This
is an important piece not just because of Robert Fisk's elegant
graces as a writer, or because history, as such, is newsworthy.
Timing
matters too. In the past three years, ever since Fukushima, Japan has
moved from being the cradle of Zen and wabi-sabi to being one of the
most **willfully** toxic places on the planet.
Lest
a comparison to Mordor (or America) sounds too harsh, or even racist,
given the "serene and enlightened" persona of the Japanese
people, or so we think, Tokyo, with its more than 40 million
inhabitants, has just shrugged its electoral shoulders and
doubled-down on its nuclear agenda, even in the wake of Fukushima.
Moreover,
as Robert Fisk's article suggests, Japan's prime minister, aided and
abetted by America - just as Obama aided and abetted Shinzo Abe's
Secrecy Act - is now moving full steam ahead to rearm. And, cherry on
the cake, it is even now trying to pick a fight with China.
If
we condemn North Korea, whose evil leader is bat shit crazy and was
never elected, why then are we not vigorously condemning Japan, whose
evil leader is equally crazy and was elected by the majority of the
voting population?
---Michael
Green
Robert
Fisk: Sinister efforts to minimise Japanese war crimes and portray
the empire as a victim must be exposed
The
man known as Abe’s ‘brain’ says Japan has become ‘a
hopelessly pacifist nation’
6
April, 2014
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.
Yasukuni’s
purpose is to minimise Japanese war crimes and portray the
expansionist Japanese empire as a victim. That’s what Abe wants do
to. He’s spending more on his country’s military. The man
referred to as Abe’s “brain”, the former diplomat Hisahiko
Okazaki, says that Japan has become “a hopelessly pacifist nation”.
Now that China is a newly emergent military power – and challenging
Japanese ownership of the Senkaku Islands – Abe’s rewriting of
his country’s outrageous occupation of China takes on a far more
sinister quality.
One
of the best British political scientists on Japan, James Stockwin,
has expressed grave concern at Abe’s visit to Yasukuni. A retired
Oxford academic, Stockwin is no Japan-hater; just a decade ago, the
Emperor of Japan awarded him the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays
(with neck ribbon), no less. But he speaks frankly of Japan’s
atrocities in the Second World War and finds it “quite
extraordinary … that Abe should use this juncture to visit the
Yasukuni shrine, a gesture he must know would be regarded as highly
provocative by China”.
In
an iconoclastic moment, Stockwin suggested that China and Japan
should jointly bulldoze into the sea “these useless pieces of real
estate”.
But
there is a far darker side. Last year, the Japanese passed the
Designated Secrets Act, which applies a prison sentence of 10 years
to journalists and whistleblowers who give publicity to “state
secrets” – and five years for those who ask questions about
secrets! This document, as Stockwin says, “runs counter to some of
the most basic principles of democracy”. There have been protests
against it. And how did the secretary general of the governing party
characterise the protesters? They were “terrorists”, of course.
Emperor
Hirohito himself – along with Admiral Yamamoto and all the old
war-mongers – would have approved. Long live the Greater South-east
Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Speak not of Nanking. Set course for Pearl
Harbour. That should put paid to all that exclusion, discomfort and
anger in Glendale City.
A
reminder that Russia was once the good guy
Staying
with World War Two, “Stalingrad the movie” has an American
version (Enemy at the Gates), a German version (Stalingrad) and now
Fyodor Bondarchuk’s Russian version (Stalingrad again).
Jude
Law’s portrayal of sniper Zaitsev and his love affair with a Soviet
radio translator got howled down in the Russian Duma. The German film
showed the Nazis at their worst but had the Wehrmacht leave Italy for
Russia on a modern electric train.
Bondarchuk’s
fearful 130-minute epic, which I watched in Canada last week, beats
them both. Partly based on the diaries of Vasily Grossman – by far
the finest Soviet writer of the Second World War, way ahead of
anything by Solzhenitsyn – it follows the last days of a platoon
of Red Army soldiers and seamen confronting Friedrich von Paulus’s
Sixth Army in the wrecked home of a lone Russian girl.
Her
family have all died but she refuses to leave her bombed house;
Mariya Smolnikova’s portrayal of 19-year-old Katya is breathtaking.
In
a war movie of immense violence, she is as close to perfect as a
refugee whose soul is both mutilated by war and ennobled by struggle
– because she underplays every moment.
At
a time when we all hate Russians again – Ukraine, the Crimea –
it’s worth being reminded of a time when they were the good guys
and when Hitler thought he represented “Western civilisation”.
Not
a bad film then, especially – as someone said – if you want to
know what it’s like to be shot in the throat
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