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发帖数: 38600 | 1 http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-33754932
Seventy years after the end of World War Two, the voices of revisionism in
Japan are growing stronger and moving into the mainstream, particularly on
the issue of comfort women, who were women forced to be sex slaves for
Japanese soldiers during the war.
One of the most eloquent voices of revisionism is Toshio Tamogami.
Mr Tamogami is well-educated, knowledgeable and, when I meet him,
exquisitely polite. The former chief of staff of Japan's air force believes
in a version of Japanese history that is deeply at odds with much of the
rest of the world.
But it is increasingly popular among young Japanese, tired of being told
they must keep apologising to China and Korea.
Last year Mr Tamogami ran for governor of Tokyo. He came fourth, with 600,
000 votes. Most strikingly, among young voters aged 20 to 30 he got nearly a
quarter of the votes cast.
"As a defeated nation we only teach the history forced on us by the victors,
" he says. "To be an independent nation again we must move away from the
history imposed on us. We should take back our true history that we can be
proud of."
In this "true" history of the 20th Century that Mr Tamogami talks of, Japan
was not the aggressor, but the liberator. Japanese soldiers fought valiantly
to expel the hated white imperialists who had subjugated Asian peoples for
200 years.
It is a proud history, where Japan, alone in Asia, was capable of taking on
and defeating the European oppressors. It is also a version of history that
has no room for the Japanese committing atrocities against fellow Asians.
Mr Tamogami believes that Japan did not invade the Korean Peninsula, but
rather "invested in Korea and also in Taiwan and Manchuria".
I ask him about the invasion of China in 1937 and the massacre of civilians
in the capital Nanjing. Surely that was naked aggression?
"I can declare that there was no Nanjing Massacre," he says, claiming there
were "no eyewitnesses" of Japanese soldiers slaughtering Chinese civilians. |
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