This is just common sense that the Japanese Self Defense Force wouldn’t just land in South Korea without governmental permission, but due to the massive misinformation in Korea, this fact has to actually be socialized publicly in the media:

Japan reaffirmed Wednesday it would not send its troops to the Korean Peninsula without a request or prior consent from South Korea even though the country is expanding the role of its self-defense forces, the Defense Ministry in Seoul said.

Earlier, Japan stressed that Tokyo would never send troops to the Peninsula even for a contingency without permission from the Seoul government.

“Japan’s defense minister is explaining to its assembly on its position that (Japanese self-defense forces) will not enter the territory of South Korea if there’s no consent from the country,” a defense ministry official quoted a group of Japanese officials as saying during a working-level defense policy meeting.

“The Japanese side has reasserted this is the Japanese government’s basic stance.”

Earlier in the day, the neighbors held the 21st round of the working-level defense policy meetings in Seoul, resuming the director-level defense dialogue channel after over two years.

Since the last round held in Tokyo in March 2013, the annual meeting was suspended last year due to worsening diplomatic ties over unresolved history-related feuds.

The South Korean side was headed by Yoon Soon-ku, the ministry’s director general on international policy, while the Japanese delegation was led by his counterpart, Atsuo Suzuki.

The Japanese side has also suggested the signing of two military agreements — the General Security of Military Information Agreement and the Cross-Servicing Agreement — during the session, but the Korean side was cautious, the defense official said on condition of anonymity.

“Forging these agreements requires the understanding and support from the public,” he said, referring to public anxieties over military intelligence with the former colonial ruler. “It should be reviewed carefully.”  [Yonhap]

You can read more at the link.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un (C) and Ri Sol-ju (L) applaud as they watch an art performance given by the State Merited Chorus to mark the 62nd anniversary on July 27 of the Armistice Agreement that effectively ended the 1950-53 Korean War, in this image taken from the Korean Central TV Broadcasting Station on Aug. 4, 2015. The report did not mention when the meeting was held. (Yonhap)

I guess we will see how strictly enforced these new measures are on South Korean teachers:

Teachers found guilty of committing sex offenses will be deprived of their teacher’s license, the Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education (SMOE) said, Thursday.

The office said it will take a zero-tolerance approach to sex offenses by teachers.

The measure came after a group of male teachers at a public high school in Seoul were recently accused of sexually harassing female teachers and students for more than a year.

“Schools should be the safest social fence for students,” Superintendent Cho Hee-yeon said at a press conference at the SMOE building in central Seoul.

“We’ll take stern legal action against teachers found to have committed sex offenses. For a single offence, we’ll not only kick out such teachers convicted of sexual molestation but also disclose their names,” he said.

If a teacher’s sexual misconduct is reported, the SMOE will launch a special inspection immediately and will have the teacher removed from his or her post even before the police investigation is concluded or prosecution’s indictment is issued.  [Korea Times]

Here is what civic groups have to say about the new measures:

Civic groups, however, said that the SMOE’s measure would not be an ultimate solution because most of the abusers have been punished softly and returned to schools after one or two years of probation.

“Of a total of 240 teachers disciplined for their sexual abuse in the last five years, 115 teachers, or 47.9 percent, still remain in school,” said a parent group official.

You can read more at the link.

Despite the US policy of advocating for a denuclearized North Korea, the Kim regime repeatedly says they want nothing to do  with it:

A North Korean official taking part in the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) in Kuala Lumpur said Wednesday that there is nothing to change regarding Pyongyang’s nuclear issue.

The official revealed the stance when he was asked by reporters to comment on the North’s nuclear issue.

The North has repeatedly said that it is not interested in talks seeking Pyongyang’s unilateral scrapping of nuclear ambitions. South Korea and the U.S., on the other hand, have been calling on the North to engage in dialogue in the wake of the Iranian nuclear deal.

The North Korean official left open the possibility of Pyongyang holding bilateral talks with members of the six-way nuclear talks, including China and Japan as he said it remains to be seen if time will be allotted.  [KBS World]

You can read more at the link.

It looks like President Park’s sister is quite the headache for her, but I would be in more agreement with her if she criticized her sister for not doing more for the modern day Korean comfort women in China:

Just as President Park Geun-hye struggles to improve the country’s relations with Japan, an unlikely figure has catapulted herself to the center of controversy by criticizing Seoul for dragging out the sex slavery rows: her younger sister, Geun-ryeong.

In an interview with Japan’s video-sharing website Niconico, the 61-year-old Park Geun-ryeong said she was sorry that in most news reports South Korea blames Japan for the ongoing toil of the so-called comfort women “without itself taking greater care” of them.

Citing previous statements including the regret expressed by Emperor Hirohito to then-President Chun Doo-hwan in 1984, she said it is “inappropriate” to demand an apology every time a new premier takes office.

Park also defended the Japanese prime minister’s globally criticized visit to the controversial Yasukuni war shrine in December 2013, calling Seoul’s opposition an “interference” in another country’s internal affairs.

“I believe if anyone thinks that the prime minister would worship at the Yasukuni with an ambition for another war in mind, he or she is an abnormal person,” Park said. “How would blood-related descendants not pay respect to their ancestors?”

Her remarks are likely to have little impact on the bilateral diplomatic relations or the ongoing talks aimed at resolving the sex slavery dispute, but they instantly sparked public uproar given her position in the presidential family.  [Korea Herald]

You can read more at the link.

Hopefully these ROK soldiers legs are able to be saved:

Two soldiers were seriously wounded in what is believed to be a landmine explosion in the heavily fortified demilitarized zone, the military said Tuesday.

The explosion took place on the southern side of the DMZ in Yeoncheon County, Gyeonggi Province, at 7:40 a.m. while the two Army staff sergeants carried out a search mission there, according to the military.

The explosion nearly severed the soldiers’ legs and they were rushed to a military hospital, the military said, adding that they are not in critical condition.

“There’s not the possibility of North Korea’s involvement,” a military official said. Possibly a landmine is the cause of the explosion, he noted.  [Korea Times]

Should Korean students study abroad? http://t.co/M8HUUgSKhB pic.twitter.com/v9yf5cdM2I

— KEI (@KoreaEconInst) August 3, 2015

It is amazing the quality of Kodachrome photos from back in th day.  This image of an apple market in 1952 during the Korean War looks like it could have been taken with a modern digital camera.  Image link via Reddit Korea.

It seems every time some reporter wants to make some point about Japanese historical revisionism they drag out this guy:

Seventy years after the end of World War Two, the voices of revisionism in Japan are growing stronger and moving into the mainstream, particularly on the issue of comfort women, who were women forced to be sex slaves for Japanese soldiers during the war.

One of the most eloquent voices of revisionism is Toshio Tamogami.

Mr Tamogami is well-educated, knowledgeable and, when I meet him, exquisitely polite. The former chief of staff of Japan’s air force believes in a version of Japanese history that is deeply at odds with much of the rest of the world.

But it is increasingly popular among young Japanese, tired of being told they must keep apologising to China and Korea.

Last year Mr Tamogami ran for governor of Tokyo. He came fourth, with 600,000 votes. Most strikingly, among young voters aged 20 to 30 he got nearly a quarter of the votes cast.

“As a defeated nation we only teach the history forced on us by the victors,” he says. “To be an independent nation again we must move away from the history imposed on us. We should take back our true history that we can be proud of.”

In this “true” history of the 20th Century that Mr Tamogami talks of, Japan was not the aggressor, but the liberator. Japanese soldiers fought valiantly to expel the hated white imperialists who had subjugated Asian peoples for 200 years.

It is a proud history, where Japan, alone in Asia, was capable of taking on and defeating the European oppressors. It is also a version of history that has no room for the Japanese committing atrocities against fellow Asians.

Mr Tamogami believes that Japan did not invade the Korean Peninsula, but rather “invested in Korea and also in Taiwan and Manchuria”.

I ask him about the invasion of China in 1937 and the massacre of civilians in the capital Nanjing. Surely that was naked aggression?

“I can declare that there was no Nanjing Massacre,” he says, claiming there were “no eyewitnesses” of Japanese soldiers slaughtering Chinese civilians.

It is when I ask him about the issue of Korean comfort women that Mr Tamogami’s denials are most indignant.

He declares it “another fabrication”, saying: “If this is true, how many soldiers had to be mobilised to forcibly drag those women away? And those Korean men were just watching their women taken away by force? Were Korean men all cowards?”  [BBC via Reddit Korea]

You can read the rest at the link.

First of all in regards to the question of whether Japanese men are cowards, scholars who have looked at the comfort women issue would tell you that most of the women put into the comfort women system were sold by Korean brokers.  So Korean men weren’t cowards they were salesmen.  Actually kidnapping of Korean women by Japanese soldiers would be a very rare occurrence when the broker system made so many of these women readily available.  Women that were kidnapped were likely by Korean brokers.  This does not absolve the Imperial Japanese from responsibility since they ran the comfort woman system, but it provides context of what was going on at the time.  Likewise this same system was in place to service the US military where women were being sold, often by their families, to become camptown prostitutes.

Secondly I am well aware of Japanese historical revisionism since I have been to the Yushukan Museum which promotes the Asian liberation narrative of people like Tamogami.  However, instead of bringing this guy up as a source to confirm pre-conceived narrative, I would like to see a journalist conduct a national poll and see how many Japanese actually believe this narrative?  I am willing to bet that a strong majority of the Japanese public believes that what happened during World War II was not liberation and Imperial Japan was in the wrong.  At the same time many of them probably believe that the World War II history issue is being exaggerated for political reasons which is what allows voices like Tamogami to have the following that he does have.

This is another innovative way to go after the Kim regime financially:

An Israel-based civil rights group is trying to seize a North Korean ship being held in Mexico in a rare effort to make Pyongyang pay at least part of a rare $330 million U.S. District Court judgment against it.

The Shurat HaDin law center in April won the ruling over the abduction of a South Korean-born pastor in China and his presumed torture and killing in North Korea. Now the center seeks whatever assets it can find from the largely isolated country.

It has focused on the cargo ship the Mu Du Bong, which has been held in Mexico after it ran aground there last year.

Civil courts in Mexico City and the state of Veracruz have declined to hear Shurat HaDin’s request, but it is now appealing.  [Korea Herald]