Garret DeOrio:
Thank you for your response (as well as your very interesting post).
You said: “It’s telling, though, that an article about a present-day individual crime so quickly led to WWII and multiple indictments of an entire nationality based on incidents from WWII. The young men in question now are young enough that even their grandparents are often too young to have fought in WWII. It really is the equivalent of trying to explain Columbine through the prism of WWII. Not the most fruitful strategy if you really want to understand what’s going on two, even three generations after the end of the war.”
The reason that I brought up the Japanese wartime atrocities is to illustrate the incongruity of Japanese culture and violence – yet there it was. Just as today, these violent young mens’ behavior is incongruous with Japanese culture.
I’m not equating them other than to say that both are puzzling – and both illustrate that even in Japanese society, violence exists.
These things happen all over. That they happen also in Japan is not particularly surprising to me.
On another note, you said earlier: “During the first year of the Occupation, US forces in Japan committed as many as 300,000 rapes.”
Do you have a cite for this? My understanding is that there were 350,000 American servicemen in Japan the first year of occupation (with the number decreasing every year after). That is an incredibly high rate of rape.
