Talk:Shigematsu Sakaibara

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With all due respect, I have to wonder how fearing another attack would cause someone to want to execute a bunch of civilians. Just sounds like a weird attempt at justification.--Cabazap (talk) 05:31, 8 December 2011 (UTC)
 * The same people who justified their rampage of Asia as a righteous liberation of Asia from Western powers. Angry bee (talk) 17:07, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

The prisoners could rise up during an external attack and thus be a liability. Staff used to guard the prisoners could also be redirected to defense roles. It's not that hard to come up with a few reasons if you actually think about it tactically instead of having an emotional, juvenile mindset of "because Japanese people were monsters".219.101.245.1 (talk) 02:53, 20 February 2013 (UTC)


 * Firstly, no one here said "because Japanese people are monsters." Your attribution to others here of an extreme view of all Japanese, when no one here expressed it, is not a good will statement.


 * The fact is that there was a specific broad and top down well documented culture of distain and dehumanization of POWs within the Japanese military. IN fact Hirohito himself signed an order removing the designation of POW and Geneva protections. NO military force in modern times directly murdered POWs as often as the Japanese did. The Japanese murdered surrendered and disarmed Chinese, Americans, British and others very often. In a single incident in Nanking about 57,000 disarmed and surrendered Chinese POWs were machined gunned to death. Millions and millions of other non combatants were directly murdered by Japanese forces.


 * Japanese forces routinely beheaded, disemboweled, buried alive, used for target practice POWs across the entire theater.


 * It is neither a condemnation of Japanese people, nor a condemnation of Japanese culture in general, to note that their military culture at the time sanctioned wide-scale murder of POWs. And notably, Japanese military culture condemned even their own solders who surrendered as subhuman and traitors. The 1941 Japanese "Code of Battlefield Conduct" (Senjinkun) makes it clear that its own soldiers were traitors if they surrender under any circumstances. You won or died fighting. No other outcome was acceptable for a Japanese combatant. This FACT also goes to why often over 90% to 100% of Japanese soldiers had to be killed on any given island, since few to none would surrender, when normally a casualty rate of 10% to 20% would cause any other WWII unit to surrender -- and is instructive about the type of issues the US faced in the decision to use atomic weapons to force a surrender instead of opposed landings on Japanese main islands.


 * Again this is not about Japanese people, but about a specific and documented aspect of Imperial Japan's military culture and codes. DEnial of this is not good faith73.212.229.38 (talk) 13:15, 11 January 2015 (UTC)


 * For every atrocious act from man, beast, or bacteria, we can find a "justification". It does not mean the act should be accepted by any reasonable human being.  The ends do not justify the means. Angry bee (talk) 03:00, 11 June 2013 (UTC)

4 September vs. 7 September
In 2008, a change was made to this article indicating that the surrender took place on 7 September aboard USS Levy. This is inaccurate. Multiple online documents indicate all surrender activity, both on Wake itself and onboard USS Levy, took place on 4 September. Example. --Hammersoft (talk) 15:40, 10 June 2015 (UTC)