Morbid Fact Du Jour For September 30, 2011
Today’s Honorable Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
The 20th century Japanese soldier identity was forged in a thousand-year-old system in which social hierarchy was established and sustained through martial competition. For as far back as anyone could remember, the islands’ powerful feudal lords employed private armies to wage incessant battle with each other; by the medieval times these armies had evolved into the distinctively Japanese samurai warrior class, whose code of conduct was called “bushido” (the “Way of the Warrior”). To die in the service of one’s lord was the greatest honor a samurai warrior could achieve in its lifetime. Such codes of honor were certainly not invented by Japanese culture. The Roman poet Horace first defined the debt owed by the young men of each generation to their rulers – Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. But the samurai philosophy went a giant step beyond defining military service as fitting and proper. So harsh was its code that its most notable characteristic was the moral imperative that adherents commit suicide if they ever failed to meet honorably the obligations of military service – often with the highly ceremonial and extremely painful ritual of hara-kiri, in which the warrior met death by unflinchingly disemboweling himself in front of witnesses.
Time did not erode the strength of the bushido ethic. During World War II the infamous kamikaze suicide missions, in which Japanese pilots ceremoniously trained to fly their planes directly into American ships, dramatically impressed upon the West how ready the young men of Japan were to sacrifice their lives for the emperor. But it was more than a small elite group that held to the view of death over surrender. It is striking to note that while the Allied forces surrendered at the rate of 1 prisoner for every 3 dead, the Japanese surrendered at the rate of only 1 per 120 dead.
Culled from: The Rape Of Nanking
Of course, it was this “never surrender” attitude that was used by Truman as justification for dropping the atomic bombs on Japan – to force them to surrender. I think he had a point.
Yeah, Truman did.. I wonder just how many people these days remember. Not just “Oh, we bombed the crap out of them, we’re such horrible people.” We’d probably all be speaking Japanese by now.. Which.. LMAO.. IMO, isn’t such a baaaaad thing at all! ;D Y’know, just what I learned while doing an apprenticeship under a dog behaviorist/trainer.. You have to match the correction with the level of behavior. I believe, that wicked high correction they got was truly the only way to stop them. ArigatouGozaimashita Comtesse for sharing all this morbid little tid bits.. keep it up.
Besides the Kamikazees, the war also saw forced “Comfort Girls”, The Rape of Nanking, brutal treatment of all the countries they invaded to their natives, and also a medical experiment camp where they apparently used the locals to see how diseases can be spread. Japanese behavior during WWII rivaled the Nazis in brutality. The only thing they didnt have was the mechanized systems of death, which is why the Japanese may not have the body count the Nazis did.
While I love Japanese art and culture, they were infected by the same kind of craziness that Germany was, it was just a different set of leaders. One of their ambassadors to Russia started to see what was happening to Jews fleeing into the Soviet Union trying to get out of Europe. He started giving visas to these Jews, long after his government asked him to stop. He wrote them until he boarded the train to leave Russia because he was recalled to Japan for disobeying orders to stop writing those visas. When he got back to Japan he was made a radio operator and treated as a disgrace by his government. He never told his children, they found out by accident as adults. He saved a couple thousand Jews by acting on his humanity and not his patriotism.