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I really don't get the US hating all Asians part. Where does that come from?

Many of the cold war era wars were proxy wars with Russia to stop the spread of communism. A natural place for that to occur was where Russia was attempting to move neighboring governments to communism, which was Asia.

Also we were at war with Japan, they attacked the US after all, so I would hardly call them allies at that point in history.

Really, the US started the war with Japan when Commodore Perry forced Japan, literally at gunpoint, to begin trading with the US in 1853.

The first Opium War had already happened, and the second was about to begin. If the Japanese were to maintain their autonomy and avoid the disastrous fate China suffered as a result of Anglo-Chinese trade, colonial expansion was their only realistic option.

When they attacked Pearl Harbor it was mostly out of desperation, because the oil embargo ordered by Roosevelt placed Japanese imperial operations in imminent jeopardy.

For a less US-centric perspective on the US/Japan war, Noam Chomsky's 1967 essay [0] is worth a read. He doesn't excuse their violence, but he does point out that it was more justifiable than other US violence in South East Asia.

[0] https://chomsky.info/196709__/

This is a hilarious, sock puppet-esque take on Imperial Japan, which is suitably foot-noted as fertilized by Chomsky's fever dreams of anti-Americanism at any cost. I think the Koreans and the Chinese have a slightly different take on the issue. And the Phillipines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam... "The Japanese are a hundred times crueller than the French. Even a worm or a cricket could not live under their brutal violence" (Elliott, 2016).

Japan got a very good deal out of gunboat diplomacy, and its population was much better off for it, then and now.

I'm sure I could improve your life by forcing you to do certain things at gunpoint: are you eating right, saving the maximum possible for retirement, using your time as efficiently as possible, gentle in your relations with everyone?

Whether some Japanese derived some benefit from the ultimatum doesn't change that it was a coercive relationship, enforced by a nation with a history of destructive exploitation of other nations and races, justifying its exploitation in terms of cultural and racial superiority over its subject people. Your argument is straight out of "White Man's Burden."

I think I know a bit more about he subject than you, having studied the Edo era academically and being a licensed instructor in the military techniques carried down by one family of Tokugawa bodyguards, including the oral history that comes with that.

That era was a shitshow ruled over by oppressive sociopathic samurai where life was short, domineering, and often brutal. They kept their country isolated from technology for the only reason of disempowering potential reformers. It is only looked back with fondness by those whose naïveté keeps them from knowing better, or who have nationalistic political agendas.

The gunboat diplomacy was frankly a move of liberation that benefited the people of Japan. And it was not an occupation either -- fair trading terms were what was offered, by the standards of the day, a far better deal than China had for example. Japan was enabled by the deal, turned into a prosperous trading partner and world superpower a mere 40 years later.

I don't know what lense you are looking at his through, but it is not refracting history correctly.

> I don't know what lens you are looking at this through...

Mostly from reading Buruma's Inventing Japan, and Dower's War Without Mercy and Embracing Defeat.

The fact that the pre-Perry regime was nasty has no bearing on the causal factors of Japan's later imperialism

You are correct, but it's orthogonal to anything I said. The point I was making is that feudal Japan was an oppressive, nasty place and gunboat diplomacy, while not bloodless (see the internal conflicts of the Meiji Restoration), was a much smoother transition to prosperity for the inhabitants of Japan than alternative interventions being tried elsewhere.

I don't buy the line that coercive actions are necessarily wrong. Using force to remove a dictator that is oppressing its people (or an entire caste of brutal autocrats) is morally justifiable IMHO. And if you compare the American involvement in Japan with the other sorts of things that were going on at the time in East Asia, it was pretty tame.

Historians must restrict themselves to evaluating choices by the standards of the time under consideration. And by the standards of day, the Japanese got a pretty good deal, especially when compared with their neighbors.

The Japanese economy was in a shambles. Perry gave them a way out of the trap they were in.

I could say the same about Tibet but for some reason, I think you would be one of those people who call for "Free Tibet".

The two are incomparable. A mere 40 years after Perry sailed into Tokyo bay, Japan went from backwater feudal island to an industrial superpower and unshackled itself from the unequal treaties, asserting its dominance on the international stage as an independent, sovereign nation. Nearly 70 years after the fall of the Dalai Lama's regime the people of Tibet are still largely poor and marginalized, with their cities and resources taken over by the occupying Han Chinese that claim the land as their own. The subsidies given to Han Chinese that relocate are straight out of the manifest destiny playbook. So I'm not really sure what point of comparison you are trying to make.

Go read about the China hands in the state department. The USG had a direct hand in abandoning Chiang to Mao and Stalin; setting up the genocides in China and the Korean War.

as a South Korean, "U.S. hates asians" is a blatant lie. In fact, US saved South Korea from Chinese communism.

Look what happened to all those North Koreans thanks to all those chinese-influenced "good-willed" communists.

And after the Korean war, US bombarded South Korea with supplies - even people born on '30s and '40s remember rations from U.S. left over

Is it really even Chinese communism ?

Seems more like Kim-ism.

also, Chinese gov. is still on the Kim-ism side, even though it talks like it isn't.

Look at what Chinese gov. does to North Korean escapees.

Chinese gov. uses 'civilian police force' to round em' up and send back to North Korea, even though it knows 99.99% of them ends up tortured-to-death.

In that regard, Chinese gov. hates Koreans more than it can

Kim-ism wouldn't have been possible without Chinese help.

wow, did you read a history book backwards?

> the Korean War they dropped more bombs, including napalm and experimental bombs, on the Koreans than all of the bombs dropped in WWI and WWII combined

This seems like an extreme claim. I can't find any reliable source that claims that more bombs than the ones dropped in WWI and WWII combined were dropped to Korea.

> And these are two of the US' closest Asian "allies".

Not back then, Japan had sided with the Axis.

> The US simply hates the Asians

Some far-right people do probably hate Asians in the US, but my experience with the people from the US that I know as well as my experience here in the UK Asians tend to be quite liked.

> This seems like an extreme claim. I can't find any reliable source that claims that more bombs than the ones dropped in WWI and WWII combined were dropped to Korea.

I don't know about "WWI and WWII combined" but the US bombing campaign against Korea definitely was devastating. The US did bomb the absolute shit out of North Korean cities -- with more tonnes of bombs than in entire US war against Japan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_War#Bombing_of_North_Ko... , https://theintercept.com/2017/05/03/why-do-north-koreans-hat...

Even US Generals concur:

General MacArthur: "The war in Korea has already almost destroyed that nation of 20,000,000 people. I have never seen such devastation. I have seen, I guess, as much blood and disaster as any living man, and it just curdled my stomach the last time I was there. After I looked at the wreckage and those thousands of women and children and everything, I vomited [...] If you go on indefinitely, you are perpetuating a slaughter such as I have never heard of in the history of mankind."

General O'Donnell: "I would say that the entire, almost the entire Korean Peninsula is a terrible mess. Everything is destroyed [...] There is nothing left standing worthy of the name."

General LeMay: "We burned down just about every city in North Korea and South Korea both [...]We killed off over a million civilian Koreans and drove several million more from their homes, with the inevitable additional tragedies bound to ensue", "We went over there and fought the war and eventually burned down every town in North Korea anyway, someway or another, and some in South Korea too. [...] Over a period of three years or so, we killed off -- what -- twenty percent of the population of Korea as direct casualties of war, or from starvation and exposure?"

The US Generals were arguing that the use of nuclear weapons would have been more humane, and they might be right. Essentially, being more brutal to end a war quickly is better than holding back to fight for years.

I believe they might be referring to the bombing in Laos but mixed up the wars.

http://legaciesofwar.org/resources/books-documents/land-of-a...

>as well as my experience here in the UK Asians tend to be quite liked.

Worth pointing out that "Asian" in the UK would normally refer to South Asian people - i.e. Indians, Pakistanis, etc. If you meant Far East Asian people, you'd specify that, or the actual country.

> In the Korean War they dropped more bombs, including napalm and experimental bombs, on the Koreans than all of the bombs dropped in WWI and WWII combined.

Source, please?

Found this[0] via a cursory Google search:

> The Korean War, a “limited war” for the US and UN forces, was for Koreans a total war. The human and material resources of North and South Korea were used to their utmost. The physical destruction and loss of life on both sides was almost beyond comprehension, but the North suffered the greater damage, due to American saturation bombing and the scorched-earth policy of the retreating UN forces.1 The US Air Force estimated that North Korea’s destruction was proportionately greater than that of Japan in the Second World War, where the US had turned 64 major cities to rubble and used the atomic bomb to destroy two others. American planes dropped 635,000 tons of bombs on Korea -- that is, essentially on North Korea --including 32,557 tons of napalm, compared to 503,000 tons of bombs dropped in the entire Pacific theatre of World War II.2 The number of Korean dead, injured or missing by war’s end approached three million, ten percent of the overall population. The majority of those killed were in the North, which had half of the population of the South; although the DPRK does not have official figures, possibly twelve to fifteen percent of the population was killed in the war, a figure close to or surpassing the proportion of Soviet citizens killed in World War II.

Doesn't quite live up to the parent's exaggerated claims, but still not a pretty picture.

[0] http://apjjf.org/-Charles-K.-Armstrong/3460/article.html

There isn't one. Claims like that are just used to make rhetorical points, facts be damned.