Lotsa stuff

I finally got my camera hooked up to my computer. I didn't think I had any new pictures but it turns out that I took some and forgot. The problem with putting them up all at once is that it's too much work to talk about them all so I'll be brief. The first one is of me at the dinosaur museum. Then we have some shots of the Tokyo Tower and the Imperial Gardens. This is some random building I went past in a park today. I have no idea what the significance is.

For sightseeing today, I visited the Yasukuni Shrine. That's the one that is always causing controversy because the Japanese heads of state often pay their respects to it even though it contains the remains of Class-A war criminals. There are thousands of lanterns with all different japanese characters on them which leads me to suspect that they might be the names of war dead. I'm sure it would be cool to see them all lit up at night.

The shrine itself was pretty bland. It doesn't really hold any significance for me and I wasn't really sure what I was looking at anyways. There was a rather large museum on the site and now that was interesting! For more reasons than one. I am of course a historian at heart and they had some amazingly interesting stuff even back past the samurai period. What was extremely interesting however was their take on basically the past 100 years of history. It's often said that history is written by the winners - all that I can say is that the winners forgot to serve notice of this little detail to the losers. It's amazing to see the same history from a different point of view. I wasn't even sure if they were talking about the same war. Actually I guess they weren't. We talk about World War 2 and they talk about The Greater Asian War. Anyways I learned today that Japan was dragged into conflict with other Asian countries as a result of western imperialist aggression and the Americans forced the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbour. Also the Rape of Nanking was the fault of the Chinese for refusing to surrender. Apparently as a result of this, "heavy casualties were suffered" and the people of Nanking were liberated. Amazing. Oh well I suppose you can't expect much since it's located on a site that refuses to remove the names of war criminals.