It looks like Palo Alto is about to approve Yamamoto as a name for one of its middle schools to replace their name sakes and eugenics proponents Jordan and Terman .

One have to consider the alternatives, let’s just say it

* Adolf or Hitler school of art. (I’ve certainly known an Adolfo walking around and succeeding in the Bay Area in his own way)

* Jesus middle school (a common name, especially in Latin America.)

* Stalin elementary

* Mussolini Middle School, a language model of a single layered artificial neural network without nonlinearities could concievably think it is equally suitable for a school name as Cipriani Elementary or Capuchino High School.

* Castro elementary.

* Guevara charter school (of Che fame.)

What’s wrong with those names? There is ample opportunity for Americans of those names to succeed here that they can be name sake of a middle school in Palo Alto. Why were they not chosen? Would they be approved over significant objection of the city’s residents?

But that’s not so bad. Imagine if there was a successful Chinese-American worthy of this designation with Mao as last name. What would all of you say then? Probably something like “I don’t want my son to be chairman of the Mao middle school student council”

The main problem is probably because Chinese Americans all live under rocks like me. We don’t really care about politics until we’re stung in the eye and ear with this kind of Nonsense.

We should avoid naming schools using very distinctive war criminal names. For god’s sake, you have kids whose grandpa’s were bayoneted and mother raped or bombed by troops under command by a certain Admiral Yamamoto. And I don’t mean just Chinese kids. There are so many people who suffered due to the machinations of the evil axial powers during WW II. Let’s have some human decency to be sensitive to others’ sufferings in our school choices. Let’s not use a recent war criminal name for this otherwise desirable school.

What in the name of all that is good and holy were you thinking? Shame on you who decided to use this name.

…

But after fussing a bit. I guess it’s pretty well known that Chinese have been encroaching on Palo Altan real estate. This is probably an antagonizer intended to reduce foreign Chinese investments in those houses. Anyway… I guess this saying is true: all’s fair in politics and capitalism. It’s just sad that it has to be a criminal from a crime against humanities.

(Okay, he wasn’t a convicted war criminal, but only because he was shot down by American due to him being an enemy of the country. But that he is killed by Americans is not an excuse for what he caused to happen. That name still stirs fear and disgust in many many Asian countries. What he did was unusually cruel and wrong. The suffering people have memories, even if history books are selective… We remember.)