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Comment by badminton1 | Hacker News Reader

There are many views on the bombing. The difference is that Americans do not hide it. It's controversial, but people know about it.

Same with Germans. People know about how the Germans behaved in WW2, they're not proud about it, it's learned in schools, and they do not hide it.

Japan on the other side, actively hide their actions. Japanese schools present a revisionist version of history in which all their horrible and brutal war crimes never happened. The Japanese people promote a vision of Japan with a tradition full of honor and virtue. Do they teach their kids that they dropped a bomb carrying the bubonic plague? or the massacre of Nanking? the mass beheadings of people? the sexual slavery? and many other horrible crimes, even targeting kids... probably not. This is the difference.

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For the record, this doesn't reflect my personal experience in Japan in any way whatsoever. People here are quite well aware of their history, but they don't understand some people's focus on Japan's most recent expansion into China and Korea any more than Americans would understand someone whose sole concern is the eradication of native Americans. This kind of "they're not sorry enough for me" discussion is fruitless, because no nation or ethnicity has a moral high ground to stand on.

Edit: I want to add that in my personal experience, there is no place on Earth that is more peaceful and pacifistic than Japan in 2016. Don't pay attention to the government, which simply tows the line for America...I'm talking about the people in the cities and villages. Meanwhile, to my point above, America does nothing but wage wars since WW2. Make of that what you will.

I've been living in Japan for a couple years, and this reflects my experience too with regards to most people I've met. However, it's not just the government, but also a powerful and ageing elite which shares these views. Admittedly not people you'll meet everyday, yet they wield obvious political influence.

Anecdotally, I hadn't met any such people until yesterday, where I had to attend a rotary international conference for a scholarship I receive from them. The audience was composed of around 700 people, most of them CEOs of local corporations, politicians or otherwise wealthy and connected people. The average age must have been somewhere in the late fifties/early sixties. The invited speaker was Masahiko Fujiwara [1], a mathematician turned essayist, who probably should have stuck to number theory. It was basically an hour and a half of chauvinist propaganda, hailing the past greatness of Japan, the superiority of the Japanese people, and mocking (I quote and translate) "Americans, Europeans and white people" at every turn with racial stereotypes. And the entire audience was laughing and clapping their hands! It's scary to think that these people might well be a representative sample of the ruling Japanese elite.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masahiko_Fujiwara

Scary indeed. Those were the same people who dragged Japan into imperialism. I guess waters in Japan run deep, and there have those small-minded people in the ruling class that you find everywhere else, too.

I certainly don't see the current government of Japan reflecting the sentiments of normal people in any way whatsoever, but I think a lot of working class people feel like the government exists in a compromised world where influences of powerful nations like America and Russia use Japan as a proxy. Japan is not a passive player in that game, but the game itself doesn't seem to interest the average person. The people I know are just working hard to make ends meet and do a good job, raise a good family, etc.——normal human stuff.

I'm not so naive to think that Japanese people aren't capable of being racist assholes, but I would say the prevailing sentiment here is more humility than arrogance or conniving. I'm a white American who married into a Japanese family with a (very) distinguished naval history. My ancestry here is definitely elite, but the money and power are a shadow of what they once were——and that's probably a good thing. There's no room for hubris when you're on the ropes. Everyone just has their focus at the human scale.

Yeah, regarding the not sorry enough position, people of the West generally broadcast toward Japan rather than the other way around. Read a book like "Senso," a compilation of letters to a Japanese newspaper by Japanese people sharing their recollections of the war. The sorrow becomes apparent. The shame is not hidden.

>Meanwhile, to my point above, America does nothing but wage wars since WW2. Make of that what you will.

America is the reason Japan is pacifist. America forced Japan to become pacifist at the point of (quite a few) guns. While it's wonderful that the Japanese people have embraced pacifism culturally, their country's pacifist stance is nonetheless paid for with the obligation of American military violence.

Yea the snideness of that last sentence is a bit much, seeing as its current pacifism was bought with American blood and is secured by the Pax Americana.

You are saying that the Japanese didn't pay for their current pacifism with the blood of all _their_ soldiers that died in that war?

That'd be accurate. I suppose my stance would be that Japan's current pacifism was imposed on them at the cost of all their soldiers. In my mind 'bought' assumes intentionality, and I don't believe that pacifism was the goal of Imperial Japan.

Fair enough, I removed the last sentence, but I stand by the snideness nonetheless.

If nihonde wants to contrast Japan's pacifism with America's violence, they would do well to remember how much easier it is to remain pacifist when someone else has to take the bullets for you.

Please elaborate. I'd like to know which of America's wars or conflicts since WWII were fought on Japan's behalf?

You're employing a strawman in suggesting open military conflict is the only way in which Japan is a benefactor of America. In reality, America's dominance of the ocean's secures Japanese commerce and frees up money they would otherwise have to spend on defense - indeed, Japan's sophisticated economy benefitted a great deal by essentially having it's sovereignty guaranteed with no investment in a standing military. American power in the Pacific protects the Japanese from the ascension of China and probably somewhat from the belligerence of Russia - if America withdrew it's implicit military support of Japan, do you think the Japanese have the power to keep the Senkaku Islands from being annexed by China?

None. But AFAIK the US is obligated by treaty to defend Japan against any external military threats, meaning any potential conflicts Japan might have with its neighbors would be fought on Japan's behalf by the US. Japan is ostensibly pacifist because it's "military" isn't Japanese, it's American.

I guarantee you that "Japan is ostensibly pacifist" because the people who live here right now have no interest in war. The only signals of war and conflict here are American.

No normal people in Japan are interested in the territorial conflicts with China, or constitutional debates about self-defense, or where to stage American military hardware, except that they would like all of that nonsense to end so that they can get on with their lives.

Your 'Pax Americana' is doublespeak on the highest order, as Americans go around the world setting and lighting their own powder kegs.

Yesterday, a V-22 Osprey flew low over my house, and while it is a marvelous sight on many levels it is ultimately the only emblem of death and destruction on a landscape of almost unimaginable serenity. My neighborhood is all bamboo swaying in the wind, old people on bicycles running errands, kids playing baseball and catching beetles, some lazy cats and a lazy river...and here comes a fucking V-22 Osprey overhead.

Meanwhile, a Marine in Okinawa is accused of killing a young Japanese girl. These things just simply do not happen very often in Japan, so the attention on this murder is intense. Okinawa is a really nice place, and the people there would prefer not to deal with this cyclone of...death and destruction in their midst. It made sense at one time, but it really is not that time anymore.

I know that you have a hard time overcoming the urge (programming) to see America as the great liberator of the world, policing the wild streets of lesser, unruly regions that would be lost without Uncle Sam, but...at some point, the big bully protecting the block becomes the only problem that anyone on the block is having.

The ironic thing is that I agree with you far more than I disagree with you, and I'm anything but "programmed to see America as the great liberator of the world". I would like nothing more than for the US to reduce its global military presence, because I think the age of nuclear superpowers and the "Pax Americana" is coming to an end, and, as you said, the US is becoming the problem.

However, you seem to be incapable of perceiving Americans as anything but mind-controlled militarists, or of seeing Japan's relationship with the US military as anything more complex than a violent foreign intruder forcing its will onto a pure and innocent yamato nadeshiko, so I'm going to stop trying to engage you in thoughtful conversation on this topic.

To be honest, I enjoyed this conversation, even though I probably project some unfair assumptions onto you. I'm an American myself, so I'm also well aware of the beautiful side of American life. I guess we're ultimately in agreement that the best of America happens when we look after ourselves and our own homestead, and the same is true of Japan. I just get so damn frustrated when America can't seem to resist the urge to own everyone and everything, which is basically a destructive impulse. At the end of the day, national boundaries are not important, and the most useful qualities for the long-term preservation of our human race are humility and thoughfulness.

> I'm an American myself, so I'm also well aware of the beautiful side of American life.

Ah... that explains the sakura tinted glasses, then.

The peace treaty that ended WWII handed over control of Japan's military to the USA. Japan's peacefulness is a gift from foreigners.

> no nation or ethnicity has a moral high ground to stand on

There are quite a few old and small countries and ethnic groups that have reasonably good human rights record in the post-Columbus times. See Iceland or the Sami people for example.

I bet even during WW2 Japanese civilian life was peaceful too, but that doesn't prevent Japan's brutal invasion into other nations. Your personal experience doesn't matter much. Also I don't think Asians reveal their true thoughts to foreigners easily. Besides what matters is Japanese government's take on the history. If Japanese government continue to deny their wrongs during the war and worship their war criminals in shrine, then it is a major problem to the neighbors.

I don't know how much of it can be attributed to the fact that they are required to be peaceful (as a country) by law.

It's not like Japan would be the first country to selectively remember history to make itself look good. I doubt they teach much about Dresden in the UK, or the extermination of Indians in America, or killing literally every Aborigine in Tasmania, or the British forcing the Chinese to buy opium.

I went to school in Japan and we didn't learn a sugar-coated version of history. We went to Hiroshima and listened to a talk from a bomb survivor who told us it was our job to make a world where something like that could never happen again.

In American schools an overwhelming amount of time is spent teaching about the sins of our country and other white people. Slavery, Jim Crow laws, the genocide of Native Americans. In a unit on WWII, a week would be spent on the entire war, and the other 3 specifically dedicated to the Holocaust. All in all I'd say we spent over half of our history lessons and a third of our English lessons covering subjects like these.

Very true, and a great point. There are still gaps, though. How many schools teach you the reasons that Germany turned against Jewish people after WWI? In fact, how many schools teach the history of WWI in any kind of detail at all? And what about the reasons for the Southern resistance during the Civil War? My recollection (and I went to an expensive private school) was that these wars were characterized as simplistic, binary good/evil conflicts, where a bunch of "bad" people went nuts and had to be sorted out by "good guys" who were obviously right. If someone asked a question like "why did National Socialism focus on Jewish people", that person would be immediately shunned and the question would be offensive——again my experience. If you don't let people ask difficult questions, and provide answers for them, it isn't so much an education as a program.

I was trying not to ruffle feathers, but that's what I was getting at. I was quite liberal as a teenager but even I could tell that history/social studies was mostly used as an opportunity to indoctrinate. The one teacher I had that tried to provide opposing views on every topic got canned.

I agree with you but the schools' focus on the Holocaust, in my experience, was heavily centered on the Jewish experience, despite that many millions of non Jews were also exterminated. I guess this is because America has lots of Jews but not so many Poles, handicapped, homosexuals, etc (or they don't have much political power).

Also I remember learning about measles blankets and all that, but it never got to the point of using this historical context to inform a discussion of the current social/economic situation Native Americans face. All in all it was portrayed as a romantic and fair battle between cowboys and Indians.

Tldr the only war crimes we teach our kids are those whose victims have survived and attained some political prominence.

Agreed. Not sure why you were downvoted. You can find this information in American history textbooks or online.

The eradication of Native Americans was discussed extensively during my public school education in the US. Make of this anecdote what you will.

I'm encouraged by that, actually. It's a morbid and uncomfortable topic, but those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

In the UK, children are definitely taught a history to be proud of in general. Which is the opposite of how history is taught in Germany. But there were a few exceptions. I'm certain we studied the Allied bombing of Dresden and also the massacres that occurred during the Indian independence movement.

It seems only right to me that children be taught pride in their country and their history. There's no need to teach people to cringe at the mention of their nation.

There is a middle ground between hating their nation and blind national chauvinism. And if one must choose between extremes, "cringing" beats the heck out of falling in line and being a party to genocide

> There's no need to teach people to cringe at the mention of their nation.

Ideally, teachers do not tell kids what to feel. Teachers share facts.

The USA just kicked President Jackson off the front of the $20 bill, and his genocide was part of the reason he was the least respected money face.

The "Trail of Tears" is a major unit in several years of K-12 education.

Sounds like progress. We shouldn't forget the oppressors, but we also shouldn't honor them.

Of course, one might wonder how Jackson has been on the $20 for this long to begin.

That's pretty straight-forward. Until the last ~30-50 years the vast majority of the US population held a high or at worst neutral opinion of Jackson.

From, say, 1928-1960 there was practically no wide-spread criticism of Jackson's personal history regarding Native Americans (or any of his other terrible beliefs).

Consider that FDR is still very highly regarded by the left in the US, despite the fact that he was a blatant racist and interned a hundred-thousand Japanese-Americans.

In Australia, the extermination of all Tasmanian aborigines was definitely not taught in highschool, in at least the late 80s when I went. It's not suppressed at all, and plenty of people are aware of it, but it's certainly not taught (or at least, wasn't at that time).

We were taught in high school, ~15 years ago.

I remember wondering how it was actually performed. The story was told as a long line of men walking from on end of the island to the other, killing any aboriginals they found in the process. Tasmania is a very large island, so it seemed like they would need an inordinate number of men to form a line that joined all the way across it, and it would take a very long time to walk the length of it.

Turns out the line was a real thing, called the Black Line [1], and was part of a war called the Black War [2].

Lieutenant-Governor George Arthur decided to remove all Aborigines from the settled areas in order to end the escalating raids upon settlers' huts. He was also concerned about preventing the settlers from taking the law into their own hands and launching revenge attacks. To accomplish this he called upon every able-bodied male colonist, convict or free, to form a human chain that then swept across the settled districts, moving south and east for several weeks in an attempt to corral the Aborigines on the Tasman Peninsula by closing off Eaglehawk Neck (the isthmus connecting the Tasman peninsula to the rest of the island) where Arthur hoped that they could live and maintain their culture and language. This action was only directed against Aborigines of the Big River and Oyster Bay tribes, since the conflict was only with these two tribes.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Line

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_War

> probably not

Do you know whereof you're speaking, or are you attacking a school curriculum you've imagined? Japanese education does cover these topics. There was a big controversy around 2000 when the government approved a new textbook that greatly downplayed Japan's military past but it was never used in more than a handful of schools.

Obviously there's a never-ending debate about precisely what gets taught, and right-wing activism to whitewash textbooks is always in the background. But the topics you're talking about do get taught, and discussed widely, and you'd have a hard time finding an educated Japanese person who isn't familiar with them.

Americans may not hide their actions, but they certainly paint the actions in a light favorable to the American self-image. Germany on the other hand exhibits complete contrition and there is no denial of the wrongness of the actions that happened. There are extreme and fringe holocaust denial beliefs in some sub-groups in Germany, but as a government policy what I've said is true.

As an American, this is a question I struggle with. The the atomic bombs did what they were meant to, a swift end to the war with a full capitulation by the Japanese, before the Russians were able to mount an invasion of their own. This is generally forgiven because it in theory saved the lives of American soldiers who would have had a hard fight to take Japan.

But all of this was done, and with an understanding that it would, cause a massive number of civilian casualties. The US and allies did this to Tokyo and Dresden with non-atomic weapons as well.

To me these are crimes that we as a country have never really admitted to. We discuss it openly, but we have never truly said that we were wrong to kill so many innocent people. I believe that this is partly why we today do not also hold ourselves accountable to the large number of civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Edit: I should include Vietnam as well in which we killed some multiple of millions. But even that has the list too short. We as Americans suffer from the Sam euro centric view we've always had, if your white, it's a death worth counting, if not, eh...

You never noticed the opposition to the Vietnamese war? It is the primary cultural feature of the 1960s-1970s, and then in movies through the 1980s

I should be more clear, there are many idividuals in the US who believe these actions were wrong, but the government continues to report civilian deaths as irreleveant in most cases.

Also, I'd say those movies you're referring to were much more from the perspective of the unjustly forced into war soldier, than the plight of the Vietnamese.

I was not alive then, my knowledge of Vietnam is all books and information from my parents and friend's parents.

Life is so strange. The other day, I joined a new Japanese language class. The only other person who was starting that day was a young Vietnamese man. So here is an American and a Vietnamese man in Japan, speaking to each other in broken Japanese. Fifty years ago, we might have been killing each other. Thank goodness we found our peace and became friends with a common goal instead.

Also, we're still killing civilians as collateral damage in the middle east through drone strikes. And the civilian death toll is officially underreported because of how they've chosen to define an enemy combatant. A quick googling shows counts in the 100k+ range.

My view is that the people who made those difficult decisions are all dead now. Let's study their reasons in the coldest, least judgmental light and try to make some sense of their dilemma. From there, maybe we can do a better job of avoiding the situations that lead people to have to make those hard choices.

There are also groups of Americans that condemn such actions. There is also compassion for the victims. There is a mainstream ethical debate, which is what allows society to move forward.

It's hard to have contrition for policies and actions which saved, arguably, millions of lives.

Saving 10 people at the cost of killing one person is still a tragedy, unless you're UtilitarianMan or a psychopath.

It certainly is hard to have contrition if all your lines of thinking start with the conclusion that you are never wrong about anything, and work backwards from there

At least in my experience in the US school system, not a lot talks about American behaviour in WW2

Besides the atom bomb, America basically bombed Japan out of existence. So much so that when the atomic bombs were dropped, it was first assumed to be just another part of that night's bombing runs. No major city was less than 90% destroyed.

The issues of Japanese war behaviour comes up very often, and the people have been very outspoken in not wanting to return to a militarised state. I would say that Japan has mostly behaved in a similar manner to Germany on the topic (if with several decades of lateness).

You can open up Japanese textbooks and find the history of the war (and the unrest beforehand that lead to the military getting so much power).

EDIT: another thing. There are movies/TV serials about wartime Japan. Every single one of them highlights the absurdity of the war that people are being sent out to. The lies the government propagated to keep the war going. The punishing of intellectuals for expressing even the smallest doubt. Some even covering how foreigners were mostly thrown out of the country. I have rarely heard doubts about whether we should have bombed Japan as much as we ended up doing.

> I would say that Japan has mostly behaved in a similar manner to Germany on the topic

Are you sure on that? I doubt Japan's neighboring nations would agree on that.

When I visited the peace museum in Hiroshima, I was surprised by how honest the exhibits were about admitting their own ugly history that led up to the bomb. I was shocked by the forgiveness of the Japanese people. Some survivors actually work in the museum and greet visitors coming through. The peace museum is one of the most emotional places I've ever visited and it leaves such a vivid picture of the human cost of war.

It's not that Japanese people are hiding their history. If there are clear evidences that are not flawed and could not be denied, they will not deny, but admit and apologize. For example, there was the famous Korean sexual slavery issue coined by Seiji Yoshida that later he and Asahi Shimbun admitted it was a complete fiction. This revealed that the comfort women issue was not about slavery but prostitution.

Why do you apologize for the thing if it wasn't true? The thing which is making complicating is that the Chinese government is promoting hatred towards the Japanese government as a propaganda and is exaggerating the results.

Do you really believe the claims of the country which has the Great Firewall? Do you really believe the country which the government is officially producing anti Japanese movies? Do you believe the country which hides the Tiananmen Square Incident and the ongoing killings of the people in Tibet and Xinjiang?

There are suspicions of the claims and the numbers coming from such country.

https://sfi.usc.edu/news/2016/05/11436-japanese-activist-tam...

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-21226068

Both articles refer to the same person Tamaki Matsuoka, which is known to be writing books based on logically mistaken interviews. For example, there is a book written by her about 102 "anonymous" ex-soldiers, which she claimed that an 11 years old boy was sent to Nanking as a soldier and raped many women. http://www.amazon.co.jp/%E5%8D%97%E4%BA%AC%E6%88%A6-%E9%96%8...

There were no Japanese soldiers of such a young age.

> Japan on the other side, actively hide their actions.

The US, like the rest of the Allied powers, do more than their fair share of actively hiding their crimes during the war years. They also love to gloss over the degree to which, before they saw him as a threat to their existence, the Allied powers actually admired and respected Hitler and even sought to emulate his leadership.

I mean, most Americans sure as heck don't know that FDR literally modeled the genocide in Puerto Rico after 'the methods which Hitler used effectively'[0]. Because very few schools actually bother to mention Operation Bootstrap in the first place, let alone acknowledge that that the US forcibly sterilized 40% of Puerto Rican women (on the grounds that they were 'unfit to reproduce').

Hiroshima and Nagasaki are the exception only because the events directly led to the Cold War as we know it[1], and it's kind of hard to understand the next 50 years of world history without understanding that the Cold War was happening.

[0] https://books.google.com/books?id=3llNN7jmQE4C&pg=PA255&lpg=...

[1] Yes, the Cold War would still have happened even if the US had decided not to drop the bomb, but since we did, the bombings became the unforgettable, tangible symbol of the fear that the Cold War was based on.

http://apjjf.org/-Mark-Selden/1943/article.html

Here is an excellent analysis of American high school textbooks and their handling of the war with Japan.

It's pretty clear that Americans do in fact censure what is taught.

Today, Chinese government says that Japanese army killed 300,000 people in Nanking. In reality, Nanking's population had been doubled at that time. Plus, there were only 200,000 people from the beginning. I still think there had been something small massacres though, why can't we find dead bodies for 300,000 people?

Talking about comfort women, the system was not only Japan. USA and South Korea had also introduced exactly same system during Korean war. Look at today's USA. How many Korean prostitutes are out there? They would be called sex slaves 50 years later.

I didn't downvote you, but such claims really require good sources.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostitutes_in_South_Korea_for...

I came here to say pretty much exactly this.

There are a lot of Japanophiles (be it culture, food, anime or whatever). Much of it seems to spring from disaffection for the West. All of that's fine but this revisionist view of history is one thing that's always bothered me about Japan.

Now we have China and Japan squaring off over some uninhabited rocks in the South China Sea and I think it's at least in part a byproduct of WW2.

The Chinese remember Manchuria, Nanking, etc. From the outside looking in it seems like "payback" might not be the goal of this but it sure is a nice bonus.

The Japanese on the other hand as a whole I think don't understand this motivation because they don't have this foundation in historical events. To them it must seem like the Chinese actions are unprovoked and unwarranted.

This sort of thing is a dangerous and inevitable consequence of ignoring the lessons of history. Population and economics are on the side of the Chinese here.

It's rather xenophobic to think that anti-Westernism is the reason people find Japanese culture interesting.

US Hollywod movies (and McDonalds) are popular worldwide. Do those fans hate their home countries?

The "rock" is actually located in East China sea.

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