Someone once read something written in 1948 and commented that

the writer sounded pretty racist towards the Japanese.

Maybe he was but let's take a look at the writer.

He happened to be a Pacific Marine that had served in two major campaigns during WW2 and had faced some of the worst savagery the world has ever seen. He wrote in 1948 and the brutality he saw was still fresh in his mind.

I can't really say as I'd blame him.

I was born a few years after the war and had no part of it. I didn't witness the horrors the troops faced while fighting thee Japanese and can't begin to imagine what these men saw.

Still, I can certainly see why a lot of them were less than enamored with the Japanese. 

Yesterday I ran into a 93 year old Pacific Marine that had been through Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Saipan and Okinawa.  

I didn't ask but I'd put pretty good money that he didn't drive a Toyota if he was still driving. 

You have to get into a person and walk around in his skin for a while before you can judge him.

Several years ago in the cockpit of a sailboat headed for Tacoma from Hawaii the subject of Hitler youth came up and I took a look at myself as a younger kid. I was a Boy Scout and liked the outdoors, shooting, fishing and things. I very, very well would have joined as a kid and wound up brainwashed enough to try and shoot a Sherman tank with a Panzerfaust during the last days of the war.

Same holds if I were a Japanese farm kid growing up in the late 30s. I would have probably believed everything I was told by the government and fallen in on the final Banzai charge on some God forsaken island.

The difference between me and a lot of others is I'll look at it honestly and admit it. I'll at least try and figure out how I would have acted in a different time and place and under different circumstances.

It's pretty easy to criticize some old goat that doesn't like the Japanese (or the Germans or whomever) if you haven't either been there or at the least looked at things through their eyes.





To find out why the blog is pink just cut and paste this: http://piccoloshash.blogspot.com/2009/12/my-feminine-side-blog-stays-pink.html NO ANIMALS WERE HARMED IN THE WRITING OF TODAY'S ESSAY