The man known as Abe\u2019s \u2018brain\u2019 says Japan has become \u2018a hopelessly pacifist nation\u2019<\/i><\/p>\n
I had to go to California to learn that Michiko Shiota Gingery, who lives in the Central Park area of Glendale City, suffers \u201cfeelings of exclusion, discomfort and anger\u201d because her local authority unveiled a memorial to the innocent Asian women turned into sex slaves by the Japanese Imperial Army.<\/p>\n
These \u201ccomfort women\u201d, the Japanese military\u2019s repulsive euphemism for the victims they turned upon with such sexual sadism, were gang-raped, used as prostitutes and often butchered by Japanese soldiers during their occupation of Korea and China in the late 1930s, in the early years of what was for them \u2013 but not for us \u2013 the Second World War. These women \u2013 the few ageing survivors and the many dead \u2013 are a symbol of Japan\u2019s wartime disgrace.<\/p>\n
Now you would have thought, wouldn\u2019t you, that these poor women (forced into mass prostitution by the Japanese army and government over many years) had themselves suffered \u201cfeelings of exclusion, discomfort and anger\u201d? But no, it\u2019s poor Michiko Shiota Gingery, presumably of Japanese origin, who\u2019s all upset at the Glendale monument to this most appalling of Japanese war crimes. Furthermore (a gritting of teeth is necessary here), a joint lawsuit claims that Glendale City \u2013 a peaceful and intensely boring suburb of greater Los Angeles \u2013 has exceeded its power by infringing on the US government\u2019s right to conduct America\u2019s foreign policy; thus \u201cthe monument threatens to negatively affect US relations with Japan, one of this nation\u2019s most important allies\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n
Since we are a family paper, I will merely say that statements of this kind are identical to the material that comes out of the rear end of a bull. But it\u2019s all of a kind. Turkish Americans bleat that Armenian-American monuments to the 1915 Armenian genocide \u2013 the world\u2019s first holocaust \u2013 upset good \u201crelations\u201d between the US and Turkey. Which is why the spineless Obama still, despite his pre-election promises, will not acknowledge that the Turks deliberately killed one and a half million Christian citizens of the Ottoman empire.<\/p>\n
If the Germans started to deny the truth of the Jewish Holocaust, I suppose it would only be a matter of time before the anti-Semites of Europe lined up to express their \u201cfeelings of exclusion\u201d every time they saw a memorial to Hitler\u2019s war crimes.<\/p>\n
But when Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe shames himself and his country by wandering through the Tokyo Yasukuni shrine, what else can we expect? I\u2019ve been to Yasukuni myself, a place of cherry trees and blossoms and a museum to honour the memory of the 2.5 million Japanese soldiers, kamikaze pilots, rapists and war criminals who died in the Second World War. I had a cousin who died building the Burma railway and so I was greatly interested in the real steam loco shunted into Yasukuni, the very first engine to use that infamous track. It carried home the ashes of the first Japanese soldiers to die in Burma. No doubt Abe enjoyed his little trip to honour the murderers of Imperial Japan.<\/p>\n
Sure, Japan has apologised for the little matter of the \u201ccomfort women\u201d. But why, according to the Chinese, has Yasukuni received 60 visits from Japanese prime ministers between 1945 and 1985, including six visits made on 15 August, to mark the date of Japan\u2019s surrender? The 1937 rape of Nanking \u2013 in which tens of thousands of Chinese women were raped and at least 100,000 killed \u2013 is being turned into part of \u201ca self-defensive holy war\u201d; school textbooks now try to depict Japanese aggression in the 1930s as the \u201cliberation of backward nations\u201d. The Japanese Education Minister is proposing to reject textbooks that do not adopt a \u201cpatriotic tone\u201d. When the US hears that Palestinian textbooks include Israel as part of \u201cPalestine\u201d, American officials roar like bears. But when the Japanese do far worse, the Americans turn into mice.<\/p>\n
Yasukuni\u2019s purpose is to minimise Japanese war crimes and portray the expansionist Japanese empire as a victim. That\u2019s what Abe wants do to. He\u2019s spending more on his country\u2019s military. The man referred to as Abe\u2019s \u201cbrain\u201d, the former diplomat Hisahiko Okazaki, says that Japan has become \u201ca hopelessly pacifist nation\u201d. Now that China is a newly emergent military power \u2013 and challenging Japanese ownership of the Senkaku Islands \u2013 Abe\u2019s rewriting of his country\u2019s outrageous occupation of China takes on a far more sinister quality.<\/p>\n
One of the best British political scientists on Japan, James Stockwin, has expressed grave concern at Abe\u2019s visit to Yasukuni. A retired Oxford academic, Stockwin is no Japan-hater; just a decade ago, the Emperor of Japan awarded him the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays (with neck ribbon), no less. But he speaks frankly of Japan\u2019s atrocities in the Second World War and finds it \u201cquite extraordinary \u2026 that Abe should use this juncture to visit the Yasukuni shrine, a gesture he must know would be regarded as highly provocative by China\u201d.<\/p>\n
In an iconoclastic moment, Stockwin suggested that China and Japan should jointly bulldoze into the sea \u201cthese useless pieces of real estate\u201d.<\/p>\n
But there is a far darker side. Last year, the Japanese passed the Designated Secrets Act, which applies a prison sentence of 10 years to journalists and whistleblowers who give publicity to \u201cstate secrets\u201d \u2013 and five years for those who ask questions about secrets! This document, as Stockwin says, \u201cruns counter to some of the most basic principles of democracy\u201d. There have been protests against it. And how did the secretary general of the governing party characterise the protesters? They were \u201cterrorists\u201d, of course.<\/p>\n
Emperor Hirohito himself \u2013 along with Admiral Yamamoto and all the old war-mongers \u2013 would have approved. Long live the Greater South-east Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Speak not of Nanking. Set course for Pearl Harbour. That should put paid to all that exclusion, discomfort and anger in Glendale City.<\/p>\n
A reminder that Russia was once the good guy<\/strong><\/p>\n Staying with World War Two, \u201cStalingrad the movie\u201d has an American version (Enemy at the Gates), a German version (Stalingrad) and now Fyodor Bondarchuk\u2019s Russian version (Stalingrad again).<\/p>\n Jude Law\u2019s portrayal of sniper Zaitsev and his love affair with a Soviet radio translator got howled down in the Russian Duma. The German film showed the Nazis at their worst but had the Wehrmacht leave Italy for Russia on a modern electric train.<\/p>\n Bondarchuk\u2019s fearful 130-minute epic, which I watched in Canada last week, beats them both. Partly based on the diaries of Vasily Grossman \u2013 by far the finest Soviet writer of the Second World War, way ahead of anything by Solzhenitsyn \u2013 it follows\u00a0 the last days of a platoon of Red Army soldiers and seamen confronting Friedrich von Paulus\u2019s Sixth Army in the wrecked home of a lone Russian girl.<\/p>\n Her family have all died but she refuses to leave her bombed house; Mariya Smolnikova\u2019s portrayal of 19-year-old Katya is breathtaking.<\/p>\n In a war movie of immense violence, she is as close to perfect as a refugee whose soul is both mutilated by war and ennobled by struggle \u2013 because she underplays every moment.<\/p>\n At a time when we all hate Russians again \u2013 Ukraine, the Crimea \u2013 it\u2019s worth being reminded of a time when they were the good guys and when Hitler thought he represented \u201cWestern civilisation\u201d.<\/p>\n Not a bad film then, especially \u2013 as someone\u00a0 said \u2013 if you want to know what it\u2019s like to be shot in the throat.<\/p>\n _____________________________<\/p>\n Robert Fisk, based in Beirut, is a multiple award-winning journalist on the Middle East and a <\/i>correspondent for <\/i>The Independent, a UK newspaper.\u00a0 He is the author of many books on the region, including <\/i>The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East<\/a>.<\/p>\n