Japan's surrender

62 years ago, the Japanese imperial army unconditionally surrendered, finally bringing to an end the Second World War. Today, a delegation of the Japanese Mei Shin Kai group commemorated the end of the war together with the Chinese people in Nanjing – site of the Nanjing Massacre. The Chinese and Japanese peoples now live in peace, but the Japanese government still refuses to fully acknowledge and atone for the horrors its predecessors inflicted. In Germany, the Third Reich is dead and buried, but the Japanese leaders still maintain that the Imperial Japanese Army fought to liberate the Asian peoples and defend Japan. 62 years after the end of the war, the Japanese government should finally and irrevocably refute the Japanese Empire.

But the mood is changing. Today, only one member of Shinzo Abe's 16-member cabinet visited the Yasukuni Shrine. The number of members of parliament visiting the shrine declined from 62 last year to 46 this year.

Japanese schoolbooks should tell the truth about the war, instead of glorifying the Japanese Empire and instilling in young minds the repulsive idea that it may return in the future. Finally, to become a modern country, Japan should send the emperor into retirement and establish a republic. 62 years after the end of the war, 62 years after the emperor should have been deposed, he is still clinging to the Chrysanthemum Throne, driving his empress and his daughter-in-law-princess crazy.

Japan was only half liberated in 1945. The task remains unfinished.

Abe's crushing defeat

Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe's Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) suffered a crushing defeat in upper house elections. Together with its coalition party New Komeito, the LDP only managed to grab 46 seats as it needed 64 seats to keep it majority in the House of Councillors. Half of the upper house's 242 were up fro grabs in Sunday's election. Former prime ministers who suffered similar defeats stepped down, but Abe declared that he would cling to power as his LDP still has a majority in the lower house. But his LDP colleagues will start getting nervous. They don't want to see a similar defeat at the next elections. While the Japanese parliament cannot force Shinzo Abe from power, the LDP could by choosing a new chairman.

Abe's government wanted to ramp up nationalist sentiment by embellishing Japan's past, rewriting the pacifist constitution and giving its army more leeway in missions abroad. The majority of the Japanese people don't care about this. They care about bread-and-butter topics like the economy, pensions, wages and unemployment. The opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) cleverly played up these themes and won big in the upper house. Now it will be able to delay or even block legislation tabled by the LDP.

Except for an 11 month intermezzo, the LDP has been continuously in power since its founding in 1955. The Japanese people want change. Shinzo Abe is paying the price. After 10 months in office, he is struggling to pass the one year mark. (The New York Times: “Governing Party in Japan Suffers Election Defeat”) (The Times: “Revenge of the middle classes sends Japan’s ruling party to historic defeat”) (The Guardian: “Japanese PM vows to stay despite poll disaster”)

Marco Polo Bridge

70 years ago today, the Japanese engineered the Marco Polo Bridge incident southwest of Beijing as a pretext to launch of full-scale invasion of China. It also started the 8-year War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression. In fact, the Marco Polo Bridge incident also marked the start of World War II, although it would still take a few years before hostilities would commence in Europe.

The Japanese invasion led to the fall of Beijing and Tianjin, and at the end of the year 1937 the then capital of China, Nanjing. Nine surviving veterans of the 29th Corps of the Nationalist Army, aged between 87 and 94, commemorated the incident at the bridge, during which more than 5,000 people were killed. (China Daily: A day that pains people even 70 years later)

The event was also commemorated in Taiwan, were presidential hopeful Ma Ying-jeou saluted the soldiers who fought against the Japanese.

One would hope and think that in the 21st century naked aggression of one country against another would finally belong to the past. In World War II, the United States was one of the allies fighting against the Nazi and Japanese aggression. At the beginning of the 21st century, the U.S. attacked and invaded the sovereign country of Iraq under a false pretext to murder its people and rob the country's oil. 70 years ago the Chinese people resisted the Japanese aggressors and finally defeated them. The Iraqi people will do the same with the Americans. Where there is aggression, there is resistance. Nothing can stop it, not even the dictator in the White House.

Shameless traitor

Former Taiwanese president Lee Teng-hui likes to portray himself as a staunch patriot fighting for the rights of the Taiwanese people against the big bully, China. Today he showed his real face, not as a patriot at all, not as a Chinese, not even as a Taiwanese, but as an agent of war-time Japanese imperialism.

His elder brother actually died in 1945 fighting in the service of the Japanese emperor. Now, more than 60 years later, Lee Teng-hui traveled to Tokyo to pray at the Yasukuni Shrine, where 2.5 million war dead are honored, including 14 convicted top war criminals and hundreds of thousands of Japanese imperial troops. The dead are not just “remembered”, they are considered to be deities who died in the service of the Japanese Empire. (CNN: Taiwan's Lee visits Tokyo's Yasukuni war shrine)

China and South Korea rightly complain when the Japanese prime minister visits the shrine. Current PM Shinzo Abe has not dared to visit yet since assuming office so as not to derail Sino-Japanese relations.

Now, here comes the Taiwanese traitor Lee Teng-hui praying at the same shrine... Over the years, the Chinese government has used several rather unflattering words to describe Lee. By visiting Yasukuni, he proved beyond any doubt that the Chinese government was right.

Lee said the visit was a “private, family event”. Being a traitor can never be “private”.

The Comfort Women

The Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe shamelessly denied that Chinese, Korean, Malaysian, Dutch women and women from a few other countries were forced into sexual slavery during World War II by the Japanese army. He claimed the women offered their sexual services willingly to Japanese soldiers. (Washington Post: Prime Minister Denies Women Were Forced Into WWII Brothels)

To say this is at least as criminal as denying that the Holocaust ever took place. But while Holocaust deniers are facing prison terms, the Japanese prime minister will still be received around the world as a respected statesman.

There can be no doubt about what took place during the Second World War. Young girls were kidnapped by Japanese soldiers and forced to work in brothels to “comfort” the Japanese aggressor troops. They were raped tens of times a day on the orders of the Japanese government. Abe says there is “no evidence”. The story of those estimated 200,000 women is told in “The Comfort Women: Japan's Brutal Regime of Enforced Prostitution in the Second World War” by George Hicks. Abe should perhaps read the book, instead of repeating the words of Japanese fascists.

In 1993, then Japanese chief cabinet secretary Yohei Kono apologized to the victims and even former prime minister Junichiro Koizumi repeated the apology. Now Shinzo Abe is again denying that it took place.

If those comfort women were really “professional prostitutes”, they could certainly have found better paying and less cruel customers than the Japan's sadistic soldiers. Abe's denial is ridiculous and criminal. He should be forced to resign. Denying that comfort women existed and were forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese government shows that Japan is trying to become once more an imperialist aggressor. This is a threat to international peace and security, therefore the United Nations Security Council should act to force the Japanese government to behave. Since Japan is a ally of the U.S., of course this won't happen...

Will Abe do a Nixon?

Will he or won’t he do a Nixon, that’s the question!

Japan’s newly appointed prime minister Shinzo Abe arrived in Beijing to a courteous welcome by president Hu, NPC chairman Wu and premier Wen. It is a highly symbolic visit, the first summit meeting between the leaders of the two countries since October 2001. The Chinese government turned its back on Abe’s predecessor Junichiro Koizumi because he stubbornly kept on visiting the Yasukuni Shrine. Abe is even more right-wing than Koizumi, so where’s the logic?

“Two years from now, we might look back on this and say ‘Look, he did a Nixon’”, the Dutch China-guru Willem van Kemenade told the Associated Press. Right-winger Nixon made a bold move by visiting Chairman Mao in Beijing in 1972 and paved the way for the restoration of relations between the U.S. and China.

Relations between China and Japan have deteriorated to rock bottom. Will Abe succeed in turning the tide and make his visit not only symbolic but also historic? We’ll know in two years time.

Willem must have been flattered by being called a sinologist in the AP dispatch. He surely knows a Chinese swear word or two. Does that make one a sinologist? Never mind, Willem definitely has a way to coin an expression: “Did you do a Nixon today?”.