Quote:
Originally Posted by MMM
Thank you for sharing that, Nyororin. That is an incredible story, and I am glad I resisted my urges to close this thread earlier.
|
The really sad thing is that they`re in no way an exception. It is in no way a rare story. This sort of thing was honestly happening all over Japan.
Obviously there were crazy guys out there who raped and pillaged, who got a kick out of hurting others. This sort of thing doesn`t excuse those sorts of actions at all.
But I think that because of the horrors committed by one segment of the Japanese army, people forget that the majority were just regular guys - most of them untrained, most of them not wanting to be there - who were fighting to the death because they didn`t want to die, and if they did at least they would have died trying not to.
When great-grandmother heard the war had ended, and about the bombings - she apparently collapsed crying why hadn`t they done it sooner, why hadn`t they done it a year earlier. (Almost all of them died in the last year of the war when things were desperate.)
I think that most of the Japanese population knew they were losing, knew there was no hope, but really had no power to do anything.
ETA;
I forget where it is, but there is a really depressing museum about this sort of thing. It`s sort of like the "museum of the unwilling soldier", and has a huge collection of art, music, poetry, etc done by those who were sent off to war, from before the war. All of the contributors died in battle.