Brendan, the first paragraph betrays an incredibly shallow and US-centric attitude towards WW2. The Japanese committed genocidal atrocities on POWs and civilians alike during WW2--the rape of Nanjing, which wiped an ancient city off the map not with bombs but house by house and person by person; the medical experimentation camps in China and Korea; the famous Death March that slaughtered American and Filipeno troops by the thousands.

Japanese civilians were no less complicit than the average German civilian (leaving out concentration camp guards, etc) and are complicit now in a widespread cultural attempt to pretend it never happened, and teach a fictionalized version of their history, both to their own children and to the world.

(Also, Japanese goals in WW2 were never about 'taking on' the US, like some kind of supervillain; it was about dominating the Asian mainland. Even as losers of a war with the West, it was far from lunatic to assume they would be able to walk away from the negotiating table with a much large foothold on Korea and China. And they were fighting China a full decade before the US got involved, so the order of "The US, then China, then Russia" is particularly asinine.)

If the first paragraph is the impression of WW2 Kabei left you with, then I have trouble seeing it as anything but propaganda, which may not affect its artistic merit but seems relevant to any review.

Yes the Japanese have no moral dilemmas left over from WWII. Not like those terrible Nazis right? Unless of course you take into account the hundred of thousands of Chinese people they tortured, experimented on, and murdered. All they did was experiment with biological and chemical warfare on unwilling prisoners, perform vivisections on living human beings without anesthesia, and placed people in high pressure chambers until they literally exploded. The list goes on and on. There is a Japanese documentary titled "Japanese Devils" that has interviews with actual prisoners from the Unit 731 prison camp in Manchuria.

http://www.springerlink.com/content/x8k1…
"Japanese microbiologists and other scientists, as early as the 1930s, used humans for test purposes in their quest for a viable offensive biological warfare system...Field tests in China unleashed plagues that killed tens of thousands, and possibly hundreds of thousands."

http://www.vcn.bc.ca/alpha/speech/Harris…
"Perhaps as many as two hundred fifty thousand others were killed in the field tests, and in post-war outbreaks of epidemics that can be attributed directly to the activities of the bw and cw human experiment researchers. These figures exceed greatly the number of victims of the Nazi doctors experiments with their hapless victims. Some of the Nazi doctors were held accountable for their crimes in the famous 1947 Nuremberg Doctors Trials. There were no comparable Japanese Doctors Trials. "

"Victims were frequently vivisected while still living."

List of some of the Japanese atrocities on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731
* being hung upside down to see how long it would take for them to choke to death.[11]
* having air injected into their arteries to determine the time until the onset of embolism.[11]
* having horse urine injected into their kidneys.[11]
* being deprived of food and water to determine the length of time until death.
* being placed into high-pressure chambers until death.
* being exposed to extreme temperatures and developing frostbite to determine how long humans could survive with such an affliction, and to determine the effects of rotting and gangrene on human flesh.[11]
* having experiments performed upon prisoners to determine the relationship between temperature, burns, and human survival.
* being placed into centrifuges and spun until dead.
* having animal blood injected and the effects studied.
* being exposed to lethal doses of x-ray radiation.
* having various chemical weapons tested on prisoners inside gas chambers.
* being injected with sea water to determine if it could be a substitute for saline.
* being buried alive. (This practice included infants.)

So, the first paragraph wasn't a joke?