Regarding the Jan. 28 article "Tamogami out of ASDF, not out of range": It irritates me that the former chief of staff (retired Gen. Toshio Tamogami) of the Japanese Air Self-Defense Force can get away with (the sort of comments that led to his ouster). Why should we give legitimacy to his arguments?
I served with the Red Cross in China during the 1930s and saw firsthand how Japanese soldiers torched and killed civilians in Nanking and Peking. He claims that Japan was not an aggressor and that England was. No doubt England was an aggressor in the 1800s for resources and empire. But by the time the 1920 naval agreement was in place, along with the establishment of the League of Nations, the generally accepted principle among Western nations was no more land grabbing.
The man is in denial. How many people would really accept listening to an argument that the Holocaust was a fabrication? The world has thousands of hours of eyewitness accounts from Japanese soldiers about atrocities committed in Japan. No matter how loud a lie is uttered, that doesn't make it true.
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