....Upon closer examination... these portrait of the enemy reveal that sterotypess operated several ways in the war between Japan and theAgnloo-American powers. First the followed predictable patterns ofcontrainesss, in which each sideprotrayedd the other as its polar opposite as darkness opposed to its own radiant light. Second thepostivee self-images of one side were singled out....Third, ....Each raised the banner of liberation, morality, and peace.....
On the Anglo-American side, the first of these patterned stereotypes, that of the contrainessor mirror opposites , can be seen in the depiction of japan as thoroughly militaristic, repressive, irrational nation.....In the United State and the United Kingdom, the road to Pearl harbor was depicted as a one-way street; Japan provoked war and did so because of the peculiarities of its own history , culture and collectivepshychologyy. Eternal condition such as the global Depression and the emergence of quasiautarkic block economies all over the world may have abetted and accelerated these trends, but the essential causes of the war in Asia were peculiarly Japanese......
Such anti-Japanese stereotypes, however, had obvious counterparts in Japan's own propaganda about the Anglo-American enemy, where it was argued andsincerlyy believed by many that Japan was forced to go to war to defend its honor and veryexistnecee againstecnomicc and military "strangulation" by the rapacious and hypocritical "white imperialist. .....The Japanese made no mention, understandably, oftherirr own energeticactivetiess as a late-developing imperialist and colonial nation----a doubly embarassing point for them, since the victims of their own imperialism(in Formosa, Korea, and China, including Manchuria) were also, presumedly , their "blood brothers"
page 30
The southern region, embarking troops were informed in "Read This and the War is Won", was the treasure house of the Far East and a land of everlasting summer. It was also a place where a half million of British ruled 350 million Indians, and other few score thousands of Englishmen ruled 6 million Indians, and another few score thousands of Englishmen ruled 6 million Malayans; where two hundred thousand Dutchmen governed a native population of 60 million in the East Indies; where twenty thousand Frenchmen controlled 23 million Indochinese, and a few tens of thousands Americans ruled over 13 million Filipinos. Eight hundred thousand whites, the tally went, controlled 450 million Asians; if India was excluded the count was 100 million oppressed by three hundred thousand. ....p24....The Japanese were informed that Western expansion was inspired partly by love of adventure, but more by desire of local resources as well as market....."How were American Indians treated? What about African Negro?".....page26
....the report(The American-British Challenge Directed Against Nippon) launched into a detailed summary of the causes of the present conflict. The Greater East Asia War was described as "the counteroffensive of the Oriental races against Occidental aggression " and the United States was depicted as having been Japan's antagonist since the turn of the century, when it hypocritically demanded an open door in China while using the Monroe Doctrine to prohibit outsiders from interfering in the American, The decades that followed witnessed a steady increase in the anti-Japanese sentiment and activity on the part of the Americans:attempts to nuetralizee Manchuria and gain U.S. railroad rights there afterthe Russo-Japanese War; criticism of japan's postionn in China at the peace conference at Versailles in 1919; pressure to force Great Britain to give up the Anglo japanese alliance in the early 1920';the imposition of an unfavorable naval ratio at the 1921022 Washington Coferencee; anti-Japanese immigration and commercial policies; support, along with Great Britain, of Chiang Kai-shek's attack on Japan's legitimate rights and interests inMachuriaa and China, especially after the 1931 manchriann Incident.page 59
Japan's PanAsiatic slogan played upon these sentiments and the favorable response of many Asians to the initial Japanese victories against the Americans, British, and Dutch intensified Western presentiment of an all-out race war In Asia. In China, the japanese had persuaded Wang-Ching wei, formerly a respected nationalist leader, to head their puppet government. After Pearl Harbor, Indian and Burmese patriots both formed independent nationalist armies in collaboration with the Japanese, while in Indonesia pro-Japanese sentiments were expressed by the rousing triple slogan of the so called AAA movement:Japan the Leader of Asia, Japan the Protector of Asia, Japan the Light of Asia.....
Brume and the Philippines , long colonies of Britain and the United States respectively, were granted nominal independence by Japan in 1943. Occupied Indonesia was later also given independence, although the quick end of the war made the transfer of authority untidy.....Admiral Ernest King worried about the repercussions of Japanese victories "among the non-white world while Roosevelt's chief of staff Admiral William Leahy wrote in his diary about the fear that japan might "succeed i combing most of the Asiatic peoples against the white."....
.....In fact, Pan-Asian unity was a myth,....Ba Maw, dreamer of Asian blood calling Asian blood , eventually became a bitter, scathing critic of japanese "brutality, arrogance and racial pretensions," in his disillusion, as in his dreams, he was typical. ....As the self-designated leaders of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, however they prove to be as overweening as the Westerners had bee before them, and in many instances even more harsh:dominating the political scene taking over local economies, imposing broad programs of "Japanization." slapping non-Japanese in public, torturing and executing dissidents, exploiting native labor so severely that between 1942 and 1945 the death toll among such workers numbered in the hundreds of thousand. Untold millions of Asian civilians died during the brief existence of the Co-Prosperity Sphere ---from fighting atrocities, disastrous labor and economic policies and the starvation and disease that followed the war destruction.pagepage 6
....it is easy to forget how shocked the Western Powers were when the Japanese began bombing Chinese cities in 1937, and how much Japan's actions at that time served to convince most Europeans and Americans that this was a race and nation still beyond the pale of civilization. .....the Department of State denounced Japan on the grounds that "any general bombing of an extensive area wherein there resides a large population engaged in peaceful pursuits in unwarranted and contrary to principles of law and humanity. page 18
The prospect of putting Japan's cities to the torch actually had been envisioned in US military circles since shortly before Pearl Harbor,.....
Precision bombing was abandoned dramatically on the night of March 9-10, 1845, when 334 aircraft attacked Tokyo at low altitude with incendiary bombs, destroying sixteen square miles of the capital city and making more than a million people homeless. Between eighty thousand and one hundred thousand civilians died in the Tokyo raid---"scorched and boiled and baked to death" was how the mastermind of the new strategy, major General Curtis LeMay, later phrased it. The heat from the from the conflagration was so intense that in some place canals boiled, metal melted, and building and human beings burst spontaneously into flame.....By the time Japan surrendered, sixty-six cities, including Hiroshima and Nagasaki, had been subjected to both precision raids and general urban-area attacks. The exact number of civilians killed by both incendiaries and the atomic bombs is uncertain, but probably was close to four hundred thousand. page 41
Massacres of civilians by Japan's ground forces also marked the commencement of this period in 1937, and carried through to its end in 1945. ....
The Chinese people were the first victims of Japanese massacres .....it was in 1937, with the Rape of Nanjing fell on December 12 after heavy shelling and bombing, and for the next six weeks Japanese troop engaged in the widespread execution, rape, and random murder of Chinese men and women both in the captured city and outlying communities.....Much smaller killing occurred in other Chinese cities that fell into Japanese hands, including Hankow and Canton.page 43
Some of the greatest atrocity in Manila took place after MacArthur had announced the liberation of the city,......Carlos Romulo, the distinguished Filipino editor who escaped from Bataan in 1942 and returned with MacArthur's forces in 1945, described the horror of returning t find Manila "black and gutted and reeking," a "city of the tortured and the dead." "There were my neighbors and my friends whose tortured bodies I saw pushed into heaps on the Manila streets, " Romulo recorded, "their hand tied behind their backs, and bayonet stabs running through and through. This girl who looked up at me wordlessly, her young breasts crisscrossed with bayonet strokes, had been in school with my son. I saw the bodies of priests, women, children, and babies that had been bayoneted for sport, survivors told us, by a soldiery gone mad with blood lust in defeat."page 45
Although both German and Japanese atrocity stories were covered regularly in the English-language media, three incidents which received special attention in 1943 and the opening weeks of 1944 were widely interpreted as confirming that the Japanese were uniquely barbaric. ....all involved the killing of Caucasian prisoners. This was propaganda of the most sophisticated sort, turning concrete events into icons and symbols.....On the eastern front it is estimated that the Germany's took as many as 5. 5 million Soviet prisoners, of whom at least 3.5 million were were dead by mid-1944. Being more sensitive to the fate of their own countrymen, however, most citizens of the United States and the United Kingdom had a very different picture. Of 235,473 U.S and U.K prisoners reported captured by Germany and Italy together, only 4 percent(9,348) dies in the hands of their captors, whereas 27 percent of Japan's Anglo-American POWs (35,756 of 132,134) did not survive, No one had such numbers at their fingertips at the time, but the trend was clear. Thus, there was a logical explanation for the perception that the Japanese treated prisoners more brutally than the Germans, but the perception was nonetheless culture-bound and racially biased
(page 48)
War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War
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pow/wiki
World War II casualties
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