Before I show the conversation with Tamaki Matsuoka, I want to provide a little background on the woman who has spent more than 30 years of her adult life finding out what happened in Nanking during the Nanking Massacre of 1937/1938. Among other things, she interviewed over 250 former Japanese soldiers who were stationed in Nanking during that period and over 300 Chinese survivors of the Nanking Massacre. By correlating their stories, she established irrevocably that the Nanking Massacre was one of the most horrific atrocities ever occurred in the history of the human race. During an approximately six-week period beginning on December 13, 1937 just in the city of Nanking, the then capital of China, the Japanese Imperial Army slaughtered approximately 300,000 Chinese (most were civilians, including women and children) and raped approximately 20,000 women and girls (including great grandmothers and young girls less than 10 years old).
She started on this project on her own when she was an elementary school teacher in Osaka, Japan. At first working alone on this project on weekends, holidays, summer breaks with funds initially from her own savings. Eventually, she wrote several books, including the 2002 book The Battle of Nanking – Searching for Forbidden Memories, which was awarded the “Japan Congress of Journalists Prize” that is given to distinguished journalists, and the 2016 book Torn Memories of Nanking that summarized her lifelong work. She also produced numerous documentaries, including the award winning documentary with a title “Torn Memories of Nanjing,” similar to the title of her later 2016 book.
Below is a conversation capturing hours of discussion that I had with Tamaki since we became friends 12 years ago. My questions are in regular font, and Tamaki’s answers are in slightly bigger font in Italics.
Tale of Two Standards in World Politics – Part I
The central image of the U.S. government of itself is that it is a model government for the world to admire and mimic. It is a gold standard in terms of governance of the country with respect to democracy and human rights, and in terms of world peace and addressing the world’s critical problems. In a sense we as Americans as well as the people of the world have more of less accepted this characterization of the U.S. and the American people, because for more than half a century from the end of WWII to about the beginning of the 21st century, so many of us in the U.S. and in the rest of the world have often tried to pursue this so-called American dream without seriously thinking what was this American dream, whether reality matches this depicted dream, whether it has been achieved, and more importantly how far is the actual U.S. government from this gold standard.
This article looks more carefully into the American government and its actual practice during its existence in the last 250 years so that we can have a better benchmark to assess the actual American government. For our assessment, we will consider the following metrics:
Part I of this two-part article discusses the first two metrics of democracy and human rights. Part II discusses the other two metrics of peace and addressing world problems. Read More »