I’m finishing up this new book about a WWII prisoner of the Japanese and it reminds me that Japan was every bit the moral equal of the Nazis.
Unlike Germany, however, Japan has not come to grips with its savagery.
Germans get educated in school about the Holocaust but the Japanese system skips over Japanese atrocities.
For all its flaws, Judeo-Christian English-speaking civilization remains the best hope for humanity.
The New York Times book review says:
While only one in 100 Americans captured in Europe died, nearly one in three perished in Japanese captivity. But like John McCain a generation later, Zamperini had a special status: as a former Olympian, he was a valuable propaganda tool, too precious to kill. But his celebrity also made him very tempting to torture. First in the Pacific and later in Japan, he was subjected to an unrelenting regime of assaults: humiliation, starvation, medical experiments, slave labor and disease. A succession of sadistic guards topped by a psychopathic sadist named Mutsuhiro Watanabe, a k a the Bird, derived a special, almost orgiastic pleasure from beating him.
