For those who wonder why Japan just can't apologize to satisfy its Asian neighbors. But this excerpt will surely upset some:
So it’s all Japan’s fault?
No, the Koreans and the Chinese bear a large share of the blame. With the Koreans, there has been an unwillingness to help the Japanese find ways of reconciling when the Japanese have tried to do so. This was most apparent with the Asian Women's Fund, which the Korean government did not support and in fact subverted by establishing a separate, rival support system for the former comfort women. This has been made worse by the tendency of Korean politicians to score cheap points by very publicly taking out their frustrations with Japan -- as when President Lee Myung-bak went to Dokdo/Takeshima recently
V/R
Dave
December 11, 2012
Japanese leaders in the dock at the Tokyo War Tribunals in 1946. Author Thomas U. Berger says Japan is less repentant than Germany for wartime transgressions -- but it’s not that simple.
Why Japan Is Still Not Sorry Enough
By Kirk Spitzer
TOKYO – Keen observers know that Japan’s ugly territorial disputes with its neighbors aren’t really about fishing grounds or oil and gas reserves or ancient historical claims. What they’re about is that the Japanese still – still – won’t admit they did anything wrong during the Second World War or during their long colonial rule in Asia.
That’s how the neighbors see it, anyway. And it explains why arguments with China and South Korea over largely worthless islands have turned into volatile confrontations. Armed ships are conducting rival patrols around the Senkaku (Diaoyu) Islands, which Japan controls but are claimed by China; Japan and South Korea are in a bitter feud over Dokdo (Takeshima) Island, which South Korea controls but which Japan claims.
Now comes author Thomas U. Berger to explain why Japan is viewed as so unrepentant. Some 20 million people died and millions more were subjugated and oppressed during Japan’s half-century of war and colonial expansion, which ended in 1945.
In a new book, War, Guilt and Politics After World War II, Berger says a complex web of culture, politics, geography and shifting notions of justice have made it more difficult for the Japanese to apologize for past transgressions than other societies. That’s particularly true compared to Germany, whose crimes outstripped even those of Japan, but which has largely reconciled with former victims.
(Continued at the link below)
Judge Pal of India summed up the Tokyo Trials in 1948. Many Japanese Class B defendants were "fiendish and devilish" and about 800 of them got the rope for rape, murder, and torture with justification. (He also said that Naking was a real atrocity but that the number of of murders and rapes at Nanking was inflated for propaganda purposes) The Class A defendants were scapegoats for Hirohito, who had approved the attack on Pearl Harbor to save his throne, but also for the U.S. Communist agent Harry Dexter White, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury identified as a Soviet agent by the FBI in 1950, who deliberately provoked a war between the United States and Japan in the interests of Communism, and the anti-Communist dupes he befuddled. Teddy Roosevelt handed Korean to Japan on a silver platter (Taft-Katsura Agreement of 1905) and recognized Japanese control of Manchuria (Root-Tarahira Agreement of 1908. The Anglo-Amerocan goal was to keep Russian out of British India and keep China open to all Western nations withouit committing large numbers of troops and ships. (American National Biography, Oxford University Press, Had Harry Dexter White not oulled strings to undermine an anti-Communist nation explicitly developed by Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, Peral Harbor would not have happened and Hiroshima and Nagsaki would be recognized as war crimes, just as Nanking was a war crime. Read "Operation Snow: How A Soviet Mole IN FDR's White House Triggered Pearl Harbor."
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