Nineteen U.S.-based historians have protested attempts by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and his administration to suppress statements in U.S. and Japanese history textbooks about the “comfort women” who suffered under a brutal system of sexual exploitation during World War II. … In November, the Foreign Ministry told the Japanese Consulate in New York to ask publisher McGraw-Hill for changes in “Traditions and Encounters: A Global Perspective on the Past,” its world history school textbook co-authored by historians Herbert Ziegler and Jerry Bentley. … McGraw-Hill rejected the ministry’s request, saying that the scholars are aligned behind the historical facts of the issue.

You can read the full article at: http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2015/02/09/national/u-s-historians-slam-abe-effort-to-change-textbook-dealing-with-comfort-women/#.VclOMflcBuk

(July 3, 2014)

After the end of WWII, when Japanese war criminals were apprehended and interrogated, they wrote confessions. And now China’s State Archives Administration has started to release online via the Internet the written confessions of 45 Japanese war criminals, one a day, starting on July 3, 2014. The first admits to killing at least 5,000 Chinese civilians.

In the first, dated 1954 and 38 pages long, Keiku Suzuki, described as a lieutenant general and commander of Japan’s 117th Division, admitted ordering a Colonel Taisuke to “burn down the houses of about 800 households and slaughter 1,000 Chinese peasants in a mop-up operation” in the Tangshan area, according to the official translation.

Among a litany of other crimes with a total toll in the thousands, he also confessed that he “cruelly killed 235 Chinese peasants seeking refuge in a village near Lujiayu”.

He also “ordered the Epidemic Prevention and Water Supply Squad to spread cholera virus in three or four villages”.

Suzuki was sentenced to 20 years in prison by the court and released in 1963.

See the link, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftCx4HEc2Z4, for a video description of some of Suzuki’s crimes, as well as additional background information.

The purpose of releasing these confessions is not for the call of revenge, but remind the public of the importance of peace, because these archives are the tragic proof of how war can release men’s inhumanity to men.  These 45 confessions totaling over 2,000 pages are just the tip of the iceberg of evidence on Japan’s enormous war crimes in China.

(August 15, 2014)

The first Comfort Women memorial plaque was dedicated in 2010 in Palisades Park, New Jersey to honor the hundreds of thousands of girls and young women who were forced by the Japanese military to work as sex slaves for the Japanese soldiers during WWII.  These girls and young women suffered greatly not only during the war, but also for the rest of their lives with damaged health (physically and psychologically) and they were also often looked down upon or even ostracized by their family, local community, and country.  The Palisades Park plaque got national and international attention because the Japanese Consul General of New York personally met with the mayor of Palisades Park trying to get the plaque removed.

Since then, several similar plaques or statues have been erected in many parts of the U.S.  A most recent one is a monument of a Korean-American comfort woman near Los Angeles in Glendale, California’s Central Park.  A group by the name of the “Global Alliance for Historical Truth” (GAHT-US) with support from the Japanese government filed a lawsuit against the city of Glendale requesting that the monument be removed. The plaintiffs claimed that the placement of the monument interfered with the Executive Branch’s primary authority to conduct foreign relations and was an unconstitutional interference with the federal government’s foreign affairs power.

A judge at the US District Court on August 8, 2014 dismissed the lawsuit.  The judge ruled that the plaintiffs did not have “standing” to bring suit as they suffered no tangible harm from the placement of the monument in the park, and Glendale’s placement of the monument is entirely consistent with the federal government’s foreign policy.

Once again, the Japanese government’s attempt to silence American citizens’ protest of the comfort women issue has backfired, and just brought more publicity to the issue.

For more information about the lawsuit, see:  http://www.jstudentboard.com/reporter/korea-and-abroad/glendale-prevails-in-statue-suit/

By Sui-Lee Wee and Li Hui
(Reuters – May 12, 2014)

Descendants of hundreds of Chinese men forced to work in wartime Japan are suing Japanese corporations in a Chinese court in Shandong Province.

In possibly the biggest class-action suit in Chinese legal history, about 700 descendants of Chinese forced laborers filed suit against two Japanese firms in April of this year, said Fu Qiang, a lawyer representing the families.

Japan invaded China in 1937 and ruled parts of it with a brutal hand for the next eight years. 40,000 or more men were taken to Japan against their will to work in mines and construction under terrible working conditions, and many never made it back to China. Among the plaintiffs are several forced laborers, now in their 80s and 90s, and this might be their last chance to seek redress.

The suit was filed against Mitsubishi Corp (Qingdao) Ltd, a subsidiary of Mitsubishi Corp, and Yantai Misubishi Cement Co, a joint venture between Mitsubishi Corp and construction firm Mitsubishi Materials Corp, Fu said.

The plaintiffs are each seeking 1 million yuan ($160,100) in compensation, a public apology in several prominent Chinese and Japanese newspapers, as well as the erection of a memorial and monument in remembrance of the forced laborers, and paying for their legal expenses.

Many such lawsuits were filed in Japanese courts during the last two decades, but all of them were unsuccessful for reasons such as the Chinese government had waived WWII compensation under the 1972 Japan-China Joint Communique.

However, these lawsuits are now in Chinese courts, and furthermore, the plaintiffs and their lawyers argue that Chinese citizens never waived their rights for compensation from Japan.

Although it may be a long and difficult road ahead, including whether the Shandong court will hear their case, the plaintiffs and their supporters already see two positive signs:

1. The acceptance by a Beijing court of a smaller suit in February from 40 plaintiffs demanding compensation for Chinese citizens made by the Japanese to work as forced laborers for Mitsubishi Materials Corp and Nippon Coke during WWII
2. Mitsui O.S.K. Lines Ltd recently agreed to pay $29 million for the release of their vessel after Chinese lawyers were successful in impounding the vessel in a different lawsuit.

For more information about this lawsuit, see:  http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/05/12/us-china-japan-reparations-insight-idUSBREA4B0VO20140512

by
Stephen Harner:  Forbes – 6/22/14

(http://www.forbes.com/sites/stephenharner/2014/06/22/the-nytimes-china-threat-myth-the-pivot-to-asia-and-obamas-foreign-policy-legacy/)

This Forbes article is one of the few Western media articles that provides an unbiased analysis of the U.S.’s foreign policy toward China in the Far East. The author is Mr. Stephen Harner, who has many years of experience in Asia, especially Japan and China, in both business and as a former Foreign Service Officer in the U.S. Department of State.

Referring to President Obama’s strategic military “pivot” or “rebalance” to Asia, i.e., the decision to redeploy 60% of American air and sea power to Asia by 2020, in order to counter an aggressive, hegemonic, expansionist China, Harner wrote:  “the narrative of an expansionist China is a myth.”  Furthermore, the NY Times’ 6/18/14 editorial entitled “China’s Power Grab Is Alarming” is also a myth.

As a matter of fact, he wrote “The reality is almost completely the opposite.  …  China claims sovereignty over the Spratly and Paracel Islands in the South China Sea.  By China, we should understand not just the People’s Republic in Beijing, but its post-1911 predecessor, the Republic of China (i.e., the government on Taiwan), and the great China’s imperial dynasties dating back at least 1000 years.  The claim is based inter alia on discoveries by the Ming dynasty admiral Zheng He and by occupation of islands and exploitation of the surrounding waters for fishing by Chinese fishermen for hundreds of years.”

He continued “Five times–in 1970, 1971, 1978, 1980, and 1999–Philippine armed forces took actions that have placed nine islands claimed by China under foreign occupation.  Since occupying the islands, the Philippines has proceeded to build military installations and station some 1000 men on them.  Beyond occupying the islands, Manila has for years taken actions highly provocative to China, including arresting and expelling Chinese fisherman fishing in the disputed area. Chinese protests have been dismissed. In June 2011 the office of PI president Aquino declared that the South China Sea would henceforth be called the West Philippine Sea. In July 2011 a delegation of Philippine legislators landed on a Chinese-claimed island, declaring Philippine “sovereignty.”

Against this background, he wrote “what we–and The Times–should find remarkable is not China’s “maximalist stance in territorial disputes,” to quote the editorial, but Beijing’s restraint.”

He then quoted part of a talk by General Fang Fenghui, the Chief of the General Staff of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, during his visit to the Pentagon on 5/15/14:  “China is conducting the exploitation activity within 12 nautical miles of the Zhongjian Islands which is a part of the Paracel Islands. And this is an activity conducted within our territorial water.  …  And secondly, the related countries in the South–in the South China Sea have drilled actually many oil wells in the South China Sea, but China has never drilled even one.  From this single fact, we can see how much restraint China has exercised.  And the purpose of this restraint is to keep–to maintain the stability of the South China Sea region.”

Harner concludes his article with:  “The supreme irony is that the ‘pivot’ policy –in essence an American reprise of Cold War “containment” now directed at China, fueling an arms race and U.S. alliance structure that is a growing threat to China– has emboldened the Philippines and Vietnam, as well as Japan, to oppose and challenge China, and to decline to negotiate in good faith to resolve disputes.  …  The New York Times is propagating a “China threat” myth and is biased, unfair, untrue, and, in the end, dangerous for the United States.”

In light of the current China-bashing by the Western mass media and U.S. political leaders as part of the U.S. policy to contain, surround, and weaken China via her collusion with several Asia nations to carry out that policy, it is refreshing to know that there are people who are courageous to point out the fallacy of the U.S.’s foreign policy.

(September 11, 2014)

 Below is some email exchange between Barbara Wind, Director of the Holocaust Council of Greater MetroWest in NJ and a Japanese academic.  With so much evidence for the various atrocities committed by the Japanese military during WWII, yet many Japanese people, organizations, and government leaders still deny their existence.  We thank Barbara Wind for sharing these emails with us.

RE: Japanese Message to Holocaust Center
Inbox x
Wind, Barbara
to Sunao
September 11, 2014, 2:40 PM

Dear Sunao Tanimoto,

Thousands of Jewish refugees from the Nazis owe their lives to the Japanese, most of whom found sanctuary in Shanghai, which Japan controlled during the Second World War. We are most grateful that they did not accede to German demands that these Jews be annihilated and the larger Jewish community has and will always continue to express its gratitude for this.

However, in the matter of Comfort Women and other mass atrocities inflicted by the Japanese military against China, Korea and other lands, you are either willfully ignorant or dishonest.

There is an overabundance of documentary evidence that Japan made sexual use of girls and women they captured in their war of aggression. There are also Chinese, Korean and Dutch survivors/eyewitnesses who have testified to those atrocities. And I have been privileged to meet some of them. Among those eyewitnesses are former and Japanese veterans of WWII.

Japan, like all nations, has much to be proud of as well to be ashamed of. However comforting it is to create a narrative that casts only positive light on a people, no amount of denial or denial narratives will obscure ugly truths. Nor can lies lead to peace and reconciliation. If you truly want to honor Japan, consider an honest, albeit painful assessment of her 1930’s-1940’s history. Germany, which Japan was allied to during WWII, did this long ago. It’s time for Japan to do the same.

Peace in deed,

Barbara Wind

Barbara Wind
Director, Holocaust Council of Greater MetroWest
Jewish Federation of Greater MetroWest NJ
901 Route 10 | Whippany, NJ 07981
(973) 929-3066 | fax (973) 884-9316
bwind@jfedgmw.org | www.jfedgmw.org

From: Sunao Tanimoto [mailto:honest-tani@nifty.com]
Sent: Sunday, March 09, 2014 12:47 PM
To: Wind, Barbara
Subject: FYI: Japanese Message to Holocaust Center

Dear Sir,

Holocaust Council of Greater MetroWest

This is a letter from a Japanese to inform you what the truth was as for the Korean insistence.

Today, It is regrettable to say that Korean Government tries to link the comfort women issue to Holocaust. I hope you will know the Japanese morality which was kept for more than 1700 years under the same dynasty. This resulted in the support of Persecuted Jewish People those days.

There were no Japanese Army Forced Comfort Women during the last war.

Please read and watch what the truth was as follows and let your friends see truth instead of political rumors of no proof.

If you have any related questions, please let me know.

Thank you.

Sincerely yours,

Dr. Sunao Tanimoto
Ex. Prof. of E.E., Nippon Inst. of Tech.,
4-14-1-501, Takanawa, Minato-ku, Tokyo 108-0074, Japan
M.S.`71 from Univ. of Wis., Madison, Comp. Sci.

———–CONTENTS ———

CHAP.I JEWS AND JAPANESE

1. Attached file-1 : Japan Saved Lives of Persecuted Jewish People :

Translated from Lower High School Textbook

2. Japan who helped Jewish refugees

http://www.sdh-fact.com/CL02_1/25_S2.pdf

3. Genius Jews and Masterful Japanese

3.1. The Jews and the Japanese Joined Modern Western Civilization as Outsiders and Achieved Amazing Success.

http://www.sdh-fact.com/CL02_1/45_S4.pdf

3.2. Outsiders Helping Each Other

http://www.sdh-fact.com/CL02_1/46_S4.pdf

CHAP.2  COMFORT WOMEN AND PROSTITUETE

4. False Accusations of Comfort Women:

http://www.howitzer.jp/korea/page03.html

5. United States Office of War Information ;  About Korean Comfort Women Psychological Warfare Team　Attached to U.S. Army Forces India-Burma Theater

“A “comfort girl” is nothing more than a prostitute or “professional camp follower”

http://www.exordio.com/1939-1945/codex/Documentos/report-49-USA-orig.html     Last 4 characters “html” may be torn. Please write down the lost characters on the URL entry.

6. No Organized or Forced Recruitment: Misconceptions about Comfort Women and the Japanese Military

http://www.sdh-fact.com/CL02_1/31_S4.pdf

7. Comfort Women in Korea

   By Kase Hideaki, Chairman, Society for the Dissemination of Historical Fact, JAPAN

http://www.sdh-fact.com/CL02_1/98_S4.pdf

8. The Truth about the “Comfort Women”

By Moteki Hiromichi, CEO, Sekai Shuppan

http://www.sdh-fact.com/CL02_1/84_S4.pdf

9. Attached file-2 : A Korean Comfort woman’s False and Contradicted Testimony

10. Relationship between　”Comfort Women”　and　”Medical Treatment”

http://www.sdh-fact.com/CL02_1/80_S4.pdf

11. Message to Koreans: Video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXIYFvyVKBo

12. Prostitution in Korea : Video

http://youtu.be/KZ2d1bqycmw     　　Click the English Language Bottom on the first slide.

13. Attached file-3 : History of Comfort Women in Far East Asia

CHAP.3  NANKING ISSUE

14. The Nanking Hoax: A Historian Analyzes the Events of 1937 　By Ara Ken’ichi

http://www.sdh-fact.com/CL02_1/67_S4.pdf

15. No American Wittnessed the Nanjing “Massacre”  By Matsumura Toshio, Historian

http://www.sdh-fact.com/CL02_1/85_S4.pdf

CHAP.4 OTHERS

16. Testimony by a Taiwanese old lady:　　Video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_iMBldTapWU

17. For more Information,

please visit the Digital Library :”Society for the Dissemination of Historical Fact”

      http://www.sdh-fact.com/

… one of the criteria for those buried at Arlington is that they have had to have been honorably discharged from the military. Those court-martialed or tried for war crimes cannot be interred. This is not the case for Yasukuni. In addition to the 14 Class A convicted war criminals who were found responsible for carrying forward the Pacific War, there are thousands who violated both Japanese and international laws. …

http://nationalinterest.org/commentary/sorry-japan-yasukuni-not-arlington-9718?page=1

Zhang Shijie, 88, gave a sigh of relief when his son Zhang Yang told him a Beijing court had accepted a lawsuit against two Japanese firms who forced him and another 37 Chinese people to work as free labor during World War II. “I finally have something to look forward to,” he said.

http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/850227.shtml

About 24 years ago, Mr. Tong Zeng in China started a campaign to try to get compensation from Japan for the numerous Chinese who were forced by the Japanese military to work as slave laborers during the Second Sino-Japanese War.  Once this initiative was reported in the Chinese media, thousands of former Chinese slave laborers or their relatives, as well as Chinese victims of other Japanese atrocities, wrote to him reporting on their experiences.  To his surprise, over the next few years, he received over 10,000 letters from all over China.

Twenty plus years later, he is now thinking of scanning these letters and put them up on the web.  This is such a great plan.  So now there is a small team of people in the U.S. collaborating with Mr. Tong and his associates on this project.  During these 20-plus years, because a lot of Chinese media people and relatives of the letter authors have borrowed and never returned many of those letters, only about 5,000 of these letters remain in Mr. Tong’s possession (copying machines were not very prevalent in China 20+ years ago).

The project has been expanded to include:

• Scanning the 5,000 letters and envelopes to create an electronic record of each letter and envelope
• For each letter, manually enter some simple indexing information for classification and to facilitate retrieval.
• Transcribe each Chinese letter to create a digital file in the electronic database so that searches can be done based on any part of the contents of each Chinese letter.
• For a representative subset, like 10%, of the letters, translate them into English to create an English digital file for this subset of the letters, so that searches can be done based on any part of the contents of the translated English letter.  Later, remaining letters are also planned to be translated into English.
• Develop a public website to host these digital files.  The website will be in both Chinese (Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese) and English, to allow the public around the world to read and search these “cries for justice” testimonials from a large number of Chinese victims of Japanese war crimes during WWII.

For those who know Chinese, the following link (http://v.ifeng.com/special/duirisuopei/) provides an excellent 14-minute video of the history of trying to get justice for the victims of Japanese wartime atrocities through lawsuits in Japan, and more recently through lawsuits in Chinese courts.  These “10,000 Cries for Justice“ letters are part of this seeking-justice movement.  If you scroll down the screen of this link, you can also see some sample letters.

http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/2014/04/01/japanese-opposition-comfort-women-statue-sydney