NHK Panel remembers the Tojos

Friends of Historical Accuracy regarding the ethnic Japanese Evacuation of 1942

Anybody out there watch AZN TV? Sunday is Japanese programming day so it's on at our house. NHK has a pretty good news program similar to NBC's "Meet the Press". Yesterday, Hideki Tojo's granddaughter was on defending the Tojo family name. It was the usual stuff you'd expect to hear from a Tojo. (You'd probably have heard it from a Hitler, too if Hitler had kids.) Japan was in a war of survival. America forced Japan to bomb Pearl Harbor. The Tokyo War Crimes trials were a sham orchestrated by the racist victors who convicted and executed men who had not broken any laws nor committed crimes. (No mention of the Hague Convention that Japan did ratify.)

It's not surprising to hear a Tojo saying this. Yaskuni Jinja says the same thing at their big new beautiful and wealthy Yushukan Imperial War Musuem right next door to the shrine. (I had no idea the Japanese Imperial Army liberated Nanking from Chinese terrorists until I visted the Yushukan.) What was surprising was the plethora of Japanese scholars around the table who agreed with her! Only one man had the guts to speak plainly against what Tojo was saying, a member of Japan's Diet.

Japan has a long way to go in coming to terms with the war. From the NHK show, the only regret seems to be that they lost it. Comparisons between Japanese and Japanese Americans are naturally fewer than they were before Pearl Harbor, but in this case both groups need to stand up and acknowledge the darker chapters of their history early last century.