In Jakarta Koizumi said sorry about Japan's WWII atrocities, while in Tokyo 80 legislative members (though no Cabinet Minister) visited the Yasukuni shrine to revere war criminals.
This mixed Japanese behaviour seems to indicate that while Japanese leaders are keen to defuse Asian hostility towards Japan, there exists a hard core right wing element within the Liberal Democratic Party who are still unrepentantly arrogant about Japan’s wartime record and insensitive towards her neighbours’ resentment.
I am just wondering if the Communist Party Of China would ever apoloogise to its people for the "mistakes" that it made that resulted in the "hundreds" or "thousands" or "millions" of innocent Chinese folks killed during the Cultural Revolution and the stupid One Leap Forward crap concocted by Mao?
ReplyDeleteIf the old communist hacks think they are so great, why don't they allow a one-man one-vote suffrage, instead of ruling by the barrel of a gun and trying to hang-on to a daed iedeology?
Why don't they? Because they are a bloody dictatorship - have never pretended otherwise. China had only a whiff of democracy when Sun Yat Sun was President, and even then it wasn't the type of democracy as the western term and understanding of it suggests.
ReplyDeleteWill the CCP ever apologise to the murder of its own peopel? Who knows but definitely not now. Even Australia, unlike Canada, refuses to apologise to its aborigines for the various episodes of massacre, as had happened in Tasmania.
But callous as I may now sound, one could argue that those (China's and Australia's) were domestic killings, to be repented at a future date by a future conscionable leader.
Japan's atrocities were those committed by an alien nation. If it wants peaceful coexistence, it has to own up and say sorry. Many Chinese and Koreans are even suspicious and sceptical of Koizumi's apology, stating that he apologised in Jakarta because he wants Chna's support for a permanent seat in the UNSC.
Another point in the argument, again sounding rather callous, would be the degree of savagery in the atrocities. While all killings are bad, I don't believe the Japanese war crimes against her Asian neighbours, particularly against the Koreans and the Chinese can ever be conveniently likened to the political massacre of the Chinese people by its own leader. The former was excessively cruel against passive non-combatants while the latter evolved out of suppression of opposition or failed agricultural policies.
The rape of Nanjing demonstrated the horrenous and heinous brutalities of the Japanese occupation army - burying people alive, boyoneting raped women in their vaginas, chopping innocent civilian heads off as a game by Japanese officers, etc, comfort women as sex slaves and the notorious Unit 731 experimenting with germ warfare on some 20,000 Chinese civilians.
Japan cannot claim a seat as a leading nation of the world unless she is prepared to account morally and bravely for her dark savage past.