Anti-Japanism and Yasukuni Shrine

Anti-Japanism, a form of racism manifested with intense prejudice as in an attitude or policy of hatred and hostility toward the Japanese race, became so apparent when U.S. and other Western powers envisaged colonization of Japan more than a century ago. The World War II could be so defined as the war to annihilate the Jews and the Japanese race when we review WWII in view of such a statement as the most famous American hero, Mr. Charles Lindberg made in his diary “What the German has done to the Jew in Europe, we are doing to the Jap in the Pacific. As Germans have defiled themselves by dumping the ashes of human beings into this pit, we have defiled ourselves by bulldozing bodies into shallow, unmarked tropical graves. A long line of such incidents parades before my mind: the story of our Marines firing on unarmed Japanese survivors who swarm ashore on the beach at Midway; the accounts of our machine-gunning prisoners on a Hollandia airstrip; of the Australians pushing captured Japanese soldiers out of the transport planes which were taking them south over the New Guinea mountains; (“The Aussies reported them as committing hara-kiri or ‘resisting’”);------.

After the end of the Greater East Asia War (also called “the Pacific War” in the U.S., etc.), General Douglas MacArthur ignored the Potsdam Declaration and also international laws. Instead, he rampantly issued his own decrees much to the surprise of  the Government of the Imperial Japan. MacArthur’s motive was to whitewash almost all historical events that led to the war between Japan and U.S., so as to revise the history. Dr. Watanabe Shoichi, Professor Emeritus at Sophia University, Tokyo claims that General Douglas MacArthur was the most extreme revisionist when viewed from where Japan stood during the U.S. occupation of Japan.

 In other words, MacArthur’s drive for anti-Japanism culminated when he imposed the current Constitution of Japan and also the outcome of the Tokyo Trials on Japan along with a number of forced changes made to Japan just because Japan lost the war largely dictated by its security, which Dr. Watanabe has stated on the number of occasions.

Mr. Ishihara Shintaro, the then Tokyo Governor stated 4 years ago when the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) was in power  “Those guys are not Japanese!” in reply to a question raised  by a reporter “None of the DPJ Cabinet members has visited Yasukuni yet. Why have you visited Yasukuni?.” 

U.S. Forces’ Policy of Not Taking Japanese POWs

Unlike the Great Imperial Japanese Forces took the surrendering enemy soldiers prisoners of war, U.S. Forces had a policy of not taking Japanese POWs and of conniving mistreatment of Japanese POWs, obviously refusing to observe what’s required in the Geneva Convention.

By slaughtering the surrendered or surrendering Japanese soldiers, U.S. Forces had achieved objectives of reducing the burdens to treat them as POWs and at the same time of eliminating the slightest possibility that U. S. Forces might be accused of war crimes committed against them.

U.S. and its allies killed every surrendering or surrendered Japanese soldier whenever possible, except when they filmed the scenes of capturing the surrendering Japanese soldiers to show that they had humanely treated the disarmed soldiers and civilians, so as to strengthen the image that U.S. fought for freedom and justice. They showed no mercy towards Japanese soldiers, whether they were the surrendering ones or not, with the firm conviction that Japanese were less than wild animals.

Just because U.S. won the war, U.S. acted like “the Almighty without a single flaw” under the guise of preserving justice and observing the international laws by opening the Tokyo Trials, in which victors accused losers of war crimes, who had in fact honestly observed the international laws with all their capacity, hoping that the world would understand Japan’s fight for freedom of the Asian race brutally enslaved by the white ruled nations for centuries.

Mr. Charles Lindberg’s statement supports the above. He states in his diary “Our men think nothing of shooting a Japanese prisoner or a soldier attempting to surrender. They treat the Jap with less respect than they would give to an animal, and these acts are condoned by almost everyone. We claim to be fighting for civilization, but the more I see of this war in the Pacific the less right I think we have to claim to be civilized.”