The media has hit its latest low now blasting headlines about how President Trump disrespected his Japanese hosts and threaten to kill precious Japanese koi by dumping his box of fish food into the pond at Akasaka Palace:
It was a story that seemed to reinforce stereotypes of President Donald Trump: On a visit to Japan, he was handed a box of food for a ritual feeding of carp, and after doling out a few spoons’ worth, he got impatient and dumped the rest of the box all at once.
Initial reports of the food dump — like this early video from CNN — suggested that Trump acted on his own. This pushed the late-night Twitterverse and blogosphere into a tizzy. The website Jezebel posted a story headlined, “Big Stupid Baby Dumps Load Of Fish Food On Japanese Koi Pond.”
One problem: Trump didn’t just decide to dump his food on his own. Video shows he was following the lead of his host at the koi pond event, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. [Politifact]
You can read more at the link, but it is reports like this that just validate everything the Trump administration says about the media. So we can now add Koi-gate to the endless list of examples of fake news.
This is something that many people who don’t understand missile defense think until they realize the physics behind it:
U.S. President Donald Trump has said Japan should have shot down the North Korean missiles that flew over the country before landing in the Pacific Ocean earlier this year, diplomatic sources have said, despite the difficulties and potential ramifications of doing so.
The revelation came ahead of Trump’s arrival in Japan on Sunday at the start of his five-nation trip to Asia. Threats from North Korea’s nuclear weapons and missile development programs were set to be high on the agenda in his talks with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Monday.
Trump questioned Japan’s decision not to shoot down the missiles when he met or spoke by phone with leaders from Southeast Asian countries over recent months to discuss how to respond to the threats from North Korea, the sources said.
The U.S. president said he could not understand why a country of samurai warriors did not shoot down the missiles, the sources said. [Japan Times]
You can read more at the link, but the reason is quite simple why the missiles were not shot down. The missile were flying 770 kilometers above the country in outer space; this is higher than the international space station. The Japanese Aegis ships and Patriot interceptors cannot engage missiles flying that high. To shoot down the missiles the Aegis ship would have to be located out in the ocean where the missile was coming down at. There is no way the Japanese would could have known when and where North Korea was going to fire the missile at to have a ship sitting there waiting to shoot it down.
The real story here is why are diplomatic sources leaking this information to the news media? This is a natural question that many people wondered initially after North Korea fired the missile over Japan. I would hope by now someone has briefed President Trump on missile defense capabilities.
I wonder if this guy has been killing people for many years or if this killing spree over the past two months is the first time he has killed anyone? Fortunately this guy is now off the streets:
Police arrested a 27-year-old man in Zama, Kanagawa Prefecture, on Tuesday after finding parts of nine bodies in his apartment, investigative sources said Tuesday.
The Metropolitan Police Department made the discovery while investigating Takahiro Shiraishi in connection with the disappearance of a 23-year-old woman from Hachioji, Tokyo. The woman is believed to have met the man after writing on a suicide website that she wanted to kill herself.
“It’s true that I tried to hide the bodies of the people I killed to destroy evidence,” Shiraishi was quoted as saying by the police.
According to investigative sources, Shiraishi has also told police that he killed all nine victims since he moved into the apartment in late August. He also told police that he took money from his victims and that the theft was one of his motives.
A saw, believed to have been used to dismember the bodies, was also found in the apartment. According to the police, Shiraishi said he cut up the bodies in the bath, disposing of some body parts in the garbage.
The apartment is located near the U.S. Army’s Camp Zama. [Japan Times]
It seems the US President has received a very warm welcome in Japan:
U.S. President Donald Trump (L) meets Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe at Kasumigaseki Country Club to play golf in Saitama Prefecture on Nov. 5, 2017. Trump came to Japan for the first time as a President, and will stay in Japan until Nov. 7th.
Landing in Japan on the first stop of his marathon five-nation tour of Asia, U.S. President Donald Trump on Sunday called the nation a “treasured partner” and “crucial ally” of the United States while asserting that “no dictator” and “no regime” should ever underestimate America — a not-so-veiled rebuke of nuclear-armed North Korea.
After paying a solemn visit to Pearl Harbor and the USS Arizona Memorial in Hawaii on Friday, Trump on Sunday marked the start of his trip to Asia by disembarking from Air Force One at the U.S. Air Force’s Yokota Air Base in western Tokyo. Cheers erupted as he appeared on stage with his wife, first lady Melania Trump, prompting thousands of U.S. military personnel there to welcome the pair with enthusiastic chants of “USA! USA! USA!”
“Japan is a treasured partner and crucial ally of the Unites States,” Trump told a packed aircraft hangar after changing into a bomber jacket. “Today we thank them for decades of wonderful friendship between our two nations.”
It was the first visit by Trump to Japan since his astonishing rise to the presidency last year. The trip will give him and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe — touted as one of his best friends among world leaders — a chance to reaffirm their shared strategy of piling “maximum pressure” on the North while also demonstrating anew the strength of the two nations’ alliance.
After delivering his speech, Trump flew to Kasumigaseki Country Club in Saitama Prefecture for two hours of golf diplomacy with Abe — an informal setting that also involved 25-year-old professional golfer Hideki Matsuyama.
Before hitting the links, Abe presented Trump and Matsuyama with white baseball caps, each embroidered with the message “Donald & Shinzo Make Alliance Even Greater.” [Japan Times]
You can read more at the link, but President Trump gave a nice speech to US troops at Yokota Airbase as well.
It appears that the Japanese public supports Prime Minister Abe’s attempts to strengthen the defense force, modify the pacifist constitution, and take a hard-line with North Korea based on the recent election results:
Japan’s ruling coalition appeared headed to an impressive win in national elections on Sunday, in what would represent at least a partial comeback for Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.
A victory would boost Abe’s chances of winning another three-year term next September as leader of the Liberal Democratic Party. That could extend his premiership to 2021, giving him more time to try to win a reluctant public over to his longtime goal of revising Japan’s pacifist constitution.
In the immediate term, a victory likely means a continuation of the policies Abe has pursued in the nearly five years since he took office in December 2012 — a hard line on North Korea, close ties with Washington, including defense, as well as a super-loose monetary policy and push for nuclear energy. [Stars and Stripes]
You can read more at the link, but it looks like the “bromance” that President Trump and Prime Minister Abe have will continue.
This guy should have known better than to make these type of comments in South Korea:
Sunchon National University
Sunchon National University has dismissed one of its professors for making derogatory comments about Korean women who were forced into sexual slavery for the Japanese military during World War II.
Six out of seven members of the university’s disciplinary committee in the city of Sunchon, South Jeolla Province, chose the severest level of punishment for the professor, whose name is withheld, on Wednesday.He was charged with failing to fulfill his duty faithfully and failing to preserve his vocational dignity.
University President Park Jin-sung apologized for “those hurt by the blasphemous comments made by our school professor, especially the women who had gone through the ordeal in Japan.”
He said the school suspended the professor after the incident was reported in April and formed a task force to investigate the matter.
The professor, 56, from the university’s teachers’ college, made the comments during a lecture.He said many of the women, also known as “comfort women,” “probably knew that they were going to sexually serve the Japanese soldiers and thus voluntarily left for Japan.” He also said all the women were “crazy about Japan and would not have gone there if it weren’t for their (sexual) passion.” [Korea Times]
You can read the rest at the link, but he is not the first academic fired for making comments against the comfort women dogma. Professor Park Yu-ha at Sejong University was arrested for defamation for writing a book that takes a balanced look at the comfort women issue. She was fortunately found innocent.
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 wrote about is the same historical narrative that American Sarah Soh wrote about in her book “The Comfort Women: Sexual Violence and Postcolonial Memory in Korea and Japan“. 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 has more nuance to it then each side is willing to admit. Ultimately the Imperial Japanese government was responsible for the actions of the Korean brokers that supplied the majority of the Korean girls. The Imperial Japanese had to have known how young the girls were and the unethical and deceptive actions the Korean brokers were taking to make them available to the Japanese military. There is no need to rewrite the history of what happened to the comfort women when the truth is bad enough.
