As reported over on Japan News Junkie the video below has been causing quite an uproar on the Japanese Internet.
It features two female Nagasaki University students who perform a dance (and flash a little upskirt) to a tune from the erotic game TimeLeap in front of the Atomic Dome in Hiroshima
Some are saying it it is insulting to the souls of the people who died in the A-bombing of the city. Others are saying it is no big deal.
One would think that China’s recent agreement with Japan to jointly develop gas fields in the East China Sea, which defuses a longstanding territorial dispute would be cause for happiness in both countries. But the history between the two nations being what it is has caused some Chinese to condemn the deal as surrendering national sovereignty to hated enemy.
Some messages left on message boards, which are normally tightly monitored and censored by the security services, have accused the authorities of “selling out” to Japan while others described those who made the deal as “traitors.”
A small demonstration against the agreement and Japan’s claims to disputed islands in the East China Sea was also held outside the Japanese Embassy in Beijing on Wednesday by Chinese nationalists.
Demonstrations against government policy are almost unheard of in China. To take place, the demonstration would have to have been approved by the security services.
In question is Japanese involvement in the Chunxaio (Shirakaba) gas field, which is west of the line up to which Japan claims as its territorial waters. Some Japanese media is reporting that China has agreed to allow Japan develop the Chunxiao field, but the Chinese government is claiming that Japanese involvement will be restricted to investment only.
NPR’s All Things Considered has an interesting biography (audio, 7:30 min.) of Japanese hibakusha (Atomic bombing survivor) artist, Ikuo Hirayama, who is now in his 70s.
Many of his friends died. Hirayama grew ill from radiation sickness and his white-blood-cell count plummeted, but eventually he recovered. He left Hiroshima, adopted Buddhism as a way of honoring the dead, and took up painting, practicing an ancient technique called Nihonga, in which colors are blended from ground-up mineral pigments, then attached to the canvas with glue.
Hirayama became famous as a painter of Buddhist images and of the Silk Road, the highway that brought Buddhism to Japan. His Silk Road paintings convey Hirayama’s belief that the road, with its exchange of commerce and ideas, showed that cultures can interact constructively. The paintings epitomize a sense of hopefulness and cooperation, peace and tranquility, the antithesis to Hiroshima, 1945.
One of Hirayama’s most powerful works is a huge, six-paneled canvas called “The Holocaust of Hiroshima.” It’s a striking painting; most of the canvas is a blood-red sky, filled with wisps of dirty clouds. In the upper right, the Buddhist god of wrath looks down upon the city. Hirayama says that despite the sorrow and destruction portrayed in “The Holocaust of Hiroshima,” the painting offers a message of hope.
Japan’s defeat in World War II was a huge emotional blow to the country which is still felt today. Although more than sixty years have passed, the subject of the war is still in many ways “taboo,” and not discussed very often outside of certain specific situations. (Kind of reminds me of growing up in the 1970s and asking what that Vietnam War thing was all about…no one seemed to want to tell me.)
One interesting mechanism the Japanese have evolved to allow them to deal with the subject of war has been an unlikely one: animation. While the traditional image of a “soldier” used to be tied to black and white photographs from the historical Pacific War, this has changed somewhat after three decades of popular culture in which the idea of “war” was more likely to be defined in sci-fi terms, such as the One Year War of the original Mobile Suit Gundam series, in which spacenoids living in orbital colonies fight for independence from Earth.
While it’s not generally possible for Japanese to wax romantic about the real war, which they lost, you can probably find fans within a certain age range who could tell you about the First Battle of Jaburo between Char Aznable-lead Zeon forces and the Federation in great detail, or a Space Battleship Yamato fan who can get misty-eyed about the Battle of Saturn, when dozens of Andromeda-class battleships were destroyed by the Comet Empire.
If you asked Japanese who they considered the most respected “military heroes” of the country were, you might find some who would answer Amuro Rei or Bright Noah or Captain Okita/Captain Avatar, the legendary characters from these war-oriented anime series. It’s not unlike the original Star Trek, which was able to tell stories about race relations and other difficult topics that couldn’t be discussed in the 1960s unless they were disguised as science fiction tales far off into the future.
You probably don’t think about Douglas MacArthur very much, but to the Japanese, he’s quite a figure.
As Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in the Pacific, he battled the Japanese throughout the region, and his was the hand that officially received the surrender on the USS Missouri, ending the war. But to the Japanese, it was in the postwar period that MacArthur did great things, guiding the rebuilding of Japan as a “kind and loving father” to the nation, not entirely different from the Founding Fathers of the Meiji Restoration 78 years before.
MacArthur brought in many democratic reforms, writing a new anti-war constitution. He broke up the zaibatsu conglomerates and redistributed five million acres of land to individual farmers, which no doubt helped contribute to Japan’s healthy middle class today.
More than anything, I think that MacArthur knew the importance of not “stepping on the face” of the Japanese, to borrow a phrase from their language. They were defeated, but the General took care to protect the Imperial Family from responsibility for the war, which was an important symbol to the people. I can find no evidence of “Abu Ghraib” like events during the Occupation, possibly thanks to the policy of choosing soldiers who had not fought in the Pacific theater, and thus had no special grudges.
A lot of the plans he implemented were undone after the Occupation ended, such as the ban on all forms of martial arts and Kabuki plays, but the important changes stuck. The generation growing up after the war ended has the most reverence for the man. When I asked my wife’s mother what her impression of him was, she practically gushed. “It’s because of MacArthur that Japan is here today.”
I recently subscribed to a great podcast named Botar’s Old Time Radio, which plays episodes of old radio shows like Superman, Burns and Allen, Captain Midnight, Fibber McGee and Molly, etc.
The other day they played a 1941 episode from the Adventures of Superman called Dragons Teeth, which had Clark Kent going into the Chinatown district of Metropolis. The following is a transcript of the text of the story. . .
Narrator:
As our story opens today, Kent and his editor, Perry White, are on their way to the Chinese section of the city, in response to an urgent summons from Doctor Chi Wong, learned scholar and collector of Oriental art. Darkness has fallen, and the narrow winding streets are empty save for a few waif-like figures half hidden in shadowed doorways. Here and there a dim light burns in a store window piled high with bits of jade, lacquered boxes, and all manner of strange curios from a land beyond the sea.
The unearthly silence is broken only by the purr of a motorcar.
Listen
Kent:
Isn’t a little strange Dr. Wong didn’t tell you why he wanted to see you Mr. White?
White:
Well, you know Orientals, Kent. They don’t say much over the telephone. It’s an instrument of the devil and they don’t trust it.
Kent:
Oh, but surely Dr. Wong doesn’t feel that way. Wasn’t he educated here in the United States?
White:
Yes. But the Chinese have certain inborn superstitions that even education won’t eradicate. Once an Oriental, always an Oriental.
In a Reuters article a few weeks back, I got a history lesson on four disputed islands north of Hokkaido. The article discusses these sparsely populated islands and their history. A few tidbits:
17,000 Japanese fled or were forced from the islands after the invasion in August, 1945 — just after Russia declared war on Japan and just a week before Japan surrendered.
About 7,900 Japanese who once lived on the islands are alive today and their average age is 75.
Before, during and after World War II, the stereotypes Japanese held of United States (US) citizens and the stereotypes US citizens held of Japanese citizens changed drastically. At a certain time before World War II, some Japanese held a neutral feeling about people from the US, while others held a positive view of US citizens and US culture. In the US, compared to other Asian nationalities, there were many positive feelings about Japanese citizens as well. Leading up to World War II, however, the US government and US writers created myths that all Japanese were despotically ruled, automatons, who would do anything for the glory of their emperor-that they were the new eastern imperialists. In response, Japanese writers began to create myths that all people from the US were evil, barbarous, imperialists as well. Nonetheless, directly after World War II was over, these myths changed drastically. Amazingly, the negative stereotypes held on both sides changed into positive stereotypes almost overnight. Over the last half of a century, the stereotypes on both sides have oscillated back and forth, between good, neutral and bad, due to many varied circumstances. What caused such drastic changes in stereotypes between citizens of the US and of Japan? What can be done to insure that people of different cultures maintain positive images of one another? What can be done to insure that peace is maintained between the US and Japan?
The New York Times has a quartet of articles related to Japan.
One article deals with a lawsuit regarding WWII forced suicides. I have not heard much about this issue before and it is quite interesting. The topic of revisionist history is a universal one. In this particular case an author wrote about these suicides and was sued for defamation but the lawsuit was just thrown out.
A Japanese court has rejected a defamation lawsuit against Kenzaburo Oe, the 1994 Nobel laureate in literature, agreeing with his depiction of deep involvement by the Japanese military in the mass suicides of civilians in Okinawa toward the end of World War II.
The defamation lawsuit, filed in 2005, was seized upon by right-wing scholars and politicians in Japan who want to delete references to the military’s coercion of civilians in the mass suicides from the country’s high school history textbooks. Last April, during the administration of Shinzo Abe, the prime minister at the time, the Ministry of Education announced that references to the military’s role would be deleted from textbooks.
Another article (actually Reuters run by the New York Times) discusses Japanese weightlifter Ryuta Takahashi who has was banned for two years after testing positive for an illegal steroid.
Takahashi becomes just the fourth athlete to receive a two-year ban from Japan Anti-Doping Agency (JADA) since the agency took on the role of a national disciplinary body in July 2007.
“We had cases in bodybuilding, chess and windsurfing,” Asakawa said.
You have to watch those chess players! Apparently, illegal doping is a much smaller problem in Japan than in the U.S. but it does exist in Japan, too.
Yet another article profiles the prolific Japanese architect Minoru Mori who has done a lot of work both in Japan and abroad.
As president of the Mori Building Company of Tokyo, he has remade the city’s skyline with half a dozen high-rises, including a $4 billion megacomplex over 27 acres, Roppongi Hills.
Now, he is fielding offers to build skyscrapers like the Shanghai center in Bangkok and Singapore. And he is planning to build or help build 10 more huge complexes like Roppongi Hills in downtown Tokyo, including one that could be Japan’s tallest, over the next 10 to 15 years.
The last article is a light look at Japanese cuisine by New York Times regular Japan correspondant Norimitsu Onishi (who also wrote the first article). The article is specifically about yoshoku, or “Western food.”
At once familiar and alien, these dishes may make Americans feel, with some justification, that they have wandered into a parallel culinary universe. All are standards of a style of Japanese cuisine known as yoshoku, or “Western food,” in which European or American dishes were imported and, in true Japanese fashion, shaped and reshaped to fit local tastes.
Today yoshoku is thoroughly Japanese. It is a staple of television cooking shows and mainstream magazines. The lines outside venerable upscale yoshoku restaurants here in Tokyo are as long as ever, mostly with older Japanese for whom yoshoku provided a first taste of a Western world they had not seen. Yoshoku restaurants are also a requisite of the trendiest new shopping districts, like Midtown and Roppongi Hills, where they cater to younger Japanese whose mothers made the food at home.
Slate.com, one of my favorite websites, has an article on Hiroshima which I found disappointing. It’s long (very long — whatever happened to being concise?), unfocused, and somewhat pointless. Despite that, it does raise a few thought-provoking questions and makes a couple of interesting observations even while rehashing a lot of old material. Points of note include the banality of much of modern day Hiroshima (Starbucks, KFC, McDonalds, etc.), comparisons to current issues of 9/11 commemoration, and why A-bomb victims deserve special recognition over other war dead. You won’t miss much if you give this article a pass, but if Hiroshima and its place in history interests you, give it a quick read.
“The threats began about two months ago, when we started press screenings of the movie in Japan,” [Chinese-born director Li Ying] told The Hollywood Reporter in Berlin, where “Yasukuni” screened at the Berlin International Film Festival’s Forum sidebar. “The threats have gotten worse and worse as we have gotten closer to the Japanese theatrical release of the film in April.”
Andy Young who runs Siberian Light - The Russian Blog, writes in to point us to his post about a long forgotten battle fought between Japan and the Soviet Union in the opening days of World War II. Forgotten, but so significant that it literall altered the course of history.
In August 1939, just weeks before Hitler invaded Poland, the Soviet Union and Japan fought a massive tank battle on the Mongolian border - the largest the world had ever seen.
Under the then unknown Georgy Zhukov, the Soviets won a crushing victory at the batte of Khalkhin-Gol (known in Japan as the Nomonhan Incident). Defeat persuaded the Japanese to expand into the Pacific, where they saw the United States as a weaker opponent than the Soviet Union. If the Japanese had not lost at Khalkhin Gol, they may never have attacked Pearl Harbor.
The Japanese decision to expand southwards also meant that the Soviet Eastern flank was secured for the duration of the war. Instead of having to fight on two fronts, the Soviets could mass their troops - under the newly promoted General Zhukov - against the threat of Nazi Germany in the West.
In terms of its strategic impact, the battle of Khalkhin Gol was one of the most decisive battles of the Second World War, but no-one has ever heard of it. Why?
A new movie out of Japan named The Truth About Nanjing attempts to claim that the Nanjing Massacre never happened.
According to Satoru Mizushima, the film’s director, “There is one indisputable fact: there was no massacre at Nanjing. We don’t want our children to grow up thinking Japan is a barbarian country.”
A preview of the highlights of the film, which is backed by ultra-conservatives including Tokyo governor Shintaro Ishihara, included newsreel footage of Japanese Imperial army officers entering Nanjing on horseback while soldiers stand to attention.
“The entry of the Japanese military brought peace and order to the people of the city,” read the subtitles.
Japanese veterans who served in the area at the time were shown denying any large-scale violence against civilians.
The film is based on the writings of Shudo Higashinakano, who asserts that the Nanking Massacre story as invented by Americans and Europeans who were living in Nanjing at the time.
Director Mizushima is also on record claiming that Japanese war criminals martyrs sacrificed to atone for the sins of Japan, making them similar to Jesus Christ.
They resemble Jesus Christ who was nailed to the cross in order to bear the sins of the world. They died bearing all of old Japan’s good and bad parts and headed for the gallows.
It’s been revealed pressure from the United States got then Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to relent on his contentious claim before a Diet committee in March that there was no proof Japan Imperial forces were directly involved in forcing women into sexual slavery during World War II.
After Abe’s remarks, U.S. Ambassador Thomas Schieffer told a senior Japanese government official the U.S. would not be able to continue to support Japan over the North Korean abduction issue if Abe did not back down. After deliberations with other government officials, Abe altered his position and announced that he stands by Japan’s 1993 official statement of apology to the sex slaves, which were referred to as “comfort women” during the war.
The 1993 statement, issued by then Chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono, acknowledges and apologizes for the Imperial forces’ involvement in forcing women and girls to work in frontline brothels in Japanese-occupied areas in the 1930s and 1940s.
Game maker Legendo has come out with a new war game that lets you fight on either side of the first WWII battle between Japan and the United States.
Attack On Pearl Harbor puts you into the cockpit of a fighter, dive bomber, or torpedo bomber from which you can blast and bomb the enemy to your heart’s content. There is even a multi-player mode that lets you have dogfights with up to four of your friends.
“I encourage the three countries concerned to find a solution acceptable to all of them, taking into account any relevant solutions, or else to agree to differ and to report the outcome of these discussions to the next conference,” F.J. Ormeling, chair of the session at the ninth conference on the standardization of geographical names, said Monday.
Both North and South Korea have been lobbying to change the name to Sea of Korea or East Sea basically because they hate anything that has the name “Japan” in it, claiming Sea of Korea or East Sea has been the name used in Korea for more than 2,000 years and Sea of Japan is a product of Japan’s colonial past.
Japan’s position on the matter seems to be more logical.
“First, (the) Sea of Japan is the only name for the sea area concerned that has been established both historically and internationally,” Jiro Kodera, a member of Japan’s U.N. mission and its representative at the conference, said in prepared remarks.
He also argued that the term was in use in the late 18th and early 19th century, predating Japan’s occupation of the Korean Peninsula.
Kodera said the issue has been raised by North and South Korea as a “bilateral and political claim,” and it should be settled among the parties without taking it to the conference.
In addition to claiming the term has been authorized by the United Nations, he said, “My delegation firmly believes that it is high time for this issue to be put to rest and for us to turn our attention to the true aims of this conference.”
Korea is not at all satisfied with the result, claiming that Japan’s stance during any bilateral discussion of the issue is inflexible.
No doubt finger chopping, flag burning, self-immolation, screeching, and claims of worldwide disdain for Korea as a small nation are sure to follow.
A man who is a member of right-wing group in Japan has been arrested for giving Prime Minister Shinzo Abe the finger. . . Literally. . .
The man was upset that Abe failed to visit Yasukuni Shrine on the anniversay of Japan’s defeat in World War II, and so he cut off his little finger and sent it to Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party headquarters.
An envelope delivered to the Liberal Democratic Party headquarters in Tokyo also contained a letter of protest and a disk of photographs of the 54-year-old man cutting off his finger, a police official in Okayama Prefecture, western Japan, said.
“I thought they would ignore me if I just sent the letter, so I put my little finger in as well,” Kyodo news agency quoted the man as telling police.
Removing part of a finger is a traditional form of punishment or atonement among gangsters in Japan.
Don’t know if there is any relation to the Japan surrender anniversary or not, but I just noticed that tonight’s nine o’clock TV movie on Tokyo’s chanel 12 is Bridge on the River Kwai.
The above is a photo by Reuters showing a young boy at Tokyo’s Yasukuni Shrine where people gathered to mark Wednesday’s 62nd anniversary of Japan’s surrender following World War II.
Check out the THE JAPAN TIMES for a gripping account of the War experiences of Masamichi Shida, a man who was accepted into the Japanese Naval Academy at the age of 15 back in 1942, and eventually was slated for a one-way ride as a kamikaze pilot.
In March 1945, Shida himself graduated from the academy, and a week before being commissioned he and fellow pilots were handed a questionnaire asking: “Do you strongly desire to become a kamikaze? Or only moderately? Or not at all?”
Today, Shida takes great pains to explain what was going through his head when he chose certain annihilation. For starters, he’d worked hard up to that point and didn’t want to back out now. And he was about to become an officer in a navy that placed honor before all else. He and most of his fellow pilots answered: “Strongly.”
One comrade was rumored to have demurred and quietly left the unit in shame as the others looked on with a mixture of pity and contempt. The young man — this elite soldier — had disgraced himself. But before long, Shida would find himself envying his “courage” to resist the call.
Despite years of tantrum throwing by Korea, 
He also argued that the term was in use in the late 18th and early 19th century, predating Japan’s occupation of the Korean Peninsula.
