| [+[[JAPAN x CHINA #2 |
| JANUARY 01, 2010 Hi~ I'm the authoress of Half A Millenium, and I must say to begin with, I'm Japanese (if you haven't uh, read all of my lengthy author's notes, that's fine-- I tend to skim those over too) and when I first saw your review I was like: cool; a long one! And then I was like: wait a second, what does THIS have do to with MY story. Which led to me rereading my story all over again to understand where the cause of such emotions came from. Since you left me such a nice and long review, I feel that my response should be nice and long as well! ^^ (Hope you have time--if you haven't noticed, I tend to digress... heheh) Needless to say, I don't feel that your anger is justified. There is a reason why I wrote this story, and more than being some (un)subtle political message or anything realistic at all, it is a story, first and foremost, between two people who happen to be nations, and it is my firm belief that being a person is more important than whatever other positions you may have. But onto the point-by-point rebuttals~ First! I felt that Half a Millenium accurately portrayed the crimes of war. The real emotion is in the syntax and the language, not so much in the detailed description. I want to convery the emotions and the feelings, because (as stated) I'm trying to capture 'Japan' and 'China' as 'Yao' and 'Kiku' as opposed to just nations. Chapters 36-41 in HaM were entirely devoted to the war crimes and happenstances within WWII between China and Japan. Second! It has already been stated both in the historical notes and author's sections about how history is a mystery and we never really know the statistics. I don't think that the Japanese killed LESS people than the Chinese, and I felt that my lengthy historical notes supported such a belief. However, in the same manner, I don't think that the Chinese nationalist party didn't kill (or get killed by) the communists. That's the main point that I'm assuming your anger in "The cause of such anger is that after they have done crimes, they are still accusing us of causing them, the culprit accusing the victims of committing the crime, pushing blame on to us." Is resulting from. Third! I believe that the Japanese were at fault in WWII (which is why they lost, seriously), and that there are still Japanese militarists who believe that they were not at fault. I don't care about the majority, because I agree with you about statistics (namely; no one cares, so long as something happened to someone). But the fact of the matter is, you're doing the same thing, lumping all "the Japanese" into some heavily militaristic group of people who hate on the Chinese and don't take credit for the evils they've committed. There are GREAT!Japanese people, just like there are Nankingnese (is that right?) people who have Japanese friends. I'm sure that there were some prime ministers of Japan who were honestly sorry about the Rape of Nanking, just like I'm sure there were stupid and corrupt and fascist ones as well. Finally (fourth), I don't believe your anger is justified towards the entirety of the Japanese population, or any country/race that has ever done anything bad as a whole (Nazi Germany, Communist Russia, Communist China even!). I mean, I don't hate all of America because they bombed some of my innocent countrypeople, and I have Chinese friends who actually don't care that I'm Japanese. I'm sure that you don't hate all of the Japanese, and maybe you'll see that even the insanely-militaristic ones have one or two (or fifteen) good character traits. I hope you don't think that I'm trying to tell you to forget the past, or forgive anything at all. I think you have all the right to be furious, murderous, heck, at the people who committed crime after crime at Nanking (and elsewhere, of course). But don't spread your anger to a whole group of people--that's just bad. But what am I saying, really? I ramble, I get lost, and when I make a good point, i lose it in twenty-seven bad ones. And I'm really just a college student in the USA trying to get by, a person whose opinions you'll never care about elsewhere. I hope I've at least refuted your points (which were, by the way, directed against all the Japanese, which meant that I just HAD to say something--it's as bad as saying "All Chinese people eat cats") and if nothing else, shown that I am not an overly militaristic crazy-negligent Japanese person. But if I haven't, please do respond--maybe you CAN group all of any nation into a single (negative) stereotype. What do I know? XD |