Posted on 02/18/2006 2:45:31 AM PST by Aussie Dasher
JAPAN'S ambassador to the Philippines today apologized to the nation for the destruction of Manila towards the closing stages of the World War II.
Ryuichiro Yamazaki spoke at a wreath-laying ceremony to mark the 61st anniversary of the Battle for Manila that left over 100,000 Filipinos dead and destroyed the city once known as the Pearl of the Orient.
"The terror that each Filipino man, woman and child must have experienced in Manila 61 years ago is beyond the imagination of any sane human being," he said at a memorial to the dead in the Intramuros part of the city.
"With this historical fact in mind, I would like to express my heartfelt apologies and deep sense of remorse over the tragic fate of Manila," the ambassador said in an emotional speech.
"About 100,000 Filipino civilians were killed, many of whom suffered atrocities by the Japanese military," he said.
The Battle for Manila began on February 3, 1945 and lasted 28 days
We could start a whole website about the young turks, et al. 8^)
--What, then, would be 1940's Germany's excuse?
It's not an excuse, just an observation no doubt influenced by the show I saw last night on Easter Island (LOL).
I just finished Victor Davis Hanson's "Between War and Peace" and it's more obvious to me than ever that learning about recent and ancient history gives us the keys to understanding current events as well as human nature. I highly recommend this author - although his stuff takes me much longer to read because he has a giant freaking brain and uses words in sentences that I have to read many times over to comprehend.
Well that just bull.
I am tired of apologies for stuff that happened generations ago.
I really don't want to hear what we did to the Indians. I don't want to hear us apologize for the napalming of Dresden and Tokyo or the nuking of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and I don't want current day Germans offering any apologies either. It is nuts to apologize for slavery. All these were different eras.
Did Bush REALLY apologize for Katrina? What is with all these apologies for stuff either you have nor responsibility for anyway of for stuff that happened generations ago?
My great-great-great-great-great-great-great....great-great-great-great....great-great-megagreat uncle's third cousin, Cave Man Charlie, clubbed a couple of bony, weak cave men over some hot cave babe.
I offer my apologies.
"No other city, including Warsaw, was as damaged in WWII."
I'm sure Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden, Schweinfurt, Ploesti, Monte Cassino, Stalingrad, Sebastopol, and Nanking might have just as much cause to say the same...
"From what I've read and heard, we (the US) desperately needed Japan as an ally against the giant Soviet Empire at the close of the war, so their behavior was largely swept under the rug."
That would apply to Germany if that were true. All of the long list of America's enemies are immune from critisism, from Indians to Japanese, except for one, Germans of the second world war.
But it points out one of th problems with the Islamics. Their countries are far more homogeneous today than they were in 1940. Nearly all the million Jews living in Islamic countries were driven out between 1947 and 1952. Much of the Christian population has left. Hindus, Sikhs and Buddhists have been sepearted or expelled in the Eastern Islamic countries. It's recipe for behaving the same way the Japs did.
One of my Filipino friends told me that as far as he knew, the Japanese have been paying reparations for decades, though I can not independently verify that.
I meant that Japan strikes me as a solid fortress, A united, racially pure, xenophobic country with a cruelty streak a mile wide. They don't play games with immigration or tolerance. I think beneath the surface of Japan beats the heart of a beast that makes Nazi Germany look like a weak imitation of Japanese racial superiority beliefs.
Damn good movie, and does not hesitate to show the cruelties inflicted on our POWS.
I really recommend it.
I'm still looking for that movie. Will keep trying!
I know you can purchase it on Amazon.
But you should be able to find it at most video stores, or WalMart.
Good Luck!
Your repsone assumes that Americans (at the time)actually gave a damn about what the Japanese did to Asians as opposed to what the Germans did to Europeans. Remember, the majority of the population of this country had (still has)Eurpoean roots (and in many cases, still had family, many of whom were lost, in the Old Country).
The "Help China" lobby in this country in the 1940's was almost universally retricted to Missionary and business entities, for example. You did not find the same kind of outrage over Japanese atrocities when the targets were Filipinos, Burmese or Indonesians. These people were, for all intents and purposes, invisible to the general American public.
Therefore, the atrocities committed by the Germans resonated so much more strongly on the American psyche than similar one committed by the Japanese on the Chiense, Filipinos or other Asians. Add to this fact that the Germans kept meticulous records (written and filmed) of their actrocities, and once these were released, the American public was presented with an even more powerful and justifiable reason for outrage.
Also, bear in mind that many of the Asian nations the Japanese brutalized were part of the old European empires, and that the rectification of such injustices was seen as a European perogative and not American.
In the case of the Philipines, the issue has more to do with the fact that the United States was well on the way to granting that country independance when the war started. The Philipines was not considered by the mass of American public opinion to be an "American problem". The only mitigating factor is the Bataan Death March and the American soldiers who lost their lives and were held in captivity as a result of the loss of the Philipines.
The course of the Pacific War had, by 1944, had shown that the Allied goal of "Unconditional" surrender would not work on the Japanese, and with reserves of manpower drying up and the American public sick after 5 years of war, some concessions to the Japanese were going to have to be made. It didn't hurt the cause that the American Caesar (MacArthur) was more or less implying the same thing.
The Indians could be forgiven their sins because they were, after all, fighting for their country, regardless of what side they happened to be on. The British government recognized such when it granted India independance. The same could not be said of the hoardes of non-German Europeans who fought on the German side. For many Europeans, the war was an ideological one (Hitler as bulwark against Soviet Communism), rather than a war of racial superiority (which it was for the Japanese).
I'm not really one to get involved in religious claims but a little bit of Christian humanity was exactly what I was thinking. If you'll excuse the psycho-babble, the culture of death that the Japanese had could not make a person truly happy in my opinion.
100,000 dead in 28 days for a single city! Yet the American left goes insane over 2,200 Americans dead over 3 years in 2 countries (Afghanistan, Iraq). It is sad that so many Americans have lost the sense of true sacrifice.
"If you'll excuse the psycho-babble, the culture of death that the Japanese had could not make a person truly happy in my opinion."
And yet, the entire 100 million-strong Japanese population was willing, with few exceptions, to lay down their life for their Emperor.
You are confusing religion with culture. The two do not exactly correlate. Christian humanity would have clashed,in a majority of cases, with the established notions of Japanese culture.
A Christian, for example, would not have simply given up after failure and committed suicide, a Japanese would. the reason being that Christianity is inherantly a forward-looking philosophy (The Christian is encouraged to leave his world a better place because the Savior will return, so we try harder after we fail), while in Japanese society, the Savior was already walking the Earth (the Emperor) and the sin of failure in his Service could not be forgiven.
Islam has the same problem. The greatest thing that could ever happen for a Muslim already has (Mohammed has ascended to Heaven, never to return). There is no impetus for self-improvement, nor any need to evolve past a certain point in cultural development.
The differance between Japan and Islam is that prior to the War, the Japanese were already on their way to becoming a democratic state based upon what the Japanese had identified as the most important Western notions of a propsperous, civil society. The War had only proved to teach the Japanese that they had not quite gotten it right. The end goal was the same: national greatness. Only the course they plotted towards that goal changed.
No, that's not the reason. There would have been Nuremberg equivalent trials in Japan as well, but for the rapid initiation of the Cold War after WWII ended. First came conflicts with the USSR, the China's fall in 1949, then Korea. It became neccessary to quickly build Japan back up industrially and politically to defend against the Communist wave sweeping that part of the world. The MacArthur papers from 1945-6 indicate that prior to those events, Japan was slated to be kept at a low-level agricultural level, and was not expected to rejoin the world's powers in the future. Clearly, events radically changed that future.
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