1.Spiritual level.
The Japanese are a nation with a strong sense of adversity. This is also our general perception of Japan. The small size of the country, the shortage of resources, and the frequent occurrence of disasters seem to have led to a sense of urgency that the Japanese people will die tomorrow.
China, on the other hand, has a lot of land and money, as if it was a refuge prepared by God for Japan, so Japan's motives for starting a war are completely tenable.
But to be honest, I think it's actually an excuse, and at the very least, it can't be the main reason.
You must know that war is an act of the state, and it is decided by a small group of top leaders. Will these people be affected by these natural factors?No matter how scarce resources are and how hard the people's lives are, the emperor and the prime minister still eat and drink spicy food.
The goal of the war may indeed be resources and land, but the reason for this is not the argument that "Japan is desperate to solve its natural problems" behind this statement, but the greed of those in power.
This is the cause of the war, but not the reason for the madness of Japan. The madness of Japan, in my opinion, is first of all to mention the feudal emperor system and the spirit of bushido.
Japan's imperial system has a long history, and the Imperial family is a spiritual symbol of Japan as a descendant of the legendary god Amaterasu.
Historically, there was a time when the power of the emperor was occupied by the shogunate, and the imperial family was reduced to mascots. However, since the Meiji Restoration, a series of policies, such as the return of copyrights, have strengthened the authority of the emperor and deepened the concept of loyalty to the emperor.
Complementing this is the spirit of bushido, and aside from all its outward forms, I think the spirit of bushido is essentially a disregard for life. It can be seen from the act of caesarean section (you are not a sixth son......The spirit of bushido succeeded in building the Japanese (or at least the most vocal aristocracy in Japanese society) into a place where they could spare their lives for the sake of honor.
So what is the highest honor?Loyal to the Emperor!In this way, the emperor can say whatever he wants, cannot refuse, cannot doubt, and in order to achieve the emperor's goals, his own life can be discarded. It doesn't matter if your own life is gone, is the enemy's life still your life?
That's why in the Russo-Japanese War, Nogi Noshinori launched a long live charge in Lushun, using the body of a Japanese soldier to block the ** people's Makqin.
That's why there are Lushun Da** and Nanjing Da**. Although those civilians and captives have completely lost the ability to resist and have not hindered their orders from His Majesty the Emperor, they are only human lives, and they will be killed if they are killed.
2.The material plane.
There are also two reasons at the material level, the first is the reason for starting the war.
For this reason, I think it was actually made by the Japanese ** themselves. After the Meiji Restoration, Japan's industry and commerce developed rapidly, the people's living standards improved, and capitalism flourished.
But after a period of development, the development has not moved.
In order to promote capitalism, Japan sold many state-owned enterprises to wealthy businessmen, creating many chaebols such as Mitsubishi and Mitsui. The development of industry and commerce has enriched many middle classes, and the lives of urban people are getting better and better.
But the old men made money too hard, and forgot to give some oil and water to the "untouchables" below, so the factories rattled and the shops rattled, and the people had no money to buy.
At that time, farmers were still the majority in Japan. And the misery of the life of the Japanese peasants is simply unimaginable. Japanese peasants generally pay half of the year's harvest, and in some places even three-quarters. And this annual yield is not based on your actual production that year, but the theoretical yield of the land.
So if this is a famine year, aren't the farmers dumbfounded?Therefore, Japanese farmers farm in the summer and go to the city to work in the winter, just like that, they may not be able to get enough food and clothing, how can they have spare money to buy goods?
Because Japan's domestic purchasing power was too low, merchants had to seek foreign trade industries, but at that time, Western goods were very competitive, and they could not make much money selling in the West.
In such a comparison, China is naturally the best choice for people who are stupid and have a lot of money.
After the First Sino-Japanese War, Japan was able to open treaty ports in China. Soon after, World War I broke out, and Westerners were busy eating dogs, which naturally affected business.
It was at this time that Japan ushered in the glory of Taisho.
Ironically, Japan was quite anti-war at the time. But their happiness was all won by war.
The illusion of beauty will always dissipate. As soon as the war ended, Westerners freed up their hands and renewed their efforts in commodity competition. There are no large number of military orders, and fiscal revenues are decreasing year by year. The common people still have no money, and the development of capitalism is slow.
The house leak happened to rain overnight, and a wave of economic crisis hit, causing great losses to Japan, followed by the Kanto Da**, which killed 100,000 people and lost billions. Domestic contradictions are becoming more and more acute.
In order to maintain the position of ruler and divert attention, Japan chose to start a war. At the same time, in order to solve the domestic contradictions caused by the economic crisis, the United States implemented Roosevelt's New Deal, and it was successful.
In this regard, in order to divert the contradictions, the people in the military department for the sake of military merits and promotions, the chaebols for military orders, and the common people for money (taking the reparations of the First Sino-Japanese War as an example, it is easy to make the people believe that they can have money by fighting China, and in order to make the people feel at ease, they also made up a set of rhetoric for "liberating the poor people of China"), and the war began.
And what made the Japanese so crazy in the war was actually very simple - there were no supplies.
According to the memoirs of Japanese veterans of World War II, it was extremely difficult to guarantee the living materials of Japanese soldiers during the invasion of China. At the beginning of the war, the supply lines could not keep up, and in the later period, the soldiers basically had to rely on themselves to find food.
What's the difference between this and being a bandit?Although the Japanese military department clearly laid down detailed rules for requisition, the code was not issued to soldiers to learn Xi.
Even if they did learn, the cold and hungry Japanese soldiers would not pay attention to it. That's why we see that every time the Japanese occupy a place, they have to grab supplies like crazy, and the looted materials must be eaten by themselves, but what about the local people?These people also have to survive and eat.
In order to reduce food loss, the Japanese chose to kill their captives and leave only those who worked for them. Later, it became a robbery, killing, and burning.
Countless Chinese have been brutally murdered for such reasons.
But why are there no supplies?The soldiers and horses did not move, the grain and grass went first, and the Japanese did not know
Of course they knew, but all the generals who gave the order needed was military merit. Of course, the supplies will be sent, you will fight the battle for me first, and the supplies will be sent to you slowly.
In the final analysis, it is still indifferent to life, focusing only on one's own immediate interests, and not caring about the actual suffering of others.
This attitude of the top level was perfectly inherited by the Japanese soldiers, and eventually led to one tragedy after another in the war of aggression against China.
3.Institutional aspects.
Japan's system at that time was also a typical example of self-inflicted harm, and they lacked effective containment of military power. And because of the long-term misguidance, the people are convinced that their miserable life is caused by foreign policy.
Coupled with the two military "glories" of the First Sino-Japanese War and the Russo-Japanese War, the people felt that war was an effective way to improve their living standards. At that time, there was a lot of resentment in Japan, and they always blamed the cabinet for social problems, but they did not say a word about the distribution system established by the emperor and the military's war arrangements.
Therefore, at that time, the assassination of *** by the Japanese angry youth was very frequent. The cabinet was afraid of being assassinated, and the more it worked, the more cowardly it became, and it obeyed the orders of the military department, which eventually led to the military department governing the country and completely losing its mind.
The military has a voice and more and more control over the people, especially in education and information control.
In terms of education, before World War II, Japan began to revise its textbooks, and elementary school textbooks included content such as wives sending their husbands on wars, and mothers saying to their sons before they went on the war, "You will die on the battlefield and it will be my pride."
After the Japanese occupation of Tohoku, the school would broadcast a report on the progress Xi of the war on the campus every day, and students would not begin to study until they had listened to the principal's lecture on the soldiers. (Mentioned in Akira Fujiwara's memoirs).
In terms of information control, you may still remember that two Japanese officers killed prisoners in China and beheaded 100 people. But in Japanese propaganda, those two men killed enemy soldiers, which was a military merit. After the two of them returned home, they were treated as heroes, and even toured the country to speak.
Summary. In my opinion, what Japan did in World War II was actually a process of a small group of refined egoists who coerced the whole country for their own selfish desires.
While learning about these histories, I also saw the resistance of the Japanese people against the military. There are records that some Japanese soldiers refused to carry out ** and were imprisoned by the army, and there were also anti-war fighters like Ita Sukeo who sent 100,000 rounds of Japanese ammunition to the Chinese and left a book "Please aim them at the Japanese fascists".
All this proves that there are still people among the Japanese people who stand on the side of justice. And in today's Japan, even if the atrocities against China have been erased from education, there are still some Japanese people who consciously understand these histories and realize Japan's historical responsibility.
In the struggle to oppose the war, to oppose the rise of the Japanese right-wing forces, and to demand that Japan face up to history, recognize the Nanjing Revolution, and apologize to the victims of the war of aggression against China, these people should be our comrades-in-arms.
If we insist that "Japanese people are all bad people," we will push the anti-war people to the opposite side. This is exactly what the Japanese militarist forces want.
Only when we have a correct understanding of history and make it clear that our enemies are Japanese militarists who intend to seize interests through unjust means, gain political support by inciting national antagonism, deny the truth of history, and even attempt to start another war, can we concentrate our forces, smash their best attempts, demand that they recognize historical facts, and can we seek justice for the suffering Chinese people and save the country and people from being ravaged by war.