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I spent a lot of time in Japan, and the people seemed extremely ashamed of their war time actions, it was in the news plenty too.

Still?

Anyway, here's the thing about Japan vs. Nazi Germany that I think is the reason for the phenomenon you mention.

The Nazis were SYSTEMATIC. The Japanese were merely cruel and xenophobic.

Take the Bataan death march. A very large number of people were killed, something in the neighborhood of 35,000. It was incredibly brutal, horrible treatment, and baseless beatings, torture and executions were constant, starvation, etc. etc. It was a horrible, horrible thing, for which Japan should be endlessly ashamed. But it was also the product of jingoism, indifference, and wartime realities. It's actually pretty hard to deal with 35,000 prisoners, and while you can't just let them go, it's also somewhat hard to care for them all, feed them all, etc. The Japanese responded by not really caring for them for feeding them, plus being extremely cruel.

The same thing is generally true in China. They were extremely cruel, but they mostly just took resources and left people to starve. It was cruel indifference to people that weren't useful to their war effort.

Now, contrast that with the Nazis who actually made an EFRFORT to round up Jews/Gypsies/others and bring them to special camps to be killed and/or tortured. There was a real systematic effort towards cruelty and mass genocide, and it was almost exclusively directed at civillians.

Everyone can somewhat understand the idea of hating enemy soldiers, and treating them poorly. Japan went above and beyond in this respect, but they were essentially acting like many soldiers have felt. "F that guy, he can't have any of my food, and if he steps out of line, I'm going to shoot him."

It's a whole other ballgame when you start systematically rounding people up for genocide. That goes from "terribly misbehaving soldier" to "complete pyschopath."

It's the difference between "the worst of human behavior" and "inhuman behavior."

The Japanese DID systemically rape Nanking. Have you read some of the things they did? They make the most disturbing horror film/novel make look like a fething joke.

Very similar to the Bataan situatiion. It was actually NOT especially systematic. It was just lots of very aggressive, jingoistic, xenophobic soldiers doing very horrible things.

Consider what the went on in Abu Ghraib. Now, I'm not suggesting AT ALL AT ALL AT ALL that it's even CLOSE to what happened in Nanking, Buchenwald, Bataan... But what I am saying is that it's understood that at times soldiers will act out of line, and without orders. That's what happened in Abu Ghraib, and while it's embarassing, it's not systematic or officially sanctioned.

The Japanese were a similar, if much more widespread and horrific form of this.

Yes a lot of Chinese died. They died, in great majority, to starvation. Also, it's not like Mao Zedong, their own Premier, didn't see to far, far worse not long after.

Letting people starve is bad, but carefully tracking them down, rounding them up, and putting them to death is worse.

One is just reckless indifference. The other is a systematic killing, an expenditure of resources for the purpose of killing. It's worse.

How much worse? Whatever. I agree, the Japanese did incredibly horrible things. I just think that what the Nazis did was more shocking, and somewhat unprecedented.

Casual cruelty is commonplace.

Systematic genocide is rare.

But then again, if you're worried about Japan, what about:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_Genocide

There's a lot of bad that goes on.

I already knew about that. Another case of non-whites getting killed so no one really cares.

I guess I should have assumed as much. I mean, if Nancy Pelosi is aware of something, it's safe to assume everyone else on earth is as well.

Also, FWIW, while I do think that race is somewhat at play here, it's not in the way Amaya is suggesting.

If you look at how the Nazis treated American POWs, they were actually much more restrained with them than the Japanese were. Bad things went down, but nothing that compares to the Bataan death march, for example, and killing of POWs was much, much more common back then than it is today.

So in terms of "killing white people" the Japanese actually did a lot more of it, in illegitimate ways.

Where I think race plays a role, is that white people look at Germans (other white people) and they see what they did and they fiind it especially upsetting because it's being done by other white people.

When a Japanese person does it, a white person might think "whatever, Asians are weird, they don't care about killing people." But when another white person does it, it's that much more likely to cause you to imagine yourself do it, and that's what really shocks people, and gets their attention.

It's generally accepted that the atomic bombs saved lives. They probably even saved Japanese lives. That makes them an obviously moral decision by most people's calculus.

The discussion of US 'criminality' and such, isn't entirely wrong, but it's really inapplicable. Attacking civillian centers was a common tactic on all sides during WWII. It was certainly a pretty unpleasant tactic, but at that point in human history it was viewed as a legitimate tactic.

So, there was noting "illegal" about it. Was it immoral? Maybe...

But this is a whole "what's worse" thread...

And in that respect, attacking civillian centers in area you don't control, not as bad as torturing and murdering civillians you have already conquered, is worse than systematically exterminating an entire race of people.

So, if you want to talk about the immorality of attacking civillian centers, I think you've got a valid point. But if we're comparing this to what the Japanese and Germans did, I don't think it's on the same level.


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Not really, the chariot (the most advanced piece of weaponry a few thousand years ago) or the Greek Fire and other instrumental innovations in warfare can in now way match up to what the A-bomb could have achieved from a simple demonstration.

You're suggesting a demonstration would have helped... Need we revisit the fact that TWO bombs were dropped? They used a bomb ON PEOPLE and the Japanese were not immediately convinced.

Some suggest that the second bomb was unnecessary, and the Japanese would have surrendered given a bit longer. I don't know. But I'm just saying, we dropped two of the things before they gave up. If a demonstration would have worked, then one on a city would have worked even faster.