Word: japanized
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...city. The 61-year-old, running for his fourth term as mayor, was shot twice in the back near his campaign office at around 7:50 p.m. local time, and was taken to the hospital, where he remains in critical condition. Itoh's heart had stopped, according to NHK, Japan's national broadcaster, but there has been no further news about his condition as of midnight...
...Police apprehended Itoh's attacker moments after the shooting. They've identified him as Tetsuya Shiroo, 59, and said he was a senior member of a gang affiliated with Yamaguchi-gumi, Japan's biggest yakuza criminal syndicate. Police say Shiroo admitted to the shooting upon his arrest. His motive remains unclear: local media are reporting that Shiroo had a personal grudge against the mayor and his local government, but at least one anti-nuclear activist wondered whether there might be a political motive...
...very young pilots - many kamikaze were university students - are lionized in gleaming oil paintings and bronze statues, but the museum does nothing to contextualize the waste of their lives. The kamikaze, after all, did nothing to stop the American war machine from bearing down on Japan. Sending them to their death as suicide bombers was as brutally absurd as the "bulletproof" vest on display in the museum that is nothing more than a cloth shirt stitched with coins from shrines. It's bad enough to lie to foreign countries; to perpetuate that lie to your own people seems unforgivable...
...kamikaze lie will be given a new lease on life next month when a new movie, I Go to Die For You, takes romanticization of the kamikaze to the big screen. It was written by Shintaro Ishihara, the governor of Tokyo and one of Japan's most nationalistic politicians. That such a film would play in the mainstream and be made with technical support from today's Japanese military, which you'd think would steer clear of this particular subject, will be grist for the mill to those warning of a rise in "dangerous" nationalism in Japan...
...reality, there's no such rise. The vast majority of Japanese remain knee-jerk pacifists, and you'd have a difficult time finding anyone among Japan's disaffected youth willing to die for much of anything, much less for the emperor. But the past still matters. It would be right - to Japan's wartime victims and to Japan itself - to have a memorial that honors the war dead without honoring the ideology that cost them their lives. As peaceful a square as any you might find in Tokyo, Yasukuni shrine could be that place, but only with a radically different...