Category Archives: History

Asia, China, Government, History, Japan, North Korea, Politics, United Nations, United States

Essay: North Korea’s revenge for Japan’s forced occupation of Korea (pre-1945)

ASIA

THE North Korean regime of Kim Jong-un very deliberately chose Japan for its greatest act of provocation to date.

Crucially, it wanted to demonstrate the vulnerability of America’s key ally in East Asia – though Kim was playing on North Koreans’ savagely bitter memories of Imperial Japan’s 35-year occupation of Korea until 1945.

Japanese was imposed as the only permitted language in schools, but few Koreans were able to master it well enough to get good jobs.

Any new businesses were owned and run by the Japanese. Only a handful of Koreans were allowed to go on to higher education.

The Thirties were the height of Emperor Hirohito’s Great East Asia Co-Prosperity sphere, an initiative that purported to benefit all of East Asia but which, in reality, had the Japanese installed as the master race and ultimate beneficiaries.

Koreans were dragooned for forced labour and to be cannon fodder in Hirohito’s armies, while some 200,000 women were turned into sex slaves.

At that time Japan’s armies occupied a vast swathe of territory from Korea to New Guinea, and the troops needed company on garrison duty.

So-called ‘comfort women’ were provided by their caring imperial government – Korean women who were shipped around Hirohito’s Pacific Empire as well as into occupied China. They were not only degraded into forced prostitution, but faced the risk of being bombed by the Allies when they attacked Japanese bases.

After World War II, the ‘comfort women’ were deplorably treated by their own people.

They were regarded as collaborators and shunned. In North Korea – Korea was divided into North and South in the aftermath of the war – a charge of collaboration with the Japanese could mean death.

Imperial Japan neither apologised nor paid compensation. In South Korea today, the legacy of this exploitation is still seen as a humiliation for which Japan has not made amends.

Stoking more than a century of Korean-Japanese antagonism is part of Kim’s plan to split America’s allies. At the same time, he is bolstering his dynasty and ramping up national feeling by reminding North Koreans of the potent myth of his grandfather, Kim Il-sung, as a resistance hero, defying the Japanese.

In response to the North Korean threat, Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is trying to push through changes to his country’s post-war ‘pacifist’ constitution which renounces war and ‘the threat or use of force as a means of settling international disputes.’ And while other players in the regions such as South Korea, China and the Philippines don’t like Kim’s aggression either, they have lurking fears of Japanese rearmament.

What is most alarming for Abe is North Korea’s ability to overfly Japan. Japan’s Patriot missile defence didn’t intercept Kim’s rocket – but it was not because Tokyo chose restraint.

It couldn’t have stopped the missile if it wanted to, because it was launched from a new site in North Korea, most likely from a mobile launcher, and in a very unexpected direction.

This brought the issue of Japan acquiring a nuclear deterrent to the fore.

For millions of Japanese, the legacy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, destroyed by atomic bombs in 1945, is the only argument needed against going nuclear. The Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster in 2011 has made even civil nuclear power controversial.

But North Korea’s apparent impunity and America’s dithering have brought out Japanese hawks who say their country must go nuclear. Washington is against such a move, but after events earlier this week Japan can legitimately ask if it can really rely on its ally to deter an attack.

 

JAPAN’S role in the world economy is huge and its forces – for the purposes of self-defence under that post-war constitution – are impressive. Since 1945, it has built up a large army and air force, and one of the biggest navies in the world (although the U.S. has made sure Japan lacks aircraft carriers capable of offensive action).

Given Japan’s mix of high-tech industry and nuclear power stations, it could make a nuclear bomb quickly. But there is another player in the region – China’s reaction to such a development would be off the scale.

In Europe, in the seven decades since the end of World War II, the idea of a war between the old enemies seems incredible. But in East Asia, while American power has kept the peace between Japan and her old foes, the deep-rooted enmity between the Chinese, Koreans and Japanese is never far from the surface. Disputes over sea borders, for instance, are just one symptom of the distrust between these nations.

So, while there is method and history attached to Kim’s madness, it does leave the Japanese government facing a huge dilemma. Whether the U.S. will still be able to bear influence over the direction that Japan’s military will take – in being able to properly defend itself –  is likely to be an issue that will gain increasing traction in the weeks and months ahead.

  • Appendage
Koreas Timeline

Koreas: Historical timeline

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Arts, History, Religion, Society, Spain

La Sagrada Familia

ANTONI GAUDI

I WONDER if you know the story of Antoni Gaudi, who became known as “God’s architect”. It is one of courage, patience and faith in adversity.

Antoni was born in Catalonia in 1852 and trained as an architect in Barcelona. Inspired by Catalan, Christian and Moorish culture, he developed his own individual style using patterned brick, stone, bright ceramic tiles and distinctive metal work.

From 1882 Gaudi began to devote almost all his time to the design and building of his monumental church in Barcelona dedicated to the Holy Family, La Sagrada Familia.

His last years were dogged by personal sorrows and lack of money to continue the building of La Sagrada Familia, which he saw as “the last great sanctuary of Christendom”, but “God’s architect” did not give up. He held fast, and struggled on with his great endeavour to create “a place of fraternity for all”. He died in June 1926, after being knocked down by a tram and was buried in his unfinished masterpiece.

Today many thousands visit La Sagrada Familia where work continues, funded from sources which share its creator’s vision. It is hoped that the great church will be completed to mark the one hundredth anniversary of Gaudi’s death.

 

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Arts, History, Science

Quantum Leaps: Sir Isaac Newton

1642 – 1727

So many extensive books and articles have been written on the life and impact of Sir Isaac Newton over the last three centuries it is impossible to do his achievements justice in a short entry like this. He is quite simply one of the greatest scientists of all time.

. A Slow Beginning

His early years did not necessarily suggest, however, he would end up as such. Born and bred in the quiet village of Woolsthorpe in Lincolnshire, England, and schooled in the nearby town of Grantham, he was not particularly noted for academic achievements as a child. Even on entry to Trinity College, Cambridge, he did not stand out until, ironically, the University was forced to close during the period 1665-1666 due to the high risk of plague. Newton returned to Woolsthorpe and began two years of remarkable contemplation on the laws of nature and mathematics which would transform the history of human knowledge. Although he published nothing during this period, he formulated and tested many of the scientific principles which would become the basis for his future achievements.

However, it would often be decades before he returned to his earlier discoveries. For example, his ideas on universal gravitation did not re-emerge until he began a controversial correspondence on the subject with Robert Hooke in around 1680. Furthermore, it was not until Edmond Halley challenged Newton in 1684 to find out how planets could have the elliptical orbits described by Johannes Kepler, and Newton replied he already knew, that he fully articulated his law of gravitation. Yet he had begun work on the subject back in the 1660s in Woolsthorpe after famously seeing an apple fall from a tree and wondering if the force which propelled it towards the earth could be applied elsewhere in the universe.

Following his declaration to Halley, Newton was forced to recalculate his proof having lost his original jottings, and the result was published in Newton’s most famous work Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687). This law of gravitation proposed that all matter attracts other matter with a force related to the combination of their masses, but this attraction is weakened with distance, indeed, in inverse proportion to the square of their distances apart. This universal principle applied just as equally to the relationship between two small particles on earth as it did between the sun and the planets, and Newton was able to use it to explain Kepler’s elliptical orbits.

. Newton’s Laws of Motion

In the same work, Newton built on earlier observations made by Galileo and expressed three laws of motion which have been at the heart of modern physics ever since. The ‘law of inertia’, states that an object at rest or in motion in a straight line at a constant speed will carry on in the same state until it meets another force. The second stated that a force could change the motion of an object according to the product of its masses and its acceleration, vital in understanding dynamics. The third declares that the force or action with which an object meets another object is met by an equal force or reaction.

Aside from the wide-ranging uses for the laws Newton outlined in the Principia, the important point is that all historical speculation of different mechanical principles for the earth from the rest of the cosmos were cast aside in favour of a single, universal system. It was clear that simple mathematical laws could explain a huge range of seemingly disconnected physical facts, providing science with the straightforward explanations it had been seeking since the time of the ancients. Newton’s insistence on the use of mathematical expression of physical occurrences also underlined the standard for modern physics to follow.

. Further Achievements

Newton achieved major breakthroughs in other areas too. His proof that white light was made up of all the colours of the spectrum was outlined in his 1672 work New Theory about Light and Colours. In Opticks (1704), he also articulated his influential (if partially inaccurate) particle or corpuscle theory of light.

Another achievement significant to mathematics was his invention of the ‘binomial theorem’.

Newton had a practical side too, inventing the reflecting telescope in the 1660s. This new instrument bypassed the focusing problems caused by chromatic aberration in the refracting telescope of the type Galileo had created.

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