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Comment by senthil_rajasek | Hacker News Reader

"If this were in the US or UK, Perry would likely be hated for whatever and his statue torn down."

I am originally from India. There are still monuments commemorating British kings ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gateway_of_India) personally I want them to be torn down.

I am not comparing Japan with Colonial India but I know that in 2023 colonialism and imperialism should not be celebrated.

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I’m from Bangladesh. If it wasn’t for British colonialism, both of us would be subsistence farmers right now instead of on HN.

That’s not any knock on the people of the subcontinent. It’s just math. The transition from subsistence agriculture to industrial society is an inflection point, like a lightning strike, and there’s no reason to believe it would’ve happened in India any time near when it happened in Britain out of thousands and thousands of years of history.

The British themselves were colonized repeatedly, by the Romans, by the French. You don’t see them tearing down statutes or rejecting that history.

I can't speak for Bangladesh.

Also, I won't argue against colonialism apologists on this thread.

In the spirit of hacking the site guidelines: I feel like writing a comment to declare that you're leaving the argument has to be anti-intellectual-curiosity in some nonzero way.

Pointing out the existence of the side effect of triggering/accelerating industrialisation is in no way apologism for all the awful things that were inflicted on the countries in question (being English, I've spent a fair amount of time digging in to what we did and every time you think you've found the worst there turns out to be yet another layer of even more awful underneath.)

As an analogy: I grew up in NW England during the troubles, and the nearest big city was Manchester. After the IRA blew up the city centre, the rebuilt version was much much nicer and attracted substantially more commerce. That can be true without in any way having any interest in defending the IRA's explosive terrorism and extrajudicial murders (possibly my favourite exchange on twitter was Gerry Adams posting about feeling like the grinch going around his house turning off all the christmas lights before he went to bed and somebody replying "surely you know somebody who can fit a timer.")

The Meiji restoration, as this was called, removed the Shogunate (=top dog warlord) which had ruled for a good couple hundred of years and re-inserted imperial rule (i.e. the Japanese emperor was again the ruler). This was done by the Japanese themselves (a bit of civil war took place for this to happen[0]). There was no external rule forced on Japan after Perry's black ships. No colonialism or external imperialism involved, so it's not really comparable to anything else.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boshin_War

My comment was about Perry, who used violent threats to open trade with Japan, still being celebrated in Japan.

There was indeed a bit of (at least apparent) threat involved. No colonialism or imperialism though - Japan has never been a colony of anyone as long as Japan as a nation has existed (which is, officially, since around 660BC [0]

[0] https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/japans-nat... (which should probably be taken as seriously (or not) as the foundation of Rome in 753 BC)

There was the occupation post-WW2, which is somewhat similar, if much more understandable than typical colonization/imperialism.

You have to define imperialism very narrowly to claim that. Perry's (overt) threat resulted in unequal treaties being forced on Japan. Japan's current Constitution was similarly written by Americans and forced on it during the post-WWII military occupation. Any nation that permanently hosts uncontrolled foreign troops and bases on its homeland is, at the very best, a client state.

Perhaps we should make a distinction between colonial imperialism and modern imperialism.

The latter mostly concerns itself with trade treaties, however lopsided, whereas the former also involved a lot more meddling in the culture, the power structure, and the internal structure of the economy.

US bases in Japan have the opposite impact of colonialism. If it weren’t for the bases, Japan would have to pay for their own defense, using up finances and resources that can be allocated to growth and wealth in the current system.

The current arrangement isn’t imposing on or extracting anything from Japan, just protecting it, mostly for free.

Not that I’m saying this is unfair to America either; it’s mutually beneficial for both nations, which is why everyone has kept this happy arrangement for so long.

> re-inserted imperial rule (i.e. the Japanese emperor was again the ruler)

Eh, not really. The real military power behind the restoration was the Satsuma-Choshu Alliance, the Emperor was mostly[1] a convenient figurehead, and many of the Shogun's retainers transitioned smoothly into nobles and bureaucrats in the new system.

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

[1] It's complicated though, and reams of paper have been written about eg. Hirohito's actual responsibility for WW2.

Well, yes, I didn't say anything contradicting that either. I wasn't about to write up the whole story - it is in any case available via that link I gave. I don't think I gave the impression that the Emperor himself rallied up the forces to fight the Shogunate.

One major difference is that Japan managed to open to trade while keeping control of their country, benefitting from the former and using it to rapidly develop and modernize, while not losing autonomy and sovereignty, across the entire colonial era, at least up until they lost WWII. India obviously had a very different experience with colonialism.

As an Indian, I find the mention of the Gateway of India in this context odd, since it's the least egregious of the lot. Nor has there been any mainstream demand to tear it down. Locals don't treat the site with any tangible connection to the British Raj, and are at best indifferent to it. There is the plaque, but nobody seems to care.

Contrast with the Victoria Memorial, the largest memorial to any monarch anywhere, the site is replete with statues of British monarchs and Governors. Bengal as a province has the longest history of British colonialism, and probably had suffered the most of any Indian region the ills of colonialism. Despite that, there hasn't been any mainstream demand to tear the place down, or even the statues. The locals are very knowledgeable about their colonial history, but seem fine with the statues and enjoy it as a place to hang out.

I’ve noticed in conversations with my Indian friends, in general they seem very pragmatic with respect to the British Colonial era. Personally, I expected an outlook closer to my Irish relatives, which usually were more negative.

That’s not to say that I’m projecting the feelings of a billion people from a sample of a handful of folks, and my family certainly had some strong bias wrt the Brits. My academic exposure of Indian history basically consisted of a reading about the Indian Mutiny, a bit about Ghandi, and casual mention of partition. It’s a story and history that should be told.

That's an interesting contrast, and I'm sure there's academic literature which lays out why that's the case. My personal impression is that this might have to do with the immediate aftermath of Independence, faced with strong internal crises to deal with. British Imperialism & Partition had left the country bereft - food production, economic infrastructure (raw materials & factories separated by hostile borders), & general development (India at the onset of colonialism produced about a quarter of the world's GDP, and at the end was about 2%). We had a host of issues to deal with, and hating on the British was unproductive. Within 25 years, India was in three full on wars with hostile neighbors. The British were a distant enemy.

I suppose the Irish antagonism with the British dates from the much more recent "Troubles", rather than historic English Imperialism.

My British Indian friends tend to regard it as a subject more worthy of black humour than of bearing a grudge. "Sure, your ancestors were arseholes, but do you have any idea how much money we make off you just by being capable of selling you food that has a flavour?" sort of thing.

(that's kinda the ISO standard joke of that class and I'll often tell a version of it myself as a means to indicate I believe that given the history they have every right to take the piss out of us as much as they like, after which anybody of Indian ancestry in the group will tend to grin and start telling better jokes than that one with me and my fellow white English as the target - magnificent way to be entertained over a pint ;)

I had a British friend who would tell that joke in reverse, as in "the real reason to colonize India was so that someone would teach us how to cook properly"

If the statutes of british monarchs were raised during their reign, or shortly after, those statues now represent history. A bad bit of history, but history none the less. If they were erected way later, they celebrate this bad pit of history and can be torn down.

History does not have to be celebrated, it definitely has to be remembered so.

If walls can become memories, statues and monuments can be torn down without losing their place in history.

What?

Berlin Wall.

I guess the Berlin Wall is a memory... Not quite because parts of it remain.

And not leaving parts it up was not appreciated by everyone.

Well, Nazi monuments erected during Nazi Germany are pretty taboo but we still have other ways of remembering the history. I'm personally not sold that we have to preserve giant monuments to loathed people for the sake of remembering history.

Well, there are still Hitler's (and others') letter boxes in the Reichstag, along with all other letterboxes for every dully elected MP up to the latest election, and future ones.

WW2 and holocaust memorials can be found all over the place, ranging from impressive, and depressing, sites like Dachau Concentration Camp to a some ruins and a explanation at sites of former KZ satelite locations somewhere in the woods. Not everything the Nazis built was torn down. And I highly doubt there are Churchil or Auchinlek statues in former Bengal, and if there are, sure, get rid of those.

You guys still have a lot of flak towers around, although to be fair those were built to be indestructible.

I quite like the "stick a display next to the monument explaining the history and pulling no punches while doing so" approach, optionally (and in some cases I suspect highly preferably) having relocated the thing to a museum first so people only have to see it at all if they're intentionally looking at stuff related to that era of history.

However as somebody who's generic white british and grew up in an area that was unusually white even compared to the median bit of britain I tend to default to expecting that most of the time my perspective isn't going to add much to a debate in progress and leave it be instead.

I am Indian and I want them to stay. I would go so far as to say that colonial era structures are the only beautiful buildings that have been built in India in the last 100-200 years.

India has great pre-colonial era architecture.

There is no Indian architecture in the last 100-200 years because of the brutal british colonialism.

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