Wife and I visited Honolulu a few years ago as a retirement gift to ourselves.
On a tour of Pearl Harbor, we boated out to the Arizona Memorial and noted 75 percent of the folks on the boat were Japanese tourists.
I asked one young Japanese fellow why he wanted to see the sacred place. He responded that he and his wife wanted to see what their grandfathers had done; if it was really true. In so many words, they couldn’t believe it.
The Japanese were the ones that set the rules for a war characterized by brutality and cruelty. Small wonder so few Japanese were taken prisoner — their code did not permit it and they routinely abused, starved, and murdered both civilian and military prisoners. As the lands the Empire had conquered in the heady early days of the were liberated by the Allies, the Japanese high command issued orders to kill the prisoners being held. Civilized behavior? Hardly.
One of the most ghastly revelations was the Imperial Japanese Army's Unit 731. This unit specialized in chemical and biological warfare. Run by Lt. General Shiro Ishii, Unit 731 surpassed the Third Reich for war crimes of this kind: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731. Cold war politics prevented Ishii and his subordinates being tried as war criminals. Instead, the Allies granted immunity when all the records of Unit 731 were turned over to them. Ishii died from throat cancer in 1959, aged 67.