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If you read Japanese history books you might discover that Japan loves to do sneak attacks. They lull their opponents asleep and attack when they least expect it. And when they invade a country they wreak as much destruction as possible. What happened in the 30s and 40s was just a pattern of behavior the Japanese utilized before for countless centuries.

That's pretty much the standard non-Western way of war. They don't declare war all that much. The Chinese intervention in Korea was a massive sneak attack, but no one's ever called them on it. We lost thousands of GI's that day.

And destroying the enemy's stuff is also pretty standard issue military strategy. We killed more people via strategic bombing in Germany than in Japan, and burned their cities to the ground with napalm. A lot of this stuff is meant to cow the populace in order to minimize the resistance to their rule once they win. Killing millions of Japanese and German civilians via aerial bombing certainly helped secure the peace once we defeated their conventional forces. The underlying threat was that we would pull back in the case of rebellion and burn their cities to the ground again. Between the chevauchee during the Hundred Years' War and the depredations of the Thirty Years' War, I think it's hard to say that the Japanese have any monopoly on medieval military practices. The Chinese themselves haven't exactly been angels. In the 18th and 19th centuries, they exterminated the Dzungars, massacred tens of thousands of Taiping rebels after they surrendered in Nanking and did another post-surrender massacre of an estimate 70,000 surrendered rebels in Yunnan. Bottom line is that nobody has clean hands.

“...think it's hard to say that the Japanese have any monopoly on medieval military practices...”

The west has a sense of ROE that the east does not have.

During WW2 the US threw that book out as American flyers strafed lifeboats and Marines torched spider holes.
we learn fast, there are no rules in war.
maybe one day we will apply that to the WOT (terrorist)
else we lose.........

Bottom line is that nobody has clean hands.

Ain't that the truth! You know your history very well. The U.S.A. is a very young country, and many only look at the last hundred years of hostilities. Hostilities, and interim periods of peace, have gone on in Asian countries for thousands of years. History would be very different if the Chinese and Mongols had conquered Japan in the late 1200's.

Mongols with their subjugated Korean and Chinese armies invaded Japan in 1274 and 1281. They pierced the hands of Japanese captive women and hung them on the side of their boats to intimidate the Japanese. 140,000 Mongols, Koreans and Chinese in 4400 boats attacked Japan, using explosive shells and grenades during a time when Europe was medieval. Japanese barely survived, and got better protecting their nation from attacks. Who knows what the future holds?