Can't even get them to own up to 'Comfort Women'. Women from occupied territory transported against their will to service the troops.
Sounds like the Japanese educational system has the opposite problem of ours. They distort to promote a love for their country.
The Japanese are an important ally to us and I personally like the Japanese I’ve met. I trained with the Japanese self defense force numerous times and then partied with them. They can party BTW, however they need to face the reality of what their fathers/grandfather/great grandfathers did. It also might help them to understand there is no way in he#$%$% we are ever apologizing for dropping the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
But it's not like that at all.
Causes of the American Civil War?
Armenian Genocide?
Famine in the Ukraine?
Jewish Holocaust?
Japanese war atrocities?
Palestinians in Israel?
Plenty of people have radically different views on these things. And now we seem to be at a point where we need to ask if the American Government is what we think it is. Are we wacky conspiracy theorists who actually think that Obama and Hillary were serving the New World Order and completely subverting the rule of law and the US Constitution? Is that what the history books will show?
The answer is: it depends.
The BBC is trying to SHAME the Japanese for being Nationalistic and having some god damned cultural pride!
Must be because Japan isn’t taking any Islamic Rapeugees and most certainly doesn’t have open borders like the totally suicidal United Kaliphate.... umm “United Kingdom”...
It is partially our fault.
We needed a revived, but declawed, Japan as our Asian aircraft carrier, that didn’t need billions like we had to give to Europe. We looked past a hell of a lot to save us unwanted headaches with a nation of millions of people that could have turned the island into an even bigger mess if we put them through the contrition wringer and removed their highest national symbols.
Japan never really was conquered. They just smartly took the path of least resistance, but thankfully they didn’t (and couldn’t) hold onto the worst parts of their WW2 past, other than the mistaken assertion that it should not matter to their neighbors, or that they were “liberators”.
One of the few times it appears that the winners DIDN”T write the history...
I’m not as familiar with this issue as I’d like, but I have some sympathy for the Japanese of today. How many of those who committed atrocities in WWII are alive today? I don’t feel any responsibility for slavery because I wasn’t there. Should today’s Japanese feel responsibility for the actions of their grandparents?
I like the Japanese, but their attempts to rewrite, if not ignore, their history is in high contrast with how the Germans handle things.
The Japanese colonial experience is a weird one. I think part of the Japanese people honestly believed they were trying to do good in other parts of Asia by “modernizing” them. And yet they engaged in such barbaric acts of cruelty and oppression on countries like Korea and China and treated them as if they were subhuman.
But not all parts of the Japanese colonial empire reacted the same. In China and Korea, hatred for what the Japanese did to them continues to this day (although it is starting to fade even in Korea as younger generations of Koreans and Japanese interact with each other and find they have more in common than differences). But in Taiwan there is still an admiration for what Japan did, such things as building railways and schools and better infrastructure. And you find a lot of the Japanese culture still being perpetuated in Taiwan by the Taiwanese, perhaps partly as a reaction that they were not all that happy when they got invaded by 2 million Nationalist Chinese refugees in 1949.
We have exactly the same problem in this nation when it comes to understanding what happened in the Civil War. What we are taught as history is mostly propaganda aimed at protecting those who acquired and kept power as a result of the Civil war.
There seems to be some people here who think that it’s OK for the Japanese ignore some horrible parts of their history. I wonder if a relative of someone that Japanese officers ate would agree with that. I know that I want Japanese children to know that my uncle died of a bayonet wound to the throat. I want Japanese children to know why we incinerated most of their cities.
I don’t care about their patriotism. I don’t care about their feelings. I don’t think they have a right to be proud.
To make things even more controversial, the hero of Nanking was a Nazi. He saved thousands of Chinese lives.
I just finished a book on the history of Japan. Very complex and hard for me to understand.
I will say they are among the smartest people in the world. They went from what is almost a medieval culture to a world power in less than 50 years.
Their behavior in WWII can only be described as barbaric if not even worse.
They also pretty much consider their treatment of the Ainu as a taboo subject.
Later
My frat mate from university teaches English there. The article is completely true. Even the principal told him not to talk about the war to students in his gakuen’ or high school.
Can't even get them to own up to 'Comfort Women'. Women from occupied territory transported against their will to service the troops.
During the ‘50s, some newspaper sent a couple of reporters around the world, asking people what they thought about the U.S. dropping the atom bombs on Japan. I was in my 20s then, but even then, it looked like a “Lay the Guilt on America” tour.
Usually it was mixed reviews, but when they got to the areas Japan occupied, the general response was “Why did you drop only two?”