Let's Happy-Education! No more boring war atrocities

[Taro Toporific]

Education minister praises textbooks that shy away from Japan's wartime atrocities
AP News, Nov 28
Japan's education minister has praised recent history textbooks that reduce references to the country's past atrocities, including the military's use of sex slaves, news reports said Sunday...Education Minister Nariaki Nakayama said.... Japan's education system must rid itself of "self-condemning" perceptions that everything the country did was bad....Recent school texts that only fleetingly mention Japan's past transgressions were better...

[Taro Toporific]

[puargs]

Personally, I'm actually surprised any of those things got in the books in the first place. Growing up in the states, I never had anything in my history books about Jefferson's sex addiction and illegitimate children, or KKK "intimidation" techniques, or faceless killings and rape comitted in the Vietnam war.

MOST countries don't want to admit their darkest hours, it's no surprise to me that Japan doesn't either.

[AssKissinger]

Personally, I'm actually surprised any of those things got in the books in the first place. Growing up in the states, I never had anything in my history books about Jefferson's sex addiction and illegitimate children, or KKK "intimidation" techniques, or faceless killings and rape comitted in the Vietnam war.

MOST countries don't want to admit their darkest hours, it's no surprise to me that Japan doesn't either.

I agree with that. The media still glosses over what happened in Laos and Cambodia as well. I remember a full page article on the subject of 'Why is Laos so poor?' in a major American daily. A huge essay. And there wasn't a single mention of the fact that we bombed their asses into smithereens for for no damn reason.

Japan's history textbooks are a sensitive issue for Asian countries that suffered Tokyo's aggression. The approval of a middle-school textbook in 2001 written by a group of nationalist scholars damaged the country's relations with South Korea and China, which said it whitewashed Japan's wartime past.

I'd like to see some of the key passages translated into English. Otherwise I can't form an opinion. If anybody can link to this or take the time to do it that would be really cool.

[vir-jin]

Japan's education system must rid itself of "self-condemning" perceptions that everything the country did was bad....Recent school texts that only fleetingly mention Japan's past transgressions were better...


we hope they are. This year a student of architecture/ undergraduate course passed the entrance exam for the master course and two weeks later he fail the graduation exams.

[Taro Toporific]

[Captain Japan]

[dimwit]

It is sad for me as a person who has choosen to live here to see people so horribly willing to delude themselves. No young people I know believe much of anything their history books tell them but they also are completely unaware of the international reaction to the trash these people produce and its' implications on Japan-rest of the World relations.

[Buraku]

Japan radicals still crying that they lost the war. Europe saw the move of radical Fascists into power. Hitler also establishes links with Japan in '36, allied prisoners the Japanese took faced a worse time than those inside Nazi camps, in the early months of the Pacific War thousands of Aussies and Americans were dying at the hands of the Japanese, from starvation and neglect, from torture and summary execution. Take the Nazi-Imperial Burma-Siam railroad, Unit 731 experiments or the Bataan death march, when Hong Kong fell on that one day 1,689 Canadians were captured by the Imperial Japanese. .
So many Americans are blindly Nippophilic. They love Japan because of its anime, hentai, otaku-culture it is perhaps these people who make other gaijins in Japan sick... the US-Otakus who love Japan merely because the country happens to be rich, hentai and asian. Some try to move to Japan not realizing how xenophobic the Japanese people tend to be, or how closed the society still is, Bush and US Senators slam Japan for the Beef ban and say to Nippon 'open your market for face sanctions'. They used to nail the gaijins to crosses but today they have the Japanese-Only signs.
Bitter divisions remain between the British and Japanese veterans of the Burma campaign, the Japanese government has expressed regret for what happened but they have not made a meaningful apology..other other words they say 'we Japanese regret it' but then reply with ' crimes against humanisty were ok because we Japanese were building a modern Asia', or it was the 'whites that started the war' against Japan
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/3058189.stm
Japanese minister man says that some women who are raped are "asking for it" by the way they dress. See the Japan times for news on Nippon - Sounds of disbelief spread through the courtroom as the Tokyo District Court on Thursday dismissed a civil lawsuit against Tokyo Gov. Shintaro Ishihara for making discriminatory statements about women.
Presiding Judge Yoshiteru Kawamura said that while Ishihara's comments may have been unpleasant for many women, "it is difficult to say that his words caused serious emotional distress to each of the women on a personal level." Tokyo governor beats lawsuit over sexist comments . Ishihara, quoting a college professor, said ``the worst thing a civilization has produced is an old hag,'' and added that ``it's a waste, and almost a crime, for women to go on living even after losing their reproductive ability.''
As a poster on p219.ezboard.com - foldmasterqfrm8 said 'N Korea blasts Nippon at UN. for abducting 200,000 women' 'For once this nutty KimJong has said something I can agree with - And no, his numbers are not an exaggeration.
Japanese sex slaves I hear Japanese people moaning and groaning about their 20 or so citizens that were abducted by the NorthKoreans but nobody seems to remember that the Japanese forced 670,000 Koreans to go to Japan during WWII: " Japanese abduct 670,000 Koreans but can't remember, the war that never was in white washed Ishihara history ! " There was a recent story about a Korean national blocked from promotion by Tokyo government vows to fight on, the 54-year-old spent a decade fighting the Tokyo Metropolitan Government for the right to take a promotion exam, from which she was barred because of her South Korean nationality. If she had won, nationality would have ceased to be a factor in determining senior civil service jobs in Japan.
And of course we have the keystone cops who try hunting gaijins, corrupt banking system, falling birth rates, and stagnation of the Nippon economy. Combined with the chronic weakness in domestic demand that has been afflicting Japan the economy could easily be thrown into a dangerous downward spiral. Instead of inadequate workforce numbers, Japan's problem could well be mounting unemployment.
http://www.asiafinest.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=19840



Soon Nippon will start fishing expeditions near a pair of East China Sea islands to strengthen its hand in a dispute with the mainland over the Imperial rights to natural resources in the area, officials said, they also have many disputes with Taiwan, Russian, Vietnam and South Korea over a bunch of rocks in the sea, the Ruskies got pissed at 'em and the Russians almost blew the Nippon boats out of the water, Ishihara came back with a radical or racist comment about Russians, but you could expect this with the Yasukuni poltics and a Governor Blinky that says whites started the war and calls other Asians N*ggers. Now Ishihara wants teachers to sing songs of praise for symbols of Japan's militarist past, the Hinomaru (Sun) flag and the anthem, known as "Kimigayo". The taipeitimes recently reports, South Korean's president called for compensation and an apology for colonial rule, Roh said Japan should follow the example of post-war Germany and acknowledge its past wrongdoing, the Asahi news-site said Koizumi's regular visits to the Yasukuni shrine in Tokyo, which honors Japanese war dead including war criminals, was an irritant to improving ties with South Korea.

[Charles]

It is sad for me as a person who has choosen to live here to see people so horribly willing to delude themselves. No young people I know believe much of anything their history books tell them but they also are completely unaware of the international reaction to the trash these people produce and its' implications on Japan-rest of the World relations. :x

Ignorance cuts both ways. I bet there are very few people here who know what "Nixon Shock" was, or what the Carter Doctrine did to ASEAN generally and Japan specifically.
But there's an endless supply of people who can spout the same old WWII era bilgewater.

[Ketou]

I don't get it Charles. Are you saying that the US unpegging the dollar from gold, which forced Japan to unpeg the yen, was an atrocity?
From what I can gather (economics is not a strong point), the US made an adjustment out of economic necessity and Japanese bumbling caused it to suffer more pain than was neeeded.

EDIT: Ok, I reread your post and understand that you were talking about the lack of education of said info. No need to answer the atrocity question!

[Charles]

I don't get it Charles. Are you saying that the US unpegging the dollar from gold, which forced Japan to unpeg the yen, was an atrocity?
From what I can gather (economics is not a strong point), the US made an adjustment out of economic necessity and Japanese bumbling caused it to suffer more pain than was neeeded.

EDIT: Ok, I reread your post and understand that you were talking about the lack of education of said info. No need to answer the atrocity question! :)

Yes, you perceived my remark as it was intended, as the typical US residents' ignorance of global politics, even if they lived through the era when it was happening.

But it's an interesting question. I recently became acquainted with one Japanese take on this, they claimed "Nixon Shock" was a deliberate maneuver to raise the price of oil which the US and China could afford but Japan could not. I haven't heard of any interpretation like this since the "ABCD Theory" that ran up to WWII.

And there's the rub. History belongs to the historians. It all depends on who is writing it. Churchill once remarked "History will be kind to me, since I intend to write it."

[AssKissinger]

Link

As the outgunned Chinese Nationalist army fled across the Yangtze River on that ignominious day, Nanjing fell to 50,000 Japanese troops who marched in, presenting themselves as benificent saviours.

They were anything but.

"My mom was embracing my one-year old sister under the table," Xia continued.

"They dragged my mom out from under the table and immediately stabbed my sister to death. They just killed her like that," she said, with a sharp wave of her arm.

On that harrowing day a dozen or so soldiers then set upon her mother, gang raping and then killing her, while two neighbourhood children cowering under the table with them were shot dead.

As the Japanese turned to dispatching others her grandparents grabbed Xia and her three remaining sisters and ran into another room, gaining precious minutes.

"I heard screams and gunshots from the other room but we were so scared we didn't dare to make a sound," said Xia.

Everything went quiet before the soldiers finally stormed in, bayoneting her grandparents first, then raping and killing her 15- and- 13-year-old sisters.

Xia blacked out.

She doesn't know how long it was before she came to, but she remembers hearing the crying of her four-year old sister. Xia was soaked in blood, and had been stabbed three times in the arm and back.

Surrounded by the decomposing corpses of her family and neighbours, the two sisters hid in the house for the next 10 days, surviving on scraps of food.

"We didn't dare to move or eat in daytime, Japanese soldiers were near by and they walked by my place on patrol everyday," she said.

An old couple eventually found them and snuck them to the International Safety Zone, a makeshift refugee camp set up by foreigners who had remained in Nanjing to try and prevent further killings.

According to historians and thousands of recorded personal testimonies, what happened in Xia's house occurred with abandon throughout the metropolis that was then home to one million residents.

[jingai]

But it's an interesting question. I recently became acquainted with one Japanese take on this, they claimed "Nixon Shock" was a deliberate maneuver to raise the price of oil which the US and China could afford but Japan could not. I haven't heard of any interpretation like this since the "ABCD Theory" that ran up to WWII.

Interesting if bizarre theory. The US under Nixon and China were collaborators during the Cold War against Japan? The US could afford oil shocks? Look at oil use/GDP and what the supply shocks of the '70s did to the US economy. Stagflation and recession did a number on the US, too.

The US economy was overheated and ripe for inflation by the early '70s with a near-full employment economy from the longest growth period since the war (until the '90s) with all the added money going into Vietnam pushing it towards inflation. Add an OPEC oil embargo and you have a recipe for inflationary disaster as rising energy prices also force other prices to rise.

With the whole world pegged to the dollar, which itself was backed by gold, this whole system was unsupportable. For example, 360 yen to the dollar made a lot more sense in 1955 than in 1970, and when the currencies floated the yen suddenly became worth a lot more.

I don't see how the increased value of the yen would raise oil prices as the ability of yen-users to purchase foreign commodities should increase as the yen went up in value. A cheap yen was good for exports, not imports.
I haven't studied economics in a while so is there something else I'm forgetting?

[emperor]

Happy Anniversary!

[djgizmoe]

Alright, I'm writing a paper using communications theory to talk about cycles of intercultural misunderstanding, and the whole Japanese history textbook issue seems a good example. Anybody have any (citable) sources for info on:
1. Just how many (or what percent of schools) have chosen to use textbooks that critics find most revisionist.
2. How China and South Korea schools choose their textbooks. The Japanese government selects eight privately published texts, right? I'm assuming (perhaps incorrectly) that the Chinese government has in-house writer/historians to write theirs, and I have no clue about how things are done in Korea...
Thanks.