Comments by "XSportSeeker" (@XSpImmaLion) on "What Does This Symbol Mean To The Japanese? | ASIAN BOSS" video.

  1. The more you learn about the world, the more you understand how common this is... Schools will always teach mainly the history of it's own country as perceived by the lens of themselves. It's always biased, the views are very often dualist in nature (victors and losers, good and evil, right or wrong), and it always ommits or exacerbates something. It's also always limited because like, we cannot spend 40 years in school, and we don't have enough lifetimes to learn the entire history of the world. Further, if you stop to think about it, globalization is something relatively new. There aren't that many people who have lived a significant ammount of time in more than one country, enough to have learned the history, past and culture of those. If you stop to think about it a bit further, it makes sense. Western and allied countries might see the Swastika as the closes symbol to absolute evil, even generations who have absolute zero direct contact with it. Because it's spread out over all forms of media - movies, series, stories, books, entertainment, games, philosophy, history, politics, etc etc etc. It's associated with negative things like racism, discrimination, totalitarism, dictatorship, war crimes, political propaganda, genocide, indiscriminate killing, horrible human experimentation and others. So the symbol was reappropriated to represent the most negative things that people in western countries can imagine. But obviously, not all countries did the same. So the association just isn't there to start with. If you ask japanese people about the things the symbol is associated with in the west, they'd see them all individually as bad, but the correlation just isn't there. It surprises us because most people don't realize how ingrained it is for ourselves. My last visit to Japan which happened in early 2018, an uncle of mine (it was a 7 family member trip) who's past his 70s and is japanese descendant got very surprised when he saw a Swastika in a stone lantern in some Kyoto street. I explained to him that the symbol had origins previous to WWII and employed in Japan because of Buddhism since ancient times. Conversely, most western people do now know that the Swastika is an ancient religious symbol that was originally connected to prosperity and good luck. So, weird as it may sound for tons of people in western society, it's our idea of the symbol that got corrupted by Nazis, as Nazis were the ones who misappropriated it in the first place.
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