Dear People of the World (formerly Dear Americans)

Between 9 and 12 of July, I was staying in Berlin, Deutschland (Germany).

It was a beautiful and interesting city. The purpose of visiting there was to learn history of holocaust and the Cold War era.

The first place I visited was Holocaust Memorial. It is Wave of Stones.

The memorial for 6 million Jewish victims. The place was near Brandenburger Gate and the Parliament Building.

On one downtown street, I found small memorial plates. It is called "Stolperstein. (Hitting stones)" One of 1600-1700 existed on Berlin streets to mourn holocaust victims.

I also visited some history museums. One of the most impressive ones was German History Museum. I saw below postar for Anti-Jew proganda, which depicts Jews as greedy and communist.

 

The same museum exhibited part of former Berlin Wall.  

 

I went to Checkpoint Charlie, the former checkpoint between West and East Berlin. That now became tourist spot.

 

The below photo is memorial for Border Crosser who failed and then being killed.

Berlin experienced very dramatic history. I really felt that by being there.  

I've made video clip of my stay in Berlin. See this you tube clip.

On 12 of July I left Berlin for Krakow to see one of the famous World Heritage designated by UNESCO.

I will talk about that later.  

Danke schonn!

Last month, I mentioned the below ad was racist using monkey as OBAMA in presidential election campaign.

The company that uses the ad, EMOBILE admitted the commercial was offensive to Afro-Americans considering the historical fact that monkey character had been used to portray Blacks as inferior creature to other people. Then early this month, they announced they would not air the commercial on TV and pulled the ad. However, they said they never meant to insult Black people by this ad because monkeys has been their maskots in their company's products.

I've mentioned this issue last month on this blog, see this article posted on June 21. I also mentioned on Japan's well-known internet newspaper, JANJAN. This is the article (in Japanese.) Some people object my view because I seem to make extreme interpretation of the ad concept. There are a lot of commercials that use animals to portray human characters.

But as a result, I was right. EMOBILE received so many complaints from Americans living in Japan. CNN covered this story. I knew that would happen because I used to live in the U.S. and learned so much about history of racism. I took Black Studies course.

Well, that helped. Most Japanese are ignorant about this issue because our society is much less diverse than the U.S. in terms of race and ethncity.  

EMOBILE wasted so much ad budget but they learned good lesson. So did many Japanese citizens.

I've bought a DVD of that show a few years ago. I've watched it many times. I highly recommend all the people on the earth to watch it.

The show was produced amid the fear of coming war in Iraq by Alliance Atlantis. It caused controversy because the show featured Hitler as living man not just as evil guy.

Maybe the producer was worried about the atmosphere in the U.S. after 911 was like the one in Nazi-Germany.

Focal point of the film is indifference of ordinary people of that time. People did not want to care about politics because they were too tired of hearing serious news.

But the result of such indifference was Auschwitz.

In the show, there was a journalist who became counterpart of Hitler. His name was Fritz Gerich. He established the newspaper "Straight Path" to criticize Hitler's Nazism. But at the end, he was murdered in Dahau concentration camp after Nazi regime took over all the authorities of Germany.

Fritz wrote letter to his wife, it said "Urge others to speak up even what they say is unpopular."

That impressed me a lot. That may be most difficult thing on the earth but necessary to change things better.

The other thing that impress me was a leader of Storm Troops, Rohm was gay. Rohm was Hitler's long time comrade and Hitler knew Rohm was gay. Interestingly enough, Nazi murdered hundreds of thousands of gays in concetration camp along with Jews and Roma (Gyspsies).

I will visit Berlin and Auschwitz soon. I will telll you what I feel about the sights and their histories.

I found such an ad in Tokyo train.

 

It says "CHANGE to Emobile phone." This monkey might look like one of US presidential candidates.

I think it is racist. They couldn't post the same postar in the U.S.

I don't like it. They could use human actor (Japanese or Afro-American guy) instead of a monkey.