"Backlash" Japan Abe's Denialist Supporters Attack Korean Ex-Comfort Woman Grandma Yongsoo

"Backlash" Japan Abe's Denialist Supporters Attack Korean Ex-Comfort Woman Grandma Yongsoo Lee
The Japanese Abe government supporters personally attacked Grandma Yongsoo Lee who had came from Korea to support the resolution for a "Comfort Women" memorial at the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Calling her a liar and a prostitute this backfired and angered many Supervisors and those attending the hearing.
The Japanese Abe government is also reported to have spent $500 million for an international media propaganda denying the sexual enslavement of the women by the Japanese Imperial Army and Japanese consulate officials visited the offices of every San Francisco supervisor to oppose the memorial.
Additional video:
https://youtu.be/p0oE2VPs8mc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Za-BMvOkzyY
For more information on Comfort Women Issue.
comfortwomencoalition [at] gmail.com
Production of Labor Video Project
http://www.laborvideo.org

Short Cuts-Abe And Japanese Denialists Propaganda Blitz
Short Cuts
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n17/jeff-kingston/short-cuts
Vol. 37 No. 17 · 10 September 2015

Short Cuts
Jeff Kingston


August in Japan is a month for remembering war. Ceremonies marking the atomic bombings of Hiroshima (6 August) and Nagasaki (9 August) are followed by a commemoration of Japan’s surrender to the Allies on 15 August. More than three million Japanese were killed in what is variously called the Pacific War, the Fifteen-Year War or the Greater East Asia War, depending on one’s view of history. For liberals, the war of aggression began in 1931 when Japan invaded Manchuria and escalated into a wider war with China from 1937, eventually precipitating a clash with the US. For conservatives, the war of national self-defence began in December 1941 when Japan, suffering terribly under American sanctions, fought back by launching an attack on Pearl Harbor.

On 14 August, in a statement to mark the 70th anniversary of surrender, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe surprised nobody but disappointed many by failing to apologise for Japan’s wartime treatment of its Chinese and other foreign enemies, as well as of its own citizens and the mostly Korean ‘comfort women’ forcibly engaged in the service of Japanese troops. Since the early 1990s, it has become routine for Japanese leaders to apologise for Japan’s role in the Second World War, an act of contrition on the German model which has failed to smooth relations with China and South Korea but which annually reinforces Japan’s commitment to its postwar constitution, founded as it is on principles of non-aggression. This time, Abe dug in his heels. The ‘position articulated by previous cabinets’ – which had ‘repeatedly expressed feelings of deep remorse and heartfelt apology’ – would, he said, ‘remain unshakeable into the future’, but, he insisted, ‘we must not let our children, grandchildren and even further generations to come, who have nothing to do with that war, be predestined to apologise.’ Abe made no mention of the conclusion reached by the specialist panel he had convened to advise him on his statement: that it had been a ‘reckless war’ unleashed by irresponsible leaders. Instead he said that Japan had been cornered by ‘vast colonies possessed mainly by the Western powers’ and isolated internationally by a ‘diplomatic and economic deadlock’. The only route to self-determination had been a turn to force. The Japan we know today – peaceful, prosperous – exists only because of the great sacrifices of the wartime generation.

Emperor Akihito spoke for the majority when, on 15 August, the day after Abe’s statement, and in an implicit rebuttal of it, he talked of Japan’s continuing ‘deep remorse’ for its wartime actions. The people’s view has barely changed. At the end of 1945, according to Akiko Takenaka in Yasukuni Shrine: History, Memory and Japan’s Unending Postwar (Hawaii, £66.70), only 4 per cent of Japanese ‘felt ashamed’ of the defeat or failed to support Akihito’s father Hirohito’s declaration of surrender. The war was viewed as an unmitigated catastrophe and the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal charged a handful of senior leaders with Class A war crimes. It perhaps isn’t incidental that one of these was Abe’s own grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi, who was held as a suspected Class A war criminal, though never charged, for his role in mobilising slave labour in wartime Manchuria, and who served as minister of munitions from 1941. Abe, the most unremittingly conservative leader Japan has had since the war, has committed himself to revising Article 9 of the US-imposed 1947 constitution, which ‘renounces war as a sovereign right of the nation’ and places constraints on Japan’s armed forces.

Abe – who has indicated that he hopes to remain in power until 2018, when Japan will celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Meiji Restoration and the beginning of rapid modernisation – seeks to loosen those constraints. Although the peace constitution is seen by many as a cornerstone of Japanese identity, Abe presides over a revisionist movement that over the past few years has made its presence strongly felt at all levels of Japanese society and has come to dominate the corridors of power. As Akiko Hashimoto shows in her excellent book The Long Defeat (Oxford, £16.99), the revisionists are waging an all-out offensive that extends from textbooks to demanding constitutional reform and restraints on the freedom of the press. Nippon Kaigi (Japan Conference) is an ultra-conservative organisation that seeks to rewrite what it sees as Japan’s masochistic view of history, end apology diplomacy and put the emperor back in the driver’s seat. It boasts a membership of nearly 40,000, including retired CEOs, military top brass, party heads, university presidents and prominent pundits. It circulates petitions that garner millions of signatures. Twenty years ago its views would have been condemned as extreme; now they’re mainstream. Most of Abe’s cabinet and more than half of the Diet are Nippon Kaigi members; Abe serves as its ‘special adviser’. It is the Tea Party with power.

A good example of the new revisionism is Hidemichi Tanaka’s The History of Japan: Really, What Is So Great about It? (Aracne, €15). It represents a popular genre in Japan, the expansive field of nihonjinron, or theories about the Japanese. Tanaka, an art historian, has a simple answer to the question in his title: everything is great about Japan. He gallops through two thousand years of cultural glory, from the ancient chronicles Kojiki and Nihon Shoki to Noh theatre, and ingeniously marshals his evidence to prove that the usual aspersions cast on Japanese motives are in every case wrong. A great deal of fanciful reinterpretation is involved in the process. A great deal of fanciful reinterpretation is involved in the process. He defends Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and establishment of the puppet state of Manchukuo as bringing peace and economic growth to the region. The subsequent war that raged from 1937 becomes the ‘China Incident’; the Nanjing Massacre is downsized to a raid; and the ‘Greater East Asian War’, which drove the Western powers out of the East, in Tanaka’s view allowed Japan to change the world and bring ‘the period of world wars to a close’. The attack on Pearl Harbor was orchestrated by Roosevelt. Cunning, this: the US was ‘stuck in the quagmire’ of the Great Depression and ‘the only possible way out was by waging a war’, so Washington issued Tokyo with an ultimatum so unacceptable that the Japanese were provoked into launching the attack. It’s a popular theory among the Nippon Kaigi diehards; in 2008, Toshio Tamogami, chief of staff of the Japanese air force, was forced to resign shortly after publicly repeating it and praising the consequences of Japanese imperial aggression.

Ground zero for the unrepentant view of Japan’s wartime past is Yasukuni Shrine in central Tokyo. In 1978, 14 Class A war criminals were enshrined there (their souls deified in a Shinto rite), ensuring that the controversy at home and abroad doesn’t go away. Abe has said that one of his greatest regrets during his first term as premier, from 2006 to 2007, was not visiting Yasukuni, as his colourful predecessor, Junichiro Koizumi, had done six times. He put that right in 2013, and his visit was sharply criticised by Beijing, Seoul and Washington. For Japan’s neighbours, Yasukuni is emblematic of Japan’s infuriating blind spot about their shared history. Tourists, though, experience it as a pleasing photogenic oasis, with its traditional Japanese architecture and annual lantern festival; bus tours include it on their itineraries, even for Chinese groups. The priests and advisers who run the shrine have found ways to make it appeal in the 21st century. The adjacent military museum, the Yushukan, was renovated in 2002; it lends weight to the revisionist narrative by presenting the martyred Japanese dead as soldier-gods and the Chinese as terrorist bandits.

Yet the revisionist argument that the peace and prosperity Japan enjoys today owes everything to the soldiers’ wartime sacrifices is still something that most Japanese refuse to accept. The staggering loss of Japanese lives in the war is an indelible aspect of Japanese memory, passed down through families, popularised in manga, novels and films. According to the familiar narrative, the soldiers were cannon fodder, sacrificed for the vainglory of reckless leaders who operated without constraint, plunging the nation into a maelstrom that killed twenty million foreign Asians in the name of liberating them, and millions of Japanese. Abe will have a hard time rewriting that.

US Capitalist Politicians Welcome Militarization Of Japan "
“We welcome a larger role for Japan in regional and global security affairs and look forward to our country working with Japan to implement these new measures,” the Republican and Democratic committee leaders said in a joint statement Friday."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/japan-enhances-militarys-role-as-security-bills-pass/2015/09/18/16a5bf3e-5e65-11e5-8475-781cc9851652_story.html
Japan enhances military’s role as security bills pass


A protester shouts slogans during a rally in front of the parliament building in Tokyo on Friday. (Shuji Kajiyama/Associated Press)
By Mari Yamaguchi | AP September 18 at 8:26 PM
TOKYO — Japan’s parliament early Saturday approved contentious legislation that enhances the role of the country’s military by loosening post-World War II constraints, after the ruling bloc defeated opposition parties’ last-ditch effort to block a vote.

The upper house’s approval makes the legislation into law, reinterpreting Japan’s constitution and fundamentally changing the way it uses its military. Opponents say it violates Japan’s constitution and puts the country at risk of becoming embroiled in U.S.-led wars.

The legislation has sparked sizeable protests and debate about whether Japan should shift away from its pacifist ways to face growing security challenges. Rallies have spread across the nation especially after the ruling parties approved the bills in July in the more powerful lower house.

Japan’s military can now defend its allies even when the country isn’t under attack — for the first time since the end of the World War II — and work more closely with the U.S. and other nations. Japan will also be able to participate more fully in international peacekeeping, compared to its previous, mostly humanitarian, missions.

“The legislation is necessary in order to protect the people’s lives and their peaceful livelihood, and it is to prevent a war,” Prime Minister Shinzo Abe told reporters after the passage of a total of 11 bills — one related to international peacekeeping and a package of 10 others designed to allow Japan’s military to defend its allies in an action called “collective self-defense.”

Dozens of constitutional scholars, lawyers and other legal experts have joined protests, saying the legislation allowing Japan to use force to settle international disputes violates its U.S.-drafted postwar constitution that renounces a right to wage war.

China said it and other Asian neighbors are closely watching the vote because of Japan’s wartime aggression.

“We demand that Japan genuinely listen to just appeals from both at home and abroad, learning from historical lessons and adhering to the path of peaceful development,” said Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei.

Previous postwar governments had all made the notion of collective self-defense unconstitutional. But Abe’s Cabinet last year decided to allow it by unilaterally adopting a new interpretation of the constitution, instead of formally revising the charter, saying it must be adapted to today’s increasingly challenging security environment. The constitutional reinterpretation triggered public criticism that Abe’s government undermined democracy. Opponents also say the change would cause Japan to do more in the bilateral alliance with the U.S.

In Washington, leaders of Senate committees overseeing U.S. defense and foreign policy welcomed the legislation’s passage, saying it would contribute to international peace and security and strengthen the U.S.-Japan alliance.

“We welcome a larger role for Japan in regional and global security affairs and look forward to our country working with Japan to implement these new measures,” the Republican and Democratic committee leaders said in a joint statement Friday.

Even though many Japanese acknowledge growing security risks and have grown accustomed to sending peacekeepers overseas, many remain wary of a greater military role. Media surveys have consistently shown a majority of respondents oppose the legislation.

“This legislation betrays the constitutionalism, pacifism and democracy that Japan has built over the past 70 years since the end of World War II,” said Tetsuro Fukuyama, a senior lawmaker representing the main opposition Democratic Party of Japan.

Opposition lawmakers chanted “Unconstitutional!” and “Invalid!” while casting a ballot during a vote on the bills at the upper house, which came at the end of the session.

Since Thursday, opposition parties had pulled out all the stops to delay the vote. They introduced a series of no-confidence measures against government ministers and parliamentary leaders, and made filibuster speeches.

One opposition lawmaker, Taro Yamamoto, used a snail-paced “cow walk” to shuffle to the podium to vote, while others made drawn-out speeches, a variation that has become known as the “cow tongue.”


Yamamoto wore a black suit and tie with Buddhist prayer beads around his wrist, as if attending a funeral. He kept using “cow walk” tactic, ignoring repeated scolding by the house president to stop it and heckling from the ruling lawmakers criticizing him.

The maneuvers were destined to fail, but ate up hours of time requiring debate and votes on each measure.

As the drama played out in Parliament, protesters rallied outside for a fifth night in a row.

The legislation that lacks public support would face resistance in the future, said Jeff Kingston, director of Asian Studies at Temple University Japan.

“In a way you can say that this legislation lacks legitimacy in the eyes of the people,” he said. “It’s going to be very controversial to actually invoke this legislation to justify dispatch of troops that obviously most people don’t want. That probably has electoral consequences.”

Associated Press news assistant Liu Zheng in Beijing contributed to this story.

Shinzo Abe’s Bid to Redefine Japan and Its Military Has Echoes of Family History-The Rise Of Japanese Imperialism Supported By US Imperialism
Shinzo Abe’s Bid to Redefine Japan and Its Military Has Echoes of Family History
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/14/world/asia/japan-military-shinzo-abe-family-history.html?&moduleDetail=section-news-1&action=click&contentCollection=Asia%20Pacific®ion=Footer&module=MoreInSection&version=WhatsNext&contentID=WhatsNext&pgtype=article
By JONATHAN SOBLE
AUG. 13, 2015

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President Obama with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan in April. Questions have been raised about how far Japan should go in rebuilding its military power and whether it should broaden the reach of its security partnership with the United States. CreditDoug Mills/The New York Times

In a famous photograph from his childhood, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan is seen perched on the knee of his smiling grandfather, the influential postwar premier Nobusuke Kishi. There is no sign of the turmoil just outside the family home, where thousands were protesting Mr. Kishi’s plan to extend Japan’s military alliance with the United States.

The scene, and the parallels between Mr. Abe and Mr. Kishi, who died in 1987, have taken on renewed significance in Japan this summer.

Mr. Abe, who has pushed through a series of measures that would allow the military to send soldiers on overseas missions for the first time since World War II, is now facing protests of his own over his more assertive security policy. But he remains stubbornly true to his long-held ambition to reshape Japan’s national identity, stripping it of what he sees as a self-destructive pacifism while establishing some independence in military matters from the United States, the wartime enemy that became the country’s postwar ally and protector.

Japan’s Apologies for World War II
Here is a look at major statements on Japan’s war legacy by monarchs and senior officials since its defeat in 1945.

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While playing out as a domestic issue, the debate over Japan’s military posture has far-reaching implications for security policies in the region, where the United States has long held sway but is being challenged by a resurgent Chinese military that is increasingly willing to project its power. After a series of confrontations with China over territorial claims in the South China Sea, many Japanese officials have begun to harbor doubts about whether they can truly rely on Washington to defend the country’s interests.

“A military alliance is a blood alliance,” Mr. Abe wrote in a 2004 book, explaining his thinking, which has changed little, if at all, over the years. “If Japanese don’t shed blood, we cannot have an equal relationship with America.”

But his push to give the Japanese military a greater role is being met with growing protests that, though smaller than those of two generations ago, have nonetheless raised the temperature of long-simmering national debates and cut into Mr. Abe’s political standing.

Questions have been raised about how far Japan should go in rebuilding its military power and whether it should broaden the reach of its security partnership with the United States to areas far beyond its own borders. A string of anniversaries commemorating the war’s end 70 years ago have given the issues an extra charge.

Mr. Abe, political scientists and historians say, sees himself as a transformative leader whose mission is to impose decisive answers on these questions, and in so doing, to drag this reluctant nation toward goals he shares with his grandfather.

“Kishi wanted to clear away the remnants of the war, but he felt he was never able to complete the task,” said Yoshihisa Hara, a professor at Tokyo International University, who interviewed Mr. Kishi extensively several years before his death. “Abe worships his grandfather, and he’s taken up his mantle.”

Takashi Shinobu, a professor at Nihon University, said both men’s politics hinged on an ambivalent attitude toward the United States, one that combined resentment over elements of the postwar settlement — especially the pacifist, American-drafted Constitution — with a pragmatic view of the military and economic benefits of partnership.

Where Mr. Kishi cultivated the United States as a shield against the threat of Soviet communism, Mr. Abe’s undisguised concern is the growing regional might of China, whose relations with Japan remain marred by disputes over maritime territory and wartime history.

In a statement that Mr. Abe plans to issue on Friday to mark the 70thanniversary of Japan’s defeat, he is expected to broadly uphold past official apologies for the country’s imperial expansionism. But even small deviations from accepted formulas could anger China and South Korea, another neighbor where resentment remains strong.

Mr. Abe is on the verge of achieving at least one specific goal that eluded his grandfather.


FROM THE ARCHIVE | AUGUST 15, 1945

Japan Surrenders, End of War!
Japan's unconditional surrender, announced more than a week after the United States dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, came after several premature reports of the end of the Pacific War.

The New York Times

See full article in TimesMachine
Last month, in a stormy session, the lower house of Parliament passed legislation that would allow Japan to send its military on combat missions overseas for the first time since the war. It is now before the upper chamber, where it is also expected to win approval. Mr. Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party and its smaller coalition partner, Komeito, control a majority of the house’s seats.

The legislation, a package of 16 related bills, is the outcome of a widely contested new interpretation of the Constitution, which previous governments had seen as forbidding all but the most strictly defensive use of force. The bills would permit Japanese forces to fight only in defense of allies, and even then under restricted circumstances. But opponents accuse Mr. Abe of doing an end-run around the basic law, which he lacks the political support to amend.

Most constitutional experts say the legislation violates the charter, and some Japanese fear it could embroil Japan in American military commitments in the Middle East and elsewhere. While it was the United States that imposed the pacifist Constitution in the first place, it has long urged Japan to take on a more muscular military role.

The Japanese public appears to prefer the status quo: Mr. Abe’s support has slipped below 40 percent in recent surveys, a little over half the level he had soon after he took office at the end of 2012.

Kuni Miyake, a former diplomat who was part of a group of experts advising Mr. Abe on history issues ahead of the 70th anniversary of the end of the war, said that while a more “mutual” United States-Japan relationship might soothe the pride of nationalists, Mr. Abe’s strategy was informed mostly by pragmatism.

“He knows China is too big for Japan to face by itself, and the best way to ensure American engagement in the long run is to offer something in return,” he said. “If there’s a dream, it’s to become a normal, NATO-type ally of the U.S.”

How much closer Mr. Abe will get to achieving that dream remains uncertain. Experts said he was unlikely to drop his support for the formal constitutional changes required to give Japan a fully unfettered military. But the public backlash against the security bills was a reminder of the obstacles he faces.

Mr. Abe shares a comeback story as well as a worldview with his grandfather. Mr. Abe is having a rare second stint as prime minister, after resigning once in 2007 amid health problems and political-funding scandals in his cabinet.

Mr. Kishi’s comeback was more dramatic: After serving in Japan’s wartime government, he spent three years in American detention as a suspected war criminal, though he was never charged. When he returned to politics it was as a Cold War anti-Communist, complete with American support and funding.

The leftist demonstrators who converged on the Kishi home, in 1960, opposed his plans to extend Japan’s alliance treaty with the United States and allow the Americans to continue stationing troops and weapons in the country. Hundreds of thousands more surrounded Parliament, some clashing violently with the police.

Mr. Kishi pushed the extension through, including changes that gave Japan more say over how the United States used its forces in the country. But he resigned soon afterward over the social unrest that erupted over the issue. Mr. Abe has written of the admiration he felt for his grandfather for sacrificing for his principles.

“In his mind, that’s the heroism that defines his grandfather,” said Mr. Hara of Tokyo International University. “Abe isn’t ready to leave office yet, but on some level, he may eventually want to go out the same way.”