The Bushido Code is what made the Japanese so ruthless in WW2. I don't believe that is taught in Japan anymore.
It took the Japanese militarists a couple decades to raise that generation of warriors. I don't think you'll find their like today.
There are still students of the Old Code over there... I might have mentioned this, but one of my labmates in my college's computer lab was from Japan, and he argued that Japan lost the war as karmic retribution for how Tojo and the military junta of which he was part had perverted and corrupted the Bushido--the guy actually made a persuasive argument that MacArthur and his GI's were more samurai-like in their conduct than the Imperial Army and Navy.
We sometimes ascribe "fierceness" to soldiers, such as ISIS fighters today, when what we really mean is that they refuse to surrender when all is lost. I would argue that the United States Marines...the victors...were the fiercest warriors in the Pacific. The Japanese were merely idiotically stubborn.
I believe you're right. But we know when the Japanese people put their mind to something...they can be very much like us. They'll do it very well.
The Japanese soldier was very well trained, and very willing to kill the enemy. Studies showed that US soldiers were very hesitant to kill. Only about 12% of US soldiers would shoot to kill (unless they were in imminent danger), because they were hesitant to kill and very much preferred not to.
VERY interesting. That is very much the perspective of many Japanese I have known over the years. They saw Imperial Japan as arrogant and greedy, willing to do anything to get what they want, and to hell with right or wrong, morality, or humanity.
The U. S. Marines were absolutely fierce ... they would decapitate the dead Japanese soldiers, boil off the flesh, and mount the skulls of the enemy on their tanks, in rows. This seems almost ... tribal, by today's standards, but it did freak out the Japanese.GunGeek said:
Yeah, the Japanese certainly didn't make shooting to kill optional.
According to him, Japanese culture is such that they would still Climb Mount Niitaka or Kamikaze Up for their Emperor if so ordered, but the leadership better be Damn Sure because they're going to have a hard sell getting the authority to Go To War and give those orders again in the first place. It's like flipping a switch from Hippie Peacenik to Viking Berserker with almost nothing in between. (His hot-take on the No War clause was that it had served its purpose and was now somewhat obsolete, but to keep that reassurance of safety to the international community it should be modified to "no offensive war unless authorized or requested by our treaty partners"--I think he was envisioning something akin to the KATUSA program where Korean troops trained and fought alongside GI's under American command.)
