As Grandmother used to say, "If it's not one tham ding it's another".
From Ambrose Evans-Pritchard at the Telegraph:
The dangerous drift towards world war in Asia
At ground zero in Hiroshima the inscription for victims of the world's first Atomic bomb is a pledge. We will never again repeat the evil of war.
The six-storey "A-Dome", the old Industrial Promotion Hall, was directly below the blast, 600 meters above, and for that reason survived as a gaunt half-wrecked structure when almost everything else was flattened instantly for a radius of two kilometres.
The Japanese original is vague on who "we" is, but the English translation tactfully refers to mankind as a whole.
Families come from all over Japan in a pilgrimage to visit the peace shrine. They look through the Cenotaph to the "A-Dome", the old Industrial Promotion Hall. This six-story building that was directly below the blast, 600 metres above, and for that reason survived as a gaunt half-wrecked structure when almost everything else was flattened instantly for a radius of two kilometres.
They walk through the museum in total silence learning the details of what happened on August 1945, and the gruesome aftermath. The learn about the 2000 degree heat shock that lasted three seconds and incinerated anybody in the epicentre instantly, but left those in the suburbs to die more slowly with burnt skin hanging from their bodies.
They read the day-by-day diaries of the survivors, and the second shock of radiation a week or so later as they came out in a rash of purple spots, and started to vomit their inner organs. Some 140,000 were dead within five months, mostly civilians, including Korean and Chinese forced labourers.
This is what the Japanese are brought up on, so different from the "Patriotic Education" campaign in China for the last twenty years. Beijing's policy has whipped up revanchist hatred against the Japanese for the sins of the 1930s and 1940s, no doubt to divert popular wrath away from a Communist Party tarnished by corruption.I wrote about article 9 in Jauary's "Shinzō Abe and 'the Funniest Song Ever Written About Any Japanese State Document...Ever!'":
Japan's national ideology is pacifist, and this is written into Article 9 of its constitution, which states that "the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes."
This peace complex adds a strange twist to events. It inhibits Japan as a muscular China presses its claim on the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands -- a cluster of uninhabited rocks near Taiwan -- and as Chinese warships push deep into Japanese waters.
Map of the disputed Diaoyu/Senkaku islands
Yet there is no doubt that Japan will fight.
"We simply cannot tolerate any challenge now, or in the future. No nation should underestimate the firmness of our resolve," said Shinzo Abe, the hawkish premier bent on national revival.
After talking to Japanese officials in Tokyo over the last few days, I have the strong impression not only that they are ready to fight, but also that they expect to win, and furthermore that conflict may come at any moment....MORE
"Funniest Song" quote from reviewer Richard Foss - The Los Angeles Reader.
Saturday's post "March of Folly: China Calls U.S. Position on Japan-China Dispute "Betrayal" got me thinking about the Japanese constitution, specifically Article 9:
ARTICLE 9. Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes. (2) To accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.
-U.S. Library of Congress
Prime Minister Abe really, really wants to get rid of Article 9 and after the December elections has a super-duper [technical term] majority, 76%, of lower house members who feel the same way....MORE
