Christopher Columbus

Charles Chu

Rethinking the obvious @ http://thepolymathproject.com

Sep 8

Christopher Columbus and the Manufacture of Identity

When I first visited Japan a decade ago, I was surprised to learn that Japanese schools did not teach students about the systematic murder of several hundred thousand Chinese civilians at the 1937 “Nanking Massacre”.

Mariko Oi at the BBC says that, as a student, her textbook only had a single footnote about the event:

“There was one page on other events leading up to the Sino-Japanese war in 1937 — including one line, in a footnote, about the massacre that took place when Japanese forces invaded Nanjing — the Nanjing Massacre, or Rape of Nanjing.”