The grave injustice of COMMEMORATING victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

[snagglepuss]

whilst FORGETTING about the atrocities committed by the Japanese.

Today my thoughts are with the forgotten victims of the Japanese - Chinese, Koreans, Filipinos, Burmese, Vietnamese and Malay. I post this in their memory.

When I was younger I heard about the horrors the Germans inflicted, the post-war horrors inflicted by Stalin and the untold suffering of civilian casualties in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It wasn't until some 15 years ago that I found out about the Japanese war crimes, their magnitude and their utter brutality.

I was shocked and angry that this story hadn't been told. I feel as angry now as I did then that collective memory is so selective. Why is it that some people's victimization is remembered and commemorated whilst the unimaginable suffering and victimization of many millions are largely forgotten.

According to historian Chalmers Johnson "It may be pointless to try to establish which WWII aggressor, Germany or Japan, was the more brutal to the peoples it victimized. The Germans killed 6 million Jews and 20 million Soviet citizens; the Japanese slaughtered as many as 30 million Filipinos,Malays,Vietnamese ,Cambodians Indonesians, and Burmese at least 23 million of them ethnic Chinese."

http://www.answers.com/topic/japanese-war-crimes

What also galls me beyond belief is that the Japanese to this day refuse to fully acknowledge their guilt. They refuse to have their history taught in schools. Not all Japanese however are so quick however to gloss over their crimes. As you can read below a former mayor of Nagasaki "felt ashamed of the annual peace declarations he issued during his sixteen year term as mayor of Nagasaki "because they failed to include the point of view of Japan as an aggressor in the war.""

So for anyone who like myself is unaware of the magnitude of Japanese atrocities and the horrific brutality of their crimes during the period of Imperial expansion, the links below give some small sense of it.


GERM WARFARE EXPERIMENTS ON WOMEN,CHILDREN AND MEN

" it was the human experiments that distinguished Pingfan. Once, in an operation aimed at extracting plague-infected organs, which Kamada still finds it difficult to talk about, Kamada took a scalpel with no anesthetic, to a Chinese prisoner, or "log," as the Japanese euphemistically called their victims. "I inserted the scalpel directly from the log's neck and opened the chest," he told an Japanese interviewer, at the time anonymously. "At first there was a terrible scream, but the voice soon fell silent..

snip

"Today, a bizarre stone memorial that Kitano erected in honor of his experimental rats still stand in a disused rat cellar in China. It was more courtesy than he showed the victims of his experiments, who were
euphemistically referred to as "monkeys" in published scientific papers. The Shenyang medical school still has hundreds of slides of human brain cross sections, some of which were used in papers published by Sendai University with open references to the use of "fresh human brains."
Prof. Keiichi Tsuneishi, a Japanese historian of science, pieced together much of the Unit 731 story from scientific papers published by doctors, many of whom later agreed to speak to him. "They have no sense of remorse at all," he says. Instead, the doctors complained of wasting the best years of their lives on medical research that could not be continued after the war."

http://www.geocities.com/wallstreet/floor/9597/confessi...


RAPE OF NANKING

"Numerous atrocities were committed en route to Nanjing, but they could not compare with the epic carnage and destruction the Japanese unleashed on the defenseless city after Chinese forces abandoned it to the enemy."

snip


"Women were killed in indiscriminate acts of terror and execution, but the large majority died after extended and excruciating gang-rape...One eyewitness, Li Ke-hen, reported: "There are so many bodies on the street, victims of group rape and murder. They were all stripped naked, their breasts cut off, leaving a terrible dark brown hole; some of them were bayoneted in the abdomen, with their intestines spilling out alongside them; some had a roll of paper or a piece of wood stuffed in their vaginas" (quoted in Yin and Young, The Rape of Nanking, p. 195).

... Many young women were simply tied to beds as permanent fixtures accessible to any and all comers. When they became too weepy or too diseased to arouse desire, they were disposed of. In alleys and parks lay the corpses of women who had been dishonored even after death by mutilation and stuffing." (Yin and Young, The Rape of Nanking, p. 195.)

SNIP

... The Japanese drew sadistic pleasure in forcing Chinese men to commit incest -- fathers to rape their own daughters, brothers their sisters, sons their mothers ... those who refused were killed on the spot." (Chang, The Rape of Nanking, p. 95.)

SNIP

"Atrocious tortures were also inflicted on the captive men. "The Japanese not only disemboweled, decapitated, and dismembered victims but performed more excruciating varieties of torture. Throughout the city they nailed prisoners to wooden boards and ran over them with tanks, crucified them to trees and electrical posts, carved long strips of flesh from them, and used them for bayonet practice. At least one hundred men reportedly had their eyes gouged out and their noses and ears hacked off before being set on fire. Another group of two hundred Chinese soldiers and civilians were stripped naked, tied to columns and doors of a school, and then stabbed by zhuizi -- special needles with handles on them -- in hundreds of points along their bodies, including their mouths, throats, and eyes. ... The Japanese subjected large crowds of victims to mass incineration. In Hsiakwan a Japanese soldier bound Chinese captives together, ten at a time, and pushed them into a pit, where they were sprayed with gasoline and ignited." (Chang, The Rape of Nanking, pp. 87-88.)

http://www.gendercide.org/case_nanking.html


JAPAN'S REFUSAL TO ACKNOWLEDGE ITS WAR GUILT AND ATROCITIES

"One of the leaders of an influential and growing movement to deny Japan's war crimes and prevent Japanese children learning about Japan's war guilt and atrocities is Professor Nobukatsu Fujioka of the Education Department at Tokyo University. Fujioka chooses to ignore overwhelming evidence and claims that the Nanjing Massacre did not occur. He is harshly critical of Saburo Ienaga and anyone who believes that Japanese schoolchildren deserve to be told the truth about Japanese war crimes. "It's masochistic", said Professor Fujioka in 1997. "No other country in the world subjects its schoolchildren to such terrible history education. (They) are volunteering to show that Japanese people are ruthless".

According to Fujioka, Japanese troops were no more brutal than those of the United States. He claims that the American occupation forces brainwashed the postwar Japanese into believing that they had committed terrible crimes.

Fujioka is not a fringe radical. His distortions of history have wide support in Japan, not only from ultra-nationalist thugs and militarists but also from a new breed of better educated neo-Imperialists, including at least sixty-two parliamentary members of the ruling Liberal democratic Party (LDP), many academics, writers, journalists, businessmen, and sports figures. His books denying Japan's war guilt and countless atrocities are best sellers in Japan.

SNIP

In 1997 a former mayor of Nagasaki, Hitoshi Motoshima, told the newspaper Mainichi Shimbun ... that he felt ashamed of the annual peace declarations he issued during his sixteen year term as mayor of Nagasaki ..."The first thing to do is to apologise to China and others who were victims of Japan's aggression. Hiroshima and Nagasaki should pardon the atomic bombing and lead the world in reconciliation".
Following an unfortunate pattern of intimidation in Japan, Hitoshi Motoshima was attacked and seriously injured by a Japanese nationalist for speaking the truth about Japan's war guilt and war crimes."

http://www.users.bigpond.com/battleforaustralia/JapWarC...


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I first posted this in 2003, the discussion that followed is well worth the read, not only because it is DU at its best, information dense and no holds barred debate, but also for the highly informed posts by DU's "The Magistrate" (one of DU's Greats and sorely missed) who comes out swinging against those who take issue with the premise of the OP.




http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x6249698

[TM99]

1. Who has forgotten?

This a hell of a straw man you have erected here.

Those who know history know that many sides in WWII perpetrated horrid acts from the Germans to the Japanese to the Russians and yes to the Americans.

This vile bombing is ours, and guess what? We have never apologized or admitted we might have been wrong either.

I agree with most of the posts condemning this one from 2003.

[Yo_Mama]

2. It's not an injustice.

I don't apologize for the deed, because I believe that in an awful situation, it was probably the best option.

But of course we must mourn the innocents and the powerless who died or were maimed.

I do appreciate your central point - it is immoral to simply view the Hiroshima/Nagasaki bombings without the historical context, and it is immoral to mourn the victims there without also mourning all the other victims of that war theater.

We should remember both those bombings and the widespread death and Japanese atrocities against civilian populations that ever made the military consider the bombings, and resolve to not get ourselves in that situation again. It will take a lot of international cooperation.

But the Japanese government has changed itself, and I think huge nations have changed themselves since. It will take keeping all these memories culturally alive to maintain the momentum against wars of conquest as a means of dealing with societal problems.

[davidpdx]

3. I have lived in South Korea for 10 1/2 years

The day after I arrived I wanted to learn the subway system. So one of the other teachers volunteered to let me tag along since he was going out anyway. Little did I know the first place I'd visit in Korea was Seodaemun Prison which according to Wikipedia "was used during the Colonial period to house anti-colonial activists, and could accommodate around 500 people." It was an eye-opening experience.

[Lee-Lee]

4. Thank you. Both my grandparents were victims

On my fathers side.

My grandmother died shortly after my dad was born from complications of the birth, because she was denied treatment in the hospitals run by the Japanese occupation government.

My grandfather was hauled off by the Japanese several months before my dad was born. Nobody knows if he was executed, put in a prison camp and died or was worked to death in a forced labor camp. They took him and he was gone forever.

All told around 75% of my family on that side was dead by the time the war ended. 75% of a family dead in 4 years...