Japanese History Quotes
The Emperor was then only 20 years old and it is doubtful that this was actually written by him personally or even that he was the originator or driver of this policy—probably the strongest statement regarding education of any nation in history. Nonetheless, it is a great quotation on the role of education in the nation. He even ordained that all girls should be educated—an achievement which had not been achieved by the majority of countries 140 years later in 2012. Most incredible about this quotation is that the Emperor made everything else of importance subordinate to the education of children." Meiji the Great
This fact held true through an unbroken line of 20 emperors since the country’s founding. Bu looking at this 1915 quotation we see what an incredible trauma and shock the defeat of Japan was for a people who could not even conceive of such a thing. The reason the historian placed quotation marks around ‘has never once felt the shame of foreign conquest.’ Was because it was a common saying and phrase used by Japanese.
In one of the great American disgraces, during WWII, American citizens of Japanese ethnicity were forced into an “evacuation” into camps for the duration of the war. German American citizens were not similarly treated. There was not a single act of sabotage or anti war propaganda by Japanese Americans before (or after) the “evacuation.” Many German Americans were so involved but never interned, but one of the major motivations was to get the valuable farmland owned by many Japanese on the West Coast. (The Japanese American citizens could not work or earn the money to pay the mortgages or taxes on their property and the white Californians were able to acquire the land for very little. Many believe this was the real motivation for the Japanese American incarceration as there was none such on the East Coast where there were few Japanese American land holdings.
