Why were the Japanese so ruthless in WW2? Was it just a cultural thing?

Because they didn't win.

There are plenty of Allies-descendants who claim that Dresden was a war crime and that the atomic bombs were not justified. Do equivalent examples of these attitudes exist in Japan?

Gook is a pejorative for Korean people specifically.

define "plenty"

Japanese thought that Japanese thinking, stoic, severity, Bushido common use in the world.
And the soldiers with power since the Meiji era were lower class citizens, not samurai.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Siffleet

Why is there still a Japanese Internet Defence Force in 2017?

They were literally just doing what the British, French, and Germans had been doing for a hundred years prior, just on a larger scale. No one except perhaps the Americans really had the moral high ground to call them out on anything.

On the treatment of POWs, fun fact: Soviet POWs in Finnish captivity had a lower survival rate than American POWs in Japanese captivity.

Japanese men spent their entire lives holding their feelings and repressing their desires. The first time they had the chance to do whatever they wanted with no repercussions, they went crazy.

British and French didn't execute prisoners of war.

>Soviet POWs in Finnish captivity had a lower survival rate
This is bad why?

Hahahahhahahaha
Good one.

All Japs really did, was to hold commanders to the same standard as Brits/Americans/French had shown how to do.

the picture you posted looks pretty fake though

They didn't though, they literally didn't.

Next up you will tell me that Britfags didn't introduce Indians to scalping.

Yea see you can't prove it.

Spies and shit were executed, but they didn't just go around randomly executing their captured enemies like the Japanese.

The Japanese didn't randomly execute all their POWs, the only ones that made killing POWs officially policy were the Germans.

>Japs
>Random executions
ahahahahha

>except the Americans
U wot m8

The American administration in the Philippines was miles ahead of British and French administration in South Asia, if not on the level of the Japanese administration in Taiwan.

Are you guys mentally handicapped, netouyous, or just baiting? Here's just one example from the entire war

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangka_Island_massacre

Key word: ALL their POWs. Local commanders and soldiers killing POWs was common, but it wasn't official policy like it was for the Germans on the Eastern Front, and most POWs they captured survived.

>america let millions fo their own people starve, or even killed by the government for not confroming to communism.

>america was batshit crazy during WWII

Yep, totally comparable to evil capitalist pig-dogs of the ruthless american empire

>More specifically, 56 percent of Americans think the use of atomic weapons against Japan during World War II was justified, according to a new poll by the Pew Research Center. Meanwhile, 34 percent said their use was not justified.

>While the number of Americans supporting the bombings has dropped nearly 30 percent since the immediate aftermath of the war – a 1945 Gallup poll found 85 percent in support – the number appears to have remained steady over the last decade. A 2005 Gallup poll found that 57 percent of Americans approved of the twin bombings.

"...in [July] 1945... Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act. ...the Secretary, upon giving me the news of the successful bomb test in New Mexico, and of the plan for using it, asked for my reaction, apparently expecting a vigorous assent. "During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of 'face'. The Secretary was deeply perturbed by my attitude..."

--Dwight D. Eisenhower

>400 million
where are you getting this number

probably includes the death toll from every single conflict from 1917-1991

Anuses.

Since the archives opened in the 90s scholars generally agree on a number between 5 and 10 million (give or a take a couple) for Stalin's death toll, depending on what you count.

>Goes to surrender to enemy
>A enemy which you haven't even fucking scouted their surrender policy for
Why would you do that?

> Why is there still a Japanese Internet Defence Force in 2017?

Weabos I assume.

> The Japanese didn't randomly execute all their POWs

Their are countless account of them murdering random POWs for fun or honour or whatever the fuck they called it . They didn't murder every single one, but then again the guy you replied to never made that claim. You added the "all" bit. So well done for refuting a strawman.

Ever heard of the Geneva Convention? Everyone else has, except for the Japanese apparently

No it was just WW2.

>surrender policy

Genenva is fine on paper.

The reality is that its not worth anything if any of the involved parties has participated in genocide, export blockades, economic warfare, ignoring their own signing, usage of any modern weapons, total war, and several other forms of killing civilians.
You also have really fun shit, like POW camps being starvation camps.

Probably because their ship had been sunk and they were stuck in enemy territory. Their mistake was expecting any human decency from the Japs.

>Beheading
>Ruthless

You should read about Hohols and Croats who collaborated with Nazis.

I definitely agree with you, but I'm just trying to say that the Allies in comparison were nowhere near the level of the Japanese with the exception of the Soviets. You often hear about "Allied war crimes:" these days but the ones in the Pacific (so excluding Dresden, the Auschwitz guards, etc) are mostly limited to the A-bombs and an informal policy of killing captured Japanese because of their tendency to use surrender as a last ditch effort of killing more soldiers. A lot of the Japanese war crimes were committed even before Midway which was the turning point, so there really isn't much of an excuse when your supply lines for food, clothing etc are still in place and your military is steamrolling the European colonies, China, and PNG

I think you're really missing the point here in failing to recognize that this was entirely the fault of Western Europeans.

You are thinking WW2 = WW2 created this standards.
Most of the standards are either from Internal Japan stuff, experience fighting other Asian, or Coloni powers ignoring their own stuff while genocide to natives.

The general trend is that no respect was given, if it involved colonies(i.e Australia), people who had already fled from battle, or the enemy had at some point not respected their own ink.
That said, had the British respected their own ink during the 19th century, things would have been fine. But they set the precedent, and so did the French.

Cultural

They thought it was dishonorable to surrender so they treated POWs like garbage

...

Government used propaganda and bushido code to rile up fighting spirit and devotion. Japan also never signed the Geneva convention so they had limits of how they could treat POWS in their view.

They didn't always act like that, they were fairly civil in their war with Russia in 1905, in fact I think there was an anecdote that life as a Japanese POW was better then life in Russia. Russians were given tea and sometimes allowed to ride bikes.

>The Japanese didn't randomly execute all their POWs
It's literally in the OP.
Yes, Germans and Japs were the bad guys, that is why.
The allies didnt do these things though.

It's really just a matter of aesthetics.

That pic looks pretty bad, but in the end, executing someone with a sword isn't really any more "ruthless" than a using firing squad or a gas chamber.

Because if you lose in samurai era Japan, you are supposed to kill yourself and they used to do it with honor. Foreigners outside of Japan didn't kill themselves as they were expected to so Japanese soldiers did it for them. it was seen as mercy not execution.

The allies dropped 2 bombs to kill millions in seconds on Japan leaving behind a radioactive wasteland. But that's not a war crime!

>Millions
The 2 nuclear attacks killed a quarter of a million people, I agree they were bad but those attacks were drwarfed by the millions of civilians who died under the Japanese.

>Yes, Germans and Japs were the bad guys, that is why.
What a quaint explanation of history. Thanks for that. "We're the good guys, they're the bad guys." Fucking Americans.

History lesson in a sentence: Everyone was a bad guy, the worst being the USSR. (At least the other countries sent their men to die with their own guns and bullets and didn't make them share)

>What a quaint explanation of history
>it's a "post-modernists think they're too good for morality" episode

>it's a "post-modernists think they're too good for morality" episode
Nope, I'm just not deluded.

And this proves... ?
Eisenhower's theater was Europe. He had no experience in the pacific theater. More learned and involved scholars have crunched the details and concluded the atomic bombings were strategically necessary and even saved Japanese lives in the long run.

b8 or a moron

>Why were the Japanese so ruthless in WW2? Was it just a cultural thing?
No. It was an edgy LARP thing.
>Sino-Japanese War.
>Russo-Japanese War.
Japs: hold they are surrendering! Let us treat them humanely as do all civilized nations do to those who surrender.
What Bushido? That is feudal primitive claptrap. We must embrace modern civilization.
>Several decades, post-Paris treaty butthurt. and ultranationalist screeching later.
>Second Sino-Japanese War and WWII
*puts on headband*
*belts knockoff katana*
I AM HONORABLE OFFICER CORPS MODERN SAMURAI HAHA MUH HONOR THOSE THAT SURRENDERED HAVE NO HONOR BETTER THEY DIE IN THE BATTLE THAN LIVE SHAMEFULLY DEFEATED *cuts belly open.*

No you weeb. Japan's culture was/is just radically different from our judeo/christian one. Notice how for some reason everytime a japanese person is crazy and decides to murder a schoolgirl or something, they really let themselves go with torture and such.

pretty much

Samurai spirit and all

>Notice how for some reason everytime a japanese person is crazy and decides to murder a schoolgirl or something, they really let themselves go with torture and such

There are even more examples of westerners doing that and Japan has a lower homicide rate than all western countries. Go be a stormnigger white supremacist somewhere else. Whites are more violent than Asians on average.

True.
>Be white
>Go to Southeast Asia
>Murder-rape a child.

literally a meme with no proof other than black and white pictures

>a nation at war issued executions

WOAH

I don't think anyone is claiming that the A bombs weren't a war crime you weeb

I never said those cases were numerous, just that they shared things in common with eachother.
Also I'm probably as far away from a white supremacist as you could imagine

there is absolutely nothing worse than delusional weeaboos

>Veeky Forums white supremacists vs reddit asian supremacists

I don't know why you lot have been immigrating from r/hapas and r'/am recently but it's pretty funny anyway

It says in the wiki article that they're not even sure if it's the same fucking person. What's your point? Could still be a fake.

>b-but ITS FAKE REEEE

>The photograph of Siffleet's execution was discovered on the body of a dead Japanese major near Hollandia by American troops in April 1944. It is believed to be the only surviving depiction of a western prisoner of war being executed by a Japanese soldier.[10] The photo was published in Australian newspapers and in Life magazine but was thought to depict Flight Lieutenant Bill Newton VC, who had been captured in Salamaua, Papua New Guinea, and beheaded on 29 March 1943.[2][11] It later went on display at the Australian War Memorial. Elsewhere, despite positive identification in 1945 of Siffleet as the soldier pictured, the image continues on occasion to be misidentified as Newton.[2][12] Siffleet is commemorated on the Lae Memorial in Lae, Papua New Guinea, together with all other Commonwealth war dead from actions in the region who have no known grave.[13] A memorial park commemorating Siffleet was also dedicated at Aitape in May 2015.[14]

How is that ambiguous in any way?

How was he "positively identified"? I'm not seeing anything about that in the sources even. They could tell that by a shitty black and white photo where you can't see the guy's face?

No gooks.
It's Nips.

>Japan has a lower homicide rate than all western countries
Reported homicide rate, but the truth is that a lot of murders are hand-waved as suicides because Jap cops hate investigating and are inept.

Nigga the entire Nanking Massacre was on the basis that they wanted to get rid of their POW.
> inb4 Nanking isnt WW2
> inb4 you believe WW2 started in 1939
You europeo-centrist cunt.

This is the same crock of shite Hoteps say about white people and Nazis say about Jews.

the German atrocities were more often than not carried out in a top-down function: namely, the government was fully complicit in the atrocities (through the SS and its Einsatzgruppen, for example), the Japanese atrocities were more often than not carried out as a result of a lack of government control over its troops. I would argue that the Japanese civilian populace at the time was not "particularly vicious," for instance, bringing up the case of the thousands of Jews that emigrated from Lithuania to Kobe in 1940-1941, where despite growing anti-Western sentiment the Jews were treated essentially as tourists.

On the other hand, the military was plagued by both disorganization and war crimes. In 1931, during the Mukden incident, a Japanese colonel essentially unilaterally invaded Manchuria from Korea without orders from the government, and was promoted for his audacity despite his expectation that he would be executed. This revived the ancient Japanese idea of "gekokujo," literally meaning "the weak over the strong." The idea was that local "daimyo," or lords, could overthrow or overrule those who were supposedly superior to them, such as the shogun. This idea was revived, as many lower officers in the Japanese military envisioned themselves following in the colonel's (now general) footsteps. As a result, often times senior officers would have little idea what was happening on the ground, or if they did they were either unable or unwilling to do anything about it.

(contd)

For instance, during the Bataan Death March, General Honma had laid out a plan to feed and move American prisoners from the Bataan peninsula to a series of camps. The problem was that he had arrangements for only 25,000 prisoners, not the 100,000 that actually surrendered. Japanese logistics here were overwhelmed, and the soldiers guarding the prisoners essentially were left to their own devices to move them from point A to point B. Japanese military discipline was notably savage, with officers and NCOs physically abusing their underlings on down to the general enlisted. Many of these troops took out their frustration by beating and killing the prisoners. For his part, Honma, who was forced to retire by the high command for being too friendly with the Filipinos (such to the point that some of his officers attempted to have various Filipino officials executed under his name, which he was able to stop) and concerned with preserving the lives of his troops, claimed he was busy laying siege to Corregidor rather than overseeing the march.

In another instance, another Class A war criminal, General Yamashita, had difficulties managing the conclusion of operations in British Malaya after the capture of Singapore. He turned a bit of a blind eye to the Sook Ching massacres of Singaporean ethnic Chinese, although he did notably intervene after some Japanese troops broke into one of the hospitals and killed some patients (by having the offender executed and going to the hospital to apologize). He too was tried and convicted of not controlling his troops and preventing massacres, in what has become known as the Yamashita standard of command responsibility.

(contd)

Area army, Iwane Matsui, was fully aware of "abominable actions" happening in Nanking under his watch, and publicly denounced atrocities in a speech he made during the massacre. But he did not or was not able to rein in his troops, However, Iris Chang contends that he was used as a fall guy for Crown Prince Asaka, who was also in charge of troops during the massacre.

Nor was this solely relegated to the army. While you had several notable instances of humanity, such as the Japanese destroyer Ikazuchi picking up over 400 survivors of Allied ships (for comparison, the ship itself held little over 200 crew), you also had instances like the Japanese submarine I-8 forcing survivors to walk the plank and proceeding to machinegun them in the water. These totally polar moments suggest that the IJN too suffered from incredibly poor command-control and that officers on the ground more or less had the final call of who lived and who died.

Above all, the Imperial Japanese military, particularly in the Chinese theater, were generally stretched very thin, and many groups often fell out of communication and supply for extended periods of time where they were for the most part, left on their own. Battered, fatigued, heavily armed soldiers left to their own devices in a chaotic warzone with no supervision and expecting little opposition often lead to human tragedies, as history tells us time and time again.

At the end of the day, many of the war crimes committed by Japanese military forces were often against standing official orders. Even punishments, up to and including execution of perpetrators of various war crimes, including rape, arson, and murder, did not always rein in the troops.

There are various reasons for this but a combination of being unable to consistently maintain and reinforce chain of command, discipline in the ranks, and little recourse for the victims meant that war criminals generally had a free hand to act.

(contd)

Additionally, a long, brutal campaign against an opponent that they had long standing ethnic tensions with only added fuel to the fire. Many Japanese soldiers had been fighting a long, exhausting, and bloody campaign against a tenacious enemy they had expected to defeat quickly and easily. They regularly faced partisans/resistance fighters that would hide among the civilian populace, using guerrilla attacks *and* civilians themselves occasionally taking up arms spontaneously. And the Chinese populace in general were extremely uncooperative and did not often have pleasant interactions with Japanese military forces.

Combined with a lack of supervision and lack of consequence for crimes, this ended up becoming an environment where Japanese soldiers often felt justified committing horrific acts upon both prisoners of war as well as civilians under the guise of 'pacifying' rebels or guerrilla fighters hiding among the populace, which was generally inhospitable to the invaders. We see how similar situation occurred in the American wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

(contd)

It is also interesting to contrast the IJA in WW2, with the IJA in WW1, during which they were an exemplary example of humane treatment of POWs.

The scope of the conflict during World War I was much lower for Japanese forces. They were very focused operations to seize colonial holdings of the Germans mostly, as well as conducting naval operations to interdict German naval assets.

The fighting while fierce was limited and did not sprawl, nor did the fights grow heavily protracted. This is not to say there weren't quite a few casualties, because there were. But the fighting was markedly different from the type of entrenched, bloody, meat grinder campaigns the Japanese forces would see during World War II.

Further, the main national motivation for Japanese participation during World War I was consolidating their position as an imperial power among their global peers. Their main offering for their allies was the ability to resupply in ports in Asia, as well as material support from Japan in general.

Japanese invasions were conducted and sold to the general populace as a great contribution toward the empire. During the time, expanding colonial holdings and general imperialist ambitions was seen as the best way for a nation to prosper and succeed. And the successes came relatively swiftly and according to plan. The war plans were generally well executed and there wasn't a massive breakdown in discipline or control and command structures.

Compare with Japanese ambitions in Asia during World War II, where Japanese forces were fighting one of the bloodiest modern campaigns in living history, with horrendous casualties, lack of proper medical care and often whole detachments without resupply or cut off entirely.

(contd)

yep. the weebs posting jap defence are simply sprouting anime tier shit.

From WW1 to WW2, also, the motivations had changed. Japanese war doctrine had grown more ideological and more demanding of both their enemies and their own soldiers. The rise of militarism, spurred a huge boost in influence and power for the military forces of the empire, to the point where the army and navy were making decisions on how to lead the nation and would often ignore direct orders from the civilian government.

As mentioned earlier, the ideology of "gekokujo" was introduced, inspired by a particular interpretation of samurai warrior values from Japan's Warring States period and it justified disobeying your leaders if your disobedience would lead to greater success or glory.

This had privates disobeying squad leaders, sergeants disobeying lieutenants, captains disobeying generals, and generals disobeying government officials. This is also what is attributed to the spate of assassinations of various politicians in Japan leading up to the great rise of the army's influence.

And of course Japanese hated Chinese more than Germans. The Japanese had violated China several times now, and Chinese people were firmly aware of the fact that Japanese ambitions included carving out their own piece of China alongside the other imperial powers. The Japanese side often considered the Chinese to have 'fallen', once a great civilization but now a weak nation that was ripe for colonization and 'uplifting' by the global power of Japan.

Popular Japanese disdain for Chinese people can generally be summarized as both condescension (Japan was strong while China was weak) as well as the idea of 'benefitting' the Chinese by conquering them and then reshaping China into something better (which would of course benefit Japan, as compensation for their labors). Japanese propaganda often played on the themes of the current Chinese authorities being weak, corrupt, or puppets of non-Asian imperialist powers and proposed themselves as the best alternative.

(cont'd)

Because fuck other races.
Before 1950 all wars were about race. Read primary sources from say 1913 (to pick something at random) and you get US presidents saying stuff like 'we must advance the white race". Everyone understood cultural identity as a viable marker of status.

Lastly it should also be noted that glorification of death in the service of the empire ratcheted up a great deal leading up to and of course during World War II. Japanese soldiers who took prisoners of war considered the prisoners to be dishonorable in surrender. This strong ideological bent to the conflict lent itself to rationalizing extreme acts in the name of the cause more.

The lack of discipline within the ranks because of the rampant ideas of *gekokujo* or just general poor command structures, often exacerbated by the extreme conditions the Japanese forces had to fight in, created an environment that allowed many crimes to be overlooked or unnoticed at all.

I should take this time to say that while Japanese war crimes during World War II were rampant and numerous, there were also acts of kindness and altruism. Of course, they are overshadowed by the incredibly egregious war crimes (and they most certainly do not 'cancel' each other out, they are simply different events.)

This is true of virtually all wars. There is great capacity in such terrible times of conflict for great horrors but also great kindness.

I just wish they had killed more Chinese

You can see enough of his face to compare it to a man who was captured by the Japanese and found dead.

Outside of Western-Anglo society, race didn't exist on a socio-cultural level.

*freeze frame*
*record scratch*
yup, thats me youre probably wondering how i ended up this situation

He made it up.

Its a communist flag i don't think the number is only Stalin.

Nice meme stormfag. Why wouldn't this apply to other countries too? It's a fact that Japan has very low crime. You can leave your bike unchained there and no one is going to steal it.

>You can leave your bike unchained there and no one is going to steal it.
japan also has used panty vending machines XDDDDD
> Japan has very low crime
Very low reported crime. Deal with the police in anything other than directions and it'll stand out immediately.

articles.latimes.com/2007/nov/09/world/fg-autopsy9

>let me pull this giant shit out of my ass and use it as an example

Fuck off Black Pidgeon, go back to watching anim-ay and/or making videos about Trudeau

He merely said the sentiment existed because you asked you dopey fucking idiot

Only whites cared about advancing their race. The Muslims accepted everyone into their numbers. So did the Asians.

Its funny with the debate over the Japanese murder rates, because generally its the stormniggers who are the ones who like to boast about how low Japan's murder rate is and say it is because it doesn't have any immigrants.

Here it is reversed, as they try to argue a higher death rate for Japan.

a stormfag and a weeb, neither know anything about japan.

color me surprised