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Post by Admin on Mar 17, 2015 13:51:53 GMT
Most Japanese right-wing commentators don't deny that such comfort stations existed, but they bristle at suggestions the women were kidnapped from their homes, badly mistreated, or were anything other than highly paid prostitutes. They insist the experience of the comfort women should not be singled out for special criticism, as every other military force in history also had women serving the troops. The Japanese Imperial Army, they contend, acted no differently than all others. A new development is that Japan's right-wing activists have now taken their struggle to revise historical understandings into the United States in several forms: by campaigning against local monuments and US textbook descriptions of the "comfort women" experience, and by recruiting American spokesmen to help them spread their views. One of the boldest actions, carried out not by unofficial activists, but by the Abe government itself, took place last November and December. Japanese diplomats contacted McGraw-Hill publishers in New York and asked them to delete two paragraphs regarding comfort women in the world history textbook Traditions and Encounters: A Global Perspective on the Past. The US publisher naturally rejected the request, even though it was followed at the end of January by comments made by Prime Minister Abe himself in the Diet, Japan's parliament. The Japanese leader said he had read the relevant section of the textbook and was "shocked," and he bemoaned that previous Japanese governments had "failed to correct the things we should have corrected". The McGraw-Hall protest provoked a letter from 20 US-based historians published this month by the American Historical Association. The historians' letter asserted that careful research had established that the wartime comfort women's experience contained "beyond dispute the essential features of a system that amounted to state-sponsored sexual slavery". These historians went on to express dismay that "conservative Japanese politicians have deployed legalistic arguments in order to deny state responsibility", and that "extremists threaten and intimidate journalists and scholars involved in documenting the system and the stories of its victims". Japanese right-wing activists have been proving increasingly formidable in terms of the amount of support they can mobilise. More than 23,000 plaintiffs have signed on for a lawsuit against the centre-left newspaper Asahi Shinbun for allegedly damaging the national honour and causing emotional distress through its coverage of the comfort women issue over the years. Other lawsuits have been launched, for example, to force the removal of a comfort women monument in a park in Glendale, California. A handful of conservative US citizens have recently allied with Japan's political right and have found themselves highly celebrated within these circles as a result. Perhaps the most high-profile American recruit to the cause is Michael Yon, an award-winning writer and photographer who gained a degree of prominence for his on-the-ground coverage of the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan. Recently, Yon has become fixated on China, which he describes as a "criminal state" bent on regional and, ultimately, global domination. He views the comfort women issue not as a genuine campaign for justice or the proper recognition of history, but as a strategic "information war" meant to keep Japan divided and weak. As Yon explained on his Facebook page: "Japan must make a Constitution that is pro-Japan. Japan must be a powerful fish that is far too dangerous for China to try to swallow or push around. Ultimately, there will be no peace if Japan is weak. A weak Japan will eventually lead to war."
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Post by Admin on Mar 22, 2015 13:02:46 GMT
A group of Japanese historians is urging McGraw-Hill, the American publisher, to “correct” a college textbook that they say contains “many erroneous expressions” about sex slaves used by Japanese soldiers during World War II. Saying that the women were simply prostitutes, the group is taking up an official Japanese effort to win support for its perspective on the euphemistically known “comfort women,” a particularly sensitive part of its wartime legacy. “There are women in Amsterdam who sit in windows displaying their services and in Japan we have Soapland, which is part of the sex trade,” said Ikuhiko Hata, a Harvard- and Columbia-educated emeritus professor at Nippon University, likening the comfort women to those working in the red light districts in the Dutch and Japanese capitals. “Prostitutes have existed at every time in human history, so I do not believe that comfort women are a special category,” Hata told foreign journalists in Tokyo on Tuesday. As soon as Wednesday, 19 Japanese university professors will send a letter to McGraw-Hill taking issue with eight phrases in the two paragraphs about the “comfort women” in “Traditions and Encounters,” a 900-page history textbook used in U.S. colleges. Japan’s Foreign Ministry has already attempted to persuade both McGraw-Hill and Herbert Ziegler, the University of Hawaii professor who wrote the paragraphs, to change the wording, and was rebuffed by both. Ziegler last month told The Washington Post that he viewed the request as “an infringement of my freedom of speech and my academic freedom.” Now Japanese professors, led by Hata, are taking action, writing to McGraw-Hill to contest the textbook’s statement that as many as 200,000 women were forcibly recruited to be comfort women for Japan’s imperial army. Hata says the real number is about 20,000. They also take issue with the claim that the women were “a gift from the emperor.” “This is too impolite expression for a school textbook, which defames the national head,” the Japanese letter says. The Japanese historians also criticize the estimate that the women serviced 20 to 30 soldiers a day. If that were true, Hata said, “the soldiers would have had no time to fight the war; they would have been too busy going to the brothel all the time.” “I have never seen so many mistakes in such a textbook,” he said at a news conference at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan, a heavily annotated copy of the book on the table in front of him. “Historians, including myself, have decided to lodge a complaint and point out to McGraw-Hill the errors that they have made in their textbook, asking them to correct their errors,” he said, noting that he always thanks readers who write to him to correct errors in his books. “I’m full of great hopes that McGraw-Hill will be grateful to us, too.”
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Post by Admin on Apr 4, 2015 12:43:04 GMT
Abe walks a tightrope in his efforts to invigorate Japan. He wants a more robust Japanese defense policy without kindling fears of renewed militarism. He seeks a less apologetic, inward-looking Japan but said he doesn’t want to undo apologies by previous prime ministers about procurement of “comfort women” or other sins of World War II. “On the question of comfort women,” he said, “when my thought goes to these people, who have been victimized by human trafficking and gone through immeasurable pain and suffering beyond description, my heart aches.” An aide said this was the first time he had publicly referred to “trafficking” in connection with the women. The remarks provoked a backlash from South Korea. A South Korean official said Saturday that the remarks were a deception if Abe had been attempting to shift the blame for the forcible recruitment of the comfort women to private brokers and deny the government’s involvement. In the interview, published Friday, the newspaper quoted Abe as saying the comfort women had been “victimized by human trafficking.” His original words in Japanese were not revealed. During a Diet committee meeting on Monday, Abe confirmed he told the interviewer that comfort women were victims of jinshin baibai, which is usually translated as human trafficking. “There has been a variety of discussions, and human trafficking has been cited in some discussions,” Abe said about debate on the comfort women issue.
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Post by Admin on Apr 8, 2015 14:50:45 GMT
Manabisha, a Tokyo-based publishing company, will publish a middle-school history textbook for the first time that will include a passage about so-called comfort women, something that no other textbook currently in use mentions. The book was approved by the education ministry after it added the government's stance on the issue to its original textbook. The addition reads: "There have so far been no confirmed documents to directly prove [the involvement of military and administrative personnel in] the forcible taking away of comfort women." It is the first time a reference has been made to comfort women in a middle-school textbook since the 2002 academic year. The reference to comfort women is carried on a page titled, "The postwar era to be questioned anew - Diplomatic normalisation between Japan and China, and the East Asia." The ministry did not approve the Manabisha textbook in its original form, saying that it is difficult to understand the overall trend of history, and it pointed out about 270 passages as inaccurate. One inaccuracy concerned a description based on the testimonies of the former comfort women. The ministry denounced it as "being not based on the government's view." The publisher deleted the descriptions based on the testimony of former comfort women and incorporated the government's view on the matter. Manabisha was established in 2013 to publish school textbooks written and compiled by a voluntary group consisting of teachers and others. The publisher explained that it "took up comfort women as part of the global move to look at individuals whose human rights were infringed during wartime." The description of comfort women appeared for the first time in middle school history textbooks for use in the 1997 academic year. In six of seven such textbooks, there was a description that "many young women were also sent to battlefields as comfort women." One textbook made mention of "comfort stations." The number of textbooks mentioning comfort women and stations decreased to three of the eight for use in the 2002 academic year. There are no such textbooks currently in use.Speech
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Post by Admin on Apr 15, 2015 13:46:06 GMT
At present the common rhetoric in Japan is that they have hit the wall, and are suffering an "apology fatigue," caused by the failure of South Korea to recognise Tokyo's repeated apologies. The 1993 Kono Statement stated that the Japanese Government extended "its sincere apologies and remorse to all those, irrespective of place of origin, who suffered immeasurable pain and incurable physical and psychological wounds as comfort women." Amongst many others, apologies were also given by Prime Minister Murayama Tomiichi in his 1995 Fiftieth Anniversary of the War's end speech, and Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro's 2005 Sixtieth Anniversary of the War's end speech. Furthermore, in 1995, Japan started the Asian Women's Fund where they disbursed 700 million yen from the national budget to support AWF's medical and welfare activities to those comfort women identified, and another 600 million yen was raised by a wide range of individuals, enterprises, labour unions, political parties, and Diet members to support the aims of the AWF. Additionally, then Prime Minister Murayama also sent personally signed letters expressing apologies and remorse to those comfort women. Trust between the two is impeded further by instances such as South Korea's failure to adhere to the 1965 Treaty of Normalization. By signing this treaty, the Park Chung-hee administration agreed never to make further compensation demands against Japan, either at a government or individual level, after receiving US$500 million in grants and soft loans from Tokyo as compensation for its 1910-45 colonial rule. Despite this, the South Korean Government is still demanding further reparations from the Japanese government. The South Korean rhetoric is that Japan still needs to acknowledge its wrongdoings, and recognise South Korea's past suffering. There is immense frustration with the Japanese right wing attitudes, which Seoul accuses of trying to "rewrite", and "whitewash" history. Since being re-elected in 2012, Prime Minister Abe has sent confusing signals that seem to undermine previous apologies. There have been instances where Abe has denied that the women were coerced, thus implying that they were indeed willing prostitutes. To his cabinet, Abe has also elected ministers who have denied past wartime abuses. Also, visits to the Yasukuni shrine by Prime Minister Koizumi in 2005, and Prime Minister Abe in 2013 infuriate not only Seoul, but many in the international community. These actions fuel the incentive within South Korea to cling to the past. Furthermore, past incidents such as the Asahi Shimbun controversy in the 90s opened the floodgates for the blame game to continue between South Korea and Japanese right wing nationalists. The Asahi Shimbun, a leading newspaper in Japan retracted its articles that were carried during the 80s and 90s which recognised that comfort women were indeed forced into sexual slavery based on the narratives of a former Japanese soldier named Yoshida Seiji, who claimed he had coerced women on the island of Jeju into service. The newspaper issued an apology, after Seiji's testimony was discredited. Post the Asahi withdrawal, Japan demanded a revision of the 1996 UN report, which described the comfort women system as "military sexual slavery." However, this request was declined, leaving both South Korea and Japan once again at odds over the issue. The question that begs to be asked is that why has bitter history with other nations not prevented Japan from establishing friendly and productive partnerships with them? Since the end of WW II, Japan has been successful in reaching out to its ex colonised South East Asian neighbours. The Philippines sets a great example of a nation whose comfort women suffered the same fate as those of South Korea and China, yet they have been able to forgive Japan. After the end of WW II, Japan has never waged war on another nation. Instead, Japan has been a major donor of humanitarian and economic aid, a large amount of which South Korea has accepted. More credit should be given to Japan, who over the years has become defensive over cries that it is re-emerging as a nationalistic state. Though over the years political and strategic narratives related to comfort women have dictated the demise in bilateral relations, positive signs of cooperation are emerging. In March, Foreign Ministerial level trilateral talks took place in Seoul between Japan-South Korea- China, with the ministers agreeing to restore a "trilateral summit" amongst their leaders. This was followed by secretary level bilateral talks between Japan and South Korea. The year 2015 not only marks an important date in international history - the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II, but it is also the 50th anniversary of normalisation of relations between South Korea and Japan. It is a chance that both Japan and South Korea should grab with an aim to re-normalise their relations. Reconciliation has to come from both sides, not one. Prime Minister Abe in his 70th Anniversary of the War's end speech would need to clearly, sincerely, and unambiguously acknowledge Japan's wartime crimes. South Korea for its part would also need to recognize Tokyo's apologies, which would soothe Japan's apology fatigue.
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