They may start to find it advantageous after the House passes its resolution, however. Iranian nuclear weapons are unlikely to be used on Japan.

I was wondering if you noticed that Nippon Oil had already found the advantage and had already announced the switch to pay in yen, a few days before this piece was published. The idea that an oil company would decide to switch its transaction currency as some sort of retaliation for a meaningless resolution in another country is misguided at best; it’s hard to tell if this is just ignorant of the ways of business or deliberately written to be misleading.

Seeing these two unrelated issues conflated was very disappointing. I think it says a lot about what’s going on here.

democrats are the key movers in driving fwd this comfort resolution ‘bill.’

they are also the key movers to get US forces out of Iraq ASAP and of course, to make Bush look like a fool every chance possible.

perhaps some of these democrats are fully aware of the possible repercussions that may/will happen btwn japan-us relations as a result of passage of this bill — one of which would be an accelerated end to japan’s support of the us’s iraq efforts.

by triggering the erosion of japanese support in iraq, perhaps these democrats hope it will be yet another policy setback for the bush administrations efforts there.

1)Chris Hill is marginalizing Japan in 6-party talk.
2)row over reluctance on sharing F-22 data and Aegis info reeks to China.
3)Kyuma.Cheynee didn’t meet him in Tokyo,Rumsfeld didn’t meet him in Washington.
Robert Joseph made statement over justification of A-bomb,right after Kyuma’s resign.Talk about overkill.

I found Kato’s move highly undiplomatic and irrelevent,though.

Japanese ambassedor to U.S at that time, Masanao Haniwara warned U.S against this law and told senate leaders it would cause grave danger to Japan-U.S relations.

This move provoked a backlash from Senate leaders and the law passed in 1924.

I think Kato’s letter woud provoke a backlash the same way as 1924.

That’s sort of what I was thinking and wondering about; obviously, neither of us work in the diplomatic corps, so it’s impossible to say exactly what they do write on their own initiative (without some form of proof). But I had sort of assumed that what you’re saying would hold true, which makes this an interesting case, since the ambassador is going against what’s being said about the issue back home.

Perhaps he’s been allowed to write by staking his own job on the line. It will be interesting to see it play out.

He is now a proffesor of Economy at the Jobu University.

When the comfort women problem became an open issue, the most shocking incidence was a conffession by Yoshida Seiji who stated that he, under the direct order of the military, kidnapped women and young girls from the Cheju island and handled them over to the IJA as comfort women.

Initialy that was regarded as a shocking and also first hand testimony about the direct involvement of the IJA.

Ikeda as the director of the NHK made a documentary about the incident in Cheju islands conducting interview and research in Korea.

However, testimony from numerous Koreans who lived at the village where Yoshida alleged that he conducted the comfort women hunting, contradicted with the Yoshida testimony and all denied that such thing ever happened.

Later Yoshida addmitted at court that he had lied.

Ikeda is one of the furious deniers of the comfort women problem.

In my opinion, he is a very controversial person and I don’t agree with him about the comfort women problem, but anyway, here is his blog.

http://blog.goo.ne.jp/ikedanobuo/