A Japanese war memorial? <sputter> ARE YOU FUCKING INSANE!

The BBQ Pit
41

[QUOTE=Sitnam]
And I wouldn’t have used it if it wasn’t appropriate.
[/quote]

It’s not appropriate now. It wasn’t appropriate when you used it. And it will remain inappropriate well into the future.

It shows I’m a blame sight more familiar with the calendar than you are. You’re condemning a group of people today based on something another group of people with the same nationality did in 1944.

Sorry, bub, You’re a racist. And the capstone in the proof you are racist is that your best ally in that seems to be Cryptoderk.

42

erie774, this Wiki link about the Yasukuni Shrine in Japan for their Imperial war dead offers a bit of a look at the various controversies that can happen within Japanese society as well as international reactions.

43

[QUOTE=OtakuLoki]
For an exercise - how aware are you, as an American, that the US invaded Canada several times, with the intent to conquer it?
[/QUOTE]
I was always under the impression any battles between the US & Canada had more to do with fighting the British Empire - not conquering its sovereign neighbor to the north.

44

[QUOTE=Monty]
Sorry, bub, You’re a racist. And the capstone in the proof you are racist is that your best ally in that seems to be Cryptoderk.
[/QUOTE]
You know, I’m sure you’re going to come in an apologize for calling him a racist since he came back in and apologized 10+ posts up, but how hard is it for people to read all of the posts before posting? I’ve been seeing this everywhere lately and it’s driving me nuts.

45

Yeah, I missed that post. Sitnam, I apologize to you. Helen’s Eidolon, thank you for bringing that to my attention.

46

[QUOTE=OtakuLoki]
<snip>They’re distressingly prevalent in the Diet and other levels of government. Not at all like the neo-Nazis in Germany, which I understand to be generally a youth movement, with little actual political power. Some of our posters from Japan would be better able to answer this than I can, so I’m just going to hit high points. Sunspace and others will likely be here with better cites soon enough.

The Japanese education system is far, far more centralized than most Americans can imagine. My understanding is that the Ministry of Education actually sets up national curricula, with recommended lesson plans - not simply giving individual school districts the choice between various approved texts. And the Nationalists tend to be over-represented in the committees that sit on texts, because they care so much about Japan’s historical image.

For an exercise - how aware are you, as an American, that the US invaded Canada several times, with the intent to conquer it? It’s not something most Americans think about, really. And it’s not often mentioned in US histories. Not even through any deliberate attempt to obfuscate history - just because in the long run, for US history, it’s not been that important. The invasions never really went very far, and today Canada is a close and trusted neighbor.

I’m guessing that you’ve never really thought about how much fighting there had been along the US-Canada border. And you’re a well-educated and intelligent person. But that’s an example of how thoroughly an event, or series of events, can be forgotten if it’s not mentioned in general histories.

When you consider Japan, you have other factors - the Nationalists I’ve mentioned do have real political power. They often try to ostracize any educators who mention Nanking, and there aren’t many who even try. So, not only is the Japanese War Crimes record uncomfortable to consider, it’s subject to people actviely trying to suppress it. And so, most people in Japan, don’t think about it. And often have no real idea of how prevalent the crimes were.
[/QUOTE]
You see, this is what blows my mind. I have heard about the invasions before and read about the Cold War plans to take over Canada. All it takes is for one little nugget of info to pass by me and I’ll start digging for more data. Surely in the past 60 years this info has gotten out to the citizens! When they hear about it do they collectively stick their fingers in their ears, close their eyes and say, “La, la, la, la. I’m not listening to you!”

When the word about Abu Graib leaked out it spread like wildfire. Even when the information about radiological tests on the mentally handicapped got out or the syphilis tests on black men got out it quickly got disseminated to the average citizen and could not be ignored by the US government. I don’t understand how the Japanese citizens can not be aware of their past. Is the time from the 1930’s to 1945 just a blank?

47

[QUOTE=OtakuLoki]
Without trying to offer support for the Japanese military’s policies towards the various populations that they subjugated, nor their treatment of POWs, what the fuck makes you think that nuking more cities in Japan would have made the changes that you want to see in the Japanese government?

I’m digusted with your comment for a number of reasons.

First and foremost I’m sick of the meme that most Westerners have that a nuke is somehow inherently worse than any other possible means of waging war. The Tokyo firebombing raid, I believe shows just how horrid, “convential” munitions can get. It’s a fucking weapon, and it’s not inherently worse than any other munition. Get a bloody clue.

Secondly, Japanese society was riven down to bedrock by August 1945. People were starving in job lots while the military was propagandizing to prepare the population to fight to the last man a la Saipan. Even after hostilities ceased there were still huge problems getting food to people throughout the islands. To believe that, in those circumstances, more cities being bombed into craters would have appreciably changed the current Japanese government is engaging in wishful thinking on the order of holding a banana in one’s ear to keep the elephants away.

Third, if you really want to put blame for Post-War Japanese government and society where it belongs, don’t forget that the US, and MacArthur especially, acquiesced to a white-wash job allowing Hirohito and many other civilian leaders to remain in power, in a successful effort to allow Japan to be rebuilt as a industrial nation without allowing the Reds entry into the situation.

I’m not saying that they were wrong in that decision - I don’t know. It is a triumph of expediency, but there are times I suspect that expediency is more moral than taking a pointless moral stand that leads to greater chaos down the road. But it is vitally important to remember that much of the architecture of the current Japanese government (Not society, just the forms of the government, rather than the people in it.) comes directly from MacArthur.

Finally, there’s something fucking beautiful about someone who’s so outraged by racist intolerance that he’s willing to advocate nuking job lots of an ethnic group to learn them.
[/QUOTE]

This whole post conveys several important, overlooked historical elements and thorny ethical issues in a thought-provoking way. Just wanted to say, “well said.”

Sailboat

48

[QUOTE=erie774]
I don’t understand how the Japanese citizens can not be aware of their past. Is the time from the 1930’s to 1945 just a blank?
[/QUOTE]

I’ve posted before about my encounter in the 1980s with a friend who was a German exchange student. He was from Hamburg and totally had no concept at all about the bombing – the entire thing was a new idea to him, even though it completely reshaped the city he’d lived in all his life and was only 40 years or so in the past. I think there must be some truth to the idea that all of us have cultural blinders on. I wonder what mine are.

Sailboat

49

[QUOTE=OtakuLoki]
erie774, AIUI there have been some apologies. The most recent I think was the recent Prime Minister saying something conciliatory about the comfort women.

[/QUOTE]

Yeah, that was beautiful in its sensistivity. “I’m sorry you thought you were forced into prostitution by us.” Typical arrogant whitewashing Japanese bullshit.

50

[QUOTE=JohnBckWLD]
I was always under the impression any battles between the US & Canada had more to do with fighting the British Empire - not conquering its sovereign neighbor to the north.
[/QUOTE]

I agree that the attempts to conquer Canada took place as part of a greater war with the British Empire, and were quite justifible on the basis of removing a staging point from the enemy. (After all, the troops that burned Washington came from there, first, before moving south to attempt New Orleans.) Having said that, however, it’s important to remember that the doctorine of Manifest Destiny was spoken at many times to include the whole of North America, not simply those parts not claimed by other European nations.

What I’m trying to say is that there was a popular desire to unite all of Great Britain’s North American empire into a single polity - ours.

Johnny Hildo, I didn’t mean to imply I thought that it was much of an apology - just an example of some that have been made. There’s a difference between a sincere and worthwhile apology and a something smarmy. The comfort women statement doesn’t come close to making it out of smarmy. But it is better than the usual practice from Japan of pretending that things like that didn’t happen at all. Is it good enough? No. Is it better than what had been said before? I think it is, all the same.

And I’d like to point out, my understanding is that it did cost the PM political points at home, anyways. So, while it wasn’t what I think needs to be said - it was something he spent political capital to say. Which is a rare enough event for any nation’s politicians.

Sailboat, thank you.

51

[QUOTE=erie774]
I don’t understand how the Japanese citizens can not be aware of their past. Is the time from the 1930’s to 1945 just a blank?
[/QUOTE]
And where do you get the impression that Japanese citizens have no historical memory?

Sit down some time and watch *Gokiburi-tachi no tasogare (“Twilight of the Cockroaches.*”)

It’s an allegory of the period, with the Axis powers represented by animated cockroaches and Allies represented by live action humans.

Yes, it’s poignant and tragic when the “Japanese” colony is hit hard by all the technological horror that the humans can muster, but they’re fucking cockroaches that were boldly asserting their territoriality over the apartment.

I don’t think anyone can watch a pop-culture artifact like that and continue to argue that the Japanese have no historical consciousness of the period – particularly when contrasted with the generalized North American amnesia about the roots of the eugenics movement for which Hitler’s Germany has the honour of receiving all the credit. I am a young man, and yet one of the eugenics programs which the Nazis pointed to as an exemplar of forward-thinking, and which the Third Reich consciously emulated was still on the books in Canada in my lifetime.

It seems atrocities want to be forgotten, or minimized, or rationalized.

If we want to avoid them in the future, we would all do better to look to our own instead of pointing fingers and spitting blood.

52

[QUOTE=OtakuLoki]
For an exercise - how aware are you, as an American, that the US invaded Canada several times, with the intent to conquer it? It’s not something most Americans think about, really. And it’s not often mentioned in US histories. Not even through any deliberate attempt to obfuscate history - just because in the long run, for US history, it’s not been that important. The invasions never really went very far, and today Canada is a close and trusted neighbor.

I’m guessing that you’ve never really thought about how much fighting there had been along the US-Canada border. And you’re a well-educated and intelligent person. But that’s an example of how thoroughly an event, or series of events, can be forgotten if it’s not mentioned in general histories.
[/QUOTE]
The first, in 1775 (before we had declared independence) involved an invasion force of 1700 militiamen. The second that year involved 1100 men. The survivors were chased out of Canada. The “invasions” during url=“”]the War of 1812 were larger and more successful but not permanent, either. The British also invaded the US during both wars. The same cannot be said for China or Korea, who did not invade Japan durin WWII.

Oh, then in 1866 and 1867, the Fenians, and Irish Independence group based in the US, sent a few thousand guys into Canada at one time or another. They were laughably unsuccessful, even by the pathetic standards set earlier in the century.

So, I’m sorry, but to compare these raids, and their non-mention in elementary school texts, with what Japan did before and during WWII, and which it ignores in its texts, is a false equivalence.

53

Larry Mudd, good point, but there’s only so much that the Japanese seem to think about, with regards to WWII.

You’ll see things like Twilight of the Cockroaches, or Barefoot Gen. Or Grave of the Fireflies, one of the most depressing and well made anti-war screeds I can imagine.

But none of those works acknowledge that the same horrors that they decry when they happen to Japanese persons were being performed on Chinese, Koreans, Phillipinos, or Europeans by the Japanese military while they had been winning the war. I’ll even go so far as to emphatically point out that the cruelties that the Japanese performed were often deliberate, rather than incidental. I don’t pretend it makes a difference to a child why he or she is being blown up or burned. But, again, I think there’s a moral difference between choosing to inflict such horrors as a deliberate goal, vice as something that comes as an inescapable consequence of a more understandable military plan.

54

[QUOTE=dropzone]
So, I’m sorry, but to compare these raids, and their non-mention in elementary school texts, with what Japan did before and during WWII, and which it ignores in its texts, is a false equivalence.
[/QUOTE]

dropzone, I didn’t mean to imply that the effects of the raids were equivalent to the effects of what Japan did during WWII.

All that I’d meant to bring up with the example of the Canadian invasions was to show erie774 how easy it can be for a policy or series of campaigns can be removed from a national consciousness often simply by focusing on other things during elementary schooling. I just was trying to mention something that I felt was a rather large part of US policy for a time, that is often unknown to most people whom I’ve talked to. And something that believe is unknown precisely because I think that it’s not taught in the schools.

IOW - an attempt to demonstrate how education can affect what does and does not remain in a national consciousness.

As I said in my original post on the topic - in the long run it’s not an important part of US history - it never really came to much, for us. (Canadians have a rather different view of the matter, of course.) That can’t be said for the Japanese and thier World War II record, I don’t think.

(FWIW, I tend to view the whole attempts to build a Japanese east Asian empire of the 30’s and 40’s as part and parcel of WWII - a major part of the casus belli with the Allies was that the US was threatening to embargo the oil that the Japanese needed to continue their efforts. So I find it simpler to refer to the whole era as part of Japan’s WWII record. A verbal short-hand that I hope you won’t object to.)

55

[QUOTE=OtakuLoki]
dropzone, I didn’t mean to imply that the effects of the raids were equivalent to the effects of what Japan did during WWII.
[/quote]
I’m relieved!

Ignore them. All they do is whine. :wink:

56

[QUOTE=OtakuLoki]
But none of those works acknowledge that the same horrors that they decry when they happen to Japanese persons were being performed on Chinese, Koreans, Phillipinos, or Europeans by the Japanese military while they had been winning the war.
[/quote]
What stands out to me about Twilight of the Cockroaches is that the figures that stand in for the Japanese are literally subhuman, and their fate is depicted as the natural consequence of unforgivable hubris. As for actually looking straight at the atrocities commited by one’s own nation, I think there are very few nationalities that are keen to pick very much at a scabby superego.

An old girlfriend of mine (with dual citizenship) once kept a high-school history textbook from her schooling in California. One particular phrase from it is stuck in my memory forever, verbatim: “In 1812, Canada was invited to join the union, and declined.” Full stop. New paragraph.

Amazing, the differences in the history you learn, such a short distance away.

57

It might be constructive to have some facts about what the Japanese people do or do not believe. The following three links are for the English sites of major Japanese newspapers, essentially representing what the Japanese-language version reports (some of the Japanese-literate Dopers can confirm that easily enough). Try searching these sites for relevant articles (such as “Nanjing” – especially The Japan Times, which seems to have the deepest archive), and you’ll see how it represented to the Japanese.

http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/

Wikipeia also has a list of war apologies issued by the Japanese government..

58

[QUOTE=erie774]
Are the Right-Wing Japanese Nationalists you mentioned similar to the neo-Nazis in Germany?
[/QUOTE]

It is just flat out illegal to be a Nazi of any type or a holocaust denier in Germany, in contrast the Japanese still have their king…and soon another army.

[QUOTE=erie774]
I agree that the histories need to be corrected to admit to what happened. How hard would it be to get honest books out to the general populace? Is the media so repressed that potentially “offensive” facts could be kept away from the citizens?
[/QUOTE]

I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say they just don’t WANT to accept it as a culture. In contrast ,American schools may quickly go through atrocities towards Native Americans, but you won’t find any ‘reasonably’ intelligent American that will deny it happened. That’s whats wrong here. And Shinto Abe is the current manifestation of that.

59

[QUOTE=Monty]
It’s not appropriate now. It wasn’t appropriate when you used it. And it will remain inappropriate well into the future.
[/QUOTE]

Two inappropriates don’t make an appropriate so I already retracted and apologized for my insensitive comment so find another horse for your club.

[QUOTE=Monty]
It shows I’m a blame sight more familiar with the calendar than you are. You’re condemning a group of people today based on something another group of people with the same nationality did in 1944.
[/QUOTE]

I said Japan not the Japanese. I’m writing about how the wrongs of a government were perpetrated in part by a culture that treats ASIANS and POWS as inferior, THAT is racism. Need to check your high school history book punk.

[QUOTE=Monty]
Sorry, bub, You’re a racist. And the capstone in the proof you are racist is that your best ally in that seems to be Cryptoderk.
[/QUOTE]

That would be biting if it were true. Talking about the wrongs of an organization doesn’t mean I feel superior to another race.

60

Do you really think that Americans are any less cruel when given half a chance? I think that the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki would stare at your words in disbelief at your irony – as would many nations around the world who look upon our government’s current disregard for human rights with despair. Abu Grab anyone? Gitmo? Formerly secret detention centers? Denial of “Prisoner of War” status in accord to the Geneva Conventions? Sending prisoners to other countries for interrogation?

Our behavior is condemned by the children and grandchildren of the Nazis that we condemned. Some children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors in Israel would condemn Palestinians. Some Muslims think that Westerners don’t deserve to live on the face of the earth and seek to destroy us.

And you’re going to single out the Japanese?

See Clint Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima. It’s a good film and it’s based on a true story.