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Rep. Mike Honda, who pushed forward the U.S. Resolution 121, appeared on Japan's TV program and stated that the Kono Statement is the ground of Resolution 121. |
| Mike Honda visits Comfort Woman Memorial built at Palisades Park, Fort Lee, New Jersey. |  |
Q: Why is the Kono Statement important?A: Because it is the ground of the US Lower House Resolution 121 passed in 2007.
The Japanese people are suffering from this FALSE ALLEGATION!
There was prostitution. There were comfort stations. Prostitution was completely legitimate business back then. However, they were not coerced, not forcibly abducted by the Japanese army or police. It was quite like American GIs had Korean "Monkey Houses" in the Korean War in 1950s and have Filipino prostitues in Iraq or Afganistan today.
The comfort women were not “Sex Slaves” as often portrayed in the US media. They were highly-paid prostitutes/camp followers working at frontline brothels.
The Author cannot understand why the Americans poke their nose into everything in the world with only superficial scanty knowledge!
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Rep. Mike Honda, who pushed forward the U.S. Resolution 121, appeared on Japan's TV program and stated that the Kono Statement is the ground of Resolution 121. |
| Mike Honda visits Comfort Woman Memorial built at Palisades Park, Fort Lee, New Jersey. | |
| South Korean President
Kim Yong-sam |
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While Japan's Prime Minister Abe is speaking to South Korean President Park Geun-hye friendly in his poor Korean language, she does not see PM Abe's face looking straight to the front just ingnoring him. Many Japanese people thought this is unusually rude. Probably, she constantly demands Japan to admit “the past sin” because she needs to appeal her hard stand to radical anti-Japan group within South Korea.
Although PM Abe attended the conference in order to save President Obama' face, in reality he is disgruntled because he had to say in the previous Diet Meeting that he had no intention to revise the Kono Statement (probably he had to say so due to the pressure of the US to keep it).
Today, the Comfort Women Issue has become a powerful tool for South Korea to make a “holy war” against Japan.
However, the author believes that she is making a serious mistake. Facing this constant finger-pointing from South Korea, many of the Japanese today begin to consider that the Koreans, whether North or South, are Japan’s true enemy next only to the Chinese Communist Party Dictatorship.
They are neither "right wingers" nor "nationalists" often portrayed in Western media. They are just ordinary Japanese citizens. Particularly, young people of Japan today openly say they dislike or hate South Korea and its people. It is reported there is a significantly fewer number of Japanese students who are willing to take Korean language or South Korea as their major area of study compared to some years ago, considering them crazy maniacs posssessed by anti-Japan fantasies. If you have someone in your neighborhood who constantly expresses hatred or hostility towards you, do you want to take him as your friend? If you live in hatred and hostility, of course people around you try to avoid you and sometimes return you with hatred and hostiliy. It is like looking in the mirror with your disfigured ugly face of hatred. Although not clearly visible today, loss of their interest in South Korea will eventually lead to the loss of the future benefit for South Korea.
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If you are a Japanese, do you want to take them as your friend? |
S. Korea is forcing Japan to maintain Kono Statement using Nuclear Security Summit 2014, which is scheduled to be held on March 24/25 at Prague, as a “hostage.”
S. Korean officials declared that they would attend the nuclear summit talks regardless of whether the talks would be the Japan/Korea Bilateral meetings or the Japan/US/Korea Trilateral meetings subject to the condition that PM Abe maintains the Kono Statement.
This is a scurvy trick.
[Memo by the Author] March 15, 2014
Statement of Nobuo Ishihara on Feb 20, 2014 at Japan's Diet
[Author’s Opinion & Description]There are two important points in the following statement of Nobuo Ishihara made on Feb.20 at the Lower House Budget Committee.
These two points can be interpreted as “the Kono Statement was the product of conciliation between the two governments of Japan and South Korea.”
- No fact-finding investigation was made on the interview of 16 former comfort women to identify whether their testimonies are true or false.
- Naturally, it is surmised that conciliation of opinions was made between the Japanese government and South Korean government.
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Nobuo Ishihara
Former Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary |
Asahi Shinbun Feb.21, 2014A former senior official who helped draft the 1993 Kono statement of apology to wartime “comfort women” said no direct evidence was found to support assertions that the Japanese military played a coercive role.
Nobuo Ishihara, a former deputy chief Cabinet secretary, said Feb. 20 that the military’s involvement mentioned in the statement was based on witness accounts, not documents.
“None of the materials available to us backed up the allegations that the Japanese government and military were directly involved in coercive recruitment,” Ishihara said as an unsworn witness at a Lower House Budget Committee session. He was responding to questions by Hiroshi Yamada of the opposition Japan Restoration Party.
Ishihara said the statement was issued at a time when pressure was increasing to strengthen relations with South Korea.
In August 1993, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono released the statement apologizing to former comfort women who were forced to provide sex for Japanese soldiers at front-line brothels during World War II.
The statement acknowledged the Japanese military was involved either directly or indirectly in the installation and operation of “comfort stations,” and the transport of the women.
According to Ishihara, the roots of the Kono statement can be traced back to 1991, when a group of former comfort women from South Korea sued the Japanese government. In response, Koichi Kato, chief Cabinet secretary under Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa, released a statement that said Tokyo would not take any action.
South Korea reacted angrily and called for Japanese government investigations into the matter. But the welfare ministry, responsible for handling war-related issues, said it possessed no relevant documents.
Ishihara said he asked other ministries to gather materials on the issue, but no documents turned up showing that the women were forced into the brothels.
Kato announced the findings in another statement, but Seoul called for additional investigations.
After Kono replaced Kato as chief Cabinet secretary, the investigation continued, but still no records were found to corroborate allegations that the women were forcibly recruited.
South Korea asked Japanese officials to listen to what the women had to say.
Tokyo agreed to interview 16 former comfort women in hopes of breaking the impasse and improving relations between the two countries.
“Some of the comfort women testified that government authorities were involved in the recruitment process,” Ishihara said. “We relied on those accounts to finalize the Kono statement.”
Ishihara said despite the women’s testimonies, Japan still did not have any definitive materials to back up their allegations.
“We settled on the expressions that we used in the (Kono) statement because we decided it could not be ruled out that government authorities were involved with the recruiting agents,” he said.
Ishihara said the testimonies revealed that recruitment was undertaken mostly by agents, and that there was a possibility that government or military authorities were involved in the recruiting process.
“We never admitted the recruitment was based on direct instructions from the Japanese government and military,” he said. “No corroborative probes took place afterward to verify the facts of the testimonies. We were not in an atmosphere where we could have opened corroborative investigations. We were not in an atmosphere where we could have asked to do so."
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was in attendance at the Lower House Budget Committee session.
When he was serving his first stint as prime minister in 2007, his Cabinet approved a document that said, “There was no mention in the documents, discovered by the government before it announced the investigation results on the same day (it released the Kono statement), that directly pointed to so-called forcible transport (of the women) by the military or government authorities.”
His current administration has come under fire from South Korea and China over territorial issues and perceptions of events before and during World War II.
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