Aggression

Rewriting history:

A group of Japanese sued over a history textbook that critics say whitewashes Japan's wartime aggression and has angered Asian neighbors, demanding on Thursday that a local government cancel its adoption of the text.

Critics of the textbook say it plays down the 1937 Nanjing Massacre in China and ignores the sexual enslavement of women for Japanese soldiers.

The book's authors and supporters have argued that the text's approach corrected a "masochistic" view of history which they said had deprived Japanese of pride and patriotism.

Speaking as someone who has visited several different Japanese islands, I can tell you this much with certainty: the Japanese are some of the most generous, hospitable, giving--and utterly, thoroughly, incorrigibily racist people on the planet. The word gaijin has some very ugly overtones which don't translate well into English, but if you think of it as having a whole fistful of racial epithets subsumed into it, you're getting warm.

Japanese racism is so ingrained that they even apply it between different islands in their own country. The residents of Honshu, for example, think of the residents of Hokkaido as sub-human trash, even though they are separated by a mere 10 mile strait and descend from racially identical ancestors. The enmity between them makes the American rural south of the 1930's look like a veritable paradise of social harmony. Similar tensions exist between the denizens of the other islands, and you don't even want to know what the Japanese as a whole think of the Koreans, Chinese, and other Asians. But you don't have to imagine it; just read the history of World War II. It's not pretty.

I think we've all seen quite clearly the fruits of Japanese patriotism and pride. The last thing the world needs is a new generation of little Tojos.