What a horrible euphemism: “comfort women.” Just needed to be said.
A recent article by Howard French in the IHT’s Letter from China series begins: Imagine a world where Germany denied the Holocaust, the United States denied the slaughter of Native Americans and Europe denied organizing its immensely profitable and centuries-long trans-Atlantic trade in African slaves.
Why would they bother? Presumably because they thought cleaning up these dark blots on their past would boost their self-esteem, enhance patriotism and raise their stock in the world.
Close your eyes, spin on your toes three times and reopen them to behold a world where precisely this sort of thing goes on: today’s East Asia.
There are many sore points in the relationship between China and Japan, but none so raw as World War II or, as it is known in China, the “War to Resist Japan.” This year marks the 70th anniversary of the Rape of Nanking and already more than a half-dozen movies are in the works with Woody Harrelson, and Oliver Stone, and the estate of Iris Chang among many others getting involved in different projects. When violence, sex, and nationalism come together it makes an explosive cocktail. Such
Chow Yun-fat is starring in the third installment of Pirates of the Caribbean as Chinese pirate Sao Feng. (Whose name refers to the classical Chinese poem: “The Asian market, he whispered/at a board meeting for Disney/how best to capture it/hire a Chinese guy/said the marketing rep softly.”) Piracy in China has a long, long history. Koxinga was a famous example (though his dad was more of the pirate.) And pirate crews operating along China’s coast in the 16th and 17th centuries could be surprisingly multi-cultural affairs with mixed crews of Chinese, Malays, Japanese, Europeans, and even escaped African slaves. AP has the story on the new flick along with some other interesting fun facts on 19th century piracy around the island of Lantau. (Though the line between “pirate” and “opium smuggler” on 19th century Lantau was probably razor thin, for AP’s purposes, “pirate” sounds cooler than “drug dealer.”) Global Voices Online looks at Cambodian scholar Keng Vannsak’s recent remarks during a radio interview that have sparked a historical controversy in the Southeast Asian nation. Keng argues that 12th-century King Jayavarman VII, a famous Buddhist sage-king in Khmer history, was actually “an utterly ruthless monarch” whose devotion to building temples
Interesting weekend for Japanese history:
December 23 is a public holiday in Japan to celebrate the official birthday of the reigning emperor, Akihito. Akihito used the occasion of his 73rd birthday today to remind Japanese not to forget the lessons of World War II nor forget those who died in the conflict, especially the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The emperor also has a bit to celebrate this year with the birth of his first grandson, Prince Hisahito back on September 6. The imperial household clearly hopes Hisahito’s birth to the reigning emperor’s youngest son will spare them a protracted and messy constitutional battle over the question of female succession. Through September of this year, the “heir apparently” was crown prince Naruhito’s only child, Princess Aiko.
First, there have been empresses in the past. Deal with it. Second, you gotta feel for Aiko who went from “constitutional crisis/symbol of Japanese girl power” to “best connected 5-year old in Kyoto” in the span of a week. You’ve seen how petty and competitive parents can get at a spelling bee or a little league game–now imagine there’s a throne at stake. We haven’t
Today is the 69th anniversary of the Nanjing Massacre (“Rape of Nanking”). Perhaps no other event in the Pacific Theater of World War II has been more controversial. Japanese accounts figure as few as 100,000 non-combatants were killed and there are those still in Japan, and elsewhere, who deny the incident ever took place. Contemporary Western observers (as well as Iris Chang’s The Rape of Nanking) put the death toll closer to 300,000 with as many as 20,000 women reportedly sexually assaulted. When lecturing, I’m forced to use a kind of waffling median, “150,000-300,000 killed, we may never know.”
150,000 dead either way is as precise as we can get? In the end, the body count really doesn’t matter. The actions of the Japanese army on December 13, 1937 and for several weeks afterwards will remain as one of the great atrocities from one of the bloodiest centuries of human history. The Japanese army was certainly not alone in committing acts of outrage against civilian populations during that war, but this in no way excuses what happened at Nanjing.
The CND site has a page devoted to the massacre, obviously with a certain pro-China nationalist bias. Nevertheless, the site contains
I’ve been to Paris, it certainly has its moments. The French love their intellectuals, can’t pick up after their dogs, and can speak without the slightest trace of irony about ‘race relations in America’ whilst their suburbs burn in rings around their cities. (Anyone else notice how so many French suggest that the Blacks and Arabs are impossible to assimilate into French society and can never be ‘truly’ French…until selection time for the national football squad?)
Well, the Japanese still love France. In fact, they love it so much–and have so idealized the Parisian experience–that when they arrive, it makes them ill.
From Reuters: “Around a dozen Japanese tourists a year need psychological treatment after visiting Paris as the reality of unfriendly locals and scruffy streets clashes with their expectations, a newspaper reported on Sunday.
“A third of patients get better immediately, a third suffer relapses and the rest have psychoses,” Yousef Mahmoudia, a psychologist at the Hotel-Dieu hospital, next to Notre Dame cathedral, told the newspaper Journal du Dimanche.
Accustomed to white gloves and hovering sales people in their home country, the Japanese find the attitude of the French to be, well, sickening:
“Fragile
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