History matters
What children in Japan learn about their own recent past:
We’ve learnt that Japan fought a war with China and colonised parts of the country. Sometimes the Japanese were a bit cruel, forcing places to adopt Japanese names and forcing people to adopt the Japanese language. But we didn’t really get into the details of what actually happened. I feel my understanding of the war is a bit thin.
Yeah, it is. It’s those textbooks we keep hearing about – the ones that infuriate the Chinese and Koreans (and Indonesians? Indians? Burmese? Thais? We don’t hear so much about that) because they radically minimize what Japan actually did when it ‘fought a war with’ (i.e. invaded) China (and the rest of East Asia). It involved a little more than forcing places to adopt Japanese names and forcing people to adopt the Japanese language. Forced labour in lethal conditions would be one item.
Turkey, Japan, Serbia; denial denial denial. Not good.
Not only Japan, of course. I’d grown up hearing about the US treatment of slaves and native americans, but it wasn’t until I discovered the other writings of Mark Twain that I found out about our involvement in the Philippines around the last turn of the century.
I think denial is pretty much par for the course for “imperialist” countries. The Japanese just have perfecte it.
I think that the only countries that don’t deny embarrassing and cruel parts of their histories are the ones that don’t have embarrassing and cruel parts, and I don’t know if there really are any. After all, human beings populate all of them.
Of course, some countries have more embarrassing and cruel bits in their histories than others.
Actually, JonJ, Germany seems to be an exception to that rule. The German people and German government (well, the government of West Germany, anyway) have done a remarkably good job on the whole (with exceptions, of course) of owning up to their responsibility for both WWII in general and the Holocaust in specific. I’ve always seen a certain nobility in their honesty about their nation’s evil past precisely because of the contrast with most other nations’ deliberate deceptions.
I’ve always been very conscious of this sort of thing because my tiny town in Ohio had a small, ill-kept monument marking the grave of the last member of the local Native American tribe, the Maumee. The river I grew up on was named the Maumee, and geographical features (roads, towns, counties, rivers, state parks, etc.) throughout Ohio bear very obviously Native American names as well. At at some point when I was still very young, I came to understand that these names were all that was left of a slaughtered culture.
It is ironic that a Chinese Communist should be speaking about facing up to history. Perhaps he and his ilk will stop oppressing the Tibetans, an imperialist barbarity that is happening right now.
There is coincidentally an interesting article at http://www.feer.com/articles1/2007/0704/free/p036.html on similar thought control among scholars of China. For example, “We ignore the fact that of the 3,220 Chinese citizens with a personal wealth of 100 million yuan ($13 million) or more, 2,932 are children of high-level cadres”.
“We’ve learnt that Japan fought a war with China and colonised parts of the country. Sometimes the Japanese were a bit cruel, forcing places to adopt Japanese names and forcing people to adopt the Japanese language”.
I read that the results of the annual textbook screening are closely watched in China, South Korea and other Asian countries. Even within Japan there are fresh denials of the military’s responsibility in the Battle of Okinawa and in sexual slavery, COMFORT WOMEN which are long accepted as historical facts. It is likely to deepen suspicions in Asia that Tokyo is trying to whitewash its militarist past even as it tries to raise the profile of its current forces.
In 1995, Japan set up an “Asia Women’s Fund” for atonement in the form of material compensation and to provide each surviving “comfort woman” with a signed apology from the prime minister, stating “As Prime Minister of Japan, I thus extend anew my most sincere apologies and remorse to all the women who underwent immeasurable and painful experiences and suffered incurable physical and psychological wounds as comfort women.” The fund is funded by private donations and not government money, and has been criticized as a way to avoid admitting government abuse. But because of the unofficial nature of the fund, many “comfort women” have rejected these payments and continue to seek an official apology and compensation.
I note that he omitted the most crucial word, “sexual” abuse in his apology. The women should stand their ground and not cave in to the utter connivance of the government who is desperately trying to airbrush them out of history textbooks. By denying these brave women rights to their respectful place in the nations textbooks and their just monetary rewards the government is compounding the abuse .
I hear a loud bell ringing .It is an RC bell. It is not appealing but instead humming , drumming buzzing “Japan,denial denial denial. Not good”.