America will not leave Japan Options

[Captain Corea]

what a load of bull crap. seriously the US did more harm to japan than japan did to asia during ww2. and americans certainly RAPED MORE women than the japanese did because americans raped in japan for well over 6 decades whereas the japanese did it only during the war.

Says the Iranian that has no vested interest in Asia.

Perhaps if you actually lived in Asia you'd know how many here feel about Imperial Japan.

[KraterosHellas]

Says the Iranian that has no vested interest in Asia.

Perhaps if you actually lived in Asia you'd know how many here feel about Imperial Japan.

i have met MANY asians, chinese, japanese, korean, vietnamese, and it struck me how similar they all are. i was appalled by it because i saw so much hatred between these people online...then i realized that maybe they don't hate each other at all...maybe they are just being manipulated by the west..

i am supremely confident that the young generations in asia are ready to forgive the past and move on toward closer ties with japan and with each other. but in order for that to happen there is one obstacle...can u guess what it is? i'm sure u'd know by now

[hapkido1996]

Yeah, it would've been better if nobody had put a stop to this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanking_Massacre

Nanking Massacre

...

Japanese war crimes


Contest to kill 100 people using a sword

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The Nanking Massacre or Nanjing Massacre, also known as the Rape of Nanking, was a mass murder and war rape that occurred during the six-week period following the Japanese capture of the city of Nanjing (Nanking), the former capital of the Republic of China, on December 13, 1937 during the Second Sino-Japanese War. During this period hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians and disarmed soldiers were murdered and 20,000–80,000 women were raped[1] by soldiers of the Imperial Japanese Army.[2][3][4]

The massacre remains a contentious political issue, as various aspects of it have been disputed by some historical revisionists and Japanese nationalists,[3] who have claimed that the massacre has been either exaggerated or wholly fabricated for propaganda purposes. As a result of the nationalist efforts to deny or rationalize the war crimes, the controversy surrounding the massacre remains a stumbling block in Sino-Japanese relations, as well as Japanese relations with other Asia-Pacific nations such as South Korea and the Philippines.

An accurate estimation of the death toll in the massacre has not been achieved because most of the Japanese military records on the killings were deliberately destroyed or kept secret shortly after the surrender of Japan in 1945. The International Military Tribunal of the Far East estimates more than 200,000 casualties in the incident;[5] China's official estimate is about 300,000 casualties, based on the evaluation of the Nanjing War Crimes Tribunal. Estimates from Japanese historians vary widely, in the vicinity of 40,000–200,000. Some historical revisionists even deny that a widespread, systematic massacre occurred at all, claiming that any deaths were either justified militarily, accidental or isolated incidents of unauthorized atrocities. These negationists claim that the characterization of the incident as a large-scale, systematic massacre was fabricated for the purpose of political propaganda.[6][7]

Although the Japanese government has admitted the acts of killing of a large number of noncombatants, looting and other violence committed by the Imperial Japanese Army after the fall of Nanking,[8][9] some Japanese officials have argued that the death toll was military in nature and that no such crimes ever occurred. Denial of the massacre (and a divergent array of revisionist accounts of the killings) has become a staple of Japanese nationalism.[10] In Japan, public opinion of the massacres varies, and few deny the occurrence of the massacre outright.[10] Nonetheless, recurring attempts by negationists to promote a revisionist history of the incident have created controversy that periodically reverberates in the international media, particularly in China, South Korea, and other East Asian nations.[11]

Pick any war and you'll find war crimes and atrocities. American, Japanese, Russian, Korean, Bolivian, Australian...It has nothing to do with race or nationality. Read a fu-king book, people.

[Captain Corea]

i have met MANY asians, chinese, japanese, korean, vietnamese, and it struck me how similar they all are. i was appalled by it because i saw so much hatred between these people online...then i realized that maybe they don't hate each other at all...maybe they are just being manipulated by the west..

i am supremely confident that the young generations in asia are ready to forgive the past and move on toward closer ties with japan and with each other. but in order for that to happen there is one obstacle...can u guess what it is? i'm sure u'd know by now

Did you travel through Asia? Because you know, "knowing" people online is not actually real.

Take a trip through Asia sometime... better yet, live here for a while. After some time, you might actually understand what people are feeling.

[KraterosHellas]

Did you travel through Asia? Because you know, "knowing" people online is not actually real.

Take a trip through Asia sometime... better yet, live here for a while. After some time, you might actually understand what people are feeling.

i HAVE been to east asia, for ur information. i've stayed in beijing and seoul and observed lot of things there, met lot of people and gained sufficient primary sources. i have also met asians in america. so please wake up from ur delusions that i'm misinformed or making stuff off the top of my head. constantly asking "do u have vested interests" "do u live here" do u have any relations" etc. this $hit gets pretty annoying. and oh yea i don't need to prove that i have vested interest in asia by living there or whatever, cuz that WON'T alter the effectiveness and truthfulness of my arguments. the very fact that u constantly bring this up weakens ur own credibility.

[Vendetta]

Don't forget Japanese civilians were also victims of Imperial Japan's military regime. Don't take the antagonistic versus Japan angle. That's exactly what the Japanese right-wings want. Be specific when you want to criticize something about a nation of millions of people. It's not so much that WW2 is still directly affecting us. The real concern is about the current attitudes that will project into the future. Western Europe almost got this down but East Asia still needs a lot of work.

I agree with the above; a lot of people forget that there are Japanese civilians who are actively against what the Imperial Japanese military do. Japanese people are not to be confused with the Japanese military. There are liberals here in the US who are against a lot of what the government and military do but we can't just bunch Americans all into one group either. Just because Japan as a whole doesn't apologize, there are thousands of Japanese people who are aware of the war crimes that have been committed and are apologetic and repenting. And the museums and schools that teach students warped history isn't very uncommon in the world. In the US, the history books of the South are vastly different from the ones in the North.

And for those who are feel like asking, yes, I've been to Asia...Korea and Japan.

This post has been edited by Vendetta: Sep 2 2011, 12:20 PM

[hapkido1996]

...and oh yea i don't need to prove that i have vested interest in asia by living there or whatever, cuz that WON'T alter the effectiveness and truthfulness of my arguments.

The longer you live in a place, the more experience you have and the greater your database of experience upon which to draw conclusions. Passing through for a few days just gives you a narrow cross-section that is both limited and distorted. I've been living in Korea since 1996. Your lack of experience with real Korea and Koreans is obvious to me. If I wanted to know what Mozambique was really like, I'd ask the person who had lived there the longest. That's what people with common sense would do. *cough*

the very fact that u constantly bring this up weakens ur own credibility.

To the contrary. You embarrass yourself my making such an illogical statement in the first place, not to mention your spelling, grammar and punctuation errors.

[KraterosHellas]

The longer you live in a place, the more experience you have and the greater your database of experience upon which to draw conclusions. Passing through for a few days just gives you a narrow cross-section that is both limited and distorted. I've been living in Korea since 1996. Your lack of experience with real Korea and Koreans is obvious to me. If I wanted to know what Mozambique was really like, I'd ask the person who had lived there the longest. That's what people with common sense would do. *cough*



To the contrary. You embarrass yourself my making such an illogical statement in the first place, not to mention your spelling, grammar and punctuation errors.

it doesn't matter how long u live there, what matters is the perspicaciousness and soundness of ur observation and conclusions from afar. u urself is limited to the scope of what's right in front of u. u are not aware of what goes on at night in the itaewon district, or near US military camps, or some decrepit clubs...these things are shielded from ur eyes. for most koreans, these things are out of sight and out of mind. i understand this because i know that east asian culture has a habit for covering up controvertial issues. but for the rest of the world, for acute observers and analysts such as myself, nothing escapes the roving mind, the piercing logic...

[hapkido1996]

it doesn't matter how long u live there, what matters is the perspicaciousness and soundness of ur observation and conclusions from afar. u urself is limited to the scope of what's right in front of u. u are not aware of what goes on at night in the itaewon district, or near US military camps, or some decrepit clubs...these things are shielded from ur eyes. for most koreans, these things are out of sight and out of mind. i understand this because i know that east asian culture has a habit for covering up controvertial issues. but for the rest of the world, for acute observers and analysts such as myself, nothing escapes the roving mind, the piercing logic...

You seem quite sure of this, considering that you know absolutely nothing of where I've been, what I've done and what I've seen in the past 15 years. Unlike many of the expats over here, I have not made a protective Western bubble around myself. If you were such an "acute observer and analyst," you would know better to base dogmatic assertions without the first shred of evidence to support it. You pased through Korea, made some sweeping generalizations based on little more than your own confidence in your genius. Yay. You're doing the same thing that the expats who live in their little Western bubbles do, and then belittling them for it. Pot...meet kettle. *yawn*

I repeat: I'd rather get my information from someone who's been living in a country for 15 years than from some who visited briefly. That's not to say that everything the old-timer says is irrefutable, but someone who just passed through could hardly have a comparable data base upon which to draw reliable conclusions. This is not a difficult concept. It is the foundation of the scientific method. The broadest possible base of empirical data and necessary inference based on that data are necessary for credible knowledge claims. Not fleeting glimpses and conjecture based on bias, tenuous extrapolation and imagination.

[MorbidlyObese1]

Why can't we all just get along? o(^^)o <-----that's my hug face :-)

[datukillscrap]

You seem quite sure of this, considering that you know absolutely nothing of where I've been, what I've done and what I've seen in the past 15 years. Unlike many of the expats over here, I have not made a protective Western bubble around myself. If you were such an "acute observer and analyst," you would know better to base dogmatic assertions without the first shred of evidence to support it. You pased through Korea, made some sweeping generalizations based on little more than your own confidence in your genius. Yay. You're doing the same thing that the expats who live in their little Western bubbles do, and then belittling them for it. Pot...meet kettle. *yawn*

I repeat: I'd rather get my information from someone who's been living in a country for 15 years than from some who visited briefly. That's not to say that everything the old-timer says is irrefutable, but someone who just passed through could hardly have a comparable data base upon which to draw reliable conclusions. This is not a difficult concept. It is the foundation of the scientific method. The broadest possible base of empirical data and necessary inference based on that data are necessary for credible knowledge claims. Not fleeting glimpses and conjecture based on bias, tenuous extrapolation and imagination.

i agree. one may visit but that visit would not be sufficient to learn about the culture. krateos is western, that means his culture is predisposed towards confrontational and face to face interactions. westerners are easy to observe because they easily show emotion and speak their mind.

one thing krateros has not learned is that what asians say or do is different from what they think or feel. asians (at least my culture) do not like to be confrontational since we value harmony and consensus and not outright competition. in pilipino we call this "pakikisama" that means that before you speak you test the waters first to see if you might be giving offense to someone or if you might be stepping on another persons honor.. we also believe in giving deference to our elders. so if you're probably old - no one would disagree with you in your face.

considering that filipinos are probably the most westernized of all asians .. the thought that we still adhere to pakikisama proves that, that cultural aspect of asians is very strong.