On Wed, 13 Aug 2003 04:38:11 +0000 (UTC), mtfester@netscape.net
belched the alphabet and kept on going with:

>Michael Cash <mikecash@sunfield.ne.jp> wrote:
>
>> I think the Hirasawa case raises a question which, if one gives it
>> some thought, may cause people to view the whole broad issue in a
>> different light:
>
>> How can one realistically expect Japanese to hold accountable their
>> own government for past crimes and abuses of power against the people
>> of other nations when they don't even hold accountable the Japanese
>> government for current crimes and abuses of power against themselves?
>
>Reminds me of what I wrote a few years back:
>
>Something else must be pointed out here. The Internal Security Act was  
>passed in 1929. This was the act that created the special (and famous)   
>"Thought Criminal" category; those accused of being not quite patriotic
>enough. From 1929 to about 1943, about 67,000 Japanese were arrested, with
>about 6,700 being convicted of "thought crime". While the ostensible crime
>was lack of proper patriotism, the reality was that the vast majority of
>those arrested were guilty of a) being Communist b) being suspected of
>being Communist c) being suspected of being "liberal" d) being suspected
>of being associated with or tolerating a leftist/ Communist/intellectual,
>etc. Not really crimes of security, but political crimes. It MUST be noted
>here that these people, Japanese, many of them otherwise respectable,
>HAVE NOT RECEIVED APOLOGIES EITHER. Their convictions STILL STAND,
>even those who actually DID oppose the war. NO effort to investigate
>even on an individual basis has been made. Those who have tried to get
>the cases reopened have been told that "All the evidence was destroyed
>in the war", so the case could not be reopened. However, they are
>assured that the government does not consider them to be threats in
>the future, so they shouldn't worry. Also, on both Saipan and Okinawa,
>Imperial soldiers shot Japanese civilians, forced families of Japanese
>civilians off cliffs, and strangled the occasional infant. On Okinawa, 
>they murdered elderly Okinawans for speaking Okinawan, threw grenades 
>into caves where Japanese civilians had taken refuge, and forced others   
>to drink poison, rather than surrender. They murdered all civilians who 
>attempted to get other civilians to surrender, and murdered each other
>in the process of surrender. Japan has not apologized for this.
>
>The point is that the modern Japanese government will not apologize even  
>to its OWN people, for the actions of Imperial Japan.

I was looking at it in terms of post-war abuses of power. Hirasawa was
not the first Japanese citizen to be railroaded, nor was he the last.
Abuses of police and prosecutorial power are an ongoing problem, and
the systemic problems which give rise to enzai and the cultural
circumstances which cause people to (largely) ignore the problem are
ongoing as well.

Moving away from the criminal justice system, one can find abuse of
power problems in various parts of the bureaucracy. More oversight and
accountability need to be built into the system.

My point was that if a good-sized portion of the general populace is
either ignorant of these ongoing problems, doesn't care about them, or
feels there is nothing that can/should be done about them then it is
hardly realistic to expect that same populace to hold the government's
feet to the fire over aspects of the past that many would just as soon
either forget or pretend never happened.

The thread very quickly moved away from Hirasawa's railroading (which
is fine, I won't bitch about topic drift), and on to discussion of
larger scale abuses and atrocities from the past and if/why the
Japanese as a people and as a nation are or are not aware of them and
the degree to which they are or are not known and have or have not
been addressed and redressed.

I'm just suggesting that one doesn't have to look very far to find the
answer.




--

Michael Cash



"There was a time, Mr. Cash, when I believed you must be the most useless
thing in the world. But that was before I read a Microsoft help file."

                                Prof. Ernest T. Bass
                                Mount Pilot College


http://www.sunfield.ne.jp/~mike/