Liberal Japan

[This is a modified form of a message recently sent to the Community in Japan group forum.]

Yes, that’s right. Hold your breaths everyone. A gaijin has spoken on the issue, and we know how important that is. Wait, are you saying if a single gaijin speaks his mind on the matter, it doesn’t really matter so much? Well, let’s see …

Recently I was looking at old entries in the Japan Probe blog and came across this one, which perhaps should be called, “let’s ask the gaijin about the Nanking Massacre”.

I’m referring to the first video presented there, which can also be accessed at YouTube here.

I watched the video and was at least a little disturbed. First, some preliminaries.

About the Nanking massacre:
1. I’ve never studied the issue.
2. I was under the impression that the international consensus is that it happened and was bad.
3. I thought deniers were only in Japan, and that their denial was similar to Apollo moon landing denials. (For example, deniers that the moon landing point out inconsistencies with photos taken of the moon landing, such as shadows being in the wrong place and so on. Or the American flag seemingly blowing in the wind even though there is no wind on the moon. From what I’ve briefly seen of the Nanking Massacre deniers, they seem to use the same techniques. They argue photos were faked and so on by looking at shadows …)

About Dave Spector:
1. I don’t know much about him.
2. He’s entitled to his opinion.
3. He’s also entitled to earn a living as best he can in Japan.
(In other words, my intention is *not* to criticize him, personally, but the program.)

Now, if you watch the video this is what it amounts to:

We can show you that we Japanese are right that the Nanking massacre didn’t happen. We will will do this by presenting our case to the gaijin, and showing that even a gaijin when listening to our arguments can’t help but to agree with us Japanese that the Nanking Massacre didn’t take place.

This is identical to the old Life Cereal commercial “hey, Mikey.”

If you’ve never seen the commercial, then you can view it here.

Now in our present case the role of Mikey is played by the gaijin.

Gaijin will get a spoonful (or earful) of arguments explaining why the Nanking Massacre didn’t happen, and then let’s see how gaijin reacts. If gaijin decides the Nanking Massacre isn’t really a fact, then surly it mustn’t be.

Basically the video ends with Dave Spector agreeing that the Nanking Massacre mustn’t have taken place. (Is Spector being sarcastic?)

You know, surly there are about a thousand more useful ways this issue could be handled.

Moreover, why does the gaijin have to be so much of a … well … gaijin? I guess a zainichi Chinese person wouldn’t have done? There are certainly a lot of them around.