70 Years of Selective History after the Pacific War

What are the prospects for the next 70?

By Jean-Pierre Lehmann, March 10, 2015 | http://www.theglobalist.com/70-years-of-selective-history-after-the-pacific-war/In her movingly beautiful novel dealing with Japan from the mid-1930s to the mid-1960s, “The Gods of Heavenly Punishment” (2014), author Jennifer Cody Epstein describes how people tended to divide life between “before” and “after”: before and after the war.
When I was living in Japan in the 1950s, I remember the coinage and frequent usage of the term “apure” – this was derived from the French term “après guerre” and was meant to convey the mood of the “new” Japan after 1945.
Already in his outstanding book, “Year Zero: A History of 1945″ (2013), Ian Buruma, dealing with both the Atlantic and the Pacific Wars, demonstrated how things were not that simple.
As he shows, the closure of Auschwitz did not immediately result in the end of anti-Semitism in Germany or elsewhere in Europe.
“Year Zero” also covers in gruesome detail the atrocities committed by the Japanese in China – the mass rapes, the activities at Unit 731 in then Japanese-occupied Manchuria, where vivisection was carried out on prisoners of war amid experimentations in biological and chemical warfare.
There have been waves of water under the bridge in the past 70 years, though they have flowed quite differently in Europe and East Asia. http://www.theglobalist.com/70-years-of-selective-history-after-the-pacific-war/