Perspectives on the past

[unixronin]

Japanese author Kenzaburo Oe, in a New York Times op-ed column, is outraged about Hiroshima.

Outrage about Hiroshima and Nagasaki is nothing new.  Unfortunately, neither is selective amnesia.

However, Richard Fernandez, writing for Pajamas Media, has a different perspective.

And you know what?  He's right.  The usual suspects who are routinely, annually outraged about Hiroshima and Nagasaki have a tendency to be strangely silent about atrocities committed by Japan during the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Second World War such as the Bataan Death March, the "Death Railway", the Manila Massacre, and — before World War 2 even officially began — the Nanking Massacre, more often known as the Rape of Nanking.  Estimates are that the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed between 150,000 and 250,000 people within four months of the bombings, roughly half of those on the actual day of the attacks.

By comparison, an estimated three hundred thousand Chinese were slaughtered and sixty to eighty thousand women and girls raped (most of them killed afterwards) at Nanking alone, and "at least" a hundred thousand Filipinos at Manila.  Another ninety thousand Asian forced-laborers and sixteen thousand Allied prisoners of war died building the Death Railway.  Of the 75,000 prisoners who set out on the Bataan Death march, only 54,000 reached the destination; Japanese troops also frequently killed bystanders for showing sympathy or concern for the prisoners.  (Some of the missing 21,000 escaped, but it's impossible to say how many.)  The Japanese government has repeatedly and persistently tried to "rewrite history" to deny that many of these atrocities ever happened, even in the face of photographic evidence and first-person accounts from survivors, and has only ever issued apologies for a very few of them.  Many Japanese nationalists still claim that the Nanking massacre was completely fabricated for purposes of anti-Japanese propaganda, and Japanese law does not acknowledge those convicted in post-WW2 war crimes trials as criminals.

Far beyond even any of these specific incidents, estimates of the total number of Asian civilians slaughtered by the Japanese military during the 1930s and 1940s range from ten million to thirty million.

So where's the outrage about all of those?

Make sure you read the comments too.  There's some very good observations there, starting with this one:

Those killed at Hiroshima, and later Nagasaki, were killed in spite of their being non-combatants.

Most of those killed in Manila and the vast majority of the slain in Nanjing were killed because they were non-combatants.  Wherever the Japanese went, the slaughter started after resistance ceased.

When the Americans carried the day, the killing stopped as soon as the victory was won.

We've nothing to apologize for.

Disclaimer:  I have a personal horse in this race.  One of my grandfathers, who served in Malaya under Gen. Stilwell, was captured by the Japanese and forced to work on the Death Railway and the Kwai (actually Kwae Lai) bridge.  He technically survived the war, physically speaking; but a part of his mind remained forever trapped in the Japanese prisoner-of-war camps.  He eventually committed suicide, as the only way to escape from the horrors he was unable to ever forget.

Comments

[ithildae]

My Opa was a Russian POW during WWII. (He was with the German Army. He survived because his enlistment papers showed he was not a Nazi. The Russians summarily killed any that could not prove they were not a Nazi.) His imprisonment was brutal, and it destroyed his health. Escaping from East Germany was a harrowing experience. That war was a miserable experience for most who fought and survived. That is why we developed rules of war. One could wish that war would forevermore be unnecessary. Unfortunately, we understand human nature far too well, especially the nature of tyrants.

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

I grew up down the street from a survivor of the Bataan Death March.

[docstrange.livejournal.com]

Absolutely.

Let's not forget the horrors conducted over the thirty-five years of imperial occupation of Korea, from slave labor camps, attempts to destroy the culture, and of course the infamous "comfort women" that Japan did quite a lot to cover up.

I think our ambassador could indeed offer an apology with regard to Nagasaki and Hiroshima - to Korea, for the thousands of Korean "conscript" (read: slave) laborers forced there by the Japanese, and who were killed in the blasts. But those seeking an apology for what was done to shut down Imperial Japan itself can pound sand.

[wyrdling.livejournal.com]

asia still carries a lot of hate for japan. memories don't fade that fast.

a land invasion of japan would have been horrific. how does one weigh one against the other? truman had to, and i wouldn't want that hot seat. and he had no idea what the long term after effects of nuclear radiation would do to someone.

[perspicuity.livejournal.com]

japan gave us Godzilla... as a result of all that - the bombs that is.

depending on perspectives, it's their way of saying "bite me" in some fashion.

the winners always try to rewrite history. however, Japan didn't win ;)

#

Apologize? Perhaps not. Regret? That's more like it.

[dakiwiboid.livejournal.com]

I am using this in the literal sense of remembering with a sense of loss of sorrow, mind you. I feel sorrow whenever I think of the bombings.

I deeply regret that those bombs were dropped. I deeply regret those deaths. I deeply regret the painful deaths of the Manhattan project workers who were exposed to what this page calls "enormous amounts of toxicity" (http://www.mphpa.org/classic/VET_ARCHIVES/MPVA_19.htm). I worked at a university with four professors who were veterans of the Manhattan Project. Three of them were ardent pacifists, and one of them used to say to me regularly that everything he did in the cause of peace was designed to help atone for the deaths he had caused. Two of them died of cancer as well.

People here in St. Louis died producing uranium for the Manhattan Project. The waste from it was dumped right on the flood plain, and workers were cleaning it up in the 70s without protective clothing. I don't think we'll ever know how many people have been sickened by that waste. We still have an active threat from it, even though the Corps of Engineers has worked for a long time to remediate it.

How can we not regret Hiroshima and Nagasaki? We harmed ourselves as well as the Japanese, and continue to do so.

I know that there are people in Japan who regret the crimes of their military and their government. I've read what they've written, but what they say will always be ignored because it's not what the world wants to hear.

Re: Apologize? Perhaps not. Regret? That's more like it.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Regret, certainly. Just because something was the least of available evils does not mean you cannot or should not regret it. But by the same token, regretting what you have to do should not prevent acknowledging that you have no better options.

What we need is to create less situations in which we are forced to actions we later regret. Unfortunately I don't have any easy answers as to how the human race can accomplish that.

[jmkelly.livejournal.com]

So one atrocity justifies another? The deaths of civilians in Nanking and the Philippines are balanced out by the deaths of civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

The civilized world has long condemned the kind of rape and pillage the Japanese military committed in China, Indochina, and the Pacific islands. Those were millions of individual acts of indefensible violence. To condemn them is to say nothing new.

But strategic bombing still enjoys some respect; it has been the foundation of superpower strategy for over half a century. We make a distinction between maiming and killing myriads of civilians by shooting and stabbing them, and doing the same by dropping bombs on them.

Maybe it needs to be said that this is a distinction without a difference.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

So one atrocity justifies another? The deaths of civilians in Nanking and the Philippines are balanced out by the deaths of civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

No. Nobody said that. This is a straw-man.