I have to add to what I wrote yesterday, but would not do that in an entry devoted to the victims of the atomic bomb.
Japan only surrendered, even after two atomic bombs, after assurances that Emperor Hirohito would not be prosecuted on war crimes charges. The emperor in turn would abdicate his status of deity, which he held as head of the Shinto religion in his country.
It is a decision that went down like the proverbial lead balloon in those countries that had suffered under Japanese occupation, or whose armed forces had been incarcerated in POW camps. China suffered cruelly between 1931 and 1945, as did many other nations in southeast Asia between 1941 and '45.
Germany, by comparison, was utterly vanquished and its Nazi leadership discredited. The country had to start from the bottom. Japan also rebuilt itself, but has moved a lot more slowly in coming to terms with its past. The death of Hirohito, some years ago, helped to some extent. But the calls for a formal apology go as yet unheeded. Only when that profound expression of regret and apology comes will the dreadful events of the 1930s and 1940s begin to be buried.
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Or when the generations that remember totally die out.
ReplyDeleteLori
It's always fascinated me how the Nippon culture, so introspective and self-aware, could be so barbaric in war, so unfeeling and inhumane, so blood-thirsty. Japan never wanted to "take its Rx" but US bombs as you say made any thought of furthering the war impossible. Why do a people who know the depths of suffering insist on visiting so much of it on, say, the Chinese? I see parallels with Nazi Germany too, but by the closing of the European theater events, most Germans were anti-facist anyway, I'd say. With the Japanese, they were kept from producing weaponry as one of the conditions of surrender, and it seems to the benefit of the world, since they used their resources to make great headway into electronics. Yet they felt and acted like whipped dogs, "lost face" but no apologies for their cruel barbarism. This didn't seem to be the German condition after the war. I think they were more than happy to be occupied, even by the USSR. At least for awhile. That whole part of history is still reverberating today in my opinion, and I was expecting more after Hirohito's death. CATHY
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