Abe Backtracks on Japan's Comfort Women Admission

[xenomorph42]

Abe will stand by 1993 sex slave apology: aide
AP/JT

Here we go again! Don't you just love flip-floppers?:rolleyes:

[amdg]

He's just trying to be comforting.

and he won't stop until he's comforted every single one of us.

[Captain Japan]

If Abe's intention is to confuse everyone so much that his stance is muddled, he has succeeded with me...
Abe refuses additional apology on military brothels
Mainichi

Japan will not apologize again for its World War II military brothels, even if the U.S. Congress passes a resolution demanding it, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe told the Diet Monday.

Abe, elaborating on his denial last week that women were forced to serve as frontline prostitutes, said none of the testimony in hearings last month in the U.S. House of Representatives offered any solid proof of abuse.

"I must say we will not apologize even if there's a resolution," Abe told lawmakers in a lengthy debate, during which he also said he stood by Japan's landmark 1993 apology on the brothels.

[TFG]

The UN should pass a resolution and start an embargo against Japan.
You know, just ban the sale of things like Lui Vitton, Channel, Prada, Rolex and other such crap. That will have the government overthrown in a month.

[Greji]

So Mulboyne is he calling the comfort women lying whores or not? I can't decide. Seems to me if he says there is "no evidence", then that is exactly what he's saying.

I have to agree with Mulboyne on this, that Abe was misquoted to a degree throught the translation and even now, the Mainichi refers to the mis-translation in the NYT. It appears to go back to when Shii of the JCP trying to pin him down to saying he lied, or at least, contradicted his statements. Abe maintains he was questioning the need to publish the comfort women issue in Junior HS texts and that he concurred with the statements made about the issue itself by Kono Yohei, as a governmental position.

I think that was used as feed for the direction of the most recent translations of his comments. As Mulboyne points out, the so-called Japan, or Far East hands in the foreign media do not have, for the most part, the language ability to know what they're being given in terms of accuracy.

[Taro Toporific]

[Abe's] just trying to be comforting...

[floatl][/floatl]

AP - Tue Mar 6, 6:31
Japan's Chuo University professor Kensuke Yoshimura, right, and his student Eriko Furuta view a replica showing an inside of comfort station room at the Historical Museum of Sexual Slavery by the Japanese Military in Gwangju, south of Seoul, Tuesday, March 6, 2007AM ET...more...

[AssKissinger]

http://english.people.com.cn/200703/12/eng20070312_356474.html

He's sorry for not being sorry.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Sunday expressed unfeigned apology to "comfort women" who were forced by Japan's then military government into sex slavery during World War II.

In a TV program of NHK earlier in the day, Abe also reiterated that his government will not change the policy of honoring the Kono statement.

Former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi and Ryutaro Hashimoto have both sent letters of apology to past "comfort women," and he shares the same mind and want to sincerely apologize to those "comfort women" who have suffered mentally and physically, Abe was quoted as saying by Kyodo News.

The prime minister's remarks were a big conversion from what he said on Thursday, when he hinted a reinvestigation of the facts unearthed in 1993 by the previous official probe which gave birth to the Kono statement in the same year.

[Mulboyne]

Bloomberg: No Military Coercion in War Brothels, Nakagawa Says

Japan's military did not force women into sexual slavery during World War II and the government should re-examine a 1993 apology to so-called "comfort women," the country's ruling party policy chief Shoichi Nakagawa said. "There's currently no evidence that permits us to declare the military, the strongest expression of state authority, took women away and forced them to do things against their will," Nakagawa, 53, said in a March 9 interview in his Tokyo office. "We need to research the issue further"..."We admit that there were comfort women who traveled with the military," Nakagawa said. "Poverty and other issues were behind this development, which is quite tragic and sad. It's a sad fact that similar phenomena existed in other parts of the world, including the U.S."

[Buraku]

Female foreigners are OK in Japan, so long as they're not Asian
http://www.asiamedia.ucla.edu/article-eastasia.asp?parentid=65530

[AssKissinger]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070316/ap_on_re_as/japan_sex_slaves_1

The Japanese government has found no evidence that the military or the government forced women to work in World War II military brothels, the Cabinet said in a statement to a lawmaker Friday.

They'll have to apologize for an extra century now.

[blackcat]

Its a typical Japanese political means for support.

1. Ultranationalist politcian makes a racist/sexist ignorant comment.
2. Gets attacked by media(mostly foreign!)
3. Politicain complains its not fair and his racist comment was taken "out of context" so he withdraws from future elaboration/debate.
4.therefore becomes a "victim" and the poor Ol japanese are victims of "japan-bashers"
5.Gains political/symPATHETIC support.

http://www.ww2pacific.com/atrocity.html

http://www.hri.ca/partners/vawwnet/Testalej.htm

[Mulboyne]

Abe explains sex slave stance to Bush

I'm certain I would have laughed in your face years ago if you'd told me that such a headline would be on a mainstream newswire like Kyodo. Even knowing the context today, it still seems slightly surreal.

[Mulboyne]

Kyodo: New records show women coerced into prostitution in wartime Indonesia

Japanese authorities abducted and coerced women into prostitution during World War II in occupied Indonesia, according to Dutch government documents made available Friday by a Japanese journalist in Berlin. The evidence contradicts Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's recent remarks disputing such wartime coercion by the Japanese military that have stirred international controversy and drawn fire particularly from South Korea and China which are sensitive to any Japanese attempt to distort its past aggression. In one of the undisclosed documents obtained by journalist Taichiro Kajimura, who met Japanese reporters in Berlin, a 27-year-old Dutch woman was quoted as testifying that she had her clothes ripped off by Japanese military police and was taken to a brothel where she was forced to sell sex despite having tried to resist. The document, dated May 1946, was submitted to the 1946-1948 Tokyo war crimes tribunal as evidence of a forced mass prostitution incident in 1944 in Magelang, now in Central Java province, which a Dutch government report has called the most notorious incident of its kind.

A woman interned in a detention center for women attested, according to another document dated March 1948, Japanese who visited the center instructed to take women, including girls, to a clinic in the guise of disease, and some of those chosen were taken to a brothel and coerced into prostitution. Both were records of examining the women as sworn witnesses of the Magelang incident. The some 30 pieces of new documents obtained by Kajimura, who is investigating Japan's wartime crimes, also contained victims' testimonies over a similar prostitution incident that occurred also in 1944 on the Flores island east from the Java island. "The victims were hauled and forced into prostitution as typical cases of what Prime Minister Abe has described as 'coercion in a narrow sense'," Kajimura said, disputing Abe's denying of such military coercion over wartime sex slaves, euphemistically called "comfort women" in Japan.

[Takechanpoo]

[American Oyaji]

Nice find Take.

[DrP]

Typical Japanese reaction - denial and avoidance. Sorry Tak, why doesn't Japan own up? All you have to is bow and chop a finger joint. We'll be happy enough. Japan was trading slaves 500 yrs before US was born and continued to do so well though WWII (what do you call the hundreds of thousands of Asians forced into labor by the japanese during the 1930's - 1940's ?? the Japan equivelant of the "New Deal" ? Oh - and as for chemicals? How about the poison gas factories that literally litter China and continue to poison young children today? Why don't YOU take a walk around the block and reflect on your bulls*.

[AssKissinger]

Nice find Take.

Yeah it was a real piece of outstanding journalism except for not even naming the 'official'.

[Tsuru]

I'm getting so tired of this shit. Why can't Japan just take the moral high road, admit they were wrong and get on with it?

Japan 1 - China 0. But oh no.

I bet the Japanese ambassador asked the Dutch foreign minister about slavery when he was summoned to the ministry to explain why Abe keeps scratching his scabs. Fucking idiots.

[amdg]

Wow – Finally got around to reading that full-page ad they took out in the newspaper entitled “The Facts”. This is really a fantastic document.

Let’s take a look at “Fact 1” – Fact 1 states they had a look through the archives and couldn’t find anything to indicate that women were forceably rounded up to work as comfort women. Therefore the conclusion they want you to make is that because they found no documentation of it, it therefore didn’t happen. OK, well, even though the absence of written evidence, in their archives, about a very embarassing topic, is not very convincing, I’ve seen worse logic. I can at least see where you’re headed.

But wait a minute. The paragraph then goes on to say that the army directives that they did find stated that no-one in the army must forcibly abduct women for sex and that “those doing so have been punished”.

(sound of record player scratching to a halt)

What? WTF? This document says that people forcing women into sex have been punished. Isn’t that evidence that it happened? I think it just might be.

So the records show that it did happen, but that it wasn’t sanctioned by the leaders at home. So, “Fact 1” is a steaming pile of incriminatory shit.

Let’s look at Fact 2.

Fact 2 is basically that Police in Korea, under Japanese juristiction, punished ‘brokers’ who were forcing girls into sex. OK, more evidence that it did happen. The shit be getting stinkier.

Fact 3.
There were admittedly cases where law and order broke down and sex slavery happened. So, OK, it did happen.

Someone crack the window please.

Fact 4.
The comfort women embedded with the Japanese army received wages and were sometimes beaten up by the soldiers they were servicing. And American soldiers like raping people too, so there!

Thanks, that’s lovely.

I absolutely love it when whackjobs decide to put pen to paper and give us a look at what goes on in their minds. It’s often the very best indictment of them. Talk about shooting themselves in the foot.

[Mulboyne]

Japan Focus ran a long article on this issue recently.