this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2023
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The Japanese did some pretty radical things during the occupation. It's interesting to see the ripple effects of these policies so far into the future.
Japan also never apologised and pretends they did nothing wrong.
Japan has actually apologized several times, and then immediately declared they had nothing to apologize for. Which IMHO is worse.
Are they afraid of reparations or something? I don't understand. Like, Canada apologized to the native americans and it wasn't an expensive or embarassing process. I won't say native folks were made whole from the process, but it was a formal acknowledgement. Any idea what the resistance is?
That's precisely the point. Apologizing is cheap, actually working with Indigenous communities, upholding their sovereignty to their ancestral lands, actively helping them heal from the multi generation wide effects of what they were forced to go through, listening to them and acting on their feedback, and actually giving them rights in general is expensive, which is why we haven't done that. We basically said "sorry aboot that genocide eh?" And unilaterally declared the Indigenous rights issue solved.
I hope you didn't get the wrong impression of how I view Truth and Reconciliation. All I'm saying is that the government acknowledged some of their crimes.
The Japanese state, won't even do that for the Koreans.
It's more like a wound that never healed than just ripples - early South Korean leaders were people who had formerly collaborated with the Japanese, and it showed in the way they treated their people. It's only relatively recently that South Korea became what anyone would call a liberal democracy.