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The Japanese Soldier Who Fought WWII for 30 Years

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Re: The Japanese Soldier Who Fought WWII for 30 Years

#71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worse option: letting the other guy go to war, and you don't. Its called surrender and can be worse.

I'm just curious. Do you have any example of country (region?) that had a real option of waging war against its enemy but chose to surrender and got worse then it would get if it choose to wage war? (by any reasonable prediction, of course)

How different is that from losing? Lots of examples of that: anybody that lost to the Japanese in WWII. Anybody that lost to Germany in WWII.

Re: The Japanese Soldier Who Fought WWII for 30 Years

#73
post #20
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With soldiers this dedicated to the cause though you have to think had there been no atomic bombs the world may have been a very different place.

The atomic bombs were devastating and impressive, but they didn't do much more actual damage than the B-29 fire bomb raids on Tokyo in terms of loss of life and property. When you can drop bombs at all, it doesn't really matter what kind of bombs they are. The atomic bombs were an excellent PR move of sorts, as a tool to convince the japanese to give up more than as a weapon of war.

You're talking about two bombs on relatively unimportant targets, specifically because they wanted relatively untouched cities to erase as a demonstration. That won't kill as many people as years-long bombing campaigns on more populous cities. They were staged demonstrations, not attempts to kill massive amounts of people.

If Japan didn't surrender after the first two atom bombs, the next half dozen would have undoubtedly caused much, much more damage.

Re: The Japanese Soldier Who Fought WWII for 30 Years

#74
post #28
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Had there been no atomic bombs the world may have been a very different place." That is true, but for reasons that have nothing to do with Japan. As far as Japan is concerned, the theories about how they would have fought for every house, etc. are false. The Japanese were trying to negotiate a surrender even before the first atomic bomb fell.

As far as Japan is concerned, the theories about how they would have fought for every house, etc. are false. One of the most astonishing facts about the Pacific War was how few Japanese soldiers ever surrendered to the Allies (before the war officially ended). The Japanese sense of honor demanded that they fight till the end and never surrender. I no longer have the exact number, but IIRC, the total number of captive…

My dad fought in WWII, at Okinawa. His unit had a 120% casualty rate or so--the entire unit, plus 20% of the replacements. According to him, one of the reasons we had so few Japanese prisoners is because the Marines weren't especially interested in taking prisoners. The intelligence officers were quite displeased at that.

Re: The Japanese Soldier Who Fought WWII for 30 Years

#75
post #18
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed so, but I read they were considering surrendering to the Russians, which is something the US really didn't want.

I don't know where you read that but it makes no sense. The Russians could not have taken Japan if they wanted to, they had to go through the US navy to do that. The Soviet Navy at the time was not much to speak of and it also happened to be on the other side of the earth. A big chunk of the Japanese army surrendered to the Russians (as they were stuck in China), and also, if I remember correctly, the Japanese tried…

It was long suspected--no less by the Soviets--that another motive for the atomic bombings was to warn off Stalin. (Of course, there were enough idealistic traitors in the Manhattan Project that Stalin knew all about it and got his very own atomic bombs a few years later, so the joke was on us.)

Re: The Japanese Soldier Who Fought WWII for 30 Years

#76
post #16
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Had there been no atomic bombs the world may have been a very different place." That is true, but for reasons that have nothing to do with Japan. As far as Japan is concerned, the theories about how they would have fought for every house, etc. are false. The Japanese were trying to negotiate a surrender even before the first atomic bomb fell.

Indeed so, but I read they were considering surrendering to the Russians, which is something the US really didn't want.

Considering the fate of the parts of Europe which ended up occupied by the Russians, it's probably good for Japan that they ended up surrendering the way they did.

Re: The Japanese Soldier Who Fought WWII for 30 Years

#77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US started a war in Iraq that has exterminated about a million human beings so far and has produced 3 or 4 million refugees. We started that war because we believed lies. If taking actions that lead to a million corpses because we were insufficiently skeptical doesn't trouble you, well, I'd guess that our value systems are sufficiently incompatible so as to make discussion impossible. Also, I dislike sociopathy.

Hm. Is that number pulled out of the air? http://www.iraqbodycount.org/

No, it most certainly is not. The number is based on the Lancet 2 study which found about 650,000 excess deaths. Tim Lambert at Deltoid extrapolated the Lancet 2 excess mortality rates to about one million because Lancet 2 ended just as violence in Iraq was increasing enough to make further field work impossible. See http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2008/11/deaths_in_iraq_1.php for more information.

In general, Iraq Body Count is an obscene underestimate of excess deaths. IBC data comes from two sources (1) english language journalist accounts and (2) Iraqi government data. We know that (1) is absurd because when violence increases, deaths increase and reporters' presence on the ground decreases dramatically. If you read journalists' accounts of their own work in Iraq (for example, Imperial Life in the Emerald City by Rajiv Chandrasekaran), you'll note that in many cases reporters simply never left the green zone. How could they possibly write stories about killings when they can't leave the green zone? We know that the data from (2) is highly suspect because much of the conflict in Iraq has been sectarian with government death squads engaged in ethnic cleansing. For example, we have evidence showing that when Shiite religious parties took control of the ministry of health after elections, they fired Sunni medical staff and imposed policies restricting the treatment of wounded Shia. If the Shia run ministry of health won't treat Sunni victims, why on Earth should we trust them to faithfully record statistics about how many Sunnis were executed by government death squads? I mean, are we normally so credulous that we accept death counts made by the government accused of making the killings?

From a scientific perspective, IBC's "analysis" is garbage and should be ignored. At the very least, you have no business citing IBC unless you understand enough about IBC's methodological flaws to explain precisely why it can only be considered a gross underestimate.

Re: The Japanese Soldier Who Fought WWII for 30 Years

#78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm just curious. Do you have any example of country (region?) that had a real option of waging war against its enemy but chose to surrender and got worse then it would get if it choose to wage war? (by any reasonable prediction, of course)

How different is that from losing? Lots of examples of that: anybody that lost to the Japanese in WWII. Anybody that lost to Germany in WWII.

When you surrender then your losses should be usually lower then of that when you loose. Otherwise there would be no point in surrendering.

I'm guessing that surrendering early might often lead to much less damage than attempting to wage a war against serious opponent.

Re: The Japanese Soldier Who Fought WWII for 30 Years

#79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hm. Is that number pulled out of the air? http://www.iraqbodycount.org/

No, it most certainly is not. The number is based on the Lancet 2 study which found about 650,000 excess deaths. Tim Lambert at Deltoid extrapolated the Lancet 2 excess mortality rates to about one million because Lancet 2 ended just as violence in Iraq was increasing enough to make further field work impossible. See http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2008/11/deaths_in_iraq_1.php for more information. In general, Iraq B…

Sorry, I only meant to point to reports of concrete data. I didn't know the standard of accuracy here is extrapolations on studies, speculation and politically-charged argument, istead of data reported "on the ground".

Re: The Japanese Soldier Who Fought WWII for 30 Years

#80
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hiroo Onoda may be dumb, but I believe you can't tell that based on this story. To suggest otherwise is myopic. Apply Occam's razor: news of Japan's surrender is a (probably not uncommon) Allied trick vs. the US created a magic secret weapon that would force Japan -- a country so dedicated to winning they crash planes into boats -- to surrender shortly after Hiroo left it. In Hiroo's Japanse solider's shoes, which se…

In 1946, perhaps, in 1950? 1955? 1960? 1970? no. At that point, 5, 10, 15, 30 years after the fact the idea that Japan had not lost the war, the war was still going, and yet they had not reconquered the Phillippines doesn't pass the smell test.

I think we have to question if Onada really still thought in days, weeks or years. At least to me, it does not sound totally unbelieveable that he eventually stopped counting days and weeks and rather lived a sequence of days. A very long sequence of days, long enough to make him lose track how long it was.

At least to me, this is kind of plausible, because he had no more reference in his days. You know: Hey, every seven days there is this special day where I cannot go shopping if I need something. This coincides with a week going by, and thus, you have a fairly "natural" notion of a week. For him, I guess, a day consisted of getting up, checking his surroundings, gathering intelligence, staying hidden, maintaining his weapons and eventually hiding and going to sleep again. Day after day after day.

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