Viswanathan K's Thoughts

In World War 2, Japan could have gone either way, with the Allies or with the Axis powers, says Nick Mulder in this interview . The story, he says, starts several years before World War 2 started – it starts when Japan invaded China in the 1930’s. The West didn’t want Japan to become the new colonizer (what if Japan decided to next fight European imperialists for other parts of Asia?).   The way the League of Nations imposed sanctions on Italy for invading Ethiopia, the US considers imposing sanctions on Japan. But there are Neutrality Acts in the US designed to avoid dragging the country into foreign wars. “(Those acts) make it impossible for the US president to discriminate by cutting off trade with one country that’s party to a conflict and not with the other; the Neutrality Acts actually obliged the US government to break off arms trade with both parties to a conflict.”   Meanwhile, World War 2 breaks out, so Britain puts strict controls on its colonies – their ...

I’d only heard the same old reasons as to why the Americans dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They were tired with the never ending war. Japan showed no signs of surrendering even after the war had ended in Europe. They dreaded the prospect of the death count should a land invasion of Japan be needed. Revenge for Pearl Harbour. Racism – it was OK to “test” on yellow Japan but not white Nazi Germany…   Until I read Malcolm Gladwell’s The Bomber Mafia , I’d never heard how the Japanese felt about the matter. Remember, before the atomic bombings, the US had deliberately created bombs with material (napalm) that would start off fires in wooden-housing Japan. What that meant is that the scale of deliberate widespread destruction went far beyond what say the carpet bombing of German cities had done – in Japan, they had burnt cities and then dropped the atomic bombs. You’d think the Japanese, even a few decades would be angry, right?   And yet, many Japanese ac...

If you complain about gadgets having too many features, I wonder what you’d have to say about the famous (notorious?) toilets of Japan. I mean, their toilets can play music, have “featured buttons”, and “cleaning sprays that automatically sanitized”. Like any foreigner, Roma Agarwal, author of Built , experimented: “I did press a few buttons and regretted it pretty quickly – but hey, I felt cleaner afterwards, if a little violated.”   The Japanese interest in, er, “solid human waste” was established centuries back, writes Agarwal. No, it wasn’t some kind of weird fetish; it was a necessity. The land wasn’t too fertile, but the population was booming, and so increasing food production was literally a life and death matter. It also meant the soil was being depleted of nutrients at an alarming rate since leaving the land uncultivated for any period wasn’t an option: “They found the answer in their own sanitation: the burgeoning population created a lot of waste.”   Th...

When Japanese PM, Shinzo Abe, recently said that this generation should be the last one to apologize for Japan’s World War II related atrocities, I could see why: how long could future generations keep apologizing? I went on to wonder why the Germans don't ever feel the same way. But it turns out that German and Japanese perceptions of their roles during World War II are significantly different. One very important difference was that the German defeat ended up with the removal from power of Hitler and his Nazi regime. Whereas in case of defeated Japan, the ruling Emperor Hirohito under whose command Japan had marched, was not prosecuted because General Douglas MacArthur felt that “a crushed people would be more biddable with their emperor still in place”.  That difference meant the Germans could distance themselves from Nazism (to some extent) and look at their crimes a bit more objectively than the Japanese could. Further, many Japanese have always questioned why Japan...

In moments of idealism, we often find ourselves wishing for a simpler/better/less-evil’er world. Or hear others say something similar and smirk. While in some cases, it is definitely a possibility, in others, it is good to step back and think of the practicality of what is being hoped for. The first kind is worth wishing for: If you wish for a cleaner alternative to, say, fossil fuels, it could happen. While difficult, no law of physics prevents such a technology from being developed. Even being cheaper than existing fuels eventually. It could happen. If not today, maybe tomorrow. Or the day after. But not impossible. The other kind of wishful thinking is what does deserve a smirk. The kind where people hope for things that would violate the laws of physics: like hoping for a perpetual motion machine to “fix” the energy problem. Or the kind, and this is more common among idealists, wishing for things like world peace. These are cases where hope is based on human nature chan...