In recent weeks, the relationship between Japan and her neighbours has deteriorated over the textbook known as 'The New History'. The book is already unpopular with the Teachers' union and so only 18 schools (8 of them Private) out of 11, 102 schools actually use it. In other words, 0.1% of the Junior High School population get to see its contents.
Teachers' concerns over the content have limited use of the textbook, which covers all of Japan's history. The current edition has 236 pages, only about 20 of which deal with the 1920-1945 period, the height of Japanese expansionism.
But those 20 pages are highly inflammatory, with passages defending Japan's militarism as an attempt to liberate Asia from western colonialism and claiming that resource-poor Japan was pushed into a corner and used aggression as a last resort.
Similar logic was used by Japan's wartime leaders. Critics say the text underscores a disturbing, broader trend.
"All history textbooks are shifting their focus away from Japan's wartime atrocities," said Mikio Someya, a spokesman for the liberal Japan Teachers' Association, the country's leading teachers' union.
For example, he said, none of the textbooks approved this month mentions Japan's official role in establishing front-line brothels during the war. Historians say as many as 200,000 women from Korea, China, the Philippines, Taiwan and the Netherlands were forced into sexual slavery for Japanese soldiers.
Japan's military also seized up to 800,000 men from China, Korea and other Asian countries in the early 1900s and shipped them to Japan to work in coal mines and ports under brutal conditions.
Tokyo has acknowledged its wartime offenses, but refuses to compensate victims directly or apologize, saying all government-level compensation was settled by postwar treaties.
How do I put this diplomatically?
In accepting the Potsdam declaration, Japan surrendered at the end of WWII unconditionally. If one goes over the transcripts of the cabinet meetings that included the Emperor in the heat of July and the dog days of August, it is clear that the Prime Minister Kantaro Suzuki and his cabinet are stuck on is the word unconditional. In other words, what would the allies do with Japan after the surrender?
The Army felt it was better to go out in blaze of glory as they had been working up to that event for a good 20 years. The decimated Navy staff felt that process had already taken place. The Emperor finally interceded and told the cabinet to accept. Now a lot of people who hate the late Showa Emperor around the world would object, but this was a very good call that saved lives on both sides. Not the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, boys & girls.
Part of the 'unconditional surrender' meant the undertaking of Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal as well as having no sovereignty until 1952 when the peace treaty was signed in San Francisco. People came and laid their claims. Compensations were paid to those states. In fact the payment of these compensations was a prerequisite deal in the signing of the San Francisco Treaty. In other words, the weirgyld for compensation had to be paid before Japan could be a sovereign state again. This is why Tokyo gets a bewildered look when people come out years later and say they didn't get paid. For all of her war crimes it is not Tokyo's fault that the respective states didn't pass on the compensation.
Not only that, Japan has been sending Overseas Development Aid for decades. This sum runs to billions of dollars a year. That plus the investment that Japanese industry has been making across Asia runs to trillions; and it's undeniable those things have benefited Asia. You can see why some people in Japan get quite irritated with the people who want more compensation for WWII or want more apologies or more contrition or changed textbooks or whatever.
Bottom line, you either accept the weirgyld and shut up, or you refuse to accept the weirgyld for whatever reason and keep feuding; you can't take the weirgyld and still feud. That is incredibly bad faith.
The Korean War As Part Of The Global War
While we're on this topic, loyal reader Pleiades sent this along as today's food for thought. It's sort of funny because the writer clearly believes in the Illuminati who are trying to go for world domination. But if you side-step that, it's still a sort of interesting read.
This bit made me laugh:
Yeah. There's no end to the sources of paranoia: now it's some Korean war movie about the Korean War.For most of the past ten years or so, it has been my 'expert' opinion that the current Global Civil War began on April 17th of 1995, or just two days before the event at the A.P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City. That was the day that an Air Force Lear jet carrying a senior defense electronics expert named Clark Fiester and a senior Air Force general named Glen Proffitt II was either shot down or bombed out of the air over northern Alabama. Sources have advised me that this criminal event, an assassination by air crash, was in fact an Act Of War related directly to what happened two days later in Oklahoma. They say it has to do with government corruption too.
After viewing Taegukgi hwinalrimyeo twice, however, and taking notes for a close analysis of the movie, it dawned on me that I wasn't wrong about the assassinations of Fiester and Proffitt being acts of war, but that I was wrong in thinking that this was the kick-off to world-around civil war.
It was simply the kick-off for the newest phase of this on-going war !!
I don't believe in conspiracy theories, but I do give credence to geopolitics forcing the same issue over and over again. The reasons for the conflict in the Korean peninsula are remarkably similar for the 1895 war between Japan and China, the 1905-1905 war between Japan and Russia, and the 1951-1953 war between the USA and China. That's a highly strategic piece of real estate the Koreans are sitting on. Russia wants access to a port that doesn't freeze over in winter. In 1895, it was willing to rip off China to do it. In 1904, it was willing to invade Korea to do it. In 1950 China was willing to coax the North Koreans into getting total control of the peninsula; thus threatening shipping lanes. And every times this happened, people marched through Korea.
But there are other places on the planet like that. Like the Bosphorus, where once Troy was laid siege, where Constantinople was laid siege and everything else inbetween. Or the Hellespont where the men who marched across it form a who's who of generals. Darius, Alexander, Crassus, Julius Caesar, Constantine the Great, Richard the Lion Heart, even our very own Anzacs at Gallipoli went there at the behest of Winston Churchill.
And guess what. The Turks and Greeks still stare across there with mutual contempt and hatred.
It's just a very valuable piece of real estate.
Riots Every Day In China
Related to the textbook issue is the issue of Japan possibly joining the UN Security Council as permanent member thereof. Of course this is very uncomfortable for China who won their seat on the basis of WWII, but more so, by ousting the legitimacy claims of Taiwan.
Now I'm not here to suggest Taiwan's claims over mainland China are legitimate. But you can see that Communist China's claim to its seat isn't exactly without controversy.
But China as a nation did 'earn' its spot through its being on the winning side in WWII. I guess that's why it gets to re-hash gripes about WWII in order to block Japan's entry. And maybe it is worth orchestrating public opinion and making it look like there's a nationwide outrage about it; but when the oil prices hit US$100, the people might want to riot about something else other than whether Japan is on the Security Council or not. Heck, by then they might want an Asian ally in that seat.
- Art Neuro
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