IT is hard not to be impressed by the audacity of the Japanese Consul General in his that children in Scotland should have the teaching of the Japanese language added to an already congested school curriculum ("Diplomat calls for Japanese to be added to curriculum", The Herald, July 4).
He justifies his suggestion with the claim that children in this country have a growing interest in Japanese culture and language.
If it wasn't for the fact that Japan has been attempting to persuade Unesco to have 23 of its factories and industrial locations designated as World Heritage sites, I might just have passed over this move by Japan to dissimulate. Has he forgotten that the grandfathers of many of those same Scots schoolchildren slaved and died as prisoners of war in those same factories during the Second World War - something which studiously and arrogantly ignored in the Unesco application?
Does he not know that many Scots families currently have more than a smattering of the Japanese language, words bitterly learned by family members while in the hands of a cruel enemy and never erased from damaged memories? Has he forgotten that Japanese schoolchildren are still not being taught the true facts of what happened in the Far East during that dreadful period in history?
Once Japan stops airbrushing facts and ignoring aspects of history with which it does not agree, then I will have some sympathy with the attempts by the Consul General to involve Scots schoolchildren in Japanese culture.
Campbell Thomson,
2 Castle View,
Newmains,
Lanarkshire.
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