Would You Rather Be Colonized By The Japanese or The Dutch?

Executive Summary

• The European colonial period is often described in very negative terms by African countries.
• There is a good comparison point versus the Japanese.

Introduction

It is common for Africans to make derogatory statements about European colocalization. However, what is far less discussed is how this colocalization compares to non-European powers.

Our References for This Article

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Japan’s Colonialization of Dutch Indonesia

In WW2, Japan captured Indonesia from the Japanese. This is a saying in Indonesia regarding the Japanese occupation/colonialization during WW2.

It is much better to be colonized by the Dutch for 350 years. Than being occupied by Japan in 2.5 years.

And this is not the only Southeast Asian country with such a saying, as is found in the following expression in the Philippines.

It is much better to be colonized by the Spanish and the Americans for 360 years than being occupied by Japan for 3 years.

During the invasion of Southeast Asia, it is estimated that the Japanese killed 8.6 million. It is estimated the Japanese killed 1 out of every 20 Filipinos.

Scientific Experimentation

The Japanese atrocities generally were at least as bad as anything performed by the Nazis, with the Nazis treating prisoners of war far more ethically than the Japanese.

The Japanese Obsession With Beheading

The Japanese military had a strange obsession with beheading people they had captured be the military of civilians.

Source: By Utagawa Kunimasa V – Sharf Collection, Museum of Fine Arts.

The Japanese military has a long history of beheading helpless PWOs, which illustrates similarities with another barbaric culture in Saudi Arabia. This image depicts a scene from the late 1800s during the Sino-Japan War. This is covered in more detail in the article Have Japan’s War Crimes Been Historically Deemphasized Because They Are Not White?

Conclusion

It was difficult to find much material on the occupation of Indonesia by the Japanese, and much of it seemed repetitive or from the same source. The information available of the behavior in China by the Japanese is far more widely available, with one example being found in the following quotation.

Japanese war crimes are not just limited to massacre. Special units of the Japanese military carried out experiments on Chinese POWs and civilians in the early 1940s. The Unit 731 led by Shirō Ishii subjected these Chinese people to experiments of amputations, vivisection and biological weapon testing. Chinese prisoners were let to freeze outside with their arms exposed and occasionally soaked in water to freeze to a solid state. The arms were amputated while the doctors repeated the procedures on the upper part of the arm connecting to the shoulder and later removed the legs finally leaving a chest and the head, which caused 3000 deaths. The Imperial Japanese Army collectively killed 580,000 people. – Enkivillage

However, the expression that persists in Indonesia and the Philippines is telling.

What the Japanese Coloniazliation of Asia Would Have Brought

The planned colonization by the Japanese would have brought hell on earth for all of the countries that would have been under Japan’s rule. Curiously, Japan is not held accountable for these actions today, and it is very rare to hear of the term Japanese colonialization. The Japanese also hide all of their war crimes and crimes of occupation from their citizens and do not admit that they did anything that was unethical.

The Japanese Do Not Care And Are Not Taught About the Crimes of the Japanese Military

In Asian culture, a country can’t take responsibility for one’s actions. Therefore, the Japanese do not teach anything about these atrocities. Most Japanese see the country as a victim of WW2, as they were heavily bombed during the war.

Are The Japanese Not Held Accountable for Their Atrocities Because They Are Not White?

There is a valid question of whether the war crimes and horrendous behavior of the Japanese during WW2 (and many wars before this) have been whitewashed because it is not considered politically correct to hold non-whites accountable for barbaric behavior or a complete lack of ethics. We hear about the atrocities of the Nazis without end, as they are kept alive in movies. In contrast, the atrocities, which in many dimensions exceeded that of the Nazis, are barely mentioned. Both Germany and Japan were heavily bombed during the war, yet only the Japanese were considered victims. The Japanese are not only guilty of these war atrocities but also for positioning themselves as victims of the war, for being entirely unconcerned with those they killed and mutilated, and for doing everything they could to cover up their atrocities. That is, the Japanese were not just horrendously unethical; their lack of ethics continued for decades, and to the present day they have refused to take any ethical responsibility for their behavior.

Our Golden Pinocchio

Those who discuss Japan in glowing terms hide its history of occupation and do not hold Japan or the Japanese to any ethical standard because they are not white.