Whataboutism and Japanese military research

Whataboutism in historical research is rightly frowned upon because it’s usually replace discussion of some “inconvenient” question with counter-accusations, tended to discuss anything, but not the original question.

In Japanese military research the most popular place for “what about…” to appear is the discussion of war crimes, committed by the Japanese military. As if war crimes, committed by the Allies, somehow exonerate Japanese war crimes.

However, there are questions in Japanese military research, that simply couldn’t be discussed objectively without “what about…”. Those are qualitative assessments. You can find multiple stories of “Japanese did wrong here”, “Japanese design was bad”, “what were Japanese thinking doing like this”, etc.

Some of those accusations look very serious… until you’ll start to compare Japanese actions, designs, doctrines with those of the USA or other nations. And SUDDENLY you’ll find out that Japanese were just following the popular trends, did the obvious things, even copied US theories or practices. Japanese doesn’t look incompetent or stupid anymore.

Of course, this doesn’t mean Japanese did no incompetent or stupid things or never erred. But comparing Japanese ways of doing things with foreign ways will help you greatly reduce number of false accusations against them. After you’ll manage to ask “what about…” question you’ll see the worldwide exchange of thoughts, doctrines, designs, which Japan was a part of. And not just a “mysterious” (read: “weird”) Japanese mind, suddenly doing weird things.