Japanese "Co-Prosperity Sphere": What was it really?

[Alaska Hawaii and the Aleutes]

Oh god, you are so foolish. Look at Unit 731! They were obsessed with themselves and only them. The others were for them creatures you could experiment on. The Japanese were fanatic! Kamikaze is fanatic! Unit 731 is fanatic! They were monsters and paid for it. They brought pain and suffering to everyone except themselves!

Exclamation marks do not really improve the argument.

Sure, let me rewrite it without the exclamation marks.
Oh god, you are so foolish. Look at Unit 731. They were obsessed with themselves and only them. The others were for them creatures you could experiment on. The Japanese were fanatic. Kamikaze is fanatic. Unit 731 is fanatic. They were monsters and paid for it. They brought pain and suffering to everyone except themselves.

[Marxist Germany]

To all those defending the Japanese empire: Unit 731

This doesn’t change the fact that the Empire of Japan was net beneficial to humanity.

I know very well that your clean and moral world can not exist and any attempt to establish it will only cause horrors to be worse.

The Nazis too built a few roads here and there, does that make them a net benefit to humanity? Your arguments are weak, and building infrastructure does not justify genocide. Moreover, I fail to see how committing atrocities prevents "worse" atrocities from happening.

[Alaska Hawaii and the Aleutes]

To all those defending the Japanese empire: Unit 731

Thousands of men, women, children and infants interned at prisoner of war camps were subjected to vivisection, often without anesthesia and usually ending with the death of the victim.[25][26] Vivisections were performed on prisoners after infecting them with various diseases. Researchers performed invasive surgery on prisoners, removing organs to study the effects of disease on the human body.

[...]

Prisoners had limbs amputated in order to study blood loss. Those limbs that were removed were sometimes re-attached to the opposite sides of the body. Some prisoners had their stomachs surgically removed and the esophagus reattached to the intestines. Parts of organs, such as the brain, lungs, and liver, were removed from some prisoners.

[...]

At least 12 large-scale field trials of biological weapons were performed, and at least 11 Chinese cities were attacked with biological agents. An attack on Changda in 1941 reportedly led to approximately 10,000 biological casualties and 1,700 deaths among ill-prepared Japanese troops, with most cases due to cholera.[4] Japanese researchers performed tests on prisoners with bubonic plague, cholera, smallpox, botulism, and other diseases.[33] This research led to the development of the defoliation bacilli bomb and the flea bomb used to spread bubonic plague.[34] Some of these bombs were designed with porcelain shells, an idea proposed by Ishii in 1938.

[...]

During the final months of World War II, Japan planned to use plague as a biological weapon against San Diego, California. The plan was scheduled to launch on September 22, 1945, but Japan surrendered five weeks earlier.[35][36][37][38] Plague fleas, infected clothing and infected supplies encased in bombs were dropped on various targets. The resulting cholera, anthrax, and plague were estimated to have killed at least 400,000 Chinese civilians.[39] Tularemia was also tested on Chinese civilians.[40]

[...]

Army Engineer Hisato Yoshimura conducted experiments by taking captives outside, dipping various appendages into water, and allowing the limb to freeze.[49] Once frozen, which testimony from a Japanese officer said "was determined after the 'frozen arms, when struck with a short stick, emitted a sound resembling that which a board gives when it is struck'",[50] ice was chipped away and the area doused in water, limbs brought close to fire and other "methods" used to determine the effect it had on frostbite. The effects of different water temperatures were tested by bludgeoning the victim to determine if any areas were still frozen.

[...]

"Infection of venereal disease by injection was abandoned, and the researchers started forcing the prisoners into sexual acts with each other. Four or five unit members, dressed in white laboratory clothing completely covering the body with only eyes and mouth visible, rest covered, handled the tests. A male and female, one infected with syphilis, would be brought together in a cell and forced into sex with each other. It was made clear that anyone resisting would be shot."

[...]

Female prisoners were forced to become pregnant for use in experiments. The hypothetical possibility of vertical transmission (from mother to child) of diseases, particularly syphilis, was the stated reason for the torture. Fetal survival and damage to mother's reproductive organs were objects of interest. Though "a large number of babies were born in captivity", there have been no accounts of any survivors of Unit 731, children included. It is suspected that the children of female prisoners were killed after birth or aborted.

Already told them about Unit 731, but great to have so many examples!

[The Huskar Social Union]

A shit cover for Japanese Imperialism and colonialism across Asia and Oceania.

[Polska Rzeczpospolita Robotnicza]

To all those defending the Japanese empire: Unit 731

This doesn’t change the fact that the Empire of Japan was net beneficial to humanity.

I know very well that your clean and moral world can not exist and any attempt to establish it will only cause horrors to be worse.

Net beneficial being when you slaughter the helpless and enforce a colonial hegemony upon East Asia in order to bring one thing and one thing alone to Japan, the profits of raping Asia dry. Some 'net beneficial' right there. Bet you don't care though because you either view the people that the Japs exploited as subhuman anyway or you will deny that they were ever that insanely cruel towards people. The Empire of Japan was an incredibly terrible regime that was as much a 'net gain' for Humanity as smallpox or the plague. The only good thing they did was surrender after WW2 and even then they didn't do it properly as anyone who has looked at the Soviet-Japanese conflict will see.

The fact that you think that the massacres committed by Japan are even acceptable because a 'moral world can not exist' is completely ridiculous and shows that you are entirely bankrupt of any sense of ethics or even common sense (since the brutality that the Japanese showed the Chinese was so horrific and cruel that it just made China fight harder and hate the Japanese even more).

[Nekostan-e Gharbi]

This doesn’t change the fact that the Empire of Japan was net beneficial to humanity.

I know very well that your clean and moral world can not exist and any attempt to establish it will only cause horrors to be worse.

The Nazis too built a few roads here and there, does that make them a net benefit to humanity? Your arguments are weak, and building infrastructure does not justify genocide. Moreover, I fail to see how committing atrocities prevents "worse" atrocities from happening.

Nazism is in a very different category since its goal was extermination of peoples. It is impossible to be worse than them by definition.

[Nekostan-e Gharbi]

This doesn’t change the fact that the Empire of Japan was net beneficial to humanity.

I know very well that your clean and moral world can not exist and any attempt to establish it will only cause horrors to be worse.

Net beneficial being when you slaughter the helpless and enforce a colonial hegemony upon East Asia in order to bring one thing and one thing alone to Japan, the profits of raping Asia dry. Some 'net beneficial' right there. Bet you don't care though because you either view the people that the Japs exploited as subhuman anyway or you will deny that they were ever that insanely cruel towards people. The Empire of Japan was an incredibly terrible regime that was as much a 'net gain' for Humanity as smallpox or the plague. The only good thing they did was surrender after WW2 and even then they didn't do it properly as anyone who has looked at the Soviet-Japanese conflict will see.

The fact that you think that the massacres committed by Japan are even acceptable because a 'moral world can not exist' is completely ridiculous and shows that you are entirely bankrupt of any sense of ethics or even common sense (since the brutality that the Japanese showed the Chinese was so horrific and cruel that it just made China fight harder and hate the Japanese even more).

There will always be the strong and the weak. Better let different people be strong to prevent something like Nazism than illegalizing strength which ironically requires overwhelming power to accomplish.

[Odreria]

In sum, all the raping and murdering kinda killed the vibe.

[Washington Resistance Army]

The Nazis too built a few roads here and there, does that make them a net benefit to humanity? Your arguments are weak, and building infrastructure does not justify genocide. Moreover, I fail to see how committing atrocities prevents "worse" atrocities from happening.

Nazism is in a very different category since its goal was extermination of peoples. It is impossible to be worse than them by definition.

Japan actively worked to exterminate several groups. Small Tungusic ethnic groups in Manchuria were near totally wiped out by the Japanese occupation as a quick example.

[New Visayan Islands]

Speaking as a Filipino (read: from a country belonging to the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere occupied by The Empire of Japan during the War) whose still-living grandmothers were children when Imperial Japan came knocking, it wasn't the hope for independence in SEA that some believed it to be. After all, East or West, a colonizer is a colonizer, something those who downplay accusations of colonialism coming from the geopolitical East ought to keep in mind, but I digress.

Indeed, considering what Imperial Japan did in the parts of Asia-Pacific that it occupied, it's no surprise to see, for example, Lee Kuan Yew (who, lest it be forgotten, was among those who escaped Sook Ching) defending the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki:

But they also showed a meanness and viciousness towards their enemies equal to the Huns'. Genghis Khan and his hordes could not have been more merciless. I have lo doubts about whether the two atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were necessary. Without them, hundreds of thousands of civilians in Malaya and Singapore, and millions in Japan itself, would have perished.

Then there are privations of a more religious nature, as were recorded by the Catholic clergymen of the occupied Philippine Islands, an excerpt of which is quoted in this post (any typos came directly from the site):

This letter would not be complete if we refrained from mentioning our deep appreciation of the United States Armed Forces, upon whom we invoke the Lord of Hosts, the God of Victories, to shower all blessings and success. Under God’s guiding hand they have restored by their arms that security which enables us to say in truth to our flock, “PAX VOBIS”. In the first place they have freed the Church and her ministers from the danger of that worst of all plights… conversion into mere tools and instruments of a pagan Caesaro-theocratic Government. From the beginning there have been clear indications that the Japanese government intended to absorb the Catholic Church as a potent agency to control the Filipino people. Circulars were issued commanding all priests to preach extolling the advantages of the so-called Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, of the surrender to Japanese arms of the guerillas in the mountains, and the total submission of the prople to their government. Subtle appeals to racial self-sufficiency and supernationalistic aspirations were made use of, which if successful by the permanency of the Japanese rule, would have deprived again the teeming millions of Catholic Filipinos of the service and ministrations of American and European missionaries of both sexes, who have pledged their lives to work for souls in these far-flung Islands. And that beautiful and very patent proof of the Catholicity of the Church — the earnest, united and harmonious, disinterested working of native and foreign clergy under both native and foreign-born Bishops, a thing no other human society anywhere except the Catholic Church can show, would undoubtedly have been destroyed.

Surely a pagan and at the same time theocratic imperialism, more exclusive and fanatic than the old Roman Empire, though not externally bigotted, could not long permit the existence of the Catholic Church. In fact the Japanese openly call the present war a holy war to restore to their Emperor whom they acknowledge as son of their sun goddess, his divine right to rule all lands illumined by that celestial orb.

The result of the speech of His Excellency, the Apostolic Delegate, before General Tanaka in January 1943, in which he sought liberty for the Church to continue uninterrupted and untrammeled her divine mission, was the bringing to light of the previously veiled policy of the Japanese Government in a derisive editorial of the Japanese controlled TRIBUNE. Thus was unmasked that surface show of tolerance to the Catholic Church which the conqueror had stressed as being an essential part of his liberal-minded policy to this Catholic country. The arrest of a high church official in the Archbishop’s Palace in Manila on the very eve of the meeting in that place of all the Bishops and Prefects-Apostolic of the Northern Ecclesiastical Province was obvioulsy a move to cow the Ordinaries whose full cooperation in all his plans the enemy sought to have. A year before that event, lying, he announced through the radio that such cooperation had been promised to the Japanese Imperial Army by the hierarchy of the Philippines in conferences alleged to have been held for that object in the Apostolic Delegation and at the Archbishop’s Palace in Manila on January 6th and 7th, respectively in 1942.

[Nekostan-e Gharbi]

To all those defending the Japanese empire: Unit 731

Already told them about Unit 731, but great to have so many examples!

Implying that I didn’t know about it.

That doesn’t matter though. The most important legacy of the IJN is racial, that is, it shows what an East Asian power is capable of doing. Such balance of power is more important than war-related atrocities in the long run. The Pacific War should have never happened and fucking sucked. However without it it would have been impossible for the strength of Japan to be accurately estimated. This is why even after the war there was still a prominent position for Japan to play for Anglo powers like to play music chairs and rarely fully vanquish any power. Napoleonic France, German Empire and Soviet Union failed to unseat Anglos yet their successors remained important powers.

[Comerciante]

Already told them about Unit 731, but great to have so many examples!

Implying that I didn’t know about it.

That doesn’t matter though. The most important legacy of the IJN is racial, that is, it shows what an East Asian power is capable of doing. Such balance of power is more important than war-related atrocities in the long run.

So in laymans terms the IJN proved that they can be just as murderous and slaughter just as many innocent people as any European Power? Congratulations?

[Nekostan-e Gharbi]

Implying that I didn’t know about it.

That doesn’t matter though. The most important legacy of the IJN is racial, that is, it shows what an East Asian power is capable of doing. Such balance of power is more important than war-related atrocities in the long run.

So in laymans terms the IJN proved that they can be just as murderous and slaughter just as many innocent people as any European Power? Congratulations?

Yup. That itself is actually something that earns respect in this cruel world lol for respect is downstream from fear. Moreover capabilities to do evil usually correlate with capabilities to do good. This isn’t always true though since China is not capable of doing much good even if it wants to while it does a lot of evil even without having to have such intention.

[Picairn]

Yup. That itself is actually something that earns respect in this cruel world lol for respect is downstream from fear. Moreover capabilities to do evil usually correlate with capabilities to do good.

Imperial Japan got so much respect they got nuked twice and had people revolting against them in the end.

[Comerciante]

So in laymans terms the IJN proved that they can be just as murderous and slaughter just as many innocent people as any European Power? Congratulations?

Yup. That itself is actually something that earns respect in this cruel world lol for respect is downstream from fear.

If that was an acceptable preview of the world, then the US made a mistake stopping at just one bomb. They should have wiped out Japan in its entirety until everything from Kyushu to Hokkaido was irradiated.

If this is the kind of world you would try to justify with some edgy assertions that the world is cruel is just as naïve as assertions the world is kind, then I have no more words to waste on this thread.

[Nekostan-e Gharbi]

Yup. That itself is actually something that earns respect in this cruel world lol for respect is downstream from fear. Moreover capabilities to do evil usually correlate with capabilities to do good.

Imperial Japan got so much respect they got nuked twice and had people revolting against them in the end.

People in Japan itself or not?

Nukes were meant to induce surrender, not to wipe out a population. I do think the surrender should have happened. In fact the war shouldn’t have happened.

[Picairn]

People in Japan itself or not?

Nukes were meant to induce surrender, not to wipe out a population. I do think the surrender should have happened.

Countries under Imperial Japan's yoke still decry Japan's crimes in history textbooks until today.

[Nekostan-e Gharbi]

Yup. That itself is actually something that earns respect in this cruel world lol for respect is downstream from fear.

If that was an acceptable preview of the world, then the US made a mistake stopping at just one bomb. They should have wiped out Japan in its entirety until everything from Kyushu to Hokkaido was irradiated.

If this is the kind of world you would try to justify with some edgy assertions that the world is cruel is just as naïve as assertions the world is kind, then I have no more words to waste on this thread.

There were not that many nukes. Moreover this served no military need. Pacific War was not a total war. Both sides still had some limits.

[Nekostan-e Gharbi]

People in Japan itself or not?

Nukes were meant to induce surrender, not to wipe out a population. I do think the surrender should have happened.

Countries under Imperial Japan's yoke still decry Japan's crimes in history textbooks until today.

History textbooks are generally strongly ethnonationalist in many countries. That is, they want you to hate your neighbors outside the country. The world would have been better if these things have never existed since they are full of propaganda.

[Picairn]

History textbooks are generally strongly ethnonationalist in many countries. That is, they want you to hate your neighbors outside the country.

And? Does that make 20+ million deaths and untold suffering caused by Japan any less real?

[New haven america]

Nekostan coming in to justify Japanese imperialism in 3... 2... 1...

Yup. The Empire of Japan was awesome. The only issue here is that it shouldn’t have picked fight with Anglos which caused a lot of sorrows on both sides.

You know China wasn't communist during WWII, right?

And that they attacked more countries than just China?

And that the US isn't Anglo, it's majority German actually?

And that Hawaii is mostly Polynesian and Japanese, not White, right?

[Nekostan-e Gharbi]

History textbooks are generally strongly ethnonationalist in many countries. That is, they want you to hate your neighbors outside the country.

And? Does that make 20+ million deaths and untold suffering caused by Japan any less real?

They are real. Then what?

[New haven america]

Countries under Imperial Japan's yoke still decry Japan's crimes in history textbooks until today.

History textbooks are generally strongly ethnonationalist in many countries. That is, they want you to hate your neighbors outside the country. The world would have been better if these things have never existed since they are full of propaganda.

Yeah, and Japan's history textbook all but erase most of WWII from Japanese history.

[Nekostan-e Gharbi]

Yup. The Empire of Japan was awesome. The only issue here is that it shouldn’t have picked fight with Anglos which caused a lot of sorrows on both sides.

You know China wasn't communist during WWII, right?

And that they attacked more countries than just China?

And that the US isn't Anglo, it's majority German actually?

And that Hawaii is mostly Polynesian and Japanese, not White, right?

A non-communist China is still China.

[Comerciante]

If that was an acceptable preview of the world, then the US made a mistake stopping at just one bomb. They should have wiped out Japan in its entirety until everything from Kyushu to Hokkaido was irradiated.

If this is the kind of world you would try to justify with some edgy assertions that the world is cruel is just as naïve as assertions the world is kind, then I have no more words to waste on this thread.

There were not that many nukes. Moreover this served no military need. Pacific War was not a total war. Both sides still had some limits.

Then we just use firebombs and the bunch of other ones we can mass produce more easily.

I mean why not? You've made it clear that Japan is an existential threat. The only way to ascertain our future is to abolish Japan. Nations should work together to make certain Japan can never again form a decisive threat to the rest of the world. I'm certain we can convince the Koreans to get in on it, the Philippines maybe? China would be happy to help.