Tag: Japan

More bad news for US Forces Japan.  The strangest thing to me about this story is how do you assault someone for 90 minutes on airplane?:

 A Navy lieutenant was arrested Friday following allegations that he groped and punched a female passenger aboard a Japan-bound flight, police and Navy officials said.

The lieutenant, 33, assigned to Naval Air Facility Atsugi, is suspected of touching the 19-year-old college student’s clothed thigh, then punching her in the head several times during a flight from San Diego to Narita International Airport, an airport police spokesman said.

Police allege the officer assaulted the woman for about 90 minutes aboard the Japan Airlines flight, beginning around 11 a.m. Thursday, according to police and media reports.

The woman changed seats after another passenger reported the incident to a flight attendant, police said.

The officer had been drinking on the flight, though how much he had consumed is unclear, the police spokesman said.

Police arrested the lieutenant and took him into custody shortly after midnight, following an investigation that began after the plane arrived Thursday afternoon.  [Stars & Stripes]

You can read the rest of this crazy story at the link.

Here we go again, hopefully the hotel has security cameras that caught exactly what happened in the hotel lobby:

(CNN)A U.S. serviceman has been arrested in the southern Japanese prefecture of Okinawa on suspicion of raping a Japanese tourist, local police have confirmed to CNN. The alleged attack took place in the serviceman’s hotel room in Naha, the prefectural capital.

The man, identified by Okinawan police as 24-year old Navy sailor Justin Castellanos, stationed at Camp Schwab in Okinawa, allegedly took the victim, a 40-year-old woman from the Japanese prefecture of Kyushu, to his room after finding her asleep, drunk, in the hotel’s lobby before raping her. [CNN]

You can read the rest at the link but it does bother me how the media names the accused sailor in the article before he even goes to trial. 

I have always thought that one of the things that may have motivated some of these World War II hold outs was the fear of being prosecuted for war crimes, not the idea of never surrendering.  There was a number of massacres that happened on Guam during the war that makes me wonder of Sergeant Yokoi had anything to do with?:

For some combat veterans, war lives on in memories of camaraderie, loss, pride and shame.

For a small group of Japanese soldiers who fought in World War II, the war literally did not end for decades.

Referred to as “stragglers” or “holdouts,” these men retreated to remote, mountainous jungles as Allied forces retook dozens of Pacific islands conquered by Japan.

Guam is tiny compared with some other Asian nations, but its small population that clustered mainly along the eastern coastline left much of the interior isolated even 25 years after war’s end in 1945.

Cpl. Shoichi Yokoi was among the last of the stragglers discovered in the Pacific, captured on the eastern side of Guam in 1972 when two local shrimpers were checking traps along the Ugum River abutting the cave he’d lived in for 28 years.

Photographs of Yokoi and other Guam stragglers — Pvt. Bunzo Minagawa and Sgt. Masashi Ito, both captured in 1960 — are on display at the Pacific War Museum in Guam.  [Stars & Stripes]

You can read the rest at the link.

People holding up South Korean flags, or “Taegeukgi,” reenact the March 1 Independence Movement in 1919 against Japanese colonial rule in Seoul on Feb. 26, 2016, four days ahead of a national holiday marking the uprising. (Yonhap)

The yearly Takeshima Day nonsense has concluded with nothing much of interest occurring.  I miss the good old days of the Great Dokdo War.  I can still remember the hard days when those of us in Korea had to stock up on food and supplies to survive the initial declaration of war from President Roh.  We made it through multiple cease fires, close calls, and even the failure of the Daemado campaign.  Times had been so desperate that even talk about recruiting North Korea to fight off the evil Japanese Imperialists was announced.  Though the casualties on the Korean side have been heavy at times, through it all the brave defenders of Dokdo have continued thwart the massive Japanese armada descending on Dokdo.  We were also treated back then to such Korean patriots like Flag Eater Man, Chung Dong-young, the Finger Chopping Lady, the Knife in the Gut Man, Weed Killer Man, the Dokdo Riders, and most importantly that great general of all things Dokdo, Bee-Man.  Now all we have is this:

South Korea condemned Japan’s dispatch of a senior government official Monday to a local event aimed at publicizing its claim to Dokdo, a pair of outcroppings in the East Sea.

In a statement, the Foreign Ministry stressed that Dokdo is South Korea’s territory historically, geographically, and under international law.

It called on Japan to immediately stop such a territorial provocation and “humbly face up to its history” of aggression and imperialism.

The ministry called in Hideo Suzuki, a minister at the Japanese Embassy in Seoul, to deliver a message of protest. Lee Sang-deok, director-general handling Northeast Asian affairs at the ministry, had a closed-door meeting with Suzuki.

Earlier in the day, the Shinzo Abe administration sent Yasuyuki Sakai, parliamentary vice minister of the Cabinet Office, to the controversial yearly event hosted by the Shimane Prefecture.

In 2005, the western prefecture, which claims administrative sovereignty over the islets, designated Feb. 22 as “Takeshima Day.” Takeshima is the Japanese name for Dokdo.  [Yonhap]

You can read more at the link.

With the completion of the comfort women agreement it would seem that moving forward at some point on the military intelligence sharing agreement would be the next area of cooperation that the ROK and Japan should focus on.  This is especially important considering the increasing security threats from North Korea:

South Korea said Monday that gaining the public’s support is a prerequisite for Seoul to review whether to seek a pact on sharing military intelligence with Japan.

Japan’s Kyodo News reported Sunday that South Korea and Japan seem to hold the view that conditions are ripe for deepening military cooperation, saying that Defense Minister Han Min-koo said Seoul is mulling reviewing whether to clinch a Seoul-Tokyo pact on sharing military intelligence.

In 2012, the two nations initialed such a pact to spur the exchange of information on North Korea. But Seoul suspended its signing due to strong opposition from civic groups, which claimed the deal was inked hastily and behind the scenes.

Seoul’s defense ministry dismissed the report, adding that Han’s remarks meant that various factors should be first taken into consideration.

“Support from the National Assembly and the general public should be prerequisites for the accord to be clinched,” the Defense Ministry said. [Korea Times]

Even if the US helped broker a deal between South Korea and Japan, so what?  It is in the US’s as well as Japan’s and the ROK’s national interests to work together when threats like the one posed by the Kim regime a real issue today:

North Korea claimed Monday that the United States pulled strings on a controversial deal between South Korea and Japan over Tokyo’s wartime sex slaves in a bid to strengthen its alliance with the two countries.

In December, Seoul and Tokyo reached a landmark deal to resolve the issue of Japan’s coercion of Korean women into sexual slavery during World War II. But some of surviving South Korean victims accused their government of failing to obtain Japan’s acknowledgment of legal responsibility and rashly reaching the deal without consulting them.

“The U.S. placated South Korea and Japan and forced them to sit in front of a negotiating table over the issue,” the Korean Central News Agency said. “The agreement was reached, masterminded by the White House which is seeking to use the two allies as storm troops for its control over Asia.”

The North’s claim came as the United Nations Security Council is working on a fresh resolution for stronger sanctions against North Korea over its nuclear test on Jan. 6.  [Yonhap]

You can read more at the link.

With Japan developing its own domestic stealth fighter, it makes me wonder how long it will be before the ROK feels they need to develop their own as well:

Japan on Thursday unveiled its first stealth fighter jet, officials said, with the maiden test flight planned for next month.

The defence ministry’s acquisition agency showed off the domestically developed, radar-dodging X-2 fighter at a regional airport near the central city of Komaki.

Its first flight is scheduled in mid-February before delivery to the defence ministry by the end of March next year, the acquisition agency said.

The X-2, developed by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, measures 14.2 metres (47 feet) long and 9.1 metres wide and was built as a successor to the F-2 fighter jets developed jointly with the United States.

Presently, only the United States, Russia and China have been internationally recognised as having successfully developed and flown manned stealth jets, the agency said.

Japan has reportedly spent about 39.4 billion yen ($332 million) to develop the aircraft.  [AFP]

You can read the rest at the link.

It seems like there is some bitterness in Japan over the backtracking in the ROK over the recent comfort women deal:

In this year’s policy speech, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe described South Korea as Japan’s “most important neighbor that shares our strategic interests.” Just like last year, though, he omitted “fundamental values” from this sentence.“At the end of last year, Japan and South Korea brought to an end a long-standing issue with our final and irreversible settlement on the issue of the comfort women,” Abe said during the speech, which he delivered to a joint session of the Diet, Japan’s parliament, on Jan. 22. “Since South Korea is our most important neighbor that shares our strategic interests, we will build a cooperative relationship for a new era in order to ensure peace and stability in East Asia.”  […………]

Abe’s decision to describe South Korea as a country that only shares “strategic interests” and not “fundamental values” appears to reflect unpleasant feelings that still remain even after the Dec. 28 settlement of the comfort women issue. In other words, Abe views South Korea not as a friend that shares values but as just a business partner that he must work with in regard to the issues of China’s rise and North Korea’s nuclear weapons and missile programs.  [Hankyoreh]

You can read the rest at the link.

Here is another sign of increased ROK and Japanese military cooperation which will hopefully continue to build trust between the two nations.  For those that don’t know DSP satellites have infrared sensors that can detect heat from missile launches or nuclear detonations:

South Korea plans to set up a new military network to share text and imagery information on North Korea’s nuclear and ballistic missiles with the United States and Japan this year, the Defense Ministry said Friday.

The military plans to install a Link16 data link, connecting its interface control cell with that of the United States Forces Korea, both in Osan, south of Seoul, showed the ministry’s 2016 policy plan reported to President Park Geun-hye earlier in the day.

The military tactical data exchange network will allow the allies to share text and imagery intelligence on North Korea’s nuclear and missile activities nearly on a real-time basis.

With the data link, South Korea will be able to gain access to U.S. information collected from its Defense Support Program reconnaissance satellite over the Korean Peninsula.

The move practically means South Korea will have the real-time military data link also with Japan, given the USFK’s Link16 connection with the Japanese military.

“Despite the U.S.-Japan linkage, information sharing will not take place without the agreement from each side and, even if it takes place, it will be confined to subjects on North Korea’s nuclear weapons and missiles,” a defense official said.  [Yonhap]

You can read more at the link.