Mom told me that back in her day, Japanese history books started with Hiroshima.
Years ago, wife and I toured the Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor.
On the Navy launch taking us out to the shrine were a dozen or more Japanese kids in their teens.
I asked one why they were on the tour. A young woman responded saying “We wanted to see what our fathers and grandfathers had done. The war is not taught much in Japan...”
The US has an opposite approach in teaching history.
They never teach anything favorable about the US.
That is unacceptable. The population of Germany, per the census just released, is 24% "of migrant background", because the government of Germany is actively and intentionally working to dilute and destroy German culture and German enthicity. The Germans have paid millions upon millions in reparations, scolded their military for using marching songs that are "too martial" and quiver in fear at the notion of someone loving their country "because nationalism."
Maybe the BBC should talk about Islam’s brutal history and what they leave out.
At least the Japanese don’t do it anymore.
Funny how these ‘historical’ articles, which are really common knowledge to anyone with a passing interest in the ww2 pacific theater, pop up when Japan is currently beefing up its military to counter the increasing threat of China. Perhaps a few articles on the seedier side of the chinese cultural revolution are in order.
Yeah, the Japanese were much like the Germans, in a way. They had an idealistic vision that they were “helping” by being imperialists, and almost all of them didn’t know about the atrocities the Japanese military were conducting overseas. When the Americans made the brilliant choice of forcing the emperor to surrender on radio, the veneer of all that idealism came crashing down.
The irony now is that both the Chinese and Koreans are flooding Japan with tourism. It’s quite annoying to see some of my old haunts in Kyoto now infested with Chinese tour groups that are not the most scrupulous of sorts.
Because Japan’s neighbors, for example, South korea’s lowlife politicians, need to use Japan-bashing as a distraction.
What was the sentence, Ouch?
We spent a couple months in China when my husband was on a job assignment. We stayed on the executive floor set up for long term ex-pats. They had a dining room where they served breakfast in the morning and they had a lounge on the floor that was used in the evening.
You could sense the attitude of the hotel guests , who were Japanese, against the Chinese staff. The animosity was palpable from the Japanese toward the Chinese hostesses that worked in the hotel’s common areas set up for foreign visitors.
The Steps:
1. Historical guilt orgy
2. Immigration
3. Cultural destruction
4. Destruction of the country
5. PERFECT, Eternal Global Bliss
I used to think that Asian mistrust of neighboring countries due to ancient and recent hatred a bad thing until I realized what power Asia would have if they were all on the same page. Just thinking about it scares me.
The Chinese, the Koreans, the Filipinos.... yeah, they’ve all got reasons to hold a grudge against the Japanese. Fairly recent reasons.
I worked for years at a Japanese company. I had many many Japanese co-workers. I remember one time when the subject of World War II came up. A Japanese man born about 1962 knew that World War II was the war when Japanese civilians were bombed by Americans. That was all that he knew about WW II. He was a university graduate and the head of the IT department.
Two years ago, I launched the History of Southeast Asia Podcast. The podcast has moved ahead chronologically from the stone age to the present, and for the past few months has covered World War II events. Now I am wondering how many Japanese are listening to it.
By and large, The Japanese people, after decades of indoctrination, are socialists trapped in the democratic governmental framework set up by the USA after the war. When the country began to thrive, economically, they had time for selective introspection but they had limited material to choose from, and limited desire to see the whole truth. Before the bubble burst in the 80s, they even regained much of their racial and national arrogance.
An interesting trichotomy emerged. The older folks who remembered the war and its aftermath, were mostly traditionalists in lifestyle but ambivalent (warm) towards the West and the USA, the middle-agers who, while modernists in lifestyle, harbored guilt and resentment that manifested as anger towards all things western and the USA in particular, and the young folk who wanted no part of the traditional Japanese lifestyles and embraced a love of all things foreign.
In truth, no one in these 3 groups ever received a proper government-supplied History education about the war and Japan’s role.
Hard to point any fingers when you take a look at the ignorance of the American kids when it comes to an understanding of our basic history.
it turned out only 19 of the book’s 357 pages dealt with events between 1931 and 1945.
Today’s school books here in the USA do not mention WW2 much or not at all except to vilify the USA.
The reason the countries around Japan hate them has to do with what happened before WWII. Start with Japan's involvement in Korea and the murder of Queen Min.
The Annexation of Okinawa.
Americans think that it started with Pearl Harbor. Or maybe with the invasion of Manchuria if they have really read some history.
It began 50 years before that.
When my kid was in the 4th grade back in the 90’s his school had a Japanese language program. The Japanese teacher was in her mid 20’s and told the class one day that it was bad for the US to have bombed Hiroshima.
My son chimed in “You shouldn’t have bombed us first”. Teacher dropped the discussion and switched topics.
Regarding neighbors.....
I lived in Manila, Makati actually, and my office was on the top floor of a 12 story building on Ayala Avenue.
On a floor below, the Japanes company Mitsubishi had an office. The boss was a well dressed man in a blue suit and a red tie. He was responsible for Mitsubishi Raparations on behalf of the Japanese government.
If he was waiting for the elevator, he rode alone. No one would ride with him. If he got on an eelvator, those already there would scrunch up against the wall to avoid being close.
It was 21 years since the war ended but it was fresh on the minds of the Filipinos.