by ROBERT FISK
Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe (center) is led by a Shinto priest as he visits Yasukuni shrine in Tokyo, December 26, 2013.
The man known as Abe’s ‘brain’ says Japan has become ‘a hopelessly pacifist nation’
I had to go to California to learn that Michiko Shiota Gingery, who lives in the Central Park area of Glendale City, suffers “feelings of exclusion, discomfort and anger” because her local authority unveiled a memorial to the innocent Asian women turned into sex slaves by the Japanese Imperial Army.
These “comfort women”, the Japanese military’s repulsive euphemism for the victims they turned upon with such sexual sadism, were gang-raped, used as prostitutes and often butchered by Japanese soldiers during their occupation of Korea and China in the late 1930s, in the early years of what was for them – but not for us – the Second World War. These women – the few ageing survivors and the many dead – are a symbol of Japan’s wartime disgrace.
Now you would have thought, wouldn’t you, that these poor women (forced into mass prostitution by the Japanese army and government over many years) had themselves suffered “feelings of exclusion, discomfort and anger”? But no, it’s poor Michiko Shiota Gingery, presumably of Japanese origin, who’s all upset at the Glendale monument to this most appalling of Japanese war crimes. Furthermore (a gritting of teeth is necessary here), a joint lawsuit claims that Glendale City – a peaceful and intensely boring suburb of greater Los Angeles – has exceeded its power by infringing on the US government’s right to conduct America’s foreign policy; thus “the monument threatens to negatively affect US relations with Japan, one of this nation’s most important allies…”
Since we are a family paper, I will merely say that statements of this kind are identical to the material that comes out of the rear end of a bull. But it’s all of a kind. Turkish Americans bleat that Armenian-American monuments to the 1915 Armenian genocide – the world’s first holocaust – upset good “relations” between the US and Turkey. Which is why the spineless Obama still, despite his pre-election promises, will not acknowledge that the Turks deliberately killed one and a half million Christian citizens of the Ottoman empire.
If the Germans started to deny the truth of the Jewish Holocaust, I suppose it would only be a matter of time before the anti-Semites of Europe lined up to express their “feelings of exclusion” every time they saw a memorial to Hitler’s war crimes.
But when Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe shames himself and his country by wandering through the Tokyo Yasukuni shrine, what else can we expect? I’ve been to Yasukuni myself, a place of cherry trees and blossoms and a museum to honour the memory of the 2.5 million Japanese soldiers, kamikaze pilots, rapists and war criminals who died in the Second World War. I had a cousin who died building the Burma railway and so I was greatly interested in the real steam loco shunted into Yasukuni, the very first engine to use that infamous track. It carried home the ashes of the first Japanese soldiers to die in Burma. No doubt Abe enjoyed his little trip to honour the murderers of Imperial Japan.
Sure, Japan has apologised for the little matter of the “comfort women”. But why, according to the Chinese, has Yasukuni received 60 visits from Japanese prime ministers between 1945 and 1985, including six visits made on 15 August, to mark the date of Japan’s surrender? The 1937 rape of Nanking – in which tens of thousands of Chinese women were raped and at least 100,000 killed – is being turned into part of “a self-defensive holy war”; school textbooks now try to depict Japanese aggression in the 1930s as the “liberation of backward nations”. The Japanese Education Minister is proposing to reject textbooks that do not adopt a “patriotic tone”. When the US hears that Palestinian textbooks include Israel as part of “Palestine”, American officials roar like bears. But when the Japanese do far worse, the Americans turn into mice.
The Independent for more
(Thanks to Harsh Kapoor)