When they brutally attacked China, which was not at war with anyone, the Japs demonstrated themselves to be vermin. The expression of post-mortem respect for the worst of those engaged in that massive crime and its escalating downstream crimes demonstrated that many Japs are still vermin. The election of the blatantly unrepentant Abe as PM of Japan confirms it.

All Japs? To know which ones and how many you'd need to know who willingly served in their armed forces during the war, and who and how many supported the troops in thought, word or deed.

Months of thousand-bomber raids, and the violent occupation by justly vengeful Russians, did much to cleanse Germany of dreams of conquest. Germany seems to have learnt the lessons spelt out at Nuremberg. Pity the nations that brought Germany and Japan to heel haven't also learnt.

Yeah ... this all sucks big time. But so what.

The scourge here is the glorification of militarism, which unfortunately carries the inevitable by-product of glorifying war crimes. You can't separate the two. The only demarcation line is that the side that wins has the luxury of not having to atone for its war crimes or even admit that it committed any.

As for the double standards in why Germany's war crimes are treated differently from those of Japan, this has a lot to do with the highly influential role of the American Jewish lobby in Holocaust remembrance and also the fact that Germany was a long-time imperial rival of England.

While today's war criminals - Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Kissinger, Blair, Clinton (both B and H), Sarkozy, Obama et al - don't have shrines to their souls (although their PR teams are probably working on it), they are being duly worshipped in countless other ways.

There is a real cultural problem underlying this. Japanese culture does not recognise 'guilt', only 'shame'. We Westerners expect the Japanese to be like the Germans and experience guilt for what they did and proceed to expiate it. That kind of thinking, with which I agree, being myself from the West, does not resonate with the Japanese. What is uppermost in the minds of most Japanese leaders is the 'shame' of having been defeated. People who to us are 'war criminals' are to them something in the nature of 'heroes' who were, unfortunately, defeated. This is not to approve the Japanese attitude; it only seeks to explain it.

Trendy lefties have a child like belief that everybody on planet Earth is absolutely equal, and that everybody wants peace, and they all think just like us. Then along comes Tony Clifford with an article which plainly displays that Asians do not think like westerners at all.

The Japanese are a very intelligent and martial race who produced the bravest soldiers of WW2. The Japanese had noted that even small countries like Britain, Portugal, Spain, and Holland could become immensely rich world powers provided that they had an empire that they could exploit. This is what their military leaders had in mind when they seized a golden opportunity to grab some of the rich colonies of the western powers who were presently fully occupied with the war in Europe.

From the Japanese perspective, they were simply doing to the Europeans what the Europeans has already done to the Asians. Their call for a "Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere really struck a chord with the nationalist groups in these western Asian colonies who correctly realised that the Pacific war was really a race war. Many Asians welcomed the Japs as fellow Asian liberators from the whites, before they realised that the Japanese were infinitely more cruel and rapacious than the Euros. These nationalist groups then looked to the Euros as their liberators from the Japanese.

It is obviously beyond Tony Clifford's comprehension that the Japs consider themselves, and all of Asia, as victims of European aggression, and that they were Asia's liberators. The Japanese today consider men like Tojo to be true patriots who tried to make Japan a great country and they are sorry that he failed. The Japanese do not think that they did anything wrong by starting the war, any more than any other colonial power who did the same thing for the same reason.

Please note that while western European tertiary educated people think it is fashionable to always oppose the interests of their own people, Japanese tertiary educated people are still intensely patriotic and they think that their western counterparts are barking mad lunatics.

I think, from what I can infer, that Lego assumes that my surname is 'Clifford', which it is not. But that is a mere detail.

When I was an undergraduate I spent some time researching the reasons why Japan went to war (that includes her invasion of China, Manchuria, etc., not just what most Westerners would consider the beginning of the war, with the bombing of the American bases on Hawaii). With a father who had fought with the RAAF in WWII, I had been brought up with fairly predictable attitudes to Japanese aggression. But my researches changed my view considerably. I came to understand that Japan saw itself as having every reason to do what it did in the '30s, particularly in the light of European and American attempts to belittle a small but proud nation and deprive it of trade and raw materials. This, of course,combined with the Samurai tradition, officially repudiated during the Meiji restoration but still deeply embedded within the national Weltanschauung, to encourage the militarism of the '30s.

I'm not sure that Lego's position and mine are all that far apart.

Tonyo

It looks as if Lego has used the Jap issue as a prop to sneer at people who give a damn (redneck code word “trendy lefties”) and people who study to know what they’re talking about (redneck code “western European tertiary educated people”). The rest is an astounding muddle. The Japs are described as the bravest soldiers of the war, without managing to distinguish between honourable and dishonourable bravery – sacrificing oneself for an honourable or a dishonourable purpose. I guess that makes the killers who flew into the Twin Towers pretty brave. The muddle continues with the Japs conducting a “race war” against China for a decade before hitting the USA over the US blockade of the Jap war supplies – taking advantage of the British being embroiled in a war in Europe (which didn’t break out for eight years after the Jap rampage against Asians started in Manchuria) and millions of Asians (but not Lego) discovering that it wasn’t a race war against Euros at all.

In contrast, Clifford and Tonyo have turned up a genuine insight. Unlike Europeans (and nearly all other by the way), Jap culture knows no shame at having wronged others (“guilt”), only shame at having failed in a vile enterprise. This is familiar also in the criminal underbelly of European society. European street toe-rags know none of the shame of responsibility, only the shamed resentment at having failed or been slighted (“dissed”) or thought to have grassed. This anti-human Jap sociopathy accounts for the culture described by Tom Clfford. It also explains why even a couple of nukes could slow them down but not change a rat mind-set. It was criminal after the war to miss the chance of utterly humiliating them by trying Hirohito and having him beheaded in public by a despised Korean. In droves they still think they’re sons of heaven and dream of a new killing spree. Hence the thumping majority for Abe.

Hi Julian

Japanese culture for millennia had stressed that dying for ones master was the greatest thing any samurai could do, and any samurai who died for his master would be instantly reborn a samurai. This was the reason why so many Japanese soldiers in WW 2 very willingly sacrificed their lives in suicidal attacks against allied forces for the emperor, and the empire.

The Japanese to this day consider themselves the liberators of Asia from white colonialism and that what they did was right. They are sorry that the did not win, and they will never condemn the leaders who did their utmost to further the interests of Japan. If they had won, Japan today would be a superpower. The idea of condemning your own culture and feeling guilty over wars of conquest is an entirely western invention.

Our culture claims that the Japs were bad because they started a war to get themselves an empire in Asia, forgetting that Europeans had been doing exactly the same thing in Asia and everywhere else for 400 years. Whether this was wrong from a European perspective is conditional upon your point of view. The rapacious behaviour of the British and Dutch East India companies which started wars purely for commercial advantage could be described as morally wrong, but over all, European culture was hundreds of years ahead of any other and the spread of western technology, commerce, medicine, and usually efficient and benign government was a real advance to whatever barbaric local tyranny that the native people at that time suffered under.

The Muslims who die fighting to spread Islam are the highest grade of Muslims who will be rewarded in the Muslim heaven by having all sorts of pleasures and rewards bestowed upon them by Allah. Not only do they not think that they are doing anything wrong by putting a bomb in a commercial aeroplane, they think that what they are doing is absolutely right. Their own God instructs them that non Muslims are not really human anyway so it doesn't matter if you kill them.

if Japanese textbooks don't give much credence to the rape of Nanking, Pearl Harbor attack, experiments on POWs, 'comfort women' for their soldiers or reparations for war crimes, then it's no surprise to see why Chinese get so upset, and former sex slaves never get compensation, let alone an apology.

As Sen.Daniel P. Moynihan so aptly put it:

"You may be entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts."

Lego makes a good point in drawing out the common features of those Japs and those Moslems whose inherited core values set the tune for the rest. They epitomise all enemies of the human race.

From about the time of Immanuel Kant (late 1700s), Europeans built the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, in a gigantic creative burst. Others were also getting there but more sporadically. The power of liberated individual minds was released setting off the giant strides in European culture putting it, as Lego points out, “hundreds of years ahead of any other . . .and . . . a real advance to whatever barbaric local tyranny that the native people at that time suffered under”. In decimating the authority of religion and gunpoint rule the Enlightenment had opened the way to a first-time-ever flowering of morality, as expressed for example in UN declarations on human tights and the right of peoples to self-determination in the land of their birth. (Google Kant categorical imperative). After the war, when the deadly threat to the Enlightenment itself had been lifted, its values advanced towards outgrowing the colonial rapaciousness which the scientific revolution had once placed on steroids.

What to do about the throwbacks that threaten the rights of humanity?

Islam? First, stop importing it. Require of all would-be immigrants that they commit on entry to upholding for all people freedom of speech, association, assembly: freedom to join or leave or disobey or deride or offend any religion without any threat of personal harm. If they backslide, chuck ‘em out.

Japan? We’re lucky, if they get uppity China will sort them. Indeed a Chinese aircraft carrier is on the way to the disputed Diaoyu Islands as we speak. Thanks to our and our allies’ truly heroic soldiers of the 1940s we didn’t get to know the Japs as well as the Chinese do.

Yes, we should never let Japan's wartime record be forgotten.

The Japanese are well-practised at the art of selective and collective amnesia, we're often reminded by the media of Nazi atrocities, while the equally barbarous behaviour of the Japanese militarists seemed to have been forgotten, curious isn't it. There's no doubt that Hirohito was an un-indicted Class A war criminal, and had justice prevailed he would have been hanged.

I wonder how much the average Australian knows of the barbarous cruelty of the Japanese in WW2 and before, very little probably, whatever lies the Japanese try to tell us or themselves, we should never forget by allowing the truth to be covered in "anti-racist" PC, pixie dust.

Emperor Julian,

"..we didn’t get to know the Japs as well as the Chinese do."

Yes, indeed, the Chinese have long memories and they will soon be in the position to teach the Japanese a history lesson.

Mac, during the war it would have been hard for an Australian not to know the Axis were vermin. Everyone knew what they’d done. As a primary schoolboy I had a sneaking and shameful hope which I tried to suppress, that the war would be over before I got to 18. Then one day we were shown some footage made five years earlier by an American (then neutral) woman in Nanking with a 16 mm camera hidden in her handbag. That was when I knew all I wanted was to make it to draft age before the war ended and kill Japs. V-J day beat me by some years, which is probably why I'm still around!

After the war the American sirs were busting a gut to get people to forget what the war was about - crushing aggression and defending freedom - and lay down a miasma of McCarthyism to get us ready to step into the Axis' boots. There was a memorial hymn late in the war which commemorated our fallen soldiers: "All they had hoped for, all they had they gave. To save mankind, themselves they scorned to save". Sometimes there'd be a voice: "C'mon, sing the verse for the Japs" and there'd be "All they had hoped for, all they had they gave. To enslave mankind, themselves they too enslaved". A gulf between honour and dishonour.
.

Emperor Julian,

I was born in 1946, so when I was growing up memories of Japanese barbarism were still raw wounds with my parents' generation. The fact is that although the Americans needed both Japan and Germany as allies during the Cold War, the Japanese wartime record was sanitised--in contrast to Germany. Hollywood will never let us forget the Nazis, but Japan's wartime history is virtually ignored. The Americans actually purged left wing and progressive people from the Japanese government and bureaucracy during the early stages of the Cold War. As a result, the right wing transformed the image of Japan from predator to victim, few members of later generations really understand the remarkable change in the perception of Japan that the Japanese have managed since 1945.

The Japanese were the Nazis of the Asia-Pacific, no argument.

My father was in the RAAF during the war, God knows what would have happened to him and millions of other Allied servicemen if Japan hadn't been "encouraged" to surrender by nuclear attacks. So I have to admit that I don't give a rat's in regard to the endless speculation as to whether Hiroshima and Nagasaki were necessary, it's very easy for critics to take the moral high ground 60 years after the fact.

I'm going to make myself unpopular again (why not, no sense doing things by halves).

The Japanese came from two small islands and they were very aware that they were vulnerable, having seen the size of the Western forces in the first world war and having had a history of fighting off invaders, including the famous mongol invasions in the 13th century thanks to fortuitous typhoons destroying the invader's fleets. They were (and remain)intensely driven by loyalty and duty to the group. In other words, they were intensely eusocial, perhaps more than any other ethnic group on earth, because of their isolation which meant that their gene pool was very uniform. as a result they had a very strong ingroup/outgroup differentiation (still do, but it's weakening) and they had an exaggerated willingness to sacrifice themselves for the group's benefit.

They decided to try to protect the home islands by creating a buffer zone and because they considered the Western cultures effete because of their willingness to accept capture they thought that if they carried out their plans quickly and ruthlessly they could then arrange a peace on their own terms and hold their gains.

They simply didn't understand that the West was just as eusocial, but because we had been rubbing up against each other for millennia, we were more pragmatic.

And they did something our culture regarded as unacceptable - they attacked Pearl Harbour on the sabbath and they did it without warning. Just another thing they couldn't have understood because they don't have the concepts in their culture. they just saw it as a striking while the iron was hot.

As history has shown though, the Japanese are thoroughly good people to do business with because of their sense of duty and personal obligation. They're not us, but we still have more in common than different.

I agree with Antiseptic's analysis of Japanese historico-cultural attitudes and resultant actions, altho 'two small islands' is numerically inaccurate.

Tonyo

Thanks Tonyo. I simplified the geographic situation out of consideration for my audience.

Antiseptic,

You seem to be as ignorant of Japanese history as Islamic history.

1."having had a history of fighting off invaders" - in reality, the Japanese also have a history of invasion and aggression against Korea and attacks on Russia and China, long before Pearl Harbor.

2. "they had a very strong ingroup/outgroup differentiation (still do, but it's weakening)",

LOL, that's PC for racism and xenophobia.

3. "....the Japanese are thoroughly good people to do business with because of their sense of duty and personal obligation." You wouldn't have liked to "do business with them" during WW2. You should investigate how the survivors of Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Fukushima have been treated by the rest of Japanese society.

Anti, I'm not really certain whether or not you're serious, your smug ignorance seems rather overdone, whatever, you're often amusing.