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Imperial Japan: Difference between revisions
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It is sometimes claimed that unlike Germany, which as a nation apologized for the actions of the Nazis in Europe, Japan has never formally apologized to the Asian nations that were invaded by the Japanese armies. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_war_apology_statements_issued_by_Japan Several apologies from Prime Ministers and the Diet ] and Japan has paid [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Peace_with_Japan#Compensation_to_Allied_civilians_and_POWs over 300 billion Yen in war reparations] to the nations it occupied, with some formal apologizes to former POWs by a few Japanese ambassadors. However, the lack of a Japanese counterpart of "De[[Those Wacky Nazis|nazi]]fication" and extremely cautious treatment about the mention of the subject in textbooks makes Asians that lived through the Japanese occupation continue to see the Japanese as generally unrepentant, and is also largely responsible for the country's seemingly cavalier attitude toward its past crimes. It should however be noted that virtually all Japanese school history textbooks do describe Japanese war atrocities (and in particular, the Rape of Nanking), and despite the recent attempt by the right-wing [[Propaganda Machine|Society for History Textbook Reform]] to introduce a textbook omitting/casting doubt on the Nanking Massacre, comfort women, and general colonial nastiness, widespread protests and denunciation by the Japan Teachers Union led to the book being introduced in a measly 18 of the country's 11,000+ junior high schools.
The Japanese are proud people; admitting such crimes against humanity would be a serious social sin of losing face, and as such, the education system in Japan tends to [[Internal Retcon|"whitewash"]] the more brutal aspects of Japanese history (something non-existent in Germany, where a good chunk of history class is spent on [[Nazi Germany]]), pretending little of interest actually happened. This translates to few works of [[Anime]] (or other media) referencing this history, even when the work is "historic" in nature, an action that causes Japan's neighbors to take great offense. Then there's the fact that the failure to officially "come clean" has also allowed plenty of scope for Japanese right- wing groups to offer their own revisionist take on the subject, which can be summed up as "we didn't do anything bad to anyone, and if we did, they deserved it," and is if anything even more offensive to Japan's neighbors. There's also some contributions from more [[Fan Dumb|extreme]] or [[Misaimed Fandom|misguided]] elements of the fandom of Japanese pop culture, good old ultranationalism, as well as plain old [[Troll|trolls]] (the largest forums in Japanese netspace, 2ch and 2chan, are notorious for racist trolling, some of which is [[
Note that Japan is still officially an Empire (in fact, it's the only country that still has an Emperor.)
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