Some pretty gross historical inaccuracies here, in an opinion piece trying to tell people to be mindful of historical context: > One of the last rooms of the m

Some pretty gross historical inaccuracies here, in an opinion piece trying to tell people to be mindful of historical context: > One of the last rooms of the museum next to the shrine contains a long, well-illustrated explanation — in Japanese and English — of how President Franklin D. Roosevelt forced Japan to attack Pearl Harbor, and it makes a pretty convincing case. I hadn’t realized how steadily Roosevelt had cut off Japan from copper, from American scrap steel, then from oil. ... the US cut those off because of Japan's invasion of China. It's actually a pretty gross whitewashing of Japanese history, the same reason why China and Korea are so frustrated at Japan: Japan constantly pretends that the only thing it did wrong was lose WW2. Blaming the US for Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor is exactly the same kind of thing as blaming Ukraine for Russia's invasion of Ukraine. > Americans weren’t exactly innocents on this score, since we had taken the bases that the Japanese attacked in December 1941 — Hawaii and the Philippines — from the unraveling Spanish and British empires. Uh... the British Empire didn't unravel until after WW2. The Philippines were taken from the Spanish. But Hawaii was a fully independent kingdom, and even after the sugar interests sponsored a revolution that overthrew the Hawaiian monarchy and then begged to be annexed by the US, the US dithered and only annexed it a few years later when the Japanese were making a move to annex Hawaii instead.