Panel Heavy With Right Wing Academics Advising Abe

 

A panel of experts appointed by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe met for the first time Wednesday to discuss what he should say in a statement marking the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II, fueling speculation that he may water down previous government apologies for the country’s wartime past.

Japan issued a landmark apology on the 50th anniversary in 1995 under then-Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama, for the first time acknowledging its colonization and aggression in parts of Asia before and during the war. In 2005, then-Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi also apologized.

A key question is whether Abe will use the same terms such as “colonial rule” and “aggression” in his statement.

Abe appointed the 16-member panel - 10 academics, three business leaders, two journalists and an international aid worker - to seek advice on what he should say on Aug. 15, the anniversary of the war’s end.

Abe told the panel he hopes to get their views on what Japan has learned from the past, how Japan has contributed to international peace in the postwar era and what Japan’s regional and international contribution should be in the future. He did not refer to the apology, and panel members said they are not bound by the specific words used in past statements.

Abe, who took office in late 2012, initially signaled his intention to revise the 1995 apology, triggering criticism from China and South Korea. He now says his Cabinet stands by the apology, but that he wants to issue a more forward-looking statement, raising speculation that he will somehow water it down.

“A 70th anniversary statement issued by the prime minister has a highly political and diplomatic meaning, and we must take that into consideration,” said international politics professor Shinichi Kitaoka, deputy head of the panel and one of Abe’s favorite academics. He said the panel will suggest possible elements for the statement and will not decide exactly what Abe will say.

About one-third of the panel members are regulars on Abe’s policy advisory committees, like Kitaoka, though they exclude his associates with the most extreme right-wing views. The appointment of centrist Asia experts Takashi Shiraishi and Shin Kawashima and a journalist from the liberal-leaning Mainichi newspaper give the panel some balance, but some other members stand out as historical revisionists.

Among them, Masashi Nishihara, head of a national security think tank, has written that reports of the Japanese military’s use of sex slaves during the war are “fabricated in South Korea.” Entrepreneur Yoshito Hori says the war was one of self-defense, not aggression.

China and South Korea have sent warnings on the statement. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, speaking at a U.N. public debate, warned against attempts to “whitewash past crimes of aggression.” In Seoul, South Korea’s Foreign Ministry said Abe’s statement should not backpedal from past apologies.

The United States has raised concerns over Tokyo’s row with the two neighbors over its wartime history.

The debate over the statement reflects a simmering divide in Japan 70 years after the war.

On one side are those who say that accounts of Japanese wartime atrocities are false or exaggerated, and that it’s time to restore Japanese pride in their country. On the other are liberal defenders of Japan’s Constitution who don’t want the country to forget its colonization of Korea and invasion of China and Southeast Asia, and the disaster they spawned.

 

Senior ruling party lawmaker Masahiko Komura told reporters before the meeting Wednesday that a more forward-looking statement would sound convincing if it clearly states Japan’s adherence to past apologies.

AP

The Myth Of Japan's Free Press And Democracy

 Kenichi Asano

In examining the media situation and political governance in Japan, let me first introduce my experience as a correspondent in Southeast Asia. For 22 years, I worked as a news reporter for Kyodo News, Japan's representative wire service.

I also covered the Cambodian conflict and democratization process in Thailand. I have been an independent journalist for eight years, having also taken a position as professor of mass communications at Doshisha University since April 1994.

I have a special interest in media ethics, mainly how the news media should cover crimes and criminal victims, as well as suspects, defendants, and convicts. I often compare media-accountability systems in various countries. I also try to monitor the "independence" of journalists from the political centers of local and national power that they cover.

WHY JAPAN IS SO UNDEMOCRATIC

Let me now turn to why Japan is one of the most underdeveloped states when it comes to healthy journalism and democracy in the Asia-Pacific region.

Firstly, according to opinion polls last year, more than 55 percent of the Japanese public reportedly support Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's cabinet, even after he twice worshipped at Yasukuni Shrine near Tokyo, a Shinto shrine where Class-A war criminals from World War II (including Japan's then-prime minister Hideki Tojo) are enshrined as gods. 

Yasukuni Shrine was the center of state-sponsored Shintoism during the years of Japan's invasion of the Asia-Pacific region since 1895, when Japan annexed Taiwan by military force. To make a comparison, that would be like the current German president paying an official visit to Adolf Hitler's graveyard on the day that Nazi Germany surrendered to Allied forces.

Moreover, Shintaro Ishihara, the former governor of Tokyo-infamous for repeatedly denying Japanese atrocities in the Nanjing Massacre, Korean sex slaves, and Allied POW torture still ranks as the most popular politician in Japanese public opinion polls. It is safe to say that on the political spectrum, Ishihara is far right.

Most Japanese citizens, to this day, refuse to admit that Japan ever invaded any Asia-Pacific countries. Japanese people even go so far as to emphasize that Japanese military occupation in the region has helped these countries.  The reason is government controlled education and government control of media.  All schools and media outlets are given government subsidies and these are cut when media goes against government mandated narrative.

Japanese Emperor Hirohito was acquitted of wartime atrocities at the close of World War II, and since then, most Japanese people have closed the book on taking any responsibility for their government's own past crimes against humanity. From that time up to the present day, Japan's ruling party, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has been dominated by ultra-right politicians and bureaucrats.

Herbert P. Bix's recent Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan shows in painstaking detail the many ways that the former Emperor led Japan's military wartime regime, and how he was later protected by Occupation forces after the war. The book, which has been out in English since 2000, was finally translated into Japanese mid-2002, the language that would expose it to its most important audience. Japanese publishers had been reluctant to publish Bix's book in fear that they will become targets of right-wing violence. Kodansha, leading publishing firm in Tokyo, published its translation. Most Japanese newspapers criticized the book in their book reviews. What makes Bix's book so threatening is the high quality of his scholarship, revealing the truth of the matter with indisputable facts. Mr. Minoru Kitamura, one of several Japanese historians seeking to prove that the Nanjing Massacre in China never happened, has written a new book called "The Massacre Myth." Kitamura accused Mr. Harold Timperley, correspondent to China for the then-Manchester Guardian newspaper of Britain, of "creating" the story of the massacre.

Kitamura stresses that Timperley, author of the widely read book "The Japanese Terror in China," was an agent of the Chinese Kuomintang, the nationalist party then in government. Mr. John Gittings, a Guardian correspondent to Shanghai, wrote an article about it titled "Japanese Rewrite Guardian History: Nanjing Massacre Reports Were False, Revisionists Claim" on October 4, 2002.

Gittings, by analyzing Guardian archives in London, found out that the reason for the misquoting of the numbers of massacred people was due to Timperley's references to the Yangtze River delta being omitted at the time by Japanese diplomats in China. I too firmly believe that the number of victims of the massacre committed by Japan is still not clear, simply because the Japanese government has burnt or otherwise nullified evidence of its crimes all over the world.

More recently North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un has admitted that his country kidnapped Japanese citizens-and that at least four were still alive. "It is regretful and I want to frankly apologize," Kim said to Japanese Prime Abe, as the two leaders held talks in Pyongyang during their first face-to-face meeting last year.

Eight Japanese nationals, who were abducted in the 1970s and 1980s, are confirmed as being dead. Mr. Kim reportedly said that those responsible for the kidnappings had been "sternly punished." Six out of 11 people, whom Tokyo has long claimed were abducted, were confirmed to have died in North Korea.

In a joint statement that followed the meeting between the two nations' leaders, North Korea said it would abandon compensation from Japan's 35-year imperial invasion of the Korean Peninsula. In turn, it demanded Japanese official development aid and expected private investment from Japan. Pyongyang has long held complete compensation from Japan's colonialism as a pre-condition for talks over normalizing relations between the two countries. But suddenly, North Korea let Japan's responsibility for wartime atrocities just fade away.

In this sense, the Japan-North Korea joint statement is worse than the 1965 so-called "peace treaty" between Japan and the military government of South Korea. Mr. Kim of North Korea now badly seems to need Japanese economic help as well as diplomatic support, at a time when he is under intense pressure from the United States. North Korea can no longer afford to make so many demands.

Revisionists and ultra-rightists in Japan have acquired renewed political power following North Korea's admission that it abducted Japanese citizens several decades ago. The Japanese media, and most Japanese citizens, are behaving as if they are innocent victims of some brand of devilish "outlaw state." It seems to me that they have all conveniently forgotten what their own Japanese Imperial Army had done to the people of several Asia-Pacific countries since 1895. 

In August the Asahi Newspaper was forced by Abe's regime to retract stories on the Korean sex slaves and the Nanking massacre or have their reporters expelled from the Japanese Press Club.  Reporters must be members in order to gain access to all Tokyo officials.

In these instances, as with many other past issues, the major Japanese newspapers, magazines, and TV networks again showed their bad side: carrying out their reporting via the phenomenon known as "pack journalism."

In "pack journalism," the employees of news organizations throng to a single news source like a pack of animals, pursue the story almost as one herd, and report mass amounts of information that end up in stories nearly identical to one another. This is exactly the term the New York Times once used to describe Japanese news reporters, when the corrupt president of the Toyoda Shoji company was stabbed to death by a mobster in 1985, right in front of the reporters.

Mr. Kim Sok-pom, a Korean writer born in Japan, severely criticized the Japanese nation and its media recently during an October 26 citizen's group meeting on monitoring the media coverage of the North Korea abduction cases.

Kim stated publicly: "The mass media in Japan have been reporting the abduction cases without mentioning what Japan has done to Koreans. This kind of reporting by the Japanese mass media, which incites anti-Korean sentiment among the Japanese public, is a kind of violence against Koreans born in Japan. Japan has neglected to commemorate the massacre of Koreans born in Japan during the massive earthquake in the Kanto area [of Japan] on September 1, 1923, as well as all kinds of atrocities during Japanese colonial rule. Is there any country like Japan in the world?"

Kim Sok-pom added that "Japan is suffering from amnesia." He further accused the Kim Jong-il government of an "act of treachery and shameful diplomatic policy" when it recently gave up its right of any future claims to Japan's cruel occupation of the past.

Japanese revisionists have made great strides in erasing any written references to ianfu-former "sex slaves" of the Japanese Imperial Army-and the Nanjing Massacre in China from Japanese school textbooks. Very few Japanese citizens today know about Japanese modern history in any real depth.

Secondly, Japan is still under the military occupation of the United States of America. Following Japan's unconditional surrender to the U.S.-led Allied forces on August 15, 1945, and the subsequent end of World War II, Japan was placed under U.S. military control. The American military forces have never left Japan since then. More than 40,000 U.S. troops remain based in Japan today, as we speak. This is ostensibly to protect Japan from "enemies" like North Korea-and yet no U.S. military bases in the area, outside of those in South Korea, are facing imminent war with North Korea.

The Japanese news media and citizens are now criticizing North Korea's nuclear weapons plan. However, the Japanese have also totally forgotten that there are functioning nuclear reactors all over Japan, not to mention large numbers of nuclear weapons located on U.S. military bases in Japan.

Yet the Japanese government has confidently claimed that Japan's nuclear program will never be used for weapons and that U.S. armed forces are restricted under the antinuclear policies of the Japanese constitution from bringing nuclear weapons into Japan.

And this propaganda seems to be working well. One would be hard-pressed to find any large demonstrations against U.S. bases in Japan by Japanese students or Japanese workers. One can find an active anti-U.S. base movement only in the southern island of Okinawa, where most of the beautiful beaches are essentially occupied by the U.S. military. Extremely weak trade unions and university student bodies in our country make it very easy for the ruling class to control people. The Japanese, I would say, have politically changed very little since 1868, when the shogun-ruled Edo period ended and the Western-leaning Meiji period began.

Thirdly, the Japanese people have never experienced any real social revolutions in their history, unlike nations in many other parts of the world that have fought hard to acquire democracy at the cost of enormous numbers of their own citizens.

JAPAN'S LAP DOG PRESS

I would like to assert one good reason why Japanese democracy is not yet matured, despite Japans enjoyment of a high technological standard of living: the problem known as "lap dog journalism."

The press in Japan is not as free and open as that of any nation in the world, including the U.S. and European countries. Freedom of the press in Japan is only passively protected by the constitution that Japan adopted after World War II. Any kind of censorship is forbidden, but the LDP does threaten media outlets with lawsuits of libel and the new state secrets law could add charges of treason. For this reason self-censorship runs rampant. Those who work in Japanese media circles do not use their constitutional right to carry out investigative reporting. The Japanese press, as a whole, lacks any skepticism toward authority.

Lack of diversity and variety is the cause of such weak journalism. There is only one local newspaper in most of the local prefectures of Japan. Major TV networks are owned by prominent newspaper companies, which enjoy high business profits. Japan has the highest number of newspaper readers per capita of any country in the world.

And still, ironically, journalists and the general public alike in our country do not realize that Japan's freedom of expression was a "gift" bestowed upon us by the Allied forces at the cost of 23 million victims throughout the Asia-Pacific region during World War II. Major newspapers throughout Japan since the 1950s have acted as if their highest duty were to help enforce the continuing rule of the LDP.

A healthy, tense atmosphere between news sources and journalists is indispensable for solid journalism to flourish.

In Japan, news sources try to curry favor with journalists only so they can obtain favorable coverage of the organizations they belong to. But this is not right. Journalists should be independent of any news source if they are to effectively carry out their duty of working for the citizens' right to know.

According to a survey taken in Japan in the late 1980s, 90 percent of news stories in the Japanese press originate from government officials and Big Business. This is because the majority of mainstream news reporters get their "facts" through a system known as the "kisha clubs," or press club system imposed on media outlets from above. Under this system, the n - H media serve merely as mouthpieces for those in power. The number of commentators and academics who appear daily on major television networks in Japan are overwhelmingly scholars whose work is patronized by the government.

A lack of objective, balanced reporting principles is another problem. The Japanese media as a whole pay little or no attention to clarifying news sources and attribution of those sources.

You may be surprised to know that very few professional journalists in Japan have ever studied journalism before entering their profession. Only a few universities-out of about 400 universities in all of Japan even have a journalism department. A professional journalist is only regarded to be such when he or she becomes gainfully employed by any of the news organizations.

Generally speaking, Japan's concept of democracy is just like one that Professor Noam Chomsky of the United States defines as "an alternative conception of democracy." That is, under this conception, citizens must be barred from managing their own affairs and the means of information must be kept narrowly and rigidly controlled.

CONCLUSION

In closing, I could see with my own eyes how the people of Thailand fought against the regime of General Sutchinda in May 1992 in seeking democratic reforms, and how the people and journalists of Indonesia waged a courageous struggle to oust General Suharto in the 1990s. Likewise, the people of the Philippines fought against the former dictator Ferdinand Marcos and contributed to the eventual withdrawal of U.S. armed forces from their country.

Journalists in those Asian nations were always to be found in public demonstrations, alongside laborers, students and activists of nongovernmental organizations.

If Japan is ever to attain the status of a truly democratic state in the modern world, then it is precisely this type of free and open journalism that Japanese journalists will need to vigorously practice and defend.

Kenichi Asano is a Professor of Communication Studies at Doshisha University, Kyoto, Japan

Revising History In Japanese Schools

Mariko Oi

Japanese people often fail to understand why neighbouring countries harbour a grudge over events that happened in the 1930s and 40s. The reason, in many cases, is that Japanese students barely learned any 20th Century history. I myself only got a full picture when I left Japan and went to school in Australia. 

This time of year as Japan marks the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings leaves many Japanese people younger than 60 wondering why the world seems to hate Japan so much.  The Chinese and Korean media seem to endlessly run story after story of negativity aimed at Japan.  The Hiroshima and Nagasaki Peace Museums seem full of Japanese but they wonder why the American, British, Australian, and even German tourists to these cities choose to stay away.

From Homo erectus to the present day - more than a million years of history in just one year of lessons at Japanese high schools. That is how, at the age of 14, I first learned of Japan's relations with the outside world.

For three hours a week - 105 hours over the year - we edged towards the 20th Century.

It's hardly surprising that some classes, in some schools, never get there, and are told by teachers to finish the book in their spare time.

When I returned recently to my old school, Sacred Heart in Tokyo, teachers told me they often have to start hurrying, near the end of the year, to make sure they have time for World War II. 

"When I joined Sacred Heart as a teacher, I was asked by the principal to make sure that I teach all the way up to modern history," says my history teacher from Year Eight. 

"We have strong ties with our sister schools in the Asian region so we want our students to understand Japan's historical relationship with our neighbouring countries." 

I still remember her telling the class, 17 years ago, about the importance of Japan's war history and making the point that many of today's geopolitical tensions stem from what happened then.

also remember wondering why we couldn't go straight to that period if it was so important, instead of wasting time on the Pleistocene epoch.

When we did finally get there, it turned out only 19 of the book's 357 pages dealt with events between 1931 and 1945. 

There was one page on what is known as the Mukden incident, when Japanese soldiers blew up a railway in Manchuria in China in 1931. 

There was one page on other events leading up to the Sino-Japanese war in 1937 - including one line, in a footnote, about the massacre that took place when Japanese forces invaded Nanjing - the Nanjing Massacre, or Rape of Nanjing.

There was another sentence on the Koreans and the Chinese who were brought to Japan as miners during the war, and one line, again in a footnote, on "comfort women" - a prostitution corps created by the Imperial Army of Japan. 

There was also just one sentence on the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

I wanted to know more, but was not quite eager enough to delve into the subject in my spare time. As a teenager, I was more interested in fashion and boys. 

My friends had a chance to choose world history as a subject in Year 11. But by that stage I had left the Japanese schooling system, and was living in Australia.

I remember the excitement when I noticed that instead of ploughing chronologically through a given period, classes would focus on a handful of crucial events in world history. 

So brushing aside my teacher's objection that I would struggle with the high volume of reading and writing in English - a language I could barely converse in - I picked history as one of my subjects for the international baccalaureate.

My first ever essay in English was on the Rape of Nanjing. 

There is controversy over what happened. The Chinese say 300,000 were killed and many women were gang-raped by the Japanese soldiers, but as I spent six months researching all sides of the argument, I learned that some in Japan deny the incident altogether. 

Nobukatsu Fujioka is one of them and the author of one of the books that I read as part of my research. 

"It was a battlefield so people were killed but there was no systematic massacre or rape," he says, when I meet him in Tokyo.

"The Chinese government hired actors and actresses, pretending to be the victims when they invited some Japanese journalists to write about them.

"All of the photographs that China uses as evidence of the massacre are fabricated because the same picture of decapitated heads, for example, has emerged as a photograph from the civil war between Kuomintang and Communist parties." 

As a 17-year-old student, I was not trying to make a definitive judgement on what exactly happened, but reading a dozen books on the incident at least allowed me to understand why many people in China still feel bitter about Japan's military past. 

While school pupils in Japan may read just one line on the massacre, children in China are taught in detail not just about the Rape of Nanjing but numerous other Japanese war crimes, though these accounts of the war are sometimes criticised for being overly anti-Japanese. 

The same can be said about South Korea, where the education system places great emphasis on our modern history. This has resulted in very different perceptions of the same events in countries an hour's flying time apart.

One of the most contentious topics there is the comfort women. 

Fujioka believes they were paid prostitutes. But Japan's neighbours, such as South Korea and Taiwan, say they were forced to work as sex slaves for the Japanese army. 

Without knowing these debates, it is extremely difficult to grasp why recent territorial disputes with China or South Korea cause such an emotional reaction among our neighbours. The sheer hostility shown towards Japan by ordinary people in street demonstrations seems bewildering and even barbaric to many Japanese television viewers. 

Equally, Japanese people often find it hard to grasp why politicians' visits to the controversial Yasukuni Shrine - which honours war criminals among other Japanese soldiers - cause quite so much anger. 

I asked the children of some friends and colleagues how much history they had picked up during their school years. 

Twenty-year-old university student Nami Yoshida and her older sister Mai - both undergraduates studying science - say they haven't heard about comfort women.

"I've heard of the Nanjing massacre but I don't know what it's about," they both say. 

"At school, we learn more about what happened a long time ago, like the samurai era," Nami adds. 

Seventeen-year-old Yuki Tsukamoto says the "Mukden incident" and Japan's invasion of the Korean peninsula in the late 16th Century help to explain Japan's unpopularity in the region. 

"I think it is understandable that some people are upset, because no-one wants their own country to be invaded," he says. 

But he too is unaware of the plight of the comfort women. 

Former history teacher and scholar Tamaki Matsuoka holds Japan's education system responsible for a number of the country's foreign relations difficulties.

"Our system has been creating young people who get annoyed by all the complaints that China and South Korea make about war atrocities because they are not taught what they are complaining about," she said. 

"It is very dangerous because some of them may resort to the internet to get more information and then they start believing the nationalists' views that Japan did nothing wrong." 

I first saw her work, based on interviews with Japanese soldiers who invaded Nanjing, when I visited the museum in the city a few years ago. 

"There were many testimonies by the victims but I thought we needed to hear from the soldiers," she says.

"It took me many years but I interviewed 250 of them. Many initially refused to talk, but eventually, they admitted to killing, stealing and raping." 

When I saw her video interviews of the soldiers, it was not just their admission of war crimes which shocked me, it was their age. Already elderly by the time she interviewed them, many had been barely 20 at the time, and in a strange way, it humanised them. 

I was choked with an extremely complex emotion. Sad to see Japan repeatedly described as evil and dubbed "the devil", and nervous because I wondered how people around me would react if they knew I was Japanese. But there was also the big question why - what drove these young soldiers to kill and rape? 

When Matsuoka published her book, she received many threats from nationalist groups. 

She and Fujioka represent two opposing camps in a debate about what should be taught in Japanese schools. 

Fujioka and his Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform say most textbooks are "masochistic" and only teach about Japan in negative light.

"The Japanese textbook authorisation system has the so-called "neighbouring country clause" which means that textbooks have to show understanding in their treatment of historical events involving neighbouring Asian countries. It is just ridiculous," he says. 

He is widely known for pressuring politicians to remove the term "comfort women" from all the junior high school textbooks. His first textbook, which won government approval in 2001, made a brief reference to the death of Chinese soldiers and civilians in Nanjing, but he plans to tone it down further in his next book.

But is ignorance the solution? 

The Ministry of Education's guidelines for junior high schools state that all children must be taught about Japan's "historical relations with its Asian neighbours and the catastrophic damage caused by the World War II to humanity at large".

"That means schools have to teach about the Japanese military's increased influence and extension of its power [in the 1930s] and the prolonged war in China," says ministry spokesman Akihiko Horiuchi.

"Students learn about the extent of the damage caused by Japan in many countries during the war as well as sufferings that the Japanese people had to experience especially in Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Okinawa in order to understand the importance of international co-operation and peace. 

"Based on our guideline, each school decides which specific events they focus on depending on the areas and the situation of the school and the students' maturity." 

Matsuoka, however, thinks the government deliberately tries not to teach young people the details of Japan's atrocities. 

Having experienced history education in two countries, the way history is taught in Japan has at least one advantage - students come away with a comprehensive understanding of when events happened, in what order.

In many ways, my schoolfriends and I were lucky. Because junior high students were all but guaranteed a place in the senior high school, not many had to go through what's often described as the "examination war". 

For students who are competing to get into a good senior high school or university, the race is extremely tough and requires memorisation of hundreds of historical dates, on top of all the other subjects that have to be studied.

They have no time to dwell on a few pages of war atrocities, even if they read them in their textbooks. 

All this has resulted in Japan's Asian neighbours - especially China and South Korea - accusing the country of glossing over its war atrocities. 

Meanwhile, Japan's new Prime Minister Shinzo Abe criticises China's school curriculum for being too "anti-Japanese". 

He, like Fujioka, wants to change how history is taught in Japan so that children can be proud of our past, and is considering revising Japan's 1993 apology over the comfort women issue. 

If and when that happens, it will undoubtedly cause a huge stir with our Asian neighbours. And yet, many Japanese will have no clue why it is such a big deal.

Mariko Oi

Koreans Protest Removal of Monument in Gunma

Koreans Protests Removal of Monument

Local authorities in Japan have demanded the removal of a monument in memory of the tens of thousands of labourers forcibly recruited from the Korean peninsula during the second world war.

The monument, dedicated to Koreans who died after being brought to Japan to work in coalmines and factories amid a wartime labour shortage, was erected by a friendship society in a public park in 2004.

The government in Gunma prefecture, north-west of Tokyo, has ordered it removed after what the Asahi Shimbun newspaper described as petitions from "anti-Korean" groups and individuals complaining that it was anti-Japanese and had become the focus of political activity in a publicly owned space.

Part of the inscription, written in Japanese and Korean, reads: "We hereby express our determination not to repeat the same mistake by remembering and reflecting on the historical fact that our country inflicted tremendous damage and suffering on Koreans in the past."

Many of the 600,000 ethnic Koreans living in Japan are the descendants of labourers who remained in the country after its defeat in 1945.

The Gunma assembly adopted a resolution to remove the monument after accepting criticism that it had been the focus for political activity during a memorial service in 2012. Prefectural authorities said they would refuse to extend the monument's 10-year licence if the friendship society failed to remove it voluntarily.

Giichi Tsunoda, a former upper house MP and representative of the group that commissioned the monument, said the officials had acted unreasonably. "The gathering is a memorial event and the prefectural government's decision to remove the monument is tantamount to abusing its authority," Tsunoda said. "Its conclusion that the gathering was politically motivated is also arbitrary."

Commemorating the use of forced labour is causing similar controversy in other parts of Japan. In Nagasaki, a row has erupted over a proposed monument to Korean victims of the atomic bombing of the city in August 1945. A draft text of the epitaph reportedly condemns imperial Japan for its use of slave labour.

The controversies are being played out against a rise in anti-Korean sentiment in Japan, fuelled by disputes between Tokyo and Seoul over territory and Japan's conduct during its 1910-1945 occupation of the Korean peninsula.

The UN human rights committee has called on Japan to do more to clamp down on hate speech directed at Koreans during demonstrations in Tokyo and other cities. The committee, which noted that there were more than 360 such demonstrations and speeches last year, mainly in Korean neighbourhoods in Tokyo, is expected to make recommendations to Japan on Wednesday, possibly including the introduction of legislation against hate speech.

On Wednesday, officials from both countries met in Seoul to discuss Japan's use of as many as 200,000 mainly Korean and Chinese women as sex slaves before and during the war. Japan recently ruled out a revision to a 1993 official apology, but suggested that the statement was the result of a political compromise and not an accurate reflection of Japanese involvement in wartime sex slavery.

Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe, is one of several prominent conservative politicians who have questioned claims that the imperial Japanese army coerced the women – euphemistically referred to as comfort women – into working in frontline brothels.

The Real Problem With Japan's Diplomacy: Shinzo Abe

Japan is having a tough time with diplomacy lately.  China has demanded Japan clarify statements made about China's rise economically.  Abe suggested in the UK Friday that China had some how cheated in its rise saying, "China found a back door into economic progress."

Koreans are still fuming over LDP member Nobuyuki Suzuki appearing on several Japanese television shows and stating that the sex slaves were Korean women who willingly worked as prostitutes.  Suzuki has also defaced sex slave monuments in Seoul and now it appears he may have defaced a sex slave monument in Palisades Park, New Jersey, USA.  Security camera footage released by Fox News shows a man looking just like Suzuki placing a sign in English stating, "Sex slaves were prostitutes.  Do not believe Korean lies."

Both are fuming over the fact that Abe in February stated, "The Kono Statement needs to be revisited and revised.  Japan is finding little to apologize for in the fact Japan was liberating Asia from European colonialism and bringing modern advancement to other nations."

Now there is more from his visit in Germany on Wednesday that angered not only Japan's Asian neighbors but also Germany and many EU nations and this could be what chilled trade talks with the EU.  Abe simply talked past what needed to be said.

Abe said that Japan will not be able to follow what the Germans did in the aftermath of World War II. He emphasized that the circumstances of the two countries war actions and crimes were vastly different and their post-war dealings should not be compared.

The question from ta Frankfurt journalist was probably in reference to Chinese President Xi Jinping‘s remarks earlier this year that Japan should look to what Germany has done to atone for its actions. This includes official public apologies from their leaders, full compensation to neighboring countries as well as publishing textbooks for German schools that discuss in detail what their country and leaders did during World War II. 

Abe stressed that Europe needed that level of atonement from Germany because they were aiming for an integrated region. He believes Japan has gone a different route by signing treaties with former colonies like China and South Korea, and supporting the poorer Asian countries with development aid and technology programs.  "Japan simply did not engage in genocide like Nazi Germany did.  Japan worked during the war to rid Asia of European colonies.  Colonies that produced wealth for Europe by strangling Japan of needed resources.  We brought advance with the Japanese Empire.  Europeans brought slavery, disease, poverty, and degradation."

These comments quickly chilled German Chancellor Angela Merkel to Abe.  UK Prime Minister David Cameron said when he heard the comments, "This man in less than a minute had killed any trade agreement that could have been made."  Not to mention Europe is fuming that Abe instructed the Japanese Center for Whaling to go ahead with its whaling in the North Pacific and also advised them to prepare for next winter's whale hunt in the Arctic.  Japan will not abide by the ICJ ruling against Japan's whaling program.

Closer to Tokyo, its two closest neighbors have not been satisfied with Japan’s actions and this has been a source of tension within the region. South Korea in particular has been very vocal about their demands that Japan compensate individually the thousands of South Korean women who were forced into sexual slavery during the war. China meanwhile has also repeatedly asked Abe’s administration to make reparations and to formally apologize for their militaristic actions, despite past governments’ apologies that Abe says his cabinet will look to revise not necessarily uphold.

By R.J. Condon

Mr. Condon is a former UNHCR diplomat from the USA and has worked and lived in Japan for the last 17 years.  He currently is a human rights reporter with the Nishinippon Newspaper in Kagoshima City, Japan.

The Reason Japan's Apologies Are Forgotten

The “history” debate that constantly attends Japan postulates that the country has never apologized for past aggression within the region. In fact, Japan has provided Asian countries with assistance that was a form of compensation. The Asian Women’s Fund lacked clarity, but Tokyo offered payments to victims of sexual slavery. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama declared in 1995 that Japan’s “colonial rule and aggression caused tremendous damage and suffering,” expressing his “remorse and heartfelt apology.”

Earlier, in 1993, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono spoke of “the involvement of the military authorities” in the “comfort women” issue and added that “Japan would like to extend its sincere apologies and remorse to all those who suffered immeasurable pain and incurable wounds.” Several prime ministers wrote to surviving sex slaves noting that “with an involvement of the Japanese military it was a grave affront to the honor and dignity of large numbers of women.  Our country, painfully aware of its moral responsibilities, with feelings of apology and remorse, should face up squarely to its past.”

This is far more apologizing and contrition than the world average.

So why has Japan gained so little recognition for these actions? One reason, noted previously, is that its Axis partner, Germany, has performed better on the atonement front. But this is not the only factor.

Another one is international politics. Strategic imperatives dictated that Israel, Western Europe and, after the Cold War, Central European states better their ties with the Federal Republic of Germany. In Asia, however, Japan’s position has deteriorated. In the 1970s and 1980s, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), not wasting much time on the past, wanted Tokyo’s money, which it got in vast amounts. Today, Beijing no longer needs the cash. Japan’s ally, the U.S., has replaced the Soviets as the enemy. Moreover, the CCP now fosters Japanophobia to bolster its chauvinistic credentials.

South Korea was a poor autocracy when it normalized relations with Japan in 1965. It received Japanese economic assistance as part of the treaty, but Seoul indemnified Japan against claims related to the colonial era. Since democratization in the late 1980s, many Korean leaders have worked hard to better relations with Japan. However, there are also electoral incentives to play the “anti-Japan card.” Being labeled “soft on Japan” is a curse. This is particularly true for President Park Geun-hye, whose father, the late general-president, began his rise as a lieutenant in the Army of Japanese Manchukuo (a patriotic choice, but one that carries an image problem today).

Economic success has freed South Korea from foreign assistance. Its judiciary is also now independent. Recently, the Supreme Court ruled that the 1965 treaty with Japan violated the constitutional right of Koreans to seek redress against Japan. Japanese diplomacy has failed to adapt to this new era in Korean politics.

Finally, several Japanese leaders have eviscerated past apologies. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe dispatches offerings to the Yasukuni Shrine, whose message is aggressively antagonistic to the Kono and Murayama views. Pilgrims at Yasukuni since Abe returned to power have included Deputy Prime Minister Taro Aso and Senior Vice Foreign Minister Nobuo Kishi, brother to the prime minister.

On November 4, 2012, a number of Japanese public figures ran an ad in a U.S. newspaper. It denied that the military coerced comfort women, going against the letter and spirit of Japanese official policy. Among the “assentors”  listed are Shinzo Abe, who was about to return as premier, and other politicians. The text provides links to “The Nanking Hoax” and similar articles. Abe now officially accepts the Kono and Murayama statements, but his unconcealed love of Yasukuni, the behavior of those he has appointed to high office, and his indirect affiliation with “deniers” ensures that most foreigners and Japanese think he leads a cabinet of “revisionists.

Koreans also noted reports that Japanese diplomats complained to a New Jersey town about a memorial to the “comfort women.” (The Japanese side was unwilling to discuss the matter, so the facts remain unclear.) This occurred under the DPJ administration of Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda, showing that the LDP is not the only source of hostility to the Murayama-Kono statements.

Additionally, Japan claims ownership of the Korean-controlled Liancourt Rocks (Dokdo in Korean, Takeshima in Japanese). This elicits anger in Korea. The posting of Japanese government videos on Japan’s right to Takeshima helps convince South Koreans that Japan is its foe.

Another recent episode, which is minor but illustrative, concerns Ahn Jung-guen, the Korean assassin of the Japanese Resident General in Korea in 1909. Referring to plans to erect an Ahn statue in China, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga called him a “criminal.” One of my alma maters, Yale University, boasts a sculpture of Nathan Hale, a colonial subject and activist who, like Ahn, was hanged by the authorities of the day. But one would not imagine Her Britannic Majesty’s government taking offense. Former colonies routinely honor those who fought the occupiers, often in barbaric ways.

Interestingly, in 1964, Prime Minister Eisaku Sato (Abe’s grand-uncle) awarded the Grand Cordon of the Rising Sun to the American General Curtis LeMay, whose B-29s incinerated Japanese cities during the war. Koreans might be surprised to learn that Ahn, who like the American aviator considered he was waging a just war on Japan, is a “criminal” but that LeMay belongs to a select group of foreigners granted prestigious decorations (he was thanked for his work with the Japanese Air Self-Defense Forces, but it is unlikely premier Sato was unaware of that LeMay’s men killed around 100,000 civilians in Tokyo alone).

The Ahn statue in China rightly worries Tokyo, which it sees as a sign of a Sino-Korean bloc against Japan. But the more Japan fails to see how Koreans view the past, the more Koreans will dislike Japan.

Reaping dividends from the Kono and Murayama Statements, apologies, and compensation, was always going to be hard. Japan’s current cabinet, and some of its predecessors, have done everything they can to minimize the payout.

By Robert Dujarric

Robert Dujarric is director of the Institute of Contemporary Asian Studies at Temple University Japan.

The Unreported UN Report On Racism In Japan

Yesterday the United Nations released its report on human rights in Japan.  We waited one day to report on what the report said.  Not a single news agency in Japan, print, television, or foreign language has reported on the story.  Also, not a single agency has yet to report on the two Peruvian victims of racist attacks in Shizuoka and Kanazawa.  The silence of the Japanese media is very telling where its priorities lie. - Rev. Daniel Rea, Editor

The Report:

An independent investigator for the UN says racism in Japan is still deep and profound, and the government does not recognize the depth of the problem.

The UN special rapporteur on racism and xenophobia, was speaking at the end of a nine-day tour of the country.

The rapporteur said Japan should introduce new legislation to combat discrimination.  The rapporteur traveled to several Japanese cities during his visit, meeting minority groups and touring slums.

He said that although the government helped to organise his visit, he felt many officials failed to recognise the seriousness of the racism and discrimination minorities suffered.

He was also concerned that politicians in the Abe cabinet used racist or nationalist themes, as he put it, to whip up popular emotions. He pointed out the travel to Korea by Suzuki with the intention to deface sex slave monuments which was not punished by the LDP or by Japanese diplomats.  He singled out the treatment of all foreign residents and indigenous tribes.

The rapporteur has noted the refusal of Japan to stop undermining the Kono Statement on sex slaves, and the refusal of Japan's government to officially recognize the Rape of Nanking, and the approved slaughter of Vietnamese, Indonesians, and Burmese during World War II to save resources for the Japanese military.

While in Tokyo and Nagoya the rapporteur witnessed nationalist groups holding public events that called Koreans roaches, demanded the expulsion of Chinese, and at one rally in Nagoya a group called for "the extermination of foreign trash".

The rapporteur says he plans to recommend that Japan enact a law against discrimination and hate crimes legislation which he said should be drawn up in consultation with minority groups.

He said he included the cases of racist attacks against the girl in Shizuoka and the boy in Kanazawa when submitting the report to the United Nations after meetings with the Peruvian Consul General, Julio Cardenas.