Jeffrey Bader, former senior director for Asia at the National Security Council earlier in the Obama administration, has drawn attention for remarks criticizing comments made by Abe Shinzō and other Japanese leaders about Japan's wartime past. As Kyodo reports:Bader...also warned the U.S. government could be more "vocal" if Japan reviewed past statements in which the …
Tag: World War II
The conservatives humbled
Perhaps one of the positive consequences of Japan's economic crisis is that it has silenced Japan's conservatives.By silenced I do not mean literally silenced — they're still fulminating. What I mean is that they have been rendered irrelevant by events. Despite their media power, their ability to churn out a seemingly infinite amount of books, …
General Tamogami refuses to fade away
Is Tamogami Toshio a millstone around Aso Taro's neck?The now former chief of staff of the Air Self-Defense Forces (ASDF) appeared before the House of Councillors foreign and defense affairs committee and continued his determined campaign to dispel the postwar consensus on Japan's wartime past.In his remarks, General Tamogami appeared to play dumb. Asked about …
Revisionist America?
At 空, Ken Tanaka responds to yesterday's post about Japanese revisionism by citing Stephen Walt regarding American "historical amnesia."I definitely take his (and Walt's) point about America's historical amnesia, particularly in regard to Japan. Few Americans appreciate the extent of the damage inflicted upon the Japanese people, or if they do, their appreciation stops at …
Japan’s revisionist problem
In my critique of Tamogami Toshio's essay, I asked, "Just how widespread are these views in the JSDF?"Jun Okumura quickly provided some sort of answer: more than fifty SDF members submitted essays in the contest won by General Tamogami. Sankei reports that the number of ASDF members who submitted essays is actually seventy-eight by the …
The Tamogami affair
The Times (of London) reports that Aso Taro may face an upper house censure motion over now-retired General Tamogami Toshio's revisionist essay on Japan's activities on mainland Asia in the 1930s.I think this would be a mistake — as Jun Okumura noted, Mr. Aso did the right thing. General Tamogami was sacked immediately. Unless it …
Prisoners of war
Lester Tenney, commander of the American Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor, a veterans organization, who spent most of the war as a prisoner of war in Japan working in a Mitsui mine, spoke yesterday at a hall in the shadow of the Japanese Diet.Mr. Tenney is currently visiting Tokyo, hoping to raise awareness of what …
The human cost of Hiroshima
The Hoover Institution has published a set of photographs discovered in 1945 by Robert Capp, an American serving in the US occupation force. The photos, taken by an unknown Japanese photographer, show the remains of victims of the bombing of Hiroshima. As Wenran Jiang, professor of political science at the University of Alberta noted at …
Recommended Book: In The Ruins of Empire, Ronald Spector
My apologies for not recommending a new book sooner, but blame it on a hectic few weeks in Japanese politics.This book, though, is well worth reading. A sequel of sorts to Eagle Against the Sun, his account of the Pacific War, Ronald Spector outdoes his earlier effort in providing a comprehensive record of the bloody …
Continue reading Recommended Book: In The Ruins of Empire, Ronald Spector
Sympathy for the devils?
A common trope among the Japanese right's apologists, revisionists, and other outright deniers of Japan's wartime crimes is that Japanese imperialism was little different from the European imperialism that had divided up Asia over the centuries — indeed, Japanese imperialism was superior because it had the effect (intended or not) of liberating Asians from the …
Tobias S. Harris 