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That's your decision, but I would kill for my family. If someone were to attack me and try to kill me, I would kill that person to stop them. I think most others here would do the same. It's subjective (unless you believe in some sort of God, in which case you can submit to an absolute), but I feel very strongly that if some wacko or pretty theif is trying to kill me or my family, I have every right in the world to fight back.
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Hellooo, El Cooty, Im PigsnieLite, Pigsnies little bro and I think the Japanese are cool & we are going to Japan for a holiday this summer. and I think also that is really cool that you have a japanese wife & 2 vietnamese kids. I would also like to say that I am a Nomo fan & I hope the Red Sox go all the way. Ichiro is ok too but Nomo is the pioneer!!!!
and even tho we are Brits, I look up his games on espn.
Hummmmm, I think It would be very hard for me to kill anyone TWT. I mean it is easy to say I would kill for Pigsnie & my mum & dad & chairman meow but I dont know if I can like stab someone thru teh chest with a kitchen knife or shoot someone in the head even in self defense. I would have nightmares & I would be afraid of being haunted like in 6th sense.
and even tho we are Brits, I look up his games on espn.
Hummmmm, I think It would be very hard for me to kill anyone TWT. I mean it is easy to say I would kill for Pigsnie & my mum & dad & chairman meow but I dont know if I can like stab someone thru teh chest with a kitchen knife or shoot someone in the head even in self defense. I would have nightmares & I would be afraid of being haunted like in 6th sense.
__________________
God save Freddie Mercury!
God save Freddie Mercury!
El Cootie your post is quite disturbing. People die in war yet there is a distinct difference between killing and viscious barbaric torture and murder. I have much family in the military. My father was with the 3rd Marine Division out of Okinawa. He served in a recon unit in Vietnam and last I saw and heard from him there were no VietCong running around with name tags identifying themselves. Americans undoubtedly killed innocent civilians, however this was not a result of some systematic brutality to murder like that condoned by Japan but rather the realities of conducting guerilla warfare in a foreign place. There is quite the difference in killing civilians because they were thought to be the enemy and murdering civilians and POW's after they've been identified. If you served in Vietnam then I'm sure you're familiar with the brutality of the VietCong and their tactics. If anything America was at a disadvantage in Vietnam because they did not stoop down to the level of necessary brutality to be successful. America as a nation was not prepared to endure the brutality necessary to win. I'm not saying that is right or wrong, but that is the truth.
Your comments about comparing the Atomic bomb to Japanese atrocities is simply horrible. Japan had a choice to avoid an atomic bomb attack, several times. In fact I believe US planes even dropped leaflets to Japenese citizens to warn not just the Emperor but all of Japan that an attack was imminent if there was no surrender. Japan did not give American POW's and other Asians anything resembling the opportunity to avoid being raped, tortured, and murdered. The truth is that Japanese agression began the war that led to the deaths of millions. The atomic bomb ended the war and probably saved millions of American and Japanese lives. The comparison you've attempted between the two is terrible.
Again though, the overriding importance of all of this is Japan's flat out denial of the atrocities committed before and after WW2. Their whole nation seems to be in denial about their role and responsibility in WW2. In fact I read somewhere there is a film called Merdeka currently running in Japan that basically glorifies their role in Asia during WW2. The producer of the film was quoted as saying Asia should be thankful that Japan helped them realize independence or some nonsense like that.
Your comments about comparing the Atomic bomb to Japanese atrocities is simply horrible. Japan had a choice to avoid an atomic bomb attack, several times. In fact I believe US planes even dropped leaflets to Japenese citizens to warn not just the Emperor but all of Japan that an attack was imminent if there was no surrender. Japan did not give American POW's and other Asians anything resembling the opportunity to avoid being raped, tortured, and murdered. The truth is that Japanese agression began the war that led to the deaths of millions. The atomic bomb ended the war and probably saved millions of American and Japanese lives. The comparison you've attempted between the two is terrible.
Again though, the overriding importance of all of this is Japan's flat out denial of the atrocities committed before and after WW2. Their whole nation seems to be in denial about their role and responsibility in WW2. In fact I read somewhere there is a film called Merdeka currently running in Japan that basically glorifies their role in Asia during WW2. The producer of the film was quoted as saying Asia should be thankful that Japan helped them realize independence or some nonsense like that.
I found this article real quickly and it touches on the film Merdeka which I mentioned in my previous post. Here is the link http://www.smh.com.au/news/0105/12/world/world4.html
Japan buries war shame in search for pride
History is being denied, Herald correspondent Michael Millett writes from Tokyo.
Japan has a deep moral flaw - it has no "normal" love of itself.
That is the view of two Japanese academics, leading figures in a controversial right-wing group intent upon installing a "less masochistic" view of Japanese history.
The absence of any patriotic culture, particularly in the hothouse environment of schools, is posing a real risk to Japanese society, argues Professor Tadae Takubo, president of the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform.
"Patriotism and nationalism do not exist in school textbooks. There is an urgent need to bring these factors in otherwise it will result in the collapse of the nation."
Professor Takubo, a Tokyo University historian, Professor Nobukatsu Fujioka, a number of other academics and the shadowy corporate figures who underpin their work are determined to avoid this looming apocalyptic state. But it is a campaign that has landed Japan in one of its perennial regional diplomatic blow-ups.
The society has succeeded, after much haggling with bureaucrats inside the Ministry of Education, in having a history textbook cleared for use in junior high schools next year.
The controversial text, one of eight approved for distribution, glorifies Japan's military past, skating over the Imperial Army's brutal colonisation of Manchuria and Korea and pushing an unashamed pro-Emperor view of Japanese society.
It avoids any mention of the Army's use of "comfort women", a euphemism for the use of sex slaves to service frontline troops. Such issues have no place in high-school textbooks. "I don't think [its mention] will ever foster love towards one's nation," says Professor Takubo.
Inevitably, the book and the ministry's clearance for publication have sparked anger in neighbouring Asian nations and problems for the the newly installed administration of Junichiro Koizumi.
China, ever alert to signs of what it regards as Japanese militarism, has cancelled top-level visits. South Korea has postponed a joint military drill and has formally demanded 25 changes to the most controversial text, and 10 to other books.
Late this week, a bipartisan group of Korean legislators sought a court injunction to prevent the textbook being distributed.
It is a distressingly familiar scene. Japan's textbook authorisation process, set up in 1948 as a step away from discredited state control, has long been a battleground for Japan's right- and left-wing forces.
But this particular row appears potentially very damaging.
Mr Koizumi, while desperate to repair ties with his neighbours, believes his hands are legally tied. The notorious textbook can be changed only if there is clear evidence of a factual error.
Passions are likely to be further inflamed following the release this weekend of a Japanese film, Merdeka (meaning independence in Indonesian), with a distinct nationalist bent.
Produced by the company that made Pride - a 1998 heroic portrayal of a wartime Japanese prime minister, Hideki Tojo - Merdeka depicts Imperial Army soldiers in Indonesia as selfless contributors to the cause of Indonesian independence.
This fits nicely with the view of professors Takubo and Fujioka that a primary motive behind the Pacific war was Japan's intention to free Asia from the colonial yoke. (That this Greater East-Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere resulted in an even more brutal form of colonisation in many Asian countries is conveniently overlooked.)
Mr Koizumi is also threatening to inflame the issue by making a highly public visit to Yasukuni Shrine, the resting place of Japan's principal war criminals and the spiritual rallying point for the arch-right, on August 15.
The overlapping controversies highlight Japan's chronic inability to distance itself from its history.
Various reasons have been advanced for this malaise. Some say it is psychological and adopt Ruth Benedict's postwar thesis in The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture that Japan is driven by a shame culture, unlike the guilt culture that shapes Western thinking.
"True shame cultures rely on external sanctions for good behaviour, not, as guilt cultures do, on an internalised conviction of sin," Benedict wrote.
The consequence is that, in the absence of external sanctions, Japan prefers to bury discussion of its war past rather than confront it head-on. Others find a more basic culprit - the Liberal Democratic Party, Japan's pivotal political force, set up in the mid-1950s, with the aid of CIA funding, as a conservative bulwark to communist expansion in Asia.
Arch right-wing groups maintain close and insidious links with the LDP, the bureaucracy and the business sector - Japan's "iron triangle" of power.
Their relentless pressure and use of aging political mouthpieces make it impossible for governments, or other parts of the elite, to deliver the concessions necessary to placate those aggrieved by the country's military past.
The only formal apology offered for Japan's misdeeds was made in 1994 by a Socialist prime minister, Tomiichi Murayama. It was not approved by the Diet because of resistance from the LDP, then in a short-lived alliance with the Socialists.
In terms of escaping the past, the contrast between the Axis allies Germany and Japan could not be more striking.
While Germany solidifies its position as one of the powers - if not the power - in an emerging 21st-century Europe, Japan is still squabbling with its Asian neighbours over its lamentable military record in the region.
As a result of the textbook furore, its bureaucrats are now engaged in an arcane debate with South Korean politicians and academics over whether or not soldiers deployed by the Yamato Court had established a permanent base on Korean soil in the 4th century.
The same two sides are trying to find common ground over the rationale behind Japan's forced annexation of Korea in the early part of the 20th century.
Unanimity is impossible.
"At this stage, we will still be arguing about these issues in another hundred years," one Japanese salaryman said in despair.
It's a common response. Most Japanese have been simply exhausted by the debate. Extreme groups find it easy to grab attention in the mainstream silence.
The problem is that Japan suffers.
Japan buries war shame in search for pride
History is being denied, Herald correspondent Michael Millett writes from Tokyo.
Japan has a deep moral flaw - it has no "normal" love of itself.
That is the view of two Japanese academics, leading figures in a controversial right-wing group intent upon installing a "less masochistic" view of Japanese history.
The absence of any patriotic culture, particularly in the hothouse environment of schools, is posing a real risk to Japanese society, argues Professor Tadae Takubo, president of the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform.
"Patriotism and nationalism do not exist in school textbooks. There is an urgent need to bring these factors in otherwise it will result in the collapse of the nation."
Professor Takubo, a Tokyo University historian, Professor Nobukatsu Fujioka, a number of other academics and the shadowy corporate figures who underpin their work are determined to avoid this looming apocalyptic state. But it is a campaign that has landed Japan in one of its perennial regional diplomatic blow-ups.
The society has succeeded, after much haggling with bureaucrats inside the Ministry of Education, in having a history textbook cleared for use in junior high schools next year.
The controversial text, one of eight approved for distribution, glorifies Japan's military past, skating over the Imperial Army's brutal colonisation of Manchuria and Korea and pushing an unashamed pro-Emperor view of Japanese society.
It avoids any mention of the Army's use of "comfort women", a euphemism for the use of sex slaves to service frontline troops. Such issues have no place in high-school textbooks. "I don't think [its mention] will ever foster love towards one's nation," says Professor Takubo.
Inevitably, the book and the ministry's clearance for publication have sparked anger in neighbouring Asian nations and problems for the the newly installed administration of Junichiro Koizumi.
China, ever alert to signs of what it regards as Japanese militarism, has cancelled top-level visits. South Korea has postponed a joint military drill and has formally demanded 25 changes to the most controversial text, and 10 to other books.
Late this week, a bipartisan group of Korean legislators sought a court injunction to prevent the textbook being distributed.
It is a distressingly familiar scene. Japan's textbook authorisation process, set up in 1948 as a step away from discredited state control, has long been a battleground for Japan's right- and left-wing forces.
But this particular row appears potentially very damaging.
Mr Koizumi, while desperate to repair ties with his neighbours, believes his hands are legally tied. The notorious textbook can be changed only if there is clear evidence of a factual error.
Passions are likely to be further inflamed following the release this weekend of a Japanese film, Merdeka (meaning independence in Indonesian), with a distinct nationalist bent.
Produced by the company that made Pride - a 1998 heroic portrayal of a wartime Japanese prime minister, Hideki Tojo - Merdeka depicts Imperial Army soldiers in Indonesia as selfless contributors to the cause of Indonesian independence.
This fits nicely with the view of professors Takubo and Fujioka that a primary motive behind the Pacific war was Japan's intention to free Asia from the colonial yoke. (That this Greater East-Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere resulted in an even more brutal form of colonisation in many Asian countries is conveniently overlooked.)
Mr Koizumi is also threatening to inflame the issue by making a highly public visit to Yasukuni Shrine, the resting place of Japan's principal war criminals and the spiritual rallying point for the arch-right, on August 15.
The overlapping controversies highlight Japan's chronic inability to distance itself from its history.
Various reasons have been advanced for this malaise. Some say it is psychological and adopt Ruth Benedict's postwar thesis in The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture that Japan is driven by a shame culture, unlike the guilt culture that shapes Western thinking.
"True shame cultures rely on external sanctions for good behaviour, not, as guilt cultures do, on an internalised conviction of sin," Benedict wrote.
The consequence is that, in the absence of external sanctions, Japan prefers to bury discussion of its war past rather than confront it head-on. Others find a more basic culprit - the Liberal Democratic Party, Japan's pivotal political force, set up in the mid-1950s, with the aid of CIA funding, as a conservative bulwark to communist expansion in Asia.
Arch right-wing groups maintain close and insidious links with the LDP, the bureaucracy and the business sector - Japan's "iron triangle" of power.
Their relentless pressure and use of aging political mouthpieces make it impossible for governments, or other parts of the elite, to deliver the concessions necessary to placate those aggrieved by the country's military past.
The only formal apology offered for Japan's misdeeds was made in 1994 by a Socialist prime minister, Tomiichi Murayama. It was not approved by the Diet because of resistance from the LDP, then in a short-lived alliance with the Socialists.
In terms of escaping the past, the contrast between the Axis allies Germany and Japan could not be more striking.
While Germany solidifies its position as one of the powers - if not the power - in an emerging 21st-century Europe, Japan is still squabbling with its Asian neighbours over its lamentable military record in the region.
As a result of the textbook furore, its bureaucrats are now engaged in an arcane debate with South Korean politicians and academics over whether or not soldiers deployed by the Yamato Court had established a permanent base on Korean soil in the 4th century.
The same two sides are trying to find common ground over the rationale behind Japan's forced annexation of Korea in the early part of the 20th century.
Unanimity is impossible.
"At this stage, we will still be arguing about these issues in another hundred years," one Japanese salaryman said in despair.
It's a common response. Most Japanese have been simply exhausted by the debate. Extreme groups find it easy to grab attention in the mainstream silence.
The problem is that Japan suffers.
And another one that touches on it. http://www.hollandsentinel.com/stori...29010045.shtml
Popular cartoons, textbook, premier stoke concern over Japan's nationalism
The Associated Press
TOKYO (AP) -- Japanese city folk have long regarded right-wing nationalism as little more than an irritant -- loud and threatening, yet too marginal to be taken very seriously.
But an international storm recently over the government's approval of a revisionist history textbook, and a wave of cartoons and movies glorifying Japan's imperialist past, are raising fears the rightist message may be getting through.
The sensitivities are likely to become all the more acute because of the unexpected rise to power Thursday of Junichiro Koizumi, who has alarmed some Asians with his hawkish views.
Japanese know the new prime minister as a maverick and a reformer. But neighbors in the region are more concerned by Koizumi's support for official visits to a shrine that honors Japan's war dead -- including war criminals -- and his calls to strengthen the military.
Koizumi's conservative positions are a far cry from the emperor worship of Japan's hardcore nationalists. And his choice of several moderates in his Cabinet -- many of whom have urged consideration for victims of Japanese imperialism -- indicate the new administration is not veering drastically to the right.
But his empowerment comes at a time when right-wing views are finding a more mainstream audience -- a trend experts believe reflects a general unease over where Japan is going. The economy has been stalled for more than a decade, unemployment is high and society less cohesive. "Society is in a state of paralysis. There's a lot of anxiety. In such a situation it's easier for nationalism to take root," said Hiroshi Tanaka, a historian of Japan's ties with Asia at Ryukoku University.
It is a subtle point, however.
Experts are quick to stress that right-wing extremists have shown no increase in number, though they continue to be a fixture in Japan's cities, blaring their calls for national purity over loudspeakers on vans done up in paramilitary regalia.
Instead, the battles are being fought in the textbooks, and in the mainstream media.
On the best-seller lists these days are two comic books that praise Emperor Hirohito's World War II troops and present Japan's conquest of Asia as "liberation from Western colonialism."
The author, Yoshinori Kobayashi, has a huge following among Japan's youth, and appears on TV talk shows to hawk his views not as a rabid demagogue but as a slick, designer-tailored commentator.
Japan's largest studio, Toho, will soon release "Merdeka" -- "Independence" in Indonesian -- a movie that portrays wartime Japanese soldiers as liberators rather than aggressors.
The latest cause celebre is a middle-school history textbook by a group of ultra-rightist scholars.
The Education Ministry, which screens all texts for public school use, demanded that the most incendiary passages be expunged.
But even then, the message of the text is clear: "Nationalism," it says, "is our last fortress to resist the high-speed information age."
The Education Ministry says it could not quash the textbook outright because, after revisions, it did not contain any obvious factual errors, and anyway it's only one of dozens of textbooks schools can choose from.
The book in its final form shows its nationalist colors less through what it actually says than what it omits -- a clear admission of wartime atrocities.
"Our job is to look impartially at the facts presented in the book," said Toru Funahashi, a ministry official in charge of textbook issues. "We asked them to take out the parts that were just too outrageous."
Still, its approval has angered some of the Asian countries Japan seized before and during World War II.
South Korea briefly recalled its ambassador, and a Korean lawmaker started a hunger strike outside Japan's Parliament building. China has lodged an official protest, and demonstrators have burned Japanese flags.
After Koizumi's premiership became a certainty, South Korea's Hankook Ilbo newspaper headlined on its front page: "Concern rises over Japan's fast move toward right."
Many Asians are extremely sensitive to any indication of a militant upsurge in Japan. Memories persist of gruesome biological warfare experiments, of women corralled into military brothels, of thousands of civilians butchered in the Chinese city of Nanking, now called Nanjing.
Right-wingers say nationalism is a way to reclaim a bit of Japan's heritage from the Western values it embraced after World War II.
"We want to provoke a rebirth of patriotism in a nation where there's too little of it," said Tadae Takubo, one of the textbook's authors.
Some, like historian Tanaka, see a hidden benefit in the debate.
"There are two sides to this controversy," he said. "Right-wing sentiment may be coming out of the closet, but we're also seeing a much stronger resistance to that sort of ideology."
Popular cartoons, textbook, premier stoke concern over Japan's nationalism
The Associated Press
TOKYO (AP) -- Japanese city folk have long regarded right-wing nationalism as little more than an irritant -- loud and threatening, yet too marginal to be taken very seriously.
But an international storm recently over the government's approval of a revisionist history textbook, and a wave of cartoons and movies glorifying Japan's imperialist past, are raising fears the rightist message may be getting through.
The sensitivities are likely to become all the more acute because of the unexpected rise to power Thursday of Junichiro Koizumi, who has alarmed some Asians with his hawkish views.
Japanese know the new prime minister as a maverick and a reformer. But neighbors in the region are more concerned by Koizumi's support for official visits to a shrine that honors Japan's war dead -- including war criminals -- and his calls to strengthen the military.
Koizumi's conservative positions are a far cry from the emperor worship of Japan's hardcore nationalists. And his choice of several moderates in his Cabinet -- many of whom have urged consideration for victims of Japanese imperialism -- indicate the new administration is not veering drastically to the right.
But his empowerment comes at a time when right-wing views are finding a more mainstream audience -- a trend experts believe reflects a general unease over where Japan is going. The economy has been stalled for more than a decade, unemployment is high and society less cohesive. "Society is in a state of paralysis. There's a lot of anxiety. In such a situation it's easier for nationalism to take root," said Hiroshi Tanaka, a historian of Japan's ties with Asia at Ryukoku University.
It is a subtle point, however.
Experts are quick to stress that right-wing extremists have shown no increase in number, though they continue to be a fixture in Japan's cities, blaring their calls for national purity over loudspeakers on vans done up in paramilitary regalia.
Instead, the battles are being fought in the textbooks, and in the mainstream media.
On the best-seller lists these days are two comic books that praise Emperor Hirohito's World War II troops and present Japan's conquest of Asia as "liberation from Western colonialism."
The author, Yoshinori Kobayashi, has a huge following among Japan's youth, and appears on TV talk shows to hawk his views not as a rabid demagogue but as a slick, designer-tailored commentator.
Japan's largest studio, Toho, will soon release "Merdeka" -- "Independence" in Indonesian -- a movie that portrays wartime Japanese soldiers as liberators rather than aggressors.
The latest cause celebre is a middle-school history textbook by a group of ultra-rightist scholars.
The Education Ministry, which screens all texts for public school use, demanded that the most incendiary passages be expunged.
But even then, the message of the text is clear: "Nationalism," it says, "is our last fortress to resist the high-speed information age."
The Education Ministry says it could not quash the textbook outright because, after revisions, it did not contain any obvious factual errors, and anyway it's only one of dozens of textbooks schools can choose from.
The book in its final form shows its nationalist colors less through what it actually says than what it omits -- a clear admission of wartime atrocities.
"Our job is to look impartially at the facts presented in the book," said Toru Funahashi, a ministry official in charge of textbook issues. "We asked them to take out the parts that were just too outrageous."
Still, its approval has angered some of the Asian countries Japan seized before and during World War II.
South Korea briefly recalled its ambassador, and a Korean lawmaker started a hunger strike outside Japan's Parliament building. China has lodged an official protest, and demonstrators have burned Japanese flags.
After Koizumi's premiership became a certainty, South Korea's Hankook Ilbo newspaper headlined on its front page: "Concern rises over Japan's fast move toward right."
Many Asians are extremely sensitive to any indication of a militant upsurge in Japan. Memories persist of gruesome biological warfare experiments, of women corralled into military brothels, of thousands of civilians butchered in the Chinese city of Nanking, now called Nanjing.
Right-wingers say nationalism is a way to reclaim a bit of Japan's heritage from the Western values it embraced after World War II.
"We want to provoke a rebirth of patriotism in a nation where there's too little of it," said Tadae Takubo, one of the textbook's authors.
Some, like historian Tanaka, see a hidden benefit in the debate.
"There are two sides to this controversy," he said. "Right-wing sentiment may be coming out of the closet, but we're also seeing a much stronger resistance to that sort of ideology."