My colleagues in Boston have better things to do than read this morning’s New York Times, but they should check out a story in the Metro section (“Occupied By the U.S., And by Art“) about a New York man who is studying little objects d’art made by Japanese held in Sugamo Prison in Tokyo after the World War II.

The point that barely gets discussed until the end of piece is that these amateur artists were war criminals. Had they beheaded American and Australian POWs? Had they raped, then murdered Chinese in Nanking? Had they organized or patronized squads of Korean comfort women? Neither our curator nor our reporter says.

The story is suffused with Eurocentrism, if not racism. A story about Herman Goering’s doodles while he awaited sentencing at Nuremberg could not be written in the same way. But the Asian victims of imperial Japan, like the Middle Eastern victims of Saddam, do not fit into our categories of acknowledged suffering.