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Comment by toephu2 | Hacker News Reader

and Japan does not? (referring to the Nanking massacre) or rather what country doesn't?

German school teachings don't defend anything. Instead they spend, for many students, roughly two years in a concentrated block of instilling guilt and horror over what happened in WW2.

That's because they lost. The winners get to write history.

Japan lost too, but, as much as i love the country, its people and its ideas, they have largely chosen to not teach their citizens that war did happen.

To be fair Japanese schools don't teach anything remotely useful about the world in general. The level of general culture over here is abysmal.

I went through both the US and Japanese systems concurrently. Both systems are working well, as intended.

Except that Johnny can barely read, while Shigeru can write 1500 kanji with his eyes closed. :)

Meanwhile Japan has a mere 22 nobel prizes since 1940.

America has 330.

Japan has seen zero economic growth for over 20 years.

America's GDP has doubled in that time.

America has the best universities, by far. Japan does not.

America has the most productive, technologically advanced, large economy on earth. Japan has been stagnant for decades.

Writing 1500 kanji with your eyes closed doesn't appear to be very useful in the real world.

For more than 100 years about one out of four American Nobel Prize winners were foreign born – and in the past 3 years, nearly half of American laureates were immigrants.

Note that this does not include second/third generation immigrants.

Only one in four? I would have guessed higher.

Albert Einstein also chose to become an American.

What you're describing is the greatest honor a country can receive. There is no higher compliment, than the best and the brightest the world over seeking to immigrate to your shores. They have been seeking America out for centuries because it was and still is an immense land of opportunity.

I'd love to read a writeup comparing and contrasting the two systems.

There are certain stupid people among Abe's camp who pretend that nothing happened in Nanking, but as far as I know Japanese officials have apologized for the country's war crimes on several occasions. How about the US ? Have they ever recognized their (previous and ongoing) war crimes?

German cities still have plagues/statues/memorials everywhere to remind people about the holocaust and the past. In Japan, you will not find a single prominently placed memorial to remind people about the wrongs Japan did, unfortunately.

Even the few small ones that had been placed in country side have been taken down in recent months/years thanks to Abe. And interestingly, Abe's mother's ancestors are from Korea supposedly.

> German cities still have plagues/statues/memorials everywhere to remind people about the holocaust and the past

I don't attribute much importance to monuments and statues. Do people actually care about them ? There were monuments to the ones who fell during 14-18 all over Europe and it did not prevent any of the European countries to enter a large scale bloody war all over again 20 years later. So what are the monuments good for?

Germany: Reminding one's population of the country's sins is the true sign of sincere apology.

Japan: When you actively rewrite history books to hide your past sins, you cannot be apologizing sincerely.

> Japan: When you actively rewrite history books to hide your past sins, you cannot be apologizing sincerely.

I agree with you on this, but if you think Japan is the only country rewriting history books my friend, you are deeply mistaken. Look at what US kids are taught about History, and cry.

ekianjo, of course not. But we are talking about japan here.

> I don't attribute much importance to monuments and statues. Do people actually care about them?

Yes. Here's a cemetary of russian victims in the center of Hannover, right across the street of one of the most popular gathering places in the entire city.

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/4lzlr7p5kmao7s1/AACiUPiTvnMoYYom-...

https://goo.gl/maps/MkW1V

Notice how it's well-kept and clean.

How many plaques and statues does Japan need to erect before you will be satisfied?

I posit that even if they installed as many plaques and statues as Germany, you would still find another reason to criticize them.

The issue is there is NONE in Tokyo as far as I know. I would love to be proven wrong with links, pics.

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