Americans Told Okinawans to Commit Suicide
No, this is not an april fool’s post.
The Japanese ministry of education asked publishers of new high school history textbooks to remove (or modify) references to the Imperial Japanese Army’s role in forcing civilians to commit mass suicide during the Battle of Okinawa, reports the Japan Times of the textbook screening results released on friday. Among other screenings are modifications about the Self Defense Forces’ dispatch to Iraq, the number of deaths in the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, and wartime sex slaves (especially since PM Abe doesnt believe that they were sex slaves).
Descriptions such as “The japanese army gave hand grenades to residents, making them commit suicide and kill each other.” will now be “Mass suicides and killings took place among the residents using hand grenades given them by the Japanese army.”
Other textboooks simply deleted the words “by the japanese army.” !!!
The reason given for all this? The former language usage could result in students misunderstanding the event!
Sure, the new versions certainly clear things up. Mass suicides and killings just suddenly took place because, one assumes, Okinawans were such japanese nationalists (an amazing development considering that they were annexed to japan merely 66 years before that) that they couldnt bear the looming defeat and turned suicidal and homocidal en masse! and according to some versions now, they killed themselves and others using grenades... that must have been dropped from the air by the allied forces.
They were forced by the americans, not the imperial japanese army, to kill!
I am sick and tired of reading about topics like this in the paper, but amazingly they keep on resurfacing. The problem is the lack of any proper discussion about japan’s role in WWII, and that isnt helped by having an administration that believes education should be a tool to brainwash its youth rather than giving them the analytical skills to learn things by themselves.
You cant really discuss such topics with a lot of people you meet here for 2 reasons: 1) it breaks the harmony and even if you manage to push on they’ll simply be non-engaging, and 2) most of them werent taught in school and have no idea what you are talking about. annexation of okinawa? ainu people used to live in tohoku? what’s in the name of all that is sweet and sour are you talking about???
Indeed, what the hell am i implying here? Japan was a victim of Western agression. The Atomic Bombs!!! Dont you dare forget that! Japan is the ONLY nation to have been ravaged by such inhumane weapons. How dare i try to paint a false picture of the past?!
Alas, this might be an april fool’s post after all.
Libellés : gargantuan harmony
posted by Mongol Nomad @
4:50 AM
7 Comments:
Sigh. What more is there to say? I mean, I've long known it to be the case that many of the younger people in Japan don't even know the basic facts of modern history; WWII is glossed over, but Japan was an amazing economic miracle!
To really understand why it's dangerous to have a further rise in nationalism in a country where, in many ways, it would still remain fairly easy to incite people to militaristic fervor, one must study the truth behind the past. And yet, no one really takes that course. It's very odd. I should talk with the people I know here about it more. I bet there are some interesting viewpoints to be had.
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well,, i don't believe that Abe didn't believe comfort women then were not sexual slaves. it's a historical fact and there still are many survivors alive and testifying thereof. What Abe chose to do is to simply ignore the fact and be a hypocrite for his survival in home politics just like many of his predecessors. what more can i say.. i'm also sort of tired of hearing Korean, Chinese governments repeatedly accusing Japanese government of its false statements on atrocities perpetrated by Japanese army during the WWII, and Japanese continuously disregarding their accusations. the more i hear these kinds of news, the more i am convinced that japan probably won't acknowledge any of historical wrongdoings until it leaves with absolutely no other choise but doing so, just like the way it surrendered unconditionally(almost) when it left with no other choices at the end of the war,,.. or, would this kind of view only reinforce the early amendment of Japanses Constitution Article 9?
NANKING MASSACRE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZzPgi4Wn9Zk
PHOTOS OF NANKING MASSACRE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybuinerGuCw
THE NEWS OF NANKING MASSACRE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTf5wAKQr8I
Japan or China?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXQEuNKuFS8
dear ashigaru,
you only posted links to youtube, probably thinking that the pieces will speak for themselves and explain everything. in fact, not. the links you posted are part of the same tv program aiming at refuting the existence of the nanking massacre. and the relying only on photos, alledgedly fabricated by the chinese communist party, leaves many questions unanswered.
while it is true that the chinese government has interests in painting japan in a bad light (they probably dont need to do much, though), that doesnt mean the photos were fake. even if the chinese communist party produced the photos in questions, that doesnt negate other evidence, including the testimonies of those escaped the massacre, the japanese soldiers who participated in the massacre and testified decades later (the tv program calls them lairs. why did they lie, i wonder? paid by the CCP?) and extensive research done by scholars (including herbert bix, the pulizer prize winner for his book "hirohito and the making of modern japan" in which the nanking massacre is discussed).
this is exactly what iris chang wrote in response to a journalist.
"A common tactic of Holocaust deniers is to pick at one small piece of evidence to draw attention away from scope and magnitude of the genocide. But a photograph of a Jewish child smiling as he gets off a train and heads for a concentration camp is not proof that the Holocaust didn't happen, but only of the irrepressible optimism of human nature. Nor is it proof that the child was happy and smiling a month later, when no cameras were around. Burress's nitpick here is also reminiscent of a dreadful time in our own history, and of those apologists for slavery who argued it could not have been that bad because the slaves were often seen singing. The Japanese, like the Nazis, relied on deception to make mass executions and mass rapes more manageable. The hapless Chinese men, women and children rounded up by the Japanese were usually kept ignorant about their fate until it was too late to escape." (http://www.irischang.net/press_article.cfm?n=9)
dear ashigaru;
i had to try very hard to finish watching the posts you wrote on your comment,which was turned to be not so successful nor necessary. After spending some time looking at those clips, I felt chilled how it is ever possible for someone to deny the fact provend by many witness, and laid wide open by immense still vivid evidences. What beyong-imagination types of lies will prevail when all witnesses are dead and evidences go frail?
you see, some say "(historical) truths are written by victors." But I would say, "truths are there to see always, and will be seen eventually to all."
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