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[quote=Anonymous]I agree with OP.  And I don’t think that the Japanese internment camps (which kids do learn about now thanks to the great work of some Japanese-American survivors) and the dropping of the bomb on Japan make any sense unless you understand the Asian theater.  I have a slightly different perspective because my parents are older and were teens during the war with older siblings that fought in both theaters—one was captured at the battle of the bulge and spent months in a German camp watching his fellow soldiers starve; one saw most of his childhood friends blown to bits on Iwo Jima; one invaded Italy from Africa; and one was on a boat headed to Japan when the bombs dropped.  So they lived both theaters in a very real way (and miraculously lost no one close to them—although my mom’s neighbor was killed at Pearl Harbor).  
I think part of it is that after the awful racist depictions of the Japanese during the war, we lacked a collective way to talk about the atrocities that didn’t seem racist.  As a country we needed to just step away from it for a bit to heal.  I think we also did that with Germany to a certain extent but the Jewish community did a wonderful job making sure people didn’t forget.  Most of the great books and movies about the holocaust came out decades after the war.  People weren’t taking about it as much in the 50s or 60s.  I think for many Korean families there was more shame, plus they had a war of their own and partition so there just wasn’t the same community pushing for attention among Asian survivors.

I recommend people watch pr read The Empire of the Sun, and also unbroken — both center on the white experience, though—someone else might have better suggestions for books that cover the atrocities suffered by various Asian communities.  But I found empire of the sun to be really haunting — Christian bale is so good in it.[/quote]

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