December 7

Today is the 71st anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.  Already, Remember Pearl Harbor is going the way of Remember the Maine as the freshness of the September 11th attacks is still with this country.  Many Americans view as perfidy the Japanese attack, calling it an unprovoked and surprise attack.  In reality, the Japanese had been bellicose for some time, having already invaded China some eights years prior and been involved in land battles with the Soviets in Manchuria.  Moreover, there was a delay in the Japanese embassy in Washington decoding the orders to bring the declaration of war to the American government, resulting in what many regard as the surprise attack.

I never forget Pearl Harbor.  But I focus more on the entirety of the war in the Pacific.

Apologists have tried to explain the Japanese approach to warfare.  Whatever the cultural underpinnings, the Japanese war machine was one of the most brutal military units to ever wage war.  When one considers all the atrocities that the Japanes committed and then compare them to the atrocities committed by all other countries in the Second World War, there is no question that the Japanese exceeded all the rest, combined.

Before the entry of the United States into World War II, the Japanese in fact engaged in deceptive practices to justify their actions.  The infamous Mukden Incident, in which Japanese arranged for a pretext to justify their invasion of Manchuria, may well have furnished Hitler with his inspiration for starting the European phase of the war in 1939.  The horrible Rape of Nanking, wherein betweeen 40,000 and 400,000 civilians were murdered in cold blood by Japanese forces, occurred in 1937.  Women were raped by entire military units, live Chinese were used for bayonet practice and Japanese officers were actually engaged in a beheading contest.  Not even the Germans' murderous largesse approached these numbers in a single engagement.

Many have heard about Dr. Josef Mengele's barbaric experiments on inmates at Auschwitz.  Fewer have heard about the Japanese Unit 731, which was a unit run by the Kempeitai, the Japanese equivalent of the German SS.  Labeled cynically as the Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department of the Kwantung Army, was run by the notorious by lesser-known General Shiro Ishii.  Its activities included live vivisections, biological experiments, germ warfare on Chinese civilians and weapons testing.  Of the latter, some of the tests involved testing grenades, chemical weapons and germ-releasing against humans tied to posts at various distances from the location of the blast and testing flamethrowers on live people.  Mengele was a piker compared to Ishii.

During the war, because of their Samurai mentality, the Japanese were exceptionally brutal to many POW's and civilian detainees.  The stories of the Bataan Death March and the Burma Railway are largely known.  In recent years, the plight of the so-called Comfort Women, institutionalized brothels where Korean women were made to serve as prostitutes for Japanese soldiers and sailors, has come to light.

A more comprehensive list (for this space) of Japanese war crimes against civilian detainees can be found here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_war_crimes

It is by no means exhaustive.

Crimes against enemy combatants was equally brutal.  Towards the end of the war, as it became more apparent to Japanese military units that they were going to lose the war, atrocities like the ones committed on Palawan, where American POWs were duped into believing that an air raid was about to occur, made to enter covered slit trenches, doused with gasoline and set on fire, prompted the raid on Cabanatuan to rescue other American POWs.  At Chichi Jima, a deranged Japanese officer had American fliers killed, cooked and eaten.  In Japan, downed American airmen were used in live vivisections without anesthesia.

Whether it was the British, the French, the Dutch, the Soviets, the Aussies or the Americans, no other reported atrocities on the scale of those of the Japanese have ever been reported.  The Germans, while committing similar atrocities, even look like amateurs when compared with the Japanese.

But what separates the Japanese from all other combatant nations in WWII is what happened after the war ended.  Thanks in large measure to Douglas MacArthur (who should have been court-martialed and not awarded the Medal of Honor), Japane got off relatively lightly. War crimes trials were held, but the punishments were wildlly uneven.  What's more, the emperor was not included in the trials.  Had Hitler survived the end of the war, he undoubtedly would have been tried.  Thanks to Dougie MacArthur, Hirohito was spared the indignity.

Fueled by that face-saving by Dougie, Japan has, in the years since the war ended, engaged in a campaign to twist history.  Its schools make next to no mention of the atrocities committed by its forces.  Revisionists try to paint the United States as the aggressor, claiming that it was our oil embargo that forced Japan to attack us, conveniently ignoring the fact that the reason for the embargo in the first place was Japan's expanionist actions and reprehensible waging of war, largely in China.  The last straw, however, is that certain Japanese have tried to argue that the US was guilty of a war crime for dropping the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

I won't belabor the point that the two bombs probably saved more lives than they took, that the two targets were legitimate military targets and that the Japanese were given plenty of warnings what would happen if they didn't surrender.  One can argue that they had no idea what faced them before Hiroshima, but after that, they had to know what would happen if they didn't surrender. 

But when a country engages in the type of warfare Japan waged as described above, it comes to the argument with unclean hands.  It cannot argue that it was justified in any way and is entitled to reparations, sympathy or understanding for what it suffered.

Pearl Harbor was a very small facet of what happened in the Pacific.  Japan has absolutely no standing to argue that it's the aggrieved party.

It's time for Japan to not offer not another limp-wristed apology but to take full responsibility for what it did during the 1930s and 1940s, teach its citizens what really happened and shut up about war crimes committed against it.  It's lucky to exist at all.  It's only through the benevolence of a more enlightened country that was rebuilt and then protected.

(c) 2012 The Truxton Spangler Chronicles