1. Can anyone source the history book, written in English that claimed that Japan tried to excise Chinese characters (kanji) from Japanese? Particularly in WW2, at Japan's worst of anti-Chinese hatred and sentiment?
2. Why didn't Japanese eradicate all the kanji from Japanese? It appears contradictory to hate the Chinese so much as to commit war crimes against Chinese, but for the Japanese to keep using Chinese characters. It appears contradictory to use characters from a language and people that the Japanese consider "completely inferior", in the Japanese language.
This eradication appears linguistically possible. Korean and Vietnamese succeeded in removing Chinese characters without loss of semantics.
My Research
> The Japanese showed similar cruelty to the Chinese, but without the secrecy
of the Nazi Holocaust. Apparently their goal was to lessen Chinese resolve
through terror. Tens of thousands of women were not only raped but also, typically, mutilated and killed. Men were frequently forced to rape members of
their own families. "Not only did live burials, castration, the carving of organs,
and the roasting of people become routine, but more diabolical tortures were
practiced, such as hanging people by their tongues on iron hooks or burying
people to their waists and watching them torn apart by German shepherds."<sup>50</sup>
The behavior of the Japanese was so atrocious that a Nazi living in Nanking at
the time described the massacre as the operation of "bestial machinery."<sup>51</sup>
Unlike the Germans, the Japanese have yet to come fully to grips with responsibility for the acts of their army in 1937, and those Japanese veterans who have
faced up to their behavior and asked forgiveness have been targets of hate and
violence from right-wing groups in Japan.
>Journalist Iris Chang, who wrote the definitive work on the rape of Nanking, placed the blame for the genocidal actions of the Japanese army on indoctrination by "a dangerous government, in a vulnerable culture, in dangerous times, able to sell dangerous rationalizations to those whose human instincts told them otherwise."<sup>53</sup> She believed, as have many others, that the behavior of the Japanese troops traced in part to the brutality, often in the form of severe physical abuse, that the Japanese army of the time inflicted on its own soldiers and officers.<sup>54</sup> When turned loose on helpless civilians whom soldiers had been indoctrinated to believe were lower than pigs and ordered to massacre them, Chang wrote, it "is easy to see how years of suppressed anger, hatred, and fear of authority could have erupted in uncontrollable violence at Nanking."<sup>55</sup> Such behavior does not seem so hard to explain when people (the teachers) in a known experimental environment, subject to no abuse, indoctrination, or coercion and under no obligation to authorities, could be led to inflict punishment that might (in their minds) lead to the deaths of colleagues in an experiment.
Paul Ralph Ehrlich. Human Natures Genes, Cultures, and the Human Prospect (2000). Page 262.
<sup>4</sup> The Second World War by Antony Beevor, p. 60
[deleted] t1_j712gpl wrote
[removed]