Truth about Japan

Today Toshio Tamogami, the Chief of Air Force Staff, was ousted, because he published an article which insists that Japan didn't invade Asian countries. Here is the article. It includes dubious claim such as that Hull Note was written by an agent of Komintern, but is partly true about the Government of Korea. Carter Eckert of Harvard University researched it and concluded that Japan's capital contributed to the modernization of Korea. Of course Korea was a colony, but the way Japan governed it was different from that of western countries. It's an interesting reading.

"WaiWai" was a popular column of the Mainichi Daily News (MDN), the English version of the Mainichi Shimbun, a major national daily in Japan. It was written by Ryan Connell, the Editor-in-Chief of MDN everyday, citing articles about sex in Japanese B-rated magazines. However, many of them were much different from the original articles. Today MDN published an official apology . All articles of WaiWai were deleted, but some caches are collected in a Wiki site . For example, an article of WaiWai cites Cyzo , a popular web magazine： From the successor of the government ministry that gave the world Pearl Harbor and the Rape of Nanking now comes a cutesy little girl cartoon character dressed as a maid with a hawkish stuffed teddy bear to give a simple explanation of Japan's defense policies, according to Cyzo (August). The editors of Cyzo protested to the Mainichi that the original article didn't include such phrases as "the successor of the government ministry that ...

Greenpeace Japan filed a criminal complaint with Japanese prosecutors Thursday, accusing whaling-ship crew members of stealing whale meat from a hunting trip. However, the alleged "evidence" was stolen from the warehouse . Jun Hoshikawa, the director of Greenpeace Japan, admitted that they stole it and apologized. According to the Japanese law, the object which was collected with illegal measure can't be an evidence. So their accusation will be rejected. This is a typical hypocrisy of so-called radical ecologists. Western people want to save the whale, while they are killing millions of cows, pigs, and other animals everyday, more than any eastern people. As eating cows is the western tradition, so eating whale is Japanese tradition. Nobody can tell which tradition is correct or incorrect. Greenpeace is the worst model of western ethnocentrism . Even more foolish is the Japanese like Hoshikawa, who imports the western arrogance to Japan. Fortunately no Japanese media is s...

Freeman Dyson wrote: I changed my mind about an important historical question: did the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki bring World War Two to an end? Until this year I used to say, perhaps. Now, because of new facts, I say no. The facts are as follows: Members of the Supreme Council, which customarily met with the Emperor to take important decisions, learned of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima on the morning of August 6, 1945. Although Foreign Minister Togo asked for a meeting, no meeting was held for three days. A surviving diary records a conversation of Navy Minister Yonai, who was a member of the Supreme Council, with his deputy on August 8. The Hiroshima bombing is mentioned only incidentally. More attention is given to the fact that the rice ration in Tokyo is to be reduced by ten percent. On the morning of August 9, Soviet troops invaded Manchuria. Six hours after hearing this news, the Supreme Council was in session. News of the Nagasaki bombing, which happened the ...

The Yomiuri reported: The Education, Science and Technology Ministry approved Wednesday the reintroduction of wording in high school history textbooks referring to the role played by the Japanese military in the 1945 mass suicides in the Battle of Okinawa after the books' publishers filed correction applications. The approval of corrections to textbooks that had already been approved is unprecedented. While the Textbook Authorization Council, an advisory panel to the education, science and technology minister, recommended the corrections be approved, it also came to the conclusion that there were no direct orders from the military to carry out the mass suicides, and it therefore refused to allow the reinsertion of wording such as "coercion by the military" that the council had objected to before the books were authorized. This marked the first time the council expressed this view of what it believes happened. According to this opinion, "From the viewpoint of residen...

Two years ago, a novelist Kenzaburo Oe, Nobel Laureate, was sued by ex-Army officials that he falsely accused them as they ordered mass suicide that had resulted 600 people killed themselves in Okinawa at the end of WW2 in his book Okinawa Note . It turned out in the court that Oe never visited the island in which he alleged the Army killed hundreds of people. He learned it from a book written by journalists who indirectly heard the story. Ayako Sono, a novelist, visited the island and found that many people testified that lieutenant Akamatsu, who Oe called "a slaughter", never ordered suicide. Probably affected by the suit, the government demanded to delete the description about "Army order" from school textbooks to their authors. Tens of thousands of Okinawa people protested the revision and organized demonstrations against it. As a result, the government admitted the authors to rewrite the story. However, historians agree that there has never been orders of mas...

The Yomiuri Shimbun's editorial criticizes the EU Parliament's resolution: The Japanese government must lobby other governments to persuade them not to follow in the footsteps of the European Parliament in adopting a resolution that sullies Japan's standing. The European Parliament has adopted a resolution condemning Japan over the "comfort women" issue. The resolution calls for the government to apologize, saying the Imperial armed forces coerced young women in Asia to work as "sex slaves" before and during World War II. The latest development resembles the resolution adopted by the U.S. House of Representatives over the comfort women issue in July. This matter has now spilled over to Europe. The parliaments of Canada and the Netherlands also have adopted similar resolutions. However, interest in the comfort women issue has not necessarily been high in Europe. The European Parliament's resolution was advocated by the minor Green Party and fewer tha...