In Philippines, wartime offspring of Japanese still fighting for citizenship | The Japan Times

2016/06/21 Leave a comment

The complexities of identities, so many years later:

It estimates there were around 3,000 second-generation Japanese-Filipino descendants, of whom nearly 900 were not registered with the Japanese government due to the wartime turmoil. Most of their fathers arrived in the Philippines before WWII and married local women.

Inomata said the center has filed 235 petitions, of which 172 earned approval and 29 were rejected, including the 10 the center intends to appeal.

Nine other cases are still being heard, while the remaining 25 have been withdrawn, mainly because the petitioners have died.

In an interview, Torres said she will endure the long, hard process of acquiring her father’s nationality just to see her relatives in Japan.

“I have not lost hope. I would be very happy to see my father’s home place and meet our relatives there. My father must have some siblings there,” said Torres, whose petition was formally filed last October but denied in February.

Joining her in the petition are her younger siblings, Roque Go, 80, and Estodi Go, who is 77.

The Maramotos can only rely on their testimonies and a family portrait taken in 1936 to prove their claim of having a Japanese father.

Torres had four siblings, but two are now dead. She said their father arrived in Davao at a time unknown to them, and married their mother, a member of the local B’laan tribe. He worked as a carpenter and had a few Japanese friends in their province.

She has few memories of her father, as she was only 8 years old when he died in an accident in 1940. Torres recalled that her father would speak the B’laan language at home, the Cebuano language when he was with neighbors, and Japanese with his Japanese friends.

In the interview, she said her “Papa” did not teach them the Japanese language, nor did he introduce Japanese customs at home.

The youngest sibling, Estodi, became emotional as he clutched the Maramoto family picture.

“I am appealing for help because I did not see my father myself,” he said.

“I am crying now because I only have this photo of him, and this was the only place where I could see him. So I want to know where my father came from in Japan, and I am also asking for help so I can see our relatives there.

“I want to be recognized as a Japanese citizen because my father was Japanese and his blood flows through me,” he said.

Source: In Philippines, wartime offspring of Japanese still fighting for citizenship | The Japan Times

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ICYMI: Douglas Todd: Lest we overlook the ‘Asian Holocaust’

2016/03/01 Leave a comment

Good piece by Todd:

Nazi Germany’s invasions and the Holocaust have been thoroughly exposed through an avalanche of books and movies. Germany’s leaders have repeatedly apologized and offered redress. And the German people, including the young, carry the guilt of their forebears’ atrocities.

That’s not the case when it comes to Japan’s war crimes.

Eugene Sledge, a U.S. professor and veteran who advised Ken Burns on his documentary, War, has said: “The best kept secret about World War II is the truth about the Japanese atrocities.”

The full horror of Japanese aggression began manifesting itself first in 1937, when Japanese soldiers launched a brutal, sexually sadistic invasion of the Chinese city of Nanking.

Peter Li, an historian at Rutgers University, continues to think Canada and the U.S. have to be held responsible for Japanese internment camps. But he also doesn’t want the world to turn a blind eye to the devastation wrought by Japan.

“As Auschwitz has become a symbol of the Jewish Holocaust and Nazi atrocities in World War II, the ‘Rape of Nanking’ has become the symbol of the Japanese military’s monstrous and savage cruelty in the Asia Pacific War from 1931 to 1945,” Li says.

“But in comparison to the Jewish Holocaust, relatively little has been written about the atrocities perpetrated by the Japanese military in China, Korea, the Philippines, Singapore and Indonesia, where close to 50 million people died at the hands of Japanese aggression. In China alone, an estimated 30 million people lost their lives.”

Given the hot spotlight on Nazi Germany, it’s little wonder those who want to shift the attention of resistant Westerners to Japan’s war crimes often use the term, “the Asian Holocaust.”

Why have Japan’s war outrages lacked the scrutiny directed at Germany?

The University of Victoria’s John Price is among those who argue one reason for the silence has been U.S. strategy since the war. After Japan surrendered in 1945, the U.S. occupied the country and turned it into an ally in its conflicts with Communist China, Korea and elsewhere. Needing a “friend” in Asia, the U.S. and other Western powers, Price suggests, have not found it in their interest to rub Japan’s nose in its iniquities.

The second reason lies in Western guilt over dropping atomic bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Those explosions helped force Japan to surrender, but at the cost of roughly 100,000 civilian lives.

As a result, in East Asia, controversy burns openly over whether Japan should more fully apologize for starting the war. But in Canada the question rarely comes up.

That’s despite Canada sending thousands of young soldiers to the Asian war, where many were killed or injured or suffered torture and mistreatment.

A person needs a strong stomach to read even a basic Wikipedia page about “Japanese war atrocities.”

Japanese military leaders often ordered troops to “Kill all captives,” says Li, editor of Japanese War Crimes: The Search for Justice. Japanese troops were routinely ordered to decapitate, rape or pour gasoline on citizens and prisoners of war.

When Japan’s soldiers weren’t burying humans alive, they were told to build their courage by plunging 15-inch bayonets into unarmed people. “Killing was a form of entertainment,” says Li. The indignities performed on corpses of victims of rape are too gruesome to cite.

Grassroots efforts to draw attention to the need for fuller Japanese apologies and redress have faced a mountain of obfuscation and denial.

Unlike in Germany, Japan’s responsibility for the war “is not clearly established in the minds of many Japanese today,” says Li. “The Japanese people have introduced the notion of ‘a good defeat’ … and they rarely invoke an enemy, or hatred for the enemy. Somehow the war has become an ‘enemy-less’ conflict.”

Last year, on the 70th anniversary of the war, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe expressed his “profound grief” for his country’s actions.

But Abe continues to send mixed messages, since he has also visited the Yasukani Shrine, which contains graves of Japan’s worst war criminals. And accounts of war atrocities remain slim to non-existent in Japanese textbooks.

Source: Douglas Todd: Lest we overlook the ‘Asian Holocaust’

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The sex slaves of Japanese soldiers deserve – at least – a real apology

2016/01/14 Leave a comment

Sylvia Yu Friedman, author of Silenced No More: Voices of Comfort Women, on the need for a more meaningful apology:

In 1970, Willy Brandt, the late German chancellor, dropped to his knees spontaneously in front of a memorial as a sign of repentance before survivors of the Holocaust in Poland. Many said they were healed by his moving gesture.

For the thousands of girls and women forced to be sex slaves for the Imperial Japanese military from the 1930s to the end of the Second World War, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe should have knelt on the ground in deep contrition for these “comfort women” – but instead, a Japan-South Korea deal was quietly expedited behind closed doors.

…After hearing Ms. Kim’s [a former sex slave] testimony first-hand, I wrote a commentary for this paper in August, 2001, about her and her fight for an official apology and restitution from the Japanese government. Immediately, a publisher reached out and asked for a book proposal on the topic. I wanted to describe their unspeakable stories for the world to know.

That is what compelled me to interview dozens of survivors in different countries for more than 10 years. What struck me the most from these interviews was how this period of captivity destroyed their lives. Universally, they told me that they wanted a sincere apology from the Japanese government that would bring healing and closure to their suffering.

The Japanese government has claimed that all rights to compensation were dealt with in treaties after the war. Until 1991, Tokyo repeatedly denied that women and girls were forced into a systemic sexual enslavement and blamed private profiteers. For the victims, these denials added insult to injury. That is why these women began to speak out.

After more than 70 years, a simple bilateral agreement between two elected officials to push this painful truth under the carpet will never be acceptable to the victims or the general public. These women must have a seat at the table. They must have a chance to express their views. They have a right to the last word.

This issue goes beyond Korea and Japan. Victims of this atrocity can be found in China, Taiwan, the Netherlands, the Philippines and Indonesia. If discussions are going to take place, these countries need to be included in the dialogue.

Many people throughout Asia Pacific, and some elder Koreans and Chinese in North America, continue to hold on to anger and hatred toward the Japanese. Unless this is resolved, these feelings will be passed down from generation to generation. A sincere, compassionate apology given to these women would help to heal wounds that extend beyond the issue of wartime military sex slavery. It would show the world that the Japanese understand that what they did hurt many people, but they are willing to take sincere steps toward true reconciliation from historical wounds.

As a last push for justice for comfort women survivors, the first Korean-Canadian senator, Yonah Martin, has invited me to participate in the International Parliamentary Coalition for Victims of Sexual Slavery, which includes ex-MP Joy Smith and U.S. Congressman Mike Honda, a long-time advocate for comfort women victims. Ms. Martin told me that the plight of the aged survivors – almost half of the victims were Korean – strikes a deep chord within her. She launched the global network last year at the United Nations.

Closure of these past wounds is urgently needed for all those involved, even for the Japanese. The survivors are dying off – only a handful of women are alive in China, Taiwan, the Netherlands, the Philippines and Korea. They need healing and reconciliation. That can happen only when a foundation of truth has been laid.

Source: The sex slaves of Japanese soldiers deserve – at least – a real apology – The Globe and Mail

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Will Japan’s apology to ‘comfort women’ bring closure?

2016/01/04 Leave a comment

While leave to others the foreign policy and geopolitical dimensions, long overdue apology:

Now, in a landmark agreement this week, Japan has apologized anew for the practice and pledged $8.3-million (U.S.) to a fund set up for survivors in what both sides said was a “final and irreversible resolution.” Does this new agreement have the power to change the course of Asian geopolitics at a time when the U.S. needs a united front against China, or will it join all the other war-time apologies that are issued, criticized, forgotten and buried beneath the remarkably long-lasting, ever-lingering hatreds of East Asia?

The surprise deal was immediately hailed in Japan as a coup for Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who seemed to have finally settled Japan’s grim historical record in Korea, after previously attempting to downplay Japan’s past abuses. This apology was as unambiguous as Mr. Abe was likely to give, offered remorse and considered the immeasurable suffering of the women – rather than trying to justify or fudge the history, as many on Japan’s right still do. The money being pledged also came straight from the Japanese government, which was meant to add an air of formality and officialdom.

But the agreement received a more muted response in Korea, where President Park Geun-hye, who is broadly unpopular, has squeezed anti-Japanese feelings for all they are worth. Former sex slaves and opposition politicians immediately criticized the deal for coming about without the participation of the “comfort women” themselves, for failing to acknowledge legal culpability and for not offering formal financial reparations. Former sex slaves said they were also angry Seoul agreed to discuss with them the possible removal of a statue – placed directly outside the Japanese embassy in Seoul – of a former sex slave sitting next to an empty chair, a symbol of the “comfort women” who died waiting for a full apology from Japan. One group of survivors called the deal “shocking” and said it was an act of “humiliating diplomacy” from Seoul.

Unlike in Europe, which has largely moved on from the scars of the Second World War, memories of Japan’s vicious imperial sweep across much of East and Southeast Asia are still vivid – and influence regional geopolitics to this day. South Korea and Japan still do not share sensitive military information, preferring to rout it through the United States, despite the obviously shared security concerns over China’s growing assertiveness in the region and the perennial problem of North Korea.

The U.S. has constantly urged Tokyo and Seoul over the years to reconcile historical disagreements and move forward in a more united fashion on matters of regional importance such as the Six-Party Talks involving North Korea. In a media briefing, a senior State Department official said the deal could be as transformative to regional relations as the monumental Trans-Pacific Partnership free-trade deal between the U.S., Canada, Japan and other Pacific nations.

Some, of course, argue that apologies in international politics are too often counterproductive. The academic Jennifer Lind has noted that reconciliation between nations does not necessarily require a formal apology – let alone many formal apologies, as in Japan’s case – because the apology provides a platform for nationalist elements in both countries to again debate and disagree over the facts.

But laying aside the criticisms of civil-society groups and opposition politicians in both countries, who have an obvious stake in milking the issue forever, the deal marks an enormously positive step in Japanese-Korean relations. Better military co-operation between Japan and South Korea might dampen China’s appetite for territorial disputes over islands in the East and South China seas, and will certainly help the U.S. execute its ongoing pivot to Asia. It will also prevent North Korea from using historical grievances as a convenient wedge to distract and divide the coalition of countries concerned about Pyongyang, and might dissuade the dictatorship from its destabilizing antics.

Japan has already indicated that it is ready to discuss the “comfort women” with Taiwan, though conversations on the issue with Beijing are likely far off. Still, Mr. Abe and Ms. Park – both arch-conservatives who thrive on the support of nationalist elements in their respective countries – will not be in power forever, and leadership transitions might generate additional warmth to thawing relations.

Though imperfect, the deal does represent an attempt to move forward peacefully, without forever nursing the sting of historic abuses. That sort of closure is something northeast Asia desperately needs.

Source: Will Japan’s apology to ‘comfort women’ bring closure? – The Globe and Mail

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Time for Japan to embrace multiculturalism

2014/11/13 Leave a comment

Interesting commentary on Japanese society in the context of its aging demographics:

There is an immediate assumption, then, that foreigners are impediments to the smooth functioning of Japanese society — not barbarians, exactly, but a hassle to deal with. Hidenori Sakanaka, the head of the Japan Immigration Policy Institute, said that a social revolution is necessary, in which Japan is reconceived as a multiethnic nation, in order to save it from aging into obsolescence. Such a dramatic shift in the self-conception of the Japanese people would be, he admits, painful.

But a move toward pluralism is essential if Japan is to avoid drastic economic downscaling and social stagnation. It’s time to take the first step and prove that hate speech is indeed unacceptable, and that there will be no room for racism in a changing Japan.

Time for Japan to embrace multiculturalism | Al Jazeera America.

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