Tag: World War II

This is an interesting historical footnote from World War II:

Deep in the forests of southwestern Oregon is a redwood sapling — a peace offering at the site of an act of war.

Friday marks the 81st anniversary of the end of the only enemy aerial bombing campaign to strike the continental United States during World War II. 

The plan was to firebomb the vast forests of America’s northwest in retaliation for the April 18, 1942, Doolittle Raid on Tokyo. The Japanese hoped their modest effort would torch millions of acres of trees and deprive the U.S. defense industry of tons of wood crucial to the war effort. The Americans would have to send thousands of troops to fight the fires.

Nobuo Fujita, a veteran Japanese Navy pilot, advocated the attack and was given the honor of taking the war to the American home front. 

Twice he would fly his submarine-launched floatplane over the forests near Brookings, Ore., release his bombs and make his way to a rendezvous with the I-25 transport submarine waiting for him off the coast.

Though Fujita did not know it at the time, nearly all the bombs fizzled. An alert student forest ranger stomped out one small flare-up. The wet forest floors took care of the rest.

Stars & Stripes

You can read more at the link.

I would definitely like to view this documentary if it gets released on a streaming channel at some point:

“I wanted to make a film that logically refutes [the distorted historical record.]”These are the words of Lee Suk-jae, who directed the documentary film “Koko Sunyi” about victims of Japanese wartime military sexual slavery. In a recent interview, he pointed out that Japan’s distortion of history is ongoing, which is why he felt the need to make the film. 

Many movies, dramas, TV programs and books related to the so-called comfort women issue have been published so far, but among them, “Koko Sunyi” logically refutes the absurdity of some of the claims of Japan’s far right based on historical data.Much of the information shared in “Koko Sunyi” is based on the Japanese Prisoners of War Interrogation Reports No. 48 and 49 published by the US Office of War Information (OWI), which contains details about the “comfort women” at the time. 

Lee’s film is centered around the life of Grandmother Sun-yi, who was taken to a sexual slavery camp, also known as a “comfort station,” in Myanmar during the war. Lee, who works as an investigative reporter for KBS, found that, among the 20 “comfort women” in Myanmar recorded in the OWI report, a woman with the surname Koko and first name Sun-yi was actually a woman named Park Sun-yi who lived in Hamyang, South Gyeongsang Province.

Hankyoreh

You can read more at the link.

Here is the latest on the forced labor issue between South Korea and Japan:

Here is the latest from the Imperial Japanese forced labor issue with South Korea:

Japan has protested a South Korean court order on Mitsubishi Heavy Industries to sell assets in order to pay compensation to two women subjected to forced labor for the company during Japan’s occupation of the Korean peninsula during 1910-1945. Foreign minister Toshimitsu Motegi said on Tuesday that the ruling a day earlier by the Daejeon District Court in South Korea was a “clear violation of international law.” “We must avoid serious impacts on Japan-South Korea relations,” Motegi said, describing the court’s decision as “truly regrettable” during a regular news conference in Tokyo.

Relations between the two countries, both important U.S. allies in North Asia, have been dogged by the bitter legacy of Japan’s wartime occupation, and ties soured in 2019 due to a dispute over export controls which has yet to be resolved.

The Daejeon District Court in South Korea ruled on Monday that Mitsubishi Heavy should sell two patents and two trademarks, according to a support group for the women, who are both in their nineties.

Asahi Shimbun

You can read more at the link, but Tokyo believes this issue was resolved with the 1965 pact where $500 million from Japan was given to South Korea.  The ROK government at the time could have compensated everyone back then with that money, however it was instead used for the overall development of the country such as improving infrastructure.  The money ultimately helped with the country’s economic development at the expense of direct compensation to those effected by Japan’s colonial rule.  This is why Japan is so strongly against the court rulings they feel they have already paid compensation.

With that all said when is the ROK government going to launch lawsuits on behalf of victims of North Korea’s kidnappings and provocations in far more recent times than Japan’s colonial rule that began over a century ago?

Via a reader tip comes this interesting read about Lee Hak-rae who was a convicted war criminal from World War II who served as a prison guard during the construction of the Thai-Burma railway line:

The last Korean to be convicted of war crimes after serving in the Japanese military during World War II has died without receiving the apology and compensation he insisted Tokyo owed him for his suffering. Lee Hak-rae, 96, died on Sunday.  (…….)

Interviewed in 1988, Lee said he had never abused prisoners in his charge and that he had been frightened of them because of their stature. 

That claim was undermined by the diaries of Sir Edward “Weary” Dunlop, the Australian army colonel who served in the Medical Corps and was captured at Java in 1942. In one passage, Dunlop wrote that he had become so incensed at the brutal treatment by “The Lizard” – the nickname the POWs gave to Lee – that he found a length of wood and hid alongside a jungle path he knew Lee would be taking. His intention was to kill Lee and conceal the body in the undergrowth, but he changed his mind after realising that he and other POWs would be held accountable for Lee’s death. (……)

“The Japanese guards were bad, but the Koreans and the Formosans were the worst,” he told The Daily Telegraph. “These were men who the Japanese looked down on as colonials, so they needed to show they were as good as the Japanese. And they had no one else to take it out on other than us POWs.”

South China Morning Post

You can read more at the link, but Lee after the war was originally sentenced to death for abusing prisoners and on appeal it was reduced to jail time. He ended up serving 11 years in prison and was released in 1956.

This could get ugly very quickly if the South Korean government decides to forcibly seize assets from Japanese companies to pay for these court rulings:

South Korean victims of forced labor during Japan’s colonial rule have begun taking steps to seize the assets held in South Korea by a Japanese firm implicated in the Japan’s wartime crime. 

The lawyers for Lee Chun-sik and three other South Koreans forced to work for Nippon Steel and Sumitomo Metal Corporation recently asked a local court in Pohang, North Gyeongsang Province to issue a writ of execution to have the company’s assets in the country seized. 

The company reportedly holds eleven billion won worth stocks of PNR, a joint venture with POSCO. 

In late October, South Korea’s Supreme Court had ordered the Japanese firm to compensate the four victims 100 million won each. 

Following the top court’s decision, the victims’ lawyers requested that the company answer how it will compensate, but has yet to give a reply.

KBS World Radio

The major issue here is that the Japanese government says that all compensation claims were paid for with the 1965 pact that saw $500 million from Japan given to South Korea. The ROK government at the time could have compensated everyone back then with that money, however it was instead used for the overall development of the country such as improving infrastructure.  

The money ultimately helped with the country’s economic development at the expense of direct compensation to those effected by Japan’s colonial rule.  This is why Japan is so strongly against the court rulings they feel they have already paid compensation for.

With that all said when is the ROK government going to launch lawsuits on behalf of victims of North Korea’s kidnappings and provocations in far more recent times than Japan’s colonial rule that began over a century ago?

A video uncovered from the US National archives shows that Japanese forces massacred a number of Korean women believed to have been sex slaves following a battle in China:

Seoul Metropolitan Government and the Seoul National University Human Rights Center unveiled video footage, Tuesday, showing scores of bodies of Korean sex slaves being dumped after being killed by Japanese soldiers during World War II.

The Japanese government has denied any responsibility for forcing tens of thousands of Korean women into sexual slavery. But the latest footage contradicts that claim, according to researchers studying the issue.

The 19-second footage depicts a Chinese soldier looking at scores of naked bodies he carried to a hill. In another scene, he takes a sock off one of the bodies before walking away. Another scene shows smoke billowing from what appears to be a mound of human bodies at a different location.

The research team said the footage was recorded Sept. 15, 1944, in Tengchong, a western Chinese village bordering Myanmar, by an Allied Command soldier, surnamed Baldwin. The team recovered the footage from the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration.

In June that year, the Allied Command began attacking Tengchong and a nearby city which were under control of almost 3,000 Japanese soldiers. As defeat became more certain, the Japanese soldiers took their own lives and killed people stationed with them, including the sex slaves. At least 70 sex slaves were believed to have been there with the troops, among whom only 23 survived.

Together with the footage, the team also revealed a document filed by the Allied Command reporting the killing of Korean sex slaves. “Night of the 13th (Sept. 13, 1944), the Japs shot 30 Korean girls in the city,” the document said.  [Korea Times]

You can read more at the link and below is the actual video.

South Korean President Moon Jae-in visits the Provisional Government of Korea in Chongqing, China, on Dec. 16, 2017, where independence fighters fought against the Japanese occupation of Korea. (Yonhap)

These photos provided by the Seoul City government on Dec. 11, 2017, show South Korean comfort women who were taken to the South Pacific island of Truk. City officials said they found U.S. military documents and other material that show 26 Korean women were taken to the South Pacific island as sex slaves for Japanese soldiers during World War II. The Japanese military had a naval fleet on the island. (Yonhap)

Remember #PearlHarbor pic.twitter.com/HbY2mq0glW

— U.S. Marines (@USMC) December 7, 2017

Kim Jae-rim (C), a Korean victim of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries’ forced labor during World War II and one of four who had filed damage suits against the Japanese company, leaves the Gwangju District Court in the namesake city, 329km south of Seoul, on Aug. 11, 2017. The court ordered the company to pay 120 million won to the 87-year-old victim. Mitsubishi is one of the leading Japanese war criminal companies involved in forced labor during the war. More than 1 million Koreans were forcibly taken to mines, ammunition factories and construction sites in Japan during the war. (Yonhap)