Japan threatens to halt Unesco funding over Nanjing massacre listing

Japan threatens to halt Unesco funding over Nanjing massacre listing
The Guardian: 13 October 2015

"My deceased benefactor, who was a soldier deployed to Nanjing when he was young, once told me with regret and shame "I shot many chinese (civilians) by machine gun on the order of senior officer." He was crying and said "Most regrettable moment in my life". Some people say the number of victims was 300,000. while others say 30,000. But it is not a matter of number. Even if it is 3,000 or 300, genocide is genocide, truth is truth, fault is fault, nothing else! It should not be repeated any more! " (a voice of a Japanese citizen through internet)
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Earlier, US and Japan were 2 biggest contributors for funding UNESCO. US stopped funding after Palestinian membership. Now Japanese government started to say this. Though Japanese government complains that China is using UNESCO as political tool, Japanese government's reaction is obviously applying the manner they complained.

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Japan has threatened to withdraw its funding for Unesco after the UN body included disputed Chinese documents about the Nanjing massacre in its Memory of the World list, despite protests from Tokyo.  The row is one of several disagreements over wartime history that have soured ties between Japan and China, which are also locked in a dispute over ownership of the Senkaku islands.

Japan’s chief cabinet secretary, Yoshihide Suga, said the decision to register the documents reflected a biased Chinese view of history. “There is a big discrepancy of views between Japan and China, and the decision reflecting a unilateral view turns the issue into a political problem,” he told reporters.
“We are considering all measures, including suspension of our funding contributions” to Unesco, he said. Suga added: “The decision-making process lacked transparency. We were not even allowed access to the contents of the Chinese documents.” Japan contributed 3.72bn yen (£20m) to Unesco last year, about 10% of Unesco’s budget. It was the first UN body Japan joined, in 1951, as it sought to contribute to the international community after its wartime defeat and occupation.
Unesco’s director-general, Irina Bokova, approved the Nanjing inscription in Abu Dhabi last Friday, after receiving recommendations from a 14-member panel of archivists and librarians.
Japan’s foreign ministry said it was “extremely regrettable that a global organisation that should be neutral and fair entered the documents in the Memory of the World register, despite the repeated pleas made by the Japanese government”.

 

Unesco, however, rejected a Chinese request that photos and other documents relating to Japan’s use of wartime sex slaves be included on the list. The Nanjing documents relate to Japan’s bloody invasion of the south-eastern Chinese city in late 1937, during which troops murdered and raped tens of thousands of people. Chinese historians claim that Japanese imperial army troops killed more than 300,000 soldiers and civilians in a six-week rampage, but Japanese historians insist the number was between the tens of thousands and 200,000.

Japan’s official position is that “the killing of a large number of noncombatants, looting and other acts occurred”, but that “it is difficult to determine” the number of victims. Officials in Tokyo called Unesco’s neutrality into question and accused Beijing of using the international cultural arena to promote its political agenda. The documents submitted by China include court records from the international military tribunal for the far east, which found several Japanese leaders guilty of war crimes, as well as photographs claiming to show the slaughter of people in Nanjing and film footage taken by an American missionary.

Japan, however, has questioned the authenticity of the documents, adding that its offers to cooperate with Chinese experts to establish their veracity had been rejected by Beijing. Japan’s foreign ministry said the nomination “raises questions about the action of the international organisation that ought to be neutral and fair”, adding that “it is evident that there is a problem about the veracity” of the archives.

Hua Chunying, a Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman, dismissed Japanese protests, describing the Nanjing massacre as a “severe crime” and “a historical fact acknowledged by international society”.
Hua said in a statement: “The facts are not to be denied. History is not to be falsified. What the Japanese side has said and done once again revealed its reluctance to face history squarely, which is wrong.”

Newspapers in Japan were united in their condemnation of Unesco’s decision. “We cannot accept China’s stance of using a system for protecting cultural assets for political purposes in a campaign against Japan, and trying to fix its self-righteous historical perception in the international community,” the conservative Yomiuri Shimbun said in an editorial.

The liberal Asahi Shimbun noted that some Chinese historians questioned Beijing’s claim that the death toll ran to more than 300,000. “There are few clues that could substantiate that death toll, which many historians in China doubt,” the newspaper said. “But there is no air of freedom that allows them to discuss the matter openly.”

Unesco accepted two Japanese nominations: memoirs and drawings by former Japanese soldiers who were held in Siberian labour camps, and thousands of documents stretching back to the eighth century that belong to a Buddhist temple. Since its launch in the 1990s, the Memory of the World programme has registered dozens of submissions, including the diaries of Anne Frank and an annotated copy of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/13/japan-threatens-to-halt-unesco-funding-over-nanjing-listing?CMP=share_btn_fb

For Japan, a Difficult Art of Saying It’s Sorry

For Japan, a Difficult Art of Saying It’s Sorry
Wall Street Journal: 13 January 2015

This year, which will mark the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II, we’re likely to hear a chorus of voices urging Japan to behave more like Germany, the model penitent.

No country has ever displayed the same level of contrition. Germany’s agonized soul-searching and apologies after the most destructive war in history helped put to rest fears that it would ever again threaten peace. Reassured, Europe was able to reconcile.

By contrast, Japan’s remembrance of its wartime past often has been unapologetic. That is said to explain why relations with China and South Korea, which were most traumatized by Japanese militarism, are still poisoned. There’s a real fear that mounting tensions between Japan and China over disputed islands could erupt into armed conflict.

Japan should apologize comprehensively, once and for all, the argument runs, to lessen tensions in East Asia. Expectations are already high among regional politicians, academics and victim’s groups for what Prime Minister Shinzo Abe will say on the anniversary of Japan’s surrender in August.
If only it were that easy.

First, it’s simply not true that Japan has been parsimonious with its official apologies.
Japan can be faulted for its tendency to dwell primarily on its own wartime sufferings, for playing down its atrocities in school textbooks and for the inflammatory denial by public figures of such facts as the widespread use of slave labor, the Nanking massacre and the forced recruitment of “comfort women” who acted as sex slaves for the Imperial Army.

But its leaders can’t be accused of not saying sorry. In recent decades they’ve apologized repeatedly and profusely.

In 1991, then-Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa begged forgiveness for the “unbearable torment and grief” Japan inflicted on the Asia Pacific. On the 50th anniversary of the surrender, Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama expressed “deep remorse” and “heartfelt apology” for colonial rule and aggression.

No Japanese leader has yet matched former German Chancellor Willy Brandt’s iconic “kniefall” in 1970, when he dropped to his knees at the memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Still, in 2001, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi laid a wreath in South Korea while apologizing for colonial rule there.

Second, it’s not at all clear that another sweeping mea culpa by Mr. Abe would do much good. It might even make matters worse.  Jennifer Lind, the author of “Sorry States: Apologies in International Politics,” disputes the widespread assumption that apologies are a necessary part of reconciliation. She notes that Germany and France made up even before Germany really began to atone for its Nazi horrors. That took a generation. Moreover, apologies are politically risky, says Ms. Lind: They often provoke a backlash in countries making them.

That’s precisely what happens in Japan, where official apologies prompt howls of denial from right-wing nationalists and other extremists, undoing all the good intentions.

The trouble with Mr. Abe is that he has appointed several such figures to positions of prominence, raising questions about where his own sympathies lie. His visit in 2013 to the Yasukuni war shrine, where 14 Class A war criminals are enshrined along with other war dead, gave ammunition to his critics. It allowed China and South Korea to paint him as an unrepentant militarist.

And there’s the rub. Further apologies won’t fix the real problem in East Asia, which is that arguments over history are being exploited by politicians for their own domestic ends.

History debates fuel competing nationalist agendas in the region. They inflame territorial disputes and preclude pragmatic diplomatic solutions.

In China, anti-Japanese sentiment has become a vital crutch for the regime. Portraying Japan as an unrepentant brute helps justify China’s military buildup.

By the same token, many in Japan have come to view China’s economic rise as an existential threat; Mr. Abe’s appeal to voters is at least in part due to expectations that he will stand up to Japan’s powerful neighbor. Getting down on his knees would play well in Beijing and Seoul, but terribly in Tokyo.

True reconciliation anywhere in the world is so hard to pull off that politicians generally have to be forced into it. A common threat is helpful. That was the case in Europe where Cold War imperatives encouraged healing.

Unfortunately, the political incentives in East Asia mostly pull in the opposite direction—toward further enmity.

So what should Mr. Abe say on the Aug. 15 anniversary? He’s promised a statement that will set out “Japan’s remorse over the war, its postwar history as a pacifist nation and how it will contribute to the Asia Pacific region and the world.” He also said he won’t backtrack on earlier official apologies.
All this is essential to improve his standing as a global statesman. But whatever he says is unlikely to appease Japan’s two close neighbors. There are no “magic words,” says Ms. Lind. “China will be unhappy regardless.”

Even if Japan adopts Germany as its model to heal the wounds of World War II in Asia, the question is whether China and South Korea would then act more like France, a model of forgiveness.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/for-japan-a-difficult-art-of-saying-its-sorry-1421127266
 

Xi’s history lessons

Xi’s history lessons
The Economist:15 August, 2015

IN EARLY September President Xi Jinping will take the salute at a huge military parade in Beijing. It will be his most visible assertion of authority since he came to power in 2012: his first public appearance at such a display of missiles, tanks and goose-stepping troops. Officially the event will be all about the past, commemorating the end of the second world war in 1945 and remembering the 15m Chinese people who died in one of its bloodiest chapters: the Japanese invasion and occupation of China of 1937-45.

It will be a reminder of the bravery of China’s soldiers and their crucial role in confronting Asia’s monstrously aggressive imperial power. And rightly so: Chinese sacrifices during that hellish period deserve much wider recognition. Between 1937, when total war erupted in China, and late 1941, when the attack on Pearl Harbor brought America into the fray, China fought the Japanese alone. By the end of the war it had lost more people—soldiers and civilians—than any other country bar the Soviet Union.

Yet next month’s parade is not just about remembrance; it is about the future, too. This is the first time that China  is commemorating the war with a military show, rather than with solemn ceremony. The symbolism will not be lost on its neighbours. And it will unsettle them, for in East Asia today the rising, disruptive, undemocratic power is no longer a string of islands presided over by a god-emperor. It is the world’s most populous nation, led by a man whose vision for the future (a richer country with a stronger military arm) sounds a bit like one of Japan’s early imperial slogans. It would be wrong to press the parallel too far: China is not about to invade its neighbours. But there are reasons to worry about the way the Chinese Communist Party sees history—and massages it to justify its current ambitions.

History with Chinese characteristics

Under Mr Xi, the logic of history goes something like this. China played such an important role in vanquishing Japanese imperialism that not only does it deserve belated recognition for past valour and suffering, but also a greater say in how Asia is run today. Also, Japan is still dangerous. Chinese schools, museums and TV programmes constantly warn that the spirit of aggression still lurks across the water. A Chinese diplomat has implied that Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe, is a new Voldemort, the epitome of evil in the “Harry Potter” series. At any moment Japan could menace Asia once more, party newspapers intone. China, again, is standing up to the threat.

As our essay on the ghosts of the war that ended 70 years ago this week explains, this narrative requires exquisite contortions. For one thing, it was not the Chinese communists who bore the brunt of the fighting against Japan, but their sworn enemies, the nationalists (or Kuomintang) under Chiang Kai-shek. For another, today’s Japan is nothing like the country that slaughtered the inhabitants of Nanjing, forced Korean and Chinese women into military brothels or tested biological weapons on civilians.

Granted, Japan never repented of its war record as full-throatedly as Germany did. Even today a small but vocal group of Japanese ultra-nationalists deny their country’s war crimes, and Mr Abe, shamefully, sometimes panders to them. Yet the idea that Japan remains an aggressive power is absurd. Its soldiers have not fired a shot in anger since 1945. Its democracy is deeply entrenched; its respect for human rights profound. Most Japanese acknowledge their country’s war guilt. Successive governments have apologised, and Mr Abe is expected to do the same . Today Japan is ageing, shrinking, largely pacifist and, because of the trauma of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, unlikely ever to possess nuclear weapons.

The dangers of demonisation

China’s demonisation of Japan is not only unfair; it is also risky. Governments that stoke up nationalist animosity cannot always control it. So far, China’s big show of challenging Japan’s control of the Senkaku (or Diaoyu) islands has involved only sabre-rattling, not bloodshed. But there is always a danger that a miscalculation could lead to something worse.

East Asia’s old war wounds have not yet healed. The Korean peninsula remains sundered, China and Taiwan are separate, and even Japan can be said to be split, for since 1945 America has used the southern island of Okinawa as its main military stronghold in the western Pacific. The Taiwan Strait and the border between North and South Korea continue to be potential flashpoints; whether they one day turn violent depends largely on China’s behaviour, for better or worse. It is naive to assume America will always be able to keep a lid on things.

On the contrary, many Asians worry that China’s ambitions set it on a collision course with the superpower and the smaller nations that shelter under its security umbrella. When China picks fights with Japan in the East China Sea, or builds airstrips on historically disputed reefs in the South China Sea, it feeds those fears. It also risks sucking America into its territorial disputes, and raises the chances of eventual conflict.

Post-war East Asia is not like western Europe. No NATO or European Union binds former foes together. France’s determination to promote lasting peace by uniting under a common set of rules with Germany, its old invader, has no Asian equivalent. East Asia is therefore less stable than western Europe: a fissile mix of countries both rich and poor, democratic and authoritarian, with far less agreement on common values or even where their borders lie. Small wonder Asians are skittish when the regional giant, ruled by a single party that draws little distinction between itself and the Chinese nation, plays up themes of historical victimhood and the need to correct for it.

How much better it would be if China sought regional leadership not on the basis of the past, but on how constructive its behaviour is today. If Mr Xi were to commit China to multilateral efforts to foster regional stability, he would show that he has truly learned the lessons of history. That would be far, far better than repeating it.

Xi’s history lessons

Playing politics with the past leads to predicaments in the future

Playing politics with the past leads to predicaments in the future
From Nikkei Asia Review: 13 August 2015

BILAHARI KAUSIKAN

Memories of World War II are far more fraught in Northeast Asia than in Southeast Asia. Japan's wartime record continues to be a serious complication to its relations with China and South Korea. It barely figures in Tokyo's relations with the 10 member countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. Yet the Imperial Japanese Army behaved with great brutality throughout Asia. What accounts for the difference?

The experience of occupation was not the same for all the countries of Southeast Asia. Thailand was Japan's wartime ally. Japan's army played an important role in nurturing Burmese and Indonesian nationalism. But even in Singapore, where tens of thousands -- the exact number will never be known -- of innocent civilians were killed by the army during the Sook Ching "cleansing" massacres, there is no abiding animosity toward Japan.

The Japanese occupation is part of Singapore's history; a valuable reminder that if we are unable or unwilling to defend ourselves, nobody else can be relied upon to do so. The British, preoccupied with the threat from Nazi Germany, denied Singapore the most advanced defense technology and sent only ill-trained troops. One Australian general, Gordon Bennett, even fled the battlefield, leaving his soldiers to suffer and die as prisoners of war. But while we do not forget, Singapore long ago decided to forgive. We look forward and not backward in our relations with Japan. This was a deliberate political choice; a choice also made by the other members of ASEAN.

Northeast Asia has chosen neither to forget nor to forgive. China and South Korea have repeatedly professed themselves dissatisfied with apologies offered by Japanese governments, which they dismiss as insincere. Weekly demonstrations to protest the use by Japanese forces of so-called comfort women are staged in front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul. In China, bitter memories are fanned and kept alive by the government, which, among other things, has accused Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of revising history and again leading Japan down the path to militarism.

 Are they right? Is Japan in a state of denial about its wartime record? The issues are more complicated than perhaps generally realized. After World War II the Tokyo war crimes tribunal, established by the victorious Allies, accused leading Japanese officials of three categories of war crimes. Two were straightforward: Class-B offenses were "conventional war crimes," such as the murder and mistreatment of prisoners of war. Those categorized as class-C were alleged "crimes against humanity," such as the massacres of civilians carried out at Nanking and Singapore. But class-A war crimes, defined as "crimes against peace" by waging aggressive war, were and remain deeply problematic.

Victors' justice

War is a legitimate instrument of state policy. Whether a particular war can be characterized as "aggressive" will always be a subjective ex post facto judgment by the victors. Those charged with class-A war crimes were specifically indicted for having engaged in a "conspiracy" to wage a "war of aggression" from 1928 to Japan's surrender in 1945, a period of almost 18 years. Yet most recent Western scholarship concurs that rather than a grand conspiracy, it was a series of ill-considered ad hoc decisions that led Japan to disaster.

Some right-wing Japanese claim that Japan fought to liberate Southeast Asia from colonial rule. In fact, Japan's intention was to establish colonies in China and Southeast Asia. Colonialism is today condemned, but was once acceptable. Imperial Japan's objectives were in principle little different from, say, the wars of conquest fought by the British in Burma, now known as Myanmar, by the Dutch in what is now Indonesia, by the French in Indochina (now Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos) and by the Americans in the Philippines. And all of this was little different from the Qing Dynasty's incorporation of Tibet and Xinjiang into China.

None of those executed as class-A war criminals or charged with "crimes against peace" was in power throughout the 18-year period during which the "conspiracy" allegedly took place. The only person in authority during this entire period, and the person in whose name Japan's war was waged, was Emperor Hirohito. Once it was decided to spare the emperor to preserve social and political stability in postwar Japan, the indictment of his subordinates became questionable.

The claim that Abe is revising history to lead Japan down a militaristic path is patently absurd. Contemporary Japan is politically, sociologically, economically and culturally a different country from prewar Japan. Even if that were his intention, it would be bound to fail. His limited attempt to reinterpret the constitution to allow Japan to carry out a wider range of military operations -- which is overdue -- has proved highly controversial.

Northeast Asia's refusal to accept history as past is politically motivated, at least in China. The Chinese Communist Party today relies on nationalism for legitimacy. As a party that still calls itself communist, it cannot base its nationalism on China's imperial past. If the past was so glorious, why was the revolution needed? The party has an ambivalent attitude toward its own revolutionary history, toward its former leader Mao Zedong, and toward such episodes as the disastrous famine caused by the Great Leap Forward and the many lives lost or wrecked during the Cultural Revolution. Chinese nationalism must therefore be outwardly directed, lest awkward questions be asked internally about the party itself.

Chinese nationalism is today targeted at Japan. But it was not always so. Consider this statement: "As you have formally apologized for the debts you incurred in the past, it is not reasonable to ask you for payments of those debts. You cannot be asked to apologize every day, can you? It is not good for a nation to feel constantly guilty." This is not an excuse by some right-wing Japanese politician -- it is what Mao told a delegation of Japanese lawmakers in 1955. And when Mao met former Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka in 1972, he brushed aside Tanaka's attempts to apologize, saying he was grateful to Japan because without the war the Communist Party would not have been able to seize power.

No more class struggle

Under Mao, the party's primary claim to legitimacy was class struggle. It emphasized that its defeat of the rival Kuomintang nationalist forces represented the end of feudal China. But once China embraced the market economy this narrative became increasingly unsustainable. Since 2002, when businessmen working in private enterprises -- otherwise known as "capitalists" -- were allowed to join the party, class struggle has lost all credibility as a means of legitimizing communist rule. The emphasis has since been on the party's defeat of Japan and Japan's wartime record.

That prosecutions for class-A war crimes were questionable does not excuse the atrocities that Imperial Japan committed in China, Korea and Southeast Asia. Those hanged as class-A war criminals may have richly deserved execution, but not for the hastily defined "crimes against peace" for which they were convicted. The problems raised by those ill-considered charges have contributed to the inability of Japan to come to terms with its past. They allow some Japanese to stress Hiroshima and Nagasaki over Nanking in Japan's historical memory.

The formal apologies or expressions of remorse or regret that several Japanese leaders, including emperors Hirohito and Akihito, have made about World War II should be accepted, and a line drawn under the unhappy history of the period. But Japanese governments have not yet done enough to dissociate themselves from extreme statements or arguments made by right-wing politicians or public figures in private capacities who have, for example, quibbled over the exact numbers killed at Nanking or the Imperial Japanese Army's precise role in recruiting "comfort women."

The absence of explicit and official disavowals of such arguments enables those whose intentions toward Japan are not benign to conflate and confuse official statements with offensive arguments, and in effect makes Japan complicit in political misuses of history. The resulting controversy sets back Japan's wish to become a "normal" country and complicates the more active diplomatic role Japan ought to play.

 History extracts a price from those who use it as a political tool. It has not been lost on ASEAN that since the target of Chinese nationalism has been politically determined, it can shift to other targets as the Communist Party's political needs change. This does not help to assuage anxieties or to build trust. And since public opinion is a double-edged sword, should an accident occur between China and Japan, say over the disputed Senkaku Islands (which China calls the Diaoyu Islands), Beijing may be trapped by its own manipulation of history. It could be forced by an emotional public opinion, which it both fears and uses, down paths that it does not really want to take. How is this in anybody's interest?

Bilahari Kausikan is a former permanent secretary of Singapore's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and currently serves as ambassador-at-large; these are his personal views.

 

'Children of the aggressor': the Japanese war babies adopted by China

'Children of the aggressor': the Japanese war babies adopted by China
AFP: 12 August 2015

Tokyo (AFP) - Now 73 and sitting in his Tokyo home, Yohachi Nakajima fights back tears when he thinks of his Chinese adopted mother and the farming village he once called home -- a boy lost inside imperial Japan's crumbling empire.

He was just three years old when Tokyo surrendered on August 15, 1945, ending World War II but also leaving about 1.5 million Japanese stranded in Manchukuo, Tokyo's puppet regime in northeastern China.

Farmers, labourers and young military reserves had migrated into the region from the early 1930s, attracted by government promises of a better life as Japan marched across Asia in a brutal expansionist campaign.

Nakajima's father, Hiroshi, was among those drawn to Manchukuo, but the frontier life proved miserable and the elder Nakajima was drafted into the military just three weeks before Japan's surrender. His fate is unknown.

Ill and poverty-stricken, Nakajima's mother sought out a local family to care for her son.
"Japan was an invader for them, clearly," Nakajima, who now lives in Tokyo, told AFP.
"It must have been pure humanity that convinced them to adopt and raise me, a child of the aggressor."

The malnourished boy, stomach bulging from starvation, was brought into the centre of the village as curious locals looked on.

One woman, Sun Zhenqin, volunteered to be his guardian and soon gave her scrawny charge a new name, "Lai Fu" (good luck coming).
"She would feed me from her mouth and gently massaged my stomach," Nakajima said.
"She was a midwife. It must have been almost on impulse that she took me in."

- 'Pearl in the palm' -

After Emperor Hirohito announced his country's surrender, the situation for Japanese migrants trapped in northeastern China deteriorated, with tens of thousands dying of hunger and disease as a frigid winter set in later in the year.

Some migrants-turned-refugees resorted to mass suicide, cramming into small houses that they blew up with grenades, while roving groups of sword-wielding male migrants stabbed women and children to death to end their suffering.

It is believed that just a handful of children were adopted by local families. Many others died of starvation, sickness and some were even killed by fellow Japanese out of mercy. There are no reliable statistics on how many survived.

The mother of Sun Shouxun, 58, a Chinese man who now lives in the northeastern city of Changchun, was one of those who took in a Japanese child.

He described his adopted Japanese sister as "a pearl in the palm" for his loving parents.
"Public opinion at the time was rather strong against raising a Japanese child and our relatives also opposed it, but my mother insisted on doing so," he said.

It is not known exactly how many Japanese children found new homes in China like Nakajima and Sun's sister, but Tokyo has confirmed just over 2,800.

Nakajima returned to Japan when he was 16 and afterwards spoke just once with his adopted mother, in 1966, during a trip to China when he acted as an interpreter on a cultural exchange.

However, the country, by then in the grips of the chaotic Cultural Revolution, was largely closed to foreigners and Nakajima only made brief contact by telephone with Sun who could only shout "Lai Fu! Lai Fu!" before the call got cut off.

The two never talked again and Sun died in 1975.

- 'No phone calls, no letters' -

Tokyo's efforts to repatriate those left behind in China only began several years after 1972, when it normalised diplomatic ties with Beijing.

Children were not the only ones missing -- there were also young women who had been dispatched as "bride candidates" to marry migrants.

Fumiko Nishino, 88, was one of them, although the official reason she moved to Manchukuo, along with her two sisters, was to work as a telephone operator.

The trio eventually found passage home, but Nishino, who had twin baby girls with a Chinese soldier by that time, refused to board the ship.

"I lost contact -- no phone calls, no letters -- with my Japanese family for years and years afterwards," she said.

"When I finally returned home to Japan (in the mid-1970s) there was a grave that said I was dead at 19. "I pushed over the gravestone and destroyed it, crying and laughing at the same time with my family."

Japan's welfare ministry said just over 4,150 women like Nishino returned home while many others make occasional visits.

Reimei Sakuma, 72, was the child of a Japanese soldier. Adopted and raised in a Chinese family, he returned to Japan in 1986 and also found his name on a gravestone raised by his Japanese relatives -- in part due to government policy.

In 1959, Japan declared that nearly 20,000 Japanese left overseas since the war -- mostly in China -- were dead or did not intend to return -- abandoning them for a second time.

"I could only feel helpless and at the mercy of two big powers," Sakuma said of his experience.
The legacy of the war still strains diplomatic ties between Tokyo and Beijing. China says more than 20 million of its citizens died as a result of Japan's invasion, occupation and atrocities.
Nakajima was one of the lucky ones. He reunited with his birth mother, who had also made it back home, and they remained close until her death at 98.

But the kindness of Sun and other villagers is one of the memories forever etched on Nakajima's mind, along with working in the fields and coming home to a steaming plate of potatoes.
"What if the situation had been the other way around? I wonder if the Japanese would have acted the same way," he said.

 

Why Are Japan’s Apologies Forgotten?

Why Are Japan’s Apologies Forgotten?
The Diplomat: 25 November 2013

The “history” debate that constantly attends Japan postulates that the country has never apologized for past aggression within the region. In fact, Japan has provided Asian countries with assistance that was a form of compensation. The Asian Women’s Fund lacked clarity, but Tokyo offered payments to victims of sexual slavery. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama declared in 1995 that Japan’s “colonial rule and aggression (…) caused tremendous damage and suffering,” expressing his “remorse and (…) heartfelt apology.”

Earlier, in 1993, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono spoke of “the involvement of the military authorities” in the “comfort women” issue and added that “Japan would like (…) to extend its sincere apologies and remorse to all those (…) who suffered immeasurable pain and incurable (…) wounds.” Several prime ministers wrote to surviving sex slaves noting that “with an involvement of the Japanese military (…) [it] was a grave affront to the honor and dignity of large numbers of women. (…) our country, painfully aware of its moral responsibilities, with feelings of apology and remorse, should face up squarely to its past.”

This is far more apologizing and contrition than the world average.

So why has Japan gained so little recognition for these actions? One reason, noted previously, is that its Axis partner, Germany, has performed better on the atonement front. But this is not the only factor.

Another one is international politics. Strategic imperatives dictated that Israel, Western Europe and, after the Cold War, Central European states better their ties with the Federal Republic of Germany. In Asia, however, Japan’s position has deteriorated. In the 1970s and 1980s, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), not wasting much time on the past, wanted Tokyo’s money, which it got in vast amounts. Today, Beijing no longer needs the cash. Japan’s ally, the U.S., has replaced the Soviets as the enemy. Moreover, the CCP now fosters Japanophobia to bolster its chauvinistic credentials.
South Korea was a poor autocracy when it normalized relations with Japan in 1965. It received Japanese economic assistance as part of the treaty, but Seoul indemnified Japan against claims related to the colonial era. Since democratization in the late 1980s, many Korean leaders have worked hard to better relations with Japan. However, there are also electoral incentives to play the “anti-Japan card.” Being labeled “soft on Japan” is a curse. This is particularly true for President Park Geun-hye, whose father, the late general-president, began his rise as a lieutenant in the Army of Japanese Manchukuo (a patriotic choice, but one that carries an image problem today).

Economic success has freed South Korea from foreign assistance. Its judiciary is also now independent. Recently, the Supreme Court ruled that the 1965 treaty with Japan violated the constitutional right of Koreans to seek redress against Japan. Japanese diplomacy has failed to adapt to this new era in Korean politics.

Finally, several Japanese leaders have eviscerated past apologies. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe dispatches offerings to the Yasukuni Shrine, whose message is aggressively antagonistic to the Kono and Murayama views. Pilgrims at Yasukuni since Abe returned to power have included Deputy Prime Minister Taro Aso and Senior Vice Foreign Minister Nobuo Kishi, brother to the prime minister.
On November 4, 2012, a number of Japanese public figures ran an ad in a U.S. newspaper. It denied that the military coerced comfort women, going against the letter and spirit of Japanese official policy. Among the “assentors”  listed are Shinzo Abe, who was about to return as premier, and other politicians. The text provides links to “The Nanking Hoax” and similar articles. Abe now officially accepts the Kono and Murayama statements, but his unconcealed love of Yasukuni, the behavior of those he has appointed to high office, and his indirect affiliation with “deniers” ensures that most foreigners and Japanese think he leads a cabinet of “revisionists.

Koreans also noted reports that Japanese diplomats complained to a New Jersey town about a memorial to the “comfort women.” (The Japanese side was unwilling to discuss the matter, so the facts remain unclear.) This occurred under the DPJ administration of Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda, showing that the LDP is not the only source of hostility to the Murayama-Kono statements.
Additionally, Japan claims ownership of the Korean-controlled Liancourt Rocks (Dokdo in Korean, Takeshima in Japanese). This elicits anger in Korea. The posting of Japanese government videos on Japan’s right to Takeshima helps convince South Koreans that Japan is its foe.

Another recent episode, which is minor but illustrative, concerns Ahn Jung-guen, the Korean assassin of the Japanese Resident General in Korea in 1909. Referring to plans to erect an Ahn statue in China, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga called him a “criminal.” One of my alma maters, Yale University, boasts a sculpture of Nathan Hale, a colonial subject and activist who, like Ahn, was hanged by the authorities of the day. But one would not imagine Her Britannic Majesty’s government taking offense. Former colonies routinely honor those who fought the occupiers, often in barbaric ways.

Interestingly, in 1964, Prime Minister Eisaku Sato (Abe’s grand-uncle) awarded the Grand Cordon of the Rising Sun to the American General Curtis LeMay, whose B-29s incinerated Japanese cities during the war. Koreans might be surprised to learn that Ahn, who like the American aviator considered he was waging a just war on Japan, is a “criminal” but that LeMay belongs to a select group of foreigners granted prestigious decorations (he was thanked for his work with the Japanese Air Self-Defense Forces, but it is unlikely premier Sato was unaware of that LeMay’s men killed around 100,000 civilians in Tokyo alone).

The Ahn statue in China rightly worries Tokyo, which it sees as a sign of a Sino-Korean bloc against Japan. But the more Japan fails to see how Koreans view the past, the more Koreans will dislike Japan.

Reaping dividends from the Kono and Murayama Statements, apologies, and compensation, was always going to be hard. Japan’s current cabinet, and some of its predecessors, have done everything they can to minimize the payout.

http://thediplomat.com/2013/11/why-are-japans-apologies-forgotten/