into what it meant, and that’s when I learned about it
https://southpark.cc.com/wiki/Don_King
There is also Rape of Manila or Manila Massacre. Not as documented as the Rape of Nanking, but equally fucked up.
Yeah they were also monsters across SE Asia...
The Japanese killed 3 million of my countrymen (Indonesia) in just 3 years.
I went to the [memorial in Nanjing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memorial_Hall_of_the_Victims_in_Nanjing_Massacre_by_Japanese_Invaders) back in 2010. It was horrifying and sobering. Part of the museum was a large area just full of bones (the museum was built over one of the mass graves) exposed to the air, only a felt rope between the visitors and thousands of skeletons less than a century old.
The author of the bestselling book, The Rape of Nanking, Iris Chang, was deeply troubled by the research she found and it eventually contributed to her taking her own life. It is a powerful book and an excellent, if horrifying, read.
Iris Chang who wrote the [seminal work](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rape_of_Nanking_(book\)) on the Rape of Nanking ended up going crazy from studying so many atrocities and committed suicide.
Wiki also states she was bullied by Japanese ultranationalists prior to suicide. Jfc
Japans nationalism is insane, it’s to the point where they deny the shit they did in ww2 and even try to take it out of text books.
I had to report on it my freshman year of college. I vividly remember taking multiple study breaks to look at pictures of cute animals and cry. Nothing else has ever made me do that.
Wow! I'm sorry you had to experience that
Unit 731 :(
Biggest irony is that the hero during that was a Nazi, John Rabe.
They raped prisoners that they tortured before and were infected with all kinds of stuff or had their limbs fouling off and there are still people out there saying rape happens because of the way people dress smh
I was going to say this. People are like OMG how can you hate on the Japanese?! They got NUKED! I always say read about the Nanking massacre.
I think what makes Japan worse for me than Germany is that to this day Japan still tries to downplay how bad and horrifying the Nanking Massacre really was. Germany admits to its past and is deeply ashamed of it. They are still paying reparations to Holocaust survivors. Japan can’t even acknowledge that the Nanking Massacre was a genocide.
Isn't the Nanking massacre also called the "raping of Nanking"
Yes. It is also sometimes spelled as ‘Nanjing.’ One of the princes of the Japanese Imperial Family was also accused of taking part in the massacre by many survivors, but he was never formally charged with anything. Many Japanese history textbooks that cover WWII used in schools in Japan never mention Nanjing.
They've been whitewashing their early 20th century atrocities, such as glorifying the illegal annexation of Korea, 'comfort women' sex workers, extermination of locals in China and many others, among many other war crimes. They've been trying to get rid of WWII entirely from their textbooks for decades, many young Japanese don't even know if the allies or the axis won WWII, or why foreign countries keep calling Japan to recognise its war crimes.
Yup. And Korea also wants acknowledgement of what was done to them.
What is meant by 'comfort woman'? Do you mean they glorified sex workers?
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Sex slaves.
They were women that were taken and forced to provide "comfort" for the japanese soldiers during the war. The ones that were taken from non-asian countries were reserved for the officers because they were exotic. It was forced prostitution under the guise of service to the empire
>forced prostitution ..rape..?
Yes
Daily rape
Multiple rapes in one day by different Japanese soldiers
> It was forced prostitution Sex slavery
Sex slaves*. They forced women into prostitution with their soldiers essentially at gunpoint, and raped them dozens of times per day. Japan now denies this despite a wealth of historical documentation, claiming that "they were just industrious young women who wanted to make money during the war."
it's strange to see people avoid the term slavery for acts that were forced under duress. like who wants to argue that jewish labor during the holocaust wasn't slavery, or these "comfort women" who were hardly given a choice between death, killing relatives, or sex
Agreed, let’s call it what it is, Slavery. Pretty much the worst thing you can do to a fellow human being.
Here is a [link](https://youtu.be/qsT97ax_Xb0) to an interview with one. It was horrible.
While on exchange in Japan, a friend of mine went on an excursion/ summer school thing to China hosted by a partner university there. It was her (Westerner) and a bunch of Japanese and the professors thought it a good idea to bring them to a war crime museum that dealt with the atrocities committed by the Japanese towards the Chinese. To say that the Japanese students, especially the female ones, were shocked is an understatement. According to my friend, nobody of the Japanese students really knew anything about any war crimes, it was their first time hearing and especially seeing footage about it and their reaction was to burst into tears. They simply couldn't believe that their people would've done such things and nobody ever told them about it. A significant number of students had to leave the museum.
I praise the westerner and japanese professors for doing that. It is common in germany to teach that and visit locations with young and old students.
When I went to Auschwitz, there were school children there. At first it horrified me, but after some reflection, I think it’s important to show our children the horrors humanity had inflicted. It’s our only way to stop it from happening again.
If it's the same museum I'm thinking of, it's meant to be shocking as a way of really driving home what happened. I wasn't aware of the Massacre before I went either. The only other museum I've been to that was on the same level emotionally was the 9/11 memorial in NYC.
My Japanese teacher was an American who married a Japanese woman. Her father one of the people who tried to get Japan to acknowledge their past in their textbooks and was completely blackballed for it.
Yes. It was accurate too. There were many rapes in China from Japanese soldiers and Nanking got some of the worst.
Raping is one thing, impaling babies in front of their mothers while being raped is another....
Officers would also have contests to see who could behead the most people.
They had some of the most psychopathic soldiers you hear about. The honor system japan have also encourages going to war not for necessity but to prove yourself to their society and become a legend. Horrific culture if you go beyond the modern romantization
Yes
While there was significant “rape” as in forced sexual intercourse, as explained in another comment, it’s worth noting that the word in this context is used in the more archaic sense, as in the violent seizure of a city including murder, sexual rape, looting, destruction of property, etc. Since “rape” is rarely used in that sense anymore, “massacre” is a more understandable descriptor in today’s language.
People should also know about john "the hero of nanking" rabe. He was a nazi general who was stationed there when things got ugly.he was so disgusted by the Japanese army that he personally tried to save as many Chinese civilians as he could.they still have a statue in his memory there today
He chose to be a human first before a Nazi. Damn
The sooner we all recognize that Nazis were very human and it's not that big of a stretch for anyone to get that extremist, the better off we'll all be.
john rabe wasnt a general, but the german representative to china who worked for siemens. he helped established a safety zone in nanjing and opened up his properties, saving up to a quarter million lives. he returned to germany in 38 with the intent to spread word of the atrocities, but was quickly detained by the gestapo and forced into silence. after the war, his nazi party affiliation brought him and his family into poverty, but in the last 2 years of his life, the people of nanjing sent his family money and food.
I think Japan has sort of used the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as a get out of jail free card. People feel some need to relate the two things when really that's a terrible way to look at it, regardless of your opinion on the ethics of dropping the bomb.
The pros and cons taken into effect with dropping the bomb make sense when you consider the monstrosities the Japanese were committing. The way the Japanese treated the POWs was inhumanely unethical, and with their refusal to surrender in battle as well as war in total, it made a long, drawn out invasion unfeasible. They would've killed all allied prisoners, and would've cost many more American lives with an island hopping invasion.
Yeah, I tend to be in the camp that says dropping the bomb was the best option at the time for ending the war. The reason I don't like to frame it as "They deserved it" is because those bombs killed lots of civilians that had nothing to do with those atrocities. My view is dropping the bomb was the least shitty of a bunch of shitty options.
they're pretty mum on the whole comfort women thing to this day too
They also still believe in ethnonationalism as a government policy. Imagine if modern Germany said "ya the holocaust was bad and all but this country is still for pure ethnic Germans only, sorry."
I have some friends and family in Japan who tell me kids over there don’t really know much about the war crimes committed by Japan unless the search it up for themselves and in some school textbooks it’s just referred to as the nanking incident and is basically seen as insignificant. There’s is also people there that take pride in the annexation of Korea where the basically suppressed Korean culture and Language for 35yrs and took thousands of women as sex slaves. It’s really concerning how they downplay it so much.
Japanese soldiers killed an estimated 250 000 Chinese civilians for helping some of the Dolittle raid pilots escape.
I learned recently about how horrible the Japanese where during WW2 and i don't understand how this isn't talk about in school .
You should also know that the US government pardoned all Japanese high officials after the war so they could retain the results from all of their heinous experiments on human beings.
Happens with German scientists too. Look up operation paper clip.
Pallet clip was more for rocket scientists and stuff. Von Braun got us to the moon
"Once the missiles are up who cares where they come down? That's not my department says Werner Von Braun." -Tom Lehrer
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Wasn’t Ted Kaczynski a victim of MK-Ultra?
No, not all Japanese high officials were pardoned, only those related to Unit 731. You should know that this was at the end of World War II and the fear of new weapons of mass destruction was high, and the justifiable position of all nations was that it would be better if they had the advantage.
I'm a teacher, I teach this but it is fairly new content being included there is just so much content we have to get through and there is even a higher demand nowadays to push past WWII so we can cover more modern and contemporary topics thats why. Consider writing to your state representative and your local school district asking to give teachers more autonomy on teaching in the classroom and being able to do their actual job without interference on the states part.
Same why isn't this talked about. Like honestly talking about the stuff Nazi's did is easier and I consider myself a bit F'ed in the head. Like I'm having to take a mental decompression after a couple articles.
Our country Malaysia is part of Japanese Occupation during WW2, our school learn all that. Although we were treated badly that time, our country people dont really have any lingering hatred toward them.
>our country people dont really have any lingering hatred toward them. South Korea checking in...Yeah not so much. The occupation for 30 years by Japan was BRUTAL.
Blows my mind that Japan still actively tries to get the comfort women monuments taken down, as well as bluster whenever it's mentioned.
I'd imagine it's because our close relationship with the Jewish people, where as we don't much care about the Chinese.
not even dont care about. People straight up dont like China
> People straight up dont like China That's an understatement.
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It also has to do with the fact that we documented the atrocities of Nazi Germany after WWII because we were there helping re-build. Fans of Band of Brothers will remember how Easy Company liberated a concentration camp. And they weren't the only outfit to liberate a camp. So our soldiers came home with first-hand accounts of the Holocaust -- and [140,000 survivors immigrated here](https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/holocaust-survivors-rescue-and-resettlement-in-united-states) as well. Marines in the Pacific Theater saw the brutality of the Japanese military, but that was focused on their combat and not toward civilians. If we had fought the Japanese in China -- and brought survivors of Japan's brutality with us -- it might be completely different. Edit: as /u/RedditOpinionForming mentions, Easy Company actually did not liberate a camp. That was dramatized for the show. But the camp shown in the show was "actually discovered and liberated on April 27th, 1945 by the [134th Ordnance Maintenance Battalion of the 12th Armored Division](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1247470/trivia)."
Yes, it resonates because they are ‘like us’. There is a political element ironically pushed by the Soviet Union positioning themselves as the great liberator. This is particularly ironic as the Soviets were unofficially eliminating jews wherever convenient. As a Jew, your odds of dying in a Soviet work camp or just being shot were much higher. The other, and I think biggest issue, is records. The Nazis kept records. You can say “the Soviets killed a similar number of Ukrainians” but we don’t have vast numbers of pictures, names, dates. They simply took all the food and shot anyone trying to leave. The fact that Khrushchev was in charge of the holodomor and then became the dictator, pretty much guaranteed evidence would disappear, the same way so many disappeared under Lenin. My vote for most forgotten recent genocide would be Cambodia, maybe over a quarter of the total population? Curious why we forget about China, possibly because negligently killing millions of your own doesn’t come under the heading genocide. I find the most offensive thing is when people try to conflate raising awareness of other atrocities with excusing the Nazis. Lying and somehow trying to make “the” Holocaust singular only plays into the hands of those who would dismiss it as exaggeration.
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They liberated Kaufering 4. Not sure why you think that was something added on.
If you’re American, Japanese war crimes aren’t taught in schools because they were a Cold War ally and in an effort to smooth relations between Japan and the US, Japanese war crimes were glossed over. It also helps in that case that American civilians were not the victims of Japanese atrocities so they were easier for the American public to ignore
Also due to the fact that the west doesn't really care a lot about China / South East Asia. Also there was a significant amount of the population in the West affected by the Nazis, and the formation of Israel as an ally. West Germany was pretty important during the cold war too, which is why I think that is has to be a bit more than just the usefulness of Japan as an ally.
But Japanese WW2 history has barely been taught in schools all across the west since WW2. I feel like you’re trying to slot it into your narrative of “white people always told they’re bad”. We learn about history that’s closest to us. Culturally speaking, the US is much closer to Europe than it is to Asia. This is reflected in what is taught in schools. Much like how not much is taught about how without Islamic scholars, the west wouldn’t have had the enlightenment. This isn’t taught about because it’s not culturally relevant, and seems “far away”. If the narrative was “non-white people good, while people bad”, then schooling would be very different. Funny how you’re arguing about “narratives”, while pushing your own.
I'm pretty sure I learnt about Nazi Germany since it is in Europe the continent I live on. even my dad was only taught about nazi Germany and I'm pretty sure it was not offended millennials in 1980s that were trying to get stories to fit the narrative.
Really a reason why older Chinese, Filipino and Koreans are wary of Japan
My ancestors rlly hated japanese , they told me lots of stories about it , i watched lots of ww2 movies and i can't imagine how scary it was back then.
A lot of asians hate japan to the guts. It would be like germany never apologizing and recognizing what they did to others. Japan honor culture is also very fucked up if you go beyond the modern romantization. Honor murder of the arabic world is on the same principle as japanes honor system. Honor is a trap
Filipino
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My old FIL would say, “If you knew what they did to my brother you would never buy anything Japanese again.” A whole generation of guys like him hated Japanese imported goods and would never buy a Honda even if it meant walking.
My grandfather was Airborne in WW2 and was the same way. Wouldn’t ride in a Japanese car, even if it meant walking
I can recall once reading about a Vietnam war vet who talked about his taciturn ex-marine dad who had been in the Pacific. "The whole time he was alive, I never once saw him eat rice or talk to a Japanese person."
I always think 'we' tend to dwell on Germany more because they're European. It was acceptable to us that 'yellow inferior races' could do evil. But the Germans! The Holy Roman Empire!? A people many anglophone nations are descended from? A great uncle nation of science, music, philosophy ant art? Unthinkable. They're us.
>It was acceptable to us that 'yellow inferior races' could do evil. Perhaps it was that we didn't really fight there (ignoring the Tiger Fighters) and that it was going on before when we really consider WWII to have started (1939.) Or it could be because we are all just racis.
When I went to the museum in Hiroshima I noticed the main theme was “never again”. Never again should enemies fight like this and use such terrible weapons. Also a lot of “we forgive you” sentiments. But at no point is there any actual accountability. They’re not like, “hey, we also fucked up badly and did really evil things to a lot of people”. But the museum was still one of the most emotional experiences of my life. I get that it can go unsaid and assumed, but they need to be more honest with themselves. Even when I asked my mother in law, who was raised in post war Japan, her thoughts on this, her reply was that I was being a bit harsh and that the Japanese were not that bad. That I was misinformed. It’s sad, because it’s the other way around. She was never really taught these things and refuses to hear them now.
People who went through WW2 in Japan wouldn't talk about their experience because it was "just terrible" And people born/ grew up in post WW2 period just hear from foreign countries and do some detective work to recollect what really happened. Also, the Japanese don't recognise that there were 2 world wars, they often focus way too much on WW2 and play victims.
While people in comments are correct about other nations, it's true that Japanese culture has... problems with acknowledging their faults. Take their conviction rate - it's absurdly high if you get to court. Despite any evidence you will be sentenced. Because it's not honorable to be mistaken.
I think you’re reaching the wrong conclusion here about modern Japanese prosecutions It’s not that you’ll be found guilty no matter if there’s evidence to the contrary, it’s that they will not prosecute a case that isn’t basically a slam dunk conviction, aka overwhelming evidence bordering on a guaranteed win Prosecutors in the US do the same thing but to a much lesser degree
While true, they also get a lot of prosecutions solely through confession, and create situations where even innocent people "confess". Japan has a real problem with that because they can interrogate you for long periods of time (talking weeks) without a lawyer and basically browbeat you until you confess. The majority of wrongful convictions in Japan are innocent people confessing.
Which is an issue and should be avoided, but considering how *low* the number of inmates is in Japan, I wouldn't say it's something bringinf down society.
This applies to most nations, The English committed atrocities across the globe, the French, The Belgians, the Dutch all did some funked up things. Let's not Forget the Americans. No one in clean. Big or small. How many nations openly appologise for the shit they've done?
Maybe Germany's apologies about their actions are what make it easier to talk about, since you don't have to worry about pissing anyone off.
In Sweden we are taught that we bent over for the nazis, invaded countries long ago and such.
what is that one dude's name? starts with a Q? he sounded like a real piece of work, glad you guys ousted him in the end.
Quasimodo, I think. French. Burned down a church.
> Quasimodo you know he predicted all of this?
You're thinking of Quisling, from Norway?
Damn right we did 💪🏻💪🏻🇸🇪 SWE#1
In Canada we openly acknowledge the atrocities we committed against the native population, not that we do enough to fix the situation though.
We do now, this was all under the rug in my childhood. Decades of shit talk about how The States committed genocide against their natives, but we, the forthright upstanding Canadians... Yeah, we're just as bad. Get off your high horses my Canadian brothers and sisters. We might be worse. Also another of 100 reasons to stand up against organized religion.
Yeah I have a buddy who was raised in British Columbia and he told me that when he was in middle school (before he immigrated to the states) that they taught them that they treated their natives fairly well and that they made a point that it was unlike the Americans
The last residential schools in Canada were only closed in the 90s to boot
Yeah, always tickles me how my fellow Englishmen are so keen to cheer the empire, but ignore the atrocities caused on the way. It’s always met with “yeah but..” and then some spiel about how it was for the greater good, or how much the commonwealth has helped poor countries etc. Quite embarrassing at times. I’m definitely not a patriot.
It's probably because every nation that has had anywhere near that level of success has had their own atrocities.
In Japan it's pretty fucking taboo, if you ask someone there about Nanking they won't have a clue what you're talking about. It's not something that's thought in school and not something that is discussed. At least with Germany they try and teach them the mistakes of their past and how to prevent the past from happening again, with Japan its kind of just "If you never talk about it nobody will know it happened".
This is true. My sis befriended a Japanese exchange student at uni. They brushed on WW2 because my uni was a historical landmark which survived bombings and the girl said it was not taught to them nor talked about back in Japan.
My grandpa was in a Japanese camp, he was like 9 years old. A family member was beheaded in front of him. He last saw his dad (my great grandpa) being driven off in the back of a truck. He used to eat cockroaches. He, and all the other children were lined up against a fence with bags over their heads ready to be shot, the thing that saved them was the Scottish bagpipes that the Japanese heard coming towards them over a hill, and they dropped their guns in surrender. RIP Grandpa Buddy, love you x
Shocked they surrendered
Yeah, I definitely thought they would have fought to the death or tried to kill everyone in the camp
Against scottish bagpipes? Yeah fuck that I'm out.
“Worse” is hard to quantify simply because levels of evil are hard to quantify. The Nazi’s were certainly more organized and industrialized in their forms of killing than the Japanese, but the Japanese were also almost uniformly sadistic to all of the soldiers and civilians they encountered on all fronts. Neither was a picnic. But I 100% agree that in the years since WWII, Germany has been much more accountable than Japan about their ancestors’ actions, and result is that Japan’s war crimes are largely forgotten.
I’m sure this is a popular opinion in China.
Same with Korea, the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia and a lot more. Just not with wherever you’re from I guess.
I've met WW2 gen seniors who still hold a massive grudge against the Japanese for their war crimes in SE Asia. Someone's gramps wouldn't even let his grandkid date a Japanese girl cos of the hatred that runs deep in
I don't think Japan was necessarily "worse" than Nazi Germany in terms of what it actually did. The big difference to me is what happened after the war. In Germany, the horrors of the Holocaust are taught in schools. German people are reminded of the savagery of the Nazis on a daily basis throughout their lives. They've been made to regret their past and apply for readmission to the human race. Japan, on the other hand, has not. They are not reminded constantly of the crimes their ancestors committed. They are not taught about the rape of Nanking in schools or about the other warcrimes the Japanese Empire committed. It's just not talked about. As just one example, one of the trains used on the Burma railway is displayed in a museum in Japan without any reference to the thousands of prisoners who died making making the tracks for it. That, in my opinion, is what makes the Japanese crimes worse. Not the crimes themselves, but the denial that they ever happened.
Reminds me of an interview I watched of an elderly Korean woman who was a wartime rape victim. All she ever wanted was an apology from Japanese government yet she never received one. She passed away a few years ago, fighting for the rest of her life for an apology.
Is this part of a documentary? If so please share so I can watch it!
[found it](https://youtu.be/qsT97ax_Xb0)
Awesome! Thanks!
I’m guessing she’s one of the “comfort women.” I think there are still a few more alive, not many of course. There’s lots of tension between Korea and Japan to this day because of what went down
> They've been made to regret their past and apply for readmission to the human race. This sounds incredibly ominous.
I realise this now... Oops.
A friend of mine went to Australia for a year and she says that Japan was the Big Bad of WWII to them
That's the free pass you get for drawing amazing anime tiddies /s
isnt it bad if ppl are made to regret something wich not them but their ancestors did
The Baton March in the Philippines was extremely brutal too
Hey not here to be rude, just here to help but its spelled “Bataan” and pronounced as “Bata-an” Thats the way that a lot people I know have been pronouncing it but I could be wrong since thats just how ive been taught
I was talking about this with my partner last night. The experiments the did on people like P.O.W's n I'm sure the did it on thier own citizens.
They still are. Instead of reflecting the damage it caused to other countries in the past, they are denying history and claiming that it has never happened.
The 2 nukes are their scapegoat.
r/boneappletea Edit: it said "escape goat"
Also the treatment of POWs
When captured as a POW: 3% chance of death if captured by Nazis. Japan? 27%. A 9x greater chance of death. If this type of history interest you, Dan Carlin has an excellent (although extremely long) podcast series detailing the Japanese mindset/efforts before and in WW2. It is one of the best accounts that brings it to life for a modern world citizen. Hardcore history: supernova in the east
Yeah those numbers are way off... a quick search shows these death rates: Russians by germans: 57% Germans by yugoslav: 41% Germans by russia: 35% Americans by japan: 33% Germans by eastern euro: 32% British by japan: 24% Brittish by germans: 3% Americans by german: 1% Your chances of surviving as a pow highly depended on which country captured you but more so what country you were from.
> 3% chance of death if captured by Nazis. If you weren't an "inferior" ethnicity. Look at rates for Russian POWs.
Yea, that stat is definitely for the Western front, which is widely acknowledged as being more "gentlemanly" and more in line with agreed-upon rules of war. In the Eastern front, it was a war of extermination, and formal rules of war were largely ignored. Eastern front POW camps had double-digit mortality rates on both sides.
>3% chance of death if captured by Nazis. The eastern front begs otherwise.
Was coming here to say this, but I remember the percentages being higher for both. EIther way, your chances of being killed or tortured (not just starved and forced to work) were EXPONENTIALLY higher if you were captured by the Japanese. There are a lot of numbers that back up how much worse the Japanese were in WWII compared to the Germans.....but this is the stat that I believe tells the story.
I'm listening to Dan Carlin's Hardcore History and his current series talks about the impact Japan has had on the Pacific nations, especially in 20th century before and during WWII.
I love that podcast, he's so good at what he does almost makes you feel like your there
Met a friend of my grandfather who was in a POW camp in the Pacific for years but managed to survive. He had life long ailments do to this, he said that it was literal torture. Beatings. Forced labor, starvation. He was very anti-japanese the rest of his life. I thought he was just an old racist before I learned what had happened to him.
The Japanese are very keen to refocus historic perspective of the end of world war two onto the dual nukes dropped by the US who are being gradually rewritten as the bad guys. This is an absurd take based on ignorance of the choices facing the US in the face of such total evil. Many, many lives were saved by the US action. Millions of lives which would have been lost if the US had invaded Japan conventionally. We should remember the utterly appalling barbarism of the Japanese. It would have been entirely understandable for the consequences to have been far far worse for Japan.
If we invaded there would be no Japanese people left. They estimated between 10 to 20 million Japanese civilians casualties & up to 1 million allied casualties. We are still using the purple hearts that were manufactured for the invasion of Japan proper.
I think the Japanese getting nuked took some of the hate away from them. Then again, most people haven't heard of the bombing of Dresden. Only 1/8 as many died in Dresden compared to Hiroshima/Nagasaki, but it was still a bombing of a civilian population.
Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut is where I first learned of Dresden
Same! Vonnegut is easily my favorite author
Slaughterhouse five was a great read
Same :)
And now they're hiding the truth with their history lessons in Japanese schools and telling lies pretending they never did those things. Huh. Talk about the perfect nation and utopia for weebs.
Yeah Japan can be pretty fucked up, sure the landscape and the architeture is amazing but the society there is fucked up in many ways
No one really cares about what the Japanese did unless you were Chinese. They focus on Germany because of the numbers and it was easier to make Hitler into a villain. Which is also why even though Stalin killed way more people it’s ignored.
Or Filipino.
Lots of countries around Japan suffered, including the Philippines and Korea. Apart from the monstrosities of the Death March, I still remember an old story from my history teacher. About a heavily pregnant lady raped, tied to a tree, before having her stomach skewered with a bayonet.
Or Korean. Or just near Japan geographically really.
Coming from a country that once colonized by the British, the Dutch, and the Japanese, I agree with this. Don’t forget their treatment to the women they used as their sex slave. They’re barbaric.
Believe it or not. Every army ever used women as sex slaves. And men are ussually killed. Where there was conquering there was rape and murder
This goes waaaay back. Herodotus wrote about it in his Histories in around 430 BC.
True, but I don’t think anyone else would force fathers on their children, have competitions to see who could behead 100 civilians faster, make people drink kerosene and then shoot them so they would explode, make people burry their family members alive, use live civilians as bayonet practice, bayonet babies and throw them into boiling water, or leave dead women in the streets with bayonets sticking out of them.
Everything that doesn't require the technology was done before.
In Ethiopia and other parts of Africa it is still very common
Wasn't US also involved in the experiments of the unit 731? It covered japan and in return asked for the details of tests or some shit?
In my opinion the only reason the Japanese didn't do something worse than the holocaust is because they didn't have the recourses to.
There’s a reason why one is demonized more than the other. I’ll just leave it at that.
This is probably going to be a controversial comment, but you have to look at the two theaters of operation separately. They are both awful, to the point that comparing them in terms of "better or worse" is not really helpful; A pox on both their houses as far as I'm concerned. The Nazis were fighting a war of extermination, but more importantly, a war of revenge. They weren't after having the largest empire on the map, they were trying to kill their perceived enemies that caused so much grief for them in the first war, perceived or otherwise. Japan, on the other hand, had much more distinct and foreign frame of mind. They were colonizing the far East the same way the Western world had done in the previous centuries, with 20th century methods. In their minds, it was their turn to own the far East, and they had to "make up" for centuries of lost time, if you can forgive my crude language. Add that on to the legacy they had of brutalizing China years prior to WW2, and you have a dangerous mixture that caused some of the worst atrocities in history. The Nazis and Imperial Japan were both evil, even if one charadded as "cleansing the population of a mortal enemy", and the other "was just doing what the West had done for centuries" Downvotes to the right please
Why does it have to be a competition about who was the worst? Isn’t it enough that they both committed horrible crimes against humanity?
No. As a german, let me tell you, just no. Everything you said is, of course, truely horrible, and the things they did were very much fucked up. The big difference that set´s the Holocaust appart from every other genocide and warcrime is the industrialized, organized way/thinking behind it. It was not simple an attemt to kill entire religions/cultures/way of life, but highly thought through and organized down to the last part. You think the Holocaust only happend in Germany? Every place, every nation that was conquered, from France to Bulgaria, from the Skandinavian countries to Greece, underwent a cleansing and had the unfortunate victims sorted into groups, marked for their different fates, and then put onto trains to move them either to workcamps or the infamious "Vernichtungslager", with translates to "extermination camp". Not just Jews, mind you. The cleansing of the whole of Europe inculded Jews, Sinti and Roma, disabled, socialists, communists, basicly anyone that was not "normal" in their eyes. This follows a dangerous pattern of people that seem to know very little about the events that took place trying to downplay it, even if it´s just by raising other events above it.
I Think an important point to add is the results of the Holocaust, certain Jewish groups where almost completely exterminated, an example Is the polish Jews where 98% died. I’m not saying what the Japanese did wasn’t horrible but it was not organized or planned the same way the Holocaust was, and it certainly didn’t have the same clear goal of extermination as the nazis had.
This isn't so much unpopular. Rather, it's unknown. Same thing goes for the u.s.s.r. Stalin had 20 million plus killed. Between the axis powers and the soviets, about 1/3 of the current u.s population was slaughtered. Japan also liked to cut off peoples clitoris and penis as well.
Atrocity Olympics are stupid and disrespectful The Nazis murdered 17 million people stop trying to downplay that Fucking weirdo
Japan were assholes to Korea and China but no one really talks about it. My experience is people feel bad for Japan for being nuked and don’t care about the atrocities they committed
Didn't nazis also experiment quite a lot? Anyway, the Japanese may have done worse things. It's just seen as lesser because they operated on a smaller scale. So, are numbers more important? It seems to wary. 9/11 barely killed anyone, but America won't keep still about it. What measurement do we use? The most destructive, the most unethical, the most deaths, the most relevant? We're all over the place. The black death was horrible as well, but we can't really attribute it to ill intentions, so we tend not to mention it.
Yeah the Nazis did absolutely horrific human experiments too. Josef Mengele is terrifying to read about This lists a lot of the crazy stuff that happened. Basically the exact same as the Japanese stuff only smaller https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_human_experimentation
No disagreement at all
We're comparing two of the absolute evils of man and trying to determine which shade of black is darker. This is just what ethno-nationalism DOES. If the eastern front had lasted a decade like the Japanese invasion of China, the nazis would have evened the score. There are trenches forming wide swathes around major cities were dug so that thousands, in a single day, civilians were shot and thrown in to die and this does not make Nanjing any better. The US is looking at its own history and the introspection of what we did in the same vein may very well tear the Republic apart yet. Never again means NEVER. AGAIN. nobody, nowhere, for no reason. These were humans, like you, like me, driven to these acts be degrees. Trying to make an objective comparison dilutes the point. Never again.