Tag: Japan

Like other places in the world there has been a spring time surge in the coronavirus in Japan that has effected the US military troops as well:

U.S. bases in Japan reported another 26 people had contracted the coronavirus between April 7 and 6 p.m. Tuesday.

The Marine Corps announced 16 new cases on Okinawa and one at Marine Corps Air Station Iwakuni near Hiroshima. Kadena Air Base reported another eight patients between April 7 and Monday. Yokota Air Base in western Tokyo said one person tested positive sometime between Saturday and Tuesday.

Stars & Stripes

You can read more at the link.

By not having their athletes at the Olympics this will more easily allow the North Koreans to make trouble this summer. What better time to start a provocation cycle that will get the world’s attention on you than the Olympics:

North Korea said Tuesday it will not participate in the upcoming Tokyo Summer Olympics to protect its athletes against the coronavirus pandemic, dashing South Korea’s hopes to use the games to kickstart the stalled peace process with Pyongyang.

The decision was made during a general assembly meeting of the North’s Olympic Committee held in Pyongyang on March 25, according to Sports in the DPRK Korea, a website on sports affairs in North Korea.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link, but will the U.S., ROK, and Japan cut a deal to end a provocation cycle before the Olympics just to get the Kim regime to behave? I guess we will see what happens.

Here is an issue that women in Japan are looking to see addressed:

Mari Inoue is a 34-year-old English professor in Tokyo. She got engaged to her boyfriend Kotaro Usui three years ago. A wedding, they say, is out of the question.

It’s not the pandemic that is preventing them, but an archaic Japanese law that requires married couples to adopt the same surname. (…..)

Japan is among only a few advanced economies to stop couples holding separate surnames after marriage – through a law that explicitly discriminates against women, according to a UN committee.

BBC

You can read more at the link, but lawsuits have failed to change the law because the judges think this is something that should be addressed through legislation. Will women care enough to make this a major election issue? I guess we will find out in the coming months and years.

The Japanese have responded to the Chinese escalation over the Senkakus:

Japan on Friday matched a move by rival China and will permit its coast guard to fire on foreign vessels attempting to land on the Senkakus, two square miles of uninhabited islands in the East China Sea.

The two countries’ coast guards regularly face off around the chain as Chinese vessels arrive to shadow or intimidate Japanese fishing vessels and Japan’s coast guard arrives to drive them away. Japan controls the islands, although Taiwan and China, which calls them Diaoyu Dao, also make claims.

Stars & Stripes

You can read more at the link.

Another servicemember going to jail for a sex crime related offense:

An airman stationed at Kadena Air Base on Okinawa pleaded guilty and another is scheduled for a court-martial on charges of making and distributing indecent recordings without the subject’s consent.

Senior Airman Dante Torello of the 353rd Special Operations Group pleaded guilty Feb. 3 to videoing his victim’s genitalia without consent and distributing the recording, according to the court docket. A photo of Torello released in June 2019 by Kadena’s 18th Wing described him as a loadmaster for the group’s 1st Special Operations Squadron.

Stars & Stripes

You can read more at the link, but there is another airman awaiting trial who was the person giving oral sex without consent that Torello was videotaping.

This is a pretty strange disappearance case over at Yokota Airbase:

Britni, 31, said she’s posted dozens of fliers with her missing husband’s photograph around Yokota and in nearby areas and appealed, in her Facebook post, for help hanging more. A Facebook group about the search for Trevor has also been created.

Air Force investigators have removed Trevor’s possessions, including his laptops, from the couple’s home, which they share with two cats and a corgi, Britni told Stars and Stripes Sunday while walking through Yokota’s east side housing area. (……..)

That evening, Trevor told his wife he was going out at around 8 p.m. to search for a neighbor’s lost cat, which he’d earlier spotted near the base movie theater.

Gate guards report Trevor coming onto the base through its east gate at 9:09 p.m. while carrying a bag from a convenience store and talking on his cellphone, Britni said.

“We have been unable to track who he was talking to – it is nobody in our joint network, which really is the only network that I knew he had,” she said.

Britni said she last saw Trevor when he returned home at 1:30 a.m. Feb. 1 without his jacket.

The couple slept in separate bedrooms and Britni, who went to work the next morning, didn’t realize her husband was missing until she finished work and saw a message from somebody who had found his wallet near a vacant townhome on base, Britni said.

Stars & Stripes

You can read the rest at the link, but his jacket, shoes, mask, cellphone, keys and empty cans of alcohol were later found as well on base not far from the wallet. It appears he has a secret cellphone that he was talking to someone on and went out late at night to supposedly look for a cat, but doesn’t come back until 1:30 AM. It seems reasonable to conclude he was out meeting someone that night. Finding out who he met could determine where he went. Hopefully he turns up safe.

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.

The Chinese are already using their new Coast Guard law to pressure the Japanese over the Senkaku Islets:

Chinese government vessels entered Japanese territorial waters near the flash point Senkaku Islands on Saturday — the first time since China passed a new law earlier this month that allows its coast guard to use military force in waters the country claims — including those around the Senkakus.

Two China Coast Guard vessels, including one from its second-largest class of ships, entered the waters around the Japanese-administered Senkakus, which Beijing claims and calls the Diaoyu, around 4:45 a.m. on Saturday, approaching two Japanese fishing boats operating in the area, the Japan Coast Guard said in a statement.

The Japan Coast Guard said it had sent vessels to the area to protect the fishing ships while repeatedly urging the Chinese ships to leave the area. Two other Chinese government ships, including one sporting a cannon-like weapon, were spotted in the so-called contiguous zone just outside the territorial waters, it added.

Stars & Stripes

You can read more at the link.

Some good news on the coronavirus front in Japan:

The daily count of new coronavirus patients in Tokyo fell on Friday, and U.S. military bases in Japan reported 12 new cases as of 6 p.m.

Yokosuka Naval Base, 35 miles south of central Tokyo, reported 10 of those new U.S. cases. The others were at Yokota Air Base in western Tokyo.

The Tokyo Metropolitan Government recorded another 577 people infected with the coronavirus, according to public broadcaster NHK. That’s eight consecutive days below 1,000 new cases in the city, according to metro government data. (…….)

Back in Japan, the Army and Marine Corps on Okinawa lifted a two-week-old ban on off-base liberty, effective immediately for the Army and at 4 p.m. Saturday for the Marines, according to Facebook posts.

The bans extended to service members, Defense Department civilian employees, contractors and family members.

Some activities are still prohibited, including indoor dining at off-base restaurants, and patronizing bars, clubs, bowling alleys, gyms and other indoor activities that involve large groups “that impede social distancing.”

Stars & Stripes

You can read more at the link.

It will be interesting to see what Japan decides to do with the Olympic Games, but I wonder if an NBA like “bubble” for the athletes would be doable in Japan:

 Japan’s government has privately concluded the Tokyo Olympics will have to be cancelled because of the coronavirus pandemic, The Times reported, citing an unnamed senior member of the ruling coalition.

The government’s focus is now on securing the Games for Tokyo in the next available year, 2032, the newspaper said. Japan has been hit less severely by the pandemic than many other advanced economies, but a recent surge in cases has spurred it to close its borders to non-resident foreigners and declare a state of emergency in Tokyo and major cities.

About 80 percent of people in Japan do not want the Games to be held this summer, recent opinion polls show, over fears the influx of athletes will spread the virus further.

Korea Herald

You can read more at the link.