Australian Army nurse receives apologies from Japanese people and government official which encourages her, quite rightly I think so far as most average Japanese are concerned, to the view that modern Japanese are very different to the Japanese who captured and abused her for many years during WWII (last couple of minutes of video captures her appreciation of this) http://au.news.yahoo.com/today-tonight/lifestyle/article/-/20458677/tale-of-courage/
Meanwhile, Japanese Prime Minister Abe, the direct descendant of major participants in the same crew which took Japan to war decides to piss off everybody in the region and anyone with a vaguely positive humanitarian sentiment by honouring the Japanese war dead, including war criminals, at the Yasukuni war shrine. http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/japanese-pm-shinzo-abes-yasukuni-war-shrine-visit-stokes-tensions/story-e6frg6so-1226790109609
Nobody should have a problem with the Japanese or any other nation honouring their war dead, at the level of personal sacrifice, as instruments of their government’s policy.
Everybody should have a problem with the Japanese or any other nation honouring their war dead as contributors to a regime of unimaginable terror and horror everywhere they went.
The conservative elements in the Japanese governments which have dominated in the post-war period are quite happy to honour their war dead as contributors to a regime of unimaginable terror and horror everywhere they went, while carefully avoiding any admission that what those war dead and the survivors did was wrong.
Contrast this with Germany, which has done everything possible to do, achieve, and maintain exactly the opposite in relation to its Nazi history. And has succeeded. And doesn’t get the same continuing hostility and distrust from its neighbours and the wider world that Japan does about the prospect of resurgent fascist nationalism leading to another war.
So we have the fairly common person to person situation that the average Japanese person responding to the Australian nurse’s abysmal experience as a prisoner of the Japanese can respond properly at a decent human level, yet we also have the consistent thread since the Allies gave up prosecuting Japanese war criminals in preference for using their ilk to support the Allies’ anti-communist program of the participants in Japanese war crimes and more recently their heirs maintaining the same arrogant and inhumane attitudes which typified Japan 1933-45.
As with the causes of the Pacific War, the problem is with the Japanese government, the zaibatsu, and related elements of capitalist and nationalistic privilege.
Something that I was inclined to dismiss about three and four decades ago when first I encountered it (about thirty years after the end of the Pacific War), but am becoming less inclined to do in light of the likes of Abe persisting with his support for war criminals and their actions in Japan’s war of aggressive expansion some seventy or so years after the war, is the often quoted experience of Allied POWs after Japan surrendered that their guards said things to the effect that the surrender wasn’t the end of the war but only a step in war of 100 years or more.
It may be no coincidence that the current Japanese government is converting its very substantial self-defence force into a potentially aggressive force, primarily to resist perceived threats from China.
Perhaps if the current Japanese government and its predecessors and likely successors didn’t dismiss the appalling actions of the Japanese in China and throughout occupied territories and reinforce approval of those actions with insulting visits by Prime Ministers to the Yasukuni Shrine, and if those governments expressed the apologies which the Australian nurse got at a personal level from Japanese who had nothing to do with the war, then maybe I wouldn’t regard Japan as the Western Pacific equivalent of Israel at its conservative government level: an arrogant and unrepentant state which continually shits on its neighbours in the knowledge that it has morally unjustified support from the West for its morally insupportable conduct because it suits the morally bankrupt bastards called politicians in the West to do so in pursuit of their perception of their nations’ advantage. Yet the same morally bankrupt bastards condemn Putin et al for being morally bankrupt.
BAH!