Truth about Japan

Winny was Found Innocent

2009-10-08T10:49:00.002+09:00

Kaneko Isamu, the author of Winny, the popular P2P software, was found innocent in the appeal court.

See the comments on Winny by Larry Lessig and me.

Kamei might Blow Up Hatoyama Administration

2009-09-20T10:43:00.006+09:00

Kamei Shizuka, the Minister of Postal Office and Financial Services, told Reuters that he would enact a moratorium of repayment of bank loans. "If the financial world gets scared at the talk of a moratorium, that shows how frail Japan's financial sector is", he said.

But how about the bank's loss? Kamei said that the government should bail out the banks that would be hurt by the moratorium.

The govenment bails out lenders with taxpayer money, so it makes sense that there should be a moratorium for borrowers when they get into trouble. We have to think about the borrowers, not just the lenders.

Well, this is an extreme version of "financial socialism" for which the FRB is attacked in the U.S. Finance Minister Fujii dissented, but Kamei said "Shut up. This is my business." He is right. Since the MoF and the FSA were separated, Fujii can't stop Kamei.

As Tobias Harris admitted, Kamei's appointment is a big mistake of Hatoyama. Although Kamei is the head of a minor party, he is as experienced politician as Ozawa. He has many connections including "black" people and, as a former high official of police, he knows many scandals of politicians. When he threatened PM Abe with a leaked information in a weekly magazine, Abe rebutted that Kamei would be more scandalous if all weekly magazines were right.

Probably it's only Ozawa who can control Kamei. Unlike western politicians, personal connections ("kao") are much more important than parties in Japan.

Hatoyama Is Attacked by Geeks for Breaking the Promise

2009-09-18T21:31:00.006+09:00

The biggest topic about Hatoyama administration on the Web was the news never reported in the major media: exclusion of reporters outside of the press club from the press conference. It's outrageous because Hatoyama promised in a press conference, when he was a leader of the opposition party, that he would open the press conference of the Cabinet if he would be the Prime Minister.

Jimbo Tetsuo, a video journalist on the Web, went to the Prime Minister's office on September 16 but blocked by the guards. He investigated the reason and reported it in detail. According to him, the Chief of the Cabinet Hirano Hirofumi admitted only five reporters from magazines and some more from foreign press as observers who couldn't ask questions. If it's true, Hirano broke the promise that his boss made in the press conference.

As the DPJ doesn't disclose the detail yet, it's unclear who is to blame. But some lawmakers were attacked in Twitter and promised to investigate the process. Foreign Minister Okada Katsuya promised to open every press conference for any media. However, it was only Sports Nippon that reported the news.

Even for me, who was working for a TV station, the closed nature of Japan's press club was bizarre. Japan is only one country in the world that has such clubs. Foreign press has attacked and laughed at it for a long time, but LDP and bureaucrats protected the clubs because they can manipulate media easily via them.

However, the change will come. My message about Okada's decision collected more than 200 Re-Twitters in an hour. All of them applauded Okada. If Hatoyama follows Okada, the DPJ would be supported by geeks, who represent the coming generation.

Hatoyama's NYT article is forged?

2009-09-01T09:28:00.007+09:00

Yukio Hatoyama's "Op-Ed" article in NYT is not written by him. Probably it was translated from his article in Japanese magazine "VOICE" by Christian Science Monitor without permission by Hatoyama.

This is copyright infringement and misleads many people to assume Japan's next Prime Minister embraces "anti-globalism". FT.com quoted it more accurately. NYT, CSM, Huffington Post, and other journal that published the article should delete it and apologize.

Update: According to Yomiuri, Hatoyama office translated and published the article. CSM might have abridged it.

Update2: A DPJ official said that an agent of LA Times in Japan contacted VOICE, but he didn't tell that the article would be circulated via syndicate, Global Viewpoint of which NYT and LAT are members. Japanese version.

Why Japan Is So Slow

2009-08-07T19:27:00.013+09:00

Today I talked with a correspondent of The Economist about the problems of Japan. He asked me why Japan is so slow to change in such self-evident problems as flexible labor market, active capital market, and globalization. It's very difficult because these problems are not self-evident for Japanese politicians and businessmen.

The core of the difficulty is the labor market. So-called lifetime employment and seniority wage is losing substance, but still persist. And temporary workers account for 1/3 of all the workforce, which the OECD calls "dual labor market". This is a collusion of managers and labor unions to protect their jobs by excluding young workers from the labor market. Since it's practically impossible to fire "normal workers", companies change workers to temps.

The OECD recommended Japanese government to make labor market flexible by "reducing the worker protection". But the government is going to eliminate short-term temps. The Democratic Party of Japan proposed a bill to ban the temp workers in manufacturing industries. It will only make temps unemployed, but it's politically incorrect to make firing workers easier.

The problem of capital market is related to that of labor market. Typical Japanese worker is employed for life and his salary increases by age. So his productivity is higher than his salary in the younger age, and lower in the older days. In other words, he "saves" his salary to the company in the younger age and "draw the deposit" when he is old. If he quits the company at the age of 40, he would lose 100 million yen ($ 1 million) in the lifetime salary. So it isn't a good decision to start up a company if you can't earn more than 100 million.

And the fundamental problem is the industrial structure: Japanese manufacturers were super-efficient in the integrated products such as cars and VTR that need complicated coordination. But the Information Revolution made products "modular" and standardized. The parts of PC are made in various countries and distributed globally, so Japanese advantage of coordination disappeared in the IT industries.

But why aren't they good at coordinating global division of labor, while they are so good at coordinating keiretsu relations with many companies? It's because the keiretsu coordination is based on implicit contracts between suppliers and makers. There are few problems of moral hazard due to asymmetric information, because they know each other closely. Global partnership is a strategic relation based on explicit contracts. Japanese managers aren't good at strategic decisions to profit from contracts, because they are promoted by consensus and cooperation.

All these problems stem from the long-term relation between managers and workers, suppliers and makers, which was efficient when Japan was growing steadily and the future was always better and brighter. In terms of game theory, such long-term relation is efficient when the players of a repeated game are patient and the rent from the relation is large.

Now the game is over: when the future is not so bright, the payoff of "defection" would be greater than that of "cooperation". The long-term relation became inefficient and fragile. It also changed politics: the Liberal Democratic Party has redistributed the rent of growth, but the source of the rent dried up. So voters want change, but they don't know what to change. And the DPJ doesn't know either. We can't expect too much from them. Real change would occur when the LDP is divided after it loses the election, and the "third party" emerges.

Japanese Writers Said No to the Kurofune of Google Book Search

2009-05-28T11:19:00.003+09:00

As reported by Mercury Project Office, 180 Japanese writers including Shuntaro Tanigawa announced to refuse Google Book Search settlement scheme on April 30.

Tanigawa is a famous poet and known for his activities for copyright protection. They says "We have impression Google is public". However they are upset and say "they are arrogance". Also 2,197 writers want to join the settlement while they do not want delete their works from Google's database. It looks like a signal not to trust the service.

Writers don't understand the settlement when they accuse Google of the "arrogance". Google doesn't respond because they are prohibited by law. It's up to the administrator of the settlement. The bureau chief of the American Writers Association, who came to Japan this week, said the settlement is favorable to copyright holders because it enables to monetize out-of-print books.

Japanese writers say this is the "Kurofune (Black Ships) of copyright" that invade Japan. However, the Kurofune, which came to Japan 150 years ago, didn't invade Japan but wanted to open the country for western countries. The Tokugawa government opened Japan and the Meiji government reformed it. That's why Japan wasn't colonized by western countries. Now Japanese writers seem more ignorant than our ancestors.

More about Negative Interest Rate

2009-04-20T21:18:00.008+09:00

It's very much discussed in Japan, but American economists aren't familiar with it. So here are links:

Tyler Cowen: Give every voter a federal debit card. And put the money in their accounts. Tell them if they don't spend it this month, the government will take it back.
Bernanke: Deflation: Making Sure "It" Doesn't Happen Here
Eggertsson-Woodford: The Zero Bound on Interest Rates and Optimal Monetary Policy
Hiroshi Ugai (BoJ): Effects of the Quantitative Easing Policy: A Survey of Empirical Analyses

There are many articles written about Krugman's article, but most of them are in Japanese. Overall, economists agree that negative interest rate is desirable if possible. But they are divided whether it's possible. Krugman argued it was possible, but he changed opinion recently. Bernanke commented on "flexible inflation objectives", but doesn't commit to the targeting.

Theoretically, the problem is how the Fed can make the expectation of inflation while it can't increase monetary aggregate. When the nominal interest rate is zero, as Krugman said, money and short-term bonds become perfect substitutes, so the Fed's operation will be buying a twenty-dollar bill with two ten-dollar bills. The BoJ tried the "time scale policy" to keep interest rate low until the inflation rate becomes positive. It was a little effective to suppress the long-term rate, but couldn't make inflation.

Greg Mankiw's Advice for Negative Interest Rate

2009-04-19T15:41:00.009+09:00

Greg Mankiw recommends the negative interest rate in his NY Times article. He acknowledges Gesell and Keynes, but it's odd that he tells nothing about Krugman's famous article in 1998. In the article, Krugman built a toy model to recommend the inflation targeting to make the real interest rate negative. However, he writes in a recent entry of his blog:

In fact, I wrote down my original liquidity trap model starting from a firm belief that the liquidity trap was nonsense: even if the interest rate is zero, I thought, increasing the money supply must raise demand. So I set out to write a model with all the i’s dotted and t’s crossed, so as to demonstrate that point - and found, to my shock, that the model actually said the reverse.

What comes down to is this: once you've pushed the short-term interest rate down to zero, money becomes a perfect substitute for short-term debt. And any further increase in the money supply therefore displaces an equal amount of debt, with no effect on anything. Period, end of story.

If Mankiw hadn't read the 1998 article, I strongly recommend him to read it. If he read it, I wonder how he overcome the difficulty to make people expect inflation when the Fed can't increase the monetary aggregate, which Krugman gave up at last.

On the other hand, Mitsuhiro Fukao proposed a more direct way to make the interest rate negative - to tax the cash. It sounds even more bizarre than artificial inflation, but Fukao insists that it's legitimate to tax the cash. Other economists propose to make interest rate negative by electronic money.

Indeed Japan's experience of the "lost decade" isn't shared by American economists...

Paul Krugman's Contradictory Advices to Japan

2009-04-16T00:23:00.004+09:00

Krugman is not known for consistency, but his comments on Japan's "lost decade" are remarkable. These are his advices:

Article in 1998

NYT blog in November 2008

Rolling Stone in January 2009

NYT blog in March

In American media, he denies the effectiveness of the inflation targeting, but he insists on inflation targeting in Japanese media. Does he talk different economic theories in English and Japanese?

Martin Wolf's Wrong Lesson from Japan

2009-03-19T23:39:00.028+09:00

Martin Wolf writes:

Despite a loss in wealth of three times GDP and a shift of 20 per cent of GDP in the financial balance of the corporate sector, from deficits into surpluses, Japan did not suffer a depression. This was a triumph.

It would be happy if our bitter experience in the 1990s were a triumph. Unfortunately, he is wrong. His only source is a book by Richard Koo, an economist who is not respected very much in Japan. His new book, The Holy Grail of Macroeconomics is full of factual errors.

He insists that the wasteful spending policy of Japanese government in the 90s rescued Japan from depression. The fact is shown in Fig. 1. Real GDP growth of Japan became negative after the first fiscal stimulus in 1992. After the biggest stimulus in 1998, GDP fell negative again. With additional stimulus in 1999, growth became slightly positive, but fell negative in 2001. Apparently the spending of a hundred trillion yen didn't much help.

Fig. 1Wolf writes:

The explanation was the big fiscal deficits. When, in 1997, the Hashimoto government tried to reduce the fiscal deficits, the economy collapsed and actual fiscal deficits rose.

This is wrong, too. Fig. 2 shows the real GDP growth from 1996 to 1997 in Japan. It shows that GDP rose in 10-12 in 1996 because consumers bought expensive goods before the tax hike in April 1997. Then GDP fell as a rebound in 4-6 and 7-9 in 1997. It recovered to the normal level in 10-12. In 1998, the GDP collapsed because of the credit crisis triggered by the bankruptcy of two major financial institutions in November in 1997.

Fig. 2
These are conventional wisdom among Japanese economists. If Wolf read, for example, Ihori et al., he would find that Koo's argument is completely refuted by professional economists. Their paper is written in Japanese, but FT must have translators. If you talk about Japanese economy seriously, you should read serious articles mostly written in Japanese. We don't talk about British economy with reading only one paperback in Japanese.

Deja Vu of the Lost Decade

2009-03-02T01:43:00.003+09:00

The financial crisis is becoming more and more similar to that of Japan's "lost decade". The Economist says

According to the IMF, non-performing loans in Sweden reached 13% of GDP at the peak of the crisis. In Japan they hit 35% of GDP. A recent estimate by Goldman Sachs suggests that American banks held some $5.7 trillion-worth of loans in “troubled” categories, such as subprime mortgages and commercial property. That is equivalent to almost 40% of GDP.

Japan’s outcome—a decade in which growth averaged 1% a year and gross government debt rose by 80 percentage points of GDP—was not one to be proud of. But given the magnitude of today’s mess, it may soon seem not that bad after all.

Governor Shirakawa of the Bank of Japan said,

In light of our experiences during the financial crisis in Japan, the development of the current global financial crisis gives me a surprising sense of deja vu. Until recently, Japan’s financial crisis has been considered as an isolated event unique to Japan. It appears that people around the globe are gradually coming to understand the implications of the massive credit bubble and its burst through the bitter experience during the current crisis.

Since I experienced the crisis as a journalist in the 90s, the response of FRB and the U.S. Treasury is much quicker than that of BoJ and MoF, but the results are not so impressive. They won't repeat our mistakes, but they might make new mistakes because, in the word of Tolstoy, happy economies are all alike; every unhappy economy is unhappy in its own way.

Nationalization of Banks Is Only the Beginning

2009-02-22T22:48:00.001+09:00

Alan Greenspan said "It may be necessary to temporarily nationalise some banks in order to facilitate a swift and orderly restructuring". The problem is not whether but when American government will announce the nationalization.

However, from the experience of Japan, the nationalization is the easier part. It's more difficult to manage the banks and dispose of the bad assets. Even more difficult is drawing the line which is to bailout and which is not. If the government bails out Citi and BankAmerica, and let other banks fail, the latter would sue the government. If the government bails out every bank, the budget deficit would be astronomical and dollar would crash so that the crisis would spread globally.

In Japan, Long-Term Credit Bank was nationalized after the severe attack to its stock in 1998 and Nippon Security Credit Bank followed. It was eight years after the burst of the bubble, but the problem was not finalized. Other "mega-banks" continued to dispose of the bad loans by "own responsibility". When Finance Minister Yanagisawa was fired and Economic Minister Takenaka took over his position in 2002, the disposal accelerated, because Takaneka threatened mega-banks saying "there is no bank which is too big to fail".

So the nationalization is not the end but the beginning of the problem. It's inevitable but not so effective measure to restructure banks. Anyway they should do it themselves. Government can only help it.

We Don't Want Tokyo Olympics

2009-02-13T22:42:00.002+09:00

Tokyo city unveiled details of their bid to host the 2016 Olympics on Friday. Tokyo organizers say their bid offers "the most compact games" and "green energy" sources including solar and wind power. Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara said "We hosted the Olympics in 1964 and plan to use many of those facilities which are still standing and in good condition." Tokyo city's report says that 70% people of Japan approve the Tokyo Olympics.

However, the residents of Tokyo, like me, are not so enthusiastic. According to the opinion poll conducted by the IOC, 59% of us approve the Tokyo Olympics, which is the least rate among the candidate cities. It's natural because we are suffering from the worst recession since the WW2. Tokyo is notorious for its shortage of medical care and the "commuting hell". The budget of 5 billion dollars can be used for more useful ends.

Where Have All the Inflation Targetings Gone?

2009-01-01T22:06:00.013+09:00

Once upon a time, some economists in Japan argued that the inflation targeting was the "global standard" of economics and that economists who didn't adopt it "don't know economics" because prominent economists such as Bernanke and Stiglitz advocated inflation targeting. Their bible was Krugman's article titled "IT’S BAAACK!" written in 1998.

Now Krugman has officially withdrawn it:

I and others tried to make for Japan in the 90s and are trying to make again now: creating inflation is easy if you’re an irresponsible country. It may not be easy at all if you aren't. [...] No matter how much Japan increases the monetary base now, expectations of future money supplies won’t move if people believe that the Bank of Japan will move to stabilize the price level as soon as the economy recovers.

And Stiglitz says "Today, inflation targeting is being put to the test – and it will almost certainly fail." Bernanke, who once criticized the policy of the Bank of Japan (BoJ) as "extremely poor", doesn't even mention it when he can adopt it if he wish.

In fact, Krugman's proposal was different from the inflation targeting as price-stabilization targeting adopted in some European countries. He recommended the BoJ to promise to be irresponsible to change expectation. Since people don't expect inflation when they see deflation, the BoJ should commit flooding money indefinitely to make inflation of 4 percent for 15 years.

Krugman might have joked, as the paper's title suggested. Indeed such a proposal can be nothing but a joke. Who believes the BoJ's promise to be irresponsible? If inflation became 4 percent, it is rational for the BoJ to break the promise, so such a promise can't be subgame perfect, in terms of game theory.

His theory was not only wrong but harmful because it pushed the BoJ to continue unorthodox monetary policies such as zero-interest rate and "quantitative easing" too long. These policies induced yen-carry trades that amounted to one trillion dollars, which accelerated the American housing bubble that caused the current financial crisis.

Anyway, Krugman backed off. But the Japanese economists who embraced his theory keep silent, probably because it would overturn their credibility (if any). It was the most shameful economic controversy in Japan, for which Krugaman is partly responsible. I recommend him to delete his wrong article and apologize to Japanese people with his followers.

Don't Embrace Inflation, Prof. Rogoff

2008-12-07T15:19:00.017+09:00

Kenneth Rogoff, a Harvard Professor and former chief economist of IMF, wrote an essay that recommends inflation targeting. Inflation targeting is a usual policy measure, but this isn't lowering but raising the inflation rate to six percent. He writes:

Fortunately, creating inflation is not rocket science. All central banks need to do is to keep printing money to buy up government debt. The main risk is that inflation could overshoot, landing at 20% or 30% instead of 5-6%. Indeed, fear of overshooting paralysed the Bank of Japan for a decade. But this problem is easily negotiated. With good communication policy, inflation expectations can be contained, and inflation can be brought down as quickly as necessary.

It's sad that such an influential economist as Rogoff doesn't know the true lesson of the Bank of Japan. They were not paralyzed by overshooting but undershooting that the inflation didn't occur in spite of their "quantitative easing" with which they put 35 trillion yen ($ 380 billion) to bank's accounts in the BoJ. Because, as Rogoff apparently knows, monetary aggregate isn't controllable by central banks that supplies the monetary base. The former is an endogenous variable determined by money demands of private sectors.

Especially when the economy suffers from deflation, the natural rate of interest is less than zero, so the real interest rate (nominal rate plus deflation rate) will be higher than the natural rate because nominal rate can't be negative. When the real interest rate is higher than the natural rate, deflation will occur, as Wicksell predicted a hundred years ago. Paul Krugman wrote ten years ago:

A liquidity trap may be defined as a situation in which conventional monetary policies have become impotent, because nominal interest rates are at or near zero - so that injecting monetary base into the economy has no effect, because monetary base and bonds are viewed by the private sector as perfect substitutes.

Japan experienced exactly as he predicted: while the BoJ dropped the interest rate to zero and supplied huge amount of monetary base, the monetary aggregate didn't increase because money demand was very weak. So Krugman was right when he wrote:

If the central bank can credibly commit itself to pursue inflation where possible, and ratify inflation when it comes, it should be able to increase inflationary expectations despite the absence of any direct traction on the economy via current monetary policy.

However, it's difficult for the BoJ to commit making inflation when they are impotent to increase monetary aggregate. Krugman recommended the BoJ to be irresponsible to seek a higher future price level. Unfortunately this policy isn't subgame perfect, using the term of game theory. In the subgame after inflation occurs, the BoJ will abandon the inflation policy. As rational players know it, they won't make the forward-looking expectation of inflation. So the subgame perfect equilibrium is no inflation at all.

These are elementary theories supported by the painful experience of Japan. For example, Hiroshi Ugai of the BoJ wrote a survey article of many empirical findings. He concludes:

Granted the positive above effects of preventing further deterioration of the economy reviewed above, many of the macroeconomic analyses conclude that the Qunantitative Easing Policy's effects in raising aggregate demand and prices were limited. In particular, when verified empirically taking into account the fact that the monetary policy regime changed under the zero bound constraint of interest rates, the effects from increasing the monetary base were not detected or smaller, if anything, than during periods when there was no zero bound constraint.

Indeed, Prof. Rogoff, creating inflation is not rocket science. It's much more difficult to create inflation when deflation is going on than launching rockets.

Tamogami's Article Is Wrong, But He Is Partly Right

2008-11-11T19:35:00.004+09:00

Today, Toshio Tamogami, the Chief of Air Force Staff, testified about his controversial article in the Diet. He insisted it was right, because 58 percent of Yahoo!Japan Poll agreed to him.

But historians criticize that it includes many wrong allegations based on secondary sources. For example, it claims that Zhang Zuolin, a warlord in China who was killed by Japanese Army with bombing in 1928, was "in fact murdered by Komintern". Its source was Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang, which has many historical errors. One of them is about Zhang: Chang maintains that a GRU report alleges they killed Zhang. Probably Chang doesn't know that Colonel Daisaku Komoto confessed he killed Zhang.

However, Tamogami was fired without asking about the article. He said he wanted to be investigated what was wrong. He is right in this aspect. This kind of problems are taboo among Japanese politicians because they are afraid of provoking neighboring countries. But the historical facts are independent of political views. As this blog clarified, there is no evidence that "comfort women" were abducted by the Army.

Japan might have been an aggressor nation, but it doesn't lead to the conclusion that Japanese Army raped 200,000 women and killed 300,000 people in Nanjing. We should discuss it more frankly in Japan and with other countries.

Was Japan an Aggressor Nation?

2008-10-31T23:12:00.008+09:00

Today Toshio Tamogami, the Chief of Air Force Staff, was ousted, because he published an article which insists that Japan didn't invade Asian countries. Here is the article.

It includes dubious claim such as that Hull Note was written by an agent of Komintern, but is partly true about the Government of Korea. Carter Eckert of Harvard University researched it and concluded that Japan's capital contributed to the modernization of Korea. Of course Korea was a colony, but the way Japan governed it was different from that of western countries. It's an interesting reading.

Japan's Stock Price Is "Abnormal"

2008-10-28T22:22:00.006+09:00

Nikkei index hit the bottom lower than 7000 yen, the price in 1982. Carlos Ghosn, the CEO of Nissan, commented it was "abnormal in every respect". Nissan's stock price is lower than that in 1999, when Nissan was about to bankrupt.
One reason is the fire sales of hedge funds that are pressed to clear position to refund customers. Another is the abnormal appreciation of yen. But it's strange because Japan's trade surplus deteriorated so that it recorded the first deficit since 1982.

FT.com attributes it to the rewinding of yen-carry trades, that borrow low-interest yen and buy high-interest assets in dollar and euro. The scale of carry trades is uncertain, but Gold Research estimates it as 1.2 trillion dollar. Such huge arbitration made yen abnormally cheaper and subsidized export industries. Now the fortune is reversed.

Its reason is obvious: the zero-interest rate policy of the Bank of Japan that lasted almost seven years until 2006. It should be ended in 2003, when the economy recovered, but some economists and politicians wanted BoJ to continue "reflation". As a result, the money contributed to the subprime bubble.

Now Japan is revenged by its silly monetary policy. It teaches us that "unorthodox" monetary policy has its unpredictable risks and that there are few policy measures for single government to counteract the tsunami of global financial crisis.

Japanese Voters Have No Choice

2008-10-26T12:52:00.002+09:00

It is said that the Lower House of Japan will be dissolved and the election will be held in November, but few people are enthusiastic as American voters, because they have no choice of alternative policies.

Jiminto, the ruling party, is the old guard of vested interests. PM Aso wants to spend two billion yen for the "additional economic measures". On the other hand, Ichiro Ozawa of Minshuto, an opposition party, promises to spend more on agriculture and children, that would cost more than 20 trillion yen.

By the American standard, we are faced with the choice between Barak Obama and Ralph Nador - big spender and super spender, when Japan has the worst budget deficit - 150% of GDP - in OECD countries. Naturally Nikkei index has fallen most sharply in OECD countries.

Don't Experiment the Rubbish Economics of "Laissez-Faire"

2008-10-01T13:35:00.014+09:00

I was amazed at the U.S. Congress's rejection of the Paulson Plan. As I looked for the reason, I was even more amazed that overwhelming majority opinion in blogs and SNS was classical laissez-faire, i.e., the government should do nothing. Today the most popular entry of digg is written by a Harvard economist named Jeffrey A. Miron that insists:

The obvious alternative to a bailout is letting troubled financial institutions declare bankruptcy. [...] Talk of Armageddon, however, is ridiculous scare-mongering. If financial institutions cannot make productive loans, a profit opportunity exists for someone else. This might not happen instantly, but it will happen.

Indeed, someday it will happen, but when? In Japan, the "voluntary" resolution of bad loans didn't happen for ten years. At last, when the government forced banks to write off their bad assets, net loss amounted to more than 120 trillion yen (1.1 trillion dollars), 24 per cent of GDP. Meanwhile Japan's nominal growth rate has been almost zero, so Japanese economy has lost almost 500 trillion yen.

Economists (including me) defend market economy, but nobody except Miron subscribe to laissez-faire. In particular, when the price mechanism breaks down due to the fear of holdup, the economy-wide disorganization would continue for years, according to Blanchard-Kremer. It brought about 60 percent drop of GDP in Russia and Ukraine for ten years.

The key is the trust that borrowed money will be repaid. When the trust breaks down, the economy never recovers automatically. If nobody repay, why should you repay alone? This is the notorious paradox called Prisoner's Dilemma. If default should become the Nash equilibrium, nobody would repay. In such situation, the trust becomes public goods that can't be supplied by private sector.

If American disaster were contained to the U.S., they would be free to experiment laissez-faire economics themselves. Unfortunately, they have collected money from over the world, so the current deficit of the U.S. is as huge as 2 percent of world GDP. If their financial system collapsed, the Great Depression would come again, in which American nominal GDP halved and unemployment grew to 25 percent. Don't make the world economy a test bed of rubbish economics.

To Bailout or Not to Bailout, That is Not the Question

2008-09-27T12:58:00.022+09:00

There are many controversies going on about the so-called Paulson Plan. Many of them focus the cost for taxpayers and long-term effects for moral hazard. Indeed they are important, but the essential problem is not whether the government should bailout banks or not. As I commented to Reuters, the biggest pain from the stupid policy of Japan's Ministry of Finance in the 90s stemmed from its delay, which spent more than ten years to begin the restructuring of banks.

In the beginning, the gross bad loan amounted only 12 trillion yen, about 2 percent of Japan's GDP in 1992. But the MoF maximized it to more than 100 trillion yen in net asset loss. Moreover, as investment shrank and firms turned into savors, nominal GDP remained almost zero for ten years. As a result, Japan lost 10 percent of real GDP compared to its potential. This negative externality to the real economy was the most serious damage. The government should buy time by the emergency plan, as The Economist supported the Paulson Plan.

However, another pitfall is that the plan focuses "Purchases of Mortgage-Related Assets". Japanese government set up such an institution, the Resolution and Collection Corp (RCC) in 1996 to compensate the cost of the infamous bailout of Nokyo (agricultural cooperatives) in the Jusen (residential mortgage companies) scandal and extended it to buy all the bad asset of Japanese banks. But it didn't work because the banks were in fact insolvent. If they sold their bad asset with fair value, they would be bankrupt.

The real problem is not, as Paulson claims, the illiquidity of assets, but the insolvency of banks. As liquidation or capital injection would be inevitable if the truth is revealed, banks don't sell their assets as long as they can hide the insolvency. In Japan, they did nothing until 2002, when Heizo Takenaka became the minister in charge of economy and finance, who threatened banks by saying "There are no banks that are too big to fail". He examined the bank assets and forced them to disclose their real asset value, stripping the "deferred tax assets" which counted the future return of corporate tax as assets.

Banks panicked and resisted the Takenaka Plan. Takenaka finally conceded because his plan would make another major bank Risona bankrupt, but banks rushed to dispose of their bad assets because the Bank of Japan helped them make the record profit by suppressing policy rate as zero and supplying huge money. As a result, Nikkei index regained from its record bottom on April 28, 2003, because the market received the signal that Takenaka would bailout major banks.

The lesson from Japan is that the core of the problem is the reluctance of bankers to clear bad assets, which leads to failure when all assets are re-evaluated. Japanese accountants were "friendly" with banks and the MoF recommended "voluntary" disposal, so the problem was prolonged for more than ten years.

Since American standard of account is not so opaque as that of Japan, the pressure for disposal would be stronger, but even Lehman Brothers reported profits until the first quarter of 2008, which was found insolvent when they were liquidated. And if CFO were "creative" as Enron and accountants were "friendly" as Arthur Andersen, they would cover up their failure.

The most difficult phase is the disposal of local banks, of which more than hundred would be insolvent, whose failure would chill the local economy and politicians would resist the liquidation. The key to the problem is the pressure for banks to dispose of the bad loan as soon as possible. So the ban of short selling of the bank stocks is not a good policy, because the stock market is the strong pressure for Lehman to file bankruptcy.

The Lesson of Yamaichi

2008-09-21T00:54:00.004+09:00

The tragedy of Lehman Brothers and the following jump of interbank rates remind me of a similar event in Japan eleven years ago. Yamaichi Shoken, one of the Big Four security brokers, filed to close business in November, 1997.

It was a consequence of an accident brought about by the bankruptcy of another broker, Sanyo Shoken. When Sanyo failed in early November, an interbank loan to it was defaulted. It made all banks panic so that Hokkaido Takushoku Bank and Yamaichi failed because they couldn't get the interbank loan.

The Ministry of Finance let Yamaichi fail because it was only a broker. However, Fuji Bank, the "main bank" of Yamaichi became the target of short selling, because Yamaichi's bankruptcy signaled the liquidity crisis of Fuji. Then overall credit crunch emerged, which forced the MoF to bailout 21 major banks in 1998. It was similar to that of AIG.

But the bailout didn't end the problem. In the end, Japan Long Term Credit Bank and Nippon Credit Bank were nationalized in 2000. Japanese government established RCC (Resolution and Collection Corporation) to buy the bad loans by public money. However, the crisis didn't end until 2002, Heizo Takenaka, the Minister of Economy and Finance, threatened major banks to write off the bad loans quickly.

The lesson is that market mechanisms don't work for dying companies. They never die voluntarily but insist that they are "not insolvent but only illiquid". So if the central bank supply plenty of money, they struggle to survive by pumping up public money. Since it takes a long time until the bank's money dries up, government intervention is inevitable.

On September 19, the U.S. Treasury Department and FRB proposed a plan to set up a public institution to resolve the bad loan, like the RTC for the S&L scandal. Many economists agreed their proposal, but Luigi Zingales made an objection. Indeed his criticism for the "socialization" of private loans is economically rational, but rational policies don't work for irrational banks. Probably we need libertarian paternalism.

Google Street View Reveals a Fake Political Body

2008-08-30T13:49:00.005+09:00

Google Street View (GSV) is controversial in the world. Some says it has no merit, but it has at least one merit: it can reveal politician's dirty money.

Seiichi Ohta, the Ministry of Agriculture, has a political body "The Group that Encourages the Congressman Ohta" that spent 40 million yen ($400,000) in 2005-6, according to its report for the government. Its bureau is placed in Jiyugaoka, a high-class residential district in Tokyo. However, as this picture of GSV shows, it's his secretary's house, from whom I borrow my home!

In a press conference yesterday, Ohta insisted that he had employed 150 operators in 2005 and 06. But it's impossible for them to work in this small house where no car can enter. I've never seen anybody but the secretary's family. The wage might have been paid for the Election in 2005 in Fukuoka, Ohta's constituency, by his supporting group.

If Ohta double-counted the expenditure of his supporting group in Fukuoka as this political body in Tokyo, it would violate the Political Funds Control Law. He didn't reveal the names of 150 operators, but opposition parties will demand him to submit the wage statement to the Diet that will begin on September 18.

The Minister of Agriculture is the "haunted post". Two of Ohta's predecessors resigned by similar scandals and one committed suicide, which led to the collapse of Abe administration. As opposition parties demand to make the special committee to investigate Ohta's scandal, if he clings to his dubious claim, Fukuda administration might collapse, too.

Chief cabinet secretary Machimura said Ohta cleared the problem, but PM Fukuda made no comment to defend Ohta so far. He is cleverer than Machimura.

Mainichi Daily News Apologizes the Racist Column

2008-07-20T18:26:00.004+09:00

"WaiWai" was a popular column of the Mainichi Daily News (MDN), the English version of the Mainichi Shimbun, a major national daily in Japan. It was written by Ryan Connell, the Editor-in-Chief of MDN everyday, citing articles about sex in Japanese B-rated magazines. However, many of them were much different from the original articles. Today MDN published an official apology.

All articles of WaiWai were deleted, but some caches are collected in a Wiki site. For example, an article of WaiWai cites Cyzo, a popular web magazine：

From the successor of the government ministry that gave the world Pearl Harbor and the Rape of Nanking now comes a cutesy little girl cartoon character dressed as a maid with a hawkish stuffed teddy bear to give a simple explanation of Japan's defense policies, according to Cyzo (August).

The editors of Cyzo protested to the Mainichi that the original article didn't include such phrases as "the successor of the government ministry that gave the world Pearl Harbor and the Rape of Nanking" (in Japanese).

This is typical for WaiWai, which appealed to foreign reader's sexual curiosity and racial prejudice. Sadly such a stereotype still works. When Connell was laid off and WaiWai shut down, many foreign readers posted e-mails that regret the closing of the interesting column about Japanese life.

Such stereotype is flooded in Wikipedia, which describes Japanese Army "raped hundreds of thousands of Comfort Women during WW2". Even worse, western media such as NY Times and BBC copy such racist documents, as this blog reported.

WaiWai is merely part of the wide spread prejudice toward Japanese. More than sixty years after the war, western people love to picture Japanese people yellow, crude, and sexually-obsessed barbarians.

Fannie and Freddie's Window Dressing

2008-07-20T00:36:00.002+09:00

Reuters accuses the U.S. government of bailing out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac by "flexible accounting". Such window dressing was the fatal blow to the Japanese financial disaster because it made financial indicators unreliable so that the financial market broke down completely.

"I don't know where these guys get the audacity to take our money, taxpayer money, and buy stock in Fannie Mae," Jim Rogers, a famous investor in Singapore, said in an interview.

What's the Time in Japan's Lost Decade?

2008-07-19T01:12:00.010+09:00

The subprime crisis is becoming more and more similar to Japan's "lost decade". This week, the U.S. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson said that the government was thinking about the bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac by public funding of 10 billion dollars.

It is comparable to the situation of 1998 in Japan, when the public capital of 1.8 trillion yen (15 billion dollars) was injected to Long-Term Credit Bank and other twenty banks. After that, LTCB was injected nearly 8 trillion yen, half of which was lost when it was nationalized finally.

Japan's lesson is clear: such fuzzy bailout makes things worse by bringing about the moral hazard that conceals bad loans, waiting for the government's rescue. Yesterday the Supreme Court judged that the CEO of LTCB who window-dressed financial statements was not guilty because "every bank did it those days".

The situation seems a little better in the U.S. because banks didn't window dressing (at least no such case was found yet). However, if the government injects capital to failing banks, most of the capital is likely to be lost and the burden would be passed to taxpayers. Such irresponsible policy would hurt the credibility of financial systems seriously. It's the core problem of Japan's lost decade.

Learning from Japan, the worst thing should come fast. If it's inevitable to nationalize Fannie and Freddie, as The Economist suggests, President Bush should not hesitate the decision. He has an advantage to do any unpopular policy because he can't be more unpopular.

Decline and Fall of Japanese Bureaucrats

2008-06-07T14:04:00.012+09:00

In Japan, bureaucrats have been the Best and the Brightest for a hundred years. In my school days, the first-rate students went to the government and the second-rate went to graduate schools. It's because Japan had to catch up the western advanced countries with the great wealth and strong army (Fukoku Kyohei) led by bright elites.

But these days, bureaucrats are favorable targets of bashing by media. Last week the Civil Service Reform Act (CSRA) passed the Diet, which abolishes amakudari that enables old bureaucrats to "descend" to the executives of related business.

This week Japan's government acknowledged that hundreds of bureaucrats routinely accept free beer, snacks and even cash from taxi drivers competing for late-night business. These "bribes" are not so serious, but the problem is the miserable situation of young bureaucrats.

Bureaucrats usually overwork more than 200 hours per month, most of which they spend waiting for the question from opposition parties. Since the Ministers know little about policy, the answers (sometimes even questions) should be prepared word by word by bureaucrats. And the answer documents must be agreed by all the related ministries. So most part of their work is spent for negotiating with other ministries and divisions. That's why they sit up all nights.

Naturally young bureaucrats are weary of such long-time unproductive works. Once amakudari was an incentive with which they recoup the "gift" they devoted in younger days. Now the gift would not be rewarded, so a lot of bureaucrats are exiting to the foreign investment banks and consulting firms. The CSRA would accelerate the "stampede".

It's a good news. Bureaucrats are not so important business that the brightest people devote their life any more. On the othe hand, foreign companies face great difficulties in entering Japanese market because of complicated and opaque regulations. As a result, foreign direct investment into Japan accounts only 3 per cent of GDP, the lowest of OECD countries. So foreigners want the people who knows the regulation.

Now Japan is facing the "third opening of the country" next to that of Meiji era and that after WW2. Young bureaucrats can be the pilots for opening the brave new world for Japan.

Greenpeace Is a Thief

2008-05-17T11:53:00.005+09:00

Greenpeace Japan filed a criminal complaint with Japanese prosecutors Thursday, accusing whaling-ship crew members of stealing whale meat from a hunting trip. However, the alleged "evidence" was stolen from the warehouse.

Jun Hoshikawa, the director of Greenpeace Japan, admitted that they stole it and apologized. According to the Japanese law, the object which was collected with illegal measure can't be an evidence. So their accusation will be rejected.

This is a typical hypocrisy of so-called radical ecologists. Western people want to save the whale, while they are killing millions of cows, pigs, and other animals everyday, more than any eastern people. As eating cows is the western tradition, so eating whale is Japanese tradition. Nobody can tell which tradition is correct or incorrect.

Greenpeace is the worst model of western ethnocentrism. Even more foolish is the Japanese like Hoshikawa, who imports the western arrogance to Japan. Fortunately no Japanese media is supporting their illegal behavior. Many Japanese are angry at their violence and hypocrisy.

Japan's credit lessons: act fast, expose all losses

2008-04-18T15:29:00.002+09:00

Reuters quotes me in its analysis of Japan's lost decade.

According to Ellsberg paradox, people are afraid of uncertainty more than fixed loss. The uncertainty leads them to over-conservative investment, which decreases security prices, which magnifies uncertainty... So the first thing the central banks should do is to force banks to disclose all the loss as soon as possible. It's the most important lesson from Japan.

What the US Can (and Can't) Learn from Japan's Financial Fiasco

2008-04-08T23:45:00.007+09:00

Yesterday Japan's opposition party (DPJ) refused the proposal of the ruling party (LDP) for the deputy governor of the Bank of Japan (BOJ), because he had been a high official of the Ministry of Finance (MOF). It seems that Ichiro Ozawa, the Chief of DPJ, has not correctly learned the lesson of Japan's lost decade, of which he was partly responsible.

Many economists, including Ben Bernanke, former Professor of Princeton, condemned BOJ's "poor monetary policy". Indeed it was poor, but it isn't enough to attack them to learn from their failure. You must understand why the best and the brightest of Japan failed so miserably.

First, you should recognize that BOJ had been regarded as a device of MOF for fifty years after WW2. The BOJ Law, enacted in 1941, manifested that BOJ must mobilize all the national forces to win the war. It meant that BOJ should print money to buy the government bonds. So BOJ financed the war and made the inflation after the war. It was the trauma of BOJ after the war, so it tends to avoid buying the government bond to keep the budget discipline.

And BOJ failed to prevent the asset inflation in the late 1980s, because MOF tightened the budget to reduce the deficit and forced BOJ to ease money, which fueled the bubble. In 1989, when BOJ tried to raise the discount rate, the Minister of Finance, Ryutaro Hashimoto, threatened to fire the governor of BOJ. So BOJ were too afraid of asset inflation rather than deflation.

As a result, BOJ was too cautious in lowering the discount rate and increasing money supply by buying the government bond even after 1991, when they started to ease money. I was surprised at hearing Yoshio Suzuki, former Chief Economist of BOJ, said "BOJ should be cautious to lower the rate because, if it should raise it again, it would hurt banks" in a program of NHK in 1991.

It's true that BOJ was inclined to tighten money because it would help restructuring of banks and firms. Masaru Hayami, a governor of BOJ, raised the discount rate from zero in 2000 because it would "help structural reform". It turned out to be wrong , but his view was based on the tradition of BOJ that regard the role of monetary policy as passive and the essential problem of Japanese economy as "structural".

It's a consensus among many economists that the main bank system that was born in the wartime and endured after the war, which centralized the economic control to MOF and banks, is no longer efficient because the financial engineering made financial industries more decentralized and global. The bank reform was inevitable.

However, if BOJ wanted to help the reform, the banks didn't want it. And MOF suppressed the disclosure of the banks' loss, most of which were in fact insolvent. So the tragedy of the lost decade was the lack of coordination between the monetary policy by BOJ and the (lack of) structural reform by MOF. Many economists naturally blame BOJ's poor policy, but the essential problem was MOF that covered up the collapse of highly centralized economic system inherited from the wartime.

So Japan's lost decade is more similar to the Great Depression than the Subprime Crisis. In the 1930, the US financial systems changed from bank-based to equity-based. Japan should have done it, too. But it meant the demise of the state-socialistic system born in the wartime led by MOF and bureaucrats. They avoided it with the huge cost, $1 trillion, burdened to tax-payers and consumers.

The true lesson is that the lack of communication between BOJ and MOF would be more harmful than amakudari (descent of bureaucrats to private companies) and that the essential problem, the obsolete and inefficient financial structure, has scarcely changed.

In contrast, the US has done the reform in the 1970s and, learning from Japan's tragedy, FRB supplied liquidity promptly and encouraged full disclosure of loss. It took Japan almost eight years to face its true problem by the bust of Yamaichi in November 1997, but FRB has done it in a year. The size of loss might be $1 trillion, but it's far smaller per GDP.

It's impressive that FRB faces the problem and tells the truth. It's the most important lesson from the lost decade that uncertainty is more dangerous than the exposure of loss, because uncertainty induces people to hoard money (liquidity preference) rather than investment, as Keynes stressed in the 1930. If the loss is fixed, the problem is half over. So I think the US economy has passed the most dangerous stage and it would recover in this year.

Japanese Lawmakers Are Trying to Censor the Net

2008-04-06T13:49:00.008+09:00

In every country, politicians love the censorship of the Internet, because many parents are afraid of the effect of "harmful information" on the Net to their children. In 1996, the U.S. enacted the Communication Decency Act (CDA), but it was rejected as unconstitutional by the Federal Supreme Court. But CDA version 2, which was limited to obscenity provisions, and the Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA) were enacted and upheld by courts in 2003.

Now in Japan, Sanae Takaichi, a right-wing legislator of the ruling party Jiminto (LDP), is trying to enact a law like CIPA. It enforces the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to filter "harmful" information for children. Other politicians and bureaucrats are worrying such legislation might infringe the Constitution that prohibits the censorship and would have great chilling effects for the ISPs. However, the opposition party Minshuto (DPJ) joined the bill. DPJ's draft is very similar to LDP's. If they join, the bill would be passed in the current Diet session.

Many bloggers, including me (in Japanese), are arguing against the bill. It would be confusing to enforce all ISPs to filter harmful information, as is seen in the mobile phones in Japan, to which operators are installing filtering software. And it would be useless because there is a non-profit organization, the Internet Hotline Center, which has difficulties in treating with 85,000 claims per year to ban the harmful information. Before making a bill, it would be more effective to supply enough resources to the Hotline Center.

Now the Diet almost stopped because the opposition parties dominate the Upper House, but once it moves again, DPJ would submit their bill. If so, LDP would submit their counterpart and negotiate to unite their bills to one. Some NPOs are lobbying to Miho Takai, a leader of the group in DPJ, to stop the dangerous bill. However, mainstream media are silent, probably because the bill would kill their enemy.

Six Lessons of the "Lost Decade" in Japan

2008-03-29T15:59:00.027+09:00

I'm surprised at Mr. Bill Emmott's article about Sen. Hillary Clinton. She said that the U.S. was in a Japanese-like situation, according to WSJ:

Look where we are with monetary policy. Maybe we've had a few little spurts of positive response with the last two cuts by the Fed but I don't think we can work our way out of the problems we're in, in the broad-based economy, with monetary policy alone. I think the Japanese tried that and tried that and tried that and there was just a lot of other challenges that they did not confront until relatively recently.

Thus she denied the effect of monetary policy and recommended the policy to help the foreclosure in communities, which would cost $30 billion. As Mr. Emmott comments, this is the wrong lesson from Japan's lost decade in the 1990s. As I covered the tragedy as a TV producer, I think the true lessons are contrary to her view.

Lesson One: Monetary policy is the most important measure to avoid Japanese-like situation. It isn't limited to interest rates and money supply but the disposal of failed banks and debtors. The Ministry of Finance (MOF) ordered banks to hide their failure to put off the clearing of bad loans. So banks continued window dressing supported by the MOF.
Lesson Two: If you can't avoid the failure, the sooner, the better. In 1992, I produced a TV program "Bad Loans of 12 Trillion Yen ($120 billion)". It was the official amount of gross bad loans in 1992. However, since the MOF didn't dispose the loan then, the land price collapsed and the net bad loan became so huge as 100 trillion yen in 2003, according to the Financial Services Agency.
Lesson Three: The central bank should ease money promptly after the crash. Since the Bank of Japan (BOJ) failed to stop the bubble, it didn't change the very tight monetary policy after the bubble burst in January 1990. After July 1991, when the BOJ eased the monetary policy, they were too cautious because they were afraid of the second bubble. As a result, the prices of real estates and stocks fell to less than 1/5 of their peak.
Lesson Four: Fiscal policy isn't effective: Japanese government repeated trying to rescue the economy by "emergency fiscal stimulus", which resulted only as the vast amount of government deficit, 180% of GDP. As many banks and companies were insolvent, the money supplied by the government was used to make up zombie banks and companies who looked alive but in fact dead.
Lesson Five: Until the focus of disease is removed by surgery, no macroeconomic medicine will be effective. In 2002, an economist Heizo Takenaka became the Minister in charge of Economy and Finance. He changed the "soft landing policy" of predecessors and said "I don't think there are too big banks to fail" in an interview with Newsweek. It aroused a panic among bankers, so they stopped postponing the disposal of bad loans.
Lesson Six: The interest rate isn't very effective under deflation, but money supply can help the restructuring. The BOJ made the interest rate zero in 1999, which didn't improve the crisis, because the real interest rate was high under deflation. Since 2001, the BOJ began the "quantitative easing" policy that supplied huge amount of money, which lessened the pain of the surgery by banks and companies to restructure themselves.

Summing up, it's an absurd policy to rescue debtors by the government. It would only put off the crisis and make the clearing of loans difficult. The FRB's current policy is not so effective, but nobody can cure such a huge crisis in a few months.

I don't think current crisis would last into a decade, as Japan experienced, because the FRB encouraged banks to disclose their loss, instead of the MOF who continued to cover up the crisis. The failure of Bear-Stearns is similar to that of Yamaichi Shoken, of which the president cried in the press conference in November 1997. Even Japan got out of the bottom in 2003, so the FRB could manage the crisis in a year or so.

Do you think I'm too optimistic? I hope American consumers will become optimistic, too. As Keynes and Hayek agreed, the essential problem of the Great Depression was the pessimism of firms and consumers under the great uncertainty. So it's good that Sen. Clinton is optimistic unless she becomes the candidate.

Did the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki bring World War Two to an end?

2008-01-06T01:05:00.000+09:00

Freeman Dyson wrote:

I changed my mind about an important historical question: did the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki bring World War Two to an end? Until this year I used to say, perhaps. Now, because of new facts, I say no. The facts are as follows:
Members of the Supreme Council, which customarily met with the Emperor to take important decisions, learned of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima on the morning of August 6, 1945. Although Foreign Minister Togo asked for a meeting, no meeting was held for three days.
A surviving diary records a conversation of Navy Minister Yonai, who was a member of the Supreme Council, with his deputy on August 8. The Hiroshima bombing is mentioned only incidentally. More attention is given to the fact that the rice ration in Tokyo is to be reduced by ten percent.
On the morning of August 9, Soviet troops invaded Manchuria. Six hours after hearing this news, the Supreme Council was in session. News of the Nagasaki bombing, which happened the same morning, only reached the Council after the session started.

It's a myth that has been long believed by many Japanese, too. Ex-Defense Minister Kyuma said last year that A-bomb couldn't be helped because it had ended WW2 before the USSR occupied Japan. He was attacked by the bereaved families in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and resigned.

Ministry does about-face on textbooks regarding Okinawa

2007-12-27T17:02:00.000+09:00

The Yomiuri reported:

The Education, Science and Technology Ministry approved Wednesday the reintroduction of wording in high school history textbooks referring to the role played by the Japanese military in the 1945 mass suicides in the Battle of Okinawa after the books' publishers filed correction applications.

The approval of corrections to textbooks that had already been approved is unprecedented.

While the Textbook Authorization Council, an advisory panel to the education, science and technology minister, recommended the corrections be approved, it also came to the conclusion that there were no direct orders from the military to carry out the mass suicides, and it therefore refused to allow the reinsertion of wording such as "coercion by the military" that the council had objected to before the books were authorized. This marked the first time the council expressed this view of what it believes happened.

According to this opinion, "From the viewpoint of residents, they were driven to commit suicide due to various circumstances and factors," adding that involvement of the Japanese military was a major factor in the mass suicides.

However, on the point of whether direct orders were issued by the military to commit suicide en masse, the council concluded that "it cannot be confirmed at this point."

This basic view was conveyed to the six textbook publishers. As a result, the publishers revised the phrasing they used in their correction applications.

To sum up, it's historian's consensus that there is no Army's order for suicide. The demonstration organized by Okinawa's left party was in vain.

Mass suicide in Okinawa

2007-12-24T09:52:00.000+09:00

Two years ago, a novelist Kenzaburo Oe, Nobel Laureate, was sued by ex-Army officials that he falsely accused them as they ordered mass suicide that had resulted 600 people killed themselves in Okinawa at the end of WW2 in his book Okinawa Note.

It turned out in the court that Oe never visited the island in which he alleged the Army killed hundreds of people. He learned it from a book written by journalists who indirectly heard the story. Ayako Sono, a novelist, visited the island and found that many people testified that lieutenant Akamatsu, who Oe called "a slaughter", never ordered suicide.

Probably affected by the suit, the government demanded to delete the description about "Army order" from school textbooks to their authors. Tens of thousands of Okinawa people protested the revision and organized demonstrations against it. As a result, the government admitted the authors to rewrite the story.

However, historians agree that there has never been orders of mass suicide. Nevertheless they insist that there was "coercion" of suicide. This ambiguous use of coercion is similar to that of comfort women. Indeed soldiers handed people hand grenades, but it was the Okinawa people who wanted to kill the U.S. Army and themselves, Sono wrote.

It is exceptional that government "censors" textbooks in an advanced country like Japan. But history should never rewritten by political demonstrations and somebody should never be attacked as a slaughter without factual grounds. Indeed the mass suicide was a tragedy, but it was not by the organized crime like the Holocaust. History and politics should be separated and discussed based on the facts.

A troubling position on 'comfort women'

2007-12-15T21:51:00.000+09:00

The Yomiuri Shimbun's editorial criticizes the EU Parliament's resolution:

The Japanese government must lobby other governments to persuade them not to follow in the footsteps of the European Parliament in adopting a resolution that sullies Japan's standing.

The European Parliament has adopted a resolution condemning Japan over the "comfort women" issue. The resolution calls for the government to apologize, saying the Imperial armed forces coerced young women in Asia to work as "sex slaves" before and during World War II.

The latest development resembles the resolution adopted by the U.S. House of Representatives over the comfort women issue in July. This matter has now spilled over to Europe. The parliaments of Canada and the Netherlands also have adopted similar resolutions.

However, interest in the comfort women issue has not necessarily been high in Europe. The European Parliament's resolution was advocated by the minor Green Party and fewer than 10 percent of the members of the parliament were present for the vote.

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Moves behind the scenes

However, Amnesty International, an international human rights organization, has organized hearings of former comfort women, including Dutch women, at various places, and is lobbying many governments to adopt resolutions on the issue. Anti-Japanese organizations with ties to China and South Korea are orchestrating such moves behind the scenes.

When Japan controlled Indonesia during World War II after ousting the Dutch military, detained Dutch women were taken by Japanese soldiers and forced to become comfort women against their will. However, Japanese military headquarters in Jakarta closed down the comfort station immediately after learning of the incident, and released the women.

This was indeed an unfortunate incident, but the story provides "counterevidence" that refutes allegations that the Japanese military systematically coercively recruited women into sexual service.

Officers and soldiers involved in the incident were sentenced as Class-B and Class-C war criminals by a war tribunal in the Netherlands after the war.

The German military had more than 500 "comfort stations" in East Europe and other occupied areas, yet we rarely hear a peep about this. A number of documents verify this fact, including a report by an official of the Catholic Church to the pope, saying Nazis took Jewish women to serve as prostitutes for German soldiers.

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Kono statement to blame

The Green Party that advocated the adoption of the latest resolution has many German members. We wonder if they intend to keep silent over what happened in their own country many years ago.

One reason why Japan has been repeatedly dragged over the coals regarding the comfort women issue is the 1993 statement issued by then Chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono. The statement suggested that Japanese officials systematically and coercively recruited women to be comfort women.

However, there is not one single document or a shred of evidence that substantiates this. Nobuo Ishihara, deputy chief cabinet secretary at that time, later said the Kono statement was issued to deflect pressure from South Korea, which had been pressing Japan to acknowledge it had carted off comfort women.

The government must review the Kono statement, which has become a source of misunderstanding in the international community.

EU Parliament passes resolution on "Comfort Women"

2007-12-14T10:42:00.000+09:00

The European Parliament (EP) approved on Thursday a resolution on Justice for the "Comfort Women," women forced into sex slavery in Asia before and during World War II by Japanese Imperial Army, urging the Japanese government to formally apologize and compensate for the victims and their families.

Author of the resolution Raul Romeva, a member of the Group of the Greens/European Free Alliance in the EP, urged the Japanese government to comply with international law to do justice for the victims. "We are talking about 200,000 women who were forced into sex slavery before and during the World War II by the Japanese Imperial Army," Romeva told the parliament.

This is another false accusation that blindly copied the Honda resolution. It has no legal enforcement and no media except South Korea reported the news. So let's ignore it.

A parliamentary hearing's big flaw

2007-12-01T16:30:00.000+09:00

Canada's parliament passed a motion this week calling on Japan to apologize to the brothel prostitutes that served for the benefit of the Japanese Imperial Army during World War II. It is not difficult to understand the concerns of this motion if you think of the gravity of tragedy and suffering these women endured, and continued existence of “human trafficking”, prostitution (sex slavery), and human right abuse prevalent today in Korea and the rest of world.

Nevertheless I am incensed about the carelessness and unfairness of the motion passed by the Canadian government. My concern and objection are three-fold: unfair procedure, biased evidence, and its negative implication for the current and subsequent generations of people and government of Japan. What I mean by "procedural concern" is that it failed to consider the full range of evidence to prove or disprove its conclusion. They clearly failed to consider a set of evidence that negates or questions the validity of this motion. Thus, this omission of due process made this motion fundamentally "biased and unfair." I am aware that it was not a legal proceeding nor an academic exercise that would have called for close examination of facts with interest over the pursuit of truth. The motion was a political action that serves the political expediency for certain groups of people with passion and desire to gain political control to punish those who were castigated as “evil” aggressors. It was meant to exonerate those women who had been wrongly treated and looked down on as prostitutes in the Korean society. Despite the political nature of proceedings and motion, we cannot remain silent about the unfairness and harmfulness of this motion based on half-truths and lies. The gravity of accusation and resulting negative implication for the people and nation of Japan are too great to ignore.

The unfair proceedings thus resulted in Parliament’s acceptance of false information and misunderstanding on the issues studied. I am not a scholar on history but I will mention one or two clear false information, which this motion were based on. The majority of the prostitutes came from Japan and not from the Korean-region of Imperial Japan (Korea was one of the Japanese territories at that time, not a colony) as alleged. Series of formal, “sincere” apologies have already been given by the government officials in the past, and the Asian Women's Fund was created for the purpose of compensating for the suffering endured by the brothel prostitutes.

Thirdly, there was a "structural(contextual)" bias in its motion, namely it failed to present historical, social context in which the Japanese government instituted the Licensed Brothel(Camp) Prostitutes attached to the Japanese Army for the benefit of the soldiers. Discussion of this issue without relevant historical context, especially with no reference to the conducts of other nations in the similar historical/social context creates a false impression of peculiarity, singularity about the people and government of Japan, whether or not it is intended. The comparisons are not to justify (or vilify) the actions studied but to give common ground and understanding of the issue(unless the comparisons truly shows its peculiarity, singularity) under consideration. This will help people to make rational, informed judgment rather than irrational, emotional generalization, and also prevents false impression and prejudice against the people and government of Japan.

Finally, this motion exploits the goodness of the Canadian people who naturally sympathize with the victims of crimes and are resolute to confront the aggressors. But here I must appeal again to the fairness of Canadian people. It must be reminded that this motion is directed against the Japanese people and nation today and possibly in the future. Another point is that one should not apply "double-standard" to understand and judge people, including the victims and aggressors alike. I am not to defend the aggression and criminal acts committed by the people or any nation but I am simply asking for "fair hearing" with interest over the pursuit of truth. It seem obvious that unless the motion is based on the “truth” derived from “fair” proceedings, it will not benefit anyone. It will not bring about any sense of closure for the people of Japan and Korea, and it will rather create increased animosity toward each other as well as instilling distrust and anger especially among Japanese against the people of Canada, which we would certainly like to avoid.

Asahi Shimbun's misleading article

2007-11-18T13:52:00.000+09:00

The Asahi Shimbun reported in the front page on 11 January 1992 that the historian Yoshiaki Yoshimi discovered documents that proves the Army's "commitment" to comfort women in the archives of Japan's Defense Agency.

According to the article, the document indicated that the military had been involved in running the brothels, for example by selecting the agents who recruited. Takashi Uemura, Asahi's correspondent in Seoul, reported further that the comfort women had been abducted as part of "Joshi Teishintai" (women volunteer corps). But it was obviously wrong because Teishintai was the labor team in the factories of military equipment.

This article kindled the phantom scandal of "comfort women". It misled the Japanese government because it was scheduled for Japanese Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa to visit South Korea five days after the reporting. Miyazawa apologized to Korean government about the comfort women without confirming the facts. And in 1993, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono addressed a statement to apologize Japanese government's "commitment".

These problems were fabricated by the Asahi that mistook the commercial prostitution as military forced labor. And there is no evidence of "abduction" of women by the Army. Since many historians and commentators attacked the wrong reporting, the Asahi tacitly admitted the error. However, they never apologized it but insists "such minor difference doesn't matter" in the editorial.

Norimitsu Onishi, a liar

2007-11-17T14:31:00.000+09:00

This site expands its subject to various kinds of lies about Japan.

The most influential source of lies is Norimitsu Onishi, the Tokyo bureau chief of NY Times. He was born in 1969 in Ichikawa, Chiba Prefecture, Japan, and moved to Canada when he was four. He graduated from Princeton University and joined the Times and covered Africa, Afganistan, and other foreign countries before he came to Japan in 2003.

His articles about comfort women are much distorted and biased. For example, in the article featured on the front page on March 8, he quoted the testimony of Wu Hsiu-mei and Jan Ruff O'Herne. However, Wu said that she was taken by a "Japanese officer" and talked nothing about the Army's coercion. O'Herne, a notorious seller of her tragedy, said nothing about the Army's order, too. Prostitutes can't be the witness of Army's order. Her case was judged by Dutch court which decided that Japanese Army had forbidden violent treatment of comfort women.

Onishi also visited a historian Yoshiaki Yoshimi, who is attacking Japanese government based on phony evidences. The document he alleges to be the proof is nothing but the warning from the Army to brokers not to kidnap women into brothels. Onishi doesn't even pretend to be impartial by interviewing more neutral historians such as Ikuhiko Hata. Onishi might be afraid of the "inconvinient truth" that his reporting is groundless.

Onishi's articles are laughing matter in Japan. The article about him in Wikipedia Japan lists his many wrong (often ridiculous) articles. He speaks Japanese fluently, but is ignorant of Japan. Onishi has advantage to write such racist articles because he looks like a Japanese. But some people suggests that he is a Korean-Japanese. If so, it's natural that he hates Japan that expelled his family.

He is the first NY Times correspondent who wrote so many stupid articles, which is hurting Times's reputation seriously. It's because the editors in NY headquarter are ignorant of Japan, too. Once I was amazed to see a picture of an unknown man captioned "Japanese PM Abe" in a Times's article on March 6 on the Web. When I pointed out it to the editor by e-mail, the picture was deleted without apology. I don't blame their ignorance. But it's criminal to repeat lying when so many Japanese people have pointed out they are incorrect.

NIPPON FALCONS LEAGUE

2007-08-29T18:35:00.000+09:00

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

Wikipedia was unlocked

2007-08-29T18:29:00.000+09:00

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.

China lobby pushed the Honda resolution

2007-08-10T22:12:00.000+09:00

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.

U.S. government doesn't endorse Honda resolution

2007-08-10T21:47:00.000+09:00

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 the Government of Japan has taken steps to address this issue, including apologies by a number of previous government officials. And in October of last year, Prime Minister Abe reaffirmed the statements.

So what I would say to you is that the U.S.-Japan relationship is strong and built on a solid foundation, and that the Honda resolution to which you refer will not change this. We hope that Japan will continue to work with its neighbors to address this question and other issues arising from the past and cultivate relationships that allow them to move forward to address current opportunities and challenges. It is important that the countries of East Asia have constructive relationships that allow them to move forward in addressing current opportunities and challenges.

Lastly, I would mention to you that another resolution has been passed in one of the committees of our Congress citing the great importance of the U.S.-Japan relationship and citing the importance of the alliance between our two countries. So I'd say that in our Congress there is a great reservoir of friendship and good feeling towards Japan. (emphasis added)

Mr. Negroponte deliberately commented only on the human trafficking and didn't mention the "coercion" by the Army. So it would be the U.S. government's view that PM Abe apologized the trafficking, not the war crime.

Protest to Asahi Newspaper on Comfort Women

2007-08-04T11:01:00.000+09:00

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.

I had been your reader for over 35 years, but I stopped being one last year after realizing that you base your reporting not from an universal and neutral viewpoint, but control it with particular thoughts and values.
Your calling seems to be to deny everything pre-war even at the cost of truth, and to denigrate traditional Japanese culture and spiritual thoughts. No onder the conservatives in this country call you “Japanophobic”.

The causes for the last war cannot be simplified into one reason, but in multiple intertwining factors, such as the colonization of and advancement into Asia by the Western powers, and the domestic situation of Asian countries.
I will accept criticism about Pearl Harbor, but cannot accept ethnic slander based on fictional “news” reporting such as yours.
It is possible to imagine that certainly, during the war, some may have gone too far or committed mistakes, but there is absolutely no proof that a public Japanese organ systematically involved itself in abduction of women or coerced sexual servitude to women.

Rather, thanks to the steadfast efforts of scholars, it has become apparent that “comfort- women-as- sex-slaves issue”, “the collective suicide of Okinawan peoples under army orders”, and the so-called “Nanking massacre”, all of which you have been promoting, are fictional.

I ask you not to forget pride as a leading press in Japan, and to base your editorials and articles on historical facts.

Japanese embassy refutes the Resolution 121

2007-08-04T10:52:00.000+09:00

Japanese Embassy in the U.S. states that the House Resolution (H.RES.121) is erroneous in terms of the facts in its official site.

1. The Japanese Government has acknowledged the Comfort Women issue and extended official apologies on many important occasions.

1) The Chief Cabinet Secretary’s Statement in 1993

“Undeniably, this was an act, with the involvement of the military authorities of the day, that severely injured the honor and dignity of many women. The Government of Japan would like to take this opportunity once again to extend its sincere apologies and remorse to all those, irrespective of place of origin, who suffered immeasurable pain and incurable physical and psychological wounds as comfort women.”

2) Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama’s Statement in 1994

“On the issue of wartime “comfort women”, which seriously stained the honor and dignity of many women, I would like to take this opportunity once again to express my profound and sincere remorse and apologies”

3) Letters from Prime Ministers to Each Former Comfort Woman , which extended Japan’s apology and remorse:

“The issue of comfort women, with the involvement of the Japanese military authorities at that time, was a grave affront to the honor and dignity of a large number of women.”

“As Prime Minister of Japan , I thus extend anew my most sincere apologies and remorse to all the women who endured immeasurable and painful experiences and suffered incurable physical and psychological wounds as comfort women.”

“ We must not evade the weight of the past, nor should we evade our responsibilities for the future."

“I believe that our country, painfully aware of its moral responsibilities, with feelings of apology and remorse, should face up squarely to its past history and accurately convey it to future generations”.

4) Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has repeatedly stated that there has been no change in the position of the Japanese Government.

“I have talked about this matter in the Diet sessions last year, and recently as well, and to the press. I have been consistent. I will stand by the Kono Statement. This is our consistent position. Further, we have been apologizing sincerely to those who suffered immeasurable pain and incurable psychological wounds as comfort women. Former Prime Ministers, including Prime Ministers Koizumi and Hashimoto, have issued letters to the comfort women. I would like to be clear that I carry the same feeling. This has not changed even slightly. ” (Excerpt from Remarks by Prime Minister Abe at an Interview by NHK, March 11, 2007)

"I am apologizing here and now. I am apologizing as the Prime Minister and it is as stated in the statement by the Chief Cabinet Secretary Kono." (Excerpt from Remarks by Prime Minister Abe at the Budget Committee, the House of Councilors, the Diet of Japan, March 26, 2007)

"I am deeply sympathetic to the former comfort women who suffered hardships, and I have expressed my apologies for the extremely agonizing circumstances into which they were placed." (Excerpt from Telephone Conference by Prime Minister Abe to President George W. Bush, April 3, 2007)

"I have to express sympathy from the bottom of my heart to those people who were taken as wartime comfort women. As a human being, I would like to express my sympathies, and also as prime minister of Japan I need to apologize to them."
"My administration has been saying all along that we continue to stand by the Kono Statement. We feel responsible for having forced these women to go through that hardship and pain as comfort women under the circumstances at the time." (Excerpt from an interview article "A Conversation with Shinzo Abe" by the Washington Post, April 22, 2007)"

"… both personally and as Prime Minister of Japan, my heart goes out in sympathy to all those who suffered extreme hardships as comfort women; and I expressed my apologies for the fact that they were forced to endure such extreme and harsh conditions. Human rights are violated in many parts of the world during the 20th Century; therefore we must work to make the 21st Century a wonderful century in which no human rights are violated. And the Government of Japan and I wish to make significant contributions to that end." (Excerpt from Prime Minister Abe's remarks at the Joint Press Availability after the summit meeting at Camp David between Prime Minister Abe and President Bush, April 27, 2007)

5) The Diet (Japanese Parliament) passed resolutions in 1995 and 2005 showing apologies to the war-time victims.

“ Solemnly reflecting upon the many instances of colonial rule and acts of aggression that occurred in modern world history, and recognizing that Japan carried out such acts in the past and inflicted suffering on the people of other countries, especially in Asia , the Members of this House hereby express deep remorse.” (Resolution of the House of Representatives adopted on June 9,1995)

6) The Chinese Premier acknowledges Japanese apologies to the war-time victims

"The Japanese government and leaders have on many occasions stated their position on the historical issue, admitted that Japan had committed aggression and expressed deep remorse and apology to the victimized countries. The Chinese government and people appreciate the position they have taken." (Speech by Premier Wen Jiabao of the State Council of the People's Republic of China at the Japanese Diet on April 12, 2007)

2. The Government of Japan and the Japanese people have taken concrete measures for the victims.

1) The Asian Women’s Fund was established in 1995 for the former comfort women with the cooperation of the Government of Japan and the Japanese people. The Government has made a majority of the contributions to the Fund for its total expenditure. (Legally, the compensation issue has been finally settled by international agreements, including the San Francisco Peace Treaty and the relevant treaties with Asian countries.)

2) The Fund has extended payments, donated by the Japanese people, to many former comfort women, and the Fund has implemented medical and welfare projects. Letters from the Prime Ministers conveying apologies were sent to the victims.

Atonement Money

2 million yen (about $17,000) per person was paid to a total of 285 former comfort women in the Philippines , South Korea , and Taiwan . However, some countries were opposed to the former comfort women receiving the Prime Ministers’ letters and the atonement money.

b) Medical and Welfare Project

700 million yen (about $5.8 million) in assistance has been given to former comfort woman in the Philippines , South Korea , and Taiwan

c) Project in the Netherlands to Help Comfort Women

255 million yen (about $2.12 million)

d) Social Welfare Service in Indonesia

380 million yen (about $3.2 million)

3. This issue is not neglected in the public school education of Japan .

1) Among all high school textbooks, 16 out of 18 among them refer to the issue.

2) All of the 18 high school textbooks describe the suffering that the people in neighboring countries had to bear before and during World War II and Japan ’s responsibility in these matters.

A disagreement with the resolution 121

2007-08-04T10:11:00.000+09:00

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 because many politicians on the left approve of the contents of the resolution, they will not pay any attention to the sovereignty issue. Had the bill said Japanese should go to church more often, of course, a different reaction would be expected. But the issue is not what America is telling Japan to do, it’s that America is telling Japan what to do!

Note the resolution explicitly tells the Japanese government how to educate its future generations. US congressmen do not even have the inherent right to tell parents how they will educated their children in America, much less Japan. Are we all Fascists these days? Imperialists? People really need to wake up on this issue.

Let’s see how many people on the left who reject interventionism in Iraq, and American imperialism in general, are all to happy to exuberantly embrace it here. Let’s see how many Japanese are good imperial subjects when it suits them.

Korean Army's "comfort women"

2007-08-04T09:08:00.000+09:00

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.

The Log in Thine Own Eye

2007-08-04T08:52:00.000+09:00

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 States wanting to "fulfill its own goals by destabilizing the region" - this latest resolution is just the kind of thing to be expected of self-righteous, parochial Congressmen raised on an excess of self-congratulating "greatest generation" propaganda, and eager to usurp the Presidential prerogative in foreign affairs - but I do think it would serve a useful purpose if some people in this part of the world started to ask themselves a few searching questions whenever the next row over Japanese apologies raises its head: how would Americans take it if the Japanese Diet passed a resolution condemning the US for its failure to apologize for genocide against the Native Americans, enslaving millions of Africans or allowing legally entrenched discrimination against non-whites right up until the late 1960s? What would the Aussies say if Japanese MPs were to sanctimoniously mouth on about the absence of any apologies for "White Australia" or Australia's long history of disgracefully mistreating Aborigines?　

The U.S. wants to create trouble between Japan, China and Korea

2007-08-03T19:30:00.000+09:00

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!

Mistaken view of history must be corrected

2007-08-03T16:23:00.000+09:00

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 problems in the Japan-U.S. relationship.

===

Flimsy origins

In the early 1990s, a certain Japanese newspaper reported that women had been forcibly recruited as "comfort women" under the name of "volunteer corps." This represents a groundless interpretation of the fact that women volunteered to work as "women corps" during the war at factories and other installations.

In 1993, then Chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono issued a statement including wording that could be taken as indicating comfort women were recruited forcibly by government and military authorities. This served to spread misunderstanding of the comfort women issue both at home and abroad.

But, as the government has repeatedly asserted, there are no documents proving that women were recruited forcibly as comfort women.

Despite this, some people even in Japan continue to claim there was "coercion" in recruiting women as comfort women. They develop their arguments without providing undisputable examples of "coercion" and take the U.S. House resolution--which describes the comfort women system as "one of the largest cases of human trafficking in the 20th century"--at face value.

===

Japan singled out

So-called comfort stations were not limited to the Imperial Japanese Army. U.S. Occupation forces used such comfort facilities in Japan, and it is now known that the South Korean military had similar facilities during the 1950-53 Korean War. During World War II, the German military also had "comfort" facilities with women who had been recruited systematically and forcibly from areas occupied by the German forces.

So why was Japan singled out as the sole target for the U.S. resolution?

Vigorous lobbying by a Chinese-affiliated, anti-Japan organization that has extensively supported U.S. Rep. Mike Honda, D-Calif., who initiated the resolution, played a key role in the move to adopt the resolution. There is no such an organization seeking to sully Germany. Of course, no organization in the United States seeks to condemn the "moral responsibility" of the U.S. military for its actions.

The possibility that similar resolutions could be approved by the Democratic-controlled U.S. Congress cannot be ruled out. Japan's diplomatic authorities must make more efforts to dispel the misunderstanding of the comfort women issue in the United States.

Reps. Honda and Lantos will be sued

2007-08-01T08:59:00.000+09:00

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.

U.S. Congress urges 'comfort women' apology

2007-07-31T10:44:00.000+09:00

On July 30, U.S. Congress have called on Japan's government to formally apologise for its role in forcing thousands of women to work as sex slaves in World War II. The non-binding resolution was passed during a voice vote in the House of Representatives.

According to IHT, Tom Lantos, chairman of the House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs, called "nauseating" the efforts by some in Japan "to distort and deny history and play a game of blame the victim."

Be logical, Mr. Lantos. The ex-comfort women said only that they might have been victims of somebody who sometimes wore "military-like suits". Ex-comfort women can't prove there were military orders to coerce them. And there are no document or testimony on the side of military officials that they ordered coercion.

Many Japanese know the historical fact that there was no "military sex slaves". They feel this resolution shows the arrogance and racism of U.S. Congress.

Even university professor can't tell the truth in Korea

2007-07-22T17:15:00.000+09:00

As commented by pandar on this blog, Professor Yi Yong Hung of Seoul University revealed that the Korean comfort women were just prostitutes in 2004.

However, because of the huge pressure from nationalistic media, he was forced to apologize to the former comfort women. In Korea, even a historian is not allowed to state historical facts. There are lots more scholars who were criticized because of their interpretations in favor of Japanese rule before 1945.

via The Japanese Rightist

The Truth Of Japan’s Annexation Of The Korean Peninsula

2007-07-22T16:37:00.000+09:00

South Korean Professor Che Keiho gives a talk on the history behind Japan’s annexation of Korea, presenting a very harsh image of pre-annexation Korea as a brutal and backwards kingdom that needed Japanese imperialism to modernize.

via Japan Probe

A Letter to the House Speaker Pelosi

2007-07-13T10:06:00.000+09:00

A novelist Iseheijiro (Nobuyoshi Ozaki) sent following open letter to Ms. Nacy Pelosi:

Madam Nancy Pelosi
Speaker of the U. S. House of Representatives
Washington, D.C. Office - 235 Cannon HOB - Washington, DC 20515

Re: Comfort Women

July 12, 2007

Dear Madam Nancy Pelosi:

I take the liberty to write you a letter in the hope that I may have my request met by you.

First, I would like to congratulate you on becoming the first woman Speaker of the House in US history.

I just read Chairman Lantos remarks regarding “The Comfort Women” resolution by the foreign affairs committee, issued on June 26, 2007. I was very disturbed and disappointed with the committee’s judgment on this issue. There are some flaws in Rep. Lantos remarks. I would call it “an attack.” Please review the remarks in a separate attached sheet and examine the particular underlined phrases.

I disagree with Rep. Lantos’s charges and accusations. In addition, I do not accept the provocative and insensitive language used in this statement. I strongly oppose politicians passing judgment on moral issues. If moral is the issue, then, American hands are not as clean as you think. If these charges were taken to a court of law and I was Counsel for Japan, I would shout loudly “Objection, your honor, these charges are nothing but rhetoric sir.” I have already strongly recommended to my people of Japan that they should refuse your demand.

Let’s talk about the legality of the resolution. The burden of proof is on the accuser’s shoulders. Rep. Lantos must prove his case with credible evidence and more importantly all evidence must be presented in a court of law in order to provide a chance for cross examination by legal professionals.

Ultimately, Rep. Honda must present this case with his clients to a court, not to a group of his colleagues who have joined the wagon without educated thought. Frankly, Madam Pelosi, as reported in the Japanese media, Rep. Honda is inspired by the idea that by attacking Japan under the name of human rights; and receiving contributions from anti-Japanese organizations mainly Chinese Americans, and by courting the Chinese vote as his constituency he will retain his seat in the House. For little money he has initiated a negative campaign against Japan, a vital friend and ally to America. Mr. Honda has been wasting American tax payer’s money for the past nine years on this issue.

Back to the legality, in this House Committee there were no attorneys, judges or jurors. Rep. Honda acted as a prosecutor and Rep. Lantos acted as a judge. That is simply wrong in the eyes of American law. Without the presence of the defendant, which is Japan in this case, this trial by the self-appointed judge Lantos is as gravely illegal as President Bush’s war with Iraq.

The notion that Rep. Lantos can indict Japan, (on a sixty four year old history issue), along with his colleagues support and pass a verdict that modern Japan is still guilty today and ask the US Congress to demand an apology is beyond absurdity. Another case they launched was the Ottoman Turks on Armenian genocide (1894/1916), a Century old history. The foreign affairs committee led by Rep. Lantos is insane. If this committee were fair and not politically motivated we should bring back all of the massacres world wide starting with the American Indians at the battle of “Little Big Horn.” Should you apologize to these Native Americans?

Rep. Lantos behavior reminds me of Joseph Raymond McCarthy in 1950’s. The infamous “guilty by suspicion” verdict based on witness’s memories and the memories of others damaged many innocent American citizens. How does Rep. Lantos know his witnesses were telling him the truth?

In the Japanese media a tremendous distrust against the Democrats has been born, especially, against the Bay Area Liberals. Already, I have seen a surge of nationalism in Japan, the public expressing rage towards the congressman who passed the resolutions last month. They feel they were stabbed in their back by trusted friends. Please note that the Japanese people accepted the fact that the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs were dropped due to their failure of having not surrendered much earlier. Japan decided not to ask America for an apology. They have now overcome their unforgiving feelings against Americans.

***

Madam Pelosi, I would like to request that you do not pass this unpopular resolution. Instead, you as House Speaker must hold your colleagues back and spend more time for further study. If you pass the resolution in a few weeks, you will make a historical mistake equal to that of President Bush’s Iraq war. The consequence will be disastrous. I can guarantee you that you will put an end to the two nation’s sixty two years long peaceful and productive relationship.

I understand that Americans don’t read Japanese text; therefore, you don’t have first hand knowledge of our history. For example, Japan was the largest contributor for the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and President Calvin Coolidge returned this favor by sending US navy ships with food and medicine to the people of Tokyo during the earthquake in 1923. Moreover, 1948, Americans sent thousands of Cupids dolls to the Japanese children who lost their parents in the war. Japanese children sang a song called “Cupid with blue eyes.” The Japanese sent hundreds of Japanese Kimono dolls to America in return. These are small examples with large significance. Japan contributed to the SF earthquake in 1989, and the cable car reconstruction, the Katrina fund, Tsunami fund, etcetera, etcetera. Not only did we rebuilt our country from ashes, we began helping others including Americans. Japan is a major contributor to relief aid for world catastrophes.

You must remember that we supported the Gulf War at a cost to one hundred twenty two million Japanese from one day old to hundred years old “one hundred dollars each.” We have been supporting this unpopular Iraq war for five years now with financial backing and our troops. Meanwhile, China has not sent a single soldier or spent one penny towards this war effort.

Madam Pelosi, we all know that war is a human failure, there are no winners in war. America as victor of the Pacific War does not possess the right to continue a sixty year old war of words. That war consumed three million three hundred thousand Japanese lives, hundreds of thousands wounded and killed on both sides. In Hiroshima and Nagasaki the atomic bombing took innocent women and children’s lives like never before and not since in the history of human warfare. History is best not to be forgotten and not to be repeated.

***

My wife and I are Democrats and have contributed to your party. President Clinton wrote me an email, and I contributed my social security income to the mid-term election campaign last November. We continue to support Democratic issues, but not this one. Our reason to support the Democratic Party is to balance the power of the office of President George W. Bush’s administration by taking over the US congress and we have done it together. We want our troops to come home from Iraq and stop killing thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians and to find a reasonable conclusion to this war.

***

I was supervisor for the construction of Toyota automotive plants in America. Later, I was Public Relations for the Toyota group until I retired. We have created a half million jobs for Americans. Whether you agree or not, today, our national security means that we Japanese and Americans are vital allies against the Chinese military buildup and Islamic terrorism. Thank you for listening to me.

Sincerely yours,

Nobuyoshi Ozaki / Christine Aragon
600 Carondelet Street Mandeville, Louisiana 70448
Nobumanchu@aol.com

*******************

[Remarks of Chairman Lantos on H. Res. 121, regarding Comfort Women, at committee markup]

I would first like to commend my friend and neighbor in California, our distinguished colleague, Congressman Honda of California, for introducing this important resolution and for all his hard work to give voice to the victims in this matter.

The Government of Japan's unwillingness to offer a formal and unequivocal apology to the women forced to be sexual slaves in World War II stands in stark contrast to its role in the world today. Japan is a proud world leader and a valued U.S. ally, making its unwillingness to honestly account for its past all the more perplexing.

Japan is clearly our greatest friend in Asia and one of our closest partners in the world. The U.S-Japan relationship is the bedrock of peace and stability in the Asia-Pacific region. Our alliance and friendship are based on mutual respect and admiration, and together we have helped promote our shared values of democracy, economic opportunity, and human rights in Asia and throughout the world.

Yet, Japan's refusal to make an official government apology to the women who suffered as so-called “comfort women” is disturbing to all who value this relationship.

The true strength of a nation is tested when it is forced to confront the darkest chapters in its history. Will it have the courage to face up to the truth of its past, or will it hide from those truths in the desperate and foolish hope they will fade with time?

Post-War Germany made the right choice. Japan, on the other hand, has actively promoted historical amnesia.

The facts are plain: there can be no denying that the Japanese Imperial military coerced thousands upon thousands of women, primarily Chinese and Koreans, into sexual slavery during the war.

The continued efforts by some in Japan to distort history and play a game of blame-the-victim are also highly disturbing. Most recently, on June 14th, members of the Japanese government took out an advertisement in the Washington Post that smears the survivors of the comfort women system, including those who testified before our Subcommittee on Asia, Pacific, and Global Affairs.

The advertisement suggests that these women, who were forcibly and repeatedly raped by soldiers, were engaged, and I quote, in “licensed prostitution that was commonplace around the world at the time.” This is a ludicrous assertion totally counter to the facts.

Our resolution calls on the Government of Japan to officially acknowledge and apologize for the appalling acts that Imperial Japan committed against the “comfort women.” It is a resolution that seeks admission of a horrible truth in order that this horror may never be perpetrated again.

But most importantly, it speaks out for the victims of this monstrous act, who were terrorized and brutalized by men at war. It gives voice to these courageous women whom others have tried to silence through shame, bigotry, and threats of further violence.

It is appropriate that this House stand up for these women, who ask only that the truth be honored.

Finally, let me clear up the intent of Congress: we do not want our good friend and ally Japan to believe we regard them in perpetual punishment for their refusal to acknowledge the comfort women episode. We want a full reckoning of history to help everyone heal, and then move on.

I strongly support this resolution and I urge all of my colleagues across the aisle to do so likewise. Tom Lantos

A Japanese comfort woman

2007-07-10T22:39:00.000+09:00

Japan Times reports a story of a Japanese comfort woman:

Shirota lived a relatively quiet life until she was 14 and her mother died in 1935. Her family bakery went bankrupt, and her father began gambling. To pay off his debts, he sold her to a brothel. Prostitution was legal then, and Shirota's was a common fate. With no other choice, she accepted it with resignation.

At first, Shirota was an assistant, helping the older women with their clothes and makeup. But gradually, she was brought into the reality of the brothel. When she was 18, she was ordered to serve her first customer. Locked in a room, she was raped. She was bedridden for days, and was treated for syphilis.

Her father continued to gamble, and took out loans from the brothel. A broker in Yokohama sold her to another brothel in Taiwan.

Indeed it was a tragedy, but her case proves that she was not "coerced by a gun" but bought from her father. And the brothel was set up by the broker who sold her to another broker. No Army officials interrupted.

It would be a myth that the majority of comfort women were Koreans. Prof. Hata estimates that 40 per cent of them (less than 20,000) were Japanese.

U.S. Envoy for Nuclear Nonproliferation said the A-bombs saved "millions of life"

2007-07-09T23:55:00.001+09:00

U.S. Special Envoy for Nuclear Nonproliferation Robert G. Joseph said in a press conference held in the Department of Defense on July 3 that the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved "millions of life".

QUESTION: In 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on civilian centers over Nagasaki and Hiroshima, consequently killing over 200,000 people. In hindsight, I think we can all agree that that was a very irNonproliferation Robert G. Joseph answered in a press conference on July 3rd that atomic bombs dropped on Hiresponsible use of the technology at the time. So my question is what gives the United States the right to sit at the head of the table and dictate to other countries how the type of technology should be regulated today?

MR. JOSEPH: I guess that's probably for me. (Laughter.)

Well, I fundamentally disagree with the premise of the question. And in fact, I think that most historians would agree that the use of an atomic bomb brought to a close a war that would have cost millions of more lives, not just hundreds of thousands of allied lives but literally millions of Japanese lives. And the United States has taken the lead in nonproliferation working with others, most recently with Russia in a number of initiatives, to deal with the threats that we face from nuclear proliferation with regard to countries in the near term like Iran and North Korea, with threats of today such as the threats from nuclear terrorism, which perhaps are the preeminent threat that we face as a nation, and trying -- working with others to shape the future so that we don't have a cascade of proliferation.

The type of world that was envisioned by President Kennedy back in the 1960s in which we have 20 or 30 nuclear powers, that is something that we need to preclude, we need to avoid. At the same time, we need to move forward responsibly with others to ensure that we can meet our energy requirements, we can see industrializing countries develop, and we can do this in a responsible manner. And that's the chart -- that's the path that we have chartered and that's the path that I think our two presidents want to take, not just our two countries, but lead in the international community.

On July 4, Japan's new Defense Minister Yuriko Koike denounced the 1945 U.S. atomic bombings of Japan as "unacceptable from a humanitarian viewpoint." She took over from Fumio Kyuma, who resigned Tuesday to take responsibility for remarks he made Saturday interpreted as justifying the atomic bombings.

Mr. Kase's Open Letter to the Chair Lantos

2007-07-03T12:36:00.000+09:00

June 20, 2007

Dear Mr. Chairman:

It is our understanding that the Committee on Foreign Affairs will soon vote on House Resolution 121. We would like, once again, to ask all members of the Committee to give serious consideration to the significance of this resolution.

As stated in reference material we sent to you on April 27 (a report entitled “No Organized or Forced Recruitment: Misconceptions about Comfort Women and the Japanese Military” by Prof. Hata Ikuhiko and in “THE FACTS” (a paid advertisement in the June 14 edition of the Washington Post), House Resolution 121 is not premised on fact, and is therefore an unjust condemnation of Japan.

Human rights are not the heart of the issue. Like you, we have enormous respect for human rights. We are concerned about the damage to Japan’s reputation and the violation of the human rights of Japanese citizens that will result from a resolution that claims to champion human rights, but is based on grossly distorted historical fact.

The resolution mentions “the ‘comfort women’ system of forced military prostitution by the Government of Japan.” But in fact the comfort women were not victims of forced military prostitution, but “nothing more than a prostitute or professional ‘camp follower’” as described in official U.S. military records (United States Office of War Information, Psychological Warfare Team Attached to U.S. Army Force, India-Burma Theater). House Resolution 121 also refers to the “Imperial Armed Force’s coercion of young women into sex slavery.”

However, the comfort women were not coerced. They simply chose prostitution as a way of earning a living. According to the aforementioned U.S. military records, “the girls’ average total monthly earnings were 1500 yen, and 750 went to their master,” which means that they were earning 10 times more than the soldiers they serviced. Army sergeants were paid 30 yen per month then. Applying the label of “sex slaves” to women who earned 25 times more than an Army sergeant both misstates the facts and insults the women themselves.

Our hearts go out to those women who suffered hardships while working in battle zones. However, we are at a loss to comprehend this denunciation of the Japanese government, especially at this late date, and despite the fact that the Japanese government is the only one in the world that has paid compensation to comfort women.

You are no doubt aware that brothels established in Vietnam during the Vietnam War were operated by the U.S. military. As stated in the aforementioned report, such brothels are described in Against Our Will by Susan Brownmiller. Similar brothels for the exclusive use of American military personnel operated in South Korea as well.

Furthermore, during the occupation of Japan, U.S. military officials instructed the Japanese government to establish brothels for American troops. They were responsible for a significant reduction in the number of rapes. However, many Japanese women suffered greatly working in the brothels. The U.S. government has never offered them compensation, nor has any other government offered compensation to women who served its soldiers in this capacity, except for the government of Japan.

If the purpose of House Resolution 121 were to examine the problem of military prostitution and offer help to its victims, then it would discuss the circumstances of military prostitution in relevant nations, the United States included, and offer solutions. Instead, it attempts to force Japan to apologize for events that occurred more than 60 years ago, on the basis of a scenario that clearly has been fabricated.　

This condemnation of Japan, ill-advised especially because it ignores the facts, is certain to arouse doubts about American fairmindedness, and even anger, among the Japanese people. Are Americans truly intent on ruining their relationship with Japan?

We earnestly hope that your wisdom and good judgment will prevail, and that you will make the right decision with respect to a resolution that is monumentally unjust.

Very truly yours,

KASE Hideaki
Chairman
Society for the Dissemination of Historical Fact

U.S. Army's "Comfort Women" in the Vietnam War

2007-07-03T12:03:00.000+09:00

From Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape, Ballantine Books, 1993

By 1966, official military brothels had been established within each division’s camp. Each one was a two-building “recreation area” where 60 Vietnamese women lived and worked. The prostitutes decorated their cubicles with nude photographs from Playboy magazine and had silicone injected into their breasts to make the American soldiers feel more at home.

MISCONCEPTIONS ABOUT COMFORT WOMEN

2007-07-03T11:14:00.000+09:00

NO ORGANIZED OR FORCED RECRUITMENT: MISCONCEPTIONS ABOUT COMFORT WOMEN AND THE JAPANESE MILITARY
Hata Ikuhiko, Professor Emeritus, Nihon University (PDF) Excerpts:

Here we will focus on the testimony of Lee Yong-soo, who lives in Seoul at Nanum House, a home for former comfort women. Ms. Lee has visited Japan several times to tell her story. Here are some excerpts from her testimony at the hearing:

Punsun knocked on my window early in the morning, and whispered to me to follow her quietly. I tip-toed out of the house after her. I lift [sic] without telling my mother. I was wearing a dark skirt, a long cotton blouse buttoned up at the front and slippers on my feet. I followed my friend until we met the same man who had tried to approach us on the riverbank. [Italic added]

Former comfort woman Mun Ok-chu (now deceased) published her vicissitude-filled story. Active in Burma, she was known for her cleverness, sunny disposition and solicitude. She was immensely popular among the Japanese soldiers, from the rank-and-file soldiers to generals. In less than three years, she managed to save up ￥26,000,3 and sent￥5,000 home to her family. At that time, the average salary of a Japanese Army sergeant was ¥30 per month.

How about the other woman, Kim Koon-ja? According to her testimony, her foster father (a Korean police officer) told her to go out and earn some money at the age of 16. Kim met a Korean man who told her he had a good job for her. She was then taken away in a freight car. Ms. Kim was either deceived by a broker or told to go with him by the foster father (perhaps sold to him to pay off a loan). What is noteworthy is that no Japanese was involved in Kim’s case.

Since there is no evidence of kidnapping by a government authority, we must assume that the young women were deceived by Koreans — their compatriots. The fact that no Japanese living on the Korean peninsula had sufficient command of the Korean language to deceive a Korean woman lends even more credence to this assumption.

A "friend of comfort women" is an agent for North Korea

2007-06-30T09:31:00.000+09:00

Prosecutors arrested Shigetake Ogata, former director general of the Public Security Intelligence Agency, and two others on June 28 on suspicion of fraud in connection with the transfer of the ownership of the headquarter of North Korea in Japan.

Ogata's counterpart of negotiation, Koken Tsuchiya, is a lawyer for the headquarter of North Korea. Once he was the Director of Japan Federation of Bar Associations and known as the chief of the Group to Demand the State Compensation for the Comfort Women. He used to say that abduction of Japanese people by North Korea was a frame up of the right-wings. He is a typical "friend of comfort women".

Asian Americans Call for Japanese Apology

2007-06-29T02:10:00.000+09:00

Bay City News Wire reports:

A group of Asian Americans were calling on the community and elected officials today to help lobby the Japanese government into an apology for the forced prostitution it forced on Asian women before and during World War II.

Members of the Global Alliance for Preserving the History of World War II in Asia, the Chinese Americans for Democracy in Taiwan and others met in a Chinese restaurant today to encourage support for House Resolution 121, introduced by Rep. Mike Honda (D-San Jose).

Some group members said that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) and Congressman Tom Lantos (D-San Mateo/San Francisco) have been giving them the runaround, according to Ignatius Ding, Executive Vice President of the Global Alliance for Preserving the History of World War II in Asia.

Members of the group, several of whom are donors to the Democratic and Republican parties, expressed concern that they are used for fundraising purposes but when it comes to action they are left out.

Chang and Ding also suggested that if Lantos, who represents a district that is 33 percent Asian-American, can't communicate with them, than perhaps it's time for new representation.

Get facts straight on comfort women

2007-06-28T09:13:00.000+09:00

The Yomiuri Shimbun Editorial

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 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.

"Sex Slave" Resolution passed by a Committee

2007-06-28T00:12:00.000+09:00

According to AP, A congressional panel on Tuesday endorsed overwhelmingly a resolution urging Japan to apologize formally for coercing thousands of women to work as sex slaves for its World War II military. The 39-2 approval by the Foreign Affairs Committee allows the measure to be considered by the full House. A large crowd of supporters applauded and cheered after the lawmakers' vote.

Many Japanese politicians, historians, and commentators are infuriated at the resolution that includes many factual errors. For example, the description "gang rape, forced abortions, humiliation, and sexual violence resulting in mutilation, death, or eventual suicide in one of the largest cases of human trafficking in the 20th century" is grounded in no historical facts. While they don't tell the number of the "human trafficking", how can they declare it is the largest one in the 20th century?

It's a shame for the U.S. Congress to say such a nonsense. And it's sad that Japan is so much misunderstood more than 60 years after WW2.

The Facts about Comfort Women

2007-06-16T00:33:00.000+09:00

A group of Japanese lawmakers in a full-page ad in the Washington Post on June 14 denied the Japanese government and military had a hand in conscripting women from Asian countries as sex slaves for the Imperial Army during World War II. Its excerpt from a blog:

FACT 1
No historical document has ever been found by historians or research organizations that positively demonstrates that women were forced against their will into prostitution by the Japanese army. A search of the archives at the Japan Center for Asian Historical Records, which houses wartime orders from the government and military leaders, turned up nothing indicating that women were forcibly rounded up to work as ianfu, or "comfort women."

On the contrary, many documents were found warning private brokers not to force women to work against their will. Army memorandum 2197, issued on March 4, 1938, explicitly prohibits recruiting methods that fraudulently employ the army’s name or that can be classified as abduction, warning that those employing such methods have been punished. A Home Affairs Ministry directive (number 77) issued on February 18, 1938, states that the recruitment of "comfort women" must be in compliance with international law and prohibits the enslavement or abduction of women. A directive (number 136) issued on November 8 the same year, orders that only women who are 21 years old or over and are already professionally engaged in the trade may be recruited as "comfort women." It also requires the approval of the woman’s family or relatives.

FACT 2
There are many newspaper articles, moreover, that demonstrate that these directives were dutifully carried out. The August 31, 1939, issue of Dong-A Ilbo, published in Korea, reports of brokers who forced women to become ianfu against their will being punished by the local police, which was under Japanese jurisdiction at the time. This offers proof that the Japanese government dealt with severely with inhumane crimes against women.

Unscrupulous Brokers Run Rampant
Abduction of Rural Women and Girls
More than 100 Women Victimized
Pusan Police Officers Dashed Off to Mukden

PUSAN -- Unscrupulous brokers have been conspiring to abduct women from poor families by promising them generous rewards in Manchuria (where Japanese soldiers are claimed to be visiting brothels in swarms). Forty-five such brokers were found to be working in Pusan, where they lured unsuspecting young women away from their families and sold them into prostitution in Manchuria. Over 100 women have already been victimized. Intensive investigation by Pusan police has revealed the identity of a Mukden dealer involved in these activities, and six officers were dispatched in the evening of August 20 to the city to arrest this dealer. The arrest is expected to fully expose the nightmarish activities of these brokers.(*extracted from an article on Dong-A Ilbo issued on August 31, 1939)

FACT 3
There were admittedly cases, though, of breakdowns in discipline. On the island of Semarang in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), for instance, an army unit forcibly rounded up a group of young Dutch women to work at a "comfort Station." The station was shut down under army orders, though, when this incident came to light, and the responsible officers were punished. Those involved in this and other war crimes were subsequently tried in Dutch courts and received heavy sentences, including the death penalty.

FACT 4
House Resolution 121 sponsored by US Representative Mike Honda and other charges of Japanese maltreatment of "comfort women" are mostly based on testimonies by former ianfu. In none of their initial statements are there references to their being coerced to work by the army or other units of the Japanese government.

Their testimonies have undergone dramatic changes, though, after the start of the anti-Japanese campaign. Those who testified in a House of Representatives public hearing first reported that they were whisked away by brokers, but then later claimed that their abductors wore clothing that "looked like police uniforms."

FACT 5
The ianfu who were embedded with the Japanese army were not, as is commonly reported, "sex slaves." They were working under a system of licensed prostitution that was commonplace around the world at the time. Many of the women, in fact, earned incomes far in excess of what were paid to field officers and even general (as reported by the Unites States Office of War Information, Psychological Warfare Team Attached to U.S. Army Forces, India-Burma Theater, APO 689), and there are many testimonies to the fact that they were treated well.

There are records of soldiers being punished for acts of violence against the women. Many countries set up brothels for their armies, in fact, to prevent soldiers from committing rape against private citizens. (In 1945, for instance, Occupation authorities asked the Japanese government to set up hygienic and safe "comfort station" to prevent rape by American soldiers.)

This is not the opinion of the "ultraright" because 13 lawmakers of the Democratic Party of Japan, the opposition party, sign this ad.

U.S. comfort women

2007-05-06T18:02:00.000+09:00

According to AP, Rep. Mike Honda asked the Congressional Research Service to look into allegations that Japanese officials set up brothels for U.S. soldiers right after Japan's surrender.

He rejected comparisons between the actions of the Japanese during the war and the Occupation forces. He said the Japanese "comfort women" system was set up and sanctioned by the Japanese government and military. "It's different," he said. "This is the military of the Imperial government, the Imperial military's policy, in capturing, coercing and kidnapping girls and women for the purpose of sexual slavery."

This excuse would not be accepted by western media that had blamed PM Abe of making such hypocritical distinction of coercion in the narrow sense and the broad sense.

Left wing's New Clothes

2007-04-22T14:43:00.000+09:00

Alexis Dudden, Associate Professor of history at Yale University and a feminism activist, wrote an article "Prime Minister Abe’s New Clothes". It says:

At stake are not the facts of coercion but the reasons for Abe’s reversals about the meaning of “coercion” and his current decision to avoid discussing the word entirely. Put simply, this is an attempt at whitewashing the record of the Japanese military before reinstalling them as a constitutional force. Abe’s determination to revise the 1947 constitution allowing Japan to operate its military had Washington’s open encouragement, which no doubt factored into his cavalier statements about the historical role of the military in the coercion of comfort women.

She is not interested in the facts, as is usual for these activists. Without examining facts, they attack "whitewashing", "revisionism", and "militarism". These are new clothes of the left-wing activists that are facing extinction after the collapse of socialism. They don't like the facts because their conspiracy theory is never supported by historical facts.

Abe "bears responsibility"

2007-04-22T13:53:00.000+09:00

In an interview with Newsweek, PM Abe reportedly said as follows:

We feel responsible for having forced these women to go through that hardship and pain as comfort women under the circumstances at the time. (emphasis added)

This translation is inaccurate. According to the full text of the interview in Japanese delivered by Japanese government, Abe answered as follows:

We feel responsible for the circumstances in which they should be comfort women.

This is not different from Abe's previous statements in the Diet. No "force" was mentioned.

Yoshimi's "new proof"

2007-04-21T15:33:00.000+09:00

Prof. Yoshimi and two accusers of "sex slavery" held a press conference at the Foreign Press Club on April 17. They claimed that they had found a new proof of military coercion. Here is the press release. According to them, a document submitted to Tokyo Tribunal includes following passage:

Q: How many women were there?
A: 6.
Q: How many of these women were forced into the brothel?
A: Five.

In fact it isn't a new proof but a tiny footnote for the Semarang incident.

Comfort women on PBS

2007-04-21T14:07:00.000+09:00

Yoshihisa Komori of Sankei Shimbun talked with Fareed Zakaria on a PBS program "Foreign Exchange" on March 30. See it on Google Video (from 11'20") and its transcription. It shows the sad fact that even professional journaist is ignorant of history.

Zakaria: But the military was paying for it--just to get at this institutional nature of--of the sex trade; as I understand it the soldiers were not paying for the prostitutes. The military as--as an institution was paying--was contracting with the intermediaries, buying the services of these women and providing them to its--to its soldiers.

Komori: But each soldier was paying--that--the individual.

Zakaria: The individual?

Komori: The individual...

Congressional Research Service report

2007-04-12T15:27:00.000+09:00

Here is a report on "Japanese Mlitary Comfort Women System" by the U.S. Congressional Research Service, which was delivered to the congress on April 3. Excerpts:

There is no doubt from the available evidence that most comfort women were in the system involuntary if one defines involuntary to include entering the system in response to deceptive recruitment.

The military may not have directly carried out the majority of recruitment, especially in Korea; but the Abe government's denial of any evidence of military coercion in recruitment goes against the testimony of former comfort [women] to Japanese government researchers who compiled the 1992-1993 government report.

In rejecting the testimony of over 100 former comfort women, the Japanese government appears to be putting itself in a position in which outsiders could begin to question the credibility of the claims that North Korea has kidnapped Japanese citizens.

One factual error: since the testimony of comfort women to Japanese government was not disclosed, nobody can know whether Abe's statement is against it or not.

Videos on comfort women

2007-04-08T23:01:00.000+09:00

These are video clips with English subtitles about comfort women from YouTube:

Professor says Koreans also responsible for comfort women

2007-04-08T21:51:00.000+09:00

Here is a blog article that quotes a Korean professor's speech:

Speaking at the Foreign Press Club in Tokyo to discuss the end of the Asian Women’s Fund, Sejong University professor Park Yu-ha pointed out that Koreans, too, needed to accept responsibility for the comfort women [YTN, Korean].

Park said, “It’s a fact that Koreans, too, were involved in the process of mobilizing comfort women. I think the responsibility for that wrongdoing surely rests with Korea, too.”

In particular, she said one Korean comfort women he she interviewed said she was sold into it by her stepfather, and she said she hated her stepfather even more than the Japanese military.

Politics and the comfort women issue

2007-04-07T08:23:00.000+09:00

The Yomiuri Shimbun published an opinion by an editor:

Japanese intellectuals who have worked to boost Japan's amicable bilateral ties with the United States have been discouraged and offended by the way the U.S. media cover the problem. They are understandably displeased not only with factual mistakes the U.S. media have made over the issue, but with their nerve in nagging this country over a sex-related matter.

BACKGROUND OF 'COMFORT WOMEN' ISSUE

2007-04-01T09:55:00.001+09:00

The Yomiuri Shiｍbun published a series of articles on the "comfort women" controversy.

BACKGROUND OF 'COMFORT WOMEN' ISSUE(1):Comfort station originated in govt-regulated 'civilian prostitution'

BACKGROUND OF 'COMFORT WOMEN' ISSUE(2):No hard evidence of coercion in recruitment of comfort women

BACKGROUND OF 'COMFORT WOMEN' ISSUE(3):Kono's statement on 'comfort women' created misunderstanding

The letter to Congressman Honda

2007-03-31T14:09:00.000+09:00

An open letter from Hideaki Kase, quoted before, to Mike Honda, who proposed the House resolution 121.

On September 28, 2006, we sent the attached letter to all members of the House of Representatives. In it, we indicated that the accusations in Resolution 759 were exceedingly unjust and based on gross distortions of historical fact. Accordingly, we find it very difficult to comprehend your reasons for submitting this resolution.. We strongly urge you to withdraw it without delay.

If you choose not to withdraw Resolution 121, you must shoulder the burden of disproving historical fact as outlined in the aforementioned letter. The persons referred to as “comfort women” were prostitutes (a legal profession at the time) working in brothels; they were indisputably not coerced to engage in such activities by the Japanese military.

Comfort station originated in govt-regulated 'civilian prostitution'

2007-03-30T12:32:00.000+09:00

The Yomiuri Shimbun published an article about ianfu:

Modern historian Ikuhiko Hata, a former professor at Nihon University, says the comfort women system should be defined as the "battleground version of civilian prostitution."

Comfort women were not treated as "paramilitary personnel," unlike jugun kangofu (military nurses) and jugun kisha (military correspondents). During the war, comfort women were not called "jugun ianfu" (prostitutes for troops). Use of such generic terminology spread after the war. The latter description is said to have been used by writer Kako Senda (1924-2000) in his book titled "Jugun Ianfu" published in 1973. Thereafter, the usage of jugun ianfu prevailed.

Were comfort women actually forcibly taken away?

2007-03-29T21:59:00.000+09:00

An article on the website of Japan-Policy Institute, a conservative think tank. This an average summary of the story, although it has many typos.

As a result of these developments, in 1997, the Asahi Shimbun, which had been pursuing the governmentfs responsibility, admitted that the gcomfort womenh had not been ones who were gforcibly taken away by the Japanese authorities.h Consequently, history textbooks one by one dropped the term gmilitary sexual slavery.h By 2006, all junior high school history textbooks had ceased to use this kind of term.

Though it is true that there were gcomfort womenh in war zones, it is definitely false that these women had been abducted by the Japanese military. In this sense, gcomfort womenh controversy has already been settled.

Don't misinterpret comfort women issue

2007-03-29T02:38:00.000+09:00

The Yomiuri Shimbun wrote an editorial to object againt the House Resolution 121. It says:

The resolution says the Japanese military commissioned the acquisition of comfort women. However, no documents have been found to support this assertion. Historians also accept that no such orchestrated action was undertaken by the Japanese military. [...]

The U.S. House resolution criticizes such moves in Japan, saying they represent their "desire to dilute or rescind the 1993 statement." But it could be a natural course of action to revise the inaccurate Kono statement. What was behind the issuance of the Kono statement was the government's misjudgment -- made under pressure from South Korea -- that its acknowledgement that the comfort women were forcibly recruited would lead to the settlement of the issue.

The use and abuse of the past

2007-03-28T21:46:00.000+09:00

A conservative columnist, Hideaki Kase writes in NewsWeek:

The fact is that the brothels were commercial establishments. U.S. Army records explicitly declare that the comfort women were prostitutes, and found no instances of "kidnapping" by the Japanese authorities. It's also worth noting that some 40 percent of these women were of Japanese origin.

House Resolution 121 about comfort women

2007-03-27T07:55:00.000+09:00

The voting for House Resolution 121 to blame Japanese government for the comfort women was postponed (probably) after PM Abe's visit to the U.S. However, since Abe's comment increased the proponents for the resolution, it might be passed, although it has no legal enforcement. Marion Edwyn Harrison, president of Free Congress Foundation, a conservative think tank, criticized the resolution as follows:

H Res 121 is ridiculous for a variety of reasons. Some of them, without limitation and not necessarily in prioritized order: (1) Our United States Government has no jurisdiction over the Japanese Government. (2) Adverse affect upon American - Japanese relations. (3) Congress is, or should be, overwhelmed with issues within its jurisdiction (e.g., spending of taxpayers’ money out of control; unlawful immigration out of control; no effective missile defense system; Social Security headed for bankruptcy; delay and defeat in confirmation of Federal judges; so on). (4) A similar resolution failed in the 109th Congress. (5) In 2001 the Japanese Prime Minister published a letter of apology.

Washington Post's double talk

2007-03-26T08:53:00.000+09:00

Washington Post's editorial says PM Abe is right to blame North Korea's refusal of response to Japan's request for more information about abduction but wrong to refuse Japan's responsibility of military abduction during WW2:

What's odd -- and offensive -- is his parallel campaign to roll back Japan's acceptance of responsibility for the abduction, rape and sexual enslavement of tens of thousands of women during World War II. [...]Historians say that up to 200,000 women from Korea, China, the Philippines and other Asian countries were enslaved and that Japanese soldiers participated in abductions. Many survivors of the system have described their horrifying experiences, including three who recently testified to Congress.

This is, to be sorry, one more false accusation based on the wrong reporting of the Asahi Shimbun and the misleading apology of Japanese government. No historian says "Japanese soldiers participated in abductions". Even Prof. Yoshimi, who blames "sex slaves", admits there is no evidence that the Army abducted the women. And no witness credibly testified that they were kidnapped by the Army. In fact, there is little controversy among historians about these facts.

It's striking that western media are herding to attack Abe as a "revisionist" without factual ground. No, Washington Post, it's you that is revising history. The "comfort women" were commercial prostitutes supervised by the Army, which were common to many countries. For example, the U.S. Army had such a system called Recreation and Amusement Association after WW2 in Japan. It's a double talk to blame Japan's military prostitution while keeping silence about RAA.

There is little controversy among historians

2007-03-26T08:24:00.000+09:00

Japan Times interviewed Prof. Yoshimi, who blames comfort women as "sex slaves", and Prof. Hata, who says the comfort women were commercial prostitutes. It's striking their conclusion about the historical fact are not so different. Yoshimi said

the military knew private agents sometimes cheated, kidnapped, traded or forcibly took some women to frontline brothels.

On the other hand, Hata said

no documentary evidence of systematic state or military coercion has been provided, although police and soldiers took it upon themselves to force victims into the brothels.

In fact their claims are consistent: the Army was involved partly in the coercion of private brokers, but never ordered to abduct women.

Asahi admits their Ianfu stories were wrong

2007-03-25T11:34:00.000+09:00

According to a comment to my blog, the PR bureau of the Asahi Shimbun replied to his question on the phone as follows:

Seiji Yoshida's testimony that he abducted women was not a true story. The Asahi corrected the articles in 1997.
It was not true that the Ianfu were forced into brothels as "Joshi Teishintai". The Asahi never reported it was true.
The article on 11 Jan. 1992 did not say that the Army had abducted women.

Although these excuses are questionable, it is obvious that even the Asahi doesn't say that the Army coerced women into brothels. The "Ianfu" is a phantom issue that was created by the Asahi's wrong report and that it admits they were wrong.

Coercion in the broad and narrow sense

2007-03-23T09:08:00.000+09:00

PM Abe's artificial definition of "coercion" is making this issue even more confusing. A blog pointed it out.

Abe didn't deny coercion in the broad sense, i.e., the coercion or deception by contractors of the Army. He denied the coercion in the narrow sense, i.e., kidnapping of women by the Army officials. NYT and other media confused this definition.

This bizarre definition came from an effort to make Abe's denial of coercion in the past consistent with Kono statement. So it is understandable for western media was confused. But some reporter, for example Onishi of NYT, seems to have misinterpreted it intentionally to make his article more sensational.

Asian Women's Fund

2007-03-20T18:51:00.000+09:00

This is a report about comfort women by the Asian Women's Fund, a non-profit organization to compensate ex-Ianfu by private funds. Since it was headed by Prof. Haruki Wada of Tokyo University, a pro-North Korean scholar, its neutrality is questionable. But this is the most extensive report about Ianfu in English.

U.S. Army report on the Ianfu after WW2

2007-03-18T15:20:00.000+09:00

Here is the document. It says

A "comfort girl" is nothing more than a prostitute or "professional camp follower" attached to the Japanese Army for the benefit of the soldiers.

Japanese government insisted the Ianfu was not business

2007-03-18T10:11:00.000+09:00

According to an article in WSJ, two lawyer point out that Japanese government insisted that employing comfort women was not a commercial activity, and a federal district court of the United States decided that it was a "war crime":

When women who survived the sex-slavery camps sued Japan in federal court six years ago, they alleged that the whole sex slavery scheme functioned as commercial activity. Faced with this charge, Japan denied it had acted as a business. The D.C. District Court agreed, holding in effect that the fact that the women were abducted and enslaved pursuant to a Japanese government "master plan" distinguished their case from routine commercial prostitution. The court concluded that this "barbaric" conduct was more like a war crime or a crime against humanity than a commercial venture, and so Japan could not be held liable under the provision of the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act that allows governments to be sued when they act like businesses.

This is the case of Hwang Geum Joo, et al. v. Japan, 172 F. Supp. 2d 52 (D.D.C., 2001). Indeed this claim of Japanese government seems to contradict the Kono statement, but it is only a tactics in court to escape the suit because the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act makes it immune if the Ianfu was not business. Japanese government didn't insist there was government coercion. The decision of the district court was reversed by the appeal court and the plaintiff lost finally in the supreme court.

"Sex slaves" of the U.S. Army

2007-03-17T18:05:00.000+09:00

In addition to the RAA after WW2, which was set up by Japanese government for it, the U.S. Army committed "state rape" in the Vietnam War. If you blame Japanese government, you should also blame the United States government.

Japanese Government states there is no evidence of military coercion

2007-03-17T13:52:00.000+09:00

Yesterday Japanese Cabinet endorsed a written statement that there was no evidence that the Japanese military had forcibly recruited women into sex slavery during World War II.

NYT's Onishi quotes the American ambassador's claim that there was testimony by "credible witness", which is wrong, as usual for Onishi. The witness from Korea and Taiwan didn't testify they were kidnapped. Dutch witness claimed she had been raped, but it was not related to the Army's order, as Dutch court decided.

Wikipedia

2007-03-16T14:05:00.000+09:00

The article about "Comfort women" was vandalized and protected. It is full of so many factual errors that I can't correct them all. Please correct them in the comments.

US Media on Comfort Woman Controversy

2007-03-14T10:25:00.000+09:00

Post from Mr. Mitibata, Suzunari　

Few Japanese can express their ideas in English. English speaking people tend to ignore the opinion in Japanese. As a result, discussions in two languages do not meet. English prevails, independent of the content and validity of the argument itself. In the comfort woman issue, US media seems to lack fairness and distorted what PM Abe had said.

"US media ignores Japanese ambassador’s press conference" by ampontan on March 9th, 2007

"PM Abe misquoted in English" by Matt on March 2nd, 2007

Japan Focus

2007-03-14T01:02:00.000+09:00

Post from Mr. Jonathan Lewis of Hitotsubashi University

1. Japan’s ‘Comfort Women’: It's time for the truth (in the
ordinary, everyday sense of the word)
By Tessa Morris-Suzuki

2. Abe’s Violent Denial: Japan’s Prime Minister and the ‘Comfort Women'
By Alexis Dudden and Kozo MIZOGUCHI

3. Government, the Military and Business in Japan’s Wartime Comfort Woman System
By Hayashi Hirofumi

4. The Courts, Japan's 'Military Comfort Women,' and the Conscience of Humanity: The Ruling in VAWW-Net Japan v. NHK
By Norma Field

5. Free Speech – Silenced Voices: The Japanese Media, the Comfort Women Tribunal, and the NHK Affair
By Tessa Morris-Suzuki

6. Cold Comfort: The Japan Lobby Blocks Congressional Resolution on World War II Sex Slaves
By Ken Silverstein

Articles about Ianfu

2007-03-13T12:51:00.000+09:00

BBC, Mar. 3: "Sex slave denial angers S Korea"

Discussion about this article

NYT, Mar.6: "No Apology for Sex Slavery, Japan’s Prime Minister Says"

NYT, Mar. 6: "No Comfort" (editorial)

Discussion about these articles

Washington Post (AP), Mar. 7: "Ex-S.Korea Sex Slaves Recall Humiliation"

LA Times, Mar. 7: "Paging the emperor" (editorial)

Economist, Mar.8: "No comfort for Abe"

Post more links and comments.

Starting up

2007-03-13T01:12:00.000+09:00

This site collects articles, raw materials, links, and other resources about the Ianfu, or "comfort women", the state-regulated prostitutes who served for Japanese Army during the World War 2.

Although there are many sites arguing this issue in Japanese, there are very little information in English. So Western media like NY Times and BBC write many wrong and biased stories. That's why I set up this blog. You can post (or copy)

Article about Ianfu in English
English translation of the articles about Ianfu in newspapers, magazines, and books
Links to Japanese sites about Ianfu.

The post should be written in English. Since this site is aiming at database, the post must be focused on the fact, not opinion.

If you have a Google account, you can comment on this entry. You can post entries for this blog if you become a team member of this blog. If you want to be a member, e-mail ikedanob@gmail.com.