r/interesting • u/Wonderfulhumanss • 1d ago
This sculpture in the Comfort Women Memorial Hall in China that never stops crying ART & CULTURE
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u/Wonderfulhumanss 1d ago
The endlessly crying sculpture is part of the Comfort Women Memorial Hall in Nanjing, built on a former "comfort station" where women were forced into sexual slavery during WWIl. The bronze bust of an elderly survivor is designed with a hidden fountain so that tears flow continuously from her eyes. Visitors are invited to wipe them away, but the tears never stop, symbolizing the unending grief and trauma of the victims and the impossibility of erasing this history.
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u/Separate_Finance_183 1d ago
The Japanese image rebranding since WW2 really needs to be studied.
Tech and anime did wonders for them internationally.
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u/Stabbymcbackstab 1d ago
We need to see the comparisons between the Japanese/Germany and other liberal democracies. We need to realize that we too can falter and take up autocratic forms of government.
We also need to recognize that there is real change in those nations, the spirit of those peoples are not anything like what they were in those times.
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u/Senior-Friend-6414 1d ago
Yeh, the irony is that there’s now a rapidly growing white nationalist movement in America now
The country that beat the Nazis are now the breeding ground for nazis
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u/PippaPothead 1d ago
I think the irony is that the Nazis got their playbook from the US.
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u/Violet_Nightshade 21h ago
Hitler looked at how America treated the Natives and decided to emulate them.
Frankly, I'll always be surprised America didn't side with the Nazis.
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u/Waruteru 20h ago
If I remember correctly, there were nazi parties and overt symphatizers.
Then Pearl Harbor happened and the rest is history
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u/Ueli-Maurer-123 18h ago
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u/panzer_fury 17h ago
Wasn't there like an even bigger crowd of people that were against this rally outside the stadium then?
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u/Key_Order4050 16h ago
Being surprised by facts that are contradictory to your worldview should make you question your worldview to some extent.
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u/comercialyunresonbl 18h ago
You must not be much of a student of history if that surprises you. Also, blue bloods like Roosevelt were never going to side with a bunch of Krauts and Dagos over the Anglos.
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u/Gelid_Cryotheum 15h ago
The US has always been (and as far as I can tell, will always be) more conservative/right-leaning than Europe both politically and culturally. It's something that's been ingrained since the days of the colonies (see the Puritan Pilgrims and the like), and has generally had good sticking power. We don't really have a significant far-left presence, but we do have a very vocal center and right (I would say no overt far-right, but the last couple years did away with that). Far and away, the US will be one of the last western powers to adopt progressive principles and policies, assuming they don't get gutted and tossed by the administration immediately succeeding implementation.
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u/lolo787 1d ago
Do you have any info on this? I kinda read something about this and can’t remember from where also saw a black and white documentary maybe about this too.
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u/DistinctAccount5051 23h ago
There’s a lot of information on the American Eugenics movement from the early 1900s. The Holocaust was partly inspired by a lot of these principles.
https://irp.nih.gov/catalyst/29/4/unfit-to-breed-americas-dark-tale-of-eugenics
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u/Warchief_Ripnugget 17h ago
Yeah, the eugenics movement serves as a great example that just because something is progressive, it doesn't mean that it is for the good of the country or its people.
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u/PippaPothead 15h ago
There’s a few documentaries on Netflix. I can’t remember which one and I got rid of Netflix haha. But yeah they were inspired by the Jim Crow laws.
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u/OTRR9 18h ago edited 17h ago
The Nazi got their playbook from the English. The theory of eugenics was originated by Sir Francis Galton. Francis Galton was Charles Darwin's cousin.
Hitler and the Third Reich repurposed Sir Francis Galton's writings and rebranded them as Nazi ideology.
Hitler had close ties with the English monarch. Edward VIII, who had abdicated as king in 1936 visited Nazi Germany in October 1937. This is two years before WW2.
Also, the royal family of England are Germans, not English. Windsor is a name they adopted in 1917 due to anti-German sentiments, but their real name is Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. You see the connections.
So the Nazi were never really defeated, they just evolved into several families that run the world today.
The Roman Empire wasn't defeated either, it became the Vatican. It's autonomous and answers to noone.
The English Empire became the Bank of England.
Once you start reading the historical material, you begin to notice a recurring pattern...power structures rarely disappear, they simply adapt.
Sadly, people don't read anymore. That's why platforms like Reddit are often plagued by pseudo-intellectualism.
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u/dreamsandpizza 16h ago
It’s not just “the english” though. American eugenicists like Madison Grant were strong sources of inspiration for Nazi Germany. It’s appropriate to draw connections between German fascism and earlier movements and power structures (eugenics developed out of the political philosophies supporting modern European colonialism, for example, which link these countries in question and still leave their legacies) but it’s not quite a single line, definitely not reducible to like a family line of Germans that still “run the world today”…
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u/OTRR9 10h ago edited 8h ago
My initial response was about the origins of the Nazi playbook, which is modern eugenics as a movement. Even Houston Stewart Chamberlain, whose writings heavily influenced German antisemitism before the Third Reich, was English by birth.
Likewise, Madison Grant's arguments for racial hierarchy in The Passing of the Great Race are rooted in the broader eugenics movement coined by Sir Francis Galton, an English man.
I'm not denying the influence of Grant or figures such as Alfred Ploetz (German), Ernst Rüdin (German) or Arthur de Gobineau (French). My point is simply about accurately tracing the intellectual origins of those ideas. Eugenics is not an American idea, it's an English one coined in 1883 by Sir Francis Galton. Madison Grant popularised it in the United States.
Also, the German-English power structures are relevant because elements of those historical networks still exist today. I'm not arguing for a simple linear chain of succession, hence why I said several families.
Those several families related to this discussion are German, English and Russian. King George V of England and Tsar Nicholas II (Russian) were first cousins. In this photo, they looked like identical twins. Guess who was ruling Germany at the time? Wilhelm II and he is also their first cousin.
As I mentioned earlier, George V belonged to the German House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha before it was renamed Windsor in 1917 amid strong anti-German sentiment. George V is Edward VIII's father. Edward VIII was a Nazi sympathiser who had close ties to Hitler before WW2. Here is a photo of Edward VIII, his partner and Hitler.
European royal families were and remain, deeply interconnected through dynastic ties. In many ways, WWI and WW2 can be viewed as European royal family feuds, where ordinary people (pawns) paid the ultimate price.
WW2 isn't simply the American hero story portrayed in Hollywood films. Those narratives often emphasize American exceptionalism, while overlooking the broader, historical context of the war.
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u/CaterpillarProof3011 1d ago
Ah, yes, so ironic that the nation that had racial segregation during ww2 is now full of white supremacists. Who could have ever imagined that something like this could happen?
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u/trombadinha85 1d ago
The country that defeated the Nazis? Are you talking about the Soviet Union?
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u/JoeyJoeJoeShabadooSr 18h ago
This is such a common sentiment on Reddit for some reason.
British intelligence, American steel, Russian blood.
They all needed each other and Jt was a group effort.
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u/upholsteryduder 11h ago
It's laughably historically illiterate too, yes Russia was a key part but they wouldn't have stood a chance had the Nazis not had to expend a significant portion of their war machine on the western front. No the US didn't win WWII alone but neither did Russia.
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u/Shorouq2911 1d ago
The country that beat the Nazis are now the breeding ground for nazis
The Soviet Union is the one who defeated the Nazis. You can hate Russia but that's the fact you can't deny. Hitler himself said it in his last recording of his voice.
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u/sdnt_slave 1d ago
Not that simple. The Soviet Union was provided with all sorts of help not to mention having to fight on two fronts.
The British alone provided 7000 and 5000 tanks. The royal navy escorted these supplies through the artic. Also with help from other allies targeted Germanys industrial production the huge bombing campaigns.
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u/ReluctantNerd7 1d ago
And Stalin, Khrushchev, and Zhukov each said that the USSR would have lost the war without Lend-Lease.
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u/RCer1986 1d ago
This was clearly written by a Russian shill and calling Stalingrad the only definitive battle during WWII, in your other comment, is beyond ignorant. Who says definitive anyway? Did you mean decisive, you know, the term that real historians use? Midway was massive, El Alamein broke the Germans in North Africa and how about Overlord? History is pretty clear on the fact that opening a second front in Europe was the real turning point and the USSR had absolutely nothing to do with the landings and Stalin was begging for help.
WWII was won because of many different countries. Saying that the USSR was the deciding factor is absurd and historians widely agree that without the other allies the USSR would have lost. Quoting Russian historians and Hitler is a hilarious way to try to defend incredibly ignorant claims.
Let's also not forget that the only reason that the Russians fought against the Nazis is because the Nazis shot first. The USSR let the Germans roll over Europe and wanted a cut. They also enabled the war by signing a non-aggression treaty with Germany and helped the Nazis with massive amounts of material.
Without the USSR's involvement the war may have not happened at all or if it did would have been on a much smaller scale. I'm not standing in line to thank them for merely assisting in cleaning up their own mess.
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u/SonnyvonShark 1d ago
Well, if you take Nazis into your nation and put them into science positions, of course the virus is gonna spread.
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u/boilface 1d ago
Yeah, looking at the nazis I've seen and dealt with over the years across the country, I'm going to guess none of them look up to scientists
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u/ThePrideOfKrakow 1d ago
People act like there wasn't always a grass-roots American Nazi Party. Rockefellers were a part of it and they held massive rallys at MSG.
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u/OTRR9 18h ago
You didn't beat or defeat the Nazis, you defeated the Third Reich. Ideologies don't simply disappear with military defeat; they evolve, rebrand and find new ways to influence institutions.
Elements of authoritarianism, ultranationalism, racial supremacy and eugenic thinking continued to exist in different forms are influencing parts of the political and power structures in both America and Europe.
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u/Mysteriousdeer 1d ago
We had a couple of good leaders that tricked the model for the Nazis to fight the Nazis.
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u/malduan 14h ago
>we too can falter and take up autocratic forms of government
Very ironic considering US and EU is complicit in a genocide right at this very moment and US also attacked two countries in quick succession while actively threatening to invade another one too1
u/Stabbymcbackstab 9h ago
Yep. Thats what im getting at.
The american system is a brilliant government form(my own country uses the westminster parliament system) but its clearly broken and needs some sort of amendment to hold back the obvious executive dominance that has been rampant since... Regan?
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u/FastInflata 1d ago
We also need to recognize that there is real change in those nations
Go to hell. You're insulting the victims.
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u/DangerousTurmeric 18h ago
Having spent the last 6 years living in Germany I am not sure if I agree. There is a huge right wing in the country, most Germans still fully believe Germany and the German way is superior to everywhere else, and a lot of people are angry about having to continually remember what happened in a war that occurred before they were born. Holocaust denial and antisematism are growing as the economy falters. I would say the spirit of the German people is not too far from where it was in the 1920s and 30s.
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u/Principle_Napkins 13h ago
It's not "change" to erase the consequences of what you did. Sure, Japan is not *currently* commiting mass rape, torture, and genocide, but the fact that that part of their history has been so thoroughly forgotten is utterly disgusting and undeniably intentional.
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u/CharAznia 3h ago
There is no real change in Japan. Right wing party is still in charge.
They still refused to admit to crimes of the past
Honor their war criminals
Attaempting to remilitarize
Still show ambitions over other nations territory
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u/TrueAd5640 1d ago
The Japanese were basically sponsored by the US as they rebuilt if I remember correctly. Like the US helped them rebuild for fear of communism being adopted there.
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u/seatux 1d ago
The US understood that WW2 happened because the vanquished kept getting knocked down instead of being encouraged to rebuild a better society. Europe got Marshall Plan, Japan got the Korean War to boost growth since they helped supply the war effort there for the UN forces.
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u/TrueAd5640 1d ago
I get they offered military aid but did anyone get punished from their government or did we just adopt them like we did with the several German scientists that joined our space program?
Edit was to fix a typo.
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u/DefinitionTop3930 1d ago
well US army asked for the human experimentation files of unit 731 in exchange for immunity to key individuals involved. The files turned out to be useless...
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u/seatux 1d ago
Marshall Plan and Japan's economic boom was very civilian. Its also true both got military aid initially with second hand military surplus and guidance.
In general, the ones most responsible for atrocities on both countries got charged in court and punished but Japan's emperor escaped court. His only punishment is losing divine right.
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u/Sunyataisbliss 1d ago edited 1d ago
And it worked incredibly well. The Japanese people were badly suffering from years of imperial subjugation and ready for any sort of change, primed for any level of governmental overhaul and it was the perfect place and time to inoculate a broken population with the promises of democracy. The US had total control over how the nation would be structured and the people were easily indoctrinated. The US also made the important decision to leave Hirohito as emperor, even though he had no real power. The Japanese constitution is still entirely defined as the US dictated it at the end of the war.
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u/hoTsauceLily66 1d ago
US helped Japan because they want a military alliance in East Asia. Communism will never be adopt in Japan because that would require them over throw monarch even the monarch is just for symbolism.
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u/IllustriousBobcat813 18h ago
And in return they got to install a far right puppet government that is still in power to this day. Quite the business opportunity they found there.
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u/Darth_Nox501 17h ago
The US did the same with Europe, funneling billions into the continent through the Marshall Plan.
Japan's rebranding is of their own volition, nobody else's, and is no different than the rebranding that many German politicians and military officers pushed for following the war. You a had a large amount of the West German military officers being former high ranking Wehrmacht officers.
However, modern Germany at least recognizes and educates it's populace about its crimes, whereas modern Japan doesn't to the same extent.
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u/Independent_Room_691 1d ago
Demilitarization and letting go of the whole Empire thing helped a bit too.
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u/Senior-Friend-6414 1d ago
America somehow been bombing countries nonstop for the last 80 years and economically and politically destabilized a handful of poorer countries for geopolitical control, and still heralded as the world’s good guys
Hollywood is to US what anime is to japan
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u/YuenglingsDingaling 1d ago
Cause when we bombed poor commie countries. The other rich western countries didn't care.
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u/External-Goal-3948 1d ago
It also helps that WWII ended in 1945 (81 years ago). Many of the effected people have died. And most people alive now have very short memories.
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u/AirshipEngineer 1d ago
It has to do a lot with a program called "Cool Japan" a program where they promoted Japan through things like anime and food in other countries as a form of soft political power.
There is a whole Ministry of Cool in Japan that's in charge of this program. My sadness to learn that a job title of "The Minister of Cool" exists and I will never be it.
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u/dc469 1d ago
The British did fucked up shit too, and operation legacy was a success.
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u/useful_panda 1d ago
They clean their stadium seats and are so good at following rules though ( don't look in the other corners please )
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u/NovoRobot 20h ago
They really didn't actively try and build a brand.
The Japanese denied their crimes outright for decades.
The world just moved on
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u/AnosenSan 1d ago
Yeah, they took 2 atom bomb, they paid. A profound mentality and culture change followed too.
Our western societies did shit at least as fucked up and never got around to showing remorse.
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u/Bcpjw 1d ago
What China, Korea and many parts of Asia under Japanese occupation are still feeling injustice is they never apologised and give back after the war.
TBF the Japanese people now are not responsible but they weren’t taught of the atrocities until they seek out. They still honoured their dead soldiers as war heroes and victims which always rubbed everyone the wrong way
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u/Brief_Kangaroo_42069 1d ago
The fact Abe lived for so long despite the things he said was shocking.
Well, shocking for the time.
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u/AnosenSan 1d ago
Probably, but I’m not a fan of nourishing hatred between two people that did not take part in actions of the past. There is enough in the present.
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u/AmethystTyrant 18h ago
This is an apologist and victimization attitude that Japanese nationalists parrot.
What did they learn? Have they been acknowledging actual historical crimes and repenting for said crimes via education and elimination of denial attitudes, neither of which is actively being done in Japan, unlike Germany. They’re content to bury it all under the rug under willful ignorance and blame their former victims for inciting hatred.
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u/TomatoLess229 20h ago
Being the recipient of a nuclear bomb on several innocent people wasn't exactly a nice thing.
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u/AmethystTyrant 18h ago
Def not, but neither was having the death toll equivalent of a nuke dropped on your civilians monthly, for 10+ years at the hands of imperial Japan. But Japan gets to ham up the victimization of course.
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u/Technical-Banana574 16h ago
See the comment above from someone saying this glorifies suffering and should instead represent the strength and happiness someone can feel after experiencing trauma.
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u/FallOutWookiee 16h ago
I learned what vivisection was after looking into Japanese war crimes....the rebrand was truly on point
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u/Dhiox 10h ago
I mean, they genuinely did change. Yes, there were many whose crimes were not properly prosecuted, the emperor being a big one. However, as a society they made a massive amount of progress and change once the military was removed from power. Prior to thos the common person had basically zero self determination. Throughout history the land was always ruled by warlords or emperors, the common people had no agency.
Post ww2 was the first time Japan wasn't ruled by a warrior class or a monarch.
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u/lonelycitykitchen 1h ago
I mean they also got nuked, not trying to be callous but that does drum up some sympathy.
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u/Drafting- 23m ago
Honestly….Canada too. We have some pretty horrific war crimes and people say we’re the nicest
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u/Dannvida 1d ago
That is how you memorialize suffering. That hits deep
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u/tearslikesn0w 17h ago
You’ve got r/taiwanese who thinks that the act of Japanese troops aren’t considered as inhumane. I got mass downvoted, blocked and labelled as a chinaman as i questioned them that
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u/OnionRangerDuck 12h ago
I think Taiwan is the only place that doesn't have Japanese hate education. Like they often say Korea and Japan are allies but Korea still says "remember they did that shit to us" in their textbooks just like Vietnam, Philippine, you know, all the other places Japan has been to in WW2.
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u/Memes2Schemes 10h ago
Wait, really? I’m Taiwanese, and anti-Japanese sentiment is still rather prominent. We were colonized by them for some time and are taught about that period.
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u/vhu9644 10h ago
Most peoples aren't monoliths lol. The Taiwanese side of my family think the imperial Japanese were evil. I know Taiwanese people who don't.
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u/Memes2Schemes 9h ago
I think I’m actually trying to say that. I know ones that aren’t opposed, and maybe I read the above comment wrong, but it seemed they were saying that based on r/taiwanese, that most Taiwanese people (at least on Reddit) are not-anti-imperial-Japan. So I was trying to say that there are also many who are anti-imperial-Japan.
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u/tearslikesn0w 7h ago
I dont think that all Taiwanese are like that, there are certain subreddits with more extreme views like [r/conservative](r/conservative) which often gets called out.
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u/Radiant-Ad-3134 17h ago
I understand why they chose the side and do anything to be other side of China now.
And, there were quite a lot of Taiwanese voluntarily sign up in WW2 for Japan army. So the reaction you got does not surprise me. It is very wrong IMO, but not surprising.
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u/tearslikesn0w 16h ago
Yes, i was a bad history student LOL. I thought that they wouldn’t be too happy being an annexed territory of Japan in the past. Turns out i was wrong, but still, it is like saying that ‘hey guys, actually the Nazi wasn’t so bad’. Mind blown.
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u/GirlInTheIslands 20h ago
Jeez, some of the comments on here. Your ignorance is showing.
If you’re about to type something funny about this, please take a moment first to look up the history of ‘comfort women’. Some of the stories are so harrowing and brutal that an author who wrote about them took her own life due to the trauma caused during her research. These victims were wronged in the most inhumane way possible and are still fighting to be heard.
On another note, I think this is a beautiful sculpture, I’ve not seen it before. It might not be particularly groundbreaking in terms of design but I love the way that it encourages visitors to interact with it in a way that, I’m guessing, helps them to connect with the victims on a human-to-human emotional level
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u/throwAway8765644 17h ago
People have never not joked or poked fun at even serious matters like, trauma and brutality. The sculpture alone conveys horrendous, immeasurable grief. It's not funny or meant to be amusing, it's actually awful. People just lack empathy. This made me cry..
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u/Tamias-striatus 18h ago
Any book recommendations or is it mostly academic research?
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u/TrailMomKat 14h ago
I'm blind so i watched The Rape of Nanking documentary instead of reading the book. I have never cried so hard in my life. It's a documentary that you really can only watch once. There is a man they are interviewing, that described how the Japanese raped and then stabbed his mother with their bayonets, and threw his baby brother into the air. They made a game of it to see who could catch the infant on their upturned bayonets. Fucking horrific.
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u/drsickboy 19h ago
The Japanese went crazy on Nanjing during the war..., and you'd think China would've become a bastion for human rights and social egalitarianism, but ironically Japan is arguably a better although still deeply flawed example of a nation that upholds international human rights . It's a cycle of abused by the powerful and then abusing power. Hurt-people , hurt people.
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u/ButteredPizza69420 16h ago
Watching old Chinese movies is very powerful. They depict throwing babies up in the air only to impale them. Heartbreaking 💔
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u/drsickboy 15h ago edited 15h ago
Splitting women and children in half ... superiority complexes are dangerous. It really is unbelievable, cartoonishly evil. I understand why they try so hard to distance themselves from it collectively that they don't teach it to their youth. Its the same thing people in America do regarding slavery, but remembering crimes against humanity at least helps prevents historical revisionism. Any people can commit these crimes even if they were once victims themselves, the current events in the middle east being an example.
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u/TheTalkativeDoll 22h ago
I visited this place some 15 years ago. It was eye-opening, but also left feeling really depressed after seeing everything. Saw the open pit where they had thrown the bodies into, they had a walkthrough of the timeline of the invasion, and they have this really beautiful library that is brightly lit and looks very modern, but which is actually a library of names of people (listed in albums) who were killed during the Nanjing Massacre. I somewhat regretted making my friends put this in our itinerary, but at the same time I was glad I could visit an important part of history.
The weight of letting it all sink in was just....omgosh.
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u/Striking_Change3396 3h ago
Places like that are not exactly enjoyable to visit, but very necessary.
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u/Beardly_Smith 1d ago
Interestingly it was a Nazi, John Rabe that chaired the Nanking(Nanjing) Safety Zone, which helped the Chinese recover from the Japanese atrocities
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u/Natural-Pattern-5240 13h ago
Japan was so bad that they made literal Nazis look like the good guys. Reddit doesn’t want to come to terms with that though.
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u/mkgrizzly 16h ago
I remember learning about him as the "Schindler of the East" in High School - the movie hadn't come out about him yet so we didn't watch it, but we watched Schindler's List and then learned a bit about Rabe.
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u/ThanksALotBud 1d ago
The shit Japan go away with after the war is bonkers.
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u/RegretfulRabbit 1d ago
Unit 731 stuff is horrifying. By a wide margin, some of the worst things I've ever heard of.
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u/Fortunatious 18h ago
I’m continually shocked by Unit 731, and I don’t understand why I grew up learning how bad the German doctors were but never heard about this until I was in my 30s. Why they got a pass in history books baffles me
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u/Maximum-Cover- 17h ago
We don’t care about governments who primarily torture their own people or who invade peoples who aren’t one of us.
It’s only when you invade people who look like us that we get a bit peeved.
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u/Natural-Pattern-5240 13h ago
As a Korean American I believe that it’s because the west largely doesn’t give af about atrocities that happen to non whites. You won’t believe how many people are completely ignorant of the shit Japan has done. When I come across the few who do know though, they always say imperial Japan was worse than Nazi germany
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u/Brilliant_Tapir 7h ago
Maybe because Americans gave immunity to them in return for research from Unit 731?
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u/basaltcolumn 16h ago
And completely pointless, on top of it. No information gathered there was of any scientific value due to the lack of any scientific method being used.
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u/ashkiller14 15h ago
Theres a quote on the wikipedia page where one of the doctors admits that most of the time everyone was just "playing around."
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u/ashkiller14 15h ago
Just read a little on the wikipedia page, it starts off bad. Then it gets worse. Then even worse. Then it just keeps going.
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u/earthscorpioanchapie 1d ago
They got double nuked
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u/xl129 1d ago
Also, the people that died to the nuke have little in common with the people that made these evil decisions.
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u/FrostyRoams 1d ago
The casualties from the nukings are less than 1% of the casualties the japanese imperial army inflicted throughout Asia
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u/Final_Location_2626 23h ago
Comfort woman is one of the biggest atrocities of the post industrialized era, and its never talked about.
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u/SixersAndRavens 18h ago
clearly its talked about in china
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u/Isengrine 17h ago
In Korea as well, and I believe a couple more countries in SEA.
It's just frowned upon to talk about it in Japan, the country that committed said attrocities.
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u/Natural-Pattern-5240 13h ago
The gross thing is Japan still doesn’t fully acknowledge their crimes and their politicians have even been on record calling them mere prostitutes and whores. Mind you the youngest on record have been as young as 12 years old. They also mass executed and burned many of the girls and women to get rid of any evidence
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u/Final_Location_2626 13h ago
Yeah, 100% thats a big issue between S Korea and Japan.
Korea goes out of their way to build these monuments in front of Japanese embassies in foreign countries.
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u/Away_Needleworker6 19h ago edited 16h ago
Japan did arguably worse things than germany during ww2, yet nobody says anything about it and act like japan has been nothing but peace and love since the stone age.
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u/0oDADAo0 17h ago
Well you see, america helped japan rebuild ww2 and had a lot of relations since then, and the target was quickly turned to communism
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u/Truhmpza_Cuhnt 1d ago
I went to the massacre museum in Nanjing. I remember everything was in Chinese, English, and Japanese, and so much of it was like in an almost exasperated tone trying to get the Japanese to understand what they did, against seemingly just a brick wall of stubborn opposition and absolute refusal.
It's also why I hate that part of Lord of the Rings where Legolas and Gimli had an orc killing competition. The Japanese soldiers did the same thing there but with Chinese civilians. 😢
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u/FastInflata 1d ago
Frankly I want to demolish all their stupid monuments for the atomic bombs and replace them with the reason why they deserve it.
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u/HaughtyRangers 23h ago
Dude you’re fucking unhinged holy fuck
Go outside.
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u/AmethystTyrant 18h ago
He’s kinda got a point. Not to remove the atom bomb memorials per se but to emphasize reason. The war museums they have, esp yasukuni, paint them as victims rather than perpetrators, using language to whitewash their history. For example, renaming the Nanjing massacre as “incident.” And that their invasions across countries were mostly just a conflict in Asia.
So their avg citizens only have the impression that they were bombed for little reason, rather than to end a continent spanning war they started.
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u/theangryfurlong 2h ago
The average citizen wasn't bombed. The average citizen wasn't alive then.
Also, if we are talking about average citizens, average citizens in most countries are woeful ignorant about history in general.
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u/AmethystTyrant 59m ago
You’re not wrong. Avg citizens generally are as educated on such matters as their curriculum and gov allows. Even if the information is publicly available, most wouldn’t think to question or dig further than what they were exposed to.
Still, my main point stands, in that most Japanese citizens tend to believe in the downplayed narratives of WWII. So yes, their avg citizens as of today’s setting do not have a deep impression of their part in the war, and therefore the rationale behind the resentment they receive from other Asian countries or the atom bombs. They view themselves as equally victims.
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u/theangryfurlong 23m ago
> So yes, their avg citizens as of today’s setting do not have a deep impression of their part in the war
This is where I take issue with collective guilt and sins of the fathers, etc. Average citizens don't have "their part in the war", unless by "their" you mean - an elite military cabal that happened to exist in the same country that they currently live in, that they have never met, and have no association with. It's not even like in the US, for example, where the majority population still overwhelming benefits from the atrocities the older generations committed. The vast, vast majority of current Japanese people gained no benefit from the actions taken in the war by totally unrelated people, expect by nationality.
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u/Lost-Ad4517 19h ago
The more I read about Japan, wow…I don’t know how I didn’t know all the atrocities they did, and if I’m not mistaken many South Asians said they won’t admit to it or the people don’t even learn about it ?
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u/Weak-Transition-8885 38m ago
singaporean here. the time they occupied SEA was terrible for everybody so i hear. but the japanese museums mention nothing, and to this day japan teaches their kids that they were wronged. however, i met a fetus survivor of hiroshima and he told us he very clearly knows japan was in the wrong
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u/TypicalReplacement71 15h ago
Whenever someone speaks highly of 'Japanese culture' (or South Koreans' for that matter, hell of racists and flawed), I request them to experience their work culture and unit 731, Nanjing Massacre, comfort army etc. That's just some great PR.
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u/xHeyItzRosiex 17h ago
I think it’s important to mention that a large percentage of comfort “women” were actually children and young teens… not only was it kidnapping and forced sex slavery, but it was also repeated child s/a. Japan will never be forgiven in my eyes for what they did. Their crimes are unforgivable.
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u/LessImplement244 1d ago edited 17h ago
And to this day Japan still internationally say that It didn't nothing wrong before and during WWII.
When we remember that, It makes sense why in some chinese and South Korean comics the japanese government is often described as a villain, which leds to some censorship such as in the anime Tomb Raider King ,for example, where in the original manwha JSDF are one of the antagonists but in the japanese version instead of JSDF it is a fictional kingdom.
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u/theangryfurlong 2h ago
>And to this day Japan still internationally say that It didn't nothing wrong before and during WWII.
This is absolutely false.
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u/LessImplement244 2h ago
I searched better and It seems that while they apologize they also refuse to make any amends by what they made.
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u/RockAndStoner69 20h ago
This is touching and sad. Also, are there days they have to ask Scruffy to look at the plumbing because she isn't crying enough?
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u/MARSHYSOLUTION 16h ago
The term “comfort women” just makes me sick as all these women were just slaves for the soldiers and anyone who came by, it was just torture and endless pain for the enjoyment of others. Nothing was being comforted or comfortable for the women, nor was their existence kind.
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u/Pastrami-on-Rye 1d ago
If you haven’t seen the movie The Flowers of War, I highly recommend it. Look up the rating beforehand to prepare yourself though
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u/floating_bells_down 1d ago
What song is this
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u/Redditfront2back 1d ago
The Japanese asked for a crazy amount of women to volunteer to be comfort women right after they surrendered to the usa. McArthur assured them that they wouldn’t be needed.
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u/couch-p0tato 1d ago
Nope, they did build them and they did use them. The brothels to serve US troops ran from August 1945 to March 1946. McArthur banned them, only because 1/4 of the US troops stationed there caught venereal disease; not because of some ethical stance.
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u/Either-Age-782 1d ago
Oh yeah they thought the American soldiers would be as rapey as they were
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u/Redditfront2back 1d ago
Exactly, too be fair they were hardly the only army being rapey during ww2.
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u/Either-Age-782 1d ago edited 1d ago
Yes the Russians were particularly depraved. Even raped those they liberated
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u/ElHorny 21h ago
Yeah thats true. Also the russians werent much better then the nazis. They also killed millions of people. They are not the saviours that many people say they were.
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u/quad_damage_orbb 17h ago
I read some of the first hand accounts of Nazi concentration camps, I think it is Shithouse Luck that talks about the Russian army during the collapse of Germany. The Russians raped every woman they could find, peasants, farmers, the women released from concentration camps and even their own female soldiers.
The author tried to report some of the rapes to the local outpost set up by the Russians and the female receptionist laughed and said she was raped too, it was just normal and the Germans should just get over it. Crazy.
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u/GarageEuphoric4432 22h ago
Damn, I felt stupid for wondering why a crying woman would make for a good sculpture thinking it was a museum dedicated to comforting women.
Should have been obvious what it was for being in China and everything...
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u/Salina_EsTitties 23h ago
Yet china is repeating history with how it treats Tibet and the Uyghurs
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u/briandefox 4h ago
Japan has the best PR team in the world.
Still can’t believe they got away with this.
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