Kim Jae-rim (C), a Korean victim of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries’ forced labor during World War II and one of four who had filed damage suits against the Japanese company, leaves the Gwangju District Court in the namesake city, 329km south of Seoul, on Aug. 11, 2017. The court ordered the company to pay 120 million won to the 87-year-old victim. Mitsubishi is one of the leading Japanese war criminal companies involved in forced labor during the war. More than 1 million Koreans were forcibly taken to mines, ammunition factories and construction sites in Japan during the war. (Yonhap)
For those that have visited the Yushukan Museum located adjacent to the highly controversial Yasukuni-jinja Shrine, there is definitely an alternative history of World War II taught in Japan. The majority of people in Japan do believe that the Imperial Japanese militarism was a great folly, but there are people who believe the history taught at the Yushukan Museum that Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor was to preempt an American attack on Japan and liberate Asian people from western colonialism:
World War II era Japanese zero fighter aircraft at the Yushukan Museum in Tokyo.
The Pearl Harbor attack that led the United States into WWII is normally a historical footnote in Japan, rarely discussed on anniversaries or in depth at schools.
That changed when Prime Minister Shinzo Abe announced he would visit Pearl Harbor with President Barack Obama on Dec. 27 to offer “comfort to the souls of the victims.”
Most Japanese today view the war as a great folly. The clause in Japan’s constitution that renounces the nation’s right to wage war has taken root so deeply that even new, restrictive laws allowing Japan to defend its allies were viewed with suspicion last year.
However, some divergent perspectives over history remain among two of the world’s closest allies.
Americans are taught that the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor was an unprovoked sneak attack.
The view among some Japanese, and particularly among some otherwise pro-U.S. alliance conservatives, is that a Western economic embargo forced Japan’s hand.
By 1941, Japan controlled large parts of China and other parts of Asia. In July, its military occupied parts of Southeast Asia, including a key port in what is now Vietnam.
The U.S., Britain and The Netherlands responded by freezing Japanese assets in their countries, which included access to most of Japan’s oil supply.
“Indeed, the oil embargo cornered Japan,” Emperor Hirohito said in an audio memoir recorded shortly after the 1945 surrender. The memoir was found in 1990 by the Bungei Shunju magazine and then translated by The New York Times.
“Once the situation had come to this point, it was natural that advocacy for going to war became predominant,” Hirohito said. “If, at that time, I suppressed opinions in favor of war, public opinion would have certainly surged, with people asking questions about why Japan should surrender so easily when it had a highly efficient army and navy, well trained over the years.” [Stars & Stripes]
You can read more at the link, but the best book I have read about the period before the attack on Pearl Harbor is Eri Hotta’s: Japan 1941: Countdown to Infamy. I highly recommend ROK Heads read this book to really understand why Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. The Japanese had opportunities to keep parts of their Chinese and Korean colonies if they would withdraw from other areas of China and Southeast Asia as demanded by the US and its allies. How different would things be today if Japan had been allowed to continue the colonization of Korea and parts of China?
There was actually a lot of dissenting opinions in Japan, but the militarists eventually were able to convince enough people they could replicate the success of the Russo-Japanese War with a decisive naval victory against the US at Pearl Harbor. As history has shown the bombing of Pearl Harbor became one of the great misjudgments in military history.
Regardless of the history involved it is good to see Prime Minister Abe finally make the visit to Pearl Harbor and hopefully put an end to any remaining hard feelings about World War II.
A bit on an interesting document even though according to the report the document was first revealed in the 1990’s:
A local research team said Monday it found a record of the Japanese military killing Korean women forced to serve as sex slaves when the country was under colonial rule (1910-45).
The operation diary for Sept. 15, 1944, recorded by allied forces of the United States and China, says “Night of the (Sept.) 13th, (1944), the Japs shot 30 Korean girls in the city (of Tengchong, China),” according to the Seoul National University (SNU) Human Rights Center.
The record was discovered at the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration in College Park, Maryland, during the research team’s monthlong field study from mid-July to August.
Words such as “whores,” “comfort women” and “prostitutes” were used throughout other relevant records, indicating the 30 women mentioned in the page were former sex slaves, said professor Kang Sung-hyun, a member of the research team.
The existence of this record was already revealed to the public in the 1990s, but the latest finding was the first time the exact institution holding the document has been identified, said the professor at the Institute for East Asian Studies under Sungkonghoe University in Seoul. [Yonhap]
You can read more at the link, but Tengchong, China is right across the border from today’s Myanmar:
Of interest is that the document also says that they found two Englishmen were their hands tied behind their backs with their throats cut. It appears the Japanese may have also executed their wounded. In the document it states that 1,000 Japanese soldiers were found dead in one quadrant of the city and that half of them were wounded before being killed. The Japanese may have killed every non-fighting soldier in the city before its fall to limit the intelligence provided to the allied forces if those people were captured.
Over at Mashable they have the story about Lieutenant Hiroo Onada posted who was the Japanese soldier who after Japan surrendered during World War II decided to fight on with his companions. The below article features some great photos that are worth checking out:
After the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, on Aug. 15, 1945, Japan announced its surrender, bringing an end to World War II.
But for some, the war was not over.
Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda was 22 years old when he was deployed to Lubang Island in the Philippines in December 1944. As an intelligence officer, he was given orders to disrupt and sabotage enemy efforts — and to never surrender or take his own life.
Allied forces landed on the island in February 1945, and before long Onoda and three others were the only Japanese soldiers who had not surrendered or died. They retreated into the hills, with plans to continue the fight as guerrillas.
The group survived on bananas, coconut milk and stolen cattle while engaging in sporadic shootouts with local police.
In late 1945, the group began encountering air-dropped leaflets announcing that the war was over, and ordering all holdouts to surrender. After careful consideration, they dismissed the leaflets as a trick, and fought on. [Mashable]
You can read the rest at the link, but Lt. Onoda and his companions over the decades would either surrender or be killed leaving him ultimately along until his surrender in 1974. I always thought that Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda should have been hunted down and held accountable for his crimes. His group had to have known that the war was over and yet they continued to kill civilians. I believe the real reason his group did not surrender was not because of honor, but because they did not want to be held accountable for the war crimes they committed.
A group of grandchildren of Koreans who were forcibly taken to work on Russia’s far east island of Sakhalin during the Japanese colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula (1910-45), arrives at Incheon International Airport, west of Seoul, on Aug. 2, 2016. A civic organization in Busan invited the group to a five-day history tour program. Some 43,000 Koreans were sent to the icy island that was a part of the Japanese empire at the time. (Yonhap)
I understand that having a nuclear weapon used against you is a horrible experience, but the two atomic bombs were a key factor in ending World War II which ultimately brought independence to the entire Korean peninsula:
A special monument commemorating Korean victims stands in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park. (Yonhap)
A group of South Korean victims of the U.S. atomic bombs dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on Thursday demanded an apology and compensation from both the United States and Japan.
“Nuclear bombs were dropped and Koreans in Japan at the time were victims,” a shelter for bombing victims in Hapcheon, South Gyeongsang Province, said in a press release.
The demand comes as U.S. President Barack Obama will visit Hiroshima later this month, making him the first sitting American president to do so.
The victims pointed out that “Japan has thoroughly hid its own war crimes while only emphasizing the fact that it was victimized by the bombing.” [Yonhap]
You can read the rest at the link, but I recommend readers check out this link to see why I think the US has nothing to apologize for in regards to using nuclear weapons to end World War II.
I have always thought that one of the things that may have motivated some of these World War II hold outs was the fear of being prosecuted for war crimes, not the idea of never surrendering. There was a number of massacres that happened on Guam during the war that makes me wonder of Sergeant Yokoi had anything to do with?:
Cpl. Shoichi Yokoi, center, who held out in the remote jungle of Guam for 28 years after the end of World War II, raises his hands with two other former holdouts of the Japanese army on July 30, 1972, in this photo displayed at the Pacific War Museum, Guam.
For some combat veterans, war lives on in memories of camaraderie, loss, pride and shame.
For a small group of Japanese soldiers who fought in World War II, the war literally did not end for decades.
Referred to as “stragglers” or “holdouts,” these men retreated to remote, mountainous jungles as Allied forces retook dozens of Pacific islands conquered by Japan.
Guam is tiny compared with some other Asian nations, but its small population that clustered mainly along the eastern coastline left much of the interior isolated even 25 years after war’s end in 1945.
Cpl. Shoichi Yokoi was among the last of the stragglers discovered in the Pacific, captured on the eastern side of Guam in 1972 when two local shrimpers were checking traps along the Ugum River abutting the cave he’d lived in for 28 years.
Photographs of Yokoi and other Guam stragglers — Pvt. Bunzo Minagawa and Sgt. Masashi Ito, both captured in 1960 — are on display at the Pacific War Museum in Guam. [Stars & Stripes]
