In winter, I'm a Buddhist,
And in summer, I'm a nudist.
- Joe Gould
"My Religion"
In fact the whole of Japan is a pure invention. There is no such country, there are no such people.
- Oscar Wilde, aware in 1889 that popular conceptions about the country and its people are mostly fiction.
Not even 10% of what Japanese people are thinking is communicated overseas.
- Watanabe Tsuneo of CSIS
All foreign correspondents, whenever they desert statistics for judgments of opinion...become models of self-deception. They may call themselves, with proper gravity, ‘reporters’. But...they are nothing but quack psychiatrists who do not even know that this is the field they practise.
- Alistair Cooke
Where all news comes at second-hand, where all the testimony is uncertain, men cease to respond to truths, and respond simply to opinions. The environment in which they act is not the realities themselves, but the pseudo-environment of reports, rumors, and guesses.
- Walter Lippmann
We want...a revolution - a turning of the wheel, so that the state becomes once again the servant of the people, and not the other way around. We are the progressives now, comrades, (and) you the reactionaries.
- Daniel Hannan
If the textbook says, "It is well known that...", you can be sure that is a very good place to begin a research inquiry.
- Isaiah Bowman, geographer and former president of Johns Hopkins University
The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance.
- Cicero (55 BC)
We do not need a censorship of the press. We have a censorship by the press. It is not we who silence the press. It is the press that silences us. It is not a case of the Commonwealth settling how much the editors shall say; it is a case of the editors settling how much the Commonwealth shall know. If we attack the press, we shall be rebelling, not repressing.
- G.K. Chesterton
You can see a lot by looking.
- Yogi Berra
All text copyright 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012 by William Sakovich
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akagenoan said
My goodness, it’s so heartbreaking to see people living in such horrible conditions. I hope something happens to change such an unacceptable way of life soon
mac said
If anyone wants to choke, they should make the effort to watch some of the ‘smuggled out at the risk of losing one’s life’ videos of street children and orphans in North Korea, there is one at;
Of course, life must have been pretty much the same for all the orphans in Japan (zanryū koji) after WWII.
There are also reported to be 1,000s of Korean kids in China, not just orphans but the children of North Korean women who were forced to marry Chinese men, or have sold themselve into marriage and prostitution.
As defectors, they do not have legal status in China and, if caught, they are forcibly repatriated to North Korea. In many cases, their children are left behind and or dumped by the family.
As many as 300,000 North Koreans are believed to live in hiding in China, where they frequently suffer abuse and exploitation … but still consider it worthwhile by way of escaping Korea. Its also the main route for human trafficking of Korean females to provide sexual labour in both Japan and the West.
Folks also probably dont know that there are 1,000s of Koreans in Eastern Europe, e.g. Bulagaria etc, as well. They were taken there as orphans of the Korean War. In most cases, they are either happy to, or even demanded to, remain there because society was so much better than in Korea.
So, if you are an American who father served out there, you may well have a half-Korean Romanian national relative still alive and well in Europe. In one such documented case, a half-black/half-Korea child of a Yanqui prostitute – rejected by Koreans – ended up in France. But Cold War and onwards, South Korea was actually the number one “exporter” and the U.S. the largest “importer” of adopted children in the world.
Although we can point a finger at North Korea today, given the thousands of homeless children wandering Japan’s burnt-out cities after 1945 (all of whom were blameless for WWII), the Allied Occupiers (in particular SCAP and GHQ), aggressively censored all Japanese public media and literature from 1945 to 1948 and on 1952 removing discussion and documentation of the problem … just as North Korea is doing today.
Consequently, we know little of the West’s own shame in such matters. It has, however, shaped Japanese society even to this day in the way it treats child crime.
Bender said
Consequently, we know little of the West’s own shame in such matters. It has, however, shaped Japanese society even to this day in the way it treats child crime.
That’s kind of stretching it. When did wandering children become criminals? The fact that they wander in the streets does not make them criminals.
Besides, you can’t compare the media back in the 1940s with the one we have now. And I’m sure everyone in Japan were well aware of those wandering children back then. So are North Koreans now, and it’s about whether the outside world should know. I’m not sure of the merits of it.
mac said
I meant with regards the leniency shown by the law to child offenders that equally surprises the West.
Perhaps there are other factors I am unaware of but, in my opinion, laws and attitudes were shaped back in the Post-War Period where exceptional allowances had to be made for the large number of street children and orphans.
The news and media was heavily censored. I am not sure of the actual figures involved. It was not only limited to big cities like Tokyo.
Due to the lack of available information, the general depth of Anti-Japan/Japanese sentiments based largely on propaganda, perhaps even the unwillingness of people themselves to talk about their experiences, its not something this is heard about or discussed in the West.