Richard Thieme wrote:
> Ken <dvdfan9@hotmail.com> wrote in message
> news:c5fec6f.0307140531.332edc86@posting.google.com...
>> Richard Thieme wrote:
>>> Kevin Gowen <kgowenNOSPAM@myfastmail.com> wrote:

> Actually I didn't jump into this thread just for the pleasure of
> jousting with Kevin. Having read much of the book in question, I have
> not had the same reaction as many of its (foreign) critics, and when
> I have attempted to discuss this with them, I have simply been told
> that I have gone bamboo (the emotional reaction we saw by someone
> else on a recent thread.

Yes, such comments about "going bamboo" are simply dismissive. They are
almost as dismissive of saying of a professor who has written about factual
and methodological errors in the Tsukuru Kai textbook, "I hope he isn't
another case of someone with low
level language skills working off of a bad translation and relying on either
radical marxists, or Chinese and Korean sources to tell him what he thinks
the Japanese must be saying in their textbooks."

I've never met Dr. Segal, but I am pretty sure Stanford University requires
of its history Ph.D. candidates proficiency in the appropriate foreign
language. That was the policy at Emory's history department when I was a
grad student there (the requirement also applied to M.A. candidates), but
perhaps I have erroneously assumed that this was the norm for graduate
history departments. You could always give him a call at Michigan State
University and confirm his language skills for yourself if you were so
inclined. I concede that he may not have the historical expertise of
Kobayashi Yoshinori.

> And I thought attorneys were supposed to be
> capable of being rational).

Oh, I am quite sure that lawyers, just like all rational agents i.e. human
beings are capable of being rational. The question is if they choose to be.
One of the saddening things about my legal education has been learning that
fallacy is rewarded.

> Kevin struck me as one person who could
> actually read the book and point out the errors he thought he had
> found.

I saw your post this morning so I took my copy of the Tsukuru Kai textbook
to work today. I did some reading during my lunch hour, and here are a few
more errors that I "think" I found:

Page 212:
The section is entitled 「アジアで最初の近代憲法」, which strikes me as odd.
After all, why would a Japanese history textbook devote a section to the
Ottoman Constitution of 1876? I read on, and it then became evident that the
authors of the textbook are under the impression that the 1889 Meiji
Constitution was the first modern constitution in Asia. I can only ascribe
this mistaken belief to one or more of the following:
1. The authors had never heard of the Ottoman Constitution
2. For some reason, the authors have decided that the Ottoman Constitution
was not a constitution
3. The authors have a very weird definition of "Asia"
4. The authors have a definition of "modern" that begins sometime after 1876
but before 1889

Last paragraph of page 214:
There is the sentence 「これによって日本は、本格的な立憲政治は欧米以外は無理
であると言われていた時代に、アジアで最初の議会をもつ立憲国家として出発し
た。」 The section, 「アジアで最初の議会をもつ立憲国家として出発した」 is
the fruit of page 212's poisonous tree. A parliament met under the Ottoman
Constitution in 1877.

These are not passages that are problematic due to simply being misleading,
as the passages I previously quoted were. These passages are objectively
incorrect. I really wonder how this came to be. I'm not sure how many
trained historians were involved in creating the text, but I know they had
at least one 漫画家, after all. How could they go wrong?

> I dunno if he expects to continue this thread or has decided that he
> has something better to do. The latter is quite fine of course. After
> all this is (or is not) Usenet.

I hadn't planned on it due to the dismissive "low level language skills"
comment, but as the thread is continuing I felt compelled to reply. You said
that you had read most of the text, so I took that to mean that you might
not have read pages 212-214, thereby giving you the benefit of the doubt. If
you have read pages 212-214, I can only assume that one or more of numbers
1-4 above apply to you as well.

-- 
Kevin Gowen
"Their idea of equal rights is the American flag and Confederate
swastika flying side by side."
- Julian Bond, chairman of the nonpartisan NAACP, on the GOP