Japan racism 'deep and profound'

[emad]

Japan racism 'deep and profound'
By Chris Hogg
BBC News, Tokyo



Only about 1% of Japan's population is registered as foreign
An independent investigator for the UN says racism in Japan is deep and profound, and the government does not recognise the depth of the problem.

Doudou Diene, a UN special rapporteur on racism and xenophobia, was speaking at the end of a nine-day tour of the country.

He said Japan should introduce new legislation to combat discrimination.

Mr Diene travelled to several Japanese cities during his visit, meeting minority groups and touring slums.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/4671687.stm

[formernaderite]

1. Japan?

Try most of the world...outside the western world, it gets pretty ugly.

[brainshrub]

2. Didn't a former Japanese Prime Minister say

Didn't a former Japanese Prime Minister say that our own racial diversity was a weakness?

I remember Clinton immediately responding that, in fact, our racial diversity was our greatest strength.

[emad]

3. Chemical weapons test site fuels rage over Japanese wartime atrocities

Chemical weapons test site fuels rage over Japanese wartime atrocities

Scientists find evidence of vast plant that used POWs as human guinea pigs in gas and biological warfare
By David Eimer

Published: 10 July 2005

Chinese scientists have found the site of a huge Second World War Japanese army chemical weapons testing facility. Located in the remote grasslands of Inner Mongolia, the site was used by the Japanese to test poison gas bombs from 1940 onwards. Chinese prisoners of war, captured during the 1937-45 Sino-Japanese War, are believed to have been used as human guinea pigs during the tests.

As many as 250,000 Chinese died between 1937 and 1945 as a result of being exposed to such weapons. More than 2,000 people have subsequently been killed and injured by chemical weapons that were hastily abandoned by the Japanese army at the end of the Second World War. Only two weeks ago, three people in the southern province of Guangdong were hospitalised after inhaling gas that had leaked from discarded artillery shells. Japanese authorities estimate there are 700,000 such weapons scattered around China; the Chinese put the number at two million.

The plant, which is about 20 miles south-east of Hulun Buir city in the far north of Inner Mongolia, was found by a team led by Jin Chengmin from Harbin Municipal Academy of Social Sciences. He said: "It covers an area of 40 square miles. It may be the largest and best-preserved gas experiment site in the world. We've found more than a thousand pits that were used for experiments, as well as trenches and shelters for people and vehicles."

News of the discovery emerged earlier this week, just three days before the 68th anniversary of the start of the Sino-Japanese War, and has further fuelled China's lingering anger over what it sees as Japan's refusal to apologise properly for its army's actions in the war. A sign of how important an issue the war still is to the Chinese came this Thursday when a Beijing museum's exhibition of photos of Japanese army atrocities was opened by Li Changchun, a member of the Standing Committee of the Communist Party's Politburo and one of China's most senior politicians.
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/article298070.ece

HARRY S TRUMAN did the right thing.................

[allemand]

5. "HARRY S TRUMAN did the right thing" ?

Do you want to suggest that the inhabitants of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were personally responsible for these horrible atrocities?

[OrlandoGator]

6. Truman laid down the law and the Japanese refused to surrender.

Many more people (Allies and Japanese) would have died had the battles in the Pacific raged on. It was a difficult calculation that resulted in the end of the war.

That said, given our history, I believe that we have to lead by example in total nuclear disarmament because we're the only country to have used such weapons in war.

[allemand]

7. There are many good arguments for and against using the bomb.

I just think that punishing Japanese civilians for war crimes committed by Japanese officers and soldiers isn't one of them.

[Mairead]

8. "Many more people (Allies and Japanese) would have died"

Both Eisenhower and Leahy were opposed to dropping the bombs because they could see that Japan was finished. The actual motive seems to have been to send a message to the world in general and the USSR in particular that the US was the new world hegemon around whom everyone else had better walk softly.

To sum up: That Japan was defeated and suing for peace before the bombs were dropped is a fact established beyond doubt. The motivations of U.S. rulers in dropping the bombs anyway is, of course, a disputed question. But the evidence utterly fails to support the official alibi that it was done to avoid costly battles. On the contrary, the evidence overwhelmingly indicates that the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were murdered, not to end World War II, but to launch what later came to be known as the cold war.

http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/20/043.html

[brainshrub]

10. If Eisenhower and Leahy were opposed to dropping the bombs

then they would not have been dropped. We were at war and the US had a new weapon that ended it.

[Mairead]

14. Their claims are documented, so your assertion doesn't seem to hold water

If you're suggesting that they lied, shouldn't you offer something beyond your personal assertion?

[wuushew]

15. Zero Americans would have died if we simply blockaded them

A blockade is a passive form of warfare that does not intentionally kill people. Japan was poor in war material not in agricultural resources. Would prolonged siege of the home islands exceed the hundreds of thousands of deaths from both atomic bombs? For Japan or its leaders to choose national suicide was a legitimate form of self-determination. I fail to see what elevates the United States above the biases of cultural relativism to be an arbiter of so called true human rights and best interests.

Japan's ability to wage war against the United States was destroyed by 1945. Can you please explain why a country that supposedly was ready to fight to the death in case of American invasion was not ready to endure a complete and total scorched earth policy for national honor? As we all know this would have never happened due to the fact that we expended all of our nuclear ordinance with the first two bombs.

Additional deaths by the Chinese may have ultimately been in our best interests as it may have delayed or prevented the Korean and Vietnam conflicts which added additional millions of casualties. The geographic reality following the Second World War was not one that many can take great comfort with as we intentionally put ourselves on a nuclear knife edge. Not to mention the fact that a strong Japan was the source of much economic hardship for the American manufacturing sector once they returned to prosperity.

The best options in August 1945 were conditional surrender, blockade or testing the A-bombs in visible but unpopulated areas as a demonstration to the Japanese and the Soviets.

[aeolian]

11. You have any idea how bloody an invasion of mainland Japan would have been

Normandy would have been dwarfed.

[allemand]

12. Please see my reply to post #6:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=104&topic_id=4070236&mesg_id=4070640

[MisterP]

9. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were hardly centers of human research

[OneBlueSky]

4. "a UN special rapporteur on racism and xenophobia" . . .

we could use one of these in this country . . . hell, we could use a Department of Racism and Xenophobia! . . .

[Xithras]

13. It's the truth.

When I visited Japan, I was suprised at how many people, even nonreligious atheists, bought into the myth that the Japanese people have "always" been on the Japanese islands. I had one guy try to explain to me how the Japanese evolved independently from other asian races following the out of Africa migrations tens of thousands of years ago. This, coming from an otherwise liberal activist, was disturbing (if you want to start an argument with a Japanese person, bring up the recent DNA tests showing that they're descended from Koreans).

All in all, Japan was one of the most nationalistic countries I've ever visited. They're overwhelmingly a peaceful people, but to most of them, if you're not genetically Japanese, you're simply a visitor to their islands.