21 February 2014

Vandalism in Japan


The BBC has an article about Japan:
More than a hundred copies of Anne Frank's Diary of a Young Girl have been vandalized in public libraries in Tokyo, Japan's capital, officials say. Pages have been ripped from at least 265 copies of the diary and other related books, they added. It is not clear who is behind the vandalism. A Jewish rights group in the US has called for a police investigation.
Anne Frank's diary was written during World War Two, while the teenager hid from the Nazis in occupied Amsterdam in Holland. For many Japanese, the book forms the sole basis of their knowledge about the Jewish holocaust, the BBC's Rupert Wingfield-Hayes reports from Tokyo. But what might have motivated the attacks remains a mystery. Japan has no history of Jewish settlement and no real history of anti-Semitism, our correspondent adds.
Toshihiro Obayashi, a library official in West Tokyo's Suginami area, said: "Each and every book which comes up under the index of Anne Frank has been damaged at our library."
The Simon Wiesenthal Centre, a global Jewish human rights organization, said in a statement that it was shocked and concerned by the incidents, and called for the authorities to investigate. "The geographic scope of these incidents strongly suggest an organized effort to denigrate the memory of the most famous of the million and a half Jewish children murdered by the Nazis in the Holocaust," associate dean Abraham Cooper said. "Anne Frank is studied and revered by millions of Japanese," Cooper added. "Only people imbued with bigotry and hatred would seek to destroy Anne's historic words of courage, hope and love in the face of impending doom."
The book was added to the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation's Memory of the World Register in 2009. Anne Frank's diary was translated into Japanese in December of 1952 and topped the bestseller lists in 1953.
Professor Rotem Kowner, an expert in Japanese history and culture at Israel's University of Haifa, told the BBC that the book has been exceptionally popular and successful in Japan.
He says that, in terms of absolute numbers of copies of the book sold, Japan is second only to the US, and adds that, for Japanese readers, the story transcended its Jewish identity to symbolize more powerfully the struggle of youth for survival. "In the 1950s and the 1960s, there were competitions in which Japanese teenagers had to reflect on the experience of Anne Frank. Thousands of teenagers sent their submissions to such competitions," Professor Kowner says. "It was a book about a war tragedy and the way youth experienced war... For many Japanese, they would view this as a tragic development," he added.
Rico says the Japanese are clueless; they don't remember who started World War Two (but the Chinese do)...

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