I think other people have brought this up, but it’s important to remember that the Japanese culture is a really important factor here: Japan’s failure to openly apologize seems to be what a lot of people are keying in on. However, and please correct me if I’m being inaccurate here, but the polite Japanese approach to apologizing can usually be best summarized by “If everyone pretends it never happened, we can avoid embarrassing anyone”. As such, I don’t think the lack of acknowledgements constitute quite the statement that europeans and americans tend to read into it.
And for the record, practically every Japanese person I’ve been good friends with has told me that they consider the country’s WWII-era conduct to be reprehensible; one of the big reasons that flying the old flag (the one with sixteen rays extending from the sun) is considered to be in poor taste is because it’s reminiscent of the war. (I’ve never inquired regarding people’s feelings about the modern navy using it.)
Sorry if my massive noobishness shows through here.
My grandfather on my maternal side was a PoW captured by the Japanese after the capture of Singapore*, sent to Changi Prison then was forced to work on the Thai-Burma Railway.
From what my mum told me of him (he died of emphysems and complications from his incarceration in 1981, so I have distant childhood memories of him) he survived mainly becuase of being asked to volunteer as an orderly for ‘Weary’ Dunlop.
What’s interestinh was his reaction that he just hated the Japanese and hated them with a passion, which got passed down to my mum and I still have sometimes an instinctive initial dislike of Japanese - which I recognise as an effect of the profound trauma he experienced and inflicted on others.
Given some of his reactions to certain things such as the fact that when the movie The Bridge Over The River Kwai was released, he would wake up screaming and often would tell my mum when growing up that his best friends had died ‘for the food you’re not eating’.
It’s especially hard seeing the fact that there are elements of control in Japanese society that, to my admitted prejudices, overdramatise the effects of the nuclear bombs, yet ignore the damage caused by the death camps and many hundreds of thousands of local Thai and Burmese forced to work who died at a much higher rate than the bombs ever killed.
What’s interesting is a story related by someone who worked at a reception desk where many different salespeople from different Asian countries came in - she was told never to confuse the Koreans with the Japanese, something like that the Japanese view the Koreqans as sub-human and the Koreans hate the Japanese for their occupation etc…
*He was actually returning from Crete and I believe was diverted there by the British… Funny thing is, he hated the British army officers for surrendering Singapore so early…
Zoe, I’m not going to disagree about your other examples in your post, but in all honesty and seriousness, why do you believe that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were measurably more cruel than any other part of the strategic bombing campaign that was taking place over Japan during WWII? At least include the victims of the Tokyo firebombing if you want to emphasize local highs in aereal devasatation.
For that matter I’ve already made clear my opinion about the moral differences between horrible things happening as inseperable consequences of a military strategy, and horrible things happening as a deliberate policy to make horrible things happen.
It’s certainly centralized but not nearly as centralized as that. While schools have to used Ministry-approved textbooks, there is some diversity in local text selection. When I was at the Prefectural Board of Education, I did some textbook evaluations. I was also rotated to several different schools in the prefecture and saw a variety of texts being used.
There is enough competition in the market at the local level that textbook publishers send their sales reps to local schools to push their wares to department heads and indvidual teachers.
A friend of mine was in Changi. He didn’t speak about it to me, but I heard about it via his wife and my mother. They never bought anything Japanese unless there was no alternative. He’s still alive, so I won’t give his name.
As for the Far East, I’ve often been told that shops for the longest time had three prices: local, tourist, and Japanese.
James Clavel (author of the popular Shogun book made into a mini-series) was at Changi. His experience ended up in the fictional account King Rat. It’s a good read.
No, they commited the atrocity, they need to appeal to us. I’m quite aware of their personal feelings of honor, admitting you did something horrible is “embarrassing”, but that is irrelevant.
‘They’ would constitute a Japanese government public and private rectification of said offense, consisting especially of a complete education of their next generation.
‘Us’ would be the nations at the receiving of said offense, constituting many Western Nations and especially China and Korea.
Is this unreasonable? Before I left for Asia four months ago the Chinese rioted over Abe going to a controversial war shrine and recent changes in Japanese curriculum particularly trivializing ‘The Rape of Nanking’…so they’re still sore about it and who can blame them?
What possible motivation could they have to dig up a period of recent history that is routinely viewed as painful and embarrassing to most citizens, when an acceptably comfortable equilibrium has already been reached? If it’s about making you personally feel better, I can assure you that most Japanese don’t care; the country as a whole has a long laundry list of losses, hardships and atrocities which affected them directly that I’m sure they’d love to hear apologies for before they go out of their way to kowtow to your sense of morality.
It was a war, and I can assure you that every force involved suffered in some capacity, and that every force involved contributed to someone else’s suffering in some capacity. Forgiveness is one thing, if you feel like it, but I personally find the manner and tone in which you discuss to be highly inappropriate; it seems to me as if your only reason for opening this thread was to use some kind of fucked up moral high ground to justify this little tirade. You may have a personal problem with the Japanese, but ignorant saber-rattling directed at events which ended over sixty years ago is no way to work through them.
I recall watching a news report of a big public ceremony that took place in London in which some Japanese dignitaries tried to apologize for how the Japanese treated the British POWs. This old vet charged into the solemn proceedings screaming at the top of his lungs something to the effect that no way will he ever accept an apology and the assembled dignitaries can all go straight to hell. He must have been in his late 70s/early 80s, and he was raging like it happened yesterday.
The Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs has a website that gives details of the contentious history books. Excerpts are provided in Chinese, Korean and English, focusing on the Meiji Period through to modern times.