Japan At War Essay, Research Paper

Commentary: Japan at WarThe book for me was a difficult reading experience. I myself as a Chinese who have never live through that time can only imagine the horrors that people of my race encountered through the many atrocities the Japanese committed on us. As I read this book the recurring thought on my mind was what if the Japanese massacred my family and that would have meant that I would have never been born and given the life as I know of as today. But war is war and no good will come out of it because it was war. Part one of the book really struck me hard on how the soldiers in the Japanese army were trained. They just took Chinese from anywhere where they found them and bayoneted them to death just in the sake of training their soldiers to kill without a moment s hesitation. This kind of training although built perfect killing machines was just too horrific in my mind of the modern world that we live in. There was a line in the book that said this kind of training turned humans into murdering demons and nothing said could have been more appropriate than that description given by a soldier in one of the stories. Than there was unit 731 and their experimentation on humans to discover more efficient means of using biological warfare to win wars more efficiently and quickly. I have known of a movie made recently regarding this event that I have never gotten myself to see that movie but I know that it showed footage of the human experiments done on my fellow country men. Words cannot describe the utter disgust I felt as I was reading that part of the book. Even though to the Japanese we were below the levels of dogs and slaughtered us like pigs in a slaughter house it is incomprehensible to me that a whole country can do something like that and felt no remorse. It took the Japanese government fifty years after the war to begin to think that they should issue a formal apology to the war crimes they did in China. I may be completely out of line by saying what I am about to say but what the Japanese army did to us made the holocaust seem like a joke. I am happy in a way that this book was written and assigned to us to be read. I strongly believe that people in general in the western hemisphere who are all caught up in the big deal of the holocaust never knew are care about that this same kind of atrocities are being committed in the eastern part of the world. They took regular civilians and they cut them up just to train more medics and doctors to further their cause of eastern domination. This was their so call training for field doctors and medics. Before I read this book I did knew that some really horrible things were done there, but now after reading this book I know now what exactly they did and the atrocities they committed on us during the war.

After reading pass the first part of the book and than begin hearing stories that did not deal with the front in China and other war crimes. It becomes apparent even though it was hard for me to swallow was that it was not really anybody s fault it was war and it had to be done everyone suffers because of war. With the stories in the book progressing towards families and their sons who died in the war. Some of the stories you can help but pity the families who lost sometimes their only child in the war. As one of the stories puts it that the father blamed himself for the rest of his life because he did not look up to the sky and that day his son flew over him. It was the last chance the father will ever get to see his son before his final mission as a kamikaze pilot. I have also seen some other Japanese movies that dealt with the theme of whole families perishing because of the war. Sometimes I wonder who was the bigger hypercritics the U.S. or Japan. The vengefulness of the U.S. towards the Japanese just because of the bombing of Pearl Harbor a military facility where the intended targets were military and the U.S. bombing everything in Japan that contained life other than military to waste. With the dropping of the Atomic bomb on Hiroshima and years later some US citizens refuse to let the victims come over for plastic surgery on bodies that were horribly burned because of radiation so they could than lead a normal life. It sometimes seems the US are just as bad as Japan for taking out civilian population and committing horrors that was just about equal in magnitude although it did not require face to face confrontation. This book was more thought provoking than the Forgotten Soldier, which felt like at times like reading an adventure book. This book sometimes made me angry at certain parts and made me pitied them at other parts. This book is one of the best books I have read that showed what war was really like and how people tried to live through a war with many prospective instead of most other books that just provides one view. It is also reason why I could not focus on one subject for this commentary since so many things and events are happening in this book. The only thing that each story in the book can relate to one another is that war makes people do things that they would never ever do in their regular lifetime. This binding statement for the book shows that war is war and terrible things happens because of it and maybe the reason why Japan hopes to forget it as it helps to prevent hate and animosity because of things done in wartime.