Maurice - OT OT (last one) Whole civilian populations in Japan committing suicide rather than suffer the humiliation of surrender? Really? Such an extraordinary claim requires extraordinary evidence? You are suggesting the children did so too.
As I noted in my post to Malloy, I was referring to whole villages in Okinawa (I concede that I was unintentionally misleading when I said whole populations. I apologize.). Although I've never seen a book which mentions the civilian suicides in anything more than passing (just as before the book The Rape of Nanking there were only passing references to Nanking), there are multiple references to it. For instance, I think that there are some references in a book which is a compendium of different first hand accounts of the invasion of Okinawa and which is named after the invasion (Operation Iceberg?). Of course the children didn't commit seppuku - it was more along the lines of Jonestown. Also note that there is a cliff in Okinawa called Suicide Cliff precisely because many people, including many civilians, jumped off of it. This behavior is almost incomprehensible to most modern Americans.
When Japanese commit ritual suicide, it is not that they don't value life, but that they value the community so much higher.
I would never say that any culture doesn't value life, and I don't think anyone on the board actually intended to say that. Lesser value on life means just that, not 'no value', or even 'little value'. Different cultures put it different places on the totem pole of values. Americans tend to put personal freedom pretty high up the list, the WW-II Japanese put honor very high up. Thus, more Americans die from freedom (gun rights), more WW-II Japanese died for honor (the humiliation of surrender).
Clark
PS If you want to continue the debate, I'll respond with a PM.
PPS Just a note on the embassy bombing. Remember that the DMA (from which the military gets their bombing charts) is the same agency that didn't put in the Italian ski lift, or the Californian power poles, or ... and those were on friendly soil and in some cases actually marked on civilian maps. |
