History and the notion of compensation are two key aspects in the study of Sino-Japanese relations. During the 1980s, the opening up by the People’s Republic of China’s government about war atrocities led a number of victims to seek reparations and apologies from Japan. Compensation cases were brought forward from the 1990s and broke the silence about what had ‘truly’ happened during the war. Moreover, the rapid spread of new information about the past prompted increased tensions between the two countries that had previously ignored the issue in order to privilege economic and diplomatic cooperation. To date, the affiliation between China and Japan seems to have deteriorated significantly and history is one of the main matters addressed in …show more content…
The VAWW-NET (Violence Against Women in War- Network Japan), Chinese War Victims Lawyer’s Research Committee (now Chinese War Victims’ Compensation Claim Group), Society to Support the Demands of Chinese War Victims (Rose, 2005, p.77), etc. are all joint-organizations fighting for the rights of the victims and trying to force Japan into taking legal responsibility for its actions and it is still a work in progress today.
The creation of these Sino-Japanese groups emphasizes the fact that the problem of compensation was just as important for both sides and signified that the history issue hadn’t been dealt with properly. The 280 members of the Chinese War Victims Lawyers’ Research Committee were ready to defend Chinese victims in their lawsuits against Unit 731, the Comfort Women System, forced labour, etc. among many more. Their research played a significant role in providing evidence (Rose, 2005, p.76) that undermined Japan’s stance on lack of sufficient evidence in order to accept legal liability for their actions (Tow, 2009 ). The involvement of academics and citizens were equally important as they too, discovered compelling evidence incriminating Japan and organizations such as Suopei counting over 2000 members are still collecting funds, providing evidence and reporting on the compensation movement in order to continue on their quest for justice and recognition (Rose, 2005, p.77). Numerous symposia were held in order to discuss war reparations and
The U.S. internment of people of Japanese descent during the 1940s was a major event in U.S. history, but it is often overlooked by many. It affected hundreds of thousands of people of Japanese descent, whether they were citizens or not. The incarceration of those placed in camps was affected mentally and it caused many of the internees to develop PTSD or otherwise commonly known as post-traumatic stress disorder (Potts, 1994, p. 1). The camps affected how the Japanese were viewed in society during the time period of the camps and following the liberation of them. It also changed how the Japanese viewed society. This paper will focus on the cultural and social aspects of the Internal Improvements.
Consistent with Japanese propaganda the nationalist leaders held belief that Japan was “the leader, protector and light of Asia”. However, this perception of liberation from colonial rule was a façade as the civilians of occupied nations experienced harsher treatment under the Japanese than they did under the colonial authorities.
Roger Daniels’ book Prisoners without Trial is another book that describes the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. This piece discusses about the background that led up to the internment, the internment itself, and what happened afterwards. The internment and relocation of Japanese-Americans during World War II was an injustice prompted by political and racial motivations. The author’s purpose of this volume is to discuss the story in light of the redress and reparation legislation enacted in 1988. Even though Daniels gives first hand accounts of the internment of Japanese Americans in his book, the author is lacking adequate citations and provocative quotations. It’s
War can be loud and visible or quiet and remote. It affects the individual and entire societies, the soldier, and the civilian. Both U.S. prisoners of war in Japan and Japanese-American citizens in the United States during WWII undergo efforts to make them “invisible.” Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken hero, Louie Zamperini, like so many other POWs, is imprisoned, beaten, and denied basic human rights in POW camps throughout Japan. Miné Okubo, a U.S. citizen by birth, is removed from society and interned in a “protective custody” camp for Japanese-American citizens. She is one of the many Japanese-Americans who were interned for the duration of the war. Louie Zamperini, as a POW in Japan, and Miné Okubo, as a Japanese-American Internee both experience efforts to make them “invisible” through dehumanization and isolation in the camps of WWII, and both resist these efforts.
While coming up with a topic for this paper, one of my questions dealt with war and cultural groups. I will be the first to admit, Racism was the last thing on my mind. The original question being, “How does war affect a Social Culture and how does it stand today?” When I started thinking about Cultures that had been so deeply affected by war, one of the first that came to mind were the Japanese in World War II. Then I recalled what one person had told me of their younger days at college, when they were attending school. Their name will remain anonymous; I do not want to make the victim’s name public as it has a very personal nature.
War can be loud and visible or quiet and remote. It affects the individual and entire societies, the soldiers, and the civilians. Both U.S. prisoners of war in Japan and Japanese-Americans citizens in the Unites States during WWII undergo efforts to make them “invisible.” Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken hero, Louie Zamperini, like so many other POW’s, is imprisoned, beaten, and denied basic human rights in POW camps throughout Japan. Miné
While World War II had been ongoing since 1939, Japan had been fighting for the Axis powers, against the United States. In 1941, when Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor, the United States government had assumed the viewpoint that the Japanese were not to be trusted, and that the Japanese-American citizens of the United States were much the same. As such, they had resorted to establishing internment camps, or preventive labor prisons, so as to keep them in check and ostensibly to prevent further Japanese sabotage. However, the government’s actions were not fully justified, as several factors had interplayed into the circumstances that directly contradicted the intentions and visible results of the internment of the Japanese-Americans, in the social, political, economical, and cultural aspects. On the whole, the internment camps served as drastic measures which were not wholly without reasoning; contrarily, those factors in support of the internment camps did not override those which had gone against it, since the United States’ own legislation, in the form of the Constitution and other laws, had explicitly prevented the depriving of human rights, privileges, and pursuits, which had doubtless applied in light of the Japanese-Americans’ universal citizenship along the Pacific Coast in the early 1940s. As such, while the internment camps were not completely unjustified and without purpose from the viewpoint of the government, they did not align with standards of law and
During this time of crisis in America, the Japanese people in our country were done a huge injustice. They were stripped their constitutional rights, relocated to a location with poor living conditions, and when America apologized it was just too late. The mental and physical health impacts of this event continues to affect tens of thousands of Japanese
When the Nazi’s arrested Jews and sent them to concentration camps, the conditions were terrible. The men, women, and children in the camps were not treated with the rights they deserved, since they were forced into harsh labor, placed in killing centers where gas chambers were used to effectively and quickly murder thousands of Jews a day, and experimented on to find new medicines and so the German scientists could find out how much pain and torture they could endure until death. In America, over 120,000 Japanese-Americans were relocated into camps during the period of World War II. Even though these Americans were not treated as harshly as the Jews in concentration camps, they lost
The implied claim for the subject of justice is how a fourteen year old girl is being forced to move into a Japanese relocation camp in the United States during World War II. The girl is not only having to leave her entire life behind, but also having to deal with the hardship of losing her best friend due to the negative sterotype put onto Japanese-Americans at the time.
In “Remarks on Signing the Bill Providing Restitution for the Wartime Internment of Japanese American Civilians” by Ronald Reagan and “An Apology” by Kevin Gover, both passages give argument on how the existing government bears responsibility for its historical misconducts. First in the speech by President Ronald Reagan, he addresses how the American government is to this day still held accountable for their past actions towards people from Japanese ancestry living in the United States when the government forcibly removed them from their homes, placed them in makeshift internment camps without trial or a reasonable justification. Then in the second speech by, Assistant of Indian Affairs Department of the Interior, Kevin Gover, the speaker
During the World War II, both the Japanese-Americans and American POWs must suffer the challenge of being “invisible”. Facing this challenge, both Japanese-American POWs and Americans are struggling to resist being “invisible”. As a result, there are many efforts being made to make both the Japanese-Americans and American POWs invisible. Instead of giving up, the Japanese-Americans and American POWs are fighting back.
In his work “Right to Kill, Right to Make Live” Takashi Fujitani compares and contrasts the Japanese treatment of colonialized Koreans leading up to World War II with the American treatment of the Japanese residents following the bombing of Pearl Harbor. This work highlights how both the Japanese and the Americans treated the Koreans and Japanese Americans, respectively, and offers several different viewpoints. Thus, this work is exceptionally important and provides incredible insight into both cultures and the harsh reality of wartime. Additionally, Fujitani also explains how the Korean and Japanese populations are still influenced today.
During world war two, countries on both sides committed war crimes that shocked both the people involved, and the globe. From 1937 through to 1945, the Japanese justified their treatment of the Australian prisoners of war at the Burma railway with three things. The Japanese believed that their bushido code allowed them to treat the Australian this way, their ethics was one of complete brutality and hardship, and the Japanese soldiers were being fed false propaganda that showed a dehumanized view of the Australians. These three statements demonstrate that the Japanese atrocities committed at Burma, were, in the eyes of the Japanese, fair and just.
This paper is a review of the book Japan’s Comfort Women-Sexual slavery and prostitution during WWII and the US occupation by Yuki Tanaka. This book was published in 2002 by Routledge. The book deals with the thousands of Japanese, Korean, Chinese and other Asian and European women who were victims of organized sexual violence and prostitution by means of “comfort stations” setup by the Japanese military during World War II.