WHAT YOU CAN LEARN FROM AN ERROL FLYNN MOVIE. We arrived in Ohio late Sunday afternoon in time to watch Errol Flynn's Objective: Burma! on cable. The movie makes mention of the Japanese decimating American troops trying reach base after blowing up a radar station--and the movie itself concludes with text describing the "evil Japanese". Regardless of the accuracy of the movie, the movie goes out of the way to portray the Japanese as more than just an enemy. That reminds me of another aspect of the Japanese participation in WWII that Japan to this day tries to deny: the slaughters in Nanking.

In Denying History, Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman write:

Nanking was only one of many atrocities committed by the Japanese between
1931 and 1945, in what Iris Chang has called "the forgotten holocaust of World
War II," the subtitle of her disturbing book TheRape of Nanking...As in the Nazi mass murder of the Jews, totals of the numbers killed vary, ranging from 1,578,000 to 6,325,000, with a mid-range moderate estimate of 3,949,000 people exterminated as a direct result of Japanese crimes against humanity (i.e. noncombatants). When total Chinese deaths are calibrated to include Japanese military actions through looting, starvation, bombing, medical experimentation, and battle deaths, historians estimate that the figure may be as high as 19 million...the Nazis did not hold a monopoly on human cruelty. There seems nothing the Nazis did to Jews that would have shocked their Japanese counterparts. (p.232)

Odd that the Japanese--well known for their sense of manners and civility--could be capable of such cruelty. For that matter, Germany and the Arabs are similarly well known in their own way for culture on the one hand and hospitality on the other--yet have also committed acts of barbarity. In the case of Arabs, I have in mind the suicide killings of civilians as well as the honor killings of their own women.

Of the three--Japan, Germany, and the Arabs--only the Germans admited to and made reparations for what they did. I wonder if that is the difference between the Judeo-Christian ethic (the idea of repentance) as opposed to the concept of losing face or cultural justification.

Just thinking out loud...it's late and it took me a couple of hours to fix my sister-in-law's computer so that I could go online.

There's also the issue of American acts of barbarism in war--some of which are debated--but again, the US tends to admit to such acts and not to make the perpetrators into heros.

Technorati Tag: War Crimes.