kenjiooi comments

Kenjiooi Jan,2. 2016. 2:00P.M. JST Despite Mr.Abe's refusal to accept the legal responsibility for rounding up comfort women and running comfort stations, despite his refusal to clarify for what purpose he has pledged to donate 1 billion yen, despite the lack of commitment to pass down the knowledge of what Japan did to Korea to the future generations through education, I do hope he lives up to the pledge and keep Japan's end of the bargain, with or without the removal of the statue of a girl symbolizing comfort women, as he puts optimistic faith in the effort the Korean side is going to make for the purpose. The last thing I want is that the Japanese government leaves every aspect of implementing the agreement up to the Korean side, taking the "piper calls the tune" attitude, thus reinforcing the impression that Japan is buying surviving comfort women's silence for 1 billion yen. I would like remind Mr. Abe that he is under the legal and moral obligation to live up to the sincere apologt and heartfelt remorse.

Kenjooi Shopenhauer= To judge the past with today's standards is in vain. Since you declare to　judge the past with today's standards is in vain, I wonder where you will get the notion of progress in historical science. To pass value judgement on what Japan did to Korea from 1905 -1945 in terms of whether it was good or evil, since you rule out going with today's standards, I would have no other choice but to conclude you would locate yourself in the heydays of colonial imperialism as a clue to go with in understanding the past. Which would mean one thing and one thing only, that Japan did something good as well. What it is all about would boil down to historical rivisionism. Passing judgement on th past, I must say the perspective we have to go with is, to borrow your words, today's standards. Given that the past is something negative we have to get over, we would have to call the past into question from today's perspective.

Kenjiooi, Dec27,2015. 5:00 JST

Franz Fischer I would go along with your idea that what the Koreans want is a real, sincere change of hearts of the rightwingers. If you ask me , I have gotb the feeling and I am sure I would feel justified in thinking that if Mr.Abe had only said the moment he came back to power three years ago that he would abide by the Kono Statement, we would not have seen such a deterioration in the bilatareal relations wi South Korea; by letting the ultra-nationalistic aspect of his political persona get the better of himself just to live up to the "Make a complete break with the postwar rgeme" self-image, he made his intention known to give a fresh, thorough check to the process through which they came up with the Kono statement only to get a rise out of the Koreans, opening a can of worms. Getting inside his mind, I have got the impression that he could have bitten off his tongue.

Kenjooi Dec,23. 2015.

Among the reasons the so-called historical rivisionists, Abe and his cronies included , if you aske me, is this fact that before and during the war Japanese people were kept in the dark about what was really going on on the battle front in Asia with an embargo placed upon free speech; it was not until after the War Tribunal in Tokyo that we learned something about what happened in Nanjing, to my regret. After the war with the occupation brought to an end, the then- conservative government put in place the textbook-screening system under which the darft of a history text books is required to comply with the Monbush-prescrived course of study, which was and still is put together to whitewash the shady parts of modern Japanese history. The fact I have got into that the people were kept in the dark is still a fact of school life today, too in that those born after the war are not adequately equipped with the detailed, accurate knowledge of the Japanese history from the early 1930s to the mid-1940s in terms of facts about what IJA did to Asia. This lack of the knowlege about the past goes a long way toward making younger Japanese an easy target for manipulation by politicians who want to get the collective memory of the past in the direction they favour. The fact that they don't know about the past would leave them with no other alternative but to react emotionally in terms of whether they like it or dislike it if and when they are confronted with something unpleasant they feel uncomfortable with. This is the price young Japanese are paying for the poor-quality history education, unless they develop issu-consciousness abot the history and study on their own. This picture may or may not apply to Mr. Abe. I have no idea.

Kenjiooi December 10, 2015

I would go along with marcelito's notion that it would be nice to think that if any member of the Japanese forces who committed atrocities against civilian populations in Nanjing and elsewhere and are still alive, they would be willing to visit the places to meet with local survivors of the atrocities. This I got from a male nursing care worker in a local nursing care fascilities who was looking after an elderly male in his late 80's. One day another elderly male was taken in. It seemed they got on the same wave length and saw without exchanging any words that they had a similar experience during the war fighting in China, killing and bayonetting innocent Chinese civilians. They broke down as they embraced each other, confessing how they had hell of a hard time with one guy saying that he was going to die with this experience kept entirely to himself as if having put into words his personal experience, which had been bottled up and festering inside him , had freed him from the burden on his conscience. The care-giver did not make any mention of whether they had felt a pang of conscience about what they had done in China. The way they went about it, however, I would feel they did. Getting back where we started from, back to the issue of if any members of IJA still alive would be willing to go back to China and take steps toward reconciliation person to person level, I would see small chance of that. Given the political shift to the right taking place at home, I wonder how many of the surviving ex-members of the army would feel up to and take the plunge. I do wish Mr. Abe would make a visit to Nanjing War Memorial instead of Yasukuni to give the Chinese people a friendly gesture of contrition. He has enough of the political capital to do so.

Kazuku Shimazaki< January 11, 2015. 4:30 P.M JST Just because another country has more piecees if information designated as state secrets than Japan does not mean the Abe Cabinet should feel justified in putting 382 pieces under that category, nor does it mean each citizen of Japan should give the Abe government the benefit of doubt wishfully thinking that they will abstain from abusing the law just to keep the people in the dark about whatever they do not want us to know. Given the current political shift to the far right and the presence of government-happy right-wing mass media and scholars who believe in currying favour with the government, we should remind ourselves of the need to to get the teeth pulled out of the law and vote LDP out of office again next time around. We should not put the past behind us.

This year marks the 70th aniversary of the end of WW2 ,and Japan, with deep remose over wartime atrocities, has walked th path of a free democratic , peace-loving nation-- January1, 2o15, 4:00 P.M JST< This year marks not the end but , according to the historical fact, the 70th anniversary of Japan's defeat in WW2 to be exact. The swing of the pendulum of the national psych on the part of the Japanese, who have got the notion of "the end of the war " instead of the defeat in the war, internalized ever since should be taken as indicating the " put the past behind us" mindset at work, which I would attribute to the fact that the current ongoing political shift to the ultra right is based on the misguided history-consciousness that Japan suffered a defeat at the hands of the US but that Japan did not get defeated by China and Korea but the war came to an end. What Mr. Abe gives top priority to pursuing is to make it possible for SDF to fight alongside with the US force in the name of collective self-defence. He says what he is after is to make a complete break with the post-war regeme. The post-war regeme, as he calls it, presupposes the stationing of Us forces in Japan, the very notion of what the postwar regeme is all about. He says one thing and he does another.

gokaiwo-maneku Dec29, 4:30 P.M. JST< I wholeheartedly agree with you. I have got the impression that Mr. Abe is among those Japanese politicians who have got a false sense of security thinking that Japan did not suffer a defeat in the last war, Japan did not suffer an unconditional surrender to the allied forces but that the war came to an end, which implies, as I get into his mind, that Japan was defeated by the US but did not get defeated by China, Korea and other Asian countries. This mentality translates into a dichotomy in the working of the Japanese mind vis-a vis China and Korea on the one hand and the USA on the other. Japan plays a subservient role to the US while with China and Korea, Japan acts very arrogant, giving a blind eye to the victimizer aspect of the wartime experience. What Mr. Abe tries to do by making it possible to dispatch SDF troops overseas on a permanent law would bear out this thinking on the part of Mr. Abe and his government, which has been left unmentioned, that the traditional Japanese governments headed by LDP are just a puppet government that gives top priority to serve the intersts of the US ay the expense of the Japanese people. This shows they are still in the grip of the occupier-ocupied mentality at work. Nothing but "back to the future"!

TAK Ooishi= I believe Senkaku belongs to Japan 100%< November 9, 2014 6:10 P.M JST Let me remind you of this historical fact; Imperial Meiji government instructed Okinawa Prefectural government to go and survey Senkaku Islands in 1885 to see if it was no man's land no other country owned as you mentioned and came back to report to the home government that it was. And the Okinawa prefectural government suggested to the Japanese Central government that a stone monument be put up right away to mark Japan's territorial soveringty over the islands but the Foreign Ministry authorities turned it down, saying that was not the right time. It was only in February 1895 when the Japanese government took steps to annex the islands into Okinawa after three attempts to do so, according to Wada Haruki. Just think Japan signed the peace treaty with Qing China in Simonoseki only two months later. That was when Japan was so sure of its victory over China. What would you make out of the long time--ten years- Japan took to get the islands annexed into Ishigaki? This is where your "Senkaku belongs to Japan 100%" claim should be open to debate. The long delay in the annexation might have meant Imperial Japan was aware China had territorial claim, since Madam Dragon had given part of the islands to one of her medical doctors for the effort he haad taken to travel to Senkaku to gather gao li shen for her illness.

Government spokesman Suga is quoted as having said in reference to the offering of a votive tree by PM Abe that it was done in his capacity as a private citizen.I wonder what Suga would make out of the public versus private debate about the status of a law-maker, who wears the hat as Prime Minister. Suppose Mr. Abe has got a sudden phone call in midnight from the Defense Department informing him of the intelligence report thay North Korea was getting a long-distance missile ready to send it flying over the sea of Japan targeted at Tokyo, expected to arrive over Tokyo in 12 minutes. He asks for the PM7s permission to shoot it down. Could you imagine Abe saying," I wear the hat as PM concurrently Commander in Chief from 9 to 5. Call me back at 5 tommorow morning" ? I have never heard of any law maker putting in a request for overtime payment. Let's remind Mr. Abe and like-minded others that as long as he wears the hat as a law-maker, he represents part of the power of the state and he is not in a position to claim that he visits Yasukuni to execise the right to freedom of religeon as a private citizen. Only after he has stepped down from that position can he enjoy visiting Yasukuni all he wants. The fact that he represents the power of the state should put him in the position where he is expected to live up to the constitution to bar himself from abusing power against the people. This is where the notion of human rights as guranteed by the constitution comes in. This is what the principle of constitutionalism is all about. What Mr. Abe and others do in their capacity as private citizens would ne nothing but constitutionalism turned upside down.

tideofiron=They see Americans bombing IS and identify with them as a shared victimhoon mentality= Ougust 7,2014 2:20 P.M<giving special Given the current on-going shift to the far right in the political climate in Japan since the coming back to power by Mr. Abe, I would not be surprised if not a small number of youngish people in their up to early 50s who graduated from school with hardly any accurate konwledege of modern Japnese history got to identify emotionally with IS troops as a shared victimhood mentality. If my description of the Japanese university student and others should not be too wide off the mark, then I am afraid we would be paying the price for promoting the whitewashed version of the Japanese history put on the put the lid on the foul-smelling aspects of it in the name of giving special consideration to the "uniquel Japanese cultural trdition".

I agree with senseiman that just because Yamatani espouses an ultra-nationalistic view on how Japan should be on its take on the last war and governing in terms of the restoration of the pre-war imperial restoration, they in the zautoku hate group saw something in common between her and themselves. In this respect I would put the three of Inada, Tkaichi and Yamatani under the same category of ultra-nationalists, who are ideologically on the saame page as Mr. Abe. The common denominator among the four of them is putting their personal reactionary polotical ideology, which we had gotb rid of with Japan's defeat in the war, on the front burner and putting the national interests on the back burner as they give a blind eye to the fact that they are elected to represent the whole country.

September 18,2014 11:00P.M JST< I would sense the "hone versus "tatemae" syndrome at work in his mind; the honest feeling he would not fight shy of revealing to his friends versus what he is willing to say to play an inter-personal/inter-office game. What he meant to say would translate into this, that he ended up playing an inter-office game the wrong way by blurting out his "honne" that it is ok to put a sexist question before a woman in private. Being a stickler for the double standard game-player would simply give away his true colorings s a politician; male chauvinist. To think that such a man wears the hat as being ni charge of promoting gender equality!

September 14, 2014 $:20 P.M JST= Samwatters" Resolving thee abduction issue is the top pripority of my administration", Mr Abe told the crowd. I agree with Samwatters that Mr.Abe has got his priorities wrong by singling out the abduction issue, that is , if we feel justified in thinking that Mr. Abe gave his honest opinion vis-a-vis the abduction issue, or for that matter any other issue as well except those related to the restart of nuclear poer plants and what he calls a complete break with "the post war regeme". What he stands out in the way he makes a speech in or outside the Diet is he does not seeem to have the feeling in his body for regarding his words as standing for the implementation of the policy he is giving voice to by speeh-making; the words a politician resorts to represents action in the form of politicail dicision-making / policy implementation. The fact of the matter is he uses words by way of ornament to decorate himself with to project a feel-good image about himself like women put on make-up. He gets intoxicated with these words. He is a narcist. Getting bacck to where we started from, to those crowd of people who have gathered together to give moral support to the abductees families you could not bring yourself to say, for example, the abduction issue pales besides the issue of getting Fukushima under contron. He should not give a blind eye to the historical fact that tens of thousands of Koreans were brought to Japan as forced labourers during the war.

September 14, 2014 3:50 P.M JST =Tessa- they should be better supervised while they do.< I know of a middle-aged woman who has registered with the local social welfare council and got her name taken down on the list of the visually-unchallenged ready to guide a visually-challenged person, accompanying him or her when they are to travel out of town whenever she can get around to doing so. Whenever there is someone ready to help out, they should be able to take advantage of the kindness without feeling any sense of indebtedness, since she is to get a nominal amount of money for car fare from the council. But puting myself in the shoes of those visully-impaired people, I have got the feeling that if and when they are requested to be accompanied by someone who can see, it might end up putting a restraint on their part in getting around on their own, depriving them of a certain level of autnomy, which I am sure would go against the spirit of living together in our own ways, regardless of whether we are able-bodied or disabled, since that is what we were born with, not what we have chosen.

It is disappointing if there are people who would misund erbstand that she does. I would nnot be surprised if it turned out that she has an emotional affinity with neo-Naziism type of extremism. According to OALD, Nazi refers to a person who uses thier power in a cruel way and a person with extreme and unreasonable views about race , apart from a member of NSP in Germany in 1933 1945. She sticks to the "Great East Asian War as the holy war" quasi- ideology the militarists resorted to to justify Japan's aggression against East Asia, insisting that the Manchurian Incident and the Sino-Japanse war that ensued up to 1945 was for self-defense. This would give away her mind-set on politics as something that should not be in keeping with a democracy. Takaichi and Inada as well as Abe himself locate themselves in the 1930's Japan in terms of their historical awareness vis-a vis the last war. They are a leftover from the heyday of Japan's ultra nationalism.

" September 6, 2014. 5:30 P.M JST I have been visiting Yasukuni as one individual Japanese to offer my sincere appreciation to the spirits of war dead."

The way she put together her argument for making her repeated visits the the sshrine, I must conclude that Ms. Takaichi leaves much to be desired in terms of her sense of the principle of constitutionalism; the consttitution is there to keep the abuse of political power by the state in check. She says she has been visiting Yasukuni as one individual Japanese, which would make me feel justified in thinking that she has made th visits to the shrine not in her capacity as a popularly-elected member of th Diet, still less as a State Minister, but as a private citize. I want her to remind herself that being a member of Parliament is a far cry from being the 9 to 5 routine business. If she were a company employee putting in the " 9 to 5 " work, she would feel free to do as she pleased after 5. Making a visit to Yasukuni as one individual Japanese would be possible only after she has stepped down as a member of the Diet. Insisting that she visits as one individual while she wears the hat as a member of Parliament, she would be thrusting her distorted notion of the constitutionalism down the throats of the Japanese people. This is a typical case of topsy turvy constitutionalism prevalent among ultra-nationalistc politicians in LDP , Mr. Abe and Takachi included. They are a group of politicians who let their romantic" Japan was beautiful before and during the last war" emotionalism, reminiscent of the 30s Japan get the better of the logical side of their personality. She should be warned against putting herself above the law.

Going with what I have gleaned from reading the newspaper articles on the issue of comfort women, I have got the feeling that what it is all about is not whether the Empire of Japan was culpable for getting together Asian women as comfort women to serve Japanese troops and managing military brothels , which there is a consensus as to holding Japan culpable, but what it is all about seems to have boiled down to whether imperial Japan or their agents resorted to force in a narrow sense of the term that ,to illustrate my point, they stormed into houses of Korean families and trucked them away for example ,or in a broad sense of the term implying that they sweet-talked or lied them into working as comfort women. Making a fine distinction between the two, which Mr. Abe tried to do five years ago when he wore the hat as PM, only to give up and back down from, would be seen as an attempt to dwarf the issue involving comfort women, in an effort to give the wrong impression to the internaional community as if forcibility in a broad sense of the term is nohing to be ashamed of as compared with forcibility in a narrow sense of the term. There they go employing another rivisionist take on the last war? Face the fact and say we are sorry, and make friends with the rest of Asia. That is the way for Japan to go forward with the 70 th anniversary of Japan's defeat and rebirth as a democracy only one year away.

<>August 31, 2014 3:40 P.M JST<> I am absolutely against boosting the consumption tax from th current 8% to 10 % come next October. The so-called Abenomics, Ahonomics, depending on ypur perspective on the overall policies pursued by the current cabinet, has been proved to be a failure as had been expected from the start; it has only contributed toward getting the Japanese yen depreciated against the US dollor by 20 %, and getting the issuance of the government bonds boosted accordingly. What they were after by the depreciation of the yen was to boost exports, getting the most out of the 110 -yen mark to the dollor exchange rate. But the fact of the matter was, overseas factors in Europe beyond the control of Japan has been working against re-enforcing the national economy riding the crest of the export-driven demand. What we have at home instead is all the materials we have to import , reflecting the steep depreciation of the yen againt the dollor, have gone up in retail prices. My "pap in the kitchen sense of economy" tells me that all the utilities charges in addition to retail prices in basic commodities have gone up when the pension payments have been reduced little by little. Those who live on pensions have hell of a hard time making both ends meet. What Mr. Abe is trying to do is to reduce the cprporate tax and in order to make up for the loss of the revenue from the lower corporte tax , give ordinary people another 2% increase in consumption tax. He should remind himself, or we must remind him that who he has been chose to repreent.

<>August 23, 2014 6:00P.M JST<>

I will go along with Educator 60 , who says to the effect that Singapore will conduct its own inspection in trems of whether the shipment of rice from Fukushima lives up to the prescrived decontamination standard before they get it through the customs. Turning our attention to the rice exporter's side, this we can say for certain that not only do they depend on the national governmen-issued safety standard, they will go out of their ways to make sure that the rice to be exported is safe for consumption by subjecting each 30 kolo weight's of rice to a rigorous inspection.

<>August 16, 2014 5:00P>M JST<> These directions given by the central government to the provincial governments that anti-Japanese patriotic dramas featuring Mao Zhou Dong-led Chinese warfare of resistance against Japanese imperialismup to 1945 could be taken as indicatting how the communist government under Xi JIn Ping is desperate to consolodate their political power base by giving ordinary people something else to worry about to get their attention distracted away from what they have to face at home, the widening rural-urban divide, increasing rich-poor income divide. This is where anti-Japanese campaighns come in by making an enemy of present-day Japan , giving masses of people a reminder of how terrible imperial Japan was to get the warmongering image of imperial Japan onto the present-day Japan. This tactics has been repeated in the past. It is high time Chinese people should waake up to the political reality at home as compared with non-ccommunist countries and grow out of the mind control. That was a fact of life in Japan up to 1945.

Putting developmemts between Korea and Japan over the territorial claim over Takeshima/Dokudo on a brief historical perspective, let me remind youb all that they go as far back as the early 17th century, when the then-Korean court asked the Tokugawa shogunal government twice, through the then- Tottori clan if they considered Takeshima as part of Japan, and the shogunal government authorities answred in the negative twice. It was just prior to the " battle at Sea of Japan during the Russo-Japanese war that the Imperial Japanese government dicided to put up a lighthouse and watch tower on the top of the island to keep a watchful eye on the Russsian Baltic Fleet sailing from the Indian Occean into the Tusima Straits, laying down an undersea cable for cablegram connecting the island to Hiroshima. By this time Imperial Japan had made arrangements annex Korea, depriving the country of its diplomatic sovereinty. Japan had already forced Korea to sighn an agreement to let Japan jhave the use of any part of the country to make it easier for Japan to go ahead with a war with Russia. This historical fact should be enough to give the lie to the claim made on the home page set up b y the Foreign Ministry that Takeshima/Dokudou is an integral part of Japan.

July 28,2014. 12:30 P.M JST= A US science advosry report says that the Fukushima nuclear accdident offers a key lesson for the nation's nuclear industry; Focus more on the highly unlikely, worst-case scinsrios< The US nuclear industry stands a ggod chance to learn a lesson from what happened to the Fukushima nuclear accident if they are going to heed this advisory report. This is where the Japanese nuclear industry makes a sharp contrasxt to its US counterpart; What lesson have they learned from the accident? Even before they get around to geting to the bottom of the accident interms ocf whether what happen happened just because of the killer tunami or the core structure of the plant had been damaged by the quale itself--more than three years after the accident-- the indusxtry combined with bureaucracy and politics still seem to keep the iron triangle of mutual back-scratching intact, being in a recklessly headlong push for getting idled nuclear reactors back online as if nothing had happened.

July 25, 2014.2:30 .P.M JST" a lack of childcare fascilities, poor career support and entrenched sexism are given as accolunting for the raw deal women workers are getting in Japan as compared with men."< As for the first two factors, they are, more or less, left to the discretion of individual local governments and individual employers. I want to get focussed on "entrenched sexism". This is where the Equal Employment Opportinity Law should come in; discrimination against women in terms of acces to education, career support, promotion, pay raise, welfare and retirement is prohibited. The fact of the matter is the law does not have enough teeth in terms of enforcement and penalty for emplyers' failure to correct the wage system weighted against women. Getting down to the reality invoving working women, I must say there is a wide perception gap between what job-seeking women university students get by way of explanation from prospective emplyers at the job fair and what they find themselves working under once employed. If Mr Abe is serious about getting more out of women to get the economy going full steam, he should legislate a law prohibiting discrimination against women on the job, including a mandatary reqirement that the ration of women in the dicision-making position be raised up to 30 % .

Kenjiooi July 19,2014 4:30P.M

I would like to ask Mr. Abe what he will make out of the reality ,as reported in this news item, involving the worsening of the bilateral relations with China to the point where Japanese corporations are paying for the latest visitb to Yasukuni followed by the re-interpretation of the no-war clause of the constitution. As long as he wears the hat as Prime Minister of Japan ,he must take a big-picture perspective on diplomacy, taking into account the national interests as a whole instead of giving top priority to focussing exclusively on a jingoistic, ultranationalistic take on the last war.

To think that of all things to pick a local assembly man hit upon the idea of giving out punctured condoms and sexual pick-me-ups as a way to get over the ever-lower birth rates to put a put a period to the long-standing phenomenon of fewer births and the aging of the population! At a first glance I got it into my head that he said these things for a joke but the fact that he gave voice to his notion at a plenary session of the city assembly brought home to me that when he made mention of the condoms and aphrodiascs, he was going beyond a joke. Whether he played the honnne-tatemae game the wrong way, I would not want him to wriggle his way out of the hot spot he ended up landing in b y saying he made a slip of the tongue, which has given us an insight into the working of his mind. Given the kind of the profession he is engaged in, he is in a position to work out a solution to this "fewer births and the aging of the population" phenomenon from the ground up, digging into what makes young people reluctnt to marry and start a family. I must say he is not made up of the right stuff, not possessing what it takes to live up to what is expectedof him by the voters. He sbhould step down.

July 15, 2014 1:30p.m="Mr.Abe says, we need to return to the basics of a strategic relation of mutual respet" < I would like Mr. Abe to get the difinition of the term "strategic relation" straight. However he difines it, the way he talks about it vis-a-vis China, I have got the feeling that he means to say," No matter how much my recent visit to Yasukuni gets a rise out of you, you should not get politics mixed up with economics, since the logic of economics is rational unlike that of politics, as evidenced by my rivisionist take on the last war to make a small segment of the population happy. Part of the picture I am painting about myself might apply to you: you have to divert the people's attention away from what you have to tackle at home for your political survival because you have no political legetimacy to your credit through the election by popular votes. This is where Japan comes in. The feeling is mutual." Is that all about strategic relations?

July 13th, 2014 4:55 PM< Going with the spur-of-the -moment idea that I would be better off doing anything to indicate my opposition to Mr.Abe-initiated reinterpretation of article 9 than twiddling my thumbs just complaining, I jumped on the pro-pacifist constitution bandwagon, ending up signing my name with the online petition site for getting the Japanese people nominated as the receipent of the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize. Come to think of it, I have come around to giving it second thoughts; Japan had had the last 69 years war-free not because the Japanese people have put conscious efforts into preventing Japan from going to war to live up to the spirit of pacifism, but rather because Japan has been allowed to give itself up exclusively to developing nd boosting the national economy, particularly up to the early 1990s with the Soviet bloc collapsing under its own weight. We have had the almost 70 years in peace with the US forces stationed on Okinawa, which functioned as the supply base for the Korean war, the Vietnam war, the Iraq war, with South Korea serving as the front-line military base targeted against North Korea and China. We should not get this out of our minds, that the Japanese economy, starting from scratch soon after the war,got back on its feet on the basis of the extra demand for Japanese products created by the Korean war, that is, the Japanese economy was turned arfound b y the war-generated military demand. We have got our hands dirty getting where we are, depending upon sacrifices made by fellow Asians, bearing witness to the fact that we do not have our hands clean enough to claim that we have lived up to the spirit of pacifism, as represented by the constitution. But to give the kira-kira-eyed hosewife the benefit of doubt, I do hope the petition campaighn goes a long way toward getting the international community "Articl 9"-minded enough to learn that Japanese self-defense forces are deprived of the right of belligerece. How come they can excercise the right to collective self defense?

Kenjiooi July 12, 2014. 2:45p.m As Mr.Abe says, we must never repeat the horrors of war. There is no getting away from how war can be horrible. What is expected of him is to put his money where his mouth is, as was shown by public opinio polls prior to the government-approved reinterpratation of the constitution, to live up to his words instead of making Japan a proactive international pease contributor b y using military force fighting alongside with the US forces. I could conjure up the image of the Japanese politician bluffing it out vis-a-vis China,riding on the coattails of Washington. What American president would be willing to order US service men and women to put their lives on the line to protect the small, uninhabited islands from incurfsion by China? The US government semms to believe in giving an equidistant treatment to both China and Japan as far as East Asia is concerned, as evidenced by the remark made by President Obama during his latest visit to Japan. To the best of my understanding about his take on the current China- Japan relations, going with what Obama said directly in English, I got the impression that behind his pledge gthat article 5 of the Security Treaty was appicable to Senkaku I sensed a nuansed warning against Mr.Abe that he should refrain from doing or saying anything that would worsen the situation. I hope Abe should get off his high horse, just saying to China,"The door for dialogue is always open." He should take the plunge to put the bilateral relations at heir worst back on track if he has the best interests of Japan and regional pease at heart. I would suggest Abe should make an official visit to Nanjing War Museum to pray for the repose of the victims, pledging Japan will never go to war, following in the footsteps of the former German Chancellar Cohl to put a human face on the apologies from Japan for wartime atrocities. His name would go down in the history of modern Japan and he would be awarded Nobel Pease Prize.

July 11,2014 5:00p.m= Rana Mitter said Xi's speech fit into a pattern of attempts by China to highlight Chinese wartime resistance against Japan to inspire patriotic fervor.< I would not deny the way Rana Mitter gave a historical account of China's attempts to highlight wartime resistance against Japan. From the perspective of the current communist government leaders who were born after Japan's surrender and who have got where they are , riding on the coattails of the first-generation resistance fighters, making an enemy out of Japan by rubbing it in whenever they have problems at home from which to get the people's attention away, they know from experience it pays to do anything to stoke anti-Japanese sentiments. The more income divide between rich and poor, between rural areas and coastal urban regions, the more they would feel need to bash Japan, I am afraid. What can be done to put a period to cycles of accusation and counter-accusaion put down to jingoistic nationalism? Mr. Abe said he made the visit to Yasukuni to pray for world peace , determinedthat Japan would not go to war again. If he meant what he said, the best he could do to put the bilareral relations at their worst back on track, would be make an official visit to Nanjing War Museum to put a human face on Japan's repeated apologies for wartime atrocities, followimng in the footsteps of German chancellar Cohl. Abe could do that, getting the most out of his political capital. It would do the trick.