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What Japanese history lessons leave out By Mariko Oi BBC News, Tokyo Japanese people often fail to understand why neighbouring countries harbour a grudge over events that happened in the 1930s and 40s. The reason, in many cases, is that they barely learned any 20th Century history. I myself only got a full picture when I left Japan and went to school in Australia. From Homo erectus to the present day - 300,000 years of history in just one year of lessons. That is how, at the age of 14, I first learned of Japan's relations with the outside world. For three hours a week - 105 hours over the year - we edged towards the 20th Century. It's hardly surprising that some classes, in some schools, never get there, and are told by teachers to finish the book in their spare time. When I returned recently to my old school, Sacred Heart in Tokyo, teachers told me they often have to start hurrying, near the end of the year, to make sure they have time for World War II. "When I joined Sacred Heart as a teacher, I was asked by the principal to make sure that I teach all the way up to modern history," says my history teacher from Year Eight. "We have strong ties with our sister schools in the Asian region so we want our students to understand Japan's historical relationship with our neighbouring countries." I still remember her telling the class, 17 years ago, about the importance of Japan's war history and making the point that many of today's geopolitical tensions stem from what happened then. Mariko's Japanese textbook: Only a footnote on the Nanjing massacre I also remember wondering why we couldn't go straight to that period if it was so important, instead of wasting time on the Pleistocene epoch. When we did finally get there, it turned out only 19 of the book's 357 pages dealt with events between 1931 and 1945. Nanjing massacre, 1937-38 A six-week period of bloodshed, after the Japanese capture of the city in December 1937 International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE), set up after WWII, estimated more than 200,000 people were killed, including many women and children Dispute over scale of atrocity remains a sticking point in Chinese/Japanese relations - some Japanese question whether a massacre took place There was one page on what is known as the Mukden incident, when Japanese soldiers blew up a railway in Manchuria in China in 1931. There was one page on other events leading up to the Sino-Japanese war in 1937 - including one line, in a footnote, about the massacre that took place when Japanese forces invaded Nanjing - the Nanjing Massacre, or Rape of Nanjing. There was another sentence on the Koreans and the Chinese who were brought to Japan as miners during the war, and one line, again in a footnote, on "comfort women" - a prostitution corps created by the Imperial Army of Japan. There was also just one sentence on the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I wanted to know more, but was not quite eager enough to delve into the subject in my spare time. As a teenager, I was more interested in fashion and boys. My friends had a chance to choose world history as a subject in Year 11. But by that stage I had left the Japanese schooling system, and was living in Australia. I remember the excitement when I noticed that instead of ploughing chronologically through a given period, classes would focus on a handful of crucial events in world history. “Start Quote All of the photographs that China uses as evidence of the massacre are fabricated” Nobukatsu Fujioka So brushing aside my teacher's objection that I would struggle with the high volume of reading and writing in English - a language I could barely converse in - I picked history as one of my subjects for the international baccalaureate. My first ever essay in English was on the Rape of Nanjing. There is controversy over what happened. The Chinese say 300,000 were killed and many women were gang-raped by the Japanese soldiers, but as I spent six months researching all sides of the argument, I learned that some in Japan deny the incident altogether. Nobukatsu Fujioka is one of them and the author of one of the books that I read as part of my research. "It was a battlefield so people were killed but there was no systematic massacre or rape," he says, when I meet him in Tokyo. "The Chinese government hired actors and actresses, pretending to be the victims when they invited some Japanese journalists to write about them. "All of the photographs that China uses as evidence of the massacre are fabricated because the same picture of decapitated heads, for example, has emerged as a photograph from the civil war between Kuomintang and Communist parties." As a 17-year-old student, I was not trying to make a definitive judgement on what exactly happened, but reading a dozen books on the incident at least allowed me to understand why many people in China still feel bitter about Japan's military past. Comfort women 200,000 women in territories occupied by Japan during WWII estimated to have been forced into become sex slaves for troops, or "comfort women" In 1993 Japan acknowledged use of wartime brothels In 2007 Japanese PM Shinzo Abe was forced to apologise after casting doubt on the existence of comfort women While school pupils in Japan may read just one line on the massacre, children in China are taught in detail not just about the Rape of Nanjing but numerous other Japanese war crimes, though these accounts of the war are sometimes criticised for being overly antiJapanese. The same can be said about South Korea, where the education system places great emphasis on our modern history. This has resulted in very different perceptions of the same events in countries an hour's flying time apart. One of the most contentious topics there is the comfort women. Fujioka believes they were paid prostitutes. But Japan's neighbours, such as South Korea and Taiwan, say they were forced to work as sex slaves for the Japanese army. Without knowing these debates, it is extremely difficult to grasp why recent territorial disputes with China or South Korea cause such an emotional reaction among our neighbours. The sheer hostility shown towards Japan by ordinary people in street demonstrations seems bewildering and even barbaric to many Japanese television viewers. Equally, Japanese people often find it hard to grasp why politicians' visits to the controversial Yasukuni Shrine - which honours war criminals among other Japanese soldiers - cause quite so much anger. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, visiting the Yasukuni Shrine in 2012 I asked the children of some friends and colleagues how much history they had picked up during their school years. Twenty-year-old university student Nami Yoshida and her older sister Mai - both undergraduates studying science - say they haven't heard about comfort women. "I've heard of the Nanjing massacre but I don't know what it's about," they both say. "At school, we learn more about what happened a long time ago, like the samurai era," Nami adds. Seventeen-year-old Yuki Tsukamoto says the "Mukden incident" and Japan's invasion of the Korean peninsula in the late 16th Century help to explain Japan's unpopularity in the region. "I think it is understandable that some people are upset, because noone wants their own country to be invaded," he says. But he too is unaware of the plight of the comfort women. Chinese protesters often mark anniversaries of 20th Century clashes with Japan Former history teacher and scholar Tamaki Matsuoka holds Japan's education system responsible for a number of the country's foreign relations difficulties. "Our system has been creating young people who get annoyed by all the complaints that China and South Korea make about war atrocities because they are not taught what they are complaining about," she said. "It is very dangerous because some of them may resort to the internet to get more information and then they start believing the nationalists' views that Japan did nothing wrong." I first saw her work, based on interviews with Japanese soldiers who invaded Nanjing, when I visited the museum in the city a few years ago. "There were many testimonies by the victims but I thought we needed to hear from the soldiers," she says. "It took me many years but I interviewed 250 of them. Many initially refused to talk, but eventually, they admitted to killing, stealing and raping." Matsuoka accuses the government of a deliberate silence about atrocities When I saw her video interviews of the soldiers, it was not just their admission of war crimes which shocked me, it was their age. Already elderly by the time she interviewed them, many had been barely 20 at the time, and in a strange way, it humanised them. I was choked with an extremely complex emotion. Sad to see Japan repeatedly described as evil and dubbed "the devil", and nervous because I wondered how people around me would react if they knew I was Japanese. But there was also the big question why - what drove these young soldiers to kill and rape? When Matsuoka published her book, she received many threats from nationalist groups. She and Fujioka represent two opposing camps in a debate about what should be taught in Japanese schools. Fujioka and his Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform say most textbooks are "masochistic" and only teach about Japan in negative light. History tuition in Japan Students first learn about Japanese history in Year Six, over 105 hours of lessons In Year Eight of junior high school, they study the history of Japan's relations with the rest of the world - this course now lasts for 130 hours Seven history textbooks are approved by the Education Ministry - schools can choose which they use Students can also choose to study World History in Year 11 "The Japanese textbook authorisation system has the so-called "neighbouring country clause" which means that textbooks have to show understanding in their treatment of historical events involving neighbouring Asian countries. It is just ridiculous," he says. He is widely known for pressuring politicians to remove the term "comfort women" from all the junior high school textbooks. His first textbook, which won government approval in 2001, made a brief reference to the death of Chinese soldiers and civilians in Nanjing, but he plans to tone it down further in his next book. But is ignorance the solution? The Ministry of Education's guidelines for junior high schools state that all children must be taught about Japan's "historical relations with its Asian neighbours and the catastrophic damage caused by the World War II to humanity at large". "That means schools have to teach about the Japanese military's increased influence and extension of its power [in the 1930s] and the prolonged war in China," says ministry spokesman Akihiko Horiuchi. Textbook crisis In 2005, protests were sparked in China and South Korea by a textbook prepared by the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform, which had been approved by the government in 2001. Foreign critics said it whitewashed Japan's war record during the 1930s and early 1940s. It referred to the Nanjing massacre as an "incident", and glossed over the issue of comfort women. The book was not used in many schools, but was a big commercial success. "Students learn about the extent of the damage caused by Japan in many countries during the war as well as sufferings that the Japanese people had to experience especially in Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Okinawa in order to understand the importance of international cooperation and peace. "Based on our guideline, each school decides which specific events they focus on depending on the areas and the situation of the school and the students' maturity." Matsuoka, however, thinks the government deliberately tries not to teach young people the details of Japan's atrocities. Having experienced history education in two countries, the way history is taught in Japan has at least one advantage - students come away with a comprehensive understanding of when events happened, in what order. In many ways, my schoolfriends and I were lucky. Because junior high students were all but guaranteed a place in the senior high school, not many had to go through what's often described as the "examination war". For students who are competing to get into a good senior high school or university, the race is extremely tough and requires memorisation of hundreds of historical dates, on top of all the other subjects that have to be studied. They have no time to dwell on a few pages of war atrocities, even if they read them in their textbooks. All this has resulted in Japan's Asian neighbours - especially China and South Korea - accusing the country of glossing over its war atrocities. Meanwhile, Japan's new Prime Minister Shinzo Abe criticises China's school curriculum for being too "anti-Japanese". He, like Fujioka, wants to change how history is taught in Japan so that children can be proud of our past, and is considering revising Japan's 1993 apology over the comfort women issue. If and when that happens, it will undoubtedly cause a huge stir with our Asian neighbours. And yet, many Japanese will have no clue why it is such a big deal. World Scarred by history: The Rape of Nanking Thousands of bodies were buried in ditches Between December 1937 and March 1938 one of the worst massacres in modern times took place. Japanese troops captured the Chinese city of Nanking and embarked on a campaign of murder, rape and looting. Based on estimates made by historians and charity organisations in the city at the time, between 250,000 and 300,000 people were killed, many of them women and children. The number of women raped was said by Westerners who were there to be 20,000, and there were widespread accounts of civilians being hacked to death. Yet, many Japanese officials and historians deny that there was a massacre on such a scale. They admit that deaths and rapes did occur, but say they were on a much smaller scale than reported. And in any case, they argue, these things happen in times of war. The Sino-Japanese Wars In 1931, Japan invaded Chinese Manchuria following a bombing incident at a railway controlled by Japanese interests. The Chinese troops were no match for their opponents and Japan ended up in control of great swathes of Chinese territory. The following years saw Japan consolidate its hold, while China suffered civil war between communists and the nationalists of the Kuomintang. The latter were led by General Chiang Kaishek, whose capital was at Nanking. Entering the city in triumph Many Japanese, particularly some elements of the army, wanted to increase their influence and in July 1937 a skirmish between Chinese and Japanese troops escalated into full-scale war. The Japanese again had initial success, but then there was a period of successful Chinese defence before the Japanese broke through at Shanghai and swiftly moved on to Nanking. Chiang Kai-shek's troops had already left the city and the Japanese army occupied it without difficulty. "One of the great atrocities of modern times" At the time, the Japanese army did not have a reputation for brutality. In the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5, the Japanese commanders had behaved with great courtesy towards their defeated opponents, but this was very different. Japanese papers reported competitions among junior officers to kill the most Chinese. One Japanese newspaper correspondent saw lines of Chinese being taken for execution on the banks of the Yangtse River, where he saw piles of burned corpses. Some victims Photographs from the time, now part of an were reportedly exhibition in the city, show Japanese soldiers standing, smiling, among heaps of dead buried alive bodies. Tillman Durdin of the New York Times reported the early stages of the massacre before being forced to leave. He later wrote: "I was 29 and it was my first big story for the New York Times. So I drove down to the waterfront in my car. And to get to the gate I had to just climb over masses of bodies accumulated there. The car just had to drive over these dead bodies. And the scene on the river front, as I waited for the launch ... was of a group of smoking chattering Japanese officers overseeing the massacring of a battalion of Chinese captured troops. They were marching about in groups of about 15, machine-gunning them." As he departed, he saw 200 men being executed in 10 minutes to the apparent enjoyment of Japanese military spectators. He concluded that the rape of Nanking was "one of the great atrocities of modern times." "The memories cannot be erased" A Christian missionary, John Magee, described Japanese soldiers as killing not only "every prisoner they could find but also a vast number of ordinary citizens of all ages. Many of them were shot down like the hunting of rabbits in the streets." After what he described as a week of murder and rape, the Rev Magee joined other Westerners in trying to set up an international safety zone. Another who tried to help was an American woman, Minnie Vautrin, who kept a diary which has been likened to that of Anne Frank. Her entry for December 16 reads: "There probably is no crime that has not been committed in this city today. Thirty girls were taken from the language school [where she worked] last night, and today I have heard scores of heartbreaking stories of girls who were taken from their homes last night - one of the girls was but 12 years old... Later, she wrote: "How many thousands were mowed down by guns or bayoneted we shall probably never know. For in many cases oil was thrown over their bodies and then they were burned. Charred bodies tell the tales of some of these tragedies. The events of the following ten days are growing dim. But there are certain of them that lifetime will not erase from my memory and the memories of those who have been in Nanking through this period." Minnie Vautrin suffered a nervous breakdown in 1940 and returned to the US. She committed suicide in 1941. Also horrified at what he saw was John Rabe, a German who was head of the local Nazi party. He became leader of the international safety zone and recorded what he saw, some of it on film, but this was banned by the Nazis when he returned to Germany. He wrote about rape and other brutalities which occurred even in the middle of the supposedly protected area. Confession and denial After the Second World War was over, one of the soldiers who was in Nanking spoke about what he had seen. Azuma Shiro recalled one episode: "There were about 37 old men, old women and children. We captured them and gathered them in a square. There was a woman holding a child on her right arm ... and another one on her left. We stabbed and killed them, all three like potatoes in a skewer. I thought then, it's been only one month since I left home ... and thirty days later I was killing people without remorse." Japanese troops showed Shiro suffered for his confession: "When there little mercy was a war exhibition in Kyoto, I testified. The first person who criticized me was a lady in Tokyo. She said I was damaging those who died in the war. She called me incessantly for three or four days. More and more letters came and the attack became so severe...that the police had to provide me with protection." Such testimony, however, has been discounted at the highest levels in Japan. Former Justice Minister Shigeto Nagano denied that the massacre had occurred, that it was a Chinese fabrication. Professor Ienaga Saburo spent many years fighting the Japanese government in the courts with only limited success for not allowing true accounts of Japanese war atrocities to be given in school textbooks. There is also opposition to the idea among ordinary Japanese people. A film called Don't Cry Nanking was made by Chinese and Hong Kong film-makers in 1995 but it was several years before it was shown in Japan. Japan's Quest for Empire 1931 - 1945 By Dr Susan Townsend Last updated 2011-03-30 Japan's slow-burning aggression was borne of frustration with a world whose order appeared tipped in favour of the west. Susan Townsend describes how the intensification of this feeling led up to the Pearl Harbor attack of 1941. When the Japanese Kwantung Army (also known as the Guandong Army) contrived to invade Manchuria on 18 September 1931, it unleashed military and political forces which led ultimately to the attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941. ... a minor engagement between Chinese and Japanese troops ... led to undeclared war between the two nations. First, the post-invasion 'Manchurian Crisis' ended with the dramatic walk-out of Japanese delegates from the League of Nations in 1933. This was in reaction to the findings of the Lytton Commission, which had upheld China's appeal against Japanese aggression, thus leaving Japan effectively isolated in the world. By this time, however, the Japanese had successfully detached Manchuria from the rest of China, creating the puppet state of Manchukuo under the deposed Qing emperor Pu Yi. Then in 1937 a minor engagement between Chinese and Japanese troops at the Marco-Polo Bridge, near Peking, led to undeclared war between the two nations. The 'China Incident' and the creation of a 'New Order' in East Asia in 1938 dominated Japanese military thinking until the summer of 1940, when the declaration of the Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere anticipated the expansion of Japan's empire into south-east Asia. What were the forces that had pushed Japan down this road of military conquest in the east, leading ultimately to war with the west and catastrophic defeat? Chasing power Massive changes were unleashed in Japan by the Meiji restoration - a period of radical modernisation - in 1868, and out of these emerged the desire for wealth, power and prestige as a way of redressing the imposition of unequal treaties that had been placed upon Japan by western powers in the past. Victory in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-5 also gave Japan its first real foothold on the Asian continent, forcing China to recognise Korean 'independence' and cede Taiwan (Formosa) and the Liaotung peninsula. The Treaty of Portsmouth, which ended the war, allowed Japan to dominate Korea ... However, France, Germany and Russia, in the 'triple intervention', protested that Japanese occupation of Liaotung would pose a constant threat to China, and they forced a deeply humiliated Japan to abandon the peninsula. Another effect of the war was to expose China's soft underbelly to the world, prompting the United States to formulate the Open Door Policy in 1899 in an attempt to prevent anti-competitive policies in China. But this didn't prevent the region from remaining one of fierce rivalries, with the US, Russia and Japan all involved, leading Japan to conclude an alliance with Britain in 1902 to counter Russian predominance in the region. Three years later Japan's victory in the 1904-5 Russo-Japanese War amazed the western world, and encouraged some Asian nationalists (those not directly threatened by Japanese expansion) to regard Japan as the region's natural leader. The Treaty of Portsmouth, which ended the war, allowed Japan to dominate Korea and secure a new sphere of influence in south Manchuria. Maintaining and strengthening this position became a fundamental national commitment. The threat of still further Japanese expansion into China brought Japan into conflict with the US Open Door Policy but the so-called 'blood-debt' of the costly Russo-Japanese war made it difficult even for moderates in Japan to contemplate a return to the pre-war position, despite the pressure to do so from America. Seaborne empire Things didn't move significantly until, after the formal annexation of Korea in 1910, Japan turned its attention to the Nan'yo-Gunto - or South Sea Islands. Japan's presence in the South Seas had formerly been limited to an assortment of Japanese traders and adventurers. But during World War One there were an influential few, engaged in business or military concerns - especially the navy - who advocated a southwards advance [nanshin] rather than the advance northwards [hokushin] favoured by the army. They made it clear that if Japan moved into the South Pacific and south-east Asia, abundant natural resources would become available. ... Japan had been allowed into the 'big power club', and for now she felt secure. Thus, after joining the victorious Allies in World War One, Japan was granted Germany's Asian colonial territories under a League of Nations' mandate. The territories consisted of Tsingtao, on the Chinese Shantung Peninsula, and the formerly German-held islands in Micronesia. At long last it seemed that the unequal treaties and the triple intervention had been avenged - Japan had been allowed into the 'big power club', and for now she felt secure. Talk of further expansion died away. Deadlock Until the late 1920s Japanese leaders generally supported the ideal, if not the practice, of economic liberalism. Their attempts to integrate the Japanese economy into a liberal world order, however, became frustrated in the early 1930s when the depressed western economies placed barriers on Japanese trade to protect their own colonial markets. Many Japanese believed that the structure of international peace embodied in the League of Nations favoured the western nations that controlled the world's resources. Moreover, the west had acted hypocritically by blocking Japanese emigration through anti-Asian immigration laws in the 1920s. ... the idea began to emerge in Japan of an East Asian federation or cooperative body ... As a result, the idea began to emerge in Japan of an East Asian federation or cooperative body, based on traditional pan-Asian ideals of universal brotherhood (hakko ichiu - eight corners of the world under one roof) and an 'Asia for Asians' liberationist rhetoric. The Japanese aggression in Manchuria in 1931 was in this context, and was justified on the basis of the Manchurian-Mongolian seimeisen or 'lifeline' argument - the idea that Japan's economy was deadlocked. Three factors creating this deadlock loomed large - the shortage of raw materials in Japan, the rapidly expanding Japanese population, and the division of the world into economic blocs. Political crises Japan's increasing isolation abroad was exacerbated by political crisis at home. The last party prime minister, Inukai Tsuyoshi, was assassinated in May 1932 by right-wing extremists. Political parties survived but were out of power, as 'national unity cabinets' ended the democratic promise of the 1920s. After an attempted coup d'etat on 26 February 1936, 'national unity' was skewed towards greater military power within the state. Then crucially, in May of that year, a rule that only serving officers could become military ministers was reinstated. This gave the military a veto over the cabinet, and the power to topple governments. ... the climate of assassination, intimidation and propaganda undoubtedly contributed to the breakdown ... After the aristocrat Fumimaro Konoe became prime minister for a second time, in 1940, his brain-child, the Imperial Rule Assistance Association, failed to deliver a popular civilian government capable of checking the military. And when General Hideki Tojo came to power in October 1941 he presided over what was effectively a military-bureaucratic regime. Although, after 1932, there had been a massive upsurge in fundamentalist nationalism, most of Japan's right-wing groups were not as radical as the European fascist movements to which they are often compared. Many embraced moderate politico-economic reform, as well as restorationist monarchical principles that had no parallel in fascist ideologies. None of these groups ever seized power. However, the climate of assassination, intimidation and propaganda undoubtedly contributed to the breakdown of party government and the disappearance of international liberalism from public discourse. The mix of international events and domestic politics was to prove a lethal cocktail. Deterrent diplomacy: Germany The conclusion of the Nazi-Soviet pact in August 1939 was a great shock to pro-German groups in the Japanese government, who regarded the Russians as dangerous. And after German forces overran France and the rest of western Europe in the spring and summer of 1940, the Japanese began to fear that Germany would also seek political control of French Indochina and the Netherlands East Indies. ... the Japanese were worried that German influence was thus affecting their interests in south east Asia. These territories were part of Japan's vital supply route for men and materials to and from the Chinese mainland, and the Japanese were worried that German influence was thus affecting their interests in south east Asia. Neither were they sanguine about Hitler's long-term intentions. Foreign Minister Matsuoka, therefore, advocated strengthening political ties with the Axis, and a 'Tripartite Pact' was concluded in September 1940. At the same time, Japan was faced with an 'ABCD encirclement' of America, Britain, China and the Dutch, all of which threatened Japanese markets and interests in Asia. The Japanese thus felt obliged to strengthen their own position further south, and embarked on a southward advance into French Indochina. This gained in intensity on 22 September 1940, after the German-influenced Vichy government in France gave its agreement to the policy. The Japanese also began negotiations with the Netherlands East Indies to increase the quota of oil exports to Japan in case oil exports from the US ceased. Deterrent diplomacy: Russia and US Relations with the Soviets had taken a down-turn in November 1936, after Japan signed the Anti-Comintern Pact (a pact to thwart international communism) with Germany. They reached their lowest ebb when Japanese and Soviet forces clashed in the Nomonhan sector of the Manchurian-Mongolian border in 1939. To defuse the threat of war with Russia, on 13 April 1941, discretion proved the better part of valour, and Japan signed a neutrality pact with the Soviets. ... the emperor himself was becoming concerned about the hawkish tone of the military ... In June 1941 negotiations with the Netherlands East Indies broke down and on 2 July the Japanese endorsed a further push forward for their 'southward advance' while secretly preparing for war with the Soviets. When Japan occupied southern Indochina that same month, the United States imposed a de facto oil embargo. By early September the emperor himself was becoming concerned about the hawkish tone of the military vis-à-vis negotiations with the United States. But a memorandum issued by US Secretary of State Cordell Hull, on 26 November, demanding that Japan withdraw completely from China and Indochina, played into the hands of Japanese hardliners. On that day the Japanese fleet sailed for Pearl Harbor. Awakening the sleeping giant Illustration of Pearl Harbor attack © The history of Japanese expansionism highlights its basically ad hoc and opportunistic nature, as well as Japan's desire to create an autonomous region under Japanese leadership. Japan's annexation of territory throughout SE Asia in 1941-2 was the immediate cause of war in the Pacific during World War Two. However, it was Japan's insistence on retaining its Chinese territory seen as crucial to its existence by moderates as well as by hardliners and US insistence that Japan relinquish this territory, that created the real tensions between the two. The tripartite pact (between Japan, Germany and Italy) of September 1940 was also a major stumbling block to good relations between the US and Japan. ... there was prejudice and misconception, but the Japanese government was also misled by military factions ... On the US side, there was prejudice and misconception, but the Japanese government was also misled by military factions, who had learned the wrong lessons from their two short imperial wars with China and Russia. They believed that Allied weakness in south east Asia and American isolationist sentiment would mean another short war. This, however, was not to be. What the Japanese had done was to awaken the fury of America, and to set in train a war that would end in their total defeat. Find out more Documentary sources Japan's Decision for War: Records of the 1941 Policy Conferences translated, edited and introduced by Nobutaka Ike (Stanford University Press, 1967) Pearl Harbor and the Coming of the Pacific War: A Brief History with Documents and Essays edited and introduced by Akira Iriye (Bedford, 1999) Books Deterrent Diplomacy: Japan, Germany and the USSR 1935-1940 edited by James William Morley (Columbia University Press, 1976) The Fateful Choice: Japan's Advance into Southeast Asia edited by James W Morley (Columbia University Press, 1980) Japan and the Wider World: From the mid-Nineteenth Century to the Present by Akira Iriye (Longman, 1997) Japanese Imperialism 1894-1945 by WG Beasley (Clarendon Press, 1991) The Origins of the Second World War in Asia and the Pacific by Akira Iriye (Longman, 1987) Pearl Harbor Reexamined: Prologue to the Pacific War edited by Hilary Conroy and Harry Wray (University of Hawaii, 1990) War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War by John Dower (Pantheon Books, 1986) Top About the author Dr Susan Townsend lived in Kobe, Japan, in 1991-2, and now teaches modern Japanese history at the University of Nottingham. Her monograph on the philosopher Miki Kiyoshi, the architect of the philosophical principles of the New Order in Asia, is to be published soon. what is already done , its over , cannot be changed We have made mistakes in the past, may have caused pain to people around us, in this birth and many before. We do not need to think of what is already done, it’s over, cannot be changed. Focus only on creating the right karma now. Creating guilt, self criticism or self hatred about the past will deplete our power, and again create present karma of negative energy. We need the power to create right karma now, so focus only on the now. When return of past karma comes to us as challenging situations or conflicts in relationships, we have to now respond to the situation with stability and positivity. Even if we are constantly receiving negative energy, we have to create and radiate only positive energy. Even if we have one strong negative karmic account, it depletes the soul power and can affect our health and our relationships. Change the quality of that karmic account so that we enjoy all our other beautiful karmic relationships. Everything that we do whether at work or in family, let us set our goals and use our skills and qualities to achieve them. The focus should be on our own journey, not in reference to others around us. If we keep striving to go ahead of others and appear to be in a race, then stress, anxiety, fear and jealousy will be our normal emotions. If we focus only on our goal, then there will be no insecurity, we will be confident and motivated. This stability will keep give us the energy, which will empower us to achieve our goal. When we create insecurity and jealousy we will achieve less than our capacity. It is because we want to go ahead of others, we compromise on our values, principles and ethics. Compromising on values depletes the power of the soul.