When about to break the law, these people will calculate the risks of being caught and the potential punishment, and weight them up against the benefits. If the result is worth the risk based on cost-benefit calculation, they will carry out the criminal conduct; otherwise, they will stop if the risk and the punishment are greater than they can handle. In short, law and punishment are external restraints that keep human instincts, desires, and impulses from deviating from social norms.
The second type of dishonesty is conducted by people who think they are honest and do not know they are doing something dishonest [ 22 , —].
They either convince themselves that a dishonest thing they have done is honest or not that dishonest, or they sincerely believe that something dishonest they have done is actually honest.
As Mazar, Amir and Ariely say:. We hypothesize that for certain types of actions and magnitudes of dishonesty, people can categorize their actions into more compatible terms and find rationalizations for their actions. As a consequence, people can cheat while avoiding any negative self-signals that might affect their self-concept and thus avoid negatively updating their self-concept altogether.
Everyone has a moral standard. Things within this limit are undoubtedly considered to be honest. For example, waiting at a red light in the middle of the night when there is no traffic. However, not everything is within the limit. Sometimes our moral standard will be challenged. A moral code, moral standard, or self-perception is an internal examiner that checks if our behaviours are out of range. Ideally, our self-perception can regulate our behaviours every time since no one wants to be labelled as dishonest by others or by themselves.
However, the same psychological mechanism also manipulates us to lie to ourselves because most people want to believe they are honest even they have done something dishonest. In other words, self-perception maintenance mechanism is meant to make us feel good about ourselves. Once our self-awareness of dishonesty gets lost and our self-perception maintenance mechanism takes control, it may induce self-deception, as Mazar and Ariely point out:.
Therefore, self-deception can be successful even in the most extreme cases: For example, doctors who participated in genocide in Nazi Germany managed to convince themselves of the rectitude of their actions [ 27 ]. Memory is flexible and docile. We may change the facts in our memories to hide our true intentions or justify our behaviours to persuade ourselves and others that we are good people. Sometimes you know you are lying when you are lying, but, sometimes, you are not even aware you are lying if you truly believe that you are doing something benevolent.
Dan Ariely talks about an experiment to test if people will lie about the number on dice they toss in order to win the money. In an interview about Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of Theranos, a company claiming it had created a machine that could test for every possible disease with a single drop of blood.
Dan Ariely mentions that the polygraph can only detect your lies when you know you are lying. If, however, you sincerely believe that what you are saying is a truth, the lie detector cannot point you out. In another version of the experiment, we do the same thing, but people pick a charity.
For a good cause. What do you think happened, people cheat more or less? People cheat more. And the lie detector stops working. Because what does the lie detector detect? The lie detector detects a tension.
Therefore, for the sake of helping China transform, Matsui Iwane will sanction all the necessary means even though they are evil. It is not that Matsui Iwane does not know the atrocities done by Japanese soldiers are evil. It is that he believes that if evil deeds are done for good purposes, they should no longer be considered evil. Judging if an action is evil or not is determined by the nature of the action and what the action can achieve.
Black Sun — The Nanking Massacre shows us how Japanese soldiers justify their killing based on the idea that, if the evildoings are for good purposes, they are not evil anymore. However, logical this may be, it is still absurd. Human beings are the only species that has a moral sense among all the living creatures on the planet. Something cruel can be done by nature, or by God, or by wild animals, without attracting moral criticism, but cannot be done by human beings, such as natural culling.
Compensations will only be made for the damage caused by actions or accidents which can be predicted and prevented by human minds. If someone or some country executes a culling process, the individual or country will be sentenced by law as guilty of mass killing even though it might be for a good cause. Therefore, the Nanking Massacre and the Holocaust ought never to have happened no matter what the reason was. It is also a legal principle on which all of the above-mentioned international laws are based.
Morals and laws are consistent on the point that they cannot be overruled by any unratified international agreement, even by a rescript from the divine Emperor. They debate about what methods should be used to defeat China and the Chinese people even though they both agree that this so-called holy war, the second Sino-Japanese war, is necessary.
If a sword is only used to destroy, it will become evil, even though swords are made to protect oneself against evil and to fight against it. Takayama uses a story of swords as an analogy to persuade Nakajima to stop killing. Even though he fails, his story still acts as a strong opposition against the justification of mass killing and other inhumane behaviours.
The leaves passing through the sword were all cut into halves. Masamune had no interest in killing people. Because his perspective is that a sword should no longer be a killing tool. Besides, building a military force is like sword forging, a process of self-cultivation. The purpose is to suppress the killing desire that arises from the instinct of self-protection. Mass killing will make the Chinese remember only the massacre; the true intention will never be revealed.
If one of the purposes of military force is to make the Chinese accept Japanese culture, love the Japanese emperor, and willingly follow the lead of the Japanese empire, a massacre ought never to have been allowed. It is impossible for the Chinese to embrace the beauty of Japanese culture when they are only fed with the evil part of it.
Black Sun — The Nanking Massacre not only shows us the cruelty of Japanese soldiers through its violent and graphic scenes. It also tells its audience that a good purpose must be achieved by proper and decent means. Although many war criminals from the second Sino-Japanese and the Pacific wars have been punished by law, not all of them realize that what they have done is not only legally wrong but is also evil in a moral sense. The conversation between Takayama and Nakajima in the film, therefore, is designed to refute the justification of a mass killing, and to tell Japanese soldiers, who have done evil things but still believe they are good, that they are actually deceiving themselves.
Only when they realize the fact that they are immoral, can they really begin to repent their sins. The whole life of Japan centres about this anthropomorphic dogma, and it is probably true to say that Japan is the most united, the most homogeneous, nation on earth under the surface differences of her domestic political life.
Soldiers who committed rape were usually punished according to the general criminal code as Japanese civilians. According to the law, the victim was responsible to press charges on the crime of rape. Since rape victims are mostly murdered, it will be impossible for them to press charges against their assailants. As a result, the criminal code against rape was not able to stop rape from happening, and the actual numbers of rape cases must be higher than reported rape cases during the second Sino-Japan War.
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Gibney, Alex. HBO documentary. The inventor: Out for blood in silicon valley. Download references. You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar. Correspondence to Lung-Lung Hu. Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material.
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Skip to main content. Search SpringerLink Search. Download PDF. Abstract Japan was supposed to obey the law during the second world war. Introduction Did the Nanking Massacre really happen in ? In addition to the prohibitions provided by special Conventions, it is especially forbidden a. He took over at a time of rising democratic sentiment, but his country soon turned toward ultra-nationalism and militarism.
Though Hirohito later portrayed himself as a virtually powerless constitutional monarch, many scholars have come to believe he played an active role in the war effort. According to custom, imperial family members were not raised by their parents.
Instead, Hirohito spent his early years in the care of first a retired vice-admiral and then an imperial attendant. From age 7 to 19, Hirohito attended schools set up for the children of nobility.
He received rigorous instruction in military and religious matters, along with other subjects such as math and physics. In , Hirohito and a man entourage traveled to Western Europe for a six-month tour; it was the first time a Japanese crown prince had ever gone abroad. Upon his return to Japan, Hirohito became regent for his chronically ill father and assumed the duties of emperor.
That December, Hirohito survived an assassination attempt, and the following month he married Princess Nagako, with whom he would have seven children. At around the same time, he ended the practice of imperial concubinage. Hirohito officially became emperor when his father died in December When Hirohito assumed the throne, a universal male suffrage law had just passed, and political parties were near the height of their prewar powers.
However, a plunging economy, rising militarism and a series of political assassinations soon caused a crisis for the pro-democracy movement. The next prime minister was shot and mortally wounded, and in yet another prime minister was assassinated by naval officers upset about a treaty limiting the number of Japanese warships.
From then on, almost all prime ministers came from the military rather than from the political parties, which were disbanded altogether in More political violence occurred in , when a lieutenant colonel slashed a general to death with a samurai sword.
And in , over 1, soldiers mutinied in Tokyo, seizing the army ministry and murdering several high-ranking politicians.
In , Japanese army officers initiated the so-called Manchurian Incident by detonating a railway explosion and blaming it on Chinese bandits. They then used the event as an excuse to take over Manchuria in northeastern China and set up a puppet state there. Excursions into other areas of the country soon followed, and by war had broken out. That winter, the Japanese army massacred an estimated , civilians and prisoners of war in and around the city of Nanking.
Rape is thought to have been commonplace, and women throughout Japanese-controlled regions of Asia were brought in to serve as prostitutes. He also sanctioned the use of chemical warfare and the uprooting of peasants. In September , Japan signed the Tripartite Pact with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, in which they agreed to assist one another should any of them be attacked by a country not already involved in the war.
Japan sent troops to occupy French Indochina that same month, and the United States responded with economic sanctions, including an embargo on oil and steel. A little over a year later, Hirohito consented to the decision of his government to battle the Americans. On December 7, , Japanese planes bombarded the U. The United States declared war one day later.
But the tide started turning at the June Battle of Midway and soon after at Guadalcanal.
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