The National Forum   Donate   Your Account   On Line Opinion   Forum   Blogs   Polling   About   
The Forum - On Line Opinion's article discussion area



Syndicate
RSS/XML


RSS 2.0

Main Articles General

Sign In      Register

The Forum > Article Comments > Hiroshima: the beginning and the end of nuclear history > Comments

Hiroshima: the beginning and the end of nuclear history : Comments

By Jed Lea-Henry, published 10/8/2015

The Japanese leadership were unmoved. It was the shadow of Stalinism that made the difference.

  1. Pages:
  2. 1
  3. 2
  4. 3
  5. 4
  6. Page 5
  7. 6
  8. 7
  9. All
Plantagenet,
I (Moriyama)sent two comments, before your latest replies, on Gi-Wook Shin/Colonialism, Invasion, and Atomic Bombs: Asia's Divergent Histories/thediplomat.com. That will make part of my reply. Moriyama is shown by two Chinese characters. You will see three trees in the first, and three sticks standinig on a horizon in the second.

http://thediplomat.com/2015/08/colonialism-invasion-and-atomic-bombs-asias-divergent-histories

Your replies are manifold, and I am at a loss what to do with them because I shall have to write a very long answer. But I will give you a reply on a few subjects you dealt with.
Posted by Michi, Sunday, 16 August 2015 12:39:50 AM
Find out more about this user Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
Thanks mate.
Posted by plantagenet, Sunday, 16 August 2015 11:57:13 AM
Find out more about this user Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
I agree with Prof. Smith, "...it is too early to know what Japan's neighbors (particularly China and South Korea in Michi's opinion) will make of the Abe Statement..." I also agree that " Abe clearly had his eye on Japan's diplomacy," as the professor said, rather than "deep remorse" and "apology" in my opinion.

The Sino-Japanese relations will be at least a little bit improved. Actually the two governments have already been exchanging, at lower diplomatic levels of contact, siginals of being ready for amelioration. For instance, when Abe officially visited the shrine a few years ago, the CCP's response was a restrained one; it did not resort to its hobbyhorse of anti-Japanese demonstrations. Of course there is no reason at all to expect for China suddenly to change its overt anti-Japanese rhetoric as a Chinese intellectual said recently to a Japanese China-watchr that if Japan apologized, it would confound the CCP and rob it of its useful means of domestic and international propaganda. There is also no reason to expect a kind of Franco-German detente; differences that separate China and Japan are very deep.

Prof. Smith said, "Yet opposition leaders in the Diet still found room for complaint...," "But no less important will be the reaction at home," and "Only time will tell if Abe will succeed in bridging the longstanding differences that have to date separated the right and the left in Japan's domestic politics."
Posted by Michi, Sunday, 16 August 2015 1:12:40 PM
Find out more about this user Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
Plantagenet
From above.

Now that the legislations have passed the Lower House (of Japan), they will be enacted by September 27...But the division within Japan will remain long after the legislation is enacted and is likely to come back to haunt the Japanese government when it finds itself in the position of having to utilize the new laws. (From Yuki Tatsumi, Japan's New Security Legislation: A Missed Opportunity.)
http://thediplomat.com/2015/07/japans-new-security-legislation-a-missed-opportunity.

It is oversimplification to divide post-war Japanese politics into two camps, conservatives and opposing socialists, and like every simplification, can be misleading; and the two camps in the oversimplified picture should be subdivided for accuracy as need be.
Since conservatives' Liberal-Democratic Party had close to two third's representation and the largest opposition party, the Socialist Party, had close to a third in the Diet for a considerably long period, the simplified map will not be completely meaningless.
This division is traced back to the 1920s, when Marxism-Lenism burst into the Japanese intellectuals' circles after the Russian revolution of 1917. The massive influence remained in the 1930s' Japan even if not as apparent as in the 1920s, and even rightist intellectuals came under it; nationalists were greatly influenced and young officers that engineered radical movements in the army were found to have been swayed by it.

One very big and important difference between Japanese socialists and their counterparts of Great Britain and Germany was that the latter two groups had already broken off with Marxism in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth. Such a clear-cut break did not occur in Japan, which makes schism in post-war Japanese intellectual climate far deeper.
For instance, I do not think, and most probably I am not mistaken, that no leaders of the British Larbor Party and of the West German Social Democratic Party ever went to Moscow and said, "American imperialism is the enemy that the British or German and the Russian people face in common." It was exactly what Japanese socialists did and said in Beijing.
Posted by Michi, Sunday, 16 August 2015 5:15:06 PM
Find out more about this user Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
Hi Michi

Its true "if Japan apologized, it would confound the CCP and rob it of its useful means of domestic and international propaganda."

Japanese leaders have apologised many times but the Chinese Government simply cannot accept this because China would lose a political lever over Japan.

With Chinese economic growth slowing down over the past year (and poor Chinese stockmarket performance over the last few weeks) Japan can expect more Chinese demands to (re)apologise. This will be a Chinese tactic to make the Chinese public forget economic mismanagement under the Chinese Communist Party backed Ruling Class.

Also the Comfort Women phenomenon is strange. Korean middlemen frequently participated in these women's false recruitment and ongoing enslavement. Korean organised crime also organised Korean comfort women on a mass basis to service the US armed forces in Korea for decades after 1945.

Pete
Posted by plantagenet, Sunday, 16 August 2015 5:52:37 PM
Find out more about this user Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
Plantagent,
Continued from above.

The division has been felt nowhere so strongly and sharply as in the issue of security or war and peace. Quite naturally. We do not want war. We do not want war for our children and grandchildren and grand-grandchildren. We can make a lot of compromises and sacrifices ourselves for them.

Japanese socialists are not the only opposition group to the conservatives but they make easy what I am talking about.
They deemed almost everything that the conservatives were doing in connection with war and peace and thought that the latter were trying to remilitarize Japan; that they were justifying Japan's past militarist expansion and trying again to make hegemony, a once failed idea, in East Asia without feeling any remorse; that they were trying to whitewash their bloody past by visiting Yasukuni Shrine and rewriting school textbooks; that they were trying to muster political support when they decided, even before Japan became affluent in the 1960s, to increase welfare stipends to bereaved families, suffering pecuniarily, just a pitiful pittance of money, who lost husbands, sons, and fathers.
(In passing, just to show how Marxism had great impact on Japanese. I went to Hiroshima University in 1963, eight months before President kennedy was assassinated. If you said, "I'm going to study economics," you would be usually asked, "Which economics? Marxist economics or modern economics?" Today we simply say "economics" to mean what modern economics used to stand for.)

China and South Korea "started" the unresolved issues like visits to the shrine, school history textbooks, comfort women and the contention that the Germans were repentant enough while the Japanese were not. (I think the Japanese were far more repentant that the Germans. Some other time for this.)
No, these issues were all started by Japanese lefts, and China and South Korea are capitalizing on it, because Japan is critically divided on them. China does not make gigantic propaganda, for instance, on the Senkaku Islands, because if it did it would not work divisevely but rather unite Japanese.
Posted by Michi, Sunday, 16 August 2015 6:26:03 PM
Find out more about this user Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
  1. Pages:
  2. 1
  3. 2
  4. 3
  5. 4
  6. Page 5
  7. 6
  8. 7
  9. All

About Us :: Search :: Discuss :: Feedback :: Legals :: Privacy