Quote:Ebony wrote:No, it was already being strangled by sea and hammered from the air by summer of 1945. Had Operation Olympic gone through in 1946, There would had been no Japan. Period. What was happened next was similar to what happened to Germany. The emperor was demoted from demigod to a human being (personally Hirohito should had been tried and hung as well, but that's politics for you). The policies and institutions made by the militarists were scrapped and replaced by policies made by the new Shogun. Douglas MacArthur. The good news is that Japan rose again from the ashes like a phoenix. The bad news is that Japan has never came to terms with what it did before and during WWII.
A friend is of the opinion that Japan is the first post-apocalyptic culture on Earth. I can see the evidence of that claim. Seventy years ago, the Empire of Japan, which had never experienced true defeat prior, was swatted aside in two definitive shows of force by the United States, that left two metropolitan areas destroyed and changed the paradigm of how war was waged. Shortly after that, core tenets of Japanese culture and religion were systematically dismantled, but they were not completely rewritten. As a result, the people of Japen have had to fill in the blank spots left, as well as figure out how to survive in the post-war world. They didn't have a slow decline, like the British Empire, but rather a short and fast removal. They've had to recover ever since, and I think they're still recovering.
You can see that in the history books. Japanese do not like to examine how the war came about and what their role is. That's why there is still such a huge reserve of ill will towrd Japan among the nations in the Far East. If the Germans can do, I don't see why Japan can't.
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Into terror!, Into valour!
Charge ahead! No! Never turn
Yes, it's into the fire we fly
And the devil will burn!
- Scarlett Pimpernell