With the passing of the 75th anniversary of the horrific firebombing of Tokyo, it is quite bizarre reading a story that is written from the very biased perspective of someone who has never had to admit his own country’s genocide, or to come to terms with the Japanese population’s complicity in such horrendous crimes from the late 19th century right up until the end of World War II. It goes without saying that is essential to remember appalling acts of genocide like the firebombing of Tokyo. However, let's also not allow anyone to forget the at least six million civilians (by some counts as much as ten million) that Japan murdered, including in "the Rape of Nanking (the Nanjing Massacre)", "The Rape of Manila" and a multitude of other massacres ( and these are only the ones of which we have documented records), along with the torture, rape and enslavement of civilians, POW's and nurses. Then we should also remind everyone of the biological and chemical weapons experimentation that the Japanese carried out against foreign civilian populations. It would also be a good idea to remind the Japanese public of the sexual slavery that hundreds of thousands of women were forced to endure for the pleasure of Japanese soldiers. Then there's the cannibalism. Perhaps we could send a copy of Lord Russell's "The Knights of Bushido" to Prime Minister Abe, as he publicly denies some of these facts. Or why not make some excerpts from it compulsory reading for Japanese high school students, since from all accounts, history class in Japan is not a subject based on actual events? This is because talking about Japan’s role in invading most of East and Southeast Asia its crimes there is still shunned in society today. Then again, the United States did not ultimately hold most of the Japanese war criminals accountable for their crimes against humanity anyway because they intended to use Japan as one of their military bases to impose the new American order on the world after World War II. And of course, the USA continues to commit war crimes around the world to this day, too, for which they are unlikely to ever be held accountable for either. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/09/magazine/the-man-who-wont-let-the-world-forget-the-firebombing-of-tokyo.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_war_crimes |