Portrayal of Cloud's Mental State (and eventually Zack) in the Remake

[LicoriceAllsorts]

Mako has parallels to several energy sources, including coal or oil fired electricity generating plants.

 

[The Twilight Mexican]

It's also A Thing that the conduct of the Japanese army has been sometimes downplayed or glossed over in their histories to a controversial degree.

No doubt the Ministry of Education has had an unsavory history of attempting that, but the individual school districts throughout Japan have blessedly rejected such attempts almost universally and insisted upon a more accurate account. Which I would argue says far more about the Japanese culture than those disgraceful efforts by the Education Ministry.

Some of that shame was 'we lost, we failed our Emperor', leading to mass suicides and such. Much of it at the time was for the surrender, not the bombs.

Are you sure you're not thinking of the mass suicides compelled upon civilians by the army? In Okinawa and Saipan in particular, the civilians were misled into believing that they and their families would be raped, tortured, and ultimately still murdered if captured, portraying suicide as the preferable option. For those choosing to kill their children, these suicides had less to do with imperial dishonor than manipulation of love and compassion.

Granted, at that particular time, many would still have been concerned with the notion of failing the empire. As it was taught to me, though -- and explained by the admittedly few Japanese people I've known -- the civilian populace by and large despised the emperor following the surrender and admission that he was not actually a deity, as they felt betrayed/that their suffering was for nothing.

There's a vast array of perspectives on what happened, and that's just the people directly affected. At the time, the US military censored the full effects from popular knowledge, this kind of thing is way too complicated for any one definitive perspective.

Of course, and I acknowledged that before. But there is still a culturally prevailing perspective.

 

[Clement Rage]

Is this one of those situations where we're arguing but secretly in agreement again?

I'm not waving a flag for Imperial Japan here or trying to discredit any particular viewpoint. I just happened to do some reading on the victims of Nagisaki lately, and as you might expect, it's too complicated for any one definitive perspective. The victims themselves tended to be stigmatised within Japan, there was a coined term for them I can't remember.

The 'betrayed by the empire' is there, so is the 'we failed our Emperor' viewpoint, and a massive host of others, from 'what the fuck does China have to do with my eight dead grandkids?' and so on.