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ORIGINAL: joanus

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ORIGINAL: DomKen

Are you now claiming your aunt was Okinawan?

Also why not report it to proper authorities while you were supposedly in country?

My grandparents moved to Okinawa after the bombing of Hiroshima trying to escape the war. Why they thought Okinawa was any better I dont know.

In Iraq if your not an American soldier your little better off than the Iraqis themselves and confunting or reporting American misconduct is a good way to get your self shot. Also there is little chain of comand in Baghdad, mostly just redneck hoolgins running around with guns. Check out the internet just about every site has videos goofing off (stuffing 15 guys into a porta-john is not how you win the war on terrorism) or racually sluring the very people they're helping. Some sites actually have videos of these acts being comitted. Lets not for the the pictures of the Afgani butt pyramid pictures that where all over the new about a year or so ago.

For Miyahira, whose brothers and relatives killed themselves, the memory of what happened after she was captured by US soldiers as she fled the bombing undergirds her opposition to any textbook revision. "When Americans offered us something good to eat, I was finally able to think of many of my family members who committed mass suicide," she recalls. "I could not bear it."

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ORIGINAL: Alumbrado

Not that attitude and a confrontational style are a bad thing....[:D]

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ORIGINAL: Alumbrado

I'm afraid that whatever good points Joanus would like to bring to people's attention (anyone who didn't know about the US fire bombings in Japan should read up) are getting lost in the 'tude and delivery.

Not that attitude and a confrontational style are a bad thing....[:D]

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ORIGINAL: DomKen

I've seen videos of young soldiers acting like young people do everywhere. I've never seen evidence that a group in a hummer opened up on a playground with an MG while blaring loud music and shouting racial epithets. Seems like you're the only surviving witness since I just checked around and even al-jazeera never reported on this event. Neither did Reuters or the BBC or any of the other international news services that do certainly look into all claims of atrocities by US troops.

I've also once again checked the lists of crimes commited by US troops on Okinawa. No case of 3 commisioned officers raping and killing a 12 year old girl acccording to the Okinawan civilian government.

You're making extraordinary claims which you need to be able to support.

Thompsonx, here's a little something left on the museum site that pretty clearly has no business in the building if the museum is all about Hiroshima:
http://www.pcf.city.hiroshima.jp/frame/Virtual_e/exhibit_e/index.html
This is a special exhibit from 2 years ago. The website doesn't catalog what special exhibits it had on display almost 20 years ago when I was there but here:
http://www.japanfocus.org/products/details/2477
is an article that describes how exhibits critical of Japan's role in WWII only appeared in the museum in the 1990's.

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ORIGINAL: DomKen

Yet another attempt by Japanese nationalists to revise their history away so they can rearm and rebuild their empire.

I've never been as offended as I was during my visit to the Hiroshima Peace museum while in the USN. The place was all about how Japan suffered during the war. Not one word about Nanking or Bataan/Corregidor or Korean women or Unit 731 or the eating of POW's or Pearl Harbor or anything. I literally had to leave before I hurt somebody.

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ORIGINAL: thompsonx
DomKen:
The second cite does not open for me for some reason.
While the first site did open I could find nothing on the page that was not related to the A bomb.  To what specifically were you referring?
Japan's culpability in WW II is hardly at question.  The causes of the war between Japan and her neighbors requires a thorough understanding of East Asian history something few westerners have any knowledge of.  I have offered the titles of several interesting books giving an overview of the situation should you choose to avail yourself of them.
I am not an apologist for Japan or her policies I was simply pointing out that "Peace Park" in Hiroshima is a museum dedicated to the A bomb and its ramifications.  It is dedicated neither to being the "mea culpa" of Japan for her history or the ovation to America for the "bringing of enlightenment" to the "heathen yellow hoard"
thompson

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This fast changing international and domestic climate soon affected museum depictions of the war. Several cities and prefectures, including Osaka, Kawasaki, Saitama, and Kanagawa opened peace museums in the early 1990s that both critically depicted Japan’s role in the Asia-Pacific War and also preserved local Japanese memories of their own war losses, while Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum and Nagasaki Prefectural Peace Museum incorporated new material critical of Japan’s war. In 1996, Japanese conservative nationalist groups, alarmed by these changes, went on a counter-offensive. These groups, such as the Liberal View of History Study Group (Jiyushugi shikan kenkyukai), led by Fujioka Nobukatsu, had earlier attacked middle-school textbooks as “self-flagellating” and sought not only to end Japanese criticism of Japan’s wars in the 1930s and 1940s but also to change public opinion in favor of future rearmament. They attacked the Nagasaki museum curators’ plan to “include in their exhibit” photographs of “the Nanjing Massacre, Unit 731 and their experiments with biological weapons, and the comfort women.” In response, the Nagasaki museum removed some of the new exhibit.