"Imagination!"
Posted on 07/05/2007 7:08:10 PM PDT by blam
Told to commit suicide, survivors now face elimination from history
New mood in Tokyo to sanitise one of war's darkest episodes
Justin McCurry in Tokyo
Friday July 6, 2007
The Guardian (UK)
Choho Zukeran was a schoolboy, mobilised to dig beachfront trenches, when US soldiers landed on his native Okinawa, sparking one of the bloodiest battles of the second world war. Over the next few weeks, some 200,000 Japanese and Americans would die, including more than a quarter of Okinawa's civilian population. Some died in the invasion, others killed themselves - on the orders of the army that was supposed to be protecting them.
"The army had given us two grenades each. They told us to hurl the first one at the enemy and to use the second one to kill ourselves," Mr Zukeran told the Guardian from his home in Okinawa, a subtropical island 1,000 miles south-west of Tokyo. Whole families and communities committed suicide together. Yet if the government in Tokyo gets its way, Japanese children may never learn how thousands of Okinawa residents, under direct or indirect pressure from the military, took their own lives.
This year the education ministry ordered publishers of seven high-school textbooks to be introduced next April to remove references to the forced suicides. The ministry said "it was not clear there were military orders [to commit suicide]" and that "recent studies suggest there were no such orders".
The demand is part of a growing movement to sanitise - or simply ignore - the darkest episodes in modern Japanese history, which have gathered pace under one of the most conservative governments of recent decades, led by the hawkish prime minister, Shinzo Abe.
A long simmering row over the 1937 massacre of tens of thousands of Chinese civilians in Nanking by
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
Now, imagine a world where the Muslims are in control.
Exactly. Any society that does not embrace life....
Why can't they just deal with simple facts and not worry about pride so much?
(I'm being rhetorical. Truthfully, I like their society better in many ways.)
I think the author has exported either a Western or a democratic understanding of the relationship between the army and the nation (or civilians) that does not fit the understanding current in Imperial Japan.
I've always kinda wanted to have a bookstore...now I'm motivated to open one on Waikiki - where the Nippers regularly swarm - and stock it with nonrevionist Japanese history books.
Hamlet - Horatio contemplating committing suicide by drinking poison wine.
The reason I think the japanese military believed this is because this is how they themselves behaved towards conquered people.
And....I think you figured it out.
>> Imagine what the world would be like if the Japanese had won the war.
>> Now, imagine a world where the Muslims are in control.
On the other hand, imagine a world in which we went to Iraq and utterly defeated the enemy, unflinchingly calling it by its real name, radical Islam — and then went into Syria and Iran and did the same. A world in which we demanded no less than full and complete surrender. A world in which murderous terrorists were never allowed to fester, because any mosque/neighborhood/village that spawned them was simply and immediately wiped off the face of the earth (with clear margins around it for good measure, just like you’d treat a cancer).
Just imagine that we gave Europe, Russia, China and all the rest of the greedy yet self-destructive clowns of the world the finger — and simply went in and did what must be done.
Imagine that same world thirty years hence — when all of the forces of evil (read: Islamonazis) in the region — literally all of them — were eradicated (yes, along with significant “collateral” deaths among those who harbored them and sympathized with them).
Free of their malignancy, imagine that the decent people in these countries embraced their newfound freedom and became an economic miracle, an island of freedom and prosperity in the sixth-century $h|thole that is the Middle East.
Just like Japan and Germany after their utter humiliation in WWII.
Yes, imagine that.
Imagine is all you can do, unfortunately. We have the military strength and skill, but not the resolve or the leadership to make it happen.
Bingo.
I believe in printing the truth. I don’t like revisionist history.
That said, I don’t really blame the Japanese for not wanting this in their textbooks. There have been instances in American history where we have behaved less than honorably. I certainly wouldn’t lie about it, and in a text might make a passing mention of it. But to dwell on such things denigrates a country.
bump. :)
"Imagination!"
Most disturbing story.
That or they some how got hold of 50 year in advance copy's of The Guardian (UK) and othe current newspaper
“I think this article is a little off. I think the Japanese military really was looking out for their citizens. I think they really did think American soldiers would terrorize, rape and torture the populace. I think they really did believe they were doing the people a favor by assisting them to commit suicide.
The reason I think the Japanese military believed this is because this is how they themselves behaved towards conquered people.”
I agree completly. They were scared of what U.S. soldiers would do to the population, based on what their military did in places they had conquered. The population was down to using bamboo spears if necessary to ward off the G.I.’s who were to land, if the Emperor had not gone on the radio and told everyone to stand down, that the war was over. Married to a Japanese and lived in Japan , I have heard private citizens and former military....both Army and the Navy say that this is what they were taught. They were to save their last bullet for themselves if it came down to that or capture. Being captured never came into any of their training. So when many of them were captured, they didn’t hesitate to tell all they knew.
One more thing, the families of those conscripted into the military were instructed to say in effect, “don’t come back alive unless you are victorious”....in other words do not be captured, nor surrender.
Luckily my father-in-law broke with the order and told my brother-in law to take care of himself and come home safely. What we in the U.S. tell our military.
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