Al Jazeera America is shutting down

[Israel_B]

Nah, already this has gone too far off topic and anyway the best articles I know are in Japanese so of no use to him or most anyone in this thread.

[metsuken]

@Israel_B

So long story short you don’t actually know what the textbooks say or what Japanese people think.

Yeah, how silly of me to trust the authority of scholars who study this sort of thing for a living.

@Israel_B

Having lived in Japan for the last 18-19 years and being able to read the language and talk to people, let me offer you some anecdotal comments in return for yours.

Oh, so you automatically know better than those scholars because you’ve lived there.

@Israel_B

There are many shades of opinion amongst the people and an amazing range of books on the subject of the pacific war available. The high school texts which garnered so much attention cover the war in at least as much detail as those in the US or the UK.

So many shades that they elect right-wing nationalists that glorify the Japanese Empire, ignore war crimes, and continue to support the whitewashing of Japanese history, at times even getting directly involved in it themselves. Shintaro Ishihara actually wrote his own “history book” detailing how the Rape of Nanking is an elaborate conspiracy.

By the way, you’re implying that an even-handed or moderate historical view is popular in Japan. If that is true, why is it that the MEXT is still pushing for a revisionist narrative, even overruling the wishes of local governments?

@Israel_B

You will probably get lots of likes for your post as you have referred to popular opinions. It’s not so popular to say things like “non citizens don’t get voting rights in most countries”. Fact is by definition if someone is Zainichi they refuse to get citizenship. Legally they are “special permanent residents”, which is like US green cards which are inheritable, except it’s easier for an SPR to get citizenship. I’m a regular permanent resident but it would take more for me to get citizenship than an SPR.

I had to take a deep breath before responding to this, because if you said this to my face, I would’ve probably punched it. The overwhelming amount of privilege seeping out of this post makes me sick.

By the way, thank you for completely invalidating the racism that my Zainichi friends have suffered and ignoring the historical context of their oppression.

None of what you said justifies the parameters of Japanese citizenship except “that’s just the way it is” and it simultaneously ignores the injustice of denying political office to someone purely on the basis of ethnicity. Basically, in the eyes of the Japanese government, it does not matter if a Zainichi is born in Japan, raised in Japan, is from a family that’s lived in Japan for five generations, and is for all intents and purposes, Japanese. As long as they cling on to that small sliver of Korean culture and keep their ancestral Korean names, this forever marks them as a foreigner and alien.

The only way to have any say in the electoral process then is for these people to forsake their Korean identity and formally adopt a Japanese name, thus becoming Japanese. Clearly, you don’t find it problematic that Zainichi Koreans are pressured to give up their ethnic identity to a government that still refuses to acknowledge war crime’s against their old country and cave in to the rampant racism throughout the islands. It also conjures up images of the soshi-kamei. To this day, I have family members that speak better Japanese than Korean because of imperialism, but hey, fuck them, right?

@Israel_B

It’s also unpopular to say Abe is the best PM here is n decades but it’s true, all that one sided Wiki stuff not withstanding. For what it’s worth a few weeks ago Abe & president Park announced a deal to close the comfort women issue. Not to mention all the other foreign relations efforts as well as domestic policies to get wages up and increase women in management, etc. Still people will complain, that’s life

And it turned out, once again, to be complete bullshit. Basically, the Japanese government was trying to pay hush money. This wasn’t a move of, “What we did was fucked up. We will do everything in our power to make it right by teaching what actually happened in our schools.” It was, “Here’s some money. Please stop harshing our vibe and telling the world that we’re unapologetic assholes.”

@Israel_B

Sorry for the separate reply but they s here what you said is so far off to hat it isn’t even wrong. It’s a false analogy to compare the war in east Asia to the holocaust. Not even the PRC goes that far when they do their corpse accounting.

L O L

Anywhere from 3-10 million civilians were slaughtered by the IJA. The only reason the window of deaths is so large is because the revisionist viewpoint in Japanese academia is so popular. You’d never find a German historian daring to downplay the Holocaust.

You know what, you’re right. Maybe it is a false analogy. In some ways, Japanese war crimes were far more horrid than the terror of the Holocaust. The Japanese court martials after the war even make some former Nazi officials white in the face.

Infecting thousands of people with bubonic plague? Raping women and then infecting both the women and the fetuses with various diseases? Testing grenades, flamethrowers, and chemical weapons on live civilian subjects? Placing test subjects in high-pressure chambers and dosing them with lethal amounts of X-rays to study how long it took them to die?

Yeah, let’s totally downplay all of that.

@Israel_B

He provided interesting anecdotes and linked to incredibly one sided Wikipedia articles.

I linked to studies done by actual, peer-reviewed professors. You offered nothing.

@Israel_B

Nah, already this has gone too far off topic and anyway the best articles I know are in Japanese so of no use to him or most anyone in this thread.

How convenient that the articles you have on hand are Japanese and cannot be peer-reviewed, as if academics in a country with a revisionist government would be the highest source of authority regarding said revisionism.

I’ve seen some of your posts around and didn’t understand why you pulled out the victim card so much because I thought the stuff you posted was pretty good. Now I see in context why you would be considered insufferable around here.