Behind screens and under cover of night, a local government in Japan is tearing down a monument dedicated to remembrance, reflection and friendship between Japan and Korea
I think these kinds of comments are harmful to the discourse because there a good deal of nuance missing.
For one, it’s pretty reductive to call them ‘Japanese who’ve done bad things’ when who you’re talking about is dead or on their death beds. That’s not who the monument is for or about.
Historical monuments aren’t for attributing the sins of grandparents to their grandchildren. It’s about humanzing the victims and teaching people of this generation what was allowed to happen in the past. It’s about teaching them the dangers of complacency and the complicit nature of being a bystander.
If it’s worth anything, 4,300 people signed a petition against the removal and many protested in person.
Yes, Japanese people as a whole are severely lacking when it comes to acknowledging the atrocities committed by their country. No, Japanese people today are not personally responsible for them. The better we are at separating acknowledgement from responsibility, the easier time we will have convincing people to remember them.
I think the person you’re responding to already knows that and the implication of “the bad things they’ve done” is that they mean “the bad things their nation has done.” It’s a problem that Japan seems to have more than other nations because it’s historically made a big show of its status as the only nation to ever suffer the use of nuclear weapons, and has plenty of memorials and museums to remember the event, while militantly denying, internally and externally, its own history of incredible violence and cruelty towards neighboring countries.
This would be valid if Japan didn’t continue to deny their role in atrocities. The Japanese people of today are entirely responsible for the lack of recognition of their role in the atrocities of yesterday.
Japanese people as a whole are severely lacking when it comes to acknowledging the atrocities committed by their country
And when educating people, we need to change the way the message is delivered to start taking collective responsibility for the bad things, the “bad people” and acknowledge that everybody of every culture or ideology is capable of being evil, and has been before, and will be in the future, that Nazi Germany wasn’t a “them” issue, it’s an “us” issue, and we need to do way less elitist finger wagging from some implicit position of detached moral purity.
When we teach that “X culture did Y thing to Z culture N decades ago”, we need to stop focusing on the X and Z part.
No, we don’t need to seek revenge, we don’t need to “right the wrongs”, because every action has consequences and trying to “undo” one bad thing will make more bad things. Just learn and move on, trying not to make the same mistakes. That’s the best we can do.
Depends what you mean. If you’re talking about reparations I don’t agree. In this world, there are a lot of people materially suffering and we shouldn’t be picking and choosing who gets free gift cards and who doesn’t based on race. Unfortunate things happened in the past that set the current stage. There’s a lot of suffering out there and everyone seems to think they have an inalienable right to reproduce despite the consequences. So reparations to me is scooping water out with a coffee cup from a sinking ship. It’s also the quickest way to lose elections. Nobody will go for it when we’ve all seen our material conditions worsen over our lifetimes, even in the debt-ridden “rich nations”.
That we as humans are living beyond our means in terms of population and resources. Particularly if everybody wants to live above the poverty line. I really didn’t think this was news to anybody at this point.
I think these kinds of comments are harmful to the discourse because there a good deal of nuance missing.
For one, it’s pretty reductive to call them ‘Japanese who’ve done bad things’ when who you’re talking about is dead or on their death beds. That’s not who the monument is for or about.
Historical monuments aren’t for attributing the sins of grandparents to their grandchildren. It’s about humanzing the victims and teaching people of this generation what was allowed to happen in the past. It’s about teaching them the dangers of complacency and the complicit nature of being a bystander.
If it’s worth anything, 4,300 people signed a petition against the removal and many protested in person.
Yes, Japanese people as a whole are severely lacking when it comes to acknowledging the atrocities committed by their country. No, Japanese people today are not personally responsible for them. The better we are at separating acknowledgement from responsibility, the easier time we will have convincing people to remember them.
I think the person you’re responding to already knows that and the implication of “the bad things they’ve done” is that they mean “the bad things their nation has done.” It’s a problem that Japan seems to have more than other nations because it’s historically made a big show of its status as the only nation to ever suffer the use of nuclear weapons, and has plenty of memorials and museums to remember the event, while militantly denying, internally and externally, its own history of incredible violence and cruelty towards neighboring countries.
You’re over analysing things for no reasons as my choice of word is perfectly appropriate when you take half a second to figure out the context.
This would be valid if Japan didn’t continue to deny their role in atrocities. The Japanese people of today are entirely responsible for the lack of recognition of their role in the atrocities of yesterday.
And when educating people, we need to change the way the message is delivered to start taking collective responsibility for the bad things, the “bad people” and acknowledge that everybody of every culture or ideology is capable of being evil, and has been before, and will be in the future, that Nazi Germany wasn’t a “them” issue, it’s an “us” issue, and we need to do way less elitist finger wagging from some implicit position of detached moral purity.
When we teach that “X culture did Y thing to Z culture N decades ago”, we need to stop focusing on the X and Z part.
No, we don’t need to seek revenge, we don’t need to “right the wrongs”, because every action has consequences and trying to “undo” one bad thing will make more bad things. Just learn and move on, trying not to make the same mistakes. That’s the best we can do.
Id agree except that I think you can and should try to rectify historic wrongs where the descendants of the victims are still materially suffering.
Depends what you mean. If you’re talking about reparations I don’t agree. In this world, there are a lot of people materially suffering and we shouldn’t be picking and choosing who gets free gift cards and who doesn’t based on race. Unfortunate things happened in the past that set the current stage. There’s a lot of suffering out there and everyone seems to think they have an inalienable right to reproduce despite the consequences. So reparations to me is scooping water out with a coffee cup from a sinking ship. It’s also the quickest way to lose elections. Nobody will go for it when we’ve all seen our material conditions worsen over our lifetimes, even in the debt-ridden “rich nations”.
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That we as humans are living beyond our means in terms of population and resources. Particularly if everybody wants to live above the poverty line. I really didn’t think this was news to anybody at this point.