Does the general population respect ww2 veterans?

5 comments

1. WW2 veterans are in their 90s. If you were 16 when the war started you would be 98 today. Of the few that are left, most of them are not wandering around interacting with people every day on the street.

2. This won’t directly answer your question, but maybe you’ll enjoy my anecdote anyway.

   My wife’s grandfather worked in a factory in kokura during the war so he wasn’t directly in the military, and the story goes he survived the war because August 9th 1945 was cloudy so the bomber went to it’s secondary target of Nagasaki instead.

   Anyway, he was long dead when I met my wife, but the time came to meet my wife’s grandmother. The general consensus among the family was that she would be very upset at her oldest granddaughter marrying a foreign barbarian and I was given strict instructions to not take anything she said personally as she was old and from a different time.

   So the time comes and I meet her. We briefly discuss SMAP and she is delighted that my favorite member was also her favorite member. She then went on to tell stories of her husband, and how he was fluent in English and Hindi and spent his career translating technical manuals for factories in India. My wife’s mother had never heard these stories apparently and was shocked with sudden understanding about why she had been forced into English lessons as a girl.

3. What do you mean by “respect”? Like doing something special at their graves to commemorate their history in the military? Unfortunately almost all of them have joined our ancestors by now.

   My grandfather never talked about the war in front of me and it was a general attitude of his generation. Working 16 hours a day just to feed his family took up most of his postwar life, and he just wanted to be the doting grandfather to his little grandchildren. He did tell his sons that he didn’t believe in god or buddha because of the war though, and it was something my grandmother readily agreed with.

4. There aren’t as many public shows of support for the military as you get in the States, but there isn’t as much public patriotism generally. I don’t think you will find a lot of people with strong negative feelings regarding the military, either. I live near a military base and the folks in uniform are just like any other salarymen waiting for traffic lights to change so they can get to work on time.
   You do see some vets wearing military insignia on hats and things, so there is some pride there, I just don’t think it’s as performative as it is in the US.

5. I’m British but living here.They did what had to be done for survival and that sacrifice should be appreciated but war isnt heroic by default. Its a failure of humanity to work together through peaceful means and often those with less sacrifice the most. I hate when people glorify war and hate it even more when someone generalises a population’s attitudes to something. There’s plenty of places in Japan that will show you the true cost of war. Okinawa, Nagasaki etc.