That is a very perceptive and interesting post, peter.

Yet if you were a politician or a public figure, and you demonstrated such candor, you would be quoted out of context on the media and attacked immediately from many quarters for making "racist" statements, when all you have done is simply tell the truth! Such is the sickness of our times.

The truth is, in fact, totally unacceptable to many people nowadays if it does not fit within certain carefully delineated guidelines. That's Orwellian if anything is...

I am not surprised that many Japanese are unaware they started the war. Typical.

There was plenty of virulent racism practiced by the Japanese before and during WWII, against the Chinese, the Koreans, and pretty well anyone else they came up against. Likewise, the Chinese and Koreans were thoroughly prejudiced against the Japanese (not surprisingly, under the circumstances, but they would have been even without those circumstances, I suspect). As for the Americans, British, etc., they generally regarded the Japanese as vermin to be exterminated without mercy, and routinely machined-gunned survivors of sunken ships in the water...as did the Japanese to Allied survivors.

No nation can claim a clean slate in this regard.

We must try to do better than we did in the past, and be more aware of the prejudices we are taught to take for granted.

And we must not let other people cow us into silence because we don't fit their particular political agenda.

- LH