What this Japanese Kindergarten is doing is wrong, but South Korea has little creditability to complain considering the anti-Japanese hatred taught to kids in their country:
Screen shot from Tsukamoto Kindergarten’s website. / Yonhap
Tsukamoto Kindergarten, a preschool in Osaka city, Japan, is being investigated for allegedly handing out flyers containing hate speech against Koreans living in Japan and against Chinese people, Kyodo News reported on Thursday.
“Korean residents in Japan and Chinese people are devious,” read the flyer that the kindergarten allegedly distributed.
Kyodo News also pointed out that the flyer called Chinese people “shinajin,” a derogatory term.
The kindergarten is known to have sent out flyers in December 2016, criticizing Korean residents in Japan.
“The problem is that people, who are Korean at heart, reside in Japan as Japanese,” read the flyer.
The school has previously been criticized for making students memorize the “Imperial Edict on Education,” used during Japan’s imperial rule of other countries.
During a field day in 2015, the school also allegedly made students take an oath blaming Korea and China for making Japan a malevolent nation. [Korea Times]
You can read more at the link, but the Osaka government has sent a warning to the school to stop their anti-Korea and China activities. Has the Korean government ever warned any of their schools to stop anti-Japanese activities?
It looks like out of the all the world leaders so far that have interacted with President Trump, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe seems to be the one that has developed the best relationship with him so far:
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and his wife Akie Abe arrive ahead of his meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump, at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, U.S., February 9, 2017. REUTERS/Joshua Roberts
With a hug and a handshake, President Donald Trump and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe opened a new chapter in U.S.-Japan relations on Friday with Trump abruptly setting aside campaign pledges to force Tokyo to pay more for U.S. defense aid.
The two leaders appeared to have established a quick friendship during a day of talks at the White House and a flight together aboard Air Force One to Florida for a weekend of golf.
At a joint news conference with Abe, Trump avoided repeating harsh campaign rhetoric that accused Japan of taking advantage of U.S. security aid and stealing American jobs.
It was a welcome affirmation for Japan in the face of challenges such as China’s maritime expansion and North Korea’s nuclear and missile development.
“We are committed to the security of Japan and all areas under its administrative control and to further strengthening our very crucial alliance,” Trump said. “The bond between our two nations and the friendship between our two peoples runs very, very deep. This administration is committed to bringing those ties even closer,” he added.
A joint U.S.-Japanese statement said the U.S. commitment to defend Japan through nuclear and conventional military capabilities is unwavering.
The statement amounted to a victory for Abe, who came to Washington wanting to develop a sense of trust and friendship with the new U.S. president and send a message that the decades-old alliance is unshakeable.
Japan got continued U.S. backing for its dispute with Beijing over islands in the East China Sea that China also claims. The statement said the two leaders affirmed that Article 5 of the U.S.-Japan security treaty covered the islands, known as the Senkaku in Japan and the Diaoyu in China. [Reuters]
Will we one day execute Operation Senkaku Freedom? According to Secretary Mattis we will if the uninhabited islets are ever occupied by China:
Defense Secretary Jim Mattis walks with Japanese Minister of Defense Tomomi Inada during a pass and review at the Defense Ministry in Tokyo, Saturday, Feb. 4, 2017.
Defense Secretary Jim Mattis chastised China on Saturday for “shredding the trust” of its neighbors, while reaffirming that the United States would defend Japan-administered islands claimed by China if they were ever attacked.
Mattis also praised the current cost-sharing agreement for hosting U.S. bases in Japan as a “model agreement,” despite comments by President Donald Trump during his campaign that Japan and South Korea were not paying enough for hosting U.S. troops.
In 2013, China declared an Air Defense Identification Zone over the uninhabited Senkaku Islands, which lie near Okinawa prefecture and Taiwan.
Japanese and Chinese fighter jets regularly overfly the uninhabited territory. Coast guard and other vessels have shadowed one another in nearby waters. [Stars & Stripes]
I am surprised this poll showed 5% of people wanting to pay more to keep US forces in Japan. It will be interesting to see what this number is whenever a similar poll in Korea is done:
A C-5M Super Galaxy arrives at Yokota Air Base, Japan, last year. A Nikkei poll taken this past weekend found that 57 percent of Japanese favored maintaining spending on U.S. bases at current levels, while 30 percent said Japan is spending too much. YASUO OSAKABE/U.S. AIR FORCE PHOTO
Japanese citizens do not want to pay more for hosting U.S. military personnel and are now more likely to predict a downturn in bilateral relations, according to a Nikkei poll released Monday.
The survey taken this past weekend found that 57 percent of Japanese favored maintaining spending on U.S. bases at current levels, while 30 percent said Japan is spending too much. Five percent said Japan should spend more, the poll said.
Japan pays an average of 189.3 billion yen — or between $1.65 billion and $1.95 billion, depending on currency exchange rates — per year to support U.S. bases in the country as part of a five-year deal signed in 2015. [Stars & Stripes]
It looks like Japan is thinking of introducing their own THAAD system as well:
Japan’s Kyodo news agency reports the government may be following in South Korea’s footsteps on deploying U.S.-provided THAAD missile defense.
Kyodo says Tokyo will soon set up a THAAD review committee to examine the system in detail.
Japanese Defense Minister Tomomi Inada visited a THAAD unit on Guam Friday and was briefed by U.S. officials.
She says there’s no concrete plan to introduce THAAD quite yet, but warns that North Korea’s missile and nuclear development has entered what she calls a new phase. [KBS World Radio]
According to the article the ship was transporting rice from North Korea’s west coast to its east coast. I wonder if there was anything else was on the ship?:
Twenty-six North Koreans have been handed over to a North Korean tanker after being pulled from a sinking cargo ship off the coast of Japan late Wednesday.
The Japanese Coast Guard (JCG) went to the rescue after receiving a distress signal from the ship, which had run into difficulties off Japan’s Kyushu Prefecture, 38 miles (61 kilometers) southwest of the Goto Islands, a spokesman said.
The crew members spent a short time in Japanese custody before being collected by a tanker to take them back to North Korea. [CNN]
The Japanese government has responded to the installation of a comfort woman statue in front of their consulate in Busan:
South Korea expressed “strong regret” over steps taken by Japan on Friday, including recalling its ambassador, in protest against a statue recently set up in front of its consulate office to shed light on its wartime atrocities of forcing women into sexual slavery.
“We express our strong regret over the action taken by Japan with regard to the statue,” the foreign ministry said in a comment issued in the name of its spokesman.
“The government wants to make it clear again that both countries should keep advancing their bilateral ties based on trust regardless of any challenging issues,” it added.
Earlier, Japan decided to temporarily call in Yasumasa Nagamine, its ambassador to South Korea, in protest against the statue installed at the end of last year by a civic group in front of its Consulate General building in the southern port city of Busan. He will likely return to Japan next week.
Tokyo also announced a halt to the ongoing negotiation on a currency swap agreement between the two countries — an emergeny channel of and the postponement of a high-level economic cooperation meeting. [Yonhap]
You can read the rest at the link, but I am still waiting for the installation of a statue in front of the Chinese embassy in protest of all the modern day Korean comfort women in that country that these activist groups don’t care about.
For those that have visited the Yushukan Museum located adjacent to the highly controversial Yasukuni-jinja Shrine, there is definitely an alternative history of World War II taught in Japan. The majority of people in Japan do believe that the Imperial Japanese militarism was a great folly, but there are people who believe the history taught at the Yushukan Museum that Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor was to preempt an American attack on Japan and liberate Asian people from western colonialism:
World War II era Japanese zero fighter aircraft at the Yushukan Museum in Tokyo.
The Pearl Harbor attack that led the United States into WWII is normally a historical footnote in Japan, rarely discussed on anniversaries or in depth at schools.
That changed when Prime Minister Shinzo Abe announced he would visit Pearl Harbor with President Barack Obama on Dec. 27 to offer “comfort to the souls of the victims.”
Most Japanese today view the war as a great folly. The clause in Japan’s constitution that renounces the nation’s right to wage war has taken root so deeply that even new, restrictive laws allowing Japan to defend its allies were viewed with suspicion last year.
However, some divergent perspectives over history remain among two of the world’s closest allies.
Americans are taught that the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor was an unprovoked sneak attack.
The view among some Japanese, and particularly among some otherwise pro-U.S. alliance conservatives, is that a Western economic embargo forced Japan’s hand.
By 1941, Japan controlled large parts of China and other parts of Asia. In July, its military occupied parts of Southeast Asia, including a key port in what is now Vietnam.
The U.S., Britain and The Netherlands responded by freezing Japanese assets in their countries, which included access to most of Japan’s oil supply.
“Indeed, the oil embargo cornered Japan,” Emperor Hirohito said in an audio memoir recorded shortly after the 1945 surrender. The memoir was found in 1990 by the Bungei Shunju magazine and then translated by The New York Times.
“Once the situation had come to this point, it was natural that advocacy for going to war became predominant,” Hirohito said. “If, at that time, I suppressed opinions in favor of war, public opinion would have certainly surged, with people asking questions about why Japan should surrender so easily when it had a highly efficient army and navy, well trained over the years.” [Stars & Stripes]
You can read more at the link, but the best book I have read about the period before the attack on Pearl Harbor is Eri Hotta’s: Japan 1941: Countdown to Infamy. I highly recommend ROK Heads read this book to really understand why Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. The Japanese had opportunities to keep parts of their Chinese and Korean colonies if they would withdraw from other areas of China and Southeast Asia as demanded by the US and its allies. How different would things be today if Japan had been allowed to continue the colonization of Korea and parts of China?
There was actually a lot of dissenting opinions in Japan, but the militarists eventually were able to convince enough people they could replicate the success of the Russo-Japanese War with a decisive naval victory against the US at Pearl Harbor. As history has shown the bombing of Pearl Harbor became one of the great misjudgments in military history.
Regardless of the history involved it is good to see Prime Minister Abe finally make the visit to Pearl Harbor and hopefully put an end to any remaining hard feelings about World War II.
. I highly recommend ROK Heads read this book to really understand why Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. The Japanese had opportunities to keep parts of their Chinese and Korean colonies if they would withdraw from other areas of China and Southeast Asia as demanded by the US and its allies. How different would things be today if Japan had been allowed to continue the colonization of Korea and parts of China?
