So if I say “Workers of the world, unite!”, I’m specifically excluding slaves! Those guys will have to fend for themselves?
Yes.This is clearer in the original German: Proletarier aller Länder vereinigt Euch!
Yeah, the 2 guys who wrote The Civil War in the United States clearly didn’t give a fuck about slaves 
I understand Alessan’s point, but it has veered the discussion into a needlessly silly area.
Can we get back on point? Which was ‘how big of an idiot was this guy?’
It is a difference only of minor degree. If this guy was writing a history of the Japanese empire and said something like “Many Korean women in found themselves working to support the moral of Japanese soldiers.”, that would be a true, but highly misleading and biased statement without a lot of clarification on how they “found themselves” in that position. Bad and trying to hide a horrible fact with a passive description of the result. But this is actually much worse. Instead of trying to hid behind weaselly and misleading phrases to lessen the focus on the bad actions of the Japanese occupiers, this professor is specifically denying that the Japanese occupiers had any hand in this at all.
The equivalent would be claiming that Africans volunteered to come to America to be slaves.
I would absolutely say that what this guy is saying is more wrong and hurtful, but I think the passive eliding of responsibility is more damaging in the long run. It is harder to fight and fosters the assumption that bad things just happen with no need to worry about how or why they happen.
I’m reminded of one of my favorite bits from Thor: Ragnarok.
“Prisoners with jobs” indeed.
This issue (“comfort women” i.e. sex slaves) is becoming more and more contentious between two of our strongest allies, Japan and South Korea. Japan just wants it to go away, and South Korea won’t let it go. I wonder how bad this could get, for them and for the US, and at what point would the US government take any kind of stand about it.
Japan has apologized in general language for the hardships, suffering and damage caused by Japan, including once in 1992 when Prime Minister Miyazawa said " Concerning the comfort women, I apologize from the bottom of my heart and feel remorse for those people who suffered indescribable hardships." It puzzles me a little that, having admitted that much, Japan is so unswervingly unwilling to make any payments to survivors or to the families of victims now deceased. The amount of the payments would not be material to Japan, nor would such payments be any more of an admission of guilt than they have already made. I suppose they are afraid it would open the door to a flood of claims from other victims of Japanese conduct before and during what they call the “Pacific War.” There is still a core of nationalistic jingoists in Japan who have a lot of influence, and who are determined this will never happen. The whole thing seems insoluble to me.
i don’t think we should take any kind of a stand other than to say we recognize those women as sex-slaves who were kidnapped and raped for years. South Korea and Japan need to work this out between them.
With tears in my eyes, I’ll just leave these here:
The Japanese government has formally apologized for the sex slavery more than once.
- January 1, 1992: Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa, in a press conference, said: “Concerning the comfort women, I apologize from the bottom of my heart and feel remorse for those people who suffered indescribable hardships”.
January 17, 1992: Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa, … “Recently the issue of the so-called ‘wartime comfort women’ is being brought up. I think that incidents like this are seriously heartbreaking, and I am truly sorry”.
July 6, 1992. Chief Cabinet Secretary Koichi Kato said: "The Government again would like to express its sincere apology and remorse to all those who have suffered indescribable hardship as so-called ‘wartime comfort women,’
August 4, 1993: Chief Cabinet Secretary Yōhei Kōno said: “Undeniably, this was an act, with the involvement of the military authorities of the day, that severely injured the honor and dignity of many women. The Government of Japan would like to take this opportunity once again to extend its sincere apologies and remorse …”
August 31, 1994: Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama “… On the issue of wartime ‘comfort women,’ which seriously stained the honor and dignity of many women, I would like to take this opportunity once again to express my profound and sincere remorse and apologies.”
There are many, many, many, many more examples like this.
The Japanese government and individual people have also contributed to create a compensation fund.
Can someone propose a definitive, final act or set of actions that the Japanese government could undertake on this matter that they have not already done?
I believe I mentioned that, and included one of the same quotes you used. My search was focused on South Korea, but of course other countries also suffered in this way, including the Phillipines.
Japan made itself into a monstrosity of evil in much of Asia, starting in 1910 when they took over Korea (if not earlier). It’s also true that (as I mentioned above) there is an influential core of nationalists in Japan who don’t truly apologize for anything that Japan did. Maybe that’s the problem. In Germany, Nazism has no influence in the government and has been eradicated as much as they can without becoming thought police. In Japan, that has not happened. Many ordinary Japanese look on their country as a victim for the atomic bombs that were used there, without any acknowledgement of what led up to that horrible choice. I wonder if Japan were able to root out that kind of influence whether that would help other countries to put their hearts finally at rest.
Nationalist sentiments in Japan have made whitewashing of history a continuing problem. Note that Ramseyer’s claims have been promoted by some Japanese outlets; Japan Forward, which published his “Recovering the Truth about the Comfort Women” article linked to in the OP, is a website run by one of Japan’s five national newspapers. Not exactly a fringe media organization.
“The latest edition of a history text book used in more than 50 junior high schools across Japan makes no mention of the over 300,000 deaths in the Nanjing Massacre of 1937, skips allegations that as many as 400,000 girls and women were press-ganged into serving as prostitutes for the Japanese military during World War II and hints that the 1941 attack on US forces at Pearl Harbor was justified as the US embargo on Japan was a form of undeclared war.”
“The book is just one way in which nationalists here are trying to whitewash the worst excesses of Japan’s brutal invasion and annexation of large swathes of Asia in the early decades of the last century and promote national pride, critics charge. And it is all the more alarming, they say, because the far right here is attempting to indoctrinate children with their beliefs.”
So the Japanese government or Japan as a whole should be held permanently responsible for the existence of nationalist sentiments among individual Japanese people? I don’t think any government, nation-state, nation, or state in the world would pass such a standard.
There are still Germans who hold nationalist sentiments. They even have a reasonably successful political party now.
The United States is full of people who are bent on whitewashing American history.
There are several problems with many of the “apologies”, including the fact that many are of the “I’m sorry that happened to you” and “hey, those guys back then were real assholes and I’m sorry we’re associated with them” variety rather than the “we did wrong and apologize for our role in it” variety.
There have been only a limited number of statements made by Japan where they take unequivocal responsibility for it, which is an important aspect of an actual apology, and this understandably angers a lot of people.
Germany took the approach of totally repudiating the actions and to this day take full responsibility for them, never using the “the Nazis who did that aren’t us anymore” excuse. It’s a study in total contrasts in the responses over the decades.
Then there’s the problem that many Japanese politicians who gave even those limited apologies were subsequently castigated in Japan almost immediately after for offering them, both in the press and by standing members of the Diet. There’s always been strong minority opposition in the general public and within the government to offering even these statements of regret and so on, much less taking any real personal responsibility for them.
So what more can they do? They can accept their role as the successors of the regime of the era by taking actual responsibility and culpability for those actions and by cracking down on the rather sizable minority of public officials who continue to avoid that responsibility, deny they ever occurred, or blame the victims instead.
Tu quoque is a lousy argument in general.
Still, it seems to me that both Germans and Americans are still fighting to keep ultra-right wingers in check, including attempts to whitewash/rewrite history. We’ve had our textbook controversies here, but imagine the outrage if substantial numbers of students were issued history textbooks that omitted any mention of slavery.
Japan moved backwards after Shinzo Abe became Prime Minister, and there continue to be complaints about official complicity in historical revisionism.
Maybe a comprehensive selection of Japanese academics and leaders will rise to denounce Ramseyer’s claims. It’d be nice to see.
I wonder what his takes on the Rape of Nanking, Unit 731, or the Bataan death march are.
Several? Or many? Or all of them? Do the good ones not count at all? Or do good apologies have to achieve a certain numerical dominance over bad apologies?
And what is the Japanese government supposed to do about that? Stop 100 percent of their citizens or politicians or elected officials from criticizing or expressing disagreement with or dissent from such apologies? Again, no government—at least in a free democracy—could hope to meet such a standard.
Who is “they” here? The current administration? Because it seems to me whatever the current administration does is then cancelled out by what past administrations did or failed to do, and per the above, is cancelled out by disagreement from just about anyone.
What does “cracking down” here mean? There are a good number of American politicians who say horrible things. How many of them experience a crackdown of the kind that you are suggesting Japanese politicians should face?
If the idea is that an apology is only good if no Japanese politician or no Japanese person ever dissents from it, then basically there’s nothing the Japanese government can do.
What do you mean when you say “Germany” here? A particular chancellor? A particular administration? A certain percentage of the population. Because I would find it difficult to believe that no German person ever did this or that no German politician ever did this.
I suspect Japan is being held to a slightly different standard than Germany is.
The good ones are fine. And yes, if they achieved a numerical dominance, I’d be fine with that. Has that occurred?
You seem to be under the impression this is a negligible or fringe minority. It’s not. It’s a growing (yes, growing) minority of the ruling LDP party in Japan.
Again, no government—at least in a free democracy—could hope to meet such a standard.
By “cracking down”, I mean having the leadership of the LDP, which is and has been the dominant political party of Japan for decades, censure its own members and repudiate their statements. Instead, they put a person like Shinzo Abe in charge, who is known for being the opposite of an apologist for Japanese war crimes. Abe is no longer PM but his wing of the party still runs things.
It’s not fringe figures but party leaders who repudiate the apologies and do things like visit the Yasukuni shrine (including Abe) that help perpetuate the feud.
The standard is not 100% agreement. The standard is that the Diet and all major political parties repudiate the terrible things fringe party members say publicly. Instead, the leaders are often part of it.
That’s not to say Korea is entirely innocent here, but if I’m going to pick a side, it’s the one that doesn’t have some of its leaders try to glorify some of the people guilty of war crimes and atrocities.
If leading members of the CDU or CSU went out of their way to visit a shrine to Nazi war heroes and a not insignificant number of Germans castigated others for not doing so, I might agree with you.
Hikers! They were hikers!
And the Donner party were picnickers.
Yep. Invoke a law that puts real penalties (not a slap on the wrist) on people on Japanese soil who deny the facts. That’s what Germany did, but Japan wouldn’t do. And predictably, there is now a major movement for denial which includes most of the Japanese government.
That’s something that would never happen in the a United States. It would violate our basic principles. Why should we hold a Japan to that standard?