Before this is moved to off-topic, let me remind you that there are significant oil and gas reserves offshore from these islands under dispute between Japan and China.The Japanese original is vague on who "we" is, but the English translation tactfully refers to mankind as a whole.
Families come from all over Japan in a pilgrimage to visit the peace shrine. They look through the Cenotaph to the "A-Dome", the old Industrial Promotion Hall. This six-story building that was directly below the blast, 600 meters above, and for that reason survived as a gaunt half-wrecked structure when almost everything else was flattened instantly for a radius of two kilometres.
They walk through the museum in total silence learning the details of what happened on August 1945, and the gruesome aftermath. The learn about the 2000 degree heat shock that lasted three seconds and incinerated anybody in the epicentre instantly, but left those in the suburbs to die more slowly with burnt skin hanging from their bodies.
They read the day-by-day diaries of the survivors, and the second shock of radiation a week or so later as they came out in a rash of purple spots, and started to vomit their inner organs. Some 140,000 were dead within five months, mostly civilians, including Korean and Chinese forced labourers.
This is what the Japanese are brought up on, so different from the "Patriotic Education" campaign in China for the last twenty years. Beijing's policy has whipped up revanchist hatred against the Japanese for the sins of the 1930s and 1940s, no doubt to divert popular wrath away from a Communist Party tarnished by corruption.
Japan's national ideology is pacifist, and this is written into Article 9 of its constitution, which states that "the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes."
This peace complex adds a strange twist to events. It inhibits Japan as a muscular China presses its claim on the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands -- a cluster of uninhabited rocks near Taiwan -- and as Chinese warships push deep into Japanese waters.
With PO, these disputes will become more dangerious. If it is the opinion of foreign policy experts that the two superpowers of the East are close to war now, what is it going to be like a decade or two down the line as we enter the long arc of industrialism decline?
As I have said many times before, preparing for a world war MUST be part of your preps.
Sticking your head in the sand is NOT an option!
