I found this thought provoking. Essentially it briefly discusses how history is taught in Japan, and its neighbours and the issues that causes.
Its not a new article, but it is interesting. (I thought).
www.bbc.com/news/magazine-21226068
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Interesting but perhaps nor surprising really. It's quite fascinating speaking to my wife about what she learned about British history growing up in England versus what I was taught during my childhood in Scotland. Same history but with a very different take. You'd have to research it much thoroughly than the levels of either curriculum to decide what was the real truth of course. No doubt there will be elements of fact in both tempered by an amount of things being seen from a partisan position.
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>>Interesting but perhaps nor surprising really. It's quite fascinating speaking to my wife >>about what she learned about British history growing up in England versus what I was >>taught during my childhood in Scotland
You do not have to leave Scotland to have 2 x versions.
Reformation e.g. John Knox - taught in Non-Dom Scottish Secondary Schools differs from Reformation taught in Scottish Roman Catholic Secondary Schools.
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While in the Andrew we visited the port of Kure, not far from Hiroshima, so of course visited the Peace Park and museum there. This was over 25 years ago.
The museum had many items of scorched clothing, a lot of which was from children caught in the blast, plus stone steps with the shadow of people visible on them. a very moving place.
There was a lot of printed material amongst the exhibits, much of which I had no time to read due to the press of people filing through the museum. None of this mentioned the reasons for the bombing by the US as far as I saw and nobody else from the ship who were there saw any reference to it either.
Having spoken to friends who visited the museum earlier this year things may have changed as they certainly saw an explanation for the US actions. The museum will almost certainly have been refurbished since our visit. We spoke to some American expats while we were there who said that this part of Japanese history was not widely broadcast in their museums or schools. Perhaps over time their attitude has changed.
Apparently French history regarding their dealings with England (and others) over the centuries differs quite substantially to what we are told, I am sure each country will view their history in different ways, including ours.
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Indeed. Inevitably one man's glorious victory is usually another man's dreadful atrocity. Depends which team you support or if you do. Smart monkey stuff again. Most things are.
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The Japanese don't do failure at all well. They either have to go way over the top and apologise for all the sins of the world, take personal responsibility for it and kill themselves, or simply pretend it never happened.
Either way they never learn anything from it.
The French of course just like to fester failure like an unlanced boil.
Americans never fail, its just not an option.
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Of course even over the relatively short period since my visit, information is much easier to access for most people due to the internet etc so I suppose much history has to be modified to manage the different views available from other sources.
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>> reasons for the bombing by the US
A warning to Russia. The war with Japan was already being won.
>> Apparently French history regarding their dealings with England (and others) over the centuries differs quite substantially to what we are told.
As regards the young German schizophrenic Joan of Arc, it also differs from what original documentation shows.
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The French have been re-writing WW2 for decades. Even more than the Americans.
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>> >> reasons for the bombing by the US
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>> A warning to Russia. The war with Japan was already being won.
Err the planned US led invasion of the Japanese mainland was estimated to cost # 1 million US lives, countless Japanese military lives and no doubt even more civilian lives.
# based of the fanatical "fight to the last man" attitudes seen at Iwo Jima and Okinawa,,
Last edited by: madf on Sat 13 Dec 14 at 13:27
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That is the popular reasoning as I was aware, but the Russian point may have been part of it.
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>> >> >> reasons for the bombing by the US
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>> >> A warning to Russia. The war with Japan was already being won.
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>> Err the planned US led invasion of the Japanese mainland was estimated to cost #
>> 1 million US lives, countless Japanese military lives and no doubt even more civilian lives.
The invasion of the japanese main Islands was never needed, there were plans for a complete bockade.
>> # based of the fanatical "fight to the last man" attitudes seen at Iwo Jima
>> and Okinawa,,
The Japanese had already started to make overtures of surrender. That attitude went down the pan when things turned really bad.
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To mis quote H Ford, 'History is Bunk' and is generally written by the winners.
As Britain was usually on the winning side (US war of independence excepted, and we let them win that), we usually write the correct version of history, in my opinion. But its still bunk!
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>> But its still bunk!
Sometimes Alastair. The sort of 'history' retailed by religious believers for example. The stuff the nuns told me was clearly bunk even to a six-year-old, and in later life I have been shocked and appalled by the sort of crap Muslims believe, even atheist Muslims of whom there are a fair number.
Proper history though is by far the most interesting subject for an adult person. Challenging but consistently interesting and useful really.
'I didn't get where I am today by borrowing the opinions of roughneck philistines like Henry Ford.'
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Is there ever a correct version of history.Whoever writes it.
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I don't think so Dutchie. A war is a far too complex affair to summarise in a book let alone a few paragraphs. I'm not sure there is any such think as objective truth when it comes to history. Individual facts exist certainly but history overall is subject to endless re-interpreation.
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>> Individual facts exist certainly but history overall is subject to endless re-interpretation.
Yes, that is why history is better seen an art (creative writing) than a science.
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>> Is there ever a correct version of history.Whoever writes it.
We can't ever know whether a given account of an event or series of events is 'correct', because we weren't there and probably wouldn't have understood what was going on if we were.
Ask a policemen whether three witnesses to an incident ever give identical accounts. The accounts may be sort of convergent, but will produce an overall picture which is always approximate, rather than gospel truth. Aspects of it will remain arguable.
History's like that, only worse. Absolutely fascinating it is.
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My history teacher taught me about the Dutch Spanish war.Big blue eyed blond men fighting the little Spanish at sea.The school version.
I used to like reading books of a Dutch history writer Dick Dreux.His version was of pressganged men forced to fight for king and queen, hungry poor and nothing to lose.
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>> My history teacher taught me about the Dutch Spanish war.Big blue eyed blond men fighting the little Spanish at sea.The school version.
The Spanish may have been small Dutchie, but their ships were huge compared to yours (or ours indeed).
Holland was a great maritime power which gave the British a terrible time in the East, and in a corner of Latin America. Even in home waters actually, for centuries. We Europeans cut our teeth on imperial adventures. Just as well we're friends these days eh?
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>> and in a corner of Latin America
They still speak Dutch in Suriname. Whereas to the west they speak English (Guyana), to the east they speak French (French Guiana) and to the south they speak Portuguese (Brazil).
Makes for a fun life at the borders.
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>> gave the British a terrible time in the East,
The Dutch were a bit ahead of us in the Indian Ocean although behind the ghastly Portuguese savage Vasco da Gama. Apart from the Dutch East Indies, I think they colonised Ceylon before the British.
In the late-imperial Ceylon of the forties, when I was a child there, one became slowly and confusedly aware of a sort of class of mulatto Dutch-Sinhalese people who were rich and tended to be big in commerce and land ownership. In British forties Ceylon they were known as 'Burghers' and treated as equals, with respect, by people like my parents anyway. There was a highly enviable 14-year-old Burgher boy called Johnny who lived in a big house in what seemed the jungle, ran barefoot through the abrasive vegetation and made bent-sapling snare traps for small animals, with cunningly-hidden hair-trigger arrangements. We went there once for a hog roast, his father having drilled an immense, reeking wild boar. The adults all got plastered as usual.
I haven't seen a word about Burghers in modern, sometimes rather ferocious Sri Lanka. But my guess would be that they are still there and still influential. Discretion - knowing when to lie low and be polite - is a bourgeois virtue after all.
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His version was of pressganged men forced to fight for king and queen, hungry poor and nothing to lose.
Not only pressganged but armies / navies normally supplied some food, clothing, shelter, pay possibly, plus a chance of looted goods after a victory to men with otherwise little hope so may have seemed a good option to many.
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>>US war of independence
The foundation myth of America. The only "Americans" at the time were Indians. The First Civil War (because that's what it was) was fought between different factions of the British.
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>> The invasion of the japanese main Islands was never needed, there were plans for a
>> complete bockade.
I have always wondered why it was thought necessary to invade Japan.
Germany was different - there was a nutter in charge who was quite prepared to go on fighting to the end, and lots of Germans who thought it was a good idea to support him.
But Japan had a sophisticated mechanism for bowing to the winds of change, and at some point the emperor would just say, "Sorry chaps, the game's over, things haven't gone altogether as planned" and the PM would have disemboweled himself and then there would have been a change of government, and they would all have stopped being bukshido samurai and become western businessmen with a strong tradition of democracy.
It would have been easy to give a lesson to the Russians somewhere else, preferably with fewer inhabitants.
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>> It would have been easy to give a lesson to the Russians somewhere else, preferably
>> with fewer inhabitants.
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You could look at the other way and say that the lesson they were trying to give was, 'We don't care how many we have to kill, we will use it and win regardless.'
With the evidence coming to light over the last few days with regard to Guantanamo inmates and their treatment nothing would surprise me, not that I was surprised to learn what they had been doing; more surprised that they have actually owned up.
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>> You could look at the other way and say that the lesson they were trying
>> to give was, 'We don't care how many we have to kill, we will use
>> it and win regardless.'
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Actually I don't suppose the Russians were surprised at all. They knew all about progress with the bomb because of their high-placed spies.
The lesson we gave them was that they needed to hurry up and build their own.
It's a good job we did encourage the Russian bomb, to form a counterweight to the ominous signs that the Americans were getting gung-ho about using it pre-emptively, as they considered against Russia at the start of the cold-war, and against the Chinese in Korea and China.
Having superiority over your enemy can be a dangerous position.
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History taught in Japan... - Runfer D'Hills
