Yoon has always been a fascist, so this isn’t surprising in the slightest. He gained power by targeting women and disabled people, and appealing to far-right incels.
Fascist Japan never really ended. If you look at who the US allowed into positions of power after Japan’s unconditional surrender, you’ll see it was largely the same government, but as a US client state.
I’m not familiar tbh. I just learned about how lots of Nazis remained or were placed in politically powerful positions by the west, often out of a desire to suppress communism.
East Germany had lots of the same in its bureaucratic and generally not very “political” parts. Its politicians, yes, didn’t include that kind of people. But unlike mother USSR it had a facade of pluralism, where one of the allowed parties was, again, very close to moderate Nazis.
Japan never really had an uprising though. It’s weird that they went from American enemy number one to super friendly in like 30 years. But I’m not very educated on this subject so feel free to correct me here.
for those who don’t want to go through wiki articles, what he means is essentially after wwii, the US was like o shit communism. better be friends with Japan so we can install a bunch of army bases so we can have control in that area. Japan, ravaged by war, was just like… ok. which is why they get a lot of passes in western society for the shit they pulled in history. the end.
I think these kinds of comments are harmful to the discourse because there a good deal of nuance missing.
For one, it’s pretty reductive to call them ‘Japanese who’ve done bad things’ when who you’re talking about is dead or on their death beds. That’s not who the monument is for or about.
Historical monuments aren’t for attributing the sins of grandparents to their grandchildren. It’s about humanzing the victims and teaching people of this generation what was allowed to happen in the past. It’s about teaching them the dangers of complacency and the complicit nature of being a bystander.
If it’s worth anything, 4,300 people signed a petition against the removal and many protested in person.
Yes, Japanese people as a whole are severely lacking when it comes to acknowledging the atrocities committed by their country. No, Japanese people today are not personally responsible for them. The better we are at separating acknowledgement from responsibility, the easier time we will have convincing people to remember them.
This would be valid if Japan didn’t continue to deny their role in atrocities. The Japanese people of today are entirely responsible for the lack of recognition of their role in the atrocities of yesterday.
I think the person you’re responding to already knows that and the implication of “the bad things they’ve done” is that they mean “the bad things their nation has done.” It’s a problem that Japan (or more specifically, Japan’s government throughout the years) seems to have more than other nations because it’s historically made a big show of its status as the only nation to ever suffer the use of nuclear weapons, and has plenty of memorials and museums to remember the event, while militantly denying, internally and externally, its own history of incredible violence and cruelty towards neighboring countries.
I was wondering if it were tied to recent court decisions in Korea to allow someone to sue over wartime labour, but it looks like this has been going on a lot longer.
This is a shameful thing... but goddamn if we couldn't have found a better article about it. This one is so heavy with bias that it puts a whole stink on the protests of the memorial's removing.
They should be grateful that Japan brought civilization, technology, and Christianity to their barbaric society instead. The destruction of Tenochtitlan saved Koreans yet they still cry about it 500 years later.
I was trying to criticize the tacit view that the Spanish/Portuguese conquest of Americas was a net positive by confusing Koreans and Aztecs.
If Japanese colonialism and forced labor of Koreans is wrong, then the same action that the Spanish did is just as wrong too since people try to inject nuance for that colonization.
I thought that it was a pretty funny comment but it didn’t workout this time. I’m going to send myself off to reeducation.
That was a weird comment indeed, and I still had to reread it several times after your explanation to figure out what was going on. But kudos to you for owning up to it.
I have seen first hand how Koreans are treated in Japan to this day. Second class citizens, not considered ‘japanese’ even if born in Japan, cant rent houses or apartments, discrimination in employment.
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