Guest post: They could have come as liberators
Originally a comment by Tim Harris on It’s almost as if there’s a pattern.
I do not think it was ‘vast swathes’ of Japanese intellectuals who suppressed or discounted the Nanking Massacre. Certainly a number of nationalists, many of whom could barely be called ‘intellectuals’, did (and do). Modern Japan had the misfortune to be re-born as a modern nation at the height of Western imperialism and racism, and was one of the only Asian nations never to be made a colony. In 1919, Japan proposed a ‘racial equality’ clause to be included in the Treaty of Versailles. This was turned down by Anglo-Saxondom – the British because of the Empire, the Australians because of the ‘White Australia’ policy, and the USA for obvious reasons (which included of course Woodrow Wilson’s appallingly racist beliefs). The Japanese certainly perpetrated terrible atrocities before and during the Second World War, particularly in China, and behaved badly wherever they went – a great mistake & misfortune, I think, for they came as new masters when they could have come as liberators: but one of the consequences of Japan’s invasions was the collapse, in Asia and subsequently elsewhere, of Western colonialism, whose own atrocities, which continued well after the Second War when they sought to recover their colonies, the ‘civilising’ Westerners chose, and choose, to forget – the Vietnam War, as well as the massacres throughout Indonesia in the sixties, aided & abetted by the USA, Australia & the UK, constituting an important part of the aftermath of colonialism. In March of this year, the Dutch finally apologised for massacres of Indonesians in 1947 when they were trying to claw back their colonies, and paid reparations to families whose ancestors has been murdered by Dutch troops.
There is a great deal of bad faith in the continued Western criticism of Japan’s behaviour, and it derives from the fact that the Japanese were the first to defeat a white Western nation decisively (the Russo-Japanese war), and then defeated, tellingly though temporarily, various Western nations in colonial Asia.
Regarding history textbooks, etc, I suspect you will find little in British textbooks about British behaviour in Kenya during the Mau-Mau uprising – in 2011 the Foreign Office agreed to release a great number of carefully and illegally hidden documents concerning torture and massacre in the attempt to put down the uprising, and in mid 2013 the government agreed to pay £19.9 million in compensation to over 5,000 claimants who had suffered abuse during the Mau Mau Rebellion. Until 2015, British tax-payers were still paying off government debts incurred as a result of ‘reparations’ made to British slave-owners after the abolition of slavery – there had been of course no reparations made to the slaves themselves.
Interesting and informative comment, thank you. I didn’t know very much about Japan or its history and you have prompted me to find out more.
Just one nit-pick:
Did you mean to say “was the only Asian nation”? Or did you mean “was one of the few Asian nations”? Because what you wrote doesn’t actually make any sense.
“doesn’t actually make any sense”?
Oh, bullshit. You can nitpick it as ungrammatical if you like, but to pretend that you don’t understand what he’s trying to convey is silly.
Easy, easy, pardner – tigger did say it was a nitpick.
I don’t really get it though. Is it a solecism to say, I don’t know, France and Italy were the only EU countries to [whatever]? We can say that can’t we? If we can say that why we can’t say “one of the only [plural thing]”?
Yes, ‘one of the few’ – the others being Thailand and to a degree the stricken China, which had at least to resist the encroachment of the Western powers and bow to their demands (of course, the Sino-Japanese war which went on for decades was an attempt to impose colonial rule on China – and Japan had made Korea & Taiwan colonies; though in the first case if Japan had not done this, Korea would probably have become a colony of Russia. So ‘few’ sounded a bit excessive! There was also large-scale Japanese settlement of the northernmost large island of Hokkaido that began in the Edo period because of the threat from Russia; and in the Meiji era Hokkaido was regarded and treated virtually as a colony. If anyone is interested there is a remarkable book of poetry by a left-wing Japanese poet that has been very well-translated by a Dutch historian who teaches now in Britain, and was published by a friend of mine: Genzō Sarashina, Kotan Chronicles: Selected Poems 1928-1943, edited and translated by Nadine Willems (Isobar Press). Sarashina was the son of Japanese settlers and became a teacher at a school for Ainu children until he was sacked for his left-wing views. The poems are mostly about the treatment by the Japanese government of the Ainu and the life of the Ainu, and they are very good. Nadine Willems has written a splendid introduction to the book, which goes into the history of Hokkaido and the way left-wing intellectuals like Sarashina were stifled under the militarists.
Another book worth reading is Norman Lewis’s ‘A Dragon Apparent: Travels in Indo-China’, which shows what French rule was like in Vietnam – not very nice.
A quick Google search suggests that grammarians seem to disagree on the point, though I note that Merriam-Webster at least has endorsed the usage of “one of the only.”
I have no problem with pedantry in general, and indulge in it from time to time. I’m not a complete descriptivist, and I think some rules have their place. But I am irritated when pedants pretend to be confused by a phrase because of a supposed grammatical error. It’s like the adult who feigns confusing because a child used “ain’t.” If you want to argue that a grammatical rule is correct, or useful, or helps avoid ambiguity in some situations, sure, have at it. If you want to argue that people should speak or write in a grammatically correct way because otherwise people will think less of them, ok, that has its place as advice — I certainly wouldn’t suggest using “ain’t” in formal correspondence!
But feigning confusing that doesn’t exist just makes the pedant look sillier than the person they’re correcting, in my opinion. If person A says “Bill was hung for murder,” and person B interjects to ask “was this ‘Bill’ a painting, because people are ‘hanged,'” I know which person I’m rolling my eyes at. Sorry, pedants, I mean, “I know at which person I am rolling my eyes.”
Of course, any comment about grammar must contain at least one error, and I managed to use “confusing” for “confusion” twice. But I’m sure you all understood my meaning!
Slight corrective on the slaveowner compensation act:
http://marginallyproductive.com/2020/06/21/financing-abolition/
I will bow to superior financial understanding here, though the principle remains the same. What I won’t bow to is the dismissive attitude of economists like Dierdre McCloskey, and, alas, the original historians of the Legacies of British Slave-ownership project, regarding the effect of these payments on the direction of the British economy from then to now, which was, as far as I can tell, immense and still almost entirely unacknowledged.
An all too common outcome. So many overthrows and uprisings turned bright promise into another wave of immiseration.
For my part, I thought “one of the only [plural thing]” had been standardised long ago.
Screechy, yes, fair enough, I agree about the pretend-incomprehension. Just thought you were a little harsh.
Right around the same time yesterday I was whingeing on Facebook about a newish confusion in which people seem to think you can’t ever say “in to” – that if the two appear together in that order you MUST convert them to “into.” The result is hideous.
Thank you. Ophelia.
I am sorry to have upset Screechy with my nitpick.
I still believe that ‘the only’ is singular. “One of only [number] countries” would be informative. Thank you, Tim, for coming back and responding with the missing information. And thank you, too, guest. I have learned a lot from this post.
That “the only” is singular in all uses? I think that might be a personal idiosyncrasy, tigger.
Hey, I just said it was bullshit, not that I was upset. There’s a lot of bullshit in this world — some of it mine — and I can’t afford to get upset by all of it.