Saw this on my twitter feed. At first thought it was interesting and funny from the first tweet, but then I read the rest of it. People are being low-key weird about this including the OP. I think it’s a fascinating piece of history, personally. I’ve never seen a historical journal with drawings like this before, most have only had words; one doesn’t usually have time to draw when bombs are going off around them.
Fascinating piece of history maybe, but it’s incredibly unsettling how many people don’t care or even like that this man probably did some unspeakable things.
Yes exactly! The comments and quote tweets were very insidious. Talking about how horrible the Soviet work camps were as if he wasn’t a part of an army that committed some of the worst atrocities in history; he literally got to go home. It’s either they have no idea what Japan was up to in WWII or they know and don’t care.
One of the replies was something to the effect of “you don’t know he was a war criminal, he was just a soldier. Besides, all sides did war crimes, so whatever really.”
In terms of general knowledge in the west, the Japanese invasion, occupation, and genocide of China and other Asian countries is not at all well known.
I can sort of “empathize” since when we learned about WWII in school there was no mention of Italy and Japan. They taught it like only Germany was wrecking shit. I don’t remember when I found out about Japanese war crimes during WWII but I’m pretty sure I found out on my own. Doesn’t mean people can’t do their own research.
