American conservatives look at Japan’s WWII record

Will the American right pay attention to Japan’s WWII record when it comes to atrocities committed against Brits and Aussies?

Powerline is the name of a carefully-written, deeply conservative American blog kept by three lawyers who live in Minnesota and in Washington D.C.

Yesterday, one of Powerline’s authors, Scott W. Johnson, noted the new book Surviving the Sword : Prisoners of the Japanese in the Far East, 1942-45 by Brian Macarthur in a blog post titled ‘Prisoners of the Japanese’. The book is about the treatment of British, Australian, and colonial soldiers captured by the Japanese Army in 1942, and does not especially concern Japanese atrocities in China.

Nonetheless, perhaps this book will help to temper the American right wing’s unseemly enthusiasm for setting up Japan as a strategic ally against a perceived threat from China.