Suchergebnisse

[A]n overwhelming majority of Japanese wants to 'protect' the constitution—using the same word, mamore, that Abe and his supporters use to justify their desire for Japanese troops to fight.

"Don't get me wrong," said Mr. Hasegawa, a fisherman. "I don't think that the bombing of Hiroshima was a good thing." Staring at the furious grey channel where the Pacific Ocean meets the Sea of Okhotsk off Hokkaido in northern Japan on a cold, clear day last March, he spoke like a trauma victim reliving the past: "But if the Americans had dropped the atomic bomb a month earlier, those islands out there would still be Japan's." Were I unaware of the chronology of the summer of 1945 and had we been anywhere else, such a comment would make the engaging 64-year-old seem insensitive or odd. Yet on the horizon three miles in the distance were the snow-covered banks of one of Russia's Kuril Islands, known to the Japanese who lived there until 1945 as Suishojima of the Habomai group. Mr. Hasegawa's father was among the 17,291 Japanese who called it and several other nearby islands home.

Dudden reviews BEYOND THE 'JUDGEMENT OF CIVILIZATION': The Intellectual Legacy of the Japanese War Crimes Trials, 1946-1949 by Ushimura Kei and translated by Steven J. Ericson.