If the concept of Bushido didn't become popular until Japan's modernization (at the end of the 19th century)...how much of Japan's conduct in WW2 (notably, the fighting until death) can be attributed/blamed to this misinterpretation of samurai history?
Looking at the Wikipedia entry for Kamikaze [1], I was surprised to read that the concept of suicide attacks only became formalized late in the war (June 1944), rather than something ingrained in the Imperial Japanese fleet from even before the start of conflict.
OT: I really love the posted article's massively deep footer, which also looks good on mobile. I frequently have trouble designing nice footers around a long list of links and I'm bookmarking this site as a place to copy from.
Was Japanese war crimes really worse than the European standards in pre modern times?
From my Swedish history, see the 30 year war (for a viewpoint not covered well in Swedish schools, google Polish deluge). To me it seems the main difference is that Sweden didn't have the same technological resources a few centuries earlier...
Edit: The obvious point is -- does present Swedish culture explain why historical atrocities were so common...?
Yes, though it's not the kind of thing one will find on sugar coated high school history or books from patriotic academics.
It's common historical knowledge that the Japanese were pretty much defeated and desperate (out of oil and resources, with the Russians circling them, and they had already examined the possibility and terms of surrender, using USSR as a mediator). Of course to make it less easy, the US insisted on surrender under very humiliating terms to not let them save face, even though the US knew they were on their last legs.
Besides that, there's nothing about "invading" that's worse than dropping nukes on civilians (not to mention the same "choice" can be said for any war).
Except if the idea is "Better a war crime to evaporate 250.000 men, women, children, dogs and kittens, especially civilians" than to risk the lives of my men on an invasion according to standard war practice and law. Even though I know that the enemy is on its last legs anyway".
So they're still fighting and the war is not over yet?
> there's nothing about "invading" that's worse than dropping nukes on civilians
A country's leadership is responsible to its own people first. Truman dropped bombs to avoid sacrificing his people. Tojo let his people die to avoid loosing face.
WW2 ended in a horrific way and the stories popular in the US definitely leave out details that make the US look bad. However your comments read like you've adopted the opposite bias rather than less bias.
>A country's leadership is responsible to its own people first.
That's the kind of thinking that leads to genocide and war crimes.
>However your comments read like you've adopted the opposite bias rather than less bias.
Well, not much bias. This is pretty much how big powers always operated. Read a few now US historians on WWII -- or somebody closer to Howard Zinn than some "celebrated establishment academic".
Thats simply false. If you actually study the document of that time, nobody was talking about post war demonstration.
You have essentially 3 ways to defeat Japan. First, invade and take the country, city by city, town by town. Second, bomb them into submission. Second, starve them into submission.
Given the Japanese resilience shown in the war, they were sure that the Japanese would fight a defence to the death of their homeland. Applying scorched earth policy, and more worse things. This would have cost many American lives and a huge amount of both soldiers and civilians in Japan.
The second idea had already been done so much that their was not much left to bomb. From the perspective of death, the nukes were not worse then a couple normal bombing raids. In Tokyo they had already killed more then 250'000 people just by conventional bombing.
The third choice is just as cruel and would have taken a very long time (and they were already doing it anyway, they would just have to wait).
The nukes, from a moral perspective, are nothing more then a step up from normal bombing. Just as fire bombing was a step up from precision bombing that they tried before. The only difference is the fallout, but that comparatively speaking is relatively weak compared to a full on war.
You objection should really be to all bombing of civilians.
What would be your opinion should they have done? Also, if you care about democracy, people did not give a fuck about bombing or nukes, they were all for it.
Totally. Although that's the indoctrination that the USA wants to spread, unbiased authors always point that the war was about to finish for the Japanese and if the USA didn't want to invade them China would take care of it soon anyway.
Therefore, it's generally accepted outside the USA that the bombs were just a warning to a rising URSS that the USA now had the upper hand.
Japan is an island and needs external resources in order to survive.
When the nuclear bomb was ready Japan was already under siege and nothing could get inside or outside by air or sea. Japan was already defeated consuming resources like food or oil and not replenishing them, it was only a matter of time for unconditional surrender(Japanese had already proposed "honorable surrender").
The US documents are already declassified. Nukes were launched because:
1-They were ready, and the military wanted to test it on a real target. The war was going to end before they could test it.
2-To give a clear message to URSS, specially over Europe occupation.
For the military there was not a real difference between bombing a city and killing women and children, like was routine by the time, and doing it much faster and effective. Over 50 million people died at WWII. Nukes only killed a small fraction of it.
No, the Japanese in China acted pretty much the same way as the various armies marauding through Germany in the 30 years war or the various armies in the Congolese Civil War, come to that. And part of the reason the Japanese fought so hard against the Americans in the final days of WWII was that they assumed that they'd be getting the same treatment they'd be dishing out if they let America occupy their cities.
Japanese people are human and the base morality that evolution has endowed us with. This divides humanity into two groups, in group and out group. Morality only applies to the in group. It takes a lot of acculturation and education to expand an individual's conception of the in group is, from family/tribe to nation/culture to humanity. As such, any sub-culture that can take over the public sphere of a culture will have little difficulty getting people to dehumanise the other, and once they're dehumanised people have little more difficulty committing atrocities than they do slaughtering animals.
As you may have noted none of this is specific to Japanese culture. That's because in this respect we're a lot weirder than they are in historical perspective.
If you want a good overview of man's violence towards man and it's decline I recommend Better Angels of Our Nature, Stephen Pinker.
Thanks for the explanation. The book looks quite interesting.
But that still doesn't explain why the armies of Western nations seemingly committed less and less serious atrocities. Or is that just an illusion because "history is written by the victors"?
Ugly points in the USA's history: Trail of Tears. Slavery. Battle of Blair Mountain. Japanese Internment. Kent State. Jim Crowe. Abu Gahrib. Guantanamo. Drone Strikes. Global Surveillance.
History is written, there's just more eye-catchy things to get distracted over.
Game of Thrones. Brexit. Reality TV. Concerts. Drugs. Sex. Food. Cars. Video Games.
Going by personal anecdote (well, by my grandmother who fled Silesia as a child): German refugees in late WW2 largely considered the Russians far more gruesome (violent, rape-y, etc, especially when drunk) than the British and Americans, although some considered their brutality justified by what they were hearing from how German soldiers (and the SS especially) had treated Eastern Europeans.
I'm guessing it's because Germans had racial propaganda dehumanizing Eastern Europeans (Slavs are "untermenschen") and the Russians retaliated once they were able to. They had seen far more gruesome behaviour by the Germans and had less inhibitions to treat them in kind. The Americans and British, OTOH, had merely been exposed to the far more "conventional" horrors of war (i.e. civilian casualties from war and occupation) until they found out about the camps.
As for the lack of atrocities committed by the West: don't for a second believe anything about the Pacific theatre of WW2 was lacking atrocities. Japan quite literally raped China, yes, but the US routinely firebombed Japan until they literally nuked city centres.
The fire bombing of Dresden (a German population centre) is considered a morally questionable decision these days. The routine fire bombing of Japanese cities is not even talked about. And whether you consider fire bombing civilians a war crime or not, the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki most definitely were.
The thing to know about war crimes is that the legal framework for defining and punishing war crimes we have today (even if we make far less use of it than we should) didn't exist back then. There was no legal basis for the Nuremberg trials, legally speaking, other than victor's justice.
The reason no Allied (including Soviet) commanders or politicians were tried after WW2 wasn't that they didn't commit any atrocities, there were simply no international laws they could be charged for violating.
Note: I'm not arguing whether the way the US fought Japan worked or not, or whether the death count would have been higher or lower had they done it differently. I'm merely arguing that objectively speaking not only the "bad guys" have done horrible things to humans in modern wars. And I haven't even mentioned how the Vietnam war is perceived outside of the US.
> I'm guessing it's because Germans had racial propaganda dehumanizing Eastern Europeans
The Russians also distributed plenty of propoganda pamphlets to their troops to show no mercy to the Germans (including citizens) as they faught their way towards Berlin. Propoganda comping from some high-ranking soviets, not just within the military. It was said to be a big contributing factor to their notorious behaviour afterwards.
I'm fairly certain the racial propaganda against "Japs" is part of the reason for the lack of inhibitions in how the US dealt with Japan (namely the massive firebombing of civilian centres and the ultimate decision to become the first nation to use nuclear weapons and also the first nation to use nuclear weapons against civilian targets).
Humans who are taught to dehumanize others are capable of doing pretty horrible things.
Is Bosnia considered Western? Genocide there in 1992-1995.
On a road trip, a Serbian in-law had us stop by this beautiful bridge in Bosnia. Built in the 1500s with Ottoman architecture, which is odd for that area. I took photos there, smiling and having fun like an idiot. Only after leaving and checking wikipedia on my phone did I see that the relative failed to tell me about the massacres that happened there by the Serbs. Women, children, rape, etc.
It's not an illusion. But the IJA's conduct during the Russo-Japanese war or during WW1 was as good as any Western military's, in accordance with the relevant Geneva Convention's.
Thats a very simplistic and in the end not really satisfactory explanation. After all not every conflict ends in genocide and Ausschwitz. And as evil as it is when women are raped by soldiers in war, normally they are not tortured to death and their genitals mutilated.
well, as sad as this is, I wouldn't expect this to be unique to Nanking, Japanese, or WWII for that matter. once small children are massacred for example, you don't get much lower no matter how hard you try, and this has been done countless times in all scales, all over the world, many times through history.
or you think genocide is some 20th century invention?
Russians also mutilated many German/eastern euro women as well during the during the final months of WW2. The best analysis I've read explained that it was due to a multitude of factors:
a) Not only allowed by authority figures (Soviet officers) but also heavily promoted by propoganda coming out of Russia via pamphlets saying to show no mercy
b) Done by soldiers who faught for months/years in some of the bloodiest and most zero-sum fighting in the entire war, as the soviets fought their way to Berlin against Germans who were given an obvious suicide mission - to buy as much time as possible for Htiler futile end-game strategies. The Russians also passed many Ukranian/Belorussian towns that were ravaged by Germans.
c) There was basically total anarchy that existed in that area between Russia and Germany. It existed well before the Russians arrived. This stateless anarchy was largely how the Nazis were able to conduct their genocide so effectively and without worrying about punishment.
So this is the same enviornment that the Russians commited their horrible mass rape of German citizens.
China was similarily going through their own anarchistic transition with the battle between communisits (Mao) and nationalists (Chiang Kai-shek) taking place in the power-vacuum. So the pesants who were caught in between existed in a similar brutal enviornment as in eastern europe/Germany and a similar war-ravaged army with a superiority complex operating in an anarchistic state.
Although whether Russia/Japan military were special in their brutality, even in a greater historical context, it's hard to say. There were definately some differences between the Japanese empire/early Soviet Union compared to the west that stand out even today, in terms of harshness of the military towards their opponents/civilians - which may make it stand out.
While many people will say "but the Nazi's were evil too"... the abuse of civilians by Germans was largely kept hidden from their military. The secret police would only come in after the military left an area and it was kept as much a secret from them as possible.
> how much of Japan's conduct in WW2 (notably, the fighting until death) can be attributed/blamed to this misinterpretation of samurai history?
Japanese soldiers' "fighting to the death" nonsense was myth invented many years after WW2 by allied "historians" to justify the mass murder of japanese soldiers by the allies.
It's not that the japanese weren't willing to surrender. It was that the allies ( unfortunately out of extreme racism ) wouldn't allow japanese soldiers to surrender.
If you dig a little past the history/propaganda and look at the raw data/facts/etc of the pacific war, you will learn how brutal the pacific war was. And how racist the allies were towards the japanese soldiers. Nearly every japanese soldier who was wounded was butchers and killed as were nearly all japanese POWs.
It was called the "no prisoner policy" of the allied soldiers. And if you want to read about some more base aspects of the pacific war, go read about the mutilation of the japanese soldiers by the allied soldiers. Some real sick shit.
The more you learn about the real nature of ww2, you realize that there was no good side in that war. Just two evils fighting each other.
No, but while all sides in war end up committing war crimes of one form or another, you definitely have systems in which this is a feature, not a bug. Large-scale massacres of civilians have been a regular staple of the Japanese armed forces during WWII (particularly the Army). And the pattern of abusing civilians of the so-called "co-prosperity sphere" and terrible treatment of POWs was not a case of isolated incidents.
This has been subjected to revisionism multiple times.
After public protest and court ruling, it is now admitted it was the Japanese army which ordered people to kill themselves and even killed them:
"Orders from Japanese soldiers led to Okinawans committing group suicide," and, "The [Japanese] army caused many tragedies in Okinawa, killing local civilians and forcing them to commit mass suicide." [1]
> After public protest and court ruling, it is now admitted it was the Japanese army which ordered people to kill themselves and even killed them:
That's a bit of revisionism as well. The reason why many okinawans killed themselves was because the allied soldiers were raping and killing okinawan civilians.
From your own wikipedia link...
"There was some return fire from a few of the houses, but the others were probably occupied by civilians – and we didn't care. It was a terrible thing not to distinguish between the enemy and women and children. Americans always had great compassion, especially for children. Now we fired indiscriminately."
The nonsense about "distinguish between the enemy an women and children" is just egotistic nonsense. We have a long history of butchering women and children ( especially non-white women and children ). All we have to do is review US treatment of natives, blacks, etc throughout US history to see how compassionate we were.
The reason why the okinawans killed themselves was because of the brutality and savagery of both sides ( americans and japanese ).
> The more you learn about the real nature of ww2, you realize that there was no good side in that war. Just two evils fighting each other.
You don't win wars without killing people, and therefore all sides are evil by definition.
The little process of judging "war criminals" after the war is over is just for one's good conscience. If the Allies had lost they would have been judged as war criminals by the victors too.
Where is the American Treblinka, the British Buchenwald? WWII was against genocidal maniacs who starved entire countries and destroyed Yiddish speaking culture.
Not sure if you are addressing this comment to me and my Wikipedia post, or at wbl (who I was responding to).
I am not sure what measure anyone would use to compare war crimes etc., but if you are talking about pure body count, then the number of civilians killed during (a) the Rape of Nanking and (b) the Hiroshima/Nagasaki atomic bombs run about the same...
The ongoing firebombing campaign against Japanese cities also killed more.
The bombing raids against Tokyo alone almost certainly killed far more than Hiroshima throughout the war.
And it included the most destructive single bombing raid of the entire war. Operation Meetinghouse [1] burned a quarter of Tokyo to the ground in a single night, and may have killed as many as 100,000 - more than is believed to have died in the immediate aftermath of Hiroshima (though possibly fewer than the total Hiroshima death toll, depending on which estimates are right).
"Hitler's concept of concentration camps as well as the practicality of genocide owed much, so he claimed, to his studies of English and United States history. He admired the camps for Boer prisoners in South Africa and for the Indians in the wild west; and often praised to his inner circle the efficiency of America's extermination—by starvation and uneven combat—of the red savages who could not be tamed by captivity." (http://www.jewishjournal.com/sacredintentions/item/hitlers_i...)
The Allied involvement in WW2 never was about the holocaust. In fact, the full extent of the holocaust only became apparent after WW2 as Allied soldiers had liberated the concentration camps and discovered the paperwork.
Also don't think that anybody in WW2 cared about the Jews. There are enough stories about Jewish refugees being rejected at borders and sent back to face certain death because nobody believed them or cared about them. Hating Jews was socially acceptable everywhere until the Nazis showed what that kind of thinking can lead to in a modern society (with the technical and political means to actually round up and murder people at scale).
The US only got directly involved in WW2 when it had no other choice (technically, Germany declared war on them after the US declared war on Japan). Britain only declared war on Germany because it had a pact with Poland which Germany invaded -- Germany had already annexed Austria and occupied Czechoslovakia at that point.
Heck, Italy and Hungary were allied with Germany for a significant part of the war. Not to mention various countries like Spain and Finland that fought alongside or at least supported Nazi Germany.
WW2 was a world war. It's called that because it involved so many countries that were at war with each other throughout the entire world at once over an extended amount of time. There were many reasons for each individual conflict and WW2 itself is just the aggregate of all of these (with the two major ones of course being the attempted domination of Europe by Nazi Germany and the attempted domination of East Asia by Japan).
It wasn't about ideals or principles. It was about power and territory. And for the Allies it was mostly about survival: a German victory would have meant vassalage for Western Europe and annihilation for most of Eastern Europe (because the Nazis wanted that territory as "lebensraum", i.e. living space, meaning the existing population had to go).
TL;DR: While halting the genocides was a nice side-effect of defeating Germany, the Allies weren't in it to save the Jews.
My grandmother didn't give a damn about that when the Canadians showed up. And Hitler's plans for Poland were comparable to the Shoah: 1/3 dead, 1/3 slaves, 1/3 peasants.
> annihilation for most of Eastern Europe (because the Nazis wanted that territory as "lebensraum", i.e. living space, meaning the existing population had to go)
Where is the axis hiroshima/nagasaki? Where is the axis firebombings of japan and germany?
> the British Buchenwald?
Go look up bengali holocaust where millions of indians were starved to death by the british. It's also funny that you would bring up death camps ( which were invented and pioneered by the british ). The germans modeled their death camps after the british death camps of south africa...
Looks like a holocaust picture right? Wrong. It was from a british concentration camp in south africa during the 2nd boer war.
> WWII was against genocidal maniacs who starved entire countries and destroyed Yiddish speaking culture.
WW2 was about one group of genocidal maniacs fighting against another group of genocidal maniacs for resources/power/wealth.
I don't think the allies ( US, Britain, Soviet Union ), the KINGS of genocide are any better than germany or japan when it came to genocide. As bad as the destruction of yiddish culture may have been, it pales in comparison to what happened to the natives, aborigines, inuit, pacific islanders, africans, siberians, circassians, etc.
As I said, in ww2, it was evil vs evil. Evil won and evil lost. If both sides had somehow lost, then you could argue that the good won.
For the japanese military in WWII, rape was normal. Butchering civilian populations wholesale was normal. The Americans and British did not play by those rules, even though we did a lot of killing. This was not two equivalent evils.
Both my parents were in their early teens in Malaysia during the Japanese invasion and subsequent occupation. The both lived near (different) POW camps, and yes, they both agreed that the treatment of the British & Aussie POWs in those camps by the Japanese guards was brutal.
But they both say that when the roles were reversed and the Allies took back Malaysia, the treatment by Allied soldiers of the Japanese prisoners was equally as horrific. Call it 'revenge mentality' or anything else, but the truth is that it happened and they saw it happen with their own eyes. It is just not documented in the history books we read today.
My father had his bicycle commandeered by a Japanese soldier when the Imperial forces walked into Kuala Lumpur unopposed. The soldier politely asked to 'borrow' it and my dad's family knew better than to refuse. At the end of the war however, the same soldier knew defeat was coming so he actually sought out my father's family and returned the bike. It was a lot worse for wear, but he got it back.
Another Japanese officer gave my grandfather one of his ceremonial swords as a gift because he was going to go down to the river to commit seppuku rather than be captured by allied forces. Bushido or not, that sort of cultural belief was the norm back then.
My mother still speaks fondly of British POWs who she said were just young boys that she felt sorry for. She and her mother used to go down to the camp to collect the clothing of the POWs and the guards so they could mend them. Some of the English soldiers taught her to make toy bunny rabbits out of socks and she still remembers how to make them to this day.
She speaks of the sorrow of going down to the camp one day to return some uniforms only to find the place deserted. A remaining guard told her that the Allied POWs had been shipped off to Burma to build a railway. She cries even now when telling the story.
My mother actually still has some of the 'banana money' that was used by the Japanese in Malaysia during the occupation. Both my parents said that any actual fighting done by the Japanese forces was precise and directed against military installations in order to minimise civilian casualties.
My father's best friend lived among the labour camps on the ground of the KL railway station. When the initial Japanese air attack on the railway yards came, they bombed a few cars/buildings and shot out the clock tower (after dropping leaflets explaining that they would demonstrate their superiority by shooting out all the clock towers in KL). There were hardly any civilian casualties.
Conversely when the allied forces later counter attacked KL, they carpet bombed the railway yards, killing almost all the civilian labourers living there (including my dad's friend).
Perhaps it is because I heard all these first hand witness accounts while growing up that I always listen to any official war reports with a grain of salt. War is hell, and makes monsters of ALL the participants.
I can confirm something similar from some other wars, including the huge distortions presented to the public at home. Every side presents themselves as fighting "honorably" and "justly." But you see how much remains intentionally distorted, where even stealing student's work and showing it to the world as the "report of our security services" is symptomatic:
Shigeru Mizuki's epic manga, Showa, recounts much of his history serving in the Japanese military. He doesn't seem sympathetic to the Imperialist propaganda and points out many of the atrocities committed on both sides. It was eye-opening for me since much of the history of the war that I know is British/North American and highly skewed.
These stories are worth retelling... again and again.
That doesn't refute the claim that the allies had a "take no prisoners" policy, killing wounded or surrendering enemy. It's plausible that that got reworked into the more palatable "they all died by choice" meme. Does anyone have sources, either way?
Also, regarding "butchering civilian populations wholesale" see [1], [2].
I think you will find a few comments in this Quora thread can explain the "take no prisoners" policy. Basically the Japanese were using perfidy as a normal war tactic (perfidy is a war crime, surrender and then, when your enemy's guard is lower, attack).
To me there's not greatest lack of honour than committing perfidy in war.
> Basically the Japanese were using perfidy as a normal war tactic (perfidy is a war crime, surrender and then, when your enemy's guard is lower, attack).
The japanese started suicide runs because the allies had a no prisoner policy.
"American soldiers in the Pacific often deliberately killed Japanese soldiers who had surrendered."
That's why the japanese didn't surrender. What the allies were doing in the pacific war is something that even ISIS would view as deranged.
If false surrendering is a war crime, then so is torture, mutilation and "no prisoner" policy.
Why did the japanese soldiers stop surrendering? You have to look at the context. Would you surrender to someone who is going to torture you, mutilate you and decapitate you and boil your head so that your skull could be sent to the US as a war trophy? Of course not.
I think that you will find evidence in both directions. It was a feedback loop. The Americans soldiers had a racist preconception of the Japanese, and at the same time were exposed to the the atrocities that the Japanese committed in China, way before fighting the Americans. You cannot ignore the indoctrination of the Japanese (and please, don't make me here recount some of their massacres in China). Many Americans considered them killing machines without heart with whom it was impossible to reason.
> I think that you will find evidence in both directions
Most american POWs survived ww2 under japanese control. Almost no wounded or surrendering japanese survived ww2 under American control.
There was brutality on both side for sure. But the allies were especially racist and especially brutal. What the allies did in the pacific has no parallels in human history in terms of brutality and savagery on the battlefield.
Hundreds of thousands of japanese were tortured and mutilated. Hundreds of thousands of japanese were decapitated and their heads were boiled to make war trophies.
It is the ugly side of history hidden from view because the winners get to write the histories.
As I said, evil won ww2 and evil lost ww2.
> Many Americans considered them killing machines without heart with whom it was impossible to reason.
That doesn't explain the mutilation, torture and other depraved behavior by the allies. America was the most racist society on earth during ww2. The nazis modeled their racial ideology on the US for a reason.
The brutalizing of nonwhites has a long history in the US. The propaganda about the japanese being "unreasonable" or "suicidal" are lies we invented to hide our savage behavior. No different than our excuses for mutilating native americans and blacks.
FYI: The mutilating of non-whites continued in the korean war and the vietnam war. I guess they were "unreasonable" too... I guess all the blacks that were tortured and lynched were "unreasonable" as well.
"Butchering civilian populations wholesale was normal. The Americans and British did not play by those rules"
Perhaps you are not aware of the firebombing of German and Japanese cities, where as many or more civilians died as in the nuclear bomb detonations over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which perhaps you also forget.
Sadly, Vonnegut quotes David Irving's "The Destruction of Dresden" as a source for the number of dead (extremely inflated over other sources). Sadly because although Vonnegut didn't know it at the time, Irving was a Holocaust denier who wanted to rehabilitate the reputation of the Nazis by showing them to be no worse than the Allies.
Hmm...because having the flesh burned off your bones or dying slowly of long term radiation sickness etc. is a better option than being raped and bayonetted? Why don't we take a straw poll on that?
Tens of thousands of japanese women were raped after ww2. The only reason that more japanese women weren't raped was because the japanese government provided "comfort women" for the allied troops.
The allies had far less incidents of rape. And defently not systematic like Japan. If you really beliefe that its clear that you have never actually studied the issue.
> For the japanese military in WWII, rape was normal.
What racist gibberish. It was "normal" just like it was normal for the allies. The allies did a lot more raping than the axis...
> Butchering civilian populations wholesale was normal.
And it was not normal for the allies? The allies murdered a lot more civilians than the axis.
> The Americans and British did not play by those rules
Is that a joke? Intentionally burning of millions of innocent women and children are what? The nuking of cities full of innocent civilians are what? We intentionally murdered a shitload of innocent civilians too. Lets not pretend otherwise.
> This was not two equivalent evils.
You could argue that the british/americans were more evil than the japanese/germans. I prefer to say evil is evil.
The fact that you think we were any better just shows that you are an unthinking person who mindlessly swallows propaganda. Or that you don't know what really went on in ww2.
The british were some of the worst genocidal maniacs in humans history ( aborigines, indians, africans, etc ). And we did our fair share of genocides ( native americans, inuits, etc ). We didn't go from mass lynching of blacks to turning into saints overnight. The US and Britain were two of the most racist and evil societies on earth in the 1940s. There is a reason why the nazis modeled their ideology after the british/american racial ideology.
My impression is a lot of soldiers and contemporaneous sources said Japanese fought to the death, engaged in suicidal 'banzai charges', killed themselves rather than surrender, and that those few who did surrender thought it was shameful, and had been taught to expect mistreatment from Americans similar to what Japan dished out on e.g. the Bataan Death March.
Now it's quite possible that some of that was exaggerated and history as written by the victors. (authors like Leckie, Sledge, Jones ... have their books but didn't get too far)
But if your opponent is willing to surrender, it's generally a better tactic to let them surrender, than to have a no-prisoners policy that means their only hope for survival is to defeat you.
Not saying there was no racism, no brutality, no war crimes from the American side, but would need to see more evidence that the relative lack of prisoners was 100% due to American war criminality vs. how Japanese fought.
Sure, but you are talking about racist hatred trumping rationality and civility. There weren't a more racist and savage group in ww2 than the allied soldier in the pacific. Hundreds of thousands of japanese soldiers were tortured, mutilated/decapitated and turned into war trophies. It's a good thing we won ww2, otherwise, so many people would have been executed for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
"There weren't a more racist and savage group in ww2 than the allied soldier in the pacific."
Not even the German government, engaged in attempting to exterminate the undesirable population of Europe? Or the German treatment of Soviet prisoners? Or Soviets of German prisoners?
Certainly, there was a lot of hatred and racism on the Allied side. (And then there the allegation of Patton's famous disinclination to accept the surrender of German soldiers who had just fired single-use anti-tank weapons at American forces.) But I think you're getting hyperbolic there.
Do you have a source for the hundreds of thousands of Japanese soldiers being tortured, mutilated, decapitated, and turned into war trophies?
> Not even the German government, engaged in attempting to exterminate the undesirable population of Europe?
They weren't more racist than the US/British. You could argue they were as racist since they modeled their racial ideology from the US/Britain.
> Or the German treatment of Soviet prisoners?
The german treatment of soviets and the soviet treatment of the germans were horrific. But nowhere close to the level of depravity that the allies in the pacific sunk to. The allies didn't just kill japanese POWs. The allies tortured and mutilated and decapitated hundreds of thousands of japanese soldiers. There are countless japanese skulls and all kinds of mutilated japanese body parts in the US because the GIs did so much mutilating in the pacific. No fighting force in ww2 engaged in such disgusting behavior.
> Do you have a source for the hundreds of thousands of Japanese soldiers being tortured, mutilated, decapitated, and turned into war trophies?
It was so prevalent that FDR, the leader of the free world, was fiddling with the bones of a tortured japanese soldier in the oval office.
"On June 13, 1944, the press reported that President Roosevelt had been presented with a letter-opener made out of a Japanese soldier's arm bone by Francis E. Walter, a Democratic congressman.[4] Supposedly, the president commented, "This is the sort of gift I like to get", and "There'll be plenty more such gifts"
"In 1984, Japanese soldiers' remains were repatriated from the Mariana Islands. Roughly 60 percent were missing their skulls"
More than 70,000 japanese were killed in marina. If 60% were missing their skulls, that means more than 42,000 skulls sent to the US. That's just one island campaign...
You don't learn about this in school. As I said, evil won ww2 and evil lost ww2. There was no good guy in ww2.
The Wikipedia article on Japanese WW2 holdouts is interesting, some held out surrender to the 90s either living in remote regions or joining other fighting groups.
> My impression is a lot of soldiers and contemporaneous sources said Japanese fought to the death, engaged in suicidal 'banzai charges', killed themselves rather than surrender, and that those few who did surrender thought it was shameful
That is the propaganda/"history" that I am talking about. If you look at previous battles/wars, the japanese soldiers did surrender. The japanese soldiers did surrender in the beginning of the pacific war to the allies and they were brutally slaughtered, tortured and mutilated. It was part of the racist "no prisoner" policy by the extremely racist allied soldiers. That's why the japanese stopped surrendering.
The myth of the "unsurrendering" japanese was created after ww2 by "historians" to justify the absolutely absurd casualty rates that the japanese endured. Many of these battles in the pacific had deaths rates of 100%. That's unheard of in wars, unless one side was completely genocidal. Meaning there were 0 wounded 0 japanese POWs. What this means is that the allied soldiers simply massacred the japanese soldiers and went around killing wounded japanese soldiers. We know this happened because we have video footage of allied soldiers killing wounded japanese soldiers.
> and had been taught to expect mistreatment from Americans similar to what Japan dished out on e.g. the Bataan Death March.
The Bataan March was "myth". Hundreds of thousands of japanese POWs were tortured and mutilated and massacred by american soldiers. Maybe 100 americans soldiers were killed in the bataan march. Maybe. The propagandist myth of the bataan march certainly influenced the savage behavior of allied soldiers, but the allied soldiers in the pacific were from some of the most savage and racist societies on earth. We pretend that nazi germany and imperial japan were "racist", but we were just as racist as they were and much of axis racial ideology was copied from US/British racial ideology.
> But if your opponent is willing to surrender, it's generally a better tactic to let them surrender, than to have a no-prisoners policy that means their only hope for survival is to defeat you.
Right. Unfortunately, racist hatred wouldn't allow the allied soldiers to let the japanese surrender. That's why the japanese soldiers fought so hard. That's why the kamikazes only came into existence against the allied soldiers. The japanese never exhibited that behavior against the russians, chinese, etc.
> Not saying there was no racism, no brutality, no war crimes from the American side, but would need to see more evidence that the relative lack of prisoners was 100% due to American war criminality vs. how Japanese fought.
"American soldiers in the Pacific often deliberately killed Japanese soldiers who had surrendered."
"But the Japanese wasn't dead. He had been wounded severely in the back and couldn't move his arms; otherwise he would have resisted to his last breath... "
If you do the math, pretty much all of the japanese on these islands were killed ( 70K+ ) and tens of thousands of these soldiers were tortured, decapitated and had their heads boiled for war trophies.
There are people who say the German concentration camps were 'myths' too. There are memes that propagate because they serve someone's agenda... maybe the same applies to the narrative that the "allied soldiers [i.e. Americans] in the pacific were from some of the most savage and racist societies on earth."
Fortunately, there are professional historians that try to sort through this stuff.
I'm not saying the march didn't happen. I'm just saying that the propaganda surrounding the bataan "death" march is a myth. Growing up, you'd think it was worst thing in the world. But then you learn that hardly any americans died and that those americans who died were invaders/colonizers of the philiphines themselves and just as evil as the japanese invaders. That's what I'm getting at.
> There are people who say the German concentration camps were 'myths' too.
Okay? What does that have to do with what is being discussed?
In ww2, you can objectively say that pure evil won and that pure evil lost.
If both sides are equally evil in your view, would you say you are indifferent to which side ended up winning WWII? Is it a mistake on my part to assume you would be indifferent had the Axis powers achieved complete and utter victory over the Allies? After all, they are both equally evil.
Seeing as you seem to be claiming that both sides were equally evil, I'm very interested in your views on how you think the victorious Axis powers would have treated those they defeated.
Whatever may be said of the crimes committed by both sides during the war, it seems to me that both Japan and Germany fared rather well after surrender considering they were both completely defeated. We are not all that far removed from WWII and yet today Japan and Germany are both overwhelmingly populated by the descendants of Germans and Japanese, not the descendants of foreign conquerors, and enjoy some of the highest qualities of life in the industrialized world.
I'm curious how you think Jews in Germany, or Europe, or indeed the rest of the world would have fared under an Axis victory. Do you think there would be any meaningful Jewish community left in Germany or Europe? How do you feel the Roma, or Slavs or homosexuals would have fared? How would the populations of the Korean peninsula, Taiwan, China, the Philippines and elsewhere in Asia have fared in the subsequent decades of a Japanese victory in the Pacific? Would these communities have fared as well in defeat as the Germans and Japanese have?
> If both sides are equally evil in your view, would you say you are indifferent to which side ended up winning WWII?
As an american, of course I'm glad the US won. All I'm saying is that the US wasn't any better than anyone else. We weren't saints. And certainly the brits, who had been brutalizing africans, indians, chinese, aborigines, etc for centuries weren't saints either.
> Is it a mistake on my part to assume you would be indifferent had the Axis powers achieved complete and utter victory over the Allies? After all, they are both equally evil.
As an american, of course I would care. The point is whether one was more evil than the other?
> Seeing as you seem to be claiming that both sides were equally evil, I'm very interested in your views on how you think the victorious Axis powers would have treated those they defeated.
Pretty much exactly the same as british treated their colonies? You do realize that europeans had been raping, pillaging and exploiting much of the world before ww2 right?
> it seems to me that both Japan and Germany fared rather well after surrender considering they were both completely defeated.
Initially no. Japan, especially, were brutalized by the allies after ww2 because of racial hatred while germany was built up because of racial "pride". Lets not forget that we destroyed japanese infrastructure and pretty much starved them for years before the korean war broke out. While white europe god the marshall plan, asiatic japan got starvation.
> We are not all that far removed from WWII and yet today Japan and Germany are both overwhelmingly populated by the descendants of Germans and Japanese,
What's your point?
> I'm curious how you think Jews in Germany, or Europe, or indeed the rest of the world would have fared under an Axis victory.
Not too well. Just like the natives in the US/canada and the aborigines in australia. I bet every palestinian wishes that the axis had won...
> Do you think there would be any meaningful Jewish community left in Germany or Europe?
No more than there are meaningful natives in us/canada or aborigines in australia.
> How do you feel the Roma, or Slavs or homosexuals would have fared?
The roma/slavs would have been germanified. The homosexuals would be brutalized like Alan Turing was by the british.
> How would the populations of the Korean peninsula, Taiwan, China, the Philippines and elsewhere in Asia have fared in the subsequent decades of a Japanese victory in the Pacific?
They would have been japanofied and not much would have changed since most of asia had been under brutal european domination anyways.
> Would these communities have fared as well in defeat as the Germans and Japanese have?
You are making arbitrary assertions just to push your agenda.
If the axis had won, there would have been WINNERS and LOSERS. Just like if the allies had won.
Yes, the jews would have suffered. But the arabs/palestinians and most of the world suffering under european colonization would have rejoiced.
After all, many people around the world supported japan and germany. Much of the independence movements throughout the middle east and asia was supported by japan and germany. Not only that, in asia, the japanese soldiers even stayed behind after ww2 ended and joined independence movements to fight the returned savage european colonialists.
If you want a good look at the other side, read the Showa series of manga by Shigeru Mizuki. It mixes historical background (based on photos) with his own personal story (a more cartoony style).
And his own story is Hellish by any standard. In the third volume particularly, his group gets caught by enemy fire and are presumed dead. When he makes it back to camp, they has already reported them as dead. This turns out to be an embarrassment and they are effectively told to go back into the jungle and die. Some do.
> Looking at the Wikipedia entry for Kamikaze [1], I was surprised to read that the concept of suicide attacks only became formalized late in the war (June 1944), rather than something ingrained in the Imperial Japanese fleet from even before the start of conflict.
Related but at a tangent - after a lifetime of interest in karate I came to realise that most of the stuff taught at karate is not practical.
Katas and karate punches and kicks - most of this better thought of more as dancing or ceremonial. A bit like Tai Chi - except that Tai Chi claims no real world martial value.
The myth remains however of karate being great self defence training.
Our local karate club is packed with ever more kids going every week to learn pointless moves, with parents thinking the kids are learning to defend themselves.
It's sad to see so many people think that Tai Chi is just meditative shadow boxing. It's really more about fluid/soft and hard movements, developing an intuition for how your opponent will move and using an attacker's force against them.
I've seen people finding it very useful as an influence in HEMA where 9/10th of the difficulty lies in reading your opponent to know when and how they will attack.
It's also immensely useful for demonstrating the importance of footwork, as the last video you link to (by the English-speaking Wing Chun instructor -- even if his style isn't "really" Tai Chi) shows very beautifully.
This couldn't be further from the truth. Sorry I'm not pointing to "evidence" but what you are saying is like laser tag guns are far better than AK-47.
The context here is self defense. Not fighting in bars, gang melees, or whatever. Part of that is avoiding fights by defusing confrontations. Another aspect is defense with controlled escalation. First, you get out of the way. If that's insufficient, you trip them. If that's insufficient, you take them down. If that's insufficient, you incapacitate them.
There are many schools of Aikido. I studied in an American dojo that incorporated street-fighting skills. Also substantial work with staff and wooden sword.
I've done some form of boxing, grappling /judo or martial art for 30 years. I taught physical skills- use of force, to law enforcement for 6 years.
For 5 years I worked in a violent custodial environment.
Some young people entering that work-place had never faced an angry man, never been in a real fight. For them that "martial arts" environment is a reasonably safe and accessible place to start.
I agree that it is no substitute for actual combat/use of force training but I wished some of them had at least gone to the local Y or a regular basis. The 6 month "entry to service" training was not sufficient, nor was 3 days a year skill updates.
Perhaps the biggest issue with "martial arts" is the misunderstanding some people arrive at they can start a fight and win, and not get hurt. That their theoretical skills will enable them to prevail without pain. That is dangerous and un-helpful.
Boxing, judo, grappling and wrestling all are more practical than karate.
The core issue with karate is that it is loaded with formal or ritualistic representations of fighting. Karate kicks, punches and blocks are all hopelessly unusable when fighting a boxer for example, who is trained to defend their head and hit their opponents head hard and fast. By contrast, few, if any, karate stances are explicitly defending the head from being hit. The more extreme examples include holding the fist at the hip - a truly useless place for a fist to be during a fight.
You should watch Royce Gracie in early MMA competitions (before grappling became regularly studied by most competitors). He completely dominated everyone, no matter what discipline.
Distance did not help. At best, a punch or kick or two were thrown, and then the grappler was able to close the distance, and then anyone who didn't study grappling (or at least wrestling) was at a massive disadvantage, and the fight quickly ended in the grappler's favor.
BJJ is probably the most useful for self-defense (personal opinion), but it's also the most complicated to learn. It covers ground fighting better than wrestling or judo, which is where many situations will eventually end up. If I had to pick one, excluding MMA (which is basically a combination of everything listed), I would make it this.
Wrestling and judo for takedowns and takedown defense. Judo is more complicated and difficult to learn than wrestling (imo), but, depending on your age and physique, wrestling may be of limited use to you (a 50+ year old will likely have trouble applying many of the wrestling takedowns). A lot of what you'd need from these two would be covered in a BJJ school anyway, just with less time and focus spent on those areas.
Boxing and kickboxing to learn how to defend yourself from strikes. Again, depending on age and phyisque they may otherwise be of limited use, since an older or smaller person is unlikely to be punching with knockout power, and would run a higher risk of breaking bones in their hands when striking.
An MMA school would tend to cover all of that, but they may be more focused on competition than self-defense, which will affect what they teach you and how you train. Same problem with BJJ schools - a lot are more concerned with tournaments than self-defense, which can change the focus of your practice considerably.
Boxing for as long as you can remain standing, wrestling after that.
Basically, if you're not actually fighting, you don't know how to fight. It would be like learning how to program, except you've never actually written a program before.
Ninjutsu is the hackers' martial art - it's full of clever exploits of the body based on a very good understanding of the physics involved. It emphasizes practicing real fighting situations.
Not sure if it's popular elsewhere but Ju-Jutsu training has been pretty intensive and helpful - not sure if it helps in a real fight through, but I guess with a few years of regular training you are better off - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_ju-jutsu
If you want self-defence, my impression is that world-wide Krav Maga is generally a form that manages to hold a high standard across different locations and instructors. But as always, practice will never be any better than the instructor and the students he or she accepts.
In general, any martial school that focuses not on competition, can be good (the set of techniques are not really that different, they're all ways for one human to break another human - physics and biology dictates what falls out as efficient).
Judo can be efficient self-defence in a club that tries to focus on the early martial arts curriculum (but generally fails miserably at teaching strikes and kicks). One benefit of judo is that it (should) teach good ukemi (how to fall) - I usually say that knowing ukemi is knowing how to block the ground. A large number of real-world injuries come from hitting your head on the ground or on the curb, so being able to get up (and run away) from being thrown to the ground is a good start. Not to mention some grappling can go a long way if you find yourself in an intimate situation that you only too late realize is turning into an attack. This also holds for brazilian ju-jutsu (which despite it's name is more like early judo practice, than traditional ju-jutsu) -- but I've yet to see many bjj dojos that have a reasonable focus on throws and efficient ukemi (which makes sense, if you focus on a sport that does mostly take-downs and not throws).
That said, most big martial arts can be great for self-defence, if the instructors have an interest and are competent in self-defence. But practising real-life self-defence isn't really pleasant - so doesn't go well with typical "martial arts for exercise" type programs.
My understanding of Krav Maga is that it's more or less formalized mixed martial arts.
I studied Tang Soo Do for many years, and the really useful self defense techniques were not taught until I got my black belt, and we started learning techniques from different martial arts.
This teaching was deferred primarily because the useful techniques can be extremely dangerous to practice (strikes to the throat being a good example, and grappling techniques where you maximize leverage with the intention of breaking bones).
See my other comment on how techniques aren't all that different due to physics and biology.
MMA can mean many things; I usually read it as the modern circus that is UFC etc - a sport.
Krav Maga is self defence (or self offence, it's pretty violent; it's for situations where you'd be justified in using lethal force, not for "scuffles"). It's simple, and has a curriculum that's built around survival; you'll typically see something that looks a lot like Krav Maga in any martial arts self defence class (if it's any good). And you can typically find "krav Maga" techniques in any martial art. For example one of the first techniques thought in taekwondo is the straight front kick, the first movement of the kick is lifting the knee - so you start practicing a knee to the groin as a white belt. But sadly you could become a fifth Dan in taekwondo and not even realize that, because of the sorry state of self defence in a lot of taekwondo dojangs.
My point in calling it formalized MMA (by which I mean the literal definition of the acronym, mixed martial arts) was that rather than the techniques being passed down by tradition (like tang soo do, kung fu, aikido, etc), it was built up by mixing and matching techniques from various art forms with the explicit goal of a brutal, effective form of self defense.
Taekwondo, I think, long ago parted ways with any intention of being an art of self defense, if that intention was ever there to begin with.
The competitive element of judo is a pro and a con. Executing a technique against someone actively trying to resist is very educational and good for your training - it shows what works (vs practicing with someone who just lets you throw them). But trying just to win has its own drawbacks and leads to weakness and a very narrow focus.
I agree that the sport part of judo can be a benefit, but not because of the competition aspect; but because the sport mindset led to efficient and safe techniques that can be practiced at "full force".
Two typical examples are: tomoenage that in its original jujitsu form was a kick to the groin, but in judo is a foot to the hip; first you can't go and kick your practice partners full force to the groin (without them wearing protection - hence you can't really practice the actual technique) , and second if you kick someone in the groin they'll roll up, and the throw becomes ineffective (although you could argue that a good kick or two to the groin is usually quite enough. But only if you actually hit. A good landing on the head is also quite effective). And ipponseionage which in a jujitsu variant involves crossing the arms in an elbow lock, hoping to break the lower arm in the throw - but also becomes a slower and less efficient technique.
So the safe set of judo techniques makes for very good sparring practice. But it won't prepare you for a thumb in the eye or a bite to the face. Or being stomped on the head while grappling.
I'll just add that HN is probably not the best place to ask that question, and also that you're probably very rarely get an unbiased answer. The overwhelming majority of practitioners view their own art through rose-colored glasses, especially if they've had little or no personal experience studying other marital arts.
One of the unfortunate lessons I learned early on in real life, is that "self defense" systems which only cover one-on-one fighting (eg the Tae Kwon Do schools I've seen) are close to useless in real life. eg in a bar fight, or a group of drunks decides to pick on you when you walk past. I'd studied Tae Kwon Do for about fours years before discovering this (the hard way doh!). :/
With Ninjutsu and Arnis (at least some schools), training for combat against multiple opponents is a core part of it. So, less likely to suck in real world situations.
As for what makes practice "self defence" as opposed to "martial arts" -- there really shouldn't be any contradiction - "martial arts" really is about fighting, maiming hurting and killing people. Or it was. But of course there are lot of other benefits to what is good "martial arts" training - soundness of mind and body etc.
But if what one wants to learn is primarily "self defence", then one has to, unsurprisingly, practice self defence. Practice the type of situations you want to defend yourself from. I could probably link to videos all day, but eg: this one with Phil Thompson explains some of the basics (despite the cheezy intro):
There's also something to be learned from military martial arts, like (this is more typical Martial Arts wanking, so to speak, but I really love this guy):
Note, don't put too much emphasis on the "Systema"-bit, DK Yoo probably holds high level dan grades in more martial arts styles than I even know about. That said, Systema is a very interesting style - developed by and for the Russian/Soviet special forces with inspiration from traditional Russian wrestling and judo -- it's a surprisingly soft style for a modern military martial art. Like man other styles, if you can find a good instructor/dojo I'm sure it can be a perfectly fine approach to self defence. But as Thompson says above, it's not the physical techniques that are the hard part.
The reason I call out Krav Maga (developed from practical self defence in the Warsaw ghettoes, and evolved by the Isreali military and special forces) is that it is modern (as in new), it has a pretty reasonable and well-functioning system of grading instructors - so if something "really is" Krav Maga, it's a bit easier to know a little about the quality of the training - unlike, say "karate" or "jujutsu" - or "taekwondo" (which encompass everything from the funny stuff that is in the olympics to more traditional stuff that is closer to the founder's original vision [ed: note that the second two videos with Thompson is from a taekwondo seminar, so there are obviously still places where you can practice taewkondo and actually learn something useful]) - and the general civilian training (to the best of my knowledge) has a strong focus on self-defence - practising actually useful stuff like verbal assault, multiple attackers, situation awareness and so on.
It very much is a system for self defence, while most other things one could practice ends up being "martial arts with self defence added on". Personally I prefer that, I don't really enjoy practising just self defence - not to mention the fact that I'm not entirely convinced there are enough situations that are dangerous enough that I really need to defend myself violently, and yet not so dangerous that I won't simply be stabbed to death or shot -- that's its really worth the effort to practice all that much with the aim of self defence.
But practising any kind of physical confrontation for fun will boost confide...
Aikido doesn't have a reputation as "something you'd use on the street". Krav Maga may be good if you get a real teacher and not some guy who's seen videos on youtube.
Judo maybe, aikido no. As an aikidoka myself, I train it because it's a good workout with good people, and it's incredibly subtle and difficult to make work even in a controlled training environment. Pretty much the opposite of what someone genuinely concerned with self defense would want.
For self defense (which I am not interested in), something brutal and simple will be better. In fact, the brutal-er and simpler the better. Learn how to get hurt badly and still keep going for defense. Practice groin and throat strikes for offense.
Judo is much simpler than aikido, but not hugely brutal. Still, if I were suddenly required to try and defend myself with some aspect of my martial arts training (unlikely), I'd be much more likely to call on my judo than my aikido.
Focus on practicality in martial arts is kind of boring, and is largely irrelevant for most people unless we're talking about boosting confidence. And then, best not let your confidence convince you that violence isn't likely to hurt or kill you.
What you see as pointless is in fact good conditioning of the mind and body, something that reduces anxiety in the parents and boosts confidence in the kids. Anyone who learns a martial art with the intention of getting into fights, well, is an idiot.
You need to take a long view of the martial arts, instead of a short one. Two years of practice won't teach you jack shit. A lifetime of it can be very fulfulling.
Many people have difficulty seeing the benefits in kata training, but it really is one of the best ways to learn to apply techniques correctly.
As for practicality, what does that even mean? Do you frequently need to punch people in the teeth?
I studied it for a few years as a kid, and came to a similar conclusion but had assumed it was that particular flavour of karate being an overly formalised, functionally ceremonious, branch emphasising discipline, flexibility and strength over fighting prowess.
A foundation, rather than an end-product if you will.
This is not true at all. Your life-long interest in karate apparently includes 0 practical knowledge. I doubt you have even watched a youtube video from a karate tournament.
The modus operandi in karate is "Immoblize your enemy as fast as possible". Immobilize in this context means kill or knock out and ASAP means instantly. There is nothing more vicious out there than Kyokushin.
It is my understanding that there are two ways of how karate is taught, as a sport and as a practical martial art, with majority of clubs being the former case.
Possible counter-examples to this are Stephen "Wonderboy" Thompson [0] and Lyoto Machida [1]. There are probably more, but these are examples of two very successful MMA fighters whose backgrounds are based on Karate and whose MMA fighting styles are apparently very Karate-like so it can't be completely useless.
(Disclaimer: I am a complete layman.)
Also, for those advocating Aikido: how many Aikido guys excel in MMA?
(Only a slightly rhetorical question--I could very well be wrong.)
MMA isn't fighting, it's a sport. The one interesting thing to come out of it from a martial arts perspective, was Gracie challenging the idea that grappling wasn't an effective strategy even against people with a lot of striking experience. But it has rules, it's one-on-one, no weapons ... it has very little to do with real-world fighting.
That said, someone that's been boxing for a few years is more likely to win against someone who has no form of fight training. But he might not win against someone who's been in regular fights the past few years.
People that actually fight, do so to win. That usually means two, three on one, bringing a weapon against someone that's unarmed etc. Being able to choke someone out doesn't help all that much if his buddy is going to knife you in the neck while you're doing it.
As for Aikido, I love Aikdo. And if trained for self-defence, it could probably work well enough - but that requires training in an environment where you have people around you to that know how to use the attacks your trying to defend against. I've rarely seen an Aikido dojo with people that are good at kicking, kneeing, punching and elbowing people. It's not even that often you'll see people with a decade of real judo practice under their belt. Without a few decades worth of such experience, it becomes impossible to truly practice Aikido techniques with an aim for self defence. If nothing else, there's a strong tradition for practising defence against multiple attackers in Aikido.
On the other hand, in terms of being fit, clear of mind, of freeing oneself from the idea that one has something prove, letting go of ones pride -- those are things that can certainly get one out of fights. And situational awareness and not being a moron is probably 99% of the key to successful self defence.
After all, if you know you're headed to a fight, you'd be better off going the other way, or pre-emptively calling the police, or getting some help - so that the fight can be avoided.
As for Karate - it can certainly be a good foundation for self defence. But there are numerous styles, and numerous ways of approaching Karate. If your focus in competition sports, it's unlikely you'll end up great at self defence.
Many real fights are one on one without weapons. I think MMA synthesizes such a fight relatively well, with the exception of usually cluttered or cramped environments and wearing real clothes.
As for situations with several opponents, possibly with weapons, I don't think there is a style that will save you here except the old run-fu.
Most "real fights" that are "one on one without weapons" can be avoided. Fighting for pride, or fun, isn't self-defence. [ed: Not to mention the fact that a "cluttered environment" is an environment rich in weapons. Be that bottles, knifes, fire axes, bar stools, bricks or metal pipes etc.]
I like watching MMA because it pits all the various styles against eachother with a minimum set of rules. This way, it becomes very apparent which styles work and which don't.
Predictably, more practical and direct styles like boxing and grappling form the bread and butter for most participants and make up the majority of fights. But interestingly, very high-level practitioners of traditional styles, such as karate and taekwondo, are actually extremely effective, and among some of the best fighters in the sport.
I suspect a lot of the fake and impractical looking techniques in e.g. karate are actually useful, but only when practicing at a very high level. I also suspect that this may be by design - to weed out thugs and impatient pupils from the ranks before teaching actually useful martial technique.
I was training a kati (kata in Chinese) that was very flowery (literally, the name of the routine had the word "flower" in it).
It felt useless and so I asked the teacher what some weirder moves were used for...
First thing he was pleased I asked, most students doesn't. Then he showed me... it was just brutal, several moves were bone breaking grappling moves designed to be used as counter attacks.
I suspect most practitioners don't know this because people don't want to learn this grossly violent stuff, and so teachers don't make and effort to teach what exactly they are learning, and several of the moves were risky and opportunistic, not the thing a newbie can pull off in actual combat.
Yea, a lot of it is more comparable to doing dancing, gymnastics or exercise for fun, but I wouldn't call it 100% pointless.
There's good evidence that there is usefulness in karate for self defense. Lyoto Machida is an MMA fighter who at one point was #1 in the world in his weight class, and he uses a lot from karate (he has a lot of karate heritage as well as training). He won a fight a fight via crane kick, which is a technique from vs a former #1 LHW and HW fighter, I found it on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVSGQ_FRs3k
For self defense it's also probably useful to do routine exercise, stretches, etc., so in that sense it's also probably helpful.
Boxing, wrestling, and submission-style training such as jiu jitsu are the most effective hand to hand combat techniques, but even then it's still not entirely practical. Humans are evolved to fight with weapons, so it's all kind of pointless anyways. I once saw a little girl quickly dispatch a scary-looking guy with pepper spray.
I don't do any martial arts stuff, but I those going to the MMA gym that talk shit to those that do karate is just the pot calling the kettle black, aside from being immature.
I was immediately very interested by one of the references, which extensively compares five different versions of Nitobe's book: the original (English) and 4 translations (in Spanish, French and Japanese). They study the overall texts as well as side-by-side passages in detail, and show how the seemingly innocuous translations are each tainted by the motives and environment of each translator and author. I'm always fond of translation studies and this one is captivating.
English version here (the original is in Spanish... we'll have to trust the (apparently uncredited) translator on this one)
Chivalry, Bushido... the reality of knights wherever they cropped up and under whatever name, is that they abused people beneath them, and each other. A lot.
While it might be a more authoritative place to start, it's not the only academic paper in the sources, and it's definitely not the entire argument undergirding this post. I for one appreciate when he pulls out a citation that make you raise an eyebrow.
I guess i'm super conservative about sourcing when reading arguments made about historical topics (and academic papers at least tend to make it clear whether or not their sourcing is primary, secondary, or what).
Especially when it comes to claims of what the common perception was at any particular point in human history i am always curious to see not what someone's narrative is, but what they're building their case upon.
(also as an aside the use of The Last Samurai as a lens or touchstone for discussing bushido was a bit weird to me given how prevalent the notion of bushido is. But maybe i'm just sad that that's the go-to reference.)
Yeah, there's a good chance The Last Samurai might currently be the most popular lens through which people view bushido right now (Americans at least). I share your sadness but I'm sure most people actually have multiple points of reference on the concept. Would be funny if it continued to evolve into something completely different (something featuring Tom Cruise?)
I studied Japanese history in a grad program for a while, and every professor I met agreed that bushido is a modern construct. There are plenty of academic articles about it, but you probably won't find many of them without access to JSTOR.
Interesting that the author mentions that the term "Bushido" wasn't really a thing until last century. I was sure I saw the term mentioned in the writing of Miyamoto Musashi, but I assume that might have been a modern translators interpretation. (I read the English version, not the native Japanese one).
Also, some of my favourite graphic novels by Stan Sakai, Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima seem to mention the term too, but seeing as they are modern writers, I assume they 'westernised' their dialogue to suit.
> Interesting that the author mentions that the term "Bushido" wasn't really a thing until last century. I was sure I saw the term mentioned in the writing of Miyamoto Musashi, but I assume that might have been a modern translators interpretation. (I read the English version, not the native Japanese one).
I'm not sure about the author level of Japanese, but when he said that the term "bushido" was not used but the terms "bushi no michi" existed before, well it's the exact same thing. 武士道 is bushido and 武士の道 is bushi no michi. The exact same writing, but a slightly different expression. It can't be that far off of a concept.
The term "bushido" itself can be seen from late 16c literature (甲陽軍鑑, written between 1575 and 1586, is said as the first written appearance of the word), but initially it meant more practical skills of combat or survival. I don't have Miyamoto Musashi's book at hand but I suspect if he used the term it had the similar meaning.
The use of the word in its modern sense is a modern development. It was used before, but to signify different things. In other words, while the samurai had concepts about the warrior ethos, which they may have called bushido (among other things), the concepts they understood and wrote about were different from the concept of bushido espoused by Nitobe Inazo, who was criticized for being ahistorical by his Japanese contemporaries.
Citing Mamoru Oshii as a kind of expert on bushido is completely laughable. How does anything he says about the subject gives him any kind of authority ?
I recently (3 months) started iaidô[1] in my Japanese university club, and one thing that struck me was how few "bullshit" talks we had about the discipline. In contrast, when browsing for clubs in my country, each website was filled with a last a few paragraphs saying how spiritual the art is, how it is all about discovering yourself and the truth of the universe.
People of my club are more interested in it because katana are cool than the bushidô spirit or something -- basically nobody ever talked about it. Anyway, when everybody train I cannot help to feel the underlying military spirit of the it, and how in a society like Japan it can quickly turn the way it turned in WWII.
I just starting Kendo training here at a local dojo. Our instructor is very adamant and clear at almost all training sessions that the skills we are learning with the bamboo and wooden swords are NOT usable in a self defence or martial capacity at all.
Rather that our studies are for mental focus, fitness and spiritual calmness. These are the exact reasons I took up the study of this art.
In my younger days, I studied Tae Kwon Do for years, but as most other have said here - it has no real practical value in a street fight either, aside from extra fitness, flexibility and general peripheral awareness which may serve as an advantage in a conflict situation.
I wonder how much the unusability is actually related to weapon carry right. I mean, of course sword skill is useless for defence if you cannot carry a sword with you. If it were otherwise, like in pre-Meiji Japan, I'm sure kendô skill would be better than nothing. But given that by the time warriors were taught real military fighting and not martial art in the modern meaning, the question is a non starter. So I agree with you and your teacher.
Interestingly enough, from the 6 different clubs (aikidô, karate, iaidô, nippon kenpô, shaolin temple box, sumô) that were demonstrating their art at some event, the most effective or useful one seemed to be... sumô and nippon kenpô. The sumô dudes were very strong and had serious skill for putting done someone on the ground. The boxer kicks were pretty serious too. On the other side, the way people falled on aikidô kata seemed pretty fake, not to mention the karate dudes fighting thin air.
People always think aikidô is fake, until they try it.
I couldn´t believe it for myself until a girl, two heads smaller than me and probably a third of my weight, brought me to the floor. There´s nothing fake in it. There is just pain if you resist, so you don´t.
And besides that, the goal of aikidô is to prove the enemy that attacking you will not help him with anything. It´s not meant to overcome him with force, by pain or injuries. It´s very spiritual and different to other dôs.
The techniques aren't fake, they're just unreliable outside of training.
It's one thing to pull it off against a training partner who is using a known subset of attacks and when you know they're coming. Different when you're in a chaotic self-defense situation and facing a fully-resisting opponent who will try anything to win.
You need a much higher level of skill to deal with the latter than the former. It's the same as how a really good boxer can (against a less skilled opponent) just drop his hands and bob-and-weave to avoid strikes, but an average or unskilled boxer can't afford to try fancy, high-risk techniques, when simpler tactics are a much safer way to win the fight.
That's the biggest problem with stuff like aikido for self-defense. Taking an average person and giving them six months or so of aikido training will NOT make them able to effortlessly toss around men 3x their size who are seriously trying to hurt them, and telling them that it will is selling them a dangerous lie. Even if they put in decades of training, they're still relying on relatively high-risk techniques when there are other more reliable ones.
I don't mean to crap on anyone's favorite styles. Aikido is an art form with some self-defense applications, and it's great for that. But a lot of people don't understand how hard it is to beat someone who is massively bigger and stronger than you, and it's doing them a dangerous disservice to market it to them as more than that.
(~5 years previous experience in tae kwon do, muay thai, BJJ, and hapkido, among others.)
This is well put. In judo, for example, most throws are pretty simple in having a readily discernible fulcrum. The setup and execution of the throws are efficient and reliable.
In aikido, the point around which someone falls can often be floating unintuitively in space after a combined sequence of off balancings that are neither intuitive nor natural. I study aikido primarily today--not because it is easy, but because it's hard. I'm also utterly unconcerned with self defense. I train for those moments when everything is in alignment and either I or my training partner go vaulting effortlessly through the air. I wouldn't count on that happening in real life.
In terms of self defense, people are almost always better off 1. giving an attacker what they want in terms of money or belongings, 2. Running away, 3. Fighting dirty--in that order.
Aikido is a very "broad church" - ranging from fluffy bunny to pretty hard styles - and the effectiveness can vary significantly.
The principles and techniques can be very effective, but it depends on what/how you train (or who you train with).
There are many reasons to train, and based on your reasons, you should choose the martial art you wish to study, and also the teacher/school where to study. That said, it can be a great idea to study with a good teacher (but of an art you are less keen on) who is close by, than the perfect martial art which you can only get to infrequently.
Aikido isn't the best art to quickly learn how to defend yourself if that's all you want to do. But it has many pluses - "old man's judo" as a friend of mine said - you can keep going and keep getting better (if you practice) inspite of age...
Current aikidoka here--ukes are generally more compliant in aikido than, say, judo. But then again the throws often have a lot more going on, and thus require some level of compliance to just learn. Pressure ramps up as one advances, but there's really never shiai-level intensity.
I mainly do aikido because it's insanely difficult (at least by my estimation having done judo and a somewhat more traditional jujitsu) and a good workout. I don't think aikido or most other martial arts are particularly good for self defense. Actual violence is ugly and unpredictable.
Your instructor seems like a sensible fellow.
Indeed, there are various focuses to the martial arts and what is taught in a particular school won't meet every requirement. I've found this article very useful for summarising this idea:
Unsurprisingly, it puts what I teach (HEMA) almost entirely in category 2, though some parts might be very slightly relevant to some of the other areas from time to time.
form kendoka here: I don't want to distrust your instructor, but Kendo IS the way to study all you need to fight. Then there is each school where you can practice special katas and become proficient with one or another technique, but overall.
I study kenjutsu (and aikido) - and have friends/colleagues who are also serious kendo practitioners.
Kendo has pluses and minuses - the shinai used can teach habits of "flicking wrists" which just don't work with heavier weapons. And yet advanced practitioners have serious focus and skills.
I much admire a female Japanese friend (and sempai) who was told by our sensei to go and study kendo (while not slacking off in her other studies). In her fifties, and a 5th dan, off she went and started from scratch but made rapid progress, and brought back what she had learned. Our sensei told other people to do different things - horses for courses.
But what does it mean "to fight"? No rules? For your life? For someone else's life? These are the fundamental questions to be examined and resolved. How would you know if you are ready?
There is no doubting that in just my 3 months of study so far that my balance, focus, strength and endurance have improved significantly. All of these factors in themselves will probably make me better prepared to stand up to an attacker in a dark alley than I was before I started the study.
However, the finer techniques of grip and striking style - while beneficial for honing and improving all of the above, have little relevance in a street fight situation.
But even if my Kendo study gives me the balance and a millisecond better reaction time to be able to pivot out of harms way and dodge a blow, and if it gives me the endurance to run the heck away from a danger scenario, then it is all worthwhile.
Like many other things worth doing, iaido is best experienced by doing it. Talking about it will get you nowhere. Get your sword out and start training until you wear yourself out.
The people in your club who are there because katanas are cool will all quit within the next 3 years. Some may last 5. None will last 60 unless they get over the coolness factor and see it for what it is.
That being said, iaido is great. It's a good physical and mental workout. It'll teach you a lot about yourself, a bit like meditating but with sword in hand. There will be endless repetition in a search for unattainable perfection. It certainly can be 'spiritual' in a sense.
Source: over 2 decades of martial arts and nearly 2 decades of iaido.
Japanese university clubs are pretty intense, 3 sessions per week for first grader, up to 5 for the more advanced member.
But given how much 1 and 2nd year and how few 3rd year and upper there is, you seems totally right on your point. Actually I was wondering why there was so few of them, but I guess the cultural background also plays a lot; 4th year mostly focus on searching a job and not a lot of student do a master degree.
And sure it have the beneficial effects you point (I started it partly to correct my posture), but I think putting too much emphasis on the spiritual side is a kind of Orientalism bias.
It is common for members of a university club to be practicing effectively 2 or more hours per day. Over several years this brings pretty rapid progress. Getting to nidan is fairly common.
But after they leave, the majority stop, or do maybe once a week at most. A friend of mine carried on to do a PhD, so was able to continue quite a lot - 20+ years later he is 6th dan!
I haven't read Nitobe, but Yamamoto Tsunetomo's Hagakure mentioned in the article, which was weirdly popular a few years back, is a horrible piece of propaganda written by someone who has about as much contact with war fighters as Nietzsche.
Hagakure was written during the Edo period (1600-1868), during which time there were very few battles fought, and samurai were mainly bureaucrats and government functionaries living on fixed pensions. The book is an attempt to maintain warrior culture in the face of the reality that samurai no longer had any occasion to fight.
...collected from a mid-level bureaucrat in the early 18th century who apparently never had the opportunity to be willing to die for his lord, and which didn't become popular until the early 20th century.
Fun (though unverifiable) fact: No one reads Inazo Nitobe, or that "Hagakure" thing in today's Japan. It looks like these are mostly for Westerner's consumption. "Bushido" today is often taken as some weird/quaint moral code that is often depicted comically. It could be interesting for a historical viewpoint, but I don't think these historic texts are very useful to explain the modern-day Japan. It's a bit like reading Jefferson while trying to understand Trump.
But the point is that they were widely read at some point, so they shaped the culture in ways that are now ingrained.
It's like Homer's epics: nowadays they are mostly restricted to students of literature or historians, but their influence on Western culture throughout history is massive.
I've never read any of their blog posts before now, but Tofugu makes another product called WaniKani, that I've been using daily for 6 months now. It's basically flashcards for Kanji memorization, but it creates a regimen and has great third-party mobile applications that give you reminders to continue making progress. Without it, I definitely wouldn't have the will power to keep studying.
(I got through about half the article)
I think making the analogy to Christianity and chivalry is simply a way for Nitobe to communicate the way samurai were percieved and it seems a bit dramatic to lay it all at his feet as some kind of grand manipulative agenda.
The Meiji era (and the Taisho era after it) were times of a very bizarre "formalization" of japanese culture. Like other comments mention, things like karate, kendo, ekinaba, art of sword making, etc. etc. were all formalized and unified under one umbrella at this time. Before say "karate" you'd have different schools teaching different martial arts under different names around the country.
I actually don't have a very good grasp on why this happened
The real bushido of modern Japanese, at least of generation born in 70-ies, is their work ethics. I worked with JICA team for 3 seasons, I never seen people that commited and self-sacrificing to work as these people were. And I hope, I will never see again. Life is so much more than work.
Medieval War Principals meet modern weapons. People charged in with horses and protective amuletts at verdun. But where butchering a village was hard work in medieval times, modern weapons make it the flick of a switch.
Add to that a culture where non-fullfillment of expectations is a huge shame and extererior pressure upholds all the norms, and you get japans behaviour during the ww2.
Every nation rewrites its history according to contemporary needs and cherry picks (or creates) sources to support it. A good example of today is Russia, where Stalin cult is resurgent and not so honorable history facts (pact with Hitler, Holodomor etc.) are being suppressed or played down[1].
[EDIT:] Honestly though, since this allowance comes so late and is not connected back to the main narrative, it does undermine the whole mess. Next up, a hard-hitting takedown of Thomas Malory and Alfred Lord Tennyson...
Does this apply to the 'Bushido Shoshinsu' written by Shigesuke? That's the one I'm familiar with with and it didn't seem to have any Christian undertones.
Other modern inventions that people think are ancient:
1) Scots wearing different patterned kilts to denote clans. This was mostly invented by Sir Walter Scott
2) Druid rituals. Druids were wiped out by the Romans, and the only accounts left of their rituals are Roman. What we now think of Druid rituals are a mixture of Roman writings and stuff made up in the 19th century.
I am not surprised. It seems that a certain subset of the European elite embraced the samurai as a symbol of what Europe lost with the shift from Feudalism to Democracies.
Note how you can see something of the same with how knights and related honor codes gets embraced by extremists across Europe (in particular in times of hardship).
Similarly, the post-ww1 British administrators of what became Irak elevated the bedouin on a pedestal[1]. And the region is paying the price to this day.
I haven't read the book referred to in the article but I've for example read Mishima's Runway Horses - which also draws on historical circumstance from the Shinpūren Rebellion (1876). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinp%C5%ABren_Rebellion
Does that not exemplify similar values as us (Westerners) expect from the term 'Bushido'? Was the former a very rare isolated incident and not actually representative of samurai ethos?
Mishima was as influenced by ultranationalism and the bushido mythos as anyone - to the point that he committed suicide during an attempt to restore the emperor. I don't think his writing counts as counterexample.
This is not such a unique story, same is for instance with yoga, no one in India really did yoga as we think of it today until the end of 19th century. Same story with the free masons, they were re-invented in 17th century with no evidence whatsoever of having any resemblance to the original order. One could also argue that pretty much all religions in the world also fall into this category.
Masaki Kobayashi made a couple of subversive films in the 1960's that present a very dark view of Samurai culture. These films [1][2] are excellent. [1] in particular is exquisite (and tied for the Jury Special Prize at Cannes in 1963).
209 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 240 ms ] threadLooking at the Wikipedia entry for Kamikaze [1], I was surprised to read that the concept of suicide attacks only became formalized late in the war (June 1944), rather than something ingrained in the Imperial Japanese fleet from even before the start of conflict.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamikaze#Beginnings
OT: I really love the posted article's massively deep footer, which also looks good on mobile. I frequently have trouble designing nice footers around a long list of links and I'm bookmarking this site as a place to copy from.
From my Swedish history, see the 30 year war (for a viewpoint not covered well in Swedish schools, google Polish deluge). To me it seems the main difference is that Sweden didn't have the same technological resources a few centuries earlier...
Edit: The obvious point is -- does present Swedish culture explain why historical atrocities were so common...?
Or the bombing of 250.000 civilians in Hiroshima and Nagashaki to make a point for the post-war era?
AFAIK, American WW2 leaders saw it as a choice between invading and dropping nukes. Is there evidence to suggest otherwise?
(This atrocity was part of an invasion, not a total war with an enemy that didn't follow the laws of war.)
Edit: The brother comment referenced the same example while I was off for a coffee and to find a wikipedia link. :-)
It's common historical knowledge that the Japanese were pretty much defeated and desperate (out of oil and resources, with the Russians circling them, and they had already examined the possibility and terms of surrender, using USSR as a mediator). Of course to make it less easy, the US insisted on surrender under very humiliating terms to not let them save face, even though the US knew they were on their last legs.
Besides that, there's nothing about "invading" that's worse than dropping nukes on civilians (not to mention the same "choice" can be said for any war).
Except if the idea is "Better a war crime to evaporate 250.000 men, women, children, dogs and kittens, especially civilians" than to risk the lives of my men on an invasion according to standard war practice and law. Even though I know that the enemy is on its last legs anyway".
So they're still fighting and the war is not over yet?
> there's nothing about "invading" that's worse than dropping nukes on civilians
A country's leadership is responsible to its own people first. Truman dropped bombs to avoid sacrificing his people. Tojo let his people die to avoid loosing face.
WW2 ended in a horrific way and the stories popular in the US definitely leave out details that make the US look bad. However your comments read like you've adopted the opposite bias rather than less bias.
I'm adding this to my selection for future usage.
According to TFA we should probably blame Nitobe for that as well. Frankly this seems as ridiculous to me as blaming Nietzsche for the Nazis.
That's the kind of thinking that leads to genocide and war crimes.
>However your comments read like you've adopted the opposite bias rather than less bias.
Well, not much bias. This is pretty much how big powers always operated. Read a few now US historians on WWII -- or somebody closer to Howard Zinn than some "celebrated establishment academic".
You have essentially 3 ways to defeat Japan. First, invade and take the country, city by city, town by town. Second, bomb them into submission. Second, starve them into submission.
Given the Japanese resilience shown in the war, they were sure that the Japanese would fight a defence to the death of their homeland. Applying scorched earth policy, and more worse things. This would have cost many American lives and a huge amount of both soldiers and civilians in Japan.
The second idea had already been done so much that their was not much left to bomb. From the perspective of death, the nukes were not worse then a couple normal bombing raids. In Tokyo they had already killed more then 250'000 people just by conventional bombing.
The third choice is just as cruel and would have taken a very long time (and they were already doing it anyway, they would just have to wait).
The nukes, from a moral perspective, are nothing more then a step up from normal bombing. Just as fire bombing was a step up from precision bombing that they tried before. The only difference is the fallout, but that comparatively speaking is relatively weak compared to a full on war.
You objection should really be to all bombing of civilians.
What would be your opinion should they have done? Also, if you care about democracy, people did not give a fuck about bombing or nukes, they were all for it.
Totally. Although that's the indoctrination that the USA wants to spread, unbiased authors always point that the war was about to finish for the Japanese and if the USA didn't want to invade them China would take care of it soon anyway.
Therefore, it's generally accepted outside the USA that the bombs were just a warning to a rising URSS that the USA now had the upper hand.
When the nuclear bomb was ready Japan was already under siege and nothing could get inside or outside by air or sea. Japan was already defeated consuming resources like food or oil and not replenishing them, it was only a matter of time for unconditional surrender(Japanese had already proposed "honorable surrender").
The US documents are already declassified. Nukes were launched because:
1-They were ready, and the military wanted to test it on a real target. The war was going to end before they could test it.
2-To give a clear message to URSS, specially over Europe occupation.
For the military there was not a real difference between bombing a city and killing women and children, like was routine by the time, and doing it much faster and effective. Over 50 million people died at WWII. Nukes only killed a small fraction of it.
Japanese people are human and the base morality that evolution has endowed us with. This divides humanity into two groups, in group and out group. Morality only applies to the in group. It takes a lot of acculturation and education to expand an individual's conception of the in group is, from family/tribe to nation/culture to humanity. As such, any sub-culture that can take over the public sphere of a culture will have little difficulty getting people to dehumanise the other, and once they're dehumanised people have little more difficulty committing atrocities than they do slaughtering animals.
As you may have noted none of this is specific to Japanese culture. That's because in this respect we're a lot weirder than they are in historical perspective.
If you want a good overview of man's violence towards man and it's decline I recommend Better Angels of Our Nature, Stephen Pinker.
But that still doesn't explain why the armies of Western nations seemingly committed less and less serious atrocities. Or is that just an illusion because "history is written by the victors"?
History is written, there's just more eye-catchy things to get distracted over.
Game of Thrones. Brexit. Reality TV. Concerts. Drugs. Sex. Food. Cars. Video Games.
I'm guessing it's because Germans had racial propaganda dehumanizing Eastern Europeans (Slavs are "untermenschen") and the Russians retaliated once they were able to. They had seen far more gruesome behaviour by the Germans and had less inhibitions to treat them in kind. The Americans and British, OTOH, had merely been exposed to the far more "conventional" horrors of war (i.e. civilian casualties from war and occupation) until they found out about the camps.
As for the lack of atrocities committed by the West: don't for a second believe anything about the Pacific theatre of WW2 was lacking atrocities. Japan quite literally raped China, yes, but the US routinely firebombed Japan until they literally nuked city centres.
The fire bombing of Dresden (a German population centre) is considered a morally questionable decision these days. The routine fire bombing of Japanese cities is not even talked about. And whether you consider fire bombing civilians a war crime or not, the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki most definitely were.
The thing to know about war crimes is that the legal framework for defining and punishing war crimes we have today (even if we make far less use of it than we should) didn't exist back then. There was no legal basis for the Nuremberg trials, legally speaking, other than victor's justice.
The reason no Allied (including Soviet) commanders or politicians were tried after WW2 wasn't that they didn't commit any atrocities, there were simply no international laws they could be charged for violating.
Note: I'm not arguing whether the way the US fought Japan worked or not, or whether the death count would have been higher or lower had they done it differently. I'm merely arguing that objectively speaking not only the "bad guys" have done horrible things to humans in modern wars. And I haven't even mentioned how the Vietnam war is perceived outside of the US.
The Russians also distributed plenty of propoganda pamphlets to their troops to show no mercy to the Germans (including citizens) as they faught their way towards Berlin. Propoganda comping from some high-ranking soviets, not just within the military. It was said to be a big contributing factor to their notorious behaviour afterwards.
Humans who are taught to dehumanize others are capable of doing pretty horrible things.
On a road trip, a Serbian in-law had us stop by this beautiful bridge in Bosnia. Built in the 1500s with Ottoman architecture, which is odd for that area. I took photos there, smiling and having fun like an idiot. Only after leaving and checking wikipedia on my phone did I see that the relative failed to tell me about the massacres that happened there by the Serbs. Women, children, rape, etc.
Wikipedia article: Visegrad Massacres
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanking_Massacre
or you think genocide is some 20th century invention?
a) Not only allowed by authority figures (Soviet officers) but also heavily promoted by propoganda coming out of Russia via pamphlets saying to show no mercy
b) Done by soldiers who faught for months/years in some of the bloodiest and most zero-sum fighting in the entire war, as the soviets fought their way to Berlin against Germans who were given an obvious suicide mission - to buy as much time as possible for Htiler futile end-game strategies. The Russians also passed many Ukranian/Belorussian towns that were ravaged by Germans.
c) There was basically total anarchy that existed in that area between Russia and Germany. It existed well before the Russians arrived. This stateless anarchy was largely how the Nazis were able to conduct their genocide so effectively and without worrying about punishment.
So this is the same enviornment that the Russians commited their horrible mass rape of German citizens.
China was similarily going through their own anarchistic transition with the battle between communisits (Mao) and nationalists (Chiang Kai-shek) taking place in the power-vacuum. So the pesants who were caught in between existed in a similar brutal enviornment as in eastern europe/Germany and a similar war-ravaged army with a superiority complex operating in an anarchistic state.
Although whether Russia/Japan military were special in their brutality, even in a greater historical context, it's hard to say. There were definately some differences between the Japanese empire/early Soviet Union compared to the west that stand out even today, in terms of harshness of the military towards their opponents/civilians - which may make it stand out.
While many people will say "but the Nazi's were evil too"... the abuse of civilians by Germans was largely kept hidden from their military. The secret police would only come in after the military left an area and it was kept as much a secret from them as possible.
Japanese soldiers' "fighting to the death" nonsense was myth invented many years after WW2 by allied "historians" to justify the mass murder of japanese soldiers by the allies.
It's not that the japanese weren't willing to surrender. It was that the allies ( unfortunately out of extreme racism ) wouldn't allow japanese soldiers to surrender.
If you dig a little past the history/propaganda and look at the raw data/facts/etc of the pacific war, you will learn how brutal the pacific war was. And how racist the allies were towards the japanese soldiers. Nearly every japanese soldier who was wounded was butchers and killed as were nearly all japanese POWs.
It was called the "no prisoner policy" of the allied soldiers. And if you want to read about some more base aspects of the pacific war, go read about the mutilation of the japanese soldiers by the allied soldiers. Some real sick shit.
The more you learn about the real nature of ww2, you realize that there was no good side in that war. Just two evils fighting each other.
After public protest and court ruling, it is now admitted it was the Japanese army which ordered people to kill themselves and even killed them:
"Orders from Japanese soldiers led to Okinawans committing group suicide," and, "The [Japanese] army caused many tragedies in Okinawa, killing local civilians and forcing them to commit mass suicide." [1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Okinawa#MEXT_controv...
That's a bit of revisionism as well. The reason why many okinawans killed themselves was because the allied soldiers were raping and killing okinawan civilians.
From your own wikipedia link...
"There was some return fire from a few of the houses, but the others were probably occupied by civilians – and we didn't care. It was a terrible thing not to distinguish between the enemy and women and children. Americans always had great compassion, especially for children. Now we fired indiscriminately."
The nonsense about "distinguish between the enemy an women and children" is just egotistic nonsense. We have a long history of butchering women and children ( especially non-white women and children ). All we have to do is review US treatment of natives, blacks, etc throughout US history to see how compassionate we were.
The reason why the okinawans killed themselves was because of the brutality and savagery of both sides ( americans and japanese ).
You don't win wars without killing people, and therefore all sides are evil by definition.
The little process of judging "war criminals" after the war is over is just for one's good conscience. If the Allies had lost they would have been judged as war criminals by the victors too.
I am not sure what measure anyone would use to compare war crimes etc., but if you are talking about pure body count, then the number of civilians killed during (a) the Rape of Nanking and (b) the Hiroshima/Nagasaki atomic bombs run about the same...
The bombing raids against Tokyo alone almost certainly killed far more than Hiroshima throughout the war.
And it included the most destructive single bombing raid of the entire war. Operation Meetinghouse [1] burned a quarter of Tokyo to the ground in a single night, and may have killed as many as 100,000 - more than is believed to have died in the immediate aftermath of Hiroshima (though possibly fewer than the total Hiroshima death toll, depending on which estimates are right).
[1] http://www.wired.com/2011/03/0309incendiary-bombs-kill-10000...
Also don't think that anybody in WW2 cared about the Jews. There are enough stories about Jewish refugees being rejected at borders and sent back to face certain death because nobody believed them or cared about them. Hating Jews was socially acceptable everywhere until the Nazis showed what that kind of thinking can lead to in a modern society (with the technical and political means to actually round up and murder people at scale).
The US only got directly involved in WW2 when it had no other choice (technically, Germany declared war on them after the US declared war on Japan). Britain only declared war on Germany because it had a pact with Poland which Germany invaded -- Germany had already annexed Austria and occupied Czechoslovakia at that point.
Heck, Italy and Hungary were allied with Germany for a significant part of the war. Not to mention various countries like Spain and Finland that fought alongside or at least supported Nazi Germany.
WW2 was a world war. It's called that because it involved so many countries that were at war with each other throughout the entire world at once over an extended amount of time. There were many reasons for each individual conflict and WW2 itself is just the aggregate of all of these (with the two major ones of course being the attempted domination of Europe by Nazi Germany and the attempted domination of East Asia by Japan).
It wasn't about ideals or principles. It was about power and territory. And for the Allies it was mostly about survival: a German victory would have meant vassalage for Western Europe and annihilation for most of Eastern Europe (because the Nazis wanted that territory as "lebensraum", i.e. living space, meaning the existing population had to go).
TL;DR: While halting the genocides was a nice side-effect of defeating Germany, the Allies weren't in it to save the Jews.
> annihilation for most of Eastern Europe (because the Nazis wanted that territory as "lebensraum", i.e. living space, meaning the existing population had to go)
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/bomb/peopleevents/pandeAMEX61.h...
Where is the axis hiroshima/nagasaki? Where is the axis firebombings of japan and germany?
> the British Buchenwald?
Go look up bengali holocaust where millions of indians were starved to death by the british. It's also funny that you would bring up death camps ( which were invented and pioneered by the british ). The germans modeled their death camps after the british death camps of south africa...
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/ba/LizzieVa...
Looks like a holocaust picture right? Wrong. It was from a british concentration camp in south africa during the 2nd boer war.
> WWII was against genocidal maniacs who starved entire countries and destroyed Yiddish speaking culture.
WW2 was about one group of genocidal maniacs fighting against another group of genocidal maniacs for resources/power/wealth.
I don't think the allies ( US, Britain, Soviet Union ), the KINGS of genocide are any better than germany or japan when it came to genocide. As bad as the destruction of yiddish culture may have been, it pales in comparison to what happened to the natives, aborigines, inuit, pacific islanders, africans, siberians, circassians, etc.
As I said, in ww2, it was evil vs evil. Evil won and evil lost. If both sides had somehow lost, then you could argue that the good won.
For the japanese military in WWII, rape was normal. Butchering civilian populations wholesale was normal. The Americans and British did not play by those rules, even though we did a lot of killing. This was not two equivalent evils.
http://foxtalk.tistory.com/98
Both my parents were in their early teens in Malaysia during the Japanese invasion and subsequent occupation. The both lived near (different) POW camps, and yes, they both agreed that the treatment of the British & Aussie POWs in those camps by the Japanese guards was brutal.
But they both say that when the roles were reversed and the Allies took back Malaysia, the treatment by Allied soldiers of the Japanese prisoners was equally as horrific. Call it 'revenge mentality' or anything else, but the truth is that it happened and they saw it happen with their own eyes. It is just not documented in the history books we read today.
My father had his bicycle commandeered by a Japanese soldier when the Imperial forces walked into Kuala Lumpur unopposed. The soldier politely asked to 'borrow' it and my dad's family knew better than to refuse. At the end of the war however, the same soldier knew defeat was coming so he actually sought out my father's family and returned the bike. It was a lot worse for wear, but he got it back.
Another Japanese officer gave my grandfather one of his ceremonial swords as a gift because he was going to go down to the river to commit seppuku rather than be captured by allied forces. Bushido or not, that sort of cultural belief was the norm back then.
My mother still speaks fondly of British POWs who she said were just young boys that she felt sorry for. She and her mother used to go down to the camp to collect the clothing of the POWs and the guards so they could mend them. Some of the English soldiers taught her to make toy bunny rabbits out of socks and she still remembers how to make them to this day.
She speaks of the sorrow of going down to the camp one day to return some uniforms only to find the place deserted. A remaining guard told her that the Allied POWs had been shipped off to Burma to build a railway. She cries even now when telling the story.
My mother actually still has some of the 'banana money' that was used by the Japanese in Malaysia during the occupation. Both my parents said that any actual fighting done by the Japanese forces was precise and directed against military installations in order to minimise civilian casualties.
My father's best friend lived among the labour camps on the ground of the KL railway station. When the initial Japanese air attack on the railway yards came, they bombed a few cars/buildings and shot out the clock tower (after dropping leaflets explaining that they would demonstrate their superiority by shooting out all the clock towers in KL). There were hardly any civilian casualties.
Conversely when the allied forces later counter attacked KL, they carpet bombed the railway yards, killing almost all the civilian labourers living there (including my dad's friend).
Perhaps it is because I heard all these first hand witness accounts while growing up that I always listen to any official war reports with a grain of salt. War is hell, and makes monsters of ALL the participants.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_Dossier
"The media seems to be right" until the war comes to you.
These stories are worth retelling... again and again.
Also, regarding "butchering civilian populations wholesale" see [1], [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_a...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo
To me there's not greatest lack of honour than committing perfidy in war.
[1] https://www.quora.com/Is-false-surrendering-a-war-crime
The japanese started suicide runs because the allies had a no prisoner policy.
"American soldiers in the Pacific often deliberately killed Japanese soldiers who had surrendered."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied_war_crimes_during_World...
Not only that the allies were tortured, mutilating and decapitating hundreds of thousands of wounded/surrendered japanese soldiers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_mutilation_of_Japanes...
That's why the japanese didn't surrender. What the allies were doing in the pacific war is something that even ISIS would view as deranged.
If false surrendering is a war crime, then so is torture, mutilation and "no prisoner" policy.
Why did the japanese soldiers stop surrendering? You have to look at the context. Would you surrender to someone who is going to torture you, mutilate you and decapitate you and boil your head so that your skull could be sent to the US as a war trophy? Of course not.
Most american POWs survived ww2 under japanese control. Almost no wounded or surrendering japanese survived ww2 under American control.
There was brutality on both side for sure. But the allies were especially racist and especially brutal. What the allies did in the pacific has no parallels in human history in terms of brutality and savagery on the battlefield.
Hundreds of thousands of japanese were tortured and mutilated. Hundreds of thousands of japanese were decapitated and their heads were boiled to make war trophies.
It is the ugly side of history hidden from view because the winners get to write the histories.
As I said, evil won ww2 and evil lost ww2.
> Many Americans considered them killing machines without heart with whom it was impossible to reason.
That doesn't explain the mutilation, torture and other depraved behavior by the allies. America was the most racist society on earth during ww2. The nazis modeled their racial ideology on the US for a reason.
The brutalizing of nonwhites has a long history in the US. The propaganda about the japanese being "unreasonable" or "suicidal" are lies we invented to hide our savage behavior. No different than our excuses for mutilating native americans and blacks.
FYI: The mutilating of non-whites continued in the korean war and the vietnam war. I guess they were "unreasonable" too... I guess all the blacks that were tortured and lynched were "unreasonable" as well.
Or maybe the US was just extremely racist.
Well, I can think of a few things that are way worse. Like torture and mutilation.
Perhaps you are not aware of the firebombing of German and Japanese cities, where as many or more civilians died as in the nuclear bomb detonations over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which perhaps you also forget.
The book makes a lot more sense once you understand Vonnegut's history with the bombing.
I'd be very appreciative if you could link to a source for this claim.
Millions of german women were raped by the allies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_during_the_occupation_of_...
Tens of thousands of japanese women were raped after ww2. The only reason that more japanese women weren't raped was because the japanese government provided "comfort women" for the allied troops.
Systematic? Is that a joke? Millions more german and japanese women were raped by the allies than vice versa.
Lets not belittle the german and japanese women who were raped.
What racist gibberish. It was "normal" just like it was normal for the allies. The allies did a lot more raping than the axis...
> Butchering civilian populations wholesale was normal.
And it was not normal for the allies? The allies murdered a lot more civilians than the axis.
> The Americans and British did not play by those rules
Is that a joke? Intentionally burning of millions of innocent women and children are what? The nuking of cities full of innocent civilians are what? We intentionally murdered a shitload of innocent civilians too. Lets not pretend otherwise.
> This was not two equivalent evils.
You could argue that the british/americans were more evil than the japanese/germans. I prefer to say evil is evil.
The fact that you think we were any better just shows that you are an unthinking person who mindlessly swallows propaganda. Or that you don't know what really went on in ww2.
The british were some of the worst genocidal maniacs in humans history ( aborigines, indians, africans, etc ). And we did our fair share of genocides ( native americans, inuits, etc ). We didn't go from mass lynching of blacks to turning into saints overnight. The US and Britain were two of the most racist and evil societies on earth in the 1940s. There is a reason why the nazis modeled their ideology after the british/american racial ideology.
Now it's quite possible that some of that was exaggerated and history as written by the victors. (authors like Leckie, Sledge, Jones ... have their books but didn't get too far)
But if your opponent is willing to surrender, it's generally a better tactic to let them surrender, than to have a no-prisoners policy that means their only hope for survival is to defeat you.
Not saying there was no racism, no brutality, no war crimes from the American side, but would need to see more evidence that the relative lack of prisoners was 100% due to American war criminality vs. how Japanese fought.
https://www.quora.com/Are-educated-Americans-no-longer-taugh...
When, exactly, would that be?
Not even the German government, engaged in attempting to exterminate the undesirable population of Europe? Or the German treatment of Soviet prisoners? Or Soviets of German prisoners?
Certainly, there was a lot of hatred and racism on the Allied side. (And then there the allegation of Patton's famous disinclination to accept the surrender of German soldiers who had just fired single-use anti-tank weapons at American forces.) But I think you're getting hyperbolic there.
Do you have a source for the hundreds of thousands of Japanese soldiers being tortured, mutilated, decapitated, and turned into war trophies?
They weren't more racist than the US/British. You could argue they were as racist since they modeled their racial ideology from the US/Britain.
> Or the German treatment of Soviet prisoners?
The german treatment of soviets and the soviet treatment of the germans were horrific. But nowhere close to the level of depravity that the allies in the pacific sunk to. The allies didn't just kill japanese POWs. The allies tortured and mutilated and decapitated hundreds of thousands of japanese soldiers. There are countless japanese skulls and all kinds of mutilated japanese body parts in the US because the GIs did so much mutilating in the pacific. No fighting force in ww2 engaged in such disgusting behavior.
> Do you have a source for the hundreds of thousands of Japanese soldiers being tortured, mutilated, decapitated, and turned into war trophies?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_mutilation_of_Japanes...
It was so prevalent that LIFE magazine ran a cover story on it...
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/b5/LIFE_May_1944...
It was so prevalent that FDR, the leader of the free world, was fiddling with the bones of a tortured japanese soldier in the oval office.
"On June 13, 1944, the press reported that President Roosevelt had been presented with a letter-opener made out of a Japanese soldier's arm bone by Francis E. Walter, a Democratic congressman.[4] Supposedly, the president commented, "This is the sort of gift I like to get", and "There'll be plenty more such gifts"
"In 1984, Japanese soldiers' remains were repatriated from the Mariana Islands. Roughly 60 percent were missing their skulls"
More than 70,000 japanese were killed in marina. If 60% were missing their skulls, that means more than 42,000 skulls sent to the US. That's just one island campaign...
You don't learn about this in school. As I said, evil won ww2 and evil lost ww2. There was no good guy in ww2.
That is the propaganda/"history" that I am talking about. If you look at previous battles/wars, the japanese soldiers did surrender. The japanese soldiers did surrender in the beginning of the pacific war to the allies and they were brutally slaughtered, tortured and mutilated. It was part of the racist "no prisoner" policy by the extremely racist allied soldiers. That's why the japanese stopped surrendering.
The myth of the "unsurrendering" japanese was created after ww2 by "historians" to justify the absolutely absurd casualty rates that the japanese endured. Many of these battles in the pacific had deaths rates of 100%. That's unheard of in wars, unless one side was completely genocidal. Meaning there were 0 wounded 0 japanese POWs. What this means is that the allied soldiers simply massacred the japanese soldiers and went around killing wounded japanese soldiers. We know this happened because we have video footage of allied soldiers killing wounded japanese soldiers.
> and had been taught to expect mistreatment from Americans similar to what Japan dished out on e.g. the Bataan Death March.
The Bataan March was "myth". Hundreds of thousands of japanese POWs were tortured and mutilated and massacred by american soldiers. Maybe 100 americans soldiers were killed in the bataan march. Maybe. The propagandist myth of the bataan march certainly influenced the savage behavior of allied soldiers, but the allied soldiers in the pacific were from some of the most savage and racist societies on earth. We pretend that nazi germany and imperial japan were "racist", but we were just as racist as they were and much of axis racial ideology was copied from US/British racial ideology.
> But if your opponent is willing to surrender, it's generally a better tactic to let them surrender, than to have a no-prisoners policy that means their only hope for survival is to defeat you.
Right. Unfortunately, racist hatred wouldn't allow the allied soldiers to let the japanese surrender. That's why the japanese soldiers fought so hard. That's why the kamikazes only came into existence against the allied soldiers. The japanese never exhibited that behavior against the russians, chinese, etc.
> Not saying there was no racism, no brutality, no war crimes from the American side, but would need to see more evidence that the relative lack of prisoners was 100% due to American war criminality vs. how Japanese fought.
"American soldiers in the Pacific often deliberately killed Japanese soldiers who had surrendered."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied_war_crimes_during_World...
"But the Japanese wasn't dead. He had been wounded severely in the back and couldn't move his arms; otherwise he would have resisted to his last breath... "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_mutilation_of_Japanes...
"In 1984, Japanese soldiers' remains were repatriated from the Mariana Islands. Roughly 60 percent were missing their skulls."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariana_and_Palau_Islands_camp...
If you do the math, pretty much all of the japanese on these islands were killed ( 70K+ ) and tens of thousands of these soldiers were tortured, decapitated and had their heads boiled for war trophies.
In ww2, you can objectively say th...
There are people who say the German concentration camps were 'myths' too. There are memes that propagate because they serve someone's agenda... maybe the same applies to the narrative that the "allied soldiers [i.e. Americans] in the pacific were from some of the most savage and racist societies on earth."
Fortunately, there are professional historians that try to sort through this stuff.
"100–650 American prisoners of war died on the march before they reached their destination."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bataan_Death_March
I'm not saying the march didn't happen. I'm just saying that the propaganda surrounding the bataan "death" march is a myth. Growing up, you'd think it was worst thing in the world. But then you learn that hardly any americans died and that those americans who died were invaders/colonizers of the philiphines themselves and just as evil as the japanese invaders. That's what I'm getting at.
> There are people who say the German concentration camps were 'myths' too.
Okay? What does that have to do with what is being discussed?
Revisionism FTW.
If both sides are equally evil in your view, would you say you are indifferent to which side ended up winning WWII? Is it a mistake on my part to assume you would be indifferent had the Axis powers achieved complete and utter victory over the Allies? After all, they are both equally evil.
Seeing as you seem to be claiming that both sides were equally evil, I'm very interested in your views on how you think the victorious Axis powers would have treated those they defeated.
Whatever may be said of the crimes committed by both sides during the war, it seems to me that both Japan and Germany fared rather well after surrender considering they were both completely defeated. We are not all that far removed from WWII and yet today Japan and Germany are both overwhelmingly populated by the descendants of Germans and Japanese, not the descendants of foreign conquerors, and enjoy some of the highest qualities of life in the industrialized world.
I'm curious how you think Jews in Germany, or Europe, or indeed the rest of the world would have fared under an Axis victory. Do you think there would be any meaningful Jewish community left in Germany or Europe? How do you feel the Roma, or Slavs or homosexuals would have fared? How would the populations of the Korean peninsula, Taiwan, China, the Philippines and elsewhere in Asia have fared in the subsequent decades of a Japanese victory in the Pacific? Would these communities have fared as well in defeat as the Germans and Japanese have?
As an american, of course I'm glad the US won. All I'm saying is that the US wasn't any better than anyone else. We weren't saints. And certainly the brits, who had been brutalizing africans, indians, chinese, aborigines, etc for centuries weren't saints either.
> Is it a mistake on my part to assume you would be indifferent had the Axis powers achieved complete and utter victory over the Allies? After all, they are both equally evil.
As an american, of course I would care. The point is whether one was more evil than the other?
> Seeing as you seem to be claiming that both sides were equally evil, I'm very interested in your views on how you think the victorious Axis powers would have treated those they defeated.
Pretty much exactly the same as british treated their colonies? You do realize that europeans had been raping, pillaging and exploiting much of the world before ww2 right?
> it seems to me that both Japan and Germany fared rather well after surrender considering they were both completely defeated.
Initially no. Japan, especially, were brutalized by the allies after ww2 because of racial hatred while germany was built up because of racial "pride". Lets not forget that we destroyed japanese infrastructure and pretty much starved them for years before the korean war broke out. While white europe god the marshall plan, asiatic japan got starvation.
> We are not all that far removed from WWII and yet today Japan and Germany are both overwhelmingly populated by the descendants of Germans and Japanese,
What's your point?
> I'm curious how you think Jews in Germany, or Europe, or indeed the rest of the world would have fared under an Axis victory.
Not too well. Just like the natives in the US/canada and the aborigines in australia. I bet every palestinian wishes that the axis had won...
> Do you think there would be any meaningful Jewish community left in Germany or Europe?
No more than there are meaningful natives in us/canada or aborigines in australia.
> How do you feel the Roma, or Slavs or homosexuals would have fared?
The roma/slavs would have been germanified. The homosexuals would be brutalized like Alan Turing was by the british.
> How would the populations of the Korean peninsula, Taiwan, China, the Philippines and elsewhere in Asia have fared in the subsequent decades of a Japanese victory in the Pacific?
They would have been japanofied and not much would have changed since most of asia had been under brutal european domination anyways.
> Would these communities have fared as well in defeat as the Germans and Japanese have?
You are making arbitrary assertions just to push your agenda.
If the axis had won, there would have been WINNERS and LOSERS. Just like if the allies had won.
Yes, the jews would have suffered. But the arabs/palestinians and most of the world suffering under european colonization would have rejoiced.
After all, many people around the world supported japan and germany. Much of the independence movements throughout the middle east and asia was supported by japan and germany. Not only that, in asia, the japanese soldiers even stayed behind after ww2 ended and joined independence movements to fight the returned savage european colonialists.
And his own story is Hellish by any standard. In the third volume particularly, his group gets caught by enemy fire and are presumed dead. When he makes it back to camp, they has already reported them as dead. This turns out to be an embarrassment and they are effectively told to go back into the jungle and die. Some do.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yokosuka_MXY7_Ohka
You don't lose planes for fun.
Katas and karate punches and kicks - most of this better thought of more as dancing or ceremonial. A bit like Tai Chi - except that Tai Chi claims no real world martial value.
The myth remains however of karate being great self defence training.
Our local karate club is packed with ever more kids going every week to learn pointless moves, with parents thinking the kids are learning to defend themselves.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcc0jNJwgJA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HQnuWY13ac
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iw4xFD-47Q
I've seen people finding it very useful as an influence in HEMA where 9/10th of the difficulty lies in reading your opponent to know when and how they will attack.
It's also immensely useful for demonstrating the importance of footwork, as the last video you link to (by the English-speaking Wing Chun instructor -- even if his style isn't "really" Tai Chi) shows very beautifully.
Edit: I mean that it's more usable in real life.
There are many schools of Aikido. I studied in an American dojo that incorporated street-fighting skills. Also substantial work with staff and wooden sword.
The core issue with karate is that it is loaded with formal or ritualistic representations of fighting. Karate kicks, punches and blocks are all hopelessly unusable when fighting a boxer for example, who is trained to defend their head and hit their opponents head hard and fast. By contrast, few, if any, karate stances are explicitly defending the head from being hit. The more extreme examples include holding the fist at the hip - a truly useless place for a fist to be during a fight.
Primary head defense in most karate stances is distance.
Distance did not help. At best, a punch or kick or two were thrown, and then the grappler was able to close the distance, and then anyone who didn't study grappling (or at least wrestling) was at a massive disadvantage, and the fight quickly ended in the grappler's favor.
BJJ is probably the most useful for self-defense (personal opinion), but it's also the most complicated to learn. It covers ground fighting better than wrestling or judo, which is where many situations will eventually end up. If I had to pick one, excluding MMA (which is basically a combination of everything listed), I would make it this.
Wrestling and judo for takedowns and takedown defense. Judo is more complicated and difficult to learn than wrestling (imo), but, depending on your age and physique, wrestling may be of limited use to you (a 50+ year old will likely have trouble applying many of the wrestling takedowns). A lot of what you'd need from these two would be covered in a BJJ school anyway, just with less time and focus spent on those areas.
Boxing and kickboxing to learn how to defend yourself from strikes. Again, depending on age and phyisque they may otherwise be of limited use, since an older or smaller person is unlikely to be punching with knockout power, and would run a higher risk of breaking bones in their hands when striking.
An MMA school would tend to cover all of that, but they may be more focused on competition than self-defense, which will affect what they teach you and how you train. Same problem with BJJ schools - a lot are more concerned with tournaments than self-defense, which can change the focus of your practice considerably.
Basically, if you're not actually fighting, you don't know how to fight. It would be like learning how to program, except you've never actually written a program before.
If you're in Australia, this group seems legit (I used to train with them years ago): http://www.tesoma.com
In general, any martial school that focuses not on competition, can be good (the set of techniques are not really that different, they're all ways for one human to break another human - physics and biology dictates what falls out as efficient).
Judo can be efficient self-defence in a club that tries to focus on the early martial arts curriculum (but generally fails miserably at teaching strikes and kicks). One benefit of judo is that it (should) teach good ukemi (how to fall) - I usually say that knowing ukemi is knowing how to block the ground. A large number of real-world injuries come from hitting your head on the ground or on the curb, so being able to get up (and run away) from being thrown to the ground is a good start. Not to mention some grappling can go a long way if you find yourself in an intimate situation that you only too late realize is turning into an attack. This also holds for brazilian ju-jutsu (which despite it's name is more like early judo practice, than traditional ju-jutsu) -- but I've yet to see many bjj dojos that have a reasonable focus on throws and efficient ukemi (which makes sense, if you focus on a sport that does mostly take-downs and not throws).
That said, most big martial arts can be great for self-defence, if the instructors have an interest and are competent in self-defence. But practising real-life self-defence isn't really pleasant - so doesn't go well with typical "martial arts for exercise" type programs.
I studied Tang Soo Do for many years, and the really useful self defense techniques were not taught until I got my black belt, and we started learning techniques from different martial arts.
This teaching was deferred primarily because the useful techniques can be extremely dangerous to practice (strikes to the throat being a good example, and grappling techniques where you maximize leverage with the intention of breaking bones).
MMA can mean many things; I usually read it as the modern circus that is UFC etc - a sport.
Krav Maga is self defence (or self offence, it's pretty violent; it's for situations where you'd be justified in using lethal force, not for "scuffles"). It's simple, and has a curriculum that's built around survival; you'll typically see something that looks a lot like Krav Maga in any martial arts self defence class (if it's any good). And you can typically find "krav Maga" techniques in any martial art. For example one of the first techniques thought in taekwondo is the straight front kick, the first movement of the kick is lifting the knee - so you start practicing a knee to the groin as a white belt. But sadly you could become a fifth Dan in taekwondo and not even realize that, because of the sorry state of self defence in a lot of taekwondo dojangs.
Taekwondo, I think, long ago parted ways with any intention of being an art of self defense, if that intention was ever there to begin with.
Two typical examples are: tomoenage that in its original jujitsu form was a kick to the groin, but in judo is a foot to the hip; first you can't go and kick your practice partners full force to the groin (without them wearing protection - hence you can't really practice the actual technique) , and second if you kick someone in the groin they'll roll up, and the throw becomes ineffective (although you could argue that a good kick or two to the groin is usually quite enough. But only if you actually hit. A good landing on the head is also quite effective). And ipponseionage which in a jujitsu variant involves crossing the arms in an elbow lock, hoping to break the lower arm in the throw - but also becomes a slower and less efficient technique.
So the safe set of judo techniques makes for very good sparring practice. But it won't prepare you for a thumb in the eye or a bite to the face. Or being stomped on the head while grappling.
One of the unfortunate lessons I learned early on in real life, is that "self defense" systems which only cover one-on-one fighting (eg the Tae Kwon Do schools I've seen) are close to useless in real life. eg in a bar fight, or a group of drunks decides to pick on you when you walk past. I'd studied Tae Kwon Do for about fours years before discovering this (the hard way doh!). :/
With Ninjutsu and Arnis (at least some schools), training for combat against multiple opponents is a core part of it. So, less likely to suck in real world situations.
But if what one wants to learn is primarily "self defence", then one has to, unsurprisingly, practice self defence. Practice the type of situations you want to defend yourself from. I could probably link to videos all day, but eg: this one with Phil Thompson explains some of the basics (despite the cheezy intro):
"Protect Self Defence on TV3's Pacific Beat Street" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLkKE-gSuj0
Some more snippets with Thompson:
"Self-Defence Seminar with Phil Thompson - The Passive Stance" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9cU6yGSgB8
"Self-Defence Seminar with Phil Thompson - Wrist Grabs" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlI3rzsml_g
There's also something to be learned from military martial arts, like (this is more typical Martial Arts wanking, so to speak, but I really love this guy):
"Systema Demonstartion on Korean Special Forces" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfHfua9ku4s
Note, don't put too much emphasis on the "Systema"-bit, DK Yoo probably holds high level dan grades in more martial arts styles than I even know about. That said, Systema is a very interesting style - developed by and for the Russian/Soviet special forces with inspiration from traditional Russian wrestling and judo -- it's a surprisingly soft style for a modern military martial art. Like man other styles, if you can find a good instructor/dojo I'm sure it can be a perfectly fine approach to self defence. But as Thompson says above, it's not the physical techniques that are the hard part.
The reason I call out Krav Maga (developed from practical self defence in the Warsaw ghettoes, and evolved by the Isreali military and special forces) is that it is modern (as in new), it has a pretty reasonable and well-functioning system of grading instructors - so if something "really is" Krav Maga, it's a bit easier to know a little about the quality of the training - unlike, say "karate" or "jujutsu" - or "taekwondo" (which encompass everything from the funny stuff that is in the olympics to more traditional stuff that is closer to the founder's original vision [ed: note that the second two videos with Thompson is from a taekwondo seminar, so there are obviously still places where you can practice taewkondo and actually learn something useful]) - and the general civilian training (to the best of my knowledge) has a strong focus on self-defence - practising actually useful stuff like verbal assault, multiple attackers, situation awareness and so on.
It very much is a system for self defence, while most other things one could practice ends up being "martial arts with self defence added on". Personally I prefer that, I don't really enjoy practising just self defence - not to mention the fact that I'm not entirely convinced there are enough situations that are dangerous enough that I really need to defend myself violently, and yet not so dangerous that I won't simply be stabbed to death or shot -- that's its really worth the effort to practice all that much with the aim of self defence.
But practising any kind of physical confrontation for fun will boost confide...
Most people are better off learning combat systems aimed towards personal defense:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krav_Maga
For self defense (which I am not interested in), something brutal and simple will be better. In fact, the brutal-er and simpler the better. Learn how to get hurt badly and still keep going for defense. Practice groin and throat strikes for offense.
Judo is much simpler than aikido, but not hugely brutal. Still, if I were suddenly required to try and defend myself with some aspect of my martial arts training (unlikely), I'd be much more likely to call on my judo than my aikido.
Focus on practicality in martial arts is kind of boring, and is largely irrelevant for most people unless we're talking about boosting confidence. And then, best not let your confidence convince you that violence isn't likely to hurt or kill you.
You need to take a long view of the martial arts, instead of a short one. Two years of practice won't teach you jack shit. A lifetime of it can be very fulfulling.
Many people have difficulty seeing the benefits in kata training, but it really is one of the best ways to learn to apply techniques correctly.
As for practicality, what does that even mean? Do you frequently need to punch people in the teeth?
I studied it for a few years as a kid, and came to a similar conclusion but had assumed it was that particular flavour of karate being an overly formalised, functionally ceremonious, branch emphasising discipline, flexibility and strength over fighting prowess.
A foundation, rather than an end-product if you will.
The modus operandi in karate is "Immoblize your enemy as fast as possible". Immobilize in this context means kill or knock out and ASAP means instantly. There is nothing more vicious out there than Kyokushin.
(Disclaimer: I am a complete layman.)
Also, for those advocating Aikido: how many Aikido guys excel in MMA? (Only a slightly rhetorical question--I could very well be wrong.)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Thompson_(fighter)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyoto_Machida
That said, someone that's been boxing for a few years is more likely to win against someone who has no form of fight training. But he might not win against someone who's been in regular fights the past few years.
People that actually fight, do so to win. That usually means two, three on one, bringing a weapon against someone that's unarmed etc. Being able to choke someone out doesn't help all that much if his buddy is going to knife you in the neck while you're doing it.
As for Aikido, I love Aikdo. And if trained for self-defence, it could probably work well enough - but that requires training in an environment where you have people around you to that know how to use the attacks your trying to defend against. I've rarely seen an Aikido dojo with people that are good at kicking, kneeing, punching and elbowing people. It's not even that often you'll see people with a decade of real judo practice under their belt. Without a few decades worth of such experience, it becomes impossible to truly practice Aikido techniques with an aim for self defence. If nothing else, there's a strong tradition for practising defence against multiple attackers in Aikido.
On the other hand, in terms of being fit, clear of mind, of freeing oneself from the idea that one has something prove, letting go of ones pride -- those are things that can certainly get one out of fights. And situational awareness and not being a moron is probably 99% of the key to successful self defence.
After all, if you know you're headed to a fight, you'd be better off going the other way, or pre-emptively calling the police, or getting some help - so that the fight can be avoided.
As for Karate - it can certainly be a good foundation for self defence. But there are numerous styles, and numerous ways of approaching Karate. If your focus in competition sports, it's unlikely you'll end up great at self defence.
As for situations with several opponents, possibly with weapons, I don't think there is a style that will save you here except the old run-fu.
Predictably, more practical and direct styles like boxing and grappling form the bread and butter for most participants and make up the majority of fights. But interestingly, very high-level practitioners of traditional styles, such as karate and taekwondo, are actually extremely effective, and among some of the best fighters in the sport.
I suspect a lot of the fake and impractical looking techniques in e.g. karate are actually useful, but only when practicing at a very high level. I also suspect that this may be by design - to weed out thugs and impatient pupils from the ranks before teaching actually useful martial technique.
I was training a kati (kata in Chinese) that was very flowery (literally, the name of the routine had the word "flower" in it).
It felt useless and so I asked the teacher what some weirder moves were used for...
First thing he was pleased I asked, most students doesn't. Then he showed me... it was just brutal, several moves were bone breaking grappling moves designed to be used as counter attacks.
I suspect most practitioners don't know this because people don't want to learn this grossly violent stuff, and so teachers don't make and effort to teach what exactly they are learning, and several of the moves were risky and opportunistic, not the thing a newbie can pull off in actual combat.
There's good evidence that there is usefulness in karate for self defense. Lyoto Machida is an MMA fighter who at one point was #1 in the world in his weight class, and he uses a lot from karate (he has a lot of karate heritage as well as training). He won a fight a fight via crane kick, which is a technique from vs a former #1 LHW and HW fighter, I found it on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVSGQ_FRs3k
For self defense it's also probably useful to do routine exercise, stretches, etc., so in that sense it's also probably helpful.
Boxing, wrestling, and submission-style training such as jiu jitsu are the most effective hand to hand combat techniques, but even then it's still not entirely practical. Humans are evolved to fight with weapons, so it's all kind of pointless anyways. I once saw a little girl quickly dispatch a scary-looking guy with pepper spray.
I don't do any martial arts stuff, but I those going to the MMA gym that talk shit to those that do karate is just the pot calling the kettle black, aside from being immature.
English version here (the original is in Spanish... we'll have to trust the (apparently uncredited) translator on this one)
http://www.erudit.org/revue/ttr/2010/v23/n2/1009160ar.html
As an aside, it seems that Project Gutenberg has the text of Nitobe's book that the article discusses:
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/12096/12096-h/12096-h.htm
If you're interested in the subject, that might be a good place to start: https://open.library.ubc.ca/cIRcle/collections/ubctheses/24/...
I guess i'm super conservative about sourcing when reading arguments made about historical topics (and academic papers at least tend to make it clear whether or not their sourcing is primary, secondary, or what).
Especially when it comes to claims of what the common perception was at any particular point in human history i am always curious to see not what someone's narrative is, but what they're building their case upon.
(also as an aside the use of The Last Samurai as a lens or touchstone for discussing bushido was a bit weird to me given how prevalent the notion of bushido is. But maybe i'm just sad that that's the go-to reference.)
Yeah, there's a good chance The Last Samurai might currently be the most popular lens through which people view bushido right now (Americans at least). I share your sadness but I'm sure most people actually have multiple points of reference on the concept. Would be funny if it continued to evolve into something completely different (something featuring Tom Cruise?)
Also, some of my favourite graphic novels by Stan Sakai, Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima seem to mention the term too, but seeing as they are modern writers, I assume they 'westernised' their dialogue to suit.
I'm not sure about the author level of Japanese, but when he said that the term "bushido" was not used but the terms "bushi no michi" existed before, well it's the exact same thing. 武士道 is bushido and 武士の道 is bushi no michi. The exact same writing, but a slightly different expression. It can't be that far off of a concept.
People of my club are more interested in it because katana are cool than the bushidô spirit or something -- basically nobody ever talked about it. Anyway, when everybody train I cannot help to feel the underlying military spirit of the it, and how in a society like Japan it can quickly turn the way it turned in WWII.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iaido
Rather that our studies are for mental focus, fitness and spiritual calmness. These are the exact reasons I took up the study of this art.
In my younger days, I studied Tae Kwon Do for years, but as most other have said here - it has no real practical value in a street fight either, aside from extra fitness, flexibility and general peripheral awareness which may serve as an advantage in a conflict situation.
Interestingly enough, from the 6 different clubs (aikidô, karate, iaidô, nippon kenpô, shaolin temple box, sumô) that were demonstrating their art at some event, the most effective or useful one seemed to be... sumô and nippon kenpô. The sumô dudes were very strong and had serious skill for putting done someone on the ground. The boxer kicks were pretty serious too. On the other side, the way people falled on aikidô kata seemed pretty fake, not to mention the karate dudes fighting thin air.
I couldn´t believe it for myself until a girl, two heads smaller than me and probably a third of my weight, brought me to the floor. There´s nothing fake in it. There is just pain if you resist, so you don´t.
And besides that, the goal of aikidô is to prove the enemy that attacking you will not help him with anything. It´s not meant to overcome him with force, by pain or injuries. It´s very spiritual and different to other dôs.
(I did aikidô for five years during university.)
It's one thing to pull it off against a training partner who is using a known subset of attacks and when you know they're coming. Different when you're in a chaotic self-defense situation and facing a fully-resisting opponent who will try anything to win.
You need a much higher level of skill to deal with the latter than the former. It's the same as how a really good boxer can (against a less skilled opponent) just drop his hands and bob-and-weave to avoid strikes, but an average or unskilled boxer can't afford to try fancy, high-risk techniques, when simpler tactics are a much safer way to win the fight.
That's the biggest problem with stuff like aikido for self-defense. Taking an average person and giving them six months or so of aikido training will NOT make them able to effortlessly toss around men 3x their size who are seriously trying to hurt them, and telling them that it will is selling them a dangerous lie. Even if they put in decades of training, they're still relying on relatively high-risk techniques when there are other more reliable ones.
I don't mean to crap on anyone's favorite styles. Aikido is an art form with some self-defense applications, and it's great for that. But a lot of people don't understand how hard it is to beat someone who is massively bigger and stronger than you, and it's doing them a dangerous disservice to market it to them as more than that.
(~5 years previous experience in tae kwon do, muay thai, BJJ, and hapkido, among others.)
In aikido, the point around which someone falls can often be floating unintuitively in space after a combined sequence of off balancings that are neither intuitive nor natural. I study aikido primarily today--not because it is easy, but because it's hard. I'm also utterly unconcerned with self defense. I train for those moments when everything is in alignment and either I or my training partner go vaulting effortlessly through the air. I wouldn't count on that happening in real life.
In terms of self defense, people are almost always better off 1. giving an attacker what they want in terms of money or belongings, 2. Running away, 3. Fighting dirty--in that order.
The principles and techniques can be very effective, but it depends on what/how you train (or who you train with).
There are many reasons to train, and based on your reasons, you should choose the martial art you wish to study, and also the teacher/school where to study. That said, it can be a great idea to study with a good teacher (but of an art you are less keen on) who is close by, than the perfect martial art which you can only get to infrequently.
Aikido isn't the best art to quickly learn how to defend yourself if that's all you want to do. But it has many pluses - "old man's judo" as a friend of mine said - you can keep going and keep getting better (if you practice) inspite of age...
I can recommend: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Meditations-Violence-Comparison-Mar... for some thought provoking reading and study.
I mainly do aikido because it's insanely difficult (at least by my estimation having done judo and a somewhat more traditional jujitsu) and a good workout. I don't think aikido or most other martial arts are particularly good for self defense. Actual violence is ugly and unpredictable.
http://nononsenseselfdefense.com/four_focuses.html
Unsurprisingly, it puts what I teach (HEMA) almost entirely in category 2, though some parts might be very slightly relevant to some of the other areas from time to time.
Kendo has pluses and minuses - the shinai used can teach habits of "flicking wrists" which just don't work with heavier weapons. And yet advanced practitioners have serious focus and skills.
I much admire a female Japanese friend (and sempai) who was told by our sensei to go and study kendo (while not slacking off in her other studies). In her fifties, and a 5th dan, off she went and started from scratch but made rapid progress, and brought back what she had learned. Our sensei told other people to do different things - horses for courses.
But what does it mean "to fight"? No rules? For your life? For someone else's life? These are the fundamental questions to be examined and resolved. How would you know if you are ready?
However, the finer techniques of grip and striking style - while beneficial for honing and improving all of the above, have little relevance in a street fight situation.
But even if my Kendo study gives me the balance and a millisecond better reaction time to be able to pivot out of harms way and dodge a blow, and if it gives me the endurance to run the heck away from a danger scenario, then it is all worthwhile.
The people in your club who are there because katanas are cool will all quit within the next 3 years. Some may last 5. None will last 60 unless they get over the coolness factor and see it for what it is.
That being said, iaido is great. It's a good physical and mental workout. It'll teach you a lot about yourself, a bit like meditating but with sword in hand. There will be endless repetition in a search for unattainable perfection. It certainly can be 'spiritual' in a sense.
Source: over 2 decades of martial arts and nearly 2 decades of iaido.
But given how much 1 and 2nd year and how few 3rd year and upper there is, you seems totally right on your point. Actually I was wondering why there was so few of them, but I guess the cultural background also plays a lot; 4th year mostly focus on searching a job and not a lot of student do a master degree.
And sure it have the beneficial effects you point (I started it partly to correct my posture), but I think putting too much emphasis on the spiritual side is a kind of Orientalism bias.
But after they leave, the majority stop, or do maybe once a week at most. A friend of mine carried on to do a PhD, so was able to continue quite a lot - 20+ years later he is 6th dan!
It's like Homer's epics: nowadays they are mostly restricted to students of literature or historians, but their influence on Western culture throughout history is massive.
The Meiji era (and the Taisho era after it) were times of a very bizarre "formalization" of japanese culture. Like other comments mention, things like karate, kendo, ekinaba, art of sword making, etc. etc. were all formalized and unified under one umbrella at this time. Before say "karate" you'd have different schools teaching different martial arts under different names around the country.
I actually don't have a very good grasp on why this happened
1. http://www.economist.com/node/10102921
http://www.mountvernon.org/digital-encyclopedia/article/cher...
[EDIT:] Honestly though, since this allowance comes so late and is not connected back to the main narrative, it does undermine the whole mess. Next up, a hard-hitting takedown of Thomas Malory and Alfred Lord Tennyson...
The history gets rewritten all the time. It is simpler to define and understand it as geological depositions of bullshit.
Archeology is a bit better. (The same, but without the bull- part, literally.)
1) Scots wearing different patterned kilts to denote clans. This was mostly invented by Sir Walter Scott
2) Druid rituals. Druids were wiped out by the Romans, and the only accounts left of their rituals are Roman. What we now think of Druid rituals are a mixture of Roman writings and stuff made up in the 19th century.
Note how you can see something of the same with how knights and related honor codes gets embraced by extremists across Europe (in particular in times of hardship).
Similarly, the post-ww1 British administrators of what became Irak elevated the bedouin on a pedestal[1]. And the region is paying the price to this day.
[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/2989a78a-ee94-...
Does that not exemplify similar values as us (Westerners) expect from the term 'Bushido'? Was the former a very rare isolated incident and not actually representative of samurai ethos?
[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0056058 [2] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0061847