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.
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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.