◇在日英人クリスと討論１（日中戦争）
途中に緑色の仕切りが入ってますが、そこまでは翻訳が終わっていると言う印です。
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re: japanese point of view: why nanjing massacre
8/5/2005 8:27 PM by Chris
Im sorry but I would like to dissociate myself from Soudenjapan's comments, which may be mixed up with mine on this thread. I think there is a certain amount of morally questionable revisionism going on in his posts. I think Japanese people should think hard about the reality of their own appalling crimes in Asia in World War 11 and Chinese people should think about their own moral culpability in other contexts, rather than focussing exclusively on obsession with an "others" immorality. English people should think hard about the wrongs and genocides commited by Western imperialism. But Soudenjapan, in particular, doesn';t seem to want ot do this. He/.she wants to avoid such difficult self (?) examination through sophistry.
I should add that I do not feel that Souden Japan's views are representative of many Japanese people's views. One of the problems of this kind of issue is the people who speak in these types of fora do not necessarily have representative viewpoints and convey a wrong impression. I live in Japan and I feel most Japanese people have a grudging acknowledgement that unacceptable atrocities were committed in World War II
re: japanese point of view: why nanjing massacre
8/7/2005 7:04 AM by soudenjapan
Chris, I always welcome someone expressing opposing views to mine. And it is a good thing to let the Chinese or any other people in the world know that there are diversity in oppinions and views in Japanese society.
My view quoted in this entry is about context. It has nothing to do with the truth about occurrence of specific atrocities. Atrocities indeed took place. They are always part of fighting insurgents and guerrilla warfare. No question about that.
So my question to you, Chris, is:
Do you have any other competing view on the context in which atrocities occurred and why the Japanese did what they were doing in China? I want to take a look at your version of comprehensive view that help us understand the whole event, and a view that intergrates what the Chinese were doing and what the Japanese were doing, civilians and military, atrocities and military objectives, everything.
re: japanese point of view: why nanjing massacre
8/7/2005 7:08 PM by Chris
My question to you, before we get to the question of fighting terrorism, is why were the Japanese in China, or Manchuria, or Korea in the first place? It seems rather analagous to the British fighting the Maumau in Kenya. Or the Americans fighting the insurgents in Iraq. Ie we were not supposed to be there in the first place so "fighting terrorism" is no excuse.
I have to say that the openess of your question is a relief. I thought you were a nationalist nutter.
re: japanese point of view: why nanjing massacre
8/9/2005 4:00 AM by soudenjapan
Chris,
The Japanese were in Korea and Manchuria primarily for economic interest and for the creation of buffer zone to ease the pressure from Russia and communism.
You can argue the legitimacy of the policy, what's right and what's wrong in terms of morality, worldview, decision-making, diplomacy, alternative policy, or anything. But how does it help you answer my previous question? An argument on the ligitimacy is unlikely to contribute to the description of what was going on in China during Sino-Japanese War.
I'm just curious about your view on what I called "context." Did my initial comment quoted in this entry made any sense to you, or what part of the comment are you having problem with?
re: japanese point of view: why nanjing massacre
8/9/2005 6:47 PM by Chris
I feel I have a pretty strong idea of the different layers of meaning in your post. You seem to be hiding behind a morally degenerate and intellectually bankrupt sophistry to explain away Japanese atrocities in the Sino Japanese war.
There are two honest lines of argument open to you.
1. The first is to clearly distinguish the historical explanation of why japanese soldiers committed terrible atrocities in the Sino Japanese War from any moral justification of those actions. Ie. your initial comment stands but it stands as a purely factual explanation of the motivation behind the atrocities. The same explanation - that the killings were motivated purely by a wish to quell insurgents - would of course apply to the Nazis in Eastern and Western Europe, to the Turkish in Armenia, to the Americans in Vietnam (and Iraq?), to the Roman practise of decimation. Indeed, it could be used to explain just about every wartime atrocity since the dawn of time. It doesn't excuse anything.
Infact, I think it is not even a very convincing explanation of what happened. In the Japanese case there were many other factors leading to the atrocities such as weak command structures within the Japanese military, extreme brutality within the Japanese army at the time and the prevalence of extremist and racist ideology among its officer corps.
2. The second line of argument is to try, if not to excuse, then to portray the Japanese actions as less morally repugnant by analogy to the current war on terror. There are a number of serious problems with any such attempt. The first is that there can be no honest parallel between the Japanese aggression in continental asia and the war on terror, even if we accepted the justifications of the war on terror, for the simple reason that there was no Japanese September 11 or anything like it. There was no terrorist threat to Japan before its aggression in Asia and, infact, no serious threat on the Japanese mainland for most of this period. This was a war of aggression and the fighting of insurgents was part of that aggression. Of course, my question about whether the Japanese had any right to be there is the central point here. You can't avoid it if you are going down this second line of argument. But lets say we concluded that the Japanese had some right to be in China (which, let's face it, they didn't. It was much more analogous to the British in Kenya or the French in Algeria). Then for this argument to suffice as a justification of what they did, you would have to also prove that there tactics were legitimate responses to the terrorist threat. They were not. However much I might condemn American actions in Iraq, I haven't noticed wholesale and purposeful butchery of the local population as one of their policies. That is much more analagous to what the Nazis did in Eastern Europe. If you really think that the deliberate massacre of hundreds of thousands of people can be justified with the glib comment that wars against guerilla fighters "inevitably get nasty" then you are utterly morally bankrupt.
The truth is that, if you are following the first line of argument, your explanation is historically incomplete and really rather uninteresting. If you are following the second line of argument, you are just wrong.
Infact, what I think you are trying to do is move between the two arguments, vaguely implying some sort of moral excuse without having the honesty to come out and argue it clearly. It is pure sophistry.
re: japanese point of view: why nanjing massacre
8/11/2005 5:00 AM by soudenjapan
It sounds like a great comment at first sight. But taking a closer look at it, one quickly notices that there is very little substance in your comment with lots of mere interpretaion, personal impressions, and charcterization like excuse, bankrupt, morally repugnant, serious problems, etc., based sololy on your guesses and imagination. Your political belief and ideology are fully expressed in your post as well. That is fine. But where is the substance?
>The same explanation - that the killings were motivated
>purely by a wish to quell insurgents - would of course apply
>to the Nazis in Eastern and Western Europe, to the Turkish in
> Armenia, to the Americans in Vietnam (and Iraq?), to the
>Roman practise of decimation. Indeed, it could be used to
>explain just about every wartime atrocity since the dawn
>of time.
Do you really believe that you have the capacity to reach this kind of conclusion with such a super generalization and simplification covering human history from the dawn of time to the current war in Iraq? You must be a smart person, but you really need not try to inflate your ego so that you can sound like a well-qualified, adept historian in this field. An attempt like this only reduces your credibility.
Now, let me address some of your concerns.
First, after signing the Simonoseki Treaty with China in 1895, the Japanese always had the right to be in China.
Second, an atrocity like "Tongzhou Incident" was nothing but terrorism againt Japanese people for which then Chinese government paid compensation later, which therefore proves that the Chinese government clearly recognized that the Japanese had had the right to be in China.
Third, justification has nothing to do with any of my comments in this thread.
Fourth, I believe that my comment and view have never been evasive from the beginning. But if you do find anything vague in them, you can quote me properly and ask for clarification.
As for the substance in your comment, my understanding of your argument is:
At first you thought that "your initial comment stands but it stands as a purely factual explanation of the motivation behind the atrocities."
But you believe now that the real causes of atrocities were:
1. weakness in military command structures
2. extreme brutality
3. extremist and racist ideology
And, thus, you concluded that "[t]his was a war of aggression and the fighting of insurgents was part of that aggression."
That's your argument, isn't it, Chris? Correct me if I'm wrong.
re: japanese point of view: why nanjing massacre
8/11/2005 8:49 PM by Chris
No, that is not my argument. I will try again.
I was simply saying that you had two lines of argument open to you (1. a purely historical, amoral explanation of what happened. 2. an attempt to use that explanation to justify Japan's actions.) I was saying that the two types of argument should not be confused and that you should come out in the open and state clearly which of the two you were trying to argue. Previous posts had been shifty on this point. Sometimes you seemed to veer towards the first: "whether it was right or wrong thing to do what they did in China is completely a separate issue on an entirely different dimension." And sometimes you seemed to veer towards the second line of argument "when insurgents start using kids and women as weapon to attack the occupation forces, battles inevitably get nasty".
That is why I called your argument evasive and described it as sophistry. It is a sophist's technique to blur arguments in this way for rhetorical effect.
Your reaction to my Nazi and Turkish comparisons completely misses the point of what I was trying to say. I was simply trying to illustrate how the first line of argument would have no moral content. You could indeed argue that the Japanese were reacting to terrorism, just as you could say the Nazis were when fighting the French Resistance, but it would not help any attempted moral argument one jot. I went on to say that I thought your attempted explanation, even if you were not attempting a moral justification of Japan's actions (you claimed earlier not to have been) felt incomplete and I offered a few other factors contributing to the atrocities that were not adequately taken into account purely to describe these incidents as reactions to terrorism.
Now, however, I think you are being more straightforward. I think it is fairly clear that you are attempting a moral justification, or at least partial justification, from your analogy between your claim that they were fighting terrorists and the current war on terror. Although, after going into some detail in your justification, you lapse again into blurring the boundaries between these two arguments by saying "justification has nothing to do with any of my comments in this thread". Which is it to be?
re: japanese point of view: why nanjing massacre
8/11/2005 9:21 PM by Chris
I will assume that you are claiming that Japan was justified in being in China and was fighting an understandable battle against terrorism in the context of that legitimate occupation.
If I came up to you with a Bowie knife and beat you up and held the knife to your neck and said "Now, do you accept I have the right to take your wallet" and you said "OK" because you had had enough of being beaten up would that give me the right to take your wallet?
That is about how much force your argument that the Shimonoseki treaty justified Japan's presence in Asia had. As a matter of fact, most of that treaty was quickly abrogated because the Western Powers held a Bowie knife to Japan's neck. If we were relying on scraps of paper like that to come to a view about the rights and wrongs of imperialism in the past, we would come to the conclusion that England, for instance, had a perfect and continuing right to lord it over massive tracts of Africa and Asia and the Americas. The Allied powers would have had every right to sit in Japan after its world war II humiliation and suck it dry for ever after.
The rights and wrongs of imperialism are about whether it is right to suppress another people for your own ends. The rights and wrongs of freedom fighting are whether it is right to resist such suppression, and what tactics should be used. Maybe there were some immoral things done on the Chinese side during the Japanese occupation but Im afraid quoting repeatedly one incident in which about 200 people were killed rather points out the imbalance of the scales of evil in that particular conflict)
By the way, I did google the Thongzhou incident and found this appended to the bottom of the account in Wikipedia of the incident "The Tongzhou Incident primarily appears in Japanese far-right literature, and very rarely in Western, Chinese and other sources. Chinese historians insist that the right-wing organizations in Japan use this incident to downplay the atrocities committed by the Imperial Army in the Nanjing Massacre, focusing on the cruelty of the Chinese army." Of course, maybe it is wrong that this incident is not featured in the Western literature but it would be fair to say that the incident, unlike something like September 11, was actually part of a continuum of escalating violence between two sides on hairtrigger in July 1937. There had been skirmishes between Chinese and Japanese troops for the whole of July, two days before there was a small battle between the two sides at Langfang where seventeen Japanese planes bombed a Chinese barracks. On the atrocities on the other side of the balance of evil see:
Experimentation
Massacre 1
Plague attack
Firebomb attacks on residential areas
Massacres abroad
A massive massacre
Of course, these are just a few of the horrors that you seem to think are best described as a run of the mill anti terror campaign. The full list would go on for pages. It was a lot more that a run of the mill anti terror campaign, it was a terrible black mark on the history of Japan. The only point I was trying to make when I first entered this discussion was that every country should look at its own black marks. You don't seem to want to. I wonder why?
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re: japanese point of view: why nanjing massacre
8/12/2005 6:07 AM by soudenjapan
Chirs,
Your comment is long again. Let me take one by one to examine the deatils.
>And sometimes you seemed to veer towards the second line
>of argument "when insurgents start using kids and women
>as weapon to attack the occupation forces, battles
>inevitably get nasty".
I feel that this is a simple factual statement to which no personal value judgment attached. Unless you are applying your personal imagination here, quote me again from any of my comment in this thread the sentence with which I referred to the right or wrong of the inevitable consequece.
It happened in Vietnam. It happened in Palestine. It happened in Chechen. It must have happened elsewhere. It is, therefore, a fact in guerrilla warfare. Thus it is safe to say that "when insurgents start using kids and women as weapon to attack the occupation forces, battles inevitably get nasty." Perfectly make sense and very fair.
You can copy the sentence and take and paste it in any discussion forum on guerrilla warfare that involves kids and women as weapon.
Are you disagreeing to the content of the statement?
>I will assume that you are claiming that Japan was
>justified in being in China and was fighting an
>understandable battle against terrorism in the
>context of that legitimate occupation.
Your assumption is irrelevant here. What matters are facts like existence of official agreements and treaties between Japan and China back then.
Your personal characterizations like "understandable battle," "legitimate occupation" are irrelevant too. No matter how many times you repeat it, an imagination is an imagination and will not be a fact.
This is going to be an uphill battle for you with heavey burden on your back, Chris, because you have a slightest ground for what you are claiming in the discussion with me.
>That is about how much force your argument that the
>Shimonoseki treaty justified Japan's presence in
>Asia had.
I don't know how to respond to this argument of yours, but the only thing I can say here is that I have never heard anyone, Chinese historians or Western International Law experts, raising a question about the validity of the Simonoseki Treaty.
>most of that treaty was quickly abrogated because the
>Western Powers held a Bowie knife to Japan's neck.
That's right. But a deal was a deal between the Japanese and Russians and Germans. Later in the histroy, however, the Japanese reached new deals with both Russians after Russo-Japanese War and Germans after World War I. With those new agreements, their interests in China were transfered to Japan.
>Of course, these are just a few of the horrors that
>you seem to think are best described as a run of the
>mill anti terror campaign.
Yes. Those operations were brutal. That's all. No change is required to the core structure of my argument:
(1) Sweeping operations of guerrilla fighters in civilian clothing, terrorists, insurgents, and their supporters who were utilizing women and kids as their weapon.
(2) Removing anti-Japanese government and installing pro-Japanese government in China.
re: japanese point of view: why nanjing massacre
8/12/2005 8:28 AM by Chris
Ok, I think we are getting somewhere. We are on the first track: a purely historical explanation with no attempt at justification or limitation of the wrongs committed by the Japanese in China. You accept that what was done in China was wrong and in many cases evil. You are simply saying that it was done in the context of a rather nasty war.
Thus far, I can accept what you are saying. But I would also say the same contextualising is perfectly possible in the case of the Nazis in Eastern Europe or Western Europe, the British in Kenya, the French in Algeria, the Serbians in Bosnia, etc etc etc. It is simply a factual claim about the context for the violence and has nothing to offer us whatsoever in any moral judgement of the Japanese in China. I repeat that I do not feel this is a complete explanation of why the atrocities happened but I feel we are now not so far away from each other on this rather limited point.
What divides us now is a separate but related issue about the legitimacy of Japan‘s presence in China. You fail to address the key point about treaties such as Shimonoseki, which are concluded essentially under duress, that they do very little to morally justify the suppression of another country and people. I notice you completely fail to address my mugging analogy and completely fail to acknowledge that such pieces of paper would justify Britain ruling half the world and the US continuing its occupation of Japan for ever. Would that be right? I think you are going to have to exercise your morality beyond legalistic posturing (I think a real legal treatment would probably be a lot more complicated and probably veer towards Chinese rights towards independence, but I am not a lawyer and I cannot offer such a proper and complete treatment of the legal situation. I suspect you cannot either.)
The fact is that, looked at objectively, the only justification for Japan's presence in China and indeed mainland Asia came from Japanese aggression. The slips of paper you think are so important were entirely the result of that aggression and coercion and therefore it is rather circular to use them as a justification for it. The British empire had numerous slips of paper to justify its depradations but most British people at least are honest enough to acknowledge that these slips of paper are completely useless when justifying what we did. There is no convincing case, in my opinion, to argue that there was some kind of consent given by the broad mass of the Chinese or Korean people to their occupation (indeed the evidence is firmly in the opposite direction), there is no convincing case that despite such opposition the Japanese did any good during their occupations of China (it was disastrous for China and killed more than 8 million civilians), and there is no real case that Japan needed to be an aggressor in Asia protect itself (this has to be a major threat to
re: japanese point of view: why nanjing massacre
8/12/2005 9:03 AM by Chris
... Sorry for another long post, but I feel the truth is that your argument is weak. I did not want to get involved in this argument when I first got involved in this thread (infact I was coming from exactly the opposite direction) but the truth is that most right thinking people when they read your attempts to justify Japan's prewar aggression will see them for what they are: highly tendentious and over stretched.
Why don't you spend less time worrying about about worthless slips of paper like the Shimonoseki treaty, which fill the annals of mans cruelty to man (eg. the institution of slavery had an extraordinarily strong legal infrastructure) and more time seriously looking at the facts of what Japan did in China and Asia more generally. Read those links again? Is it really adequate to describe as a "brutal" response to terrorists things like plague attacks and medical experimentation on POWs and the massacre of 200,000 people in non-combat incidents in a six week period following the fall of Nanking. More than 20,000 women (some estimates claim 80,000) from as young as seven to the elderly were raped during those six weeks. Can that be explained purely in the context of a response to terrorism? Rapes were often performed in public during the day, and often in front of spouses or family members. The girls were often killed afterwards, and their bodies were sometimes mutilated. There are some claims that the Japanese forced family members to commit acts of incest, fathers to raped daughters. Can that be explained purely in the context of a response to terrorism? What about forcing monks to rape women for soldiers amusement? What about the following description in the Wikipedia link: "Many were taken to the Yangtze River, where they were machine-gunned so their bodies would be carried down to Shanghai. Others were used for live bayonet practice. It is believed that decapitation was a popular method of killing for the Japanese troops. Reports of soldiers being exhausted from decapitating prisoners were common. According to other reports, some Chinese were burned, nailed to trees, or hung by their tongues, and some women had their breasts cut off. Witnesses recall Japanese soldiers throwing babies into the air and catching them with their bayonets. Pregnant women were often the target of murder, as they would often be bayoneted in the belly." Is that really about combatting terrorism. Why can't you look at this evil honestly?
Can there be any honest analogy with the current war on terrorism and the way it is being waged (By the way I disagree with the current tactics). Oh and by the way, and a bit off topic, I would love to see how you could justify the 16000 deaths on the death railway in Thailand, the Manila massacre, the Bataan death march, the Alexandra hospital massacre or the Sandakan death marches in terms of your mid 20th century war on terrorism.
I really urge you to go to the following URL and examine whether your current construct really is very helpful when trying to understand the Asian holocaust committed by the Japanese:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Japanese_War_Atrocities.
I am sorry for posting such long diatribes but I really think that when considering the deaths of millions of people we, people who are lucky enough to live in less hellish situations, must try to be honest and not use nationalistic sophistry to deny the reality of other people's suffering. I try to do that when looking at the evils committed by my country over the years. I try to do that when looking at the firebombing of Tokyo and the atomic bombs. I try to do that when looking at the conduct of some Allied soldiers towards Japanese during the pacific war. So why do you spend your whole time coming up with spurious arguments to avoid looking at the reality of your countrymen's conduct in the past.
re: japanese point of view: why nanjing massacre
8/12/2005 4:59 PM by soudenjapan
Chris,
>The full list would go on for pages. It was a lot
>more that a run of the mill anti terror campaign,
Sweeping operatioin means "sweeping" operration, which is a military operation whose business is killing. They did it. It was bloody and brutal.
The reason the Japanese killed civilians were already thoroughly explained but let me reiterate again that they were no regular civilians, which Chinese people do not deny. They were insergents, guerrillas, terrorists, and supporters, men and women, the young and old, to whom the Geneva Convention at that time provided no protection. They were fighters in civilian clothing. They were tough and determined fighters.
the China had and still has such a huge population, the largest in the world, in fact. When sweeping operations are executed in a country like China, the toll unavoidably goes up, especially when civilians are all fighting. That has nothing to do with justification. It is a matter of logic.
>but I really think that when considering the deaths of
>millions of people we, people who are lucky enough to live
>in less hellish situations, must try to be honest and not
>use nationalistic sophistry to deny the reality of other
>people's suffering. I try to do that when looking at the
>evils committed by my country over the years. I try to do
>that when looking at the firebombing of Tokyo and the atomic
>bombs.
As I said again and again, those are simply irrelevant here. Your beliefs and determination are fine, but they are nothing to do with the description what was going on in China at that time from the Japanese point of view.
You are simply having problem with your own ideas, imagination, and characterizations like honesty and sophistry, not mine. Because you are not supposed to know, from the already given information above, whether SoudenJapan is saying that the conducts of the Japanese soldiers in China were either justifiable or injustifiable.
>whether your current construct really is very helpful when
>trying to understand the Asian holocaust committed by the
>Japanese:
No, I'm not trying to do that from the beginning.
I believe that I made it very clear somewhere in early stage of this thread that the issue of the Nanking Massacre was brought up by bingfeng, the owner of this blog, not by me. He created the title for this entry, and combined it with my comment about the Japanese point of view.
>when considering the deaths of millions of people
Wrong again. I was not considering the death of millions. I was considering how the Japanese saw the war against China and uderstood their military operatioins. I am simply trying to describe it as they saw it back then.
>You accept that what was done in China was wrong
>and in many cases evil.
No, I said again and again the same thing tha I didn't mention either way. Good or bad, right or wrong. I did not state it. I have kept saying that it is irrelevant and I'm still saying the same. It is only you, Chirs, who is drifting from one side to the other, saying that soudenJapan is justifying the evil at one point or soudenjapan is accepting the evil at another point.
>You are simply saying that it was done in the context
>of a rather nasty war.
Yes, this sounds OK.
re: japanese point of view: why nanjing massacre
8/12/2005 7:16 PM by Chris
1. You are morally bankrupt.
I was going to write some other stuff about the ways in which your arguments are incoherent and delusional but to be honest the real problem is 1.
But I can't resist this little addition: did you read the posts about what happened in some of those atrocities? Did you not feel that the questions asked in those posts need to be answered? Did you feel your explanation was adequate. I am reduced to amazement.
re: japanese point of view: why nanjing massacre
8/12/2005 7:59 PM by Chris
I'm starting to think that I have said all I can usefully say in relation to the discussion with Soudenjapan. There is clearly a intellectual and moral blockage there.
However, I have one thing to say on the point I originally made on this thread. My involvement in this discussionhas left a very deep impression on my thinking on this subject. It has made me question the people around me in Japan about the extent of their knowledge and acceptance of the atrocities committed by Japan in the second world war. My original point still stands that most Japanese people do acknowledge that very evil things were done in Asia. I also think that Chinese people should question themselves about the role of anti-Japanism in their own polity and about the many black marks on their own immediate history.
However, I have started to reassess whether there is a continuing problem with Japanese people's view of the last war. I think Soudenjapan is an extremist and not representative of most peoples' views. I would like to make clear that it is not so much my interaction with his views that has caused the change of heart (I knew people like him existed long before) but the renewed interest in this question that has prompted me to question the people around me about the precise nature of their knowledge of Japan's evil in Asia. It has become clear to me that, though many people acknowledge that bad things were done, they have no idea about the precise facts of what was done.
I am not talking about opinions here, I am talking about facts - babies on bayonets etc. - which should be part of every Japanese persons knowledge of what was done in the name of their country abroad. How can they properly interact, as a democratic society, with their closest neighbours without widespread acknowledgement of these facts? There is also a discourse among some people that combines an acknowledgement that bad things were done with various victimisation theories about how Japan was forced into the war and how Japanese people suffered in the war (of course, the second point is true, which makes the wrongs of their leaders even more terribl, and the first point is nuanced and I hesitate to mention it in SoudenJapan's presence.) This is very different from Soudenjapan's revisionism, which is a minority interest.
I repeat that most Japanese people in my experience acknowledge that terrible things were done but I do think there is a need for some basic facts to be taught in schools about this period in Japanese history. We don't need opinions, we don't need war guilt, compensation is irrelevant; we need facts. One of the Japanese people I talked to said: "I think most of us know something really terrible was done but we are not really sure exactly what. Why is that? "
Until now, the textbook issue is a red herring. It rests on a misunderstanding of Japan's educational system cause by experience of more totalitarian regimes. Japanese textbooks are man
... not prescribed by the Central Government and it is up to the school which one is adopted. The really dodgy textbooks are adopted by a small minority of schools (2 per cent or something) and I know from personal experience that many Japanese people are really angry when they are adopted. Schools are bombarded with protest letters and emao;s . But there is a more serious issue in that even the relatively OK textbooks are not explicit enough about the facts of what Japan did. Most of the people I talked to said they were not really taught many specific facts about the atrocities when they were young. We don't want Souden's opinions about what happened, we don't want mine, we don't want yours Binfeng (or whatever your real name is) we just want the reality taught to our (their) young people.
re: japanese point of view: why nanjing massacre
8/13/2005 7:45 AM by soudenjapan
Chris,
Oh, come on, Chris, don't try to pretend as if you knew a lot about this issue. You added very little new information in this tread, if not at all. Yours is nothing but mere description of brutality of specific events. You provided only emotions in this thread. What else did you add. Any viewpoint?
Those do not give structure to the holistic view of the entire event. Neither do those help theorize. You don't even have a comprehensive argument that is workable to integrate both the Chinese and the Japanese side, civilisans and military, the old and young, men and women.
Unfortunetly, I was always under the impression that you had very little knowledge about this issue other than the fact that something brutal occurred in China 60 to 70 years ago. You did not even know what kinds of agreement were there at that time between China and Japan, and Japan and other countries.
I feel that you are not ready to argure this issue. You need to learn the basics with regard to this issue and, of course, your own comprehensive arguement. First thing first, Chris. Expressing your political conviction is not good enough.
re: japanese point of view: why nanjing massacre
8/13/2005 7:53 AM by soudenjapan
Chris,
Show me the succinct, concise argument of yours.
Without it, you are just creating confusion in this thread with your unnecessarily long messages. You avoided the first step, and you kept avoiding it in the rest of your posts. That is what your were doing in the last severl days.
re: japanese point of view: why nanjing massacre
8/13/2005 8:02 AM by soudenjapan
Chirs,
>did you read the posts about what happened in some of those
>atrocities? Did you not feel that the questions asked in those posts
>need to be answered?
Those are irrelevant in this thread, Chris, as I said again and again. You are merely trying to divert attention to an issue that is out of scope of my argument. Besides, information on the atrocities and brutaly the Imperial Army were involved are NOT new. You may be very young and it might have been new to you, but it is not for others.
You have just found the moon up in the sky for the first time in your life. Congratulations. But others always knew that it had been always up there.
re: japanese point of view: why nanjing massacre
8/13/2005 8:23 AM by soudenjapan
Chris,
I have just skim through the entire thread again. But I am still unable to locate your argument corresponding to mine.
Here is how our interaction started.
>Do you have any other competing view on the context in which
>atrocities occurred and why the Japanese did what they were doing
>in China? I want to take a look at your version of comprehensive view
>that help us understand the whole event, and a view that intergrates
>what the Chinese were doing and what the Japanese were doing,
>civilians and military, atrocities and military objectives, everything.
Then you answered this way.
>My question to you, before we get to the question of fighting
>terrorism, is why were the Japanese in China, or Manchuria, or
>Korea in the first place?
What's this? Where is your answer?
I did not see your answer but I did answer this particular quetion anyway.
But you are still avoid answering my quetion to you, Chris. And I am still waiting. Don't try to avoid answering by flooding this thread with your long comments with little substance. Don't try to avoid answering by attempting to expand the scope of my initial comment so that you can turn this argument into another argument of entirely different nature.
I am not going to let you do that. Be fair to the argument and be straightforward, Chris.
re: japanese point of view: why nanjing massacre
8/13/2005 12:09 PM by soudenjapan
Chris,
I asked a question to you in the beginning of our interaction. That is, what do you think the Japanese were trying to achieve in China?
I told you my own ideas:
(1) To sweep Chinese fighters, military and civilian guerrillas, insurgents, terrorists, and their supporters both within and outside China.
(2) To replace the anti-Japanese government with a pro-Japanese government.
What was your answer? Instead of stating your own view on the historical question I asked, you started asserting that my position is unclear. What is this all about, Chris?
Regardless of my position, either you agree or disagree, vague or clear, your view is your view and has nothing to do with clarifying my position, isn't it? Why did you keep writing about, and nothing but writing about the alleged vagueness of my position, instead of clearly expressing your own? To this day, you have not done that.
I don't seriously understand, Chris?
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