Japanese vs Germans Part XCCMXL

Anyone here for a laugh, go away now, please!

It's really getting difficult in my mind these days keeping score with which of the two are/were/still are the most brutish examples of human existence in recent times, what with various revelations here and there.

Five years in Japan, with an uncomfortably intimate experience of the Japanese psyche at least gave me a basis of something to see where they were coming from. Germans, not much.

And I don't know why I obsess about these things. Well, all I can say is that I simply want to be able to understand it. I want to know why people do the things they do, but above all, I want to know why particular groups of people do what they do. Is it their culture? Their education? Mass-induced psychosis?

Here, let's start with the Germans. Or rather, the Americans. Just admit that this picture is almost a cliché of how Americans behaved in WWII:

American soldiers handing out candy to children

Now let's look at a typical image of German soldiers:

German soldiers humiliating a Jewish man by cutting his hair off before taking him away to be shot

Look at the thuggish grins of outright glee on the face of every soldier . . . can you in your right mind ever imagine that the same scenario was ever played out among allied troops? It's downright horrifying.

The Japanese: I don't need pictures. Let's just say that through my five years of living among them, I discovered a host of repressed perversions and aberrant behaviour patterns that would fill a library of scholarly psychological research.

Between the two cultures, I'd have to say that at least the Germans have semi-owned up to their monstrous crimes, not that even doing hair-shirt penance and being flogged every day for the rest of their lives for each and every German citizen living today, for the sins of their fathers, would ever make up for it, but at least they plead guilty.

Not so the Japanese. They prefer to play the victims, the "viciously A-bombed innocents," basically not denying anything but not admitting to anything either, and their prime ministers still go every year to worship at the Yasukuni Shrine, in which are interred several of the worst war criminals ever to have existed. We're talking the Heinrich Himmlers of Japan, my flock. Truly evil individuals.

My ex-wife, who used to work in what they call "hostess clubs" used to tell me about WWII veterans sitting around and laughing and reminiscing about their experiences perpetrating mass murder in China. These old farts in their 80s joking about the "good old days."

But what I also noticed in Japan was a streak of ultra-perversion among Japanese males; a streak so ugly that only when I had to admit I wasn't just imagining it did I accept its true horror.

Many, many Japanese men are sadistic, woman-hating perverts; perverts so twisted and repressed that one wonders how the society as a whole manages to lurch along from day to day.

To wit: this delightful video game.

To think: there are organized gangs of men who swarm rush-hour trains in the morning to do what they call "chikan" . . . or now, with the advent of cell-phone cameras, take so-called "upskirt" videos.

To the point where the authorities have actually segregated trains with the front cars for women only. Can you imagine that happening in, say, San Francisco?

I know I've muddled a whole bunch into one pot but it just shows me that the older I get, the less I actually understand why people do what they do, or more importantly, why whole distinct cultures do what they do.

So far, with this new bit of news from Japan, Japanese 2, Germans 2. A tie!