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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Any Jewelry, post: 9538622, member: 2844&quot;]It is more about a feeling of injustice, and being Dutch I already knew the stories growing up, years before I met my husband. We heard the stories from refugees that came here from Indonesia.</p><p>The Japanese weren&#039;t victims, they were perpetrators, and the Japanese population in general was in favour of the war. That doesn&#039;t mean they should be treated harshly, but the victim role they assumed after Nagasaki and Hiroshima was used to negate their role as a cruel perpetrator.</p><p>I have also known people who were in Nagasaki at the time btw, Dutch-Indonesian POWs who were forced to work in the shipyards under harsh conditions, like daily beatings.</p><p><br /></p><p>Another thing is the lack of attention to what happened in East Asia, the focus is generally on Europe, or it rapidly shifts back to Europe. Even today there are people in Europe who say &quot;oh it was much worse here than in SE Asia, because we had cold winters&quot;.</p><p>Of course cold winters were an exacerbating factor, but so were the extremely brutal treatment, harsh conditions and tropical diseases in SE Asia. The war in Asia wasn&#039;t a second rate war with second rate suffering, 20-30 million deaths say otherwise. (Numbers were probably higher, for instance the Indonesian number of 3-4 million is based on incomplete information.)[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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