Whoi knew a bunch of Japanese textbook could cause such trouble?

[Drake Tungsten]

Japanese music scares me

You're not alone (and I didn't even check out the links)...

[Combat Ingrid]

Originally posted by Boshko

http://aog.2y.net/samples/02-AudioTrack%2002.mp3

http://aog.2y.net/samples/06-AudioTrack%2006.mp3

http://aog.2y.net/samples/07-AudioTrack%2007.mp3

[Ned]

One begins to understand the Japanese mentality that was on display at Nanking when one sees this: http://www.netflix.com/MovieDisplay?...53&trkid=64596

This movie consists in its entirety of three men torturing a woman to death for sport.

[Tingkai]

Originally posted by Drake Tungsten

Ienaga Saburo fought against Japanese censors for 30 years, achieving a partial victory in 1997.

Exactly, which is why the Japanese authorities won't censor this conservative history book now.

The 1997 court ruling said the government had the right to determine which textbooks get approved and the right to censor textbooks that contained misleading or wrong information.

The new textbook clearly distorts history and should not have been approved for that reason.

[Drake Tungsten]

The 1997 court ruling said the government had the right to determine which textbooks get approved and the right to censor textbooks that contained misleading or wrong information.

The textbook you want them to censor doesn't contain any misleading or wrong information. How would they be justified in censoring it based on the guidelines set down by the courts in the Ienaga case?

[Kidlicious]

Originally posted by Tingkai
Economics? How do the protesters benefit economically by voicing complaints about the cover up?

Those little tiny islands those both China and Japan claim. This is just a cheap intimidation plow.

And it seems your solution is to forget the truth. You support the re-writing of history to cover up crimes?

No one is covering up crimes. Everyone writes history with a personal bias. That's the nature of history books.

What I'm concerned with is nationalist hysteria spreading and ending up in violence.

Do you not see the hypocrisy in condeming China for covering up its crimes while then saying it is okay for Japan to do the same thing.

Again. Japan is not covering up it's crimes. The whole world knows about them. The thing to learn about those crimes is to prevent extreme nationalism and racial hatred from spreading to critical levels.

Just as China must acknowledge things like Tianamien Square, so must the Japanese acknowledge the numerous slaughters it committed during WWII.

They just need to not commit those atrocities in the future. I don't think any reasonable person thinks that there is any significant danger of Japan reliving it's past. China, on the other hand, people are concerned about, because of the present situation there.

[DaShi]

Originally posted by Kidicious
The thing to learn about those crimes is to prevent extreme nationalism and racial hatred from spreading to critical levels.

I like this point a lot. This is truly what is important about remembering the past, not just of your own country but of others as well. The last century alone has shown us the horrors of nationalism. It's disturbing that these lessons are being forgotten in both the East and the West. But nationalistic furor against another race is extremely troublesome, and China seems to be breeding it at home and abroad. It is ironic that the Chinese had nationalistic riots against nationalism.

[Ned]

Originally posted by DaShi


I like this point a lot. This is truly what is important about remembering the past, not just of your own country but of others as well. The last century alone has shown us the horrors of nationalism. It's disturbing that these lessons are being forgotten in both the East and the West. But nationalistic furor against another race is extremely troublesome, and China seems to be breeding it at home and abroad. It is ironic that the Chinese had nationalistic riots against nationalism.

This is a joke, is it not. The Chinese often remind us that they have the oldest continuous civilization on Earth. I hardly think the commies are ever going to put a real dent in this sense of national identity.

[Tingkai]

Interesting comments Kidicious. I don't agree, but at least you're interesting and thoughtful. I don't mean to sound patronizing so pls don't take it that way.

Originally posted by Kidicious

Those little tiny islands those both China and Japan claim. This is just a cheap intimidation plow.

The islands in question are owned by South Korea, but Japan is now re-stating their claim, which has inflamed tensions in the region.

Japan also inflamed regional tensions by claiming a sea area (no islands there) which is also claimed by China, but this occurred after the textbook dispute started so it is impossible to say that China started the protests in order to prevent the claim the Japanese had yet to make.

If anything, the Japanese used the textbook dispute to provoke the Chinese and then used the Chinese protests as an excuse for staking a greater claim over the sea area.

Originally posted by Kidicious
No one is covering up crimes. Everyone writes history with a personal bias. That's the nature of history books.

Historical events are not personal opinions. History books contain facts along with opinions backed by facts about why events occurred.

What the Japanese are doing is denying the facts occurred.

The Japanese should be teaching their children the facts, just as the Chinese should be teaching their children the facts. If one side doesn't do that, then this is not an excuse for the other side to lie.

The only way to counter destructive nationalism is to teach people the destruction that it causes. This is why we must never forget the Holocaust, the Nanjing massacre, the price our countries paid for freedom during WWII, the useless deaths of WWI trench warfare, and so on.

Of course the Japanese are covering up the crimes. The textbooks:
- claim the Chinese provoke the Japanese into attacking China.
- avoid mention of the Nanjing massacre and whitewash the death by saying some people happened to be killed during the fighting
- Avoid mentioning comfort women, even though the Japanese government promised 10 years ago that textbook would mention this crime
- no mention of the millions of others civilians executed by Japanese soldiers, yet the textbooks do mention the Japanese civilians killedin American bombing raids
- the Japanese invasions in Asia are presented as a war of liberating people from colonial rule.

Originally posted by Kidicious
What I'm concerned with is nationalist hysteria spreading and ending up in violence.

Then condemn the violence, not the reason why people are protesting.

I agree completely that there is no need for violent protests against the Japanese, but I believe strongly that we must speak out against the lies being spewed by the Japanese government, just as we must protest the Chinese lies about June 4.

Originally posted by Kidicious
Again. Japan is not covering up it's crimes. The whole world knows about them.

Do you know how many Filipinos were murdered in Manila by Japanese troops?

The Nanjing massacre was largely forgotten until Iris Chang wrote about it.

Most Japanese people have not been taught about the crimes their country committed. Most think that their country suffered the most during WWII

Originally posted by Kidicious
They just need to not commit those atrocities in the future. I don't think any reasonable person thinks that there is any significant danger of Japan reliving it's past. China, on the other hand, people are concerned about, because of the present situation there.

Today, Japan is peaceful because its constitution forbids it from having a major military force. But the Japanese are planning on changing their constitution. That raises the threat that the Japanese will repeat the mistakes of the past because they have never been taught about those mistakes.

[Kidlicious]

Originally posted by Tingkai
If anything, the Japanese used the textbook dispute to provoke the Chinese and then used the Chinese protests as an excuse for staking a greater claim over the sea area.

Maybe they did. Maybe they will also use it to stir up some anti-Chinese hatred. You see these kind of protests never help.

Historical events are not personal opinions.

This just isn't true. If you don't like how people write history just write your own history.

Then condemn the violence, not the reason why people are protesting.

I don't concider these protests because Japan isn't a war like nation. I consider these anti-Japanese rallies.

Today, Japan is peaceful because its constitution forbids it from having a major military force. But the Japanese are planning on changing their constitution. That raises the threat that the Japanese will repeat the mistakes of the past because they have never been taught about those mistakes.

I think they were taught pretty well when we nuked them a couple of times.

[Drake Tungsten]

Today, Japan is peaceful because its constitution forbids it from having a major military force. But the Japanese are planning on changing their constitution. That raises the threat that the Japanese will repeat the mistakes of the past because they have never been taught about those mistakes.

There is a country in East Asia that increasingly resembles the miltaristic Japan of the 1930's, but it sure isn't Japan...

[DaShi]

Agreed, know history isn't enough to avoid repeating mistakes. People must understand it as well. At this point, and in the future, the atrocities of Japan should be brought up as reminders of the dangers of nationalistic furor and racism for all countries. Unfornately, the Chinese seem to be too good at copying. And I was worried that China was beginning to look too much like the US.

[Ned]

DaShi, I don't think nationalism was the cause of Japan's attrocities. There was a screw loose in their ethical system that may have been caused by racism. The fanatical Nazi's, the SS, were similarly cruel to those they considered to be less civilized, such as the Slavs, but were respectful of the Brits and Americans they captured. Ditto the Japanese, to an extent. They treated American and Brit captives very well compared to Asian POWs.

[Drake Tungsten]

Good commentary...

China's hardly in a position to lecture Japan

April 22, 2005

YOU could be forgiven for smiling at East Asia's two giants bickering over school textbooks and rocky reefs, over how many apologies add up to an Apology and who should pontificate at the UN on behalf of Asia. Yet China-Japan wrangling, containable for now, could yet explode and make Middle East violence seem like kids throwing stones.

East Asia is the axis of world power, because the US, China, Japan, and Russia intersect here as nowhere else.

Coiled Japan and theatrical China have seldom got on well. War between them in 1894-95, starting over Korea, undermined China's last dynasty and gave Taiwan to Japan. Widespread war again occurred from 1937 to 1945, as Japan's armies sought to put China under Japanese tutelage. Japan's attack doomed Chiang Kai-shek's rule and fuelled Mao Zedong's victory - and Tokyo lost control of Korea as well as Taiwan. Since 1945 only US power has prevented a resurgence of China-Japan rivalry, with all that would mean for Australia and other countries in the region.

Although the issues seem genteel, the China-Japan crisis is not really a surprise. China, buoyed by the world's gushing endorsement of its "rise"', believes it can lecture Japan with impunity. Just at this time Tokyo, thanks to North Korea's craziness, generational change in Japan, China's economic clout, and the flourishing Koizumi-Bush relationship, has forsaken bowing and scraping and become hard-nosed in its foreign policy.

Beijing's gripes with Tokyo are mostly spiritual. Younger Japanese are not willing to kowtow in unending shame for World War II. Japan has an economy three times the size of China's (with 10per cent of China's population), which rankles a Middle Kingdom used, until the 19th century, to being No.1. It judges Japan morally unfit for a permanent seat in the UN Security Council.

Japan says it is graduation time for China. No longer poor and a victim, Beijing is seen to be shamelessly milking the World War II issue for concessionary loans and self-esteem. Many Japanese also see China's anti-Japan rhetoric as calculated political mythology -- and this indeed is the heart of the matter.

China's diplomatic awkwardness in the world is inseparable from its tight political control at home. Apologies, textbooks, uninhabited islands, war memories -- all become painted faces and props in the Beijing opera of the paternalistic Chinese state's cultural and foreign policies. Marxism has mostly lost its hold over Chinese minds. But truth and power emanate from one fount: historically the emperor's court, today the Communist Party. The hold of the Chinese Communist regime over its people depends on belief in the cries and groans of the Beijing opera.

One opera act can give way to a surprising sequel. Folk in the People's Republic were taught to love the Soviet Union and then to hate it. India was esteemed in the 1950s and vilified in the '60s. Vietnam was "as close as lips and teeth" in the '60s yet invaded by Chinese armies in 1979. When Japanese prime minister Kakuei Tanaka tried to apologise directly to Mao for World War II in 1972, Mao brushed him off, saying the "help" provided by Japan's invasion of China made possible the Communist victory in 1949.

The moment's raison d'etat is supreme. Turning on rhetoric, emotion, and government-sanctioned demonstrations is an easy trick. Since political safety valves are lacking in Chinese society, no one knows the relative weight in the anti-Japan demonstrators' motivations among (a) dislike of Japan, (b) doing what supervisors prompt and (c) letting off steam by shouting slogans in the street (normally forbidden in China) that might end up annoying a Chinese government seen as condescending and corrupt.

On textbooks, a projection identification occurs. Dynastic regimes in East Asia all viewed history as the province of state orthodoxy. China and Vietnam, putting Leninist dress on the skeleton of traditional autocracy, still do. Japan and Taiwan, as democracies, do not.

No book of any kind attacking the Communist Party's monopoly of power in China has been published in China in the 56 years of the PRC. Some of the most trenchant books anywhere in the world on Japanese war atrocities have been written, published, and widely read in Japan. Beijing seems to think that because its textbooks jump to government policy, Japan's do too. But they do not. In Japan, unlike in China, there are government-sponsored textbooks as well as independent ones.

The blunt truth is that reasonable Chinese, Japanese, and other scholarly estimates vary widely for Chinese killed by Japan in the Nanjing Massacre of 1937 and in World War II. They also do for Chinese killed by their own Communist government in the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution (no apologies, yet, for these mishaps; what's a million here, 10million there, among comrades?). No one textbook can embody final truth.

The main text for middle-school history in China devotes nine chapters to Japan's aggression against China in the 19th and 20th centuries, but does not mention China's invasion of Japan under the Yuan Dynasty. (Vietnam comes off even worse than Japan. Nothing is said of the Han Dynasty's conquest of Vietnam or of China's 1000-year colonisation of thecountry.)

China has enjoyed a good run in relations with Japan and reaped economic benefit. The very real horror of war is one reason and the skilful political theatre practised by Beijing is another. But the mood in Japan toward China has changed and Beijing may be miscalculating. China will certainly pull back from the brink of a real rupture; it has too much to lose. But it is not certain that Tokyo will lie down and take any more abuse, vandalism, and Chinese distortions of history.

Australia and other friends of China and Japan should talk earnestly to both powers about the crucial role of the Japan-China relationship for peace in East Asia. Maybe there could be a three-way summit, not yet tried, where US, Japanese and Chinese leaders discuss face to face their mutual responsibility for peace in the Korea Peninsula and the Taiwan Strait. With due respect to Europe, Washington has more to talk about with Japan and China than with the members of the European Union.

Ultimately, however, calm management from all quarters will only go so far in steadying Japan-China relations. Japan is a democracy and China is a dictatorship, and while that continues, the root problem is China's political system. Canberra, Washington, and other democratic capitals should tell Beijing that an open society is necessary for history to be viewed steadily and for international business exchanges to succeed.

After former president Jiang Zemin, during a 1998 trip to Japan, gave endless speeches on World War II, the Japanese chief cabinet secretary said in frustration: "Isn't this a finished problem?" But Japan's past transgressions may never be a finished problem while a Leninist-imperial state exists in Beijing.

Ross Terrill, a research associate in East Asian studies at Harvard University, is author of The New Chinese Empire (University of NSW Press, 2003).

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,15043318%255E7583,00.html

China's political system is the root problem.

[Alexander's Horse]

Australian news reports Koizumi has made a big apology at a meeting in Jakarta.