>>26933007>The vast majority of americans were very against the warTrue in general. However, public opinion is never fully coherent, and people were sympathetic to China. Most people didn't want to do anything about it, not go to war, but they felt bad, hence the aid to China that
>>26932380 described. Not unlike Ukraine of the present: nobody wants to go to war for them, but a lot of people feel bad about it, so the public is generally supportive of "sending aid" in an abstract sense. You know, just aid to help them with a war, because that's not actually war, right?
Additionally, the particular journalism of that era in the US was feeding people war porn about Japan's conquest of China. I am not pointing to anything as false (or as true), but more to the style: the reporting used extremely dramatized writing, because that kept people buying papers. It laid the groundwork for seeing the Japanese as something beyond aggressors, as irrationally brutal, so that when Pearl Harbor came the public already had a background attitude of "Well we had heard they were madmen!"
