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I have more than once heard the complaint made against Japan that they have never taken responsibility for their aggression in World War II. Instead, bizarrely, it is said, they see themselves as a victim.
They are never going to take responsibility. This is because, by their own rules, they really were the victim.
Newcomers to Korea are commonly warned by old hands of what they must do if they ever get into a fight. The rules are not what a European or a North American would expect. If there is any kind of altercation, and the police are called, they are not interested in who started it. That is not relevant. The victim is whoever is most bloodied, and whoever gets out of the fight in better shape will be convicted as the aggressor, as a matter of course.
This makes good sense. It is often impossible to determine who really "started it." Is it the person who took the first blow? But then, what if they were provoked verbally? What if they were seeking revenge for their brother's beating a year ago? Why is there any special significance to the first physical blow? It is a very difficult thing to justly decide.
On the other hand, nobody gets into a fight in order to get beaten up.
Demonstrably, this works pretty well to prevent fights in the street: you cannot win in such a fight. There is a reason why the overal level of violence in Far Eastern societies is low.
So, as a point of Far Eastern law and common moral perception, whoever wins a fight is the guilty party, their guilt increasing with the decisiveness with which they win.
This of course runs counter to the Calvinist, and to some extent the Christian, assumptions on which the West and the US operate, which hold that, God intervening on the side of right, the good guys will normally win any fight.
Remove that assumption, and it is easy to see it all through Oriental eyes.
1 comment:
They aren't victims in the same sense we usually attribute the word to. If there are any victims at all when it comes to Imperialist nations at all. The Japanese were essentially "bullied" or rather OUTPLAYED by the Europeans and Americans. They were trying to expand their Empire into China and the rest of the World didn't support it because they wanted a piece of it. Russia had expanded across Asia. The United States massacred all the Natives and seized their lands. The Europeans had global empire spanning every continent. But the poor Japanese who just started playing the game were told they couldn't do that because it was suddenly inhumane!
There's a line I'm paraphrasing that the Japanese allegedly said when they walked out on the League of Nation for their unequal allowances toward the Japanese Empire. "When we finally learned how to play chess, you change the game to checkers."
So who started the war?
Of course the Japanese wouldn't say they were the one's. They speak from a different perspective and it's not some mystical oriental mindset. The Japs speak and think bluntly.
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