Japanese PM denies wartime 'comfort women' were forced

The interesting thing to me is that at the same time, in a BBC poll released today, Japan is viewed as the second most positive international influence among all nations of the world.

I'm not making a point, other than there seems to be an interesting dichotomy here and their 'international standing' doesn't seem to be suffering as much as one might think.

 

If you click on the PDF link they break it down by responses from individual countries.
Australia rates Japan as 55% positive, 27% negative.
South Korea rates Japan 31% positive, 58% negative.
China rates them at 18% positive, 63% negative.
On the other far end of the scale Canada rates them 74% positive 14% negative.

 

I don't agree with the methodology of the survey. First, they only had respondents from 19 countries. Secondly, making a statement that seems to imply that 1800 people from China represent 36% of the total Urban population is just stupidity. Third, the numbers are not representative of the total number of people who view Japan in negative view. The Philippines has 1,000 people surveyed yet China and India only has 3400 combined? The poll is flawed IMO.

 

Interestingly in terms of other countries that Japan f***ed with,

Indonesia rates them 84% positive, 9% negative.
The Philipines rate them 70% positive, 8% negative.

I am still trying to figure those two out.

 

yeah that's kinda weird also...

 

Well.. the rest of the world doesn't care enough about them apologizing... China and Korea do, but the rest of the world don't really care as long as the supply of Ninendo Wii and Japanese tourists is not interrupted.

Anyone buying XBox 360, Samsung, Ford instead of Nintendo,Mitsubishi, and Toyota because of Japan's lack of apology lately?

I have some relatives from the city of Nanjing, China. They won't ever buy a Japanese car.

Then again, they own 3 Volkswagons, so I'm not sure how consistent they are about the fascist history thing...

 

They don't buy the Japanese car cuz of the whole 300k massacred and countless rapes thing.

At worst, the Germans were implicit because of their alliance with Japan.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanking_Massacre

 

Brazillian?

 

Carl Herrera

 

This reminds me of a book I read (_More Like Us_) which stated we Americans have higher standards wrt sexism and racism than the rest of the world. Maybe the rest of the world see Japan's racism as status quo and let's it ride?

I also remember reading that Japan has memorials at the A bomb sites listing the names of all the Japanese citizens and their effing pets that died. "Guest workers" from Korea are not listed. Thus, Koreans rank lower than pets in the Japanese eyes.

 

The Phillipines just wants to like evrybody. They (as a whole) never held imperialism against the US, either.

 

He's not Brazilian.

 

I don't think he needs to be told about what the Japanese did in WWII.

I think he is trying to say the Germans were evil fascist bastards as well. They had a few mass murders that you might have heard about, and he is pointing out that they will buy from the German evil bastards, but not the Japanese evil bastards.

Perspective and associative distance is everything, as much as I wish otherwise. I've met a number of older Southern people who somehow are still pissed off about the Civil War because they had stories from Grandparents about Sherman's march to the sea.

I find it somewhat easy to understand why someone in China would care about Japanese atrocities and not German ones. It is not ideal, but it is somewhat natural.

 

Germany admitted their atrocities. I guess that makes a big difference.

 

People, I guess, care about what happens locally... look the at Houston Chronicle... they did a blurb about Gerald Green of the Celtics, and has to point out that he's from Houston.

There are always these stories where CNN reports 100,000 dead from an earthquake in India, and has to point out that 2 American tourists were wounded.

 

Probably the complete destruction of the German hierarchy had a big effect as well. In German Hitler was the embodiment of God and he got some gas and a torch. In Japan the Emperor was preserved so there is not a clean break like in Germany.

 

Except I'm sure there are Holocaust survivors who won't have anything to do with Germany, but have no problem driving a Toyota. It is perspective, not a quantative difference in levels of badness.

 

One other dynamic is that Germany was divided and was the battleground of the Cold War. Both West and East used the memory of the Nazis as an object lesson of why the other side was wrong. The West described the Nazis and Soviets as coming from the same totalitarian style of governance, while the East described the West and Hitler as coming from the same reactionary, exploitative school of thought.

There were international political games being played in Germany that didn’t exist in Japan. A really good way to understand how this worked is to watch the film, Judgement at Nuremburg. It deals with a made up case, but it does do a good job of explaining the way US/Soviet tensions affected everything happening in Germany after WWII.

 

As I've mentioned here before, my wife has an older Dutch cousin who spent time in a Nazi concentration camp in the Netherlands, having been caught at the Swiss border trying to escape from the German occupation. The man is highly educated, the head of a large private school, and freely admits to being unable to forgive what was done to his country, and to him. He hates seeing young Dutch and German people having fun together, and knows intellectually that the Germans of that generation had nothing to do with it and regret it extremely, and yet he can't help himself. He was forced to "dispose" of the bodies of Jews and Gypsies lined up and shot against an embankment at the camp, a place he showed us... one guard tower being the chief remains after several decades. One would never know it was there, unless you knew about it. The woods are slowly covering up what's left.

Yes, it's for domestic consumption, but a very stupid thing to do by Japan's government. The West seems to have an excess of stupid governments at the moment, something I hope we'll see replaced by progressive ones, which is the strong trend in this country.



D&D. Dog Food for the Masses.