Quote:
Originally Posted by Tinordi
*bewildered face*
Japan is not a counterpoint, it's a point... to my argument.
They never had to fess up for their crimes. The United States needed a quickly rebuilt and emboldened Japan to act as a counter-weight in the context of rapid communist expansion in East Asia. As such, they didn't want to mess with decades long introspection. They needed a strong, nationally proud Japan to dominate the region.
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Japan also benefited from the cover it got from the holocaust and the fact that its most heinous atrocities had occurred before 'the war' in its invasion of China.
In comparison with the death camps, the vast amount of film of mass executions etc the stuff Japan did during the war tended to get overlooked, I also think the fact we dropped a couple of Nukes on them tended to mute western outrage as well, right from 1945 there were legitimate debate as to whether we had to use the bombs and that debate took the edge off our condemnation of Japan.