Do Germany and Japan have WWII memorials and/or celebrate “memorial” days?
Japan has the Yasukuni Shrine, which is a Shinto shrine for those Japanese who lost their lives in wars from the Mejii restoration onwards. It’s gotten some criticism, because among the people memorialized are some who were convicted of war crimes.
I’ve been to ground zero in Hiroshima. There’s a memorial nearby that gets new cards/flowers, etc. every day. There’s also Peace Prayer Park that has a large bell you can ring for peace.
I’ve also been to Germany but saw no mention of anything related to WWII. I didn’t look very extensively for it though, and I didn’t want to bring the subject up to any locals.
I’ve seen a memorial dedicated to local victims of the holocaust in Germany. IIRC, it was in either Cochem or Koblenz.
In Germany we don’t celebrate a Memorial day or anything similar.
There is no central and universally recognized WWII memorial (I don’t say there is no thing with that name, but I can’t think of one.) There are however some local memorials for the fallen soldiers from that village or quarter. They consist of plates listing the names of the fallen, usually (I think) both for WWI and WWII.
There are memorials for certain aspects of the war and the Third Reich like the concentration camps, the Memorial of the Murdered Jews of Europe, a memorial for displaced persons and others. In addition to that there are numerous memorial for earlier war created before 1945, some of them kind of “generic” so that they include the fallen of WWII (e.g. a Navy memorial)
In general the whole veteran business is viewed with a lot of suspicion and doesn’t play a big role in everyday life.
(emphasis mine)
That’s putting it mildly. It’s been a major controvarsy, especially with the current Prime Minister who keeps going there despite official objections from China, Korea, etc. Even a regional court (not Tokyo) ruling that says his visits are unconstitutional doesn’t seem to stop him. This Wikipedia article has some more info.
As for “memorial” days, 8/15 is the anniversary of the end of war and gets a lot of attention, but it’s not a national holiday. There are no war-related national holidays.
There are, or were, WWI and WWII memorials all over Germany. Almost every little town has some sort of monument for the war dead, sometimes with names and photos. In downtown Kaiserslautern there is a very impressive monolithic WWI memorial for the local 23d Inf Reg’t, a red sandstone sculpture of eight helmeted soldiers carrying a ninth on a shoulder high stretcher. In the old days there were flowers left at the base on some days. What days, I do not know. It may have been Corpus Christi, or the anniversary of some terrible battle.
There are Japanese war memorials on various Pacific Islands, e.g., Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima, memorializing those who died in those battles in particular.
Ahhh, I can’t believe I forgot about this.
There is a monument on top of a cliff in Okinawa where some obscene amount of Okinawans jumped off after the Japanese government told them the US Marines were coming to eat their babies.
The Jewish Museum in Berlin (two separate links) is typical, in its recognition of the inseparability of the Holocaust and WW2.
One of the most famous WWII memorials in Japan is “Himeyuri no To,” a memorial to a group of high school girls who were impressed into serving as nurses for the Japanese army during the battle of Okinawa. Something like 200 of them died - most of them having committed suicide (they were told not to surrender).
There is also a monument to Koreans killed in WWII on Okinawa as well.
A Japanese friend visited a “Peace Museum” at a training site for kamikaze pilots near Kagoshima (on Kyushu).
There are quite a few WWII museums and memorials, and noth Hiroshima and Nagasaki hold memorials services on their respective days, but there isn’t a national holiday or anything.
Are you sure that isn’t the memorial at Banzai cliffs in Saipan (June 1944)? Was there another incident of mass suicide by jumping off cliffs in Okinawa?
Yup. Here’s a site displaying the memorials at the top of the “suicide cliffs”, as they are called.
I used to live on Okinawa. The place is called Mabuni-ga-oka in Japanese, but called “Suicide Cliff” by the local military personnel.
I’m sure. I’ve been to the cliffs in Okinawa. Never been to Saipan.
From http://www.yasukuni.or.jp/english/:
It is safe to say that the Japaneses never learned the lessons of WWII and that they will repeat history as soon as the opportunity is given to them…
That explains the enthusiasm with which the deployment of SDF troops to Iraq was embraced.
What is the strategic advantage of going to Iraq for the Japaneses, tell me? And they are there, are they not?
To strengthen the US-Japan security alliance.
To secure US cooperation should North Korea attack.
To avoid the kind of international criticism Japan received after offering only money, not troops, to aid the U.S. in the Gulf War.
Further, the vast majority of the SDF troops are engineers. They are there for humanitarian reasons - purifying water, rebuilding roads and schools, and the like. They are armed with pistols, but may only fire in self-defense. This is hardly warlike behavior.
If Japan will repeat history as soon as the opportunity arises, tell me, then, why they haven’t attacked North Korea after Kim admitted his government abducted Japanese citizens? Also, after Koizumi’s failed mission to return with all eight family members of repatriated Japanese, and his failure to secure cooperation in the investigation into 10 more missing Japanese and gain any more information on North Korea’s suspected nuclear weapons program, he promised more aid to North Korea, rather than storming its shores.
The Japanese government can certainly be criticized over its lack of honesty about its war record, but your comments about the inevitability of Japan repeating history can be safely dismissed as alarmist. Further, the vast majority of Japanese people are not in agreement with whatever right wing group created the website you linked to.
True, they are not in agreement but they are not very strongly in disagreement either! Apart from a few pacifists here and there, most just don’t care…
Japaneses are individually friendly and they have a nice country…But they are ignorant of their history and easily manipulated by their governement because of their attitudes; in or out of the group, “the nail that sticks out invites the hammer”, “there is nothing that can be done about it” and general prejudice towards Chineses, Koreans, etc.
Should a catastrophic event occurs, such as the collapse of their banking system or a terrorist attack on their soil by East-Asians terrorists it would change everything… The fascists that are already at all level of the government would come back in control unopposed and it would be WWII all over again - ready to re-establish dominion over their neighbors. And they’d probably get to keep it for a while this time because the Americans are on their side! Just look at how easy it is to whip the Americans in a frenzy about the Chineses…
It hasn’t happened yet because they are still comfortable and rich, but it won’t last forever. You can be sure that the events such as the North Korean’s kidnapping of Japaneses citizens will be internalized and used when the time comes… That is why those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.