Japanese politician: rape was necessary during WW2

[Anomalocaris]

So, why do the Japanese get to simply wash their hands?

Because during immediate post-war years, it would take a lot of work on the part of the US to root out the pre-war establishment that took Japan to war in the first place would be take a lot of work. The vacumn this would leave would also destablize Japanese society, and potentially give Soviet Union an opening to eatablish political blocks in Japan sympathetic to the Soviets. So the US elected instead to avoid the power vacume by largely keeping the pre-war establish in place, and make that establishment beholden to the US by allowing it to retain its sway over Japanese politics, finance and industry, and to protect members of that establishment by allowing the establishement to hide its dirty wartime laundry.

Once that establishment is entrenched again in the post war Japan, it naturally has no interest whatsoever in ever airing its own dirty laundry. The longer the time that has past, the more vested are all levels of Japanese society in keeping this hidden.

The chance to make Japan repent its WWII crimes to the same degree as German has long passed.

[ideologue08]

Well they were atom bombed as you said, so that was punishment enough in my opinion. If you include all the earthquakes and tsunamis as well, they took a beating.

Hi there

The above (in bold) is fair enough.

But what I dislike is that - Japanese children do not learn of their nations death camps, the medical and military experiments carried out on humans, the millions of murders, massacres and atrocities they committed against civilians and POWs, the rapes, the beheadings, the slavery (including sex slavery) etc etc - all in the name of Imperial Japan.

Their schools books do not always feature these things, or feature them accurately.

http://spice.stanford.edu/docs/134
http://www.japanfocus.org/-Mark-Selden/3173

Worse, their Government to this day insists they violated no forms of international law.

German children learn all about the Nazis and the holocaust. Other nations (American, Britain) teach their children about crimes they have committed - colonialism, slavery etc. Catholic schools study the crusades and all the bloodshed which went along with those.

So, why do the Japanese get to simply wash their hands?

If humanity is to avoid mistakes, surely we must learn from the mistakes? Which includes acknowledging them and talking about them.

I understand that they got a bit of retribution with atom bombs - but that was not intended as "punishment", but that was simply to save the lives of Allied troops by avoiding the need to physically invade the Japanese home islands. (I am sure the chance for American to test out its new shiny atom bombs - as well as send a public message to the Soviets - had some influence too).

Teaching their kids about Japan in WW2 would not be "punishment" either, this would be part of "reconciliation" (which is a good thing).

The Japanese people are immoral anyway. There was a documentary about how the police over there say that the rate of solving crimes is something like 96%, so in order to hit the 96 figure they arrest random people sometimes who are completely innocent and they charge them.

[Anomalocaris]

The Japanese people are immoral anyway.

As are ideologues

[Minimalist]

Cops do that everywhere.

[Fidel_Castronaut]

I remember reading a good post that Germans wrote a while back about the racism and xenophobia that is rife in Japanese society.

TBH it's not a subject I know too much about, but I do know that Japanese society is one of the most alien to me (a Brit). Their repression of sexuality, yet their inclination to some of the weirdest porn, real and animated, is one of the things I've never been able to "get", but I guess it's one of those things I never will.

I think the repression of many topics surrounding WWII, and the atrocities committed by the Japanese in, for example, POW camps, is pretty revealing of the general denial/ignore concensus in Japanese society.

[Anomalocaris]

I think western perception of japan often conflates particularly japanese traits with western preception of confucian dominated east asian society in general. Compared to western societies and even more so to other east Asian societies, the Japanese society might in many ways be socially repressed, but is not and has not been particularly sexually repressed per se. Where else in the world do you still find popular participatory religious street festivals dedicated to the shinto equivalent of patron saint of prostitutes, whose relic is an iron phallus, in which local, non-prostitute young women parading on the street wearing nothing but japanese style loin cloth while carrying parade float style effigies of giant pink penis? Where women in the crowd would be encouraged to sit astride and embrace these giant phallus effigy, and if they can get both arms and legs all the way around and touch, it is regarded as sign of good luck?

[image removed]

[Anomalocaris]

I guess the staff is more prudish than the sexually repressed Japanese.