Nations, culture and what we are told act as kinds of lenses that greatly influence how we see events. We can gain a better appreciation of this by looking at how people from other cultures look at the same events in history and the world today.
When working in Japan a few years back, I had a class of three more elderly students. The conversation at one point got to World War 2 and their experiences. While of course they were all young Japanese at the time, they had very different backgrounds.
One was a female university student. When I asked her how she felt when she found out the war was over, she said “very sad.” When I asked why, she explained that she could not believe Japan had lost!
Then there was another woman who was in high school at the time. She said her reaction to the war ending was of fear because they had been told Americans were like animals. She also said that her parents gave her pills to take in case US soldiers came for her. I did not know the word for the pills at the time, but from the sound of it, I thought it had something to do with birth control. However, when I looked the word up, it was potassium cyanide!
The third student was a male who was in the Japanese Army manning anti-aircraft guns at the time. His reaction was very different though. He said he was overjoyed and felt saved. He said he liked to watch American movies before the war and never believed the propaganda dished out by the Japanese government at the time.
This is obviously not a scientific sample of public opinion in Japan at the end of the war (do not think any were ever taken), but from what I have read of from Japan during the war, it seems like the majority supported the government line until the end as most of those I talked to had.
Of course, the Japanese with their kamikaze attacks, mass suicides and other actions during the war were regarded as especially fanatical. However, there were plenty of Germans fanatically devoted to Hitler and Soviets dedicated to Stalin. Were they really that different? For example, many soldiers in the Soviet Army died in the most suicidal attacks launched without the least regard for the lives of the soldiers.
In more recent years, I have found many Japanese very shocked when told that the US military service was voluntary and those in Iraq were essentially volunteers. They seem to regard dying in Iraq just as senseless as Americans regarded dying in a kamikaze attacks.
Obviously, there are just and unjust causes in the world and sacrificing for the right ones can be good. However, the world would probably be a better place if people, particularity in times of war, tried to look at their own actions from the eyes of those outside their world.
Author: Anthony Leger