- (April 2007)
Why Japan should not get a permanent seat at the United Nations Security Council.
Supported by the USA, Japan has been trying for years to gain a
permanent seat at the United Nations Security Council. Japan's reasoning is
that Japan pays more money to the United Nations than any other country except
the USA, and that much worse countries (such as mainland China) are represented
on the council. Japan's guilt dates from the 1930s and 1940s, China's guilt
dates from much more recently. If one counts domestic massacres too, the
communist regime of mainland China has killed a lot more people than the
Japanese in World War II. Why is China entitled to have a permanent seat
and Japan is not?
The reason is that Japan's actions might be very old (very few of the Japanese
who committed those atrocities are still alive), but the guilt has not gone
away because Japan has never fully acknowledged the atrocities.
"The Nanjing Massacre is a lie made up by the Chinese" (Ishihara Shintaro, former Japanese Cabinet Minister, 1990).
"The Nanjing Massacre is a fabrication" (Nagano Shigeto, Japan's Justice Minister, 1994).
"The Pacific War was a war of liberation" (Nagano Shigeto, Japan's Justice Minister, 1994).
"The Americans brainwashed the postwar Japanese into believing they had committed terrible war crimes" (Nobukatsu Fujioka, Professor of Education, Tokyo University, 1997).
"Foreign comfort women conscripted for Japanese Army brothels were voluntary prostitutes" (Kajiyama Seiroku, Japan's Chief Cabinet Secretary, 1997).
"Japan was forced to go to war by American oil and other embargoes" (Hosei Norota, senior member of the Liberal Democratic Party, 2001).
"There is no evidence that foreign women were coerced by the Japanese army to become sex slaves during World War II" (Japan's prime minister Shinzo Abe, 2007)
There are literally hundreds of such statements that clearly try to present
Japan as the victim not as the cause of the war.
Every now and then a school textbook surfaces that is denying Japan's
atrocities in World War II and even depicts Japan as the winner of World War II.
Some "manga" comics justify Japan's invasion of China and aggression of the USA during World War II as an effort to liberate Asia.
Since it would be dangerous to publish books on the subject, it is the manga
that have become the main vehicle for revisionist history, and this has become
a hugely profitable industry.
This is just about the opposite of what Germany did. Germans are taught that
Hitler was a psycho and that Germans did much wrong to the rest of Europe.
Germans grow up with a sense of shame for their past.
The Japanese grow up with a sense that it is not clear what really happened
in World War II. The only thing that is obviously true is that the USA dropped
two nuclear bombs on two Japanese cities that killed hundreds of thousands
of innocents. Everything else (Japan's invasion of China, Japan's attack at
Pearl Harbor, Japan's occupation of Southeast Asia are all clouded in
mystery.
China has been particularly hurt by Japan's refusal to fully acknowledge what
happened. No historian in the world has found any evidence to doubt that
Japan invaded China and killed at least five million Chinese (many more
according to Beijing). No historian doubts that Japan used Chinese prisoners
to conduct biological experiments. No historian doubts that Japan enslaved
Chinese and Korean women to be used as sex slaves for the troops.
But many Japanese are raised in a system that creates precisely those kinds
of doubts. Precisely the opposite of what Germany does.
The West is shocked to hear that school textbooks in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere
in the Islamic world distort history to make "infidels" look like legitimate
targets for terrorists. The West should realize that Japan's distortion of
its own history is not any different in the greater scheme of things. It may
justify a future generation to commit the same "mistakes" again.
Therefore Asian countries are right in not trusting Japan.
As George Santayana once admonished: "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to relive it".
TM, ®, Copyright © 2007 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
Back to the world news | Top of this page
Articles on Japan before 2007
|