I LOVE JAPAN. Kazuhiro Arai

What USA did to Japan               As I wrote before, USA instigated Japan to start the Japan-US war through several economic sanctions including the oil embargoes in 1940 and 1941, which could be considered a virtual war declaration on Japan at that time. It was aware of the Pearl Harbor attack beforehand by listening in to the communications of the Japanese Navy. This was why aircraft carriers Enterprise and Lexington and newly built escort vessels were not at the harbor and only old warships were moored there. In spite of these facts, USA insisted that Japan had carried out a sneaky attack. There are many wars including the Vietnam War that were started without a declaration.               USA dropped countless incendiary bombs over Tokyo on the 10 th of March 1941 and killed more than a hundred thousand civilians. It dropped atomic bombs on Hirosh...

Christianity Cannot Be a Religion for Modern Society               Being a Christian may be beneficial to an individual because he can talk to God, his life becomes easier, he can die with more ease, etc. We need to note that these benefits accrue to an individual. Game theory teaches that individual benefits are not necessarily consistent with social benefits. In other words, pursuit of individual benefits can make all people worse off. This mechanism is called the prisoner’s dilemma. Individual rationality does not necessarily mean social rationality, contrary to the individualistic philosophy of Western society.               Religious wars are an example of the prisoner’s dilemma here. People involved think that they are right and that their enemy is wrong. They may even think that their enemy must be eliminated because of wrong belief. Religious wa...

Wars and Religion               I would like to claim that religion is closely related to wars. There have been many religious wars in history. Even wars that are not directly related to religion are sometimes indirectly related to it in the sense that strategies are chosen by religious criteria as in the case of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In addition, inhuman acts in wars are often overlooked because churchmen or other moral leaders are silent about them for religious reasons as in the case of Nazi’s Holocaust.               Take here an example of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East opened after WWII. It was actually a ‘cultural war’ between Japan and victorious or Christian countries. It was obviously illegal because it applied ex-post facto law, but there were virtually no Western churchmen or jurists who opposed ...

Why USA dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (2)               USA is unique in the sense that it is the only religious developed nation in the world. Christianity is so deeply rooted in Americans’ daily life and politics. The wars it has had are no exceptions.               It dropped atomic bombs over Japan because Americans believed that Christianity allows killing non-Christians such as Japanese. There was a Catholic chaplain who lent moral and religious support to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.* Furthermore, no American cardinals or bishops opposed the mass slaughter of Japanese people, which is similar to the cases of massacring Native Americans and enslaving black people. Christianity teaches love of one's neighbors but Christians carried out massacres of Native Americans, Australian Aborigines, Jews, and Japanese. So did Marx...

Why USA dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (1)               USA dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to kill hundreds thousands of Japanese people and tortured many survivors for a long time. An a-bomb is so massively destructive that it cannot be used without insanity. The acts of having dropped a-bombs can be rightly compared to Nazi’s Holocaust. Indeed, the method of killing by a-bombs was much more inhuman than by a poison gas.               American people have been taught in school and broadcast that the bombing was necessary to end the war and save a million American lives. However, this is a completely fabricated story to justify the mass destruction and to reduce the consciousness of sin of American people. Well before the bombing the Japanese had already lost ability to fight the war and been trying to surrender. The f...

Protectionism (1) President Trump’s trade policy is likely to exert a dangerous influence on international trade. Although I disagree with his protectionism, I do not think the principle of free trade is desirable to humankind. It has two serious defects. The first is that it assumes all production plans can be adjusted without costs. It claims that if country A’s wine production has become competitively weaker than country B’s, country A should produce something else. Such a change of production plan incurs enormous costs which are ignored by that principle.               The second defect is that it ignores national security. International trade can be and actually has been used to threaten foreign countries or put them in a subordinate position by suggesting restriction of export of indispensable products. USA invoked oil and iron embargoes against Japan to induce the ‘Pacific War.’ It has used trade quite strat...

The fundamental and implicit principle of US policy toward Japan has been to weaken her military and economic power in order to maintain its supremacy. Against international law USA established after WWII the new Japanese constitution that renounces the right of belligerency. USA enforced strict censorship over Japanese media for several years after WWII. It tried to build up an image that Japan’s militarism caused the ‘Pacific War’ and prohibited criticizing its occupation policy. Censorship obviously contradicts the fundamental principle of free society, which USA was going to build for Japan after WWII. What USA does often contradicts what it says. For example, it criticized Japan for not declaring war before attacking Pearl Harbor by naming it a sneaky attack. How many times did it declare war? USA is always obsessed with the idea that it needs to get rid of obstacles to maintaining the position of number one. Japan has long been such an obstacle. Ezra Vogel’s Japan as Numb...

              Americans are totally obsessed with a clear and simple idea. It is that they are number one and others must obey them. They used to express it explicitly before as ‘manifest destiny.’ Today they do not do so, but they do possess it inside and this fact can be confirmed by their behavior. This idea has caused countless disasters all over the world.               Early European immigrants to the North American Continent could live there and become Americans because Native Americans kindly taught them the method of agriculture. However, they thanked their god instead of the Native Americans and eventually killed most of them by employing dirty tricks. Native Americans are peaceful and trustworthy people. Most of them, however, live today in the Indian reservations of 55.7 million acres or about 2.3% of the area of the United States. This perc...

              Western people seem to have illusions about China. First of all, most of them cannot distinguish China from Japan. China is a country that lacks freedom of speech and law governance. Many people there are extremely poor. Japanese civilization is quite different from Chinese civilization, as is discussed in Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. Japan is a country that has highest levels of freedom of speech and law governance. Equality prevails in most aspects of Japanese society.               The western illusions about China have led some countries to have close relationships with it. Germany is one of them and supplied it with weapons and staff when Japan had the Tripartite Pact with Germany and fought with China. Today’s Germany seems still very friendly to it. USA also employed unwise polic...

Chinese people are almost everywhere in the world. Japanese universities are full of Chinese students. My impression is that about a half foreign students are Chinese. They are better at the Japanese language than other foreign students, but poorer at mathematics, economics, and English. Many of them are unable to read English books. I feel that Chinese female students lack elegance. When I talked about this to some professors, they agreed. Many Chinese visit Japan for sightseeing and their bad manners make most Japanese people dislike them. Chinese are disliked in most countries including Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, which have many Chinese immigrants. On the other hand, Chinese government is trying to establish footholds in many countries for economic and military expansion. China is the world’s only country that is obsessed with expansionism today. It annexed Tibet, Turkestan, and part of Mongolia. It claims that Taiwan belongs to it. It is now trying openly to take the...

Koreans take an extremely hostile attitude when facing a Japanese team in sporting events. A reason is that they have received anti-Japanese education. Then, do they really dislike Japan? The answer is not necessarily ‘Yes.’ So many Koreans visit Japan every year. Very few Korean residents in Japan return to Korea. There are many Japanese restaurants run by Koreans in America and Europe and the owners pretend to be Japanese. Many other Koreans are said to pretend overseas to be Japanese too.               Koreans criticize Japan for the case of ‘comfort women.’ They claim that the Japanese army took Korean women away and forced them to become its ‘sex slaves.’ This claim is based only on a fiction forged by a Japanese writer. This is most puzzling. There is no evidence for such cases. Why did not they examine the cases and offer enough evidence? Korea (has) had actually a widespread culture of prostitution. The cultu...

North Korea is today’s most dangerous country in the world and South Korea is the most risky country since it is weighing USA with China for a friend. The world divided the Korean Peninsula into two and has created two problematic countries. If it had not done so, it would have faced only one problematic country. Only Koreans in the world are unable to unite long after the end of the Cold War. Koreans are the world’s most difficult people to understand. One of the reasons is that they pretend to be under democracy with separation of powers. Another is that their culture is not sufficiently refined and quite childish. Still another is that they have subordinate mind because they have been surrounded by big countries through history. People in the world were dumbfounded by the backbiting diplomacy of the former South Korean President Park Geun-hye. Was the president a primary school pupil? Most South Korean presidents were prosecuted and some were sentenced to death. It is hard to ...