Xelkelvos posted:

I don't think the series has ever shown anything like Gulags and stuff for the school. Only mentioned possibly not meant to be taken seriously as they're still Japanese high schools at the end of the day. The windowless classroom thing is likely what tube "gulag" actually is, but the day to day school life at most of the schools is so barely touched on.

LatwPIAT posted:

Thundercloud posted:

During WWII the Nazis thought the Japanese went too far in some of the things they did

Thundercloud posted:

and because unlike Germany they didn't apologise or make reparations to their victims, and quietly released the people the allies made them imprison, there's a whole culture of denial that they did anything wrong that persists to now.

MadScientistWorking posted:

Speaking of Nazis what was the name of the company that sold Triumph of the Will at Gencon for at least a decade?

evol262 posted:

No, they didn't.

Nessus posted:

I think the context here is that in China German diplomatic officials interfered with the Japanese army getting up to hella atrocities on at least one occasion, but the one incident I know of was definitely "not authorized by the home office." Of course I doubt the Germans approved of the occasional absent-minded non-anti-Semitic activities the Japanese got up to too.

Nessus posted:

I think the context here is that in China German diplomatic officials interfered with the Japanese army getting up to hella atrocities on at least one occasion, but the one incident I know of was definitely "not authorized by the home office." Of course I doubt the Germans approved of the occasional absent-minded non-anti-Semitic activities the Japanese got up to too.

Mors Rattus posted:

It happened the other way around, too, with at least one Japanese official being involved in saving a number of Jews from the Nazis. But it was always, on both groups, a thing specific individuals got up to rather than policy.

Nessus posted:

I think the context here is that in China German diplomatic officials interfered with the Japanese army getting up to hella atrocities on at least one occasion, but the one incident I know of was definitely "not authorized by the home office." Of course I doubt the Germans approved of the occasional absent-minded non-anti-Semitic activities the Japanese got up to too.

Schadenboner posted:

To my understanding the Japanese actually tried to import Jews? Like, they literally believed the stuff about how Jews were these financial masterminds and decided that importing some would be good for business?

Which actually makes me wonder if they ever tried to start any poo poo in the JAO?

E: here we go: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_settlement_in_the_Japanese_Empire

E2: of course, Imperial Japan loving to rub dicks with the White Russians in Manchuria/Manchukuo and the evolution of those White Russians during the 1920s and 30s from ordinary anti-Semitic aristocratic Russian fuckwads into super anti-Semitic fascist Russian fuckwads probably was a net drag on the Fugu Plan?

Eifert Posting posted:

People in Asia internalizing 30s era antisemitism as a positive stereotype still exists. I knew multiple Jews in Asia who said people essentially asked them for their secrets.

Han Feizi posted:

There’s also the story of John Rabe, the Nazi liaison in Nanking who established the Nanking Safety Zone when the Japanese were murdering everyone. But he was just a local actor trying to leverage his status as the ranking Nazi, not an attempt by the actual Nazi regime. Even then he was detained upon his return to Germany, interrogated by the Gestapo, and told to keep quiet. The letter he wrote to Hitler begging him to keep the Japanese from murderfucking non-combatants was confiscated and never delivered. But he was still a loving Nazi so he was probably just bummed that all the people killed were obviously not Jews.

Rhandhali posted:

Belle and Blade, probably.

They sell war movies and historical films. Selling a DVD of a movie that is public domain and of legitimate historical and technical interest is one thing, particularly since it's one film out of a catalog of tens of thousands.

But poo poo like this Nuremburg sign, Deutschland Uber Alles with SS and Swastika sign, SS Pinup Girls, Wehrmacht Pinup Girls is pretty well indefensible.

I haven't been since 2013 but I heard that they got in trouble for selling thongs or something with offensive slogans on them.

Libertad! posted:

Many Japanese felt similar through a mirror darkly: some who were aware of the Holocaust thought it was barbaric which never amounted to more than a "tut-tut you shouldn't be doing that" besides the aforementioned individual examples of granting Jewish visas. These same Japanese had no moral reservations against doing the same to the Korean and Chinese who in their eyes deserved to be wiped off the face of the Earth.

It's easier to criticize from outside the cultural tent than to look at one's own and go "Are We the Baddies?"

open_sketchbook posted:

People can make games out of war because they've never had to experience war, and that's a good thing.

mllaneza posted:

It's not everybody, but a lot of wargamers have a strong "lest we forget" attitude about making mass death and destruction into a game.

open_sketchbook posted:

People can make games out of war because they've never had to experience war, and that's a good thing.

Angry Salami posted:

I should note that Sugihara, at least, was a genuine good guy - he'd previously resigned his position in Manchuria in protest over the mistreatment of Chinese by the Japanese army.

Rhandhali posted:

Yushukan, the military museum at Yasukuni is probably the most hilariously blatant example of propaganda and revisionism I’ve ever seen. It’s worse than the official PLA museum in Beijing.

To give you an idea you are greeted by a locomotive that was used on the Thailand-Burma railway. This is the one from Bridge over the River Kwai, built with thousands of slave laborers including allied POWs who died en masse.

There about four rooms about how the US provoked Japan to attack them, that Pearl Harbor was America’s fault and the whole invasion of China was based on a misunderstanding. Nanking wasn’t even on the maps anywhere that I could see, let alone mentioned.

On top of that the gift shop was pimping some anime about a couple of guys in a midget sub going off to die stupidly on some suicide mission. Maybe involving the Yamato?

It’s been a few years and I expected that it would be bad given that it’s at Yasukuni, but it really has to be seen to be believed.
I don’t speak or read Japanese at all and the message was crystal clear even with very limited English language materials there.

jakodee posted:

Japan is like Italy more than Germany in this, I think.

Cessna posted:

"the US cut off our oil and then bombed our cities."

Ilor posted:

I mean, it leaves out a few key steps, but it's not technically incorrect. Be careful about reading too much into what you manage to get out of people in casual conversation, though - Japanese culture is funny on giving offense and any topic that looks like it might do so is generally avoided with claims of ignorance or a deft changing of the subject. Responding to a question with "I don't know" is as much a way of saying, "yeah, let's don't go there" as "it's a little bit difficult" is a polite way of saying "it's loving impossible, and you should feel stupid for asking."

Cessna posted:

I was just curious how the schools covered the subject.

The overall impression I got was that people really just didn't care.

Cessna posted:

I was stationed over in Japan. I'm a big ol' History nerd. The few times I asked the locals what they knew or were taught about WWII it was usually "we never got to that in school" or "the US cut off our oil and then bombed our cities."

Ilor posted:

Heh, the same could be said of pretty much anywhere, tbh. It is staggering how few people (in ANY country) have a decent grasp of world geography, let alone history. Unfortunately this ignorance is often what allows fash to flourish - people just don't know enough to call bullshit when they see/hear it, so it's easy to get sucked in.

PinheadSlim posted:

I don't understand how someone can see that and think "I should replace and sexualize the crews with teenage girls and remove all the serious context from this for a goofy sports show. This is a cool and good idea."

Cessna posted:

I was stationed over in Japan. I'm a big ol' History nerd. The few times I asked the locals what they knew or were taught about WWII it was usually "we never got to that in school" or "the US cut off our oil and then bombed our cities."

Xelkelvos posted:

To be fair, depending on the state, US K-12 schools rarely get into the 20th century in history classes and everything about WW2 is more or less learned through hearsay, movies or other media, and cultural reference.

God forbid you ask an American what they know about WW1 or even who we fought beyond "Germany"

Ilor posted:

Heh, the same could be said of pretty much anywhere, tbh. It is staggering how few people (in ANY country) have a decent grasp of world geography, let alone history. Unfortunately this ignorance is often what allows fash to flourish - people just don't know enough to call bullshit when they see/hear it, so it's easy to get sucked in.

Cessna posted:

I was stationed over in Japan. I'm a big ol' History nerd. The few times I asked the locals what they knew or were taught about WWII it was usually "we never got to that in school" or "the US cut off our oil and then bombed our cities."

PinheadSlim posted:

At my highschool you could take either a WW2 or Vietnam War class for History credit. It got really into the resource war aspect of WW2, and Vietnam was taught with surprising accuracy. I knew Vietnam was hosed up when I was 15, but after that class I could with some confidence articulate exactly how hosed up it was.

That's probably not normal at all, but it was an American public school.

lilljonas posted:

This is starting to be a pretty obscure derail but I've studied at graduate level university in Japan and my classmates would not know which century WW2 was. Meanwhile, Berlin is full of momuments for remembering German WW2 war crimes. To compare the two countries is just silly.

Italy is kind of on the Japanese side of things, with certain football teams still doing fascist salutes en masse and many families displaying portraits of Mussolini at home as if it was a Normal and Cool thing.

ProfessorCirno posted:

The equivalent isn't the US not really teaching WW1, the equivalent is the US not teaching jack poo poo about Reconstruction and it's intentional failure, or really teaching about anything regarding MLK beyond "he had a dream and then a bad person shot America's Black Friend," or America not teaching a whole lot about the intentional mass genocide of Indigenous Americans, or etc, etc, etc. Like, it's a long goddamn list.