Last Japanese Soldier To Surrender Dies At 91

Robot Number V

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irishda said:
Robot Number V said:
Adam Jensen said:
-Dragmire- said:
While I can't relate to him in any way, that's quite the dedication that guy had.
That's one way to put it. Another way would be to call him a servile idiot.

Yeah, that works better.
Yeah...pretty much this. People are saying he was "dedicated", but....Dedicated to what? The war was OVER. He was dedicating himself to something that no longer existed. More importantly, he was KILLING for something that no longer existed.

How exactly is that praiseworthy?
First, he was dedicated to his duty as a soldier. In the words of Tennyson, "theirs is not to reason why/theirs but to do or die." Some people would call that servile, and to that I'd have to say of course it is. That's exactly how a military functions. Unit cohesion is entirely dependent on soldiers carrying out their orders rather than questioning them. More than that, how was he to believe the war was over? In carrying out his orders, that meant living off the grid deep in perceived enemy territory. Any attempt at persuasion could have easily been seen as propaganda.

Second, you don't evade capture or death for 30 years by being an idiot.
Well, I never said he was an idiot. That was the other guy. Since you quoted me, I'm honestly not sure if he'll get a message or not.

Anyway, being a good soldier does not equate to being a good person. And before I go any further, I want to clarify that I'm not saying he was a bad person either. He was just a product of his environment, as are the rest of us. I just don't get why people are acting like what he did is some kind of achievement to be praised. It's a fucking tragedy.
 

Soviet Heavy

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Commissar Sae said:
Well that and they received word that American troops killed Japanese POWs, the number were inflated but there are several cases of Japanese POWs being mass executed by Americans, often having been tortured or having to live through horrible conditions before hand. There are eyewitness accounts from American marines saying how some of their fellow soldiers would open the mouths of wounded prisoners to check them for gold teeth, and often ripped teeth out even if they weren't made of gold. The Japanese have a pretty horrific track record for poor treatment of POWs as well so I am by no means trying to brush that off, but the Pacific front became much more a war of hate than the western front.
I don't see how there could be mass executions of Japanese POWs when most of them were dead before they could be captured. If you're referring to American mutilation of dead or dying soldiers, absolutely, it was terrible. But Japanese soldiers captured alive and kept alive were extremely rare occurrences. Usually, those men were ones captured in their sleep, rather than after being wounded. Like is said, wounded Japanese soldiers would still try to kill people even as they tried to pick them up, so Marines and Infantrymen adopted an unofficial policy of executing wounded men before they could go for a grenade.

There's a big difference between killing someone still trying to fight back, and one that has been legitimately captured.
 

Adam Jensen_v1legacy

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irishda said:
Second, you don't evade capture or death for 30 years by being an idiot.
He didn't evade shit. Everybody knew where he was and all they ever wanted was to reason with the lunatic. Nobody wanted to capture and kill him for all those years.

And he was a fuckin' idiot. Nobody with a functional brain would spend 30 years in a jungle thinking that the war is still on and that all the people who came to try to get him to surrender are enemy combatants. 30 years, and he couldn't figure it out. That's how stupid and deluded the guy was.
 

michael87cn

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To be brutally honest, what an idiot without an original thought of his own. Following orders is a good thing, but when your own government tells you "look, son, its over. come home" and you ignore it and continue killing people? Damn stupid is what that makes you.
 

dyre

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FalloutJack said:
ExtraDebit said:
He's a war criminal, why do you people wish him peace?
Actually, Japanese war criminals would be Pearl Harbor bombers, people above and beyond the call to war who cross the line from soldier to evil fuckwad. However, since a fair few of the most overzealous soldiers in Japan of back then were, say, kamikaze pilots, they're hard to punish, having been dead. A man who merely killed a bunch of people in wartime is nothing. There's no end of people in America who have done as much or more.

But if that's not good enough for ya, there is the fact that what we did to Japan is almost as bad as the Treaty of Versalles at the end of WWI. We neutered Japan, militaristically-speaking. After dropping the first two atomic bombs in war history on their soil, we denied them the power to make war at all, only to defend themselves. We punished that generation and - until this is repealed - all generations that follow. There would be no need to persue individual war criminals after we were through with them.
LOLWHATTHEFUCK

1. The Treaty of Versailles worst offenses were what they did to the German ECONOMY. The war reparations crippled their economy and, juxtaposed with a global recession, turned their currency into worthless paper.
Subpoint: Additionally, the Allied powers unjustly blamed the war on Germany. In Japan's case, the blame would be fairly attributed.
2. It is historically accepted BY BOTH AMERICAN AND JAPANESE SCHOLARS that, with the Cold War around the corner and the US facing new enemies, the occupation of Japan was EXTREMELY lenient and in fact benevolent. We spared their Emperor (you know, the fuckwit war criminal who ordered his own citizens to commit suicide to avoid capture because he didn't want his people to see that the US actually treated prisoners pretty decently), rebuilt their economy, and reformed their system of government. General MacArthur, who led the reconstruction, is STILL remembered fondly by the Japanese people, because the Japanese reconstruction was a textbook example of an occupation done right.

We committed a whole helluva lot of war crimes to beat the Japanese (like burning most of their cities to the ground), but once we won, we did a pretty damn good job on the occupation.
 

GonvilleBromhead

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michael87cn said:
To be brutally honest, what an idiot without an original thought of his own. Following orders is a good thing, but when your own government tells you "look, son, its over. come home" and you ignore it and continue killing people? Damn stupid is what that makes you.
Not necessarily stupid - as I pointed out before, the authority he would have expected new orders to come from no longer existed, and the military language used in Japan had undergone a major shift.

If you were expecting a written communication concerning the end of a war to come from the Imperial Japanese Army General Staff and saying something along the lines of "It is my unfortunate duty to inform you of the cessation of hostilities between the Empire of Japan and the United States of America, the United Kingdom, the Commonwealth of Australia (etc. etc.), which has occurred in a manner not in the long term interests of our most noble Empire" and you received a letter from someone claiming to be the "Minister of Defense" (with no military rank) on "Japan Ground Self Defence Force" headed notepaper saying "The war's over, stop shooting at fluglepuffs*" it would hardly be surprising that it would be considered a bad fraud. I would have imagined being stuck in a jungle for 30 years didn't exactly help his mental state, either.

Honestly, the idiots in this instance were the people who failed to realise that they needed someone whose authority he would unquestionably recognise to give the order.#



*a word for "civilian" didn't exist in Japanese until one was invented for the 1947 constitution.
 

martyrdrebel27

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this is such an awesome story. you know what it makes me think of? Inglorious Basterds. I know, not really the same, but I know SOMEONE out there gets that same vibe. I hope someone makes a movie about him.

sometimes it's entirely possible to enjoy a STORY without necessarily reading into the CONTEXT.
 

Commissar Sae

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Soviet Heavy said:
Commissar Sae said:
Well that and they received word that American troops killed Japanese POWs, the number were inflated but there are several cases of Japanese POWs being mass executed by Americans, often having been tortured or having to live through horrible conditions before hand. There are eyewitness accounts from American marines saying how some of their fellow soldiers would open the mouths of wounded prisoners to check them for gold teeth, and often ripped teeth out even if they weren't made of gold. The Japanese have a pretty horrific track record for poor treatment of POWs as well so I am by no means trying to brush that off, but the Pacific front became much more a war of hate than the western front.
I don't see how there could be mass executions of Japanese POWs when most of them were dead before they could be captured. If you're referring to American mutilation of dead or dying soldiers, absolutely, it was terrible. But Japanese soldiers captured alive and kept alive were extremely rare occurrences. Usually, those men were ones captured in their sleep, rather than after being wounded. Like is said, wounded Japanese soldiers would still try to kill people even as they tried to pick them up, so Marines and Infantrymen adopted an unofficial policy of executing wounded men before they could go for a grenade.

There's a big difference between killing someone still trying to fight back, and one that has been legitimately captured.
The Japanese leadership promoted 2 main ideas when it came to surrender, that fighting to the death was more honorable and that you would be killed by the Allies if you surrendered anyway, so better to fight to the death. Combined with the allied soldiers general attitude brought on by their sides propaganda that made the Japanese sub-human and you have Japanese soldiers who are sure they will be killed by allied soldiers if they surrender, and allied soldiers who are only too happy to oblige that idea. So of course they would generally fight to the death.

I can't remember where I read the testimonial, but there was at least one case early on in the war where American troops machinegunned a group of surrendered enemies rather than escort them back to the allied lines. This was hardly unheard of, but it still reinforces the idea that surrender will only result in death anyway.
 

dyre

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Commissar Sae said:
Soviet Heavy said:
Commissar Sae said:
Well that and they received word that American troops killed Japanese POWs, the number were inflated but there are several cases of Japanese POWs being mass executed by Americans, often having been tortured or having to live through horrible conditions before hand. There are eyewitness accounts from American marines saying how some of their fellow soldiers would open the mouths of wounded prisoners to check them for gold teeth, and often ripped teeth out even if they weren't made of gold. The Japanese have a pretty horrific track record for poor treatment of POWs as well so I am by no means trying to brush that off, but the Pacific front became much more a war of hate than the western front.
I don't see how there could be mass executions of Japanese POWs when most of them were dead before they could be captured. If you're referring to American mutilation of dead or dying soldiers, absolutely, it was terrible. But Japanese soldiers captured alive and kept alive were extremely rare occurrences. Usually, those men were ones captured in their sleep, rather than after being wounded. Like is said, wounded Japanese soldiers would still try to kill people even as they tried to pick them up, so Marines and Infantrymen adopted an unofficial policy of executing wounded men before they could go for a grenade.

There's a big difference between killing someone still trying to fight back, and one that has been legitimately captured.
The Japanese leadership promoted 2 main ideas when it came to surrender, that fighting to the death was more honorable and that you would be killed by the Allies if you surrendered anyway, so better to fight to the death. Combined with the allied soldiers general attitude brought on by their sides propaganda that made the Japanese sub-human and you have Japanese soldiers who are sure they will be killed by allied soldiers if they surrender, and allied soldiers who are only too happy to oblige that idea. So of course they would generally fight to the death.

I can't remember where I read the testimonial, but there was at least one case early on in the war where American troops machinegunned a group of surrendered enemies rather than escort them back to the allied lines. This was hardly unheard of, but it still reinforces the idea that surrender will only result in death anyway.
Emperor Hirohito encouraged the suicides because he was afraid that once the Japanese realized that Americans in fact treated POWs reasonably well, it would negatively affect the Japanese fighting spirit (since surrender just became an actual option). So it was pretty much completely Japan's fault that the Japanese were fighting to the death. You can't reasonably blame the Allies at all in this particular matter.

And when you look at how the Japanese treated THEIR prisoners....yeah, the Japanese aren't looking so good for this issue. All wars have propaganda, all wars have soldiers occasionally going overboard. The Japanese took it to the next level and then some.
 

GonvilleBromhead

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The Japanese treatment of prisoners was rather more varied in reality than it is generally thought; it all came down to the commander. Some treated them reasonably well, more or less following the Geneva convention, others very much less so (though I freely admit that the latter was rather more common than the former).

It all goes back to the de-Europeanisation of the armed forces and military culture and the revival of a imperfect and exagerrated "bushido" style honour system post WWI in order to give the militarisation of Japan a nationalistic legitimacy.

Add onto this the fact that being put in charge of a PoW camp was a not a an appointment that was likely to fill oneself with a sense of honour, being one that saw you looking after the enemy and not killing them, and the fact it was an appointment given to incompetent or otherwise undesirable officers, explains (explains, I hasten to add, does not equal "justifies"!) the brutality - they weren't allowed to kill the enemy in honourable combat, so they made the best of the situation and treated them like shit. Add onto this the fact that guards would not, usually, be actual Japanese soldiers but Koreas and other "second rates" (as they were perceived by the Japanese military) who were themselves abysmally treated and you end up with a cycle of violence, with the PoW at the bottom of the heap.
 

Commissar Sae

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dyre said:
Emperor Hirohito encouraged the suicides because he was afraid that once the Japanese realized that Americans in fact treated POWs reasonably well, it would negatively affect the Japanese fighting spirit (since surrender just became an actual option). So it was pretty much completely Japan's fault that the Japanese were fighting to the death. You can't reasonably blame the Allies at all in this particular matter.

And when you look at how the Japanese treated THEIR prisoners....yeah, the Japanese aren't looking so good for this issue. All wars have propaganda, all wars have soldiers occasionally going overboard. The Japanese took it to the next level and then some.
You seem to have latched on to one of my points and ignored the other. Americans treated non-Japanese POWs and most civilian populations reasonably well, but rape and murder were still atrociously common. The Japanese doctrine of no surrender arose due to two factors, and one of those was that the Allies weren't taking prisoners even when they surrendered. Between being told by your government that you can expect to be murdered if you surrender and then knowing of hundreds of cases where surrendering, wounded or incapacitated Japanese soldiers were simply killed rather than taken prisoner and you can be sure that you will fight to the death. Those that were actually taken prisoner were generally well treated, but the combination of Japanese propaganda and Allied executions meant very few Japanese soldiers ever became pows.

Surrender was never really an option for most, because the Allies in the Pacific generally killed those who surrendered anyway. You have to remember that the American propaganda at the time was incredibly racially driven, and the Japanese were viewed as sub-human by most of the soldiers on the ground. So much like the Eastern Front in Europe it devolves into a war were atrocities build on top of atrocities for both sides and the whole things continues in a downwards spiral. Hell, Marines were known for making trophies out of the corpses and sending them home. One guy was so proud of his first kill that he cut off the mans head, boiled it until the flesh melted off then sent it home to his wife to place on the coffee table. That is not something you do to an enemy you consider to be human, that is something you o on safari. This is by no means an isolated account either. So before brushing off the Allied atrocities by saying the Japanese were worse maybe you should read into both sides a bit more.

The nature of the allied victory in WWII often gets somewhat concealed to us today. We hear all about the horrors perpetrated by the axis (and there were many and they are inexcusable) but we treat our side like living saints. Talk to any veteran of WWII and the honest ones will tell you we won by being utter and complete bastards, because that is how you win a war, not by following the rules and being nice, but by being willing to be the greater monster. Well that and proper logistics.
 

GonvilleBromhead

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The few numbers of Japanese prisoners taken was less due to a general "no quarter" policy, and more a reaction to Japanese tactics (alongside PTSD and revenge motivated killings that are a feature of most wars).

The perverted version of the Bushido code made surrender rare to start with, and Allied knowledge of this meant that the surrender of Japanese soldiers was always treated with a certain amount of suspicion - not unwarranted, considering some of the Japanese tactics. A common trick of the Japanese was to surrender, keeping a grenade in one hand (Japanese grenades of the period being smaller than the Mills/pineapple-type grenades used by the Allies or the potato mashers of the Wehrmacht), and letting at an appropriate moment. Wounded Japanese soldiers were also left lying on grenades, in manner that ensure that when they were picked up to be put on a stretcher the explosives would detonate.

Such things are not actions likely to engender a sense of trust in a man apparently surrendering, and led to such unofficial rules as "shoot any Japanese soldier surrendering with his hands clenched" and "leave any wounded Japanese soldier where you find him". Similarly, what was perhaps the most common war crime perpetrated, that of the desecration of Japanese corpses, was a response to the Japanese playing possum to catch their enemies unaware.

Such approaches turn what would in normally circumstances be a pointless war crime into an eminently sensible precaution.
 

irishda

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Adam Jensen said:
irishda said:
Second, you don't evade capture or death for 30 years by being an idiot.
He didn't evade shit. Everybody knew where he was and all they ever wanted was to reason with the lunatic. Nobody wanted to capture and kill him for all those years.

And he was a fuckin' idiot. Nobody with a functional brain would spend 30 years in a jungle thinking that the war is still on and that all the people who came to try to get him to surrender are enemy combatants. 30 years, and he couldn't figure it out. That's how stupid and deluded the guy was.
Yeah, a war lasting a really long time never existed before. And are you serious? Nobody wanted to capture and kill him? Let's ignore the fact that the original post even said that one of the men under his command was killed in a shootout in 1954, and the last one was killed by the cops in 1972. If a guy wounds multiple people, burns crops, and kills 30 people, what the hell sort of country WOULDN'T try to capture him? Walk out your front door and start setting fire to crops or orchards and shoot up the cops wearing an old German uniform. Then go hide. Let's just see how many people only want to "reason with the lunatic."

But you have a point. After all, he should've easily guessed there was no longer a war because of the news he read every night on his ipad.
 

beastro

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The man was a fanatic, he went beyond all common sense. He should have focused more on the fact that he was out of touch with his superiors and reporting his situation to them.

I'd understand if he kept this up for a couple years after the war, but decades?

There is a major difference between a Japanese soldier doing his duty to his country, emperor, and people attacking an enemy during a time of war and choosing to ignore common sense and continue to kill civilians 3 decades after the end of hostilities.

All this man shows is that kind of mentality the allies were up against during the war and what they'd have faced had nuclear weapons not brought a quick end to the war.

You seem to have latched on to one of my points and ignored the other. Americans treated non-Japanese POWs and most civilian populations reasonably well, but rape and murder were still atrociously common. The Japanese doctrine of no surrender arose due to two factors, and one of those was that the Allies weren't taking prisoners even when they surrendered. Between being told by your government that you can expect to be murdered if you surrender and then knowing of hundreds of cases where surrendering, wounded or incapacitated Japanese soldiers were simply killed rather than taken prisoner and you can be sure that you will fight to the death. Those that were actually taken prisoner were generally well treated, but the combination of Japanese propaganda and Allied executions meant very few Japanese soldiers ever became pows.

Surrender was never really an option for most, because the Allies in the Pacific generally killed those who surrendered anyway. You have to remember that the American propaganda at the time was incredibly racially driven, and the Japanese were viewed as sub-human by most of the soldiers on the ground. So much like the Eastern Front in Europe it devolves into a war were atrocities build on top of atrocities for both sides and the whole things continues in a downwards spiral. Hell, Marines were known for making trophies out of the corpses and sending them home. One guy was so proud of his first kill that he cut off the mans head, boiled it until the flesh melted off then sent it home to his wife to place on the coffee table. That is not something you do to an enemy you consider to be human, that is something you o on safari. This is by no means an isolated account either. So before brushing off the Allied atrocities by saying the Japanese were worse maybe you should read into both sides a bit more.

The nature of the allied victory in WWII often gets somewhat concealed to us today. We hear all about the horrors perpetrated by the axis (and there were many and they are inexcusable) but we treat our side like living saints. Talk to any veteran of WWII and the honest ones will tell you we won by being utter and complete bastards, because that is how you win a war, not by following the rules and being nice, but by being willing to be the greater monster. Well that and proper logistics.
Revisionist BS. I'm ashamed that you're fellow Canadian.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Goettge#Goettge_Patrol

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_war_crimes#Perfidy

After dealing with that enough, I sure as hell wouldn't be taking any prisoners either.

As for humane treatment, that's a load when talking about the Japanese and how they treated who as at their mercy.

For a people who were so obsessed with Bushido and honour, they really liked to show the world how little they really had.