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DESCRIPTION:2/21 Protest Corrupt Racist Abe Administration And His Wife Akie-Stop The 
 Nukes, Stop US/JPN Militarization/Secrecy Laws/Conpiracy Laws/Stop 
 Education Of Privatization, Union Busting And War Mongering\n\nExposing 
 Education Privatization Corruption  And Racist Rightwing Nationalism  In 
 Japan-Protest Against Akia Abe\nThursday Feb 21 at 5:00 PM\nSt. Regis 
 Hotel\n125 Third St.\nSan Francisco\n\nThe Japanese Abe government is 
 restarting the many  nuclear plants in Japan despite the mass opposition of 
 the Japanese people and the environmental dangers to the world. It also is 
 demanding that the families return to Fukushima because it has been 
 supposedly “decontaminated”.\nAkie Abe and her husband Shinzo have also 
 been pushing militarization in public education and  privatization of 
 schools  in Japan and personally supporting rightwing nationalist schools 
 with illegal public subsidies. The Abe government has harassed and bullied 
 teachers who are against militarization in the schools and also against the 
 “denialists” in the government who say that there were no ‘comfort 
 women’ or sexual slaves of the Japanese Imperial Army during the 2nd WW. 
 \nThe Abe government is also  spending $500 million around the world to 
 stop the building of memorials for the 'comfort women' and heavily lobbied 
 the SF Board of Supervisors to oppose the building of a memorial here is 
 San Francisco. Their supporters publicly attacked one of the mothers 
 eighty-nine-year old Lee Yong-soo, a "prostitutes" and "liar" at the SF 
 Board Of Supervisors. Akie talks about honoring women and is being "honored 
 in SF for honoring women"  but she and her husband do the opposite in San 
 Francisco.\n\nAbe and his wife  are also  presently involved in a 
 corruption scandal with Akie being the  “honorary” principle of a 
 privately run racist school in Japan being built by the owner of Tsukamoto, 
 which has been accused of receiving illicit financial favors from the 
 government. This school has incited racist attack on Korean, Korean 
 Japanese and Chinese. The school according to the NYT was praised by Ms. 
 Abe  for “nurturing children with strong backbones, who have pride as 
 Japanese, on a basis of superior moral education.” Apparently corruption 
 and stealing funds from the Japanese government is part and parcel of her 
 “moral education”.\nAlso according to reports  "five mothers who pulled 
 their children out of Tsukamoto said they had encountered chauvinism at the 
 school or had been attacked by Mr. Kagoike or his wife, who serves as vice 
 principal, often in ethnically bigoted terms. They asked for anonymity 
 because they feared social ostracism for speaking out.\nOne mother said her 
 family liked South Korea and often vacationed there, but that when her son 
 told his teacher of a planned trip, the teacher said that Korea was a 
 “dirty place” and that the family should visit “somewhere better in 
 Japan.” Another mother said teachers had told her that her son “smelled 
 like a dog,” and that Mr. Kagoike had called her “an anti-Japanese 
 foreigner.” (She is Japanese.)”\nThe Abe government has also moved 
 ahead with supporting the building of US bases in Okinawa despite the 
 opposition of the people and environmentalists. The US used Okinawa as a 
 base for US military intervention in Asia and during the Vietnam war,  B52 
 bombers were used every day to kill and destroy the people of Vietnam. The 
 US people must demand that we get our bases out of Okinawa and leave the 
 Okinawan people in peace. They face regular rapes by US military personnel  
  and dangerous  accidents harming the people of Okinawa. It is also used as 
 a testing ground for the Osprey helicopters and other deadly US weapons on 
 the small island.\n\nThe drive for militarization and war along with 
 restarting the many Japanese nuclear plants is a threat to the Japanese and 
 the people of the  world. \nJoin Us and  Speak Out For Justice, Against War 
 and For The Families Of Fukushima\n\nThis rally and press conference is 
 endorsed by\nUnited Public Workers For Action. www.upwa.info\nNo Nukes 
 Action Committee\n\nIf you would like to endorse and support or want more 
 information please contact\ninfo@upwa.info\n(415)282-1908\n\n\nLotus 
 Leadership Awards \nHonoring\nAkie Abe, Spouse of the Prime Minister of 
 Japan\nand\nColorful Girls \n\nMaster of Ceremony\nMina Kim, News Anchor at 
 NPR station KQED\n\n\nST. REGIS HOTEL\n125 Third Street\nSan 
 Francisco\n\nWednesday\n21 February 2018\n6:00 PM\n\nLotus Leadership 
 Awards honor those who have made major contributions to the well-being of 
 women and advancing gender equality in Asia\n\nMrs. Abe is Chairperson of 
 the Foundation for Social Contribution and is engaged in social and civic 
 activities, such as school construction in Myanmar. Born in Tokyo, Mrs. Abe 
 is married to Mr. Shinzo Abe, the 98th Prime Minister of Japan and has 
 devoted herself to the fields of education, women’s empowerment, and 
 international exchanges. She is also involved in agriculture, including 
 rice farming initiatives in the city of Shimonoseki. In 2014, Mrs. Abe 
 established “UZU Workshop,” a leadership and learning community that 
 organizes panel discussions and other programs to support and advocate for 
 women. \nColorful Girls is a grassroots nonprofit in Myanmar empowering 
 adolescent girls of all ethnicities with leadership skills to advocate for 
 their rights. One teenage Colorful Girl created a successful campaign to 
 overcome harassment of women on public buses in Yangon. Please watch this 
 short film to learn more about the Colorful Girls:\n\nFor table purchases 
 and sponsorship opportunities \nplease email 
 wendy.soone-broder@asiafoundation.org\n\nPhoto\n\nTomomi Inada, the defense 
 minister, and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe reviewing an honor guard at the 
 Defense Ministry in Tokyo in September. Ms. Inada is fighting calls for her 
 resignation.CreditKazuhiro Nogi/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images 
 \nTOKYO — Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan has staked a significant 
 part of his governing agenda on his plans to empower women. But an 
 unrelenting scandal over allegations that a right-wing education group 
 received improper political favors has ensnared two of the most prominent 
 women in Mr. Abe’s life: his wife, Akie Abe, and his defense minister, 
 Tomomi Inada.\n\nThe scandal has dented Mr. Abe’s popularity, and his 
 feminist credentials have been especially hard hit.\n\nAs the scandal began 
 to dominate headlines last month, Mrs. Abe resigned as honorary principal 
 of a new school planned by the right-wing group in Osaka. The group, 
 Moritomo Gakuen, promotes elements from Japan’s prewar patriotic school 
 curriculum and bought land from the government at a steep discount.\n\nLast 
 week, the leader of the group said Mrs. Abe gave him an envelope of cash 
 two years ago as a donation from the prime minister, a claim Mr. Abe has 
 vociferously denied.Ms. Inada, Japan’s second female defense minister, 
 whom Mr. Abe has been grooming to be his successor, is fighting calls for 
 her resignation after she retracted a statement that she had never 
 represented the school group in a lawsuit. In fact, she appeared in court 
 on its behalf in 2004. She said she had initially forgotten and apologized 
 in Parliament.\n\nHigh-profile women are often scrutinized in Japan, which 
 ranks the lowest among advanced industrial countries for female 
 representation in Parliament. But the emergence of Mrs. Abe and Ms. Inada 
 as central figures in the school scandal has emboldened critics who have 
 long portrayed them as problematic advocates for women’s rights.\n\nMrs. 
 Abe’s feminism is “quite shallow,” said Jiro Yamaguchi, a professor 
 of political science at Hosei University. He added that although Mrs. Abe 
 appeared occasionally at events that campaigned for women in agriculture or 
 innovation in women’s work-life balance, the first lady had not been seen 
 as committed to real, systemic change.\n\nMrs. Abe, who did not respond to 
 requests for comment, has supported women’s causes in Iran and is a 
 patron of the Asian University for Women in Bangladesh, whose mission is to 
 provide a college education to women from deprived backgrounds. In her 
 memoir, “I Live My Own Life,” Mrs. Abe said she supported her 
 husband’s efforts to create a society in which “women can shine,” 
 writing that “women don’t need to work just like men do.”\n\nThe 
 Japanese news media sometimes describes Mrs. Abe as the prime minister’s 
 “at-home opposition party,” because she has expressed more progressive 
 views on issues like lesbian and gay rights and nuclear power in addition 
 to supporting women’s causes.\n\nPhoto\n\nJapan’s first lady, Akie Abe, 
 center, at a fund-raiser in Tokyo last week for the Asian University for 
 Women. She has occasionally been described in the news media as the prime 
 minister’s “at-home opposition party” because she has expressed some 
 more progressive views.CreditJérémie Souteyrat for The New York Times 
 \nBut the disclosure of her ties to the right-wing school group has 
 undermined that reputation.\n\nMoritomo Gakuen already operates a 
 kindergarten that requires students to recite the Imperial Rescript on 
 Education, a 19th-century royal decree that prescribes that subjects be 
 “ever united in loyalty and filial piety” and that “husbands and 
 wives be harmonious.” Its leader, Yasunori Kagoike, has been accused of 
 bigotry against Chinese and Koreans.\n\nIn response to questions for Mrs. 
 Abe, the office of the prime minister referred to his comments in 
 Parliament on Friday, when he defended his wife, saying that she had never 
 given money to the school group and that neither of them was involved in 
 selling public land to the proposed school.\n\nMoritomo Gakuen has decided 
 it will not build the school and has been ordered to return the land to the 
 government. Mr. Kagoike is expected to testify in Parliament on 
 Thursday..\n\nWomen who want to see more female representation in positions 
 of power say they are even more disappointed by Ms. Inada.\n\n“Inada is 
 anti-feminist,” said Mari Miura, a professor of political science at 
 Sophia University, pointing to the defense minister’s membership in an 
 ultraconservative activist group that believes women belong in the home. 
 She added that Ms. Inada had resisted calls to push legislation that would 
 allow married women to use different surnames from those of their husbands, 
 a cause important to Japanese feminists.\n\nMs. Miura said Mr. Abe had 
 chosen Ms. Inada because she shared his revisionist view that Japan had 
 been unfairly accused of atrocities in World War II. “The women chosen by 
 him are just symbolic or a cosmetic way of conveying women’s 
 advancement,” Ms. Miura said. “And that doesn’t really empower women 
 at all.”\n\nMs. Inada was one of three women to assume political 
 leadership positions in Japan last summer, but from the moment she was 
 appointed, critics have questioned her qualifications.\n\nEven in her own 
 Liberal Democratic Party, some lawmakers have asked why a lawyer who had 
 never been a vice minister in either the Defense or Foreign Affairs 
 Ministries would be selected for such a significant post, particularly as 
 tensions in the region escalate, with North Korea developing nuclear 
 missiles and China pushing territorial claims.\n\nAt times, the commentary 
 has strayed to her appearance. Observers on social media complained about 
 the casual outfit and oversize sunglasses she wore on a plane to Djibouti 
 in eastern Africa over the summer, when she met with Japanese troops on a 
 counterpiracy mission. On another occasion, after she visited a Japanese 
 naval ship, a popular tabloid magazine disapproved of the high heels she 
 wore.\n\n\nJapanese peacekeepers in South Sudan in October. Questions about 
 Ms. Inada’s competence have intensified after disclosures that Japan’s 
 army had withheld reports on the activities of its peacekeeping units in 
 the country. CreditCharles Atiki Lomodong/Agence France-Presse — Getty 
 Images \nHer biggest opponents argue that while such appraisals are 
 unfortunate, Ms. Inada has shown her lack of qualifications in multiple 
 ways.\n\n“It’s very disappointing that all the attention goes to female 
 politicians’ fashion,” said Kiyomi Tsujimoto, a member of the House of 
 Representatives from the opposition Democratic Party who has been one of 
 Ms. Inada’s harshest critics in Parliament. The real problem, Ms. 
 Tsujimoto said, is that Ms. Inada does not have “confidence and 
 experience and knowledge of the army.”\n\nMs. Inada once shed tears in 
 parliamentary session under questioning by Ms. Tsujimoto, who had asked 
 whether she had flown to Djibouti to avoid visiting the contentious 
 Yasukuni war shrine on the annual day in August that commemorates the end 
 of World War II.\n\nQuestions about Ms. Inada’s competence have 
 intensified since disclosures that the Ground Self-Defense Force, Japan’s 
 army, had withheld reports on the activities of peacekeeping units in South 
 Sudan.\n\nWhile both Ms. Inada and Mr. Abe had portrayed the operation as 
 safe, the reports, which surfaced in the Japanese news media last month, 
 described several episodes of “combat” between warring factions in 
 South Sudan. The law forbids Japanese troops to participate in missions 
 where active conflict is involved.\n\nIn a faxed statement, Ms. Inada said 
 she had not seen the leader of the Moritomo Gakuen group for 10 years. And 
 she said that she had ordered a special investigation into the South Sudan 
 reports. If any problems emerge, she wrote, “ I will try to improve it 
 under the defense minister’s responsibility.”\n\nBut analysts say that 
 if army officials or bureaucrats hid the reports from her, that shows her 
 lack of power in the ministry.\n\n“It’s hard to see how she’s going 
 to gain any amount of authority or trust from the public, let alone the 
 people she has authority over,” said Jeffrey Hornung, a fellow in the 
 security and foreign affairs program at Sasakawa Peace Foundation USA, a 
 research institute based in Washington.\n\nIn Parliament last week, Mr. Abe 
 defended Ms. Inada, saying he wanted her to “continue to perform her 
 duties with sincerity.”\n\nFor now, critics say Ms. Inada may survive the 
 scandal.\n\n“If Abe throws her under the bus, he’s likely to get 
 spattered because he’s her career mentor,” said Jeff Kingston, the 
 director of Asian studies at Temple University in Tokyo. On the other hand, 
 he added, “he needs a scapegoat so he can change the 
 channel.”\n\nFollow Motoko Rich on Twitter @MotokoRich.\n\n\nRacist 
 Corrupt Japan PM  Abe Implicated In Reactionary Private School 
 Scandal\nhttps://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/24/world/asia/japan-abe-first-lady-school.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fasia&_r=0\nBigotry 
 and Fraud Scandal at Kindergarten Linked to Japan’s First Lady\nBy 
 JONATHAN SOBLE\nFEB. 24, 2017\n\n\nA morning assembly at the Tsukamoto 
 Kindergarten in Osaka, Japan, in November. Children at the school march to 
 military music and recite instructions for patriotic behavior laid down by 
 a 19th-century emperor.CreditHa Kwiyeon/Reuters \nTOKYO — At Tsukamoto 
 Kindergarten, an ultraconservative school at the center of a swirling 
 Japanese political scandal, children receive the sort of education their 
 prewar great-grandparents might have recognized.\n\nThey march in crisp 
 rows to military music. They recite instructions for patriotic behavior 
 laid down by a 19th-century emperor. The intent, the school says, is to 
 “nurture patriotism and pride” in the children of Japan, “the purest 
 nation in the world.”\n\nNow Tsukamoto and its traditionalist supporters 
 — including the wife of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe — are under fire. The 
 school has been accused of promoting bigotry against Chinese and Koreans 
 and of receiving illicit financial favors from the government.\n\nA growing 
 outcry has put Mr. Abe’s conservative administration on the defensive and 
 drawn attention to the darker side of an increasingly influential 
 right-wing education movement in Japan.\n\nMr. Abe said on Friday in 
 Parliament that his wife, Akie Abe, had resigned as “honorary 
 principal” of a new elementary school being built by Tsukamoto’s 
 owner.\n\nThe school sits on land that the owner, a private foundation, 
 bought from the government at a steep discount — a favorable deal that 
 invited charges of special treatment after details surfaced this 
 month.\n\n“My wife and I are not involved at all in the school’s 
 licensing or land acquisition,” Mr. Abe told the legislature. “If we 
 were, I would resign as a politician.”\n\nMr. Abe and other Japanese 
 conservatives often accuse the education system of liberal bias, seeing it 
 as a place where left-wing teachers spread “masochistic” narratives 
 about Japanese war guilt and promote individualism and pacifism over 
 sturdier traditional values.\n\nTsukamoto is at the extreme edge of an 
 effort by rightists to push back, said Manabu Sato, a professor who studies 
 education at Gakushuin University in Tokyo.\n\n“It’s a rejection of the 
 postwar education system, whose basic principles are pacifism and 
 democracy,” Professor Sato said.\n\nAkie Abe, center, the wife of Prime 
 Minister Shinzo Abe, in Florida this month with the first lady Melania 
 Trump. Ms. Abe has resigned as “honorary principal” of a new school 
 being built by the owner of Tsukamoto, which has been accused of receiving 
 illicit financial favors from the government.CreditScott McIntyre for The 
 New York Times \nAt Tsukamoto, displays of old-style patriotism have 
 sometimes shaded into prejudice.\n\nThe school apologized on its website 
 last week for statements that contained “expressions that could invite 
 misunderstanding from foreigners.”\n\nParents said complaints about 
 mundane-seeming matters like parent-teacher association fees would be met 
 with chauvinistic diatribes, with school officials accusing “Koreans and 
 Chinese with evil ideas” of stirring up trouble. They said the school’s 
 principal, Yasunori Kagoike, accused parents who challenged the school of 
 having Korean or Chinese ancestors.\n\n“The problem,” Mr. Kagoike said 
 in one notice sent to parents, was that people who had “inherited the 
 spirit” of foreigners “exist in our country with the looks of Japanese 
 people.”\n\nMr. Abe has made overhauling Japanese education a priority 
 throughout his career, championing a similar if softer version of the 
 traditionalism practiced at Tsukamoto.\n\nIn early publicity pamphlets for 
 its new elementary school obtained by the Japanese news media, Mr. Kagoike 
 proposed naming it after Mr. Abe. Mr. Kagoike later opted for a different 
 name, a change that the prime minister said had been made at his 
 request.\n\nMr. Abe has supported a drive to amend history textbooks, 
 toning down depictions of Japan’s abuses in its onetime Asian empire, and 
 he passed legislation to make “moral education” — including the 
 promotion of patriotism — a standard part of the public school 
 curriculum.\n\nTsukamoto has taken the patriotic approach to schooling 
 further.\n\nIt first gained notoriety a few years ago for having pupils 
 recite the Imperial Rescript on Education, a royal decree issued in 1890 
 that served as the basis for Japan’s militaristic prewar school 
 curriculum and that was repudiated after World War II.\n\nConservatives see 
 the rescript as a paean to traditional values; liberals as a throwback to a 
 more authoritarian era. It encourages students to love their families, to 
 “extend benevolence to all” and to “pursue learning and cultivate 
 arts” — but also to be “good and faithful subjects” of the emperor 
 and to “offer yourselves courageously to the state” when called upon to 
 do so.\n\nIn interviews, five mothers who pulled their children out of 
 Tsukamoto said they had encountered chauvinism at the school or had been 
 attacked by Mr. Kagoike or his wife, who serves as vice principal, often in 
 ethnically bigoted terms. They asked for anonymity because they feared 
 social ostracism for speaking out.\n\nOne mother said her family liked 
 South Korea and often vacationed there, but that when her son told his 
 teacher of a planned trip, the teacher said that Korea was a “dirty 
 place” and that the family should visit “somewhere better in 
 Japan.”\n\nAnother mother said teachers had told her that her son 
 “smelled like a dog,” and that Mr. Kagoike had called her “an 
 anti-Japanese foreigner.” (She is Japanese.)\n\nPhoto\n\nMr. Abe, center, 
 has made overhauling Japanese education a priority throughout his career, 
 championing a similar if softer version of the traditionalism practiced at 
 Tsukamoto.CreditKazuhiro Nogi/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images 
 \nAttempts to reach Mr. Kagoike failed. A woman who answered the telephone 
 at the foundation that operates Tsukamoto, Moritomo Gakuen, said the 
 Japanese news reports about the school and its land deal had been 
 “unfair,” but she did not elaborate. Multiple follow-up calls went 
 unanswered.\n\nIn addition to serving as principal of the kindergarten, Mr. 
 Kagoike heads Moritomo Gakuen and is a director of the Osaka branch of 
 Nippon Kaigi, a prominent right-wing pressure group that includes Mr. Abe 
 and other influential conservative politicians as members.\n\nIn a message 
 on Moritomo Gakuen’s website, which the foundation removed on Thursday, 
 Ms. Abe praised it for “nurturing children with strong backbones, who 
 have pride as Japanese, on a basis of superior moral 
 education.”\n\nJapan’s defense minister, Tomomi Inada, has also praised 
 the foundation, sending Mr. Kagoike a formal letter of appreciation for his 
 work.\n\nThe land deal that turned Tsukamoto from a subject of raised 
 liberal eyebrows into a full-fledged scandal took place last year, though 
 the details took months to emerge.\n\nThe Finance Ministry allowed Moritomo 
 Gakuen to have the land — a two-acre vacant lot near an airport in an 
 Osaka suburb — for 134 million yen, or about $1.18 million, according to 
 government records and testimony by ministry officials in 
 Parliament.\n\nThe price, which the ministry initially kept sealed, was 
 surprisingly low. The ministry had previously assessed the land’s value 
 at 956 million yen, seven times higher. In comparison, a neighboring plot 
 only slightly larger was bought by the local municipality, Toyonaka City, 
 for 1.4 billion yen in 2010.\n\nThe ministry says it lowered the price to 
 account for cleanup costs that Moritomo Gakuen would have had to bear. It 
 said the lot contained discarded concrete and other refuse as well as 
 elevated levels of arsenic and lead.\n\nOpposition politicians are pressing 
 the ministry to explain its calculations. The national daily Asahi Shimbun, 
 which broke the story, quoted Mr. Kagoike as saying Moritomo Gakuen had 
 spent “about 100 million yen” on cleanup, a fraction of the discount it 
 received.\n\nThe new elementary school now sits partially built on the 
 lot.\n\nEiichi Kajita, the president of Naragakuen University who also was 
 chairman of the licensing council that granted Moritomo Gakuen permission 
 for the school, said the council had not been told about the land deal when 
 it made its deliberations.\n\nHe said Moritomo Gakuen’s ideology, which 
 includes an emphasis on Shintoism, Japan’s ancient animist religion, was 
 not a barrier to its opening a school, but that the council was reviewing 
 its decision.\n\n“If there was something inappropriate, permission could 
 be revoked,” he said. “Whether they’re Shintoists or rightists, if 
 parents want that, it’s not our place to object.”\n\nFollow Jonathan 
 Soble on Twitter @jonathan_soble.\n\nMakiko Inoue contributed 
 reporting.\n\nFukushima nuclear disaster: Lethal levels of radiation 
 detected in leak seven years after plant meltdown in 
 Japan\n\nhttp://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/fukushima-nuclear-disaster-radiation-lethal-levels-leak-japan-tsunami-tokyo-electric-power-company-a8190981.html\n\n​The 
 Independent         February 2, 2018​\n\nFukushima nuclear disaster: 
 Lethal levels of radiation detected in leak seven years after plant 
 meltdown in Japan\n\nExpert warns of 'global' consequences unless the plant 
 is treated properly\n\nJeff Farrell\n\n\nWorkers of theTokyo Electric Power 
 Co, which is tasked with the job to decommission the nuclear power plant in 
 Okuma, Fukushima EPA\n\n\nFormer Trump strategist Steve Bannon praises 
 Abe’s nationalist 
 agenda\nhttps://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2017/12/17/national/politics-diplomacy/former-trump-strategist-bannon-praises-abes-nationalist-agenda/#.WjahSRSFC-Q\nBY 
 TOMOHIRO OSAKI\nSTAFF WRITER\nDEC 17, 2017\n\n\nVisiting ex-White House 
 chief strategist Steve Bannon on Sunday lauded Prime Minister Shinzo Abe 
 for his Trump-like effort to infuse Japan with a spirit of nationalism 
 while unleashing a volley of scathing criticism against what he called the 
 “mainstream media,” likening them to “running dogs” with a 
 globalist agenda.\nBannon, who was in Tokyo over the weekend to attend a 
 gathering of conservatives, said Japan was on the right track under Abe, 
 whom he called a “Trump before Trump.”\n“He talked about a nation’s 
 pride, a nation’s destiny, a nation taking control of its future,” 
 Bannon said when talking about Abe in his speech at the Japanese 
 Conservative Political Action Conference 2017, co-hosted by the Japanese 
 Conservative Union and the American Conservative Union.\nAs such, Bannon, 
 who is now head of the right-wing news website Breitbart News, credited Abe 
 for trying to “re-instill the spirit of nationalism” and for not shying 
 away from discussing “vital” issues including Japan’s 
 “rearmament.”\n“Japan has every opportunity to seize its destiny, to 
 re-establish its national identity (and) in true partnership with the 
 United States, reverse what the elites have allowed to happen,” he said. 
 He added it is not a “full-blown conclusion” yet that Japan has to keep 
 languishing under the shadow of a rising China.\nBannon’s attack on those 
 who he referred to as “elites” and a “nullification project” that 
 he claims is being led by the mainstream media, both overseas and in Japan, 
 was another recurring theme in the blistering speech he delivered 
 Sunday.\n“The mainstream media, liberal media, remember, they are the 
 running dogs of the globalist. They are a propaganda machine,” Bannon 
 said, quoting a source in Japan as telling him that the Japanese news 
 coverage of U.S. politics makes it sound as if Trump will be impeached 
 “tomorrow morning.”\n“The ‘hobbits,’ ‘deplorables,’ and the 
 forgotten men and women that put him in office in November 2016 will never 
 allow” him to be ousted, Bannon said, as core Trump supporters are often 
 called by their political opponents.\n“They will only be there for him to 
 make sure he wins a glorious re-election,” he said, eliciting a burst of 
 applause.\nNoting conservatives are hungry for the truth, Bannon also 
 expressed a willingness for Breitbart News to make forays into Asia, 
 signaling the possibility offices headquartered in Tokyo or Seoul might be 
 created.\n“As long as we provide a platform to get alternatives to what 
 the mainstream is saying, we’re gonna be fine,” he said.\nOn trade, 
 Bannon backed Trump’s controversial decision to pull out of the 
 Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, even though withdrawing from the 
 multinational deal amounted to the U.S. essentially spoiling what would 
 have been a perfect “China-containing project,” as freelance journalist 
 Taro Kimura put it during his joint appearance with Bannon.\nIn response, 
 Bannon called the TPP an “ill-defined, generalized” agreement that the 
 U.S. cannot get into anymore, and clarified Trump’s “America First” 
 slogan as meaning an “America in partnership.”\n“If the Japanese 
 intelligentsia is sitting around and waiting for us to re-hit the bid on 
 TPP, it’s not going to happen.”\nReferring to joint military exercise 
 between the U.S. Navy and the Self-Defense Forces, Bannon said “there is 
 not a finer group of people” than the SDF.\n“If we come together as 
 friends and partners, (sunlight) opens up ahead of us,” he said, 
 referring to U.S. allies in Asia, including Japan, South Korea, India and 
 Singapore.\n\nAn Important Statue for “Comfort Women” in San 
 Francisco\nhttps://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/an-important-statue-for-comfort-women-in-san-francisco\n\nBy 
 Sally McGrane\n12:50 P.M.\n\nThough completed, San Francisco’s memorial 
 to those imprisoned as sex slaves by Japan during the Second World War 
 faces ongoing challenges.Photograph by Ma Dan / Xinhua / Alamy\nAt the back 
 of St. Mary’s Square in San Francisco’s Chinatown, the retired judge 
 Lillian Sing—who, long a trailblazer, was Northern California’s first 
 Asian-American female judge—unlocked a temporary plywood gate. Behind the 
 gate, in the corner of a terrace, stood a week-old memorial. Against the 
 backdrop of city skyscrapers, three teen-age girls, cast in bronze, stand 
 in a circle, holding hands. Next to them, looking on, stands the figure of 
 an elderly woman in Korean dress—Kim Hak-sun, the first so-called comfort 
 woman to speak out, in 1991, about her horrific sexual enslavement, during 
 the Second World War, by the Imperial Japanese Army.\n\nSing had come to 
 the park that day with Julie Tang, another retired judge and her co-chair 
 in the project to create the memorial. “What they did was so brave,” 
 Tang said, as she gazed up at the three girls. Chinese, Korean, and 
 Filipino, they represent the estimated two hundred thousand women from 
 countries across East and Southeast Asia occupied by Japan who were held in 
 brutal state-run rape camps—a crime that went largely unacknowledged 
 until the nineties. That was when Kim’s declaration inspired surviving 
 comfort women in Korea, China, and elsewhere to come forward with their 
 stories. Tang shook her head. “They were silent for fifty years, holding 
 this shame inside them,” she said. “Victims think they are to blame. 
 They think they did it to themselves.” With this statue—the first to be 
 erected in a major U.S. city, though smaller memorials to comfort women 
 exist in places like Glendale, California, and Palisades Park, New 
 Jersey—Tang, Sing, and the local coalition they assembled want to change 
 that kind of thinking. By bringing attention to the comfort women’s 
 history, they hope to draw attention to ongoing problems of human 
 trafficking and sex crimes.\n\nThis may not be as self-evident as it 
 sounds. Discussing the statue, Dara Kay Cohen, a professor of public policy 
 at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, at Harvard, said, “As a 
 scholar of wartime rape, I think it is extraordinary.” Cohen has 
 interviewed women captured as sex slaves in Sierra Leone; she found their 
 stories of being raped dozens of times a day by fighters, even when the 
 women were sick, “eerily similar” to those of the comfort women. 
 “Publicly memorializing the rape of women is rare,” she said. “Women 
 are half of humanity,” Elaine Kim, a professor of Asian-American and 
 Asian-diaspora studies at U.C. Berkeley, and a supporter of the statue 
 (whose unveiling brings the total number of public statues in San Francisco 
 of real women to three), said. “And women are not represented in history. 
 Nothing will be done about crimes like these if they remain in the 
 shadows.”\n\nThe Japanese Army’s “comfort stations,” initiated in 
 the early nineteen-thirties, were expanded extensively following the 
 Nanjing massacre, also known as the Rape of Nanking, in 1937. According to 
 a paper by the Yale political-science professor Elisabeth Jean Wood, the 
 stated goal of the comfort stations was to reduce random civilian rapes. 
 Girls were seized from the local populations. Conditions were brutal, and 
 death rates were high. “In one day, we had to serve forty to fifty 
 soldiers,” Lee Ok-seon, a Korean survivor, who was kidnapped at the age 
 of fifteen, recalled in video testimony. Girls who refused were lined up 
 against the wall and slashed open with knives. “I don’t call it a 
 ‘comfort station.’ I call it a slaughterhouse,” Lee said. Jan 
 Ruff-O’Herne, a Dutch girl, was taken from the Indonesian prisoner-of-war 
 camp where she was living with her family. In a television interview, she 
 recalled arriving at the comfort station: “We started protesting right 
 away. We said we were forced into this, they had no right to do this, it 
 was against the Geneva Convention. And they just laughed at us. They said 
 they could do with us what they liked.”\n\nAfter the war, survivors 
 risked rejection by their families. Ill and impoverished, many never 
 married or had families of their own. Ruff-O’Herne had two daughters, but 
 did not tell them what happened to her. “You know, how can you tell your 
 daughters?” she said in the same interview. “All these years, I was too 
 ashamed. You think, What will they think of me?” But, after seeing Kim 
 Hak-sun and others come forward and struggle to have their stories heard, 
 Ruff-O’Herne decided that she had to help by speaking up. (Her daughters 
 hugged her.)\n\nThe former congressman Mike Honda told me that, in addition 
 to the stigma faced by victims of sexual crimes, the Japanese 
 government’s stance on the issue has been a problem. He said that Prime 
 Minister Shinzo Abe “flip-flops”: “He says, ‘We’re really 
 sorry,’ then, ‘It never happened.’ He’s all over the field.” 
 Honda, who spent his own early years in a Japanese-American internment 
 camp, said that he first heard of the comfort women in the nineties, after 
 an aide returned from an exhibition visibly upset. Honda became determined 
 to learn more. “We know a lot about what happened in the war in Europe, 
 but not a lot about what happened in Asia,” he said.\n\nAfter he 
 researched the comfort women, he decided to act. “For me, as a 
 Japanese-American, there was a parallel,” he said. “We fought to have 
 the U.S. government apologize to us. Now we have to get the Japanese 
 government to recognize the historical facts.” In 2007, Honda brought 
 survivors—including Ruff-O’Herne—to testify before Congress, and 
 successfully pushed through legislation demanding that the Japanese 
 government apologize. “Telling the story of the comfort women to the 
 public is powerful,” Honda said. “The statue is a physical 
 representation of something that happened in the past that needs to be 
 learned about, in order to prevent violence against women and end human 
 trafficking—which is a one-hundred-and-fifty-billion-dollar 
 industry.”\n\nSteven Whyte, the Carmel-based artist who created San 
 Francisco’s memorial, had a similar learning curve. “I was familiar 
 with the term ‘comfort women,’ but I didn’t realize the extent of the 
 torture,” he said. Once he saw the call for applications, he researched 
 the topic, and wanted the job so much that he reduced his regular prices. 
 “You think of every girl you’ve ever known—your nieces, your 
 daughters, your girlfriends, everything. It’s desperately 
 upsetting.”\n\nWhile most of the comfort-women statues around the world 
 have been put up by South Koreans or members of the Korean diaspora, the 
 push for this statue was led by San Francisco’s Chinese-American 
 community, with support from several other groups, including members of the 
 Japanese-, Filipino-, Korean-, and Jewish-American communities, Eric Mar, 
 who served as the city supervisor during the planning-and-design process 
 and championed the project, said. “I thought, to be successful, we had to 
 build a pan-Asian coalition,” he explained. Mentioning his own teen-age 
 daughter, Mar began to weep. “It’s very emotional, for a lot of 
 people.”\n\nAt the cavernous Cathay House restaurant, just up the street 
 from St. Mary’s Square, Sing and Tang were joined by Judith Mirkinson, 
 the president of the board of the Comfort Women Justice Coalition. Over hot 
 toddies and Chinese chicken salad, the women talked about the challenges 
 they faced in bringing the statue into being—including local 
 Japanese-Americans who say they worry that the statue could give rise to a 
 new wave of discrimination, and a vigorous campaign of condemnation from 
 the Japanese government. Whyte received some twelve hundred negative 
 social-media messages and e-mails, including form letters copied and pasted 
 from a Japanese Web site threatening economic boycotts of his work. 
 Activists attended hearings about the statue and called an elderly survivor 
 a prostitute when she testified before the San Francisco Board of 
 Supervisors. More recently, the mayor of Osaka threatened to end his 
 city’s long-standing sister-city relationship with San Francisco if the 
 statue is not removed—and the Japanese consul-general in San Francisco, 
 Jun Yamada, wrote a letter to the editor of the San Francisco Chronicle 
 calling the statue a “half-told” story, and warning that if the city 
 wants to “give equal treatment to all cases, there will be no free space 
 left anywhere.”\n\nThose spearheading the memorial fear that pressures 
 like these may delay the bureaucratic procedures that still need to take 
 place before the plywood gate comes down and the statue is visible to the 
 public. At lunch, Sing said that she felt that racism in the United States 
 had played a silencing role when it comes to recognizing what happened to 
 the comfort women. “Why did this take so long?” she said. Kim Hak-sun 
 “spoke out in 1991. There is the race issue: Asian women’s lives 
 didn’t matter, like black men’s lives don’t matter.” Still, the 
 three women agreed that it is no accident that this statue is here. “Even 
 if San Francisco is changing, progressivism is still woven into the fabric 
 of this city,” Mirkinson said. “And we are on the Pacific Rim,” Tang 
 said. “We are closer to Asia, and thirty-three per cent of the city is 
 Asian. People bring with them family memory that goes back to World War 
 Two.”\n\nFor Lee Yong-soo, an eighty-nine-year-old survivor who flew from 
 Korea for the unveiling, San Francisco seemed dauntingly far away. But when 
 she arrived she was glad she had made the journey. “When I saw the girls 
 holding hands, it brought tears in my eyes because she looked just like the 
 girl I once was,” Lee wrote in an e-mail. “We need more memorials to 
 remember the truth. I am the living proof of the history. But when I’m 
 gone, who will tell the story to the next generation?”\n 
 https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2018/02/12/18806678.php
SUMMARY:Protest Corrupt Racist Abe Administration & His Wife Akie-Stop The Nukes, Stop US/JPN Wars
LOCATION:St. Regis Hotel\n125 Third St.\nSan Francisco\n
URL:https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2018/02/12/18806678.php
DTSTART:20180222T010000Z
DTEND:20180222T030000Z
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