生長の家とは何だったのか？

コメント

guest-oiaaoen

20 mins ago


If there are no acknowledgment of WW2 crimes and no genuine apology from Japan, there can be no forgiveness, no reconciliation. How can Asian countries that suffered 20~30 million dead and complete devastation of their economies as a result of Japanese invasion be expected to forget such heinous crimes against humanity? Continual denial of wrong doings merely aggravates the situation. Japan must realize that the account has not been settled.


Houshu

2 hours 48 mins ago


Right now, ISIS is a brutal aggressor at the same time a victim of US fire-bombing. Those who are sanctimonius about ISIS's (and Japan's) identity crisis should get in touch with the author of this piece to form some kind of 'support group' and leave the rest of mankind in peace.



kommonsenses

3 hours 33 mins ago


First off, japan was nuked to save lives, particularly japns lives, with perhaps millions of lives saved by the a-bomb of usa.
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the nuking of japan was a tragedy only when japns today haven’t got the balls to face the history of ww2 japns war crimes and atrocities committed because of historical inferiority complex trying to act tough and beastly. japan today is the personification of victimizer accusing and playing the victims.
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japan was given the second chance alright and plenty of it when the USA took occupation of japan with troops and bases to effect a peace constitution and gave japan just about everything japan has got today (trades, money making opportunities, technologies and prosperity) to make japan rich and prosperous. yet japan squandered and blew its chance to make good because it cannot face its dirty part of history.
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with the present militaristic and unrepentant government policy running the nation, it is ruining any chance for japan to get back its feet as a free and independent nation it has not been since japan’s ww2 surrender. with such suicidal policy going, japan can only be a goner, for good.


new student 2009

in reply to kommonsenses

29 mins ago


" japns war crimes and atrocities committed because of historical inferiority complex trying to act tough and beastly "

....
I think it was a Columbia University research professor who wrote last year about Japanese inferiority complex toward Chinese for more than 1,000 years to have derived the 19th century Japanese arrogance and chauvinism since China's demise as a world power during the 19th and 20th century. That also explained why Japan committed so much war crimes and atrocities during the war.

With her successful post war economy, many in Asia were hoping Japan was able to gain self confidence and be respectable without arrogance after the war . But that's not the case. Judging from Japan's recent behavior, I am afraid that Japan is re-sinking into her inferiority complex and such complex induced arrogance again due to her long time subordination and occupation by American military presence in Japan.

But they forget that Japanese economy was capable to develop so well was mainly because of American presence and protection of Japan since the end of the WW2. May be that's why Japan is reluctant to face her past. It is like some Japanese "curse of destiny" working against Japan.


Iching88

3 hours 54 mins ago


Article 9 of Japan’s Constitution, adopted in 1947, bars the country from keeping armed forces or using force to straighten out international conflicts. But now interpretations of Article 9 remains open and Japan is eager to liberalize its very capable self-defense force, constitutional constraints in the matter of its country’s normalization.

Of course, Japan should deserve a ‘normal’ state in the world given its great economic contributions to the international community. It would win respect from the rest of the world if the following were to be done;

First thing first, Japan’s leaders should either give up visiting the notorious Yasukuni Shrine, or locate a place to let the ghosts of the 14 Class A war criminals haunting elsewhere.

Secondly, no more contradictory remarks on the sexual slavery during the war are made by Japan’s government. Instead, it should set up a monument in central Tokyo —on the Imperial Palace grounds in particular— to bring memory to the “comfort women” from Korea and other Asian countries forced to lie down to the Japanese Imperial Army. leaders of government would organize and arrange an annual meeting to invite world leaders to make measures to help compensate those who are still alive.

Last but not the least, rather than obscuring the interpretation of ‘invasion’ during the Japan’s WWII activities or denying the number of people murdered during the Nanjing massacre, Japan should bring home to its own citizens their country’s wartime history.


J. Mori

Mar 9th, 08:29


I think the atrocity under the British Colonial rule in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Burma, Middle East and Africa must be disclosed and presented before pointing their finger at other countries.


kommonsenses

in reply to J. Mori

3 hours 12 mins ago


nonsense.
british atrocities in colonial times are well documented and recognized. japns atrocities against Chinese civilians and british, Australian, new Zealand POWs and American POWs in Philippines are also well documented and recognized internationally, except for the japns.
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war atrocities were done deals and nothing can bring back these millions of murdered souls and that's that. but without being repentant and looking back at history squarely , japan is acting foolishly and cowardly and grimacing all its way to no other place but its gravesite. the biggest tragedy there is that japan in so doing it taking its vast innocent people with it.


Blueberry8823

Mar 9th, 07:49


Now TE may have other motive, but to Asian countries these killings were definitely not the same: the US delivered justice, though also bloody, it stopped Japan from inflicting more pain to everyone including themselves.

This article attempts to white wash the Japanese crimes by inserting a mind bending alternative view to blur the lines of crime and justice and strikes like a cheer leading attempt to warm up the crowd for japan rearmament.

though the various Japanese governments, yielding to rightwing nationalists pressure, never managed a sincere apology, it would be unreasonable to think that every Japanese is war loving. It could hardly be true in any nation. But the real threat to all Asia is that the long sluggish economy in Japan proved a warm bed for militaristic nationalist sentiment which afforded Abe a big majority, time and again.

No country in Asia today is ready to fight a Japanese offensive, and yet TE is busy whipping votes for Abe's rearmament and urging Asian countries to feel threatened, ironically not by the unrepentant and highly technologically advanced Japan, but by China, a big but low tech nation still and WWII victim also.

If TE wants to write a more objective and helpful article; it only has to learn from the succinct comments by its readers below. These sort of articles by TE conjure the image of "insidious western media" in the minds of countries invaded by Japan.

Though they had been saved by the Americans whom Japan provoked in stupidity, they shouldn’t rely on luck for too long and do two things asap: stop buying Japanese goods which could end up filling their war chest; and build a strong industrial base in case war looms again with TE fanning Japan rearmament.


Jinanatomy

Mar 9th, 03:23


Even if Abe repeats the predecessors' statements this year, he will be seeking his ultra-right nationalist aim of resurrecting the glorious imperialist past built on the devastation in Asia. I would rather expect Abe to make the silliest remarks to outrage the victimised Asian people. Then the global journalism might hopefully stop flattering Abe as a reformist.


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happyfish18

Mar 9th, 01:29


Hitler had killed 1 to 2 million innocent European Jews and Romany Gypsies. However there are even greater tragedies in the Great Wars with the Fascist powers of Germany, Japan and Italy that is, about 30 million Russians and 20 million Chinese had perished before the Great Victory can be achieved. The world must therefore be wary of neo-liberal politicians' selective use of fascist own war deads to justify its re-armament.


guest-wonlolw

Mar 8th, 22:56


I think the lesson here all the major powers committed mass atrocities against civilians. These were typically employed specifically to terrorize the victim population, and so were terrorism by any logical standard.

However, only the "losers" have had to apologize...the others continue to similar actions to this day, largely unimpeded by morality. It's time the discussion start to focus on the universality of this type of human behavior, and find solutions rather than just issuing condemnations against those who lost the last war.


A. Andros

Mar 8th, 22:05


I have been expecting this sort of thing for years.

Sometime after V-J Day (it was probably in '47 as repatriation was slow from the Pacific Theater) we young 'uns were awakened and chivvied downstairs to meet a tall man dressed in dark blue with a little bit of gold.

Japan and the past

Japan and the past

Undigested history

http://www.economist.com/news/asia/21645844-whether-victim-or-aggressor-country-finds-it-hard-face-up-past-undigested

Whether as victim or as aggressor, the country finds it hard to face up to the past

Mar 7th 2015  | TOKYO

MANY asleep in Tokyo did not hear the rumble of the American B-29 bombers. By the time his father shook him awake, Katsumoto Saotome’s neighbourhood in Tokyo’s lower town was in flames. Canals were no escape, for the jellied paraffin in the bombs turned water into fire. Once it stuck to you, he says, flesh kept on burning, “right down to the bone”.

Mr Saotome, now 83, is about to mark the anniversary of Tokyo’s firebombing in 1945. In the single night of March 9th-10th, about 100,000 people were killed. With many men away at the war (which was going disastrously), most of the victims were women, children and the old.

The level of casualties that night was somewhat less than from the atomic bombing of Hiroshima on August 6th 1945, but greater than from the nuclear bomb dropped on Nagasaki three days later. Nor was the firebombing confined to the capital. Between November 1944 and August 1945, nearly 70 cities were reduced to rubble and perhaps 300,000, mostly civilians, were killed—a far more devastating campaign than any that took place in Europe (see table).

But if the British bombing of Dresden a month earlier than Tokyo produced a ripple of public concern in Europe, there was little Allied revulsion over the targeted killing of Japanese civilians on an unprecedented scale. Even today, the firebombings go oddly unremarked. The 70th anniversary of Dresden was commemorated across Europe in February. In Tokyo, however, there is not even a publicly funded museum to commemorate its firestorm, and only a modest number of people are expected to mark the anniversary alongside Mr Saotome. Official attempts to document who died began only in 2009 and remain incomplete, although a memorial in a corner of Yokoamicho park bears witness to the dead, next to a charnel house with the mixed ashes of thousands who died. (The park also commemorates those who died in Tokyo’s devastating earthquake and fire in 1923.)

After the war, the capital lacked the emotional and financial resources properly to mourn the victims, says Bret Fisk, a novelist who has written about the 1945 raids. Nor was there appetite to take issue with America, Japan’s new cold-war ally. A museum project got bogged down in the 1990s. Conservatives said the plans, including descriptions of war crimes, were unpatriotic and “masochistic”.

If the suffering of civilians is difficult to acknowledge, it is harder still for Japan’s nationalists to accept the atrocities inflicted by the imperial Japanese army across Asia. A custom is now established for each sitting prime minister to issue a statement about the war on every tenth anniversary of Japan’s defeat, which is commemorated on August 15th. In 1995 Tomiichi Murayama, a Socialist prime minister, went furthest. He expressed “deep remorse” for Japan’s “colonial rule and aggression”. In 2005 Junichiro Koizumi, a nationalist from the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) that has ruled for most of the post-war period, repeated key phrases from the Murayama statement almost word-for-word.    

What Shinzo Abe, the current prime minister, will say on the 70th anniversary is now a topic of much speculation. Mr Abe presumably knows what he thinks. In the past he has queried the definition of Japanese aggression, criticised the victors’ justice of the Tokyo war-crimes tribunal, and questioned the contents of an apology offered in 1993 by the then chief cabinet secretary, Yohei Kono, to “comfort women” coerced into sex with imperial army soldiers. Yet he has now formed a committee of sensible-minded historians, journalists and others for advice. The panel met for the first time on February 25th.

A consensus exists among many Japanese politicians, not to mention Japan’s friends in Washington, that Mr Abe must unambiguously repeat his predecessors’ expressions of remorse. China and South Korea will be watching closely for changes. Mr Abe has said that he will uphold “as a whole” the Murayama statement. Yet recent signs suggest that crucial phrases on Japan and the war may be altered.

Mr Abe certainly wants to emphasise Japan’s model post-war record of promoting peace and prosperity, and how it will continue. Yet as a senior LDP politician urged last month, the surest way for the prime minister to highlight Japan’s promising future would be to inherit without evasion previous statements on the past.