Japanese should learn from past
Sometimes I feel that we, Japanese, are the luckiest nation in the world. We have enjoyed our strong economy for decades. We have not been directly involved in war for more than 50 years. Racism is invisible in our society. We believe that we are hardworking, polite and friendly people. Huh? Nanking massacre? By whom? By the Japanese? You’re kidding! We have never heard of that.At school in Japan, we didn’t learn anything about the massacre mentioned in Fang Yang’s article “Chinese holocaust” in Monday’s Lantern. Oh no, 300,000 civilians were killed? More than the combined number of Hiroshima and Nagasaki victims! Calm down, my dear Chinese friends. It happened many years before we were born. We were not there. Even though the generations of our great-grandparents or grandparents were to blame, should we feel guilty? Why don’t you forget it? Both of us are busy with schoolwork or plans for weekend dating, right?It is true that our government never apologized to other Asian nations for what the Japanese did during the war. Japanese history textbooks published under the censorship of the education ministry avoid descriptions of our shameful past. OK, our government sucks. How about ourselves? If we don’t try to learn anything from the history, can we say that we are innocent? Can we still be proud of being Japanese? Where has our sense of shame gone?
Kozo HongoGraduate student from JapanJournalism
