Shinjuku No Yaju comments

If you can charge him as an adult and sentence him to life in prison..you SHOULD be able to name him.

I hope he gets well soon. But, this must be a real slow news day if "The Prince has the sniffles" is considered newsworthy.

Since the Koreans and Chinese don't accept/appreciate the apology anyway, I say we withdraw it! They bitch and moan now and the will bitch and moan the same in future as well!

That would imply that Japan was never really sorry to begin with. Which I would like to believe isn't true for the vast majority of Japanese. There's a world of difference between being sorry about something and feeling eternally guilty. I think any reasonable human being would feel sorry, but many on the other side don't want a heart felt apology, they want Japan to Self-flagellate for the rest of eternity.

UR22335, I'm against it because it is transparently going to come back with a less apologetic result. If they were serious it would be conducted by an international body, or at the least a joint Japanese-Korean Investigation Unit. There is no way the Koreans (or any objective outsider) is going to look at the results of this and see it as legitimate. Especially WHEN (not "if) it returns with either a drastically lower number of women or a drastically more favorable evaluation of their treatment. Even if the reality IS less horrible, the process by which you seek the truth in cases as sensitive as this DOES matter.

CH3CHO, he's not a scientist or a historian...he's the leader of a nation. And not some tinpot backwater nation either. The worlds 3rd largest economy! I don't care if his "investigation" turns up that aliens came down and did the crime. The best thing for JAPAN is to do whatever it takes to have a resolution that enables peaceful, mutually beneficial relations with it s neighbors.

Ok Shinzo..., time to decide if you want to be a world leader or a bigot with a megaphone. Thoroughly denounce old man "Koreans-don't-have-souls" guy, affirm the governments FIRM stance on standing by the apology and get back to actual governance.

Is there any real reporting here? Or is this just all off the guys Twitter?

I don't envy this man his job. He's got to have ulcers the size of tangerines trying to stamp out so many fires.

This must be the 4th "arrow", the one he uses to stab Japan in the back. No good can POSSIBLY come of this.

Japanese revisionism is useful to keep the Asia divided (and this is exactly what the US want, or they would lose their reason to be present in this strategical region), so I don't buy American complaints about i

You're over thinking things. The US maintains a presence in the region for the same reason anyone has a presence anywhere. Trade. High tensions in East Asia is bad for business. War is worse. And so the US works to try to prevent it. One, by pushing for talks. Two, by having a giant navy in the region. You're right to say that its selfish, But you're wrong that it's malicious.

@ Stewart I don't see it that way. The driver was obviously wielding a deadly weapon and had already attempted to murder an officer. The very definition of justifiable force.

Throughout the entire article I was thinking the police were irresponsibly discharging a gun...then I read the last sentence. Start with THAT! holy cow, and I used to live near Okubo....

I love the US can be both overpowering puppetmaster of all international relations and feckless superpower in decline, depending on the anti-US argument being made at the time. As with most gross oversimplifications, the turh is probably a little of both but mostly neither. While true, that we do tend to stick our noses in a lot of regional disputes, in THIS case its for an objectively good cause...to prevent an armed conflict (for a change). And while we do have a large debt, and a lot of our bonds are held by the Chinese, a lot are held by Japan as well, and we have more to lose from declining relations with our staunches ally in Asia than we do from stiffening our back against China. IMHO, its a sign of the USA's growing maturity as a nation-state that the first instinct ISN'T a puffed up chest and war drums.

Is he being arrested for leaving them or for not reporting when and where he'd left them. I can see how if the weather took a sudden violent turn and he couldn't find them he'd leave the area rather than risk the life of his crew, but if he didn't report the exact location where he was when he left the area, then yeah. That should definitely be a crime.

While I don't approve of the xenophobic tone of many of the comments, as a man with a girlfriend who used to work the late shift in a Kichijoji bar this story horrifies me and life in prison for both the suspects should be a foregone conclusion.

If the President can do interviews with OUR right-wing propaganda mouthpiece, I see no reason why our ambassador can't do one with Japan's.

Next it will be "China accuses Japan of inflating war tension by allowing the Sun to rise in the east each morning"

No, your "point" is that everyone, everywhere is a war criminal so you want people to ignore/not talk about the imperial government troops crimes. But that's not how things work. The use of nuclear weapons is a stain that my country will never EVER be able to wash clean, the Holocaust is the same for Germany and the colonization of Korea is a similar (not equal, but similar) for Japan. We don't have to live under the burden of guilt and shame forever (which is what I think the lady in the article above wants Japanese to do), but we also can't sweep it under the rug and pretend it never happened

American troops are no better than 3rd world troops? rape is just a natural thing male troops do to women?

I ask what makes the American side any better? They exploded atomic bombs both in American and Japan.

Yuri, you are setting up straw men arguments to defend the indefensible. Noone anywhere is saying that rape is natural. Quite the opposite. Noone is saying any side is better or worse. There is good and evil on both sides of every war ever fought. (Thank you Jorah Mormont).

What exactly is the point of this very lengthy article?

To bring the crazies out of the woodwork. Mission accomplished.

Oh Yuri... We've had this dance before. The difference is between nationally sanctioned action vs the criminality of individuals. True, there is no difference for the victims of these terrible crimes. Rape is rape. Period. But the individuals responsible in Okinawa were tried and punished. Xenophobia =/= Oppression.

“I want the Japanese (emperor) to come here, kneel before us, state everything that they did wrong to each one of us and apologize,” BS to that "emperor" in parenthesis. She said "japanese" as in EVERY Japanese. And THAT is why this will never be resolved. So long as there's one bigot in some back alley of Tokyo who isn't sorry, no amount of remorse by the majority will be excepted. The Korean people as a whole, and these women in particular, had a great wrong done to them, but if reconciliation is impossible (and I have a sinking feeling that it is) then just say so instead of demanding that every man, woman and child bow down before you.

Ok. 1) None of China's business. 2) If America, the country against which kamikaze's actually attacked, doesn't have a problem with it than nobody should. 3) Those pilots, and the family members to whom such letters were written, were just as much victims of the war as anyone was. I can't imagine being ordered to go kill myself or be executed as traitor... The last words of these men should stand as testament to the insanity of war.

Utada Hikaru's "Can You Keep A Secret" was the first song I heard when I got to Japan in 2001 for study abroad. Congrats to her! I hope she's very happy!

So what is the end game here? I mean what is it that South Korea wants? It's clear at this point that no apology from anyone is going to be considered "sincere", and it's not like Japan's going to offer up 200,000 17-year old girls for the Korean army to abuse so... what EXACTLY is the point here? The whole world knows what the imperial army did. It was unforgivable. But it was the past. The stories have been told, those who suffered won't be forgotten. But it doesn't honor them to use their pain as a cudgel for all time. My ancestors were kidnapped and sold into slavery, but it cheapens them AND me to define my relationship with the world through that lens. IMHO

So now that they've done this, will China/Korea stop complaining about Yasukuni? It seems to be a case of tit for tat

It averages to once an hour (0.74 times an hour actually). I think some cop just said "She called like once every hour of every day for half a year"...and an intrepid report with a keitai calculator sent that to print.

Korea has the right to flip off Japan by building the memorial...what I don't think it has the right to do is to scream how bad Japan is for not using its every waking hour to hate itself. It's silly and pointless. (Sorry if I offended anyone)

I was nodding my head right up until the decidedly sharp xenophobic turn with the Chuken-beikoku paragraph which had nothing to do with the Kennedy selection or its effects. Stay classy...

Way to take the moral high ground...I can't see how you build a memorial to an assassin then cry foul when a Japanese PM goes to a shrine. But maybe thats just my common sense showing.