Very, very interesting and informative discussion about tanks. Thank you very much guys, I enjoyed reading that a lot.
@p51, great post. The Japanese have a national month of victimhood every August, and TV is filled with documentaries about how the Japanese suffered in the war. There's nothing wrong with that except that it completely deletes any discussion or consideration of the victims of Japanese aggression; the Japanese see the war as 'something that happened to them' rather than as 'something they did to millions of other people'. It's a period of national mourning for the Japanese lives lost, and a pledge to never make war so that Japanese lives aren't lost again. No wonder that the rest of Asia keeps slapping Japan in the face with its war crimes.
The postwar Japanese Ministry of Education was almost entirely staffed with wartime Kempeitai (military police) on the misguided understanding that after the occupation ended, and the US Army left, Japan could revive its imperial ideology and get back to brain washing kids. Japan's post war, US led, economic revitalization gave people a standard of living most Japanese had never experienced before, so that 'resurgence' was never embraced by the now democratized masses, but 'the dream' has never been abandoned (witness the tri-annual ceremonies at Yasakuni shrine, where over 1000 convicted war criminals were secretly enshrined in the 1960's; these are always 'to pray for peace').
My wake-up call was when my eldest daughter brought home a textbook when she was 11 that literally said 'It was a warm sunny day when the Americans dropped an atom bomb without warning on the peaceful city of Hiroshima'.
That was the day I decided that my kids would need to go to private schools to avoid the propaganda brainwashing (and I embraced poverty).
@p51, great post. The Japanese have a national month of victimhood every August, and TV is filled with documentaries about how the Japanese suffered in the war. There's nothing wrong with that except that it completely deletes any discussion or consideration of the victims of Japanese aggression; the Japanese see the war as 'something that happened to them' rather than as 'something they did to millions of other people'. It's a period of national mourning for the Japanese lives lost, and a pledge to never make war so that Japanese lives aren't lost again. No wonder that the rest of Asia keeps slapping Japan in the face with its war crimes.
The postwar Japanese Ministry of Education was almost entirely staffed with wartime Kempeitai (military police) on the misguided understanding that after the occupation ended, and the US Army left, Japan could revive its imperial ideology and get back to brain washing kids. Japan's post war, US led, economic revitalization gave people a standard of living most Japanese had never experienced before, so that 'resurgence' was never embraced by the now democratized masses, but 'the dream' has never been abandoned (witness the tri-annual ceremonies at Yasakuni shrine, where over 1000 convicted war criminals were secretly enshrined in the 1960's; these are always 'to pray for peace').
My wake-up call was when my eldest daughter brought home a textbook when she was 11 that literally said 'It was a warm sunny day when the Americans dropped an atom bomb without warning on the peaceful city of Hiroshima'.
That was the day I decided that my kids would need to go to private schools to avoid the propaganda brainwashing (and I embraced poverty).