Japanese--American wartime interactions: a model not followed in Iraq.

AuthorStraus, Ulrich A.

Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States went to war with a nation that was hardly known by the majority of Americans. Even before the war began, racial prejudice against the Japanese had already run high, especially in the West Coast states. In addition to deep-seated cultural differences, Japanese and Chinese immigrants were regarded as alien because of their willingness to work longer hours for lower wages than Caucasians during the Great Depression.

In the prewar and wartime eras the Japanese people had even less contact with average Americans. Despite the hostile propaganda, it would be fair to describetheir attitude toward our country as one of considerable respect because of America's great wealth and leadership in modern technology. At the same time, in prewar times the United States was included in the group of western countries that was perceived as predatory and dangerous to virtually all of Asia. This was no idle threat, given the fact that almost all of Asia was already composed of colonies, plus a few quasi-colonies like China.

Other than combat, the unlikely locus of prisoner of war (POW) camps became the reason for the first mass contact betweenAmericans and Japanese. The accounts of the torture, deaths andprivationsofAmericanPOWsat the hands of Japanese prisonguardsiswellknown to the nowrapidly fading"GreatestGeneration," including the AmericanWW II veterans.

Similarly, Americans captured large numbers of Iraqis initially and in the current period of extended insurgencies. In this case, we, the captors, evidenced again a general Americandisdain of another veryalien culture heightened by public revulsion overthe brutal regime of Saddam Hussein, linked in the public mind, however falsely, with the 9/11 attacks.

Thus in both cases, separated by over sixty years, the stimulus of revised perceptions lay first with Japanese and Iraqi prisoners. But in this case, the shoe would be reversed as American soldiers perpetrated atrocities upon Iraqi prisoners.

Japanese POWs

Contrasting the two cases, the experiences of Japanese POWs in American captivity produced a very different attitude. Compared with the huge numbers of German and Italian POWs in our hands, Japanese POWs were relatively rare, numbering a total of only 15,000 when the war ended. Japan's soldiers and sailors were thoroughly indoctrinated with the belief that surrender was never an option. It was regarded as the ultimate shame, with consequences not only for the individuals...

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