Zefah said:
Yeah, but the errors in Japanese textbooks are usually more about conveniently not mentioning certain important facts that might make Japan look bad.
Dude, no. The "certain facts" that Japan's history textbooks elide are
systematic, government-mandated campaigns of war crimes against Chinese and Koreans during World War II.
Unlike Germany, there was never a comprehensive war crimes tribunal for the acts committed by the Japanese armed forces in World War II, and there's never been official government acknowledgement of these war crimes. In Germany, history moved past it because the leaders of the old government were (in large part) executed for their crimes, and the new government has gone out of its way to decry, and insist on remembrance of, the genocide in Europe.
People are contributing to this problem from
every side, and the virulent anti-Japanese (and anti-American) movements in Korea aren't great either, but it's historical revisionism to ignore the huge parts of the situation that are a result of Japan's actions (and the actions of the Western powers that led to the situation that exists in Japan today.)
Generalissimo said:
Why is it that whenever I feel close to getting an explanation of why the Japanese apologies aren't enough, the one who says that Japan has never apologized always leaves?
I think the real issue is less "statements of apology" and more a sense of full cultural acknowledgement. Germany maintains Nazi concentration camps as memorials to those who were killed in the Shoah, and maintains a national policy requiring that children be educated as to the truth of the Holocaust; Japanese education elides and downplays the Japanese war crimes in China and Korea, which means many Japanese don't know about them or have inaccurate facts about them.
genjiZERO said:
And what the Allied powers weren't brutal and genocidal?
The US (like many of the other Western powers) quite certainly has its own unacknowledged war crimes that can quite legitimately be held against them. The real solution is for
everyone to acknowledge those acts, not to excuse one nation's because another
also denies their history.
And for all the ethical problems of the bombings of Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, none of them is even remotely comparable to the actions of the Japanese military during World War II. Not at all.