Quote: (01-14-2019 02:43 AM)Caduceus Wrote:
SamuelBRoberts offering nothing here except throwaway one line contrarian rebuttals, without any backup or reasonable counter arguments.
It's very clear who's the person who doesn't know anything about Japanese culture or religion.
Well, okay, since you asked...
Quote: (01-13-2019 03:17 PM)Sherman Wrote:
The world may have been better off if Japan had won the war.
Absolutely not. The Japanese were brutal monsters to the people they colonized. The Rape of Nanking was already pointed out, but there's a giant stack of similar atrocities that took place all across Asia. Here's
one. Here's another in
Singapore. My personal favorite was a naval general named Kakuta Kakuji, whose last message to command during the battle of Tinian before he died was "老人婦女子を爆薬にて処決せん" ("I'm going to use explosives to deal with the women, children, and old people.")
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A Japanese Empire would have spread Buddhism and peace around the world.
A Japanese Empire most certainly would not have spread Buddhism around the world, for the simple reason that the Japanese Empire was nativist Shinto, not Buddhist. (The official word for it is 国家神道, or "State Shinto".) They didn't even like Buddhism. One of the very first things the modern government did when it came to power was
tear down all the buddhist temples.
The government derived its entire legitimacy from the supposedly divine persona of the Emperor, which was the core of State Shinto. The first article of the Japanese constitution reads "大日本帝国ハ万世一系ノ天皇之ヲ統治ス". "The Empire of Japan is ruled by the Emperor, whose lineage is eternal." Abandoning Shinto to spread Buddhistm would've meant undermining the legitimacy of their entire system. It would be like expecting the Saudi royal house to convert to Christianity.
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Buddhism being an Indo-European religion very compatible with European thought.
Buddhism isn't remotely compatible with European thought. That's why there are no Buddhists in Europe. Hell, there are barely any buddhists (In the sense that they actually believe the buddhist worldview, not "go to the local temple for funerals and pray at it once in a while") in Japan.
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During that era, the Japanese philosopher Kitaro Nishida studied German philosophy and integrated it with Zen Buddhism, creating a religous synthesis that the Empire could export to Europe.
'cause if there's one thing that the European masses are crying out for, it's a syncretic fusion of zen buddhism and German philosophy. The Europeans couldn't be persuaded to follow Christianity, which can be explained in something like two paragraphs and has been an integral part of their culture for something like two millennia. The idea that they'd start believing some complicated religion from another side of the planet is silly. It's cool that you can name a guy from a book you read, though.
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A reconstructed Imperial Japan may be the solution to the degeneration of the West.
There will be no reconstructed Imperial Japan. The age of colonialism is over. Even the Japanese far-right isn't calling for a restoration of an expansionistic Japanese Empire. They've put out tons of books justifying the war, with titles like 大東亜戦争肯定論 (A justification for the Great East Asian War) and 大東亜戦争の大義 (The Righteous Cause Behind the Great Asian War), but all of them simply attempt to justify the war from an anti-colonialist perspective, and none of them are calling for a restoration of the Greater East-Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. (A buddy of mine who's a member of the Japanese far right once said to me, "All you westerners had colonies, how come Japan is the only who gets blamed for trying to have colonies of its own?" Guy honestly had a point. He's in no mood to bring back a Japanese empire either, for what it's worth.)
Japan has been, for 99.9% of its existence, tremendously inward focused. Getting them to even admit there's a world outside of their island chain is sometimes almost impossible. It's one of the least expansionistic countries on the planet. It was only a freakish series of coincidences that lead to it trying to take over Asia and fight the US. Shintaro Ishihara, in his book それでも「NO(ノー)」と言える日本 (The Japan that Can Still Say No) chalks it up to a single line in the Meiji Era constitution which accidentally gave the military far more power than anybody at the time realized. Take that away, or change the outcome of the
2-26 Incident and history might have proceeded very differently.
No Japanese people want to bring back military rule. Nobody wants to invade Korea. Nobody is signed up to go take Philippine oil fields. It's not going to happen.
This whole thread is very silly.