AHC: Make WW2 Japanese atrocities no longer rating machine in East Asia

It would help a lot if Japan would be owning up to its crimes in the way Germany has.

If you want East Asian politicians to not 'use' Japan as boogeyman, the solution would be to not let Japan be a boogeyman. If we compare Japans situation with that of Germany, Germany doesn't have this problem. Why? Because it did it's damned best to make up for it's crimes, instead of covering them up.

And if you're wondering, "why isn't the Japanese government fully apologizing for their war crimes?"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_cover-up_of_Japanese_war_crimes
The pardon of Japanese war criminals, among whom were Unit 731's commanding officers General Shiro Ishii and General Masaji Kitano, was overseen by General of the Army Douglas MacArthur in September 1945.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobusuke_Kishi
After World War II, Kishi was imprisoned for three years as a Class A war crime suspect. However, the U.S. government released him as they considered Kishi to be the best man to lead a post-war Japan in a pro-American direction.
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If I was Chinese I don't think I would be able to forgive Japan for what it did.

So do you think the only solution is to go back in time and somehow prevent Japan from becoming imperialistic?
 

longsword14

Banned
His Imperial Majesty General of the Army Sir Douglas MacArthur would disagree with you...
MacArthur has been dead for a long, long time. Putting all blame on his head is simplistic. Native peace time politics and civic society are far better explanations.
 
If I was Chinese I don't think I would be able to forgive Japan for what it did.
As an actual Chinese (if very out of touch), forgiveness of past sins is the easy part. The hard part is not making that forgiveness look like a sign of weakness (part of the "face" calculations, the point is that forgiveness is the laying of the foundation in which others will use for a future transgression, and with the various island disputes being touchy as it was already...)
 
I'm not sure. However, I'd like to point out that the Philippines suffered horrifically from Japanese war crimes. The Rape of Manila was more or less analogous to the Rape of Nanking. Proportionally, a comparable % of the Philippines died in WW2, possibly up to 1/15 people.

The Philippines is uh, not particularly mad at Japan today. Then again, the Philippines is mostly also pro-American, so maybe it's just a really damn forgiving country. Regardless, I do think it points out that modern opinions do not directly track with objectively how terrible the crimes/acts were, since most people aren't historians. It's much more complicated than that.
 
KMT wins the civil war and demand Japanese post-war investment in the forms of free legitimate tech transfers for 20 years. KMT China getting free tech transfers from the Zaibatsus would give it a good headstart in industrialization. Hell since the US was giving Japan tech transfers too maybe China can ask the US if Japan can provide those to China as well. Have the KMT lean more towards reconciliation, have the US purge the Japanese war criminals from the politics, and decrease Socialist party influence in post war Japan.

The CCP has overplayed the anti-Japanese card. Chinese entertainment is oversaturated with the anti-Japanese rhetoric.
 
More public exposure of active collaboration by major figures in the occupied nations.

It is hard to get up a good head of anti-Japanese steam when you are being continually reminded you dad was the head waiter at the biggest officers club in town and no one ever got food poisoning.
 
That's what the greivance degenrated into IOTL; a quick rating fix for down-on-luck politicians in East Asia wanting to get out of jam, provide voters' distractions or for no-hopers to try to launch the campaign. Even cottage industry of using this to extort concessions from Japan has sprung up.

What could happen in the past that make this angle stop being a quick political hay in Taiwan, South Korea and Mainland China? So much so that whoever brought this up in ATL got laugh or boo at as a desperate no-hoper using below the belt tactics.

You could just made grandchildren and great-grandchildren of sufferers no longer resonate with the history, and politicans who play this card being viewed by youngsters as dinosaurs. A career killer for whoever trying to attract young supporters.

For businesses to go against this, it could be mundane reason such as 'Your speech is driving customers away' or 'Your blurb cost us the deal' and so on.

Is it, really, a political hay in Taiwan? I've read, that, Taiwan was one of the very few places where the Japanese treated the locals well, very differently from the atrocities in South Korea, mainland China and other locations. I've even read, that, there is nostalgia towards the Japanese in Taiwan.
 
It would help a lot if Japan would be owning up to its crimes in the way Germany has.

One has to ask when it comes to the Japanese elite and I am sure they have... is it in Japan’s military, political or economic interest to do what you say?

Political and Military interest?: Not really. Abe wants the post war constitutional restrictions such as the banning of war and having an armed force erased. They do have an armed force, but they have had to make quite an effort to extend the scope of the wording of Article 9 (self defense non-military armed force or whatever) and other such stretches.

The Japanese political class also wants rearmament which isn’t aided by the population being reminded about WW2. Much the opposite.

Economic interest?: No. The markets for their goods is heavily outside of countries where politicians use events in the ‘30s and 40s in the Pacific as a bloody shirt to rally political support.

What about Germany?

Military interest?: In the Cold War they wanted an army to defend themselves and free Western Europe from invasion. So did the U.S. and the rest of democratic Western Europe. They were the main force in most of the Cold War facing off against the Soviets to slow them down before global reinforcements arrived.

In the Cold War the German government could blame much of the worst acts that on the Nazi Party and SS and they did. In terms of the German Army for post war Germany a great deal were veterans of WW2 and self-flagellating too much about how bad their regular army was to the Soviets would run contrary to the ability to have an army that could defend free Europe against Soviet invasion. Generally this is what people today call ‘the myth of the clean German Army’ period.

I will only say the myth is indeed a myth in that the free world and historians recognized and wrote at the time the war in Eastern Europe was an ugly war with a racial component as the war in China was for Japan. But, they also believed the bulk of the outright genocidal acts were executed by the SS and Western elite weren’t going to yell that much about past actions against a state that has millions of men they believed completely might rush democratic Europe at any time.

Once the Cold War ended or so Germany thought Chancellor Kohl admitted before he died that they let anti-military elements in German society dictate the terms of history because they didn’t think Germany would need a real military ever again. He said it was a mistake on his part and it reverberates today in Germany’s rather severe difficulty in turning around the collapse of their armed forces. In the popular consciousness the SS and Heer divide evaporated in the post Cold War years.

The problem is the German Army today and how it’s regarded can’t be simply separated from how they are seen and regarded in the last big war they were engaged in which is true of the other armed forces around the globe.

Political/Economic interest?: Berlin decided that a humble Germany that wasn’t perceived as a possible threat to anyone was in the interest of aiding EU expansion and trade for their goods. It didn’t want possible populist uprisings against Germany from its major markets inside free Europe.

We have seen the start of major populist movements in Europe against Germany and the EU, but they didn’t start over the things the German political class seemingly worried a few decades ago it might start over.
 
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