In Textbook Fight, Japan Leaders Seek to Recast History | Hacker News Reader

In Textbook Fight, Japan Leaders Seek to Recast History

nytimes.com

31 pointsdanso14 comments

Does anyone really think the textbooks in the US are showing the barbarism our country is displaying right now - let alone 70 years ago?

Civilian casualty rates in Iraq and Afghanistan (in the 7 figures) would bring war crimes indictments to the leaders of other nations. Indiscriminate drone attacks in multiple countries have killed hundreds of children. You can call everyone a terrorist but I think its fair to say being under 12 years old should exempt you from being murdered.

Let me make my point more crisp if it isn't clear - the worse war crimes committed by the US, French, British, Russian...etc are not Chapter 1 in the textbooks of their own nations.

I wonder from which textbooks you get your "facts"?

>> casualty rates in Iraq and Afghanistan (in the 7 figures)

I assume that is from the Lancet reports? Highly doubtful, see the reality check from the Iraq Body count [1] (never answered by the Lancet authors afaik). At a minimum, it would require a big conspiracy still controlling information from morgues in the larger hospitals -- since any large hospital would see a significant fraction of the official deaths for the whole Iraq, if the Lancet papers are correct! And a conspiracy to (continue to) hide the makers of prostheses for all the hidden maimed. And so on.

Now we can say, because of the later leaks of internal US military documents, that if there were large conspiracies like these to do the needed coverups, it would be known.

[2] is quite fun, btw.

Etc, etc.

(And don't even start explaining the logic of blaming a country U for what people did to civilians, while also trying to kill soldiers from U... But sure, I can agree that the Bush administration was criminally incompetent.)

[1] http://www.iraqbodycount.org/analysis/beyond/reality-checks/

[2] http://lancetiraq.blogspot.ro/2010/03/dubious-polling.html

Edit: I answered a Karma 77 account, sigh. I need to stay out of the religious hate wars people use these accounts for. [It was upvoted later, by himself? :-) ]

Edit 2: But to support your point re Japan, US sources doesn't seem to mention much that in Nagasaki they nuked the biggest church in Asia? (The remains of the church is moved closer to the point below where the bomb exploded.)

more importantly, americans need to realize that the elite have recast american history as it relates to white slavery, black slavery, the civil war, the immigration moratorium of the 1920s, jim crow, hitler, the civil rights movement, the constitution, and the anti-smoking movement.

The USA is built on false history as pushed via the educational system.

To paraphrase Orwell from his novel 1984, they who control the past control the future.

"Textbooks would also be required to state that there is still a dispute about whether the Japanese Army played a direct role in forcing so-called comfort women from Korea and elsewhere to provide sex to its soldiers."

This is insane.

This happens in the US to some extent; Texas schoolboards want the history of slavery toned down, so the Big Four textbook companies just cater to them and the whole country suffers

That is just insane. I still don't understand why some Japanese leaders can't seem to accept all the atrocities of the Japanese army during that period, and just, you know, move on!

Germany and its leaders have been able to do so and I would believe the majority of Japanese are pacifists but they seem worried about China's rise thanks to hyper-coverage of frictions with China in the media. All this greatly plays in favour of Abe's revisionist ambitions.

That is an appalling move from Abe's cabinet and I hope they will be stopped.

Yes, my wife is Japanese, but she doesn't seem to know much about the Japanese massacres of Nanking. On the other hand, the Japanese learn at school about the plight of the Japanese who were in China during the Second World War but couldn't go back to Japan when it lost the war.

Why is this not taught in school? It is important that descendants of any people be able to look back at actions from their predecessors in order to acquire "historical experience" and not repeat the mistakes of their ancestors.

Has your wife looked into the Nanking massacre since then?

I really like Japan (I am currently learning Japanese and would love to live there for 1-2 years from 2015) but some aspects of the society or the politics just make me cringe.

I don't know exactly what the Japanese schools are teaching, and the Japanese crimes of war are not a frequent topic of conversation between us, but the couple of times this was brought on she always says something in the lines of "I didn't know..." or "In Japan we don't speak about that", and she hasn't bothered to look at the history of the Nanking massacre.

> I really like Japan (I am currently learning Japanese and would love to live there for 1-2 years from 2015) but some aspects of the society or the politics just make me cringe.

I am in the exact situation as you, except that we don't know if we want to move to Japan because of the radioactivity.

Somebody should tell Japan's Leaders that you're only allowed to rewrite history when you win the war.

Peter Lee has been covering Abe's efforts to make Japan a regional military power pretty well. His latest post: http://chinamatters.blogspot.com/2013/12/yasakuni-blues-unde...

Based on that, he's not exactly an unbiased source...

Of course not. There's no such thing as an unbiased source in geopolitics.

All countries do this. Most Australians have no idea about their holocaust. Most Brits have no idea what they did to the Irish and other 'lower races'. Most members of the Commonwealth have no idea the extent to which their nations committed crimes against humanity (racial cleansing) in a lot of the regions they call home today.

It should come as no surprise that a nation built on its national identity should want to whitewash history. All the other nations - America included - have been doing it for centuries ..

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