'Unfinished Business'

[midcan5]

Recently I have been reading about the war in Pacific and the island battles, my dad was on a carrier there and hardly talked about it after the war. [Warning pet peeve ahead.] Having witnessed the change from American cars being the best in the world to Japanese corporations not only gaining the upper hands in sales, but becoming the standard for quality, I always shook my head. Datsun became Nissan. Japanese products gained a prestige that the economic ideologues praise as they put down our own companies, and the Unions that helped make America great. Maybe I am a biased old man but I am still American and if our economy, our kids, and even our support of those who need help is to continue we need to build and do here as we did in the past. What does one make of a global economy that cares only for profits - here many American corporations have behaved equally bad sometimes - outsourcing only for profit. Why, for instance, do we argue over immigrants and not outsourcing?

So it was with interest I saw this piece this morning.

'For 65 years, Japanese corporations have escaped responsibility for abusing American POWs during World War II.'

By Christian Caryl | June 28, 2010

"Lester Tenney entered World War II as a strapping 21-year-old, weight 180 pounds. By the time he emerged from Japanese captivity in 1945, he was a shattered, emaciated cripple. His left arm and shoulder were partly paralyzed due to an accident in a coal mine where he'd been sent as a slave laborer. His overseers there -- civilian employees of the Mitsui Corp., not members of the Imperial Army -- had knocked out his teeth in repeated beatings with hammers and pickaxes. At war's end, he weighed in at 98 pounds. It took him a year in U.S. Army hospitals to regain something like a semblance of his old well-being."


""Our Congress and our senators did a lousy job," says Tenney. (He then hastens to offer praise for the few who have stood up for the vets, naming Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Rep. Mike Honda (D-Calif.). When the veterans tried to sue the Japanese companies that once exploited their labor, the U.S. Supreme Court didn't even deign to consider their cases. (State and Justice Department officials actually filed briefs opposing the veterans' claims in the lower courts on the grounds that they disturbed the 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty.)"

Unfinished Business - Japan's Wartime Atrocities - By Christian Caryl | Foreign Policy


An unusual bit of history I admit. I placed in military section but it is about education and the debates one sees on responsibility when you (a nation)have done wrong.

 

[editec]

What the Japansese empire did during WWII was unforgiveable.

Except we forgave most of the people who were responsible.

That's worked out pretty well for both of our nations.

The quality of mercy is not strain'd,
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:
'Tis mightiest in the mightiest: it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown;
His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;
But mercy is above this sceptred sway;
It is enthroned in the hearts of kings,
It is an attribute to God himself;
And earthly power doth then show likest God's
When mercy seasons justice. Therefore, Jew,
Though justice be thy plea, consider this,
That, in the course of justice, none of us
Should see salvation: we do pray for mercy;
And that same prayer doth teach us all to render
The deeds of mercy. I have spoke thus much
To mitigate the justice of thy plea;
Which if thou follow, this strict court of Venice
Must needs give sentence 'gainst the merchant there.

From Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice

 

[B. Kidd]

So they want to extort the modern Japanese for $180,000 per man, or likely more, which will enable Japan to "break with a shameful past."
Funny how some people can put a price on things like the absolution of shame.
I think its' ethnocentric horseshit.
Are you also for U.S. slave reparations?

 

[SFC Ollie]

Unfinished business? Yes I suppose it is. But 60 years later is a bit late to be worrying about it, don't you think?

And no, I have not forgotten nor forgiven things like Bataan.

 

[midcan5]

What the Japansese empire did during WWII was unforgiveable.

Except we forgave most of the people who were responsible.

That's worked out pretty well for both of our nations.

A neighbor who I chide for buying a Japanese car often replies and 'who won the war.' He says that with irony as at one time he would never have purchased Japanese, he missed wwii through a physical deferment but the horror was still real for him. I'm sure Lester Tenney would have a slightly different point of view, is he wrong. At some point we all need to emulate the Amish, but then do we brush horror under the carpet? Think of other acts and is forgiveness always possible or easy.