Japanese on WWII: Rape of Nanking Never Happened
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The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. The day that will “live in infamy” is fact, and so is the “Rape of Nanking,” which saw Japanese troops kill up to 300,000 Chinese soldiers and civilians in 1937.
Well Naoki Hyakuta, newly-appointed to the board of governors of Japan’s state broadcaster, known as NHK, and a personal friend of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, says it never happened. In fact Americans invented it to conceal their own war crimes, like the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the nationalist writer said this week. Now, the US embassy in Tokyo is balking. “We hope that people in positions of responsibility in Japan and elsewhere would seek to avoid comments that inflame tensions in the region,” a spokesperson tells Time, calling Hyakuta’s suggestion “preposterous.”
Tensions are certainly mounting. Last week, NHK’s new chairman said all countries involved in World War II used a system of forced prostitution, another claim US officials quickly and firmly denied. All this, plus recent nationalist appointments of “Abe’s cronies” to NHK’s board, shows a concerted effort to remodel Japan as the real victim of World War II, a professor of Asian studies explains. “What they don’t realize is that the right-wing revisionists are not convincing many people in Japan, and they are not convincing people outside Japan.”
China’s Foreign Ministry has chimed in, per Reuters, noting, “A handful of people in Japan have tried to blot out, cover up, and distort … history. … The international community should be highly vigilant at this.”
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Denying the war crimes of the Nazis is a crime in Germany. Denying any misbehavior of Imperial Japan seems to be an act of patriotism.
Sadly most Americans I talk to seem to have bought this lie and I’ve heard people much younger than me say that the war itself was our fault and we were the criminals for using the Bomb. Nobody seems to remember the massive atrocities — the terror bombings of civilian targets, the chemical biological attacks on the civilian population of Asia, the forced prostitution of hundreds of thousands of women, the hideous medical experiments, the elevation of war criminals to war heroes with shrines built to their memories. All of this was largely unpunished. In fact we hired the man behind slaughtering
Korean women and children to teach us about Chemical and biological warfare.
I was taught in school that the Japanese people weren’t behind it and that they were victims too and yet that doesn’t synch with the facts about how many civilians committed suicide and killed their own children rather than surrender.
The Chinese have neither forgotten nor forgiven, but we have come almost to worship the Japanese and to see them as our victims. Disgusting isn’t a strong enough word.
Almost all politicians in all countries want to rewrite history to suit their own goals. The fact that they are promoting huge lies doesn’t matter at all. It’s achieving their personal goals that;s important.