History books in the schools

Avatarr\'s post in the Godzilla thread reminded me of a recent discussion with my fahja.  He was explaining how though the yonger Japanese generation is in love with America and its culture, the older generation still remembers the A-bomb and how much destruction we caused.

My dad is a retired naval officer and he\'s been to Japan many times.  One of his last visits in the 70\'s he clearly remembers speaking with Japanese college students about WWII.  He was shocked to find out they thought America just dropped the a-bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to state our power and dominance in the east.  They pretty much has ZERO knowledge of what happened at Pearl Harbor.

He later explained this was so because although Japan isn\'t really a communist country or dictatorship they have an emperor (now Akihito) that can say what he wants or doesn\'t want in Japan\'s history books. How much of this do you think is true?  I know American history books aren\'t unbiased by any means (a lot of the Vietnam war is left out) but to totally omit something as big as that is really unfortunate.

I\'m pretty sure they left out what Japan did to its neighbor countries like China and Korea.  :thumbd:  I wonder how much German schoolbooks talk of Hitler and nazism.

How well do you think your country\'s history schoolbooks represent the past?  Wouldn\'t it be surreal if all countries went by one big, authoritative source?

Let me quote Braveheart:

"History is written by those who have hung heroes" (or something similar).

/tries to make more people reply

[Living-In-Clip]

Originally posted by Samwise
Let me quote Braveheart:

"History is written by those who have hung heroes" (or something similar).

/tries to make more people reply

Quoting a gay movie is not the best way to get someone to reply..

Damnit, I replied.

Originally posted by Living-In-Clip
Quoting a gay movie is not the best way to get someone to reply..

Damnit, I replied.

Hah, my evil plan worked.

But now you must die for talking smack about Braveheart... sleep well tonight! :evil:

I\'ve heard about oddities in Japan\'s view of their own history before.  I seem to remember there were a series of novels popular in Japan a few years back that described an "alternate" history.  Sort of like "what if" the Japanese Navy had not been destroyed, but had actually conquered the entire Pacific, and invaded north america.  

My understanding was that these novels were popular because readers were already prepared to accept them by their education.  In their schools, WWII was presented as a war of aggression by the United States.  :rolleyes:

Of course, those Japanese college students you referred to did have a point about the A-Bomb attacks.  We didn\'t absolutely have to use those weapons against cities.  They did serve a purpose as demonstrations also.

Japan didn\'t have to destroy Pearl Harbor

Originally posted by mjps21983
Japan didn\'t have to destroy Pearl Harbor

Well, the motive behind declaring war on us is qustionable, but they also didn\'t annihilate Honolulu; they just sank some of our ships.

you mean most of our ships.

The only reason we dropped the bombs is because we simply couldn\'t beat the Japanese without loosing crazy amounts of soldiers.

Originally posted by Living-In-Clip
Quoting a gay movie is not the best way to get someone to reply..

Why is it a gay movie?

Originally posted by ViVi
you mean most of our ships.

The only reason we dropped the bombs is because we simply couldn\'t beat the Japanese without loosing crazy amounts of soldiers.

Actually, no it wasn\'t most of our ships.  All eight of the largest Battleships were heavily damaged, but only the Arizona and Oklahoma were total losses.  The other six were repaired and rejoined the fleet later in the war.  The Battleships were outnumbered by a great many smaller vessels in the harbor on that day, including destroyers and cruisers that emerged relatively unscathed.  I\'m not saying it wasn\'t a heavy blow, but the day of the battleship\'s primary role in naval warfare was already over at that time.  The japanese themselves proved that the era of the aircraft carrier had arrived, and we were very fortunate to have no carriers in the harbor on 12/7/1941.  Those would have been the primary targets if they had been there.

http://www.pearlharbor.org/ships-and-aircraft.asp

Also regarding your statement about "The only reason we dropped the bombs..."  That is the common story repeated in OUR history books, and it should not be blindly accepted.  The Japanese were already on the verge of capitulation at the time Hiroshima and Nagasaki were attacked.  All they needed was a functional demonstration of our weapon to allow them an honorable way of conceding defeat.  We could have tested it on a less populated area, with the same final outcome.  We didn\'t have to kill 210,000 civilians.

[videoholic]

We should just make the Japs watch the movie Pearl Harbor.

I bet that movie is banned there, like a book written about 10 years ago about their invasion on China during WWII called "The Rape of Nanking."

Did you guys know that Germany was really close to being the first with a nuke?

[ooseven mode]

Don\'t tell Dubya that or they\'ll invade Germany next



I wouldn\'t find that hard to believe at all, both Japan and Germany are very industrious and hard working.  Only problem is that have a habit of invading other countries and mass killing innocents when left unleashed. :eek:

It\'s funny how us American\'s are quick to judge other countries aggresion towards others. They never learn about America\'s invasions into other countries, like Cuba and Mexico, or they just completely forget about the fact that we killed almost an entire race of people to acquire more land.

Japan\'s books are no different from our own. Missing facts that would make the country look bad.

Read "lies my Teacher Told Me\' or, "the People\'s History of the United Stats of America" if your interested in real history. That crap in history books is so loaded with patriotic bull its hilarious.