(4) Japanese textbooks have often "incorrectly" called what happened in Nanking as a rape or massacre.
As I read these claims, I thought to myself, "This is an outrageous series of claims to the world to be making in such a widely circulated magazine as Newswek!"Throughout Kase\s insensitive and offensive writing-which was incidentally published in the special Newsweek magazine issue about memories of American soldiers and their families in occupied Iraq (2003-2007)-, Kase consistently implies that the Japanese are victims of a historical anti-Japanese campaign.
As a concerned cross-cultural educator and peacemaker, I responded to that article of Hideaki's by writing an editorial of my own and published it in several free on-line blogs and websites criticizing his victimization of Japan and its distortions of memory and popular culture.
Wherever history and memory are manipulated by government officials, their backers and official histories, I have to stand up. This is the way I desire to honor Iris Chiang and her lifelong work. Iris Chang passed away a few years back but she is my ideal as an educator and a historian. She is famous for the revealing work: The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II.
This approach of mine to education and history as a lifelong struggle is the only way that the memory of what happened in Nanking will be remembered where it counts most-in the land of Japan that once tried to benefit from the massacre.
I desire that Japan (as well as America) grows into a country that can counter the worst tendencies in Asia now which continue to lead toward tyranny and dictatorship. So far, although at the people-to-people level in Japan, relationships between the Japanese and Chinese have been improving over the last two decades, the last 70-years of post-Imperial history have not shown significant change at the government level in Japan.
Mutual empathy and an educated understanding of how nations are linked historically across cultures is what we all need to have in order to connect and remain vigilant to misguided historians while reminding both our elders and our children of the fact that internalization of history is not always simply a duty or source of pride but is also a duty of peace.
Works Referred to:
Chang, Iris. The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II.
New York: Basic Books, 1997.
Iris Chang Memorial Fund, http://www.irischangmemorialfund.org/Mission_Statement.htm
Kase, Hideaki, "The Use and Abuse of the Past", (Special Edition) Newsweek,
April 2, 2007, p. 15.
Kuwait National Memorial Museum, http://www.pbase.com/bmcmorrow/kuwaitmemorial
Stoda, Kevin, "The Use and Abuse of Newsweek: Was that a Japanese Government plant
in Newsweek in April or was that just Bad History?", http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_kevin_an_070616_the_use_and_abuse_of.htm
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