Japan News
Mar. 1st, 2007 09:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ltmurnauTwo items of Japan-related news today. I suppose the common theme is "convenient amnesia".
Comfort women weren't coerced, Japanese PM suggests
Last Updated: Thursday, March 1, 2007 | 11:33 AM ET
The Associated Press
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said Thursday there is no evidence Japan coerced Asian women into working as sex slaves during the Second World War, backtracking from a landmark 1993 government statement acknowledging that tens of thousands of women were forced into prostitution for the military.
Abe's comments to reporters came as a group of ruling party legislators urged the government to revise the so-called Kono Statement acknowledging that Japan's wartime military sometimes used coercion to recruit women to work in the brothels.
"The fact is, there is no evidence to prove there was coercion," Abe said. "We have to take it from there."
Historians say that up to 200,000 women, mainly from Korea and China, were forced to have sex with Japanese soldiers in brothels run by the military government as so-called comfort women during the war.
Japanese leaders have repeatedly apologized, including former prime minister Junichiro Koizumi, who said in 2001 that he felt sincere remorse over the women's "immeasurable and painful experiences."
Abe's comments were likely to provoke a strong reaction from South Korea and China.
Earlier Thursday in Seoul, South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun urged Japan to be more sincere in addressing its colonial past, as dozens of people rallied outside the Japanese Embassy, lining up dogs' heads on the ground. The demonstration marked the anniversary of a March 1,1919, uprising against Japanese rule, which still stirs deep-rooted bitterness among Koreans.
Each of the dogs' heads had a knife placed in its mouth on pieces of paper with the names of Koreans who allegedly collaborated with Japan during its 1910-45 colonial rule. Protest organizers said the animals had been slaughtered at a restaurant, as dogs are regularly consumed as food in Korea.
In a nationally televised address, Roh said Japan "needs to, above all, show an attitude of respecting the historical truth and acts that support this."
"Instead of trying to beautify or justify its past wrongdoing, [Japan] should show sincerity that is in line with its conscience," he said.
Roh's office said late Thursday that it did not immediately have a direct response to the Japanese leader's remarks. In Beijing, calls to the Chinese Foreign Ministry seeking comment were not immediately returned.
The Kono Statement was issued in 1993 by then-chief cabinet secretary Yohei Kono after incriminating defence documents were discovered showing the military had worked with independent contractors during the war to procure women for the brothels.
The statement has been attacked by right-wing nationalists in Japan, who argue the sex slaves worked willingly for the contractors and were not coerced into servitude by the military.
Despite the official acknowledgment, Japan has rejected most compensation claims by former sex slaves, saying such claims were settled by postwar treaties.
Instead, a fund created in 1995 by the Japanese government but funded by private donations has provided a way for Japan to compensate former sex slaves without offering official government compensation. Many former comfort women have rejected the fund.
***
Nice touch with the dogs' heads. I have never understood just why every Prime Minister after another, almost without exception, has managed to stick his generative organ into the array of whirring flashing silver blades that is the "comfort women" issue, or the "Nanjing was asking for it in 1937" issue, or the "let's go visit Yasukuni Shrine and have a picnic on top of a mound of Chinese skulls" issue. There must be some kind of perverse fascination to it, or perhaps it really does score big domestically....
And:
Declassified CIA papers reveal 1950s plot to overthrow Japanese government
Joseph Coleman, Canadian Press
Published: Thursday, March 01, 2007
TOKYO - Declassified documents reveal Japanese ultranationalists with ties to U.S. military intelligence plotted to overthrow the Japanese government and assassinate the prime minister in 1952.
The scheme - which was abandoned - was concocted by militarists and suspected war criminals who had worked for U.S. occupation authorities after the Second World War, CIA records show. The plotters wanted a right-wing government that would rearm Japan.
The CIA files, declassified in 2005 and publicized by the U.S. National Archives in January, detail a plot to oust pro-U.S. prime minister, Shigeru Yoshida and install a more hawkish government led by Ichiro Hatoyama.
The CIA, in papers released under an act of the U.S. Congress to declassify documents related to Japanese war crimes, said the plotters were led by Takushiro Hattori, a former private secretary to Hideki Tojo, the wartime prime minister hanged as a war criminal in 1948.
Two CIA documents said the plot had the support of 500,000 people in Japan and the group planned to use a contact who controlled a faction inside the National Safety Agency - a precursor to the Defence Ministry - to help launch the coup.
The files strongly suggest the Americans were unaware of the plot until after it had been dropped. The plot was developed after the U.S. postwar occupation of Japan ended in April 1952 and the CIA files say U.S. financial support for Hattori's group had dried up by then.
Still, the documentary evidence of the plot illustrates the violent potential of the right-wing, anti-communist cabal that had worked under the U.S. occupation authority's G-2 intelligence wing in the early days of the Cold War in the late 1940s and early 50s. The CIA operated separately from the G-2.
"Since the beginning of July 1952, plans for a coup d'etat have been initiated among a group of ex-purgees, including former military officers. The leader of the group is ex-colonel Hattori Takushiro," said an Oct. 31, 1952, report, which claimed "this report is the first to mention a definite rightist plan involving violence."
"The original plan of the group was to engineer a coup d'etat, including the assassination of Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru on account of his hostile attitude toward depurgees and nationalists," the CIA document said.
The document said Hattori colleague Masanobu Tsuji talked the group out of the coup, urging it to focus instead on countering the Socialist party. The files say the group then decided it would not stage a coup as long as Yoshida's conservative Liberal party remained in power.
However, the group still considered violence an option, the files say.
"The group is considering the possibility of some minor assassination attempt in lieu of a coup d'etat," the Oct. 31, 1952, document said.
Hattori and others had worked under the aegis of Maj.-Gen. Charles Willoughby, the anti-communist G-2 chief. During the occupation, Willoughby was considered the second most powerful American after his boss, Gen. Douglas MacArthur.
Some group members were considered choice war crimes trial targets after the war.
Tsuji had been wanted for involvement in the Bataan Death March of 1942, in which thousands of Americans and Filipinos perished. Another group associate was Yoshio Kodama, a war profiteer and mob boss who was deeply involved in procuring materials - often illegally - for the Japanese military machine.
Neither of them was prosecuted for war crimes.
The Japanese militarists joined U.S.-supported missions to spy on Communists in Japan, infiltrate agents into Soviet and North Korean territory and recruit Japanese mercenaries to protect Taiwan from communist forces in mainland China, declassified documents show.
The CIA files, however, say the operations were riddled with intelligence leaks, hobbled by a lack of competent agents and deeply compromised by rivalries among the rightists themselves. The agents' top priorities, the documents say, were profits and an eventual resurgence of a militarist Japan.
The assassination plot detailed in the CIA files came at a difficult time for Hattori's group.
The departure of Willoughby from Japan in 1951 as the U.S. occupation wound down deprived the rightists of their leading U.S. patron and paymaster. Meanwhile, Yoshida was openly hostile to Hattori's push for rearmament.
"The government attitude toward the Hattori group has been increasingly antagonistic and the group has lost influence since the departure of General Willoughby," said a CIA document dated April 18, 1952.
Yoshida was pushed out of office peacefully in 1954 and replaced by Hatoyama but the ultrarightist dream of resurrecting a militarist Japan never happened. The 1947 pacifist constitution bars Japan from warfare and has never been amended.
***
The story of how many ex-Nazis were used in the governing of Germany (East and West) after the war is well documented - less so the role played by out-and-out war criminals in postwar Japan. Right-wing organizations, most of which had ties with the yakuza (what is it about the "law-and-order" types and organized crime?), were also regularly used by the Occupation authorities to bust up unions and other perceived sources of leftist influence.
In the end, a coup was not necessary. The Korean War began the "economic miracle" that built Japan into the world's second largest economy, the (actually very right-wing) Liberal Democratic Party ruled Japan as effectively a one-party state from 1955 until today (Wikipedia gives a good precis here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_Democratic_Party_%28Japan%29), and the "Self-Defense Forces" got their start as distinct entities in 1954, despite the malarkey in the constitution about renouncing war.
Comfort women weren't coerced, Japanese PM suggests
Last Updated: Thursday, March 1, 2007 | 11:33 AM ET
The Associated Press
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said Thursday there is no evidence Japan coerced Asian women into working as sex slaves during the Second World War, backtracking from a landmark 1993 government statement acknowledging that tens of thousands of women were forced into prostitution for the military.
Abe's comments to reporters came as a group of ruling party legislators urged the government to revise the so-called Kono Statement acknowledging that Japan's wartime military sometimes used coercion to recruit women to work in the brothels.
"The fact is, there is no evidence to prove there was coercion," Abe said. "We have to take it from there."
Historians say that up to 200,000 women, mainly from Korea and China, were forced to have sex with Japanese soldiers in brothels run by the military government as so-called comfort women during the war.
Japanese leaders have repeatedly apologized, including former prime minister Junichiro Koizumi, who said in 2001 that he felt sincere remorse over the women's "immeasurable and painful experiences."
Abe's comments were likely to provoke a strong reaction from South Korea and China.
Earlier Thursday in Seoul, South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun urged Japan to be more sincere in addressing its colonial past, as dozens of people rallied outside the Japanese Embassy, lining up dogs' heads on the ground. The demonstration marked the anniversary of a March 1,1919, uprising against Japanese rule, which still stirs deep-rooted bitterness among Koreans.
Each of the dogs' heads had a knife placed in its mouth on pieces of paper with the names of Koreans who allegedly collaborated with Japan during its 1910-45 colonial rule. Protest organizers said the animals had been slaughtered at a restaurant, as dogs are regularly consumed as food in Korea.
In a nationally televised address, Roh said Japan "needs to, above all, show an attitude of respecting the historical truth and acts that support this."
"Instead of trying to beautify or justify its past wrongdoing, [Japan] should show sincerity that is in line with its conscience," he said.
Roh's office said late Thursday that it did not immediately have a direct response to the Japanese leader's remarks. In Beijing, calls to the Chinese Foreign Ministry seeking comment were not immediately returned.
The Kono Statement was issued in 1993 by then-chief cabinet secretary Yohei Kono after incriminating defence documents were discovered showing the military had worked with independent contractors during the war to procure women for the brothels.
The statement has been attacked by right-wing nationalists in Japan, who argue the sex slaves worked willingly for the contractors and were not coerced into servitude by the military.
Despite the official acknowledgment, Japan has rejected most compensation claims by former sex slaves, saying such claims were settled by postwar treaties.
Instead, a fund created in 1995 by the Japanese government but funded by private donations has provided a way for Japan to compensate former sex slaves without offering official government compensation. Many former comfort women have rejected the fund.
***
Nice touch with the dogs' heads. I have never understood just why every Prime Minister after another, almost without exception, has managed to stick his generative organ into the array of whirring flashing silver blades that is the "comfort women" issue, or the "Nanjing was asking for it in 1937" issue, or the "let's go visit Yasukuni Shrine and have a picnic on top of a mound of Chinese skulls" issue. There must be some kind of perverse fascination to it, or perhaps it really does score big domestically....
And:
Declassified CIA papers reveal 1950s plot to overthrow Japanese government
Joseph Coleman, Canadian Press
Published: Thursday, March 01, 2007
TOKYO - Declassified documents reveal Japanese ultranationalists with ties to U.S. military intelligence plotted to overthrow the Japanese government and assassinate the prime minister in 1952.
The scheme - which was abandoned - was concocted by militarists and suspected war criminals who had worked for U.S. occupation authorities after the Second World War, CIA records show. The plotters wanted a right-wing government that would rearm Japan.
The CIA files, declassified in 2005 and publicized by the U.S. National Archives in January, detail a plot to oust pro-U.S. prime minister, Shigeru Yoshida and install a more hawkish government led by Ichiro Hatoyama.
The CIA, in papers released under an act of the U.S. Congress to declassify documents related to Japanese war crimes, said the plotters were led by Takushiro Hattori, a former private secretary to Hideki Tojo, the wartime prime minister hanged as a war criminal in 1948.
Two CIA documents said the plot had the support of 500,000 people in Japan and the group planned to use a contact who controlled a faction inside the National Safety Agency - a precursor to the Defence Ministry - to help launch the coup.
The files strongly suggest the Americans were unaware of the plot until after it had been dropped. The plot was developed after the U.S. postwar occupation of Japan ended in April 1952 and the CIA files say U.S. financial support for Hattori's group had dried up by then.
Still, the documentary evidence of the plot illustrates the violent potential of the right-wing, anti-communist cabal that had worked under the U.S. occupation authority's G-2 intelligence wing in the early days of the Cold War in the late 1940s and early 50s. The CIA operated separately from the G-2.
"Since the beginning of July 1952, plans for a coup d'etat have been initiated among a group of ex-purgees, including former military officers. The leader of the group is ex-colonel Hattori Takushiro," said an Oct. 31, 1952, report, which claimed "this report is the first to mention a definite rightist plan involving violence."
"The original plan of the group was to engineer a coup d'etat, including the assassination of Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru on account of his hostile attitude toward depurgees and nationalists," the CIA document said.
The document said Hattori colleague Masanobu Tsuji talked the group out of the coup, urging it to focus instead on countering the Socialist party. The files say the group then decided it would not stage a coup as long as Yoshida's conservative Liberal party remained in power.
However, the group still considered violence an option, the files say.
"The group is considering the possibility of some minor assassination attempt in lieu of a coup d'etat," the Oct. 31, 1952, document said.
Hattori and others had worked under the aegis of Maj.-Gen. Charles Willoughby, the anti-communist G-2 chief. During the occupation, Willoughby was considered the second most powerful American after his boss, Gen. Douglas MacArthur.
Some group members were considered choice war crimes trial targets after the war.
Tsuji had been wanted for involvement in the Bataan Death March of 1942, in which thousands of Americans and Filipinos perished. Another group associate was Yoshio Kodama, a war profiteer and mob boss who was deeply involved in procuring materials - often illegally - for the Japanese military machine.
Neither of them was prosecuted for war crimes.
The Japanese militarists joined U.S.-supported missions to spy on Communists in Japan, infiltrate agents into Soviet and North Korean territory and recruit Japanese mercenaries to protect Taiwan from communist forces in mainland China, declassified documents show.
The CIA files, however, say the operations were riddled with intelligence leaks, hobbled by a lack of competent agents and deeply compromised by rivalries among the rightists themselves. The agents' top priorities, the documents say, were profits and an eventual resurgence of a militarist Japan.
The assassination plot detailed in the CIA files came at a difficult time for Hattori's group.
The departure of Willoughby from Japan in 1951 as the U.S. occupation wound down deprived the rightists of their leading U.S. patron and paymaster. Meanwhile, Yoshida was openly hostile to Hattori's push for rearmament.
"The government attitude toward the Hattori group has been increasingly antagonistic and the group has lost influence since the departure of General Willoughby," said a CIA document dated April 18, 1952.
Yoshida was pushed out of office peacefully in 1954 and replaced by Hatoyama but the ultrarightist dream of resurrecting a militarist Japan never happened. The 1947 pacifist constitution bars Japan from warfare and has never been amended.
***
The story of how many ex-Nazis were used in the governing of Germany (East and West) after the war is well documented - less so the role played by out-and-out war criminals in postwar Japan. Right-wing organizations, most of which had ties with the yakuza (what is it about the "law-and-order" types and organized crime?), were also regularly used by the Occupation authorities to bust up unions and other perceived sources of leftist influence.
In the end, a coup was not necessary. The Korean War began the "economic miracle" that built Japan into the world's second largest economy, the (actually very right-wing) Liberal Democratic Party ruled Japan as effectively a one-party state from 1955 until today (Wikipedia gives a good precis here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_Democratic_Party_%28Japan%29), and the "Self-Defense Forces" got their start as distinct entities in 1954, despite the malarkey in the constitution about renouncing war.
