oneman28

The row over Japan's past and future

By William Horsley
BBC News, Tokyo


Japan's decision to approve new school textbooks, criticised by some for glossing over the country's wartime record, have promoted demonstrations in several Chinese cities. But as William Horsley discovers the row between the two countries concerns the future as well as the past.


Prime Minister Koizumi's visits to the shrine were criticised by China
The most striking thing about the Yasukuni Shrine is its massive and forbidding black "torii" gate.

A distinctive symbol of the Shinto religion, a gaunt silhouette beneath which, on a bright spring day, I watched men and women of all ages streaming in to pay their respects to ancestors, or to admire the enchanting display of cherry blossoms on the tree-lined avenue.

Each family group would pause, shut their eyes and pray in front of the open-plan wooden building where the souls of two-and-a-half-million Japanese war dead are enshrined.

Those war dead include Hideki Tojo, Japan's wartime prime minister who was later hanged with a dozen other top leaders as a war criminal.

Japan's present leader, Junichiro Koizumi has made regular visits to Yasukuni Shrine in spite of furious complaints from China, South Korea and other neighbouring countries that in doing so he was condoning Japan's aggressive war in the 1930s and 1940s.

And now, the news from China is bad, very bad.

Demonstrations


Demonstrations over the text-books have extended to South Korea
Last weekend an angry crowd gathered in Beijing to throw stones at the Japanese embassy.

In other cities young people have attacked Japanese shops and businesses.

In Shanghai two Japanese students were badly beaten up in a restaurant.

Chinese leaders say Japan will not deserve a permanent seat on the UN Security Council until it faces up honestly to its wartime misdeeds.

An e-mail doing the rounds in China calls for a mass boycott of Japanese goods. "Send this on to other Chinese people", the message says, "and we won't need to go to war!"

History

This stream of invective against the Japanese is not new.

Some Asia watchers see it largely as a device by Chinese leaders to extract more Japanese aid or divert attention from their own failings.

It is alarmingly reminiscent of the age of the Communist Red Guards.

The Yasukuni Shrine remains a potent symbol of how the Japanese, intoxicated by fascism and coerced by military rule, once collectively lost their reason and were fed fantastic myths, of racial superiority and the Emperor's divinity

But on this trip to Japan I could not avoid the conclusion that a new mood of nationalism has also begun to take hold in this country which has been publicly devoted to peace and economic prosperity for so long.

One sign is the Japanese authorities' approval of several new school history textbooks written by known right-wing scholars.

One book which has angered the Chinese failed to make any assessment of the number of Chinese civilians killed in the infamous Rape of Nanjing.

The internationally accepted view is that hundreds of thousands died in an orgy of sexual violence and killing by Japanese troops.

And Japan's largest national newspaper, the Yomiuri Shimbun, in what I take to be blatant disregard for the known facts, has called on its readers to celebrate, because the new textbooks have cut out all mention of one of the greatest of all the humiliations inflicted by Imperial Japan on its neighbours: the use of large numbers of women in conquered Asian countries as sex slaves for the Japanese army.

It was right to set the record straight, I read, because the accusations "had been shown to be untrue".

Surely I thought modern Japan could not give in to the poison of such deceit and hypocrisy ever again.

The Yasukuni Shrine remains a potent symbol of how the Japanese, intoxicated by fascism and coerced by military rule, once collectively lost their reason and were fed fantastic myths, of racial superiority and the Emperor's divinity.

'Bitter dispute'

I had come to see the recently expanded Yasukuni museum of Japanese history.

For 100 years Japan has been number one in Asia. Now China, with 10 times Japan's population, is in a hurry to take over that role

I found that its 18 galleries of high-quality displays, maps and texts amount to a lavish and expensive re-write of the history of Japan's imperial age, to show the Japanese as innocent victims of a conspiracy by the Western colonial powers, to thwart Japan's ambition to lead East Asia and force Japan into war.

By this account annexing Korea, setting up a puppet regime in Manchukuo, the step by step takeover of China, each was done in self-defence, aiming only to bring peace.

As for Nanjing, I found no mention of Japanese soldiers killing civilians.

Instead, these words: "The Chinese were soundly defeated, suffering heavy casualties. Inside the city, residents were once again able to live their lives in peace."

However you look at it, that will not do as a record of what happened.

By chance I came across this testimony of a Japanese army veteran who was there.

"No matter how young or old, none of the women we rounded up could escape being raped. Each one was allocated to 15 or 20 soldiers for sexual intercourse and abuse."

Afterwards "we always stabbed them and killed them. Because dead bodies don't talk."

The bitter dispute now raging between Japan and China is both about setting the record straight and about a struggle for power.

For 100 years Japan has been number one in Asia.

Now China, with 10 times Japan's population, is in a hurry to take over that role.

And as with highly-geared racing cars sharing the same circuit, it is the moment of overtaking that brings the greatest risk of a crash.



http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programme...nt/4449005.stm

oneman28

Scarred by history: The Rape of Nanjing
Between December 1937 and March 1938 one of the worst massacres in modern times took place. Japanese troops captured the Chinese city of Nanjing and embarked on a campaign of murder, rape and looting.

Thousands of bodies were buried in ditches

Based on estimates made by historians and charity organisations in the city at the time, between 250,000 and 300,000 people were killed, many of them women and children.

The number of women raped was said by Westerners who were there to be 20,000, and there were widespread accounts of civilians being hacked to death.

Yet many Japanese officials and historians deny there was a massacre on such a scale.

They admit that deaths and rapes did occur, but say they were on a much smaller scale than reported. And in any case, they argue, these things happen in times of war.

The Sino-Japanese Wars

In 1931, Japan invaded Chinese Manchuria following a bombing incident at a railway controlled by Japanese interests.

The Chinese troops were no match for their opponents and Japan ended up in control of great swathes of Chinese territory.

The following years saw Japan consolidate its hold, while China suffered civil war between communists and the nationalists of the Kuomintang. The latter were led by General Chiang Kai-shek, whose capital was at Nanjing.


Japanese troops enter the city in triumph

Many Japanese, particularly some elements of the army, wanted to increase their influence and in July 1937, a skirmish between Chinese and Japanese troops escalated into full-scale war.

The Japanese again had initial success, but then there was a period of successful Chinese defence before the Japanese broke through at Shanghai and swiftly moved on to Nanjing.

Chiang Kai-shek's troops had already left the city and the Japanese army occupied it without difficulty.

'One of the great atrocities of modern times'

At the time, the Japanese army did not have a reputation for brutality.

In the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5, the Japanese commanders had behaved with great courtesy towards their defeated opponents, but this was very different.

Japanese papers reported competitions among junior officers to kill the most Chinese.

There probably is no crime that has not been committed in this city today

Minnie Vautrin
US woman in Nanjing

One Japanese newspaper correspondent saw lines of Chinese being taken for execution on the banks of the Yangtze River, where he saw piles of burned corpses.

Photographs from the time, now part of an exhibition in the city, show Japanese soldiers standing, smiling, among heaps of dead bodies.

Tillman Durdin of the New York Times reported the early stages of the massacre before being forced to leave.

He later wrote: "I was 29 and it was my first big story for the New York Times. So I drove down to the waterfront in my car. And to get to the gate I had to just climb over masses of bodies accumulated there."

"The car just had to drive over these dead bodies. And the scene on the river front, as I waited for the launch... was of a group of smoking, chattering Japanese officers overseeing the massacring of a battalion of Chinese captured troops."

"They were marching about in groups of about 15, machine-gunning them."

As he departed, he saw 200 men being executed in 10 minutes to the apparent enjoyment of Japanese military spectators.

He concluded that the rape of Nanjing was "one of the great atrocities of modern times".

'The memories cannot be erased'

A Christian missionary, John Magee, described Japanese soldiers as killing not only "every prisoner they could find but also a vast number of ordinary citizens of all ages".

"Many of them were shot down like the hunting of rabbits in the streets," he said.


Some victims were reportedly buried alive

After what he described as a week of murder and rape, the Rev Magee joined other Westerners in trying to set up an international safety zone.

Another who tried to help was an American woman, Minnie Vautrin, who kept a diary which has been likened to that of Anne Frank.

Her entry for 16 December reads: "There probably is no crime that has not been committed in this city today. Thirty girls were taken from the language school [where she worked] last night, and today I have heard scores of heartbreaking stories of girls who were taken from their homes last night - one of the girls was but 12 years old."

Later, she wrote: "How many thousands were mowed down by guns or bayoneted we shall probably never know. For in many cases oil was thrown over their bodies and then they were burned."

"Charred bodies tell the tales of some of these tragedies. The events of the following ten days are growing dim. But there are certain of them that lifetime will not erase from my memory and the memories of those who have been in Nanjing through this period."

Minnie Vautrin suffered a nervous breakdown in 1940 and returned to the US. She committed suicide in 1941.

Also horrified at what he saw was John Rabe, a German who was head of the local Nazi party.

He became leader of the international safety zone and recorded what he saw, some of it on film, but this was banned by the Nazis when he returned to Germany.

He wrote about rape and other brutalities which occurred even in the middle of the supposedly protected area.

Confession and denial

After the Second World War was over, one of the Japanese soldiers who was in Nanjing spoke about what he had seen.


Japanese troops showed little mercy

Azuma Shiro recalled one episode: "There were about 37 old men, old women and children. We captured them and gathered them in a square."

"There was a woman holding a child on her right arm... and another one on her left."

"We stabbed and killed them, all three - like potatoes in a skewer. I thought then, it's been only one month since I left home... and 30 days later I was killing people without remorse."

Mr Shiro suffered for his confession: "When there was a war exhibition in Kyoto, I testified. The first person who criticized me was a lady in Tokyo. She said I was damaging those who died in the war."

"She called me incessantly for three or four days. More and more letters came and the attack became so severe... that the police had to provide me with protection."

Such testimony, however, has been discounted at the highest levels in Japan.

Former Justice Minister Shigeto Nagano denied that the massacre had occurred, claiming it was a Chinese fabrication.

Professor Ienaga Saburo spent many years fighting the Japanese government in the courts with only limited success for not allowing true accounts of Japanese war atrocities to be given in school textbooks.

There is also opposition to the idea among ordinary Japanese people. A film called Don't Cry Nanjing was made by Chinese and Hong Kong film-makers in 1995 but it was several years before it was shown in Japan.


http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asi...fic/223038.stm

smilingassassin

Obviously China has not learned from the past, with tebet et all hanging over their heads, so I don't have any simpathy for them. Japan paid its price for its agression, its the only nation to be on the recieving end of not one but two nukes.

I think the Chinese are just hot because they didn't pull the triggers and the ones who did (U.S.) have now made peace with Japan.

MIKEMUN

While I agree with you that China hasn't been a beacon of light in Asia,and that they have also commited atrocities,I beg to differ. What Japan did to China was unspeakable,and they least they could have done was to apologise to the Chinese. The Chinese should be judge by their actions and the Japanese by theirs.

Germany apologised for the holocaust,but Japan never really apologised to China..And they have the audacity to ask China to apologise for the demonstrations. Yes they were not peaceful,but I can understand the people's anger. The memories are still fresh...

__________________
"They want to test our feelings.They want to know whether Muslims are extremists or not. Death to them and their newspapers."

Protester

dabrownguy

Did you know the Chinese text books sweeten their liberation of Tibet? Chinese textbooks are worst. For one they make the Japanese look like in human bastards...okay nothing wrong since they kinds "were". But nothing else has changed. Heck Britian's imperalism screwed over how many nations? and have the recently rioted? My guess is the roits are Chinese governments doing.

__________________
http://www.indiandefenceforum.com/index.php
Indian defence Forum!

Alastair

Have you ever read chinese text books? if you haven't,please enlarge ur knowledge to this.people always tend to echo what other says.

Alastair

It is talking about the history between the china and japan as well as the history happened over 60 years ago in the past world. AS for the issues of the chinese history textbooks,Tibet,Chinese Communist,human rights in China,even the Tian an meng square event in 1989. ALL of these are beside the point.

Alastair

The war criminals are enshrined in the Japanese temple, April 17, 2005
Reviewer: R. Liu (San Diego, CA) - See all my reviews


Can you imagine that Hitler were enshrined in a German Temple and German Chancellor and selected congress members worshipped in that temple every year?

The war criminals who robbed, raped, and killed people in China, Korea, and other Asian countries are enshrined in the Japanese Shrine, and the Japanese PMs and congress members paid visits to that "Shrine" and worshipped the excuted criminals every year.

And some one said they had apologized. Can you take that as apology?



Has JAPAN apologized? The answer is no., April 10, 2005
Reviewer: Mr. Anderson "Temet Nosce" (Los Angeles, CA USA) - See all my reviews

The Japanese government normally refers to the invasion of China as "China Incident." You can tell how sorry the person is by looking at the word he/she chooses to describe a bad fact.
I feel sorry for such a liar. Remember, nobody has ever invited Japanese to go to China and kill Chinese.

Then, they always use quibbles like the A-bombs to justify their own suffering and their aggression and atrocities. Again, this is an egocentric view of the history without considering the causality. Who caused all these troubles? Everybody else says Japanese. But lots of Japanese people don't think so. For example, Hosei Norota, a former defence chief, blames Japan's entry into World War II on the United States. "Faced with oil and other embargoes, Japan had no choice but to venture southward to secure natural resources," the senior politician tells a meeting of supporters. "In other words, Japan had fallen prey to a scheme of the United States." Aha, now we can see that Pearl Habor is not impossible, it is INEVITABLE?!

Is it true that an embargo will lead to a brutal war? Clearly no.
Only a person feeling no sorry can use such ridiculous arguments.

Finally, about the so-call "apology", Japanese government always said "regret" rather than "apology", except one time in 1998 by Prime Minister Murayama Tomiichi (of Socialist Party, not the powerful Liberal Democratic Party). A Japanese here said Japan has made apologies for 17 times. This is a lie. Thinking about this, "regret" for 16 times, 1-time "apology" (in lexical form) submerged in those "regrets", and then always "regret" again up to now. The sincerity of the one-time apology is very questionable. And now it is crystal clear that the apology was just a fake as Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has officially visited Yasukuni Shrine every year to pay respect to the 17 "oriental Hitlers" (the 17 war criminals of WWII whose pictures and names are worshipped in the Shrine). I just cannot imagine what the reaction it will be for Jews, Polishs and Americans IF GERMAN PRIME MINISTER SHOWS OFFICIAL RESPECT TO ADOLF HITLER, HERMAN GORING AND HEINRICH HIMMLER. I don't think Korean and Chinese people over-reacted. On the contrary, they are too shy and too nice.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg...31338?v=glance

Enzo Ferrari

http://edition.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/as....ap/index.html

What Chinese textbooks don't say
Sunday, April 17, 2005 Posted: 1246 GMT (2046 HKT)

Chinese textbooks don't mention the millions who died during Mao's "Great Leap Forward."


SHANGHAI, China (AP) -- Some things you won't find in Chinese history textbooks: the 1989 democracy movement, the millions who died in a famine caused by misguided communist policies or China's military attacks on India and Vietnam.

As China criticizes Japan for new textbooks that critics say minimize wartime abuses like the Japanese military forcing Asian women into sexual slavery, Beijing's own schoolbooks have significant omissions about the communist system's own history and relations with its neighbors.

"With rising Chinese nationalism, the efforts to rewrite history, to reinterpret history according to the demands of nationalism have become a major national pastime," said Maochun Yu, a history professor at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland.

Experts say China's textbooks are written to heighten a sense of national victimhood and glorify the Communist Party that seized power in a 1949 revolution and lashes out at any threat to its rule.

The books describe those who died fighting Japan and other outsiders as having "gloriously sacrificed" themselves for China.

Propaganda paintings reproduced in schoolbooks show Chinese struggling against foreign invaders -- poses imitated by protesters who threw rocks at the Japanese Embassy in Beijing over the weekend during violent anti-Japanese demonstrations in several Chinese cities.

An eighth-grade history book used in Shanghai, China's most cosmopolitan city, repeatedly refers to Japanese by an insulting phrase that roughly translates as "*** bandits."

The book focuses on Japanese atrocities and repeats China's claim that 35 million Chinese died or were injured during their 1937-45 war.

"Wherever the Japanese army went, they burned, killed, stole and plundered," the book says. "There was no wickedness they didn't commit."

Omissions of major events appear aimed at shoring up China's image of itself as a non-aggressor, especially since the 1949 revolution.

The books don't mention the brief but bloody 1962 border war with India that broke out when Chinese troops attacked Indian positions to enforce territorial claims.

There is nothing on the 1979 war when Chinese troops attacked Vietnam. The assault was ordered to punish Hanoi for ousting the murderous Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, which was an ally of Beijing.

Also missing:


The 1989 crackdown on democracy demonstrations, when Chinese troops killed hundreds and possibly thousands of unarmed protesters.


The estimated 30 million Chinese who starved to death during the 1958-61 "Great Leap Forward," revolutionary leader Mao Zedong's attempt to speed up China's farm and factory output through mass collectivization.

Textbooks gloss over ally North Korea's invasion of South Korea at the start of the 1950-53 Korean War, a conflict that drew in troops from the United States and other countries on the side of the South and China's army in support of the North.

The texts say only that "civil war broke out," without mentioning how it started. America is portrayed as an invader that forced Beijing to intervene by threatening Chinese territory.

A seventh-grade text also accuses the U.S. military of using biological weapons during the Korean War, repeating a claim made by China, North Korea and the former Soviet Union during the Cold War but never proven.

While Japan's distortions of its history appear driven by a reluctance to accept shame, China's are aimed at preserving communist rule, said Sin-ming Shaw, a China scholar at Oxford University in England.

"Not owning up is a calculated political policy," Shaw said.

Officer of Engineers

Namely because it did not happenned. The ESTIMATE came from the fact that someone looked at the food output during this period and concluded that it cannot possibly feed all those people and thus, 30 million must have starved.

Did not happenned. People ate less. Undoubtly, thousands must have starved but not millions. There is not one village in China where you go where people remember people starving to death. They remember not having enough to eat, but no one starved.

__________________
Chimo

Officer of Engineers

As for omissions, events are ignored all the time, even in American high school history books.

The Battle of the Plains of Abraham for Quebec City - finally deciding that North America would be English and not French. Had British General Wolf lost that battle, we would be tying French right now.

The lost of the Michigan Territories during the War of 1812

The Fenian Invasions of Canada

The US Marines landing in Nicaragua (hell, just how much is mentioned about the Banana Republics?)

But the major events? How many would tolerate not mentioning or even down played its significance.

Picket's Charge was a minor skirmish.
Washington's Crossing of the Delaware was a minor raid.
Pearle Harbour was just a warning.
11 Sept was a result of Ameican policy.

How many American would be boiling mad after reading those?

Alastair

Officer of Engineers,nice to see u here. Undoubtly,chinese people has suffered the famine during 1958-1961.The reason why this would happened including several factors as follows:
1.policy mistake,that mean the "Great Leap Forward"
2.food supplies declined by the climate
3.repay a great number of debt to USSR by food as the currency in a short time because of the broken relationship
4.as an agricultural country,it's hard for china to against the famine due to crop failures.

there is no denying that chinese authority responsible for this.BUT,as i mentioned above,things are more complicated than ordinary people thought.
what confused me is that people here are prone to link this famine to the govern by chinese communist party,and try their best the testify that tregedy why took place because of the "evil" communist.

as for the number died in this famine.it is still not unclosed by chinese administration. however it's really ridiculous the number hit to the 30 millions,Enzo Ferrari,why don't you say the number was up to 80 millions or even more?you could romance the number wot you want if that could make you feel better.

i estimate there was nearly 1 million died during 1958-1961 in China.My grandpraents told me in that rough period,everyone was starve.unbearable hungry and weak.but they were still alive.and yes,some people died indeed,several people gone in their village due to the innutrition. but please remember,lots of chinese historical record show famine was frequent during several thousands years. aslo you can search the informations about several big famine when china was under Kuomintang governed.How could you prove that it is because of the communist's "evil" rule?

smilingassassin

Sorry I don't buy all this pro China crap, you expect an appology from Japan when they are being portrayed in eighth-grade history books as "*** bandits"? Not to mention the generalization of the japanese army....

"Wherever the Japanese army went, they burned, killed, stole and plundered," the book says. "There was no wickedness they didn't commit."

Fine... you've managed to debunk the "great leap forward"....debunk the following and I may see your point:

1962 border war with India

1979 war with Vietnam. gee maybe they should have supported the murderous Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia

The 1989 crackdown on democracy demonstrations, when Chinese troops killed hundreds and possibly thousands of unarmed protesters.

China's involvement in the 1950-53 Korean War, hey the north was clearly in the write to be the agressor huh?

Tian an meng square event in 1989

Rape er liberation of Tibet, human rights violations, constant provicational actions...ect ect....I wouldn't appologize either....its the pot calling the kettle black.

China is well known for their intimidation tactics to get what they want, why should we be so polite as a responce? Maybe they should try it just once for a change and maybe just maybe we can get some adult content into the discussions with China......

Enzo Ferrari

The estimation of 30 millions people in starving are come from some statistics from some Chinese scholars who are not welcomed by Chinese administrations...
Also, I remember that the Guinness World Record of "unnatural death"....

Of course, CCP never said "regret" let alone apologise to their own people.

amit

Well said smilingassassin