I had a similar kind of eye-opening experience on my first trip to Japan, back in high school. We went to a museum in Hiroshima about… you know… Hiroshima.

The exhibits about the bomb and the aftermath were quite harrowing, if I’m honest. But there were also a couple rooms dedicated to the “greater east-Asian co-prosperity sphere”.

One panel in particular stuck in my mind: it discussed, in two or three paragraphs, how the Imperial Japanese Army went to Nanking, “uplifted” the population, faced many trials and tribulations, and eventually went home.

Colloquially, most of the rest of the world knows this campaign as the Rape of Nanking. Think Bucha, but instead of a village/small town, it’s the capital of a whole damn province (Jiangsu), with a population of about a million. About a third - yes, that’s right, roughly 300,000 - ended up enduring some combination of rape, torture, and/or murder. But the exhibit more or less portrayed that as “we went to Nanking, got a bit drunk, don’t remember much”.

That exhibit one of the main reasons I find the Japanese cultural tendency to sweep things under the rug in the interest of honoring one’s ancestors to be so incredibly caustic.

[–] simplymath@lemmy.world 8 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Yeah, the panel that stuck with me most was that the US had been escalating sanctions against Japan for their 3 decade long occupation of Manchuria and invasion of Indochina. Admittedly, there were certainly valid complaints against Western imperialism and racism, but the panel said

The United States with its biggest potential influence was hamstrung by isolationism. From 1935 to 1937, Congress passed three "Neutrality Acts". President Roosevelt, deeply concerned with developments in Europe and Asia, gave the "quarantine speech" on October 5, 1937, in which he urged that it was necessary to deal with international "lawlessness," implicitly criticizing Japan. The public opinion and Congress gradually supported strengthening sanctions against Japan, such as the abrogation of the U.S.-Japan Trade and Navigation Treaty and finally the oil-embargo, which triggered the war.

which is a bizarre way to justify Pearl Harbor.