Well, we don’t deny them. Note Wiki has a nice entry on both.
But no one is alive today that perpetrated those atrocities. And, I doubt if any victims still live, either. However there are plenty of both from the Japanese atrocities. So, there is no one to say “we’re sorry and here’s some reparations” to for the earlier ones, but the Japanese government can still at least try to make things right for many people. Denying the atrocities is spitting in the face of the living victims.
I do blame the majority of Americans, because they re-elected Bush. By doing so, they did show support for the secret prisons, and the torture, and the rapes, and the corruption, and all the other evils America has commited in Iraq and elsewhere. I consider them worse than the people who support the Japanese PM, because the Iraq war is happening right now, not decades ago.
You can hardly compare the US’s future treatment of the Bush administration with the Japanese traetment of their behaviour in WWII. Come back in 50 years time and tell me if school textbooks uniformly fail to mention any of GWB’s failings and pretend that he didn’t invade anywhere.
Japan has from time to time apologized for all of their war crimes. The problem is that noone believes them because they continue to treat their war criminals like war heroes and deny war crimes on a somewhat regular basis.
I didn’t vote for him, fuckhead.
Sure, but how much of the country can say that? Over 99% of voters in Japan can say they didn’t vote for Abe.
I am not familiar with the political system of Japan, but what’s stopping the Emperor from letting it be known he personally is against the PM’s views?
Slight aside here, but I have read several articles in the past few weeks about Japanese war crimes, and though on a smaller scale, some of the medical experimentation seems more horrendous that what was done in the German Nazi camps.
Here’s a Daily Mail article from 2 March 2007, listing such fun pastimes as dissection of live prisoners without anesthaetic, testing of biological warfare and chemical weapons on live prisoners, amputating limbs and reattaching them to the “wrong” side of the body, etc.
This portion of the article was very disheartening to read:
Shouldn’t the USA government apologize for letting the heads of UNIT 731 go free ?
Shouldn’t assisting persons guilty of war crimes escape justice be a war crime?
CMC fnord!
Sorry about the ‘hijack’. This should be in a separate thread.
I don’t think there is a “monarch” in the world as powerless as the post-war Japanese Emperor. If I understand correctly, any expressions of the Emperor and his family, that are to go out to the public, are tightly regulated and vetted by the Imperial Household Agency; public “personal” expressions are not part of the job, except for the most innocuous sort. He would almost have to wait to be in the middle of reading a speech for some ceremony where independent media were running the cameras and recorders, to go off his notes and say that. And that could cause quite some froofraw… why, it would mean the Emperor himself is exemplifying defiance of “the way things are done”, and we can’t have that, can we :dubious: ? And meanwhile, some of the major supporters of giving the Emperor back some smidgen of authority ARE the right-wing nationalist wacks so he’d end up ticking off all sides.
Its not just the Prime Minister, I think about a quarter of their congress have signed onto this position.
What I’m getting at here is this: “the majority” is not necessarily “damn near everybody.” Here in the US, the number of people who voted for Bush is very slightly more than the number who voted for someone else (mostly Kerry in '04 and Gore in '00). I don’t know how many people in Japan agree with Abe, but I bet it’s not damn near everybody there, either.
Diet or Parliament. Actually it’s “National Assembly” literally but for some reason the translation is almost always done as “Diet or Parliament.”
Sixty years ago Japan and Germany turned the world into hell. Germany admits this now, Japan struggles with the thought.
How will America deal with THEIR truth sixty years from now?
Will they still be saying they liberated Iraq? Or will they realise they made hell worse for everyone?
Oh puleeeesee dudes. Let us not conflate GWB’s steps over the line into warcrimes on the level of Tojo and Hitler. That’s just plain ridiclous. Besides it’s a hijack. If you want to postulate possible warcrimes for GWB, start another thread. Like there aren’t already a zillion of them.
In my experience from living in Japan, for those who are old enough to remember, many are deeply ashamed about what happened in the war. When I talked with older people about why younger Japanese aren’t taught what happened, they indicated that they don’t want to expose their young to those things they are most ashamed about. For those from non-face saving cultures, this kind of ‘don’t talk about it’ mentality is hard to understand.
There are ofcourse others who don’t believe it happened but they are products of their own culture’s propaganda - as we all are, whether you like to acknowledge it or not.
I agree with you sentiments, but I thought I should nitpick and say that you meant “repeatedly.” “Repetitively” just seems really inappropriate.
You yourself, of course, are exempted from that blame, I am sure.
It’s an ugly spectre, that’s for sure, but there’s not much that can be done about it.
The Japanese live in a culture that is alien to much of the Western way of thought. To attempt to push it into the same sorts of actions we would expect is like trying to put a round peg is a square hold… with a hammer. It can be done, but it’s not easy, and the results aren’t always what you would want.
Pushing them on this (or any issue, really) will only give those that would brush away this piece of their history more strength.
Note: I believe they were in the wrong, and their government knows they were in the wrong, but their society and culture cannot let them come right out, admit it, and make it all over with. Therefore, things will take more time than we are used to, and will be done a different way…