Japan has convinced itself that it is the main victim in the war in the East, but it cannot convince the world about it.
Last Friday, the Japanese authorities recalled their ambassador from the Republic of Korea and the Consul General from the South Korean city of Busan. This was at a specially convened press conference in Tokyo, said the Secretary General of the Cabinet of Ministers of the country Yoshihide Suga. The reason for the diplomatic demarche was the installation in front of the Consulate General of Japan in Busan, a monument to "women for consolation". So called Korean women who during the Second World War were forcibly forced to work in the brothels of the Japanese army.
Tokyo disowns the military past
The monument to sex slaves was installed on December 28 in Busan by activists of public organizations and students. This was done without coordination with local authorities. Because the statue did not stand the day. In a matter of hours, it was removed. The initiators of the installation of the sad monument did not calm down and in the city administration achieved approval of their actions.
December 30 monument to "women for comfort" returned to the place next to the consulate general of Japan. The next day, in Tokyo, they formally protested the actions of the Koreans, called them "unacceptable" and demanded that the sculpture be removed. It seems that in Seoul they did not understand the meaning of the Japanese protest and left it unattended.
The fact is that the problem of "women for comfort" has long been the focus of relations between the two countries. In 2011, a sculpture similar to the one that appeared in Busan was installed in front of the Japanese embassy in Seoul. At the end of 2015, Japan and Korea agreed to cooperate on sexual slavery during the Second World War.
Japan then acknowledged its “deep responsibility” for the problem of “women for comfort”. Last August, the Japanese government allocated 1 billion yen (about $ 8,5 million at the current exchange rate) to the South Korean Reconciliation and Healing Foundation. This organization helps women who survived to our days - victims of sexual violence during the Japanese occupation.
Japan’s recognition of responsibility for these actions seemed to alleviate the problem. After all, it affected the interests of thousands of families. (According to the official data of the Korean authorities, during the war, Japanese soldiers were forced to “comfort” about 200 thousands of women from Korea, China, Taiwan, the Philippines and Indonesia.) However, the current demarche of Tokyo a week after the installation of a monument in Korea’s second largest port, Busan clearly showed that the Japanese did not repent of their war crimes, and the recognition of 2015 of the year is nothing more than a diplomatic gesture.
A gesture largely forced. By that time, relations between Japan and Korea were very bad. The positions of the countries divided the military past. The most controversial was the dispute around the islands of Liancourt. This is their English name. The Japanese name is Takeshima, Koreans - Dokdo. The Japanese included the Korean islands in their territory in 1905.
At the beginning of 1946, the High Command of the Occupational Allied Forces (SCAP) ranked Liancourt among the territories over which Japan’s sovereignty should be suspended. The islands again came under Korean control. However, the San Francisco Peace Treaty between Japan and the Allied Powers did not state the status of the islands. They are simply forgotten.
Over time, statements were heard in Tokyo that Takeshima was not among the colonies that Japan had abandoned after the war. They began to insist on sovereignty over the islands. True, there already stood a small Korean garrison of coast guard forces. The legal conflict escalated into a territorial dispute.
In the summer of 2008, the Ministry of Education and Science of Japan approved a commentary on the new methodological guide for teachers. There, for the first time, it was recommended that “students pay attention to the territorial problem between Japan and the Republic of Korea”. The decision of the Japanese Ministry caused a crisis in relations between countries. South Korea recalled its ambassador to Japan and canceled or postponed more 100 joint events - sports, diplomatic consultations, cultural meetings, etc.
Four years later, Tokyo will recall its ambassador in Seoul. This will be the Japanese response to visiting the islands by the then President of the Republic of Korea, Lee Myung-bak. Since then, this diplomacy of ambassadors on suitcases has gone, the next round of which is unfolding these days.
How apologies to the aggressor turned him into a sacrifice
By the way, in that sad memorable training manual for teachers, the Japanese ministry did not forget about Russia. It obliged secondary school teachers to introduce into the students' minds the “illegal occupation” of the islands of the South Kuril chain by the Russian Federation. The claims of Tokyo on the South Kuriles in Japanese schools have been talked about for a long time. The term “illegal occupation” for teachers was prescribed for the first time. So he entrenched himself in school teaching.
Now, after the inconclusive December summit of the heads of Russia and Japan, this theme gets a new sound, and with it the rethinking of the outcome of the Second World War. However, there are no fresh facts to help such a rethinking. In the course - already worn by time arguments.
There are two main ones. First: Russia, despite the existing neutrality pact, violated the treaty, perfidiously attacked Japan and seized its ancestral territories. Clear Japanese are now waiting for an apology and compensation payments for "the illegal use of these native Japanese territories during 70 years." They want compensation "for the torment and forced labor in Siberia," the former Japanese prisoners of war. This is the second, long-standing hack.
Today, the veterans of the Japanese Kwantung Army, which in August 1945-th forced the Red Army to capitulate, united in the All-Japan Association of Forcibly interned. “It is more correct to call us not prisoners, but interned,” the executive chairman of the association Yasuzo Aoki now says. The explanation is simple: “The soldiers of the Kwantung Army laid down weapon not because they were defeated on the battlefield and surrendered to the mercy of the winner, but because they obeyed the orders of their emperor. If so, then they are not prisoners of war, but citizens who were forcibly taken to a foreign country. ” (I quote from REGNUM).
The agency cites the popular interpretation of this "internment", now included in Japanese school textbooks. Admittedly, there are proponents of this crafty theory in the Russian open spaces. They claim that the Kwantung Army capitulated on the orders of Emperor Hirohito, and the Red Army only took advantage of such a successful circumstance.
In this interpretation of events, liberal Russian historians convinced even the first president of the Russian Federation. This was most dramatically manifested during the visit of Boris Yeltsin to Japan in December 1993. “The Russian president did what the Japanese side had long been unsuccessfully seeking from the northern neighbor,” Yeltsin deeply apologized for historical the injustice that the Stalinist regime committed against hundreds of thousands of Japanese prisoners of war who were driven into Siberian camps after the end of World War II ... ”, a quote from the Izvestia newspaper of that time adorns the digest of the Yeltsin Center site today.
Being touched by this shameful fact from the biography of the first Russian president, the Center’s website, however, chided the newspaper for inaccurate coverage of the visit: Izvestia avoided one very important point that was spoken by those who were at that moment close to Yeltsin. The form in which apologies were made — the president bowed his head (a purely Japanese expression of deep sorrow and sincerity of feelings) —wrought a stunning impression on the Japanese. ”
All these political frills expose the Japanese aggressors as victims of war. And behind them is such a bloody trace that the Nazi executioners would envy. What is worth only the capture by the Japanese of the former Chinese capital - Nanking. 13 December 1937 of the year (the day after 56 years before the apology of Boris Yeltsin) the Kwantung Army stormed Nanjing and massacred the civilian population there.
For a month and a half, Japanese soldiers burned and plundered the Chinese capital, unusually committed atrocities, killed people (including children and old people), raped women. In 1948, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East estimated the number of victims of the Nanjing Massacre in 200 000 people. Chinese researchers believe the dead 300 000 people.
The difference in assessments arose because the tribunal relied on crimes committed in Nanking itself in its sentences. Chinese researchers have considered more victims who died from Japanese soldiers in the vicinity of the capital. By the way, despite the obvious facts and the verdict of the tribunal, the Japanese authorities deny the crimes committed in Nanking. Tokyo has been pursuing such a policy since the 70s of the last century.
In the sentences of the International Military Tribunal, the crimes of the Japanese were not limited to Nanking. For example, in February 1942, Japan captured the British colony of Singapore. The occupation authorities immediately began to eliminate the "anti-Japanese elements" of the Chinese community. So the Japanese called those who defended Singapore and the Malay Peninsula from them.
All Chinese men between the ages of eighteen and fifty years passed through the filtering. Caught in the lists of suspicious shot with machine guns. The death toll so far no one can establish. The tribunal stopped at a number in 50 000 shot. Singapore and British authorities insist on 100 000 victims of Japanese war crimes.
In this mournful list you can find civilians killed by Japanese soldiers in Indonesia, the Philippines and the Pacific Islands. In February 1945, the Japanese completely destroyed the five-thousandth population of the Philippine town Kalamba. The city itself was burned. In Manila, soldiers broke into the Red Cross hospital, killed doctors, nurses, sick people — even children. Approximately 100 000 people became victims of massacres in the Philippine capital.
These war crimes are not written in Japanese school books. The official position of Tokyo is to deny all the facts of genocide. Because few people in Japan now remember that after the war, international military tribunals convicted 4400 of Japanese war criminals, 1000 of them were sentenced to death. The ashes of the executed Japanese were buried in the Yasukuni temple, which is revered today as a national shrine.
Who made Japan capitulate
In recent years, a stable opinion has emerged in the public environment that Japan capitulated after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, which happened on August 9 on August 1945. Exactly on this day, military operations against the Japanese forces of the Red Army began. This was not a perfidious attack, as some unscrupulous historians are now trying to present the events.
The Soviet Union denounced the non-aggression pact with Japan back in April 1945, on the days of preparation for the Berlin offensive operation. Tokyo received comprehensive information about the reasons for the termination of the treaty, after which the Japanese should have no illusions about military prospects. Moscow explained that the Soviet-Japanese neutrality pact of 13 on April 1941 was concluded before Germany attacked the USSR and before the Japanese war with Great Britain and the USA, which became the main allies of the Soviet Union in World War II.
Under the new conditions, the non-aggression pact has lost its original meaning. By the denunciation of the treaty, the USSR forced Japan to end the war. It was 5 April 1945. In the summer of the victorious year, in July, the Allies offered the Japanese a surrender. Tokyo did not accept it.
Emperor Hirohito will announce surrender only at noon on August 15 - a week after the tragedy in Hiroshima. By that time, the Far Eastern fronts of the Red Army would crack the 21 fortified area of the Kwantung Army, take many of its units and formations into the ring, and land on Sakhalin and the Kuriles. There will be a threat of a Soviet invasion of the Japanese islands.
The events in Hiroshima, of course, shocked the world with their inhuman cruelty and strategic unjustification. But they did not stop the Japanese military, and that's why. American planes have long ironed Japan with carpet bombing. Senior researcher at the British American Security Information Council research organization, Ward Wilson, in his article “The Victory Over Japan Was Not Bomb, but Stalin,” published in Foreign Policy magazine, wrote: “In the summer of 1945, American aviation 66 Japanese cities bombed with ordinary bombs, in whole or in part, the devastation was colossal, in some cases comparable to that caused by atomic bombings. March 9-10, 16 square miles burned out in Tokyo, killing about 120 thousand people. Hiroshima is only in 17th place in terms of destruction of the city territory (in percentage terms). "
Russian historian, professor Anatoly Koshkin cites his own figures: “As a result of massive“ carpet bombing ”of Japanese cities, according to various estimates, from 500 to 900 thousands of their inhabitants died, which exceeded the number of victims of atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki”.
Be that as it may, Emperor Hirohito capitulated only a week after the atomic attack on Hiroshima. Two days later, on August 17, Hirohito wrote directly in his rescript “To the Soldiers and Sailors”: “Now that the Soviet Union has entered the war against us, to continue resistance ... means to endanger the very basis of our Empire’s existence”.
The resistance of the Kwantung Army will last until the end of August. It will be especially tense at the front of the 5 of the Japanese army. Over 40 000 Japanese soldiers - 2 / 3 personnel will die here. Survivors will then be taken prisoner and sent to work in Siberia. In Tokyo, these warriors are now counted among the internees as civilians. As if there was no war.
The current demarche of the Japanese to erect a monument to “women for comfort” in Korean Busan shows that Tokyo has already become accustomed to the image of a country affected by the war, which they have painstakingly painted for the past forty years, emphasizing the tragedy of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. But what about the memory of hundreds of thousands of people who died from the soldiers of Emperor Hirohito in China, Korea, and the countries of Southeast Asia? We must not be deceived and forget about who really carried with him pain, blood, death and destruction in the most brutal war of human history ...
Tokyo disowns the military past
The monument to sex slaves was installed on December 28 in Busan by activists of public organizations and students. This was done without coordination with local authorities. Because the statue did not stand the day. In a matter of hours, it was removed. The initiators of the installation of the sad monument did not calm down and in the city administration achieved approval of their actions.
December 30 monument to "women for comfort" returned to the place next to the consulate general of Japan. The next day, in Tokyo, they formally protested the actions of the Koreans, called them "unacceptable" and demanded that the sculpture be removed. It seems that in Seoul they did not understand the meaning of the Japanese protest and left it unattended.
The fact is that the problem of "women for comfort" has long been the focus of relations between the two countries. In 2011, a sculpture similar to the one that appeared in Busan was installed in front of the Japanese embassy in Seoul. At the end of 2015, Japan and Korea agreed to cooperate on sexual slavery during the Second World War.
Japan then acknowledged its “deep responsibility” for the problem of “women for comfort”. Last August, the Japanese government allocated 1 billion yen (about $ 8,5 million at the current exchange rate) to the South Korean Reconciliation and Healing Foundation. This organization helps women who survived to our days - victims of sexual violence during the Japanese occupation.
Japan’s recognition of responsibility for these actions seemed to alleviate the problem. After all, it affected the interests of thousands of families. (According to the official data of the Korean authorities, during the war, Japanese soldiers were forced to “comfort” about 200 thousands of women from Korea, China, Taiwan, the Philippines and Indonesia.) However, the current demarche of Tokyo a week after the installation of a monument in Korea’s second largest port, Busan clearly showed that the Japanese did not repent of their war crimes, and the recognition of 2015 of the year is nothing more than a diplomatic gesture.
A gesture largely forced. By that time, relations between Japan and Korea were very bad. The positions of the countries divided the military past. The most controversial was the dispute around the islands of Liancourt. This is their English name. The Japanese name is Takeshima, Koreans - Dokdo. The Japanese included the Korean islands in their territory in 1905.
At the beginning of 1946, the High Command of the Occupational Allied Forces (SCAP) ranked Liancourt among the territories over which Japan’s sovereignty should be suspended. The islands again came under Korean control. However, the San Francisco Peace Treaty between Japan and the Allied Powers did not state the status of the islands. They are simply forgotten.
Over time, statements were heard in Tokyo that Takeshima was not among the colonies that Japan had abandoned after the war. They began to insist on sovereignty over the islands. True, there already stood a small Korean garrison of coast guard forces. The legal conflict escalated into a territorial dispute.
In the summer of 2008, the Ministry of Education and Science of Japan approved a commentary on the new methodological guide for teachers. There, for the first time, it was recommended that “students pay attention to the territorial problem between Japan and the Republic of Korea”. The decision of the Japanese Ministry caused a crisis in relations between countries. South Korea recalled its ambassador to Japan and canceled or postponed more 100 joint events - sports, diplomatic consultations, cultural meetings, etc.
Four years later, Tokyo will recall its ambassador in Seoul. This will be the Japanese response to visiting the islands by the then President of the Republic of Korea, Lee Myung-bak. Since then, this diplomacy of ambassadors on suitcases has gone, the next round of which is unfolding these days.
How apologies to the aggressor turned him into a sacrifice
By the way, in that sad memorable training manual for teachers, the Japanese ministry did not forget about Russia. It obliged secondary school teachers to introduce into the students' minds the “illegal occupation” of the islands of the South Kuril chain by the Russian Federation. The claims of Tokyo on the South Kuriles in Japanese schools have been talked about for a long time. The term “illegal occupation” for teachers was prescribed for the first time. So he entrenched himself in school teaching.
Now, after the inconclusive December summit of the heads of Russia and Japan, this theme gets a new sound, and with it the rethinking of the outcome of the Second World War. However, there are no fresh facts to help such a rethinking. In the course - already worn by time arguments.
There are two main ones. First: Russia, despite the existing neutrality pact, violated the treaty, perfidiously attacked Japan and seized its ancestral territories. Clear Japanese are now waiting for an apology and compensation payments for "the illegal use of these native Japanese territories during 70 years." They want compensation "for the torment and forced labor in Siberia," the former Japanese prisoners of war. This is the second, long-standing hack.
Today, the veterans of the Japanese Kwantung Army, which in August 1945-th forced the Red Army to capitulate, united in the All-Japan Association of Forcibly interned. “It is more correct to call us not prisoners, but interned,” the executive chairman of the association Yasuzo Aoki now says. The explanation is simple: “The soldiers of the Kwantung Army laid down weapon not because they were defeated on the battlefield and surrendered to the mercy of the winner, but because they obeyed the orders of their emperor. If so, then they are not prisoners of war, but citizens who were forcibly taken to a foreign country. ” (I quote from REGNUM).
The agency cites the popular interpretation of this "internment", now included in Japanese school textbooks. Admittedly, there are proponents of this crafty theory in the Russian open spaces. They claim that the Kwantung Army capitulated on the orders of Emperor Hirohito, and the Red Army only took advantage of such a successful circumstance.
In this interpretation of events, liberal Russian historians convinced even the first president of the Russian Federation. This was most dramatically manifested during the visit of Boris Yeltsin to Japan in December 1993. “The Russian president did what the Japanese side had long been unsuccessfully seeking from the northern neighbor,” Yeltsin deeply apologized for historical the injustice that the Stalinist regime committed against hundreds of thousands of Japanese prisoners of war who were driven into Siberian camps after the end of World War II ... ”, a quote from the Izvestia newspaper of that time adorns the digest of the Yeltsin Center site today.
Being touched by this shameful fact from the biography of the first Russian president, the Center’s website, however, chided the newspaper for inaccurate coverage of the visit: Izvestia avoided one very important point that was spoken by those who were at that moment close to Yeltsin. The form in which apologies were made — the president bowed his head (a purely Japanese expression of deep sorrow and sincerity of feelings) —wrought a stunning impression on the Japanese. ”
All these political frills expose the Japanese aggressors as victims of war. And behind them is such a bloody trace that the Nazi executioners would envy. What is worth only the capture by the Japanese of the former Chinese capital - Nanking. 13 December 1937 of the year (the day after 56 years before the apology of Boris Yeltsin) the Kwantung Army stormed Nanjing and massacred the civilian population there.
For a month and a half, Japanese soldiers burned and plundered the Chinese capital, unusually committed atrocities, killed people (including children and old people), raped women. In 1948, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East estimated the number of victims of the Nanjing Massacre in 200 000 people. Chinese researchers believe the dead 300 000 people.
The difference in assessments arose because the tribunal relied on crimes committed in Nanking itself in its sentences. Chinese researchers have considered more victims who died from Japanese soldiers in the vicinity of the capital. By the way, despite the obvious facts and the verdict of the tribunal, the Japanese authorities deny the crimes committed in Nanking. Tokyo has been pursuing such a policy since the 70s of the last century.
In the sentences of the International Military Tribunal, the crimes of the Japanese were not limited to Nanking. For example, in February 1942, Japan captured the British colony of Singapore. The occupation authorities immediately began to eliminate the "anti-Japanese elements" of the Chinese community. So the Japanese called those who defended Singapore and the Malay Peninsula from them.
All Chinese men between the ages of eighteen and fifty years passed through the filtering. Caught in the lists of suspicious shot with machine guns. The death toll so far no one can establish. The tribunal stopped at a number in 50 000 shot. Singapore and British authorities insist on 100 000 victims of Japanese war crimes.
In this mournful list you can find civilians killed by Japanese soldiers in Indonesia, the Philippines and the Pacific Islands. In February 1945, the Japanese completely destroyed the five-thousandth population of the Philippine town Kalamba. The city itself was burned. In Manila, soldiers broke into the Red Cross hospital, killed doctors, nurses, sick people — even children. Approximately 100 000 people became victims of massacres in the Philippine capital.
These war crimes are not written in Japanese school books. The official position of Tokyo is to deny all the facts of genocide. Because few people in Japan now remember that after the war, international military tribunals convicted 4400 of Japanese war criminals, 1000 of them were sentenced to death. The ashes of the executed Japanese were buried in the Yasukuni temple, which is revered today as a national shrine.
Who made Japan capitulate
In recent years, a stable opinion has emerged in the public environment that Japan capitulated after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, which happened on August 9 on August 1945. Exactly on this day, military operations against the Japanese forces of the Red Army began. This was not a perfidious attack, as some unscrupulous historians are now trying to present the events.
The Soviet Union denounced the non-aggression pact with Japan back in April 1945, on the days of preparation for the Berlin offensive operation. Tokyo received comprehensive information about the reasons for the termination of the treaty, after which the Japanese should have no illusions about military prospects. Moscow explained that the Soviet-Japanese neutrality pact of 13 on April 1941 was concluded before Germany attacked the USSR and before the Japanese war with Great Britain and the USA, which became the main allies of the Soviet Union in World War II.
Under the new conditions, the non-aggression pact has lost its original meaning. By the denunciation of the treaty, the USSR forced Japan to end the war. It was 5 April 1945. In the summer of the victorious year, in July, the Allies offered the Japanese a surrender. Tokyo did not accept it.
Emperor Hirohito will announce surrender only at noon on August 15 - a week after the tragedy in Hiroshima. By that time, the Far Eastern fronts of the Red Army would crack the 21 fortified area of the Kwantung Army, take many of its units and formations into the ring, and land on Sakhalin and the Kuriles. There will be a threat of a Soviet invasion of the Japanese islands.
The events in Hiroshima, of course, shocked the world with their inhuman cruelty and strategic unjustification. But they did not stop the Japanese military, and that's why. American planes have long ironed Japan with carpet bombing. Senior researcher at the British American Security Information Council research organization, Ward Wilson, in his article “The Victory Over Japan Was Not Bomb, but Stalin,” published in Foreign Policy magazine, wrote: “In the summer of 1945, American aviation 66 Japanese cities bombed with ordinary bombs, in whole or in part, the devastation was colossal, in some cases comparable to that caused by atomic bombings. March 9-10, 16 square miles burned out in Tokyo, killing about 120 thousand people. Hiroshima is only in 17th place in terms of destruction of the city territory (in percentage terms). "
Russian historian, professor Anatoly Koshkin cites his own figures: “As a result of massive“ carpet bombing ”of Japanese cities, according to various estimates, from 500 to 900 thousands of their inhabitants died, which exceeded the number of victims of atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki”.
Be that as it may, Emperor Hirohito capitulated only a week after the atomic attack on Hiroshima. Two days later, on August 17, Hirohito wrote directly in his rescript “To the Soldiers and Sailors”: “Now that the Soviet Union has entered the war against us, to continue resistance ... means to endanger the very basis of our Empire’s existence”.
The resistance of the Kwantung Army will last until the end of August. It will be especially tense at the front of the 5 of the Japanese army. Over 40 000 Japanese soldiers - 2 / 3 personnel will die here. Survivors will then be taken prisoner and sent to work in Siberia. In Tokyo, these warriors are now counted among the internees as civilians. As if there was no war.
The current demarche of the Japanese to erect a monument to “women for comfort” in Korean Busan shows that Tokyo has already become accustomed to the image of a country affected by the war, which they have painstakingly painted for the past forty years, emphasizing the tragedy of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. But what about the memory of hundreds of thousands of people who died from the soldiers of Emperor Hirohito in China, Korea, and the countries of Southeast Asia? We must not be deceived and forget about who really carried with him pain, blood, death and destruction in the most brutal war of human history ...
Information