Japanese nationalists have branded Angelina Jolie a 'demon' and called for her to be banned from travelling to the country over her so-called 'immoral' depiction of Japanese Second World War prison guards in her directorial debut 'Unbroken'."Racism", in this case, is "telling the truth about the conditions in Japanese POW camps".
The Hollywood star's new movie, released on Boxing Day in the UK, is based on Laura Hillenbrand's book telling the heroic true life story of U.S. solider turned Olympian Louis Zamperini.
The 2010 biography left Japanese patriots furious at depictions of American prisoners of war being 'beaten, burned, stabbed or clubbed to death, shot, beheaded, killed during medical experiments or eaten alive in ritual acts of cannibalism'.
Now the same groups are turning their attention to protesting Jolie's big screen adaptation, branding it a work of 'pure fabrication', insisting it has 'no credibility', and accusing the star of racism.
Actually, the movie likely goes light on that point. From the survivors' accounts that I've read, conditions were horrific and about on the level of a German concentration camp. The Bataan Death March. The Rape of Nanking. The use of prisoners for experiments to test chemical and biological weapons. All of those are factual and well documented by the historical record, regardless of how much the Japanese nationalists may desire to pretend that they never happened.
But I can't go too hard on the Japanese, here, for denying reality. The past few days have shown that America has no shortage of people who want to pretend that bad things never were done, or rationalize them away.
Unit 731
ReplyDeleteAnd let us not forget Alexandra Hospital.
ReplyDeleteGreg Boyington of Black Sheep Squadron fame and Dick O'Kane, skipper of USS Tang, were in that same prison camp--Ofuna--and they tell some of the same tales and describe the same bad Japs in their autobiographies. As far as I'm concerned, Unbroken has been corroborated sufficiently enough to dismiss their objections.
ReplyDeleteThank you, Comrade.
ReplyDeleteOne of the horrible things U.S. propaganda "forgets" is that one of the conditions of the "unconditional surrender" was that we wouldn't pursue some of the perpetrators of the tortuous experiments, as long as we got to keep the records of them. Just in case.
Thank you, Comrade.
ReplyDeleteOne of the horrible things U.S. propaganda "forgets" is that one of the conditions of the "unconditional surrender" was that we wouldn't pursue some of the perpetrators of the tortuous experiments, as long as we got to keep the records of them. Just in case.
Prisoner death rate in Jap camps was at least 10 times that of POW's held in German camps.
ReplyDeleteI have only surface knowledge but my impression is that there is no comparison between Japanese and German POW camps. The Germans were harder on the Russians than they were on the American and British but it was up to Stalin to kill the Russians who were captured by the Germans. I don't recall the number of Russians repatriated at the end of the war or the exact number/percentage of those eradicated by Stalin. I just remember that the number was shocking.
ReplyDeleteIt is interesting to me that our (American) history books are explicit and detailed about the sins of Germany but remarkably quiet about Japan. The Rape of Nanking gets a mention but Japanese treatment of civilian populations and POWs gets short shrift.
Jill
"Prisoner death rate in Jap camps was at least 10 times that of POW's held in German camps."
ReplyDeleteThat's certainly not true for Soviet POWs of 1941/1942, though.
In an unusual act of poor organisation, Germany had not prepared for the intake of millions of POWs. prior to launching Op Barbarossa.
The conditions for the Red Army soldiers were horrible (they dug holes not to escape, but for shelter).
Conditions only improved much when they were discovered as industrial and agricultural manpower pool in 1943.
And I'm not even talking about the commissars' fate.
S.O., before the start of the invasion, the Germans decided that they weren't going to abide by the Geneva Convention with regard to Soviet prisoners. They regarded the Slavs as subhuman and acted accordingly.
ReplyDeleteIf they had intended to abide by the Convention, and then were overwhelmed, that might be excusable. But that wasn't the case.
Spent a lot of time in China; many, if not most Chinese folks have a deep hatred of Japanese for their past atrocities.
ReplyDelete