I do not think NK is an ill-bred child but rather a dangerous rattle snake.
Hit a rattle snake with a stick and nothing good will come out of it.

Although I agree with the sentiment (teaching North Korea an object lesson), I believe that if Japan did so all hell would break lose in the region. The Koreas are well known for it's anti-Japanese propaganda, and a missile strike even in self-defense would be labeled as an "aggression".

It's why I firmly believe the ASEAN members should handle North Korea (spreading the responsibility load on all parties to not get into the blame game that can fuel riots).

I'd prefer that Japan would at least have the ability to actually defend itself without Washington approval (as any country should have that right), yet at the same time checking the level of arms buildup due to Japan's history of going overboard. No sense of shoring up defenses if neighbors scream it's a repeat of WWII (nevermind they'll still scream it's a repeat of WWII if Japan gains even one extra destroyer).

What a mess.

SandyK

Like Park Chung Hee once said about the north Koreans, a mad dog needs an occasional whipping.

I think this is what washington should be worried about. A situation which could lead to a conflict between the U.S. and N.Korea. Unfortunately for us, I don't think we can afford to be aggressive now with Afghanistan heating up. I predict we sit by and watch them launch. Provoking N.Korea means keeping all options available (including military) ready because, like a wounded animal you just can't predict what will happen when you mess with it.

Why don't we also chastise Japan, a nation full of racists and a nation that is looking for any excuse to once again build its milatary power?

Don't be fooled what Mikio Ikuma says. I don't think even he believes that a poor country like North Korea is a threat. His aim is to destablize the region, and create an environment in which Japan can once again become a milatary power.

Japan cannot be trusted. It's a nation that still teaches its childern that the World War II was the fault of the U.S.

A pre-emptive strike on the missile site would be a bad idea. As much as I'd love to see it, I doubt it will solve anything.

I would strongly recommend that the Japanese not act in this regard, and here's why - the North Koreans fancy themselves to be a far bigger military might than they are, and they would use that as an excuse to go to war with Japan. That's not something we need right now.

-mike

Bob wrote:
===========================================
"Japan cannot be trusted. It's a nation that still teaches its childern that the World War II was the fault of the U.S."
===========================================

You haven't read any Korean textbooks, have you? If you think what the Japanese are being taught is wrong, take a look at what is being taught in South Korean schools (let alone in any other country's school books both in Asia and Europe).

Those in the know, know that each country uses propaganda to prop their side up, and the whole Asian school book and appeasement bellyho is a scarecrow. It's been used even before WWII as "polite" insults and it won't go away, because yes, Asians can be quite nationalistic in their outlook. Which is no different than what's practice in the rest of Asia or even Europe.

Here's an interesting discussion on the matter (all POVs covered)...
http://www.rjkoehler.com/?p=1530

So how about checking your own racism at the door (since you made the distinction of calling all Japanese racists -- which in itself is racism, as not every member of an ethnic group can be a racist).

SandyK

I worked at the American Embassy in Tokyo for 4 years and have visited Japan many times. My closest friends are Japanese, rather than Americans. But that doesn't mean I have blinders on. There are indeed significant segments of Japan that are xenophobic and militaristic, particularly within the LDP. General Tojo's granddaughter recently proclaimed that Japan must never admit that it was involved in a war of aggression. There is plenty of blame to go around concerning WWII--the US did put the Japanese in a corner and if there had been more respect for Japan and less dismissive racism in Washington, the war might have been avoided. Nevertheless, the Japanese have been whitewashing their own actions in the war for years, claiming that they were saving Asia from white colonialism when all they were really doing were pursuing their own particularly brutal policy of imperialism, which, like so many other modern institutions, they had adapted from the Europeans. I love Japan but in fact the preponderance of "guilt" for war crimes does lie with Japan and the increasing nationalism and jingoism that is now showing itself is a good reason for its neighbors to be uneasy. [By the way, contrary to Karen's assertion, Bob did not say that "all" Japanese were racists.]

Joseph wrote [By the way, contrary to Karen's assertion, Bob did not say that "all" Japanese were racists.]
Thanks Joseph for correcting SandyK's distortion of my view.
SandyK,
Whether you (whose comment I found rather childish) believe it or not, I think Japan has so much potential and I want Japan to succeed in becoming a leader in that region (and gain a seat in the U.N. Security Council). However, Japan must take steps to become less xenophobic and racist. The foreign policy of Japan is run by "segments of Japan that are xenophobic and militaristic, particularly within the LDP", and the U.S. must not trust what they say.

The problem with Japan, the second most powerful nation in the world, teaching wrong history is on a different level than some small inconsequential countries such as Korea doing so.
Also, I don't think you should defend Japan by pointing out other nations including Korea (who had been a victim of the Japanese aggression in the past) may be doing the same thing. Do you say that it's O.K. to beat you wife because you friends are beating their wives as well?
Perhaps, you would. But, I would think that most people would not. I guess that makes you unique.

Seth Stevenson of Slate Magazine wrote,
"There is a famous military shrine here at which Class A war criminals, like Tojo, are buried. The Japanese prime minister is impelled each year, by public sentiment, to visit this shrine and genuflect and such. Not a fantastic thing, in my view, but perhaps understandable.
Next to this shrine is a military museum. Of all the museums I have visited in Japan, including the A-bomb museum in Hiroshima, this was clearly and easily the best-funded. It expresses a vision of Japanese military history that differs, in certain crucial ways, from our own.
For instance, I was not aware that the United States had somehow tricked Japan into bombing Pearl Harbor as part of a complex scheme we had been brewing up for years. Also, I was not aware that the Rape of Nanking never happened.
Interesting thing about this museum: Every World War II battle is extensively examined, mapped, and explained with both graphics and text. Right up until the Battle of Midway. At this point, the displays quickly peter out, and the text boils down to "mistakes were made."
Outside the museum, ultra-right-wing groups have stationed fleets of big black vans with blaring megaphones. I'm told what they are shouting translates as "Revere the Emperor, Expel the Barbarian." On their roofs, the vans have big plastic replica missiles with the rising sun flag painted on the fins.

SandyK,
Is it your opinion that things like this happen routinely in other countries?
I don't think so.

Unlike either of you I'm Japanese-American. Unlike either of you, my mom lived through WWII (and was a teenager when it was over, so wasn't some child with a faint memory -- nor do I need some history book to tell me of what occured). Unlike either of you, my best friends aren't Japanese.

Those disclaimers aside.

Joseph wrote:
===========================================
"There are indeed significant segments of Japan that are xenophobic and militaristic"
===========================================

Japan is a monoethnic society (apart from the Ainu). You can't expect a country that for thousands of years to adopt the mores of other countries overnight, let alone on the beck and call of other countries what they deem as culturally acceptable. Japan isn't Europe, and it's not the USA. It's not a "melting pot" society, and probably never will be.

Japanese are indeed very nationalistic. Ex-patriates still want to be buried in Nihon the pull is that strong. They still read newspapers, periodicals and tune into NHK, despite even living abroad longer than even living in Japan proper. That's the way they are, and it's not for Americans or anyone else to judge (it's like questioning the patriotism of Americans, which Americans would balk at the insult, too).

Actually there isn't "significant segments" that are militaristic in Japan. Many factors play into this but the kids in Japan are less likely to be militaristic (and, no, 80+ year-old veterans of WWII would unlikely march on any country, let alone out their apartments). Have to understand pre-WWII Japan kids were taught military drill and indoctrinated before even high school, that isn't the case today. So no matter how nationalistic kids become, few were ever in the military to even know how to shoot a firearm, let alone know beans about small unit tactics (and it's a not a society that has a gun culture, either). Gone are the days of such drill during school for a ready built military.

With the age gap/birth rate, there's also a problem with even having a massive troop buildup anyway (even if some Tojo II came into office). Japan has one of the highest geriatric populations in the world, with a MINUS birthrate (more folks are dying than being born). Nevermind, that Japan has what the USA doesn't: a rampant socialist/communist presence (ever wonder who funds those base protests?), that protests any war.

So all of the checks are there, any other scare tactic borders on fantasy, or outright racism (and the complainer's nationalism too).

Bob wrote:
===========================================
"However, Japan must take steps to become less xenophobic and racist."
===========================================

Actually it's not the business of another country to dictate the internal polices of another country. I wouldn't want Japan dictating any upbringing policy in this country, and we have zero rights to dictate to them how to raise their kids. Some things are sacred, as we don't allow the government to raise our kids, foreign governments have no business dictating what values the parents teach their children. Anything else is hypocrisy.

Countries will have to reform on their time-scale under their cultural norms. If it's forced it breeds resentment, and only will rear it's ugly head later when we need that country as an ally.

What's dumb is dictating to other countries like colonists. Japan never asked it's ports to be opened, nor forced to "adapt" to the Western world. Whatever aspirations it did (ruthlessly as any other Empire before it) came due to Western intervention. Otherwise, Japan would still be an isolated country to this day. So don't even begin with the blame game, unless all parties apologize for upsetting the applecart (this also includes China and Korea, because prior to 1900 the rhetoric was quite insulting [which the average Westerner has no clue about]).

I wouldn't treat Japan any different than I would treat US citizens, nor demand of them what I wouldn't want done here. To do anything else is hypocrisy and playing the blame game and covert racism (which is rampant not only in the USA, even among other Asian countries).

SandyK

I'll add this little tidbit:

Do you get upset when our president visits Arlington during Memorial Day? No. Why? Because you believe the USA is kosher and free of any wrong doing over it's 200+ year history.

How about all of the soldiers who were buried in Arlington who murdered Native Americans (and yes it was not only murder, genocide)? How would you consider the belief if Native Americans considered it a war criminal cemetary too? You'd balk at the idea, and go through a song and dance justification and consider it absurd.

A national leader visits their war dead not only out of respect, for respecting all of the living relatives of fellow patriots (right or wrong, soldiers are patriots and countries honor them). No country is free of tyranny and wrongs, no country can look at the world and claim they never oppressed, murdered, tortured and killed others in their country, either. To blame Japan for a war cemetary that has the remains of "war criminals", is to say the same to the England and France of it's Wellingtons and Napoleons (who in fact were war criminals if folks look at objectively, too).

Do you sit and protest anytime England remembers the dead who died in our Revolutionary war? No. Why not? It's not because they weren't war criminals for pillaging and killing American civilians, it's because that nasty racist head rears itself again.

I don't fault ANY country paying respect to their dead. It's the last thing the living can do, and it's what makes us humane. To single Japan out as doing a wrong for honoring their war dead, alot of accusers need to reflect on their own countrys' history and the atrocities it committed, before pointing fingers. That's an objective approach, and one, yes, not plagued with cultural insensitivity and covert racism, too (and it's racism, as the hypocrites don't practice what they preach and too busy thumbing their noses at other countries internal affairs).

Soldiers are soldiers and each country has their patriots, and it's not for foreigners to judge the morality or ethics of the act.

SandyK

SandyK wrote,

"Do you get upset when our president visits Arlington during Memorial Day? No. Why? Because you believe the USA is kosher and free of any wrong doing over it's 200+ year history."

Please do not equate Japan with the United States, a country, even with all its faults, that has made a significant moral progress. The U.S. formally apologized for the internment of the Japanese (perhaps the apology, rightfully, went to your mother as well). Did Japan come remotely close to doing the similar act such as apologizing to the comfort women (ten of thousands of Korean girls abducted to be raped by the Japanese soldiers) or thousands of allied prisoners on whom the Japanese conducted a medical experiment or 200,000 Chinese, so efficiently and brutally, killed in Nanking in just a few days? NO, the Japanese children are taught that they never happened.

War crimes: Japan conducted medical experiments on prisoners; this issue has never been publicly examined.

By ABRAHAM COOPER, the Associate Dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

What if there was no Nazi hunter like Simon Wiesenthal to pursue the perpetrators of genocide? What if the U.S. bartered Auschwitz doctor Josef Mengeles' freedom in return for the results of his horrific experiments? What if postwar Germany had installed top Nazi doctors in the National Institutes of Health or as deans in leading medical schools or as surgeons general of the new German defense forces?
Impossible, you say? A second-rate script or a third-rate novel? No, I have just described what happened in postwar Japan to a cadre of unrepentant criminals whose deeds matched their Nazi soul mates in cruelty and depravity. And incredibly, one of the surviving war criminals recently invited me to his home to gloat about his role.
Meet Toshimo Mizobuchi, an energetic 76-year-old, who lives near Kobe where he granted me a 2 1/2-hour interview. Still vigorous, he is organizing this year's reunion of several hundred surviving veterans of the Japanese Army's Unit 731, which conducted Japan's not-so-secret chemical-biological warfare operation in Manchuria before and during World War II.
Deliberately infected with plague, anthrax, cholera and other pathogens, an estimated 10,000 Chinese civilians and allied prisoners of war were made into human guinea pigs by Unit 731. They were vivisected without anesthesia and then dispatched by lethal injection. Other experiments involved tying victims to stakes and bombarding them with shrapnel laced with gangrene; inserting them in pressure chambers to see how much their bodies could take before their eyes popped; and exposing them, periodically drenched in water, to subzero weather to determine their susceptibility to frostbite. Three large incinerators disposed of the corpses, which burned quickly because the internal organs had been removed.
Beyond the torture chambers of Unit 731, which occupied a six-square-kilometer base that rivaled Auschwitz-Birkenau in size, the Japanese Army conducted germ-warfare field tests not only against nearby Chinese and Russian territory but as far away as Burma, Thailand and Indonesia. The death toll may have run as high as 200,000.
A training officer, my solicitous host Mizobuchi was a mere cog in a killing machine staffed by 3,000 medical research personnel, many recruited from Japan's top institutions of higher learning. The mastermind of it all was Gen. Shiro Ishii, a physician who combined a flair for organization with the sadism of Mengele. American occupation authorities in Japan, who after the war gave Ishii immunity from war crimes prosecution, were astounded by the scope of an operation that, in addition to producing lethal pathogens, manufactured 20 million doses of vaccine each year at just one facility.
Ishii also shared the Nazi penchant for euphemism. His murderous operation was designated the Water Purification Bureau. And while Mengele called his gruesome experiments Artzvorstellern or "medical checkups," Ishii designated his victims as muratas or "logs," a grim joke that originated when the Japanese told the local Manchurians that the Unit 731 facility was being built as "a lumber mill."
A half-century later, Unit 731's victims are still nothing more than "logs" to Mizobuchi.
Assigned to Unit 731 in January 1943, he first learned of its treatment of experimental subjects when be was told the meaning of the "white smoke coming from the chimneys." Later, he became an instructor who taught new recruits without personally participating--or so he claims--in torture. Mizobuchi also disclaims responsibility for the liquidation of the camp in 1945 of all remaining 400 prisoners by "volunteers" who reported to him.
Mizobuchi then described the lessons he learned and imparted to his students that were based on human experimentation and included "what happened when a human being did not have water for a week. He would go insane. With water but without food, a person could last 50 to 60 days." When I asked whether he had any regrets about what was done to the prisoners, Mizobuchi almost jumped out of his chair. "No" he insisted defiantly, "the logs were not considered to be human. They were either spies or conspirators already sentenced to death. So now they died a second time. We just executed the death sentence."
Mizobuchi even detailed Japan's aborted plan to unleash germ warfare against American troops on Saipan in June 1944. He also participated in July 1945, in training kamikaze pilots for Operation Cherry Blossoms at Night. This was to involve five submarines, each carrying two or three small aircraft with wings folded against the fuselage, to the California coast where they would attack San Diego with "plague bombs" full of infected fleas. Planning for this incredible operation only was aborted when Japan abruptly surrendered after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Mizobuchi has nothing but praise for Gen. Ishii of Unit 731. He considers his ultimate military superior, Gen. Hideki Tojo, "a war criminal" but only in the sense that he launched a war that he should have known Japan was not yet prepared to win. As for himself, Mizobuchi confirmed to me that under the same circumstances, he would again be a "willing executioner" with no compunctions about his role.
While Germany has faced up to the horrors committed by its Mengeles, the time is long overdue for Japan to admit the atrocities committed by its Ishiis and Mizobuchis. For despite the efforts of Japanese activists, including a handful of repentant war criminals, today's Japanese government continues to maintain its half century virtual blockade against telling the full historical truth to its younger generations.
The American government, however belatedly, has begun to address our own national complicity in covering up the crimes of Unit 731. The U.S. Justice Department wants to add to its "watch list" of war criminals, which currently includes 60,000 Europeans but fewer than 100 Japanese, those responsible for war crimes ranging from the Nanjing massacre to the work of Unit 731. Washington should also immediately rescind the blanket amnesty granted to these criminals.
But Japan must also awake from its self-inflicted amnesia. An international historic commission convened by Tokyo would replace revisionism and propaganda with an honest quest for history. It would also go a long way to reassure Japan's Asian neighbors that it has learned the lessons of the past and deserves their trust.
Even professed neutral nations like Sweden and Switzerland have had the courage to take a painful look back at their World War II record; can Japan be allowed to do any less?
As Japan tries to gain permanent member status on the U.N. Security Council, the international community must insist on Tokyo assuming a moral responsibility consistent with its aspirations for international political and economic leadership. The memory of the nameless victims of Unit 731 demand no less.
-- -- --

Bob wrote:
===========================================
"Please do not equate Japan with the United States, a country, even with all its faults, that has made a significant moral progress."
===========================================

What moral progress? What rights right now are being legislated to be taken away?

Yeah, time to go back to OZ, Bob.

SandyK

SandyK,

Speaking as a person who considers himself as a friend of Japan, I would like to inform you that you really are not helping Japan at all by your childish comments. You are simply reinforcing the stereotype of the Japanese: The view that the Japanese are somehow morally defective is pervasive through out the countries in East Asia. Your comments and the fact that you are Japanese will no doubt convince many in the U.S. that there is some truth in the stereotype. So, I urge you to be careful about what you say.
I don't understand how anybody can disagree with Abraham Cooper (the Associate Dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center), who argued that Japan should admit the atrocities committed by its germ-warfare operations which deliberately infected plague, anthrax, cholera and other pathogens, to as many as 200,000 civilians and allied prisoners of war.
But, perhaps you would, and this will make you morally defective.
You imagine a coward Japan that refuses to face up its past and tell the full historical truth to its younger generations. I imagine a great Japan that courageously faces its dark past no matter how painful it may be as Germany did.

Japan's Nonstop Amnesia

(CBS) This commentary was written by CBS News Correspondent Barry Petersen

They say that, after a war, the losers get the gallows and the winners get to write the history.

Except for Japan.

Sixty years after the end of World War II, the Japanese version of its wartime history continues to offend countries across Asia who were occupied by the Japanese and suffered the brutality, murder and germ warfare experimentation of the Imperial Army.

As it does periodically, it has boiled over again in China. Students (carefully gathered and controlled by the government) staged demonstrations in several cities, including Beijing, where they pelted the Japanese Embassy and the ambassador's residence with rocks and plastic water bottles.

The streets of Seoul, South Korea, have not seen similar protests ... yet.

What, you might ask, is up here?

The proper answer, difficult as it is to say, is Japanese arrogance rearing its head. Again.

As has happened before, the anger revolves around recently approved school textbooks, which whitewash Japan's history in the first half of the 20th Century: its decades long occupation of Korea, its invasion of China, its brutal 1937 massacre in Nanjing that, by most accounts, took 300,000 lives.

The Japanese also forced women in occupied countries into brothels to "service" Japanese troops. They called them comfort women.

Let's take what historians call the "Rape of Nanjing" because that's my personal favorite for ongoing Japanese denial.

Did it happen? Outside of Japan - especially in China - there seems remarkably little dispute. But in Japan the textbooks often refer to this incident, if at all, by saying "many lives were lost" with no numbers, or worse, a glossed over and now familiar phrase that "the historical facts are in dispute."

Do not, for a second, consider that this whitewash is confined to textbooks. I've interviewed members of Japan's Parliament who say exactly the same thing, that the historical facts are in dispute.

So what's up here?

Simply put - Japan feels to apologize might suggest it was somehow wrong or evil during the war. And to obscure the issue even more cleverly, it simply ignores the parts of history that prove the evil that was Japanese occupation.

So Japanese go to school and learn a history sanitized of the realities of Japanese atrocities.

Want a contrast? Try Germany, which not only openly apologized for the war, the concentration camps, the brutality of its rule, but honestly and starkly teaches each German generation in the belief that each generation must know and understand what went wrong - so it won't go wrong again.

And more - it has preserved the concentration camps so not only its own people, but the rest of us, can visit and see and understand just how this genocide worked with horrible efficiency.

Not so, the Japanese.

This comes as a time when Japan can ill afford to offend China. The Japanese economy, sliding downward for more than a decade, is back in one of its periodic stalls. China is the engine that can help. Newly rich Chinese buy Japanese exports or purchase Japanese goods manufactured in China.

So Japanese business took note when some of the Chinese demonstrations were aimed at Japanese stores or goods in stores made in Japan.

Will it change Japan's attitude? Probably not. Nationalism trumps economics in Japan, without fail.

How much longer will Japan continue to whitewash its history? Well, we're at 60 years since the end of the war and still counting, and as recent events show, there are no signs of change by the Japanese.

If we were talking about a person, we'd suggest he or she get some counseling for being in denial.

Alas, there is no psychiatric couch big enough for a whole nation in denial.

Consider all the hells the Japanese had done to other Asians during the Second World War, don't tell me they have the right to strike others before they even confessed their own heinous crimes. My parents and grand parents went through hell indeed in the 1940s. For your information, men were given pumps in the month and water was pumped in the stomach under the sun whole days till finally they died. Some pastors(include a friend's grandfather) were ironed to death. Women were raped and stuffed with eggs beneath in virginas. Babies were thrown into he air for demonstrating the skills with the shooting. Millions were starving because the Japanese soldiers took all their crops and poultries. When did anyone or allies ever help these nations get justice or give a hand in feeding these starving people. Poverty was prevalent even after two decades of war. We drank condensed milk for the first 2 years of life, and ate rice with salted fish during most of our childhood, there was no electricity, running water nor any kind of social ammenties. So the Koreans and Chinese have every right to protect themselves given they were never friends of any developed nations. US has no business in persuading other nations to intervene in anothers'business.

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