The Defense Agency chief on Monday formally told the United States that Japan will pull its troops out of Iraq when British and Australian forces withdraw, but an air unit will remain in Kuwait for logistic support, a Japanese official said.
Director General Fukushiro Nukaga informed the U.S. during a top-level security meeting in Washington.
Britain and Australia have announced their troops will leave the Samawah area but have not said when.
The British and Australians are templating to redeploy their troops from Iraq at the end of this year which would mean that Japan will have their troops redeployed by then as well. As I had noted before plus with my personal pictures and recollections of the city Samawah, the results from the SDF deployment are mixed, but I for one appreciate their service in the effort to rebuild Iraq.
With the Japanese now templated to redeploy, will the Koreans now be tempted to do the same? You never know, those dastardly Japanese are really sneaky. In fact the real reason the 600 Japanese soldiers are being redeployed may be to add to a building invasion force to retake the Dokdo Islets. If so, Korea better hurry up and redeploy their 3,000 soldiers to reinforce the Dokdo defenses or better yet after this past week maybe the Camp Humphreys defenses.
An elderly Buddhist priest, who also headed a nursery school attached to his temple in Hiroshima, has been arrested for child prostitution, police said Friday.
Itsushi Ehara, 73, chief priest of Komyoji Temple in Aki-ku, Hiroshima, and director of an affiliated nursery school, is accused of violating the Anti-Child Prostitution and Pornography Law.
He admitted to the allegations during questioning. “I did it to alleviate my work stress,” he was quoted as telling investigators. He has also confessed to having been a member of a child prostitution club and paid several high school girls to have sex with him on more than 20 occasions.
In the specific case for which he was arrested, Ehara paid 80,000 yen to a girl, who was a 15-year-old, first-year high school student, to have sex with him at a hotel in Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo, in August 2004, Tokyo police said.
I wonder if the fact that Japan is fielding spy planes will be twisted to mean that this is another provactive measure by the Japanese military to invade Dokdo? Rest easy Dokdo watchers, the spy planes are to be used to spy on North Korean ballistic missiles instead:
Japan will soon decide which long-endurance unmanned spy plane it plans to deploy in fiscal 2007, Defense Agency Director General Fukushiro Nukaga said Wednesday in London.
Nukaga said he expects the spy drones to allow his agency to gather ballistic missile launch information quickly. The move will bolster Japan’s reconnaissance capabilities to monitor North Korea and other potential threats.
Japan has plans to domestically develop spy planes but the agency will first import them from the United States, Japan’s closest ally, with which it has been engaged in a joint missile defense project since North Korea launched a missile that flew over Japan into the Pacific in 1998.
It will be interesting to see how the Chinese are going to respond to this development.
Japanese soldiers left for the United States on Tuesday to conduct training with the US Marines simulating the recapture of an island from enemies, an official said. It will be the first joint war game between the allies premised on an invasion of an isolated island off Japan, an official of Japan’s Defense Agency said on customary condition of anonymity.
About 125 troops from Japan’s Ground Self-Defense Force and the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force in California will hold month long exercises at Camp Pendleton, Calif., according to the defense official. In the scenario, soldiers will infiltrate a captured island by boat and retake it after exchanging fire with the enemy, the official said, though no live ammunition will be used during the exercise.
The Japanese media is reporting that the exercise is in preparation of a Chinese attack on the remote southern Japanese islands:
Local media reports have said the joint exercise is aimed at showing a military “presence” in small southwestern Japanese islands off Japan’s southern main island of Kyushu in view of China’s military expansion in recent years. The official said he could not comment on those reports.
If I had to pick out one thing that sticks out overwhelmingly between Japan and Korea it would be the controversy surrounding the Yasukuni-jinja Shrine in Tokyo. Being in Japan has given me the opportunity to examine what all the fuss over the shrine is about. What is it about this place that causes so much hostility between Japan and it’s neighbors? Would I see hordes of brainwashed Japanese chanting anti-Korea slogans and preparing for the invasion of Dokto? I would soon find out.
Here is the impressive gate designating the entrance to the Yasukuni Shrine.One last tori before reaching the shrine. Still no sign of the brainwashed Japanese nationalists drawing up war plans for Dokto.
When I reached the actual shrine I did not find any big banners of General Tojo and other war criminals that the media would lead you to believe that this shrine is all about. In fact the shrine was actually pretty simplistic and underwhelming. It is mostly just a place for old Japanese men to hang out, bow at the shrine, and then sit down on a bench under a tree and smoke a pipe.
Here I am at the Yasukuni shrine. No sign of the brainwashed nationalists. Just old people smoking pipes.Japanese couple in front of the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, Japan.
Finding this place pretty boring I started walking down a path to the right of the shrine towards a large building. As I approached the large building, I discovered a statue honoring kamikaze pilots during World War II.
A kamikaze statue; I must be close to uncovering the evil hordes waiting here.
From the statue I headed inside the large building which ended up being a museum chronicling Japanese military history. The museum chronicled Japanese military history from feudal times all the way to the present SDF mission in Iraq.
The museum also had a gift store that sold loads of books, gifts, and accessories related to the SDF and the Japanese Imperial Army. You could even buy the old Japanese Army hats that appeared to be popular with the old folks that mostly populated the place.
The museum interestingly enough does not allow photographs, but I was able to take a few quick pictures of a few items in the museum during my tour.
A Japanese World War II Era Mitsubishi Zero Airplane.
The museum was actually quite interesting to read about the early feudal samurai history of Japan. Additionally the special exhibit they had honoring the Japanese victory over Russia during the Russo-Japanese War was also interesting to see.
However, the interpretation of Japanese history that has longed plagued relations between Korea and Japan began to jump out at me. The exhibit for the Russo-Japanese War claimed that the Japanese Army liberated the Korean peninsula from foreign rule and were greeted by an enthusiastic Korean populace as liberators. The exhibit also maintained that the Japanese brought much industry and modernization to the peninsula. This is true to an extent, but there was no mention of the brutal occupation and the anti-Japanese resistance by the Koreans against it.
Next was the World War II exhibit which I figured would also be quite provocative to see; I wasn’t disappointed. According to the Japanese history presented here, World War II is known as the Asia Co-prosperity War where the Japanese single handedly liberated one Asian country after another from foreign colonial occupation and the Asian people were all happy to be liberated. No mention of the atrocities committed by the invading Japanese troops.
This is a Steam Engine that Actually Operated on the Infamous Thai-Burma Railway Made Famous by the Movie, A Bridge On the River Kwai.
Additionally the museum blames the US for Pearl Harbor. Since the US implemented a trade embargo on the Japanese, the militarists felt that an attack by the Americans against Japan would only naturally come next. The museum even alleges that the United States had a plan to attack Japan in the works and would have been executed if Japan hadn’t pre-empted the American attack by conducting the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
One theme I have picked up on at the museum is that every attack the Japanese conducted was only executed because of foreign colonizers threatening Japan and it’s neighbors. Japan never wanted to colonize any country, they just wanted to liberate Asians from foreigners.
The museum continued on with many more outrageous claims and made it seem like the Japanese won every battle of World War II, but some how the Americans continued to move closer and closer to Japan without winning a battle if you are to believe the museum’s history. The Japanese interpretation of history is extremely ridiculous and completely devoid of reality.
The museum tour concludes into an area that houses pictures and names of the Japanese war dead over the centuries. I actually tried to find General Tojo among the faces but I couldn’t spot him. All the pictures were of the same size and no one stood out more than the other.
All in all Yasukuni is definitely over hyped by nationalist causes in each Northeast Asian country involved in the shrine controversy. Am I offended by the ridiculously false lies taught as history at the shrine? Yes, I am but not enough to set myself on fire or chop my fingers off.
Despite the underwhelming nature of the shrine; I recommend it to anyone with a few days to spend in Tokyo. The history and artifacts in the shrine are interesting to see despite the skewed history. Japan is not the first country to skew history in the region. Korea and China are not innocent themselves of reinterpreting history.
I never did find the Japanese nationalists worshiping the banner of General Tojo and plotting the invasion of Dokto at the Yasukuni Shrine. What I did find was also troubling and that is skewed history, but fortunately it appears that mostly only grandpas nostalgic for the old days are the only ones reading it.
China and South Korea protested angrily on Monday after Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi paid homage at a Tokyo shrine for war dead that its neighbours consider a symbol of Japan’s militaristic past.
There were small demonstrations in Beijing, Hong Kong and Seoul, and Kyodo news agency reported that a meeting tentatively planned for later this week in Beijing between the Chinese and Japanese foreign ministers would not take place.
Japan’s relations with Beijing and Seoul had already chilled because of the annual visits by Koizumi to Yasukuni shrine, where war criminals are honoured along with 2.5 million war dead.
The reaction from the Korean and Chinese governments were as expected:
But Chinese ambassador to Japan Wang Yi branded the visit a “grave provocation to the Chinese people”.
“There is no doubt that (the visit) will damage Japan-China relations,” Wang was quoted by Kyodo news agency as saying after meeting with Foreign Minister Nobutaka Machimura.
Chinese Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing called in Japan’s ambassador to China to express Beijing’s “strong indignation”, China’s Foreign Ministry said on its Web site.
Japan’s embassy in Beijing advised Japanese nationals to stay away from areas where there was potential for anti-Japan demonstrations, such as those that swept China earlier this year.
South Korean Foreign Minister Ban Ki-moon summoned Japanese ambassador Shotaro Oshima to complain, and a presidential aide said President Roh Moo-hyun was unlikely to meet Koizumi for their semi-annual summit meeting this year.
“We strongly protest the visit to Yasukuni shrine despite our request and strongly urge that it is not repeated,” Ban said.
This whole Yasukuni BS is all about these politicians playing to nationalism to draw support. Chinese government deflects opposition to their own authoritarian rule by building up anti-Japanese sentiment while the ruling Korean government draws attention away from thier own unpopularity by playing to anti-Japanese sentiment. While Koizumi does the shrine visits to show his people that Japan will not be pushed around by whining neighbors. This is all politics, unless Koizumi did this to free up some time on his schedule by having the Koreans cancel the summit so he can play golf?
In the secret accord, signed in Tokyo in 1905, the U.S. and Japan acknowledged the latter’s control of the Korean Peninsula and the former’s control of the Philippines. Korea was at the time already in Japanese hands as a result of Japanese victories in wars with both Russia and China. Calling for the U.S. to be held to account for the agreement is tantamount to asserting that it should have intervened on the Korean Peninsula even if that meant risking a war with Japan.
(…)
To blast the U.S. for failing to intervene in one instance and for intervening in another, for not seeing one attack on our sovereignty (by Japan) but seeing another (by North Korea) is tantamount to damning the U.S. if it does and damning it if it doesn’t. While anti-American acts may seem profitable gimmicks for our politicians and America-bashing is rewarded with popular applause, we should also think how such careless accusations make us look in the eyes of the international community.
It is hard to believe that this common sense dare I say, “pro-American” article, came out only a few days after the same paper published this piece of anti-American crap. Both articles are a great example of the love/hate relationship Korea has with the US. The left wing politicians really need to get over obscure history references that have little to do with Korea today. Stop focusing on the past and have a vision for the future. Actually the left wingers do have a vision for the future; unfortunately it involves tearing down the MacArthur statue in Inchon and replacing it with Kim Jong Il’s likeness. When that happens I don’t think anybody will care about the Taft-Katsura Agreement then.
It seems like the bickering between Korea and Japan will never end. The latest squabble is that South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun said last week that the 1965 treaty between Japan and Korea does not absolve Japan of the responsibility to pay compensation to war crimes victims. However, Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi sees it differently. He believes that the 1965 treaty does end all claims to compensation because the Korean government at the time could of given the $800 million dollars that Japanese gave Korea to the individual victims but chose to instead use it for economic development. Here is a passage from today’s Chosun I think really sums up this whole controversy well:
Of the five nations that got money from Japan after World War II, in the name of restitution or funds to “congratulate them on national independence,†only Korea made priority use of the funds for economic development by effectively investing it in basic facilities like the construction of Pohang Iron and Steel (now POSCO) and the Seoul-Busan Highway. In the Philippines, which got even more money, the landed elites spent it any way they liked. In the early 1960s, the Philippines’ per capita income was six times ours; now it is not even a tenth.
In March, President Roh Moo-hyun said he was ready to fight a “diplomatic war†with Japan, adding, “We, too, now have the capability to withstand considerable difficulty.” Yet if the government at the time had not secured foreign investment through its agreement on claims with Japan and sending troops to Vietnam and effectively used those funds for economic development, all the while taking criticism for its “submissive diplomacy” on the chin, the Korean government of 2005 would have no such means to boast about, and would be in no position to fight a diplomatic war.
President Park Chung-hee in 1965 chose to teach his people how to fish instead of giving the fish to them. The Philippines is a great example provided in the article. Their economy ran out of fish a long time ago while the Korean economy still continues to fish.
As horrible as the Japanese Imperial Army’s war crimes are it appears to me that 1965 treaty was supposed to be the agreement that would settle all the Japanese financial liability to Korea. However, when you have a 29% approval rating like President Roh, starting a squabble with Japan is a well used tactic to draw attention away from yourself.
Oh My News has an interesting interview with Yuko Tojo who is the daughter of World War II era Japanese leader and convicted war criminal General Hideki Tojo. Here is her reason that Tokyo fought World War II:
We should properly explain the international situation at the time, and what the Tokyo Trials were all about. How terrible the situation was. We were surrounded and facing attack. We had no oil, or steel and all our assets abroad were seized. How were we to protect all those millions of Japanese except by standing up for ourselves? The media — the Asahi, Yomiuri, all of them were fanning the flames, saying “What is Tojo up to? Why doesn’t he fight back? The media can’t say it was not involved. The people were also involved. Even fifth-grade elementary students were asking: what will we do without steel or oil? And now they talk about the Emperor’s responsibility. It is terribly saddening.
The embargo on Japan would not have happened if Japan would have stopped their conquests of other nations. But to Japanese revisionists they were “liberating” these countries from the westerners. I’m sure the Koreans didn’t feel to liberated.
Here are some of the Korea related questions she answered:
You don’t think there are a lot of similarities between North Korea today and wartime Japan?
Absolutely not; please don’t make that comparison. That is an insult to those who died in the war.
I would agree Imperial Japan was not similar to today’s North Korea because North Korea is a gangster state ruled by fear but Imperial Japan people did fanatically fight and die for the emperor willingly.
But the Emperor himself admits he is Korean.
I know nothing about his roots, but I was astonished that he said such a thing. His majesty (it is clear here that heika refers throughout to the Showa Emperor, not the current occupier of the Chrysanthemum Throne) would never have said such a thing. He knew the limits of what to say. The current Crown Prince (Naruhito) chatters away about everything. As the national essence (kokka genshi) he has to know what to say. He has to maintain the dignity (igen) of the Imperial Family.
I never heard this before but that is a surprising comment.
So do you think that China and Japan should cooperate to create history textbooks?
No, history recognition is impossible because each country’s stance (tachiba) is different. Even when the truth is the same, the interpretation by China and Japan is often completely the opposite. For example, for Koreans the man who assassinated Ito Hirobumi (1841-1909 — first Prime Minister and drafter of Meiji Constitution) An Chung-gun is a hero, but to us he is a criminal. That’s the kind of thing I mean. It’s completely impossible.
I can’t imagine the countries in northeast Asia ever agreeing on history textbooks because the dispute is a great nationalism card for the politicians to pull out when they need to unite public opinion on something.
Here are her views on America:
Do you resent America?
Not even a little. If I resented America I wouldn’t be happy that my daughter was married to a citizen of that country, would I? (Her daughter is married to a U.S. citizen who works for Boeing Corp. and lives in the U.S. Tojo says her son-in-law is soon to take a job in Iraq. When her daughter said she was worried about this, her mother told her it couldn’t be helped because “one had to defend one’s country.”) My grandfather admired America and said we could learn from it. And his American lawyers defended him and said the most amazing things. Other lawyers strongly criticize the actions of the Allied Forces. Those people treated my grandfather with great respect and he respected them, even as enemies.
Read the rest of the interview because it is an interesting read even though I can’t agree with many of her assertions.
The Japan Times is reporting that the Korean fishermen who were caught fishing in Japanese waters and were boarded by the Japanese Coast Guard, are accusing the Japanese Coast Guard of using excessive force.
Tokyo on Friday dismissed accusations that Japan Coast Guardsmen used excessive force when they boarded a South Korean boat suspected of poaching and roughed up one of its crew members.
“I think they acted correctly,” Foreign Minister Nobutaka Machimura said when asked if the coast guardsmen had acted unreasonably.
South Korea’s Yonhap news agency reported that a member of the fishing boat crew was hospitalized with injuries after he was beaten by Japanese authorities during the confrontation Wednesday.
Chief Cabinet Secretary Hiroyuki Hosoda said the coast guardsmen smashed the glass window on the door to the boat’s wheelhouse after the crew refused to unlock it and shut off the engine.
The order to cut the engine was a “necessary and minimum measure,” Hosoda said. “When the crew resisted, they got into a scuffle.”
South Korean patrol boats were summoned from off the southern city of Ulsan early Wednesday when Japanese patrol boats entered South Korean waters in pursuit of the fishing boat they said had been operating 8 km inside Japanese territorial waters.
The 77-ton eel boat Singpung-ho had refused JCG orders to stop and sailed off with two Japan Coast Guardsmen still on board. Japanese authorities contacted the South Korean Coast Guard, which helped stop the boat.
The similarities between this case and the 2002 subway incident continue. Make accusations of abuse and have pictures taken of you in the hospital to appeal to Korean nationalism to make it look like the big bad foreigners in this case the Japanese are beating down the Koreans again. A proven formula for getting out of trouble.
I would think that breaking the window of the boat to get the Captain to stop the boat would be reasonable since the boat was escaping with the Japanese Coast Guardsmen still on board. Plus when they did get in the cabin I’m sure the Captain wasn’t to helpful and resisted stopping the boat thus leading to the injuries he received. If he would of stopped the boat like he was directed he could of avoided any alledged injuries. He couldn’t do that though because then he would of been caught in Japanese waters.
So it was better to run with the coast guardsmen on board and get back into Korean waters where he knew nothing would happen to him and he could appeal to Korean nationalism against the Japanese, go to the hospital, claim abuse, and I bet he yelled “Dokto is Korea’s” at some point too for added emphasis of his innocence. I hope they make him pay the illegal fishing fine but that is about as likely as someone being arrested in the 2002 subway abduction.
