Japan has what is known as culture and tradition, unlike America, the past was brutal and the war was a crime against civilisation, but remembering past leaders is not the same as condining them, and celebrating them is not the same as celebrating what they did. Get this into your heads.

US cavelry officers who are celebrated today rapped and murdered Indians, Mexicans and Spanish settlers and civil war officers murdered the families of British soldiers, America isn’t perfect either.

The US fondly remembers presidents and military officers who committed genocide against the Indian nations, every time you celebrate presidents day or the birthdays of some of the other presidents you are doing exactly the same thing as millions of Japanese people do when remembering wartime leaders.

You are remembering slave owners, Indian opressors and war criminals. You have no right to critisize Japan until you stop doing exactly the same thing in America.

The only difference is that you have been honoring these people for a hundred years and Japan has been doing it for fifty.

“Preserving their strength instead of fighting armed Japanese”: guerilla warfare by the despised Commies perhaps?

Or maybe the knowledge that the enemy will simply exhaust itself, in a country so much larger than itself? Look at the Germans and the 900-day Siege of Leningrad. Who cracked in the end?

Left the path to SEA open: LOL. Stuck in China. Roused the American Eagle at Pearl Harbour.
How long coudl Japan have kept going without South East Asia’s natural resources?
And, of course, with Japan’s much-admired code of samurai honour - kick your enemy in the teeth when he’s down - they hit at Malaya, Vietnam and Indonesia, while the imperialists were busy at home.

Looking for a stick to beat America??: I thot it was the other way around, China-bashing is the activity du jour?

Tho, of course, the commissars have gotten much better American press since 9/11, when they came out for the American side.

Actually, I was referring to penalty/accountability, not pride/shame. Those aren’t the same things. Do I feel proud about the Allied victory in Europe? Yeah, I guess. Do I feel shame about the Trail of Tears? Yes, I suppose. But I don’t think I should be personally praised or pentalized for those actions. Although I do think Jackson’s portrait should be removed from the $20 bill.

So, by this logic, you shouldn’t be proud of all of America’s great accomplishments. After all, they were our forfathers’ accomplishments and not our own. We did none of those things ourselves. We shouldn’t feel any innate pride or shame at our past.

The Japanese are exactly right, children shouldn’t be held accountable for their fathers’ sins. If my grandfather was a murderer/rapist, I shouldn’t have to personally pay any penalty or apologize for it. I was born without sin. However, if I’m a murderer/rapist, then I should be held accountable.

yen jun, “But if the children have not been taught about the sins of the past, the likelihood is that they can be repeated.”

Japan will never be a threat to South Korea again. They’ve converted to a secular capitalist liberal democracy, just like South Korea, and the evidence so far shows that two countries with this system have never gone to war with each other. In other words, a country with a McDonalds has never gone to war with another country with a McDonalds. The Pope says Jesus holds the key to the Kingdom, but I think it’s Mayor McCheese.

The Irish should take personal responsibility for not knowing not to grow a single-crop. Fortunately, capitalism and freedom of speech enabled that technical problem to be fixed. The same thing happened in America when we let Rockefeller own all the oil. We fixed that through freedom of speech/democracy, followed by laws.

madne0, “Besides, please give me an example of large scale famine in a capitalist democracy.”

We know that capitalist democracy is the best system through the scientific process (test, observation, collecting and analyzing data), not because America says it’s so. The evidence is OVERWHELMING. Lenin should have tested Marx’s theories on a hippie commune before applying them to an entire country. This would have saved 100,000,000 lives.

But of course - the Chinese are always looking for another stick with which to beat America. Hiroshima and Nagasaki weren’t tragedies or even especially significant significant in the civilian casualty sweepstakes. Germany lost 2m civilians compared to Japan’s 600,000. Only 100,000 of Japan’s civilian dead came from the atom bombings. Now if the Chinese had gotten off their butts, and delivered a severe thrashing to the Japanese, they would never have thought of attacking Pearl Harbor and simultaneously pushing south. This pack of bums left the path to Southeast Asia open. They sure knew to kill defenseless “collaborators” after the war. But as to actually fighting armed Japanese, they spent a lot of time “preserving their strength”, while carrying out desultory raids that brought Japanese retaliation against the civilians they never bothered to protect.

Paul Webb, you might be interested to know that the neo-liberal capitalism that you so advocate has resulted in more starvation than any one dictator in history. http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/FD01Ad04.html The Irish potato famine is one example of how extreme capitalism resulted in the death of over 10% of the Irish population. Although potato crop failed back then because of a disease, English capitalistic landowners were still exporting all kinds of food out of Ireland because making money mattered more than the lives of the Irish. http://www.american.edu/ted/POTATO.HTM