Do the Japanese really know what the Japanese Army did during World War 2?

Question

I do wonder if the Japanese people in general really knew what occurred during World War 2? Do they know that there is something different in their history books as compared to other nations in the world?

I live in a country that was occupied by the Japanese. It was not a happy time. The stories are fantastic but you cannot dismiss them as fantasy because you hear various versions of the same event, of the same practises from different families and friends.

I am not about rehashing anger. But I would think the the truth is important. And those that do not know their History are doomed to repeat it.

Answer 1

The people in general probably did not know what was going on because the government wasnt giving any details about what was happening, and communications were bad. Some may not change their minds on there opinion, or what happened, but I'm sure that some people DO know there are different P.O.V's for WW2.

An example would be the atomic bombs. Some Japanese still have anger for what America did, but others don't, and are glad that it stopped the war. It stopped the war, saved many lives of our troops, AND stopped Russia from invading Japan. I am both caucasion an asian, and i have both opinions on what had happened. But everyone knew that the bombs were terrible. Though there might be different information in history books, everyone knows now that WW2 was brutal, and something like that should never happen again.

Answer 2

The allieds didn't even know the exent of it during the war.. There is no way they knew everything. Not even the war crimes tribunals found out everything.. Just the really horrible stuff.
I definitely agree with learning about the past and not repeating it. I would love to get a japanese history book and read up on their side of the war.

But let's be honest..... the allieds weren't exactly free from guilt either... Every government shamefully censors what they think their people don't want to know..
The conspiracy theories abound and public opinion is the greatest weapon of them all.

Answer 3

When I visited Japan, I asked what they learn in school about the war. The woman I spoke with had a grandfather who had served in the Diet and she was very well educated and well traveled.

She would say very little about the war, except that;
1) many Japanese cities were burned and had to be rebuilt.
2) it was an awful time.
3) the Japanese would like to forget and move on.

The truth of the matter is that ALL countries have committed atrocities. You may be referring to Nanking? To that I respectfully say, did Mao committ more terrible acts?

WWII and war in general is nothing more than inhumanity. To compare evil to evil is only a matter of scale.


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Answer 4

I hear you! But I didn't know the Japanese were distorting their history books like that. Eventually the truth will reveal itself. Anyone in Japan who has a computer and an open mind has access to all this global information.

Answer 5

I'm going to focus my answer on the issue of history Textbooks used in Japanese schools, rather than on history books commercially available in Japan, because: -
[a] Most children learn what little they know about history from their school textbooks; and ..
[b] There have been numerous protests about Japanese history textbooks, from Pacific countries that were victimized by Japan in WW2.

In Japan, as in most other non-Communist countries (but unlike most Communist countries), the authorship of history textbooks is not a Government monopoly. Independent authors write textbooks; their drafts are submitted to the Ministry of Education; if approved, they are included on a list; then local boards of education in each region of Japan pick books from the approved list for use in their schools. This has been the Japanese system for textbooks since 1947.

But, having such an apparently fair system did not actually solve the problem of textbook treatment of Japanese behavior in WW2. On the contrary, in fact. For example, in 1955, under cover of a campaign to rid textbooks of perceived pro-Communist bias, the Japanese Ministry of Education went so far as to insist that: all new textbooks must avoid criticizing Japanese behavior in WW2; and that approved textbooks must not mention at all Japan's invasion of China and the atrocities that ensued.

Those prohibitions are no longer in place. But controversy over Japanese history textbooks is far from dead. In 2000, a textbook called "New History Textbook", authored by conservative / nationalist scholars, reached the approved list. It gave a highly distorted version of Japanese behavior in WW2, and drew immediate protests - not only from neighboring countries, but also from within Japan itself. Although on the "approved" list, the "New History Textbook" was rejected for use by nearly all Japanese schools.

It is only small comfort, but according to "History Lessons" (see below) most Japanese school kids today learn from their textbooks that the people in the territories occupied by Japan in WW2 "were forced to cooperate with the Japanese army and had resources and food taken from them. They were controlled oppressively, and anyone who opposed occupation policies was severely punished." That bland version of what happened does not mention mass-scale torture, murder and rape. But I guess it is at least a small step toward the truth.

However, before condemning Japan's abiding aversion to teaching its children the truth about its behavior in WW2, I think all of us, from every nation, need to acknowledge a broader, uncomfortable truth. History textbooks in every country in the world tend to emphasize the achievements of the home country, and to downplay or even omit its failings. How do I know this? Because I have just read: "History Lessons" by Dana Lindaman and Kyle Ward, a book which reproduces what children in different countries around the world learn from their textbooks about significant shared events. It's a mildly shocking book: the history "facts" that schoolkids in different countries learn aren't always quite the same.

Answer 6

Of coz they knew bout it Stanley, well for some they prefer not to know bout it that much coz they fear of being ashamed,embarrassed, humiliated and the sense of feeling guilty of what really happened during WW2.Well, im not trying to be prejudice here, but its the fact.

Japanese people feared of being ashamed. Its not in their culture to be feeling ashamed and they are willing to end their life for it. So the simple way of avoiding that feeling is to not to know the truth at all......

Answer 7

Some honest japanese acknowledged their faults and sins.

The problem is nationalism.

The stronger the nationalism is, the harder it is to say we are sorry.

I hope japanese people restore their healthy nationalism.

They must show their regrets about what ocurred and make progress to world peace.

Answer 8

Its unlikely they know about much of the details. Their gov't probably has engaged in a massive coverup of various facts.
Here is a tidbit for ya....the rest can be found all over the internet.

The crimes
Because of the sheer scale of suffering caused by the Japanese military during the 1930s and 1940s, it is often compared to the military of Nazi Germany during 1933–45. The historian Chalmers Johnson has written that:

It may be pointless to try to establish which World War Two Axis aggressor, Germany or Japan, was the more brutal to the peoples it victimised. The Germans killed six million Jews and 20 million Russians [i.e. Soviet citizens]; the Japanese slaughtered as many as 30 million Filipinos, Malays, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Indonesians and Burmese, at least 23 million of them ethnic Chinese. Both nations looted the countries they conquered on a monumental scale, though Japan plundered more, over a longer period, than the Nazis. Both conquerors enslaved millions and exploited them as forced labourers — and, in the case of the Japanese, as [forced] prostitutes for front-line troops. If you were a Nazi prisoner of war from Britain, America, Australia, New Zealand or Canada (but not Russia) you faced a 4 % chance of not surviving the war; [by comparison] the death rate for Allied POWs held by the Japanese was nearly 30 %.[7]

[edit] Mass killings
R. J. Rummel, a professor of political science at the University of Hawaii, states that between 1937 and 1945, the Japanese military "murdered" near 3,000,000 to over 10,000,000 people, most probably 6,000,000 Chinese, Indonesians, Koreans, Filipinos, and Indochinese, among others, including Western prisoners of war. This democide was due to a morally bankrupt political and military strategy, military expediency and custom, and national culture."[8] Among the most infamous incidents in Southeast Asia were the Manila massacre, which resulted in the deaths of 100,000 civilians in the Phillipines and the Sook Ching massacre, in which between 25,000 and 50,000 ethnic Chinese in Singapore were taken to beaches and massacred.

In China alone, during 1937-45, approximately 3.9 million Chinese were killed, mostly civilians as a direct result of the Japanese invasion.[9] The most infamous incident during this period was the Nanking Massacre of 1937-38, when, according to the findings of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, the Japanese Army massacred as many as 430,000 civilians and prisoners of war, although the accepted figure is somewhere in the hundreds of thousands.[10] Herbert Bix, citing the works of Mitsuyoshi Himeta and Akira Fujiwara, claims that the "Three Alls Policy" (Sankō Sakusen) a scorched earth strategy used by Japanese forces in China in 1942-45, and sanctioned by Hirohito himself, was in itself responsible for the deaths of 2.7 million Chinese civilians. The mystery behind Hirohito's role is explained in the authoritative book by David Bergamini, who translated war diaries and depositions from the tribunals from the original Japanese, and interviewed sources directly.Similar crimes such as Changjiao massacre did occur from time to time.[citation needed]

Answer 9

I doubt it because the Japanese school textbooks do not tell the complete story.

Answer 10

Yes they know but the people who re-write history so it is more to their liking, have ELIMINATED it in the school books in Japan