Three Tigers, One Mountain: A Journey Through the Bitter History and Current Conflicts of China, Korea, and Japan

by Michael Booth

Abe Shinzo and others have used the Arlington National Cemetery defense: other countries pay their respects to their war dead, so why can’t Japan? It is true that there may well be people who could be considered war criminals buried in American armed forces cemeteries. There are certainly Confederate generals at Arlington; General Samuel Koster, infamous for his role in the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam in 1968, is buried at West Point Cemetery; and General Curtis LeMay is buried at the United States Air Force Academy Cemetery in Colorado. LeMay was the man responsible for the 1945 firebombing of Tokyo, which killed one hundred thousand people and was arguably the worst individual instance of mass killing of noncombatants in military history. LeMay himself admitted, “If I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal.” Meanwhile, in London in 1992, a statue was erected on Whitehall to air chief marshal Sir Arthur “Bomber” Harris, responsible for the bombing of civilians in Dresden in contravention of the 1922 Washington Treaty. Some consider Harris a war criminal too.

Some serious whataboutism....