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markfrankel18

Sea of Japan vs. East Sea: The school textbook change that has Japan furious at Virginia. - 1 views

www.slate.com/...ge_that_has_japan_furious.html

TOK textbook history language

shared by markfrankel18 on 12 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • he Washington Post reports that an “obscure textbook bill that elicited threats from Japan and drew busloads of Korean activists to the Capitol was headed Wednesday to Gov. Terry McAuliffe for his signature.” The bill requires all new Virginia textbooks to mention that the Sea of Japan is also known as the “East Sea.” McAuliffe promised to make the change on the campaign trail while attempting to win votes from Northern Virginia’s growing Korean community, who claim that the name was wrongly popularized while Korea was under Japanese occupation. It has predictably irritated Tokyo, with Japan’s ambassador to the U.S. warning that it could harm Japan-Virginia business relations. New York and New Jersey are reportedly considering similar bills.
Lawrence Hrubes

Why Japan Surrendered | GarethCook - 1 views

garethcook.net/why-did-japan-surrender

TOK history revision evidence war Japan America WW2 ethics

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 18 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 18 Oct 13
     
    "In recent years, however, a new interpretation of events has emerged. Tsuyoshi Hasegawa has marshaled compelling evidence that it was the Soviet entry into the Pacific conflict, not Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that forced Japan's surrender. His interpretation could force a new accounting of the moral meaning of the atomic attack. It also raises provocative questions about nuclear deterrence, a foundation stone of military strategy in the postwar period. And it suggests that we could be headed towards an utterly different understanding of how, and why, the Second World War came to its conclusion."
markfrankel18

Disputing Korean Narrative on 'Comfort Women,' a Professor Draws Fierce Backlash - The ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-comfort-women-park-yu-ha.html

TOK history

shared by markfrankel18 on 19 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • women” in 2013, Park Yu-ha wrote that she felt “a bit fearful” of how it might be received. After all, she said, it challenged “the common knowledge” about the wartime sex slaves.But even she was not prepared for the severity of the backlash.In February, a South Korean court ordered Ms. Park’s book, “Comfort Women of the Empire,” redacted in 34 sections where it found her guilty of defaming former comfort women with false facts. Ms. Park is also on trial on the criminal charge of defaming the aging women, widely accepted here as an inviolable symbol of Korea’s suffering under colonial rule by Japan and its need for historical justice, and she is being sued for defamation by some of the women themselves.
Lawrence Hrubes

This Is The True Size Of Africa - 0 views

www.filmsforaction.org/...his-is-the-true-size-of-africa

maps geography perception

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 12 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • How large is Africa compared to the United States, or Western Europe? Most inhabitants of the latter places might guess it is a little larger, but few would have any idea of the scale of the difference. This has led German graphics designer Kai Krause to produce this map to shake people's perceptions a little.
  • Any attempt to map a spherical planet onto a flat map will involve distortions of size, shape or both. There is a passionate debate among cartographers about the best way to hang the world on a wall, but most agree that the most common maps we get our sense of the world from are very bad ways to do it. The problem is that these maps exaggerate the size of the countries at high  latitudes, and shrink places near the equator - leading to a perception that Europe is larger than South America, to pick just one example among many.
  • Africa, which spans the equator, fares particularly badly on these sorts of projections: Krause says, "Africa is so mind-numbingly immense, that it exceeds the common assumptions by just about anyone I ever met: it contains the entirety of the USA, all of China, India, as well as Japan and pretty much all of Europe as well - all combined!”  Some have argued that since people associate size with importance this encourages the already strong tendency of the world's wealthiest nations to disregard those who live in the tropics. 
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC News - WWII fire-bombing of Tokyo by US remembered 70 years on - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-asia-31809257

history memory ethics

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 10 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Seventy years ago on the night of 9-10 March, in the Japanese capital, 334 American B-29 bombers dropped thousands of tonnes of incendiary bombs on the city's crowded wooden neighbourhoods. They started a fire storm that burned at over 1,000 degrees and killed more than 100,000 people.It was an event that dwarfed even the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, yet it's been all but forgotten around the world - even in Japan.
Lawrence Hrubes

Why Are Some Cultures More Individualistic Than Others? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...dividualistic-than-others.html

TOK SocialScience human sciences culture indigenous knowledge systems anthropology

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 04 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • AMERICANS and Europeans stand out from the rest of the world for our sense of ourselves as individuals. We like to think of ourselves as unique, autonomous, self-motivated, self-made. As the anthropologist Clifford Geertz observed, this is a peculiar idea.People in the rest of the world are more likely to understand themselves as interwoven with other people — as interdependent, not independent. In such social worlds, your goal is to fit in and adjust yourself to others, not to stand out. People imagine themselves as part of a larger whole — threads in a web, not lone horsemen on the frontier. In America, we say that the squeaky wheel gets the grease. In Japan, people say that the nail that stands up gets hammered down.
  • These are broad brush strokes, but the research demonstrating the differences is remarkably robust and it shows that they have far-reaching consequences. The social psychologist Richard E. Nisbett and his colleagues found that these different orientations toward independence and interdependence affected cognitive processing. For example, Americans are more likely to ignore the context, and Asians to attend to it. Show an image of a large fish swimming among other fish and seaweed fronds, and the Americans will remember the single central fish first. That’s what sticks in their minds. Japanese viewers will begin their recall with the background. They’ll also remember more about the seaweed and other objects in the scene.Another social psychologist, Hazel Rose Markus, asked people arriving at San Francisco International Airport to fill out a survey and offered them a handful of pens to use, for example four orange and one green; those of European descent more often chose the one pen that stood out, while the Asians chose the one more like the others.
  • In May, the journal Science published a study, led by a young University of Virginia psychologist, Thomas Talhelm, that ascribed these different orientations to the social worlds created by wheat farming and rice farming. Rice is a finicky crop. Because rice paddies need standing water, they require complex irrigation systems that have to be built and drained each year. One farmer’s water use affects his neighbor’s yield. A community of rice farmers needs to work together in tightly integrated ways. Not wheat farmers. Wheat needs only rainfall, not irrigation. To plant and harvest it takes half as much work as rice does, and substantially less coordination and cooperation. And historically, Europeans have been wheat farmers and Asians have grown rice.Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story The authors of the study in Science argue that over thousands of years, rice- and wheat-growing societies developed distinctive cultures: “You do not need to farm rice yourself to inherit rice culture.”
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