I just couldn’t resist
I’m trying to avoid posts like these nowadays, but I saw this while I was browsing through Yahoo! News, and one of my favorite commentors criticizes me from time to time for not giving the Japanese enough crap, so, without further ado, I bring you this:
Students protest and shout anti-U.S. slogans during a demonstration against U.S. military presence in Iraq, near the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo, April 8, 2004. Japan vowed on Thursday to make no hasty decisions about its troops in Iraq after explosions near their camp, but renewed violence in the country kept Tokyo and Washington’s other allies in Asia on edge as some U.S. senators and others raised the specter of ‘another Vietnam.’
I don’t recall even Hanchongnyeon making a sign like that… not in English, anyway.
4 Comments
Some bad guys in Iraq kidnapped a bunch of aid-workers. It seems the 7 (or so) Korean aid-workers/missionairies were let go. But the 2 Arabs (from Israel, natch), and the 3 Japanese nationals are still being held. The big warning, ‘If Japanese (military) forces don’t leave in 3 days, the aid workers get burned alive.”
Prediction: The Japanese will whine, “It’s America’s fault.”
Observation: No one in Japan will notice that the bad guys are kidnapping Japanese aid workers, in the hope of having the Japanese ‘military’ (who is doing things like rebuilding water treatment facilities), are the very sort of people whom *should* be killed by Americans. And Japanese troops. If Japan had any.
http://edition.cnn.com/2004/WO.....index.html
Sorry, I didn’t see the 2nd article on the site, which described the news about the kidnappings.
But back to my point, it’s late at night in Japan and I just heard the news. My expectations of the Japanese response stand.
I hope that all of the hostages come out of this alive and well. And with 3 days (for the Japanese, at least), that may be enough time.
But never trust a criminal……
Look at the tightly framed camera angle. It looks like there were perhaps hundreds of Japanese demonstrators. The typical anti-American Korean rally is in the hundreds of thousands. That’s the difference.
I don’t know which picture you’re looking at, Zhang. I only see TWO protestors in the tightly framed picture (and maybe the hand of a third). I understand your point about Korean protests being much larger, though rarely of the size that you suggest. Thank the pro-Pyongyang professors at so many universities, as well as so many in the media, including the state operated KBS, whose head is, in my opinion, a closet communist.
I hope that the Japanese hostages manage to get through their captivity safely.