War sucks
The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were terrible events which deserve to be mourned as a tragedy. However in this week of national veneration of victimhood in Japan, we would all do well to remember that such events did not happen in isolation or for no reason.
I do not wish for a moment to suggest that one act excuses another, as my mom always used to point out "Two wrongs don't make a right." Making war against civilians is always reprehensible, no matter what form it takes.

"What crime did these children commit?"
Holding up a picture of a boy horribly burned by the heat of the atomic bomb, Iccho Itoh made this impassioned plea before the International Court of Justice some 12 years ago, not long after he was elected mayor of Nagasaki.

I would ask what crime the people of the Greater Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere committed. Or what crimes the "comfort women" and forced laborers committed. Or what crime the people of Nanjing committed. Or what crime they continue to commit that has caused the Japanese state to deny the wrongs done against them.

There have been plenty of official apologies by the Japanese government about the war crimes committed in the service of the state and in the name of the emperor. For the most part they have been a matter of tatemae (polite, expected, official, socially required, but not heartfelt). Some veterans of the Imperial Japanese Army have truly tried to make amends, to make a honne (private, personally real regardless of social convention) apology. As the the war fades from living memory, more and more revisionists are trying to paper over what happened with weaseling about specific numbers and the wording of treaties and bitching about how it is unfair that Japan gets flack for its "supposed" misdeeds while Germany doesn't. Germany has built monuments to those killed in the Holocaust, it has outlawed Nazism, it purged former Nazis from the government, it has paid restitution. One doesn't hear the German government or media quibbling about whether it was six million Jews or 5.8 million Jews that were killed and using the discrepancy to argue that if the numbers can't be agreed on it probably never happened. In fact, shitheads that do this can be jailed in Germany. In Japan, they get elected to high office.

I sympathize with the victims of the atomic bombings. I sympathize with their descendants and their pleas for peace, but I would sympathize a lot more if the former slave laborer and comfort women got a real apology and compensation. I would take the pleas for peace a lot more seriously if Japan wasn't the top spender on arms in Asia and seventh in the world.

If the three non-nuclear principles of not producing, possessing or allowing nuclear weapons into the country weren't convieniently forgotten everytime a U.S. nuclear sub or aircraft carrier docked here, then those principles might actually mean something, instead of amounting to so much happy talk.

I've lived in Tokyo for ten years and there is much to love about Japan and the Japanese. Theirs is an incredible culture, history and tradition. Saying sorry is common; meaning it is sometimes another matter.

If the victors in World War Two can admit that the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and (especially) Nagasaki, the fire bombings of Dresden and Tokyo, the internment of American and Canadians of Japanese ancestory were all terrible things in a heartfelt and collective way and offer compensation for misdeeds of the state, is it wrong to expect any less from Japan?

"We didn't do it, nobody saw us, and when we apologized for it, we didn't really mean it"

Some days I think I either need to get a new job, have my conscience sugically removed or simply have my jaw wired shut.

Get facts straight on comfort women
The Yomiuri Shimbun

The U.S. House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee has adopted a resolution demanding an apology from Japan over the so-called comfort women. But the resolution was produced based on an erroneous perception of the facts.
The Japanese government should try to unravel the U.S. side's misinterpretation of history in order to remove a source of future trouble, while in the meantime working to block passage of the resolution by the full House of Representatives.
The resolution calls for the government to accept historical responsibility and apologize for "its Imperial Armed Forces' coercion of young women into sexual slavery." It describes "the comfort women system" as "one of the largest cases of human trafficking in the 20th century."
The resolution was made without verifying the facts and smacks of cheap rhetoric. It makes us doubt the intelligence of U.S. lawmakers.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe expressed "sympathy from the bottom of my heart" and said he "felt sorry" during his meetings with U.S. President George W. Bush and congressional leaders during his visit to Washington in April. The prime minister also said that the 20th century was a century of human rights violations and Japan was not totally blameless.
Abe's remarks did not postpone adoption of the resolution by the lower house committee.
The resolution is merely one of many adopted at the U.S. Congress. It does not have any legal binding force. Thus, some observers say Japan does not have to take it seriously.
===
Govt must dispute false charges
But this is the wrong conclusion to draw. If Japan refrains from making counterarguments, this erroneous historical view will become accepted as established fact.
Before World War II, there were many women who were put to work as comfort women against their will by parents and brokers. But this does not mean the Japanese military coerced the women.
In past studies, no evidence has been found showing "coercive recruitment of comfort women by military personnel or government officials." The government explicitly presented this observation in March in response to a question by an opposition lawmaker.
On what is the resolution based? Reportedly the 1993 statement by then Chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono played a significant part.
The statement said that Japanese military and officials were "directly or indirectly involved in...the transfer of comfort women." Such wording apparently led to the misapprehension that there was coercive recruitment.
===
Kono apology politically driven
The 1993 statement was motivated by a political desire to deflect pressure from South Korea on the comfort women issue. And it has helped broaden the misunderstanding.
Apparently out of diplomatic consideration, Abe has said he stands by the Kono statement. But as long as the prime minister takes this position, the misunderstanding of coercive recruitment will never disappear. If the statement is found to be erroneous, it should be rewritten without hesitation.
In March, Foreign Minister Taro Aso referred to the lobbying in support of the resolution as an "operation to estrange Japan and the United States." Anti-Japan forces in the United States linked with Chinese and South Koreans have exercised their influence behind the scenes on behalf of the resolution.
If the matter is left unaddressed, further demands for apologies will be repeated. The government must methodically elucidate the historical truths involved in the issue.
(From The Yomiuri Shimbun, June 28, 2007)

If anyone is looking for me, I'll be in the shower for a few days

The truth might not set you free, but it will get a lot of people off your back
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, having built his career on his credentials as a nationalist and having built his credentials as a nationalist on denying the darkside of Japan's wartime past is now claiming the whole sex slaves, sorry -- "so-called comfort women"kerfuffle -- is a result of bad reporting in the press. Meanwhile the historian who found the documents that weren't supposed to exist stands by his research that the Imperial Japanese Army forcibly abducted tens of thousands of women and forced them into sexual slavery for the glory of the empire.

Abe and nationalist in the Japanese government have very nearly derailed the six party toalks on North Korea's nukes by lambasting the North Koreans over Pyongyang's abduction of a couple of dozen Japanese in the 70's and 80's -- a reprehensible act for which there is no justification, and one which Kim Jong Il has admitted to, though the North Koreans have not come completely clean on the matter. At the same time though, Abe's government refuses to discuss or take responsibility in any sincere way for the abduction and repeated rape of thousands of Korean women at military "comfort stations" or compensation for Koreans brought to Japan as forced labour during the war. The Washington Post had a good editorial on this last week

Then there is this extended exercise in revisionism, denial and just plain nonsense -- part 1, part 2 and part 3 of why I shower when I get home from work.

And speaking of clueless neofacists...
Debito has the kind of roundup I'm too lazy to put together on the charming Japanese Foreign Minister, who thinks Japanese will be better at solving the Middle East diplomatic Gordian knot because of the colour of their eyes and skin. I'm sure you won't be surprised that he is the forefront of the "War? What War? You Mean Japan's Glorious Anticolonial Crusade to Free China (In Which We Never Committed Any Atrocities)?" movement. He also ran his family's coal company before he got into politics, a company that took full advantage of forced labor during the war. Not that you'd have read about his comments in much of the Japanese Press.

"comfort women" - the story that will not die

Japanese politicians keep harping on the same nonsensical point about how there "no historical proof" that the comfort women were coerced and how it depends on your definition of "coerced" -- I wonder how those same politicians would react if the North Koreans said there was no evidence Megumi Yokota or any of the other abductees had been forcibly taken to North Korea? For a considerably less factually challenged approach to the issue, have a look at this excellent scholarly article from Japan Focus.
Surely, we can expect a free exchange of ideas in the media on a subject like this - after all Japan has a free press doesn't it?

Presented without comment
I have kids to feed and house payments to make so I'm not going to talk about the Japanese media vis a vis Prime Minister Abe's comments on the WWII Comfort Women/Sex Slaves, but I think it is important that people see this editorial from the largest Japanese newspaper. It is about what I expected. The Galloping Beaver has a nice post on this issue.