Has anything changed in Japan?

World War II Japanese Military
#1

This isn’t a WWII item but it suggests that WWII Japanese training standards involving brutality to recruits which would have been unacceptable in the West about seventy years ago still exist in Japan, and well outside the military. Which makes one wonder just how far Japan has come from WWII in training people to win.

Star recipe: one raw talent, add insult to injury, leave 3 years

Brent Diamond
April 19, 2009

TWO days after 14-year-old Melbourne soccer player Jason Davidson arrived in Japan he realised he was in for the toughest time of his life.

He was a minute late for his first training session with an elite Japanese junior soccer team at a private Tokyo boarding school — and, as punishment, was ordered to shave his head.

Worse, his new teammates had to have their heads shaved, too. They hated him for it, and wouldn’t talk — or pass the ball — to him for three months. It would be 18 months before they invited him to join them on social occasions.

But for Jason, son of former Socceroo Alan Davidson, humiliation and isolation weren’t the only things to endure in his quest to become a world-class player.

[b]In the first weeks, the teenager from West Brunswick was smacked twice across the face by his coaches, leaving his cheekbone gashed and bruised. His crime? Not bowing properly before a match.

“It was hell,” Jason recalls. “There were guys that got broken noses and all sorts of injuries by the coaches. In a way, I was lucky.”[/b]

But he endured the rigorous and sometimes brutal training regime for three years, emerging at 17 as one of Australia’s brightest young prospects in the world game. Now that he is home from his three years at Japanese League feeder club Seiritsu Gakeun, he thinks it was worth it.
My bold

http://www.theage.com.au/news/sport/soccer/star-recipe-talent-add-injury-leave-3-years/2009/04/18/1240008832537.html

#2

Ironically though, isn’t the average Japanese servicemen in the Defense Forces akin to a police officer in the West rather than a soldier (that is usually considered “government property”) in so far as he or she can resign…

#3

Really?

Show us how, and relate this to the similarities in German and Japanese society and culture at the time.

Show us how they were equivalent.

Do you think that arrogant Japanese contempt for every other race combined with hatred of those races, notably the Chinese who were the subject of sustained race hate campaigns in Japan well before the Rape of Nanking, and the Westerners who followed soon after Nanking, might have had anything to do with it?

Define and explain that opinion by reference to established medical diagnostic standards, such as the DSM IV.

You don’t know much about the different training and other methods, beliefs, objectives and standards of the Waffen SS and the Japanese, do you?

#4

I missed that first time around, but I think it reflects very well on Japan.

If I was a soldier, I’d like the option to resign when my government committed me to a war with which I didn’t agree. :wink: :smiley:

Maybe this should be the subject of a separate thread, but why should anyone feel the obligation to fight a war just because their government gets involved in one?

I can’t think of any modern war which truly has been started or fought for the noble values which the aggressive, and sometimes defensive, governments and other interests which benefit from them claim.

#5

Wiki states this:

The “Japan Self-Defense Forces” (自衛隊, Jieitai?), or JSDF, occasionally referred to as JSF or SDF, are the military forces in Japan that were established after the end of the post-World War II US occupation of Japan. For most of the post-war period the forces were confined to the islands of Japan and not permitted to be deployed abroad. In recent years, they have been engaged in international peacekeeping operations.[2] Recent tensions, particularly with North Korea[3] have reignited the debate over the status of the SDF and its relation to society.[4]
…

The result has been a unique military system. All SDF personnel are technically civilians: those in uniform are classified as special civil servants and are subordinate to the ordinary civil servants who run the Ministry of Defense. There are no military secrets, military laws, or offenses committed by military personnel; whether on-base or off-base, on-duty or off-duty, of a military or non-military nature, are all adjudicated under normal procedures by civil courts in appropriate jurisdictions.

#6

Maybe this kind of overreaction is the reason why so many modern Japanese look back fondly at the IJA of WW2?
They look at their army today, and they see a glorified police force. They look at the army back then, and they see a brutal fighting force capable of capturing a huge chunk of Eastern and Southeastern Asia.

And other than the Germans, the Japanese didn’t have to go through a Pro-Western re-education and de-Nazification (I know Nazification doesn’t apply here, but I’m talking about an equivalent).

#7

What would be ignominious about having a “glorified police force” that is one of the best funded armed forces for decades?

#8

The fact that it doesn’t mirror the old ideals of complete loyalty, will to win, etc, that the IJA did.

#9

Perhaps, but the fact remains that those qualities are not unique to Japan and that Japan, with all its Bushido bullshit and other WWII ‘spirit’ theories, couldn’t even hold on to to its conquests for a few years, and was then crushed and occupied despite being a remote island nation with considerable natural advantages against such a result.

Japan won a lot of aggressive battles in the early part of the war and lost all its defensive battles against the Allies in the later part of the war, no matter how well prepared Japan was.

There’s not a lot to be proud of there, unless you like losing.

#10

I’m just saying. I’m far from an expert on Japan then and now, all I can say is that that’s something I could see them looking back favorably on the IJA. And you have to keep in mind that people often tend to see mainly the things they want to see, and not the whole picture. In the case of Japan, that would be the successes during the early time of the war, not the defeats that followed.

I’m not even going to claim that I’m overly different regarding the Wehrmacht. When I look at them, I prefer to look at their successes, etc - not at their role in a war of aggression, their war crimes and their crushing defeats (though I usually read the latter ones with a lot of interest as well). As much as I try to be neutral, there’s always going to be a certain (and hopefully acceptably small) bias in me when I talk about Germany.

(To be clear, the typical small print a German has to write when writing about WW2 Germany: I do not support the Nazi ideology. I refer solely to the German Army.)

#11

I’m not sure that ‘they’ do.

Most people now in Japan were born after the war and, like most people in the West in the same cohort, probably aren’t all that well informed about or interested in what happened.

I don’t see why you should be defensive about it.

You’re not approving the crimes of the Nazis but just acknowledging Germany’s military abilities, which were bloody considerable and, but for Hitler the idiot at the helm, generally successful.

(To be clear, the typical small print a German has to write when writing about WW2 Germany: I do not support the Nazi ideology. I refer solely to the German Army.)

Your Heer prejudice shows here. :wink: :smiley: What about the German navy and air force?

#12

The Japanese certainly look at their successes in the War and focus on them. I believe the US film “Pearl Harbor,” the cheesy recent one fraught with errors, was huge in Japan. Incidentally, the Japanese ‘defense force’ ethos isn’t that different from that of the Bundeswehr, and certainly no different than the Dutch conscript Army that was very lax in the 1970s. Despite their informality, the Japanese are seen as a pretty effective force that is extremely tech-savvy and fields some excellent, if unproven, systems.

The real societal view is that the military is (mildly) looked down upon. The ethos of Imperial competition and hyper-aggression of the (pseudo) code of Bushido was transferred (which only was forwarded after WWII as the Japanese Army’s attitudes towards surrender, etc., had been in line with Western armies) from a purely military ideal to industry. In this new ideal, Japan would defeat her perceived enemies and an economic realm by building better products along the Demings mode as opposed to a military one in which she ultimately could not - which was seen as the key to national survival…

#13

An interesting and insightful analysis.

Until I read it I had never bothered to think what happened to cause the WWII Bushido ideology to disappear, at least overtly, in Japan.

I suppose I had just unconsciously assumed that it disappeared at war’s end, which of course was hardly likely in the absence of any sort of de-Bushido campaign by the Allies.

It makes sense that the proud, highly adaptable and ever-industrious Japanese would convert the Bushido military spirit into what was required to win the peace.

It’s also interesting that the Japanese took enthusiastically to Deming’s ideas when he was pretty much ignored in his own country, despite having made significant contributions to improved war production which enabled America to defeat Japan. America in due course was overtaken by the quality and ‘value for money’ of products produced in Japan in accordance with Deming’s principles.

It’s ironic that by its post-war innovation and production Japan gained vastly more than it ever could have from the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere which was the whole purpose of its advances from 1941, and without anyone losing their life.

#14

I recall reading about this subject, and seeing it in documentaries and news packages throughout the 1980s. I think the overall gist was that the Japanese have always had a paradoxical relationship with the United States. On the one hand, there is inevitable bitterness with the fact we defeated the Imperial forces and nuked them twice. And a post-war occupation is an occupation --no matter how benevolent it may be. Even today the presence of US forces remains controversial. There was also a good deal of hunger and suffering in Japan far into the late 1940s. However, there was and always will be a flip side.

The enormous Japanese appetite for American culture, and vice versa really, is indicative of almost a love-dislike relationship (I think hate is too strong a word). The Japanese also had a real fear of communism and the majority welcomed the alternative of MacArthur’s tenure as a demi-emperor, and were more forgiving with US efforts to rebuild the country and Mac’s seeming genuine care for the welfare of the overall Japanese people. I think most often, the political leaders, teachers, and certain members of the cultural elites of post-war Japan were portrayed as subtlety passive-aggressive; as transferring their conceptualization of unity and nationalism from militaristic belligerence to one akin to more of a civic pride in the rebirth and of an economic miracle. However, the entire time they sort of kept such manifestations of this like the patriotic, slightly xenophobic, chants of schoolchildren in the classroom subtle and out of the direct eyeline of their US occupiers…

#15

Well if North Korea keeps firing rockets and making nukes, expect Japan, the “I’m a victim of the atom bomb” to start making atom bombs. I really don’t blame the Japanese if they do that but it will scare China badly.

So the nuked (Japan) will become one of the nukers. Ironic, isn’t it.

Deaf

#16

Well Deaf, you probably are aware that the Japanese were working on their own nuclear program during WW2. It doesn’t much matter that it was underfunded - its mere existence at all undermines any holier-than-thou assertions by the Japanese after the war ended. The Germans thought enough of their effort to send their last u-boat with uranium on board. It never arrived, surfaced after the German surrendered and was captured by the Americans.