Recently, Elizabeth van Kampen commented on a post in this blog.

She provided a link to her site, and I checked it out. It is a wonderful site and I strongly urge anyone reading this to check it out. Spend some time there and learn some real history. Here is the site:

Dutch East Indies

Elizabeth is true hero as she tries to get down as much history as possible so that we never forget the past, and can therefore learn from it.

At a different site, in an essay entitled, How I Lost My Best Friend, Elizabeth recalls the fate of her father during the war.

There she notes:

I have seen very brave women who gave me reason to stay optimistic. I have seen little boys been taken away from their mothers and been sent to a camp for men only. They stood there on a truck, 10 years old leaving their mothers while their fathers were somewhere else maybe in Burma or maybe dead. I have seen women losing their minds through all their grieves I have seen some girls and young women been taken away as “Comfort women” to the Japanese brothels. I have seen how women have been beaten up so badly that almost all their bones were broken. I can still hear the screaming in my head, we all had to stand there to watch. I have seen three women been hanged 12 hours long under the burning tropical sun, with their hands tied up on their backs. We had to watch all the time with tears in our eyes. I have seen it daily how little children died of hunger and mothers who stood there with no tears left in their eyes when their dead children were carried out of the camp.

Elizabeth also notes though, at the end of her essay:

But of course I will never blame the Japanese people for what Japanese war criminals have done in Asia. I do understand very well that the Japanese people suffered too during WW II.

Please take a chance to review what Elizabeth has written. I am sincerely honored that someone like Elizabeth would even take the time to read something written on my blog. It makes me aware of the power of the Internet, and that when I put something down on this blog, I need to take it serious because I don’t know who might read it and form an opinion about Japan based on something I’ve said. Suddenly I feel a stronger sense of responsibility and a desire to do strive even harder to make this a good blog.

There are always more than a few stories circulating about the comfort women. Here are some of the ones that caught my eye recently … Read the rest of this entry »

What do we know about the comfort women issue?

How many interviews do we have with actual comfort women, soldiers and ex-doctors? To what degree are these interviews accepted at face value as opposed to being scrutinized in some sense?

What documents do we possess that provide a historical record?

It is generally argued that the following problems exist:

1. Comfort women are resistant to come forward because of the shame and humiliation they are afraid they might experience.
2. Soldiers are reluctant to reveal what part they took in the program.
3. Many documents were burned immediately after Japan surrendered in WWII.
4. Information that would probably implicate the relevant authorities is not being made available to the public, even though some of it still exists.

These are claims that each need to be examined in turn.

In this entry, I want to focus on the last one.

Read the rest of this entry »

A sad story about a Japanese comfort women appeared in the Japan Times today. The article is titled, Memoir of Japanese ‘comfort woman’ recounts ‘this hell’. This article is well worth reading.

Here are some things that I noticed:

Read the rest of this entry »

Just thinking aloud here … is any of the following true?

• People that lean to the left side of the political spectrum tend to support resolution 121, the comfort women resolution.
• People that lean to the left side of the political spectrum would tend not to support a similar resolution condeming the large number of abortions in Japan each year.

I’m wondering if people are being ideologically inconsistent on this issue.

I think people who lean towards the left are expressing strong dissatisfaction with America meddling abroad, yet at the same time support America meddling abroad. It would seem to merely depend on the issue. I think. I don’t really know. Any opinions?

Read the rest of this entry »

Update: Good grief! Kyuma resigned. I couldn’t believe it when I heard it yesterday. What incredible news! Could things get any worse for Abe? I really want to do a news round up but not sure when or if I can get to it. I want to comment too … but have to run for now.

Great reporting of this at Observing Japan and other places as well. [sigh] I have to run.

Read the rest of this entry »

[Update: I have updated this entry by adding some more news stories. Anything new in this entry is preceded by an asterisk [*]. No English editorial from Asahi or Japan Times yet. Asahi does have an editorial in Japanese. Two S. Korean editorials have been added! Couldn’t find anything in English language Chinese newspapers yet …]

I want to review some of the reaction in the media to the passage of resolution 121, the comfort women resolution, by the Foreign Affairs Committee.

I’ve already written my own reaction here.

I am still in the process of working on this entry, but wanted to forward what I’ve got so far.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tessa Morris-Suzuki, one of my favorite historians writes an excellent review for the conservative Yomiuri Shimbun’s watershed publication, Who was Responsible? From Marco Polo Bridge to Pearl Harbor.

Here is a link to the review:
Who is Responsible? The Yomiuri Project and the Enduring Legacy of the Asia-Pacific War

Read the rest of this entry »

• U.S. House panel to put to vote ‘comfort women’ resolution on June 26, Kyodo News; “The House Foreign Affairs Committee has decided to put to a vote on June 26 a resolution to seek a clear apology from Japan over the sexual exploitation of Asian women by Japan’s military during World War II, a committee official said Monday.” Story developing …

The Japan Times reports:

S. Korea to seize assets of colonial collaborators
The South Korean government announced Wednesday its first-ever plan to seize assets gained by alleged collaborators during Japan’s colonial rule. South Korea will confiscate 3.6 billion won ($ 3.9 million) worth of land from the descendants of nine alleged collaborators who worked for Japan during its 1910-1945 colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula, a presidential committee said in a statement. The property owners can file a lawsuit to contest the government decision, the committee said. Committee head Kim Chang Kuk said in a statement that the seizures, the first of more to come, would enable South Korea “to recover our people’s dignity that was violated by Japanese imperialism and those involved in pro-Japanese and antinationalistic acts.”

The Colonial era ended over 60 years ago. Moreover, there was massive land reform after the war, wasn’t there?

Here’s a quote from Peasant Protest & Social Change in Colonial Korea by Gi-Wook Shin, pages 175 to 176 [emphasis added]:

In the South, in contrast, social revolution aborted ( Cumings 1981b; Song 1989). Landlord power remained stronger, and American occupational forces reestablished the colonial system by restoring to key positions Koreans who had collaborated with the Japanese. Popular protests and demonstrations against such injustice and illegitimacy, culminating in the 1946 uprisings, were crushed by reactionary forces under the auspices of the American military government. Undoubtedly the “chilly memory” of such repression has strongly contributed to peasants’ subsequent political conservatism. Nevertheless, peasant radicalism in postwar South Korea achieved “liberal” land reform-liberal in the sense that land was redistributed to cultivators without eliminating capitalist relations in agricultural production, unlike “revolutionary” land reform in the North ( Kang 1988). The American military government and Korean government could no longer ignore the pressing demand for land reform, and landlord resistance failed to prevent its enactment. When colonial rule was over, big landlords, 3% of the rural population, controlled 60% of the land, while a remaining 80% of the rural population were landless tenants or semi-tenants with little land. But by 1957, after land reform, 88% of the rural population were full owner-cultivators. The ancient tenancy system was simply replaced by owner cultivation. Although land reform in the South was less complete than in the North, and “never enriched the peasantry” or “overflowed the state tax coffers,” it still created far more equitable income and land distribution, redirected capital away from land speculation to manufacturing, uprooted a class that had not proved itself progressive, and brought political stability in the countryside, thus clearing the way for strong centralized state power in the postreform era ( Amsden 1989). In short, land reform provided the structural preconditions for rapid and successful industrialization and economic growth after the 1960s.

What is the intention, to take the land away from those who weren’t even alive during the colonial era? It sounds like the land reform that took place after World War II, while not as complete as that of the North, was sufficient for its purpose, which was to get South Korea on the road to “successful industrialization and economic growth”.

Let’s never forget the past, but let’s put it behind us all the same. Is this political grandstanding? What’s the political motivation?