Japanese Court Agrees WWII Mass Suicides Coerced, Nobel Prize Winner Wins

[babylonsister]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/29/world/asia/29japan.html?ex=1364443200&en=b67fb24d79b03f58&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

Suit Against Writer in Japan Dismissed

By NORIMITSU ONISHI
Published: March 29, 2008


TOKYO — A Japanese court has rejected a defamation lawsuit against Kenzaburo Oe, the 1994 Nobel Prize Laureate for literature, and agreed with his assertion that the Japanese military was deeply involved in the mass suicides of civilians in Okinawa at the end of World War II.

In a closely watched ruling on Friday, the Osaka District Court threw out a $200,000 damage suit filed by a 91-year-old war veteran and another veteran’s surviving relatives, who said there was no evidence of the military’s involvement in the suicides. The plaintiffs had also sought to block further printing of Oe’s 1970 book of essays, “Okinawa Notes,” in which he wrote of how Japanese soldiers forced Okinawans to kill themselves instead of surrendering to advancing American troops.

“The military was deeply involved in the mass suicides,” Judge Toshimasa Fukami said in his ruling on Friday. Judge Fukami cited the testimony of survivors that soldiers handed out grenades to civilians to commit suicide with, and the fact that mass suicides occurred only in villages where troops were stationed.

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 the nationalist former prime minister Shinzo Abe, the Ministry of Education announced that textbooks would be rid of references to the military’s role.

Some 110,000 people rallied in protest last September. The protests, as well as Mr. Abe’s resignation and his replacement by Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda, a moderate, led the Ministry of Education to reinstate most of the references in December.

The about-face was an embarrassment for the Japanese government, which has always denied accusations by China and South Korea that it engaged in historical whitewashing, and has asserted that its school textbooks are free of political bias.

“The judge accurately read my writing,” Mr. Oe, 73, said at a news conference.

[rockymountaindem]

1. The Japanese textbook issue rears its head again

Say what you want about our country whitewashing its history, we don't have half the problems the Japanese right-wing does.

[Bonobo]

2. Slavery of blacks and genocide of the American Natives not "half the problems"?

Think what you like. You can say Bataan or Nanking and I can say Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Fire Bombing of Tokyo -on top of slavery and Native American genocide.

Ooops, I forgot 3 million we killed in Vietnam and the million or so in Iraq. Am I forgetting something?

Ant that's not even history! It was in our lifetimes!

Ho ho.

[rockymountaindem]

4. Crack open a history textbook

Slavery and our horrible treatment of the Native Americans will be in there. I haven't been out of high school long enough to forget that. Now, those topics might not be discussed with the depth they deserve, but at least they are explicitly referenced. In Japan, the revisionists seem unwilling to rest until *all* their textbooks contain zero references to any of Japan's war crimes and blame WWII on "ABCD Encirclement" as opposed to their own imperialism. That's a huge difference.

[Bonobo]

5. It is a difference, yes. But here is a more significant difference for you:

America CONTINUES to kill people all over the world and spread nuclear weapon technology.

And by the way, you will NOT find VIETNAM (or even slavery and native amerocan genocide) given the coverage it is due.

But more to the point, our slaughter continues while Japan has not fired a shot in anger in 60 years.

[rockymountaindem]

6. That's a whole other issue

I was just discussing this in the context of history education.

[La Lioness Priyanka]

7. the way american textbooks whitewash the cold war? viet nam?

[Bonobo]

8. Well, just speaking of education.

My daughter is 13. Believe me when I tell you, she has not gotten a fair treatment of America's brutal history from her school.

Do you have kids? Did yours? I would be surprised...

[atreides1]

9. I have

And I still find very little about other atrocities that the US has either committed or has provided support for.

The point is that the US tries to whitewash its image while pointing fingers at other countries. Slavery and the inhumane treatment of Native Americans is only the tip of the iceberg.

What about the conquest of the Phillipines after the US beat the Spanish, the US allowed Cuba a semblance of self government that was denied to the indigineous people of the Phillipine Islands, and let's not forget the illegal overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy.

And who can forget the involvement of the US in Central and South America, and the deaths of innocent men, women, and children, all based on the concept of "our" national interest.

The problem is that history textbooks don't reveal the whole story, just bits and pieces!

It may only be a partial whitewash, but it's still whitewash!

[Bonobo]

10. What about Mexico? South America? Central America? The list goes on...

[asteroid2003QQ47]

11. A huge thank you, Bonobo!

The point you make cannot be stressed often enough!

[ChicagoRonin]

3. Well . . .

I'm half-Japanese and half-Korean. I remember back in high school that if I hadn't asked for a segment in my AP American History class to cover the WWII internment of Japanese Americans by the U.S., it wouldn't have happened.

[noonwitch]

12. We didn't discuss it much, even in high school

We did discuss it, though. I read a book called "Farewell to Manzanar" about a girl who was sent with her family to live in one of the camps. It's well-written, and moving-the book makes it clear that although it was a bad thing our country did, there were constant improvements being made at the internment camps.

The author was not treated horribly, but her father was-he was separated from the family and sent to a different camp for interrogation, because he was a fisherman in LA and the authorities saw him in his boat with a tank full of chum, and thought he may have been secretly supplying japanese subs off the CA coast. Her brother enlisted in the Army, so he could get out. They sent him to Japan with the occupation troops, because he spoke Japanese.

Her mother got a job in the camp as a dietician, because the people running the camps were clueless about what to feed the residents. The kids went to school, had camping trips outside of the camp and she was pointing out how they had a yearbook and all these other things to make it seem normal, when it was so wrong.

Whatever, it is a bad thing our country did, but:

1. It's not the worst thing we've done in our history-slavery and the genocide perpetrated against the native americans are, and I would hate to see anything hit us that's worse than those.
2. It doesn't even come close to what the nazis did to jews, communists, gays, gypsies, and anyone else they didn't like or who didn't fit into their "master race".