And the saga continues

Since last week's report by The ST on the ex Japanese air force chief's "unofficial" remarks on Japan's war time aggression, there have been more developing reports in the ST almost everyday this week. And in today's papers, the ST published a scathing editorial on it, coupled with another commentary written at the ST European bureau in London.

Excerpts:

Another denial tempest in Japan
The Straits Times Editorial, Saturday, 8 November 2008, Page A24

"No doubt, there will always be some Japanese people who harbour views such as those of the disgraced general. It should not be forgotten that history testbooks written by revisionist writers are allowed in Japanese classrooms, though fortunately in only a very small minority of schools. But such people, if they are in the public service, have no business articulating their revisionist ideas openly. The fact they they feel compelled from time to time to do so, would make Asian governments wonder if the official line of contrition should be taken only at face value."

Germans show how not to forget the past
by Jonathan Eyal
The Straits Times, Saturday, 8 Novemeber 2008, Page C24

"But it is still a fact that while for the Germans the act of atonement was always seen as an ongoing lengthy process, a route with no particular end or timeline, the Japanese tend to view reconciliation initiatives as one-off acts, which require no permanent change in either habits or behaviour. That's why the German efforts succeeded, while the Japanese ones remained largely unconvincing."


I don't know about you, but I always thought that the main reason why the Germans are able to accept their past terrible mistakes and move on was that as Europeans living in a region which witnessed the rise and fall of many great empires they had a better sense of history and understood that while they should remember and glorify their past achievements, they should never cling onto it, not matter how good it was (eg the Renaissance period).

But this is not the case for the Japanese, who being Asians, were taught to glorify their past (think how many times our Chinese textbooks taught us that China with its 5000 years of history, blah blah blah...), and never to forget what our ancestors did, and that we should always "trace our roots back to their sources" (aka yin2 shui3 si1 yuan2). So you see, the fact that Japan was once a great imperial power, coupled with years of closed-door policies during the Edo/Tokugawa period where warriors such as the Shinobis/Samurais (in which death was much more dignified than defeat) were worshipped, made it much harder for the Japanese to stop clinging on to their nostalgic past.

So I think it's a cultural thing, that Japan is unable to move on and look ahead. To move ahead is to accept that Japan was not such a great empire as it taught itself to believe, and as Asians we all know how that would result in the Japanese having a massive loss of "face".

This is also part of the reason why China took such a long time to admit the extent of the SARs crisis, the melamine and all the other food controversies it had to deal with.

As Asians, we sometimes have to question ourselves if the concept of "face" is worth clinging on to. Pride is a double-edge sword. It can elavate you to the loftiest of mountains, but it can also bring about your greatest downfall.