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Official history of Hirohito dodges controversies

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It obviously wasn't entirely on the Emperor's shoulders and a complex tangle of the ambition of war lords and perceived entitlement. I wish they could revise history like they revise history books. So many lives could have been saved.

1 ( +2 / -1 )

A 12,000-page history of Emperor Hirohito released in Japan on Tuesday includes childhood letters to his parents but steps gingerly around what many want to know: his thinking on issues such as his responsibility for World War II. The record took 24 years to create, but scholars and journalists say it is still incomplete.

In other words it is just another in the never-ending stream of Japan white-washing, or at best, obfuscating their history. So sad that the country deliberately avoids historical issues of great importance, which future generations of the society should be able to objectively understand, because of a concern about offending the right-wingers. So posters here can say that the nationalists are just a minority, and they do not represent the majority of Japanese all they want. The reality is that even an "Official history of Hirohito dodges controversies", as the title of the article says, reflects their impact on Japanese society.

0 ( +5 / -5 )

The funny thing is that LONG before I even knew anything about Japanese people, culture, language, etc, it was COMMON KNOWLEDGE that Japanese textbooks whitewash their own history. So that this book does this is no surprise.

The public is so conditioned to see Japan as the ultimate victim of planet Earth that in order to make their investment back, the writers / publishers HAVE to continue to whitewash history.

Books like these shouldn't be in the "history" section, they should be in the "commentary" section of the bookstore.

They're about as accurate as an Oliver Stone movie.

2 ( +4 / -2 )

Yes, Japan is guilty of whitewashing its history. If you read some accounts, there was a period between the Chinese incursions and August 1945 that simply ceased to exist. At the same time, however, it has to be realized that Japan's doctoring of the past wasn't only just perpetuated by Tokyo alone, they had more than enough help from good old Uncle Sam. Indeed, whereas certain allies wanted Hirohito to be put on trial along with his flunkies after the war, the US made sure that he wasn't strung up.

5 ( +6 / -1 )

I couldn't care less about his poems. I would be slightly more interested into how comes the country under his own reign ended up killing tens of millions and almost destroyed...

2 ( +3 / -1 )

Exactly right. The remake of the Hirohito image was in part made in the USA. This started before the war. Hirohito cultivated the image of the well-meaning humanist and it was swallowed by the US diplomatic cocktail party set who later formed FDR's "Japan Crowd." Hirohito was not the "real" enemy during the war. It was Tojo, a powerful cabinet minister but still only a minister. Hirohito must have known about Unit 731 and Japan's atrocities in Asia. He read every document handed him. But the US decided to make him a good guy in order to use him (as it did Shiro Iishi and the Unit 771 folks).

It is possible the war could have ended sooner and A-bombs would not have been used if the US had bombed the imperial palace and with that the Army and Navy headquarters, only a few blocks away.

So here we have it: 24 years of hard work to turn out one more big lie about Japan's wartime past. Seems no one is buying it. Not even the Yomiuri.

2 ( +2 / -0 )

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