The Japanese are among my favorite people today. I love visiting Japan because it’s so clean, orderly, and charming. It probably was in 1941, too, but the country was in the grip of the foul Bushido culture, which combined unrelieved brutality with a disdain for all non-Japanese races.
Andrea Widburg 'On December 7, 1941, the Japanese launched a devastating attack on American Naval forces in Honolulu. Within a short time, 2,403 Americans were dead and another 1,178 were injured. What many people forget is that the Japanese also attacked most of Southeast Asia. My mother was there when that happened.
"Neither my mother, 16, nor her sister, 12, should have been in Java. They were Dutch citizens who had been living for some years in British-mandate Palestine. Because North Africa was one of the theaters in which the Allies fought the Axis powers, the British set up military bases there. They hired my grandfather, an architect, to design the basic buildings (mess halls, barracks, etc.).
"I never met my grandfather, but he was apparently quite charming, and the British officers liked him. They told him that they thought Rommel might win. If that happened, the combined Arab and German forces would slaughter every Jew. (It was an early version of Hamas’s “From the river to the sea” plan for a Jewish genocide in land Jews had occupied for thousands of years.)
"My grandfather decided to send his daughters far from the war. He picked Java, which was then part of the Dutch East Indies. For a year, the girts had a lovely life because life was good for the European colonists benefitting from the cheap labor in the countries they occupied. That ended on December 8 (because East Asia was on the other side of the international date line), when the Japanese invaded the Malayan peninsula, countries that offered oil, rubber, and iron ore.
"Within a short time, the Japanese had interned the civilian populations – men and boys in one set of camps, women, girls, young boys in another. As Mom was always careful to point out, these camps were not extermination camps like Auschwitz. However, they were still horrific." . . .
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