4th August 2004, 8:21 PM
So many innacuracies... I know I did posts about WWII/postwar Japan several months back (I did take a 'Japanese History, 1880s-present' class last semester... :)). But they'd be pretty hard to find... don't you people remember? We did a whole post discussing WWII and Japan, I think...
Anyway, Japan is indeed now relatively pacifistic. Bushido hasn't completely gone away, but you can't totally avoid something like that in any society...
Anyway, it is true that in WWII because of their code the Japanese didn't take many prisoners or allow themselves to be taken prisoner (the number of Japanese war dead is many millions and the number captured is quite small). And in the Pacific American troops quickly responded by doing the same... remember, the first rule in war is to dehumanize your enemy. If the common soldier thinks of them as subhuman or 'different' in some way it makes it a whole lot easier to get them to kill them.
You're wrong about some things though. First, the WWII code wasn't quite the same thing as the ancient Medieval Bushido code. It was a perversion of that code, manipulated by the men in power to get the people of Japan to do as they were told. It's not exactly totally historically accurate, but the film 'The Last Samurai' does a mostly decent job of discussing it... though they might romantisize bushido a bit much. ;) It was about not taking prisoners and death before dishonor, after all. But it had a whole code of service to the lord and humility and other aspects of life that the Japanese crown (once the King took power from the shogun in the 1860s and quickly started modernizing the nation) were dropped... it was a totally different code, really, designed to get the Japanese warriors to fight harder. If you look at old, Medieval Japanese Bushido, it isn't THAT different from a lot of old European ideals of honor... the biggest difference is probably that the Japanese followed the 'death before dishonor' stuff more seriously than most Europeans did (if you want proof that 'Death before dishonor' is a Western ideal too, look no farther than Thermopilai (sp.). The classic ancient Greek battle where the 300 Spartans fought for several days defending a narrow pass against a massive Persian army then, when the enemy found a route around the pass and surrounded them, fought to the death...).
But the Samurai way also had, as I said, things like vows of poverty, defending the weak, continuing the old ways (yes, that's extreme conservatism, not wanting ANY change, but at least it's an honest ideal...)... arts (tea ceremony, poetry, etc), and the rest... not the best ideals in some ways to be sure, but a whole lot better than the stuff the soldiers were believing in WWII.
Anyway, what World War II proved was that people are easily led, especially when they are conditioned to be that way. The Japanese had only ever known strong authoritarian rule (oh, that's one other huge myth -- Hirohito, the Emperor of Japan in WWII. He wasn't exactly a shrinking pacifist being held down by a club of violent warmongerers...). They had been conditioned to follow what the government said and do as they were told no matter their personal feelings, and that is exactly what they did. By the end of the war the whole nation was most probably at the point where millions would have died willingly to protect the Emperor if we had invaded and he had commanded it... on that accord the A-Bomb might have actually saved more lives than it killed. But that's a really tough question. By the very end there was a sizable group in government that wanted peace (it had been obvious for several years that winning was impossible) and was just looking for an excuse... the A-Bomb provided that, but who knows if given a few more months something might have happened? We'll never really know, so it's one of those perfect 'what if' scenarios, I guess. :)
Anyway, Japan is indeed now relatively pacifistic. Bushido hasn't completely gone away, but you can't totally avoid something like that in any society...
Anyway, it is true that in WWII because of their code the Japanese didn't take many prisoners or allow themselves to be taken prisoner (the number of Japanese war dead is many millions and the number captured is quite small). And in the Pacific American troops quickly responded by doing the same... remember, the first rule in war is to dehumanize your enemy. If the common soldier thinks of them as subhuman or 'different' in some way it makes it a whole lot easier to get them to kill them.
You're wrong about some things though. First, the WWII code wasn't quite the same thing as the ancient Medieval Bushido code. It was a perversion of that code, manipulated by the men in power to get the people of Japan to do as they were told. It's not exactly totally historically accurate, but the film 'The Last Samurai' does a mostly decent job of discussing it... though they might romantisize bushido a bit much. ;) It was about not taking prisoners and death before dishonor, after all. But it had a whole code of service to the lord and humility and other aspects of life that the Japanese crown (once the King took power from the shogun in the 1860s and quickly started modernizing the nation) were dropped... it was a totally different code, really, designed to get the Japanese warriors to fight harder. If you look at old, Medieval Japanese Bushido, it isn't THAT different from a lot of old European ideals of honor... the biggest difference is probably that the Japanese followed the 'death before dishonor' stuff more seriously than most Europeans did (if you want proof that 'Death before dishonor' is a Western ideal too, look no farther than Thermopilai (sp.). The classic ancient Greek battle where the 300 Spartans fought for several days defending a narrow pass against a massive Persian army then, when the enemy found a route around the pass and surrounded them, fought to the death...).
But the Samurai way also had, as I said, things like vows of poverty, defending the weak, continuing the old ways (yes, that's extreme conservatism, not wanting ANY change, but at least it's an honest ideal...)... arts (tea ceremony, poetry, etc), and the rest... not the best ideals in some ways to be sure, but a whole lot better than the stuff the soldiers were believing in WWII.
Anyway, what World War II proved was that people are easily led, especially when they are conditioned to be that way. The Japanese had only ever known strong authoritarian rule (oh, that's one other huge myth -- Hirohito, the Emperor of Japan in WWII. He wasn't exactly a shrinking pacifist being held down by a club of violent warmongerers...). They had been conditioned to follow what the government said and do as they were told no matter their personal feelings, and that is exactly what they did. By the end of the war the whole nation was most probably at the point where millions would have died willingly to protect the Emperor if we had invaded and he had commanded it... on that accord the A-Bomb might have actually saved more lives than it killed. But that's a really tough question. By the very end there was a sizable group in government that wanted peace (it had been obvious for several years that winning was impossible) and was just looking for an excuse... the A-Bomb provided that, but who knows if given a few more months something might have happened? We'll never really know, so it's one of those perfect 'what if' scenarios, I guess. :)