For example, Mr. Historian, just check with the numerous Dutch women who were abuse and have filed complaints in recent years. Again, the reasons for a minor cover-up by the victims, i.e. many women who were raped and abused for months and years in prostitution camps did not want to continue in the role of victim after the end of Japanese occupation. Many women sought to start over in their societies and naturally sought to cover-up the abuses in order to build a better post-WWII planet.
Are you saying, Mr. Historian, that you find silence in the face of horror as different for the real victims of Japanese's Imperialism throughout Eastern Asian as surprise? How could you not interpret silence on rape more properly? Your own country covered up the great abuses in your homelands for many decades after WWII! These horrors include the facts that in the name of the nation and in the name of the Emperor women, children, and grandparents in villages across the land were forced for months-on-end to prepare and attack and fight the fully-armed Allied forces (carrying automatic weapons) with wooden swords until they had victory or succumbed to death.
No good historian should assume that silence on a matter by anyone is simply proof that something never happened. If Mr. Kase would meet with the women who were so abused-some abused for over many years under the severest conditions of Japanese occupation, whereby these women and teenage girls had to decide between hunger (and death) in a camp nearby or the horror and abuse of a life as a Japanese sex slave.
Mr. Kase reveals no evidence that he ever tried to personally meet with such women. (My friend D.D. has a Dutch aunt who survived one of the Japanese camps in Indonesia. Her story and others true stories have been portrayed in many films in recent years. Didn't Mr. Kase study this phenomena in film or documentary either?)
In conclusion, this so-called historian Hideaki Kase who somehow got his editorial entitled "The Use and Abuse of the Past" is guilty of a crime against humanity's valuable memories himself. If what he wrote is not a crime, it should be if he and his cronies succeed in rolling back the memories of the past and painting the Japanese as the only victims of Asian war in the 20th Century.
Further, I have to ask how could the USA periodical Newsweek have published such a week and ill-thought out piece. The article looks like nothing more than Japanese government style propaganda?
I can only imagine that some under-the-table or quid-pro-quo deal took place either at Newsweek or through pressures at the governmental level-whereby the USA government, too, is known for getting its own propaganda published as "news" in periodicals in neighboring lands around the globe.
One final caveat: Thirteen years ago I wrote a poorly written piece in a Japanese periodical, THE JET JOURNAL. Interestingly, the title of that writing of mine had a similar title to the one published by Kase in Newsweek in its April 2007 special edition on war memories. My article had been about the abuse and use of English in Japan and was called: "Homo Milk: Abusive Language and Abuse of Language". This admittedly poorly thought out piece of mine was critical towards the thoughtlessness with which Japanese peoples were using English and other foreign languages in Japan to market themselves and their identities. The Japanese government and numerous NGOs in Japan were trying to promote international awareness in Japan, and I thought my article would provide some insights. (That particular journal targets foreign language teachers and others interested cross-cultural and language issues in Japan and abroad.)Now that I am older and have more years of experience working internationally than when I wrote my 1994 article on the "Abuse of Language", I would say that the whining tone of that writing was manipulative and placed foreigners in the position of seeing themselves as victims in the Japanese society. What I had wanted to say was simply that Japanese ought to be more thoughtful about how they were going about creating new international identities by appropriating and misusing other nations' cultures & languages in marketing, on television, in magazines, etc. When I reread the article after it was published in 1994 in The JET JOURNAL , I saw that it had also been published with many inaccuracies and I am not proud of how the piece came out.
In short, I can recognize and admit when my writings are off-target. It is rare for Japanese leadership, however, to apologize for much of anything when it comes to history, but that doesn't mean that historian kase can't burn a new path by apologizing for misleading readers in Newsweek on April 2, 2007.
If Historian Kase is now ashamed at what Newsweek published (or the slant Newsweek gave his writing), I invite him to come out and admit it. Meanwhile, I think Newsweek itself has a lot of explaining to do to the American public. Why did the publishers decide to taint that special issue on American soldiers in Iraq( and their families at home) by putting that Japanese governmental propaganda article in the very same issue as if it were (1) fact, (2) newsworthy, and (3) connected at all to the reality on the ground in the Middle East today or in Asia in either the past or in the near future.?
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