With tensions increasing between the U.S. and China over Taiwan, the Japanese Times has a long article about what Japan should do in response. Here is an excerpt:

Ben Self, vice president of the Mike and Maureen Mansfield Foundation, counters that “overt steps by Tokyo to defend Taipei will produce a reflexive and even neuralgic response” in Beijing. While he concedes that this may look like appeasement, it is in fact “an acceptance of the reality that this issue is one of critical national importance to the CCP and its regime stability.”

That doesn’t mean abandoning the island. Instead, Self argues, Japan should “significantly increase interoperability with the United States, while maintaining current levels of sub rosa contact with Taiwan’s defense establishment.”

Even that will be difficult. Any effort to strengthen ties with Taiwan must overcome the powerful opposition of political and business forces in Tokyo that prioritize smooth relations with Beijing.

Yoji Koda, former Maritime Self-Defense Force fleet commander, laments that “overdependence on China’s market and too-deep interdependence really impede efforts to promote and improve Japan-Taiwan relations.”

He believes the government is similarly inclined to overweight Beijing’s concerns. Weak leadership “that does not want to create complicated issues with China prevents Japan from taking active actions and maneuvers to help Taiwan.” Nothing will change, he warns, until something serious happens between Japan and China or Taiwan and China. That possibility grows more likely daily.

Japan Times

You can read more at the link, but basically Japan wants to keep the status quo like just about every other country in the region. However, as China grows in military might it appears they are less interested in maintaining the status quo and at some point nations in the region are going to have to make tough decisions.

It will be interesting to see if the new radars really do get fielded in 2027:

South Korea will develop an indigenous long-range radar for air defense in order to replace old ones brought in from abroad, the arms procurement agency said Monday.

The Defense Acquisition Program Administration signed a 46 billion won (US$41 million) deal with LIG Nex1 Co. for the four-year development project with a plan to begin its deployment in 2027, the agency said.

The radar would be capable of monitoring and identifying aircraft inside the Korea Air Defense Identification Zone (KADIZ) and sending information to the Air Force’s Master Control and Reporting Center for defense operations.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

The Korean left has already been putting journalists they don’t like in jail and now want to expand their legal offense against their conservative critics even further:

The ruling Democratic Party of Korea (DPK) is planning to revise a law within the National Assembly’s February session aimed at requiring media to pay punitive damages for spreading “fake news”. While the DPK said that punishment is needed to prevent the distortion of information and the spread of fake news by not only conventional media, but also portal sites and YouTube, conservative critics raised concerns that the law could be used to tame the media in the name of cracking down on fake news.

The DPK’s askforce team said, Tuesday, that it would revise the law to apply punitive damages to newspapers, TV broadcasters, portal site operators, YouTubers and other one-person media users for spreading false information.

Before the team’s decision, Rep. Yoon Young-chan of the party proposed a revised bill to have YouTubers, other one-person media users and portal site operators to pay up to three times the damages caused by their fake news to the victims. The team also decided that conventional media, such as newspaper and TV, should also be subject to such punishment if they spread fake news.

Korea Times

You can read more at the link.

The comfort women controversy is one of these issues where facts do not matter, how people feel about the topic is what matters:

Korean students at Harvard University have strongly criticized a professor over his controversial claim that Japan’s wartime sexual slavery was actually voluntary prostitution, demanding its immediate withdrawal and his official apology to victims.

Harvard Korean Society made the demand in a statement on its website after Harvard Law School Japanese legal studies professor J. Mark Ramseyer caused controversy with his recently published paper titled “Contracting for Sex in the Pacific War.”

“It is a wrong conclusion based on grounds very biased and lacking trustworthiness,” the statement said. “Harvard Korean Society demands Prof. Ramseyer’s official apology and immediate withdrawal of the paper.”

“The issue of comfort women is an international inhumane act, and his academic view which justifies and negates the act is an immoral and shameless view,” it added.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

I have not read Professor Ramseyer’s paper yet because it is behind a pay wall. Maybe it is out of line, but I would not be surprised if it has similar conclusions to what Sejong University Professor Park Yu-ha wrote a few years ago about the comfort women issue:

“Park believes that Japan did not recruit comfort women in Korea, which was part of Japan from Tokyo’s perspective, in quite the same way that it did on the front lines and in occupied areas, such as in the Philippines. In those areas, records show that Japanese soldiers were directly involved in the forcible and violent taking away of comfort women. ‘Many of the Korean comfort women were apparently recruited while being cheated by agents of prostitution, some of whom were Koreans, or being sold by their parents,’ Park said. ‘While some have testified they were forcibly taken away by military personnel, I suppose that such cases, if there were any, were exceptional.’

She was of course arrested for writing such a book. The Korean public likes to think that all the comfort women were girls sleeping in bed and kidnapped by evil Japanese soldiers while the Japanese rightists like to think they were all willing prostitutes.  Both historical narratives are untrue if one really looks at the history.

What Professor Park writes about is the same historical narrative that Sarah Soh wrote about in her book “The Comfort Women“.  In the book Soh provides documented evidence that most of the Korean women put into the comfort women system were sold by Korean brokers.  The actual 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.  This does not absolve the Imperial Japanese from responsibility since they ran the comfort woman system that provided the demand for the Korean brokers to meet.  To make even worse is that many of these girls were teenagers when sold into prostitution.  I see no way that a young teenager should be considered a willing prostitute.  Especially when many girls were sold by their families into prostitution for money due to the extreme poverty.  This was actually a practice that was going on well into the US military era in South Korea.

It is pretty clear that the comfort women issue is not black and white, but ultimately the Imperial Japanese government was responsible for the actions of the Korean brokers that supplied the majority of the Korean girls that were underage.  There is no need to create a false narrative of what happened to the comfort women when the truth is bad enough.

Now Hyundai is saying they are not discussing a partnership with Apple:

Hyundai Motor Co. and affiliate Kia Corp. said Monday they are not in talks with Apple Inc. over an electric car manufacturing project in response to reports of their suspended discussions.

In separate regulatory filings, Hyundai and Kia, which together form the world’s fifth-biggest carmaker by sales, said they are “not in talks with Apple over developing an autonomous vehicle.” 

The carmakers said they are considering forming a partnership with foreign companies in regard to self-driving electric vehicles but no decision has been made yet.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.