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11/06/2008: "Japan's history wars erupt again"

THE farce has some distinctly Japanese elements, not all of them necessarily clarified in the retelling. The first is that a hotel and condominium developer would think to sponsor a tasty Y3m ($30,000) prize for an essay competition on the subject of "The True Outlook for Modern and Contemporary History".

A bland enough title, perhaps. Except that in Japan "true" is a code word among right-wing nuts for a revisionist interpretation of the wartime past which denies that Japan was an aggressor or that it committed atrocities. For most adherents of the "true" view, the conflict in which Japan was responsible for the deaths of 20m Asians was above all a war of liberation, while the Nanjing massacre of December 1937, in which countless thousands of Chinese citizens died (Asia.view will not get into a numbers game), is a phantasm of left-wing axe-grinders. The head of the competition jury is one of the chief nuts, Shoichi Watanabe, an elderly professor of exquisite manners and chairman of the Japan Bibliophile Society who has been accused of plagiarism.

A second and curious element is that among the 230-odd contestants, it turns out, some 50 were officers of Japan's self-defence forces (SDF). Japan's pacifist constitution, written by Americans after the country's defeat, severely curtails what the SDF may do. Some officers may chafe at the limitations - the United States certainly does, since it cannot count on its ally for really meaningful help in international operations such as in Iraq or Afghanistan. Thanks to the constitution's interpretation, America cannot even count on Japan to help defend it, say, against a nuclear missile attack from North Korea. But for so many SDF members to feel authorised to echo a lot of the revisionist nonsense is rum indeed.

[ Why should Japan still have a constitution that supposedly pleases no one? Clearly it does please people who want to suppress Japan's military. And if Japan re-wrote it's American imposed constitution then Germany could follow suit... Another aspect to this topic is that it's rather pointless trying to defend national honour, while the Japanese people are being replaced by foreigners anyway. ]

http://www.economist.com/world/asia/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12544740&fsrc=rss