"John Yamamoto-Wilson" <john@rarebooksinjapan.com> wrote in message news:<be6hq1$1q55i$1@ID-169501.news.dfncis.de>...
> masayuki yoshida wrote:
> 
> > > Even Fukuyama was carpet bombed, with (they include injuries) a casualty
>  count
> > > of 80,000. Lack of media or public attention and a focus on the
>  A-bombings,
> > > particularly of Hiroshima, has contributed to this ignorance or apathy
>  among
> > > Japanese. Many even forget the Tokyo firebombing.
> >
> > As far as the majority of contemporary Japanese is a post-war
> > generation, using the word 'forget' is not appropriate.  You mean
> > failing to recall person's real experience by the term?
> 
> Perhaps what Eric means is something like "many teachers forget to teach
> their students" about such things. I forget what percentage of Japanese
> twenty-somethings didn't know that Japan had fought a war on the same side
> as Germany and against the United States in a recent survey, but it was
> rather depressingly high. And even in this newsgroup there have been
> numerous gaffes by Japanese people who clearly have a very hazy idea of what
> actually went on in the 1930s and 40s.
> 
> Still perhaps that's a tradition in itself - the "floating world" - only now
> it's a world of karaoke, pachinko and shopping sprees, and the realities of
> history all seem very far away...

What you and Eric want to say in this thread may be so simple that I
will rephrase as follows:  Contemporary Japanese should learn what
their own nation did as an invader during the war times.  However, how
to teach history is not so simple.  If you tell us what of Japanese
war history you want to teach Japanese students, it would be
appreciated.

Masayuki