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Comment by ci5er | Hacker News Reader

I lived in Japan for about 10 years, and have subsequently made a lot of Chinese, HK, TW and SG friends (partly because of the businesses I have been in), and except for the TW and SG folks whose opinions seemed to be mixed by generation, there is a lot of focus in modern history education on how badly the Japanese behaved leading up to WWII and in WWII.

And, fair enough!

But there doesn't to be much education on any side of the aisle about the 1000-or-so years leading up to their mutual antagonism.

I don't think that anyone is served by having sections of their history books snipped out - and the Japanese are no saints in this regard either. (Of course, I say this in the US, now, when some people are trying to have literature and history books snipped out)

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There was no mutual antagonism. Japan of this period was expressly a violent, imperialist project, from its annexation of parts of China and colonizing of South Korea following the Russo-Japanese war to later invasions of modern day Taiwan and the Philippines, all of whom were ill-equipped to resist them. The Mongols tried to invade and China and Japan fought over the Korean peninsula sporadically during what we call the Middle Ages, but that's about the extent of prior regional strife.

If you say so.

Its basic regional history, not my "say so." Japan had an extreme isolationist policy for the two hundred years leading up until the Meiji Restoration.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sakoku

The Qing dynasty was on its last legs, following the disruption of the Opium wars, the chaos of the Taiping and Boxer rebellions, and the nascent, internal modernization movements. The independence of Korea's Joeson dynasty was put to an end when Yi Un was put under Japanese control by Ito Hirobumi in 1907. Taiwan quickly transitioned from being a Chinese Vassal state to a Japanese one. The Philippines had been colonized by the Spanish for a few hundred years, then the Americans in the period leading up to the war. They were able to so quickly build an empire because the countries around them were in a poor position to resist their sudden outburst of aggression.

You really should read some Japanese history about pre WW2, even back to the Restoration on late 1800s. Japan was very aggressive militarily, and assassination attempts against leaders not deemed to be in line with that were common.

The “Supernova in the East” podcasts might be a good start.

I tend to read back a little further than that, and I will not deny that they are aggressive in your time-frame or mine.

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