Recently, Elizabeth van Kampen commented on a post in this blog.

She provided a link to her site, and I checked it out. It is a wonderful site and I strongly urge anyone reading this to check it out. Spend some time there and learn some real history. Here is the site:

Dutch East Indies

Elizabeth is true hero as she tries to get down as much history as possible so that we never forget the past, and can therefore learn from it.

At a different site, in an essay entitled, How I Lost My Best Friend, Elizabeth recalls the fate of her father during the war.

There she notes:

I have seen very brave women who gave me reason to stay optimistic. I have seen little boys been taken away from their mothers and been sent to a camp for men only. They stood there on a truck, 10 years old leaving their mothers while their fathers were somewhere else maybe in Burma or maybe dead. I have seen women losing their minds through all their grieves I have seen some girls and young women been taken away as “Comfort women” to the Japanese brothels. I have seen how women have been beaten up so badly that almost all their bones were broken. I can still hear the screaming in my head, we all had to stand there to watch. I have seen three women been hanged 12 hours long under the burning tropical sun, with their hands tied up on their backs. We had to watch all the time with tears in our eyes. I have seen it daily how little children died of hunger and mothers who stood there with no tears left in their eyes when their dead children were carried out of the camp.

Elizabeth also notes though, at the end of her essay:

But of course I will never blame the Japanese people for what Japanese war criminals have done in Asia. I do understand very well that the Japanese people suffered too during WW II.

Please take a chance to review what Elizabeth has written. I am sincerely honored that someone like Elizabeth would even take the time to read something written on my blog. It makes me aware of the power of the Internet, and that when I put something down on this blog, I need to take it serious because I don’t know who might read it and form an opinion about Japan based on something I’ve said. Suddenly I feel a stronger sense of responsibility and a desire to do strive even harder to make this a good blog.

While nobody was watching, an interim report drafted by a study group under the Japanese Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications has set down guidelines for regulation of the Internet in Japan which, according to one blogger, would extend as far as personal blogs and homepages.

This sounds serious; here is the link.

According to a recent article in the WSJ blogs are more popular in Japan than they are in America.

The article states that as of March, America has an estimated 12 million blogs, Japan 8.7 million.

Also noted was the phenomena of blogs that are so popular they invade other media outlets ranging from comics to books to movies. Some of the examples presented in the article were entertaining. Here’s one:

“Six years ago, a Japanese businessman went online to vent about his domineering wife. Blogging daily under the pen name “Kazuma,” he detailed how she grabbed food from his plate, sent him shopping in a typhoon, and made him sleep in the living room when he caught a cold.”

See:
How Demon Wife Became a Media Star And Other Tales of the ‘Blook’ in Japan
by Yukari Iwatani Kane
http://tinyurl.com/nstxf