Karl Heidenreich wrote:I´m not that overly optimistic about this notion of Japanese objective thinking. Let´s remember that these people disliked (and many still do) westerners. Both, the US and GB, did a great deal exploiting asiatics and the only way Japan forbade this from happening to them was to arm themselves to their teeth. And after WWI the western powers put it hard to them with the Naval Treaties which gave the Japanese an inferior status to the US and GB. Yamamoto was a witness to this opposition from the japanese "fleet faction" that more than once threatened to kill him because his support to the treaties.
Anyway the political and military japanese view of western powers, specially the US, was not a good one and, with the treaties and the US position over China and, later, Indochina, would have triggered the war anyway. Again, no need of facist rulers in Europe. When the IJN fought Russia they didn´t seek, and didn´t need, the support of any other foreign regime. As a matter of fact in their war in the Pacific they were reluctant to colaborate in any way with Germany.
Best regards...
As I say this is in need of heavy qualification. For some 25 years, between 1920 (the Japanese occupation of parts of Siberia in the war between the White and Red Russians) and 1945 this is the prevailing Japanese military view. But consider the two periods outside this.
In 1854 Commodore Perry's expedition to Japan forced that country to start to open up to the outside world. For nearly 50 years the Japanese did open up, slowly at first but then with a vengeance, particulary after the 1881 Meiji Restoration. This opening up and rapid modernisation/industrialisation was done largely on Japanese terms, with the Army trained by the Germans and the Navy by the British. There was no colonial rule involved, Japan became a colonial empire in its own right.
It has been argued that the importing of German military ideas infleunced Japanese thinking which was taken on board in the years up to and including the First World War, ideas that would fall on fertile ground as they coincided with Japanese martial thinking. Until this happened Japan was not an enemy of the Occidental Powers.
Similary after 1945 Japanese militarism vanished. The American occupation had a huge influence on Japan culturally as well as politically. Japan again redeveloped economically and became an economic giant through using US production methods and thinking, and achieved living standards unattainable under military rule. There are residues of anti-Western sentiment, but no more significant than the communist movement in the US.
Since the 1950's I don't think it is the case that the majority of Japanese resent the West. On the contrary I think they have done very well out of them and they recognise that.
''Give me a Ping and one Ping only'' - Sean Connery.