But imagine a VN like this about a Wehrmacht shock trooper, though. That one probably wouldn't go over too well. Not even today, even though pretty much everyone who's old enough to remember WWII is dead now.
Not so for Japan, though. Japan still has this weird complex about the war - they either won't talk about it and pretend that it never happened, or they'll insist that their boys were honourable warriors who did nothing wrong.
And if you know where to look, it's surprising to see how often this "we did nothing wrong"-thing pops up. Conversely, I know of only *one* series that actually makes a point of saying that WWII-era Japan committed atrocities: Kakugo no Susume.
That's the thing though. They really didn't. At least not from the perspective of the time.
We don't think about these things this way because we are conditioned to see WW2 in terms of good vs evil propaganda. But in reality it was a war between three very similar power blocks with only Germany and a couple of its satellites like the Croatians being a massive outlayer. The others just got unfortunately maligned by virtue of associating with them.
And before you start screeching I am not saying that Japan Japan and Italy newer did any atrocities. Of course they did. What I am however saying is that FOR THE TIME the things they did were not out of the ordinary neither in scale (comparative to subject population) or intensity compared to what was expected of a world power and its behavior toward colonial subjects,
Neither Japan nor Italy ever undertook the sort of mass campaigns of extermination that the Germans did. They didn't even want to. They both just wanted to sit at the big table of great powers along side Britain, France and the United States and claim their share of the pie. And they did this by emulating the big powers of the time which were Britain and France.
Unfortunately for humanity that pie was called colonialism and it is baked out of human suffering and blood. But that was just the age they existed in.
You have to remember that the 1930's and 40's were still in the era of high imperialism. Marching into someone elses country, slaughtering the locals and making them your subjects in order to extract resources from them was just something people did back than. So was performing atrocities to discourage resistance.
For instance Siam, Japans only voluntary ally in the war actually joined them to reclaim land that was taken by the French not a decade prior during one such expedition.
And it's not something that would stop with WW2 either. Just look at what the winners of that war kept on doing with their colonies right up until the 70's. Shining examples include the French colonial wars in Marco and Indochina or the beautifully named "Malayan Emergency". Because calling it a genocidal campaign to hold on to a colonial empire just does not have a nice ring to it.
Looking in the other direction WW2 was in living memory of such beautiful displays of humanity and kindness as the Congo Free State and the Boer Wars. The former of which had about the same absolute death tool (about 10 million) as the Japanese occupation of China but out of a starting population that was about 30 times smaller and the later of which is the origin of concentration camps.
So really, from the perspective of the Japanese at the time what they were doing and trying to do was not that different than what everyone around them was doing. It's just that they choose the wrong side of the war to do it on.
And whilst certainly from a modern perspective it was atrocious. But that's a modern perspective. We can't judge people from the past based on morality from after they lived. That's just absurd.
Once you understand this you can also see how the people of Japan today can look back at the war and say that they weren't the same as Germany and have nothing to be sorry for other than loosing the war. After all, the things they did were absolutely not out of the ordinary for the time and the people who beat them were doing the same things and kept doing them even after they won.
