World View: Hideaki Kase Newsweek

Newsweek最新号 「米国陸軍記録で従軍慰安婦は娼婦と記載されてると紹介」

No Confort,Yes,Prostitute(金を稼いでいた公娼)

World View: Hideaki Kase


Guest Commentary
By Hideaki Kase
Newsweek International

April 2, 2007 issue - History is a hot topic in Japan these days, with the country's wartime behavior returning to haunt its citizens. Many Japanese are dismayed by the possibility that the U.S. House of Representatives will soon demand a formal apology from Tokyo for the imperial military's alleged use of "comfort women," or sex slaves, during World War II. This talk has taken the Japanese government by surprise, especially given its unprecedented support for Washington in Iraq and the war onterrorism.

The world can't comprehend why Japan is reluctant to say sorry once more. But most Japanese can't understand why issues like the comfort women or the Nanking Massacre have resurfaced at all. Since World War II, the country has abided by the pacifism forced on it by the U.S. occupation. To promote such peacefulness, the Japanese media and intellectuals created an image of Japan as a warlike place that had to be prevented from rearming at all costs. To heighten the danger, the media also exaggerated or even invented wretched acts supposedly committed by Japan's imperial forces.

In the first years after the nation's surrender in 1945, many of its citizens found this imposed meekness hard to take. In 1952, for example, the Diet unanimously called for the men convicted by the Allied war-criminal trials to be treated the same as those honorably killed or injured on the battlefield. Half of Japan's then population signed petitions calling for the immediate release of incarcerated war criminals, and the major political parties of the day refused to accept any war guilt.

By the 1970s, however, this resistance began to diminish as memories of the war faded and the economy began to boom. Intoxicated by its unprecedented affluence, Japan was willing to ask forgiveness of its neighbors if this proved good for business. In 1993, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono apologized for Japan's having coerced women into prostitution during the war. Three years later, on the 50th anniversary of Japan's surrender, the Socialist Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama acknowledged that Japanese aggression during the war had caused "tremendous damage and suffering" to many Asian countries.


In recent years, however, long-dormant nationalism has begun to rise again due to several factors. First, during the economic slump that extended into the early part of this decade, the benefits of apologizing became less clear. Second, the conservative prime minister, Shinzo Abe, is 53, and the bulk of his cabinet and aides are in their 40s and 50s. Most don't understand why they should do penance for events that occurred before they were born.




Japanese nationalism has also been revived by China's alarming military buildup and North Korea's nascent nuclear threat. And it has spiked in response to the way Japan's neighbors seem to be exploiting bad history for present gain. Seoul did not even raise the comfort-women issue, for example, when it normalized relations with Tokyo in 1965; it was Japanese leftists who finally broached the topic in the 1980s.

The fact is that the brothels were commercial establishments. U.S. Army records explicitly declare that the comfort women were prostitutes, and found no instances of "kidnapping" by the Japanese authorities. It's also worth noting that some 40 percent of these women were of Japanese origin.

(日本語訳：　実は、慰安所＝売春宿は商業施設でした。 米国陸軍記録は、従軍慰安婦が売春婦であり、日本人の当局が「誘拐」の例を全く見つけなかったと明らかに宣言します。 また、これらの女性のおよそ40パーセントが日本の起源のものであったのに注意する価値があります。)

Many Japanese politicians have also come to believe that the Nanking Massacre was a fabrication of the Chinese, who are using it to pressure Japan into granting concessions in other areas. More than 60 Diet members conducted several study sessions in February and March. Much evidence disproving the massacre was presented; for example, although the Chinese Nationalist Ministry of Information conducted more than 300 press conferences over 11 months after the fall of Nanking, it never breathed a word about any massacre. Nor did Chiang Kai-shek or Mao Zedong refer to it in statements on the first anniversary of the war.

Diet members are now forming a new caucus to study the facts. Whatever they find, further apologies are unlikely. The country's attitude has changed dramatically since the 1970s. In recent decades, for example, many Japanese history textbooks blamed Japanese forces for massacring 200,000 to 300,000 Chinese civilians in Nanking. Only one textbook mentions such events today. Saluting the rising-sun flag and singing the national anthem (the title of which translates as "Your Noble Reign") have become mandatory in public schools. These are small but telling signs of how Japan's sentiments have changed. The country is eager to resume its place in the world as a normal nation, with a normal defense and foreign policy. The harder its neighbors or the United States push it for apologies, the harder Japan may start pushing back.

Kase is a historian and author who served as an adviser to Prime Ministers Takeo Fukuda and Yasuhiro Nakasone.

c 2007 Newsweek, Inc.





多くの日本人が英文で従軍慰安婦Lee Yong-sooの証言を世界各国の大手メディアに送りつけているんだってwwwww
今回、アメリカ下院とcnnで言った証言の内容がまるで違っていると・・・・・w


米下院で偽証した嘘つき従軍慰安婦、李容洙(Lee Yong-soo)の証言。
矛盾点：年齢／家を出た状況
CNN: 14歳／兵隊に家から連れ出された。
米下院: 16歳／自分でこっそり家を出た。

CNN:
http://edition.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/asiapcf/03/03/japan.sexslaves.ap/
Lee Yong-soo, 78, a South Korean who was interviewed during a recent trip to Tokyo,
said she was 14 when Japanese soldiers took her from her home in 1944 to work
as a sex slave in Taiwan.

Lee Yong-soo（78歳韓国）は東京でのインタビューで、
彼女は1944年、14才のとき日本の兵隊に家から連れ出され、台湾で性奴隷として働かされた、
と述べました。

U.S. House of Representatives: Statement of Lee Yong-soo
http://www.internationalrelations.house.gov/110/lee021507.htm
In the autumn of 1944, when I was 16 years old, my friend, Kim Punsun, and I were
collecting shellfish at the riverside when we noticed an elderly man and a Japanese man
looking down at us form the hillside......
A few days later, Punsun knocked on my window early in the morning,
and whispered to me to follow her quietly. I tip-toed out of the house after her.

1944年の秋、私は16歳で、友達のキムプンスンと私が川のそばでエビを捕っていたとき、
年老いた男と日本人が丘の方から私たちを見てるのに気づきました。…（中略）…
数日後の早朝、プンスンは私の部屋の窓をノックして、静かに私の後についてくるようにとささやきました。
私はこっそりと家を出て、彼女について行きました。