Truth about Japan

Ise heijiro, a writer living in Louisiana, opened a blog to protest the Honda Resolution. He compares Rep. Honda to Senator Joseph McCarthy.

Wikipedia's article on Comfort Women was unprotected. Major factual errors were corrected, but many remain. And many people are rewriting it wrongly or reverting to the old version. Please watch it and correct errors.

According to the Sankei Shimbun (in Japanese), in the press conference after the resolution, Rep. Honda expressed great thanks to the China lobby "World Association to Remember the Anti-Japanese War"（世界抗日戦争史実維護連合会）, which has proposed, sponsored, and even wrote the resolution since 2001. The Association collected 42 million signature to block Japan to be the permanent member on the United Nations Security Council in 2005. It was assumed that it is influenced and sponsored by the Chinese government. So there might have Chinese government's political will to hurt Japan's reputation in the U.S.

John Negroponte, Deputy Secretary of State, replied in a press conference held in the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo on August 3. QUESTION: One more different issue, that is, "comfort women." The "comfort women" resolution so-called has passed in the U.S. Congress, I think last week. Did you or your counterpart raise that issue during the conversation? And if you have any further explanation, or if you have any difference in position that your Congress has and that your government has? D/S NEGROPONTE: Well, we didn't get into that discussion, although it is an issue that I've discussed in the past with Japanese Government officials. And we certainly understand the concerns that have been expressed. But we've also taken the position that the trafficking in women that occurred during World War II was deplorable and that it was a grave human rights violation of enormous proportions. So we extend our sincere and deep sympathy to the victims, but we also feel that t...

ABC of Modern Japanese History objects to the reports by Asahi Shimbun. Here’s a protest to infamous Asahi newspaper, which led the banner in the “comfort women as Japanese army’s sex slaves” campaign: It promoted the “confessions” of a Japanese soldier (i.e. Seiji Yoshida), that he abducted Korean women into prostitution. Later, his book turned out to be a bag of lies, but not before creating a world-wide sensation. Asahi never informed nor apologized to its readers about the farce. To Whom It May Concern, Asahi newspaper by Yusaku Tohgo I was truly annoyed by your ( Asahi ) editorial on June 28, after the US House of Representative committee passed Resolution 121. You fabricated and inflated the “comfort women” issue into a “Japanese army’s sex slave” fantasy, and never apologized nor informed the readers the fictional “facts” in your reporting. In light of this fact, I doubt that you are qualified to discuss this matter from high moral ground. ...

Matt Dioguardi wrote on his blog: Not unexpectedly, the US house has approved the comfort women resolution . I strongly disagree with this resolution. I very much understand that resolutions like this are par for the course these days in Washington, but personally I think resolutions like this are pro-war . You don’t tell other countries, especially allies how to deal with difficult and complex problems. It will be interesting, if not unsettling, to see what the reaction is to the resolution. ( Here are some reactions from when the bill was approved by the foreign relations committee.) Let’s see how many people on the left are all too happy to accept foreign interventionism, so long as they agree with the purpose of the intervention. Let me spell this out for those who don’t understand what I am implying. Japanese nationals, especially politicians, should want the sovereignty of their country respected, and on principal should reject all interventions. However, I am sure that bec...

According to Asahi Shimbun, Korean Army procured many "comfort women" during the Korean War. In an international symposium, Kim Kiok, Visiting Professor of Kyonnam University in Korea, reported that at least eight witness testified that they used war brothels. And 89 brothels in 4 areas were used 204,560 times, according to the official record of the Korean Army edited in 1956. A Korean government official admitted that they employed prostitutes voluntarily during the war and that it was different from the forced comfort women of Japanese Army.

Foreign Dispatches commented on the "comfort women" resolution. The Log in Thine Own Eye An issue I've repeatedly touched upon on here is the rank hypocrisy of Western efforts to push Japan to apologize (again, and again, and again ...) for its war crimes, even as the very same countries prefer to bury their own misdeeds - many of them much more recent - as "old history" the victims need to just "get over." As it turns out, this commentator on Aljazeera currently linked to on Itai News picks up on this double standard, which will be glaringly obvious to many non-Westerners even if not to those Americans, Australians, Dutchmen and Frenchmen inclined to seeing history in rosy terms of their "good guys" fighting against "evil" Japanese imperialists, never bothering to ask themselves by what right Europeans were lording it over South-East Asians in the first place. I don't agree with Mr. Ming's paranoia about the United State...

Al Jazeera commented on the "comfort women" resolution: A U.S. official said Japan has to apologize for sex slavery during World War II. Why only Japan? How about the U.S. for killing thousands of innocent Vietnamese women and children by dropping chemical weapons, bringing African people by force as slaves, displacing and killing American natives? Are those things OK? The American official further said that the United States wants to put its friend on the right track. How about your friend Australia? Did Australia apologize for kidnapping Aboriginal children from their parents in the 60s? Did they apologize for killing so many Aboriginals? Does the U.S. really want to put Tokyo on the right track, or create trouble between Japan, China and Korea? The U.S. wants to fulfil its own goals by destabilizing the region!

From the editorial of Yomiuri Shimbun on August 1 A resolution adopted by the U.S. House of Representatives on Monday urging the Japanese government to formally apologize over the "comfort women system of forced military prostitution" is obviously based on a misunderstanding of facts. Although the resolution is not legally binding, we cannot overlook this denunciation. The resolution accuses the Imperial Japanese Army of having "coerced" women from Asian countries to work as "sex slaves" before and during World War II. Of course, it would be remiss not to state that the Japan-U.S. alliance is absolutely vital to the national interest of Japan. In addition to close military and economic relations, both countries share common values such as democracy and human rights. Nevertheless, we must refute the distortion of the facts espoused by the resolution. Allowing misunderstanding of the facts to go unanswered might have the unfortunate effect of creating probl...

Nobuyoshi Ozaki, a writer living in Louisiana, said he would file a defamation suit against Representatives Mike Honda and Tom Lantos who wrote and passed the House Resolution 121 to blame Japan's "comfort women" during WW2 as the Japanese Army's coercion. The charge is their libel against the Japanese people by attacking them without historical ground. There is no document that proves the Army's order to coerce the women into brothels. See his blog entry .