9.18

[NWO]

^^ Some of those demands seem to want to humiliate Japan.

 

[Martian2]

Recently, a White Paper on the Sino-Japanese common history Research (periodic reports) was published. Written by both Chinese and Japanese experts, this report admitted the Nanking Massacre and determined the nature of Sino-Japanese War as an aggressive war.

The historical problem has always been a barrior blocking the two countires from developing friendly relationship.
But recently it seems that the problem might be solved. Rumors that Japanese Prime Minister Hatoyama will visit Nanking, China, and the white paper this time all showed a detente in the bilateral relationship.

Do you think the historical problem will be solved one day? In what way do you think Chinese people will forvige Japanese?
How can Chinese forgive Japanese? - China Political & Defence Forum - Global Times Forum - Discuss China, Discuss the world

Japanese have to decide whether they, as a people, have the integrity and courage to apologize to the Chinese, Korean, Taiwanese, Filipino, Thai, Burmese, Laotian, Cambodian, Malaysian, Singaporean, Indonesian, Western, and POW victims of their inhuman crimes.

Mr. Alistair Urquhart is a former British POW of the Japanese. He is "also an angry man, and my business with Japan is unfinished." Let's hear the story directly from Mr. Urquhart. The newslink contains many videos.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsi...000/8534377.stm

"Page last updated at 08:12 GMT, Thursday, 25 February 2010

The man who refused to die

By Allan Little
Today programme

They came to think of themselves as the forgotten army - the men who endured years of suffering in Japanese Prisoner of War Camps during World War II.

Yet many of the survivors, when they came back, never spoke of what they had seen and suffered. Now, one survivor of the camps has broken his 65-year silence.

Alistair Urquhart, then a 22-year-old Gordon Highlander from Aberdeen, became a prisoner of war without firing a shot.

This is a story of almost unimaginable suffering. The POWs were transported deep into Thailand on rice trucks that were more like steel coffins.

Alistair Urquhart describes the horrific journey into Thailand

He, with hundreds of others, was marched through the jungle to a prison camp. Many died from dehydration and exhaustion on the long march.

They were then put to work on the building of a railway. It involved cutting a path through a sheer stone cliff face the men came to call Hellfire Pass.

Inside 'the black hole'

The men survived on a few handfuls of rice a day. Many succumbed to disease - cholera, beriberi, tropical ulcers. Their weight fell to five or six stone. Beatings were routine.

In the 1957 film Bridge on the River Kwei the men whistle Colonel Bogie and the officers valiantly defy their Japanese guards.

Alistair Urquhart says it was not so. The film sanitises the depths to which the men sank on the building of the infamous railway bridge.

For years he went barefoot and naked except for a simple loin cloth. After another death march through the jungle, Alastair Urquhart was taken back to Singapore and, with 400 other men, loaded into the hold of a cargo ship.

There was standing room only. It was airless, fetid, the heat baking. Many died here too.

Surviving the cargo hold

The ship did sink, torpedoed at sea by an US submarine.

'I went up like a champagne cork'

He spent five days and night alone on a barge. By the time he was picked up by a Japanese whaling ship, he was dehydrated, hallucinating and close to death.

He ended up in a camp in mainland Japan. He was there when the war ended. But his prison camp was a few miles from the city of Nagasaki.

The blast of hot air from the bomb that fell on August 9th knocked him off his feet. Within days he was on his way home.

He arrived in Aberdeen in November. For years he'd dreamt of being re-united with his family. When, finally, he was, they scarcely recognised each other.

Those who returned came home to a country that did not understand what they had endured, and which, for the most part, did not want to know.

Like many of his generation, Alistair Urquhart didn't speak about his experience for 60 years. His wife died after 46 years of marriage without knowing any of it.

I am breaking my silence now, he writes in his book, to bear witness. I am a lucky man, but I am also an angry man, and my business with Japan is unfinished.

Germany has atoned. Young Germans know of their nation's dreadful crimes. But young Japanese are taught nothing of their nation's guilt.

Alistair Urquhart's book, The Forgotten Highlander: One Man's Incredible Story Of Survival During The War In The Far East, is published by Little, Brown."

 

[SBD-3]

false flag??, will i be other than pakistani, n i live in pakistan and am visiting pakistani forum

Just because you have a Pakistani flag and Karachi as your city, doesn't mean you are Pakistani. We have a lot of ******s (guess who) doing the same with UN , UK , German, Swiss, Malta and Pakistani flag as well

 

[Martian2]

^^ Some of those demands seem to want to humiliate Japan.

I don't see how you can reach that conclusion. The list of minimum requirements is quite mild. The Germans have repented and repaid 1,000 times more than the Japanese.

Berlin Holocaust Memorial

 

[NWO]

I don't see how you can reach that conclusion. The list of minimum requirements is quite mild. The Germans have repented and repaid 1,000 times more than the Japanese.

Berlin Holocaust Memorial

I'm just saying that its been 70 years; Japan has apologized. List of war apology statements issued by Japan - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

But I was just reading the crimes committed by Japan, which probably surpassed Germany, and all the memorials/reparations paid by Germany. Although reparations may not be useful now, they still should build a memorial or something. So, you do have a good point that the Japanese need to do at least a bit more.

 

[Brotherhood]

Hopefully people will understand 9. 18 memorial day is a very sad and sensitive issue to us, please be consider. I don't see its a right time and right place for any further debating.

 

[Martian2]

I'm just saying that its been 70 years; Japan has apologized. List of war apology statements issued by Japan - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

But I was just reading the crimes committed by Japan, which probably surpassed Germany, and all the memorials/reparations paid by Germany. Although reparations may not be useful now, they still should build a memorial or something. So, you do have a good point that the Japanese need to do at least a bit more.

You will have to forgive me if I don't care about being overly sensitive to the feelings of the Japanese. There are 20 million dead Chinese CIVILIANS. The Japanese beheaded men, women, and children.

They raped and pillaged their way through China. Millions of Chinese families are missing dear loved ones because of Japanese war crimes and atrocities during World War II. The Japanese conducted murderous biological experiments on Chinese civilians.

And you're concerned that I might humiliate the Japanese a little bit? Give me a break. Which world are you living in? The Japanese have the blood of twenty million Chinese on their hands and you're worried that I'm not being nice enough to them? You're delusional.

----------

Brotherhood, you're right. I'm finished with the troll.

 

[xukxuk]

we should not forget this history
God bless to those who has been killed by japanese in wwII
God punish those criminals and seal their soul in hell forever

 

[SBD-3]

While reading somewhere,I happened to pass by an interesting fact that after the acceptance of defeat by Japanese Emperor, a secret message was sent to Japanese embassies (which US crpytologists weren't able to catch and decrypt).The message was an order to start portraying Japan as victim of WWII, the embassies followed it an it was preached so rigously to not only the world but also to Japanese people themselves that they still think of themselves as the victims rather than the aggressors of WWII. here is another article on the issue

Mistaken Memories

The Wages of Guilt, Ian Buruma, Jonathan Cape, $25.00 hbk.

"The same distinction [that Ruth Benedict makes in her work The Chrysanthemum and the Sword] between guilt and shame [cultures] underlies Ian Buruma's The Wages of Guilt. Buruma... examines the difference between Japan and Germany's view of the Second World War. The implicit argument is that Germany has come to terms with the war but Japan has not. The idea is that Japan cannot apologize because, as a shame society, it has no sense of guilt."

This is the evaluation of Buruma's book given by Daniel Nassim, which appeared in the July/August 1995 edition of Living Marxism. Nassim goes on to state that Buruma is simply the newest in a long progression of Western scholars and journalists who, due to their ignorant views of Japanese culture and society, criticize the Japanese government and people for not apologizing for World War Two. Although it may be true that many Western scholars and journalists do hold mistaken, overly simplified views of Japan and its differences with the West, this is not true of Ian Buruma. In The Wages of Guilt, Buruma attempts to compare many different aspects of the memories and views of World War Two in both Japan and Germany. Rather than dealing with the entire war, he attempts to focus on just a few topics. As he says, "[In] the case of Japan, I have emphasized the war in China and the bombing of Hiroshima, for these episodes, more than others, have lodged themselves, often in highly symbolic ways, in Japanese public life."

According to Buruma, three extreme views of World War Two exist in Japan, two of which have been at odds since soon after the war ended. One is held by the constitution-backed pacifists, who view the war as another manifestation of the concept "all wars are evil," and for evidence point to the bombing of Hiroshima. The second, a more recent development, is an off shoot of the peace movement. They hold that Japan was utterly wrong for causing the war, and needs to apologize for its wrong doings. The third, which has been at conflict with the peace movement for decades, is the viewpoint of the nationalists: Japan was forced into the war, and/or that the war was fought for a good cause. It is Buruma's belief that none of these groups completely grasps the historical truth, and that they all manage to avoid really dealing with what the war really involved for Japan.

Buruma refers to the pro-peace movement in Japan as the "Hiroshima cult." By building monuments and memorials in Hiroshima's Peace Park, they have created a "Mecca of world peace," which will "let all the souls [of A-bomb victims] here rest in peace." The message of peace the cult claims to hold is universal: Hiroshima should prove as an example of the horrors of war. With its undeniable and instantaneous horrors, Hiroshima provides an easy rallying point. However, because they seldom bring up other examples from World War Two, the message ends up being easily misinterpreted: Hiroshima proves the horrors the Japanese experienced due to America's military. Buruma adds that Korean victims of the Hiroshima atomic bombing, some of whom were slave laborers, are remembered in a monument, which stands across the street from Peace Park. The monument has not been allowed inside the park, apparently because it doesn't fit the message of the park. He also tells of petitions in 1987 to get an "Aggressors' Corner" added to the Peace Memorial, which would contrast the horrors of Hiroshima with the horrors Japan afflicted on its neighboring Asian countries during the war. The petition failed, however, possibly due in part to the nationalist trucks which began patrolling Peace Park, but more likely due to the fact "that was not what this museum was for." The pure message of Hiroshima's as a victim and the need for world peace would be tainted by facts - for example, the fact that Hiroshima was a thriving military center before the bomb. Buruma's thoughts on the anti-war movement can be summed up by the quote he provides from a Japanese artist who was a POW in Siberia. In Siberia, the man passed by a red, bloody corpse of a Japanese soldier who had been lynched for brutal behavior by a Chinese mob. Attempting to submit a painting of the episode to a Hiroshima art exhibit, he was disgruntled when it was not accepted for display.

"The black corpses [of Hiroshima bomb victims] made the Japanese feel that they were the main victims of war. In unison they shouted; 'No more Hiroshimas!' It almost seemed as though there had been no war apart from the dropping of the A-bomb. A deeper insight into the real nature of war, and the only true basis for he antiwar movement, must come, not from the black corpses, but from the red one."

By constantly focusing on Japan as a victim, the pacifists are forgetting there were causes for America's actions.

A central core of leftist teachers supports the group of Japanese that is attempting to depict Japan as an aggressor rather than as a victim. In his section on Nanking, Buruma tells of a booklet he received in Japan. Titled "Nanking Atrocities," it was published by a group of Japanese high school teachers attempting to bring light to the events in China during the war. The group had also clipped together bits of newsreels from the massacre to make a documentary video, which they used as supplementary material to the insufficient information provided by the Ministry of Education-sponsored textbooks. Although he evidently agrees with their attempts to make widely known the atrocities of Japan during the war, Buruma has several problems with the purpose for which the video was shown to the children.

Typical to the responses from the teen- and pre-teenagers who saw the gruesome video in class was that of a thirteen-year-old named Ritsuko:

"I always associated the war with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But the nuclear bombings happened after 1940. Before that, Japan did things which were even worse. Watching the video, it seemed almost unreal. Before this, I could only think of Japan as the loser in the war, but we Japanese must know what happened before 1940. What impressed me more than anything else, seeing this video, was the scene of Japanese soldiers laughing as they watched Chinese people being killed. How could they have done that? I cannot understand the feelings of the Japanese at that time. . ."

Buruma responds to this in the same way responds to the German view of Auschwitz. Most Germans express regret, even shame for what Germans did in World War II. "Can one internalize Auschwitz from the point of view of the aggressors without falling prey to kitsch emotions of false guilt. . ?" The Japanese left, as well, attempt to portray Japan in the role of inexcusable aggressor, as Buruma's words show:

"The Japanese were 'aggressors,' they 'invaded' China, their behavior was 'criminal and cruel.' The Chinese were all either 'brave resistors' or 'innocent victims.' This, then, is what the students are asked to do: to replace their sense of Japanese as a victim with the aggressor's point of view."

At first this might not seem like such a bad thing. It's about time that the Japanese face up to what happened in the war. However, comments like those of the schoolgirl Ritsuko compartmentalize the reason the perpetrators were morally able to commit the crimes as being a flaw of "that time." This doesn't serve as an answer for why the war happened at all, because the only real reason Japanese soldiers would laugh at the sight of Chinese being killed is insanity. Was the Pacific War an insane act of an insane people? Perhaps in pushing these views onto middle school students, the teachers make their point, but, "the point of the film is not primarily historical... this is a political view," as Buruma states.

Opposite of the pacifists and apologists sit the nationalists. Buruma lists several of their aspirations: the emperor should be returned to his status as the religious ruler; Japan must become a legitimate military power again; America and Western Colonialism must be recognized as the sole cause of the Great East Asian War (their name for the Pacific War). Nationalists hold that the Pacific War was "not a war of invasion, but a war of survival," which Japan was forced into, by the threat of a Russian invasion of Manchuria, a desperate need for raw materials which were being denied her by the United States, and other factors. They also find serious flaws in the Western presentation of the events in the war. One of the mainstay nationalist arguments is that the 'Nanking Massacre,' as far as an act of mass killing and rampant violence, never occurred. Sure, soldiers were killed, and maybe some civilians got caught in the crossfire, but there was no wanton destruction and bloodshed. Buruma tosses the whole lot of nationalist intellectuals aside with his comment; "The arguments against the Nanking Massacre are not very sophisticated." One of the examples he brings up is that of the book A Japan That Can Say "No", and comments by one of its authors, Ishihara Shintaro:

"People say that the Japanese made a holocaust there, but that is not true. It is a story made up by the Chinese. It has tarnished the image of Japan, but it is a lie... if we rely on the information of aliens and alien countries, who use history for the sake of propaganda, then we are in danger of losing the sense of our own history."

There is something to what Ishihara says, but unfortunately he ends up in the same bed with the people he's arguing with: his views of history is heavily loaded with his political agenda. He has mistaken the Chinese government's manipulation and timely use of Nanking Massacre propaganda for their creation of it. For decades the Chinese government said nothing about this incident, and then suddenly began forcing the issue in an attempt to sway Japanese-Chinese trade talks in the early 80's. America, as well, puts a bend on the facts, or presents them in such a way that will make its own case more appealing. However, the nationalists, rather than simply manipulating the facts, end up creating their own history, denying obvious facts and fabricating obvious lies.

In Buruma's words, the nationalists are "both irrational and unhistorical." At least the 'unhistorical' part fits in his description of the pacifists and apologists as well. Rather than presenting an historical account, they present a political agenda in the framework of their interpretation of history. The fact that the majority of discussion on the war in Japan is conducted by "journalists, amateur historians, political columnists, civil right activists, and so forth," and not by scholars and professional historians, makes "irrational and unhistorical" accounts unavoidable. Buruma attributes this to the pre-war emphasis on classic history, which was used to stimulate nationalism and focus on the emperor's divinity. This lean towards classic history is still carried by senior historians, who view modern affairs as too fluid, too political, and too controversial to be dealt with as history.

The Wages of Guilt, as an attempt to account for Japanese and German views of their responsibility (or lack there of) for the events in World War Two, is an excellent book. However, in several instances Buruma leaves unanswered questions. The most obvious and most controversial was pointed out in the Living Marxism article. In order to lead into a discussion of the extremist view that the atomic bomb was a "divine punishment" for Japanese militarism and war atrocities, Buruma quickly describes several views on why the bombs were dropped. He lists the anti-Communist theory - the bombs were dropped to get Japan to surrender before the USSR seriously entered the war - and the racism theory - the bombs were an incarnation of white racism. Both theories not only have followings among Japanese journalists and amateur historians, but among Western scholars as well. However, Buruma brushes the racism theory aside quickly, not even allowing that it could have been a factor in the decision, or at least a way for the American government able to forgive themselves. A more general flaw with his book is how flighty it is. A quote on the back cover says, "Buruma probes the psychological abyss... not by abstract intellectualizing, but by being a travel writer. He goes to the places where memories are most painful, and describes what he sees and hears." However, it is just this 'travel writer' -like aspect of his writing that causes problems. By presenting so many impressions of so many places and people and things, it becomes difficult to stitch them into a coherent commentary on what the book was intended to be - Germany and Japan. In addition, although he does provide some stimulating criticisms of commonly accepted viewpoints, and of both the right, the left, liberals, and conservatives, sometimes his criticisms get cumbersome. At one point he criticizes Japanese for their solemn, semi-reverence at war museums, and at another point he criticizes Japanese for not taking the memorials in Saipan and at suicide cliff in Okinawa seriously enough. It becomes unclear what he feels the proper reaction should be when visiting a museum or memorial.

Among the many topics Buruma deals with in The Wages of Guilt, in his sections on Japan he employs the memories of Nanking and Hiroshima as a centerpiece. Although flaws do exist, such as his treatment of the reasons for the use of the atom bomb, and his perhaps-overcritical evaluations of the things around him, Buruma presents a well-rounded view of the ways in which Japanese look back on their wartime past. With his work, he has opened the door still wider for a clear understanding of Japan by Western readers.

 

[file12345]

20 million.Wooo that's far more number than Jews or even Soviets.I thought i knew about Japanese Crimes but so much.I guess Chinese genocide has always been under publicized in the media.

Guys this teaches us one lesson as already told by some members previously.

NEVER EVER BE WEAK.Look at us Muslims how are we paying for being weak,and how you guys paid for being weak.

 

[Chinese-Dragon]

20 million.Wooo that's far more number than Jews or even Soviets.I thought i knew about Japanese Crimes but so much.I guess Chinese genocide has always been under publicized in the media.

Guys this teaches us one lesson as already told by some members previously.

NEVER EVER BE WEAK.Look at us Muslims how are we paying for being weak,and how you guys paid for being weak.

You are right my friend. We can not afford to be weak ever again.

 

[SBD-3]

 

[Brotherhood]

Black day of Hongkong

During the nights of December 18th and 19th, the Japanese effected landings at three different points on the island, (North Point, Braemar Point and Sau Kei Wan) eventually cutting it into eastern and western halves. My father-in-law, Bill Poy, who was a dispatch rider, said he saw a Canadian soldier being killed in a bunker in Wong Nai Chung Gap while he was delivering messages between Headquarters and the troops.
The Japanese who landed in North Point took over the electrical generating station which was guarded by civilian volunteers, a group of older men, all of whom were killed. The Japanese troops crossed to the south of the island, and there was a great deal of fighting towards Repulse Bay and Stanley.
On December 21st, Governor Mark Young was given further instructions from Churchill that “there must be no thought of surrender.”
But, on Christmas Day, 1941, at 2.30 p.m., all fighting had ceased and at 6.30 p.m. Hong Kong capitulated. Of the 14,000 defenders, 1,500 lay dead. Twice as many would die in the three years and eight months of captivity and deprivation that followed.

Japanese Victory March, Christmas Day, 1941:

Hong Kong 1941

 

[su-47]

My condolences to the people of China for the great tragedy they suffered. As the citizen of a nation that suffered under imperialism, you have my sympathy and empathy.

I think the desire for India and China to be powers stemmed from our absolute will never to be weak again. Never again should we be exploited or suffer from oppression, persecution and tyranny!

 

[dingyibvs]

I'm just saying that its been 70 years; Japan has apologized. List of war apology statements issued by Japan - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

But I was just reading the crimes committed by Japan, which probably surpassed Germany, and all the memorials/reparations paid by Germany. Although reparations may not be useful now, they still should build a memorial or something. So, you do have a good point that the Japanese need to do at least a bit more.

It's been 70 years? That's right, it's been 70 years! 70 years and they STILL have not owed up to their transgressions. Not even an apology, let alone memorials and reparations. It's past time to ask for reparations from the current generation of Japanese, but they should at least acknowledge the atrocities their forefathers committed, for if they never acknowledge history, they're doomed to repeat it.