I went to Yasikuni Shrine last weekend. The atmosphere is certainly not like that at pther war memorials I have visited. It’s more like what you would expect at a fair or a carnival. There certainly are militaristic aspects to it. There is a monument to the Tokyo War Tribunal judge Radhabinod Pal who voted against blaming Japan alone for the events of the war. The locomotive from the Burma Railway mentions nothing about the horror of the constructing the railway. On the other hand, the books they sell in the bookshop don’t seem to whitewash the war. One book, entitiled something like The Truth about Nanjing, contained description of the massacre.
This is your proof that Japan hasn’t tried to whitewash its WW2 history?
If I hadn’t read your previous posts, I’d think this is sarcasm.
I don
[quote=“ScottSommers”]I don
[quote=“Marvin”][quote=“ScottSommers”]I don
Does CCP’s crime justify Japan’s ?
Does Japan have moral obligations only to the Chinese communists or to the Chinese people, Korean people, American people, and its own people?
Should Japan look at Germany as a comparison or should it look at the authoritarian communist China?
WW2 was not between Japan and the Chinese communists, and most people slaughtered in Nanjing were not communists.
No one likes CCP and we can not set it as the moral standard if humanity wants to progress at all.
Why should the Japanese reciprocate (spelling?) to China, when CCP does nothing?
Not that I know a lot of what the Japanese did that they have not admitted to do, but why should they continue fueling the CCP propaganda of hate against Japan if CCP can not admit their own faults?
Why is this about reciprocation? Japan has an interest in getting its own history right, whatever anyone else does. And what’s going to fuel propaganda: continually turning from the dark places in their past, or bringing it into the light? As far as reputations are concerned, attempted cover-ups typically do as much damage as the initial wrong. The sheer scale of wrong done in this case makes that rule of thumb less applicable, but nonetheless, the point stands. So long as the past is left in the dark, anyone can spin it however they wish.
[quote=“Marvin”][quote=“ScottSommers”]I don
Perhaps it should look to neither as a model?
I am tired of hearing Imperial Japan compared with Nazi Germany. The comparison doesn’t make alot of sense. Japan was an ally of Germany in WWII, not unlike Italy. Of course Italy was also involved in its own Imperial projects in Africa, and its own war crimes, but for some reason that never gets talked about much.
Japan commited attrocities in China to be sure. But in this respect it hardly differs from a host of other powers, including the Europeans (Opium wars?), the Mongols (do you hear the Chinese bitching to Mongolia?), the Tibettans (who though it is un-PC to say so were capble of the most un-Buddhist brutality when it suited them), and of course the Chinese themselves (who have an incredible track record of butchering their own).
Japan wasn’t involved in orchestrated genocide remotely comparable with Nazi Germany. Rather than being involved in something (arguably) unprecidented in history, it was simply engaged in the type of brutality perfromed by countless powers before it. I think Japan’s behavior during WWII was roughly what you would expect of an imperialist power operating in a backwards and impoverished region of the globe, and which had only very recently modernized and still retained many leftovers of its own feudal society.
Frankly I’d prefer that Japan doesn’t look to Germany as a model. Germany’s continual wailing about holocaust culpability (voiced primarily by people who were not even born when it all happened) sounds more insincere and irrelevant with every passing year. And despite German’s widely admired education of its young people regarding these matters I seem to meet just as many young racists from Germany as from anywhere else (actually probably more).
It would be nice if the Chinese government would stop playing the Japan card to build national unity and popular support using blocks of xenophobia and hatred. What they are doing is not healthy.
Maybe that’s because Italy’s war atrocities were 1/10th as atrocious as that of Japan, Germany, and the USSR. What the Allies did to Dresden was worse than any Italian WWII war crime. It’s a matter of degrees. Just as most people are able to distinguish between stealing a candy bar and robbing a bank. Sure, it’s the same crime - theft - but the matter of degree is much different. Mussolini was a bastard but nowhere in the same league of evil as Hitler, Stalin, or the Japanese military.
Like I said, matters of degree are important to consider. Every great and powerful nation has become large and strong by going through some period of imperialism. So the Japanese had a point that Europeans and Americans were being hypocritical, as they had already won their own empires. But the Japanese took empire building to a barbaric extreme. Sure, plenty of atrocities were committed in the name of the British Empire, but nothing approaching the sheer scale and evil barbarism of the Rape of Nanjing. Like I said, it’s the difference between assualt & battery and going on a psychopathic serial killing spree. You might say, “Ah, it’s all violence, it’s all equally bad,” but I think most people can see the difference.