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NNadir

(33,527 posts) Wed Apr 1, 2020, 10:58 PM Apr 2020

Some luminescent language castigating several cultures in a history book.

My hobby is reading history books, but I rarely read them cover to cover but rather excerpt them, reading sections of interest in detail and skimming other sections loosely.

In lock down, I find myself reading books cover to cover.

Right now I'm reading Parshall and Tully's Shattered Sword from cover to cover, with many pleasant surprises in the section on the background culture of Japan as it moved in the direction of war with the United States.

It covers the cultural resentment that the Japanese exhibited toward the White colonization of Asia which Japan itself had only narrowly resisted prior to the Meiji Restoration in 1868, the year that Japan was "opened" by the United States, Parshall and Tully compare the word "opened" and "raped."

It has this really luminescent phrase describing the reality how Japan envisioned itself as "liberating" it's Asian neighbors from "White Imperialism:"

The militarists concept of "liberation" ultimately proved to be little more than the shoving aside of the white powers so that the Japanese might themselves swill at the trough of economic exploitation. However, that apparently did little to sully the underlying purity of this grand vision in their eyes. Neither did Japanese resentment of racist inequality from the West stop it from foisting an equally virulent form of oppression on its own Asian neighbors.

"...swill at the trough..."

It sums up the dishonesty of both sides well, does it not?

They also describe how despite public exhaustion with a long war in China, which they call "the Chinese tar baby" how...

"The Japanese public felt powerless and detached from their own domestic politics, viewing the machinations of the Army and Navy, the assassination of government officials by members of the armed forces and other unsavory political acts of their own military with a jaundiced eye. That the prospect of fighting an additional war against the most powerful economy of earth, with the British and Dutch Empires thrown in for good measure, could bring a sense of elation to the Japanese public demonstrates the depth of its resentment against white imperialism in general and America in particular."

This forceful language to my eye evokes the history in a powerful way. It's cruelly fair.

I'm glad I'm able to use this time to read more deeply.

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