Japan’s WMD plans
From the UK’s Daily Star, Japan’s plan during the last days of World War Two to unleash the Bubonic Plague on the United States with thousands of rats infested with fleas carrying the disease. The operation was codenamed Operation Cherry Blossoms at Night;
Lead historian Lim Shaobin acquired Japanese war records to discover rats and fleas were transported from the base in Singapore.
Some of the rats loaded with the plague-carrying fleas were unleashed in China – killing more than 12,000.
Japan used six different plague attacks on China during the war, with the end game being a strike on the US.
Bubonic plague is spread by infected fleas and causes fever, the decay of flesh, vomiting blood and seizures.
So I guess this reveal still won’t justify the use of atomic bombs to some people, but the use of weaponized fleas would have far-reaching effects on the US population, perhaps lasting until present days.
According to the article, Southern California was the target, specifically the San Diego area.
I still won’t buy a Japanese car.
Category: Historical
So did Japan release ANTIFA in the U.S to spred the plague?
I know you’re kidding, but this guy suggests it was the Soviets who unleashed the ideas that created Antifa…long after the Soviets themselves were on the ash heap.
Kind of like scores of bad old sci-fi stories and TV episodes, where doomsday weapons from long-forgotten wars stick around to cause trouble. (Except this one won’t be solved in an hour with commercial breaks.)
The Soviets were intimately involved in the antiwar efforts in the US during Vietnam, so antifa would not really be a stretch. But more credible evidence suggests that Soros is bankrolling that mob of assholes.
The Japanese Unit 731 basically used occupied China as a bio-chem proving ground, hitting entire unsuspecting villages and towns with vectors to get the best field-testing results. And this is in addition to all the other “conventional” brutalities and war crimes visited upon the Chinese populace by their Japanese occupiers. No wonder the Chinese hate the Japanese with a passion to this very day…
Not just the Chinese, Koreans still have a lot of hard feelings and bad blood toward Japan as well as Filipinos, Guamanians, and everywhere else they went in WWII.
But, the Japanese invented anime….
All the more reason to keep the nukes coming! That creepy shit has irreparably damaged every culture on Earth!
Not to mention blurred porn.
Did you mean “blurred what counts as porn”?
It appears that anime is replete with sexual innuendo.
I never did get what the deal is with the blurred pr0n. Doesn’t that defeat the purpose?
Like the pay channels in the mid-80s that were all scrambled.
“He look! I think I just saw a boob!”
I believe the proper terminology is “hentai.” Nothing say lovin’ like being violated by an octopus.
Besides, how the hell can you blur Sora Aoi? That’s an atrocity in and of itself!
You can blame that on Douglas MacArther for that.
http://www.cracked.com/article_19098_6-wtf-japanese-trends-you-can-blame-white-guys.html
“Not just the Chinese, Koreans still have a lot of hard feelings and bad blood toward Japan as well as Filipinos, Guamanians, and everywhere else they went in WWII.”
Except Hawaii, site of one of their greatest atrocities, which we dumbass Americans have now pretty much turned over to them.
I noticed that when I went there with my parents in the late ’90s. My father was a 17-year old Navy man sailing toward Japan on a Marine troop-carrying ship when the bomb was dropped. I cringe every time I hear ‘war crime’ mostly from libertarians.
Given how deeply socialist democrat that state is, it isn’t really part of America anymore, anyway. No loss.
Speaking of Koreans, I remember back in 1990 when the controversy over the Smithsonian display of the Enola Gay cockpit was in full flower (essentially the display spent a lot of time talking about the horrors and suffering of the Japanese in Hiroshima after the bomb was dropped but made very little mention of the context in which it happened – as if Harry Truman just woke up with a hangover one morning and ordered Hiroshima to be bombed for no reason.)
Anyway, I was deployed to Korea for Team Spirit ’90 and at one point we stopped at Osan Air Base just south of Seoul. Outside the airbase the shop was selling t-shirts that showed an outline of the country of Japan with mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the caption was:
“Don’t Start a War if you Can’t Take a Joke.”
I served there ‘92-93 in the 2ID Western Corridor, during that time Karaoke Taxicabs were suddenly becoming popular to the chagrin of Korean Authorities, their solution? They put out the word that said cabs were a Japanese invention and *POOF!*, their popularity plummeted overnight.
Just wondering, if Japan helps South Korea take out Fatty Kim, will there be an easing of tensions?
I don’t think there’s a lot of ‘tension’ between Japan and Korea. Some historical bad feelings, perhaps but just by allowing their territory to be used as a safe rear area for US and UN forces, Japan significantly assisted Korea during the 1950-53 war.
I got to go to the Mountaineering school at Cheju-Do in 1992 and one of the things that struck me about that beautiful island were how many Japanese tourists were there.
In fact, all of Korea is a major tourist destination for Japan. I don’t know if the reverse is true since the only part of Japan I’ve ever seen is Narita airport and Yokota Air Base but it wouldn’t surprise me.
Furthermore, consider that anybody who is old enough to remember when Japan occupied Korea is pushing 80 or more by now – certainly the majority of the people in Korea have no personal recollection of Japan as anything other than a friendly country and in many cases an economic partner (Japanese industries assisted Korea in booting up their own big businesses and there are lots of partnerships between Japanese and ROK industries.)
In any case, while there has historically been no love lost between Japan and the ROK, I think that the thinking people of both countries realize they have more in common and more to gain by cooperation and alliance than in nursing old grudges, no matter how legitimate those grudges may be.
And I think that’s healthy. Unlike Muslims in the Middle East who are still spitting mad about the Crusades or Croats and Serbians still pissed off about something that happened during the time of the Habsburg Empire, the Koreans and Japanese seem more interested in looking to the future than they do in digging up the ghosts of the past.
Funny you should bring that up, tourist I mean. Back in 2014 Ms.Dustoff and I went back to Korea to visit family as we do ever so often. While there my nephew gets the idea that the wife and I visit Damado ( an island now owned by the Japanese, that prior to the Korean war was a disputed Korean territory). While there touring with other Koreans around a small town I notice a sign on the door of a pub, that read in both english and korean ” NO KOREANS ALLOWED”. Of course I referred to Ms. Dustoff to get her take, and she says without hesitation. “Damn Japanese, they don’t like us (Koreans) because we drink and party too hard!”
” Japan significantly assisted Korea during the 1950-53 war.”
For which they made quite a bit of money at a time when they desperately needed it. Not to mention they didn’t have much choice until 1952, since they were occupied by the US.
Guy on my first boat was naturalized citizen originally from South Korea. Being stationed in Hawaii, he remarked to me, “I notice there are a lot of Japanese tourists here,” to which I informed him this was a very popular destination for them.
His reply of, “Well, I hate fucking Japanese was neither surprising nor an outlier among pretty much any other culture in the Pacific Rim.
Eh … Unit 731 … very bad juju.
When we find evidence that some Islamic group is trying to do something similar to us, can we nuke them, too?
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No-one in their right mind likes war, but sometimes the best option is to kill at least 1/3rd of the population of our enemies. As Patton is reported to have said: “Your job is not to die for your country. Your job is to make the other poor bastard die for his.”
Given what they did in China alone, the Japs got off way too easy with just two cities glassed and the rest firebombed. There was no biological or chemical warfare against the Japs. Their children weren’t enslaved. Their women weren’t mass-raped. Nobody was tied to a post and used for bayonet practice. All of these things that they did to others were not done back to them. They got off easy.
We could have just done like Halsey wanted, and seen to it that the Japanese language would be spoken only in Hell…
Many years ago I read an interesting book called “Truman and the Hiroshima Cult.” It was essentially a refutation of the tired arguments against the use of the A-bomb.
One of the chapters pointed out that the A-bomb may very well have saved Japanese culture from extinction.
Essentially, there were high ranking people within the Imperial Japanese government and military who believed that it would actually be better for Japan to be exterminated, entirely destroyed, rather than to surrender to the Allies. These were the people who wanted to arm Japanese citizens with sharpened bamboo poles and suicide bombs to resist the planned American invasion of the home islands and they knew that their tactics would result in mass slaughter of the Japanese people and complete and utter destruction of Japanese cities and villages, but they actually believed that would be better than surrender.
The sad thing is, that kind of psychotic thinking prevailed among a large number of Japanese leaders and was one of the obstacles that prevented them from accepting surrender terms that were otherwise very generous to the Japanese.
It was the shock of the A-bombs (and the promise that there were more on the way) that finally allowed the more rational Japanese leaders to push the “Better-to-die-than-surrender” advocates out of the way so they could surrender.
That’s absolutely true, I’ve read and watched accounts of when Japanese Authorities were training and indoctrinating civilians to fight to their deaths in the expectations of an Allied Invasion of the Japanese mainland, our side was predicting a possible one million Allied Casualties in that scenario and far more Japanese lives lost. It is my honest opinion that the use of the A-bomb saved the lives of far more Japanese Civilians than were lost in those attacks
I’ve been told that no Purple Hearts, Bronze Stars, or Silver Stars have been minted since 1945, because they still haven’t run out of all of the medals that were made for Operation Downfall.
Keep in mind that none of those estimates went past the first 90 days, and only one even considered Navy casualties.
And as we saw at Okinawa and Iwo Jima, what were originally thought to be relatively short and low casualty battles were anything but.
If the generation of Americans who fought WWII is “The Greatest Generation”, what should we call the generation of Japanese who started that ware and were responsible for all the atrocities?
“Defeated”
Kamikaze failures?
MacArthur was greatly responsible for them escaping punishment after the war. There was then, as now, plenty of evidence that Hirohito was a knowing participant in the greater east Asia coprosperity sphere and the war crimes it entailed, but Dugout Doug had himself a new toy and didn’t want us prosecuting all the criminals in it.
That’s a very complex issue. Hirohito likely wasn’t quite the benign puppet king that he’s often made out to be, but it’s hard to say exactly what would have happened had he not rubber-stamped Tojo’s war plans. Even with all the reverence for the god-emperor that they supposedly ran on, his power was significantly curtailed compared to Grandpa Meiji. Tojo and his cronies frequently did their own thing without consulting him—like ordering the sinking of the USS Panay—and the Imperial Army sometimes did its own thing without even consulting Tojo or his predecessors—the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, for example. Also remember that a large force of Bushido fanatics (who were allegedly programmed to obey his every command) attempted to storm the Imperial Palace, directly threatening the lives of the Emperor and the whole Royal Family, in August of ‘45 to prevent the surrender. There’s so many contradictions in there that probably not even the Japs themselves could make sense of it.
Hirohito definitely carried some guilt, but just how much is not so cut and dried.
Plague still exists in the US. Nothing like the bad old days in Europe, though. We had to get shots for it at Ft Carson back in ’66. Something to do with prairie dogs on an Indian reservation as I recall.
https://www.livescience.com/51792-plague-united-states.html
When I lived in New Mexico it was a constant threat and reared it’s ugly head once and awhile, then there was the hanta virus………
I believe that plague continues to live on in the prairie dog populations – some seem to be non-symptomatic carriers. Between that and the hanta virus, there is a good argument for rodent extermination.
There are normally a few cases of bubonic plague annually, killing very rarely. I believe what swept Europe was pneumonic plague, an air-vectored variant, which is both highly contagious and has a very high fatality rate. Or so I have read.
Pneumonic plague is a consequence of bubonic plague. The pneumonic form is spread person to person via respiratory droplets after the flea vector infects someone with the bubonic form.
I’ve seen it (outside the US)
A lot of leprosy in that same area at the time.
I did not know that. Still Y. Pestis, not a subspecies?
Madagascar has been dealing with an outbreak of Plague, apparently mostly Pneumonic. I was told the CDC was there pretty riki-tik.
Now is the time to ban Flea Markets in the U.S. If you encounter a Flea, just Flee the scene. Know what I mean Jelly bean. On a serious note, The Scientists that ran the unit 731 were not convicted of war crimes. They went to work for the U.S. working on biological weapons, like the V 1 Scientists over in Germany at the end of the war.
There was a slight difference. The Germans who developed the V1 and V2 did not use humans as guinea pigs or practice vivisection on prisoners.
That depends on which kraut scientists you’re talking about. Von Braun didn’t experiment on people. Kurt Diebner, on the other hand, did.
Don’t forget the Bitch of Buchenwald.
All or most all of the people you speak of that did war crime shit have gone on to meet their maker, just like all the slave holders have expired. Many people here in the US today didn’t even arrive here till way after the civil war and Jim Crow days. The current day Japanese are our allies now and so are the Germans however I don’t understand why the Germans are letting themselves be over run with jihadies. The Japanese know better. I have nothing against Jap cars but much prefer German engineering. There is historical evidence of many peoples getting screwed by others such as Poland being invaded and Ireland being starved etc. Always keep your guard up and secure your perimiter.
I was in Japan some years ago and found it to be an interesting country. It was very clean, the people were polite, and it was as if the scale of everything was shrunk down to three-quarter size. Culturally, it’s probably not a stretch to say the Japanese are closer to Americans than the Chinese.
It might also be pointed out that China has always been the 300-pound gorilla in Asia. For centuries, the Japanese lived in fear of a Chinese takeover. For example, the word “kamikaze” means “divine wind” and comes from an historical reference to when a storm destroyed a Chinese invasion fleet. Such a situation meant the Japanese developed an admittedly cruel code of bushido in order to survive.
Personally, aside from some trade issues, I’d cut the Japanese some slack. Since World War II, they’ve mostly turned out to be a good ally to have in that part of the world. To quote Lyndon Johnson in a different context, “Better to have them inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in.”
Perry, in Japan in 1966 the pretty young divorcee who was showing me around took me to a movie house showing one of the John Wayne WWII movies set in the South Pacific. Every time the Wayne character killed another Jap soldier, the audience broke out in cheers and applause.
Go figure…
Oh, as to that politeness, I found it to be very schizoid: They are extremely polite in their personal interactions and most business dealings but when it comes to public crowds such as subways, they’ll angrily push and shove with a ferocity that would shame New Yorkers.
There are some good qualities to Japanese culture. I’ve been a long-time fan of both their residential post-and-pier construction, and bonsai landscape architecture. In San Francisco, next to the DeYoung Museum in Golden Gate Park, there’s a tea garden supported by the local Japanese community that my parents started dragging me to when I was a kid.
Years later, usually on a rainy weekday with no crowds, I’d sometimes go to the teahouse in the garden where they had waitresses in kimonos. They would bow and ask, “Jasmine tea or green tea?” and then serve a pot with a lacquer tray of tiny rice crackers. The teahouse itself had broad eaves, was open to the outside, and cantilevered out over a large koi pond. Sitting there drinking tea and listening to rain falling on water was not a bad way to spend an hour on a gray afternoon.
They pack into rush hour trains like Basic trainees in a “Cattle Truck”!
“It might also be pointed out that China has always been the 300-pound gorilla in Asia.”
Except when they were getting slapped around by the Mongols, or bogged down in what later became Vietnam, or too busy with local pissing contests between squabbling warlords to look outwards…
Asian cultures in general just don’t seem to play well together.
Tokyo was a great place for R&R, at least the parts I remember anyhow.
In both Okinawa and mainland Japan we saw that their politeness was strongly tiered: White sailors and Marines were cordially treated, blacks politely treated (for the most part) but our Hispanic and Pilipino Shipmates were rudely handled, even when they were in our company. It was distressing. All we could do was stick together. It’s a different culture. They had no Greenpeace, no EPA equivalent, no Consumer’s protection and we heard about almost no litigation. It’s a free country but it isn’t OUR country, despite our best intentions.
DOUG out
War is seldom the enterprise of saints.
They also tried to set the Pacific Northwest on fire with balloon bombs, one of which killed a family in Oregon:
https://www.wired.com/2010/05/0505japanese-balloon-kills-oregon/
My point here being that the only reason the Japanese didn’t firebomb San Francisco, LA and San Diego was because they didn’t have the MEANS to do so.
They absolutely had the intent, just not the means.
War is hell and as terrible as the A-bombs were, they finally shocked the Japanese into surrender, thus saving hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of lives.
Martinjumper- From what I saw on the history channel on the balloon attempts, like you mentioned, some did arrive and there were casualties,SO, the govt put the kabash on the news media telling them not to mention anything about it so as the Japanese did not hear anything about their balloons landing in the U.S., they thought that the balloons were not flying into the western part of the U.S., so they discontinued flying them. Another reason that there were no fires in the area was the wet weather in that part of the country.
The balloon bombs actually did cause some pretty significant fires in the Pacific Northwest, whose fire season is shorter but no less active. Their military aim, besides terror, was disruption of the lumber industry, which was a critical war industry. The 555th Parachute Infantry spent much of the war jumping on those fires, during which time they proved the Smokejumper concept the Forest Service had been experimenting with right before the war.
Speaking of “intent”… Wonder what the intent/purpose of the UK Daily Star to publish this article in 2017, since this has been common knowledge for a while. As said before, we all come from different backgrounds. We all have our opinions on this subject. This plan/intent happened @ 72 years ago. It is history..and we can’t go back in a time machine to fix it…all we can do is move forward and learn from our mistakes. Sadly, some groups do want to hold on to the past and can’t let go. A good example is removing Confederate statues, which is history and happened over a 100 years ago (Slavery).We have come a long way since that time (Civil Rights, Jim Crow laws). We need to start letting go in terms of hate/anger. BTW,when was the last time you read any complaints initiated by the innocent Japanese-Americans when they had to pick up their lives and move to interrment camps? No one in Wars/ Conflicts win. Innocent lives are lost, whether they be ServiceMembers, Families/Children. Yes, the Japanese started the war at Pearl Harbor and they did do terrible things-we need to remember the culture of the Japanese and the time period. We also need to remember our culture during WWII. Just as the Japanese were brainwashed during WWII to fight for their country and the Emperor, so were Americans. Am sure American Service members were not so innocent as well when it came fighting the Japanese. Same with Germany during WWII. And just as some of the WWII German civilians who did not care for Hitler and the Nazis, the same happened in Japan. The Japanese felt ashamed what they did during Cherry Blossom and Pearl Harbor. They have been our ally for over 70 years-same with Germany. The only problem I remembered was that Japanese kook who used Sarin gas on his own people. I started buying Japanese and German cars from American dealers because they were well made Each car lasted 20 years. I would have bought America made cars, but IMO, they did not hold up too… Read more »
YMMV on vehicles, I guess. My first truck was a 1985 Toyota SR-5. Not particularly good or reliable, damn near everything was wrong with that piece of shit, but it was essentially a vehicular zombie. Replaced it with a used Ford Ranger that ran pretty good, until I got t-boned by somebody doing 70 around a blind curve. Driver-side impact, but I walked away with a bruised hip. The Toyota Tundra that hit me was crunched all the way to the rear axle, and the driver got a helicopter ride to the ER. Used the insurance money as a down payment on a brand-new 2005 F-150. Ran that truck for 11 years and almost 200,000 miles. Condition when I traded her in was “beat to hell, but still runs just fine.” Now driving a 2016 F-150 with lots more bells & whistles, and loving it. On the other hand, I also just bought the wife a new Mazda CX-9 SUV to go with our third kid, so there’s that. Re: the unconstitutional dispossession and internment of US citizens of Japanese descent, I visited Manzanar with my wife the summer before we got married. I’m a history nerd, but she humors me (God bless that woman). For those who don’t know, Mrs. Whitey is ethnically Cambodian (and 1/4 Chinese). All of the other visitors and staff at the museum that day were either white or hispanic. We noticed a lot of people were looking at her and whispering amongst themselves. Finally, a couple of them walked up to us and asked if her grandparents had been locked up there (they were actually murdered by the Khmer Rouge). My wife gave them an utterly priceless look of irritation and said, “I ain’t Japanese!” My wife frequently gets misidentified as Vietnamese (she’s too dark), Filipina (wrong features), or Thai (not dark enough, though she was actually born in a refugee camp in Thailand), and occasionally for Korean (way too dark). Most of the time she takes it in stride and gracefully corrects the mistake, but occasionally she gets tired of it. And when… Read more »
“ethnically Cambodian (and 1/4 Chinese)”
If that third kid is yours, I think she’s had a little whitey in her too. 😉
All three are mine. A few years ago she got herself an “Irish by marriage” T-shirt for St. Patrick’s Day. I told her it should say “Irish by injection.” She slapped me.
Speakin’ o statues, Robert E. Lee was a staunch slavery Abolitionist while the pedophile “prophet” of that sixth century death cult espoused slavery which is STILL practiced in jizzlamic countries, so thus shouldn’t we be tearing down Mosques instead of destroying statues and monuments?
I’me a sucker for oriental women.
Ain’t we all? I married one!
I married…the son of a U. S. Army vet and a Japanese woman (married a short time, when I was very young.) He took me to all the samurai movies, which made clear to me the Japanese warrior ethic of no surrender, ever. While I’m sorry so many were killed as a result of the bombs, I don’t think there was any other reasonable way to end the war, which was part of the subject of this post.
My Dad., a Ww2 vet, always said Hirohito knew full well all the atrocities committed by Japan. Even use to say the Imperial Palace should have been #!**$# ground zero on the first drop.
I think your Dad was correct, Dustoff. Hirohito knew.