The Japanese politics thread: Old men fucking each other ITT

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > The Japanese politics thread: Old men fucking each other ITT

Jerry Manderbilt: May 31, 2012; No matter how much paperwork I process, it never goes away. It only increases.

Just Winging It posted:

From his own website:

What it conveniently forgets to mention is that said adoptive father was convicted as a Class A war criminal, that harmony means that if you have even a single ancestor that wasn't on the Japanese side when Kubilai Khan came knocking you're a piece of poo poo and that heritage and traditional just means the usual nationalistic crap. Voter turnout in Okayama has dropped from 78% in 1980 to 59% in 2003 though. So my guess would be that there's enough people that he hasn't pissed off or just don't give a gently caress to keep him in office, and that the rest just doesn't care anymore. What I don't get is how is it possible that other (aspiring) politicians don't take advantage of this. Compared to a shitheel like that, anyone would look good, not to mention the possibility of an actual party machine backing them up. Similarly for Ishihara, a shitheel with more than his share of fuckups that despite running as an independent keeps getting reelected. It what kind of funk are the DPJ and LDP if neither of them can get a candidate of their own to run successfully against them? Probably something to with factionalism.

On this note, how old is the general Japanese electorate? I was under the impression that most Japanese voters are in their 60s-70s... and they like what people like Ishihara and Hiranuma say.

# ¿ Sep 7, 2012 01:55

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# ¿ May 8, 2024 01:35

Jerry Manderbilt: May 31, 2012; No matter how much paperwork I process, it never goes away. It only increases.

Osaka mayor accuses U.S. military of using women for sex in postwar Japan

Hey, Hashimoto, that's an indictment against America, not a vindication of what you said.

# ¿ May 17, 2013 20:42

Jerry Manderbilt: May 31, 2012; No matter how much paperwork I process, it never goes away. It only increases.

I kind of wonder how Hashimoto would react if somebody told him "Imperial Japanese soldiers needed comfort women...just like Japan needed to be nuked twice for its own good"?

# ¿ May 18, 2013 21:17

Jerry Manderbilt: May 31, 2012; No matter how much paperwork I process, it never goes away. It only increases.

Wibbleman posted:

And here is pretty much the outcome from the right wing textbook revision attempt that tends to be the main example used for whitewashing ("The New History" textbook).

Isn't there this, though, from Japan Unbound, showing that the New History textbook and a media campaign involving it led to whitewashing in other more "moderate" Japanese history textbooks?

John Nathan, p150-2 posted:

To combat the media campaign against adoption of the text, Fuso released a commercial edition available for sale to the public in bookstores in June 2001. Though there is no law preventing such tactics, it was the first time a textbook had been marketed to the public, and critics objected that Fuso was attempting to influence the selection board. Members of the society and others took the more reasonable position that the competing texts should all be made available to allow the public to compare and judge for itself. In its first two months on the market, the New History was among the ten best-selling titles in Japan, and it had sold 720,000 copies as of February 2002, a figure that cannot be explaiend away as a function of mere curiosity inflamed by the controversy.
More significant, all but one of the seven textbooks in circulation since 1997 had muted their own accounts of the war in the revised editions they submitted to the Education Ministry for approval in advance of the August 2001 school board meetings. Two editions had substituted "comfort facilities" for "comfort women," one had removed the phrase "attached to the military," one had reported that "many Korean women were sent to the front" without explaining for what purpose, and the remaining three had deleted their accounts entirely. Descriptions of Japanese military atrocities were similarly tempered or, in some cases, deleted. Four of the seven texts removed any reference to Japan's use of poison gas in China and to the notorious Unit 731[...] Accounts of the Nanking Massacre were maintained, but in five of the six editions the estimated number of victims was deleted: "When the Japanese army occupied Nanking, they murdered large numbers of Chinese nationals (the Nanking massacre incident), but the Japanese people were not informed of this. (Note: There is no agreement as to the number of victims involved."
[...]
When the figures were released in September, they confirmed the trend that Yonenaga and members of the society had predicted: the "least masochistic text," published by Tokyo Shoseki, had jumped from 40,4 percent to a majority share of 51.2 percent. Appraised of having taken "a neutral position," Tokyo Shoseki had deleted references to comfort women and revised "200,000 Chinese, including women and children" to read "a large number of Chinese, including women and children." On the other hand, the text published by Nihon Shoseki, the only publisher that had sharpened its emphasis on Japan as an aggressor, adding even more vivid accounts of Japanese military atrocities, dropped from 14 percent to 5 percent of the total. The Nippon Bunkyo edition, which retained drawings of Japanese soldiers beating prisoners and torturing Chinese women, dropped to last place from 3.3 percent to 2.3 percent..
The textbook controversy did not occur in a vacuum any more than Yoshinori Kobayashi preaches to a lunatic fringe. The same tension between contrition about the war and the need to transform the past into a substantive basis, not only for confidence and pride but for a viable sense of self, exists today at the level of national politics and policy.

(I really didn't want to dig out this book again after using it in a research paper over a year and a half ago since it's so drat depressing to me, but then I'll bear in mind that this was ten years ago and the textbook situation might have changed since then)

Jerry Manderbilt fucked around with this message at 00:00 on Dec 27, 2013

# ¿ Dec 26, 2013 23:58

Jerry Manderbilt: May 31, 2012; No matter how much paperwork I process, it never goes away. It only increases.

Genpei Turtle posted:

Wait, so she thinks being white is a disadvantage to getting elected in the US? What bizarro world is this?

Did she watch some translation of Fox News and buy into the Fox News/Ann Coulter line that Obama only got elected because of white guilt.

# ¿ Feb 26, 2014 03:36

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# ¿ May 8, 2024 01:35

Jerry Manderbilt: May 31, 2012; No matter how much paperwork I process, it never goes away. It only increases.

mystes posted:

The results of the 2014 Tokyo gubernatorial election provided some justification for this view, though, in the form of the surprising number of people in their twenties who voted for Tamogami.

Is this guy as crazy as Ishihara?

# ¿ Feb 8, 2015 22:09

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