AHC: Less War Crimes denial/controversey in Japan regarding WW2

DanielXie

War Crimes denial and Imperial Japan apologists has been seen in several instances among many in Japan, who deny that their WW2 atrocities such as the Rape of Nanking or comfort women ever took place. Is it possible, with a PoD of 1945, to create a scenario where Japan is more apologetic torwards their actions in WW2 and nationalism is more discredited there?

I myself kinda believe that dropping the A-bomb on Japan actually encouraged this behavior among future generations there, and considering the fact that Japan could have surrendered either way, what if Americans waited, how would that play out?
 

LeX

Some or all of mainland China staying non-Communist could endear the Japanese more to the biggest group of people they victimized, and so put the "China incident" and all the baggage that comes with it more into their intellectual consciousness.
 

The Ubbergeek

OR a stronger japanese left and a society bit more on the left, conversively perhaps.

Hard with americans so close, though.

Because it is in parts due to the japanese political right harping here and there...
 
joea64

joea64

A more throughgoing approach to war-crimes trials in the wake of World War II would help. For various reasons, there just wasn't the same approach taken that there was in Germany.
 

The Ubbergeek

joea64 said:
A more throughgoing approach to war-crimes trials in the wake of World War II would help. For various reasons, there just wasn't the same approach taken that there was in Germany.
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Yeah, in the name of the starting Cold War, the old 'establishment' got it easy...
 
The Kiat

The Kiat

If you want to make them like modern Germans, then you'd have to totally break the Japanese spirit in defeating them. Yes, Japan was in ruins, but Germany was broken. You'd have to hang a collective shame over all the Japanese.
 

Color-Copycat

Have Truman replace Macarthur with someone less sympathetic to the pre-war status quo dominated by the militarists and the various zaibatsu interests.
 

John Farson

I can think of two ways:

1) Have the KMT end up with most or all of mainland China. With trade links to China and without the specter of Mao and China's isolation during the Cold War it would be more difficult for the Japanese to conveniently "forget" their myriad atrocities in China. And if they own up to what they did there, then they also have to own up to what they did in Korea ("What?! The Japanese only committed atrocities in China?!! I've got news for you, mister!!!) and elsewhere.

2) Operation Downfall takes place, with large parts of the country devastated by the fighting. For all the horrors of the bombing campaign, food shortages and atom bombs, Japan's fall wasn't as traumatic as Germany's, which only surrendered after most of the country was already overrun, Hitler was dead and Berlin in ashes.

Japan's defeat, OTOH, resembled that of Germany's in World War I, where Germany gave up before it could be invaded. Here too, Japan surrendered when only a tiny fraction of its own territory (Iwo Jima, Okinawa) had been lost. A critical difference here is that unlike WWI Germany, Japan was fully occupied and supervised by the occupying force. But without the trauma of invasion and conquest, Japan wasn't "broken" the same way Germany was, hence the persistent war crimes denial/controversy in Japan to this day.
 

LeX

When looking at this question you have to remember that the denial of war crimes isn't actually the conventional viewpoint in Japan, just that there aren't German levels of public outrage if you do deny them.
 
Vingilótë

Vingilótë

Kalle Kanker said:
They have all rights to deny the comfort wimmen thingie though, as the evidence is flimsy to say the least.
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This is completely false, and a gigantic insult to the hundreds of thousands of rape victims of Korean, Chinese, and other nationalities. Literally nobody except Japanese Neo-Nazis disputes this fact.
 

jmc247

Zmflavius said:
This is completely false, and a gigantic insult to the hundreds of thousands of rape victims of Korean, Chinese, and other nationalities. Literally nobody except Japanese Neo-Nazis disputes this fact.
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Japan's Prime Minister denies it, then again he also denies that Japan invaded its neighbors.

Japanese PM denies wartime 'comfort women' were forced

Japan's prime minister, Shinzo Abe, provoked fury yesterday by saying that the so-called "comfort women" were not coerced into becoming sexual slaves of the former Japanese Imperial Army.

Up to 200,000 women worked in brothels run by the Japanese military during the Second World War, most of them seized from Korea, China and other Asian countries occupied by Japan. Some Dutch women, captured when the Japanese overran Dutch colonies in Asia, were also forced into sexual slavery.

Mr Abe's comments to Japanese reporters late on Thursday defied the widely accepted version of history. "There was no evidence to prove there was coercion as initially suggested. That largely changes what constitutes the definition of coercion, and we have to take it from there," he said.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/wor...denies-wartime-comfort-women-were-forced.html
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Vingilótë

Vingilótë

Kalle Kanker said:
"Volunteered" probably wouldn't be the right word, more like; they got a chance not to starve to death through performing the oldest profession in the world.
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This is also largely false. In large parts of occupied China, and other areas under military occupation, recruitment was literally at gunpoint. In Korea, both force, and also deceit were employed, such as, for example, under the pretense that prospective comfort women were to be employed in civilian industry in Japan. That's not to say that that there were no volunteers, but attempts to characterize the entire enterprise as voluntary are ahistorical, and often part of a larger line of reasoning to achieve moral equivalency with Allied armies (for which while many soldiers engaged the services of prostitutes, did not have departments devoted to the practice of establishing military brothels through sexual slavery).
 

CalBear

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Kalle Kanker said:
They have all rights to deny the comfort wimmen thingie though, as the evidence is flimsy to say the least.
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I tend to do little humorous paragraphs when I ban people.

You however disgust me to a level that has knocked the humor right out of me.

We divorce you.

To Coventry with you.

Banned.
 
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