Hearted Youtube comments on The Japan Reporter (@TheJapanReporter) channel.
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As a German, it's always interesting to see how distinct the approaches are with which both of our nations have dealt with our past. On Monday, I will travel to France, where my parents, who are Germans, have retired to. A country that Germany had occupied and humiliated and forced to become complicit in its actions in WWII, but also attacked in two then-recent wars before. one of which cost a sizeable part of the population their lives. A country supposed to be a kind of "hereditary enemy" but today is one of the closest friends on an international level, with open borders that make it virtually pointless to quarrel about who controls which plot of ground.
A bit over 50 years ago, a German chancellor who had himself been persecuted by the Nazis, who had himself been a victim, who had lost his birth identity to persecution and adopted a new one to survive, accepted responsibility, as German chancellor for crimes committed in Poland. He himself was not among those involved, but as head of government, he represented the entire nation, everyone, including the guilty. When visiting the Warsaw Ghetto memorial, he dropped to his knees. As one German commentator put it "Then he, who doesn't need to, kneels for all those who'd need to, but do not kneel, because they dare not, cannot, or cannot dare to kneel. Then he acknowledges a guilt that is not his own, and asks for forgiveness that he himself does not need. Then he kneels there for Germany."
He himself later said " At the abyss of German history and under the weight of millions of murdered people, I did what people do when language fails."
The interesting thing is that the Japanese article on that gesture is but an afterthought and half of it deals with the criticism by the German opposition of the time. More, where the English article on the incident lists a visit by Yukio Hatoyama to Seodaemun Prison in 2015 as a (much later) parallel, that parallel isn't mentioned in the Japanese Wikipedia article, either. It is as if accepting your country has done wrong is anathema.
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