US Army Veteran Reacts to "How Do the Japanese Teach About WW2?"

[@CobraChicken101]

I'm liking this before i start the video because i very much appreciate the fact you checked this out. Very gratefull. This video pretty much sums up all my previous comments on the matter. 🤘❤️

[@WreckedNation01]

Cheers brother!🎉

[@ProfTydrim]

I mean that's essentially what they're trying to do in america with the book bans in schools

[@solreaver83]

Need to remmeber the Japanese are culturally an extremely proud country. Their pride and sense of honour had the suicide rather then be captured or fly planes into ships, starve to death rather then surrender etc. The realisation of what they did in ww2 has a special type of immense shame to the Japanese and to this day it still shames them. They haven't handled it as we believe we would but it's what it is.

[@GregDunne-zf2ep]

I new Germans who new nothing about the war

[@alibennett78]

Omg

[@TheDanEdwards]

So this video is a bit superficial, but then again you are looking at a Whistler video. There's much more to learn. Even if living in Japan (say for studying, or being an English conversation teacher) many young Westerners never really interact with the older generation there. Having lived in Japan with a modicum of social interaction, it is clear to me that discussions of _WWII are mostly avoided._ The _avoidance_ is not really unusual in a society - yours will do likewise, just for different topics.

[@DenUitvreter]

This is a very ethnocentric view, usually he is just very anglocentric. The West including Germany is the exception here, we have conscience/guilt culture, most cultures including the Japanese are honour/shame cultures. Conscience/guilt is of course coming from christianity, the Japanese don't confess, repent, atone just like the Arabs, Mongols and most African cultures don't do that. It's almost only the West. And even for the West, reflecting on your own history that negatively was relatively new with Germany. Before WWII it was more like "we just won't do that anymore" as forward thinkers. So when we critize Japan, we consider our culture of guilt superior to the others, at least in this. Does that make us "nationalists" which he confuses with imperialists? Personally I'm not that impressed with sinning and then confessing and everything is all right again, an the German post WWII also has elements of that, just as well as the idea of moving forward.

[@CobraChicken101]

I think you are misinformed or maybe you just like to disagree 🤣. But you missed the ball here. Japanese most definitely have a culture of consience, guilt and shame, and baring the consequenses. It is one of the key features of their culture. ( I recommend "Shame and Guilt: A Psychocultural View of the Japanese Self" from Takie Sugiyama Lebra on the matter ) . This feeling is generally brought about by breaking their norms. In which case there is no one quicker to appologise than a japanese person for even the most mundane thing. Guilt is so other-oriented that feeling guilty tends to amount to feeling apologetic to a specific person. Even the words for "guilty" such as sumanai and moshiwakenai are expressions for apology, they imply the alter whom ego owes an apology. Given such an equivalence between guilt and apology, a person who is guilty and yet fails to apologize is extremely offensive to Japanese. In fact most Japanese are only too willing to offer an apology for the slightest annoyance they happen to create to others. By their standards , it requires them breaking the norm, and their norms were/are different from ours. So one could even argue the complete opposite thesis is true : their guilt-culture is so strong that if the Japanese Emperor Would have appoligised, and admitted guilt by doing so, half the population would have killed themselves. I dont always agree with Simon and his team, but it was pretty balanced this time and has highlighted most important factors at play

[@DenUitvreter]

@@CobraChicken101 I guess I have a talent for disagreeing. I'm going not going to dive deep in Japanese culture here because I don't have the knowledge and insight for that. But other oriented guilt is shame, the relevant difference here is whether it's coming from the inside or from the outside, while we also have to distinct between the individual and the collective guilt. What the Germans did after WWII was adress their collective guilt coming from the inside, for example in their education. I can't think of any other nation doing something like that and can't imagine non Western nations doing that anytime soon. It's also relatively new for Western nations to have this individual christian concept of confession and repent (and getting forgiveness) extended to the collective and very worldly situation of war and even genocide. So to make that into the norm to than be outraged Japan didn't conform to it and declare it an exception skips a few steps imo. How Germany deals with it's recent history is the exception, coming from an exceptionally gruesome recent history, but that was the trigger I guess.

[@TheDanEdwards]

That's a rather .... unsubstantiated ... set of claims on your part.