STRONG OPPOSITION TO THE AUSTRALIA JAPAN SECURITY TREATY - SHAME ON YOU JOHN HOWARD

Australian Policy towards Japan changes with election of Rudd Government

2008-01-05T16:41:00.000-08:00

Australian Policy towards Japan changes with election of Rudd Labor Government

In March 2007, John Howard signed an unprecedented bilateral security agreement with Japan. Howard stupidly being drawn into the treaty by pressure from the ultra right wing hawke US Vice President Dick Cheney’s (the real President!)longterm scheme of tieing together a US-Japan-Australia-India virtual alliance aimed at containing China.

The wisdom of the security agreement with Japan however is very questionable given the underlying hatred of the U.S (and by inference our country) by much of their elite and the lingering dream of neo-militarists in the governing LDP of reconstructing their despised 'Greater Co-prosperity sphere' once more.

Sanity luckily after a lost decade is once again seemigly prevailing in Canberra and the new PM Rudd has let it be known that whilst he supports military ties with Japan, he considered the defence pact was a bridge too far.

In a speech to the Global Foundation in Melbourne on 8 March last year he said that the treaty “may unnecessarily tie our security interests to the vicissitudes of an unknown security policy future in North East Asia”.

Translated - Australia enjoys the advantages of distance from North Asia and it need not buy directly into security problems with bilateral agreements with either China or Japan.

Whilst Rudd will not likley formally abrogate the agreement that Howard signed, as no doubt such an action would cause great loss of face to the 'master race' his government does not own this treasonable treaty and hopefully he will allow it to sink into obscurity.

Mr Howard just why are we signing a military pact with Japan when it has never faced its cruel past and repented its Militarism ??
2007-04-07T00:17:00.000-07:00
Mr Howard just why are we signing a military pact with Japan when it has never faced its cruel past and repented its Militarism ??

At the tomb of the unknown apology
Illustration: Spooner April 12, 2005 Fairfax

Japan unlike Germany has never faced up to its War Crimes and to this day many in the Japanese elite (like the current Prime Minister Abe) are trying to rewrite history.

We call on all Australians to protest our Governments decision at signing a military pact with Japan.

We call on the Prime Minister to reconsider his closeness to those who promote Japanese Militarism in the LDP Government such as current PM Shinzo Abe.

Further he should realise that with his electorate having a large elderly population and the biggest Korean community in Australia that his inability to understand the unacceptability of this disgraceful act of promoting a military pact with Japan that many would consider "akin to treason" may well cost him his own seat at the coming election.

Given John Howards support for a Security Pact with Japan and his close ties to the regime of racial supreamist Shinzo Abe and the other neo-militarists of the LDP can he hold his seat of Bennalong? It has a large Korean Australian and Chinese Australian component along with many other older Australians whom are very angry about Abe's refusal to acknowledge Japan's war guilt.

Electorate of Bennalong

For other articles -

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/09/24/1095961857148.html?from=storylhs

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,21286273-2,00.html

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,21286619-601,00.html

http://www.theage.com.au/news/National/Future-of-NSW-federal-MPs-on-the-line/2006/06/29/1151174324039.html

Shobun - A Forgotten War Crime in the Pacific

2007-04-06T23:51:00.000-07:00

BOOK REVIEW

SHOBIN - A Forgotten War Crime in the Pacific

by Michael J. Goodwin

When nations clash in war, more than armies are involved. Cultures become antagonists as well, and there are occasions when the differences are so great that what one group comes to regard as commonplace another may regard as a heinous crime.

So it was in World War II, especially in the Pacific theater. For centuries Japanese culture had seen death in battle as glorious and surrender as a dishonoring disgrace. Those who yielded rather than die lost not only face and honor, but even their right to life itself. At the same time, that culture taught that all others were barbarians, entitled neither to respect nor to what Western culture would consider humanitarian treatment.

In wartime those unique cultural values combined to produce tragedy. Though fewer than one- tenth of all Allied prisoners of war in Germany perished in captivity, fully a third of those taken by the Japanese died in their prison camps, victims of climate, inadequate nourishment, routine neglect, and even brutal mistreatment.

Worse yet was the fate of a few, chiefly air- men, who fell into Japanese hands in the later years of the war. Their story is the story of

Shobun: A Forgotten War Crime in the Pacific. Through years of difficult research both here and abroad, Michael J. Goodwin has pieced together the harrowing tale of one patrol plane's crew after the crash landing of their PBY Catalina and their subsequent capture. It is a story of the clash of

cultures, of bureaucratic neglect and inefficiency, of the code of bushido, of willful flouting of the rules of war, of brutality, and of terrifying tragedy-all wrapped in the shifting definitions of the Japanese word "shobun."

And Shobun is something more. Underlying the book is the story of a son's search for the father he never met, of the attempt to recover from the bland pages of official documents and the harsh, hot landscape of the Southwest Pacific a sense of a man's life, and somehow, to make some sense out of his brutal death. Further, it is a search for truth and justice for all those unfortunate Allied airmen who became victims to a hazard of war that none expected, and who fell to the most deadly enemies of all: prejudice, incompetence, and the darkest side of human nature.

150 pp - hardback - Published 1995

Order Information see: http://www.warbooks.com.au/orderformnew.htm

Source: http://www.warbooks.com.au/IndividualBooks/shobun.html

Truth: last casualty of Japan's war

2007-04-06T23:34:00.000-07:00

Abe ignores evidence, say Australia's 'comfort women'

Stephen Moynihan
March 3, 2007 TheAge

THE association representing "comfort women" living in Australia has launched an attack on Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

Co-ordinator Anna Song told The Age that Mr Abe's comments were surprising.
"Mr Abe is not only denying his own government's previous statements, but also ignoring the evidence researched by UN bodies and international human rights organisations such as Amnesty International," she said.

Last month Australian Jan O'Herne travelled to Washington to tell her story before a US Congressional hearing.

In 1944, when Mrs O'Herne was 21 and interned in Java with her family, she and nine other young women were taken to a house used as a brothel by the Japanese military. For the next three months, they were raped repeatedly.

Next week, Friends of Comfort Women in Australia will rally at the Japanese consulate in Sydney. Mrs O'Herne and two other women will tell their stories.

"If the Prime Minister and the members of his Government have yet to hear the evidence, we sincerely invite them to listen to the testimonials of three comfort women survivors from Australia, Taiwan and Korea," Ms Song said.

"We believe the Japanese Government is capable of seeing the facts in its history and, as a result, providing a sincere and official apology to the survivors.

Source: http://www.theage.com.au/news/world/abe-ignores-evidence-say-australias-comfort-women/2007/03/02/1172338881441.html

Jan Ruff-O'Herne

The Forgotten Ones

"It's something that you'd love to tell, to scream about. But you could never talk about it because the shame was too great. It's something that nobody can imagine, to live with this for fifty years. Something so terrible. It is unspeakable."

Don't sign treaty unless war crimes admitted, PM told

Penelope Debelle
March 14, 2007 The Age

A WOMEN'S support group has warned Prime Minister John Howard against signing a military treaty with Japan because of its failure to admit war crimes.

"We are concerned that Australia's actions today are another step towards the international community allowing Japan to remilitarise while they still refuse to acknowledge some of the wartime atrocities committed by the Japanese military in World War II against women," Friends of Comfort Women in Australia spokeswoman Anna Song said.

The group is concerned that the history taught in Japan's schools and museums is almost entirely restricted to the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

It makes no mention of the conduct of Japanese captors at prisoner-of-war camps, the enforced sexual slavery of women prisoners, such as Adelaide woman Jan Ruff O'Herne, and other atrocities including the use of forced labour on the Burma railway.

"It is not at all about Japan being a former enemy, it's not that kind of dynamic at all," Ms Song said. "It is about having a state which is a member of the UN Human Rights Council but which has not acknowledged or taken full responsibility for its war crimes."

She said Mr Howard's enthusiasm for a new security pact was endorsing Japan's failure to face its history.

"The partner of that treaty is a state that refuses to recognise its own human rights violations and war crimes. In that sense, it is a great step backwards," she said.

"In their war museums and history books, the rhetoric is geared towards making Japan the victim of Hiroshima and the nuclear bombs that were dropped to stop the war."
Ms Song, a Melbourne-based former Amnesty International activist, is a co-founder of Friends of Comfort Women.

The group is the Australian link to a network of organisations seeking justice for between 100,000 and 200,000 women forced into wartime sexual slavery by the Japanese.

While most comfort women were from Korea, Taiwan and China, Ms O'Herne was taken from a prison camp in Indonesia in 1944 and sent to a Japanese military brothel where she was repeatedly raped.

AN ADELAIDE woman forced into sexual slavery by Japanese forces during World War II is disappointed and saddened that her story has been denied.

Jan Ruff O'Herne, 84, said she was one of the thousands of women interned in brothels as prostitutes, known as "comfort women", for Japanese soldiers during the war.

Last month, she testified at a U.S. House of Representatives hearing in Washington that she had been raped "day and night" for three months by soldiers.

Yesterday, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe told Parliament in Tokyo that there was no evidence the military coerced women in the strict sense - such as kidnapping -into serving in the brothels.

Mr Abe said none of the testimony in the U.S. hearings offered any solid proof of abuse, and his government would not apologise even if the U.S. demanded it.

Ms O'Herne accused the Japanese Government of failing to take responsibility for their crimes. She said the Japanese did not want to pay compensation to victims and rewrite history.

"I am terribly disappointed that they are trying to deny it all - it is unbelievable," she said.

"I always had hope and trust in the honour of the Japanese Government to own up to what they did and teach the next generation. But now they deny it."

Ms O'Herne, a Netherlands-born Australian, said she was 19 when she was seized from a prisoner of war camp in Indonesia and forced into a brothel to become a prostitute.

She said many high-ranking Japanese military officers had admitted to her that they had used the military brothels during the war.

"Everyone knows that it happened - but they are denying it," Ms O'Herne said. "I find it a little difficult to understand."

Ms O'Herne, from Adelaide, said she was "raped day and night" by Japanese soldiers for three months during the war.

She has been campaigning for justice for herself and other comfort women for 15 years, after keeping silent about her experiences for 50 years.

Ms O'Herne said a formal apology would help the healing process to begin.

"An apology will give us back our dignity," she said.

"You can't imagine the shame that we have lived with.

"After you've experienced those things, those atrocities, you feel dirty, you feel ashamed, you feel soiled, and we carry that shame all our life."

The Netherlands-born Australian, who was captured by the Japanese in 1942 and spent three and a half years in prisoner of war camps, said she hoped the Congressional hearing would put pressure on Japan to finally act on the matter.

"After 60 years a lot of us are already dead," she said.

"I'm 84 and it's about time that we want Japan to acknowledge their wartime atrocity."

Japan won't expand on sex slaves apology

March 7, 2007 SMH

Japan, under fire for appearing to sidestep responsibility for forcing women to act as wartime sex slaves for its soldiers, says the government stands by a 1993 apology acknowledging coercion.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe stirred anger around the world with remarks last week appearing to question the nation's role in forcing women to act as prostitutes during World War II, although he also said the earlier apology stood.

The apology, known as the "Kono Statement" after then-chief cabinet secretary Yohei Kono, in whose name it was issued, acknowledged the Japanese military's role in setting up and running wartime brothels as well as the fact that many of the women were taken to and kept in the brothels against their will.

"The government stands by the Kono Statement, including its recognition of coercion," Chief Cabinet Secretary Yasuhisa Shiozaki told a news conference on Wednesday. "Recent comments by the prime minister show this stance will not change."

Abe touched off additional protests when he told parliament on Monday that Japan would not apologise again over the sex slave issue even if US politicians adopt a resolution calling for an apology.

The non-binding resolution introduced by US Congressman Michael Honda, a California Democrat, calls on Japan to unambiguously apologise for the tragedy that thousands of women, many Korean, endured at the hands of its Imperial Army.

An Australian woman forced into sexual slavery by Japanese forces said on Monday she was disappointed and saddened that her story of abuse had been denied.

Eighty-four-year-old Jan Ruff O'Herne said she was one of the thousands of women interned in brothels as sex slaves for Japanese soldiers during the war.

The Adelaide woman testified last month at a US House of Representatives hearing in Washington that she had been raped "day and night" for three months by soldiers when she was just 19.

On Wednesday about 30 women gathered in Sydney to protest, waving red paper butterflies with the words "Break the silence. Bring justice to comfort women."

Elderly South Korean women who served as "comfort women" - Japan's euphemism for wartime sex slaves - also protested in front of the Japanese embassy in Seoul, while in Tokyo members of a women's group gathered near parliament to lambast Abe's remarks and show solidarity with the victims.

South Korea had expressed outrage over Abe's remarks and Chinese Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing urged Japan to confront its past on the topic and accept responsibility while Taiwan called on Japan to apologise and compensate the women.

US Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte, visiting Seoul on Tuesday, noted that Japan had apologised in the past.

But an editorial in the New York Times blasted Tokyo for what it termed "efforts to contort the truth" - an attack that was featured on Japanese news programs.

Shiozaki sought to allay concern that Abe's refusal to apologise again contradicted the spirit of the 1993 statement.

"Parts of the resolution are not based on objective fact, and it does not include what the government has done up to now, so that's why the prime minister has said Japan will not apologise again - a view that does not contradict the statement at all," he said, adding that the intensifying debate was not constructive.

"The longer this discussion goes on, the more misunderstandings there are likely to be," Shiozaki said.

Source: http://www.smh.com.au/news/World/Japan-wont-expand-on-sex-slaves-apology/2007/03/07/1173166791725.html

Japan's Amnesia Re: Comfort Women

2007-04-06T22:40:00.000-07:00

An essay on the violations of korean women During WW2: By Michael Green

Overview

So far we have learned about the daily work habits of Korean women, traditional values, and the current lives and traditions that these women hold. However, Korean women have gone through several harsh decades in gaining back their freedom of the tyranny of the Japanese government from events that occurred during World War II. During this time these women were known as "comfort women." The following essay is designed to give a brief overview of the history, women, and current issues surrounding the comfort women debate.

History

During World War II, Korea was occupied by Japan. During these war ridden times, the Japanese military commanded that Korean women would be used for the “entertainment” of the Japanese military. The women were not only forced be slaves for the men, but were also forced to perform deviant sexual acts, which commonly followed their own execution. The history surrounding and following these events has been very controversial and debated since the end World War II.

The country of Korea is located between the North Eastern part of China and the islands of Japan . Because of their unfortunate location, Korea has developed a long hard and troubled history. Being constantly attacked and colonized by several countries, Korea now stands as two separate entities of North and South.

One of the more horrific aspects of Korea history is that of the lives of Korean comfort women during the Second World War. These military comfort women were used by the Japanese military as sex slaves and for other forms of deviant entertainment. Though comfort women came from a variety of ethnic backgrounds, Korean women were used more than any other ethnic culture for the Japanese military's pleasures. (1)

Beginnings

The term comfort women is described as a Japanese euphemism. Meaning that the name “comfort women” does not come close to describing the harsh and difficult conditions that these women had to endure as slaves to the Japanese military. Some articles and research have reported that these women were often “sexually” used to death. Most Korean women were reported to have been sexually assaulted dozen of times in a single day. They were even forced to have sex with their own children that followed their own inhumane executions. The monstrosities and reports of these acts are amazingly abundant and have constantly being questioned by the Japanese government.

Because of the grand scale of abuse that occurred during this time there is no official estimate on how many women were effected by this Japanese take over. Some researchers believe that the range is between 80,000 and 200,000, about 80% were believed to be Korean. (2) However according to the research of Dr. Dr. Hirofumi Hayashi , a professor at Kanto Gakuin University , this number could even have been as many as 300, 000. (2) Regardless of how small or large this number may be the acts that were committed against the comfort women speak for themselves.

Continued Debate and Struggles

Despite the numerous reports and testimonies given by comfort women, some Japanese people still deny that these women were “forced” into sexual acts or killed. This echoes other parts of history that seem to be neglected by other countries and ethnic cultures, such as the Holocaust or the Native American Indian massacres. Not only were comfort women forced into slavery, sometimes causing them to die from exhaustion, depression, or diseases; but they have also had a harsh road of gaining back their own dignity. In December of 1991 35 Korean women sued the Japanese government for damages against Korean comfort women. The Korean women hoped to collect about Y700m ($5.5 million US). (6) This event marked the first time that the Japanese government was sued by Korean war victims. Because of this historical event, the South Korean government actively pursued to document and record the names of victims of the Japanese comfort brothels.

According to a 2000 journal of Contemporary Women’s Issues, several Japanese textbooks are being used to teach young Japanese children that these acts were justified and Japan’s right for aggression and colonization of its neighbors. And that certain facts pertaining to the Japanese military sexual slavery system were erased. (8) Luckily numerous human rights groups have protested the textbooks and demanded that the facts be corrected. However even as new textbooks emerged in Asia, facts were still ignored.

As the August 27, 2001 Newsweek reports, 20 young men chopped off part of their pinkies in a protest of “fury” that new Asian textbooks were still ignoring facts. The article even goes on to report that high-school history books often contain only ONE sentence in regards to the topic of comfort women. (5) These events show the continuous efforts of the Japanese to simply ignore and forget the events that occurred during the war.

This is one of the many ongoing struggles that Korean comfort women have had to face.

Possibly one of the most recent and famous struggles was when 75 women broke their silence during a trial on Japan’s wartime record held through 7th-12th of December 2000. (7) Their gathering was to out of the home that the Japanese would take responsibility for the actions that occurred during World War II. The Korean tribunal even sent a formal invitation to the Japanese government, which the Japanese turned down, creating a even more distopia of events. (7) Even though the Japanese government chose to ignore the event, the event has opened up a channel for comfort women to find some peace with their own troubled past.

However a recent article of the New Statesmen, dated March 7, 2005, explains that younger generations of Koreans and Japanese are coming to terms with each other. This year, 2005, has been declared “Korea-Japan Friendship Year.” The article explains that a recent ban that lifted cultural exchanges has caused a popular flow of music, manga, and film to reach each side’s borders. The most staggering fact is that the two countries exchange 10,000 visitors daily, instead of 10,000 annually 40 years ago. (4)

Though there are still bitter and harsh debates that continue around this topic, it seems that the Korean and Japanese are finally starting to put the past behind them and work together to make both of their worlds a better place. But both countries should still be educated and reminded of the horrific tragedy and violations of human rights during World War II. If this is simply forgotten or left undulated, events and acts similar to the comfort women could very well happen again.

What is being done now? - Film and Boook

Recently a documentary has been made called Silence Broken: Korean Comfort Women. Presented by the NAATA or National Asian American Telecommunications Association, this documentary entails personal testimonies of victims and interviews that were done with Japanese military men who deny the abuse.(3) This documentary was possible because of the work done by Kim-Gibson, who published a book with the same title. The documentary was also part of collection of films sponsored by Steven Speilberg!

According to Cara White's article(3) Dai Sil Kim-Gibson was born in Northern Korea during Japanese rule until she came to the United States in 1962. There she eventually received a PHD from Boston University and has continued to research and produce short films about Korean culture.(3) Her films have been screened in several national and international film festivals. Kim-Gibson's work is one of the many that focuses not only on the injustices of comfort women, but that of other abuses that occur because of cultural and ethnic classes. It is important for her to continue to do research in order to unravel the issues surrounding this controversial topic.

Sources:

(1) The Comfort Women Project:Chunghee Sarah Soh, Ph.D. San Francisco StateUniversity
http://online.sfsu.edu/~soh/comfortwomen.html

(2) Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comfort_women

(3) Cara White, Silence Broken:Korean Comfort Women
http://www.kimsoft.com/2000.comfort.htm

(4) Victoria, James. How Korea Became Cool. New Statesman.
7th, March. 2005. New Statesman Ltd.

(5) Hajari, Nisid. At War with History. Newsweek.
27th, August. 2001. Atlantic Edition, Newsweek.

(6) Comfort without Joy. The Economist.
18th, January. 1992. The Economist Newspaper Ltd.

(7) Women Break Silence on War Crimes. Contemporary Women’s Issues
December. 2000. Gale Group INC.

(8) Women Break Silence on War Crimes. Contemporary Women’s Issues
June. 2001. Gale Group INC.

Korean WWII sex slaves fight on

William Horsley
BBC News Tuesday, 9 August 2005

Former sex slaves are still demanding official compensation

"Japan - reveal the truth! Admit the crime! Officially apologise! Punish the criminals!" South Korean protesters chant every Wednesday outside the Japanese Embassy in Seoul.

In their midst, a small group of elderly women sit silently.

They are the survivors of the brutal, Asia-wide system of sex slaves for the Imperial Japanese Army, which the military government encouraged and helped to operate for 13 years, from 1932 until the end of World War II in 1945.

They were euphemistically called "comfort women". But experts like Korean American scholar Edward Chang of the University of California say the network of "comfort stations" were actually officially-sanctioned rape camps.

Many of the women were even killed as part of an attempt to cover up the crime.

"There should be no time limit on prosecuting these crimes against humanity," Prof Chang said.

Japan says all potential claims by individuals for sufferings inflicted in the war were closed years ago, by treaties normalising its ties with other Asian countries.

But Kang Kyung-wha, a senior official at South Korea's foreign ministry, has recently urged Japan to come to terms with its "legal responsibility" and human rights obligations towards the former comfort women.

Repeatedly abused

Kim Gunja, now aged 80, is too frail to attend the Wednesday demonstrations.

Her story is typical of the tens of thousands - some estimates say 200,000 - women from across Asia whose lives were ruined when they became military sex slaves to the Japanese.

At the age of 17, she was tricked into being abducted by a Korean middle-man who delivered large numbers of young women and girls to his country's then Japanese colonial masters.

Kim Gunja is especially angry at current Japanese leaders
Kim Gunja suspects that her foster father, a policeman, sold her for money or promotion.

She was taken by train to the so-called comfort stations for the Japanese army in Manchuria, north-east China, where she says she was raped by the soldiers many times a day for three years.

"The soldiers didn't know when they would die, and they were very cruel," she said.

She was beaten so badly that she lost her hearing in one ear. After the war she could never marry or get a good job.

She still cannot forgive. And she saves her fiercest hatred for current Japanese leaders.

She wants them to show sincere atonement for Japan's past wrongdoings and to take responsibility by paying official compensation.

Facing up to the past

Japan stands accused of a series of evasions in facing up to the military sex slave issue.

According to Mr Chang, Japan's first admission of involvement only came in 1991, after a wartime document came to light in the foreign ministry about the granting of travel permits for Asian women in areas occupied by the Japanese army.

He says that, since then, the Japanese authorities have continued to hinder the search for detailed evidence about the fate of the former comfort women.

But his own research team's trawl through America's national archives has produced a sheaf of files captured by the US army from the retreating Japanese forces.

They contain photos and other personal details of dozens of young Filipino women - evidence, he says, of the most extensive system of female trafficking the world has ever seen.

Since 1992 Japanese prime ministers have all made formal apologies for the war.

But Shin Heisoo, head of the Korean council supporting the former military sexual slaves, believes these statements are just empty words.

Only legal reparations, she says, will suffice to acknowledge what she sees as war crimes.

In Japan, a recent opinion poll showed that only 13% of the population think further apologies to Asian countries are needed.

Many in South Korea cannot just forget the past

In 1995 the Japanese government took its boldest step so far, setting up an Asian Women's Fund, which collected private donations and sent "atonement money" worth $30,000 or more to each of 364 former comfort women in Taiwan, the Philippines and South Korea.

It also directly funded medical care for the recipients.

A director of the fund, Yasuaki Onuma, acknowledges the criticism of Japan's slow and limited response.

But he also holds some hard-line South Korean campaigners responsible for the impasse.

Many of the Korean victims, he says, were put under intense social pressures to refuse the Japanese donations, although they sorely needed that support.

It was recently decided that the fund will shut down within two years.

So the poison from past cruelties will be passed on to a new generation of Koreans and Japanese.

Kim Gunja now lives near Seoul in a home for former comfort women supported by the South Korean government. She says she hopes Japan will reveal the truth and offer her official compensation.

"Otherwise", she said, "I will not be able to close my eyes when I die."

Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4749467.stm

Japan overturns sex slave ruling

As many as 200,000 women were forced into sexual slavery

BBC Asia Thursday, 29 March, 2001

A Japanese court has overturned the first and so far only compensation award ever made to World War II sex slaves, prompting outrage in South Korea.

All victimised countries in Asia will fight to the end until the day will come for the Japanese government to pay damages

Chongdaehyop coalition

Hiroshima's High Court reversed a 1998 district court ruling that ordered the Japanese government to pay a total of 900,000 yen ($7,260) in damages to three South Korean women.

Presiding judge Toshiaki Kawanami said abducting the women to use them as forced labourers and sex slaves was not a serious constitutional violation.

The three women were among 10 plaintiffs who had asked for a total of 564m yen ($44.3m) in compensation.

Fury

A coalition of 22 South Korean civic groups on Thursday furiously condemned the Hiroshima ruling.

The coalition, known as Chongdaehyop, said in a statement: "The ruling runs against the entire world's demand that the issue be settled as early as possible because many victims are getting closer to death".

Former 'comfort women' are demanding an official apology

"All victimised countries in Asia will fight to the end until the day will come for the Japanese government to pay damages" it added.

The three former sex slaves and seven forced labourers, including one who has since died, argued they were deceived by the Japanese government.

The former sex slaves said they were taken to brothels in Taiwan and Shanghai to provide sex to Japanese troops between 1937 and 1940.

The forced labourers came to Japan around 1943 to work at a factory in Toyama, central Japan. They never received any payment, the court heard.

Landmark decision

In the original 1998 ruling, the Yamaguchi District Court said the Japanese government has failed to enact laws to accommodate the payment of compensation to sex slaves.

For former sex slaves memories are bitter
The women and their supporters hailed the ruling as a landmark decision.

But they also appealed against the amount of compensation, saying it was too small.

The Japanese government also appealed, refusing to pay compensation.

Tokyo has acknowledged that its wartime army set up brothels and forced thousands of Koreans into military service, but it has refused to pay direct, or official compensation to individuals.

The Japanese government officially admitted the existence of the military brothels in 1992.

As many as 200,000 women, mostly Korean but also Filipinos, Chinese and Dutch, were forced into sexual slavery during World War II.

Nine court cases seeking compensation from former sex slaves from Asian women are still pending in Japan.

Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/1249236.stm.

Japan's Dirty Secret - The Asian Auschwitz of Unit 731

2007-04-06T20:43:00.000-07:00

The Asian Auschwitz of Unit 731

Shane Green The Age Toyko Correspondant August 29 2002

The noise was like the sound when a board is struck. On the frozen fields at Ping Fang, in north-east China, chained prisoners were led out with bare arms, and subjected to a current of air to accelerate the freezing process. Then came the noise. With a short stick, the arms of the prisoners would be struck to make sure their limbs had indeed frozen.

In the gruesome world of Unit 731 of the Japanese Imperial Army, experiments with frostbite on human subjects became a favourite in a macabre litany of cruelty. Throughout the 1930s and '40s, until the end of World War II, the secret unit used Manchuria as a killing field. It was a case of science gone truly mad for the greater glory of the divine Emperor and Japan.

Apart from the frostbite experiments, prisoners were infected with diseases including anthrax, cholera and the bubonic plague. To gather data, human vivisections were performed. Whole villages and towns were infected with the plague and cholera.

In the end, at least 3000 prisoners, mainly Chinese, were killed directly, with a further 250,000 Chinese left to die through the biological warfare experiments.

It is called the Asian Auschwitz and, in terms of inhumanity and horror, it certainly warrants this description. Yet there remains a fundamental difference with the crimes perpetrated by the Nazis against Jews. While Germany has shown deep contrition and remorse, the leaders of the country that spawned the evil of Unit 731 still struggle to come to grips with what occurred.

This week in a Tokyo court, the world was again reminded of Japan's inability to deal with its march across Asia. In courtroom 103, three judges of the Tokyo District Court rejected a claim for an apology and compensation by 180 Chinese, either victims or the family of victims of Unit 731.

If there was anything positive out of the decision for the Chinese, it was that for the first time, a Japanese court had acknowledged that Unit 731 and other units had engaged in "cruel and inhumane" biological warfare in China, costing many lives.

But that was it. The judges claimed there was no legal basis for the plaintiffs' claim, as all compensation issues were settled by a treaty with China in 1972.

While it had an authoritative legal ring to it, there was a deep sense of injustice around the courtroom and among supporters waiting outside. How could a court acknowledge a crime had been committed, yet fail to do anything about it?

The Chinese are planning to appeal, but regardless of what may come out of that, one positive factor to emerge from this case has been that the international community - and, indeed, the Japanese themselves - has been reminded of one of the darkest hours of the Japanese Imperial Army.

Unit 731 was the creation of a brutal psychopath, Lieutenant-General Ishii Shiro. His perverted imagination was captured by the possibilities of biological and chemical warfare, and in the Japan of the 1920s and '30s, he found supporters in the increasingly nationalistic and fanatical military.

Part of his fame came from the invention of a water filter that would be used by the Japanese military in the field. Yet even this innocuous invention had a connection with the grossness of Ishii's character. He once reportedly demonstrated the effectiveness of the filter to Emperor Hirohito by urinating through it, and offering the result to the Hirohito to drink. The Emperor declined, so Ishii drank it himself.

Water purification was also to have a link with the grisly activities of Unit 731. The official cover name for the unit was the Water Purification Bureau.

This latest court case, which began in 1997, has revealed much about the operations of the unit. One of the most harrowing testimonies has come from a former member of the unit, Yoshio Shinozuka, who has declared his remorse, and has vowed to tell the truth about the atrocities committed in China.

Shinozuka revealed in horrific detail what occurred at the unit headquarters in Ping Fang, just outside Harbin in northern China. The Chinese victims were known as "logs", and it was Shinozuka's job to scrub them down before the vivisection.

"I still remember clearly the first live autopsy I participated in," he recalled. "I knew the Chinese individual we dissected alive because I had taken his blood once before for testing. At the vivisection, I could not meet his eyes because of the hate he had in his glare at me."

The victim had been infected with the plague, and was totally black. Shinozuka was reluctant to use the brush on the man's face. "Watching me, the chief pathologist, with scalpel in hand, impatiently signalled me to hurry up," he recalled. "I closed my eyes and forced myself to scrub the man's face with the deck brush. The chief pathologist listened to the man's heartbeat with his stethoscope and then the procedure started."

The case before the Tokyo court also heard from the victims, and family of the victims, in villages and towns infected by the plague and cholera between 1940 and 1942.

Peize Xue was a young boy in Jiangshan when the Japanese infected the area with cholera. He recalled how his sister's three children had been struck down: "The three little ones died such tragic deaths. They were poisoned by the Japanese army," she sobbed. "Before Shuanglan (aged eight) passed away, she asked me, lying limply on her bed, to build a small casket for her."Sixty years on, these testimonies have a powerful and revelatory impact, in part because the activities of Unit 731 and related units remained forgotten until relatively recently. It was only in 1981 that international attention refocused on these awful events when an American journalist, John W. Powell junior, published A Hidden Chapter in History, alleging an American cover-up. Since then, academics and journalists have built an impressive case that details how Ishii and other key players received immunity from prosecution in return for supplying their research to American scientists.

In his authoritative Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare 1932-45, and the American Cover-up, Sheldon Harris recounts that the matter was raised only once at the Tokyo war crimes tribunal in 1946-48.

An American counsel assisting the Chinese, David N. Sutton, stunned the war crimes tribunal by saying: "The enemy . . . took our countrymen as prisoners and used them for drug experiments. They would inject various types of toxic bacteria into their bodies, and then perform experiments on how they reacted . . . this was an act of barbarism by our enemy."

According to the book, the presiding chief judge, Australia's Sir William Webb, asked: "Are you trying to tell us about a poison liquid being administered? Are you trying to provide more evidence? This is a new fact that you have presented before we judges."

The writer Sheldon Harris says that after a brief pause, Webb said: "How about letting this item go?" Sutton replied: "Well, then, I'll leave it." The issue never surfaced again, Harris writes.

Would things have been different if Allied soldiers were involved? There have always been suspicions and allegations that this happened at Camp Mukden in China, where Allied prisoners - including Australians - were held. Yet Sheldon, in his extensive research that contains many examples of the unit's activities, such as the frostbite experiments, was unable to find "substantive evidence" of this.

The immunity granted to those in Unit 731 saw the doctors involved return to mainstream Japanese society. In 1989, the now-defunct Japanese magazine Days Japan revealed how those who had escaped prosecution had gone on to take some of the most prestigious positions in the Japanese medical community.

The man who succeeded Ishii Shiro as commander of Unit 731, Dr Masaji Kitano, became head of Japan's largest pharmaceutical company, the Green Cross. Others took up posts heading university medical schools, and also worked in the Japanese healthministry.

This may in part explain the difficulty in confronting and acknowledging the activities of Unit 731, let alone compensating the victims. It is perhaps important to also distinguish between the response of the Japanese Government and the Japanese people.

Waiting in the long line this week to get into the courtroom, Kazuyo Yamane struck up a conversation. She lectures in peace studies at Japan's Kochi University, and had come to hear the decision because of a deep personal interest.

Yamane and other like-minded Japanese travelled to China in 1998 to find out more about the activities of Unit 731. "Because we didn't have any means to know what really happened, we decided to go and try to know what really happened," she says.

They spoke to people who had lost family members because of the biological warfare experiments. "We felt really guilty as Japanese," she says. As a result, the group decided to support the Chinese in their action.

Yamane believes that the Japanese Government should apologise and compensate the victims of the "terrible damage" done during the war in Asia. "That's what we citizens think. But I think there is a huge gap between the citizens and the Japanese Government.

"I think maybe now Japan is getting nationalistic, and the right-wingers are getting stronger."

In the only official comment on the day of the decision, the Japanese Justice Ministry said the court's decision verified the validity of the Japanese Government's position in refusing compensation and an apology to the victims of Unit 731.
This story was found at: http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/08/28/1030508070534.html

Site of the Former Japanese Imperial Army's "Unit 731" Headquarters

The former Unit 731 headquarters, where the Japanese Imperial Army conducted biological-warfare experiments on human "guinea pigs," is now a historical museum.

The Unit 731 Site is located in Ping Fang, China's far east corner, about 47 kilometers outside Harbin, the capital of Heilongjiang Province (former Manchuria).

The site now is only remnant of what was once a "human laboratory" where the Japanese Imperial Army, during 1935-45, conducted secret experiments to develop bacteriological weapons, using human's as guinea pigs.

As many as 3,000 Chinese, Russians and Koreans were tortured and deliberately infected with pathogens such as anthrax, plague and cholera, and lost their lives. The Japanese military's experiments were in direct violation of the Geneva Protocol of 1925 that banned germ warfare.

Death Factory

In front of the former headquarters of Unit 731, is a large stone monument inscribed with the words: "Remains of Unit 731 of the Japanese Imperial Army that invaded China." There are 13 rooms inside the hall, incontrovertibly exhibiting the crimes commited by Unit 731.

Thinly disguised as the "Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department," Unit 731 was founded by the Japanese Imperial Army as a biological-warfare unit in 1936. The huge compound consisted of more than 150 buildings covering over six square kilometers outside the city of Harbin. Japanese army physicians and surgeons took part in cruel and senseless experiments on humans and developed bacteriological weapons that released plague, anthrax and cholera viruses. No one was allowed to live within a three-kilometer radius of the compound. Former unit members say they called their victims "marutas" or "logs." Many were Chinese war prisoners and anti-Japanese activists but some were also Russians, Mongolians and Koreans.

In one exhibit hall a miniature model of the compound providing a panoramic overview of the death factory. On the walls are photographs of Japanese soldiers and medical staff attached to the unit, who stare back in cold silence.

A panel introduces Lt. Gen. Shiro Ishii, the physician in-charge, whose obsession with developing bacteriological weapons was realized at Unit 731. A Chinese guide explained in Japanese to the Soka Gakkai youth that Ishii was promoted from lieutenant colonel to full colonel for running the unit and eventually torturing and killing thousands of innocent people. Then, at the end of the war, the U.S. Government exonerated Ishii and all his subordinates for war crimes in exchange for their human experiment data.

Detailed explanations in Japanese are attached to each item displayed, such as gas masks, syringes, shackles used to prevent escape, and scalpels used to vivisect live victims. One is a large wooden hook "used to hang internal organs taken from live victims. Many inmates were forcibly taken to the compound, administered anesthesia and had their internal organs carved out as "specimens,"

The displays are however sparse as in the final days of the war, Japanese troops, under Ishii's orders, blew up the laboratory compound and killed the remaining "subjects" to cover up the crimes.

Although most of the buildings were successfully destroyed to cover-up evidence, the boiler building once used to cultivate deadly viruses, and the railroad track used to carry human marutas that lies alongside survive as do large chunks of the underground facilities remain intact- Germ warfare shell-casings for plague cultures and ceramic bombs containing plague-infected fleas, are however reproductions based on testimony of witnesses - underground jails, rooms used for frostbite experiments and the rat-breeding room used to culture plague-infected fleas.

It is estimated that outside the compound wall more than 200,000 Chinese were killed during "field testing" of germ warfare bombs. Victims were often taken to a "proving" ground called Anda where they were tied to stakes in a pattern and then bombarded with experimental weapons to test the efficacy of new technologies. Planes sprayed the zone with a plague culture or dropped bombs with plague-infected fleas to see how many people and at what distance from the center would become infected and then die. It is said that plague-infected animals were released as the war was ending and caused plague outbreaks that killed at least 30,000 people in Harbin from 1946 through 1948.

Heilongjiang Province, China, launched a three-stage-project of investigating, excavating and preserving the compound ruins. The project is now in its secondary stage and it is expected that a complete picture of the germ warfare center will come to light within five to six years. Heilongjiang Province is now working to register the remains as part of UNESCO's World Heritage.

A Government in Denial

Among the upper echelons of Japanese society, there are those who still try to hush up or turn a blind eye to the historical reality of Unit 731. Japanese history education barely touches on Japan's past invasion of its Asian neighbors, let alone details about the biological-warfare unit in China. Recently the Japanese government has been under fire by the international community, especially by Japan's Asian neighbors, over its authorization of a controversial new secondary school history textbook that glosses over events such as the 1937 Nanjing massacre and the sexual enslavement of hundreds of thousands of Asian women who served as "comfort women" for the Japanese army. The textbook also attempts to validate and temper Japan's encroachment of neighboring countries in the first half of the 20th century. The international community regards not acknowledging past deeds as denial, and leaving these facts out of the educational curriculum points to a lack of remorse.

To this day, the Japanese government still will not apologize for or officially recognize the criminal offenses it has committed.

State-Imposed Shinto Used to Justify Aggression

It is well known that, during the war, the Japanese government forced, not only its own people, but people of countries it occupied, to adhere to Shintoism, the religious ideology used by the military government to justify and promote its wars of aggression. It is estimated that 300 to 500 shrines were established in northeast China alone. There was also a shrine which deified war dead who died fighting for Japanese-occupied Manchuria. This shrine had the same role as the Yasukuni shrine, which was, by Imperial decree, founded in 1869 for the worship of "divine spirits"--the war dead--who "sacrificed themselves for their country."

In 1868, the Japanese government formally instituted State Shinto for unifying religious and governmental activities. The Meiji Constitution emphasized the sovereignty and sanctity of the emperor, which was reinforced by the divinity accorded him by Shinto. The contradiction between the government's support of State Shinto and freedom of religion guaranteed under the constitution was evaded during the various revisions to the constitution, and in 1932 the Ministry of Education declared Shinto shrines to be non-religious institutions for fostering patriotism and loyalty. State Shinto ended in 1945 after Japan's defeat in World War II. [The controversy continues, however, as some cabinet ministers continue to pay official visits to pray for war dead at the Yasukuni Shrine, which includes shrines for Class A war criminals. The government insists that it is within the confines of the current constitution's principle of separation of church and state.]

There are factions of the Japanese government and society that condone, or even encourage the prime minister and the cabinet to pay homage to the Yasukuni Shrine in utter disregard of the sensibilities of Asian neighbors who suffered atrocities at the hands of Japanese militarism. Such arrogance and callousness raise serious concerns over the ramifications on Japan's future relations with its Asian neighbors, and whether Japan can ever gain their trust.

For the Chinese, Shinto shrines were, and still are, nothing but symbols of the Japanese army's barbarism.

When and How Will Japan Come to Terms With Its History?

Artifacts dug up from the remains of Unit 731. Among the items are earthenware clearly marked "Ishii Butai" (Ishii's Corps).

People throughout Asia, including an increasing number of Japanese citizens, are asking, "Has Japan atoned, or made any amends for the suffering it caused its Asian neighbors?"

In a related tragedy, a major pharmaceutical company was among those indicted in the AIDS scandal of recent years, in which Japanese pharmaceutical companies continued to sell unheated blood products tainted with the AIDS-causing HIV virus despite having known of the risks. It was revealed during the fiasco that the prestigious drug firm had been founded by a former member of Unit 731. Nearly 2,000 Japanese, mostly hemophiliacs who depend on regular bloodclottting treatments, contracted AIDS from tainted products, and hundreds have already lost their lives.

Having a correct recognition and understanding of history will become the cornerstone for future peace. Unless Japan can squarely face and acknowledge its past deeds, there exists the likelihood of the resurgence of ultra-nationalism.

[Adapted from an article appearing in the September 2, 2001 issue of the Seikyo Shimbun newspaper.]

Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare,1932-1945, and the American Cover-Up

2007-04-06T20:35:00.000-07:00

Photo - 1936 -- Unit 731, a biological-warfare unit disguised as a water-purification unit, is formed. Japanese General Ishii directs the construction of more than 150 buildings over six square kilometers - at Pingfan, outside the city of Harbin.

BOOK REVIEWS

Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare,1932-1945, and the American Cover-up

By Sheldon H. Harris
Routledge, 2002
385 pages, $57 (pb)

By Phil Shannon
28 August 2002

In the last days of World War II, as the Japanese retreated from the Soviet army's advance into Japanese-occupied China, great care was taken by the Japanese army to destroy certain of their bases in dozens of Chinese cities. Red Army soldiers, arriving at these sites, discovered mass graves, many of the bodies still warm. The Japanese retreat was hasty but highly methodical. There was something they wanted to keep secret.

US and Soviet military investigators soon began piecing together the ugly story of Japan's biological warfare (BW) research in China, including experiments on humans. Sheldon Harris has meticulously documented the gruesome story in Factories of Death.

The primarily Chinese victims, but also Korean and Japanese civilians and Allied soldiers, were infected with pathogenic bacteria including bubonic plague, anthrax, cholera, typhus, smallpox, tuberculosis and dozens of other diseases to determine the most deadly killers. Some victims had vivisection performed on them. Those that did not die from the infections were no longer “viable experimental material” and were killed, their bodies burned in crematoria.

Field trials of delivery mechanisms (bombs, aerial spraying, poisoning of water and animals) were conducted against victims tied to stakes, and against whole Chinese villages and cities. Epidemics raged. In Nanjing, during the two-month slaughter and rape-fest of 1937-8, Chinese POWs were given dumplings laced with typhus and released to spread the disease. Children were given chocolate infected with anthrax. In border skirmishes with Soviet troops, pathogens were spread to thousands of Red Army soldiers.

Around 30,000 to 50,000 people are estimated to have been killed from the experiments alone in the BW bases, while victims of the open-air field trials reached six-figures. The human suffering was incalculable.

The standard defence of Japanese politicians and military comma-nders, then and now, was that these atrocities were the result of the “rogue” Kwantung army, the “loose cannon” Japanese military force in “Manchuria” (the three north-eastern provinces of China) which was occupied from 1931 to 1945. This force supposedly operated beyond the control of civilian and military authorities in Tokyo. This is a lie.

The ultra-right, fervently nationalist political and military forces which increasingly dominated Japan from the early 1930s had a program of military expansion of which biological warfare, made militarily practicable by human experimentation, was an accepted strategy.

Army doctor Major Ishii Shiro, a professor of immunology at Japan's top military medical school, the Tokyo Army Medical College, had conducted BW experiments on Japanese civilians in Tokyo and was given the opportunity to experiment on a much larger scale in occupied China.

He headed the infamous Unit 731 of the Japanese Imperial Army located in the region known as Ping Fan. This massive BW factory and laboratory had ready access to thousands of prisoners — Chinese resistance fighters, Communist guerrillas, common criminals, POWs and Chinese civilians (people with an intellectual disability, vagrants, opium addicts and random people swept from the streets when “experimental stocks” were running low).

Unit 731 at any one time had 5000 personnel, including some 500 scientists (mostly microbiologists) from Japan's most prestigious universities. The war ministry in Tokyo lavishly funded the unit and support came from the highest levels of the military establishment, the scientific community, the Japanese Diet (parliament) and the royal family. Tens of thousands directly participated in Unit 731, including Prince Takeda (Emperor Hirohito's cousin and Kwantung army official who later headed the Japan Olympic Committee for the 1964 Tokyo Olympic Games).

Any diligent investigation by the US occupying forces after the war would have uncovered Japan's BW program and the war criminals responsible for it. Surviving victims, disaffected subordinates, dissident scientists, the conscience-stricken and the merely opportunistic could all have dobbed in their principals. The Japanese left, particularly the Japanese Communist Party, which strongly opposed (and infiltrated) Japan's BW network, had highly accurate knowledge of the atrocities.

Information from all these sources flooded into the US agencies investigating the Japanese leadership's war crimes. Yet by the time the war crimes trials concluded in 1948, not one of those responsible for the BW atrocities had been indicted, let alone convicted.

Although the chief war crimes prosecutor had compiled a detailed picture of the BW program and of those responsible (tracing the line of authority all the way to Tokyo), the plug was pulled by Washington as a deal was hatched to offer immunity from prosecution to the BW war criminals in return for providing the US with the results of their work.

Most “highly valued” were the human experiments “showing the direct effects of biological warfare agents on man”. This was the view of the US State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee (SWNCC), a high-level, powerful body of the departments of state and war, and the US Navy, which determined occupation policy in Japan.

Prosecution for BW crimes, the SWNCC argued, would “stop the flow of information”. The US Joint Chiefs of Staff agreed, including commander-in-chief President Harry Truman, who in March 1947 ordered an end to BW war crimes investigations.

The “utmost secrecy” was also ordered about the decision to trade immunity for information. A cover-up would “guard against embarrassment” of the US political and military authorities letting war criminals go unpunished so that the US could reap the benefits of their atrocities. Knowingly accepting the proceeds of crime is a crime itself, and the US had to be spared this awkwardness.

Washington's own BW research program had begun in 1943 with secret government funding of US$60 million, and by 1945 the US army had operational plans for 1 million anthrax bombs. Public revulsion at biological experiments on humans, however, had restrained the Dr Strangeloves so the Japanese BW research was a godsend.

The cover-up in Japan and the US has continued ever since. The master war criminal, Ishii, lived in quiet retirement on a handsome government retirement package. Other BW war criminals went on to illustrious careers with the Japanese ministry of health and welfare and the universities, their past un-investigated, ignored or covertly valued.

Every director bar one of the Japanese National Institute for Health, a government-sponsored research institute, has been a war criminal who served in a BW unit and experimented on humans. Half the scientific staff of the NIH had been veterans of Unit 731. For three decades after the war, they continued work on unfinished Unit 731 projects, and performed other biological experiments on unwitting prisoners, babies, psychiatric patients and soldiers of the Japanese “self-defence” army. In the 1980s, hospitalised children were given untested vaccines by NIH researchers, thousands dying or becoming disabled as a result.

The government-employed BW war criminals worked hand-in-hand with their war crime colleagues in the private pharmaceutical and blood-treatment companies, the primary concern of this network of war criminals being company profitability. Unit 731 has vanished from the school textbooks approved by the Japanese ministry of education.

As well as importing German Nazi scientists and intelligence officers after the war, Washington continued on its BW path, enriched by the windfall Japanese data and occasionally working in collaboration with its Japanese compilers. The US used biological warfare during the Korean War. From 1948 to 1968, a secret BW testing program was launched on misled or uninformed US citizens (a pale shadow of Unit 731 atrocities but a shadow cast by the same moral framework).

In both Japan and the US, the biological warfare atrocities, the deal with the war criminals and its cover-up, the post-war BW programs and human experiments, and the pharmaceutical company scandals were justified by the “national interest”, military “defence” and corporate profits.

The joint regard for Unit 731 held by both Japanese and US military and political elites show that when it comes to human rights, the concerns of those who hammer away about the “national interest” amount to nothing but immense suffering and death for humanity.

From Green Left Weekly, August 28, 2002.

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A Plague upon Humanity - The Hidden History of Japan's Biological Warfare Program
by Daniel Barenblatt

Chapter Excerpt-Chapter One
A Doctor's Vision
Few have the imagination for reality.
-- Goethe

It began in Kyoto in 1927. Dr. Shiro Ishii had his decisive revelation while going about his customary routine, thumbing through a stack of scientific research journals, making his usual effort to keep abreast of the latest research literature. At the age of thirty-five, the physician had just received his Ph.D. in microbiology from Kyoto Imperial University, one of the world's top institutions in that field and a school comparable in distinction to an American Ivy League college. Ishii was a rather eccentric young man, but he was even then highly respected among his Japanese peers and professors, with a reputation for brilliance and innovation that caused many of them to overlook his extracurricular activities and tastes.

Browsing through a medical periodical, Ishii came across an article that electrified him. He had discovered a report on the Geneva Convention of 1925, to which Japan had been a signatory. The article, written by a War Ministry delegate to the conference, First Lieutenant Harada, explored why Japan had signed the convention, a treaty organized by the League of Nations that banned the use of chemical weapons. As of 1925, some 1.3 million men in Europe and North America still suffered severe health problems resulting from their exposure to poisonous gas in the battles of World War I. Few in the league wanted to see this calamity repeated, and to the convention was added one more prohibition: It was also forbidden to make weapons from the germs responsible for infectious disease epidemics and pandemics such as bubonic plague, or the Black Death, as it was called, which wiped out 25 million Europeans in a five-year period during the fourteenth century.

Ishii read the text of the Geneva Convention over and over again, with both fascination and a sense of validation, for this was the direction in which he had been heading for some time. Titled the "Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or Other Gases, and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare," the compact states that "the use in war of asphyxiating, poisonous or other gases and of all analogous liquids, materials or devices, has been justly condemned by the general opinion of the civilized world ... [T]he High Contracting Parties ... accept this prohibition, agree to extend this prohibition to the use of bacteriological methods of warfare and agree to be bound as between themselves according to the terms of this declaration."

The treaty was signed in Geneva on June 17, 1925, by 128 nations -- nearly every country on the planet. The prospect of germ warfare obviously created universal feelings of terror and revulsion among the civilized nations of the world. But Shiro Ishii took a different lesson from the Geneva Convention. If the prospect of germ warfare created such dread, he reasoned, Japan must do everything in its power to create the most virulent germ weapons, as well as effective methods for destroying wartime enemies with lethal diseases.

For years Ishii had spoken to colleagues and military officials of the strategic military potential of disease, and now the framers of the Geneva Convention had inadvertently done the Japanese physician a great service. Their fear of germ warfare catalyzed him to new levels of action. He would visit offices of Japan's top military officers, trying once more to persuade them that a program to conduct biological and germ warfare was the key to victory for Imperial Japan in any future wars.

By 1927 the nation had already conquered and occupied Korea and large portions of China, and powerful men in the ruling circles of Japanese society hungered for further expansion. Ishii now saw the way to make real his dream of state-of-the-art laboratories that could produce billions of deadly germs upon a general's request. The bacteriological weapons so reviled by the dignitaries who had traveled to Geneva in 1925 would become Japan's secret weapon. Ishii would be their mastermind.

At nearby Kyoto Army Hospital, to which Ishii had been attached as an active duty officer soon after attaining his doctorate, he proselytized about the military's need to make biological weapons. He took a train to Tokyo to see his old army buddies posted at the Tokyo Army First Hospital, where he had been on staff as a military surgeon five years earlier. There he managed to charm his way into the offices of high-ranking officials. He also got in to see top commanders and tacticians in Japan's War Ministry.

Ishii pleaded with them to begin researching biological weapons, citing the Harada article. He urged them to make tactical plans for the deployment of germ weapons. He also reminded them that most of the nations that had used chemical gas weapons in World War I also had ratified the Hague Convention of 1899, which banned the use of poison gas. One had to expect, he argued, that in the event of war, other countries would again develop banned weapons regardless of whatever international treaties to which they had sworn agreement.

The generals, colonels, and military scientists listened politely to Ishii, and not for the first time. The young doctor's face was well known around staff headquarters. "He always emphasized the role of bacteriological warfare in our tactical planning," wrote General Saburo Endo in his diary. But Ishii's ideas fell on deaf ears at the War Ministry. The government at the time, under Prime Minister Giichi Tanaka, had stressed a more limited role for the military and a less aggressive foreign policy. The Japanese army and navy commanders went along for the most part with the Tanaka directives, and those heading up Japan's military were unimpressed with the theoretical concepts of biological warfare. They preferred to abide by Japan's moral obligations as outlined broadly in the 1925 Geneva Convention, which Japan had signed, although not ratified.

Japan had ratified the 1899 Hague Convention, which banned chemical weapons ...

The foregoing is excerpted from A Plague upon Humanity by Daniel Barenblatt. All rights reserved. ISBN: 9780060933876; ISBN-10: 0060933879; Imprint: Harper Paperbacks; Publication Date: 09/02/2005; Format: Trade PB; Trimsize: 5 5/16 x 8; Pages: 304; $26.95

TV REVIEWNightmare in Manchuria - History channel

http://www.mvgroup.org/forums/uploads/post-15-11242154799.jpg

This is the shocking history of video Unit 731 - Nightmare in Manchuria which documents japanese developement of biological warfare in World war 2. To reach their goal of world domination, the Imperial Government of Japan decided that they would have to build a huge arsenal of bioÂchemical weapons. Their takeover of the Chinese province of Manchuria was the first step, and in a top secret research facility called Unit 731, Japanese doctor Shiro Ishii and his staff conducted weapons research that claimed the lives of untold thousands perhaps even hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians. These atrocities were not exposed and no one was ever punished because the documents recording the grim findings were secretly sold to the United States in exchange for amnesty. These crimes against humanity are finally revealed, condemning two governments for their complicity in keeping this story silent for so long, and the repercussions may be felt for a long time. 50 min. A must see for everyone. History channel

More info at:
http://www.ihffilm.com/r660.html
http://www.nesa.org.uk/html/unit731.htm

Other documentaries on the same topic:
http://indypeer.org/show_file_page.php?file_id=301 (subtitles at: http://indypeer.org/show_file_page.php?file_id=471)

ed2k://|file|Unit.731.-.Nightmare.in.Manch...410BB3F05314A|/

Meet Japan's Evil Prime Minister, Abe Shinzo

2007-04-04T23:45:00.000-07:00

Meet Japan's Evil Prime Minister, Abe Shinzo:

* Calls for pre-emptive strikes against North Korea

* Grandson of anti-democratic, Class A war criminal Kishi Nobusuke

* Believes that Prime Ministers should worship at Yasukuni Shrine

* Believes that Japanese school textbooks must follow the party line and remove all negative aspects of Japan's war in China and it's WW2 history

We're just good friends, honest - But China has reason to suspect Japan's military flirtation with Australia

2007-04-01T22:16:00.000-07:00

We're just good friends, honest - But China has reason to suspect Japan's military flirtation with Australia

The Economist Mar 15th 2007 Claudio Munoz

WHEN he signed a security pact with Australia this week, Shinzo Abe, the Japanese prime minister, at a stroke doubled the number of Japan's allies. Until now, Japan has had formal security ties only with America, under whose protection Japan, with a pacifist constitution, has sat since the second world war.

Even if it falls well short of a mutual-defence treaty, to some Australians the agreement signed by John Howard in Tokyo on March 13th is unwarranted. After all, Japan came close to invading their country during the war; Australian prisoners-of-war were brutally treated in Japanese camps; and only a couple of weeks ago Mr Abe had brought ignominy upon himself by denying that foreign “comfort women” had been coerced into working in wartime military brothels. Elderly Australian women are among those who have testified otherwise. Yet the world moves on and in Mr Howard's view “Australia has no better friend or more reliable partner within the Asia-Pacific region than Japan.” Mr Abe spoke of a “shared destiny”.

So if it is now important that the two countries be allies, the natural question is, against whom? To ask this, both sides insist with prim faces, is entirely to miss the point. Co-operation between the two countries has deepened on several levels. Until last July, Australian troops had protected Japanese ones doing reconstruction work in southern Iraq. Nearer to home, peacekeeping troops have worked side-by-side in Cambodia and Timor-Leste.

Alexander Downer, the Australian foreign minister whose own father was a prisoner of the Japanese for more than three years, talks up their co-operation in disaster assistance after the Indian Ocean tsunami of late 2004. The two countries' aid programmes in Asia have shared objectives. Thus the agreement's provisions for regular meetings involving the two sides' foreign and defence ministers, joint military exercises, and more formal arrangements for sharing information would all improve humanitarian missions.

A security agreement is a symbolic way of building up those new aspects of the relationship, says Mr Downer. The two sides will also negotiate a free-trade agreement to strengthen economic ties. All good stuff. But the louder the denials from both sides, the more evident is the main catalyst for the security pact: the rise of China.

That may come as a surprise to some. Australia has often had to defend itself against charges from human-rights groups and others of sacrificing democratic principles for profits in its dealings with China, which has an inexhaustible appetite for the commodities, such as iron ore and uranium, that Australia is able to supply. But as an Australian diplomat explains: “China is a good, constructive commercial partner, but in terms of ideas and values, it will never be anywhere near as close to us as Japan. It's quite clear: Japan is our best friend in Asia.”

Australia's security posture has long been a cause for wariness in China, particularly because of its alliance with America and the possibility that Australia might come to America's aid in a war with China over Taiwan. Still, as long as the new pact does not imply Australian support for Japan in its territorial disputes with China in the East China Sea, China's government will attempt to hide its displeasure. Economic ties come first.

As for Mr Abe, the pact is of a piece with a more robust foreign policy for Japan that was begun by his predecessor, Junichiro Koizumi. Before sending troops to Iraq, Mr Koizumi had also dispatched supply ships from Japan's so-called Self-Defence Forces to the Indian Ocean to help with the war in Afghanistan in 2001.

Since he came to office last September, Mr Abe has redoubled Mr Koizumi's commitment to Japan's alliance with the United States, but wants to do more than just shelter under America's wing. He has pushed for faster deployment of missile-defence systems in the face of North Korean provocation. He has turned the Japanese Defence Agency into a full ministry, with a seat in the cabinet. And he wants the pacifist article nine of the constitution to be revised. Mr Abe has sought a new partnership with India, while building security ties with South-East Asia.

It all amounts to a strategy of balancing China's geopolitical reach: Japan, in other words, is not about to roll on its back to let China be the region's top dog. Mr Abe's domestic ineptitude may mean a short term in office, as the ruling Liberal Democratic Party and its coalition partner face crucial elections for parliament's upper house in July. Even if so, Japan's emerging regional posture is likely to survive him.

Source:http://observingjapan.blogspot.com/search/label/Australia-Japan%20security%20declaration

Is Australia's new defence relationship with Japan going to damage relations with China? ABC 18-03-07

http://www.abc.net.au/ra/bayvut/english/s1874509.htm

That's the question being debated as Australia's Prime Minister, John Howard prepares to sign a declaration on defence and security during his current visit to Tokyo.

Mr Howard says China shouldn't be worried, and says Australia's approach to China will have marked differences from the policies of the United States.

But Australia's Opposition Leader, Kevin Rudd, says Australia shouldn't be moving towards a defence pact with Japan, because of uncertainty about the future of North-east Asia.

This report by Radio Australia's Foreign Affairs and Defence Correspondent, Graeme Dobell.....

DOBELL: Australia says the defence declaration won't have the status of a treaty, but it will mean that Japan's security relationship with Australia will be closer than with any other country, apart from the United States. The Prime Minister, John Howard, says the declaration could eventually become a full defence pact.

That approach has been attacked by the Labor Opposition Leader, Kevin Rudd, who says that a fully treaty would tie Australia to closely to the uncertainties of North-east Asia.

RUDD: However, given our current strategic circumstances, I don't believe we should be now moving down the path of a formal defence pact between our two countries. To do so at this stage may unnecessarily tie our security interests in this country to the vicissitude of an unknown security policy future in North-east Asia.

DOBELL: Mr Howard says the security declaration is a natural outcome of the trilateral security dialogue between Australia, Japan and the United States, which has been running for five years. The Prime Minister says China should not be too worried about the move by Japan and Australia because of the quality of Canberra's relations with Beijing. Mr Howard goes further, saying that Australia's approach to China will have marked differences from the policies of the United States.

Both Korea's call on Japan to face up to the truth about its Wartime Cruelty

2007-04-01T22:09:00.000-07:00

South Korea calls Japan to action on wartime past

April 1 2007 Rueters

SEOUL (Reuters) - South Korea's foreign minister on Saturday urged Japan to settle disputes arising from its militaristic past to allow relations between the two countries to improve.

Song Min-soon's comments came after Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe angered South Koreans earlier this month when he said there was no evidence Japan's government or army had forced women, many of them Koreans, to serve as sex slaves for Japanese soldiers during World War Two.

"Like today's weather, there is turbulence (in the relationship between South Korea and Japan,)" Song was quoted by officials as telling his Japanese counterpart Taro Aso.

"The clouds above us and the fog ahead must be cleared, and it is a task for us, not the past generations that committed wrongs," Song said at the start of talks in the resort island of Cheju.

Abe has since repeated a previous apology by Tokyo over the so-called "comfort women," saying he stood by a 1993 government statement on the issue.

Aso reiterated Abe's apology and expression of sympathy to the women who had been forced into sexual slavery, Japanese and South Korean officials said after the meeting.

Aso said later that he, Song and Chinese Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing would hold three-way talks in Cheju on June 3, Japan's Kyodo news agency reported.

Japan's ties with both China and South Korea chilled under Abe's predecessor, Junichiro Koizumi, who made annual visits to the Yasukuni shrine in Tokyo where Japanese leaders convicted as war criminals by an Allied tribunal are honored along with war dead.

Abe has tried to improve relations, visiting both countries for leaders' summits after taking office in September.

Aso proposed the resumption of bilateral free trade talks with South Korea, which were suspended in 2004, and Song pledged a positive review once Seoul's trade talks with the United States conclude.

The two ministers also agreed on the early resumption of six-country talks on ending North Korea's nuclear weapons program, officials said.

(Additional reporting by Linda Sieg in Tokyo)

Noth Korea Blasts Japan For Wartime Atrocities, Sexual Slavery

SEOUL, March 8 Asia Pulse - North Korea on March 7 lashed out at Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe for what it called his efforts to negate Japan's past crimes related to forcing thousands of Korean women into sexual slavery.

"No matter how desperately the Japanese authorities may try to whitewash the crime-woven past of Japan and cover up the crimes related to the 'comfort women' for the imperial Japanese army, the worst flesh traffic in the 20th century, they are historical facts that Japan can neither sidestep nor deny," an unidentified spokesman for the North's Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

"What should not be overlooked is that Abe has taken the lead in totally negating the crimes, asserting that there is no evidence proving the forcible recruitment of 'comfort women' for the imperial Japanese army," the statement carried by the North's state-run Korean Central News Agency said.

The statement is a repeat of Pyongyang's criticism of Tokyo, which colonized the Korean Peninsula from 1910 through 1945.

But it comes amid a fresh dispute over the countries' shared past, as the Japanese prime minister has claimed that the well-documented history of his nation is "not based on objective facts."

The U.S. House of Representatives is currently considering a resolution, calling on Japan to admit and apologize for its World War II atrocities.

Abe has said his government stands by a government apology issued in 1993 by then Chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono, but declared he would not make any fresh apologies, claiming there was no "coercion" by the Japanese military in forcing Korean women and many others from other Asian nations into sexual slavery.

The North's Foreign Ministry spokesman said Abe's claim represented "the revival of Japanese militarism."

"No denial can ever write off or tamper with history. Japan will certainly be forced to pay for the crimes related to the sexual slavery," said the statement.

(Yonhap)

Japan's denial of war crimes is committing another

2007-04-01T22:02:00.000-07:00

This massive heap of human skulls and bones at Nanking (now Nanjing), together with Japanese photographic records of the atrocity, constitute irrefutable proof of Japan's genocidal war against China. These are some of the remains of victims of the Rape of Nanking (also known as the Nanjing Massacre) in 1937.

A HISTORY OF JAPAN'S REFUSAL TO ACKNOWLEDGE ITS WAR GUILT AND ATROCITIES

Sucessive Japanese governments refuse to acknowledge Japan's military aggression

Despite irrefutable evidence that Japan waged aggressive war across East Asia and the western Pacific region between 1937 and 1945, this has never been frankly acknowledged by Japan's dominant Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) which has ruled Japan for nearly fifty years.

Many Japanese LDP members of parliament, government officials, academics, and revisionist film makers have aligned themselves with militarists and extreme nationalists in claiming that Japan's "intervention" in China in 1931, 1933, and 1937 was necessary to "liberate" the Chinese from exploitation by Western colonial interests.

FALSE HISTORY - CHINESE VICTIMS "LIBERATED" BY JAPAN'S IMPERIAL ARMY

The following published comments are a small sample of Japanese falsification and distortion of Pacific War history:

"The Pacific War was a war of liberation"

Nagano Shigeto, Japan's Justice Minister (1994).

"The Pacific War was a war to liberate colonised Asia"

This resolution was moved in the Japanese Parliament (Diet) in 1995 by 221 members of Japan's dominant Liberal Democratic Party (LDP).

"Japan was forced to go to war by American oil and other embargoes"

Hosei Norota, senior member of Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party (2001).

"Japan was forced into WW II to liberate Asia from the yoke of Western colonialism.

Hideaki Kase, producer of the controversial Japanese film "Merdeka" (2001)"

Japan's refusal to acknowledge its military atrocities

Japanese LDP governments refuse to admit that at least five million Chinese civilians and prisoners of war were "liberated" from their lives by the Japanese military during the so-called "interventions" in China, and prefer to describe the brutal war waged against China between 1937 and 1945 not as a war, but as "The China Incident".

Despite the clearest possible evidence that the Imperial Japanese military slaughtered, raped, and looted their way across East Asia and the western Pacific region between 1937 and 1945, successive Japanese LDP governments and many Japanese politicians, bureaucrats, and academics have aligned themselves with militarist and extreme nationalist groups by denying that terrible atrocities were committed against millions of prisoners of war and civilian captives or employing vague euphemisms to hide the extent and scale of the horrors that were committed. Again, senior Japanese politicians and academics brazenly deny historical facts accepted by the rest of the world:

"The Nanjing Massacre is a lie made up by the Chinese"

Ishihara Shintaro, former Japanese Cabinet Minister, interviewed October 1990.

"The Nanjing Massacre is a fabrication"

Nagano Shigeto, Japan's Justice Minister (1994).

"The Americans brainwashed the postwar Japanese into believing they had committed terrible war crimes"

Professor Nobukatsu Fujioka, Professor of Education, Tokyo University (1997)

Between 1937 and 1945, hundreds of thousands of captive foreign women were forced to become sexual slaves in Japanese Army brothels across East Asia and the Pacific region. Although they are prepared to compensate the unfortunate victims through a private fund, Japanese governments will not admit publicly that the Imperial Japanese Army committed these atrocities against women. Here is one sneering denial of historical truth by a very senior Japanese politician:

"Foreign 'Comfort Women' conscripted for Japanese Army brothels were prostitutes"

Kajiyama Seiroku, Japan's Chief Cabinet Secretary (1997).

After forty-one years of denial of Japan's war guilt and war crimes by Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) governments, rule by the long-dominant LDP ended in 1993.

When Japan's first Socialist Prime Minister, Tomiichi Murayama, was touring South-East Asia in 1995, he apologised for the "tremendous damage and suffering" caused by Japan's "colonial rule and aggression… in the not too distant past". Murayama's apology did not mention atrocities such as the Nanjing Massacre, and was the closest Japan has ever come to an admission of war guilt and apology for its war crimes.

The apology by Murayama was viewed as inadequate in China but caused widespread fury in Japan. In an endeavour to repair the political damage that his apology caused to the Socialist Party, Murayama's government officially recognised two infamous symbols of Imperial Japan, the rising sun flag (Hinomaru) and the song of praise to the divine emperor (Kimigayo). The Socialist government ordered that the Hinomaru and Kimigayo be integrated into official school celebrations.

The Hinomaru (literally "circle of the sun")

This flag with the red disc on a white background was flown wherever the Japanese military slaughtered, raped, and looted their way across East-Asia and the western Pacific between 1931 and 1945, and is hated by people in these areas who are old enough to remember the brutality of Japanese armies.

The official recognition of these symbols of Imperial militarism by the Socialist government severely undermined the credibility of Japan's Socialist Party as an opponent of militarism.

With the fiftieth anniversary of the Japanese surrender due on 15 August 1995, Prime Minister Murayama had planned to initiate an anti-war resolution in the Japanese parliament (The Diet). Murayama's resolution was pre-empted by 221 members of the LDP who resolved that the Pacific War had been "a war to liberate colonised Asia". The resolution caused outrage in Asian countries that had been brutally invaded and occupied by Imperial Japanese armies.

The Liberal Democratic Party regained and held power after January 1996, and successive LDP governments have continued the hard-line policy of refusing to acknowledge Japan's war guilt and war crimes. In 1999, the LDP government used the occasion of a visit by the president of China to refuse a formal apology for Japan's many war crimes against China between 1931 and 1945. In 2000, the Chinese requested a formal apology for Japan's war crimes against China on the occasion of a visit by the Japanese Prime Minister to China. Japan ignored the request.

There are no indications that the LDP is changing its hard-line policy of refusing to acknowledge Japan's war guilt and war crimes under the leadership of Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi.

Contrasting Germany's acknowledgment and Japan's denial of war crimes

Japan's refusal to acknowledge its war guilt and war crimes stands in stark contrast to the willingness of Germany to confront its war crimes. However, it is arguable that Japan has only been able to avoid squarely confronting its war guilt and war crimes because of the active connivance of the United States. In 1948, intensification of the Cold War persuaded the American government that Japan should become an American ally and bulwark against the spread of communism in Asia. This was unlikely to happen if investigation and prosecution of Japanese for war crimes continued.

From the beginning of 1949, the United States called a halt to Japanese war crime prosecutions and the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers in Japan, General Douglas MacArthur, began to release suspected war criminals from Sugamo Prison. MacArthur also obstructed prosecutions of Japanese war criminals by Allied countries. I will return to the American role in facilitating Japan's refusal to acknowledge its war guilt and war crimes in the next chapter.

Censoring school books to hide the truth about Japan's war guilt and war crimes

Until the end of Allied occupation of Japan in 1952, school textbooks were strictly controlled to prevent Japan's military aggression being glorified or excused.

Following the end of Allied occupation, the traditionalists reasserted their control of Japanese education. In 1956, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party denounced schoolbooks that told the truth about Japan's war guilt and war crimes in a published statement entitled "The Problem of the deplorable Textbooks".

In 1962, an officially sponsored seven-volume history of the Pacific War was published. This sanitised history, called "Japan's Way into the Pacific War", ignored Japan's military aggression across East Asia and the western Pacific and the countless atrocities committed by Japan's military. Shortly afterwards, Japan's Self Defence Forces published a history of the Pacific War that exonerated Japan's Imperial military from any war guilt or war crimes. These fraudulent histories laid the foundation for successive Japanese LDP governments to deny Japan's war guilt and war crimes.

Following the lead from their political masters, Japan's education bureaucrats began to censor history books for schoolchildren to prevent them learning the truth about Japan's military aggression between 1937 and 1945, and the many horrifying atrocities that were committed by Japanese during the course of that military aggression. If Japanese schoolchildren are told anything at all about the Pacific War, it is usually in a false context where the United States, Britain and the Netherlands are dishonestly accused of "forcing" Japan to wage a defensive war to obtain supplies of oil and rubber. The schoolchildren are not told in official history textbooks that oil and rubber were withheld from Japan in an effort to persuade Japan to halt its brutal and unprovoked war against China.

The children are not permitted to learn in their history books about the slaughter of millions of prisoners of war and captive civilians by the Japanese military, or the hundreds of thousands of captive foreign women who were forced to become sexual slaves in Japanese Army brothels across East Asia and the Pacific region.

At times the falsifications and distortions of history in Japanese school textbooks have become sufficiently outrageous to produce a storm of international protest. In 1982, on the fiftieth anniversary of Japan's forcible seizure and annexation of China's Manchurian region, the Ministry of Education ordered amendments to school history books. The children were not to be told that Japanese armies "invaded" Chinese Manchuria. Instead, they were to be told that Japanese armies made a "gradual advance" into Manchuria. Not content with this falsification of history, the Ministry of Education insisted that children not be told that Japan "annexed Korea in 1910" but that this sovereign country was "reunified with Japan".

Under pressure from both China and South Korea, the Japanese Prime Minister resigned and Japan promised to withdraw the falsifications of history from children's textbooks. The new Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone placated outraged neo-Imperialists and militarists by attending the infamous Yasukuni Shinto shrine and paying homage to Japan's war dead, including its worst war criminals.

In 1985, on the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of Japan's surrender in 1945, a new history textbook was released for schools. The "Newly Edited Japanese History" declared that Japan's armies entered China, the Philippines, French Indo-China, British Malaya, and the Dutch East Indies not as invaders but to "liberate" their Asian brothers from colonial oppression. This history book denounced as a lie the claimed slaughter of at least 200,000 Chinese civilians and prisoners of war after the fall of Nanking (Nanjing) to Japanese troops in 1937. China was outraged and lodged a fierce protest. The Japanese government promised that the offending text would be amended, but this was undermined by a public declaration from forty-seven members of the ruling LDP government that Japan's seizure of vast areas of China between 1931 and 1945 was caused by misunderstandings and was not undertaken for the purpose of expanding the Japanese empire.

In response to agitation for sanitising Japan's war history from extreme nationalist and militarist groups, Japan's Education Ministry approved in 2001 a history textbook for use in junior high schools produced by the extremist Society for History Textbook Reform. Among other revisions of history, this textbook played down the Nanjing Massacre, the use of hundreds of thousands of foreign women as sex slaves in Japanese Army brothels, and replaced the brutal "invasion" of China by the Japanese Army with an "advance" into China. This fraudulent distortion of history was opposed by Japanese liberals, including the influential civic group "Children and Textbooks Japan Network 21", and the strength of the opposition led to many school boards refusing to accept the revisionist history book.

The debate on the content of history textbooks for schools continued under Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi who had a history of supporting the cover-up of Japan's war guilt and war crimes, however he backing down when the level of protest from Asian neighbours and Japanese liberals causes embarrassment to Japan internationally.

Japan in Denial - The History of the Nanjing Massacre

2007-04-01T21:47:00.000-07:00

Murdered Chinese women and children are strewn across the steps of a Nanjing building.

The Nanjing Massacre, 1937-38

http://www.gendercide.org/case_nanking.html

Summary

The Nanjing Massacre, also known as "The Rape of Nanking," was an attrocity against the largeley Civilian population. It is particularly remembered for the invading forces' barbaric treatment of Chinese women. Many thousands of them were killed after gang rape, and tens of thousands of others brutally injured and traumatized.

Meanwhile, approximately a quarter of a million defenseless Chinese men were rounded up as prisoners-of-war and murdered en masse, used for bayonet practice, or burned and buried alive.

The Background

The Second World War began in Asia. Japan's military dictators had long viewed China as the main outlet for their imperial and expansionist ambitions (for an overview, see Saburo Ienaga, The Pacific War 1931-1945). Japanese forces invaded and occupied Manchuria in northeast China in 1931, setting up the puppet state of Manchukuo.

After the manufactured "Marco Polo Bridge Incident" of July 1937, the Japanese launched a fullscale invasion of China, capturing Shanghai on 12 November and the imperial capital, Nanjing, on 13 December. Numerous atrocities were committed en route to Nanjing, but they could not compare with the epic carnage and destruction the Japanese unleashed on the defenseless city after Chinese forces abandoned it to the enemy.

Mass Civillian Murder - Women and Children

Women were killed in indiscriminate acts of terror and execution, but the large majority died after extended and excruciating gang-rape. "Surviving Japanese veterans claim that the army had officially outlawed the rape of enemy women," writes Iris Chang. But "the military policy forbidding rape only encouraged soldiers to kill their victims afterwards." She cites one soldier's recollection that "It would be all right if we only raped them. I shouldn't say all right. But we always stabbed and killed them. Because dead bodies don't talk ... Perhaps when we were raping her, we looked at her as a woman, but when we killed her, we just thought of her as something like a pig." (Chang, The Rape of Nanking, pp. 49-50). Kenzo Okamoto, another Japanese soldier, recalled: "From the time of the landing at Hangzhou Bay, we were hungry for women! Officers issued a rough rule: If you mess with a woman, kill her afterwards, but don't use bayonets or rifle fire. The purpose of this rule was probably to disguise who did the killing. The military code with its punishment of execution was empty words. No one was ever punished. Some officers were even worse than the soldiers." (Yin and Young, The Rape of Nanking, p. 188)

One eyewitness, Li Ke-hen, reported: "There are so many bodies on the street, victims of group rape and murder. They were all stripped naked, their breasts cut off, leaving a terrible dark brown hole; some of them were bayoneted in the abdomen, with their intestines spilling out alongside them; some had a roll of paper or a piece of wood stuffed in their vaginas" (quoted in Yin and Young, The Rape of Nanking, p. 195). John Rabe, a German (and Nazi) businessman who set up a "Nanking Safety Zone" in the city's international settlement and thereby saved thousands of Chinese lives, described in his diary the weeks of terror endured by the women of Nanjing. Though young and conventionally attractive women were most at risk, no woman was safe from vicious rape and exploitation (often filmed as souvenirs) and probable murder thereafter. "Groups of 3 to 10 marauding soldiers would begin by traveling through the city and robbing whatever there was to steal. They would continue by raping the women and girls and killing anything and anyone that offered any resistance, attempted to run away from them or simply happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. There were girls under the age of 8 and women over the age of 70 who were raped and then, in the most brutal way possible, knocked down and beat up." (Chang, The Rape of Nanking, p. 119.) In addition to those killed after the violation, historian David Bergamini notes that "Many immature girls were turned loose in such a manhandled condition that they died a day or two later. ... Many young women were simply tied to beds as permanent fixtures accessible to any and all comers. When they became too weepy or too diseased to arouse desire, they were disposed of. In alleys and parks lay the corpses of women who had been dishonored even after death by mutilation and stuffing." (Yin and Young, The Rape of Nanking, p. 195.)

Not all of the victims of rape were female. "Chinese men were often sodomized or forced to perform a variety of repulsive sexual acts in front of laughing Japanese soldiers," writes Chang. "At least one Chinese man was murdered because he refused to commit necrophilia with the corpse of a woman in the snow. The Japanese also delighted in trying to coerce men who had taken lifetime vows of celibacy to engage in sexual intercourse. ... The Japanese drew sadistic pleasure in forcing Chinese men to commit incest -- fathers to rape their own daughters, brothers their sisters, sons their mothers ... those who refused were killed on the spot." (Chang, The Rape of Nanking, p. 95.)

Mass Civillian & POW Murder - Men

On 5 December, even before Nanjing's fall, Prince Yasuhiko Asaka -- uncle of Emperor Hirohito -- issued a secret order to "Kill all captives." When Nanjing was taken, "All military-age men among the refugees were taken prisoner," whether or not they had actually been soldiers (Yin and Young, The Rape of Nanking, p. 76.

At wharves along the Yangtze River, tens of thousands of these prisoners -- up to 150,000 in all -- were massacred in cold blood. A typical order, issued to the 66th Regiment 1st Battalion on 13 December, read as follows:

Battalion battle report, at 2:00 [p.m.] received orders from the Regiment commander: to comply with orders from Brigade commanding headquarters, all prisoners of war are to be executed. Method of executed: divide the prisoners into groups of a dozen. Shoot to kill separately. ... It is decided that the prisoners are to be divided evenly among each company ... and to be brought out from their imprisonment in groups of 50 to be executed. ... The vicinity of the imprisonment must be heavily guarded. Our intentions are absolutely not to be detected by the prisoners. Every company is to complete preparation before 5:00 p.m. Executions are to start by 5:00 and action is to be finished by 7:30. (Quoted in Yin and Young, The Rape of Nanking, pp. 110, 115.)

According to Iris Chang, "The Japanese would take any men they found as prisoners, neglect to give them water or food for days, but promise them food and work. After days of such treatment, the Japanese would bind the wrists of their victims securely with wire or rope and herd them out to some isolated area. The men, too tired or dehydrated to rebel, went out eagerly, thinking they would be fed. By the time they saw the machine guns, or the bloodied swords and bayonets wielded by waiting soldiers, or the massive graves, heaped and reeking with the bodies of the men who had preceded them, it was already too late to escape." (Chang, The Rape of Nanking, p. 83.) The Japanese held grotesque killing contests, including "a competition to determine who could kill the fastest. As one soldier stood sentinel with a machine gun, ready to mow down anyone who tried to bolt, the eight other soldiers split up into pairs to form four separate teams. In each team, one soldier beheaded prisoners with a sword while the other picked up heads and tossed them aside in a pile. The prisoners stood frozen in silence and terror as their countrymen dropped, one by one." (Chang, The Rape of Nanking, p. 85)

Atrocious tortures were also inflicted on the captive men. "The Japanese not only disemboweled, decapitated, and dismembered victims but performed more excruciating varieties of torture. Throughout the city they nailed prisoners to wooden boards and ran over them with tanks, crucified them to trees and electrical posts, carved long strips of flesh from them, and used them for bayonet practice. At least one hundred men reportedly had their eyes gouged out and their noses and ears hacked off before being set on fire. Another group of two hundred Chinese soldiers and civilians were stripped naked, tied to columns and doors of a school, and then stabbed by zhuizi -- special needles with handles on them -- in hundreds of points along their bodies, including their mouths, throats, and eyes. ... The Japanese subjected large crowds of victims to mass incineration. In Hsiakwan [along the Yangtze] a Japanese soldier bound Chinese captives together, ten at a time, and pushed them into a pit, where they were sprayed with gasoline and ignited." (Chang, The Rape of Nanking, pp. 87-88.)

How many died?

After the war, the International Military Tribunal of the Far East cited "indications that the total number of civilians and prisoners-of-war murdered in Nanking and its immediate vicinity during the first six weeks of the Japanese occupation was over 200,000. That these estimates are not exaggerated is borne out by the fact that burial societies and other organizations counted more than 155,000 bodies which they buried ... these figures do not take into account those persons whose bodies were destroyed by burning or by throwing them into the Yangtze River or otherwise disposed of by [the] Japanese." As well, "According to Japanese Lieutenant colonel Toshio Ohta's statement, between December 14 and December 18 the Japanese commanding headquarters of Nanjing Port disposed of 100,000 bodies while other troops disposed of 50,000." (Yin and Young, The Rape of Nanking, pp. 78, 90.)

With the sole exception of the Nazi gendercide against Soviet POWs, this was the most concentrated massacre of prisoners-of-war in recorded history. The rapes and rape-murders of women were also of staggering proportions. "Certainly it was one of the greatest mass rapes in world history," writes Iris Chang. She notes that "it is impossible to determine the exact number of women raped in Nanking. Estimates range from as low as twenty thousand to as high as eighty thousand." (Chang, The Rape of Nanking, p. 89)

Who was responsible?

Emperor Hirohito

Senior members of the Japanese high command bearing direct responsibility for the mass atrocities in China included the Emperor Hirohito, who made all major military decisions, including the one to invade China in 1937; Hirohito's uncle, Prince Asaka, who issued the order to "Kill all captives" and was thus the main architect of the gendercide against Nanjing's men; General Yanagawa Heisuke; and Lieut. General Nakajima Kesago, commander of the 16th division, who "supervised the beheading of two prisoners-of-war to test his new sword, thus setting an example for his troops in mass-scale killing in Nanking" (Yin and Young, The Rape of Nanking, p. 284).

The Aftermath

The massacres and mass rapes in Nanjing continued for a full six weeks, extending into January 1938. Eventually the genocidal rampage was replaced by a brutal occupation conducted under a puppet authority, the "Nanking Self-Government Committee." Life began to return to the city, and its population eventually re-stabilized at around 700,000, two-thirds of the prewar population. In August 1945, after atomic-bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Japanese surrendered to the United States and other allies. The Second World War was over.

In 1946-47, war-crimes trials were held in Nanjing. "Only a handful of Japanese war criminals were tried in Nanking," notes Chang, "but they gave the local Chinese citizens a chance to air their grievances and participate in mass catharsis." (Chang, The Rape of Nanking, p. 170.) Tani Hisao, a commander of the 6th Division which had committed many atrocities in Nanjing and elsewhere, was sentenced to death in March 1947 and executed the following month. The International Military Tribunal for the Far East tried nearly 30 key Japanese commanders, including Matsui Iwane, commander of the Central China Expeditionary Force. Iwane, however -- according to Chang -- "may have served as the scapegoat for the Rape of Nanking. A sickly and frail man suffering from tuberculosis, Matsui was not even in Nanking when the city fell" (Chang, The Rape of Nanking, p. 174). He was nonetheless executed along with six other "class A" war criminals in this Japanese equivalent of the Nuremberg trials. General Yanagawa Heisuke and Lieut. General Nakajima Kesago, two of the main Japanese field commanders in charge of the occupation of Nanjing, died of natural causes in 1945, and thus could not be prosecuted. Controversially, the Japanese imperial family, including Emperor Hirohito and Prince Asaka, received immunity.

A conscious attempt has been made by "revisionists" in Japan to deny or downplay the involvement of the Japanese military in massive atrocities during World War II. In September 1986, the Japanese education minister, Fujio Masayuki, referred to the Rape of Nanking as "just a part of war." In 1988, a 30-second scene depicting the Rape of Nanking was removed from Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor by the film's Japanese distributor. In 1991, censors at the Ministry of Education "ordered textbook authorities to eliminate all reference to the numbers of Chinese killed during the Rape of Nanking because authorities believed there was insufficient evidence to verify those numbers" (Chang, The Rape of Nanking, p. 208). And General Nagano Shigeto, a Second World War veteran appointed justice minister in Spring 1994, told a Japanese newspaper that "the Nanking Massacre and the rest was a fabrication."

Until the recent resurgence of interest in the Nanjing Massacre, the atrocities and their survivors had been largely forgotten. "After the war some of the survivors had clung to the hope that their government would vindicate them by pushing for Japanese reparations and an official apology. This hope, however, was swiftly shattered when the People's Republic of China (PRC), eager to forge an alliance with the Japanese to gain international legitimacy, announced at various times that it had forgiven the Japanese." Despite the fact that "the PRC has never signed a treaty with the Japanese relinquishing its right to seek national reparations for wartime crimes," no such reparations have been sought -- or offered. Overseas Chinese have, however, mounted increasing activist efforts. "The 1990s saw a proliferation of novels, historical books, and newspaper articles about the Rape of Nanking ... The San Francisco school district plans to include the history of the Rape of Nanking in its curriculum, and prints have even been drawn up among Chinese real estate developers to build a Chinese holocaust museum." (Chang, The Rape of Nanking, pp. 223-24.) Chang concludes her book, itself an important contribution to the revival of interest in these ghastly events, with a call for justice, however delayed:

Japan carries not only the legal burden but the moral obligation to acknowledge the evil it perpetrated at Nanjing. At a minimum, the Japanese government needs to issue an official apology to the victims, pay reparations to the people whose lives were destroyed in the rampage, and, most important, educate future generations of Japanese citizens about the true facts of the massacre. These long-overdue steps are crucial for Japan if it expects to deserve respect from the international community -- and to achieve closure on a dark chapter that stained its history. (Chang, The Rape of Nanking, p. 225.)

Japanese confronted with war crimes past as films recall the Rape of Nanjing

Scotsman http://news.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=499232007
Jim Hunter Gordon 31-3-07

JAPAN is set for another round of recriminations over its historical conduct, with no fewer than seven films about the Rape of Nanjing massacre committed by its forces set to be released for the event's 70th anniversary this year.

The £13 million Nanking! Nanking! is the latest in a flurry of films about the event to be granted a permit by the Chinese authorities. It will start filming next month, coinciding with the Chinese premier Wen Jiabao's planned ice-breaking visit to Japan.

China says that Japanese troops killed 300,000 people in Nanjing between December 1937 and March 1938 - including tens of thousands who were raped and tortured. An allied tribunal put the death toll at about 142,000, but this figure has been challenged many times over the years with some estimates as high as 400,000.

While the Japanese government has recognised that the atrocity did happen, some historians in the country argue that only soldiers were killed, and have sought to have references to the massacre removed from textbooks.

Taro Aso, the Japanese foreign minister, said last week that he hoped talks between 20 historians from Japan and China would carry out an "objective" study into the history in what is a sensitive year.

Six feature films are to depict the massacre according to photographic and forensic evidence, and the stories of foreigners who stayed in the city to try and save Chinese lives.

Meanwhile, a group of Japanese nationalists are making a rival documentary film called The Truth about Nanjing, which denies the atrocity occurred and is to be directed by Helmer Satoru Mizushima.

Jiang Yu, a spokesman for China's foreign ministry, said it was in Japan's "own interests" to take a "correct and responsible attitude" to its wartime history, adding that "China had always advocated the development of friendly relations between the two countries."

The Chinese Communist Party has in the past been criticised for stoking anti-Japanese sentiment. Actress Zhang Ziyi was widely criticised as a "traitor" for playing a Japanese role in the film Memoirs of a Geisha.

Hong Kong actress Maggie Cheung, will reportedly star in Nanking! Nanking!

Director Lu Chuan, one of the so-called "sixth-generation" of Chinese directors, told local state media: "We've spent two years collecting historical documents about the massacre. I will try to make history clear and explain it in the movie, rather than expose the sorrow between nations."

The highest profile release is likely to be The Rape of Nanking, produced by Gerald Green's Viridian Entertainment and the Jiangsu provincial government.

The £20 million budget production is to be based on the late Chinese-American writer Iris Chang's book but told through the eyes of a mother and daughter.

"We hope we can make the film a classic just like Schindler's List," said Green.

Civillian Slaughter

"The Rape of Nanking" - the old transliteration of Nanjing - as it is known, happened during the second Sino-Japanese War.

The fighting was fierce, with both sides suffering heavy casualties.

Upon the fall of Nanjing on 13 December, 1937, many Chinese soldiers attempted to disappear into the civilian populace. This spurred the imperial Japanese army to round up the male population, killing many civilians in the process. But the most infamous treatment was meted out to the city's women, subjected to mass rape, mutilation and murder.

Militarist Japanese PM Shinzo Abe 'grandson of war criminal Nobutsuke Kishi' denies war time sex slavery

2007-03-13T18:50:00.000-07:00

PM Menzies meets 'War criminal'and Post War Japanese PM Kishi in 1957
Japanese PM dashes sex slaves' hope of apologyTokyo
March 6, 2007 The Age

JAPAN will not apologise again for forcing women to act as sex slaves for Japanese soldiers in World War II, even if the US Congress passes a resolution demanding it, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said yesterday.

Mr Abe, elaborating on his denial last week that women were forced to serve as front-line prostitutes, said none of the testimony in hearings held last month before the US House of Representatives offered any solid proof of abuse.

But Mr Abe said he stood by a 1993 Japanese government apology that acknowledged the military played a role in setting up and managing wartime brothels and that coercion was used. This has disappointed many of his conservative supporters who shared his past criticism of the initial apology statement.

"I have to say that even if the resolution passes, that doesn't mean we will apologise," Mr Abe told a parliamentary panel, reiterating the government stance that the US resolution contains factual errors.

Historians say that up to 200,000 women, mostly from Korea and China, served as "comfort women" in Japanese military brothels throughout Asia in the 1930s and 1940s.

Accounts of abuse by the military — including the kidnapping of women and girls for use in the brothels — have been backed up by witnesses and victims, as well as by former Japanese soldiers.

But prominent Japanese scholars and politicians deny direct military involvement, or the use of force in obtaining women, blaming private contractors for any abuses.
Last week, Mr Abeinfuriated South Korea when he questioned the extent of physical coercion used in recruiting the women.

"There is no evidence to back up that there was coercion as defined initially," he told reporters on Thursday, apparently referring to claims that the Imperial Army had kidnapped women for the brothels.

Yesterday, he said there seemed to have been some cases of coercion, by middlemen, but added: "It was not as though military police broke into people's homes and took them away like kidnappers."

The issue still threatens to sour US-Japan ties ahead of Mr Abe's expected visit to Washington in the northern spring.

In coming weeks Congress is due to vote on a non-binding motion introduced by California Democrat Michael Honda, calling on the Japanese Government to "formally and unambiguously apologise for and acknowledge the tragedy that comfort women endured at the hands of its Imperial Army during World War II".

Mr Honda, who is of Japanese descent, has voiced his alarm at efforts by some conservatives in Japan to withdraw or revise the Government's earlier admission of a state role in the brothel system.

Japan has refused to compensate former comfort women, insisting that all payout claims were settled in postwar treaties with its former enemies.

A fund launched by the Japanese Government in 1995 has been denounced by most of the victims as an empty gesture because it is dependent on private donations.

AP, REUTERS, GUARDIAN

Source: http://www.theage.com.au/news/world/japanese-pm-dashes-sex-slaves-hope-of-apology/2007/03/05/1172943356992.html

Japan PM denies WWII sex slavery

Norimitsu Onishi, Tokyo
March 3, 2007 The Age

PRIME Minister Shinzo Abe has denied that Japan's military forced foreign women into sexual slavery during World War II, contradicting the Government's longstanding official position.

Mr Abe's statement was the clearest so far that the Government was preparing to reject a 1993 government statement acknowledging the military's role in setting up brothels and forcing women into sexual slavery.

That declaration also offered an apology to the women, euphemistically called "comfort women".

"There is no evidence to prove there was coercion, nothing to support it," Mr Abe said. But he said he would stick by his pledge to parliament, made last October, that he and his Government would abide by previous admissions of Japan's responsibility for the suffering caused by its occupation of swaths of Asia.

Women's rights activists in the Philippines denounced Mr Abe's denial.
"We are enraged," said Rechilda Extremadura, executive director of Lila Pilipina, an organization of activists and former Filipino wartime sex slaves.

In 1993, the Government offered a "sincere apology and remorse" for the confinement of the women for sexual slavery, and acknowledged that the military "directly or indirectly" was responsible for maintaining these "comfort stations".

Mr Abe's remarks came as the US House of Representatives debated a resolution that would call on Tokyo to apologise for the military's role in wartime sex slavery.
The push for a resolution included Australian Jan Ruff O'Herne, who went to Washington to describe her refusal to submit to the Japanese soldiers who repeatedly raped her as a young woman in Indonesia.

In Japan, in keeping with a recent trend to revise wartime history, about 120 legislators from the governing Liberal Democratic Party want Mr Abe to alter the apology, which has become a pillar of Japanese diplomacy and a litmus test of its sincerity about atonement for war crimes. The legislators say there is no evidence the military coerced women. They plan to present a petition to the Government demanding a rewrite of the apology, which they consider a stain on Japan's honour.
Mr Abe, whose approval ratings have been plummeting over a series of scandals and perceived weak leadership, seemed to side with this group. A nationalist, he has long led efforts to revise wartime history.

Nariaki Nakayama, the leader of the 120, suggested the brothels were a simple business venture.

"Some say it is useful to compare the brothels to college cafeterias run by private companies, who recruit their own staff, procure foodstuffs and set prices," he said. "Where there's demand, business crops up," he said.

We're just good friends, honest - But China has reason to suspect Japan's military flirtation with Australia

2007-03-13T18:33:00.000-07:00

Japan can still not face up to its War Crimes

2007-03-08T03:29:00.000-08:00

Militarist former PM Junichiro Koizumi annual visit to the Yasakuni shrine to Japan's war dead (including Class A War Criminals) that so upset Japans neighbours

Photo: Reuters

JAPAN STILL CAN NOT FACE UP TO ITS WAR CRIMES

Japan still does not understand that human rights do not cease to exist during war (whether between states or as a civil war).

Whilst Japan had been a party to all the successive conventions about the conduct of war from 1856 to the 1930s it still refuses to concede that it broke all of them during its invasion of China in the 30ies and during the World War 2.

It signed the following conventions 1856-1929:

Declaration Respecting Maritime Law (Certain Regulations for Sea Warfare), 1856

Geneva Convention for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded and Sick in Armed Forces in the Field, 1864

Declaration Renouncing the Use, in Time of War, of Explosive Projectiles Under 400 Gram's Weight, 1868

International Convention for Adapting to Maritime Warfare the Principles of The Geneva Convention of 1864, 1899

International Convention for the Pacific Settlement of International Disputes [Hague I], 1899

International Convention for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded and the Sick in Armies in the Field [The Red Cross Convention], 1906

Declaration Prohibiting the Discharge of Projectiles and Explosives from Balloons [Hague XIV], 1907

International Convention Concerning the Law and Customs of War on Land [Hague IV], 1907

International Convention Relative to Certain Restrictions on the Exercise of the Right of Capture in Maritime War [Hague XI], 1907

International Convention Relative to the Conversion of Merchant-Ships into War-Ships [Hague VII], 1907

International Convention Relative to the Opening of Hostilities [Hague III], 1907

International Convention Respecting Bombardments by Naval Forces in Time of War [Hague IX], 1907

Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or Other Gases, and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare [Gas Protocol], 1925

International Convention for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded and the Sick in Armies in the Field, 1929

International Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War, 1929

It respected none of them. In particular the key Geneva Convention that provided that prisoners of war -

must be treated humanely: must not be subject to torture or to medical or scientific experiments,

must be protected against violence, intimidation, insults and public curiosity/display.

when questioned - in the prisoner's native language -

must only give their names, ranks, birth dates and serial numbers.

Those who refuse to answer may not be threatened or mistreated.

must be immediately evacuated from a combat zone, must not be unnecessarily exposed to danger and must not be used as human shields.

must not be punished for acts committed during fighting unless the opposing side would have punished its own forces for those acts as well.

Japan did none of these things!

Japan’s War Guilt Revisited

"It is our obligation as Japan’s most influential newspaper to tell our readers who was responsible for starting the Sino-Japanese War and the Pacific War."

So writes Tsuneo Watanabe, Editor-in-Chief of Japan’s (and the world’s) most widely circulated newspaper, Yomiuri Shimbun, in the introduction to the book From Marco Polo Bridge to Pearl Harbor: Who Was Responsible.

Watanabe, who is now in his eighties and served in the Imperial Japanese Army during WWII, was bothered by the way unfinished business concerning the war continued to hinder Japan’s progress. As a remedy, he set up a War Responsibility Re-Examination Committee at his newspaper to undertake a 14-month investigation into the causes of Japan’s Pacific War.

Watanabe tells us that the Committee concluded that, "not only high-ranking government leaders, general, and admirals should shoulder the blame." According to the Committee, "field officers were often more influential than even the Emperor, war ministers, and chiefs-of-staffs in making decisions to go to and escalate the wars, and were responsible for many atrocities."

Watanabe laments the fact that after Japanese war criminals were tried by the Tokyo Tribunal of 1951, "No efforts were made in the name of Japan or the Japanese people to look into where responsibility for the war rested." As a result, "there can be no genuinely honest and friendly dialogue with those countries that suffered considerable damage and casualties in the wars with Japan."

But does the Yomiuri study go far enough? While it assigns responsibility to Japan for WWII, and even unflinchingly names the political and military leaders who bear responsibility, one can still detect a whiff of reluctance in its failure to fully describe some of Japan’s war-time actions. For example, the horrors of the Nanjing Massacre in 1937, when Japanese soldiers killed 250,000 Chinese – many of whom were civilians – are given little more than a brief mention.

"If things are left as they are," writes Watanabe, "a skewed perception of history – without knowledge of the horrors of the war – will be handed down to future generations."

Truth: last casualty of Japan's war
April 25, 2005

Japan is still struggling to face up to the truth and consequences of its brutal role in World War II, writes Tony Parkinson.

I remember visiting Berlin's Reichstag in the days when the city was still divided. Back then, 20 years ago, one floor of the building served as a Holocaust museum. The people of West Germany could make no more evocative statement than to turn over this edifice of Prussian power to a commemorative for the millions who died in concentration camps. Even so, it was awkward and uncomfortable to watch a middle-aged German woman collapse in tears as she confronted some of history's most gruesome images. She couldn't have been more than a child when these atrocities happened. Was it her burden to carry?

Yet school group after school group was escorted by teachers through these bleak galleries. They were expected to know what happened, and to attempt to understand how it could have happened in a society such as their own.

Japan, like Germany, has emerged 60 years after war as one of the world's most successful and significant nations. But why won't - why can't - Japan reach the same pact with history and come up with a more convincing way of demonstrating its contrition for the crimes against humanity carried out in its name back in those barbarous years?

Japan's Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi issued a public apology for the pain his country inflicted on neighbouring Asian nations before and during World War II. "Japan, through its colonial rule and aggression, caused tremendous damage and suffering to the people of many countries, particularly to those of Asian nations," he said. "Japan squarely faces these facts of history in a spirit of humility."

His words were an attempt to ease the recent alarming inflammation in relations with China, in particular. More broadly, though, they were symbolic of an important and praiseworthy effort to make amends as the 60th anniversary of the end of war in the Pacific approaches.

Perhaps the more enduring question is this: will anyone be persuaded as long as Japan's education system continues to shield the young from the unexpurgated truth about the war? Shouldn't they have all the facts so they might better understand why China, and others, have trouble forgetting, much less forgiving, what happened all those decades ago?

Sixty years on, it is a hangover of history that won't go away. This is one of the themes explored in great depth in Hellfire, Cameron Forbes' epic history of the murder and mistreatment of prisoners of war on the Thai-Burma railway.

Forbes' narrative brings all his elegance as a wordsmith, his many years as a war correspondent and his extensive insights into the cultures, history and topography of Asia to the task of documenting one of the more shameful episodes of 20th century inhumanity.

No fewer than 8000 Australians died on the railway. This was more than a third of all those taken captive as Japanese forces swept south in 1941-42 to conquer Singapore, Malaya, Java, Borneo and Timor - a gruesome rate of attrition by any measure.

What dark spirits, what perversion of the warrior's code, drove the Imperial Japanese Army to enslave tens of thousands of Allied soldiers, many diseased and starving, and force them on pain of death to pile-drive through rock and dense jungle to build a land bridge to Burma? How could they stand and watch men die like flies as they pushed deadlines set by the 9th Railway Regiment in Tokyo? How could they maul and monster those too weak to work?

Perhaps just as troubling, how could some in modern Japan seek to banish the memory, hit the erase button - as if to pretend it never really happened at all?

Forbes' study of this latter point singles out the Yasukuni Shrine, the most important, if most controversial, testimonial to Japan's war dead. In the museum adjacent to this Shinto temple, there is a display of the first engine to travel the infamous Thai-Burma railway.

But there is not a single mention of the savage sacrifice involved in the rail project which, as Forbes puts it, was very much "built on the bones of the dead".

The whitewashing of Japan's war record at places such as Yasukuni Shrine lingers as a permanent provocation to many in the region, Australians included. Yes, it is a bit much for China to argue Japan's refusal to grapple properly with this dark episode of its past serves to disqualify it "morally" from a global leadership role. China, too, can be highly selective about its past. Its history books by no means dwell on the horrific purges and bloodshed of Mao's Cultural Revolution, nor mention the death of 250,000 Tibetans in China's ruthless subjugation of the mountain province in 1959, nor the brutal crackdown on students in 1989 in Tiananmen Square.

Japan today is a strong and stable democracy, the world's second-largest economy, and a consistent and generous aid donor, especially in South-East Asia and the Pacific islands.

I can see why two generations of Japanese not born at the time of that war might wonder why the world, 60 years on, cannot let rest the ghosts of the past. Like that woman in Berlin, can they really be faulted for crimes they did not commit, nor would ever contemplate?

Yet I can also see compelling reasons why young Japanese should be expected to confront the ugly, unadorned truth squarely and honestly.

It is almost certainly a forlorn hope. But Hellfire, faithfully translated, would be a perfect addition to the reading list in Japanese schools. It might open hearts as well as eyes.

Tony Parkinson is international editor. Hellfire: The Story of Australia, Japan and the Prisoners of War by Cameron Forbes (Macmillan).

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

2007-03-08T02:53:00.000-08:00

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.