TRANSMISSION POINTS
The rewriting of textbook accounts of the civilian suicides on Okinawa is a modern example of identity management. Alternative interpretations or versions of events contained in the context of “objective” documentation of actual events are the fourth order of Epistemological control on seeing. The control of news or media is therefore essential to the management of popular or collective response to past and present events or realities.
Points of exchange are crucial in social topologies. Identity is shaped, driven or determined at points of exchange, or transmission points.
In the case of World War 2 atrocities carried out under the auspices of Japanese force, the redesign of perception is being undertaken by conservative Japanese historians. These historians are also redesigning other histories that nationalists would prefer disappear, such as the massacre of Chinese civilians under Japanese occupation in Nanking. The Chinese remember Nanking differently than do those Japanese historians.
This sort of thing is a regular feature in Japanese culture, but certainly is not restricted to the Japanese. It is a common feature of oppressive societies. As this text is being written, some officials in the US government are attempting strenuously to prevent the release of accounts of torture perpetrated by US forces on alleged terrorists. Any society can become socially oppressive by subverting the principles of free speech.
