At a Military Museum, the Losers Write History

[cstaylor]

At a Military Museum, the Losers Write History

A Chinese university student who visited the museum gasped audibly, shaking her head in barely contained anger at the Nanjing text. "This is why our two countries can never be true friends," she said. "How can we trust a country that continues to lie so boldly about its past?"

[Steve Bildermann]

"This is why our two countries can never be true friends," she said. "How can we trust a country that continues to lie so boldly about its past?"

As opposed to one that lies so bodly about it's present..

TIBET: AN OCCUPIED COUNTRY

Four decades occupied by China - Over 17% of Tibetans killed - 6,000 monasteries destroyed - Genocide by Chinese continues - Appeal to the world community for help - Give us genuine self rule autonomy

http://www.friends-of-tibet.org.nz/occu.html

Or it's own revolting past.

http://www.christusrex.org/www1/sdc/massacre.html

[cstaylor]

Yeah, you have to wonder why someone would be upset about visiting a museum directly associated with Yasukuni.

I wonder if all foreign correspondants go through this cycle?

[Steve Bildermann]

Yes. Glasses house indeed.

A quick stroll through either the British Museum or the Imperial War Museum (gotta dig that name) will soon set any visitor right about how the magnanimous we British were during our time of 'Empire'

When I was a snot nosed little kid I used wander about thinking 'wow it's so neat of all these countries to send their stuff here for us to keep and display'

[tokyojoe]

In order to get past the kindergarten version of history you have to study on your own. I was recently in Korea and visited the war museum. It celebrated their various victories over the Mongols, Chinese and Japanese. But if you go look at their palaces you read how the buildings were destroyed not once but twice by invading Japanese armies.

[American Oyaji]

America its self refuses to look at how slavery effects the face of racism even today.

It's a terrible thing to remove a people from thier homeland and take their culture away from them.

Have you ever seen the whip Indiana Jones uses? This was used on slaves on a routine basis.

I went to Disney World last year and I was able to be onstage during the Indian Jones live stuntshow as a group of people pulled out of the audience. The guy playing Indy was using a whip. That thing has a sonic boom and even though it didnt hit me, I could FEEL the pops through the air.

If you've heard of the atrocities in Korean prisons, then you understand what slavery was like. Only it was practiced openly as a nation.

Nations always turn a blind eye to events they are ashamed of.

[Taro Toporific]

[Captain Japan]

This will likely go premium so the rest of the article is in the next (two) post(s)...
Japan’s top daily forces war reappraisal
FT

Pinpointing the true source of power in Japan is a notoriously slippery task. In a society where decisions tend to emerge through a drawn-out process of consensus, even prime ministers are sometimes little more than figureheads, articulating policies engineered by anonymous others deep in the bowels of the body politic.

One man, however, who has enjoyed undisputed influence is Tsuneo Watanabe, now 80, chairman and editor-in-chief of the Yomiuri newspaper, which with a circulation of 10m is the world’s largest daily. Mr Watanabe, who took charge of the Yomiuri empire in 1991 after starting as a political reporter, has long had the ear of prime ministers, business leaders and elite bureaucrats, including other “shadow shoguns” who have helped shape Japan.

The country’s most powerful media executive, who is also the force behind the Yomiuri Giants, the nation’s most successful baseball team, has wielded his enormous influence to promote a consistently conservative agenda.

The wealth he has amassed, unusual for someone who worked up the ranks as a reporter, has invited criticism; so have the uses to which he has put his power, which some argue have lent respectability to the strident nationalism heard increasingly in Japan these days. His causes have included a long public campaign, now closer to fruition than ever, to rewrite the postwar pacifist constitution. His newspaper has been a champion of Japan’s armed forces and an advocate of the country standing taller in international affairs.

This made all the more remarkable a recent about-face by Mr Watanabe, often referred to as “God” by his awestruck underlings at the Yomiuri. It began in 2005 when the Yomiuri shook the political establishment by decrying in an editorial the visits of Junichiro Koizumi, then prime minister, to Yasukuni shrine, where 2.5m war dead, including 14 Class A war criminals, are honoured. Those visits were unnecessarily provocative to China and showed a wilful ignorance of Japan’s dark wartime history, the newspaper thundered....more...

[Captain Japan]

[Captain Japan]

[Mulboyne]