Anonymous asked: Were any Japanese citizens resistant of the Empire and their ideals during WWII? I've often wondered about this, but have never found any sound information on it.

This is a good question too anon.

I did a huge project on that for uni a while back, and really from what I could find (and my professor made me dig deep and far so I wouldn’t present the usual “the Japanese were horrible! war crimes!!” speech to the class) there weren’t many, if any at all.

But it wasn’t the citizens fault, and I understand it’s really hard to understand why, especially if someone has a Western mindset (because the mindset of most Asian countries is really different from Western countries in the sense that it is the majority over the individual which is what has nearly always made their armies so great), is that they had been so toughly conditioned by the government that resistance was, well to be cliche, futile.

I’m sure there might have been a few, perhaps in the older generation—I don’t image the younglings would be in on it considering they all really had been brainwashed, especially the young men—but they were probably shut down so quickly that there was no news out of. I can’t imagine there would be as much resistance to the ideals the Empire was propagating—not like in Germany and Italy.

Any followers know of any and have citations?
I got nothing for this off the top of my head.

September 15, 2012, 11:39pm / 19