Japan - A Surreal Nation:

It seems to me the Japanese never learn, and refuse to learn after all these years! Year in, year out, their leaders create world problems for the other Asian Nations (China, Taiwan and South Korea especially) when they insists on visiting the Yasukuni war memorial in Tokyo, where their 14 executed Class A WWII war criminals - from Tojo the wartime PM to Yamashita the Tiger General of Malaya - are buried and honoured, along with millions of other lesser-known Japanese war dead.

The Osaka High Court in Japan ruled on 30/09/2005 for the first time, that Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's visits to this controversial war shrine violated the Japanese Constitution in that his visits to the shrine were official acts in his capacity as PM, and this violated the country's constitutional separation of religion and state - a moral victory for the millions of victims of Japan's wartime aggression.

Koizumi, who has visited this shrine four times since taking office in 2001, rejected this Court verdict, and has again hinted that he will visit the shrine again at the end of this year - a move that will continue to strain and aggravate relations with China and South Korea. Millions in Asia see the shrine as a symbol of the militarism that led to Japan's brutal invasion of much of this continent in the early 20th century.

While the Court ruled that the visits were unconstitutional, it rejected a claim of damage from 188 plaintiffs, including relatives of war dead from Taiwan, on the grounds that Koizumi's visits to Yasukuni did not infringe on their individual rights! The Taiwanese had argued that they suffered mentally because many of their indigenous ancestors, who were conscripted by Japan under colonial rule (Taiwan was forcibly ruled by Japan for 50 years to WWII), were enshrined with Japanese soldiers who staged horrific and unspeakable acts of aggression.

The Fukuoka District Court handed down a similar verdict in April last year. The lower Osaka District Court had ruled in May last year that Koizumi's pilgrimages were "personal" in nature! (Just ask oneself how an act by a PM of a country can be considered "personal"?).
Only the Supreme Court has the final power to make binding rulings on constitutional issues - so the "victory" by Japan's wartime victims remains just that - a moral one only, but not legal or political!

Unlike the Germans (especially the West Germans, not the former Communist East Germans) who have as good as fully atoned for their WWII sins and the Jewish Holocaust where Hitler gassed/murdered 6 million Jews, by paying billions of DM/US$ to surviving Jewish families, the Jewish Defense League, World Jewry etc., the Japanese behaviour is nothing short of surreal: to this day, they have refused to apologise for their evil deeds, but instead, their ultra-nationalists keep on defending their records! Consider the following dastardly and bestial acts they committed during WWII and before:

1. They attacked a weak China via Manchuria in 1931 (way before WWII begain in 1939!), and seized this State and set up their own puppet State called Manchukuo, with Pui Yi (remember the romanticized Western bullshit film called "The Last Emperor")?

2. They then set up Unit 731, and began their human experiments and biological warfare program using Chinese citizens as guinea pigs for their malaria, dysentry, anthrax, thypoid, smallpox, cholera, etc. diseases to turn these into mass-killers. These atrocities included the dissection of live Chinese prisoners in an attempt to determine the effects of pathogens on the human body!!! Only God and the Japs knows how many thousands innocent Chinese perished here - cruelly and madly and agonizingly - since the Japs destroyed all record later of such experiments. Estimates of casualties from Japan's germ warfare program in China from 1932 to 1945 vary, but the most careful English-language study so far, by U.S. historian Sheldon H Harris, says that even by late 1942, the casualty count "fell into the six-figure range".
And: the germ warfare program's architect, Shiro Ishii, died his natural death in Tokyo in 1959, without ever spending a day in court for his monstrous crimes against humanity!

3. See also the, regrettably, late Ms Iris Chang's "The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II" and you will shudder at just how cruel the Japs can be! This book was first published in 1997, and it helped break a 6-decade long international silence on this subject!
On December 13, 1937 (remember WWII starting 1939), Japanese troops entered Nanking, the wartime Chinese capital, after suffering heavy casualties in Shanghai. In less than 2 months, they murdered more than 300,000 Chinese civilians, and raped more than 80,000 Chinese women! Some of their bestial acts: soldiers practising their bayonets on tied-up Chinese prisoners, others burned alive, pregnant women bayoneted and raped, decapitated heads put on spikes or waved around like trophies, hundreds of unarmed civilians mown down with machine guns and dumped in rivers and open graves etc. etc. And the rest of the world just looked on! Ah yes, the United Human Rights Council called it "the single worst atrocity during the World War II era in either the European or Pacific theatres of war"!
The Japanese conquerors of Nanking did not believe the Chinese to be human beings, so they just raped and slaughtered them, and you will see their WWII history is replete with these horrific thoughts and deeds (Remember one of Brue Lee's film where there is a sign at one of these International Settlements in Shanghai and other big cities (the IS is virtually a separate, legal preserve and enclave unlawfully foisted on China by different white men - U.S., Britain, France, Germany etc. during this period of China's weakness) that say: "No Dogs or Chinese Allowed"?).

4. Do you know there is even a much greater "Schindler's List"here in Nanking at that time than the film of the same name made by that Jew Steven Spielberg? Schindler of course, was that Nazi officcer who helped saved the lives of a couple of thousand Jewish prisoners of war by keeping them to work in the factories and foundries, rather than going off to the Nazi gas chambers.
In Nanking, a Nazi John Rabe, 55, refused to leave his Siemens post in Nanking, even when the Japanese invaded Nanking. Soon, often at the risk of his life, he began the mobilization of aid and organized an "International Safety Zone" in Nanking, together with his American friends. In this Safety Zone, they helped prevent further massacres, rapes, looting etc. by the rapacious and poorly-disciplined Japanses army and some 250,000 Chinese men, women and children were gathered here in relative securityover this periodf - 250,000 Chinese against a couple of thousand Jews, but nobody in the Western world bothered to publicize this epochal event! John Rabe was held in the highest esteem by his friends, revered as a Saint by the Chinese, and grudingly respected bt the Japanese, whose acts of misconduct he constantly resisted.
His deeds to this day has not been recognized by the world except in a book published in 1998 called "The Good German of Nanking - The Diaries of John Rabe" edited by Erwin Wickert, translated from the German by John E. Woods, and published by Little, Brown and Company, London. In Iris Chang's book, however, she paid much respect to John Rabe for his selfless and humanitarian work here.

5. Over 50,000 Chinese men were slaughtered in Singapore and Malaya when the Japs invaded these colonial territories in December 1941, just after their successful attack on Pearl Harbour on 07/12/41 that triggered the U.S. offocial entry into WWII- to "promote" to Asians their glorified "East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere" program, and to help "deliver" us from the "white man's burden"! Why? All because they were Chinese and on mere suspicion that these men were supportive of the Chiang Kai Shek/China war efforts!

6. And who could forget the 250,000 "comfort women" they forcibly abducted from China and Korea, the latter especially, to serve the sexual needs of the Japanese military machine? More than anything else, these atrocities generate the most anger and protests year in year out in China, Taiwan and Korea. Regretfully, successive legal actions by some of the surviving comfort women at Japanese courts of laws over these last few years have all failed - on the grounds that they are not "proven", they are time-lapsed, and Japan paid its dues to these countries after the San Francisco treaty in 1950! Here, it has to be understood that the Colonial Powers attended and signed for this Treaty, and U.S. was all for it, as 1950 was the start of the Cold War and Iron Curtain with Stalin and McCarthyism was the rage and fear of growing Communist aggression worldwide. To this day, there is no Peace Treaty between Japan and China and South Korea, for example, to end the WWII hostilities.

7. And what about the thousands of Aussie, British, Indian armed forces personnel, together with thousands of Malayan civilians who perished at the infamous Burma Death Railway, (again, that misconstrued film "The Bridge on the River Kwai") at Changi prison, death march in Sandakan by Aussie prisoners of war etc? These, like the Rape of Nanking, are just "incidents" in Japan's school history books!

To sum up Japan's shit role in WWII as per comment by David McNeill in an article which appeared in The Sun 23-24 April 2005: " Japan's way of moving forward since the war has been to sign normalization agreements with its former enemies, ending all claims for compensation, and to hand over billions of dollars in development aid - an apology of sorts that means not having to say the word "sorry".

After all these years, "sorry", it seems, like that well-known song, is still the hardest word for the Japanese to say sincerely, although year in year out, their Leaders stand at attention, bow their head low, say "sorry-to", but don't mean it - and then visit the Yasukuni shrine annually!!
Su you see what I mean by Surreal?

We are a sad lot: nobody gives a damn about us, and if you are a Leftie Golfer, like me, you will find that your choices of clubs and other golf materials like gloves, are very limited, and sometimes, non-existent.

The situation is very different in Australia and U.S. for example: in these 2 countries the lefties are spoilt for choices, and they can count on the latest models from various golf manufacturers, swing weight, flex, length - the whole works! Plus, very valuable and well-meaning advices from their golf shop pros!

In Malaysia, nobody loves us: in my Club, there are only 5 lefties, and with age catching up, they are also a dying breed. Now, after donkey years of chomping golf, we are told that the "Regular" flex we normally use as per U.S. specs, is actually "Firm" in Japanese specs! No wonder these bloody clubs feel so heavy, and more so for me, after all these years! Now, with "Senior" flex available in U.S. and Japan makes, looks like we have to go for the Asian/Japanese version as they are of course lighter for us smaller-frame Asians! Talk about having us on all these years!

I also note that finally, Wilson Malaysia, for instance, has stated that they will now bring in only Japanese specs golf sets for the Malaysian market, and hooray for them, since now, maybe we will finally get lighter golf equipment to suit our needs better.

As for getting Golf Sets specifically custom-fit for one's own individual needs, a word of caution from me: in Malaysia, there are too many of these "experts" (usually whites) who come and go, and, as far as I am concerned, some of them know as much golf as me - which is nothing! But they come as "experts" to help you get the set to suit your needs/frame etc., and these made-to-measure sets are not bloody cheap either - you are still talking of some RM10,000 for a set of 3 woods and 9 irons and a putter! And they come to you with all the modern technology, gadgets, gizmos and what have you - but DO they really suit you? Only YOU will know - after you cough out RM10,000!

My own experience: I had a Driver and iron set custom-fit for me about 5 years ago at RM4,000, and it was a bloody disaster - financial all the way: the cost upfront, and the fact that I could never hit the balls properly with this set - shanking seems to be the order of the day! This white "expert" felt I need larger grip, and these clubs were then fitted with thicker grips which made my game even worse, as they WERE bigger and harder to grip! And since I am 5'10" he felt some irons need to be longer as well - and again, it buggered up my game totally! So much for his expertise! Needless to say, this set is still lying in my store! As we are only Tiger Hood ("Hokkien" dialect for "hammer"!) I feel safer sticking to factory sets.

My only consolation is that Pan West brings in Callaway left-hands, which I have been a disciple past 10 years. But then again, a RM10,000 latest Big Bertha Fusion FT-3 driver and fairway woods and full iron set is not everyone's cup of tea, right or left-hand, so we can only dream and drool over it!- unless Someone From Up There decides to drop me this exquisite gift - truly one from Heaven, man!