By Signing a military treaty with Japan John Howard shows he cares nothing about Japan's collective Amnesia about its crimes during WW2

JAPANESE IMPERIAL ARMY "COMFORT WOMEN" BEING LOADED INTO A TRUCK

Japan's amnesia

Published: March 6, 2007 IHT

Source: http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/03/06/opinion/edjapan.php

What part of "Japanese army sex slaves" does Japan's prime minister, Shinzo Abe, have so much trouble understanding and apologizing for?

The underlying facts have long been beyond serious dispute. During World War II, Japan's army set up sites where women rounded up from Japanese colonies like Korea were expected to deliver sexual services to Japanese soldiers.

These were not commercial brothels. Force, explicit and implicit, was used in recruiting these women. What went on in them was serial rape, not prostitution. The Japanese army's involvement is documented in the government's own defense files. A senior Tokyo official more or less apologized for this horrific crime in 1993. The unofficial fund set up to compensate victims is set to close down this month.

Abe wants the issue to end there. Last week, he claimed that there was no evidence that the victims had been coerced. On Monday, he grudgingly acknowledged the 1993 quasi apology, but only as part of a pre-emptive declaration that his government would reject the call, now pending in the U.S. Congress, for an official apology. America isn't the only country interested in seeing Japan belatedly accept full responsibility. Korea and China are also infuriated by years of Japanese equivocations over the issue.

Abe seems less concerned with repairing Japan's sullied international reputation than with appealing to a large right-wing faction within his Liberal Democratic Party that insists that the whole shameful episode was a case of healthy private enterprise. One ruling party lawmaker, in his misplaced zeal to exculpate the army, even suggested the offensive analogy of a college that outsourced its cafeteria to a private firm.

Japan is only dishonored by such efforts to contort the truth. The 1993 statement needs to be expanded upon, not whittled down.

Parliament should issue a frank apology and provide generous official compensation to the surviving victims. It is time for Japan's politicians — starting with Abe — to recognize that the first step toward overcoming a shameful past is acknowledging it

Ex-soldier fights to make Japan remember its past

By Colin Joyce in Tokyo
BST 07/06/2006

Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/06/07/wjapan07.xml&sSheet=/news/2006/06/07/ixnews.html

Japan's amnesia over its militarist past is being challenged by a compelling documentary film which suggests that the Japanese army breached the terms of surrender in 1945 by leaving soldiers to fight on in China.

The Ants, to be released next month, records the struggle of the Japanese veteran Waichi Okumura to put atrocities on record and to tell the story of the forgotten soldiers left behind in China. Now 81, Mr Okumura revisited Shanxi province where he fought, including a pilgrimage to the place where he and other recruits were "toughened up" by being made to kill Chinese prisoners with bayonets.

Waichi Okumura, 81, tells of Japanese atrocities in China

The story is remarkable because most Japanese veterans play down atrocities and romanticise the war whereas Mr Okumura asks openly: "What the hell were we fighting for?"

Veterans who speak out have typically been ostracised by their comrades but Mr Okumura is supported by a dwindling group of fellow soldiers. The documentary covers their long and unsuccessful legal battle against the Tokyo government to show that 2,600 Japanese troops were made to fight alongside the Chinese nationalist warlord Yan Xishan until 1948, in clear breach of Japan's unconditional surrender.

The Japanese government says that the men volunteered to join the Chinese nationalists, leaving their units without permission. But the men say that officers had quotas of volunteers to fill from each unit and that being told to volunteer by an officer was the same as an order to a Japanese soldier.

They say their mission was to maintain a Japanese military presence so that one day Japan could resume its territorial ambitions on the mainland. Mr Okumura, who was held in China until 1954, said that 550 of the men were killed and he was among more than 700 captured by communist troops.

Testimony from survivors of both sides supports the case that there was a secret deal between Yan and Japan's Gen Raishiro Sumida. Records show that the men continued to be bound by Japanese army regulations, suggesting that they fought as soldiers of Japan, not volunteers in a Chinese army.

Japanese society is famed for its avoidance of confrontation. Mr Okumura takes the opposite approach. He asks a Chinese victim of brutal gang rape by Japanese soldiers to retell her ordeal for the camera and recalls how he had kept lookout while fellow soldiers committed rape. At Tokyo's controversial Yasukuni Shrine, where Japan's war dead are commemorated, Mr Okumura embarrasses young people by asking them why they don't know their history and why they are worshipping dead soldiers.

A crowd of unreformed nationalists at the shrine cheers a speech by one of their heroes, the soldier Hiroo Onoda, who hid in the Philippine jungles for 31 years unaware that Japan had lost. Mr Okumura confronts him by asking "Are you glorifying our war of aggression?" In perhaps the most shocking scene in the film, Mr Okumura shows his friend Den Kanekoc written testimony he found in China that records how he killed an innocent Chinese peasant by bludgeoning his head with a rock.

Mr Kaneko, a tiny man who cares for his paralysed wife at home, admits it must have happened but does not remember the incident. "It's strange that I don't remember but killing people happened every day back then. It was nothing to me. I really was a demon," he says.