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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Tony said
That may be true but that’s the price you sometimes end up paying when you end up losing the war.
Fair? Hardly, but then life rarely is.
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War? You mean the war that ended before we were born? That Japan paid the price for long ago?
Japan is now at the point at which they’ll be stamping “Return to Sender” on any bills that are presented for payment.
-A.
Andrew in Ezo said
I always wonder at the seeming preoccupation that many in the West have with explaining (modern) Japan based on WW2. If it’s something negative, it’s a remnant of pre-war tendencies, that are somewhat hard-wired into every Japanese. If it’s positive, it’s due to the enlightenment provided by the post-war occupying powers.
PeterDownUnder said
Japan’s lack of nationalism and Korea/China’s brimming nationalism both originate from post-WWII.
Japan came to view itself as a victim of nationalism since WWII whilst Korea/China’s version of nationalism is reactionary to Japan’s nationalism pre-WWII.
Having been left behind a legacy of Japanese superiority these countries rebounded with their own versions of Japanese fascist nationalism. Much of what you see in Korea/China mirror Japan post-Meiji.
The concept of race and nationalism itself was a Japanese export to the rest of Asia, and post-colonialist thought in Korea/China remains sternly anti-Japanese for a reason.
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P: Thanks for the note.
Prof. Fujita argues that the country in the region most resembling pre-war Japan is North Korea with juche. He thinks Chinese and South Korean nationalism is more an aspect of what Japanese historians call Sinocentric culturalism, which predates Japan’s Meiji period. He also says the Japanese were prone to the same ideas post Meiji, particularly in the early 20th century, when some looked down on China as inferior because the dynasties kept falling apart and they couldn’t prevent European colonization/domination.
-A.
toadold said
This makes me think about the “reparations” movement by certain Black ideologues in the US. They were/are seeking money from the federal government for the past crime of slavery. They’ve been having trouble cashing that in due to both the tiredness of the race card being played and immigrants who have become US citizens long after the US Civil war who feel they shouldn’t be paying tax money for something their ancestors had nothing to do with. There is also the casualty figures for the US Civil war which was in excess of a half a million.
Tony said
Yeah, the war ended over 70 years ago but S Korea and China are hanging on to it regardless. The fact that Japan lost only means that these two countries can continue to hammer Japan over the head with it.
Again, it’s hardly fair but that’s the way it is
———–
First of all, this post has nothing to do with “fairness”. Don’t know where you got that.
Second of all, the days that Japan sits still for the hammering are over. It may not manifest itself as overtly as the China/South Korea bashing now, but it will become more evident as time passes.
And as time passes, more people outside the region are going to start to wonder what the Chinese/South Korean problem is, rather than what the Japanese problem is.
-A.
Tony said
Me thinks Japan will resist Korea more than China. We hope people outside question the fuss made by the two countries but I think so long as their flat screens are showing American Idol, Britain got Talent, and Eurovision, there will be little thinking about the troubles here at all.
———-
Or about any troubles anywhere, but discussion of anything above a certain level requires that the sleepwalkers be discounted.
-A.
Tony said
That’s a lot of discounting!