Japan
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I have to admit the title might be a bit harsh but I hope it got your attention. Paul McCartney’s arrival at Tokyo’s Narita International Airport on January 16, 1980, marked his first visit to Japan since the Beatles tour of 1966. The occasion was a planned 11-city concert tour by his band Wings. Instead,…
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Like their southern neighbors, the USA, the Canadians also put their fellow Canadians,albeit from Japanese descend, in intern camps. However it appears that history has forgotten this chapter. Unlike their Southern neighbors the Canadians kept restrictions for their Japanese-Canadian citizens in place for several years after the war. I am not saying that I don’t…
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The true measure of any society can be found in how it treats its most vulnerable members. The American Catholic missionaries in Tapaz,Philippines probably could not be specified as vulnerable but the people they cared for were. additionally the missionaries themselves did not pose any threat themselves to the Japanese occupiers. The Hopevale Martyrs were Christian martyrs who…
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A bright Sunday in December Japanese planes blazed out of the sky to strafe and bomb an American warship while it lay at anchor. You’d be forgiven to think this was the Pearl Harbor attack, but you’d be wrong. The sinking of the USS Panay is pretty much forgotten now. But it was one of the…
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How do you fight an enemy that is not afraid to kill themselves? In the air they had the Kamikaze pilots on the ground they had troops carrying out Banzai charges, how can you fight an enemy that has absolutely no regard for life? Not even their own lives. How do you fight an army…
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Tani was born 22 December 1882 in Okayama Prefecture. He graduated from the 15th class of the Imperial Japanese Army Academy in 1903 and from the 24th class of the Army War College, where he became an instructor in 1924. The College used his texts on strategy and tactics as required readings. He saw service…
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On October 7, 1940, Lieutenant Commander Arthur McCollum of the Office of Naval Intelligence submitted a memo to Navy Captains Walter Anderson and Dudley Knox (whose endorsement is included in the following scans). Captains Anderson and Knox were two of President Roosevelt’s most trusted military advisors. McCollum wrote that it would be in the interest…
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Bat bombs were an experimental World War II weapon developed by the United States. The bomb consisted of a bomb-shaped casing with over a thousand compartments, each containing a hibernating Mexican free-tailed bat with a small, timed incendiary bomb attached. The bomb was designed to terrorize the people of Japan in a most unexpected way. Dr. Lytle S. Adams, like most Americans at…
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The Jewel Voice Broadcast was the radio broadcast in which Japanese Emperor Hirohito read out the Imperial Rescript on the Termination of the War (, announcing to the Japanese people that the Japanese Government had accepted the Potsdam Declaration demanding the unconditional surrender of the Japanese military at the end of World War II. This speech was broadcast at noon Japan Standard Time on August 15, 1945, after the Battle of Okinawa, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and…
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The text of this ‘good luck flag’, which belonged to the Japanese General Shunkichi Ikeda, reads: ’A tiger walks 1,000 miles, but always returns again’. A group of Japanese women from his place of birth embroidered this thousand-stitch saying, meant to bring him luck and prosperity. Whenever the General went into battle with his troops…
History of Sorts 
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