Shisaku has a snarky roundup of Abe Shinzo’s recent visit to the United States. Here’s the blog’s response to Abe’s hinting that maybe “the past is the past.”

“The 20th century was a century that human rights were violated in many parts of the world. So we have to make the 21st century a century — a wonderful century in which no human rights are violated. And I, myself, and Japan wish to make significant contributions to that end. And so I explained these thoughts to the President.”

First–uh, Abe-san, we are already six years into the 21st century. Believe me, rights have been violated.

Second–are you out of your freaking mind? Just because the date on Gregorian calendars start with a 2, we have to kiss off thinking about what happened in the past? (For all you on Jewish, Chinese or Hejirah calendars, you are not in the 21st century. You are on your own as to whether to violate or not violate human rights)

The English version of the Asahi Shimbun article about the U.S. action against China in the WTO over intellectual property has a pretty obvious headline: “WTO complaints against China put Japan in a bind.” It addresses the fact that the U.S. government asked Japan to join the action (and they haven’t decided yet as far as I’ve seen), and how that’s kind of awkward when Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao is in Tokyo for a “thawing” visit.

But the final two paragraphs seem to make a point of sticking it to China more than the United States:

Honda Motor Co., for example, has won a suit against a Chinese company that made “Hongda” motorcycles. In the 10 years ending in January, Chinese authorities acted on about 2,000 cases of intellectual property rights violations involving Honda products and technology.

Meanwhile, Chinese vendors sell batteries labeled “Sqny” (not Sony Corp.) and pirated versions of Japanese anime DVDs.

Francis Fukuyama, the U.S.-born political scientist who made his name by declaring another discipline, history, to be so over in End of History and the Last Man, does not work much with Japanese issues, despite what some people assume based on his name.

But he learned something about establishment Japanese nationalism when he had The End of History translated into Japanese. His publisher chose Watanabe Shoichi [jp], an ally of Tokyo Governor Ishihara Shintaro, to be translator. Fukuyama describes his revelation:

In the course of a couple of encounters, I heard him explain in front of large public audiences how the people of Manchuria had tears in their eyes when the occupying Kwantung Army left China, so grateful were they to Japan. According to Watanabe, the Pacific War boiled down to race, as the US was determined to keep a non-white people down. Watanabe is thus the equivalent of a Holocaust denier, but, unlike his German counterparts, he easily draws large and sympathetic audiences.

Remind me to screen potential translators later in life for holocaust deniers! But in this column, Fukuyama’s greatest insight is this: “The legitimacy of the entire American military position in the Far East is built around the US exercising Japan’s sovereign function of self-defense.”

Fukuyama makes some pretty odd assumptions in the column, including that the United States government would prefer that Japan not revise Article 9, but this observation certainly seems to support that idea.

Japanese Foreign Minister Aso Taro is in rare form, even for his inflammatory self. Making a case for the potential for Japanese diplomacy in the Middle East, he asserted that skin color would be a major advantage:

“Japan is doing what Americans can’t do,” the Nikkei business daily quoted the gaffe-prone Aso as saying in a speech.

“Japanese are trusted. If (you have) blue eyes and blond hair, it’s probably no good,” he said.

“Luckily, we Japanese have yellow faces.”

Folks on the CNN website posting a Reuters story picked a photo of Aso looking particularly pugnacious, and to add insult to injury, they fought back by spelling his name wrong in the caption!

Photo in context after the jump.

(more…)

Surrounding Australian Prime Minister John Howard’s trip to Japan this weekend, Japanese PM Abe Shinzo “expressed an unfeigned apology to ‘comfort women.’” Or did was the headline that he “trie[d] damage control over WW2 sex slaves”?

If you ask the Chinese official news agency, which often serves as an outlet for the Chinese government’s scoldings of Japanese leaders for “inappropriate” statements on history, Abe really meant it. In a report offering almost no details, Xinhua writes:

TOKYO, March 11 (Xinhua) — Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Sunday expressed unfeigned apology to “comfort women” who were forced by Japan’s then military government into sex slavery during World War II.

In a TV program of NHK earlier in the day, Abe also reiterated that his government will not change the policy of honoring the Kono statement.

…

The prime minister’s remarks were a big conversion from what he said on Thursday, when he hinted a reinvestigation of the facts unearthed in 1993 by the previous official probe which gave birth to the Kono statement in the same year. …

In what I’ve come to know as the language of Xinhua stories, my hunch is this reflects a desire among the decision-makers in Chinese media to put the “comfort women” aside. Reuters, under the more skeptical headline quoted above, has some more detail:

On Sunday, Abe repeated that the 1993 apology remained in effect. “We have stated our heartfelt apologies to the ‘comfort women’ at the time who suffered greatly and were injured in their hearts,” Abe said in an interview with NHK television. “I want to say that that sentiment has not changed at all.”

The furore precedes a visit to Tokyo in mid-April by Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao and Abe’s trip to Washington later that month.

In a sign the Bush administration was growing concerned, U.S. Ambassador Thomas Schieffer last week advised Tokyo not to renege on the 1993 apology, known as the “Kono Statement” after the chief cabinet secretary in whose name it was issued.

“No friend of Japan would want Japan to back away from the Kono Statement,” Schieffer told Japanese reporters on Friday

The Reuters article quotes a Sofia University political science professor as saying that the U.S. headlines surrounding this story might have led the Abe team to worry about the opinions of the Japanese public. “When Asian governments criticise Japan, no one cares but when it’s reported in the New York Times, they have to react,” said the professor, Nakano Koichi. “They care about the American elite being upset.”

Let’s see what Rep. Honda has to say about this on the Hill Thursday.

I think it’s a little odd that the United States would be telling another country that they should set aside their differences with North Korea, given, you know, the Axis of Evil and the six-party nuclear talks. But that’s exactly what U.S. State Department spokesman Tom Casey did today:

“We recognize and have said that there are many tough issues and emotional issues in the Japanese and North Korean part of this,” Casey said of the multilateral negotiating process launched by the February 13 denuclearization agreement.

“We certainly appreciate those difficulties, but do want to see them meet and move forward and work on resolving them,” he said.

Just joining us? See this entry and this follow-up.

New developments:

• U.S. Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte would not comment on Abe’s specific words, but AP reports:
  

  “Our view is that what happened during the war was most deplorable,” he said when asked about the sex slave issue. “But … as far as some kind of resolution of this issue, this is something that must be dealt with between Japan and the countries that were affected.”

• Occidentalism posts two Korean newspaper ads from 1944 seeking 慰安婦, or “comfort women,” who were promised what amounts to a salary and a signing bonus. From the post:
  

  The newspaper ads suggest that, at least in Korea, the recruitment of “comfort women” was open, legitimate, and socially acceptable. They are also evidence that the women were well paid. For example, a commenter going by the name of “Void” wrote that the salary of a lieutenant in the Imperial Japanese Army was only 110 yen per month, which means that the women would have been receiving almost triple the salary of a Japanese army lieutenant.

  Even the Kono Statement acknowledged that some women were recruited in the open and some by force. The ads certainly don’t imply “legitimate and socially acceptable.” Just because you can buy something from a newspaper ad doesn’t mean society thinks it’s OK. Further, the newspaper may have been controlled by Japanese forces, and under imperial administration, it would be misleading to say open press reflected the norms of the people being dominated.

• Meanwhile, a Korean woman who has spoken out at the U.S. Congress about her experience as a sex slave reemphasized to reporters in broken Japanese her experience of abduction and brutal rape during enslavement. Hers is only one example of several that have surfaced in the day’s press reports. Here’s Lee Yong-soo, 78:
  

  “I cried ‘mother, mother,’ but they never stopped. They used electric shocks to torture me. They kicked me. They cut me,” she said tearfully in broken Japanese.

  “After I returned home after the war, I did not tell anyone about what happened to me,” she said.

  She said she has been staging protests for 16 years outside the Japanese embassy in Seoul to demand an apology.

  “Japan forcibly took me away. I am a living witness. I will tell my story wherever,” she said. “I demand the prime minister of Japan apologise.”

  I don’t have any independent information on this woman’s account, but what she describes sounds a lot like “coercion” to me.

In the politics of 20th century East Asian history, the Japanese wartime practice of using women as sex slaves under the putrid euphemism “comfort women” is comparable only to the Nanjing Massacre and the Yasukuni Shrine in its prominence. In 1993, Japan’s chief cabinet secretary, Kono Yohei, acknowledged that “comfort stations” had existed and that military and government officials directly engaged in “recruitment” of sex slaves.

The Kono Statement hardly apologized for the full horror of the practice, but now Japanese Prime Minister Abe Shinzo is nonetheless backing away from Kono’s half-measure acknowledgment. “The fact is, there is no evidence to prove there was coercion,” Abe said, according to AP. “We have to take it from there.”

This comes after Abe in October said his administration would “inherit” the Kono Statement, despite the fact that he had spoken out against it previously.

Meanwhile in the United States:

Several members of the U.S. House of Representatives have drafted a nonbinding resolution calling for Abe to “formally acknowledge, apologize and accept historical responsibility” for using “comfort women” during the war.

Supporters want an apology similar to the one the U.S. government gave to Japanese-Americans forced into internment camps during World War II.

More on this later.

A Nikkei Shimbun poll found that the Japanese public ranks China as Japan’s highest diplomatic priority, followed by the United States and South Korea.

Reuters reports that the leaders of the United States, Japan, and China will meet in Hanoi:

China, Japan and the United States will “exchange views on bilateral ties and international and regional issues of common concern” on the sidelines of an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting in Hanoi, the official Xinhua news agency reported in a brief dispatch.