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Are the Japanese Really Hated?
Written by Robert Vance on March 29, 2008 – 4:25 amI had a Japanese student in class today. Everyone loved him. He was funny and also very smart. At the end of class, everyone had a lot of questions to ask him about his culture and his language. I sat back and pleasantly enjoyed this blatant display of hypocrisy. Less than one week earlier, a group of students sitting in the same classroom had told me that they would not talk to a Japanese student even if he or she was sitting across the room from them. “We hate the Japanese,” they proclaimed to me unabashedly. “We can never forgive them for what they did to us.” But actions speak louder than words in a country where people are brainwashed with propaganda from an early age. While most Chinese people may be loyal in their rhetoric to the government’s negative perception of Japan, they are not so harsh in practice. They treat a Japanese person like they would any other foreigner; with curiosity and respect.
Japan has perpetrated horrible atrocities on China. No one is denying that fact. To deny those atrocities would be like denying the Holocaust. And there is no question that the Japanese textbooks have been rewritten to downplay the role of the Japanese in the atrocities. But as many foreigners have attempted to explain to their students, the Japanese youth of today were not involved in those atrocities. They are not the monsters that China remembers. And every country puts their spin on history. While the Japanese government could and should go a little farther in their official apologies, it is time for the Chinese to stop hating and starting building new cultural bridges. And perhaps the actions of my Chinese students today show that this is already happening in China.
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boy, there are different types of japanese, chinese hate ones who loving destroying and ruining other countries.
I have engaged and been engaged by students on this topic a number of times. After the initial government slant of “I Hate the Japanese” we talk about it in a little more detail, and they always come away with the notion that it is in fact the Japanese government of that time that they hate not all Japanese.
By explaining that the citizens of the country do what the government decides in Japan just like they do in other countries around the world such as the US, UK European nations and of course China they come away with a more defined notion of their “hatred”.
It is not that they are misguided, they simply do not stop to think in enough detail about the topic.