很少在纽约时报上看到如此旗帜鲜明抨击日本军国主义的文章

艳阳天

看得偶镜片碎了一地，简直怀疑这不是纽约时报，而是中国日报:-)

Editorial

Japan's Offensive Foreign Minister

Published: February 13, 2006

People everywhere wish they could be proud of every bit of their countri
es' histories. But honest people understand that's impossible, and wise
people appreciate the positive value of acknowledging and learning from
painful truths about past misdeeds. Then there is Japan's new foreign mi
nister, Taro Aso, who has been neither honest nor wise in the inflammato
ry statements he has been making about Japan's disastrous era of militar
ism, colonialism and war crimes that culminated in the Second World War.


Besides offending neighboring countries that Japan needs as allies and t
rading partners, he is disserving the people he has been pandering to. W
orld War II ended before most of today's Japanese were born. Yet public
discourse in Japan and modern history lessons in its schools have never
properly come to terms with the country's responsibility for such terrib
le events as the mass kidnapping and sexual enslavement of Korean young
women, the biological warfare experiments carried out on Chinese cities
and helpless prisoners of war, and the sadistic slaughter of hundreds of
thousands of Chinese civilians in the city of Nanjing.

That is why so many Asians have been angered by a string of appalling re
marks Mr. Aso has made since being named foreign minister last fall. Two
of the most recent were his suggestion that Japan's emperor ought to vi
sit the militaristic Yasukuni Shrine, where 14 Japanese war criminals ar
e among those honored, and his claim that Taiwan owes its high education
al standards to enlightened Japanese policies during the 50-year occupat
ion that began when Tokyo grabbed the island as war booty from China in
1895. Mr. Aso's later lame efforts to clarify his words left their effec
t unchanged.

Mr. Aso has also been going out of his way to inflame Japan's already di
fficult relations with Beijing by characterizing China's long-term milit
ary buildup as a "considerable threat" to Japan. China has no recent rec
ord of threatening Japan. As the rest of the world knows, it was the oth
er way around. Mr. Aso's sense of diplomacy is as odd as his sense of hi
story.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/1 ... amp;amp;oref=slogin