The new Japanese Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe, is calling for a rewrite of the Japanese constitution to remove the military restrictions imposed by General Douglas MacAuthur & Allied Powers after World War II. The new Prime Minister has also brought up the option of a preemptive strike against North Korea, and wants a softer version of Japanese history in schools...
...As Abe took power this week, wary observers warned of a virulent form of nationalism they say is moving into the Japanese mainstream for the first time since Japan's defeat in World War II. Those voices came from American and European analysts, not just from China and Korea, where memories of Japan's imperial aggression still burn. When Abe suggested in the summer that it might be necessary to take out North Korea's missile bases in self-defense, a South Korean government spokesman said the declaration "unveiled Japan's expansionist nature."
Members in Abe's
LDP (Liberal Democratic Party) claim they just want to make Japan a "
normal" country...
...Abe's supporters do want to roll history's clock back if only as far as 1945. Their quarrel is with the political culture that was encrypted into Japan after the war. Their targets are the American-imposed constitution and an accompanying education system they accuse of weakening traditional Japanese values and leading to a morally flabby nation.
"When we mention conservative politics, it is not the same as prewar politics or militarism," said Hakubun Shimomura, deputy Cabinet secretary of Abe's new government. "It is not an arrogant nationalism. We are not hostile to other cultures. But we want Japanese people to respect traditional Japanese culture, a culture that goes back more than 2,000 years but which has been weakened in the last 60 years."
As for teaching a less "
masochistic" version of history in schools...
"Abe's stance is that postwar Japan is bad," says Takashi Tachibana, a commentator and author who has written about Japan's prewar intellectual class and is a critic of the new prime minister. Tachibana says Abe sees the constitution and the 1947 Basic Education Law as the underpinnings of a stunted postwar era, "the root of all evils that need to be fixed."
It is not a minority view. Polls show nearly two-thirds of Japanese support a new education law that would require schools to teach patriotism.
The call to inject patriotism in the schools comes at a point where Japan has been accused of not being honest about it's past crimes. China & both Koreas are already pissed about some of the nationalist changes occurring in Japan. The repeated visits to the
Yasukuni Shrine by Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi set off protests & caused international condemnation. At the Yasukuni Shrine, 1,068 convicted WWII war criminals are venerated as souls who fought for Japan's Emperor. Among those are
14 Class A War Criminals. Basically all of the people responsible for most of the horrible shit in the Pacific during the 1930s & 40s that led to the deaths of as many as
20 million civillians in China, both Koreas, Philippines, and other Asian nations. They're also among those responsible for the murder of tens of thousands of Allied POWs, in incidents like the
Bataan Death March.
All of this has led to China & South Korea making statements like this....
The sharpest rebuke came from China, with Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing saying Mr. Koizumi's visits to the shrine were tantamount to modern Germany's honoring its past Nazi leaders.
"If German leaders worshipped Hitler and worshipped the Nazis, how would the European people look at this? Yet Japanese leaders are worshipping such war criminals who harmed so many Chinese people," said Li Zhaoxing.
Lee Hyuk, an official in charge of Asian affairs at the South Korean Foreign Ministry, also voiced his country's opposition to Mr. Koizumi's visits to the shrine.
"[The] Korean government and people are also strongly against Japanese leaders distorting past history," said Lee Hyuk.
On his
official home page, new Prime Minister Shinzo Abe
denies the Japanese Military ever used
comfort women. Abe also has a view of the 14 Class A War Criminals at the Yasukuni Shrine that some see as denial...
Experts say the U.S. concerns over having Abe as Japan's leader have largely to do with his views, expressed in his book ''Toward a Beautiful Nation,'' that are critical of the Tokyo war crimes tribunal which after World War II tried the Japanese Class-A war criminals who were later honored at Yasukuni.
Abe goes on to say in the book that the Class-A war criminals are not criminals under Japanese domestic laws and that there is misunderstanding in connection with criticisms of their enshrinement at Yasukuni.