Japanese War Memorial, Ban Kat, Chiang Mai

[Mr Brown]

RIP - they did not die in vain, for Japan is advanced, polite and educated whereas Bangkok is filthy, the people are greedy and childish and the beaches are filthy and Issan is SHIT - unless you're into blue fucking plastic pipes and pink tissues.

mmmh, contraversial me thinks

[RusticCharm]

Couldn't bring myself to pay respects to those Bastards.

If I ever go to this 'temple', I'll take pics of myself pissing on it and post them online.

[robuzo]

^Classy

[qwert6]

I'm not sure that means they didn't die in vain, Senor Scamp. As many Japanese are willing to admit, the smartest thing they ever did was to surrender to the US. It is difficult to imagine that Japan would have achieved such impressive prosperity (much of which has been squandered, sadly) had they won or fought the Allies to a standstill.

As to honoring these dead soldiers, most were conscripts without a lot of choice about what they were doing. It shouldn't be too hard to feel sorry for them.

Read about those bastard and the way they treated every other nationality during WW2; scratch one today and you'll find the same barbarians.

[robuzo]

^Hmm, you sound bitter.

[Sailing into trouble]

Anyone seen the footage and stills of Japanese recruits using tied down chinese civilians for bayonet practice. The Rape of Nanking? That attitude and the attitude of many Japanese of the time was one of blameless self righteousness. But that attitude was not then and is not now owned by the Japanese alone. We have seen it in the Balkans, all over Africa, mid east, far east, Anyone remember Mr. Pot. Today a country that uses Quant-animo Bay so it can torture openly and without any qualms? The list is endless. We have all witnessed the same. It's here in our life times as well as what our fathers and grand fathers had to deal with in theirs.

In WW2 the winning side gave the logic that the atomic attacks had to be done to stop allied deaths. Even today the old logic is retaught every night on American TV channels. That the Japanese where negotiating a surrender at the time of the attacks is never mentioned.

That the allies, eyeing the problem of the emergent USSR, used the non caucasian japanese as a propaganda warning to the Russians. No one can doubt the brutal inhuman nature of the treatment of POW's by the Japanese. Yet we seldom look at what the Germans did to the Russian POW's or what the Russians did to the Germans during and after the War. We often talk about the Japanese fighting to the last man, one of the reasons was that we didn't take prisoners. In many of the theatres.

As long as we cloud and rewrite history to ease our own consciences and to justify our own nationalistic supremacy then history will keep on repeating itself, again and again.

All joking apart, the Queens visit to Ireland was huge. Europe that has created so many problems world wide with its empire building, is at last seeing that only by the dismemberment of boundaries and the abandonment of individual national ambition does it have a chance of leaving its horrendous past behind and looking forward to a future that will not tolerate the sins of the past.

When I asked my dad how he felt about me having a German Girl friend, he summed it up by saying he was brought up to condemn the sin not the sinner! He fought against the Germans. Now my uncle who fought against the Japanese, that is a different story.

[robuzo]

^The Germans handle history a lot better than the Japanese. Interestingly, much of the Japanese rewriting of history came quite a few years after the war, when the US installed a right-wing government with many war criminals in high positions. In the immediate aftermath of the war there was a lot of anger at the military and shame in Japan over what they had done in Asia. Many former soldiers told horror stories about what they had seen- but once the left-wing was taken out of the picture it was glossed over.

I don't blame the soldiers who fought the Japanese for not wanting to forgive. At the same time, I know a Japanese man, a very kind gentleman, who was a prison guard during the war. After the war one of the Americans he had been guarding returned to Japan as a businessman and hired his former guard to be his personal chauffeur. They remained close over the years. The Japanese man in question hated the militarists, and despite working for a very successful capitalist was himself a communist. An unusual case to be sure, but it shows that things can be much more complicated than they seem.

[upupandaway]

Have no use for what happened then but as you say they more than likely had no choice. For sure in my opinion if Japan had won the war they would be in a sad state of affairs today. Not as bad but similar to North Korea.

It does look peaceful there. Kind of like the cemeteries the Australians built just west of Bangkok. Kongchanotbury

[harrybarracuda]

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."