Truth about Japan

From Mainichi Daily News : Washington-based Mainichi Shimbun reporter Masaya Oikawa contacted East Asia specialist Dr. Larry Niksch, who was involved in the creation of the House resolution as a staff member of the Congressional Research Service (CRS). The interviewer seems to know more than the interviewee. Mainichi: In the 2006 CRS memorandum, you referred to Mr. Yoshida's book . Were you aware of its falsehood at that time? Niksch: At the Congressional Research Service, at that time I can tell you that the inquiries that I received from Congressional Offices for information -- none of them mentioned the Yoshida case. I deleted the Yoshida claim from the 2007 Memorandum. One reason possibly was that I discovered some of the doubts, or the other possible reason -- I found more authentic evidence. The section on evidence related to the comfort women system in the 2006 Memorandum is less than one page, whereas in the 2007 Memorandum (it) is six pages. Mainichi: There is an offi...

From JapanNews There is no doubt that a large number of women, including those from the Philippines and Indonesia, had their honor and dignity injured during World War II. There may have been cases deemed inexcusable from a present-day human rights perspective, even if no coercive action was taken by the prewar government and the military. Still, it is necessary to discuss two issues related to the whole controversy as separate matters—that is, how to deal with sex-related issues facing soldiers and whether the Japanese wartime military was involved in forcibly recruiting women for the provision of sex. Questions can be asked as to the appropriateness of calling the Japanese government to task by insisting coerciveness was prevalent in the provision of sex by those women in a broad sense of the term. We believe focusing on such questions is an attempt to sidestep the real issue.Gaining a proper perception of history requires thorough efforts to uncover the whole truth behind an...

August 2014 saw the comfort women issue again highligted by Asahi Shimbun, Japan’s leading newspaper that originally reported the long-continued and one of the most controversial war crime of Japanese army. Through the series of articles published on Aug 5 and 6, Asahi Shimbun , for the first time after 32 years,retracted the original 16 reports on Seiji Yoshida, who there confessed to have forcible drafted young women in Korea , and also corrected what was claimed in the past such that women belonged to Imperial women volunteer corps (called “Joshi Teishin-tai” in Japanese). It’s long past due but accecptable anyway, however Asahi Shimbun still stays defiant not to express any apologies and even insists some need to confront “the essential matters of comfort women issue”. We wonder why Asahi retracted and corrected such major misinformation that had been repeated, also why they don’t even express apologies and still preach their own thoughts. We verify those of Asahi’s artic...

Dear Mr. Fackler, I met you twice when you asked me about Japanese economy. Our opinion largely coincided. But this time you are not frank as you were. Your NYT article pretends to be neutral, but you try to defend your coleague's erroneous articles. As I wrote, Mr. Onishi's articles are full of historical errors. You would hurt yourself by protecting such errors. But you are cautious than Onishi when you attack Japanese government by quoting a Korean official saying “However hard the Japanese government tries to distort the true nature of the comfort women issue and play down or hide the past wrongdoings, it will never be able to whitewash history.” What's the "true nature"? The Army kidnapped women from Korea? To be sorry, the Asahi confessed it was their mistake. Not only Yoshida but " No official documents were found that directly showed forcible taking away by the military on the Korean Peninsula and Taiwan, where the people living there were...

After a long time of hesitation, NYT tries to rescue their wrong articles like the Asahi by labeling majority of Japanese politicians and journalists as "right-wing". Mr. Fackler is a nice guy who reads my blog. It is sorry that he has surrendered to NYT politics, but he is much more cautious than Onishi. Calls by right-wing politicians and activists to challenge the women’s stories have increased sharply since August, when a major liberal newspaper, the Asahi Shimbun, printed a front-page retraction of several articles it published on the issue in the 1980s and 1990s. Those were based on the testimony of a former Japanese soldier, Seiji Yoshida, who said he had helped kidnap Korean women to work in the brothels. Many mainstream Japanese scholars and most non-Japanese researchers reject those claims, saying Mr. Yoshida’s testimony was never a major piece of historical evidence that women were coerced. They cite other evidence, mainly the testimonies of many of the women, w...

Ms. Tabuchi of NYT tweeted as follows in September: Far-right magazine selling out in Japan after declaring "comfort women" bogus, says Nanking Massacre next pic.twitter.com/9CDkfGDgqb — Hiroko Tabuchi (@HirokoTabuchi) 2014, 9月 2 Good point. This is the Japanese monthly magazine "WiLL". It is extremely right and nationalistic, but sells almost 100,000 copies per month. Mr. Nobukatsu Fujioka writes "Next we go to Nanking Massacre" for only three lines, but it is misleading to confuse it with comfort women. In December 1937, when Japanese Army occupied Nanking, it killed many people, partly civilian. It is a historical fact nobody denies. It would be questionable to describe it as "Massacre" or not, but there can be no excuse for Japanese Army to invade into Nanking. Even Japanese didn't know why. Some say the "massacre" that killed 300,000 people was the propaganda of Chinese Nationalist Party. It might be correct, but it c...