Mate, I don’t hate anyone.
The Japanese as a people don’t bother me in the least. I’ve met many Japanese and have always found them delightful people. The world could do a lot worse than take them as a model for individual behaviour.
What bothers me about some Japanese is the mentality and, worse, the actions it inspires as outlined in my earlier posts where the modern version of the militarists and nationalists and racial supremacists, who took Japan to war from 1931, employed for several decades after the war exactly the same educational and censorship policies that perverted Japanese thinking and national attitudes before and during the war. And without which they would not have been nuked.
If you want to see just how important controlling the education system was in Japan’s road to war, and in creating and maintaining the whole brutal apparatus of Japan’s military dominated imperial government, read the late Professor Subaro Ienaga’s Japan’s Last War: World War II and the Japanese 1931-45. Here is his nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize. http://vcn.bc.ca/alpha/ienaga/letter.htm His work earned him unremitting attacks, including threats to his life, from the Japanese right.
Ienaga should be a national, and international, hero. Instead, there are significant and powerful forces in Japan which are determined to whitewash Japan’s real past as exposed by Ienaga and others in Japan and well known outside it. They prefer to conceal Japan’s wartime activities and, ridiculously, present Japan as the poor victim of war crimes of which the greatest example is being nuked. While pretending that Japan never did anything nasty. Among millions of others with real experience of Japan’s war, the Australian troops who found their mates’ bodies partially eaten by Japanese and tortured and mutilated in all sorts of ways, common to the Japanese, within a few hours of capture have a different view. As do their descendants. My admiration for Ienaga and other rational and courageous Japanese like him is boundless. My contempt for the militarist revisionists is also boundless, not least because they keep alive the flame which led Japan to war and which could lead it to war again.
Asian concepts of time, struggle and war are very different to Western and European concepts. A perfect example is the inability of Americans, and other Westerners, to sustain for more than a few years any largish war they aren’t winning convincingly, as in Vietnam and Iraq. Contrast the American attitude to Vietnam, where the Americans were seriously engaged for only six or seven years, with the North Vietnamese engagement from 1945 (and earlier) to 1975. Where this is relevant to post-war Japan is that it was very common for Japanese troops after the surrender to tell Allied POW’s that they might have won so far, but it was just a temporary interruption in a hundred years’ war (off the top of my head, I think you’ll find this in Russell Braddon’s The Naked Island, among many other books). Those comments reflected a range of things which aren’t present in mainstream Japan today. But I’m not sure they’re not present in the thinking of the successors to Japan’s imperial military glories who, among other things, honour the soldiers we regard as war criminals and want to whitewash their own history, and show a disturbing tendency to want to go back to the old ways.
The Japanese people as a whole were not responsible for the war in the sense that people in a democracy might be, although even in the most participatory democracy nearly half the people, or a smaller proportion being half the voters, are opposed to the current government. The Japanese people as a whole did not elect the people who ran the increasingly military and fascist state which took them to war. There was no way they could remove or challenge them effectively. On the whole the Japanese people still did not question or challenge the militarists or their increasingly aggressive actions, nor did it occur to them to do so. Instead, they cheered the militarists on from the moment they began their expansion in China. That was in part a consequence of the control exercised by the militarists etc through the education system, censorship, political repression, secret police and so on, combined with the features of Asian and especially Japanese society which produce much greater social and political conformity than do Western societies with their opposing individualistic traditions. But it was also in part a celebration of Japan’s military might and prowess, which most people in all winning nations enjoy, which confirmed Japan’s racial supremacy over the Chinese they held in contempt. In turn this arrogance was transferred to the Americans and the European colonialists, and colonists, in Asia. With rather different results, which some Japanese still cannot accept as it undermines their belief that Japan deserved to win the war and, to the extent that it didn’t, it was still a just and glorious war. Just like the Allies believe about their part in the same war, except they limit their belief to it being a necessary but just war in response to Japanese aggression.
In fairness to the Japanese people, the post-war corruption of education about the war was in part the fault of the Americans who imposed strict censorship, including on school texts, to try to avoid predictable problems with resurgent militarism etc. But, as usual, when confronted with a choice between dealing justice to those who committed outrageous crimes during WWII and using them as bulwarks against communism, America and Britain lost interest in prosecuting war crimes towards the end of the 1940‘s (Australia didn‘t). This allowed some serious war criminals to run Japan. For example, the father in law of the current Japanese Prime Minister was Prime Minister 1957/8-60 and feted by the Americans who even secretly funded his election campaigns. This is like Albert Speer becoming Chancellor of West Germany at the same time and being feted and funded by the Americans. This forgiving American and British attitude towards Japanese war criminals and Japan’s war history also allowed the old regime to continue in a modified form in all organs of government, including the Ministry of Education which then employed the textbook censorship policies introduced by the Americans (which weren’t very different to the pre-war Japanese version, except for content) to promote a sanitised and distorted version of their war history.
All nations sanitise and distort their war, and other, histories to some extent. All nations have a different view of other nations’ versions of their respective histories. All nations have elements of historical denial and delusion about their past. But until some significant changes were forced as a result of Ienaga’s pioneering work, Japan made a science and an art out of sanitising and distorting its war history to the point that it bore no relation to what actually happened. And so generations of post-war Japanese were infected with a view of their history, and beliefs about how they were mistreated by the Allies by being nuked and firebombed and so on, without any knowledge of the circumstances which really led to these events. About which no average civilian in Japan knew much or anything 1931-45 as victories were trumpeted and defeats concealed.
My problem with elements in Japan, as distinct from the Japanese people as whole, is that they present Japan as a modern democracy which has renounced its pre-war roots and the medieval elements of its society and government while strenuously doing all they can to honour and revive the bad elements of their past.
Why do the things I mentioned in earlier posts still occur at the levels of its national government and involve such large numbers of national politicians? How can, for example, such a supposedly modern society still maintain a class of untouchables, the buraku or burakumin, which, like its war history, is carefully ignored by much of Japan? It’s a mistake to think that Japan has made a full transition to the modern world as exemplified by Western thought and practice (regardless of whether or not that is the ideal political or social condition). The bulk of Japan’s people probably have made that transition, more or less, but there is still a solid old guard that wants to return to imperial glories and racial supremacist ideas by manipulating the national mind to re-create a Japan that existed, and yet in their distorted histories never existed, from 1931 onwards. Why would it want to do that when the war is in the past and Japan has renounced war in its constitution?
(Anyone who wants to come in here on how America has been trying to get Japan to renounce the no-war provision in Japan’s constitution and get involved in wars since the early 1950’s is welcome. I happen to think that if the consequence of being nuked was to make Japan a resolutely non-war country, then every life lost in those events wasn’t totally wasted and it’s a pity that a lot more countries weren’t nuked.)
Just as an aside, if only to antagonise Egorka who takes things more literally than you 
and who needs something to get his teeth into after recently bemoaning the lack of debate on the forum ;), if the Russians had been content to confine their 1917 revolution to Russia instead of going into the export market with the Comintern, then the fascists in Germany, Italy, Japan and their enthusiastic and powerful supporters in America, Britain, France and elsewhere might never have been united by that common enemy. Or we could go back further and blame the British for letting Marx in to write Das Kapital. Bloody British! It’s always their fault! 
