Best posts made by juneko

Full disclosure: I am a friend of marsmrsmars.

It comes off as weirdly paternalistic whenever you say that people who want to play on this MUSH "need to have a certain level of tolerance with uncomfortable history" in order to play here. First things first: the game does not bill itself as "dark" or "mature," the staff already went through the trouble of removing Adolf Hitler from leadership in Germany and outright banned ex-Nazi characters, so I don't see why there is any hand-wringing about ex-IJA characters.

Second of all: people in this thread are weirdly veering toward outright revisionism whenever they question whether or not Hirohito had any involvement in his country's crimes. His own family participated in them, and he was certainly aware of them. This is elementary school history. Any denial of that shows a complete lack of understanding, and you should not be speaking on a topic that you do not understand.

EDIT: It also comes off as oddly voyeuristic whenever people suggest that they're attracted to exploring these topics for whatever reason. As a roleplayer, I think you should consider that the themes you are interested in exploring are in a real context in this instance, and directly related to terrible suffering that is in living memory of some people alive today. If you WANT to play as a war criminal that participated in the massacre of 25 million Chinese people, I think you need to reflect on why that is.

@faraday
I understand this perspective entirely, and I think that there is room for "shades of gray" in media which portrays Imperial Japanese soldiers. However, I also think that it would be enlightening to wonder, for a moment, why there are no movies like this from the Chinese perspective.

@Groth
Bomber Harris, do it again.

The discussion of Japanese war crimes does not need to be punctuated by mention of Allied war crimes, it feels more like a disingenuous "gotcha" than a legitimate concern for these atrocities. One side participated in the deliberate ethnic slaughter of anywhere from 10 to 25 million Chinese people, and the other did not. You cannot draw an equivalency between the Japanese military's conduct in the Sino-Japanese War and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or the Holocaust and the fire-bombing of Dresden.

Nobody here will ever once deny that the Allies committed war crimes during World War Two, history is settled on that affair. It is wrong to draw an equivalence between these war crimes and the ones committed by the Axis, which more qualify as crimes against humanity.