The GI War Against Japan: American soldiers in Asia and the Pacific during world war II, 2002
The belief to some was that the Japanese had little concern for their own lives since there were so many of them, and that life, to the Oriental, was cheap.
This was shown in the way that the Japanese committed suicide so easily. They might blow themselves up with their own grenades, engage in a futile banzai attack against well-fortified positions, or die by the hundreds in kamikaze attacks. All this was basically totally foreign to how the GIs thought.
This was also shown by the way that wounded Japanese soldiers would kill themselves, and by the way that even civilians chose suicide over surrender (although a good part of this was due to Japanese propaganda that led the civilians to believe that American soldiers would rape them and brutalize them.)
The main chapter of the book, as far as I am concerned, is the one entitled Human Rage.
The longer the war went on, the more the hatred seemed to grow.
This led to desecration of the dead.
Another little-read reality was the brutalization of civilians that had cooperated with the Japanese.
U.S. soldiers also, just like the Japanese, committed rapes.
According to the author, the number of rapes was sizable.
The author also talks about cultural differences, and the perceived problem of Christianity vs. Japan's Shinto religion.
Then the author explores the racial hatred the American soldiers had for the Japanese.
Government publications helped fan this hatred. Some of the hatred came from when soldiers saw how the Japanese had tortured prisoners they had taken.
The more fanatical the Japanese acted, the greater the hatred grew and the greater the desire for total extermination of the Japanese.
Main Index
Japan main page
Japanese-American Internment Camps index page
Japan and World War II index page
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