Pinkgold comments

Many political and religious leaders, including Taiwan's President Lee, have visited the Yasukuni Shrine.

The spirit tablets of the 1,068 "war criminals" of the IJA have been housed in Vatican since May 1980, when Pope John Paul II held a special mass for them. The Yasukuni controversy began around 1984 and it's been 30 years since then.

China and Korea should stop their unfruitful political campaign. Japan is not going to be quiet any more, as many Japanese have finally realized that "peace at any cost" strategy would never work with Chinese and Koreans whose history education is jingoistic.

"Work this out, work it out peacefully, work it out through consultations” = "Korea should agree go to the ICJ."

Japanese leaders' apologies did not sound genuine because they were simply paying diplomatic lip service.

After all, the two countries concluded a settlement treaty in 1965. Any claims or complaints arising from Japan being in Korea between 1910 and 1945 were finalized and Japan paid 800million dollars in grants and soft interest loans and gave massive technological transfer to Korea. Despite that, Korea continued to ask for apologies, so what else could those leaders have done?

Emperor's apology is out of the question. Neither is his visit to Korea which President Lee asked for.

Those who believe that comfort women were drafted by the Japanese military must read Chunghee Sarah Soh's (2009) book "The Comfort Women" and LEARN that Japan had no policy to coerce women into prostitution:

in the case of Yi Yong-su and Kim Kun-ja,their original published testimonial narratives told very different stories from the current, paradigmatically established image of all former comfort women having been drafted by the Japanese military (p,101) ... the survivors present[ed] dramatically untruthful versions of their recruitment when they were placed under a spotlight of the political stages of the United States and Japan (p. 102).

Basically, Prof. Soh is saying those former comfort women have lied. Testimonies are not evidence. There is no evidence for coercion by the Japanese government or military.

It's hypocritical of Korea not to do anything about her present-day comfort women who are swindled and coerced into prostitution by Koreans, and arrested by police all over the world.

I don't like Hashimoto, but I agree with him on this matter. Prof. Byeong-jik Ahn of Seoul National University who led the research on Korean comfort women and supervised the (1993) publication of their testimonies declared publicly in 2006 that there is no evidence that the Japanese government/military was forcibly mobilizing comfort women. Prostitution was legal, there were plenty of business establishments, people were poor, and there were many girls sold for prostitution, especially in northeastern part of Japan and Korean Peninsula.

Abundant evidence shows that Korean women were swindled, kidnapped, or sold by Korean brokers. Abundant evidence also shows that the Japanese authority kept a watchful eye on illegal human trafficking and arresting illegal traffickers.

Why did a total of 802,147 Korean men, fighting the odds of less than 2.2% acceptance rate, enthusiastically, and some of them repeatedly, try to enlist in the Japanese military from 1938 to 1943 if the Japanese military was mobilizing their 200,000 sisters and making them sex slaves? To F*** their own sisters? The majority of the police force in Korea was Korean. What were they doing?

Japan should stop using "broader sense of coercion" to include "poverty" and "against one's will." It's been so insincere and hypocritical. Japan should be brutally honest, like Hashimoto!