Were Koreans Oppressors in the War, or its Victims?

IF YOU CHOOSE TO BELIEVE the newspaper narratives, the Japanese nation denies or chooses to ignore its behavior during the first half of the 20th century, while the Koreans were innocent victims of that behavior.

That might be the price one pays for choosing to swallow the mass media product, but then sometimes the antidote to that particular poison can be found in a surprising place—such as a Korean newspaper!

Here’s an example: Earlier this month, the Choson Ilbo of South Korea published an article titled Were Koreans Oppressors in the War, or its Victims? The piece gives readers a glimpse of a reality more complicated than that usually presented in the popular press.

It is in fact a review of a book recently released in South Korea called A Metahistory of Korean-Japanese Disputes over Historical Awareness. (It doesn’t seem to be available in Japanese yet.) The newspaper (poorly) translated their own article into Japanese, and I’ve tried to render it into English because I think the information it conveys should be more widely known. Please keep in mind that what you see after the process went from Korean to Japanese to English (and in one excerpt from English to Korean to Japanese to English) is probably not what people higher up the linguistic chain got.

The Choson Ilbo chopped up the review into three separate pieces for some reason, so I’ve put them all into one place. I’m not sure how well-written the original was, but the situation is what it is. Hereafter, the voice is that of the reviewer, Yu Seok-je.

*****

A 19-year-old youth born in the colony of Korea volunteered to serve in the Japanese military. He rose to the rank of first lieutenant in the army and became a member of the kamikaze special attack squadron. Before leaving on his mission, he made a sound recording of his will for family members back home. The disc on which that will was recorded was discovered decades later. The voice cutting through the noise on an old record was by no means filled with sadness. It was the powerful voice of a first lieutenant in the Japanese army who pledged his loyalty to “His Majesty the Emperor”, and wished for the health of his parents. After his death in battle, he was enshrined with 26,000 other Koreans in the Yasukuni Shrine.

There was a surprising response to a television documentary broadcast three years ago that contained this information. Previously, one constant in Korean society was that the mention of the word Japan, with its negative image, would create a frenzied reaction. This time, however, there was no reaction at all.

Why was that? It was because these people were victims who, it was claimed, died an unjust death, while at the same time, serving as officers in the Japanese military and shouting Tenno Heika, Banzai! (Long live the Emperor!) In the decades-long debate about the faction friendly to Japan (during the colonial/merger period), dominated by the Korean-Japanese problem, there were no means available to offer an explanation about them.
　
The editors of this book are Kan-Nichi Rentai 21 (Korea-Japan Solidarity 21), a group consisting of Korean and Japanese intellectuals launched in 2004 to seek a new Korean-Japanese relationship appropriate for the 21st century. They are searching for a means to achieve solidarity by examining themselves and achieving a more mature viewpoint that transcends the antagonistic relationship that has arisen between the two countries. In brief, they now want to leave behind the intolerant nationalism with which one party views the other for a closer study of history. That’s why the authors of this book have chosen to step back from knee-jerk nationalism itself and develop a new viewpoint of their own through self-reflection.
　
The book So Far from the Bamboo Grove (In Japanese, Yoko’s Story) touched off a dispute about historical awareness last year. (Note: This is a semi-autobiographical novel by Yoko Kawashima Watkins describing a Japanese family’s escape from northern Korea at the end of World War II. The father was serving there as a government official during the colonial/merger period.) Commenting on the book, UC San Diego literature professor Lisa Yoneyama said, “Yoko’s Story closely resembles that of A Little Princess (a 1905 children’s novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett). Both have the backdrop of a colonialist history that is not American and leave the impression that the United States is not connected with the history of colonial rule. That’s why mainstream American society appreciated Yoko’s Story as a book depicting the suffering of war. In this book, the historical background of Japanese colonial rule in Korea is wiped clean. This is related to the lack of historical awareness in the United States of their own colonial domination of others.”

Also commenting on Yoko’s Story was Professor Shin Hyon-gi of Yonsei University: “The dispute regarding this book began drawing nationalistic battle lines over the war in memory. Moreover, there was a sense of outrage that the Japanese, in their memories, considered themselves the victims. If you think about it carefully, however, (you’ll wonder) is it true that all Koreans were victims and all Japanese were always the victimizers? Talking about the experience of cruel persecution and ordeals is one way to achieve a collective identity. A clear line of distinction is drawn between the “good Korea” and the others, who are the villains. But crushing the memory of the Japanese does not mean that the memory of Koreans has won.”

Thus the book extends the horizon of thought into “troubling territory” that had been viewed as taboo in both countries. The victims in the victimized country have raised their voices to censure the victimizers in the oppressor country. But neither the victims in the oppressor country nor the oppressors in the victimized country are visible in this construct. No clear distinction can be made between victimization and victimhood, and the construct is both compound and multilayered. When the nationalism of both countries is in conflict, there is no place for one to stand in the rapids.

The Japanese wives have been forgotten by nearly everyone. Professor Kano Mikiyo of Keiwa College asserts that the problems of the past are by no means resolved. In the latter half of the 1930s, the policy of forming a unified whole of Japan and the colony of Korea (in Japanese, the naisen ittai policy) led to the strong encouragement of intermarriage. There were 5,458 marriages between Koreans and Japanese from the years 1938 to 1943, and of these 3,964, or 73%, were between Korean men and Japanese women. Most Japanese women stayed in Korea (after the war), and according to a 1975 survey, 73% of the remaining 956 women were in the economic classification of poverty or extreme poverty.

Professor Kano said, “The backdrop to the tragedy of these Japanese wives is the tacit acceptance of their fate in the patriarchal systems of both countries. In Japanese society, Korean men, who were ethnically weaker, were stronger both socially and culturally in gender terms under the patriarchy. Fixing up these men with the women of the stronger (Japanese) group exacerbated their self-esteem as males. Did this really achieve a balance by promoting equality?”

Considerations of the “troublesome territory” continue. Professor Lee Yon-hun of Seoul National University was critical of the explanation written in a South Korean history textbook that “Japanese imperialism stole 40% of Korean territory”.

In regard to the argument that the Class A war criminals should be separated from the rest of those venerated in Yasukuni Shrine, Prof. Takahashi Tetsuya of the University of Tokyo worries this would be a “dangerous scenario”. “After the Class A war criminals were separated, the war dead who were involved in Japanese invasions overseas before 1928, and who had no connection with the invasions after 1928, would remain enshrined. Once the Class A war criminals were removed, if the Yasukuni Shrine were to become operated by the state and visits by the Tenno (Emperor) were possible, it could be used as a device for supporting Japanese military activity.”

The critical weakness of this book is that the opinions and assertions of the 18 Korean and Japanese authors, and the logic of those assertions, are not unified. One possible interpretation is that the lowest common denominator for the authors is simply that they have removed themselves from the line of sight of nationalism, with which many people have been permeated. As the book itself states, if that is the case, as heated disputes with a multiplicity of viewpoints rage with no one offering a conclusion or a proper answer, its significance can only be discovered by considering it as one attempt to identify their common ground.

Endnotes

I’m not sure why Mr. Yu thinks the lack of a unified voice is a drawback; it is inevitable there will be a wide range of viewpoints in an issue such as this, and I think it is worth drawing attention to them.

The group Korea–Japan Solidarity 21 recently published a textbook examining the war that was written by Japanese, Korean, and Chinese historians. Nothing by that group is available on Japanese Amazon.com, however.

It is interesting to note that a textbook is apparently in use in South Korea with the claim that “Japanese imperialism stole 40% of Korean territory”. Who knew that such a textbook existed? Yet everyone knows about a Japanese textbook that glides over the same period in history–everyone except students in Japanese schools, because only a miniscule micropercentage of them even use it.

It is unfortunate that all the Japanese cited in the review are academic leftists; Prof. Yoneyama in particular seems to have permanently pitched a tent out in left field. Here is her profile on her university’s site, in which she tells us as much about her cat as she does her “partner”. The professor is rather upset at the success of So Far from the Bamboo Grove, as you can tell from this article in the English-language version of The Hankyoreh, a South Korean newspaper. Here is a plot summary of A Little Princess; I haven’t read either book, but to think the two are comparable seems like something dreamt up by a college literature professor with an axe to grind and time on her hands. She’s offended that Ms. Watkins wrote the book, and she’s offended that Americans like it.

Extend the logic of her argument and one would expect her to be attacking Gone with the Wind for its portrayal of slaveholders on a plantation during the American Civil War.

It is worthwhile for people outside Japan to realize that viewpoints such as those of Prof. Takahashi exist, even though the scenario he postulates here is as likely to occur nowadays as a cow jumping over the moon. His Japanese language website describes him as an enthusiastic participant in the Peace Boat voyages to South Korea and Pyeongyang. (Members of their cruises also met several times with Yasser Arafat.)

The Peace Boat project was the brainchild of a group that included Tsujimoto Kiyomi, a member of the lower house of the Diet in the Social Democratic Party (formerly the Socialist Party). She was forced to resign in a financial scandal, and was later reelected through the proportional representation system. She is also suspected of, at minimum, having ties to the Japanese Red Army terrorist group. Others think she funneled them money.

It would be interesting to know if a wider spectrum of Japanese political opinion is represented in Korea-Japan Solidarity 21. There are other currents in contemporary Japanese-Korean relations, after all. For example, former Prime Minister Mori Yoshiro, a conservative/traditionalist, is the chair of the Japan-Korea Parliamentarians’ Union; an assistant executive director of the same group is former Prime Minister Abe Shinzo!

Did FDR bankrupt Japan?

NOW HERE’S A SERENDIPITOUS FIND—while searching for something else on the site of an Internet merchant, I discovered a recently-published book that looks intriguing. It’s called Bankrupting the Enemy: The U.S. Financial Siege of Japan Before Pearl Harbor.

According to the publisher’s blurb, the main points are as follows.

1. American government experts thought the war in China would bankrupt Japan, but didn’t realize that Japan had a supply of dollars hidden in New York.
2. When the Americans found out about the money, Japan tried to repatriate it. President Roosevelt moved to block them by using the 1917 Trading with the Enemy Act to freeze the assets and forbid the sale of Japanese gold to the U.S. Treasury (the only open gold market at the time).
3. Some Washington bureaucrats “thwarted” the plan, however. (The blurb does not say how.) Dean Acheson, the man Roosevelt selected to implement this plan, managed to prevent Japan from getting the money.
4. The author examines an OSS-State Department study of conditions in pre-war Japan that found the measure created economic hardships for Japan. Those hardships contributed to the country’s resolve to maintain the aggressive course that led to Pearl Harbor. Apparently, no one in the U.S. government had bothered to analyze the policy’s impact on the Japanese economy.

The publisher’s promotional copy is not well written and might lead a reader to think the OSS study was conducted before the war. As a poster on this History Channel discussion board notes, however, the OSS did not exist at the time. The book’s author, Edward S. Miller, responded to the note by stating that the OSS study was conducted in 1943 and was a retrospective look at Japanese economic conditions in the 1930s. He used this to extrapolate financial conditions in Japan had it not launched its attacks in 1941.

Mr. Miller is now retired, but has served as the chief financial officer at two companies, so he seems well qualified to understand financial operations of this sort. He is also the author of a book called War Plan Orange, which analyzes American war plans devised over the early part of the 20th century to deal with a potential Japan-U.S conflict. That book won five awards.

There is a long-held belief in some quarters that President Franklin Roosevelt baited Japan into attacking America to give him an excuse to enter the wider war. One quoted passage in the review, however, suggests it was his intention to “bring Japan to its senses, not its knees.”

That in turn suggests Roosevelt’s idea might have backfired by exacerbating rather than defusing Japan’s aggression. In other words, the attack on Pearl Harbor might not have been the result of a deliberate Roosevelt strategy, but a Roosevelt miscalculation.

But as Sherlock Holmes said, “It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data,” and I just discovered the book’s existence this week.

Here’s the page on the publisher’s website.

Book recommendation request

AN AMPONTAN READER sent me an e-mail asking for recommendations about “Japanese customs and traditions in the business environment.”

In the course of the mail, he writes, “Early next year, I will make the first of several trips to Japan for business. In the course of my work I will have dealings with executive level officers, IT managers, and their subordinates.”

My correspondent lived in Japan for two years and has a Japanese wife, so he already is familiar with the country to a degree. He said that he wants to expand his knowledge.

If anyone has any recommendations for English-language books, feel free to send them in to the comments section.

Yoroshiku!

A more muscular Japan?

THE BOSTON GLOBE HAS PUBLISHED AN OP-ED called A More Muscular Japan that combines a discussion of Japan’s growing military strength and the country’s relations with North Korea.

Some newspapers, such as the New York Times, print articles about Japan that seem deliberately malicious. That is not the case with the Globe article. It is largely a collection of superficial, mundane observations obvious to any layman, combined with a dollop of incoherence.

For example:

After decades of North Korean military provocations, Kim Jong Il now has a big problem on his hands, as the Japan of old is transforming into an increasingly more muscular nation, one less hesitant to use force.

Japan is less hesitant to use force? How do we know this? The author doesn’t say, nor does he provide any argument to support this assertion.

Japan did send a contingent of troops to Iraq, but they weren’t involved in combat operations. The Japanese did exchange fire with and damage a North Korean vessel designed for covert operations of some sort five years ago, which ended when the Koreans scuttled their own craft. (For some reason, the Telegraph article linked here did not see fit to mention the missile the North Koreans fired at the Japanese. BBC TV at the time broadcast film of the battle, and ended it abruptly without showing the missile being fired. But I digress.)

And why does Kim Jong-il suddenly have a problem? All he has to do is stop his “decades of military provocations” and his problems disappear. (Which the Japanese sinking of the North Korean ship seems to have achieved.)

Relations between the two countries have long been contentious and mutually distrustful. From Pyongyang’s perspective, Japan’s military alliance with the United States and its history of harsh colonial rule have remained impediments to normal relations. From Tokyo’s perspective, North Korea’s brazen abduction of Japanese nationals during the late 1970s and early 1980s, its repressive authoritarianism, and its flagrant militarism make North Korea a repellent neighbor.

Why should anyone particularly care about Pyeongyang’s perspective? Japan isn’t causing any problems with the North Koreans. The “history of harsh colonial rule” isn’t an impediment to relations with South Korea.

The author has one thing right—it is a repellent country because of its repressive authoritarianism and flagrant militarism. So why should the perspective of a peaceful, free-market democracy be compared to that of the repellent country in a way that suggests they have equal standing or interests?

Unlike China, where the business community acts as a brake on a Japanese hard line, businesses are largely indifferent to relations with North Korea.

Nowhere in the article is support provided for the implicit suggestion that Japan would take a “hard line” against China if the business community weren’t against it. And what form would this hard line take? The article is about a Japan whose military might is growing. Does that mean the author thinks Japan would be rattling sabers in the direction of Beijing? I hope not, as that would be a very tenuous assertion indeed.

The Japanese do chase away the occasional Chinese submarine that tests its territorial waters, but there is no sign of any serious military dispute on the horizon. Japan holds some islands in the East China Sea that China claims, but China would have to initiate military action for the Japanese to even consider taking up arms. The Chinese have indulged in bellicose rhetoric similar to that of Kim Jong-il, but they haven’t fired any missiles in Tokyo’s direction.

Perhaps that’s because the Chinese business community–which is also its political community and military community–acts as a brake on its more irresponsible elements.

…it appears that diplomacy has, at least temporarily, stemmed the tide of nuclear ambitions in North Korea. Yet, the question remains: When and where will this tide rise again? All bets are off, but you can count on one thing: The next time Japan will be walking taller, and it may be carrying a bigger stick.

Help me out here, somebody. The North Korean tide of nuclear ambitions might be stemmed, but the question remains where it will rise again? Just what is this supposed to mean? There is a specific place that nuclear ambitions rise? The North Koreans would threaten to use nuclear weapons somewhere they haven’t already threatened to do so?

Then we get the dire warning, “all bets are off, but you can count on one thing”. If all bets are off, you can’t count on anything, can you? And those are two things the author is counting on, not one.

“The next time Japan will be walking taller”. What is this “next time” supposed to mean? The next time North Korea has nuclear ambitions? But that would mean Pyeongyang hadn’t really given them up, wouldn’t it? And how will these ambitions be manifest? Will they be accompanied by new threats against Japan? If so, why?

And how will Japan be “walking taller”? Will it have amended its Constitution? (That process will take a few years yet, at the minimum–assuming attempts to amend it are successful.)

“You can count on one thing: The next time Japan…may be carrying a bigger stick.” May be? How can we count on something that may happen…or may not happen?

I am astonished that an American newspaper would publish this slapdash recitation of poorly written banalities. Who could have been responsible for it?

Richard J. Samuels is director of the Center for International Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His book, Securing Japan: Tokyo’s Grand Strategy and the Future of East Asia, will be published next week.

This man was able to convince a publisher to bring out a whole book’s worth of this sort of prose? And the title! How is the part before the colon related to the part after the colon? Tokyo’s grand strategy is to secure Japan?

I wonder who would read this to the end—other than the MIT grad students who have it forced on them when they take his courses.

No wonder American policymakers responsible for Japan are wandering around in the dark and bumping into walls.

Japan’s ongoing national conversation

WHENEVER YOU SEE OVERSEAS CRITICS maintain that the Japanese are in denial or avoid talking about their Imperial past, it is a dead giveaway that the critics are out of their depth. I’ve often made the point that the discussion of Japanese wartime behavior, including the comfort women and the Nanjing Massacre, is conducted from a broader perspective and in more detail here than anywhere else in the world.

Now, Philip Seaton of Hokkaido University has published a book presenting the same thesis. Titled Japan’s Contested War Memories, it was favorably reviewed by Jeff Kingston in The Japan Times on Monday.

Writes Kingston:

Stereotypical images of Japanese collectively in denial about the atrocities committed by the Imperial armed forces are grossly misleading and overlook the more prevalent view accepting wartime guilt and favoring atonement. In this excellent study featuring media and cultural analysis, Hokkaido University’s Philip Seaton persuasively argues that, “Japanese war memories are not nearly as nationalistic as they are frequently made out to be.”

Seaton points out that war memory is fiercely contested among Japanese, and collective amnesia is impossible given this ubiquitous and robust discourse. History remains at the center of contemporary political battles and it is thus a “current affairs” issue….The war has not been forgotten. Quite the opposite, the Japanese seem unable to let it go.”

While not mentioning the comfort women specifically, this point is made about compensation:

In terms of Japan’s steadfast legal position that all compensation claims have been resolved, he argues that “most governments tacitly accept or openly support the Japanese compensation position.”

In conclusion, Kingston writes:

Translating this book into Chinese and Korean might help.

I’d like to share his optimism, but too often it seems that some Chinese and Koreans are not really interested in facts that would derail their other objectives. In that regard, they perhaps share an affinity with some members of the U.S. House of Representatives and journalists and editors on the staff of the New York Times.

Sushi as a metaphor for globalization

THE CURRENT ISSUE of Washington Monthly has a review of The Sushi Economy: Globalization and the Making of a Modern Delicacy by Sasha Issenberg, which explains how sushi was transformed from a Japanese delicacy to supermarket fast food in the space of a couple of decades.

I haven’t read the book, but if the review is any indication of its contents, that might change soon. From the review alone, we learn that:

• Before World War II, the Japanese considered tuna to be inferior food, and wouldn’t even eat toro–they used it for cat food.
• The industry leader in the U.S. supplying the fish for sushi is a company established by Reverend Sun Myung Moon, founder of the Unification Church.
• A significant amount of the world’s bluefin tuna is now raised in pens in Port Lincoln, Australia, which has reaped enormous financial benefits as a result. It is also the home to an annual tuna-tossing championship. (My wife was appalled when she saw a film clip of this recently on Japanese television.)

The entire review is here. You can find the website for the tuna toss here. Meanwhile, this is a Chicago Tribune article on True World Foods, the Reverend Moon’s company. And here’s the True World Foods company site.

Japan’s next prime minister?

WANT TO TAKE BETS on who’s going to be Japan’s next prime minister? I just might put my money on Foreign Minister Taro Aso.

That’s not because of my political acumen or any inside information. I simply picked up the newspaper this morning and saw the advertisement at the bottom of page two. Aso has just released a book, titled Totetsumonai Nihon. (Translation off the top of my head: Japan the Tremendous, though there are several other possibilities.)

Aso has at least one thing in common with current office-holder Shinzo Abe: they are the grandsons of former prime ministers. Aso’s forebear was Shigeru Yoshida, the head of government from 1946 to 1954 (except for a 17-month period), which encompassed most of the Allied occupation. His father-in-law was the late Zenko Suzuki, prime minister from 1980 to 1982

Naturally, the ad leads with a reference to Yoshida: “When I was a boy, my grandfather, Shigeru Yoshida, often said to me, ‘The Japanese people have tremendous energy. Japan will most certainly recover in the future. Japan is a tremendous country.’”

Following is my quick and dirty translation of six bulleted points from the book cited in the ad:

• Japan is the time-tested champion of the universal value of peace.
• Japan is a ‘wellspring of moral lessons‘ for Asia.
• The otaku culture is the focus of global attention.
• “Captain Tsubasa” gave rise to (Zinedine) Zidane and (Francesco) Totti.
• The NEETs are not castoffs.
• Japan’s aged population is the healthiest and wealthiest in the world.
• China’s rise is a good thing.

(Quick explanations: Aso uses the word shinise, meaning a long-established shop or enterprise, which I rendered here as ‘time-tested champion’. Captain Tsubasa was a comic about soccer. Tsubasa means wing. NEET is an acronym coined in the UK that refers to people “not currently engaged in employment, education or training”. The expression has caught on in East Asia.)

Finally, printed as if it were a slogan accompanying his photo on the far left is the phrase, “Shouldn’t we try believing in the underlying strength of this country?”

Publishing a book is no guarantee that Aso will take the reins of government—opposition leader Ichiro Ozawa published at least three, and he’s never going to be prime minister (though he did pull the strings behind the scenes for a few years in the mid-90s).

But Shinzo Abe came out with his first book a year before assuming office. The title, Toward a Beautiful Country, became the slogan of his administration. Now one has to wonder if the Liberal Democratic Party is using Aso to hedge its own bets with Abe in case the Upper House election next month goes poorly. (The Democratic Party of Japan, the primary opposition party, is unlikely to take power during the intermediate term absent an LDP catastrophe and the Wizard of Oz returning to offer them a three-for-one deal on a brain, a heart, and courage.)

Considering some of his statements during his political career—not to mention some of the assertions made in the advertisement—an Aso administration would be entertaining, to say the least.

It also, alas, would provide column fodder for the usual torpedoes of the Western media and an outlet for the proliferation of weedpatch bloggers offering uninformed political commentary.

David Frum on Pei’s “China’s Trapped Transition”

AUTHOR AND COMMENTATOR David Frum provides a concise overview of Minxin Pei’s China’s Trapped Transition: The Limits of Developmental Autocracy. Frum writes:

Pei argues that almost all the current thinking about China’s development is wrong. China is not an overwhelming success story rapidly racing to economic parity with the United States. It is, he argues a society, on the verge of crisis.

While most policymakers are concerned with China’s growing economic and military prowess, Pei thinks China may instead be headed for stagnation. Frum continues:

A vicious cycle has been unleashed. The richer China grows, the more reluctant the ruling elite becomes to surrender power, because power has become so much more valuable. But the refusal to loosen the grip on power undermines China’s wealth, by creating unchecked incentives to the state’s agents to prey upon wealth creation…Pei suggests that China’s neoauthoritarian regime will soon exhaust its economic vitality.

Frum considers the book to be essential reading, but also warns that it is demanding of the reader.

If you’re unfamiliar with David Frum, by the way, you owe it to yourself to make his acquaintance. Judge Richard Posner says that he has one of the 100 most influential minds in the United States. His website is here.

Crusading for rights without understanding them

Naturalized citizen/gaijin activist Debito Arudou writes a self-congratulatory article in Japan Focus about how he led a movement to remove the magazine Gaijin Hanzai (Foreigner Crime) from store shelves.

The magazine, which I’ve never seen on a store shelf, seems more stupid than repellent. A detailed summary of its content is at the Japan Focus link.

DA states this magazine constitutes “hate speech” and violates the “rights” of foreigners. He also cites some UN treaties about hate speech to which Japan is a signatory. But he also notes:

Japan still has no laws or official guidelines regarding “hate speech”, particularly towards Japan’s ethnic minorities and international residents.

And I hope they never do. The very idea of any laws prohibiting “hate speech” is based on a grave misunderstanding of rights–in this case, the right to free speech.

Rights by definition are absolute, so it is not possible to for them to be in conflict. Therefore, the right to be free from people saying nasty things about someone and bruising their tender feelings is not a right at all, but a figment of the imagination.

Why the statutes of the UN, a nearly useless organization, should be cited as an authority on rights and hate speech is beyond comprehension. After all, they elected Libya as the chair of their human rights commission by secret ballot.

The activitists dealt with the magazine the right way, by threatening boycotts. There’s nothing wrong with that, assuming they think it’s a problem that needs to be dealt with, and it worked.

But if they really have deluded themselves into thinking a magazine violates some phantom rights, why don’t they just buy a bunch, stack them up in a vacant lot, and burn them in a public ceremony? That’s in keeping with the tradition they inherit.

Are we supposed to ban books just because someone somewhere might be offended? And what would be the standards for determining “hate speech”? They would inevitably be subjective and necessitate the use of Orwellian thought police.

It’s a tragedy that by descending to the use of the hate speech concept, antithetical to classical liberalism, these activitists have turned themselves into junior authoritarians. For that matter, in other similar causes, the idea of fighting for rights is really just boilerplate covering a secondary objective. The primary goal is to play Little Jack Horner: “He stuck in his thumb, pulled out a plum, and said ‘What a good boy am I’.” In other words, they get to feed their vanity and congratulate themselves on their moral superiority.

When it comes to the concept of rights, this group needs some serious self-reflection rather than the self-congratulation of the Japan Focus article. Forget about that muyo no chobutsu, the UN. They should go to a better source and read the Bill of Rights.

Several times.

Britain’s “Operation Nipoff”

Japan is repeatedly reminded by the Western media of its sins and brutal behavior during the Second World War. The comfort women story is just the latest of these; the stories of the Nanking Massacre in China and the Bataan Death March in the Philippines have been told for decades.

These were the stories told by the victors. We know some of the stories that have gotten glossed over in the West, such as the one about the Japanese prisoners held in equally brutal conditions in the Soviet Union for 11 years after the war. But what stories have the victors have forgotten to tell entirely?

Some of the tales are starting to come out now. Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper have just published a book in Britain called Forgotten Wars: The End of Britain’s Asian Empire. The book is 674 pages long; they must have forgotten a lot of them. For example:

Two years after Japan surrendered in 1945, there were still some 80,000 Japanese prisoners of war in the hands of British South East Asia. General Douglas MacArthur wanted to repatriate them and dissolve Japan’s broken army, but Britain refused. It preferred cheap conscript labour and seemed to enjoy humiliating these legions of the lost. They existed on only half a normal PoW diet; men were routinely forced to kneel and beg their captors for food. Nearly 9,000 of them died of malnutrition or disease. The last remnants of ‘Operation Nipoff’, as it was malignly known, didn’t get home until as late as 1948.

One might try to excuse British behavior by arguing that they were just getting back at the Japanese for the earlier cruelties they suffered. But that is, after all, just an excuse; Japan had been literally flattened and burnt out in defeat and unconditionally surrendered. Revenge and the pound of flesh had already been taken.

Even more remarkable is the book’s tacit admission that despite its utter defeat, Japan managed to attain one of its war objectives:

The core of the Empire that seemed to make Britain great began at the end of the Suez Canal and ran as a gigantic arc through Asia. Japan’s aggression fractured that arc. But in 1945, London wanted to put the old world back together again….It thought we could go back to colonial business as usual. Even Attlee’s sainted government took time to realise that there could be no going back, that years in the shadow or grip of Tokyo control had changed hearts, minds and ambitions forever.

The Japanese started out with the intention of ending the European colonization of Asia (albeit replacing it with their own). Bayly and Harper seem to think they ultimately succeeded in ending European rule. The tragedy for everyone is the means by which that success was achieved.

NOTE: I read this review in the print edition of the Japan Times. It is not online at that site, because it originally appeared in The Observer. The review is available on the website of The Guardian, Britain’s premier newspaper of the Left. Unfortunately, however, the complete text is not on line. The link to The Guardian’s review is here. Please note that the book is about Britain’s involvement with Asia as a whole; there is not much more in the review about Japan specifically.