Japanese history textbooks used in schools are famous for whitewashing history. In particular there are three events they downplay or just plain leave out:
- The Nanjing Massacre (1937), also known as the Rape of Nanking or, as some Japanese textbooks call it, The Nanjing Incident. In this Incident the Japanese wiped out 300,000 Chinese, raping, even gang raping, many. This went way beyond any military necessity.
- Comfort women (1930s-1940s) – some 200,000 women the Japanese forced to become sex slaves for the army. They did this in Korea, Taiwan, Indonesia, Burma, etc. Japan apologized in 1993, but some want to take it back, denying there ever were sex slaves.
- The forced mass suicide of Okinawa (1945) – the Japanese army forced many Okinawans to kill themselves. A fourth of Okinawans died in the Battle of Okinawa.
There are other touches: invasion is called an “advance” into a country, the Korean independence movement is called an “uprising”, the passive voice is used to avoid pointing fingers at Japan, etc.
All this is made still worse by how the Japanese teach history. Like the Americans they:
- Teach names and dates – they are easy to test for. Students learn them so they can get into a good high school or university, but are left with a weak understanding of Japan’s place in the world.
- Push patriotism – the government wants students to be proud of their country.
- Seem to barely cover recent history – so that students will know more about samurai times, for example, than about the Second World War.
The Ministry of Education approves which textbooks schools can use. There are about seven or eight they approve for Year 8 (13 to 15-year-olds) that schools can pick from. They cover a range: some will, for example, talk about the Nanjing Massacre, some will put it in the footnotes, some will deny it ever took place.
While Japan looks at itself through rose-coloured glasses, its neighbours do not. They have no reason to. If anything, Japan’s whitewashing brings more attention in China and South Korea to Japan’s past misdeeds. All this causes the Japanese to misunderstand how they are seen by neighbouring countries.
Within Japan, some on the left want textbooks to be more truthful, while some on the right see that as “masochistic” and “anti-Japanese”. Some even see the Japanese Empire as a good thing: it was freeing Asia from Western powers!
Many countries whitewash their own history. China does it too, like leaving out the Tiananmen Square Massacre and calling the time after Mao’s Great Leap Forward in 1958 the Three Years of Economic Difficulty – leaving out the fact that 30 million died during the Difficulty!
The Japanese case becomes such a big deal because its misdeeds affect other countries and, having lost the war, it cannot cover them up. Had the Japanese Empire won and held onto Korea and China, comfort women and all the rest would have quietly disappeared from the history books.
Sources: BBC, The Economist, New York Times, Tofugu, Kathleen Woods Masalki.
See also:
Interesting Cross Cultural Comparison of how the governing groups of particular nations feels compelled to lie and deny cases of extreme aggression and/or failure.
If Ones looks at ones ownself or the individual the comparisons are quite the same and even more understandable.
We always want to see and remember ourselves at our best ,and repress,forget and deny when we lost our temper,went too far and instances of miserable failure and defeat.
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Wow. Though, it’s not too surprising. History is always modeled in the images of the powerful.
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This is such a coincidence, abagond posting this article.
I was watching the martial arts movie, “IP MAN” during the movie, it covers when japan, occupied china at that time.
I found it so interesting, that i wanted to learn more about why japan, hated china so much, that they wanted to kill them all and take over china.
So after the movie finished, i found a black and white documentary on YouTube and learned what it was all about.
Land, resources and History.
China has more land, than the entire continent of Europe! Being the 4th largest country on the planet, Japan wanted that land.
China has Iron,Tin,Coal and other natural resources, Japan wanted for themselves.
China goes far back as 4,000 years!
They were around, before the pyramids were built, before the fall of the roman empire, before Moses and Jesus Christ.
More than 4,000 years ago, Chinese civilization existed! That’s a lot of history!
This Documentary has 7 parts from 1-7, watch it when you have free time, its very sad to watch innocent chinese people die but its educational.
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Here is what you get from this type of history. Much of the ruling class here families have got dirty hands. Which means that many of the ruling class would have to say their father or grandfathers were dirty. This is a reason given to why they go to the mass grave where triple A war criminals are buried. Plus if China says something it always as welcolmed as the yellow dust from China (Chinese sand blows here every year with pollutants).
When I first came here and worked in the Junior High School I had to sit through a movie about World War II where the Americans were bombing and some girl died in a cave. It didn’t show the Japanese in a good light either but trust me it was the last place I wanted to be sitting. Many Japanese people wonder why Americans don’t apologize for the bombs especially the nuclear ones.
According to a lot of older guys here, (I swear we need a time machine or at least a time viewer) Many of the comfort women were supposedly sold off by their parents to the Japanese army and according to a number of people here the Koreans in the Japanese military commited the worst of the crimes against these women.
I have personally heard from many people that Nanking happened but not like the Chinese say. Or that it never happen and the description in the Rape of Nanking was more indicative of Chinese behavior not Japanese behavior. We should all be careful because those islands that spark up in-fighting in Asia is one of the reasons for American military build up in this area.
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I recently watched the film City of Life and Death, which is about the Nanjing massacre. In February, I also came across an article about an American teacher (of Japanese descent) who tried to speak about racism in Japan and got quite the backlash:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/02/22/american-teacher-in-japan-under-fire-for-lessons-on-japans-history-of-discrimination/
Think it is quite appropriate to post here since it is to do with people being so chauvinistic, any criticism of their country (however accurate) is seen as an attack.
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@ Kiwi
Thank you for the correction! I did a reverse search on the image before I posted it but all I got for it was the Rape of Nanking.
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I like too state that most regular Japanese military at the time were afraid of those in charge. As reported in many of those people in prison camps the Japanese treated their own pretty bad also. It is a case of the privilege class working their supriority.
Here are some things I have encountered while being here, the American President knew the attack on Pearl Harbor was going to happen. He let it happen so he could entire the war.
A little true but gruesome history point to this is the US post office asked the military to stop sending severed heads of Japanese through the mail. Most of the military guys that were trying to steer Japan away from doing so much harm were killed. In Japan there was a Japanese guy that tried hard to save the Jewish population in Japan but his superiors demoted him.
Most countries around here blame America for allowing Japan to cover up her history.
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I wonder how some of this historic barbarism would play into today’s “Model Minority” stereotype campaign? Notice that “race realists” never seem to acknowledge these atrocities as part of their theory of the civilized.
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Dear God, who cares where the picture is from. How the hell does anyone justify doing something like that to other human beings? We are a fucked up planet.
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The planet is innocent, its the higher life forms, that is the problem.
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^ no it’s not! The planet broke my $200 picture frame in the Northridge earthquake! The planet still owes me $200!!
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How dare you, blame mother earth? She’s just a rock, floating on her axis of 23.4° and that’s 3,959 miles in circumference. You should be ashamed of yourself to put all the blame on Terra. ( Terra ) Earth’s Latin name. ^_^
I love to watch documentaries on all the planets and our closest star, the sun.
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Also we only take family photos during the happy events, not during the arguments.
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[…] Japanese history textbooks used in schools are famous for whitewashing history. In particular there are three events they downplay or just plain leave out: The Nanjing Massacre (1937), also known a… […]
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Truly bizarre Kiwi.
Damned if you do and damned if you don’t
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My grandmother was a young woman with a baby during WWII. And she told me the story of her best friend at the time. She was caught and forced to be a “comfort woman”. She didn’t last long because she killed herself rather than continue to be subjected to raped and beaten multiple times a day. My grandmother only knew about her friend because a handful of the surviving comfort women told her what happened. Japanese history can be revised, certainly, but just like white history, we know the truth. You can only hide the truth for so long.
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My mother had a coworker in the 1980s and 1990s who was born in the Philippines in the early 30s (guessing around 1930-1932). She never married and never let a man touch her. She screamed and squealed whenever a male coworker even got close to her.
Later on, my mother learned that she was raped by Japanese soldiers when she was 12-13. This is one of the few I have met personally that was raped by the Japanese.
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@ jefe:
I cannot blame the poor woman. Can you imagine? Being raped countless times a day. Having objects viciously rammed into your nether regions and possibly not surviving. Being beaten within an inch of your life because you tried to refuse sex or were menstruating heavily. In a way, my grandmother’s best friend did herself a favor by doing herself in.
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Oh my God!!! That photo with the heads is insane! If you’re going to kill some guys, just do and bury them already, there is no reason to parade around with artifacts and pose with heads. C’mon!
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Lord!!! Is that photo real? My God! That is just inhumane. That is just animalistic. i want to read more about this on my own. That is just horrific.
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Absolutely. Even if you cut off heads, why would you pose with them in a photo? War is war and all, but like I said above; just kill who you’re going to kill and don’t mess around with corpses.
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The perpetrators of this crime need to be made to remember their awful deed. This is a crime against humanity. They need to be ashamed. No human being deserved that.
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Then, I read about the comfort women. My heart broke for them. These por women were tortured and made sex slaves. Their bodies and psyches damaged forever. And then forced to be quiet about what was done to them. But in war women are unfortunately abused globally.
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*poor women* typos.
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@mary burrell
oh contarre ,it is very human and we are animals ,it what we here hide and pay those with a talent for it to pretend to it for our entertainment as well as the wealth which allows we here to live ever so comfortablly even as we so unfairly share it amongst us.
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Excellent point Mbeti. It is that way indeed.
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@KoT
I think you might be onto something there.
If many countries in Asia think America is in bed with Japan, then they may think the USA tacitly overlooks all the atrocities they committed.
But USA did suffer from Pearl Harbor and the Bataan Death March, but I guess they feel that if they won the war, they can overlook all the other atrocities, esp. if they were committed against non-Americans or non-white people.
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@ Jefe, I agree with you but America has been messing with Japan since Matthew Perry or Commadore Perry came a knocking.
The States are very tied to modern Japan. One of the reason Onsens here are split up between male and female is because of American Puritan issues that the Japanese have adopted. Before it was not split by gender but by class.
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When I was a child I was a huge fan of Kung Fu movies, especially Bruce Lee. After a while I began to notice the enmity between Chinese and Japanese people in the films and always wondered about it.
It wasn’t until I saw Bruce Lee’s Chinese Connection and the sign he was staring at in the movie where no dogs or Chinese were allowed that I started to get some idea that a major event had occurred among these two peoples and that I’d learned nothing at all about it. I think I was about 12 or 13 years old.
So I did a little bit of research. I went to the library and pulled out a few books about WWII and that’s when I found about about the atrocities japan committed during the war, including what one book called The Rape Of Nanking.
I am a huge fan of a lot of Japanese culture and always have been but the knowledge of what the Japanese did during the war has colored everything else I’ve ever learned about Japan
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lkeke35
Check out the documentary, i posted in this thread, earlier in the threads.
It gives you the whole background on what was done to china and why.
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@ Jefe, I do believe that America thought it had a right to Japan. That is why we basically wrote their constitution. It colors the problems we are having with Okinawa. It was a horrible thing they did to their neighbors. One of the biggest problems is that it is said that Japan paid money to at least the South Korean government to pay to help those former comfort women out but the government used the money to build South Korea up. This is always touted when this issue comes up. One need only to go to the Japanese Times or even JapanToday and search through articles on this.
I like Japan or I wouldn’t live here but if this area wants to be a powerhouse Japan, China, and Korea have to work together and this is a huge stumbling block along with contested islands. Until they can work together it will be slow for Asia to enjoy a continental financial power house.
I hope they do because if it happens maybe just maybe we can stop having these expensive military bases all around this region. Although I feel sorry for Guam because we’ll just concentrate them there.
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@Sondis
That video was done during WWII when the US was at war with Japan and is a bit one-sided itself. I don’t buy that China has been a purely peaceful “nation” for over 4000 years. It grew itself by expansion and assimilation and is an empire like any place else. It is just that it is on the Asian mainland, so there is plenty of room to do that. Japan expanded over a group of islands and ran out of room.
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If I walk up to anyone here and mush you in your face, how many will pull out a cell phone to call the police and how many will beat me within an inch of my life? It takes very little provocation to bring out a severely violent reaction in human beings, so how can these atrocities surprise anyone. Many young men lust for physical confrontation to test their manhood and fighting prowess. I see in in my city, in bars, on TV and I read about it. Young men, and men in particular, are aggressive. When you can channel that aggression into an act of warfare, then events like the The Nanjing Massacre can happen.
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I finished watching the video series posted by Sondis.
While there are elements of truth in it, particularly the sequence of events in the timeline leading to Pearl Harbor, I can’t help but think that it is basically a war propaganda film aimed at US audiences so that they would not feel any remorse about the 120,000 fellow citizens they interned behind barbed wire, nor the bombs that they would drop the following year in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Well, we have to admit that making allies with China helped to nullify the Chinese Exclusion Act in the USA in 1943.
First China was the ally against the Japanese. A decade later, the Japanese would be an ally against communism and China would get shut off.
The video completely missed the original Japanese premise – to rid Asia of Western imperialism, and to replace them with themselves.
And China’s natural resources can no longer support its population and economy. Africa, Indonesia, Australia, even Brazil – YUMMY.
It is funny listening to the music alternate between the national anthem for the PRC and the national anthem for the ROC. Feels like a time warp.
One thing that I think the video got right — Chinese (at least the Han) had a strong sense of ethnic and cultural heritage, but a weak sense of nationhood. Nothing arouses nationalistic sentiment better than vilification of Japanese and any perceived encroachment on sovereign territory. I wonder if it is better to keep the Senkaku / Diaoyu islands in a perpetual state of limbo just to keep Chinese nationalistic sentiment high.
But this Han ethnic pride makes it too easy to vilify China’s ethnic minorities, eg, the Uyghur and the Tibetans. I hear Han Chinese not only branding Uyghurs as terrorists, but wishing that they could be banished back to Turkey or something. But, it looks like it was more the case of the Han encroaching on them, not the other way around. Even more ludicrous (at least to me) is the notion that the Dalai Lama has been planning for decades abroad to carve out Tibet from the rest of China.
I can see why they like to promote race-based nationalism, but it makes me feel so uncomfortable.
I could see why China would love to let a rogue nation-state like North Korea run away with threatening Japan (or indirectly, via the USA). They can maintain the heightened sense of terror without getting their hands dirty.
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The “March of the Volunteers” was not yet the National Anthem in 1944, as the PRC was not “liberated” until 1949. At the time, it was a song of Chinese solidarity in fighting the Japanese. I suppose the US War department did not know at the time that it would be the future National Anthem.
Curious that it was chosen to be the National Anthem when it was conceived to rally against Japanese. It has retained this main theme.
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“I wonder how some of this historic barbarism would play into today’s “Model Minority” stereotype campaign? Notice that “race realists” never seem to acknowledge these atrocities as part of their theory of the civilized.”
I can’t speak on ‘racial realism’ (don’t really read things like that), but I can say that civilization is often used as a pretense to justify the slaughter of indigenous people all over the world. The constructs of ‘civilized’ and ‘uncivilized’ serve to show who is dominant and who is dominated. So to the lovers of domination, mass murders and genocides are merely ensuring that their ideal society can progress, even if it leaves corpses all over. It’s quite disgusting.
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Thanks for calling it a campaign.
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@Yomurigiant, Hanshin Tigers all the way. I agree that civilization often does subjugate but I think part of the human stain would be that war is a part of us. Like competing ant tribes we do form our own groups. I just wish that Japan, Korea, and China could come to an agreement. That this text book, visiting grave, island disputes of all these countries because Japan is not alone in most of these areas.
Truely Korea is Japans closest neighbor. If they could find away for more cooperation than this area could be economically more solid. Not just for those three countries but most of Asia.
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[…] Japanese history textbooks used in schools are famous for whitewashing history. In particular there are three events they downplay or just plain leave out: The Nanjing Massacre (1937), also known a… […]
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^ “I just wish that Japan, Korea, and China could come to an agreement. ”
How do we do this?
First of all, I suggest that we make all the disputed islands protected marine reserves, ie, NO FISHING and no oil drilling. Then they will all “co-operate” to make sure the other party abides by the rules and will have international support all the way.
They could allow marine scientists and scuba divers to visit (ideally on liveaboard vessels), but no resource is to be taken.
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At Jefe
most of the fishermen would not listen they will claim their great-great-grandparents fished there. They already do fish in those areas with limited problems. It is the whole problem of politicians visiting those islands that is when it becomes blown up.
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http://edition.cnn.com/2013/05/27/world/asia/japan-us-hashimoto-apology/index.html
The mayor of Osaka was 100% serious when he stated this past week
– the adult entertainment business in Japan should be “utilized more” by U.S. personnel.
– “anyone would understand” the role of “comfort women” when soldiers were risking their lives and you wanted to give them “a rest.”
– disputed that the Japanese government during the war had organized the trafficking of comfort women.
– ‘the armed forces of nations in the world’ seemed to have needed women ‘during the past wars,'”
The CNN article also says
Can anyone vouch on how much the history of Comfort women by the Japanese military in past wars is now covered in high school textbooks in Japan? I suppose they have been waiting for them all to die off so that they can erase the history.
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[…] Japanese history textbooks used in schools are famous for whitewashing history. In particular there are three events they downplay or just plain leave out: The Nanjing Massacre (1937), also known a… […]
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[…] of the Japanese government, an apology is not worth explosive reactions from these groups. The state’s advocacy of school textbooks that downplay and omit parts of Japanese imperial history does not help either. The prevailing […]
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There was a cultural genocide in Okinawa. The original language became extinct, it survived only as spoken by the okinawans that emigrated to Brazil [and there was also an attempted cultural genocide during the fascist government of Getulio Vargas 1930-1945] and Hawaii.
https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%ADngua_oquinauana
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