I am personally not sure if the number ‘20,000' of the Jewish refugees in the article is correct. Anyway, thank you very much for the kind words, Professor Shiloni. (Lily)
Haaretz(http://www.haaretz.com)
Heads must roll: There's only one way to repair Israeli-Japanese ties,19 August 2013
Only the firing of the premier’s designated interactive media chief can repair the damage in relations with Japan that his words have caused.
by Ben-Ami Shiloni
Daniel Seaman, former head of the Government Press Office and deputy director-general for information in the Ministry of Public Diplomacy and Diaspora Affairs, the man who the prime minister wanted to appoint as director of the interactive media unit in the National Information Directorate, aroused a storm in Israel and Japan when he wrote on his Facebook page that “I am sick of the Japanese, ‘Human Rights’ and ‘Peace’ groups the world over holding their annual self-righteous commemorations for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki victims. [The bombings of] Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the consequence of Japanese aggression. You reap what you sow... Instead, they should be commemorating the estimated 50 million Chinese, Korean … and other victims of Japanese imperial aggression and genocide.”
Seaman does not seem to be aware that the message of the memorial services in Hiroshima and Nagasaki is not nationalist. They do not include a condemnation of the Americans who dropped the atom bombs on the cities, nor a justification of the goals of the war. On the contrary, their message is pacifist and anti-nationalist, and includes condemnations of militarism, of the war and mainly of nuclear weapons.
For many years the ambassadors of the United States and Israel refrained from participating in those memorial ceremonies. But when Israel's ambassador to Tokyo, Nissim Ben-Shitrit, decided to participate in the memorial service in Hiroshima in August 2009, his action was praised in the Japanese media. A year later the U.S. ambassador to Japan, John Roos (who is Jewish and worships in the synagogue in Tokyo) also began to participate in these ceremonies. When the earthquake and tsunami struck northeastern Japan in 2011, Israel was among the first countries to mobilize to offer assistance. The field hospital set up by the Israel Defense Forces in the disaster area and later donated to Japan aroused feelings of appreciation and gratitude. Many Japanese today admire Israel for its cultural and scientific achievements.
In the Second World War the Japanese were cruel and perpetrated war crimes in China and other places in Asia. But, unlike the Germans, they did not operate out of an ideology of genocide. Koreans and Chinese who cooperated with them were treated fairly and integrated into the Japanese army. When Japan's ally, Nazi Germany, murdered six million Jews, Japan saved all the 20,000 Jewish refugees from Europe who fled to it and its occupied territories.
In the Hiroshima district there is now a museum to commemorate the Jewish Holocaust, which is visited annually by thousands of students. Anne Frank's diary was a bestseller in Japan for years. Japan was also the first country in Asia to establish diplomatic relations with Israel, in 1952, relations that have never been severed or suspended. The State of Israel was convinced that postwar Japan is a democratic and peace-loving nation, and on that basis it sent then-President Chaim Herzog to participate in the 1989 funeral of Emperor Hirohito, who was the emperor during the war.
The question as to whether there was a need to drop two atom bombs on Japan in order to convince it to surrender in 1945 is a controversial one. Various historians point to the fact that Japan was already willing to surrender under certain conditions, which were in any case granted to it later, and that the declaration of war against Japan by the Soviet Union frightened the Japanese more than the atom bombs. General Douglas MacArthur and Admiral Chester Nimitz, who conducted the U.S. war against Japan, said after the war that the atom bombs were not necessary for bringing about Japan's surrender.
Daniel Seaman is not the man who can decide whether the atom bombs were proper or necessary. The storm aroused by his words in Japan endangers the good relations today between Japan and Israel. Only a final and declared cancellation of his appointment is likely to repair the damage he has caused. Israel's new ambassador to Japan, Ruth Cahanov, who is about to submit her credentials to the emperor of Japan in a few days from now, will have to repair what another civil servant has spoiled.
・The writer is a professor emeritus of Japanese Studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and a member of the Israel National Academy of Science.
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