this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2024
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this is why we need anime. you simply don't get these life lessons anywhere else
This is kind of a bad translation tbf. It is literally correct but not figuratively. It's more like "Nobody can escape the finality of death."
Caveat: I don't know Japanese but I have seen this frame discussed before. I've also heard some other odd death related sayings in JP media, like "He wouldn't die even if you killed him."
Played for laughs in Maou Gakuin no Futekigousha (Misfit of Demon King Academy), where the immensely overpowered protagonist often asks things like "Did you think killing me would be enough to make me die?".
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In Dutch culture, Prime Minsters are considered important figures and assassinating them is necessary in order to eat them.
In Brazilian culture, Presidents, even former ones, are considered important figures and watching their meeting planning a crime is a serious cultural comedy.
(for anyone out of the loop: Bolsonaro recorded an all-hands meeting with several ministers, sometime during the 2022 campaign, wanting a "solution" to his inevitable loss. One of the ministers even asked if it was being recorded, to which both bozo and the intelligence general gestured a "no", because "everything we're saying here could incriminate us". Said recording was found on the Google Drive of one of his cronies and was openly displayed in local news)
To be honest: I passively learned that Japanese commit Seppuku if they break their knightly code. The kamakazi pilots. And during WWII, they were non stop “I didn’t hear no bell” even after the first nuke.
This biased me into thinking Japanese values life a tidbit less than others.
But I’m pretty sure they just had a rampant conservative choo choo train with no brakes, no exits for the more sane Japanese.
Watch some Japanese programming, read any magazine there, and you'll probably notice a huge amount of articles praising people living long, active, healthy lives. Is suicide an issue? Absolutely. But it's ridiculous to say they don't value life, especially when compared to some countries which seem to have a problem with gun violence
They also claim, like, so many of the "oldest people in the world".
Which none of those live in Tokyo I guess.
While yes, most of the world’s oldest people generally don’t live in cities, what’s your beef with Tokyo specifically? You make it sound like a death city.
It's just that over ~~90% (i think)~~ 30% of Japans population lives there. So the claim that they have the oldest people in the world makes it funny when most of their population lives in a city that is probably not that healthy to live in.
I mean Tokyo is probably the best Mega city on the planet so it ain't that bad for sure.
Ok but Google says that 10% of Japanese live in Tokyo, which is still massive but 90% is a ridiculous stretch
Maybe he's referring to the greater Tokyo Metropolitan area? Sounds more plausible at least since it's absolutely massive. Def not for just Tokyo city.
The Greater Tokyo Metropolitan area has a population of 37 million while the country has a population of 125.7 million. While an impressively large percentage, it’s still less than a third (29.4%) of the population of Japan proper.
Fair enough and also insane. Shout out to their public transit there. I stayed there for a couple weeks and it was amazing how easy it was for me to do whatever I wanted without worrying about how to get to places.
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Oh yeah, what about your gun problem huh?
To describe a tactic that exploited the Shintoist beliefs of soldiers of a fascist state as "conservative" is certainly one way to put it...
Pretty sure the ones dropping nukes on entire cities have even less value for life.
We literally nuked them to cow them into surrender rather than spend millions of American and japanese lives in a brutal and ultimately pointless land campaign. We took away their glorious last stand on the home islands and replaced it with instant annihilation, lingering death, and the taste of the sun. It might have spared more Japanese lives in the long run, but it definitely saved a whole mess of American lives in an immediate way. That's what really matters. USA #1 baybeee
There's strong arguments to be made that we nuked them so that they'd surrender to us instead of the Russians.
3 prongs.
It was also to show off the nukes to the Russians
Why do one thing when can do many thing same time
The Russians had zero ability to invade the Japanese home islands. The Russian official declaration of war only cut off a potential way for the Japanese to broker a peace through a neutral Russia.
I suspect they could've gained a limited (big emphasis on limited) ability to invade the Japanese islands if/once they seized coastal Chinese and Korean regions that were under Japanese control, some ships might've been around.
That's a post facto justification. Reading over the notes of the people doing the strategic planning for it all, it's quite clear they expected the war to continue. For example, there was a debate on if they should drop the nukes as they become available (which would have been a few a month), or if they should store them up and drop a whole lot on invasion day.
The Japanese had already fought on through the firebombing of Tokyo. That killed a comparable number of people to the atomic bombings. It just takes a lot more bombers to make it happen compared to dropping a nuke.
Honestly I feel like we really missed something when we passed on the bat bombs. Those things would have absolutely annihilated any significant concentrations of Japanese structures. I feel like weaponizing nature could be done a lot better
In his letter, Adams stated that the bat was the "lowest form of animal life", and that, until now, "reasons for its creation have remained unexplained".
In one incident, the Carlsbad Army Airfield Auxiliary Air Base … near Carlsbad, New Mexico, was set on fire on May 15, 1943, when armed bats were accidentally released.
Bat bombs were an experimental World War II weapon developed by the United States. The bomb consisted of a bomb-shaped casing with over a thousand compartments, each containing a hibernating Mexican free-tailed bat with a small, timed incendiary bomb attached. Dropped from a bomber at dawn, the casings would deploy a parachute in mid-flight and open to release the bats, which would then disperse and roost in eaves and attics in a 20–40-mile radius (32–64 km). The incendiaries, which were set on timers, would then ignite and start fires in inaccessible places in the largely wood and paper constructions of the Japanese cities that were the weapon's intended target.
Thanks for this incredible bit of knowledge.
And I thought the anti-tank dogs on the soviet front were cruel... This is even worse.
Initially, dogs were trained to leave a timer-detonated bomb and retreat, but this routine was replaced by an impact-detonation procedure which killed the dog in the process.
Oh great
Just makes me think that the Japanese probably should've surrendered way earlier to save those lives
Complete bullshit and typical 'murican propaganda. Japan was already preparing to surrender.
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Here in the states we have a long standing tradition of assassination of our elected officials.
The US also has a long standing tradition of overkill in warfare. It has little to do with our lack of respect for life, rather the assumption enemies might not me keen to surrender or may believe in the cause for which they're engaged in hostilities enough to put up an honest fight.
Shaun on YouTube makes a pretty strong case the US didn't need to drop atom bombs on Japan to secure its surrender, but the US has been really good about not resorting to nuclear attacks since then even when officials wanted to use them, as per Reagan and Trump. Human civilization continues to close on eighty years without a nuclear war.
Everyone forgets the Korean war, but MacArthur begged for the use of nukes when he fucked up and gave the Chinese an excuse to get directly involved. This is especially notable because while the USSR had tested a nuke at that point, they didn't have many, and they didn't have the ability to deploy them en masse against the US directly. The US still had an effective monopoly on deploying nukes, and it still didn't use them.
Oh, and fuck MacArthur.
We put a monetary value on their lives. The value is different, but it's there nevertheless.
That's almost more disgusting
Who told you Japan was planning to continue the war after Hiroshima?
They were planning to concede after the first bomb. The president didn't even learn of Nagasaki until it was in the news.
There's a lot more to it than that. Just for starters, there was a short lived coup in the military to try to keep it going. Tons going on in those last few days of the war on the Japanese side, and even if you had perfect knowledge of everything, it wasn't obvious that they would surrender.
I could never claim to summarise even five minutes of WWII with a couple of sentences, but my point is that it's hardly fair to characterise Japan as "ain't heard no bell"
I mean maybe not all of Japan but like.... But there are definitely some Japanese soldiers who were insistent that they really didn't want to hear any idea of surrender
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In traditional Nippon culture ritual suicide is the final act of protest one makes, say if ordered by superiors to commit an immoral act. In the twentieth century, this translated into a if you can't take the heat... sentiment in the highly competitive corporation environments. Hence young adults had a high suicide rate when they couldn't perform well enough in school to get salaried jobs.
(My understanding of this is warching from the US and seeing the pressures on Japanese businesses to compete wit American ones. While companies on both side were rivalistic towards each other, they all influenced and were affected by the mutual economy, so recession for everybody!)
In the aughts, Japan became aware of a population crisis. Young people were not having enough children to match geriatric mortality. Also young people were disengaged from the traditional values of their grandkid-starved elders: Much like the US, and, I expect, similarly aided by the new deliberation capacities of the internet, kids realized their elders didn't care about the welfare of them or their kids, but their own legacies and, maybe, to play with the cute infant.
Which brings us to this era, in which Japan is looking to move away from the hypercompetitive, pro-suicide culture that presumably drove productivity in the 20th century.
As a note, the US typically outperformed Japan in productivity per capita, mostly because we are culturally less compliant and obedient to our authorities, hence our industrialists are quicker to replace labor forces with automation. The quicker US companies could downsize production teams and send out another batch of pink slips, the better.
Here in America murder is also really looked down upon. For example say you kill a guy then twenty years later on death row your turn finally comes up and the state fucks up and kills you badly or has to try a second time or change methods of killing. I mean that's just terrible.
I love this genre of tweet. No idea what it's called though
Tumblr shitposting
Here in Morocco, you're not even supposed to hate the king, let alone try to kill him.
One of the most famous photos from Japan was a communist getting assassinated via katana stab during a public speech. They say that assassination changed the course of government in Japan to this day.
Queen Min has entered the Chat
Bat the description doesn't do it justice. It was basically a slow fall cluster bomb but full of incendiary bats instead of dumb bombs. The bats then scatter and hide and eventually start every single fire imaginable.
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