preface
At noon on August 15, 1945, Emperor Hirohito of Japan announced to all Japanese people by radio that they would accept the Potsdam Proclamation and Japan's unconditional surrender, and World War II came to an end.
The Second World War caused huge losses to all countries in the world, and Japan also suffered from it, the economy regressed, the population fell off a cliff, and the proportion of men and women was seriously imbalanced, which were all problems that the Japanese government needed to face.
Pictured| Japan signs a surrender agreement
However, just 20 years later, Japan has jumped from a defeated developing country to a developed country.
In 1968, Japan became the second largest economy after the United States, and the Japanese population recovered miraculously at a miraculous speed.
Post-World War II Japan
On August 15, 1945, the Emperor of Japan announced Japan's unconditional surrender, and at 9 a.m. on September 2, the Japanese delegation boarded the USS Missouri, anchored in Tokyo Bay, and signed the Japan Unconditional Surrender Instrument, officially ending World War II.
With the end of World War II, the Japanese turtle, who took the lead in launching the war of aggression, retracted to its own country and began to lick its wounds silently.
After the war, Japan's mainland was in disarray, full of fragments and ruins after the war, the Japanese people were displaced and homeless, and Japan's economy suddenly regressed by as much as a hundred years.
Pictured| Japanese fleeing in 1945
At that time, some experts made predictions, they said,
If Japan were to think of restoring its national strength before World War II, it would take at least a hundred years.
It is impossible to imagine what kind of mess Japan was facing at that time.
The first problem facing the Japanese government is the infrastructure of the city.
On August 6 and 9, 1945, the United States dropped two atomic bombs on the recalcitrant Japanese mainland, leaving Hiroshima and Nagasaki in ruins that would remain deserted for decades to come.
Japan's capital, Tokyo, was also destroyed by the war, and countless high-rise buildings and roads in the Tokyo area were destroyed, and the Japanese people had no place to live and were forced to choose to wander the streets.
Pictured| homeless Japanese refugees
The second is the problem of materials.
As we all know, Japan is an island country, its own land resources and natural resources are extremely scarce, the Second World War soon exhausted Japan's national reserves for decades, and the Japanese people who were blinded by militarism sacrificed their family savings in order to support the national war.
With the frenzied Japanese military department constantly expanding its front, the Japanese army's military consumption is getting bigger and bigger, the gap in Japan's financial and resource shortages has gradually become larger, and the living standards of ordinary people in Japan have repeatedly shrunk.
After this protracted war finally ended, a large number of Japanese soldiers returned to China, and the already scarce materials at home suddenly became more stretched, and Japan's post-war economic depression was incomparable. Industrial production was almost paralyzed, and the level of agricultural production was only half that of what it was before the war.
Pictured| Japanese farmers peeling the bark of trees to feed themselves
In addition to these, Japan also had to pay the price for the numerous crimes committed in World War II, and they faced sky-high compensation from the aggressor countries. All of this plunged Japan's post-war economy into a very depressed situation.
At this time, Japan should not mention any post-war reconstruction, that is, even the most basic food and clothing problems of the people cannot be solved. After the end of the war, nearly a million Japanese soldiers returned home, further exacerbating Japan's already serious food problem.
At that time, an ordinary worker in Japan earned about three hundred yen a month, and the price of grain on the Japanese black market at that time had soared to the point of one liter and fifty yen, and many Japanese people could not eat at all.
Pictured| Veterans in begging in the 1950s.
People with better families can still eat barley and sweet potatoes to fill their stomachs, and poor people can only eat cheap things such as leaves, taro, rice bran dumplings and so on to maintain their lives.
On the streets of Japan at that time, it was common to see people dressed in very decent clothes, looking around for garbage thrown out by the US military in order to find a little bit of debris. In the face of filling their stomachs and dignity, the Japanese obviously chose the former, but even so, many Japanese people still could not fill their stomachs and starved to death on the streets of Japan.
After Japan's defeat, the U.S. military occupied Japan strongly, and MacArthur led 460,000 U.S. troops into Japan, controlling Japan's major cities and strategic points. The Japanese people, who are already in the depths of the waters, have once again made it worse, they not only have to face physical hunger, but also bear great mental pressure.
In Particular, women in Japan consider one of the most considered questions: how to avoid being humiliated and persecuted by American soldiers.
Pictured| Tokyo, 1945, a geisha girl is held by an American soldier.
In addition to various survival problems, the Japanese government is also facing the problem of a cliff-like decline in The Japanese population. Before Japan launched the war of aggression, Japan's own population was already very small, and in order to enable Japan to have enough capital to win the war of aggression, the Japanese government strongly encouraged all Japanese people to work hard to have children and cultivate more next generations for Japan.
At the beginning of World War II, Japan set a very clear strategic goal for its own population development, and they hoped that the population of their country would reach 100 million, so they revised their own laws. As amended by The laws of Japan,
The age at which Japanese women marry and have children is 13 years old, and women are strongly encouraged to marry and have children as soon as they reach adulthood. With the support of such national policies, by 1937, the total population of Japan had reached more than 70 million.
In the factories and farms of the country, a large number of women were recruited to work in order to free more men to go to war.
At that time, the Japanese people, whether adults or children, did not have a free person who enjoyed civil rights, and all of them were the tools of Japanese militarism to wage war against the outside world.
Pictured| 1950s, Tokyo, pedestrians on the street.
Under the constant brainwashing of Japanese militarism, the thinking of countless Japanese people has also been completely distorted, and they can only numbly obey the call of the state, continue to procreate for the country, and create more offspring to support this unjust war.
Throughout World War II, although Japan's population resources were scarce and there were fewer soldiers used in war, japan's military resources were never cut off with the support of such national policies.
During World War II, the frenzied Japanese military department fantasized about the "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere," which not only launched a war of aggression against China, but also launched wars of aggression and opened up many battlefields in many neighboring countries. In the middle and late stages of the war, the casualties of the Japanese on the battlefield began to increase dramatically, and the total population of Japan showed a cliff-like decline.
Pictured| In 1950, Japanese women greeted repatriated Prisoners of War II
After the end of World War II, the "men's crisis" broke out in Japan. According to relevant information, after the entire Second World War, the death toll of the Japanese army was more than three million, and the soldiers were all young and middle-aged men, so the deaths of these soldiers not only caused the decline in the total population of Japan, but also caused a serious imbalance in the proportion of men and women in Japan, as well as the problem of aging.
For a big country, this will not shake the foundation of the country, but for Japan, this is completely different, the population cliff-like decline has caused many social problems, and Japan's domestic production and development have been restricted to a certain extent.
The Japanese woman's way to "save the country"
Faced with all kinds of problems, Japan began its own road to "national salvation."
Pictured| In Kyoto in 1946, geisha served their guests a meal.
First of all, the Japanese government had to face the American army stationed in Japan, and with the arrival of MacArthur, the Japanese emperor was completely sidelined and reduced to a puppet, and the American soldiers began a fairy-like life in Japan.
At that time, in order to please the Americans, the Japanese government ordered the recruitment of up to 70,000 comfort women throughout the country, and set up special guest houses in various garrisons of the U.S. army, hoping that the U.S. military could reduce violence against the Japanese people.
By sacrificing the innocence of these women in exchange for a brief period of peace for the Japanese people.
And Japanese officials have publicly stated that
Those who signed up for the comfort women received priority access to food distribution, and they constantly used public opinion to claim that comforting the U.S. military was a "patriotic act."
According to incomplete statistics, in Japan at that time, there were nearly 150,000 Japanese women serving American soldiers.
Pictured| In 1946, two American soldiers took a rickshaw tour.
"Send a concubine to an ansheji, I don't know when to use the general"
The mistakes of Japanese men in World War II are now letting countless Japanese women pay for them, and they have fallen to this point, which is very miserable, but the dignity of their nation has also been completely lost!
In order to restore the population as soon as possible, Japan began to learn from the surrounding countries and implement various measures to rapidly increase the number of people in the country.
Japan's first target of study was the Soviet Union. During World War II, the Soviet Union was the main battlefield against German fascism, so the Soviet Union was also the country with the largest number of casualties in World War II. According to statistics, between 1941 and 1945, in order to resist the German invasion, the Soviet Union mobilized the people of the whole country to defend the country, and for this reason, the Soviet Union paid countless manpower and material resources.
Pictured| Soviet female soldiers
After World War II, the material losses caused by the war in the Soviet Union were immeasurable, and as many as 26.2 million people lost their lives in the war, of which more than 14 million were Soviet soldiers, compared with the population data of the Soviet Union before World War II, the total population of the Soviet Union fell by more than fifteen percent.
As Japan faced the same problem, the Soviet Union also faced a serious shortage of young adults, and the imbalance between men and women in the Soviet Union was even worse. In the face of such a huge population loss, the Soviet government also issued a law that lowered the legal age of marriage for women from the original eighteen to 16 years old, encouraging women to marry after reaching the legal age.
With strong advocacy and national policy support, the population of the Soviet Union soon ushered in explosive growth, the population recovery rate was very fast, and the Soviet Union also became the country with the fastest population recovery rate after the war.
After the example of the Soviet Union, the Japanese government also promulgated a lot of welfare policies, which were aimed at increasing the enthusiasm of the people for childbearing. However, the people were simply unwilling to raise more children in the turbulent social environment and heavy living pressures at that time, so the Welfare Policy of the Japanese Government had little effect.
In order to pursue the recovery of the population as soon as possible, Japan has imposed mandatory provisions on this national policy on the basis of the decree that the age of marriage and childbirth for women will be adjusted to thirteen years of age.
Each family must have five children or face a "sky-high" fine.
In order to be exempt from fines, Japanese women can only choose to have more children, which has led to a large number of underage girls in Japan leaving school early, taking on the heavy responsibility of motherhood and shouldering the burden of family living expenses.
Pictured| Japanese peasant girl entering a brothel
Compared with the Soviet Union, Japan's policy can be called shameless.
Although the Soviet Union lowered the age of marriage and childbearing for women to 16 years old, the development of Western women generally preceded that of Eastern Asian women, not to mention a 13-year-old Oriental woman who was still a completely undeveloped child. From a physiological point of view, a woman who is not yet fully developed is a very, very dangerous thing to get pregnant and give birth, and it is likely to cause the result of one corpse and two lives. At that time, countless young girls in Japan suffered from both physical and psychological persecution. This is clearly the opposite of the Soviet Union's encouragement of fertility.
In the 1950s, the Soviet Union was a country focused on industrial and agricultural production, and most of the citizens were peasant families, who had taken on the burden of family life early on, and at the age of sixteen, they had reached the time when they could start a family.
More importantly, the status of Soviet women in social life is very high, in World War II, Soviet women took up arms like men to join the army against fascism, they were given the right to pursue freedom and equality by law, although there is a policy of marriage, but if they do not want to, no one can force them to do what they do not want to do.
Pictured| Soviet girl
Not only that, the Soviet Union's subsidies for women who give birth are very generous, as long as they give birth to children, all the costs of children and the problem of receiving education are borne by the state, and will not increase the economic pressure of the couple.
That is to say, the Soviet Union encouraged men and women of the right age to marry and have children, but the ultimate power was still in their own hands, and after having children, the government would also vigorously subsidize and reduce the burden, which was fundamentally different from Japan, which forced young girls who had not yet fully developed to marry and have children, and had more children.
But the Japanese government has completely ignored it and still adheres to this shameless policy. After a period of implementation, the Japanese government found that the population still did not grow rapidly, in the final analysis, it lies in the lack of young adults in Japan, the serious imbalance between women and men, so that the population growth has not achieved the desired effect, the Japanese government once again played its shameless side, under the situation that the law explicitly prohibits polygamy, acquiesced to the fact that a man and multiple women established a husband and wife relationship.
Pictured| a Japanese girl
In order to quickly make up for the serious shortage of young adults, the Japanese government has recruited a large number of foreign male migrant workers from neighboring countries to provide more choices for "age-appropriate" women in Japan.
What is even more disgraceful is that the Japanese authorities not only openly solicited comfort women for the US military, but even indulged in the US military's aggression against Japanese women, and those US troops who committed crimes not only did not receive the punishment they deserved, but continued their fairy-like lives with a big swing.
In Japan's rapidly developing population, 60% of them are of mixed race.
Under the "active encouragement" of the Japanese government, in the short period of a few years of the US military's occupation of Japan, countless Japanese women gave birth to children for American soldiers, and the number of Japanese-American mixed children reached hundreds of thousands at that time.
In the years that followed, a small number of Japanese women who were married to Americans followed their husbands back to the United States, but more Japanese women remained in Japan. Those children of mixed Japanese and American descent also had the same fate as their mothers, only a small number of kind American soldiers took away their children, most of the Americans left alone, and the children remained in Japan and left to the mother to raise alone.
It is worth mentioning that these hundreds of thousands of Japanese-American mixed children are regarded as a national shame by countless Japanese, a large part of them are directly abandoned by their mothers, and they can only live on the streets to become beggars, only a small number of children are very lucky not to be left behind by their mothers to raise adults, but after entering the society, they also suffer discrimination from society.
It is impossible to imagine what kind of human misery Japanese women lived in at that time, on their own land, they had no human rights, no dignity, and they were completely reduced to a machine for giving birth to the country, and this evil result was also indirectly caused by Japanese militarism.
Picture | 1951, Osaka Orphanage, orphan gate at lunch.
epilogue
After the war, Japan achieved a great economic leap in only 20 years, and the most fundamental reason was that the United States spared no effort to support it, but this support was bought by selling out its dignity and even betraying countless women in its own country.
The Japanese have re-bloomed their lives on the ruins of the war, but behind this glory, there is countless darkness and filth, like a beautiful looking flower, but it has long rotted inside! Empty of its surface, the heart has long been rotten!