The government of Korea is set to confiscate more than a million square meters of land that belong to Koreans that are accused of collaborating with the Japanese colonial government.

The Investigative Commission on Pro-Japanese Collaborators’ Property announced on Monday it will seize W25.7 billion (US$1=W929) worth of land from the descendants of 10 alleged collaborators who worked for Japan during its 35-year colonial rule over the Korean peninsula.

The people in question are said to have helped Japan colonize and rule the Korean peninsula in exchange for money or high-ranking positions.

The land seizure is being conducted under a special law enacted in 2005 that gives The Commission the power to seize the assets of colonial period collaborators.

The U.S. House of Representative has passed its resolution demanding that Japan issue a formal apology for forcing women into service as comfort women during World War II.

Though largely symbolic, the nonbinding resolution has caused unease in Japan and added tension to an otherwise strong alliance. Officials in Tokyo say their country’s leaders, including Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, have apologized repeatedly for the Imperial Japanese Army’s forcing of women to work in military brothels in the 1930s and 1940s.

The resolution’s supporters, however, say Japan has never assumed responsibility fully for the treatment of the women.

Rep. Tom Lantos, D-Calif., labeled as “nauseating” what he said were efforts by some in Japan “to distort and deny history and play a game of blame the victim.”

“Inhumane deeds should be fully acknowledged,” said Lantos, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “The world awaits a full reckoning of history from the Japanese government.”

The resolation demands that Japan “formally acknowledge, apologize and accept historical responsibility in a clear and unequivocal manner.”

After decades of denial, the Japanese government acknowledged its role in wartime prostitution after a historian discovered documents showing government involvement. In 1993, the government issued a carefully worded official apology, but it was never approved by parliament. Japan has rejected most compensation claims, saying they were settled by postwar treaties.

A contributor over on the FG BBS reports that the TV screen showing the progress of the Korean Airlines flight carrying him from Seoul back to Japan clearly labeled Dokdo along with Tokyo, Seoul, and Beijing as one of the major points along the route.

Of course, the Sea of Japan was labeled “East Sea.”

I saw the Japanese trailer for akamikaze survivor documentary movie titled Wings of Defeat. The Japanese title is 特攻 (tokko) which literally translates to “special attack”, but in Japan, when speaking about tokko in the context of WWII, most people will imagine the Kamikaze pilots.

The Japanese on the front of the flier translates roughly as: “I wanted to live.” “I didn’t want to die.”

This movie looks really interesting. I’m going to have to drag myself down to the theater and pay the 1700-ish yen or so to see it! It starts July 21 in Japan.

By the way, a friend brought to my attention a book that is out of print, but available on Amazon called I was a Kamikaze. I have never read it, but it looks interesting.

Surviving suicide missions. . . That’s heavy. Apparently the author, Nagatsuka was a French literature major at Tokyo university, so he originally wrote this book in French, and later it was translated into English.

Even better, John W. Dower is in the movie. Dower wrote the amazing Japanese post-war history book, Embracing Defeat. This book is as fat as a textbook, but is so interesting it reads like a novel. Highly recommended!

- Harvey

The Daily Yomiuri ran an editorial Thursday morning stating that though outgoing Defense Minister Fumio Kyuma’s remarks about the U.S. atomic bombings of Japan at the end of WWII were ill-timed and inconsiderate, they are historically accurate.

[O]ne of the major factors in bringing the tragedy of the atomic bombings to Japan was the failure of Japanese political leaders’ diplomatic maneuvers to end the war. Taking the foolish measure of asking the Soviet Union, a potential enemy, to broker a peace deal, Japan wasted its time negotiating with the country, leading to the atomic bombings and the Soviet Union’s entry into the war.

Bloomberg has an interesting report about how many North Korean residents of Japan are changing their nationalities because they feel they can no longer support Kim Jong Il.

Kim Jong Il no longer supports the government of North Korea.

Kim is a 66-year-old businessman who owns a shoe factory in Kobe, Japan. In 1997, he resolved to switch his citizenship to South Korea from North Korea after deciding that “I could no longer support a government that allowed children to starve to death.”

Since then, thousands of North Korean residents in Japan have made the same decision. And that is bad news for the other Kim Jong Il — the one, no relation to the businessman, who has ruled North Korea since 1994.

For the last four decades, Japan’s North Korean residents have sent billions of yen in money and goods back home to their relatives and the Pyongyang regime. As more and more of them switch their allegiance to South Korea, they are choking off the flow of resources to an isolated and impoverished country already coping with trade sanctions.

While there is no way of knowing exactly how much they have sent, Katsumi Sato, director of the Modern Korea Institute in Tokyo, estimated that in the early 1990s, the annual total was some 60 billion yen ($600 million) in money and supplies.

“The cash and goods sent from Japan in the late 1980s were bigger than their national budget,” Sato said. “It was North Korea’s lifeline.”

Read the rest here.

One of the most frustrating aspects of living in Japan is being told constantly that just about any circumstance, no matter how illogical, unfair, or easily eliminated, “cannot be helped” (shikata-ga-nai or sho-ga-nai).

Now we get word that Defense Minister Fumio Kyuma has applied shikata-ga-nai logic to the end of World War II, saying that the atomic bombing of Japan by the United States during World War II was.

“I understand that the bombing ended the war, and I think that it couldn’t be helped,” Kyodo News agency quoted Kyuma as saying in a speech at a university in Chiba.

Though Kyuma comes from Nagasaki, he is able to find a silver lining the way the U.S. ended the war in that it prevented the Soviet Union from laying claim to a piece of Japan.

Kyuma’s remarks drew immediate criticism from Japanese atomic bomb victims.

“The U.S. justifies the bombings saying they saved many American lives,” said Nobuo Miyake, 78, director-general of a group of victims living in Tokyo. “It’s outrageous for a Japanese politician to voice such thinking. Japan is a victim.”

In America, the bombings are widely seen as a weapon of last resort against an enemy that was determined to fight to the death but instead surrendered unconditionally, six days after Nagasaki was attacked.

A Chinese woman has come forth with her story about how she was forced by the Japanese Imperial Army to serve as a comfort woman during World War II.

Zhou Fenying is a living witness to the dark history that still poisons China’s relations with Japan more than 60 years after World War Two.

When Zhou was 22, Japanese soldiers came to her village in eastern China, grabbed her and her sister-in-law and carted them off to a military brothel, she says.

Now 91, Zhou has broken decades of silence to speak of her traumatic experience as a “comfort woman” — the euphemism the invading Japanese used to describe women forced into sex slavery.

“I hid with my husband’s sister under a millstone. Later, the Japanese soldiers discovered us and pulled us out by our legs. They tied us both to their vehicle. Later they used more ropes to tie and secure us and drove us away,” she told Reuters in her home village in Jiangsu province.

“They then took us to the ‘comfort woman lodge’. There was nothing good there,” she said, speaking through a local government official who struggled to translate her thick dialect into Mandarin.

“For four to five hours a day, it was torture. They gave us food afterwards, but every day we cried and we just did not want to eat it,” Zhou added, sitting in her sparsely decorated home.

Read the rest here.

Another government is taking issue with Japanese revision of World War II history, but this time it’s not Korea or China, but the Okinawa Prefectural Assembly. Okinawa is opposing the national government’s orders to textbook publishers to delete references to the fact that the Japanese Imperial Army forced Okinawan civilians to commit suicide during the closing days of WWII.

The prefectural assembly’s move is in response to an earlier Education Ministry decision that ordered publishers to revise textbook references about the mass suicide of Okinawans during World War II battles.

The assembly also plans to ask the government to allow publishers to reinstate in textbooks descriptions of the mass suicide.

Several assembly members from the prefecture plan to directly inform Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Minister for Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Bunmei Ibuki.

The Sankei Shimbun reports that a U.S. military report declassified 30 years ago shows some of the Asian women who were working at brothels set up for Japanese forces during WWII were employed under contract and paid for their services.

Twenty Korean women working as prostitutes for the Japanese military in northern Burma were recruited in exchange for money and paid, according to the report written in 1944 by the US military’s intelligence division, Sankei said. The report was based on an interrogation of a Japanese owner of the brothel.

Mike Honda, who is sponsor of the resolution telling Japan to apologize formally for the “comfort woman” brothels its military set up during WWII now is asking the Congressional Research Service to look into allegations that Japanese officials set up brothels for U.S. soldiers after Japan’s surrender.

Honda rejected comparisons between the actions of the Japanese during the war and the Occupation forces. He said the Japanese “comfort women” system was set up and sanctioned by the Japanese government and military.

“It’s different,” he said. “This is the military of the Imperial government, the Imperial military’s policy, in capturing, coercing and kidnapping girls and women for the purpose of sexual slavery.”

Honda said it was important learn the U.S. military’s role in the postwar system.

Important to whom, I wonder. . .

As the Japanese Constitution marks its 60th birthday, Japanese media is filled with stories, special reports, and debates about amending or totally rewriting the national charter in order to allow the nation better to cope with the realities of the modern world. Though some of the ideas being put forth are worthwhile, there are some politicians in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) who tend to see this as a chance to cut back on some of the freedom currently being enjoyed in Japan.

Some LDP lawmakers say the 60-year-old Constitution gives too many rights and freedoms to the people, and often results in individuals exerting their rights at the cost of society as a whole, thus abusing the system.

Lawmakers often cite the difficulty the government has had since the end of the war in expropriating private land for key public projects, like major expressways and Narita airport. They say that resistance from the public to projects has delayed construction and greatly pushed up government costs.
LDP wants to amend Article 12 to state that the people “shall have freedom and be obliged to exercise their rights in ways that would not go against the public interest and public order.”

Not very liberal or democratic of the Liberal Democratic Party, is it? Of course, the rub always comes in figuring out whose job it is to decide what goes against “public interest” and “public order.”

Still others see constitutional reform as an opportunity to re-implement some of the Meiji Era notions that, depending upon with whom you side, either led Japan down its road to militaristic disaster or made Japan a great international power in a few short decades after it emerged from feudalistic self-isolation.

[A nonpartisan group conservative group of former Diet lawmakers and 190 elected politicians of politicians headed by former Prime Minister Nakasone has] presented their proposed changes to the Constitution’s preamble. The group’s new preamble says “the Emperor is the symbol of the unified public” and Japan shall “protect its independence through the solidarity of the public who love the nation.”

The “love of nation” clause, which is not in the current preamble, is something the ruling Liberal Democratic Party wants to put into the Constitution. Since the LDP’s founding in 1955, the party has made changing the Constitution one of its goals.

So, what to The People think?

Around 51 percent of people recently polled by The Mainichi agreed that the Constitution needs to be revised.

The main reason given by the people who support revision is that the current constitution is too old.

I visited former Japundit contributor Ampontan’s blog today and spent some time digesting and reading through his intriguing post titled: Eyes Wide Shut: the media and the Abe/Bush press conference.

It’s an enormously thoughtful and intelligent post, and I frankly find it quite humbling just how much work and went into dissecting the numerous issues we’ve discussed on Japundit lately: Abe, apologies, comfort women, Korea, you name it.

A few highlights (though I suggest you go over and read through the article yourself.)

First, Ampontan tells us that the US coverage of Abe’s visit, perhaps not surprisingly, missed what might be the most important revelation of the Abe/Bush pow-wow.

In the past two days, Prime Minister Abe and the government of Japan just issued its Declaration of Independence from the legacy of World War II, and in effect told Mike Honda, the U.S. Congress, and the rest of East Asia that if they don’t like it, they can take a hike. But the AP is spending its time trying to confirm that Prime Minister Abe thinks Kim Jong-il is rational.

In other words, as Amptontan says, “World War II is over” and Japan is moving past that part of its history.

NJ dot com (New Jersey dot com) has published an article about how ‘enslaved women’ of World War 2 had setup ‘Comfort Stations’ specifically for American GI’s.

Eric Talmadge of The Associated Press wrote this article which if found to be factually accurate could have severe consequences in the world of American politics which respect to how they deal with the issue. Not to mention the fact that American GI’s would be guilty of rape and soliciting prostitution. Of course some troops no matter what country will get drunk while on tour and do stupid things. Right, human nature I guess. But the issue here in this article is that the author is suggesting that Americans took advantage of ‘Comfort Women’, defined as being a selection of woman forced into prostitution.

Here is a portion of Mr. Talmadge’s report.

An Associated Press review of historical documents and records shows American authorities permitted the official brothel system to operate despite internal reports that women were being coerced into prostitution. The Americans also had full knowledge by then of Japan’s atrocious treatment of women in countries across Asia that it conquered during the war.

Tens of thousands of women were employed to provide cheap sex to U.S. troops until the spring of 1946, when Gen. Douglas MacArthur shut the brothels down.

The Kyodo News Agency is reporting that the battle for Okinawa during World War 2 will be played down in Japanese history text books.

Japan’s new high school history textbooks modified and played down descriptions of the Japanese army’s role in mass suicides by civilians during the Battle of Okinawa, in line with instructions from education ministry screeners, according to results of the textbook screening process released Friday.

Ministry screeners asked for the first time for changes to descriptions stating that Okinawa residents had been “forced by the Japanese military” into committing mass suicides, leading such phrases to be deleted.

The screeners at the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology also requested modifications to passages concerning the dispatch of Japan’s Self-Defense Forces to Iraq and on the number of victims in the 1937 Nanjing Massacre in China.

Click here for the full link.

Bloomberg Media is reporting that it is possible that the Japanese government had a hand in quietly seeing convicted war criminals such as Tojo Hideki added to the register of names at Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo.

Japan’s government didn’t force the controversial Yasukuni Shrine to honor war criminals, the country’s top officials said.

The government decades ago proposed that the Tokyo shrine honor those convicted of crimes during World War II, documents released by the National Diet Library yesterday suggest. Minutes from a 1969 meeting of health ministry and Yasukuni officials show an agreement that 12 Class-A war criminals should be made eligible for enshrinement, “while avoiding any announcement.”

The Associated Press is also reporting on this story as well.

Japan’s premier Thursday denied any wrongdoing after documents suggested past governments quietly asked a Shinto shrine to honour war criminals, setting the stage for a major diplomatic row.

I am unclear who first broke this story but its curious that no Japanese media sourse has, as of the publishing of this article here on Japundit, covered the story. Interesting.

Well did he, or didn’t he?

Some were reporting yesterday that PM Abe issued an official apology in parliament for Japan’s wartime use of sex slaves. A lot of other news sources flatly ignored it.

On the BBC, he was reported as saying

I apologise here and now as prime minister. As I frequently say, I feel sympathy for the people who underwent hardships, and I apologise for the fact that they were placed in this situation at the time.

It’s not what you’d call ‘heartfelt’, really, is it. To the extent that most Japanese online news sources haven’t reported it at all. While I gather it was on at least one channel’s evening news, it wasn’t on the FNN bulletin that I saw.

This of course follows the announcement on Sunday by Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Hakubun Shimomura in an interview on Radio Nippon denying “that the Japanese military directly recruited women to work in brothels providing sex for Japanese soldiers before and during World War II.”

There were military nurses and embedded journalists but no ‘embedded comfort women.’ It is true that there were ‘comfort women.’ I believe some parents may have sold their daughters. But it does not mean the Japanese army was involved.

So, confused? No idea what the official policy is? You’re not the only one. No wonder the US State department came out yesterday and saying that they would welcome “a more forthright and responsible manner that acknowledges the gravity of the crimes that were committed.”

What would be a sufficient apology on the issue of comfort women? According to an article published in the Japan Times, South Korean lawmaker Yoo Ki Hong pointed to:

the 1970 example of then West German Chancellor Willy Brandt, who dropped to his knees at a ceremony in Warsaw to symbolically atone for the crimes committed by Nazi Germany in World War II.

“If (Abe) sincerely wants a true South Korea-Japan friendship as well as peace in Asia, he should apologize for the past war crimes.”

I think the chances of something like this happening in the near future are highly unlikely. But it would make for quite a graphic moment.

So, why is it that the West is so rankled over the concept of Japan apologizing or not apologizing for comfort women?

Well, here’s one for you, in question form. Why is there a movement in Japan to remove any reference to sexual slavery from textbooks?

Former education minister Nariaki Nakayama takes pride in an achievement he and about 130 fellow members of the Liberal Democratic Party took the past decade to accomplish: getting references to Japan’s wartime sex slaves struck from most authorized history texts for junior high schools.

“Our campaign worked, and people outside the government also started raising their voices, creating a national trend,” said the 63-year-old Lower House member from Miyazaki Prefecture, who also openly claims the 1937 Nanjing Massacre was a “pure fabrication.”

I have really had it with these stories coming out from the West about how Japan has not apologized for its actions.

The New York Post released an article on this topic that is inaccurate in some critical parts. What’s worse is that it is written by Peter Brookes, a man who apparently is the former deputy assistant secretary of defense in the United States. A man who says that Japan has never really apologized…

What the hell is going on… Does no one do their research?

Well… That’s enough of that. Japan has apologized many times for the treatment of women during the days of World War 2. HERE for instance is one of those apologies from a Prime Minister of Japan:

The Year of 2001

Dear Madam,

On the occasion that the Asian Women’s Fund, in cooperation with the Government and the people of Japan, offers atonement from the Japanese people to the former wartime comfort women, I wish to express my feelings as well.

The issue of comfort women, with an involvement of the Japanese military authorities at that time, was a grave affront to the honor and dignity of large numbers of women.

As Prime Minister of Japan, I thus extend anew my most sincere apologies and remorse to all the women who underwent immeasurable and painful experiences and suffered incurable physical and psychological wounds as comfort women.

We must not evade the weight of the past, nor should we evade our responsibilities for the future.

I believe that our country, painfully aware of its moral responsibilities, with feelings of apology and remorse, should face up squarely to its past history and accurately convey it to future generations.

Furthermore, Japan also should take an active part in dealing with violence and other forms of injustice to the honor and dignity of women.

Finally, I pray from the bottom of my heart that each of you will find peace for the rest of your lives.

Respectfully yours,

Junichiro Koizumi
Prime Minister of Japan