My 12 years old Grandson Jesse is being taught,at school, to forgive and forget as he is so fond of telling me. I spend quite a bit of my time speaking to an old WW11 stretcher bearer. His stories are horrific. My Dad didn't talk about his service in New Guinea and my Mum had very strong feelings given the disruptions and permanent changes to our lives. When my generation dies out,we will probably take with us these feelings against the Japanese. As I tell my Grandson, it is very easy to forgive and forget if you were not the one having your breasts sliced off or other things I won't go into here.
This is true, of course. Maybe there are two problems. One is forgiveness, though I was more concerned about the other one, which is the perception of the other people as alien and different and somehow separable from one's own people or oneself. When I think about what the Japanese, or the Germans, or the Americans did, or what any of the people in South East Asia did to each other (the whole Thai, Burma, Cambodia region used to do unspeakable things to each other in wars of prior centuries), I just think it's people doing it people, with the same sorts of justifications for their actions, and the same sorts of feelings.
Maybe some groups have been a bit more vicious or perverse or wantonly cruel in wartime situations, but America has Abu Graib, and this reflects precious little on "Americans". Soldiers, in war, often behave quite badly, what with the daily job of killing. If your daily job involves embracing insanity (killing for some distance justification of the primacy of one economic system or another that will only ultimately strive to make the wealthy more wealthy and everyone else subservient wretches), acts of criminal, psychotic insanity require a shorter bridge to cross.
It was humans did it. Sometimes we did it to them, and they did it to us. The real enemy is not them, but the actions themselves whoever perpetrates them. And behind and underlying the actions is, among other things, the misconception that other people in other lands or observing other cultures are somehow essentially different, and therefore easier to abstract as non-human, mere numbers on a sheet calculating casualties.
Also, I gather, some people think those other people are capable of much worse atrocities and will stoop lower. I dunno. Some might think Hiroshima wasn't all that bad because, well, it wasn't up close and personal and it was just opening an airplane hatch and dropping some brilliant cargo. Some see what the "terrorists" do as the most heinous, lament 3,000 dead and don't care about 100,000 dead. If someone blows themselves up it's an abomination, but if a gun ship mows down civilians it's a civilized game of chess. The greed that brought about the economic crisis, and sometimes sanctions on countries that prevent them getting needed supplies to purify water (resulting in tens of thousands of innocent children dying) are as cynical and brutal in their effects, despite being caused by the smiling calculations or people sitting behind desks, wearing ties sipping coffee as are acts of physical violence done in person on the spot.
Just my opinion on that.