"ODA without a conscience"

[Brad Mayer]

 >Subject: Japan's ODA policy
 >----- Forwarded message from viola wu <violawu at hotmail.com> -----
 >
 >The Japan Times: Feb. 26, 2001
 >
 >"ODA without a conscience"
 >By KIROKU HANAI

This should come under the same objection as with Bartovs' criticism of 
Finkelstein.    Of course, the Beijing regime, Finkelstein, or anything 
else can be criticized - the question is, _who_ is doing the criticizing, 
what is the critical perspective being presented?

>He said Japanese cannot impose their moral standards on other Asians,
>considering the atrocities they committed before and during World War II.
>His statement is ridiculous. Japan should try to compensate for its past
>deeds by protecting democratization and the protection of human rights in
>other Asian countries.

Tokyo needs to focus on "democratizing" its wretched educational system, 
instead. The present Tokyo regime has no basis at all for criticizing 
anybody in Asia.  This is especially true since this regime continues to 
deliberately propagate a historical amnesia within Japan itself, by means 
of the educational system, about past relations with the rest of Asia:
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Thursday, March 1 6:10 PM SGT

Japan to approve revised version of controversial history textbook

TOKYO, March 1 (AFP) -

A revised version of a controversial new history textbook for Japanese 
schools will get government approval this month despite protests from South 
Korea and China, its publisher said Thursday.

"We expect our textbook to pass the screening in March," Toshiaki 
Shirasawa, a spokesman for Fuso Publishing's textbook division, told AFP.

But he stressed that the final version of the junior high-school textbook 
would have more than 100 changes from a version first submitted last April.

Reports that the book glosses over the wartime atrocities of Japanese 
troops in other parts of Asia, notably the enlisting of hundreds of 
thousands of women as sex slaves or "comfort women", have provoked angry 
protests in South Korea and from China and North Korea.

Shirasawa would not go into details of the changes but said they would 
address concerns in neighbouring countries.

"The problem is people base their judgement on the original edition, and 
have never looked at the revised edition," he said.

"The contents of the revised version have changed significantly from what 
is causing the controversy in South Korea and China."

The spokesman did confirm that the book covered the previously taboo 
subject of the Kyoiku Chokugo, an edict on education first issued by 
Emperor Meiji in 1890.

The edict, which outlined a Japanese nationalist world view, was required 
reading in schools until the end of World War II, when it was banned by the 
occupying allied forces. It is particularly sensitive in Korea, where it 
was also taught during Japan's 1910-45 occupation.

South Korean President Kim Dae-Jung Thursday warned Japan that a "correct 
understanding of history," was vital to the future relationship between the 
two countries. His veiled reference to the row came against a background of 
growing anti-Japanese protests in Seoul.

The South Korean national assembly on Wednesday adopted a resolution urging 
the government to put on hold Seoul's further opening of its markets to 
Japanese cultural products unless the book is withdrawn.

North Korea has also attacked the book.

"This is an insult to the Korean and other Asian peoples, victims of the 
Japanese Imperialists' aggression in the past, and part of their 
ideological preparations for reinvasion," Pyongyang's mouthpiece, the 
Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said Thursday, citing a newspaper commentary.

The protests followed last Thursday's denunciation by Taiwanese lawmakers 
of a Japanese cartoonist Yoshinori Kobayashi, who alleged in a book that 
Taiwanese "comfort women" were volunteers.

Last week China blasted as "ridiculous" comments by a Japanese lawmaker who 
argued Japan's wartime aggression had helped Asian nations become independent.
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The real root of the problem lies not in the past, but in the present 
willingness of Tokyo to allow itself to be pitted against the rest of Asia 
in the service of Washington.  Don't resist Washington, this is the essence 
of "democratization" around the world.

- Brad Mayer
Oakland, CA