the thing about watching LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA is that it will send you down an imperial japan rabbit hole where you are reminded that this was unquestionably one of the absolute worst regimes in modern history
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During the Oppenheimer discourse I was shocked to discover that there are a lot of people who think that not should the bomb not have been dropped on Japan(which is fine), but that Japan was a victim of America warmongering, like Vietnam or Iraq
The US has done rather a lot of warmongering over the past two and a half centuries. It's still super ignorant, but I can somewhat understand why the two or three exceptions might throw people off
that discourse is always so superficial. you rarely hear about the Chinese and Japanese civilians that would have starved or been killed (possibly after being tortured) had the bomb not been dropped.
To me, it's not a question of the morality of it, it's just an inevitability. The US decided to drop the bomb when it sank infinite resources into making it. Every country in history, good or bad, would have done the same thing. It doesn't mean people can't debate the ethics of course
That's because the bomb shouldn't have been dropped - Hasegawa really opened people's eyes in the history profession with Racing the Enemy. Highly recommend that work. Almost 20 years since it came out, and it still hasn't been surpassed on the subject, as far as I know.
that book is great, but it is not immune to criticism. I would caution anyone from drawing a definitive conclusion about this in general, but definitely don’t draw a definitive conclusion from a single book.
For sure, there are still even Japanese historians that argue that the bombs were part of what broke Japan's back. But the motivations to drop the bomb reveal that the primacy of saving lives was, at least, in competition with the desire to deter Soviet designs on Japan and test the bomb in wartime.
I haven't read the book, so pardon my ignorance, but who thinks that the bombs were part of what broke Japan's back? it was already broken, completely and utterly, and I don't see how that's open for debate. The only question in august 1945 was how many would die before they admitted it
that’s the part of the book that is most open to criticism. hasegawa takes a lot of liberty with his interpretations of sources.
I read that book about 10 years ago and had the same reaction you did, but the more I read the less confident I am about anything involving the end of the pacific war.
That was the story the Japanese Imperial government came up with. That and that they were “liberating” all the people that they exploited and used as slave labor, inhumanly and far more brutally than their colonial rivals.
What's started to get to me is - look, I understand why people treat nukes as a special evil, but I feel like not reckoning with the conventional bombing getting just as destructive hurts both arguments!
(In that if that bombing wasn't justified, the US was even worse than just the nukes! But also the alternative to the nukes was not necessarily no or fewer civilian casualties!)
Have you ever read any of Shigeru Mizuki's comics about imperial Japan? Onwards Towards Our Noble Deaths and Showa: A History of Japan contain some truly amazing/startling shit.
I'd 'heard' that James Clavell, author of Shogun, was surprised by the Japanese brutality, in contrast to their behavior within Japan. He was a Japanese prisoner of war (King Rat).
There is something to be said for how that movie seemed to entirely focus on Japanese civilians and military rank and file as victims of the war with nary a mention of their foreign victims.
If you want to view the movie as being a serious statement about the war you don't get to dismiss it's shortcomings because it's "just a movie about a giant lizard."
I'm a big fan of Asian horror, and even now, decades after the fall of imperial Japan, the majority of Korean horror movies deal with the trauma imperial Japan inflicted on them.
It's impressive how well Korean filmmakers can make other sources about what imperial Japan did. Source novel about class, women's roles and lesbianism in Victorian England? Boom, now it's about what Imperial Japan did to Korea.
Constantly amazes me, by the way, that nobody has made a movie about the battle of Kohima and indeed it is almost completely unknown even to American World War II buffs.
Shigeru Mizuki's legendary manga SHOWA is an amazing read. It's an autobiographical history, and it gets into just how strange it was to live in that regime.
The way he depicts it, falling under the autocratic rule of Doug fucking Macarthur was actually kind of a relief.
The Criterion Collection probably has the Kobayashi trilogy, “The Human Condition” (Ningen no Joken), which portrays the same insanity from the standpoint of a reluctant soldier in Manchukuo, stomping grounds of Unit 731.
I remember my roommate telling me how growing up in Taiwan there was this weird tension between older generations who had horrifying, visceral memories of Japanese atrocities and younger generations who were like, "But they make all the good cartoons..."
Have you read Jame Bradley's Flyboys? A huge part of that book is about the horrors of Imperial Japan in the 1900s. I had some idea before reading that because my grandfather was there after WWII in MacArthur's circle, but wow, still shocking to read that book.
The name of the movie escapes me but I was watching a Korean action movie where Hiroyuki Sanada shows up as the slick Japanese businessman bad guy. You could almost *feel* the cultural weight showing up with him.
The only real argument for dropping the bomb on Hiroshima is that these guys were the most fanatical warmongers in human history and defeating them any other way would have resulted in even more death. Easy to lose sight of today.
Very much so. If you want to go farther down a war in the Pacific rabbit hole. I highly recommend John C. McManus trilogy on the Army war and Ian Toll’s trilogy on the Navy war. And Gary J. Bass’ “Judgment at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia” is on my reading list.
A few weeks back there was a worst colonizers thread in which i was pitching the Dutch and the Belgians, and then someone mentioned the Japanese and i withdrew all consideration for European powers, as awful as they were
For obvious and indefensible reasons i wasn't thinking of them, but the worst
John Dower's "War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War" lays out the rationale for, and consequences of, their hierarchical view of East Asian societies (they rank *everything*!). It doesn't spare the US either.
"Awesome. An Asian nation is kicking the European/American colonial powers out of Asia!"
"Oh, they're just taking over the colonies and being somehow even worse."
in a hypothetical world where the nazis had never existed, the imperial japanese would have an approximately equal position in popular culture, i feel. the bad guys you don't have to feel bad about shooting in video games, etc.
Depression is a complex thing that's rarely attributable to a single-point variable; but I suspect it's not totally a coincidence that the author of one of the definitive and deeply researched accounts of Nanking ended her own life at a relatively young age
I’m a historian of eugenics, I’ve read some really messed up stuff. But it physically hurt to read Iris Chang’s book, and I’m sure that is only a fraction of what she uncovered in her research.
That book was utterly horrifying. The only thing I've read outside the Holocaust that seems comparable are the Vendee massacres and the terror phase of the French Revolution.
I gotta see that at some point, thanks for the recommendation. Whenever I discuss WWII history I always like to tell people to Google Unit 731 if they ever feel like ruining their day
as the kid of a Chinese man and a Jewish woman, I was very much brought up to view imperial Japan as the moral equivalent of Nazi germany and it took me a long time to realize that that is not a commonly held view outside my particular demographic
Reading about the Doolittle Raid, a first bombing run against Tokyo where the planes had a route they did not have fuel to return on, landing mainly in China and protected there..
I too was surprised at the numbers in the Wiki article. I'd originally read it about one China town that had helped Americans that was later wiped out by Japanese forces. 25000.
If you haven’t seen it, you should watch Masaki Kobayashi’s The Human Condition. It’s a masterpiece, but it also puts a lot of other Japanese media that treats the empire with kid gloves to shame.
Clay, I gave this a watch. I wasn’t able to finish it despite absolutely appreciating the masterpiece…it was just too much with the things happening in the world. I find myself empathizing with Kaji and it was more paralyzing than inspiring. Maybe another day though.
Letters from Iwo Jima is the best of the two in my humble opinion. It didn't get the Oscar. It was the year of Scorsese's the Departed which is obviously excellent as well. And Clint won the year before with Million Dollar Baby, his second directing Oscar, while Martin had yet to win one!!!!!
if i recall. there’s a phase in filipino 🇵🇭nationalism also looking toward industrializing japan 🇯🇵 as a way to throw off first colonial spain 🇪🇸 then the newly imperial usa 🇺🇸
This was also common knowledge among the men that fought Japan and why they carried their grudges two-fold. One for the evils of Pearl Harbor and another knowing how much evil shit they were up to elsewhere. I didn’t hear the stories until I was practically a man, they didn’t want to relive it.
There's an interesting historical arc of several key anticolonial leaders being *very jazzed* about Japan crushing Russia at Tsushima in 1905, seeing it as Japan striking a blow for anti-imperialism, and then having a real "ah" moment when Japanese imperialism shows up on their door 30-35yrs later.
(I currently think about this arc a lot in the context of a certain type of western leftist discourse - especially re: Putin's Russia and Xi's China - that it's only imperialism if it comes from the Impériale region of France)
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The US has done rather a lot of warmongering over the past two and a half centuries. It's still super ignorant, but I can somewhat understand why the two or three exceptions might throw people off
I read that book about 10 years ago and had the same reaction you did, but the more I read the less confident I am about anything involving the end of the pacific war.
(2016's best film, The Handmaiden)
https://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-62-supernova-in-the-east-i/
The way he depicts it, falling under the autocratic rule of Doug fucking Macarthur was actually kind of a relief.
Bix, Herbert P. 2000. Hirohito and the making of modern Japan. New York: HarperCollins.
https://bsky.app/profile/andrewsshi.bsky.social/post/3ktgb2swrnc2x
Nagasaki is a harder sell for me.
I mean, Unit 731 ALONE 😬
For obvious and indefensible reasons i wasn't thinking of them, but the worst
"Oh, they're just taking over the colonies and being somehow even worse."
and gave a thumbs up.
this obviously changes from 1941 onward…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._E._B._Du_Bois#Trip_around_the_world