from RT.com

The proximity of the battlefield gave rise to the ‘comfort women’ system on Japanese-occupied territories in the 1930s, according a Japanese politician. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese and Korean women were forced into sex slavery at the time.

All is fair in love and war, espoused Toru Hashimoto, the mayor of Osaka and co-founder of nationalistic opposition party Nippon Ishin no Kai (Japan Restoration Party).

Those sex slaves were euphemistically called ‘comfort women’ and came from several countries, mostly China and Korea, but also from Indonesia, the Philippines and Taiwan. It is believed that no less than 200,000 women passed through this system.

“In the circumstances in which bullets are flying like rain and wind, the soldiers are running around at the risk of losing their lives. If you want them to have a rest in such a situation, a comfort women system is necessary. Anyone can understand that,”Hashimoto told reporters at the Osaka City Government building. Brothels were needed “to maintain discipline in the military -it must have been necessary at that time,” he specified.

An unidentified government official told South Korean Yonhap news agency that Seoul is disappointed that a senior Japanese official “made comments supportive of crimes against humanity and revealed a serious lack of a historical understanding and respect for women’s rights,” AP reported.

But Toru Hashimoto refused to deny that comfort women were forced to provide sexual services against their will.

“It is a result of the tragedy of the war that they became comfort women against their will. The responsibility for the war also lies with Japan. We have to politely offer kind words to [former] comfort women,” he said, following the path of former Japanese Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama, who in his tenure apologized to those Asian countries that Japan colonized in the first half of the 20th century.

In 1995, the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II, Tomiichi Murayama issued a statement in which he acknowledged that the Japanese military forces were “seriously involved” in“staining the honor and dignity of many women” and offered his profound apology to all wartime comfort women who suffered“emotional and physical wounds that can never be closed.”

The current position of the Japanese government has suffered little change since then.

“The stance of the Japanese government on the comfort women issue is well known. They have suffered unspeakably painful experiences. The [present PM] Abe cabinet has the same sentiments as past cabinets,” Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga told journalists on Tuesday.

However, the co-leader of Japan Restoration Party expressed support to the contrary position of PM Shinzo Abe, who recently made a controversial statement that Japanese aggression in WWII is yet to be defined. The statement sparked outrage in South Korea and China.

“What Prime Minister Abe is saying is correct in that, academically, there are no definitions on aggression,”Hashimoto said.

Civic group members shout slogans and hold placards as they attend a protest over the alleged rape of a local woman by two US servicemen in Okinawa, in front of the prime minister’s official residence in Tokyo on October 20, 2012.(AFP Photo / Yoshikazu Tsuno)

But the co-leader of the opposition party went even further. Last week Toru Hashimoto visited Japan’s southernmost Okinawa prefecture, which hosts the US largest military bases in Japan. There he met local politicians to discuss uniting forces in replacing American military from the prefecture’s main island. Also, during a meeting with American military brass there, he proposed that the US marines should use local sexual facilities more actively to control sexual energies.

Hashimoto tweeted on Tuesday that official military brothels are nothing new and that immediately after the WWII the Allied Occupation forces in Tokyo established the Recreation and Amusement Association, which ran a number of brothels for soldiers.

The Pentagon’s spokesperson has dubbed Hashimoto’s remark‘ridiculous’, The Japan Times reported, while Tokyo officially specified that the remark was made by an opposition politician and represents his own opinion.

Still, there is a chance that both Washington and Tokyo misread Hashimoto’s intent. He may have been referring to Okinawa’s already existing ‘bath houses’, which is a delicate name for accommodation house, to large extent to save the local female population from sexual harassment by the American contingent.

Usually heavily-censored by Japanese authorities, the cases of rape of the local women and girls by the US contingent on Okinawa happen on a regular basis. The last trial on rape charges against American servicemen on Okinawa took place in March this year, when two US Navy sailors were convicted and sentenced to prison term for raping and robbing a local woman, AP reported.

Wing Tek Lum, author of The Nanjing Massacre: Poems, will be reading selected poems from his new book at the following southern California locations:

Mon Apr 29 12:00 p.m. – 1:30 p.m.  UCLA  n. Rolfe 1301

Tue Apr 30 5:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m. USC, Taper Hall, Richard Ide Memorial Room

Wed May 1 3:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m. UC San Diego, Cross-Cultural Center

Thu May 2 4:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m. UC Irvine, Humanities Gateway 3341

“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 they barely learned any 20th Century history. I myself only got a full picture when I left Japan and went to school in Australia.”  - Mariko Oi, BBC News, Tokyo

read more at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-21226068

http://www.wantchinatimes.com/news-subclass-cnt.aspx?id=20110904000041&cid=1101

Taiwan will not cooperate with China on Diaoyu islands: spokesman

CNA
2011-09-04
11:49 (GMT+8)

Ma said Taiwan will not join China in negotiating sovereignty disputes with Japan over the islands, which are claimed by Taiwan, China and Japan. (File Photo/CNA)

Ma said Taiwan will not join China in negotiating sovereignty disputes with Japan over the islands, which are claimed by Taiwan, China and Japan. (File Photo/CNA)

Taiwan President Ma Ying-jeou has made it clear that he will not collaborate with mainland China in dealing with sovereignty disputes over the Diaoyu islands, Presidential Office spokesman Fan Chiang Tai-Chi said Friday.

The Diaoyutai islands – known as the Diaoyutai islands in Taiwan and the Senkaku islands in Japan – are a group of uninhabited islets that lie about 100 nautical miles off Taiwan’s northeastern tip. The island group is controlled by Japan but also claimed by both Taiwan and China.

Fan Chiang said the islands are the Republic of China’s territory, no matter if they are viewed from a historical, geological, legal or agricultural perspective. “President Ma has declared on many occasions that the government will insist on its claims over the Diaoyutais,” Fan Chiang said.

Noting that nearly all conflicts in the Diaoyutai waters involve intrusions of Japanese coast guard vessels into the region to disperse Taiwanese or Chinese fishing boats, Fan Chiang said the conflicts at this stage only exist between Taiwan and Japan or mainland China and Japan.

Ma insists that Taiwan will not join China in negotiating those conflicts with Japan, Fan Chiang said. He also reaffirmed the government’s stance that it will continue to deal with sovereignty disputes in a peaceful and diplomatic manner.

References:

Fan Chiang Tai-Chi 范姜泰基

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/text/nn20110930a7.html

Friday, Sep. 30, 2011

Seoul urged to nix sex slave monument
Kyodo
SEOUL — Japan has asked South Korea to block a plan by a group of elderly Korean women who were forced to provide sex for Imperial Japanese soldiers during the war to set up a Peace Monument near the Japanese Embassy in Seoul, according to a Yonhap News Agency report Wednesday.

“Japan’s Foreign Ministry has asked us to prevent them from setting up the Peace Monument,” a South Korean Foreign Affairs and Trade Ministry official was quoted as saying on condition of anonymity.

The monument plan was conceived by the Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan, which has staged weekly rallies in front of the Japanese Embassy to demand the Japanese government apologize for and pay direct compensation to the victims, euphemistically called “comfort women.”

The group plans to unveil the monument in December to mark its 1,000th demonstration. The official told Yonhap it would be difficult for the government to block the move because setting up a monument does not require governmental approval.

Japan has yet to respond to South Korea’s Sept. 15 proposal for talks on the comfort women issue, following a Constitutional Court ruling in late August that found it is unconstitutional for the government to make no specific effort to settle the issue with Japan.

The Korean Peninsula was under Japan’s harsh colonial rule from 1910 to1945.

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/text/nn20111018a1.html

Tuesday, Oct. 18, 2011

‘Comfort women’ issue resolved: Noda
’65 treaty cited on eve of first Seoul trip; TPP, Hague on radar

By MASAMI ITO
Staff writer
The war compensation issues regarding South Korea’s “comfort women” have already been “legally resolved,” Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda said in an interview Monday on the eve of his trip to Seoul.

Primed: Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda speaks during an interview at the Prime Minister’s Official Residence on Monday. SATOKO KAWASAKI PHOTO
The issue of the wartime slaves forced to provide sex for Imperial Japanese soldiers has recently flared up again in South Korea, just before Noda’s Wednesday meeting with South Korean President Lee Myung Bak. It will be the prime minister’s first official trip to Seoul.

“Japan’s position is that the issue of the comfort women was legally resolved in 1965, and that has not changed,” Noda said, referring to a bilateral treaty that normalized diplomatic ties between Japan and South Korea. Tokyo has maintained the treaty settled all war compensation issues involving individuals.

“We will not bring this issue up during the upcoming Japan-South Korea summit meeting — it has already been settled,” he said during an interview with The Japan Times and several other media outlets.

Before a human rights panel of the United Nations General Assembly last week, South Korea urged the U.N. and its member states to provide “remedies and reparation” to those who were sexually victimized during armed conflicts.

The sex slave issue between Tokyo and Seoul has often sparked emotional outbursts between the peoples of the two countries.

On other matters, Noda reiterated that it would be “difficult” to build a new nuclear plant in Japan but expressed eagerness to continue bilateral talks to export Japan’s atomic power technology to other countries, including Vietnam and Jordan.

Noda stressed, however, that he would not be engaging in new talks over the export of nuclear power technology before assessing the triple-meltdown crisis at the Fukushima No. 1 atomic plant.

Noda also expressed interest in joining talks on the Trans-Pacific Partnership free-trade pact, despite strong opposition within the Democratic Party of Japan, which he heads.

He acknowledged there are strong voices opposing the TPP and stressed there is no deadline on the discussions before a conclusion is reached.

Regarding the 1980 Hague Convention on international parental child abductions, Noda said his government is drafting bills to sign the treaty and aims to submit them to the next ordinary Diet session.

Noda also hinted that the government might cancel the construction of a housing complex for government employees in Asaka, Saitama Prefecture, amid criticism the project is a waste of taxpayer money, especially as the country struggles to recover from the calamity.

http://michaelturton.blogspot.com/2011/09/ma-administration-takes-another-step.html

Ma Administration takes another step back to the 1950s
Very scary news reported the other day in the Taipei Times. The National Security Council (NSC) has ordered that Taiwan students be taught that the Senkaku Islands, which are currently part of Japan, actually belong to China.
The Ministry of Education (MOE) has caused a stir with its recent directive that elementary and junior high schools teach that the disputed Diaoyutai Islands (釣魚台) “have been a part of China since ancient times,” and consequently belong to the Republic of China (ROC).

Critics called it “brain-washing under the guise of education.”

Huang Chi-teng (黃子騰), head of the ministry’s Department of Elementary Education, said the directive was sent after an interministerial meeting convened by the National Security Council (NSC), in which it was decided that the ministry would give schools a paper for use as reference in teaching “the relations between the Diaoyutai Islands and Taiwan.”

The paper, which includes comments such as “Japan stole the Diaoyutai Islands,” places China and Taiwan on the same side opposing Japan, using the claim that “the Diaoyutai Islands have belonged to China in the past” to argue that sovereignty over the Diaoyutais belongs to the ROC.
The position that the Senkakus belong to “China” is an invention of both Chinese governments since the late 1960s (Ampontan has a long post discussing this, with many maps and references). Prior to that time, both governments regarded the islands as uncontroversial Japanese territory. The claim to the Senkakus is thus another item in the long wave of Chinese territorial expansion that Asia has witnessed since the 1930s, which follows the typical pattern of Chinese making claims to a given territory based on some interaction that the government has followed in the past.

On so many levels this is scary. For one thing it is bound to peeve Japan. It shows that the KMT continues to regard education as a process of ideological indoctrination. It also gives a glimpse of the Party-State mentality that continues to drive the KMT’s interactions with the rest of society. It shows how the KMT Administration regards itself as “Chinese.” And finally, as many of us noted at the time, it is a prophecy of conflicts to come.

Will Taiwanese voters notice? Perhaps the DPP can somehow make them pay attention….

This directive coincided with a forum between scholars from China and ROC scholars from Taiwan at which a MOFA official declared that the Senkakus (Diaoyutais to the Chinese) belonged to China.
Earlier at the forum, Wu Jinan (吳寄南), director and senior fellow of the Department of Japanese Studies at Shanghai Institutes for International Studies, Shaw Han-yi (紹漢儀), a research fellow at the Research Center for the International Legal Studies at National Chengchi University, as well as other Chinese and Taiwanese academics, presented papers to rebut Japan’s claims to sovereignty over the islands.

Examining related legal claims and historical evidence under international law and traditional East Asian order, the academics concluded that the Diaoyutais belong to “China.”
Asked to comment on the conclusion, Shaw Yu-ming said he did not find it problematic saying the islands belong to China as opposed to the ROC.

“Like I said, the Diaoyutai Islands were incorporated into the Kavalan Prefecture administration office in 1837. At that time, the ROC had not been established. Furthermore, the ROC is also part of China. China is the generic term for the ROC and the People’s Republic of China [PRC]. This case shows why the ‘1992 consensus’ is necessary. For us, it’s the ROC, and for the mainland, it’s the PRC. Together, it’s China,” he said.

Shaw Yu-ming said he agreed to the suggestion made by several Chinese academics at the forum that “China shall publicly declare its position that the Diaoyutai Islands belong to Taiwan.”

“If we say that the Diaoyutais belong to ‘China,’ it would lead some people in Taiwan to wonder why they need to fight for sovereignty of the islands. But if China declares that the Diaoyutai Islands belong to Taiwan, which I think it would not oppose because Taiwan is part of its territory in China’s view, the problem would be solved,” Shaw Yu-ming said.
Frighteningly, this official envisions Taiwanese boys dying to make the Senkakus safe for Beijing’s expansion. Fortunately China will never declare that the Senkakus belong to Taiwan, but the mentality exhibited here is scary.

Note also the use of terms like “stolen territory.” Many Chinese believe that Okinawa is similarly “stolen territory”. The public rhetoric suggests a revanchist position that will make it difficult to avoid conflict between Japan and China. This rhetoric also shows how Taiwan, the Senkakus, and Okinawa are all basically linked in Chinese minds and thus, how expansion into any one area will lead to more expansion into the others. Brrr……

I took a short look at Shaw Han-yi’s long piece on the Senkakus here. It is simply a sophisticated bit of ultra-nationalistic historical exegesis that utterly fails to establish its case, but gives a good look at how such things are constructed.
________________________

A South Korean’s unwanted war legacy from Japan.

In 1944, he was abducted from his village by Japanese soldiers and forced to dig tunnels at a World War II camp. In 2005, he learned he was mistakenly listed among Japan’s war dead at a Tokyo shrine … [more]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304066504576339701371568600.html

Hard Work, True Grit
Remembering the author of ‘The Rape of Nanking.’
By MARY KISSEL

Iris Chang, born March 28, 1968, was raised like many other children of her generation. Her parents relied on Dr. Spock for child-rearing advice, encouraged a love of reading, made sure that she spent time with her grandparents, and provided a loving home for her and her brother, Michael. One photograph shows the family on a trip to Yellowstone National Park, all grins, as a geyser blows behind them. Iris went on to marry and have a son. She became a writer and in 1997 published the book that made her famous, “The Rape of Nanking,” about the atrocities committed in that city by Japanese soldiers during World War II. Then, in 2004, at the age of 36, she committed suicide with a handgun.

Iris’s sudden death was the catalyst for “The Woman Who Could Not Forget,” a biographical memoir written by her mother, Ying-Ying Chang, who says she had to set the record straight and “present Iris” as “only we, her family, knew her.” But the book is less a tale of a renowned author’s vertiginous spiral into depression than it is a mother’s poignant tribute to a Chinese-American girl who achieved success through her own intelligence, hard work and grit, but also with the extraordinary support of those closest to her.

In her parents, Iris had excellent role models. Ying-Ying was born in China in 1940, and her childhood was “full of fears, worries, pains, and frights,” as her parents struggled to keep her and her brother safe while the country collapsed into civil war. Her family emigrated to Taiwan, and Ying-Ying eventually made her way to America and married a fellow Harvard Ph.D. student, Shau-Jin (a tale she doesn’t relate in the book). The two were doing postdoctoral work at Princeton University—Ying-Ying in biological chemistry, Shau-Jin in physics—when Iris was born.

A year after Iris’s birth, the family moved to the Midwest, where Ying-Ying and Shau-Jin began teaching at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. As her mother tells it, Iris was a “sensitive” child who was “shy” in public but “very talkative and often dominated the entire conversation” at home. On trips to the local library, she would check out “at least ten books at a time.” She took up piano and started winning writing competitions. “She had a tendency to obsess over the things she was interested in or working on,” Ying-Ying recalls. In high school, Iris took a liking to computers, volunteered at the local hospital and started her own magazine. She was accepted to several universities, including Cornell and the University of Chicago, but her parents advised her to go to the University of Illinois instead, because “to be home might be better for her.” She complied.

That decision is one of the few instances in the book where her parents seemed to have much sway over Iris, although the strong bond between mother and daughter is clear in the myriad of warm correspondences Ying-Ying cites in the book. “She always initiated things by herself,” Ying-Ying writes—a trait that the family supported and even reveled in. The Changs encouraged Iris to develop marketable skills and not to rely on anyone else to support her financially, although she married her college sweetheart in her early 20s. Ying-Ying reminded her: “As my mother used to say to me, the success in one’s life was dependent on 70% hard work and only 30% talent or genetic makeup.”

The Woman Who Could Not Forget
By Ying-Ying Chang
Pegasus, 426 pages, $29.95

And Iris worked. She interned at Newsweek and freelanced for the New York Times but had trouble getting a job in the run-up to college graduation. She took an internship with the Associated Press but soon left to take another one at the Chicago Tribune—and then the newspaper declined to hire her full-time. With her parents’ support, Iris returned briefly to the University of Illinois before winning an assistantship in John Hopkins’s writing program.
An adviser there encouraged her to get in touch with Susan Rabiner, a HarperCollins book editor, who would give Iris her first book topic, a biography of Tsien Hsue-sen, the father of China’s missile and space program. But the book advance was modest, and for a while Iris delivered pizzas to make ends meet.

“The Rape of Nanking” had its genesis in the tales her parents told her of her maternal grandparents, who barely escaped the Japanese onslaught in 1937. Iris attended a 1994 conference on this “most atrocious chapter in history,” Ying-Ying says, and realized that there wasn’t a good English-language book on the subject. Iris holed up at the National Archives in Washington, trawled through Yale’s library and traveled to China to interview survivors. She discovered an eyewitness’s diary—a German Nazi, John Rabe—that added significantly to the historical record of the slaughter. All the while, Ying-Ying and Shau-Jin helped her with translations and, once Iris began writing, “gave up our nights and weekends to read her manuscript.”

The book was a remarkable success for such a harrowing subject, and Iris soon got to work on another project, “The Chinese in America,” which was published in 2003. The young author was in demand for television interviews, bookstore appearances and speaking engagements. It was on one of her trips that Iris had a breakdown, in a Kentucky hotel, was hospitalized and diagnosed with, as Ying-Ying describes it, “‘brief reactive psychosis,’ due to stress conditions such as lack of sleep and food.”

Ying-Ying attributes her daughter’s slide into depression to side effects from antipsychotic and antidepressant drugs and poor medical advice. A few months after her breakdown, Iris Chang was dead. Her mother devotes only a few chapters to this period of illness and despair. Perhaps that’s best. “The Woman Who Could Not Forget” ultimately isn’t a sad story, but rather a celebration of Iris’s remarkable life.

Ms. Kissel is a member of the Journal’s editorial board.

editor note

Book reading and signing event -

Thursday, 7/21, 8:00 pm

Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena (Los Angeles)

46 N. Los Robles Ave.

Pasadena , CA 91101

(626) 449-2742

www.pacificasiamuseum.org