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I lived in Japan for several years, and came to see their sensitivity and appreciation of beauty.

I lived in the Philippines for several years after that, and got to see the monuments along the path of the Bataan Death March, and learned a lot about that...and saw what vicious beasts they were to their prisoners.

Years later, when I saw the movie “Judgment at Nuremberg” with Spencer Tracy playing the part of the judge overseeing the Nuremberg Trials, they have a scene where he and a German woman go to a beer hall frequented by locals. They are having a joyful, great time, pounding their steins on the table, drinking and singing.

Spencer Tracy’s character is looking around at all this, and is thinking to himself “How can these be the same people responsible for the horrible, unspeakable things that I saw evidence of in the courtroom today?”

The cognitive dissonance was off the chart. I think I understand, at least a little bit of that. I have often wondered how people as polite, kind, and sensitive as the Japanese I knew, could have joyously bayoneted infirm prisoners, set them afire, dissected them alive, eaten them, shoved rubber hoses down their throats to fill them with water just so they could stomp them to see it come out.

Doing it sadistically for fun.

I fully understand war can turn people into beasts, but the Japanese seemed to be both beast and sadist in equal measure in war.

I am reading a book now called “The Aviators” that discusses the lives of Eddie Rickenbacker, Charles Lindbergh, and Jimmy Doolittle. When Lindbergh went out to the South Pacific to evaluate planes and ended up flying 50 combat missions and shooting down a plane, he was appalled at the treatment of the Japanese bodies by Americans. Cutting heads off and putting them on spikes, etc. His sensibilities seemed to be completely offended. Even more so when he saw our aviators shooting Japanese in parachutes as they floated to the ground. And he was completely repulsed by the actions of the Army to eradicate the Japanese from the caves they holed up in...flamethrowers, drums of gasoline poured in, etc.

He told people that he thought this treatment of the Japanese was racist. (I lost some respect for him when I read this)

When he voiced his reaction to seeing these things, he was told time and time again by everyone from the bottom to the top: “They do it to our men, and far worse.” The Japanese seemed to have a particular penchant for sadism.