aka @kingrat@sfba.social. I'm following a lot of bookwyrm accounts, since that seems to be the only way to get reviews from larger servers to this small server. I make a lot of Bookwyrm lists. I will like & boost a lot of reviews that come across my feed. I will follow most bookwyrm accounts back if they review & comment. Social reading should be social.
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63% complete! Phil in SF has read 19 of 30 books.
In the weeks after Japan finally surrendered to the Allies to end World War II, …
As he boasted to the Australian government, his paper covered over six hundred and fifty foolscap pages, while the Nuremberg judgment had been less than 300 pages.
— Judgment at Tokyo by Gary J. Bass (Page 1,673)
new word: foolscap
(British) a size of paper, about 330 by 200 mm
In the weeks after Japan finally surrendered to the Allies to end World War II, …
In a draft heavy with Stalinist jargon, he chuntered that aggression was "an inseparable part of the overall conspiracy of the Japanese imperialistic clique against peace-loving peoples."
— Judgment at Tokyo by Gary J. Bass (Page 1,653)
new word: chuntered
Phil in SF
boosted
3 stars - enjoyed this book, you might too
So on the one hand I would actually recommend reading this book if you don't know much about making things by hand. I definitely enjoyed the book most when it talked about stuff I didn't know much about.
On the other hand, there was a lot that annoyed me about this book.
First of all, the central conceit that there is something called craeft that is different from craft annoyed me, and yes this is the whole premise of the book so maybe it's unfair to complain about, but it still annoyed me every time it came up. I generally agree that traditional crafts are worth preserving and have value in and of themselves, and that they are particularly worth keeping around since climate change might mean we have to move away from certain types of mass mechanization and waste. (It's …
3 stars - enjoyed this book, you might too
So on the one hand I would actually recommend reading this book if you don't know much about making things by hand. I definitely enjoyed the book most when it talked about stuff I didn't know much about.
On the other hand, there was a lot that annoyed me about this book.
First of all, the central conceit that there is something called craeft that is different from craft annoyed me, and yes this is the whole premise of the book so maybe it's unfair to complain about, but it still annoyed me every time it came up. I generally agree that traditional crafts are worth preserving and have value in and of themselves, and that they are particularly worth keeping around since climate change might mean we have to move away from certain types of mass mechanization and waste. (It's also very Britain-centric.)
However, this book is prone to the kinds of romanticization of pre-industrial life which I usually expect from people who have not actually made anything from scratch. Except he has! He should know better! I think the argument that it is somehow more satisfying to be more in touch with nature is somewhat undercut by the fact that needing to spend all day, every day, doing hard physical labour as a matter of survival kind of sucks.
If you ignore this kind of running theme though, the descriptions of various traditional crafts - many of which most people don't have the opportunity to do any more - is quite interesting and worth knowing about. Bonus points for standing up for basket-weaving. My hope is that people reading this book are inspired to learn a craft of their own, rather than just developing some kind of cottagecore theory of how life was better back then.
In the weeks after Japan finally surrendered to the Allies to end World War II, …
The author's position is that the prosecution failed during the testimony of Tojo Hideki, Japan's warmongering 1941 prime minister. That's because Tojo continued to assert that he and Japan had done nothing wrong except lose. I'll need to read some other works on the trial, because getting defendants to admit the error of their ways isn't normally what prosecutors do. Keenan, the head prosecutor, doesn't seem like a great prosecutor based on lots of other failures, but this doesn't seem like something to hang around his neck to me.
In the weeks after Japan finally surrendered to the Allies to end World War II, …
He worked on imperial rescripts sanctifying battles in Burma and the Coral Sea.
— Judgment at Tokyo by Gary J. Bass (Page 1,420)
new word: rescript
an official edict or announcement
(the word has been used numerous times in the book, but i thought it was a word peculiar to how Japanese government worked. finally occurred to me to look it up after the 73rd use.)
In the weeks after Japan finally surrendered to the Allies to end World War II, …
His American and Japanese lawyers argued that Matsui's militant pan-Asianism was a mere cultural divertissement, demonstrating his innocuous love for the Chinese he would soon be invading.
— Judgment at Tokyo by Gary J. Bass (Page 1,385)
new word: divertissement
a minor entertainment or diversion
In the weeks after Japan finally surrendered to the Allies to end World War II, …
Blakeny parried that "a pact may fall into desuetude as the result of repeated violations."
— Judgment at Tokyo by Gary J. Bass (Page 1,168)
new word: desuetude
(formal) a state of disuse
In the weeks after Japan finally surrendered to the Allies to end World War II, …
For Zaryanov, revolutionary wars were inherently defensive wars, waged in defense of peoples' rights. What mattered was not who started the war but what its goals were. When wars were aimed at defending national existence or the rights of the people, they could not be seen as aggressive; when wars were meant to enslave peoples or violate their inherent rights, they were aggressive.
— Judgment at Tokyo by Gary J. Bass (Page 1,085 - 1,086)
Weirdly, I agree most with the position of the Soviet judge on the subject of whether "aggressive war" was against international law and criminal. The book lays out the discussions and arguments of the war crimes judges, most of whom relied on a hodge-podge of international treaties, none of which clearly made aggressive war criminal. Others fell back on the concept of natural law, though thee two main proponents relied on different philosophers for exposition. Others simply accepted the tribunal's charter as definitive.
The reason why aggressive war was even an issue was that Douglas MacArthur and the United States really wanted to make the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor a de facto violation of international law (as covered in earlier chapters).
Mind you, I think the position of the Soviet judge was at odds with his own country's history. It's invasion of Poland, the Baltic nations, and Finland were …
Weirdly, I agree most with the position of the Soviet judge on the subject of whether "aggressive war" was against international law and criminal. The book lays out the discussions and arguments of the war crimes judges, most of whom relied on a hodge-podge of international treaties, none of which clearly made aggressive war criminal. Others fell back on the concept of natural law, though thee two main proponents relied on different philosophers for exposition. Others simply accepted the tribunal's charter as definitive.
The reason why aggressive war was even an issue was that Douglas MacArthur and the United States really wanted to make the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor a de facto violation of international law (as covered in earlier chapters).
Mind you, I think the position of the Soviet judge was at odds with his own country's history. It's invasion of Poland, the Baltic nations, and Finland were neither defending national existence nor in defense of people's rights. The Dutch judge recognized that convicting Japanese leaders of aggressive war did not comport with the Netherlands' own aggressive wars of colonization of the East Indies. His solution would have been to excise aggressive war from the charges because it was not clearly part of international treaties as criminal, a position that the Indian judge did end up taking.
I lean toward the Soviet judge because the rubric is both just & clean, and when it comes to war I am not inclind toward needing legalistic treaties to brand war crimes as crimes.
In the weeks after Japan finally surrendered to the Allies to end World War II, …
Ridiculing Webb with none of Mei's courteousness, Röling scoffed that natural law, if it was ever "more than a mere desideratum," was not a part of the positive international law in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
— Judgment at Tokyo by Gary J. Bass (Page 1,118)
new word: desideratum
something that is needed or wanted
@travisfw the authors cover the elimination of scarcity as an argument for space settlement early in the book. a later chapter, which i haven't yet got to, covers the legal framework around space.
In the weeks after Japan finally surrendered to the Allies to end World War II, …
Soon after the Soviet prosecutors wrapped up their case in Tokyo, Averell Harriman, the aristocratic US ambassador in Moscow, scoffed, "It is difficult to believe that the Soviet General Staff and Politburo are lying awake nights worrying about recrudescence of [Japanese] imperialism and aggression."
— Judgment at Tokyo by Gary J. Bass (Page 912)
new word: recrudescence
the recurrence of an undesirable condition
[slur for Japanese people replaced in quotation]
In the weeks after Japan finally surrendered to the Allies to end World War II, …
This did nothing to establish guilt but did make the Chinese prosecution look cheapjack.
— Judgment at Tokyo by Gary J. Bass (Page 825)
new word: cheapjack
(mainly North American) of inferior quality
In the weeks after Japan finally surrendered to the Allies to end World War II, …
The Tokyo trial never knew that, as Kasahara has shown, General Matsui Iwane pressed for a swift assault on Nanjing in the hopes of forcing the surrender of China's government — a lacuna that allowed the general to present himself on trial as passive and doddering, rather than an active commander.
— Judgment at Tokyo by Gary J. Bass (Page 819)
new word (have seen before but haven't bothered to look it up until now): lacuna
• an unfilled space; a gap • a missing portion in a book or manuscript
In the weeks after Japan finally surrendered to the Allies to end World War II, …
To that end, the State Department conjured up a casuistic standard that the judges must come only from the nine countries which inside the Japanese surrender on the USS Missouri.
— Judgment at Tokyo by Gary J. Bass (Page 715 - 716)
new word: casuist
