Eclipse the new rising sun

By Henry M. Seggerman

Anyone can understand that the system of comfort women was necessary to provide respite for a high-strung, rough and tumble crowd of men braving their lives under a storm of bullets.

Toru Hashimoto, May 13

We need to revise all statements, including those by former Chief Cabinet Secretary Kiichi Miyazawa, another ex-cabinet chief Yohei Kono and former Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama.

Shinzo Abe, Dec. 31

Japan is charging rapidly to a nationalist right, led by two highly seductive politicians, Toru Hashimoto, son of a Yakuza gangster and now mayor of Japan’s third-biggest city, Osaka, and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, grandson of an indicted WWII war criminal. These two are supported by many other Japanese reactionaries, including Jin Matsubara, Makoto Sakurai, and Shingo Nishimura. Mobs have even begun chanting “Kill Koreans!” in the streets of Japan.

Seemingly goaded on by condemnation of his insulting comments, Hashimoto, with nearly demented arrogance, even instructed the commander of America’s military base on Okinawa “to make better use of the sex industry to help control the sexual energy of tough guys.” No wonder Japan’s rating in the Global Gender Gap Index keeps falling; it’s nearing rock bottom, even below countries like Gambia, Tajikistan and Senegal.

Unlike during his first term, Abe this time is avoiding blatantly offensive speeches, restricting himself to blatantly offensive symbols.

Japan’s Yasukuni Shrine memorializes its war dead, including war criminals hanged by the Allied forces. General MacArthur specifically prohibited Hirohito or any of his envoys from ever visiting it. So, Abe sends his son frequently to visit Yasukuni, and on April 21, he dispatched three high-ranking politicians with a special token he asked be placed in the shrine. Two days later, 168 more Japanese government officials visited the shrine. Abe’s message was loud and clear.

Then, there’s Abe’s new numbers game. In front of cameras at a recent baseball game, Abe wore a jersey with the number 96 on the back. Article 96 of Japan’s constitution requires a two-thirds majority of both houses of Parliament, plus a referendum, to change it, a difficult process. Rightwingers say Article 96 keeps Japan from rebuilding its military capacity and developing nuclear weapons. Who in their right minds wants the people who built Fukushima on top of a fault line to have nuclear weapons?

Abe’s latest numbers game play was May 12, when he climbed into the cockpit of an Air Force jet with his name and the number “731” painted on the nose. Unit 731 of the Imperial Japanese Army operated a notorious laboratory which conducted experiments on over 10,000 prisoners (including pregnant women). They injected their victims with chemicals, mutilated them, and removed organs, ultimately killing 3,000 and sickening 300,000 more. Once again, Abe’s message was abundantly clear.

Why are some Japanese incapable of expressing the same remorse as the Germans about WWII atrocities? One reason is that WWII’s victors imposed a “denazification” program on the Germans, through rigorous social and political reform. No such “deimperialization” program was ever imposed on the Japanese.

Why don’t the Allied powers who defeated Japan, including the U.S., U.K., and Russia, as well as Asian countries conquered by Japan, including China, Korea, and Thailand, sign a joint declaration urging Japan to implement a modern-day deimperialization program, in order to cure this new sickness plaguing Japan?

Denying the Holocaust in Germany, Austria, France, Belgium, Switzerland or the Netherlands is against the law. This new deimperialization program should make denying any of Japan’s WWII atrocities a serious crime in Japan. Mayors and prime ministers should not be exempt.

Germany has no Yasukuni Shrine. Instead, Germany has a museum dedicated to the Jewish people they murdered. Yasukuni should be replaced with a museum dedicated to the millions the Japanese killed in WWII.

After WWII, the Allies took control of German media: thousands of newspapers, radio stations, theaters, magazines, and book publishers. The countries signing the joint declaration should insist on approval rights over all history textbooks in Japan. There should be at least one substantial chapter detailing how Japan raped, tortured, and killed 30 million people in WWII.

As for reparations to war crime victims, every individual compensation claim brought to Japanese courts earlier failed, with Japan paying a miniscule $10 million total, mostly to non-Asians. Japan should agree to pay unpaid reparations to the descendants of the millions of victims of its WWII atrocities, especially in Asia. These atrocities included: torture and murder of POWs, chemical warfare, biological warfare, mass killings, Unit 731 experiments, induced famines, rape, sexual slavery, and cannibalism.

After WWII, former Prime Ministers Tojo, Hirota, and thousands of other Japanese military and political officials were prosecuted for war crimes. But MacArthur gave Emperor Hirohito a “Get out of Jail Free” card. Hirohito was the ultimate authority behind Japan’s WWII atrocities; for example, Japan’s POWs had a 30 percent chance of being executed or starving to death, as a result of the POW policy Hirohito approved.

So, Japan should simply end its monarchy. Hirohito’s descendants Akihito, Naruhito, Hisahito, and the rest of the monarchy should be stripped of their titles and any state assets or funding.

In the decades prior to WWII, the Japanese people watched as their emperor and military began a campaign of mass killing and conquest across Asia. The Japanese people could have overthrown their government and halted this barbarism, but they chose not to. The Japanese people made a choice to support a government which raped, tortured, and murdered 30 million other human beings.

Due to the absence of any postwar deimperialization program, Japanese today grew up in an environment free of remorse. For many, their view of Japan’s WWII war criminals is not shame; instead, these people think they should be honored. Their view of the sex slaves is that they deserve no apology, because they were just a bunch of whores. If they did not hold these views, they would certainly not have voted for atrocity-denying demagogues like Hashimoto and Abe.

Henry Seggerman is the manager of Korea International Investment Fund, the oldest hedge fund in Korea. Contact him at henry.seggerman@iia-funds.com.