It seems every time some reporter wants to make some point about Japanese historical revisionism they drag out this guy:
A monument to comfort women was erected outside the Japanese embassy in Seoul in 2011
Seventy years after the end of World War Two, the voices of revisionism in Japan are growing stronger and moving into the mainstream, particularly on the issue of comfort women, who were women forced to be sex slaves for Japanese soldiers during the war.
One of the most eloquent voices of revisionism is Toshio Tamogami.
Mr Tamogami is well-educated, knowledgeable and, when I meet him, exquisitely polite. The former chief of staff of Japan’s air force believes in a version of Japanese history that is deeply at odds with much of the rest of the world.
But it is increasingly popular among young Japanese, tired of being told they must keep apologising to China and Korea.
Last year Mr Tamogami ran for governor of Tokyo. He came fourth, with 600,000 votes. Most strikingly, among young voters aged 20 to 30 he got nearly a quarter of the votes cast.
“As a defeated nation we only teach the history forced on us by the victors,” he says. “To be an independent nation again we must move away from the history imposed on us. We should take back our true history that we can be proud of.”
In this “true” history of the 20th Century that Mr Tamogami talks of, Japan was not the aggressor, but the liberator. Japanese soldiers fought valiantly to expel the hated white imperialists who had subjugated Asian peoples for 200 years.
It is a proud history, where Japan, alone in Asia, was capable of taking on and defeating the European oppressors. It is also a version of history that has no room for the Japanese committing atrocities against fellow Asians.
Mr Tamogami believes that Japan did not invade the Korean Peninsula, but rather “invested in Korea and also in Taiwan and Manchuria”.
I ask him about the invasion of China in 1937 and the massacre of civilians in the capital Nanjing. Surely that was naked aggression?
“I can declare that there was no Nanjing Massacre,” he says, claiming there were “no eyewitnesses” of Japanese soldiers slaughtering Chinese civilians.
It is when I ask him about the issue of Korean comfort women that Mr Tamogami’s denials are most indignant.
He declares it “another fabrication”, saying: “If this is true, how many soldiers had to be mobilised to forcibly drag those women away? And those Korean men were just watching their women taken away by force? Were Korean men all cowards?” [BBC via Reddit Korea]
You can read the rest at the link.
First of all in regards to the question of whether Japanese men are cowards, scholars who have looked at the comfort women issue would tell you that most of the women put into the comfort women system were sold by Korean brokers. So Korean men weren’t cowards they were salesmen. Actually kidnapping of Korean women by Japanese soldiers would be a very rare occurrence when the broker system made so many of these women readily available. Women that were kidnapped were likely by Korean brokers. This does not absolve the Imperial Japanese from responsibility since they ran the comfort woman system, but it provides context of what was going on at the time. Likewise this same system was in place to service the US military where women were being sold, often by their families, to become camptown prostitutes.
Secondly I am well aware of Japanese historical revisionism since I have been to the Yushukan Museum which promotes the Asian liberation narrative of people like Tamogami. However, instead of bringing this guy up as a source to confirm pre-conceived narrative, I would like to see a journalist conduct a national poll and see how many Japanese actually believe this narrative? I am willing to bet that a strong majority of the Japanese public believes that what happened during World War II was not liberation and Imperial Japan was in the wrong. At the same time many of them probably believe that the World War II history issue is being exaggerated for political reasons which is what allows voices like Tamogami to have the following that he does have.
