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Tamogami's Article Is Wrong, But He Is Partly Right

Today, Toshio Tamogami, the Chief of Air Force Staff, testified about his controversial article in the Diet. He insisted it was right, because 58 percent of Yahoo!Japan Poll agreed to him. But historians criticize that it includes many wrong allegations based on secondary sources. For example, it claims that Zhang Zuolin, a warlord in China who was killed by Japanese Army with bombing in 1928, was "in fact murdered by Komintern". Its source was Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang, which has many historical errors. One of them is about Zhang: Chang maintains that a GRU report alleges they killed Zhang. Probably Chang doesn't know that Colonel Daisaku Komoto confessed he killed Zhang. However, Tamogami was fired without asking about the article. He said he wanted to be investigated what was wrong. He is right in this aspect. This kind of problems are taboo among Japanese politicians because they are afraid of provoking neighboring countries. But the historical facts are

Was Japan an Aggressor Nation?

Today Toshio Tamogami, the Chief of Air Force Staff, was ousted, because he published an article which insists that Japan didn't invade Asian countries. Here is the article. It includes dubious claim such as that Hull Note was written by an agent of Komintern, but is partly true about the Government of Korea. Carter Eckert of Harvard University researched it and concluded that Japan's capital contributed to the modernization of Korea. Of course Korea was a colony, but the way Japan governed it was different from that of western countries. It's an interesting reading.

Mainichi Daily News Apologizes the Racist Column

"WaiWai" was a popular column of the Mainichi Daily News (MDN), the English version of the Mainichi Shimbun, a major national daily in Japan. It was written by Ryan Connell, the Editor-in-Chief of MDN everyday, citing articles about sex in Japanese B-rated magazines. However, many of them were much different from the original articles. Today MDN published an official apology . All articles of WaiWai were deleted, but some caches are collected in a Wiki site . For example, an article of WaiWai cites Cyzo , a popular web magazine: From the successor of the government ministry that gave the world Pearl Harbor and the Rape of Nanking now comes a cutesy little girl cartoon character dressed as a maid with a hawkish stuffed teddy bear to give a simple explanation of Japan's defense policies, according to Cyzo (August). The editors of Cyzo protested to the Mainichi that the original article didn't include such phrases as "the successor of the government ministry that

Greenpeace Is a Thief

Greenpeace Japan filed a criminal complaint with Japanese prosecutors Thursday, accusing whaling-ship crew members of stealing whale meat from a hunting trip. However, the alleged "evidence" was stolen from the warehouse . Jun Hoshikawa, the director of Greenpeace Japan, admitted that they stole it and apologized. According to the Japanese law, the object which was collected with illegal measure can't be an evidence. So their accusation will be rejected. This is a typical hypocrisy of so-called radical ecologists. Western people want to save the whale, while they are killing millions of cows, pigs, and other animals everyday, more than any eastern people. As eating cows is the western tradition, so eating whale is Japanese tradition. Nobody can tell which tradition is correct or incorrect. Greenpeace is the worst model of western ethnocentrism . Even more foolish is the Japanese like Hoshikawa, who imports the western arrogance to Japan. Fortunately no Japanese media is s

Did the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki bring World War Two to an end?

Freeman Dyson wrote: I changed my mind about an important historical question: did the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki bring World War Two to an end? Until this year I used to say, perhaps. Now, because of new facts, I say no. The facts are as follows: Members of the Supreme Council, which customarily met with the Emperor to take important decisions, learned of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima on the morning of August 6, 1945. Although Foreign Minister Togo asked for a meeting, no meeting was held for three days. A surviving diary records a conversation of Navy Minister Yonai, who was a member of the Supreme Council, with his deputy on August 8. The Hiroshima bombing is mentioned only incidentally. More attention is given to the fact that the rice ration in Tokyo is to be reduced by ten percent. On the morning of August 9, Soviet troops invaded Manchuria. Six hours after hearing this news, the Supreme Council was in session. News of the Nagasaki bombing, which happened the