Comments on: What happened to ??????????

By: locust

locust — Mon, 11 Apr 2005 22:50:23 +0000

ok .. guys let me go sleep… this is my last post today…

Elgin,

It is widely known that Kokuryo , Baekje(Kudara)
and Yamato shared language, customs and DNA.

It is a can of worms for the Japanese….. It can only
show how intertwined the past of Japan is with that of
Korea from the very beginning.

By: Thorin

Thorin — Mon, 11 Apr 2005 22:46:14 +0000

Mae, if you throw a rock in a pond, you might kill a frog. But don’t worry, there’s only one French guy in this pond.

By: Nomad

Nomad — Mon, 11 Apr 2005 22:29:14 +0000

“Mindless lemmings (followers) koreans are not.”

Whoo boy. Just curious, how long have you been over here?

By: R. Elgin

R. Elgin — Mon, 11 Apr 2005 22:23:20 +0000

That Christopher Beckwith book on Koguryo (Koguryo: The Language of Japan’s Continental Relatives) is not cheap (110.00)! I wish there was a paper-back version for sale. I wonder why I’ve never heard this work mentioned before now (?).

By: nonkorean

nonkorean — Mon, 11 Apr 2005 22:18:25 +0000

With Korea whitewashing apologies from Japan in order to hold onto their hate, most foreigners have a hard time siding with a country that looks so bitter and full of spite.

By: mae

mae — Mon, 11 Apr 2005 22:16:08 +0000

i also envy germany. their policy might be consistent. but the biggest difference btwn germany and japan is, in my view, they are not surrounded by their ex-colonies that have 5000years of history and pride. (iknow it is another rock in the pond..)

locust-san
thanks for comment redpepper thing. but why you took my little question so twisted? i just wonder how they taught the fact in the school in korea. if a person has persecutive prejudice anything can be interpreted negatively, regardless of nationality, i mean.

By: locust

locust — Mon, 11 Apr 2005 22:09:29 +0000

about SK kissing NK and China asses….

How about the US kissing Saudi and Pakistani asses ?

By: locust

locust — Mon, 11 Apr 2005 21:47:14 +0000

hey Dogbert ann Marmot….

I have to admit it is hard for me to refute many of your
points. Some of them are valid and some I might disagree.

but Dogbert, chinese SOLDIERS fought agains korean/US
SOLDIERS… and it didn’t leave the same psychological scars
as the japanese did.

hey, I doubt that koreans are in FEAR of disagreeing with
the prevalent knowledge. If you have been in Korea long enough
you know what I mean. Mindless lemmings (followers)
koreans are not.

I think that the most perplexing thing about Korea for the
westerners from the former empires is that koreans
seem to have a very different view of the world….
This is because koreans are damned aware of its former
status of colony (enslaved nation). The psyche of victimhood
is not as easy to get rid off as you might think…

As for NK human right issues, I am equally frustrated as
you guys. There’s a saying in korea “a cornered rat can
bite you(the cat)”…. How would you deal with the cornered
rat w/o being bitten? Just give it a slalp with the broom
stick?… I wish it were that easy..

Going back to the main point…

Am I also hypocritical to mention that another loser nation
of second world war; Gemany dealt with its past in quite
a different way. Now it is a trusted leader of EU.

There seems to be steps how you can recover from being
an agressor to being trusted neighbor.

By: Ziggy Freud

Ziggy Freud — Mon, 11 Apr 2005 21:28:00 +0000

Wanna open up a real nasty can of worms that combines the “Chinese Revisionist History” row with the “We Hate Everything About Japan” row…take a look at Chris Beckwith’s book on the language of ancient Koguryo…

This should get noolji’s hackles up.

[FWIW, Dr. Beckwith is no Japanophile.]

From the Amazon blurb…”This is the first in-depth study of the extinct Koguryo language, which was once spoken in Manchuria and northern Korea. It covers the ethnolinguistic history of the Koguryo nation, philological treatment of the sources for the language, Koguryo phonology, and a complete glossary of all Archaic Koguryo and Old Koguryo words. Special attention has been given to the theory and practice of lexically-based historical-comparative linguistics. The genetic relationship of Koguryo to Japanese is shown to be secure, unlike the non-relationship of either language to Korean or ??Altaic??, and much light is shed on the ethnolinguistic origins of Japanese.”

By: The Marmot

The Marmot — Mon, 11 Apr 2005 20:34:03 +0000

Locust, you raise compelling points, but allow me to make some counterpoints. First off, you asked how many have died because Korea whitewashed its history. One can argue a lot, because much of the dictatorial period was spent trying to cover up some of the disagreeable histories of the individuals in charge, let alone the numbers that have had to perish in North Korea to keep a system afloat, in which official histories play an important part. That’s neither here nor there, however. Let me ask, how many people have died as a result of Japan whitewashing its history? For the last 50 years — the duration of this whitewashing campaign — the most offensive thing Japan has done is Hello Kitty. China, meanwhile, has fought border skirmishes (if you can call them border skirmishes) with India, the Soviet Union and Vietnam, and fought an all-out war in Korea. The U.S. has fought two full wars in East Asia, in Korea and Vietnam. I’m not even going to get into the kinds of suffering brought on to the Chinese people by their own government during the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution — how high does the butcher’s bill have to go before the difference between “deaths inflicted by invasion” and “deaths inflicted by ones own government” becomes somewhat absurd. Yes, Japan’s WWII history was certainly nothing to be proud of, but to argue that somehow China and Russia — both of which sit on the permanent Security Council — are somehow more deserving because they won WWII whereas Japan lost is simply ludicrous. Heck, throw the U.K., France and the U.S. in there as well. All three of them were colonial powers in East Asia, two of which for much longer than Japan ever was and, all in all, probably brought about about more suffering to more people over a longer period of time.

I do not understand why some of you westerners bring the
issue of NK human rights when we are talking about Japan.

I guess the counterpoint to this is that “some of us westerners” do not understand why “some of you Koreans” (God, I hate the us vs. them discorse) are unable to see the glaring irony in policy.