Tag: Japan

For some people, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe could apologize and commit seppuku on top of Mt. Namsan and they still would not be happy.  It seems to me the outline of this deal to resolve the comfort women issues seems pretty fair:

The landmark agreement between South Korea and Japan to end their dispute over Japan’s wartime sexual enslavement of Korean women has already prompted questions about whether it really is the end.

The two countries’ top diplomats announced the terms of the deal in a press conference Monday, wrapping up 12 rounds of bilateral working-level talks that began in April 2014.

Key features of the agreement included a personal apology from Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe for his country’s wartime crime, the Japanese government’s admission of responsibility for it and a 1 billion yen contribution to a support fund for victims to be set up by the South Korean government.

While the deal satisfied some of Seoul’s key demands, critics and some victims immediately protested the lack of “legal responsibility” on the part of Japan.

Japanese Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida said the Japanese government “feels acutely responsible” for the damage it caused to the honor and dignity of many women, with the involvement of the Japanese military during World War II. He did not state whether it is “moral” or “legal” responsibility.  [Korea Herald]

You can read the rest at the link.

Tatsuya Kato, a Japanese journalist accused of defamation against the South Korean president, walks into the Seoul Central District Court on Dec. 17, 2015, for his sentencing trial. The court found him not guilty, saying that while his article was inappropriate, it falls under the freedom of the press. Kato, former Seoul bureau chief for Sankei Shimbun, was charged with defamation against President Park Geun-hye for his report in August suggesting that she was with her personal confidant when the passenger ferry Sewol sank on April 16, 2014. The whereabouts of the president at the time of the tragedy are one of the criticisms leveled against the government by the family members of the victims and civic groups. The prosecution had demanded a 18-month prison term for the Japanese reporter. (Yonhap)

News release: "attractive young lady" trilingual android to work @ #Tokyo tourist center. Your tax dollars at work. pic.twitter.com/Unf4k8JpAP

— Erik Slavin (@eslavin_stripes) December 11, 2015

It seems to me this diplomatic complaint is only going to feed the perception of this guy being a martyr for bombing the Yasukuni Shrine which will only encourage other people looking for attention to do the same thing:

The Foreign Ministry said Thursday it has lodged a strong complaint with Japan over Japanese media outlets’ reports that made public the identity of a South Korean man allegedly involved in a small explosion at a restroom at a war shrine in Tokyo.

“Through a diplomatic channel, the government filed a complaint with Tokyo earlier in the day over Japanese media’s coverage of the incident, as they revealed his identity, photo and name,” ministry spokesman Cho June-hyuck told reporters.

Japanese media reported that police arrested the 27-year-old man, identified only by his surname Chon, on Wednesday in connection with the explosion in a public restroom at the Yasukuni Shrine last month that caused no major damage.

He was arrested shortly after voluntarily returning to Tokyo by plane on Wednesday.  [Yonhap]

You can read the rest at the link.

If this guy did cause the explosion at the Yasukuni Shrine, maybe he voluntarily went back to Japan to be arrested to become some sort of martyr in the eyes of the Korean public?:

Police in Tokyo have arrested a South Korean man suspected of causing an explosion last month in a public restroom at a controversial shrine in Tokyo that honors Japanese war dead.

The 27-year-old Jeon Chang-han was arrested Wednesday after he returned to Tokyo from South Korea for voluntary questioning, police officials said.

No one was injured in the Nov. 23 explosion at the Yasukuni shrine. Police earlier said the suspect was identified from close-circuit TV and had left Japan after the blast.  [Stars & Stripes]

You can read the rest at the link.

It will be interesting to see if the ROK will turn over this suspect if the Japanese government requests his extradition:

A Korean suspect was caught on surveillance cameras before an explosion outside a public restroom at Tokyo’s Yasukuni Shrine on Nov. 23, Japanese media reported Thursday.

The shrine houses the remains of Japan’s war dead, including convicted World War II criminals.

Reports said the suspect was dressed in black and wore a backpack. He was spotted walking around the shrine around 30 minutes before the blast and then returned to his nearby hotel.

Police analyzed CCTV footage to trace the suspect’s movements.

The suspect left Japan and returned to Korea late last month, according to Japanese police. Debris from the blast, including pieces of a battery made in Korea. The suspect is in his 30s.  [Chosun Ilbo]

You can read the rest at the link.

It looks like the Chinese just wanted to send a reminder to the Japanese that they have the capability to reach and touch them if need be:

Japan scrambled jets after 11 Chinese military planes flew near southern Japanese islands during what Beijing said was a drill to improve its long-range combat abilities, reports said Saturday.

The planes — eight bombers, two intelligence gathering planes and one early-warning aircraft — flew near Miyako and Okinawa on Friday without violating Japan’s airspace, the Japanese defence ministry said in a statement released on Friday.

Some of them flew between the two islands while others made flights close to neighbouring islands, the ministry said.

A Chinese air force spokesman said several types of planes, including H-6K bombers, were involved in Friday’s drill over the western Pacific, China’s Xinhua news agency reported.

Shen Jinke said such open sea exercises had improved the force’s long-distance combat abilities, according to Xinhua.

While there were no further comments from the Japanese ministry, the Yomiuri Shimbun reported that it was “unusual” for China to dispatch such a large fleet close to Japan’s airspace and the ministry was analysing the purpose of the mission.  [Korea Herald]

You can read the rest at the link.

It has been pretty quiet on the whaling front for a while, but things could change as Japan announces that whaling will restart this year.  This news should make Animal Planet happy since they can have another season of Whale Wars:

Japan will resume “research” whaling in the Antarctic by the end of March next year, local media reported Saturday, despite a call by global regulators for more evidence that the expeditions have a scientific purpose.

The move came after a one-season suspension of its hunting in the ocean as the United Nations’ top legal body judged last year that Japan’s whaling there was a fig leaf for a commercial hunt.

Japan’s fisheries agency has since told the International Whaling Commission that it would resume whaling in the Antarctic Ocean by cutting annual minke whale catches by two-thirds to 333 this season.

But the IWC’s scientific committee said in June that Japan had failed to give enough detail to explain why it wanted to kill almost 4,000 minke whales in the Antarctic over the next 12 years.

Japan’s agency decided on Friday however to go ahead with the plan, claiming that it was scientifically adequate and no change was needed, Kyodo News said.

The Yomiuri Shimbun and other media said Japanese whalers were expected to depart for the ocean possibly by the end of December.  [Korea Herald]

You can read the rest at the link.

This will be a significant development in ROK and Japanese relations if this intelligence sharing agreement does become operationalized:

The United States has been implementing a trilateral military intelligence sharing agreement with South Korea and Japan, the Pentagon said Tuesday.

The memorandum of understanding, which was signed in December last year, calls for voluntary sharing of military secrets on North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs.

The agreement was put into action earlier this year, but questions have arisen after Assistant Secretary of Defense David Shear said earlier this month that the U.S. hopes to “operationalize” the agreement.

“We are implementing the arrangement,” Cmdr. Bill Urban, a U.S. Defense Department spokesman, said in response to a question from Yonhap News Agency. The official declined to provide further details, including how many times information sharing has taken place.  [Yonhap]

You can read the rest at the link.

I saw this posted over at the Marmot’s Hole about how a professor from Sejong University Park Yu-ha was charged without detention for writing her book “Comfort Women of the Empire”.  What crime did she commit writing this book?  The crime was defamation due to her attempting to accurately portray an unbiased history of the comfort women issue:

“she wrote the book in an attempt to re-portray them in light of the variety of testimonies provided by former comfort women.  She said their words opened her eyes to the sheer diversity of the circumstances and experiences of Korean comfort women, and to the bigger picture of ‘an empire and its colony.’

“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.’

But Park emphasized that Japan is not exempt from its responsibility for the comfort women, who were taken to ‘comfort stations’ against their will and experienced pain. That is because she sees the relationship of an empire and a colony in the backdrop of the Korean comfort women issue.  [Asahi Shimbun]

You can read the rest at the link, but 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 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.