As someone who grew up in America, the idea of learning about a war in which people who may have been your parents or grandparents were horribly defeated, your homeland destroyed, government forcibly abolished, and leaders publicly tried and put to death seems utterly foreign to me. Not saying America is the best, but really the only thing I have that's close to that feeling is the Korean and Vietnam (and of course now Iraq and Afghanistan) Wars but none of those were on American soil and didn't come anywhere close to affecting the US the way WWII affected post-war Germany and Japan.

How did Germans and Japanese renounce the ideals that many of their family members (and themselves) held so fervently? To me it seems like a similar question to the classic "What happened to the ethnic Romans?" - as in, when did the people who were conquered stop being Nazis (or the aggressively Imperialist Japanese?) and start being Germans and members of the State of Japan. It seems plausible now to say, "That was 70 years ago and thus a totally different population," but the gradual process of getting there seems hard to follow.

Sorry for the long question, just always so curious to hear about how my upbringing has affected/not affected my view on the world so I can better understand others.

And I couldn't sleep last night so