Learning without discrimination

It's Time

2012-01-31T15:29:00.000+01:00

Chinese dissident on trial after using Skype to send poem.

It's time, Chinese people!
The square belongs to everyone
The feet are yours
It's time to use your feet and take to the square to make a choice.

Zhu Yufu

Those in power everywhere hate democracy and popular protest.

Chomsky on US/China relations

2011-04-23T13:46:00.001+02:00

It's just an aside, really, in his article, 'Who owns the world?' at TomDispatch, but it is so very right, and beautifully sarcastic.

There is also much concern about the growing Chinese military threat. A recent Pentagon study warned that China's military budget is approaching "one-fifth of what the Pentagon spent to operate and carry out the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan," a fraction of the U.S. military budget, of course. China's expansion of military forces might "deny the ability of American warships to operate in international waters off its coast," the New York Times added.
Off the coast of China, that is; it has yet to be proposed that the U.S. should eliminate military forces that deny the Caribbean to Chinese warships. China's lack of understanding of rules of international civility is illustrated further by its objections to plans for the advanced nuclear-powered aircraft carrier George Washington to join naval exercises a few miles off China's coast, with alleged capacity to strike Beijing.
In contrast, the West understands that such U.S. operations are all undertaken to defend stability and its own security. The liberal New Republic expresses its concern that "China sent ten warships through international waters just off the Japanese island of Okinawa." That is indeed a provocation -- unlike the fact, unmentioned, that Washington has converted the island into a major military base in defiance of vehement protests by the people of Okinawa. That is not a provocation, on the standard principle that we own the world.

Addendum: Also on today's reading list, Lewis Shiner's Black and White, in which I find this:

“Who owns the world?” Robert’s father asked suddenly.
Robert looked at him in confusion.“I don’t know what you’re asking. The rich and powerful, I suppose?”
Robert’s father nodded.“I suppose. I would like to think that we all own it, in common.

– from p. 140 of the pdf version.

New tense discovered by The China Post!

2011-04-17T11:39:00.007+02:00

Drum roll... the singular tense!

In an editorial (criticising an open letter by eminent academics commenting on dirty tricks ahead of next year's presidential elections in Taiwan) they write:

that primary was described [in the letter] as “the primaries for next year's presidential elections,” which they should have written as presidential election, in the singular tense.

I'm a linguist and used to confusions between tense and aspect, but this is new to me.

What's even better (delicious schadenfreude...) they made the mistake in a failed attempt to score petty grammar points over political opponents*. As far as I can see, 'presidential elections' is absolutely fine: certainly there are plenty of examples of its use online by native speakers, e.g. here.

For the (shabby) political background to the editorial, see here and here and here (reverse chronological order).

There's incompetence, and then there's the kind of incompetence required to:

a) think ad hominem comments on grammar bolster a political argument
b) pick on a perfectly correct use of English and call it a mistake
c) not think twice about b) given the letter is signed by a who's who of Taiwanologists -- professors, emeritus professors etc -- at least one of whom surely would have noticed an error, you might think
and
d) invent the singular tense
and, I suppose,
e) rush it all into print

* Actually not opponents, but concerned academic friends of Taiwan, at least some of whom are supporters, like the China Post, of the current 'Nationalist' government in Taiwan. But the China Post takes a narrow --one might say Leninist -- view: criticise anything done by the Nationalist party and you're an enemy.

Donate to disaster relief in Japan

2011-03-17T18:16:00.002+01:00

Sorrow and fury

2011-03-15T12:10:00.005+01:00

There’s always one public figure, in every disaster, who makes an idiot of himself (and mocks the memory of the dead and the efforts of rescuers and survivors) by claiming it’s divine intervention. And in Japan, somehow it's always this one.

Obvious question for this moron: If the tsunami was a blow aimed by God at egoism and populism in Japanese politics how come you’re still here?

Follow-up: How’s your prediction about looting by foreigners going?

What if it is a girl?

2006-03-07T14:19:00.000+01:00

I’m on strike today, and I’m making the most of it by reading Japan Focus. I don’t think I’ve ever done a royal story here, but it’s always good to try something new, so here’s a link to Sean Curtin’s article on the issue of female succession to the Japanese throne, “Japan's Imperial Succession Debate and Women's Rights”.

Just when Japan’s Imperial House was on the verge of an historic reform that would have marked an enormous step towards making it a more gender equal institution, the legislation permitting an Empress to reign was suddenly shelved. The immediate cause of the abrupt turnaround was the surprise announcement that 39-year-old Princess Kiko, the Emperor’s daughter-in-law, was pregnant. The announcement led Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro to promptly abandon his reform plans, handing victory to ultra-conservatives who bitterly opposed the proposals.

...

Read the complete article

Princess Kiko.

Princess Kiko is the wife of the current emperor’s second son, Prince Fumihito. If her baby is a boy he would be the first male in his generation, and would be third in line to the throne after the Crown Prince (his uncle) and his dad. (Are you following this? Royal watchers must love genealogy...)

But if the new baby is a girl, then the current government, who are right-wing pragmatists, will have to rejoin battle with the right-wing ideologues in their own party. I am praying for the patter of tiny pink-booted feet...

Naruhito, Masako and Aiko

A disclaimer: obviously the abolition of the Japanese monarchy is really the best outcome -- for ordinary Japanese people, and I imagine, the members of the royal family themselves. (Just as Johann Hari argued that the British royals would be much better off abolished.) In particular, Princess Masako, the wife of the Crown Prince, has apparently been suffering serious depression, partly due to the idiotic pressure on her to produce a male heir. Good luck to her and her family.

The future empress of Japan?

I don’t expect to be returning to the subject of royalty here soon, but I have just emembered that there are some heirs to the Korean throne kicking around somewhere...

And I discover that the son of the last Korean crown prince, Yi Ku, died last year (Korea Times article, Royal Archive article) in Japan, where he had been educated and spent much of his life in exile.

Yi Ku and Julia Mullock, his wife

All very political. And of course the Japanese and Korean royal families may be very distant relatives, as the Japanese emperor pointed out a while ago.

News; mothballs

2005-10-30T15:55:00.000+01:00

Regular readers - if there are any - will have been disappointed at the lack of updates and annoyed by the proliferation of spam comments. I have tightened things up so that spurious comments are harder to post and I'll gradually remove the ones that are already here.

As for new posts, I can't promise. I'm trying to get my PhD thesis written, so updates will be infrequent at best. If you use rss, please subscribe to my rss or atom feed so you will see when I do manage a new post without having to check back at the website.

Taiwan, China and maps

2005-06-27T23:00:00.000+02:00

Time magazine recently printed a map with Taiwan and China in the same colour, prompting protest from the Taiwanese government, according to an article from The Age, collected on Asia Media. National Geographical has done the same in the past and printed a correction.

It's not so long since maps in Taiwan showed Taiwan, China and Mongolia as one country, with a capital city at Nanjing and Beijing still labelled Peping, I think.

Eric Hobsbawm on US hegemony

2005-06-27T00:54:00.000+02:00

There's only one part which mentions East Asia, in the first paragraph:

Three continuities link the global US of the cold war era with the attempt to assert world supremacy since 2001. The first is its position of international domination, outside the sphere of influence of communist regimes during the cold war, globally since the collapse of the USSR. This hegemony no longer rests on the sheer size of the US economy. Large though this is, it has declined since 1945 and its relative decline continues. It is no longer the giant of global manufacturing. The centre of the industrialised world is rapidly shifting to the eastern half of Asia. Unlike older imperialist countries, and unlike most other developed industrial countries, the US has ceased to be a net exporter of capital, or indeed the largest player in the international game of buying up or establishing firms in other countries, and the financial strength of the state rests on the continued willingness of others, mostly Asians, to maintain an otherwise intolerable fiscal deficit.

...

Read the complete article on ZNet (originally in The Guardian)

I agree with this, and with pretty much everything in the rest of the article, although I would go for a less certain tone on the current and future workings of the global economy (but then, I'm not a Marxist).

There's a biographical article on Hobsbawm, also at the Guardian, from 2002.

he still believes that asking Marxist questions is the way to understand the world - to tackle the big questions, to fit things together into a pattern , "even if it may not be the right pattern". He adds: "I used to believe you could predict the direction in which history goes. But contingency is clearly more important than we used to allow."

Cyber War in East Asia

2005-06-15T02:04:00.000+02:00

There is a cyber war in East Asia, according to the Japan Times:

If comments on bulletin boards were bullets and hacking attacks real skirmishes then East Asia would probably be a war zone now.

Mirroring offline diplomatic clashes, Internet users in Japan, China and Korea have been posting verbal assaults and hackers launching determined cyber-attacks.

Internet technology has also been at the core of recent frictions over textbook and territorial disputes.

In China, mobile phones and the Internet were used to organize protests against Japanese diplomatic missions and businesses. In Korea, citizens debated the row through blogs and bulletin-boards. In Japan, irate netizens reacted with sometimes jingoistic attacks on their country's neighbors.

As tensions peaked this Spring, numerous sites in Japan were targeted by hackers -- presumed to be based in China and Korea. Government ministries, universities, local authorities and the national police agency Web site were affected.

Yasukuni Shrine posted a notice on its Web site reporting that as many as 15,000 DOS (denial of service) attacks a second had been launched against its home page. The shrine described them as "a base act . . . terrorism that is a fundamental negation of Internet law and order."

Despite some reports of counter-attacks by Japanese hackers, it seems that Japan generally came off the worse in the cyber skirmishes.

Until recently Japan's digital security has been weak, says Naoki Miyagi of the National Information Security Center, a 26 strong department set up this April.

...

The Chinese government was also caught out by changing Internet technology.

During domestic protests against Japanese diplomatic missions and businesses organizers employed text messages, blogs, Web sites and online messaging systems.

"If it wasn't for the Internet then such large and widespread demonstrations wouldn't have taken place," says Qi Jing Ying, a researcher into the Chinese Internet at the University of Tokyo.

Chinese Internet users have become increasing adept at breaching the so-called Great Firewall of China.

"My friends and teachers in China can use proxy servers instead to access banned sites," says Qi Jing Ying. Denied many other democratic freedoms, the Chinese have thrown themselves into political debate on the Internet, she says.

Qi contrasts the tone of the Chinese Internet to that in Japan, where the content of bulletin boards like the popular 2 Channel is often dismissed as trivial.

"Even Chinese foreign office officials and political leaders look at Chinese political Web sites. I doubt that Koizumi is watching 2 Channel."

Meanwhile, in South Korea the Internet has hosted public reaction to the territorial and textbooks disputes.

South Korea has the highest broadband penetration rate in the world. Sites like the popular Daum Web portal and its bulletin boards are a venue for debate and protest.

...

Hacking attacks on Japan and other countries are well publicized in Korea. During a previous Japanese textbook controversy in 2001, three South Korean high school students going by the nom-de-net "anti-Japan" attacked the server of the rightwing revisionist "tsukurukai" textbook association, disabling it for several days.

...

Read the complete article

The most interesting thing here for me is the differences between young people in the three countries: in South Korea, generally high levels of activism and high technical literacy; in China, a small proportion of mainly young people getting around the government's restrictions; in Japan, complacency.

What the article ays about young Koreans fits well with what Charles Armstrong says on OhmyNews about changing attitudes in Korea (I quoted a different part of this article in my previous post here):

In a country that had been almost unique in its overwhelmingly pro-American popular opinion a generation earlier, statistics reflected a sharp change of attitude. For example, a poll by the Joongang Ilbo newspaper, taken in December 2002, revealed that 36.4 percent of South Koreans viewed the U.S. unfavorably, only 13 percent favorably, and 50 percent were neutral. Within these statistics, there were striking differences according to age: only among those in the over-50 age group did the majority express a favorable opinion. Furthermore, 62 percent of South Koreans in their 20s and 72 percent in their 30s wanted to restructure the U.S.-ROK alliance to make it more equal; only 21 percent of those in their 60s agreed with this.

Again, there is more going on here than simply the general rise of "anti-Americanism." Several factors contribute to this changing Korean attitude toward the U.S., 60 years after liberation from Japanese colonialism. First, there has been a generational change, with the rise to power of the "386" generation (Koreans in their 30s, who entered university in the 1980s and were born in the 1960s), who had come of age in the era of democratic protest, a time when criticism of the authoritarian ROK governments, and of the Americans who had backed them, went hand-in-hand. With the rise of this generation came the decline in influence of the conservative and reflexively pro-U.S. political establishment that had dominated South Korean politics since liberation. While the current conservative opposition is by no means insignificant, it seems unlikely that a simplistic "pro-Americanism" will ever return as the dominant mode in South Korea.

Second, there has been the growth of a vocal and critical civil society, and with it a re-examination of historical events and memories both by the government and various non-governmental organizations. Historical investigation commissions have been formed to examine various aspects of the Japanese colonial period, as well as events in which the U.S. played a direct or indirect role: the Gwangju Massacre of 1980, the bloody suppression of the Jeju Island uprising in April 1948, missing persons from the period of military rule, and so on, inspired in part by similar such commissions formed in the post-authoritarian states of South Africa, Argentina, the former Yugoslavia, and elsewhere.

Significantly, investigators are probing not only the role of the U.S., but also of the former ROK government and citizens. Citizens' activism and participatory democracy have become part of the political landscape and everyday vocabulary of today's South Korea, with the explosive growth of NGOs, many quite critical of U.S. policy. The organization of such groups and activities has been greatly facilitated by the use of the Internet, in which South Korea ranks among the highest in the world, and the concomitant rise of what Koreans call "Netizens."

Third, with the relative decline of South Koreans' sense of affinity with the U.S., there has been a strong turn toward Asia, especially China but also, in complex ways, Japan. China has replaced the U.S. as South Korea's largest trading partner; more Korean students now study in China than in America; South Korean popular culture has become all the rage in Japan, China, and Southeast Asia, while Japanese culture -- long banned by the South Korean government -- has taken off in Korea. On the other hand, the current dispute over Dokdo/Takeshima, as well as the controversy over the Japanese textbook issue and war memories more generally, reflect underlying differences between Korea and Japan that need to be resolved before relations between the two countries can become stable and friendly over the long term. And yet, despite these tensions, Koreans have increasingly warmed to the idea of an East Asian free trade area, and even a European Union-style economic and political community, although these may be only be a distant dream at this point.

Armstrong and others on S. Korea-US split

2005-06-15T01:20:00.000+02:00

There have been more replies and replies to replies on North Korea Zone.

I probably should have quoted the last two paragraphs of an article 'South Korea and the US 60 years on' by Charles Armstrong on the superb OhmyNews, since they say part of what I was trying to say better than I did:

South Korean views of North Korea have changed markedly in recent years, and stand in striking contrast to the hardline policy of the Bush administration. While there are many differences within South Korea about how to deal with the North, there is a growing consensus that North-South cooperation is beneficial to both sides, that gradual reunification is preferable to sudden collapse and absorption of North Korea by the ROK, that the North Korean threat can be managed, and that it is better to change North Korea's undesirable behavior by persuasion rather than by coercion. Such views in broad form are shared across much of the political spectrum in South Korea, including the conservative Grand National Party, led by Park Geun Hye, daughter of former South Korean dictator Park Chung Hee. The Bush Administration approaches North Korea very differently, creating a deep unease among many in South Korea.

One hears that Korea is the last outpost of the cold war, but that may be true only for Americans. For a growing number of South Koreans, their cold war -- a North-South conflict that began in the aftermath of colonial liberation and destroyed the universal hope for a peaceful, independent and unified post-colonial Korea -- is already over. Sixty years marks the end of a life cycle in East Asian tradition, a time for reflection, re-evaluation, and recognition that things can never be the same. Koreans have already begun this process; it remains for outsiders, Americans in particular, to recognize that a new cycle is underway.

And from the far-right, another voice in agreement:

"This meeting [between Roh and Bush in Washington last Friday] is a short-term-issue kind of thing because there isn't a lot of consideration of President Roh within the Bush administration as a serious alliance partner," says Doug Bandow, a Korean expert at the Cato Institute in Washington. "The problem there is that long term, things in South Korea are trending against America," he adds, referring to growing public suspicions of US foreign-policy goals.

From a Christian Science Monitor article, whose writer seems to agree too--

...South Korean suspicions of a militaristic and unilateralist US foreign policy - fears that color both the South's approach to the North, and its perception of regional issues.

At a luncheon this week with the commander of US forces in Korea, Roh said, "The successful democracy, market economy, and peace and prosperity in South Korea are all based on the alliance between South Korea and the United States." But he also thanked the US military for understanding what he said had been "unavoidable changes" in the US-Korean alliance.

Gi-Wook Shin, an expert in Northeast Asian issues at the Stanford Institute for International Studies, says South Koreans' concerns about US "arrogance" color how the South views two factors: China's emergence as an economic and security power, and Japan's higher profile in security issues. "Many South Koreans are favorable" to a rising China, "but they are concerned about Japan expanding its security role by working more closely with the US," he says.

Experts also say South Koreans increasingly feel a sense of "entrapment" from a close association with US foreign policy. "The US used to fear it could be trapped into a war [on the Korean peninsula]," says Richard Bush, an Asian expert at the Brookings Institution. "Now it's the South Koreans who fear they could get entrapped in a conflict they don't want" - either with the North, or someday with China over Taiwan.

One more piece of supporting evidence for my argument: a Korea Herald article from last week shows how the South Korean government has to struggle to tone down the US's military plans:

Defense minister rules out U.S. pre-emptive strikes

Defense Minister Yoon Kwang-ung said yesterday the United States will not initiate preemptive strikes against North Korea at this time and in any case a consensus between Seoul and Washington is a precondition to any military action.

...

"A preemptive strike or a military action is out of the question at this stage. ...Countries around the world have tendencies to consider and establish operational plans, but the CONPLAN 8022 does not exist,: as far as he knows, Yoon said on local CBS radio.

He was referring to reports about a plan, known as CONPLAN 8022-02, that reportedly directs the military to assume and maintain readiness to attack hostile countries that are developing weapons of mass destruction, specifically Iran and North Korea.

"The United States used to send weapons and personnel to allies to train on terrain as part of rotation," Yoon said.

His comments came as Pyongyang hinted it might come back to the six-party talks, though it did not set a specific date.

South Korean officials, including President Roh Moo-hyun, have often made clear opposition to a possible U.S. pre-emptive strike on North Korea in the event of failure of the multilateral talks, noting there would be heavy casualties on the peninsula.

Referring to his decision with Rumsfeld not to include specific military measures in a plan for emergencies in the communist North, Yoon said the driving force is for research, not for execution.

In 2004, Washington proposed developing the joint contingency plan further, but Seoul rejected this, saying it would undermine the Korean government's sovereignty and complicate the North Korean situation.

Instead, Seoul proposed in April to Washington that the two allies supplement or develop a conceptual plan only, without going into specifics.

Microsoft joins Google and Yahoo in failing to avoid evil in China

2005-06-14T20:21:00.000+02:00

From a BBC article:

Microsoft censors Chinese blogs

Chinese bloggers posting their thoughts via Microsoft's net service face restrictions on what they can write.

Weblog entries on some parts of Microsoft's MSN site in China using words such as "freedom", "democracy" and "demonstration" are being blocked.

Chinese bloggers already face strict controls and must register their online journal with Chinese authorities.

Microsoft said the company abided by the laws, regulations and norms of each country in which it operates.

Banned words

The censorship is thought to have been introduced as a concession to the Chinese government.

Also being restricted on the free parts of the site are journal entries that mention "human rights" and "Taiwan independence".

Those using these banned words or writing entries that are pornographic or contain sensitive information get a pop-up warning that reads: "This message contains a banned expression, please delete this expression."

...

China recently introduced stringent regulations that require all blog owners to register their web journal with the state by 30 June.

The regulations require the writer of a blog to identify themselves to the authorities.

According to Reporters Without Borders, China is using a system called Night Crawler to patrol web journals and make sure that only registered blogs are published. Unregistered blogs will be shut down.

"Following Yahoo, here is a second American internet giant giving way to the Chinese authorities and agreeing to self-censorship", said the group in a statement.

"The lack of ethics on the part of these companies is extremely worrying. Their management frequently justifies collaboration with Chinese censorship by saying that all they are doing is obeying local legislation."

"We believe that this argument does not hold water and that these multinationals must respect certain basic ethical principles, in whatever country they are operating."

...

Read the complete article

See the complete briefings from Reporters without Borders:

Microsoft censors its blog tool

Authorities declare war on unregistered websites and blogs

From the former:

The Chinese authorities are trying to impose self-censorship on all search engines and blog tools that that wish to operate on its territory. Yahoo !, which was the first, agreed to remove all "subversive" news and information from its search results. Despite repeated requests from Reporters Without Borders, the company's management always declined to discuss the issue.

Google, which has so far refused to censor its search engine, now looks likely to follow in the footsteps of its competitor. When the company announced it was opening an office in China, Reporters Without Borders wrote to its two founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, asking them to respond clearly to the question : "Would you agree to censorship of your search engine if Beijing asked you to". Google never replied.

Reporters Without Borders also wrote, on December 2003, to the CEO and founder of Microsoft, Steven A.Ballmer and Bill Gates, to bring to their attention their freedom of expression responsibilities, particularly in a country like China. This appeal, like the others, went unanswered.

So Google doesn't censor Blogger/Blogspot in China yet, but it does censor Google News, as I reported last September:

Google China helps Chinese government to censor the web

This left the way open for the Chinese authorities to block Google's English news site:

Following Google self-censorship, China censors Google's English News

Kim Jong-il 'America's Poster Boy of Evil'

2005-06-12T14:35:00.000+02:00

From the Digital Chosunilbo:

Kim Jong-il 'America's Poster Boy of Evil'
The International Herald Tribune reported Wednesday that North Korean leader Kim Jong-il has displaced former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein as the No.1 bad guy in U.S. pop culture, including movies, TV, video games and magazines.

... In the puppet film “Team America: World Police”, Kim shoots his translator in the head and then feeds UN weapons inspector Hans Blix to sharks. In a recent edition of the magazine “Parade”, Kim topped the list of the world’s 10 worst dictators. In the family film “The Pacifier”, Vin Diesel is a U.S. Navy Seal who watches over five kids while taking on the couple next door, who just happen to be North Korean spies.

Besides Kim, North Korea and its nuclear facilities feature as favorite targets for destruction by the good guys. In a video game by LucasArts, players can blow up a building with red Korean letters that read, “Yeongbyeon Nuclear Material Reprocessing.” The IHT said that while the U.S. government has vowed it will not attack North Korea, psychologists point out that by designating Kim Jong-il as “evil”, U.S. President George W. Bush has given the green light to the demonization of North Korean leaders.

Even the IHT can see it...

Korean woman run over and killed by US tank

2005-06-12T14:27:00.000+02:00

Bush wins this week's prize for disgusting insincerity:

From a Hankooki Times article

...

"We send our deepest sympathies to the woman’s families. And, (President Roh), I just want you to know our heart -- our hearts are sad as a result of this incident," Bush said.

A 51-year-old woman surnamed Kim was hit and killed by a U.S. military 2.5-ton truck in Tongduchon, north of Seoul, Friday afternoon.

The quick responses from the U.S. to the tragic death is obviously designed to smoothly pass the third anniversary of the death of two schoolgirls run over by a U.S. armored vehicle, which falls today, observers say. [Shim Mi-son and Shin Hyo-sun, junior high school girls, on their way to a birthday party when they were run over.]

Hundreds of civic group members held candlelight vigils in Kwanghwamun, central Seoul on Saturday and Sunday to mark the death of the two schoolgirls. The protestors demanded that the U.S. troops withdraw from the Korean Peninsula.

The accident taking the two schoolgirls’ lives in June 2002 caused massive anti-American protests across the nation, following the U.S. court-martial’s decision to acquit two G.I.s who drove the armored vehicle.

Read the complete article

Note that the Hankooki -- at least in its English edition -- uses the ridiculous term 'anti-american', picked up from the US press, for demonstrations demanding withdrawal of US troops and a proper trial. Why not 'pro-justice' or 'pro-independence'?

Uneasy alliance

2005-06-12T14:14:00.000+02:00

An AP picture from the Washington Post:

South Korean protesters perform as they wear masks of U.S. President George W. Bush and South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun during an anti-US rally in front of U.S. Embassy in Seoul, Friday, June 10, 2005. (Lee Jin-man - AP)

You can see how difficult it is to be president of South Korea in this Taipei Times story:

President George W. Bush and South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun pressed North Korea to rejoin deadlocked talks on its nuclear weapons program and tried to minimize their own differences over how hard to push the reclusive communist regime.

"South Korea and the United States share the same goal, and that is a Korean peninsula without a nuclear weapon," Bush said with Roh at his side in the Oval Office.

Roh, whose government has resisted the tougher approach advocated by the Bush administration toward ending the impasse, said he agreed that six-nation talks remain the best way to persuade Pyongyang to abandon its nuclear ambitions.

While Bush emphasized that the two allies "are of one voice" on the issue, Roh, who is presiding over a South Korea newly assertive about its role in the region, raised the issue of remaining differences.

"There are, admittedly, many people who worry about potential discord or cacophony between the two powers of the alliance," he said through a translator.

Roh opposes military action if diplomacy with North Korea fails. South Korea also is cool to the idea of taking the North Korean standoff to the UN Security Council for possible sanctions. South Korea instead is pursuing a policy of engagement with the communist North and supports a security guarantee or economic incentives to entice North Korea to return to six-nation talks it has boycotted for nearly a year.

Bush, however, wants South Korea -- as well as China -- to take a more aggressive stance. The president said Friday he had no new inducements for North Korea beyond those offered last June, when the North was told it could get economic and diplomatic benefits once it had verifiably disarmed. Anything else, in the US view, would amount to a reward for nuclear blackmail.

While insisting the US has no intention of launching a military strike, Bush also has steadfastly refused to take that option off the table. And the administration is increasingly hinting it is closer to pursuing UN sanctions.

...

With a unified stand the goal of the Bush-Roh meeting, diplomatic language ruled the day.

Bush said five times that Seoul and Washington either "share the same goal" or are speaking with "one voice." Roh said that the "one or two minor issues" between the longtime allies could be worked out "very smoothly."

The South Korean indicated he and Bush were on the same page on "the basic principles."

Bush administration officials have recently aimed harsh rhetoric at Pyongyang, with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld saying North Korea is "a living hell" for all but its elite and Vice President Dick Cheney calling North Korean leader Kim Jong Il "one of the world's most irresponsible leaders."

Washington believes the North should be feared, not trusted, as a potential supplier of dangerous weapons worldwide.

There are skirmishes over the 50-year-old US military presence in South Korea, due to fall by a quarter to about 24,500 troops.

The two countries also just signed an agreement for Seoul to shoulder less of the cost of US military personnel on its soil.

In April, South Korea vetoed plans to grant American command of forces on the Korean Peninsula if the North's government falls.

None of those issues came up publicly.

"How do you feel, Mr. President? Wouldn't you agree that the alliance is strong?" Roh said at the end of his opening statement, apparently startling his host.

"I would say the alliance is very strong, Mr. President," Bush quickly replied.

South Korea's Foreign Minister Ban Ki-moon noted that Bush had reiterated that the US has no intention of invading Pyongyang. He urged North Korea to respond by giving up its nuclear weapons, which he said would be "a wise decision."

Right wing critics of Roh's policy towards North Korea accuse him of appeasement, but the real appeasement here is aimed at the US. South Korea can defend itself against the North since it has much better technology to counter North Korea's huge army (although there is no defence against nuclear weapons, of course), and would probably reunite with the North through gradual detente if tensions were lower, but like all other countries it can't afford to upset the US too much. So Roh would probably like to get US troops out of Korea -- and that would be very popular, according to opinion polls -- but he is making the strategic decision that what you call a 500 kg gorilla is 'Sir'.

Congressional Resolution on North Korean Abductees

2005-06-12T13:55:00.000+02:00

There's a post on North Korea Zone about this. As usual, their stance seems very gung-ho to me. The North Korean regime is an abomination, but so is US foreign policy, and a new Korean war would be still worse. So I posted a comment. The original post, by OneFreeKorea:

The full text is here. Several observations:

1. It's hard to argue that abducting citizens of a nation with which you're at peace for political reasons isn't terrorism. Congress is clearly sending a signal that North Korea doesn't come off the terrorism list until it releases these abductees.

2. The United States is talking about South Korean abductees and Japanese abductees. Japan is talking about Japanese abductees. South Korea is not talking about South Korean abductees.

3. It is not a coincidence that this is introduced the same week that Roh Moo-Hyun is in town. Although it isn't binding, it's still an extraordinary statement of congressional displeasure with South Korea's policies toward the North.

Thanks to the North Korea Freedom Coalition for Forwarding.

I replied:

On the points made in the original post:

1) Terrorism is "the calculated use of violence or threat of violence to attain goals that are political, religious or ideological in nature. This is done through intimidation, coercion or instilling fear" (from a US army manual), so while it is evil and illegal, North Korea's kidnapping is probably not terrorism, since it was not done to achieve goals through fear or intimidation of the rest of the populace. North Korea employs massive state terror against its own citizens, but doesn't usually terrorize inhabitants of other countries. (At least, no worse than most other nations, and considerably less than the really heavily armed ones.)

The list of terrorist states maintained by the US Congress is notoriously politically biased: most of those on it deserve to be, but lots of US clients and allies are left off, unjustifiably.

2) The South Korean administration is -- rightly -- afraid of US violence or diplomatic heavy-handedness on the Korean peninsula causing massive destruction with casualties in the hundreds of thousands or millions. It also fears a sudden collapse of the Northern regime, again, with good reason. This explains, although it may not justify, the Southern government's reluctance to upset the Northern government.

It's a bit like being a bystander to a drunken argument: if you care about the parties involved and the neighbourhood, you don't do anything to make either side mad enough to start throwing punches. I'm sure the South Korean government is as appalled by the horrors of the North as anyone else, but they are in the unenviable position of having to calm the Northern regime down every time the US threatens something stupid. If the US administration would back off a bit, the Southern government would have some space to criticise the North. As things are, they must perceive doing that as too big a risk.

3. Here I agree. Congress has certain elements who want to be gung-ho about North Korea, don't care about Koreans and see the South Koreans as disobedient pip-squeaks who must be put in their place. It shows the usual contempt for democracy from US elite figures. (Compare it with Donald Rumsfeld's remarks on Turkey's parliament's decision to respect 90% of Turkish people's views and not to join in the assault on Iraq, for example.)

Amnesty: Tragedy of Tiananmen remains alive

2005-06-05T00:39:00.000+02:00

As Amnesty International said yesterday, there has of course been no inquiry into the June 1989 Beijing massacre; an unknown number of activists from those times are still in prison and people are still being given harsh sentences for discussing the events.

On the eve of the 16th anniversary of the crackdown on the 1989 pro-democracy movement in Beijing, Amnesty International calls for justice for those who lost their lives on June 3-4, who remain in prison since then for their involvement in these tragic events, and who have subsequently been imprisoned for their calls for a reassessment of the events of 1989.

"Tiananmen clearly remains very much alive today for the Chinese public and the demands by Chinese citizens for justice continue," said Amnesty International.

"We reiterate call on the Chinese government to conduct an independent inquiry into the killing of unarmed students and demonstrators. Those found responsible should be tried and brought to justice. We also call on the government to release all those who are still imprisoned in connection with the Tiananmen crackdown and who never received fair trials."

The government must stop new arrests and harsh treatment of individuals who express their views and share information on the internet and elsewhere regarding Tiananmen.

...

Numerous Chinese citizens have been detained and imprisoned for such activities. To name only a few:

• Shi Tao: a writer and journalist, was sentenced on April 30, 2005 to 10 years imprisonment for providing an overseas Web site with an official document alerting journalists to possible social instability around the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen crackdown. He was charged with "illegally revealing state secrets abroad."

• Kong Youping, a former trade union activist was sentenced to 15 years imprisonment in September 2004 after he had posted articles and poems on the internet calling for a reassessment of the 1989 pro-democracy movement.

• Huang Qi, was sentenced in 2003 to 5 years imprisonment for hosting an online discussion forum on Tiananmen and human rights abuses by the Chinese government.

The Tiananmen Mothers (set up by Ding Zilin after her son was killed in Beijing on June 4, 1989) have never ceased to call for an independent review of the events of 1989 or to seek justice for the 126 relatives whose loved ones were killed, despite persistent harassment and intimidation including periodic detention and house arrest by the authorities in an effort to prevent them from exercising their legal rights.

...

The fact that international opinion still considers the events of 1989 and China's human rights record today of relevance was recently demonstrated in the EU's decision in May of this year not to lift its embargo on arms sales to China. EU ministers specifically pointed to the need for the release of individuals still held in prison for their involvement in Tiananmen, along with other improvements in human rights such as reform of the Chinese system of detention without trial known as 'Re-education through Labour'.

Moreover, as Chinese premier Wen Jiabao himself stated in New Delhi on 12 April 2005, "only a country that respects history, takes responsibility for history and wins over the trust of peoples in Asia and the world at large can take greater responsibilities in the international community."

Read the complete press release

I think it is a bit dangerous for Amnesty to use the EU's continuing arms embargo as a gauge of continuing international concern. The Chinese government will be able to claim that the international community no longer cares if the EU ends the embargo -- as I fear it soon will.

Whoever wrote the press release is implicitly accusing Wen Jiabao of hypocrisy because the remark they quote in the last paragraph was about Japan. It is darkly amusing how well it applies to China.

Thirty to forty thousand demonstrate in Hong Kong

2005-06-05T00:01:00.000+02:00

There are reports all over the web, but mostly duplicates of the same AP story, except for the BBC.

The BBC

The AP story on the CTV site:

Tens of thousands of Hong Kong protesters raised candles in the air and sang solemn songs Saturday as they marked the 16th anniversary of China's bloody crackdown on the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy demonstrations.

In Beijing, however, security was tight and there were no signs of public commemorations on the giant square, where the 1989 student-led protests ended when soldiers and tanks attacked, killing hundreds of people.

China's Communist party has eased many of the social controls that spurred the Tiananmen protests, but the government still crushes protests against the event -- or any activity that it worries might threaten its monopoly on power.

...

"My heart is heavy," said Shum Ming, 58, a construction worker. "Hong Kong people will not forget this history when a government uses guns and tanks to crush students. It's very atrocious.''

Protester Henry Ho, 19, a Hong Kong University student, said: "If the Chinese government can say what happened that night and can say that they're sorry, it can show that they are not the same government from the past.''

Many feel a duty to speak out because they have freedoms of speech and assembly that don't exist on the mainland. Hong Kong is ruled under a "one country, two systems'' formula that promises the city a wide-degree of autonomy.

Banners and signs said: Don't Forget June 4, Democracy Fighters Live Forever, and Using History As Proof.

Vigil organizer Lee Cheuk-yan, vice-chairman of the Hong Kong Alliance, said, "Our slogan is `Recognize history' and we're asking Beijing to do just that.''

But Donald Tsang, the front-runner campaigning to become Hong Kong's next leader, urged the public on Saturday to be rational about the event, saying China has made great strides in improving its economy and people's livelihood.

"I had shared Hong Kong people's passion and impetus when the June 4 incident happened. But after 16 years, I've seen our country's impressive economic and social development,'' Tsang said. "My feelings have become calmer.''

Mine haven't. For some reason it doesn't seem to help me to calm down when I see Hong Kong's future leader say that a massacre is OK if it is followed by economic growth.

Here are some pictures:

I imagine that there must have been smaller demonstrations around the world, but I can't find any reports online. I know there were some demonstrations at the Chinese embassy in London because I was there this afternoon. I'll post pictures and a brief report here and on UK Indymedia once they are ready.

Global vigil on June 3rd for victims of Beijing massacre

2005-06-02T15:51:00.000+02:00

Alex Higgins emails:

There is a global vigil for the victims of the 1989 Beijing massacre tomorrow. To take part, wherever in the world you are, all you need to do is put a candle in some safe and visible place in your house at 8pm tomorrow (June 3rd) (perhaps with a poster in the window to explain or something - just a handwritten slogan will do, or maybe print something off the Internet) - marking the sixteenth anniversary of the beginning of the killing. This, hopefully, will be happening all over the world - but not enough people know about it!

It has been organised by Olympic Watch, which scrutinises workers' rights and human rights in the context of the Olympic Games, which will be held in Beijing in 2008. Below are some more details and something I wrote last year for the fifteenth anniversary of the massacre. Please take part and tell others - it costs you almost nothing and takes very little time!

Cheers, Alex H

Global Vigil for the victims of the Beijing Massacre of 1989

June 3rd is the 16th anniversary of the beginning of the massacre that raged over the next couple of days in Beijing in 1989, when the People's Liberation Army (as it is called with grim irony) drove the students and protestors from all over China out of Tiananmen Square and killed people by the hundred in the backstreets of the city - the regime's final answer to the growing campaign for democracy, reform, human rights and economic justice.

Petr Kutilek, the Executive Secretary of the excellent Olympic Watch (click to visit! Do it!) wrote to tell me of the Global Tiananmen Vigil which we can all participate in. It's a simple gesture - at 8pm (wherever you are in the world) on June 3rd, please put a candle in some place where it is visible and won't burn your house down, to remember the thousands killed and as a sign for hope for the future. Tiananmen Vigil's website states:

"We hope to create a rolling light of hope around the world, expressing our solidarity for the oppressed people in China." Tell other people about it - there are two days left!

People around the world will be going to their local Chinese embassy or consulate on Saturday to demonstrate. Alex, Jui Chu and I will be at the one in London (UK).

Here's what I posted last year about the massacre (mainly borrowed from Alex, again).

Anger, not pity, is best response to poverty

2005-05-29T15:03:00.000+02:00

The title comes from an excellent article in the Japan Times by Philip Brasor about poverty and its representation in the media:

Anger, not pity, is best response to poverty

In his new book, "Planet of Slums," the American urban historian Mike Davis paints a bleak picture of a world in which the poorest have become so marginalized that they have dropped off the economic radar. Over the past 20 years or so, globalization and the neoliberal policies of the International Monetary Fund have conspired to drive peasants subsisting off their land into cities that can't absorb them. The bottom line is something like a billion people living hand-to-mouth on a daily basis.

...

Well-meaning media accounts of abject poverty often avoid source problems altogether. Fuji TV has been broadcasting an annual special for the past three years called "If the World Were a Village of 100 People," which is the title of a popular children's book that attempts to make the Earth's 6.2 billion people more comprehensible by reducing their various lifestyles to that of a village of 100 residents.

This year's special was broadcast two weeks ago. A group of celebrities sitting in a studio watched reports about four children in stunned amazement. In the first, a 12-year-old Filipino girl supports her ill mother and two younger brothers by sifting through mountains of garbage for recyclables in the outskirts of Manila. The family lives in a makeshift hovel and once every three days eats a meal of watery rice gruel. The girl makes about 30 yen a day, part of which she has to spend on medicine for her mother.

The girl's situation is appalling, but the celebrities limit their comments to tearful commiserations and clueless questions. "Why doesn't she look for work somewhere else?" asks a former boxer, as if it were all a matter of personal choice, but in any case the program makes no attempt to explain the socioeconomic circumstances that keeps this family where it is.

...

Exploiting poor kids for the sake of greater awareness of their plight is not a bad thing in and of itself, but Fuji TV's purpose is to evoke pity, which has no lasting effect since it doesn't make people think about the cause of the problem. The emotion that needs to be stimulated is anger.

...

Read the complete article

Japanese TV is not greatly worse in this respect than TV in Western Europe, I think, although there is a genre of brain-dead reportage in Japan which is less common elsewhere: the 'wide show'. Short reports are presented within the framing device of celebrities watching those reports, so you get five minutes of (shallow) reportage followed by five minutes of celebrities telling you what they think about it. Predicably the comments made are often as irritatingly lacking in comprehension as the boxer's "Why doesn't she look for work somewhere else?"

For those interested in Japanese TV -- and I warn you that it is even less interesting than I have managed to describe it as here -- there's a pretty good article in the Chicago Tribune which mentions wide shows:

According to an article in the Hollywood Reporter, the Japanese watch the most television -- an average of five hours a day, which far outpaces Americans, in second place at a paltry 4 hours and 19 minutes.

...

A staple of Japanese television is the chat show, known here as a "wide show" for the wide variety of topics they cover. However, these consist almost exclusively of sensationalistic crime stories and recipes.

Hosts and panelists convene informally to talk, interview special guests and per-form silly stunts. To accentuate that homey feeling, a tall glass of iced tea is placed in front of each guest. But it's not cool to really take a sip. That would be rude.

The granddaddy of these programs is "The Wide." It's my favorite because I was once interviewed for a segment on a horrific school murder. But I was videotaped at my office. I didn't get a glass of tea.

Are war criminals still war criminals if the trial was unsound?

2005-05-29T14:17:00.001+02:00

The Japan Times reports that:

Masahiro Morioka, parliamentary secretary for health, labor and welfare, said Thursday that Class-A war criminals convicted by the Tokyo War Crimes trial after World War II are not criminals because the tribunal was "one-sided."

Japanese government leaders have said that Morioka's position does not represent the government, saying that Tokyo has accepted the results of the tribunal.

Morioka is on the right wing of the ruling LDP, which puts him very close to the unpleasant militaristic, racist elements in Japanese political life, and his comments should be understood as the insult to other Asian countries that they were probably intended as. (See the Japan Times report for the reaction of the Chinese authorities, who never sound so reasonable or representative as when right-wing Japanese politicians give them this kind of chance.)
Having said that, the trials were undoubtedly not as carefully conducted as they should have been, nor did they have a wide enough remit.

one of the judges [in the Tokyo war crimes trials], Radhabinod Pal of India, issued a blistering dissent, attacking the Tokyo trial as an instrument of U.S. political power and argued that neither war crimes or conspiracy had been proven.

Pal condemned the court's decision not to allow the defendants to bring evidence about the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and compared then president Harry Truman's use of nuclear weapons to Germany's atrocities in World War I and II.

"If any indiscriminate destruction of civilian life and property is still illegitimate in warfare, then, in the Pacific war, this decision to use the atom bomb is the only near approach to the directives of the German emperor during the first world war and of the Nazi leaders during the second world war," he wrote. "Nothing like this could be traced to the credit of the present accused."
(from a rather odd article on the Asia America site)

Japanese jingoists like Morioka tend to agree with Pal (for all the wrong reasons, no doubt). A criticism they would not make is equally important. Many people who may have committed war crimes were never brought to trial, from the emperor (a political decision by the US administration) to low-ranking soldiers, as documented for example by Michael Goodwin, in his excellent book 'Shobun: A Forgotten War Crime in the Pacific' about the shobun ('disposal') policy of summary execution for captured airmen -- "by beheading, gunshot and even poisoning."

So the trials of the leaders in Tokyo were largely show trials: carried out by the US authorities for their effect on Japanese and US public opinion. But that doesn't mean that those convicted were not guilty: most of them undoubtedly were. In particular those who were cabinet members during the war were obviously culpable.

Amnesty report 2004: Japan mistreated refugees; executed prisoners in secret

2005-05-26T17:35:00.000+02:00

After a few days of fairly concerted local activity helping to promote and make placards for a demonstration against the massacres in Uzbekistan, it's back to normal here: drawing attention to the misdeeds of East Asian governments and giving exposure to activism there.

For some reason the criminal behaviour of the Japanese government always riles me most. I suppose that although I hate what the Chinese authorities do I can see why they stamp out dissent. With the Japanese elites it seems so gratuitous: why does the second-richest country in the world insist on treating so many people with such contempt? And why are the people that they treat worst almost always among the most obviously deserving of consideration and aid? -- Korean-Japanese pensioners, Vietnamese refugees, the families of mentally ill prisoners and so on and on.

What triggered my rant is the publication of Amnesty International's report for 2004 (confusingly called the 2005 report). The summary of the part about Japan is here. There's a brief Japan Times article with some of the allegations here.

I intend to cover what the report has to say about other East Asian countries -- much worse in the case of China and North Korea, of course -- in future posts.

For now, though, here are some pieces of the report on Japan:

SUMMARY

Two men were executed in 2004 in secret by hanging. At least 61 prisoners remained on death row. Refugee recognition procedures failed to meet international standards. The issue of reparations for forced sexual slavery during World War II remained unresolved.

...
DEATH PENALTY

Japan executed two death row inmates in September. Both executions – by hanging – were carried out in secret. The prisoners were informed only a few hours before the execution and their families and lawyers were told after the executions had taken place. The executions were carried out while parliament was in recess in an attempt to avoid public debate or criticism.

• Mamoru Takuma, who murdered eight schoolchildren in Osaka in 2001, was executed with unusual speed, less than a year after his death sentence had been finalized. He was reported to have a history of mental illness.

Death row inmates were kept in solitary confinement and communication with the outside world was very restricted. At least 25 prisoners whose sentences have been finalized have spent more than 10 years on death row awaiting execution. Ten per cent of death row inmates were reportedly victims of miscarriages of justice.

• In August the Tokyo High Court rejected a request for retrial by Hakamada Iwao, who had spent over 38 years in detention and always protested his innocence.

REFUGEES AND MIGRANTS

The crackdown on illegal immigrants was strengthened after the government announced its security policy at the end of 2003. Businesses reportedly employing undocumented migrants were raided. The government also manipulated fear of “terrorism” to facilitate the forcible repatriation of thousands of foreign workers.

This crackdown was followed by an amendment to the Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Law which raised the maximum fine for undocumented migrants and extended the maximum re-entry ban on deported foreigners from 5 to 10 years.

The new law scrapped the requirement that refugees apply for refugee status within 60 days of arrival. However, concerns regarding the detention of asylum-seekers remained. Mentally ill asylum-seekers continued to be detained without appropriate medical care and reports of suicide attempts continued. Some asylum-seekers were detained and thereby separated from their children. Several people were detained for years and were suddenly forcibly repatriated while their appeals were still pending. In 2004, of 426 people who applied for refugee status, only 15 were granted asylum.

• In February, the Tokyo District Court upheld the decision to reject refugee status for a gay Iranian man known as Shayda, despite numerous reports of homosexuals being executed in Iran. Shayda was recognized as a refugee by the UN refugee agency UNHCR in 2001. The Tokyo Court acknowledged that under Iran’s Islamic penal law, those accused of same-sex acts face punishment, including the death penalty. However, the Court stated that Shayda could live in Iran safely as long as he did not “overtly” engage in such activities and that a person could find ways to avoid persecution. Shayda’s application for refugee status was rejected in 2000, and he was then detained for 19 months for overstaying his visa.

• In November, a Vietnamese woman was forcibly repatriated to Viet Nam even though her husband (a refugee) and baby remained in Japan.

In August Japanese officials, assisted by the Turkish police, visited Turkey to investigate the families of those seeking asylum in Japan. Such investigations exposed asylum-seekers and their families to increased danger as information regarding individual applications was given to Turkish authorities.

VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN

The issue of reparations for former “comfort women” – women forced into sexual slavery during World War II – remained unresolved. In February, Tokyo’s High Court rejected compensation claims by seven Taiwanese former “comfort women”. The women claimed that they were victims of systematic sexual abuse by the Japanese Imperial Army and suffered discrimination after the war. They had demanded compensation and an official apology from the Japanese government. There were originally nine plaintiffs, but two died during the case.

In May Japan enacted a law against domestic violence providing protection not only to spouses but also to former spouses and children. The law allowed courts to order perpetrators from their homes and to stay away from spouses, former spouses and children.

In the whole report only two good results: "The new law [on immigration] scrapped the requirement that refugees apply for refugee status within 60 days of arrival", plus the law on domestic violence mentioned in the last paragraph. On the other hand, it's good news that so many people are continuing to struggle.

Uzbekistan demo pics on Indymedia

2005-05-26T14:40:00.000+02:00

If you would like to see how our demo went last Saturday, please click here for the report on UK Indymedia. (Many thanks to Tim Jones for getting soaked taking the pictures and being understanding and responsible about obscuring faces. The photo below is one of his, published here under CopyLeft -- see below for details.)

As I wrote to a friend: The demo was pretty good. I met several really nice Uzbeks and their friends from all over the place. We were videoed by two different but equally creepy KGB types -- one with the Uzbek embassy, the other apparently a sort of freelance and just a kid, really. Craig Murray was there and seemed pleasant, although I didn't spend much time talking to him. Most of the time I was trying to block the cameramen from filming the Uzbeks.

An organisation for Uzbeks and their supporters in the UK is in the offing. I'll post details here once we have a website.

The photo in this post is 'CopyLeft'. This means you are free to copy and distribute it under the following license:

Permission is granted to anyone to make or distribute copies of these photographs, in any medium, for personal and not-for-profit purposes, provided that this copyright notice and permission notice are preserved, and that the distributor grants the recipient permission for further redistribution as permitted by this notice.

Modified versions may not be made.

Demonstration this Saturday in London

2005-05-19T23:31:00.000+02:00

Not a news item, but a call to action (if you happen to be in or near London -- the one in the UK, that is).

Demonstrate against the Uzbek massacres

- London, 12 noon, Saturday 21st May 2005

Assemble at the Uzbek Embassy, 41 Holland Park Road, London W11 3RP. Nearest tubes: Holland Park (Central Line) / Notting Hill Gate (Central/District Line).

*Support Uzbekistan's democratic opposition.

*Demand justice for the hundreds murdered by Karimov in Andizhan this week.

*Call for an end to Western support for this brutal regime.

This demonstration has been called by a group of UK-based Uzbek dissidents, and is supported by Craig Murray, Britain's former Ambassador to Uzbekistan, and anti-war activists.

Confirmed attending:

*Craig Murray, Britain's ambassador to Uzbekistan until last year when he was sacked for denouncing torture in Uzbek jails.

*Johann Hari, columnist for the Independent who wrote this week about the connections between the massacre and the 'war on terror'

Last Friday hundreds of people were killed in Andijan in Uzbekistan while peacefully demonstrating. A further 200 were killed the following day in nearby Pakhtahbad.

Uzbekistan is one of the world's worst human rights abusers, with torture regularly used against political opponents of the dictator, Islam Karimov. It is also an ally of the US and UK in the 'war on terror': the US has a military base there and Karimov has received many high-level Bush administration officials in recent years, including Donald Rumsfeld and Tommy Franks, and has visited Bush in the US. (See this page for details.)

Associated Press reported on Wednesday:

an AP reporter and other journalists witnessed troops opening fire on the crowd at Andijan's central square.

[Opposition politician Nigara] Khidoyatova said 542 people were killed in Andijan on Friday and another 203 people died in Pakhtabad, about 30 kilometers to the northeast, on Saturday.

"Soldiers were roaming the streets and shooting at innocent civilians," Khidoyatova said. "Many victims were shot in the back of the head."

In Pakhtabad, virtually all the victims were women and children apparently trying to flee violence by crossing into neighboring Kyrgyzstan, Khidoyatova said. Others gave similar accounts."

Korean minister responsible for investigating 1980s atrocities resigns because implicated in 1980s atrocities

2005-05-12T20:52:00.000+02:00

I'm still catching up with news stories from the last week or so.

The Korea Herald reported on 5th May that:

Vice Defense Minister Yoo Hyo-il has resigned amid controversy over his alleged role in the brutal military crackdown on the 1980 Gwangju civic uprising.

...
Civic groups called on Yoo to resign raising allegations about his role in the so-called Gwangju massacre and military operations against pro-democracy activists in the 1980s.

Yoo was a battalion commander of the 20th infantry division, which was sent to Gwangju to suppress the armed civilian revolt against a military coup by major general Chun Doo-hwan, who later became president.

The government estimates more than 200 civilians were killed during the uprising. Unofficial figures put the death toll at more than 2,000.

Yoo is also alleged to have engaged in the Chun government's forceful conscription of leaders of student activism from 1981-83. An estimated 11,000 students were forced to serve in the military and suffered torture and other forms of abuse.

Yoo's past is particularly problematic because:

Yoo heads the [defence] ministry's fact-finding panel mandated to look into military wrongdoings and suspicious deaths under past authoritarian governments.

He made the decision [to resign] after [President] Roh [Moo-hyun] last Thursday urged the ministry to make more efforts to shed light on the military's wrongdoing.

Read the complete article

Uzbek protests; Russian gas

2005-05-12T20:47:00.000+02:00

Some important news stories I wanted to find time to comment on (but didn't):

Out of my area, the BBC reports protests in Uzbekistan, broken up by the police, of course.

'Russia plays down fears it will deprive Japan of oil' -- from the Japan Times.

Chinese administration tries to prevent May protests

2005-05-02T14:56:00.000+02:00

From another Japan Times article:

(Kyodo) Police guarded streets, parks and other potential protest hot spots in Shanghai and Beijing on Sunday to head off any further anti-Japan protests after demonstrations last month led to vandalism and a diplomatic rift.

In Beijing, about 200 police officers stood guard at the Hailong Building, a starting point for the April 9 protests that drew upward of 10,000 people and culminated in vandalism to Japanese diplomatic property as well as three Japanese-style restaurants.

About 1,000 Shanghai police officers weathered a downpour to guard the Japanese Consulate, where on April 16 windows were broken with rocks and other projectiles by some of the 20,000 demonstrators who marched there.

I think there may well be protests on May 4th anyway.

This 4th May is the 86th anniversary of the original May 4th Movement, when

"over 3000 students of Peking University and other schools gathered together in front of Tiananmen and held a demonstration. They shouted out such slogans as "Struggle for the sovereignty externally, get rid of the national traitors at home", "Do away with the 'Twenty-One Demands'" [of the Japanese government], "Don't sign the Versailles Treaty". They demanded with one voice to punish such figures as Cao Rulin, Zhang Zongxiang, and Lu Zongyu, who held important posts as diplomats. The enraged students even burnt Cao Rulin's house. The government of the Northern Warlords suppressed the demonstration and arrested many students. ...

"The May Fourth Movement marked the beginning of the New Democratic Revolution in China. It also served as a intellectual turning point in China. It was the seminal event that radicalized Chinese intellectual thought. Previously Western style liberal democracy had a degree of traction amongst Chinese intellectuals. However the Versailles Treaty was viewed as a betrayal." [because of the concessions offered to Japanese imperialism] (from Wikipedia).

Ayako Ishigaki - Communist and feminist

2005-05-02T14:28:00.000+02:00

There's a review in the Japan Times of the memoirs of Ayako Ishigaki -- Restless Wave: My Life in Two Worlds -- Communist and feminist activist in Japan and the US in the first half of the twentieth century.

...

First among the incidents that would jar her out of her complacency were the rice riots of 1918. Ishigaki's wealthy aunt felt that it would be better if the hungry "would request things quietly" rather than throwing stones and kicking in the doors of rice warehouses. "In our house," this aunt complained, "we always contribute to charity and are kind to the people, but still an increasing number of them return evil for good." Ishigaki, who had earlier described her placid family life as "a quiet world, like the mirrored surface of an ancient pool; without motion, without flow, reflecting the clear blue sky," experienced, while listening to her aunt, "the faintly ominous feeling one has . . . when in a corner of the sky the rain clouds boil up suddenly and everything is dark."

It was probably this new awareness that lead her, a year later, to enter Jiyu Gakuen. Although Jiyu Gakuen was the most progressive Japanese high school of its time, Ishigaki was soon disillusioned with the mushy liberalism it offered. "It was the purpose of Jiyu Gakuen to produce women rich in interests, intelligent and cultured," she explains. "Any serious consideration of what to do about the social setup was left to other people." As this was unsatisfactory to Ishigaki, she soon embarked on the radical activism that would fill much of her life.

Ishigaki's activism, however, made things uncomfortable for her in Japan. She became involved with Japan's Farmer-Labor Party (banned by the government three hours after it was founded) and, thanks to that affiliation, spent a night in jail. One imagines that it was the threat of further persecution that made joining relatives in the United States seem like a good idea.

In America her activism continued, most notably in Japanese immigrant communities. Ishigaki was an opponent of the Japanese occupation of Manchuria and the increasing militarism that followed. One sees her trying desperately to believe that the Japanese immigrants she worked among "wanted to defend their motherland from being trampled upon and ruined by the militarists," and one shares her heartbreak when she realizes, observing the response to a speech from a visiting militarist, that "these honest, quiet, working people were engulfed in war spirit." She comforts herself with the notion that they were only "for the moment carried away." That they were so easily carried away, however, suggests that their distaste for the war had never run very deep.

"Restless Wave" was written in English and published in 1940. To demonstrate how unfortunate the situation then was, Ishigaki concludes her book with a chapter made up largely of entries from a notebook that had fallen into her hands, the diary of a Japanese soldier in China. Ishigaki reports that when she read the diary, she felt that her "heart was being gouged out and tortured." One understands, and remembers, that before things got better they got worse.

...

Read the complete article

Japan - China argument: a summary

2005-05-02T14:16:00.000+02:00

Hugh Cortazzi, a retired British diplomat, ambassador to Japan in the early '80s, has a sensible article summarizing British comment on recent 'anti-Japanese' demonstrations in China. In typical diplomatic fashion, his comments are not necessarily his own views but introduced with locutions such as 'commentators have suggested that', 'it is probable that' etc.. Comments in square brackets are my own.

On Japan:

1) PM Koizumi's visits to Yasukuni Jinja are provocative

2) Koizumi has effectively repeated Murayama's 1995 apology for Japan's war crimes.

3) The fuss is over approved textbooks, but approval of a textbook does not make its use compulsory, merely allows it.

4) "regardless of what a few rightwing nationalists such as Tokyo Gov. Shintaro Ishihara may say, Japanese public opinion, even if incensed by anti-Japanese demonstrations in China, remains basically pacific and that the chances of a revival of extreme nationalism and militarism in Japan are remote."

On China:

1) "The general impression is that the recent anti-Japanese demonstrations in a number of Chinese cities were at least condoned, if not actively encouraged and planned, by the party, which could have stopped them if it had wanted to do so"

2) "the demonstrations may have developed rather further than the authorities wished and that reining back the demonstrations was not quite as easy as expected"

3) "Some commentators have even suggested that the demonstrations were allowed to develop as far as they did because Beijing saw them as a way of allowing activists to let off steam in a way that was not directly harmful to the party"

4) "It is also probable that the Chinese authorities wanted to make it clear both within and outside China that they were opposed to a permanent Japanese membership on the U.N. Security Council, which countries such as Britain now firmly support" [as do the US -- of course -- and France].

5) "China's officially approved textbooks tend to play up Japanese atrocities during the war. The textbooks also fail to note the huge changes in Japanese society since the war's end and the pacific nature of the Japanese Constitution and of public opinion." [In fact the textbooks in use in China seem to be as grotesque and distorted as one would expect in an authoritarian one-party state. Japan's education system is an ideological battleground; in China the battle was lost long ago.]

6) "One aim of the anti-Japanese demonstrations is thought to have been to warn the Japanese government to keep off what the Chinese regard as their turf, namely the Senkaku islands and gas reserves in the area."

On possible consequences:

1) "Attention has rightly been focused on economic relations between Japan and China. The Chinese economy, as well as Japanese firms, have greatly benefited from Japanese investment in productive activities in China. Chinese threats to boycott Japanese-made products could well backfire and anti-Japanese strikes in Japanese-owned factories could damage Chinese exports and the Chinese economy."

His final section, on what should happen next, may be close to the views of the British foreign office:

From a London perspective, it is important that Japanese leaders try to avoid being provocative toward China. In particular, Koizumi would be wise to refrain from further official visits to Yasukuni Shrine, and the Ministry of Education and Science should look long and hard at textbooks that play down the behavior of the Japanese Imperial armed forces.

Indeed, there is a strong case for ending the way in which history textbooks are "officially approved" by the ministry. In many other democratic countries, there is no system of censorship and vetting of textbooks. Although this is not in fact the case, the present system tends to suggest that Japanese textbooks are centrally compiled. None of these suggestions, however, means that Japan should condone damage caused by anti-Japanese demonstrations in China. Nor should the Japanese be intimidated from pressing their case for permanent membership on the Security Council or from continuing to cooperate with the Americans in relation to Taiwan.

There is no need for Japan to send troops to the Senkaku islands, as Ishihara apparently advocates. A modus vivendi needs to be sought through bilateral talks between China and Japan. If this fails, outside arbitration might be considered. The relationship between China and Japan in the Far East is too important to be neglected or overlooked by any of us.

China's ties with Iran and Israel

2005-04-29T16:43:00.000+02:00

Two more snippets from Jane's:

China issue undermines US-Israeli defence ties

Tensions between the US and Israel over Israeli defence exports to China remain unresolved, despite recent visits by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Defence Minister Shaul Mofaz to Washington.

No doubt Israel's arms exports to China annoy the US administration -- although they could stop them tomorrow if they wanted, just by threatening to cut US aid and arms exports to Israel. I imagine that China's links with Iran annoy the US adminstration more. Among other reasons, they make it close to certain that China would veto any UN Security Council resolution calling for armed intervention against Iran's nuclear programme.

China, Iran forge closer ties

China and Iran have forged an increasingly close relationship in the last few years, to the extent that they did US$7 billion worth of business in 2004. John Hill examines the international implications of the burgeoning relationship between Beijing and Tehran.

Defence Development Advisory Commission established to reform Korean armed forces

2005-04-29T16:35:00.000+02:00

Another story from Jane's:

RoK establishes advisory body

The Republic of Korea (RoK) has established a Defence Development Advisory Commission (DDAC) under President Roh Moo-hyun to simultaneously promote armed forces reform and expand civilian influence over the military.

Japan to buy Hostile Artillery LOcator (HALO) systems from BAE

2005-04-28T00:40:00.000+02:00

Here's a sample of the kind of news you get if you sign up for Jane's Defence email briefings. It's annoying that you can't read the whole story without a paid subscription.

Japan seeks further HALO systems

Japan's Ground Self Defence Force (JGSDF) is looking to buy 15 more BAE Systems Hostile Artillery LOcator (HALO) systems after successfully completing the evaluation of a single system, originally ordered in 2002.

It seems that HALO is a "battlefield-wide system for collecting acoustic signals from many types of source and combining the data in a number of ways [including but not limited to] for computing the position of guns, mortars and shell bursts on the battlefield"

See the manufacturers' sites: Roke, BAE

"Sub wreck could reveal Japanese peace offer"

2005-04-25T21:39:00.000+02:00

I missed this interesting story when it appeared in The Guardian last week:

Sub wreck could reveal Japanese peace offer

An American Vietnam veteran could be about to answer one of the most intriguing questions arising from the second world war: was Japan preparing to seek peace with the allies more than a year before the war ended?

Paul Tidwell, a shipwreck salvager, said yesterday he believes wreckage of a Japanese submarine sunk by US warplanes in the Atlantic on June 23 1944 could contain a peace proposal from Tokyo that never made it into the hands of its intended recipient.

...

Read the complete article

He has been down there twice before and found opium, apparently.

Worst Japanese rail crash in 40 years

2005-04-25T21:32:00.000+02:00

The latest news I have is this AP report:

A packed commuter train that was behind schedule and may have been speeding jumped the tracks Monday and hurtled into an apartment complex, killing 57 people and injuring 440 in Japan's worst rail accident in 40 years.

...

Read the complete article

This has been headline news all over the world, and I have nothing to add, except to collect some photographs:

Japanese group urges commitment to non-proliferation

2005-04-22T12:44:00.000+02:00

From a Japan Times article:

Scientists, academics urge major nuclear powers to dispose of weapons

A seven-member group of Japanese scientists and academics has urged the world's five major nuclear powers to stick to a global treaty on nuclear nonproliferation and work toward the complete abolition of nuclear arms.

The Committee of Seven for World Peace Appeal, which includes Nobel physics prize laureate Masatoshi Koshiba, also urged the Japanese government to again examine the situation regarding nuclear weapons and appeal for peace as the only country to have suffered atomic bombings.

Their two statements were issued Wednesday ahead of the Review Conference of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in New York in May and in light of the 60th anniversary this year of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

...

Read the rest.

Yongbyon reactor shutdown reported

2005-04-22T00:45:00.000+02:00

It could be that North Korea is harvesting plutonium for nuclear weapons from the fuel rods. Or it could be that they want the US adminstration to think that. Or perhaps there's a technical fault. Or...

Previously, a shutdown at Yongbyon has tended to damage NK-US relations, because of the first possibility.

Yongbyon reactor

Reuters report.

Discussion on North Korea Zone (I should say that I am really glad that some of these people don't run US foreign policy. On the other hand, some of the comments are interesting).

Amnesty urges South Korean legislators to abolish death penalty

2005-04-22T00:23:00.000+02:00

A Special Bill on Abolishing the Death Penalty is currently before the Legislation and Judiciary Committee (LJC) in the 17th National Assembly. Details are from a press release from Amnesty International:

In December 2004, 175 members of the National Assembly (which consists of 299 members in total) from the ruling and opposition parties proposed the Special Bill to abolish the death penalty on humanitarian and religious grounds. The Special Bill was introduced in the Legislation and Judiciary Committee in February 2005. Amnesty International welcomes the large bipartisan support for the Special Bill by the National Assembly members and sees this as reflecting the resolve of the 17th National Assembly members towards abolishing the death penalty in South Korea.

...
A majority of the countries in the world, 120, have abolished the death penalty in law or practice. Since 1990 over 40 countries have abolished the death penalty for all crimes. Among Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, all countries except South Korea, Japan, the United States of America (USA) and Mexico have abolished the death penalty for all crimes. Mexico has abolished the death penalty for all ordinary crimes.

Since its independence in 1948, at least 900 people have been executed in South Korea, most of them by hanging. The last executions in South Korea took place in December 1997 when 23 people (18 men and five women) were executed at short notice. There has been an unofficial moratorium on executions since President Kim Dae-jung (who was himself sentenced to death in 1980) took office in February 1998. However, at least six people were sentenced to death in South Korea in 2004 and at least 60 prisoners remain under sentence of death at the end of the year.

In November 2001, 155 members of the last National Assembly (which consisted of a total of 273 members) supported a bill calling for the abolition of the death penalty. Despite this support which constituted over 56 percent of the National Assembly members, there was no progress in the status of the bill; it appears to have been stalled in the LJC of the last National Assembly.
...

China suppresses Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang

2005-04-21T23:52:00.000+02:00

Earlier this month, Human Rights Watch published a report, Devastating Blows: Religious Repression of Uighurs in Xinjiang.

According to the accompanying press release,

The Chinese government is directing a crushing campaign of religious repression against China’s Muslim Uighurs in the name of anti-separatism and counter-terrorism...

The 114-page report, Devastating Blows: Religious Repression of Uighurs in Xinjiang, is based on previously undisclosed Communist Party and government documents, as well as local regulations, official newspaper accounts, and interviews conducted in Xinjiang. It unveils for the first time the complex architecture of law, regulation, and policy in Xinjiang that denies Uighurs religious freedom, and by extension freedom of association, assembly, and expression. Chinese policy and law enforcement stifle religious activity and thought even in school and at home. One official document goes so far as to say that “parents and legal guardians may not allow minors to participate in religious activities.”

“The worldwide campaign against terrorism has given Beijing the perfect excuse to crack down harder than ever in Xinjiang,” said Brad Adams, Asia director for Human Rights Watch. “Other Chinese enjoy a growing freedom to worship, but the Uighurs, like the Tibetans, find that their religion is being used as a tool of control.”

The Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking minority of some 8 million people, whose traditional homeland lies in the oil-rich Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region in northwest China, have become increasingly fearful for their cultural survival and traditional way of life in the face of an intensive internal migration drive that has witnessed the arrival of more than 1.2 million ethnic Chinese settlers over the past decade. Many Uighurs desire greater autonomy than is currently allowed; some wish for a separate state, although there is little recent evidence of violent rebellion.

Highly intrusive religious control extends to organized religious activities, religious practitioners, schools, cultural institutions, publishing houses, and even to the personal appearance and behavior of Uighur individuals. State authorities politically vet all imams on a regular basis and require “self-criticism” sessions; impose surveillance on mosques; purge schools of religious teachers and students; screen literature and poetry for political allusions; and equate any expression of dissatisfaction with Beijing’s policies with “separatism” – a state security crime under Chinese law that can draw the death penalty.

At its most extreme, peaceful activists practicing their religion in ways that the Party and government deem unacceptable are arrested, tortured, and at times executed. The harshest punishments are saved for those accused of involvement in so-called separatist activity, which officials increasingly term “terrorism” for domestic and external consumption.

...

Click here for the complete press release
.

Abductees, DNA and Nature

2005-04-21T21:11:00.000+02:00

An article by Gavan McCormack for Japan Focus summarises the dispute between North Korea and Japan over the North Korean abductions of Japanese citizens in the 1970s and 80s, and quotes an alarming series of comments from the journal Nature.

The Japanese government, under considerable pressure from public opinion in Japan, has taken a harder line with North Korea in recent months. One key moment of tension came when DNA analysis in Japan of ashes supposedly belonging to Megumi Yokota, one of the abductees, apparently showed that they were not hers but from the remains of two different people.

Sachie Yokota holding a photograph of Megumi Yokota

Now Nature has cast doubt on these findings, as McCormack describes:

An article in the 3 February 2005 issue of the prestigious international scientific journal, Nature, revealed that the DNA analysis on Megumi's remains had been performed by a member of the medical department of Teikyo University, Yoshii Tomio.[8] Yoshii, it later transpired, was a relatively junior faculty member, of lecturer status, in a forensic department that had neither a professor nor even an assistant professor.[9] Remarkably, he said that he had no previous experience in the analysis of cremated specimens, described his tests as inconclusive and remarked that such samples were very easily contaminated by anyone coming in contact with them, like "stiff sponges that can absorb anything." In other words, the man who had actually conducted the Japanese analysis pronounced it anything but definitive. The five tiny samples he had been given to work on (the largest of them 1.5 grams) had anyway been used up in his laboratory, so independent verification was thereafter impossible. It seemed likely as a result that nobody could ever know for sure what Pyongyang's package had contained.

When the Japanese government's chief cabinet secretary, Hosoda Hiroyuki, referred to this article as inadequate and a misrepresentation of the government-commissioned analysis, Nature responded, in a highly unusual editorial (17 March), saying that:

"Japan is right to doubt North Korea's every statement. But its interpretation of the DNA tests has crossed the boundary of science's freedom from political interference. Nature's interview with the scientist who carried out the tests raised the possibility that the remains were merely contaminated, making the DNA tests inconclusive. This suggestion is uncomfortable for a Japanese government that wants to have North Korea seen as unambiguously fraudulent. ...

The inescapable fact is that the bones may have been contaminated. ... It is also entirely possible that North Korea is lying. But the DNA tests that Japan is counting on won't resolve the issue. The problem is not in the science but in the fact that the government is meddling in scientific matters at all. Science runs on the premise that experiments, and all the uncertainty involved in them, should be open for scrutiny. Arguments made by other Japanese scientists that the tests should have been carried out by a larger team are convincing. Why did Japan entrust them to one scientist working alone, one who no longer seems to be free to talk about them?

Japan's policy seems a desperate effort to make up for what has been a diplomatic failure ... Part of the burden for Japan's political and diplomatic failure is being shifted to a scientist for doing his job -- deriving conclusions from experiments and presenting reasonable doubts about them. But the friction between North Korea and Japan will not be decided by a DNA test. Likewise, the interpretation of DNA test results cannot be decided by the government of either country. Dealing with North Korea is no fun, but it doesn't justify breaking the rules of separation between science and politics."[10]

Apart from a brief reference in one weekly journal, no word of this extraordinary exchange penetrated into the Japanese mass media. Three weeks after it, the Foreign Minister told the Diet, in answer to a question, that he knew nothing about the Nature article.[11] Meanwhile, anger at North Korea mounted and preparations went ahead for what was expected to be the largest-yet protest meeting scheduled to be held in Tokyo, on 24 April. As for Mr Yoshii, one week after the Nature editorial he left Teikyo hospital, promoted from lowly university lecturer to the prestigious position of head of the forensic medical department of the Tokyo metropolitan police department. Nature reported, in its third discussion of the case (7 April), that it had been told Yoshii was therefore not available for media comment.[12] The suggestion, in a parliamentary question on 30 March, that this smacked of government complicity in "hiding a witness" drew outrage and the comment from the Minister of Foreign Affairs that it was "extremely regrettable" for such aspersions to be cast on Japan's scientific integrity.[13]

Beyond the immediate parties to the dispute, South Korean forensic scientists also expressed skepticism about the Japanese findings, on grounds of the low possibility of DNA material surviving cremation and the high probability of contamination,[14] and Time magazine (4 April) reported that the technique that Yoshii had used, known as "nested PCR," was one that professional forensic laboratories in the US avoided because of the risk of contamination.[15]

The only certainty is that both governments are lying. Previously it was obvious that both governments were stalling, but I thought that only the North Korean government was lying.

Japan's Peace Constitution -- documentary

2005-04-21T20:16:00.000+02:00

From another excellent Japan Focus article:

Rarely does a documentary film, many months in production, appears as timely as the nightly news when it's released. But the premiere in Tokyo on April 23 of "Japan's Peace Constitution" (Japanese title: "Eiga Nihon-koku Kempo"), directed by Japan Focus associate John Junkerman, comes at a moment when tensions with China and Korea over Japan's war past are at their highest levels in decades. The film, produced by the Tokyo independent production house Siglo, shows that the drive to revise the Japanese Constitution cannot be divorced from an understanding of that history or from the impact revision will have on Japan's relations with its neighboring countries.

In order to provide an international perspective on the constitution, the filmmakers traveled to eight countries, with interviews ranging from American historian John Dower on the making of the constitution to Syrian and Lebanese journalists on the dispatch of the Self Defense Force to Iraq. Chalmers Johnson provides a grounding in the "base world" American empire, and Korean historians Kang Man-Gil and Han Hong Koo appeal to Japan to fully acknowledge its past in order to embrace a future of constructive engagement with Asia.

John Junkerman, director of Japan's Peace Constitution

If Japan revises the Constitution's war-renouncing Article 9 and officially designates its military as such, other parts of Asia will increase their arms buildups and war will become a possibility, according to American film director John Junkerman.

The Tokyo-based director, who recently completed the documentary "Japan's Peace Constitution," said in an interview that Article 9 has kept Japan from resorting to use of force and reassured other parts of Asia that the country does not pose an aggressive threat.

"But if Article 9 is revised and the Self-Defense Forces are called a military and given that right of being engaged in collective . . . defense, Japan's neighbors are going to say 'there is nothing anymore that constrains Japan, therefore we have to rebuild up our arms as well,' " Junkerman said.

On Tokyo's disputes over South Korea-controlled islets known by Japan as Takeshima, and the Japan-controlled Senkaku islets, which are claimed by China and Taiwan, he said, "They could very easily escalate into increased tensions and to wars."

Junkerman's film tells how the constitutional revision is an international issue, not a domestic one, through views of 12 intellectuals from Japan and overseas, including China, South Korea and the U.S.

Chalmers Johnson, director of the Japan Policy Research Institute in San Diego, said that Japan had apologized for its aggression in East Asia by renouncing the use of force via Article 9.

"To formally renounce Article 9 is to renounce the apology," he said in the film.

The film also shows testimony from South Korean women who were forced into sexual slavery for the Japanese Imperial Army, and their protest in front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul, where they demanded that Tokyo apologize and stop its alleged militarization.

To discuss the Constitution, Junkerman noted it is indispensable to look at the history of Japan's aggression in Asia. He said one of the reasons for making the film was to educate Japanese youth, who are less aware of what happened.

The film traces the process of establishing the Constitution from 1945 to 1947 through interviews with John Dower, an expert on Japan's postwar history and a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and former University of Tokyo professor Rokuro Hidaka.
Although the Liberal Democratic Party claims the Constitution was drawn up by the U.S. and Japan should make its own, the experts argued that citizens' groups and political parties debated the Constitution and the General Headquarters of the Allied Forces incorporated their proposals in its draft.

...

Read the complete article

Robert Oppenheimer, the Bomb, and Nuclear Insecurity

2005-04-21T19:57:00.000+02:00

A Japan Focus article on early attempts to prevent proliferation:

Robert Oppenheimer, the Bomb, and Nuclear Insecurity

by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin

In his interviews and writings over the past decade, Osama bin Laden has repeatedly talked about America's atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He believes (incorrectly) that it was the atomic bombings that shocked the Japanese imperial government into an early surrender -- and, he says, he is planning an atomic attack on America that will shock us into retreating from the Middle East.

...

There were alternative policies at the beginning of the nuclear age that our government could have followed -- and could still promote -- that would have mitigated the dangers we face today. There were people then, as now, who recognized that the knowledge of how to construct and deploy atomic bombs could not be kept secret for long. And there were people then, as now, who recognized that such bombs could be smuggled into major urban areas -- meaning there is no defense against nuclear terrorism. Chief among those who clearly saw the nuclear future -- as we have lived and are living it -- was the "father of the atomic bomb," J. Robert Oppenheimer, who developed a plan for a nuclear-free world and did his best to promote this alternative path.

The history of Oppenheimer's failure to contain the nuclear genie makes clear that unilateralism and hubris are hardly unique to the Bush Administration; they have been a recurrent characteristic of US decision-making ever since the latter years of World War II. America's nuclear monopoly was "the great equalizer," Secretary of War Henry Stimson triumphantly declared in July 1945 at the Potsdam conference upon learning of the success of the atomic bomb test at Alamogordo, New Mexico. The bomb was our "trump card," our "ace in the hole," President Truman and his closest advisers believed. But others, more informed and more thoughtful, like Oppenheimer, realized that the bomb was a Trojan horse that would soon threaten our own security as much as it threatened the security of others. Oppenheimer's efforts to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons at the beginning of the atomic age are as applicable today as they were then.

Read the complete article

Japan emerges as America's deputy sheriff

2005-04-20T23:56:00.000+02:00

Simon Tisdall in The Guardian on Japan's gradual steps towards re-militarilsation.

Japan emerges as America's deputy sheriff in the Pacific

Escalating tension with China, violently illustrated by renewed anti-Japanese protests in Shanghai and other big cities at the weekend, is increasing pressure on Tokyo to expand its military capabilities and back a deepening strategic alliance with the US reaching from east Asia to the Gulf.

...

According to Kazuya Sakamoto of Osaka University, Japan and Britain are central to a far-reaching, post-9/11 US review of its overseas force deployments.

"The basic idea is that the US will gradually withdraw from the Eurasian landmass while assigning the two island nations at the east and west of Eurasia, Japan and Britain, even greater importance as strategic bases to ensure stability in Europe and Asia," Professor Sakamoto writes in the current issue of Japan Echo magazine.

An important element in this transformation fell into place last week when Japan agreed in principle to allow the command headquarters of the US Army's 1st Corps to transfer from Washington state, on the US Pacific coast, to Camp Zama, near Yokohama, south of Tokyo.

The 1st Corps has responsibility for operations in the Pacific and Indian oceans, extending to the conflict zones and oilfields of the Gulf. The primary focus of its forward deployment is likely to be the defence of Taiwan, regional challenges posed by China's military expansion, and the nuclear standoff with North Korea.

But the US has also reportedly proposed that command operations of the 13th Airforce, now on Guam in the Pacific - a base for long-range bombers and tanker aircraft frequently deployed in the Middle East - be moved to Yokota airbase in Tokyo.

"The ramifications of this would be that Japan would essentially serve as a frontline US command post for the Asia-Pacific and beyond," said Christopher Hughes of Warwick University in a paper published by the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

The American forward deployments are certain to be viewed with suspicion in China and farther afield - and face political opposition in Japan. The US-Japan security treaty states that US bases may only be used "for the purpose of contributing to the security of Japan and the maintenance of international peace and security in the far east". It says nothing, for example, about Iran.

But Dr Hughes said that since Japan had given the US a free hand to use its bases for previous Middle East operations, Tokyo "might have to accept its enhanced role as a fulcrum for US military commands".

Japan's worries about China are the main reason for acquiescing in US plans that effectively shatter any remaining pacifist illusions. But Tokyo is in any case growing more militarily assertive under its prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi.

Japan sent non-combat troops to Iraq while its navy has joined the US-led Proliferation Security Initiative. Military cooperation with Australia, South Korea and south-east Asian states is developing.

It is acquiring a ballistic missile defence system and new satellite intelligence capabilities. It has pledged to help keep the peace in Taiwan. And there has even been talk of pre-emptive strikes against North Korea and a Japanese nuclear deterrent.

In short, Japan, emerging from the shadow of its past, is again becoming a military power with a global role and hopes of a permanent UN security council seat.

China's actions may thereby be more easily explained. But further demonstrations of hostility will only exacerbate the slide towards an Asian cold war.

Demonstrations in Mongolia (I eat my words)

2005-03-29T13:35:00.000+02:00

Last Saturday I wrote:

It would be pleasant though to think that a popular uprising in Asia just across the border from China's Xinjiang region might encourage grassroots movements across East Asia, just as the revolutions in the Ukraine and Georgia seem to have been a factor in the Kyrgyz revolution. I doubt that this will be the case, except perhaps in Xinjiang.

But on Friday there had already been a demonstration in Ulan Bator (capital of Mongolia), according to this BBC article:

Mongolians protest for new poll

Activists in Mongolia are calling for fresh elections and have demanded an end to official corruption.

They held protests outside parliament in the capital Ulan Bator on Friday, and say they have more planned.

The action appears to have been inspired by the situation in nearby Kyrgyzstan, where the government has been ousted by a popular uprising.

Mongolian Prime Minister Tsakhilganiin Elbegdorj has appeared on national television to appeal for calm.

One protester said another demonstration was planned for 7 April, the day parliament is due to open its Spring session.

"We will gather more people and we will hold more street demonstrations," said J Batzandan, a 30-year-old lawyer and university lecturer.

Read more...

I am very happy to eat my words. It shows that I know next to nothing about Mongolia.

"With Regard to Recent Korea-Japan Relations"

2005-03-27T20:00:00.000+02:00

The Christian Science Monitor has a useful summary of the ongoing diplomatic row between South Korea and Japan:

Korea-Japan dispute strains longstanding alliances

South Korea's president has called recent disputes with Japan over territory, textbooks a potential 'diplomatic war.'

By Robert Marquand | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA – A messy moment between the South Korea and Japan got progressively messier this week. A sudden, bitter row over history and territory between the two main US allies in the Pacific was called a potential "diplomatic war" by an impassioned Korean President Roh Moo-hyun - who accused Japan of "rationalizing its history of invasion and colonization."

In an open letter to the people of Korea, and in terms that for discreet Asian diplomacy are probably unprecedented in frankness for a head of state, President Roh detailed their grievances with Japan. Among them: a proposed new high school history text that glorifies the early 20th century occupation of Korea by the imperial Japanese Army, and a recent vote by a Japanese prefecture to claim a historically symbolic island mid-way between the two nations.

"These moves nullify all the past reflection and apologies made by Japan," Roh said in the letter titled, "With Regard to Recent Korea-Japan Relations."

The row comes at a time when the US is aligning ever more strongly with Tokyo, and at a time when some analysts feel that the Roh government is drifting away from the triangular US-South Korea-Japan alliance that has been at the heart of Asian security since the Korean war.

Read more...

I have written about Tokdo/Dokdo/Tokto/Takeshima here before:

Tensions around disputed islands

Bland propaganda in the Japan Times about Dokdo / Takeshima This article fills in the background to the dispute, and also tells a little-known story about a US bombing run that killed hundreds of Korean sailors on the islands.

One of the less good things about the CSM article is its uncritical assumption of the usual anti-democratic stance:

At a minimum, one senior Western diplomat noted, Roh's intemperate statements shift the focus of attention away from Japanese perceived misdeeds or provocations, and onto the character of Roh himself, virtually letting Tokyo off the hook. Roh has made a series of speeches in recent months that have suggested his government is rethinking South Korea's role in the US-led Pacific alliance.

The article lets you think that this is strange, irrational behaviour from Roh, but gives the game away a few paragraphs later:

In Seoul, the current dispute is palpable. It is slathered across front pages, heard in street protests, and debated at dinner tables. Some demonstrators have gone so far as to cut off fingers and attempt self-immolation - one even drowned to death.

In recent days, Mr. Roh's lackluster approval ratings have spiked upward as he has taken a headstrong approach.

In other words, Roh is reflecting popular sentiment. The writer of the article views this with detachment or disdain: in his view, the job of the leader of a democracy is to ignore the views of his electorate and favour the priorities of the 'international community'. (cf Rumsfeld on "Old Europe" and, especially, Turkey, at the time of the build up to the invasion of Iraq.)

I tend to agree with Marquand that "the US is aligning ever more strongly with Tokyo": recent comments by Condoleeza Rice on her tour of Asia certainly suggest this.

The secretary was almost effusive on the U.S. alliance with Japan. In a speech, Rice addressed an issue important to status-conscious Japanese: "Japan has earned its honorable place among the nations of the world by its own effort and by its own character. That is why the United States unambiguously supports a permanent seat for Japan on the United Nations Security Council."
From a Japan Times article.

Marquand's "some analysts feel that the Roh government is drifting away from the triangular US-South Korea-Japan alliance" is presumably based on his reading of a recent speech Roh made:

Roh told graduating cadets at the Korean Air Force Academy that South Korea was fully capable of defending itself against North Korea, thus undermining the reason for posting American combat forces in his country.

At the same time, the president asserted that the U.S. would not be allowed to deploy U.S. forces out of Korea without his government's approval, thus putting a crimp into Pentagon plans to forge American troops in Korea into a flexible force that could be swiftly deployed to contingencies outside Korea.

from another Japan Times article, by the thoroughly biased Richard Halloran (see his first sentence, which I omitted here, for example.)

Roh's speeches are on his website:

A Message to the Nation Concerning Korea-Japan Relations

Address by President Roh Moo-hyun at the 53rd Commencement and Commissioning Ceremony of the Korea Air Force Academy

Taiwan march update

2005-03-26T23:34:00.000+01:00

In one of the largest demonstrations in Taiwan's history, about a million people marched through the capital on Saturday to protest a new Chinese law that authorizes an attack on the island if it moves toward formal independence.

AP -- from ABC News.

Reuters has:

Hundreds of thousands of people chanting "Oppose war, Love Taiwan" have joined President Chen Shui-bian to protest against China's anti-secession law that sanctions the use of force against the island.

Chen's ruling Democratic Progressive Party hopes the protest will draw international attention to the new law and put pressure on China to scrap it.

Organisers said one million joined the show of people power on Saturday against Beijing's military threat, but Taipei police estimated the crowd at just over 240,000. [Although Taiwan's United Daily News puts the police estimate at 275,000]

"I am here to protest against a barbaric China which looks down upon the Taiwanese people," said 70-year-old businessman Fan Wen-yi, adding he was not affiliated to any political party and had never participated in a protest before. "The anti-secession law, simply put, is a law that authorises war."

The protesters chanted slogans and waved green flags that read "democracy, peace, protect Taiwan" as they marched towards the presidential office from 10 locations around the capital, symbolising the 10 clauses of the anti-secession law.
...

Amusingly, Chen Shui-Bian was out on the streets, marching and chanting slogans -- and didn't make a speech. That's the kind of behaviour I look for in a head of state. He's in the middle of the next photo:

Here he is again, as an inflatable cartoon character: 扁娃 ('Bian Wah'), Baby Bian.

By the way, the green on the flags, headbands etc. stands for the governing coalition, centred on the DPP, which was founded in 1986. I assume that green was also the colour of the pro-democracy movement that the DPP grew out of, but I haven't been able to confirm this.

The opposition Kuomintang (Nationalists), one-party rulers of Taiwan from the 1940s to 2000, use blue, from the old Republic of China flag.

Another amusing thing about this is that even when a march is supported by the government, the police estimate is still much lower than the organisers'.

Actually it's not really a surprise, though, because Taipei police are controlled by the local government and the current mayor, Ma Ying-Jeou (馬英九), is in the Kuomintang.

Chomsky on Vietnam and Japan, the 'super domino'

2005-03-26T19:53:00.000+01:00

"In the 1950s the US was not prepared to lose the Second World War"

In the case of Indo-china, the US is a very free country; we have an incomparably rich documentary record of internal planning, much richer than any other country that I know of. So we can discover what the goals were. In fact it is clear by around 1970, certainly by the time the Pentagon Papers came out, the primary concern was the one that shows up in virtually all intervention: Guatemala, Indonesia, Nicaragua, Cuba, Chile, just about everywhere you look at. The concern is independent nationalism which is unacceptable in itself because it extricates some part of the world that the US wants to dominate. And it has an extra danger if it is likely to be successful in terms that are likely to be meaningful to others who are suffering from the same conditions.

So in the former colonial world, the Third World and the south, the problem was what planners called the rotten apple that might spoil the barrel or a virus that might infect others. The virus is independent nationalism that seems as though it may be successful in terms that are meaningful to others that are suffering similar problems. That's a theme that goes through the entire documentary record and it was a concern in Vietnam. So the US, during the late 1940s, hadn't really decided whether to support the French in their re-conquest of the former colony or to take the path that they did in Indonesia in 1948 and support the independence movement against the Dutch. But the issue was: suppose Vietnam turns out to be an independence movement that is out of control. They knew it was not run by the Russians and the Chinese: that was for public show. It was clearly an independent nationalist movement which could turn out to be successful. So in the 1950s they became increasingly concerned that North Vietnam was developing in ways that could be meaningful for others in the region. A fully independent Vietnam could truly dominate Indochina, which could become an independent nationalist force, a rotten apple which would affect others: Thailand, Malaya, which was a big problem at the time, possibly Indonesia. They were deeply concerned about Indonesian nationalism under Sukarno, which was going off on its own independent course and was a pillar of the non-aligned movement. If this infection of independent nationalism spread the concern was it might ultimately lead to Japan -- the "superdomino," as Asia historian John Dower called it. Not that Japan would be affected by it but that Japan would be induced to, as they put it, accommodate to independent Asian nationalism in SE Asia, maybe spreading from Vietnam, Indonesia, China, which was by then a huge rotten apple. And if Japan were to accommodate to Asian independent nationalism and offer itself as the technological and commercial and financial and industrial center it would effectively have won the Second World War. The Second World War was fought in the Pacific phase to prevent Japan from establishing a new order in Asia in which it would be the center. And it would be an independent force in world affairs. Well in the 1950s the US was not prepared to lose the Second World War and so it took a nuanced position. It first supported Sukarno then quickly turned against him. In 1958, US President [Dwight] Eisenhower was supporting the break up of Indonesia. It quickly in 1950 decided to support the French in Vietnam. And it just goes on from there. You can go through the steps, but effectively this is what happened.

From a recent interview with David McNeill, on ZNet.

It's a very fine interview, in my opinion. Off-topic (as far as this blog is concerned) Alex Higgins and I are planning a website with rebutals of Chomsky's critics. Chomsky does some of his own rebutting in this interview, since McNeill asks him about (spurious) criticisms Christopher Hitchins and Johann Hari have made.

More on China and Kyrgzstan

2005-03-26T19:27:00.000+01:00

Yesterday China closed a border crossing between its western Xinjiang region and Kyrgyzstan, citing the chaos in Bishkek and the need to guarantee the safety of passengers and freight. China has concerns the strife in Kyrgyzstan may spill over the border to Xinjiang, where many Muslim Uighurs hope for greater autonomy. Beijing has waged a relentless campaign against separatists in the desert region.

From the same Times article as this striking photo:

It seems that Russia was against the uprising, but swiftly recognised the opposition leaders when it saw (I presume) that they are not unfriendly to Moscow (and presumably not radical democrats, therefore). The US administration was not behind recent events or even much in support--they didn't rapidly recognise the new government as they did in the Ukraine, or in Venezuela during the coup they sponsored. And China clearly hates unrest on its border.

Democracy has been off the agenda for all the great powers in the Central Asian region, I think, and this has caught them by surprise.

The options for the Kyrgyz people are quite different from those that present themselves to Ukraininans. The Soviet background and gradual move out of Russia's orbit are similar, but the choice for Ukraine is between becoming a US ally and making steps towards the EU. (Rather like Turkey, in the end the choice is bound to be in favour of Europe). For Kyrgzstan, I don't doubt that it will soon be deeply within China's sphere of influence financially, but rather free in other ways, given that China has no territorial ambitions in Central Asia (as Basil Chamberlain pointed out long ago).

Effects of Kyrgyz revolution?

2005-03-26T02:13:00.000+01:00

Central Asia falls outside the remit of this blog, and I know very little about Kyrgyzstan.

It would be pleasant though to think that a popular uprising in Asia just across the border from China's Xinjiang region might encourage grassroots movements across East Asia, just as the revolutions in the Ukraine and Georgia seem to have been a factor in the Kyrgyz revolution. I doubt that this will be the case, except perhaps in Xinjiang.

I think Putin has more to worry about than China's rulers do.

From a Guardian article:

Akayev's departure made Kyrgyzstan the third former Soviet republic in the past 18 months - after Georgia and Ukraine - to see popular protests bring down long-entrenched leaders widely accused of corruption.

Putin, speaking during a visit to Armenia on Friday, said "it's unfortunate that yet again in the post-Soviet space, political problems in a country are resolved illegally and are accompanied by pogroms and human victims."

He ought to know about illegal resolution of political problems, of course, but I doubt he sees the irony...

Putin has also said that he thinks the situation in Kyrgyzstan arose because the government there was not authoritarian enough--and he has a point, since the ousted Kyrgyz government was probably less awful than the Uzbek, Tajik and Turkmen regimes.

Kyrgzstan is considered strategically important by the regional powers--for its location rather than any resources or as a geopolitical player. Both Russia and the US have bases there (in the US case, set up in late 2001) and I'd be surprised if the US had to withdraw whatever the new government in Bishkek.

Taiwanese government encourages street demo

2005-03-26T00:45:00.000+01:00

The demonstration, which will be later today, is against China's recent 'anti-secession' law.

Taipei, March 25 (CNA) With more than one million people expected to turn out in Taiwan for Saturday's protest against China's Anti-Secession Law, organizers are taking pains Friday to ensure the event is a success. The Taiwan Democratic Alliance for Peace, which is organizing the protest, is an umbrella group consists of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party, the Taiwan Solidarity Union and others. It said Friday that more than 5,000 tour buses will pull into Taipei from around the island Saturday

From an article on the Taiwanese government website

Interesting that the number of coaches is mentioned. Coach bookings seem to be how the UK Stop the War organisers predict the size of their marches: it was clear ahead of time that the march in February 2003 was going to be huge, although they were surprised when it turned out to be close to 2 million. If the march in Taiwan reaches 1 million it will be a greater percentage since Taiwan has a population of around 22.5 million (2003 figure from Taiwan govt site) to the UK's 60 miilion or so.

BBC article on the march

Reaction from a Chinese government academic on Xinhua.

Another BBC article, mentioning the Chinese reaction.

Happy new (solar) year

2005-01-09T18:14:00.000+01:00

I had planned to write an end of year review, discussing the way this blog has covered East Asian affairs since its launch in the first half of 2004 and reviewing some important developments. But I was busier and lazier over the holidays than I had hoped and the new year came and went. I'll settle for some brief comments and move on to posting new stories.

Looking back, I'm quite pleased with what I wrote; less pleased at everything that I didn't cover. It should be no surprise to me that the coverage of Japan is in more depth and more knowledgeable than what I've written about other countries. Japan is the only country in the region that I've lived in. I think that is also part of the reason that I have written about domestic politics in Japan, whereas my coverage of other countries seems to look at them mainly from a 'foreign affairs' perspective. I want to improve on this in 2005, particularly for Hong Kong and South Korea, which I think I underreported last year.

Still, I have no plans to unsubscribe from the Japan Times daily news email, so there will probably continue to be lots of stories from there. If anyone knows of a similar email service for Korean, Hong Kong, Chinese, Russian Far-East or Taiwanese English language papers, please let me know.

Tribute to Iris Chang

2004-12-10T19:50:00.000+01:00

Iris Chang, author of The Rape of Nanking, died last month. Alex Higgins has posted a brief tribute on his superb Bring on the Revolution blog. As usual when I quote from him, I reproduce the whole thing here because on Alex's blog you have to scroll a lot to find it.

I feel a further note is due for the US historian and writer, Iris Chang. Born in New Jersey in 1968, Iris trained as a journalist but left journalism to begin her own writing career. In 1997, her history of the Japanese army's fantastically brutal and genocidal destruction of the Nanking area in China in 1937, The Rape of Nanking, became an international bestseller and revived interest in, and controversy over, a crime against humanity that was terrible even by 20th century standards. Last year she published a history of Chinese immigrants in the US, 'The Chinese in America', another neglected story worthy of attention.
Iris suffered a breakdown while on a recent research trip in the Philippines and was hospitalised. Sadly, she did not recover from her depression and on November 11th, she was found in a car on a highway near Los Gatos, California, having shot herself in the head. She was 36. A friend said of her, "She felt other people's suffering to the point that it made her suffer."

Huge demonstrations in China

2004-12-08T22:21:00.000+01:00

One of the first articles at ZNet's new China Watch section discusses this:

Unrest Sharply Increasing Through Much Of China

by Jonathan Manthorpe
November 09, 2004

Away from the shimmering facade of its golden coastal cities, China is seething with violent discontent.

New figures published in the Communist party magazine Outlook say that last year there was an average of 160 major incidents of social unrest every day in China's hinterland.

Many of these outbursts of peasant outrage involved tens of thousands of people and some carried on for days as riot squads using batons and tear gas attempted to restore order.

There is a common thread that sparks these uprisings. About 800 million of China's 1.3 billion people have yet to see any benefit from market reform while the corruption of local Communist party officials is ever more onerous. ... Read the rest of the article...

There is also a recent Japan Times editorial on the same subject, taking much the same line:

In recent weeks, angry Chinese have reportedly taken to the streets not only in underdeveloped interior regions but also in prosperous coastal areas in the south of the country. The communist government in Beijing faces serious challenges as it pursues an aggressive policy of economic expansion that represents an odd mixture of socialist and capitalist principles.

According to reports, many have expressed their anger in violent ways and for various reasons. In the industrial city of Chongqing in Sichuan province, 50,000 rioters laid siege to a municipal building in protest against bureaucratic abuses. In Henan province, an ethnic clash erupted between members of the majority Han group and the Islamic minority group [Hui], causing heavy casualties.

Farmers have protested violently against giant construction projects that they thought would deprive them of their land and livelihood. In Shanxi province, scores of people were wounded, some fatally, in a bloody demonstration against an economic development project that would force hundreds of farmers to evacuate. In Sichuan province, 100,000 farmers rallied against a dam construction project, inviting military intervention. In Fujian province, droves of peasants marched on City Hall in opposition to expressway construction.

Other demonstrations were peaceful, but participants were hardly content. In Guangdong province, the coastal "sun belt" in the south, residents protested against highway tolls. In the city of Shenzhen, a mecca for foreign businesses, many workers staged street sit-ins to demand wage increases.

These incidents make it clear that farmers and residents are increasingly dissatisfied with the high-handed ways in which local government officials deal with them. Those officials, long accustomed to the autocratic leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, are seen as neglecting the wishes of local people. The incidents thus would appear to frame the problem as one of an economic juggernaut trampling the grass roots. ...

An Epoch Times article from 10th November gives details of the demonstration against forced relocation connected with the construction of a dam in Hanyuan County, Sichuan Province:

... tens of thousands of people in Hanyuan County, Sichuan Province protested the government’s forced relocation: relocation made possible by tearing down their homes under orders issued by corrupt officials. Thousands lined the Pubugou Power Station on Dadu River to stop operation there.

In response, police injured several dozen people and beat one man to death.

In the areas surrounding Hanyuan County, police clashed with farmers and local students. After the police contained the situation, all lines of communication, including Internet, were cut off and traffic was tightly controlled.

According to reports from Hong Kong and Taiwan, the origin of the conflict was the Hanyuan’s county government’s forced relocation of a hundred thousand residents to build Pubugou Power Station, a hydroelectric power plant.

According to sources, local government officials and developers collaborated by reducing the compensation of property. They did so by downgrading its productive fertile farm land - claiming that it was arid, dry land near the mountains - and paying out type-five compensation that was in place 14 years ago. Those who refused to move in advance were arrested by police and public security guards.

Farmers had believed that they could still retain their fertile farmland. However, they were forced to give up the land and move to land on the hillside where only corn could be grown. Farmers were only compensated half the value of their home while corrupted officials at different levels of the government filled their pockets with the other half.

Several months ago, the farmers appealed to government officials in Hanyuan County by collecting petitions but received no response. In response to this, within several days of the dam starting operation, fifty to sixty thousand farmers living by the Dadu River broke through the armed police guarding the station and stopped operation of the dam.

The Apple Daily reported on October 31st that Li, a farmer living in Qingfu Town, Hanyuan County, said, “50,000 to 60,000 villagers in towns such as Qingfu Town, Dashu Town, Shunhe Town, who are affected by the project at Pubugou Power Station, protested outside the station Wednesday night. Villagers held banners such as “Overthrow corrupt officials!” Hoping to delay the operation of the dam, protesters braved the cold weather for two nights as temperatures dropped to 35 degrees.

“At that time, a lot of armed police and public security guards arrived. A man started to argue with police after they assaulted a seventy year-old woman. He was struck with a brick by the police which caused his death,” said Li.

On the following two days, October 28 and 29th, nearly 100,000 farmers and students marched to the county administration building and damaged the government facility, causing the government offices to shut down. Authorities urgently mobilized over 10,000 armed police to Hanyuan County. In the conflict that ensued, at least seven armed police were injured and were all sent to Ganluo County hospital. This was because it was believed that the safety of the police officers would be compromised if they were sent to the Hanyuan county hospital near the demonstration site.

Japan to export arms to US, continue Iraq mission

2004-12-08T21:15:00.000+01:00

In case anyone thought Japan was a functioning democracy, the LDP administration has decreed that it will export arms for the first time since the 1940s and keep 600 troops in Iraq. Without a vote in parliament, and contrary to public opinion.

First, the extension of the SDF's participation in the US-UK occupation of Iraq, in a Japan Time article:

Key members of Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's Cabinet effectively agreed Tuesday to keep ground troops in Iraq for another year, and are preparing to make a formal decision possibly Thursday.

"I think it's OK to extend the dispatch (of the Ground Self-Defense Force troops)," Foreign Minister Nobutaka Machimura told reporters Tuesday morning.

Machimura made the comment after emerging from a meeting with Koizumi, Chief Cabinet Secretary Hiroyuki Hosoda and Defense Agency chief Yoshinori Ono at the Prime Minister's Official Residence.

Read the rest of the article...

Even the Japan Times does not think that "it is OK" to keep troops in Iraq on Machimura, Ono and Koizumi's say-so. Here's their editorial:

The government is set to extend Japan's troop deployment in Iraq beyond Dec. 14 for another year, although Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has not adequately explained why an extension is necessary. Nor has the Diet debated the question in detail. A joint opposition bill aimed at ending the dispatch has been scrapped without being put to a vote.

Nearly 600 Self-Defense Force troops are stationed in Samawah, southern Iraq, to support humanitarian and reconstruction efforts in the area. But the security situation in Iraq remains volatile, even as the country prepares for its first free elections in January. What is needed now is a fundamental review of the SDF mission. A troop withdrawal should not be ruled out.

The mission, which started a year ago, has raised various issues. Perhaps the most important one is that the dispatch stems from Tokyo's support of a war -- an invasion launched by the United States without an explicit mandate from the U.N. Security Council -- whose international legitimacy was questioned. The war has strained international relations, casting a shadow over Japan's aid activities as well.

It is the first time that SDF troops have been dispatched to a foreign country in conflict. The government has taken pains to explain that the troops are performing noncombat duties in a noncombat area, but the Japanese public is increasingly skeptical. The lack of safety assurances makes the dispatch essentially different from previous SDF missions abroad, including the U.N.-backed peacekeeping operation in Cambodia and the logistic support (fuel supply) of the U.S. antiterrorism campaign in Afghanistan.

In fact, the continued insurgency in Iraq is making the SDF presence there more difficult to sustain. Adding to the difficulty is the international perception that the war was not quite justified -- a perception reinforced by a U.S. government confirmation that no weapons of mass destruction existed at the time of the invasion. Japan -- which supported the military action as a member of the "coalition of the willing" -- is finding itself in an uncomfortable position. ...

"Not quite justified" might be the understatement of the year.

The second item is the dropping, without any interest in public opinion, of the ban on arms exports, which has limited the damage Japanese foreign policy has done over the years.

Japan to lift arms-export ban for U.S. missile shield project

By NAO SHIMOYACHI
Staff writer

The government's new basic defense policy will limit arms exports to missile defense-related products developed with the United States, and America would be the only recipient, politicians and government officials involved in this issue said Tuesday.

The policy will be adopted later this week.

The officials said sales of weapons and equipment concerning missile defense will be made possible as an exception to Japan's self-imposed ban on arms exports.

In announcing the new policy, which will come in the form of a statement issued by Chief Cabinet Secretary Hiroyuki Hosoda, the government will clearly state that Japan will adhere to a "cautious policy" concerning arms exports, they said.

This was the most cautious among the options considered within the ruling coalition and the government on the issue of whether to lift the decades-old export ban. The Liberal Democratic Party, under strong pressure from the domestic defense industry, had been demanding that weapons exports to all nations be allowed in principle.

Based on the LDP position, the government initially planned to let firms participate in weapons development and production outside of the joint missile defense project. It also planned to allow sales of equipment deemed purely defensive, including flak jackets and night-vision goggles, to all nations in principle.

But the LDP's coalition partner, New Komeito, which is backed by the lay Buddhist organization Soka Gakkai, insisted that arms exports be limited to areas related to missile defense projects with the U.S.

Read the rest...

EU losing chance to keep peace in Korea

2004-12-08T20:14:00.000+01:00

In a sensible article, Glyn Ford, British Labour Member of the European Parliament - and one of the few British politicians to care or know much about East Asia - argues that the EU should spend the money required to keep the Korean Energy Development Organization (KEDO) alive. This is part of the framework negotiated in 1994 under which North Korea suspended operations at its plutonium-producing heavy-water reactor at Yongbyon in return for two replacement light-water reactors and fuel oil to keep the country running in the meantime, plus diplomatic relations with the US and an end to the 50-year-old trade embargo.

The EU has been involved from the beginning, paying in a few million Euros each year. Since the US suspended the deal in 2002 the EU has paid the admin costs. Now there is apparently a threat that this money will be cut off and the deal will die completely, leaving the fearful North Korean administration isolated. I will not attempt to predict the consequences.

WATCHING KEDO DIE

EU frittering away influence in Korea

BRUSSELS -- One of the last best hopes for securing a solution to the current crisis on the Korean Peninsula is being killed by U.S. politicking and EU penny- pinching. U.S. neoconservatives are determined to drive North Korea into a corner, while the European Union bickers over "small change"' rather than take the initiative in providing an alternative vision for Northeast Asia. ...

By the summer of 2002 the LWR project was already running nine years late [mainly because the US was waiting for North Korea to collapse, an outcome it preferred to keeping its side of the bargain, as argued here previously - Nick], while the projected costs had more than doubled to around $10 billion. Things were about to get worse.

The October 2002 nuclear crisis on the Korean Peninsula was triggered when the U.S. claimed that, during a meeting in Pyongyang, North Korean First Vice Foreign Minister Kang Suk Ju confessed that North Korea was breaking the 1994 Framework Agreement by clandestinely pursuing an alternative highly enriched uranium (HEU) route to nuclear weapons production.

The result was that the U.S. cut off HFO deliveries and LWR construction was suspended, thus leaving the North Koreans no alternative but to reopen their Yongbyon plant, particularly since none of America's other promises had been kept.

It now turns out that the U.S. was on shaky ground. There was neither a transcript of Kang's statement nor any record of the meeting. The North Koreans claim that the vice foreign minister was misinterpreted, and that what he really said was that North Korea had the right to an HEU program -- not that it had such a program.

In Korean the difference is subtle, but rather than ask for clarification the representative of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff in the delegation to Pyongyang led an immediate walkout.

More important than what Kang said is the current status of Pyongyang's HEU program. Pakistan's foreign minister has never denied that A.Q. Khan, the head of Pakistan's nuclear program, provided North Korea with the blueprints for a HEU plant -- a prudent stance in view of the fact that Khan showered the plans on Iran, Libya and others. Khan may have added some sample gas centrifuges.

Yet some voices in the U.S. State Department have become increasingly skeptical of the program's existence. North Korea neither has obtained the aluminum to construct the thousands of gas centrifuges necessary to produce HEU nor -- most tellingly -- does it even have a reliable power station capable of providing enough electricity at constant current for a medium-size city.

However, as a result of the U.S. crying wolf, a cascade of events has threatened regional stability. The inevitable reopening of the Yongbyon plant enabled North Korea to reprocess fuel rods and, according to reports, extract enough weapons-grade plutonium to produce five or six nuclear weapons with the potential to produce another one every few months.

The knock-on effects of a nuclear North Korea threaten to destabilize the whole region. In the meantime, the U.S. has refused to engage in bilateral talks with Pyongyang and, instead, has used China to convene "six-party talks" with North and South Korea, Japan and Russia.

The U.S. administration is tightening the screws with talk of fixing a deadline for concluding the six-party negotiations, even though North Korea would almost certainly accept a new freeze in exchange for a restoration of HFO deliveries. That would prevent the crisis from deteriorating while a comprehensive step-by-step solution is pursued.

As for KEDO, the U.S. seems determined to kill it. The executive board will formally endorse a further year's suspension, but the U.S. has already announced it will not provide any funding for the costs of administration let alone suspension. The U.S. will also make a unilateral declaration that as far as it's concerned the KEDO project is dead.

South Korea and Japan want it to continue, but Japan, under pressure from public opinion, has said it will only fund the suspension costs if someone other than South Korea also makes a contribution.

This leaves the EU. Since the original suspension, the EU has paid the administration costs. Although the European Commission was reluctant to contribute toward suspension costs, the Commission and Parliament during the summer proposed spending 4 million euros.

But self-interest and parsimony are about to put the final nail in KEDO's coffin. In the Council of Ministers, the German Finance Ministry, against the advice of its Foreign Ministry, is saying no to save money. The French have joined because the nuclear industry did not receive the orders it had expected from KEDO.

For the cost of half a dozen London semis, Europe may lose the chance to enhance its status in Northeast Asia while letting the American neocons run amok in global diplomacy.

North Korea is an unlovable regime, but it is changing. The introduction of a market economy two years ago and the recent liberation of industry from state control bode well for those who see North Korea following a Vietnamese-style evolution.

More recent rumors of North Korea wanting to follow Iraq and apply for observer status at the World Trade Organization as well as reports that the Kim Jung Il cult is tailing off with the removal of his portraits from some public buildings all suggest that it is time to augment engagement rather than abandon it. Here Europe should lead rather than follow.

A very informative article. One or two caveats: it would have been more honest to point out the main reason why KEDO was falling apart by 2002, and better still to remind the reader that the US almost started a war on the Korean peninsula in 1994, as I mentioned in my first ever post on this blog. Still, Ford is good on the current diplomatic situation. I wonder if the EU has been warned off supporting KEDO by the US administration, given that they are indeed "determined to kill it" and not without influence in European elites.

It is also far from clear that introduction of a market economy in any conventional sense or liberation of industry from state control are on the agenda. Rather, I would expect North Korea to follow the Japanese state capitalist model of development, partly with its own capital, and partly by continuing to encourage inward investment from South Korea and Japan. If and when North Koreans get rid of the current regime they stand a good chance of being shielded from the worst effects of the WTO and IMF by South Korea, much as West Germany would hardly stand by and allow the economists to push East Germany into the third world after reunification.

Glyn Ford's homepage is here.

Reporters sans frontiers - Asia page

2004-12-08T02:08:00.000+01:00

Reporters Without Borders has an excellent website with huge amounts of information. Just since the start of this month, there are five news items relating to China on their Asia page:

7 December 2004

Cyberdissident Ouyang Yi released at the end of his sentence

Reporters Without Borders welcomed the release at the end of his sentence on 4 December of cyberdissident Ouyang Yi, who had been in prison for two years after setting up a pro-democracy website.

But the worldwide press freedom organisation protested that he was now serving a "second sentence", since he is banned from publishing for two years and will be under close police supervision. ...

6 December 2004

Arrest of poet and journalist Shi Tao

Reporters Without Borders condemned the arrest of journalist Shi Tao and urged the EU delegation to the 8 December EU-China summit in the Netherlands to press China's Premier Wen Jiabao to stop unfair arrests of journalists.

The worldwide press freedom organisation also called on the Chinese authorities to release Shi, arrested at his home in Taiyuan in Shanxi province in the north-east on 24 November 2004 for "disclosing confidential government information".

This latest arrest only adds to the relentless pressure suffered by journalists in China, the organisation said. ...

Five resign from editorial board in solidarity with dismissed magazine editor

Five of the six members of the board that provides editorial advice and recommendations to the magazine Tong Zhou Gong Jin ("Solidarity in the same boat") have resigned in protest against editor Xiao Weibin's dismissal on 2 September.

All local political figures known for pro-reform positions, the five announced their resignation on 18 October. Their names disappeared from the magazine's organisation chart in November. They are Ren Zhongyi, the former Communist Party chief in Guangzhou, Wu Nansheng, Zheng Qun, Qi Feng and Yang Yingbin.

Xiao, who had been a member of the magazine's editorial board since its creation in 1988, was fired for publishing an interview with Ren in which he advocated political reforms and criticised the authorities for censoring the print media and Internet. ...

3 December 2004

Reporters Without Borders backs European Coalition appeal not to lift China arms embargo

Open Letter to the European Union from the European Coalition Against the Lifting the EU's Embargo on Weapons Sales to China

Friday 3 December 2004 :

In the lead up to the seventh EU-China Summit on 8 December 2004 in The Hague, our organisations call on the EU to retain the weapons sales embargo on China. An end to the embargo cannot be justified without significant improvement of human rights in China.

We regret that some European Union leaders have seemingly dismissed the repeated concerns of the European Parliament, human rights groups and the citizens of Europe by indicating that they are "ready to give a positive signal to China" with regard to lifting its embargo on weapons sales.

The arms embargo was imposed as a direct response to the Tiananmen Square massacre in June 1989 and following the similarly brutal quelling of civil unrest by the People's Liberation Army (PLA) in Tibet in the same year. The international outrage over the killings and arrests of thousands of students and workers by the PLA prompted the European countries to react with firmness.

Any lifting of the arms embargo would potentially lead to European weapons technology being used to suppress peaceful resistance by the people of Tibet, East Turkistan (now known as the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region), Inner Mongolia, against Taiwan, or end up in the hands of the North Korean, Burmese and/or Sudanese military, who are privileged recipients of Chinese arms. ...

Reformist journalists and intellectuals punished and censored

Reporters Without Borders has alerted the European delegation to the EU-China summit in the Netherlands on 8 December that China has launched a new crackdown against reformists.

The Propaganda Department blacklisted six renowned political commentators from the state-owned press in November 2004. The authorities have also curbed coverage on the role of intellectuals in the development of China. Journalist Wang Guangze has been sacked under official pressure.

As Prime Minister Wen Jiabao attends the EU-China summit, a new wave of censorship and repression has been unleashed, said the worldwide press freedom organisation.

These sanctions from another age, sidelining liberals from political life, threatened to damage the credibility of reforms instituted by Wen Jibao's government, it said.

Some 25 Chinese journalists and 62 cyberdissidents are currently imprisoned, the organisation pointed out. ...

2 December 2004

Journalist Yu Dongyue reportedly loses his mind after being tortured

Reporters Without Borders called today on European Commission President José Manuel Barroso to use the upcoming EU - China Summit to urge the Chinese authorities to free journalist Yu Dongyue after reports that he has gone insane as a result of being tortured in prison.

The worldwide press freedom organisation expressed shock at the news, which came from another Chinese dissident and friend, who said Yu had been tortured and harassed by his guards. "Very lengthy imprisonment of dissidents is a feature of the repression in China and it is vital that this should be raised at the Summit," it said.

"The release last week of journalist and dissident Liu Jingsheng is sadly eclipsed by the plight of Yu, whose situation shows that ill-treatment continues in China's prisons despite the government's efforts to hide its terrible human rights record."

Dissident Lu Decheng, who demonstrated at the time of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, recently told Radio Free Asia after escaping from China that he had visited Yu in prison and that he was "barely recognisable." He had "a totally dull look in his eyes, kept repeating words over and over as if he was chanting a matra. He didn't recognise anyone," Lu said.

"He had a big scar on the right side of his head. A fellow prisoner said Yu had been tied to a electricity pole and left out in the hot sun for several days. He was also kept in solitary confinement for two years and that was what broke him." ...

In the face of such horror, it is hard not to feel powerless. One small practical step is to sign the petition for the release of Huang Qi, here. You may help to save a life.

Huang Qi, tortured in prison

When state security police came to arrest Huang Qi at his home on 3 June 2000, he just had time to send a last e-mail message saying : "Goodbye everyone, the police want to take me away. We've got a long road ahead of us. Thanks to all those helping to further democracy in China."

Huang, founder of the website www.tianwang.com, waited for nearly three years before finding out he had been sentenced to five years in prison for "subversion" and "incitement to overthrow the government." He was accused of allowing articles about the June 1989 Tiananmen massacre to appear on his website (based in the United States after being banned in China).

Cyber-dissident Huang, worn out by prison interrogators and bad detention conditions, fainted at the first court hearing in February 2001. A Western diplomat who was present said he had a scar on his forehead and had lost a tooth after being beaten by guards. The trial was adjourned when International Olympics Committee officials came to Beijing to look at the city's candidacy to host the 2008 Olympics. Beijing was awarded the Games a few months later.

He is held at the high security prison of Chuan Zhong (near Nanchong, 200 kilometres east of Chengdu). Many blows to the groin have left him impotent and he regularly finds blood in his urine. The police forced him to sleep on the bare floor for a year. He was also kept handcuffed in a dark room for one year.

He told his wife he did not think he would be released at the end of his sentence. He said he was afraid he would "disappear".

Click here to go to the petition

Following Google self-censorship, China censors Google's English News

2004-12-08T01:17:00.000+01:00

At the end of September it was widely reported (including here) that Google's Chinese news page did not present items that were blocked by the Chinese authorities. Now it has emerged that China is blocking Google's English news site.

The Epoch Times reports:

The popular online search engine company Google launched its Chinese news service. A few weeks later, China began a massive firewall blockade of English language news, according to Paris-based Reporters without Borders.

“China is censoring Google News to force Internet users to use the Chinese version of the site, which has been purged of the most critical news reports,” Reporters Without Borders said. “By agreeing to launch a news service that excludes publications disliked by the government, Google has let itself be used by Beijing.” ...

There's also a BBC article on this:

... China is believed to extend greater censorship over the net than any other country in the world.

A net police force monitors websites and e-mails, and controls on gateways connecting the country to the global internet are designed to prevent access to critical information.

Popular Chinese portals such as Sina.com and Sohu.com maintain a close eye on content and delete politically sensitive comments.

And all 110,000 net cafes in the country have to use software to control access to websites considered harmful or subversive. ...

I suspect that North Korea allows much less web access than China, but I suppose the BBC are technically right to say that China censors more: in North Korea it is simply forbidden to connect to the net at all.

Reporters Without Borders' press release is here:

Reporters Without Borders today condemned the action of the Chinese authorities in blocking access to Google's news website, Google News, for the past ten days or so, starting a few weeks after the launch of an expurgated Chinese-language version of Google News.

The press freedom organisation also urged the US company to react by stopping the filtering of its Chinese-language site and opening it to the news banned by Beijing. ...

Japanese schools to indoctrinate children

2004-12-07T16:46:00.000+01:00

In two ways, reported in two Japan Times articles. First, patriotism is going to be written into the national curriculum, secondly, a far-right 'historian' has been appointed to the education board of Saitama, a prefecture near Tokyo.
The first article reports remarks by Shinzo Abe:

Shinzo Abe, deputy secretary general of the Liberal Democratic Party, said Monday that patriotism should be clearly stated in the revised Fundamental Law of Education.

"It is only natural for a person who is brought up in Japan to love the country," he said. "Why can't we write it" into law?

"The spirit in which (Japanese) have held on so lovingly to the Constitution and the Fundamental Law of Education, which were created when we were occupied by the Allied forces and before we became independent, only proves that we are still under the mind control of the Occupation forces," Abe said, referring to the 1945-1952 U.S.-led Allied Occupation of Japan.

A panel of the LDP and its coalition ally, New Komeito, has been working on ways to refer to patriotism in the education law, stirring public concerns over a possible revival of nationalism, as seen under the nation's military rule before and during World War II.

In June, the panel compiled an interim report that used two alternate expressions to refer to patriotism. One used the phrase "love one's country" and the other used "treasure one's country."

The second article covers the appointment of Takahashi Shiro to the Saitama prefecture board of education.

The Saitama Prefectural Government will nominate to its board of education one of the authors of a controversial history textbook criticized for having a nationalist bias, it was learned Monday.

Shiro Takahashi, a Meisei University professor and former deputy chairman of the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform, has agreed to take up the post at the request of Saitama Gov. Kiyoshi Ueda.

The governor will make the recommendation to the prefectural assembly Dec. 20.

Takahashi would be the first senior member of the group that penned the contentious textbook to sit on a prefectural education panel, according to group members.

Ueda and Takahashi are acquaintances, and the governor asked the professor to join the panel in October, according to the scholar, who added that he replied that he was willing to accept.

Takahashi was a founding member of the textbook group and was its deputy chairman from 1999 to last month, when he quit because he "would be required to be neutral as a member of an education board," he said.

But Takahashi added that he does not intend to leave the group.

In September, Ueda praised the group's history textbook, calling it a "new exercise that stimulates the education community as a whole."

The textbook, published by Fuso Publishing Co., has been criticized for lacking a reference to "comfort women," and for portraying World War II in the Pacific theater as a war "aimed at liberating other Asian countries."

During the war, Japan used a large number of women, mostly from Korea, as sex slaves for its soldiers.

The textbook passed the education ministry screening in April 2001, adding fuel to a fierce domestic debate on how Japan's history should be portrayed in school texts.

Activists for Japanese-Latin Americans interned in WWII

2004-12-07T00:55:00.000+01:00

It has become well known that the US interned many people of Japanese origin during the second world war. It is not so well known that many of these internees were actually citizens of countries in South America, some of whom were deported to Japan. Others were not allowed by their own countries to return after the war. There's an article about it on the Japan Times site, coinciding with the visit to Japan of activists from the US campaigning for compensation and an apology equal to that given to Japanese internees.

Three U.S. activists assisting Japanese-Latin Americans interned during World War II urged Japan and public Thursday to heighten their awareness of the issue and support their quest for more redress from Washington.

Grace Shimizu, a founding member of the California-based Campaign for Justice, said former Japanese-Latin American internees have not received "a proper apology and acknowledgment" from the U.S. government for the violation of their human rights.

Shimizu, a daughter of a former Japanese-Peruvian internee, and two other group members are visiting Japan to boost information about their efforts to help Japanese-Latin Americans living here, and to show a 28-minute documentary featuring a former Japanese-Peruvian internee.

The United States forcibly took 2,264 men, women and children of Japanese ancestry from 13 Central and South American countries to internment camps in the U.S. between 1941 and 1945, according to the group, which was founded in 1996 by former internees and their families.

More than 800 of these internees were deported to Japan during the war in exchange for U.S. prisoners of war taken by Japan, it said. After the war, 900 out of some 1,800 Japanese-Peruvian internees came to Japan and another 300 remained in the U.S., because the Peruvian government refused to let them return, it added.

In 1998, the U.S. government and the Japanese-Latin Americans reached an out-of-court settlement that included compensatory payments of $5,000 per internee and a letter of apology from then U.S. President Bill Clinton.

However, given that Washington decided in 1988 to give $20,000 to each Japanese-American interned during the war, several former internees opted out of the agreement and are calling for equal reparations and the establishment a fund to help educate people about the events.

"We would like to inform the (Japanese) public" about what happened to the Japanese-Latin Americans, Shimizu said.

The group also said it wants to draw more attention to other related forms of discrimination still being exercised in the U.S., including the way Muslims were treated immediately after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

"What's really important is also to have dialogue within a society about the issues that are raised here (regarding the internment issue) so that people can see how things in the past are tied to issues of the present day," Shimizu said.

The group said it hopes to win more support for its cause from the international community by expanding grassroots education activities and filing a petition at the Inter-American International Commission on Human Rights, which promotes rights with the Organization of American States

Ukraine, Russia and Asia

2004-12-07T00:54:00.000+01:00

"Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire. Russia without Ukraine can still strive for imperial status, but it would then become a predominantly Asian imperial state, more likely to be drawn into debilitating conflicts with aroused Central Asians, who would then be resentful of the loss of their recent independence and would be supported by their fellow islamic states to the south. China would also be likely to oppose any restoration of Russian domination over Central Asia, given its increasing interest in the newly independent states there. However, if Moscow regains control over Ukraine, with its 52 million people and major resources, as well as its access to the Black Sea, Russia automatically again regains the wherewithal to become a powerful imperial state, spanning Europe and Asia."

- Zbigniew Brzezinski, on page 92 of the Grand Chessboard, 1997, a book whose main thesis is that the US "must perpetuate [its] own dominant position for at least a generation and preferably longer" (quoted on backcover), in the world, and therefore on its strategically most important continent, Eurasia, where "it is imperative that no Eurasian challenger emerges, capable of dominating Eurasia and thus also of challenging America" (p. xiv). Brzezinski was National Security Adviser in the late 1970s and boasted (in an interview with Nouvel Observateur magazine in 1998) that US intervention in Afghanistan at that time had drawn the USSR into an unwinnable war. He found this entirely justifiable, since it undermined the Soviet Union, regardless of the human costs to Afghans, Russians and others (thus displaying the same moral - i.e. immoral - stupidity as supposed leftists who now joyfully chant 'George Bush, Uncle Sam, Iraq will be your Vietnam').

All of which is just to say that Brzezinski is an extremely immoral agent, an man who acted to preserve and deepen US global hegemony not despite the suffering caused, but absolutely regardless of it. He is also well-informed, intelligent and generally realistic (he is not a neo-con like Wolfowitz or Perle). So what he says about Ukraine may be worth our attention.

Brzezinski classes Ukraine as a geopolitical pivot (along with Azerbaijan, Turkey, South Korea and Iran). These are "states whose importance is derived not from their power and motivation but rather from their sensitive location and the consequences of their potentially vulnerable condition for the behaviour of geopolitical players" (p. 41). That is, they are the vital squares on the 'Eurasian chessboard', control over which will improve the position of the only real players, countries like the US, Russia, China, France and Germany, whose 'reach exceeds [their] grasp' (p. 40, quoting Robert Browning).

Brzezinski's thesis makes some sense of the concentrated focus on the Ukrainian election - and subsequent popular revolution - from Russia on one side and the US on the other, with both 'players' making resources available via front organisations like (on the US side) Freedom House. It is worth noting in passing that Russia's involvement on the side of Yanukovitch had them supporting the chosen successor of Kuchma, a politician who had made his country's independence from Russia clear and thereby encouraged independent action among smaller post-Soviet states. Russia was fighting a rearguard action, in other words. The US, on the other hand, is pushing forwards, and with its military bases in Central Asia since late 2001 (after Brzezinski was writing) is leaving Russia with no sphere of influence. (But see this Japan Focus article about the multi-billion dollar China-Iran gas deal for argument that the situation in Central Asia is multipolar - between the US, China, Russia and Iran, I suppose, in order from global to regional players.)

One might wonder if Russia would try to project power in North-East Asia since it is blocked to its west and south. I doubt that it has the ability to do this. Those who still see things, inadvertently, in Cold War terms, should note that, as President Roh of South Korea says, it is China which is sustaining North Korea, wishing to avoid the consequences of its collapse. The most influence Russia has been able to bring to bear on the region is probably in ongoing negotiations over whether a gas pipeline will go to China or to the Russian coast near to Japan. Nonetheless, it is likely that loss of influence in a key state on Russia's west side will have implications for Russia's objectives and policies on its other borders.

Tokyo prosecutes pensioner activist

2004-12-04T15:14:00.000+01:00

A retired teacher in Tokyo, Fujita Katsuhisa, is being prosecuted for activism by the city government. He handed out fliers and asked parents at a high-school graduation ceremony not to stand for the national anthem. According to the prosecutors he said: "I ask for your understanding, and if possible, I would like to ask you to stay seated," which makes him sound rather sweet, but to the ultra-right Tokyo administration he is, no doubt, a dangerous radical.

I've written here before (Amnesty asks Japanese gov't not to force anthem or flag on schools) about the sanctions taken against teachers who have the guts not to stand during the national anthem, noting that racist Tokyo governor Ishihara Shintaro's administration is in the lead in persecuting public servants for acting according to their consciences, as the Japan Times report on Fujita's case confirms:

On Oct. 23 last year, the board of education issued an order requiring metropolitan government-run schools, including schools for disabled people, to display the Hinomaru national flag and to sing "Kimigayo," unofficially translated as "His Majesty's Reign," during enrollment and graduation ceremonies.

The board stipulated that teachers who failed to comply with the order would be subject to penalties, prompting criticism that the move violates freedom of thought and conscience as provided for under the Constitution.

The Japan Times report also mentions that Fujita says he didn't disrupt the graduation ceremony - unless handing out fliers and talking to parents counts, I guess - and his lawyers note that the District Prosecutor's office, which issued the indictment, didn't interview Fujita first, breaking with standard procedure.

Legal cases in Japan run very slowly, so this one is likely to take years, unless pressure can be brought to bear on the Tokyo government so that they drop it. As a service to readers, here's an email address from the Tokyo Metropolitan Government website:

Please forward any comments, suggestions or opinions you may have regarding the Tokyo Metropolitan Government to us at: koe@metro.tokyo.jp

If you do email them, please be polite. I very much doubt this address goes directly to Ishihara, and I imagine that anyone working for him has a hard enough time without abuse from activists. The people I've met who work in local government in Japan have all been very helpful. They are motivated by considerations of public service, and the ones who learn English so they can work with non-Japanese speakers are usually enthusiastic internationalists, predictably.

I'll do my best to keep up with developments in the case here.

Kaohsiung Incident - anniversary; documentary

2004-12-04T01:29:00.000+01:00

The Kaohsiung Incident's 25th anniversary on 10th December should be marked in the English-speaking world, since it was an important pro-democracy demonstration. Inconveniently, though, what happened was part of a struggle against one of our military dictatorships, rather than a communist regime, so most Europeans and North Americans have never heard of it.

Newspapers and school history books tell us about Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968 and the massacre of the Tiananmen protestors in Beijing on June 4th 1989, but not the '228' massacre in Taiwan on February 28th 1947, in which at least 30,000 people were killed by the US-backed Nationalist forces (an archive of US sources is here), South Korea's Cheju uprising, which started in 1948 and in which mainland forces killed between 30,000 and 80,000 islanders, consolidating the grip on power of US favourite Syngman Rhee, or the April 1960 revolution which finally forced him from power, the massacre at Kwangju in South Korea in May 1980, when perhaps 2000 people died, Venezuela's Caracazo (February 1989) in which some 2000 were killed, riots against British rule in Hong Kong in 1952, '56, '66 and '67, or many others.

On 10th December 1979, police attacked a pro-democracy protest in Kaohsiung (高雄 - the second biggest city in Taiwan, after Taipei) then arrested a number of activists. Since the demonstration was partly organised by Formosa magazine, the Chinese name is Formosa (or 'beautiful island') incident: 美麗島事件.

According to Wikipedia, the incident followed

... the police raid of Formosa Magazine, an illegal publication designed to support the end of Kuomintang monopolization of power in Taiwan. The ROC Government Information Office under the leadership of James Soong hoped to chill opposition voices through heavyhanded methods. The protest disintegrated into a brawl as protesters, police and undercover agents collided. Soong addressed the public in a speech condemning the protesters, labelling one of the leaders, Shih Ming-teh, "King of Bandits."

The incident publicized the oppressive tactics of the government in ruling Taiwan and the trial of eight leaders of the protest allowed a team of lawyers to publicly question the practices of torture used by the KMT to extract confessions. Most defense attorneys and defendants were members of the Chinese Comparative Law Society (中國比較法學會), which is now the Taiwan Law Society (台灣法學會).

One of the accused, Lin Yi-Hsiung, was routinely tortured by police interrogators. Then, on February 28, 1980, while Lin's wife was discussing his case, Lin's mother and twin 7 year old girls were murdered in his home. The event, known as the "Lin Family Murders," remains unsolved.

Today the China Post reports:

The Eastern Multimedia Group... will release a documentary on a bloody crackdown on democracy activists 25 years ago crucial to the creation of Taiwan democracy.

The protest against martial law, known as the "Kaohsiung Incident", is a milestone in Taiwan's modern history — but paradoxically many Taiwanese are not familiar with it.

"We hope that from an objective viewpoint we can help the nation's people understand the real events and give a historic record of the most important event in Taiwan's democratization," said ETTV president Wang Lin-ling.

The protest challenged the harsh one party dictatorship first imposed on the island by the Kuomintang's Chiang Kai-shek after his forces fled from China and Mao Zedong's Communists in 1949.

"The Kaohsiung Incident ... started Taiwan's politics moving from one party rule towards a multiparty (system)

"It was a turning point in the process of Taiwan's democracy with a vast influence," Wang said.

For a long time the clash was shrouded in ignorance as martial law was not lifted until eight years after the event, newspapers for years exercised self-censorship and, until very recently, there were no plans to put it in official school text books.

The crackdown on the protest organized by opposition political leaders and the underground Formosa magazine to commemorate Human Rights Day on the evening of December 10, 1979 saw eight protest leaders jailed for their ideals and a further 33 tried in military courts.

Wang said the protesters experience of fighting for democracy against the odds was a lesson all Taiwanese could learn from.

"It will allow the younger generation to learn from Taiwan's past and deeply reflect on Taiwan's future," Wang said. The crackdown lead to the formation of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party seven years later, with many of the leaders of the historic protest now the nation's political luminaries.

Vice President Annette Lu, who delivered a 20-minute speech at the historical rally, was jailed by the regime until 1985. President Chen Shui-bian, as a young lawyer, also defended leaders in the protest movement.

ETTV played parts of the 100-minute documentary at a press conference yesterday attended by Lu, surrounded by over a score of security guards, and other former protest leaders, including former Democratic Progressive Party chairman, now independent legislative candidate Hsu Hsin-liang, Examination Yuan President Yao Chia-wen and DPP legislator Chang Chun-hong.

There is apparently an English language version of the documentary, which I'd very much like to see.

NKZone article - negative impact of North Korea Human Rights Act

2004-10-09T00:14:00.000+02:00

I posted this in response to an article on NKZone:

This item implies that viewing the

the North Korean Human Rights Act, recently passed by the Senate, as a violation of Korean sovereignty and "an excuse to invade."

as the DLP [South Korean Democratic Labour Party] does, is somehow incompatible with being in favour of the downfall of the North Korean regime.

But on the contrary, many people who would like to see regime change in North Korea and the chance for non-violent reunification of Korea also want to see a less bellicose approach from the US administration to the problems of the region. Historically, US Human Rights Acts and similar pieces of legislation _have_ been used as excuses to invade other countries, or to infiltrate them using the CIA, so it's not crazy to suppose that one or both of these will be among the consequences this time.

As the article about the DLP [that the NKZone article quoted] says,

"In particular, the DLP took examples of the Iraq Liberation Act and Iran Democracy Act and expressed concern that even within the NKHRA, there was a hidden U.S. intention to invade North Korea. In fact, the U.S. enacted the Iraq Liberation Act in 1998 with the intention of making the Saddam Hussein regime collapse, and five years later, the U.S. carried out its invasion of Iraq."

Something similar seems to be happening now with last December's "Syria Accountability Act" passed almost unanimously in Congress, and partially implemented by Bush on 11th May this year. There's criticism of Bush's imposition of sanctions by the right-wing Cato Institute here and a better piece on the leftist site, Counterpunch, here.

It's only good sense to oppose totalitarian regimes AND to oppose US foreign policy which seems likely - at best - to entrench the power of the dictator, and not unlikely to lead to violent confrontation, given the US's record. There's no inconsistency there, just the humanitarian/leftist principle of putting first the interests of the people likely to be most affected - in this case Koreans and others in the region.

Here's a summary of the Act, which was presented to the US president for his signature yesterday. Section (302) is pretty bizarre. I don't recall anyone saying during the cold war that East German refugees shouldn't be treated as citizens of West Germany if they wanted.

Rep. Lee Yeong-sun (second from right) and other DLP members short slogans protesting the passing of the NKHRA by the U.S. Senate in front of the U.S. embassy on Sejong-no, Thursday morning.

New cruise missiles for China

2004-10-06T23:05:00.000+02:00

Jane's email news service sent me this joyous news today:

China tests new land-attack cruise missile
China has test-fired a new land attack cruise missile (LACM) designated Dong Hai-10 (DH-10), or East China Sea-10, writes Wendell Minnick. A US defence source identified the DH-10 as a ground-launched second-generation LACM with a range of more than 1,500km. He said it is likely to be equipped with an integrated inertial navigation system/Global Positioning System, supplemented by a terrain contour mapping system and digital scene-matching terminal-homing system able to provide a circular error probable (CEP) of 10m. [Jane's Missiles & Rockets - first posted to http://jmr.janes.com (You can't read the article on their website unless you subscribe to Jane's - and I'd be amazed - and amused - if anyone reading this blog did.)- 22 September 2004]

See how they've called it the East Sea missile - a nice touch, that, just in case Taiwan can't read between the lines. Also good for Japanese nationalists who would like to rearm. (The Japanese military, for all of its faults, doesn't have missile systems capable of hitting targets in other countries: but there has been some debate about it in the last week...)

Another point to consider is whether this will convince EU leaders who want to lift the arms embargo on China that perhaps there are enough weapons in East Asia already. ... I doubt it too.There was a demonstration on 1st October in Taipei (that is, purposely on China's national day) calling for the EU to keep its sanctions. China already has some 600 missiles aimed at Taiwan, or so Taiwanese sources report. Germany's chancellor Schroeder, the UK's PM Blair, and, particularly, France's president Chirac want to start selling weapons to the Chinese. The US administration is against the lifting of the sanctions.

Discrimination limits Chinese tourism in Japan

2004-10-05T01:34:00.000+02:00

An interesting op-ed piece in the Japan Times picks up on a report on NHK TV's Tokuho Shutoken (i.e. 'Capital Newsflash', I think):

Discrimination keeps Chinese tourists at bay
By PHILIP BRASOR
Japan's neglect of its tourism potential could be called a sidelight of its overall self-image. On the international stage, Japan sees itself as culturally impenetrable and overpriced. Moreover, the xenophobia that many people accuse it of fostering has become accepted by the citizens as a national trait, even by those people who object to xenophobia on principle.
...
Since Japan prides itself on being one of the most powerful economies in the world, it tends to look upon tourism as a secondary industry, or at least not as important as IT, kaigo (nursing care), or other vanguard industries that have received government stimulation. In terms of tourist volume, Japan is 35th in the world (France is No. 1) and ninth in Asia. However, the government not only neglects international tourism, in some sectors it seems to be purposely discouraging it, despite the 3.2 billion yen it has spent on the "Visit Japan" campaign.
The sector that's been most neglected is China. Since 1994, the average annual growth rate in the number of Chinese people traveling abroad has been 14 percent, culminating in 20 million overseas Chinese travelers in 2002 alone. The World Tourism Organization predicts that 100 million Chinese will be going abroad in 2020. Given China's population and economic development, this shouldn't be surprising. What is surprising is that Japan, one of its closest neighbors both geographically and culturally, isn't taking advantage of this.
And the main reason is good old-fashioned institutionalized xenophobia. Most industrialized countries in the world require visas for Chinese tourists, but Japan limits those visas to residents of certain "economic zones." In 2000, the Justice Ministry specified these zones as Beijing, Shanghai and Canton Province. This year, they've added four provinces and one city.
Apparently, the Land, Infrastructure and Transport Ministry, which deals with tourism, wanted to add even more zones, but the Justice Ministry and the National Police Agency opposed the plan, saying that there is still a danger of Chinese jumping their group tours and staying in Japan illegally. According to their figures, of the 95,000 tourists who have come to Japan from China since 2000, 362 didn't go back.
Last month, NHK's evening news magazine, "Tokuho Shutoken," looked at Chinese tourism. The show pointed out that Chinese can only obtain tourist visas as members of package tours and that they must produce five documents and a 500,000 yen security deposit when they apply.
However, the restrictions that really matter are those that may take place during the tour itself. The program looked at one tour group of Chinese bankers who were visiting Osaka. The Chinese guide, who lives in Japan, was constantly taking head counts and imploring her charges not to wander. The group was limited to only one store for shopping, and when the members checked into their hotel they had to trade their passports for room keys. There was also a 10 p.m. curfew.
It sounded more like a trip to North Korea, but one should keep in mind that these are the practices of that particular travel agency, not rules laid down by the Japanese government. By focusing on only one tour, NHK was being misleading -- anyone who walks through Ginza these days will certainly run into unsupervised Chinese tourists. The point is that travel agencies who deal with Chinese tourists bear responsibility for anyone who stays behind. According to the program, an agency can have its license suspended or even revoked if tour groups return to China lighter than they were when they left. The government's paranoia may be the source of an agency's Draconian measures, but it's obvious the tour company singled out by NHK doesn't trust Chinese, even when they have money and no logical reason to stay behind.

I removed this paragraph from the text (after the first paragraph above) because it seems only to damage the argument:

In terms of tourism, these qualities can be expressed statistically. According to financial writer Main Koda in the Asahi Shimbun, in 1964, the year that Japan first allowed its citizens to travel abroad, 128,000 Japanese went overseas while 353,000 foreigners visited here. By 1972, the year of the Osaka Expo, these numbers had been reversed, and the gap has increased ever since. In 2003, more than 13 million Japanese traveled abroad, while only about 5 million people visited Japan. This imbalance is translated as a 3.5 trillion yen trade deficit in the area of tourism.

Japan became much richer and much more expensive between 1964 and 1972 - that could account for all of the difference.

"3,000" at Naha rally against US bases

2004-10-04T00:49:00.000+02:00

From the Japan Times:

3,000 rally in Okinawa seeking closure of Futenma base

NAHA, Okinawa Pref. (Kyodo) About 3,000 people staged a rally here Saturday to call for the closure of the nearby U.S. Marine Corps Futenma Air Station following the crash of a helicopter at a university in Ginowan, Okinawa Prefecture, in August.

"We're not looking for lip service, but concrete action -- that is, the return of (the land of) Futenma," said Tokushin Yamauchi, head of the rally organizers, in reference to Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's remarks Friday over a plan to relocate U.S. military bases from Okinawa to other parts of Japan.

Koizumi said in a speech in Tokyo that the national government will start efforts to relocate U.S. military bases from heavily burdened Okinawa to other locations in Japan.

Regarding Futenma, Koizumi told reporters after his speech he will continue with the government's plan to relocate the air station's functions to a military-civilian airport to be built off Nago, also in Okinawa.

Participants at the gathering called for the suspension of a seabed drilling survey off Nago that began Sept. 9 in preparation for the offshore facility.

Google China helps Chinese government to censor the web

2004-10-01T02:22:00.000+02:00

The excellent independent Chinese news site, The Epoch Times, reveals that

An Internet monitoring group has discovered that the Chinese-language version of The Epoch Times and other independent Chinese news media are not available inside China on the popular search engine Google.

The censorship was discovered by Bill Xia and volunteers at his company, Dynamic Internet Technology.

When asked about the implications of this issue, Xia told The Epoch Times, 'I'm worried that Google is bowing to the pressure from the Chinese government. That's a bad thing. For the users in China, this will reinforce China's media control in creating a fake reality. I call it the China Matrix.' According to Google spokesperson Debbie Frost, the search engine chooses not to display results for sites that are unavailable in China. 'Google has decided that in order to create the best possible search experience for our mainland China users we will not include sites whose content is not accessible, as their inclusion does not provide a good experience for our News users who are looking for information,' she said in a written statement. This explanation worries Xia, who says, 'Even though those websites are themselves blocked, the title and description presented when the search results are returned on Google are very important. It helps Chinese people see that there is something beyond what they are shown by media in China. By blocking that information, it creates an illusion that the whole world is in line with Chinese state-run media.'

An editorial on the Epoch Times goes into the implications:

Josh McHugh in the January 2003 edition of Wired discussed Google's maxim of 'Don't be evil.' This is a pretty good saying, but complicated to carry out, he pointed out, when dealing with, among other things, repressive regimes like China. Many in the U.S., both in government and in the corporate world have the idea that if we do business with a corrupt government, then we'll reform them. It hasn't worked out that way in China. It seems the opposite happens, and the government corrupts you. Yahoo a few years back complied with the PRC's censoring. Cisco equipment forms the backbone of China's Great Firewall. Google had a choice to make when it started its version of Google News for China. It could have displayed all possible news outlets and let the Chinese government make its own choices. Or it could have filtered out sites blocked by the Chinese government. It chose the latter. Google may have thought it was benefiting the user by not showing sites that can't be accessed. But is this true? When you search on Google News, you get a summary of the article. For example, if I search for 'Google news' a number of the results are about the Google 'censoring' issue. From just reading the summaries, you get a sense of what's going on. In China, you don't get that sense, because sites are omitted. Which sites? I asked Google for a list, but was not given them. So in China you get a false sense of reality. Bill Xia of DIT talks about the China Matrix. As in the movie, The Matrix, where people took as real the world presented to them. The official goal for Google News China is 'providing the user with the best search experience possible.' To me, ensuring a 'best search experience' sounds a bit too much like what the Matrix has to offer. What if I'm searching for the truth? Each individual has a choice. Do we want to know the truth or do we want to live in ignorance? Google's decision to censor hinders the ability to make that choice. If Google News would show search results from banned websites then people in China would have an idea that there is something beyond the China Matrix. And then they might try to find the truth

"Don't be evil." It sounds so good, and then someone offers you power and influence... in this case, access to the Chinese market. One more comment: I like the idea of people in the US government and US companies hoping to reform the Chinese government. I'm sure they do hope to do this, but I doubt that most of the reforms they have in mind are the ones Chinese citizens would like...

Anyway, now we have the interesting spectacle of the Chinese government corrupting a US company (or exposing the latent corruption that was there all along) to add to the long history of Western governments and corporations corrupting China. (Anyone remember the East India Company or Jardine and Matheson?) I'm thinking here of pure malevolence like two Opium Wars, the suppression of the Taiping Rebellion, the unequal treaties and forced concession of territory, of course, but also of the presumably unintended consequences of imperial muscle. (One example would be the British anti-piracy drive in the South China Sea in the 1840s which drove pirates inland, making life hell for people living on southern Chinese rivers.)

Anyway, for the moment, I guess our job is to email Google and get them to change policy. If you live in a Western democracy your chances of going to gaol for doing so are just about zero--unlike Chinese cyber-dissidents.

The Chinese government also blocks other informative websites--including this one, perhaps, since it's hosted by blogspot. (See this column from The South China Morning Post, Jan 2003.)

And in North Korea, even computer scientists don't have access to the internet--although Kim Jong Il does, apparently, and is a big fan.

There's more reaction to the Google story, with links, at chinaweb.

Alex Higgins on the Beijing Olympics

2004-10-01T00:35:00.000+02:00

Alex Higgins has posted a fantastic article on the human-rights abuses associated with the Beijing Olympics on his Bring on the Revolution blog. As usual, I reproduce the whole thing here because you have to scroll a lot to find it on his blog.

Olympic Spirit The 2004 Athens games ended with some embarassment and controversy, but on the whole the Greek government had succeeded in pulling off the organisation of the games despite the criticisms and fears. In the run up to the Athens' games, there were many alarmed press reports as to whether the organisers would complete the necessary facilities on time, often with a tone of contempt for the Greeks thrown in. Oddly, there is, as yet, much less controversy over the preparations for the 2008 Olympics which are due to be held in Beijing. On its website, the International Olympics Committee gushes excitedly:

"a Beijing Games would leave a unique legacy to China and to sports. The Commission is confident that Beijing could organise an excellent Games".

A link below this reassurance offers us - "Find out more on the election of Beijing". The 'election of Beijing' - now there's an interesting turn of phrase. Human Rights Watch, which has launched a campaign - Olympics Watch - reports on the preparations underway to make China's capital ready:

China’s rapid urban development, fueled in Beijing by preparations for the 2008 Olympics, is leading to the eviction of homeowners and tenants in violation of Chinese law and international standards on the right to housing. In many cities, Chinese local authorities and developers are forcibly evicting hundreds of thousands of homeowners and tenants who have little legal recourse. Evicted residents left with few avenues of redress have increasingly taken to the streets to protest, where they have met police repression.

An earlier HRW report on forcible evictions in Beijing begins with this story:

"At 8:45 on the morning of September 15, 2003, forty-five-year-old farmer Zhu Zhengliang and his wife sat down in Tiananmen Square under the portrait of Mao Zedong. As his wife quietly watched, Zhu doused himself with gasoline and set himself alight. Police stationed in the square rushed to his aid, and Zhu was hospitalized in Beijing with minor burns on his arms and back. According to news reports, Zhu attempted self-immolation to protest his family’s forced eviction from their home in a rural region of Anhui province.'Zhu’s was the most prominent, but by no means the only, attempted suicide to protest forced evictions in China in 2003. In August, a Nanjing city man who returned from a lunch break one day to find his home demolished, set himself afire and burned to death at the office of the municipal demolition and eviction department. In September, resident Wang Baoguang burned himself to death while being forcibly evicted in Beijing. On October 1, China’s National Day, Beijing resident Ye Guoqiang attempted suicide by jumping from Beijing’s Jinshui bridge to protest his forced eviction forconstruction related to the 2008 Beijing Olympics.5 These suicides and attemptedsuicides were the most dramatic in a wave of almost daily protests that swept cities across China from September to December 2003."

In a courageous open letter to the Chinese government, a lawyer and tenants' rights advocate, Xu Yonghai, explained:

"Demolition and eviction has several decades of history in China. In the past, ordinary people longed for demolition and eviction [because they were moved to better homes], but now ordinary people fear demolition and eviction, they hate [it], and even use death and suicide to oppose [it]... This hatred, this opposition to demolition and eviction has really only appeared in the last few years."

The reasons for this change is that many Beijing residents can no longer expect to receive compensation when their homes are demolished and the demolition itself is often a callous and violent process with armed gangs carrying out evictions and bulldozers starting their work before people leave the area. Faster, higher, stronger! as the Olympic motto goes. Xu Yonghai has since been imprisoned for "circulating state secrets" (i.e. faxing the above to a human rights organisation). Oh Lord, these people annoy the hell out of me.Athletes are not the only people who will be working faster, higher, stronger. In the deformed worker's state, as some still like to call it, the workers are forbidden to strike or form independent labour unions:

"Many workers also lack minimal health and safety protections and adequate wages. Many are compelled to work long hours. Some contract workers may not even be paid by factories for the work they have done. 'Because they lack the right to organize independently, Chinese workers also lack effective ways to resolve these problems in the workplace. Many workers who have organized protests and demonstrations to improve conditions or demand compensation for injuries in the workplace, as well as those who have demanded unpaid wages and unpaid pensions and severance pay, have faced severe state repression. The ACFTU [government-approved trade union body] has never spoken out against the laws and regulations routinely used to justify imprisoning independent labor activists." (emphasis added)

HRW adds that international companies involved in the Olympics preparations are "generally required to abide by these conditions" - as if they needed to be forced into screwing their workforce! In reality, many multinational corporations love China precisely because its one-party dictatorship is so good for business.Such criminal conduct by the Chinese government helps to expose the fanciful notion that holding the Olympic games in China will help to usher in a new age of political pluralism for the self-serving guff that it is. In electing Beijing, the IOC has made one of its worst decisions since going ahead with the 1936 Olympics in the Berlin of Hitler's Germany.Dictatorships use international sporting events to give themselves legitimacy and to divert attention from social problems, of which China has many. Furthermore, they are aware of the potential for dissenters to use the international media presence to tell the world what goes on in the country's dark corners and respond by taking pre-emptive measures.In one notorious example, the World Cup in 1978 was held in Argentina, then run by a military junta made up of outright Nazis. In the run-up to the international football tournament, the regime stepped up the imprisonemnt and torture and killed hundreds of people, drugging them, tying them up and dropping them out of aeroplanes into the Rio Grande to ensure the World Cup went smoothly. Argentina's team went on to win the cup - now there's a story to warm the heart.Can we expect a similar crackdown in China faced with democrats, persecuted religious minorities, Tibetans, and hundreds of millions of poor people who have had enough? In China a security crackdown is something that might make even John Ashcroft or David Blunkett blink - as with what Amnesty International described as an "execution frenzy" a few years ago when the regime decided to punish criminal offences such as corruption and prostitution with the enthusiastic use of the death penalty.A woman is led to her execution following a crackdown on crime in 1999 Some human rights groups have got together to produce a set of minimal demands that the Chinese government should be obliged to meet before being permitted to host the Olympic Games. Failing that - and this is likely - we should boycott these games. Occasionally in the West our governments go through the motions of pretending to deplore the Chinese government's human rights record or the occupation of Tibet. More usually, they are fairly open about the fact that they don't care (and that they have written off Tibet). The rest of us need to decide whether we share that view. HRW: "There are many ways that people outside of China can support Chinese rights activists—by writing a letter to the government, using the Internet to help Chinese citizens get around censorship restrictions, or by linking up with other Chinese and international activists to help build the movement." It would be wonderful for China to have the Olympics at some point in the future, but not under the current regime. For more information, see the Olympic Watch website.

Sex discrimination and harassment at a US base

2004-09-30T21:50:00.000+02:00

From (yet another) Japan Times article:

A former TV anchorwoman at the U.S. Navy's Yokosuka Base [in Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan] has accused the base command of failing to address what she calls a hostile work environment that allows "nonstop harassment and reprisals."

Sharon StephensonPino claims she has been repeatedly retaliated against, demoted and suspended, and was finally forced out of her job earlier this month because of a sexual harassment complaint she filed against her immediate supervisor.

Her complaint is corroborated by another ex-employee:

Others familiar with this case say StephensonPino is not the only victim.

Foremost is her former colleague, Brian Hammond, who claims he was removed for trying to support her. A technical director for "The Yokosuka Report," Hammond said he testified "whenever investigations came" and wrote letters to the base command in efforts to help her.

When one of his affidavits was revealed last October, Hammond said, he was given a letter, signed by the base commander, notifying him that his contract would not be renewed and would end last January.

Like StephensonPino, Hammond said the supervisor had given him an exemplary record, and he had won many navy awards for his work, which included developing a system to upload TV programs on the Web site.

Hammond said he filed an EEO [Equal Employment Opportunity] complaint in protest, but it was dismissed by the base's EEO office after only the supervisor and another person he identified were interviewed.

"I am done with this place," Hammond recalls thinking, adding "it would look better on my resume if I quit on my own" instead of being fired.

... read the rest of the article

Takato Nahoko: former hostage, still an aid-worker

2004-09-30T21:39:00.000+02:00

Japan Focus has an interesting article about Takato Nahoko, one of the three Japanese people taken hostage in Iraq earlier this year. They were criticised at the time by the Japanese government and media.

Takato talks about her nightmarish ordeal, as well as disclosing details of the diary she has kept since visiting Iraq for the first time, in "Senso to Heiwa: Soredemo Iraku-jin o Kirai ni Narenai'' (War and peace: Even now I can't hate the Iraqi people; Kodansha). [I have corrected the article's translation of the title.]
Since the book was published early last month, Takato and her family have received letters from people apologizing for criticizing her and misunderstanding her good intentions, she says. The senders were, of course, referring to the "personal responsibility'' that the Japanese government demanded from the hostages.
Although Takato says she has always been aware of the need to take responsibility upon entering war zones, she felt that she and the government didn't see eye to eye on exactly what "personal responsibility'' meant. But she intends to repay the government for her ticket from Baghdad to Dubai as soon as her lawyers settle other issues with the Foreign Ministry.

Prime Minister Koizumi has not apologised for his remarks which strongly suggested that he resented the trouble the hostages had put him to. Pretty arrogant for a public servant.

Also of interest are Takato's remarks about her background, not least for the light they shed on life in a fairly average Japanese town:

People still wonder why Takato risked her life to help the street children of Iraq. Quite simply, she saw herself in those children, she said in an interview after the Tokyo news conference. The kids, some as young as elementary school age, smoking cigarettes and inhaling paint thinner from dawn until dusk, reminded her of her own youth.
As a child, Takato was a troublemaker who started smoking at 12, got hooked on paint thinner at 13 and soon afterward tried hashish.
It wasn't until she moved to metropolitan Tokyo to attend university that she began to get an idea of what she wanted to do with her life.
"I used to hate children,'' says Takato, who admits she often risked being stabbed with a butterfly knife when she managed a karaoke joint in Chitose that served as a hangout for juvenile delinquents.
But ever since she set off to India on her first humanitarian mission at age 30 to give herself a break from the day-to-day grind of working at the karaoke club, she has found children in need of compassion and affection everywhere she has visited, including Cambodia, Thailand and Iraq. When she returns to Japan to earn travel expenses, she works at a ramen joint and at a cattle ranch.

Ironically, when she visits her hometown now it exacerbates the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder she is suffering from: "the roar of fighter planes and the sound of cannon fire at the nearby Self-Defense Forces Chitose Air Base, was like reliving the war in Iraq, she says."

Still, she has managed to achieve a lot since her release:

Though she hasn't yet set foot in Iraq again since her release, she returned to Amman, Jordan, for a month from the end of July to aid the Fallujah reconstruction effort. Between her April release and July, the 34-year-old aid worker helped establish the Iraq Hope Network, whose members include numerous Japanese volunteer groups and individuals, who share information and resources to enable more effective support.
With the help of local volunteers and nongovernmental organizations, the three former hostages and their families decided to contribute some of the 8 million yen in donations they received from benevolent Japanese to rebuild a school in Fallujah, she says. Creating jobs, especially for young men, and schools to keep children occupied will help keep them away from militia recruitment and the violent anti-American movement, she explains.

Chinese slave labourers win settlement from Japanese company

2004-09-30T21:17:00.000+02:00

The workers were abducted from Henan Province during the Japanese occupation of China. The company, Tokyo-based Nippon Yakin Kogyo Co., forced 200 people to work at their nickel factory, in Kyoto prefecture. 12 died from lack of proper care:

they were forced to work 14-hour days and were beaten if they did not meet their quotas.

Slave laborers there received no wages and were given measly food and only thin blankets, even in winter, according to their claims.

(All quotes from this Japan Times article.)

The company has not apologised but it has now agreed to pay out 21 million yen (only about 158 thousand euros) following a court case brought by "Liu Zonggen, 72, three other former laborers and the family of two deceased men [who] filed the suit in 1998, seeking a total 130 million yen in compensation and an apology from both the [Japanese] government and Nippon Yakin Kogyo."

The Kyoto District Court ruled in January 2003 that the government and Nippon Yakin Kogyo had acted illegally in abducting the plaintiffs to Japan and putting them to work as slave laborers.

But the court rejected the plaintiffs' demand for compensation, saying their right to claim compensation had expired under a 20-year statute of limitations. The plaintiffs appealed the ruling.
...
In December, the high court recommended a settlement among the three parties. The government refused to enter settlement talks.

What a surprise! Still, it's nice to have some good news.

Supporters of the plaintiffs said they hope the settlement will have a positive influence on other pending legal battles over the responsibility of Japan and Japanese companies over wartime slave labor.
...
Wednesday's settlement was the second case involving a Japanese company and wartime slave laborers from China. In 2000, major construction firm Kajima Corp. settled its dispute with Chinese people taken to a mine in Akita Prefecture for slave labor during World War II by contributing 500 million yen to a relief fund for the victims.

US public brainwashed but showing signs of sanity

2004-09-30T21:02:00.000+02:00

Evidence for intense propaganda bombardment: 52% think the US should keep bases in Japan; 62% think they should keep troops in Korea.

But a there's a fair amount of common sense too:

The public opinion poll also found 51 percent opposed the use of U.S. forces even if North Korea were to invade South Korea. It also showed 61 percent opposed the use of U.S. forces if China were to invade Taiwan. The poll found that 68 percent think it is necessary for the U.S. to win the approval of the U.N. Security Council if it were to consider using military force to destroy North Korea's nuclear capabilities.

From a Japan Times article with the interesting headline: 40% in U.S. say bases unnecessary.

Incidentally, anyone who thinks members of US elites are always more liberal than average Americans needs to explain away figures like these:

According to poll by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, 39 percent replied that the United States should not have long-term military bases in Japan, while 52 percent said the U.S. should maintain them.

The figures were similar to a separate poll of U.S. leaders, including senior government officials and lawmakers, as 38 percent of those respondents said long-term U.S. bases are unnecessary, while 56 percent felt otherwise.

Indoctrination to be written into Japanese Law of Education

2004-09-30T20:48:00.000+02:00

Patriotism is where the bad guys hide out, I seem to recall. Anyone putting it into an educational curriculum is attempting to corrupt a generation of children. That includes Nariaki Nakayama, Japanese Minister of Education: "a former Finance Ministry official who last served as deputy secretary general of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party before being named head of the Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Ministry in the new Cabinet formed this week". (Quotes are from this Japan Times article.)

Nakayama also said he hopes to submit a bill to revise the Fundamental Law of Education at the next ordinary Diet session, which starts in January.

The 1947 law set the basic foundation for educational policy in postwar Japan. Last year, the Central Council for Education suggested the law be revised to foster patriotism.

Currently, the LDP is discussing how to revise the law with its coalition partner, New Komeito. But they have yet to agree on some points, including whether patriotism should be included as a key component of the law.

But the two parties decided earlier this month to let the education ministry begin drafting the bill on the points the two parties have agreed on, including further equal education opportunities.

Nakayama voiced his support for revisions to promote patriotism. "I think that as we now live in a globalized society, it's necessary to have an image of the Japanese in which (students) can have pride and confidence," he said.

By implication, Nakayama thinks it's preferable to get them to have that image by propaganda rather than trying to make Japan a country which its young people should actually be proud of. And what logical link Nakayama sees between this and 'living in a globalised society', I simply can't imagine.

In case you were wondering what the rather sinisterly-named Central Council for Education is, there's a not very informative page here. As far as I can make out, they are just a bunch of people the Education Ministry pays to provide policy advice. In this case, the ministry should ask for their money back, but they won't, because the advice is exactly what they wanted to hear...

Japan blocks needed immigration

2004-08-23T14:46:00.000+02:00

Another good article in the Japan Times about Japan's unpleasant attitude towards immigrants.

...Asian countries are interested in sending nurses and nursing-care workers to Japan. Thailand is hoping for the employment of Thai-style masseuses, cooks and baby sitters; the Philippines is looking for baby-sitting jobs.

Japanese policies regarding foreign workers are based on the ninth basic plan for employment measures, endorsed by the Cabinet in August 1999. These policies call for the employment of more foreign workers with professional knowledge and skills but recommend caution regarding the introduction of unskilled workers. However, most of the illegal workers in Japan, totaling more than 200,000, are engaged in construction work and other manual labor, showing a glaring gap between policy guidelines and reality.

Foreign graduates of local nursing schools are allowed to undergo four years of on-the-job training in Japan, but only permanent residents may sit for national examinations to become licensed nurses. Only a limited number of foreign nurses work in Japan. Caregivers and masseuses may not work here legally. Japan has no plans to allow the employment of foreign baby sitters.

Yet, taking into account the progress in FTA negotiations, the government's council on comprehensive regulatory reform recommended in its third report published last December that foreigners be allowed to sit for national examinations for licensed nurses. The report also said licensed foreign nurses should be permitted to work anywhere in Japan for an extended period, and that consideration should be given to employing foreign caregivers and masseuses.

The recommendations stirred opposition from groups in those and related professions as well as from some members of the governing Liberal Democratic Party. Basic policies on economic and fiscal management and structural reform, adopted by the Cabinet in June, said vaguely that the introduction of foreign nurses and caregivers should be considered from an "overall viewpoint," leaving the issue to future FTA negotiations.

According to a 1996 health ministry survey, only 73 percent of public hospitals and 43 percent of private hospitals in Japan had sufficient nursing staff, indicating a chronic shortage of nurses. ...

There are a few complications that the article doesn't note. Japanese women are often forced out of work when they marry or simply because they have reached their mid to late twenties. I'm not suggesting that Japanese women should become nurses, of course: the point is that the Japanese workforce could be expanded by introducing real legislation against sexual discrimination so that women who want to work--in whatever job--could do so.
A second complication is that arguably Japan should not take nurses from poor countries like the Philippines. Ironically its racist immigration policy has stopped it from contributing to the drain of key workers away from poorer countries, in contrast to the US, the UK and other European counties.
One final point: there are a lot of young Filipino women in Japan, and women from other parts of Asia, working illegally as bar girls and prostitutes in (I suspect) most parts of Japan, including small remote rural towns. This couldn't happen on such a large scale without cooperation with the gangsters involved from the police and some parts of government, so the restrictions on legal immigration are at best hypocrisy. It's not inconceivable that the current situation is deliberately maintained. It suits Japanese elites fine to deny labour rights, residency and citizenship to these women while using them to keep the huge Japanese sex industry running with less impact on Japanese people.
A report from a US governmental body recently caused mock outrage in Japan (and Singapore) by naming them as countries which do little about human trafficking.

Zushi residents defend Ikego forest against US forces and Japanese government

2004-08-22T20:55:00.000+02:00

There's an article in the Japan Times about resistance by residents of Zushi, near Tokyo, to plans by the Japanese government to destroy forest to build new housing for US troops, reneging on a promise made in 1994 that housing built then would be the last.

...To the dismay and indignation of ... many... Zushi residents, the city is facing a U.S. military construction project in its largest forest. The project, they say, comes despite a promise from the government a decade ago not to build any more facilities there.

In July of last year, Tokyo and Washington agreed to build another 800 housing units for the U.S. military in the Ikego forest area, which extends between Zushi and Yokohama, in exchange for the return of idle land at four sites in Yokohama currently overseen by the U.S. forces in Japan.

Half of the 800 units, which are to be built in the form of five 20-story buildings, are to replace some 400 units in the Negishi military residential area to be returned to Yokohama.

The remaining 400 are "the minimum required" to satisfy a long-running demand by the U.S. military to alleviate its housing shortage, according to the Defense Facilities Administration Agency, which oversees the administration and maintenance of U.S. bases in Japan.

The 290-hectare Ikego area is a large tract of near-virgin forest, 85 percent of which sits in Zushi.

The area was requisitioned by the Imperial Japanese Navy in 1938 to build ammunition storage facilities and was taken over by the U.S. military at the end of World War II. Although part of the area has been used as an ammunition depot, much of the forest has not been touched for more than 60 years.

Although Zushi residents have long been barred access, the forest, which makes up 15 percent of the municipality, means a great deal to many people. The municipal government and residents have worked for decades to get the land back with a plan to turn it into a nature preserve.

"It is now a very precious green space as more and more greenery is being lost to development," said Naoko Sugiura, a 58-year-old housewife who has lived in Zushi since her childhood.

A mother of two sons and a daughter, Sugiura said she wants to save the Ikego forest for her children.

Back in the 1980s and early 1990s, the city of Zushi and its people similarly resisted a government plan to build a U.S. military housing complex in the Ikego forest.

The national government told Zushi in 1983 it planned to build about 1,000 housing units in the Zushi portion for U.S. Navy personnel stationed at the Yokosuka naval base.

While then Zushi Mayor Torayoshi Miyoshi accepted the plan, angry residents forced Miyoshi into resigning. Zushi has since only elected mayors who were opposed to the project.

Even so, as the construction was forced through, the Zushi Municipal Government finally accepted 854 housing units in 1994, after winning a promise from the central government to Zushi and Kanagawa Prefecture that it would not build any more facilities in the Ikego area.

The housing complex was build by the Japanese government at a cost of 86 billion yen under the Japan-U.S. Status of Forces Agreement. Its construction began in 1987 and was completed in 1998.

This time around, the national government says it plans to build the additional housing units in the 36-hectare Yokohama part of Ikego. The government insists that because Yokohama was not a party to the 1994 agreement, the project does not breach the earlier promise.

"That is nothing but a sophistry," said Sugiura. "Ikego is only divided artificially between Yokohama and Zushi. The way the government has treated us really lets us down and adds to the distrust of democracy." ...

This kind of resistance from residents and local government has limited expansion of US bases over the years and is a key reason why plans that were recently mooted to move troops from Okinawa to sites elsewhere in Japan were not firmly announced in the package of troop movements in President Bush's recent speech.

Demonstration against US aircraft carrier in Sasebo, Nagasaki-ken; thoughts on where it had been; Chalmers Johnson and Taiwan

2004-08-22T20:53:00.000+02:00

Activists in Nagasaki Prefecture, Japan, demonstrated against a visit by a nuclear-powered US aircraft carrier yesterday.

The nuclear-powered U.S. aircraft carrier John C. Stennis enters Sasebo port in Nagasaki Prefecture on Saturday, circled by fishing boats carrying local antinuclear activists.
Protesters greet carrier in Sasebo
SASEBO, Nagasaki Pref. (Kyodo) The U.S. nuclear-powered aircraft carrier John C. Stennis made a port call Saturday at Sasebo port in Nagasaki Prefecture.

It was the third port call by a nuclear-powered carrier in as many years, following one in August 2002 in Sasebo and another in May 2003 in Yokosuka, Kanagawa Prefecture.

The 102,000-ton vessel, which engaged in drills with the U.S. carrier Kitty Hawk and the Maritime Self-Defense Force after leaving San Diego, is scheduled to leave the port Wednesday.

Members of local labor organizations opposing the vessel's visit staged a protest throughout the day.

While some 100 unionists organized a public rally at 7:50 a.m. in the city, others approached the aircraft carrier aboard 20 fishing boats, sailing around the flattop.

In the afternoon, more than 1,000 people from the labor groups and some 300 members of citizens' groups organized an additional antinuclear rally.

"I have been suffering from radiation since an A-bomb was dropped on Nagasaki 59 years ago," said 79-year-old Nagasaki native Hideo Morimune. "I don't feel good about a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier entering a port here. I hope there will be no accident."

Concerns about the safety of nuclear power have been under the spotlight after an accident at the No. 3 reactor in the Mihama Nuclear Power Plant in Fukui Prefecture killed four workers earlier this month.From the Japan Times.

Presumably this is one of the seven US aircraft carriers (about half of the US fleet) which took part in an unprecedentedly large exercise in the Pacific this summer. Chalmers Johnson's article about 'Operation Summer Pulse '04' is on ZNet. As he says, it's a provocative piece of sabre-rattling which is bound to have upset the Chinese leadership and strengthened the case in China for military spending.
Beware Johnson's strange bias against Taiwan, though. He says, "[US] ideologues appear to be trying to precipitate a confrontation with China while they still have the chance. Today, they happen to have rabidly anti-Chinese governments in Taipei and Tokyo as allies, but these governments don't have the popular support of their own citizens." There are plenty of things to complain about in the way Taiwan is run, but the current Taiwanese government is not rabidly anti-Chinese. It's not rabidly anything, except perhaps pro-business. And as for popular support, President Chen Shui-bian--the first Taiwanese president not to come from the party of the former dictatorship, the Nationalist Guomindang--was re-elected with a narrow majority this March. Taiwan is a democracy now, with pretty good freedoms of expression, movement and assembly. China is not. It's hardly Taiwan's fault that for historical reasons its friends include neo-cons in the US and extreme rightists like Tokyo Governor Ishihara Shintaro in Japan. The issue is what the people of Taiwan want--and at the moment they are voting for continuation of de facto independence, while generally supporting deeper business and cultural ties with the mainland.

Gregory Clark on Japan's immigration policy

2004-08-22T19:41:00.000+02:00

There's an excellent article by Gregory Clark, vice president of Akita International University, in today's Japan Times.

Barbaric immigration policy
Japan's current campaign against visa overstayers is both puzzling and cruel.

Tokyo says the campaign aims to put an end to the upsurge in foreign crime. And Japan is right to be concerned about the crime problem. But the foreign gangs so active here are hardly likely to be walking the streets without seemingly valid visas or passports. If they can crack safes, forge credit cards, pick pockets or break into houses with such skill and ruthlessness, they will have little trouble getting false documents.

The average overstayer is someone who came to Japan to study or work, who found Japan more compatible than home, who has settled down, learned some of the language and is willing to do the menial work young Japanese now refuse to do.

The chances of these people wanting to turn to crime are close to zero. To be caught even without a seat belt fastened would put a quick end to the life they have worked so hard to create in Japan.

Overall, they do far more good for Japan than any possible harm. Many are crucial to the survival of small, labor-intensive industries here. They help overcome the Japan's growing problem of population aging and decline. Some even create small pockets of internationalization, opening the eyes of the Japanese around them to the world outside. Their remittances to their home countries represent a form of costless foreign aid.

Yet if caught, the deportation procedures they have to suffer are brutal. If caught by the police, they are incarcerated for an automatic three months in detention cells before being turned over to the immigration authorities who put them behind bars again for further detention and interrogation.

On deportation day they are handcuffed and roped together like cattle to be put on buses for forcible transport to airports and marched onto planes as common criminals. Read more...

Clark goes on to point out the strange discrepancy between this treatment of people who have made Japan their home and the welcome extended to anyone (usually from South America) who can claim enough Japanese ancestry. As I've said before here, Japan's immigration system is a manifestation of ugly racist essentialism. The idea is that racially Japanese people (whatever that might mean) are more likely to fit in with existing Japanese culture, to be able to learn the language and not to make waves. These views are common at all levels of Japanese society and are widely regarded as acceptable.

Gregory Clark, by the way, has a website full of excellent articles. His life story is worth reading too. From the second page, on the ethnically Chinese resistance to the British in Malaya (as it was then):

I got to meet some Overseas Chinese in Sarawak. With an obvious sincerity, they told me about the discrimination they had suffered for years from the colonial regime, and their fears that they would suffer even more in a Malay dominated state.

Some of the more idealistic and younger Chinese had gone off into the mountains bordering Indonesian Borneo to join an armed resistance movement. Most were eventually wiped out in the uneven fight with better armed and well-paid British, and Australian, troops. Their deaths, and their motivations, will remain for ever unrecorded.

Back in Canberra I discovered that those resisters were not seen as people with a cause. Rather, they were seen as Beijing’s puppets, as clear proof of Beijing’s belligerence and determination to move south into Asia. Why? Well, they were mainly Chinese, and everyone knew that the Overseas Chinese were beholden to Beijing.

Nor was the fact that Beijing had done absolutely nothing to help the rebels with arms, funds or personnel seen as relevant. In the rock-filled minds of our Canberra ‘experts’, the rebels were members of an Overseas Chinese Third Column (their word, not mine) being prepared by Beijing for its planned South-east Asian takeover.

It was my first encounter with something that would puzzle me so much for the rest of my career. Here were intelligent, well- educated people put in charge of foreign policy, but who had absolutely no idea of the reality of the disputes they were supposed to be studying. Worse they were perfectly happy not to know that reality. They were quite content to remain in the warm embrace of their dogmatic one-sided judgements. How could they do it and still remain at ease with their consciences?

In Sarawak only a few hundred young Chinese were to die as a result of this bias. In Vietnam the numbers would be in the millions.

Clark went on to resign from the Australian civil service so as to be free to criticise the Australian and US roles in the Vietnam War.

Negligence probably killed the four workers at Mihama nuclear plant

2004-08-21T16:15:00.000+02:00

I don't see what other conclusion can be drawn from this Japan Times article:

Faulty pipes caused nine other reactor accidents

Nine accidents similar to the steam pipe rupture that killed four workers at a nuclear power plant last week have occurred at other reactors, a safety panel revealed Thursday.
...
According to the nuclear safety agency, there have been nine incidents at nuclear reactors involving pipes eroded by coolant water, just as in the Mihama accident. It reported there were another seven pipe accidents at thermal reactors.

In the Mihama accident, the faulty pipe section, which had not been inspected since the reactor started up in 1976, had worn as thin as 0.6 mm.

It was also reported that pipes had not been properly inspected at 17 areas in six of Kepco's nuclear reactors.

As well as the four workers who were killed, seven were injured, some seriously, by the steam, which was at 142 degrees Celsius. At this temperature, death results from suffocation, caused by damage to the respiratory system, as much as from external burns.
As a further indication that this accident was predictable, the most serious previous incident involving steam leakage in the nuclear industry also involved a burst pipe. This incident, which happened in 1986 at the Surry Nuclear Power Plant in the state of Virginia in the US also killed four people.
There's a report on the incident on the day it happened here.
and an editorial from The Asahi Shimbun on the following day, here.

Today, Al Jazeera reports that "The Atomic Energy Commission of Japan has admitted that the 9 August fatal accident at the Mihama nuclear plant in Fukui, central Japan, may force a rethink of the government's commitment to atomic power."

I doubt it. Japan has the third-largest nuclear industry in the world, after the USA and France, with 52 nuclear reactors that generate 45,740 megawatts of electricity. It has two strategic reasons for keeping it that way. First, it has almost no fossil fuel reserves and depends hugely on oil from West Asia, access to which can be controlled by the US, and in the future, perhaps by China. This has been acknowledged since the Mihama deaths by Osamu Goto, director of planning at the Atomic Energy Commission of Japan: "Japan has very few resources, with all the oil that we need, for example, imported from the Middle East or other sources. Nuclear energy is a very good choice for us as it has many benefits and is important to our energy security." Secondly, as mentioned previously on this blog, Japan's civil nuclear programme is designed to produce the expertise and fissile materials necessary to produce nuclear weapons at a few months notice. Kepco (the Kansai Electric Power Company), which runs the plant at Mihama has been pushing to use MOX (mixed plutonium uranium oxide) fuel, which as the Al Jazeera article notes, "will lead to the commercialisation of tonnes of weapons-grade nuclear fuel."
In the circumstances, rumours of a rethink are simply a way of appeasing public outrage. Unless that outrage is focussed through sustained campaigning, Japan will stay nuclear for the forseeable future. There are people who are working very hard at this, including Greenpeace Japan. Their nuclear expert Kazue Suzuki said:
"Kepco has been planning to put plutonium into its reactors, even though that has met some opposition from local people. After this latest incident, that opposition is certain to be stronger. People just don't trust nuclear power."
The Al Jazeera article ends with comment from Green Action in Japan:

"It is too early to know for sure, but we suspect the official report into the Mihama incident will be a whitewash because they are just looking at old, inadequate data," said Aileen Mioko Smith, of the Kyoto-based Green Action environmental group.

"We say they should shut all their plants down to conduct checks now; if they're not willing to do that, then already it's a whitewash," she said.

Representatives of Green Action held three hours of talks with senior officials of Kepco on 11 August, with Smith saying that while the company has been very quick to apologise to the families of the dead and injured, management has been equally speedy about trying to avoid legal responsibility.

Kepco's top echelons are "fleeing their responsibility" by saying that managers of individual plants should be held accountable for any mishaps, Smith said.

"We hope that this accident will have a trickle-down effect on the Japanese public, when they see the relatives of the dead crying and hitting out at the head of Kepco," she said.

"But we fear it will have a very minor impact on the government's nuclear power policy.

"There will be a big upheaval now, but then it will quickly go back to business as usual," she added.

"In Japan, there is a very big gap between what the public wants and feels comfortable with, and the need to have power and feed industry and the domestic market."

Japanese activist calls for China to stop sending back North Korean refugees

2004-08-21T15:24:00.000+02:00

From the Japan Times:

Get China to stop sending North Korea escapees back: activist

By NAO SHIMOYACHI Staff writer

Japan, the United States and South Korea must persuade Beijing to stop sending people who flee North Korea back to the country, a Japanese aid worker who recently served eight months in a Chinese prison for trying to smuggle two such people to safety, urged Thursday.

Recently returned to Japan, Takayuki Noguchi, 33, was detained in December in the city of Nanning, Guangxi Province, while trying to help two Japan-born North Koreans flee to Vietnam via China.

He was sentenced in late June to eight months in prison and fined 20,000 yuan (about 260,000 yen). He was released Aug. 9, after his time in custody was taken into account.

Speaking at the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan, Noguchi criticized the way China is handling the increasing number of North Koreans attempting to flee their country.

The two he was helping were apparently handed over to North Korea after his arrest, he said without citing the source of his information. One of the two, a woman, was recently released after a stint in a labor camp, but the other, a man, may have died, he said. Read the rest...

There may be 100,000 North Korean refugees in China. Apparently China has become harsher in its treatment of people caught helping them:

Lee Young Hwa, an assistant professor at Kansai University and a representative of the nongovernmental organization Rescue the North Korean People Urgent Action Network, said Beijing has recently stepped up efforts to crack down on North Korean escapees as well as the people who aid them.

"The recent trend is that (non-North Koreans) are getting longer sentences, whereas they were previously released soon after writing an essay repenting their actions," he said.

Tensions around disputed islands

2004-08-06T20:51:00.000+02:00

I reported the dispute over a small pair of islands called Tokto/Dokdo/Takeshima in a previous post.
Now, the Korea Herald reports that 45 people have swum from an undisputedly Korean island to Tokto, to raise awareness about the place and the fact that Japan lays claim to it.

45 People Swim From Ullungdo to Tokto
In an effort to raise interest in the protection of the Tokto islets, 45 people swam the 92-kilometer sea route from Ullungdo to Tokto Friday.

The swimmers set off from Ullung-kun, North Kyongsang Province on Thursday morning and successfully reached Tokto at 9 a.m. Friday in about 28 hours.

The participants swam the first 500-meter section and the last 1-kilometer section together before reaching the islets.

Other participants conducted a relay race in which each person swam two 1.5- to 3-kilometer legs.

The group took pictures with the Tokto Coast Guards when they arrived on the island, declaring the resolution under the national flag of Korea and urging Japan to stop making territorial claims over Tokto.

Chung Kwang-tae, 49, singer of the famous song, 'Tokto Is Our Land,' took part in the event as one of the organizing staff. Five ships and 19 staff members, including medical personnel, also accompanied the swimmers.

This is a lot less objectionable than a right-wing member of the Japanese Diet (Parliament) or a bunch of Japanese neo-fascists trying to set up camp on one of the Diaoyutai/Senkaku islands (claimed by Japan, China and Taiwan and controlled by Japan). I guess the reason is that it was Japan that colonised Korea, large parts of China and other bits of Asia, not Korea that oppressed Japan. But I'm not entirely comfortable with the idea of 'good nationalism'.

I don't suppose, anyway, that people in most Asian counties will be very impressed by the Japanese government taking over a lighthouse built by Japanese nationalists on disputed Diao Yu/Uotsuri island, as reported last Thursday on the Japan Today site.This is presumably what the 'political activists'--as the article politely calls them--wanted all along. Now the Japanese government has an official presence on the island and tensions are increased, little by little.

Gov't set to own lighthouse on Senkaku Islands
NAHA, -- The government is set to assume control of a lighthouse constructed and managed by Japanese political activists on one of the disputed Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea, sources close to the case said Wednesday.

The lighthouse was constructed on Uotsuri Island in Ishigaki, Okinawa Prefecture, and is now nominally owned by a fisherman in the city. (Kyodo News)

There's an article on the website of the Heritage Foundation, an evil right-wing thinktank in the US, noting recent Chinese probing of the sea around southern Japan. There are some comments on the status of the Diaoyutai/Senkaku islands that I wouldn't trust for a minute, and a plea for a more belligerent posture from the States. It's interesting to know what this influential part of the US policy elite thinks about this--and frightening to know that it does think about it. And when you find out what they think, that's the worst...

It's important to realise that some people from the countries involved care about these islands or will use them to try to force the hand of their government, even to the point of provoking armed conflict and risking lives. In 1996 David Chan, a man from Hong Kong, died protesting at Diao Yu/Uotsuri, as the Okinawa Times reported at the time:

A Hong Kong ship protesting the Japanese territorial claim to Uotsuri, one of the group of small islands in the East China Sea referred to by Japan as the Senkakus, was blocked by the Japanese Maritime Safety Agency last Thursday morning. Four of the people on board the Hong Kong vessel jumped into the sea to demonstrate their protest, but unfortunately one of them died. Taiwanese fishing boats were also prevented from trying to enter the area.

Protests in both Hong Kong and Taiwan have been escalating after a Japanese rightist group erected a lighthouse on Uotsuri Island, part of the disputed area between Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and China.

The Hong Kong group chartered a cargo ship with seventy-eight people aboard, and departed last Sunday to land on the island. As the ship reached the area in contention, two unsuccessful attempts were made to cross the blockade of ten Japanese Maritime Safety Agency ships. Four of the protesters suddenly jumped into the sea and were pulled out. However, Mr. David Chan, 47, leader of the group, did not survive the plunge. A ship's captain had called an SOS, and a Maritime Safety Agency helicopter had taken Chan to a hospital on Ishigaki Island.

The territorial dispute was intensified by the construction of the lighthouse. Both China and Taiwan have reacted by each constructing their own lighthouse on the island.

McDonald's and Burger King sued in Korea for exploiting children

2004-08-02T02:13:00.000+02:00

People's Solidarity for Participatory Democracy (which sounds like my kind of group) are taking a number of fast-food shops to court, according to the Korea Herald.

A leading civic group yesterday charged before the prosecution that several fast food franchises, including McDonald's and Burger King, violated the labor law by not paying minors and making them work illegal hours.

The People's Solidarity for Participatory Democracy said at a news conference that food franchises had not paid monthly wages or weekly allowances to minors and forced them to work illegal nightshifts.

McDonald's and Burger King spokesmen insisted the franchises paid owed wages in May after a warning from the Labor Ministry. "As far as I know, we paid the delayed wages. Maybe some minors were omitted by mistake," Kim Keun-yong of Burger King's public relations team said.

"We thought that we already paid the wages," McDonald's public relations staff member Yoo Su-kyoung said. "I cannot say anything right now because the company has not announced its position officially."

A survey conducted by the Ministry of Labor and released in May said more than 200,000 teenage workers were exploited by employers last year and 20.5 percent worked over seven hours a day, the limit set by the Labor Standard Act.

The survey, which polled 188 McDonald's and 108 Burger King franchises nationwide, said 4,812 employees at McDonald's and 2,142 at Burger King did not receive weekly paychecks and paid holiday allowances.

Additionally, some 7,300 young employees worked late night hours. After franchises closed about 11 p.m., minors were required to continue sweeping and cleaning, the report said.
... read more...

59th anniversary of destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

2004-08-02T01:41:00.000+02:00

It's August. People around the world remember the victims of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Hiroshima was bombed on 6th August 1945 at 8.16 am. It is estimated that 80,000 people died then, with another 60,000 dying from injuries and radiation sickness in the following months for a death-toll of around 140,000, from a population of somewhere over 250,000. This doesn't count the tens of thousands who died later from cancer and other effects of exposure to radiation.

The testimony of a survivor brings home the meaning of the statistics:

The appearance of people was . . . well, they all had skin blackened by burns. . . . They had no hair because their hair was burned, and at a glance you couldn't tell whether you were looking at them from in front or in back. . . . They held their arms bent [forward] like this . . . and their skin - not only on their hands, but on their faces and bodies too - hung down. . . . If there had been only one or two such people . . . perhaps I would not have had such a strong impression. But wherever I walked I met these people. . . . Many of them died along the road - I can still picture them in my mind - like walking ghosts. (A survivor quoted in Robert Jay Lifton, Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima (New York: Random House, 1967) 27 - see this page on About.com

The destruction of Nagasaki followed on 9th August at 11.02am. (Nagasaki was the second-choice target. Kokura city, the intended target, was spared because of thick cloud cover when the US planes arrived there earlier that morning.) It is estimated that 75,000 people died in the attack, with another 25,000 dying from radiation sickness in the next few months. This gives a death-toll of around 100,000 from a population of approximately 240,000. Again, this doesn't count the people who died from cancers and other effects of exposure to radiation.

Fujie Urata Matsumoto, a survivor of the attack on Nagasaki, is quoted on the page on About.com:

The pumpkin field in front of the house was blown clean. Nothing was left of the whole thick crop, except that in place of the pumpkins there was a woman's head. I looked at the face to see if I knew her. It was a woman of about forty. She must have been from another part of town - I had never seen her around here. A gold tooth gleamed in the wide-open mouth. A handful of singed hair hung down from the left temple over her cheek, dangling in her mouth. Her eyelids were drawn up, showing black holes where the eyes had been burned out. . . . She had probably looked square into the flash and gotten her eyeballs burned.
(Fujie Urata Matsumoto as quoted in Takashi Nagai, We of Nagasaki: The Story of Survivors in an Atomic Wasteland (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1964) 42.)

For more information see this Wikipedia article. There are more links on this page.

It is widely agreed by historians that the war could have been concluded without the destruction of Hiroshima or Nagasaki. There are a number of explanations of the bombings, including the desire of the US administration for an unconditional surrender and their fear that the USSR would enter the war and take territory in North-East Asia if negotiations between Japan and the US took long. Other motivations may have played a role: a desire to demonstrate the atomic bomb as a first strike in the cold war, or as a test of the effect of an atom bomb on a city.

As evidence for the last point, consider this analysis from the page previously referred to on About.com, quoting Dan Kurzman's Day of the Bomb:

There had been four cities chosen as possible targets: Hiroshima, Kokura, Nagasaki, and Niigata (Kyoto was the first choice until it was removed from the list by Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson). The cities were chosen because they had been otherwise relatively untouched during the war. The Target Committee wanted the first bomb to be "sufficiently spectacular for the importance of the weapon to be internationally recognized when publicity on it was released."

The Hiroshima city government and the Nagaski city government campaign against nuclear weapons. A Kyodo article covers the activities this month of two of the major anti-nuclear organisations in Japan, the Japan Congress Against A- and H-Bombs (Gensuikin) and the Japan Council against A & H Bombs (Gensuikyo).

The Japan Congress Against A- and H-Bombs (Gensuikin) hosted an annual international meeting, attended by guest speakers, including experts on nuclear issues on the Korean Peninsula, U.S. nuclear policies and the Japan-North Korea relationship.

''Unlike Iraq, North Korea is (geopolitically) surrounded by strong countries. It is the North Korean leaders themselves who feel threatened the most by other countries in the area,'' Lee Jong Wong, a professor at Rikkyo University (St. Paul's University) in Tokyo, told an audience of some 100 people.

''Nuclear development is a reasonable choice for North Korea to maintain its prestige domestically and people's support to the current regime,'' Lee said, adding that nuclear policies could also be an obstacle to the reconstruction of the North's state system. ''Comprehensive dialogues with other countries would be a way out.''

The Tokyo conference, as part of the World Congress Against A- and H-Bombs, will be followed by various events -- public debates and peace classes for children -- in Hiroshima from Wednesday to Friday and in Nagasaki on Aug. 7 and 9, Gensuikin officials said.

Another major antinuclear group, the Japan Council against A & H Bombs, known in Japanese as Gensuikyo, will start a series of rallies -- the World Conference against A & H Bombs -- Monday in Hiroshima, where a peace memorial ceremony will be held Friday.

Gensuikyo's events in Hiroshima will continue through Friday and then move to Nagasaki for rallies on Aug. 8 and 9.

Public pressure in Japan is the principal reason, in my opinion, why it has no nuclear weapons. Its right-wing government signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty, reluctantly, in 1970, but only ratified it six years later after the US agreed "not to interfere with Tokyo's pursuit of independent reprocessing capabilities in its civilian nuclear programme." (Selig Harrison, Korean Endgame, p. 233) This, together with Japan's highly-advanced space programme, is a carefully judged means of keeping inter-continental nuclear missiles within Japan's capabilities in a matter of months.
The nuclear powers in the region are the US, China, and Russia. China has offered the US a no-first use agreement on nuclear weapons repeatedly, and the US has repeatedly refused the offer, reserving the 'right' to use nuclear weapons first in a conflict if the other side uses chemical or biological weapons, or perhaps even in the case of large-scale conventional warfare. This stance is a primary reason for North Korea's attempts to develop nuclear weapons and missiles to carry them. South Korea has also worked on isotope-enrichment and missile technology, worried about its nuclear-capable neighbours and North Korea, but mostly interested in having a deterrent if Japan goes nuclear.
Tensions in the region rose in 2000-1 when President Clinton abandoned plans for a summit with Kim Jong-Il in Pyongyang, were exacerbated by the incoming Bush administration's attitude to negotiations with North Korea and have been in crisis since Bush's inclusion of North Korea in his 'axis of evil' in January 2001.
Plans for a nuclear-free North East Asia have been on the table since the end of the cold war and may well be achievable. The key is a US approach to negotiations which treats the North Korean government as a negotiating partner and works towards concessions on both sides. The current US attitude - that North Korea has sinned and must repent and atone - is leading towards disaster.

Chinese troops march in Hong Kong to intimidate voters

2004-08-01T15:45:00.000+02:00

From a BBC article:

China troops parade in Hong Kong

More than 3,000 Chinese troops have for the first time staged an Army Day parade in Hong Kong.

Some 15,000 people bought tickets to watch a display of military hardware and precision marching by the People's Liberation Army.

The troops marched at their barracks in sweltering heat, clapped by the crowds.

The parade was designed to boost patriotic sentiment ahead of elections in September, says the BBC's correspondent in Beijing, Louisa Lim.

Pro-democracy legislators were invited to the parade as a goodwill gesture but some refused to attend, seeing the march as a political stunt.

One who did attend, Democratic Party chairman Yeung Sum said he was "very impressed by the good standard and training of the troops".

The 15,000 who watched the march is a lot less than the 500,000 or so who marched on 1st July this year (out of a population of around 6.5 million). The BBC, rarely happy about popular protest, reports the march by saying "Thousands took to the streets in protest on 1 July," which is a bit like saying a new Rolls Royce costs thousands of dollars - true but misleading. Still, the rest of the article is worth reading:

The march, by Hong Kong-based soldiers, comes against a backdrop of widespread discontent following Beijing's decision to rule out direct elections in Hong Kong in the near term.

Beijing has adopted a hardline political strategy, ruling out full democracy in Hong Kong in the near future and labelling its critics as traitors.

Many of the territory's citizens feel Beijing has reneged on its promise to give Hong Kong a high degree of autonomy.

Thousands took to the streets in protest on 1 July.

Beijing is using Army Day, which this year marks the 77th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese People's Liberation Army, to send clear messages to both Hong Kong and Taiwan, our correspondent says.

The state-run media quotes Defence Minister Cao Gangchuan warning that China has the ability to smash any Taiwanese moves towards independence.

Beijing has been escalating its rhetoric towards Taiwan, which it sees as a renegade province.

More about the threats from China and on US sabre-rattling in future posts.

Some good news from China about TB

2004-08-01T15:31:00.000+02:00

A BBC article reports:

China sees success tackling TB

The number of TB cases has fallen by a third in parts of China where WHO-approved treatment programmes have been implemented.

The data was published in the medical journal The Lancet and suggests China could significantly cut TB as part of a wider global effort.

Almost 1.5 million people are newly diagnosed with TB each year in China - more cases than in any other country except India - a number very likely to increase.

The WHO-approved DOTS ("directly-observed treatment, short-course") scheme relies heavily on health workers who ensure patients take their antibiotics properly, as they often stop treatment too early increasing the chances of drug resistance.
Read more...

Bobby Fischer, Alberto Fujimori and Japan

2004-08-01T15:27:00.000+02:00

Bobby Fischer continues to fight his extradition from Japan to the US, where he is wanted for breaking sanctions by playing a chess match in the former Yugoslavia in 1992.
I have no sympathy for Fischer, whose public statements seem anti-semitic and generally offensive: "making strong attacks on what he called "world Jewry", and calling the 2001 terrorist attacks on the US "wonderful news"" according to a BBC article.
But I think that Japan is being inconsistent in who it chooses to extradite. Peru has been seeking the extradition of ex-president Alberto Fujimori, who "is wanted by Peruvian authorities on nearly 20 charges ranging from corruption to allegedly authorizing a counterterrorism death squad" (according to another BBC article) but:

The ex-president has been living in Tokyo, protected from extradition by citizenship extended because of his Japanese-born parents.

Fujimori was not born in Japan and has never lived there, in contrast to Bobby Fischer who has spent the last three years as a resident of Tokyo. In a just world, any special duties of a government should be to residents as well as citizens, and citizenship criteria need to be fair, not based on racist ideas. The current Japanese laws on citizenship count in "ethnic" Japanese abroad, and rule out children born in Japan to Koreans and other 'foreigners'.

North Korean refugees reluctantly taken by the South

2004-08-01T15:06:00.000+02:00

The BBC has an article on this, reporting North Korea's bizarre claim that South Korea has kidnapped the refugees.

N Korea condemns refugee move

North Korean defector aboard coach after his arrival in the South
The refugees are thought to have escaped through China and Vietnam
A spokesman for North Korea has accused the South of kidnapping its citizens after more than 450 defectors arrived by plane in the space of two days.

The refugees began arriving from an unspecified country on Tuesday on planes chartered by the South, in an operation shrouded in secrecy.

All had apparently escaped through China to the unnamed third country.

"This is an organised and planned kidnapping as well as a terror crime," North Korea's spokesman said.

The fact is that the South Korean government is far from keen to take North Korean refugees - it upsets the regime in the north and it costs money to support them: they get some $20,000 on arrival, plus monthly stipends until they are able to find work, which apparently takes a long time.
The border between the Koreas is highly militarised, with millions of North and South Korean troops (and 15,000 Americans) facing each other over the DMZ, so refugees generally can't get through that way. Many escape through the long land border with China but in recent years this has become very hard since the Chinese government refuses to recognise them as refugees and captures and returns many, in contravention of international law, even going as far as grabbing North Koreans as they try to enter the premises of the South Korean embassy in Beijing.
Still, many do escape through China to other countries, mainly in South East Asia. They then arrange flights to South Korea, typically arriving individually or in small groups. The recent arrival of more than 450 refugees in two groups is unusual, and suggests pressure has been put on South Korea by the South East Asian government in question - unofficially known to be Vietnam.

test - posting with ecto

2004-07-26T23:46:00.000+02:00

this post was generated by ecto, a lovely piece of software for managing blogs.
If you post a lot it will save a lot of time - or at least allow you to generate more posts in the same ludicrously long time you already spend online. It's cheap shareware with fantastic support - the author emailed me back within minutes to answer some questions I had.
It's available for Mac OS X and now for Windows - you get the message... (I have no ulterior motive for this, shares in the company... I'm just really pleased with ecto and, particularly, the support.)

Subway strike ending in South Korea

2004-07-26T02:54:00.000+02:00

From Wednesday to Friday there was a strike on the underground system in four Korean cities, Seoul, Pusan, Inchon and Taegu. The strikes in Pusan and Taegu continued on Saturday and policemen were called in to help run trains in Seoul, according to Reuters.
The Korea Times reports today that the strikes are coming to an end with negotiated settlements in which management has promised higher pay in Pusan and better pay and conditions in Inchon. Details of the settlements in Seoul and Taegu are not given.
There are often strikes at this time of year in Korea. "This summer's labor disputes... started with the action of the hospital workers' union on June 10" according to the Korea Times. Workers have also taken action at KorAm Bank, Hyundai Motor, Kia Motors, Ssanyong Motoer and GM Daewoo Auto and Technology, as well as on the underground.
One strike is continuing, at LG Caltex, a joint venture between the huge Korean LG group and US oil company Chevron-Texaco, where workers have been out since 16th July. Korea has very determined unions who were a large part of the struggle that won democracy in the 80s and 90s, but labour laws are also formidable, a legacy of the dictatorship, still on the books like much of Korea's post-war public order legislation. Thus workers in the LG Caltex dispute face the prospect of being sacked legally:

Amid the developments in the labor disputes... unionized workers of LG Caltex have continued their walkout since July 16, even though the authorities Friday proposed settlement arbitration, which is legally binding.

The National Labor Relations Commission decided the company and the union should accept a 4.5 percent wage increase and 40 working hours per week. But the authorities' arbitration did not include labor's demands for the abolishment of discrimination against irregular workers and the establishment of social contribution funds.

The commission's arbitration is valid from midnight yesterday and any continuation of the walkout will be regarded as illegal by labor laws. However, as the union is pledging to continue the strikes in opposition to the arbitration, the striking workers are likely to face legal action.

The company ordered the striking workers to return to work by 8 a.m. Thursday. It plans to give lenient measures for those complying with the deadline, but those refusing the order may face dismissal in accordance with company regulations.
Article in the Korea Times dated 25/07/2004.

Of course this is not enough for investors, who have criticized the current government (which came out of the democracy movement, but now acts in a respectable manner, sending troops to Iraq for example). This is how Reuters puts it - making clear where their sympathy lies:

The wave of strikes has posed a test for President Roh Moo-hyun, a former labour lawyer who has been criticised by employers and foreign investors for being soft on the militant labour unions. South Korean authorities have had to deploy hundreds of substitute workers to try to maintain public services.

Target North Korea: Pushing North Korea to the Brink of Nuclear Catastrophe, by Gavan McCormack

2004-07-26T02:42:00.000+02:00

Gavan McCormack, Professor of Japanese History at the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, ANU, argues for what I will call the sensible view (to pick a neutral term) of the standoff between North Korea and the US, which is held, with minor variations, by academics specialising in East Asia across the political spectrum (from Selig Harrison to Bruce Cumings, for instance). An alternative is what I will call the uninformed and potentially catastrophic view (again, not wanting to prejudge the debate) held mainly by newspaper columnists, for example, Johann Hari in the UK, who writes in The Independent:

The nations of the world united through the UN (and we can all surely agree that Kim Jong Il is the last person alive who we'd like to have his finger on a nuclear button) must take out the North's nukes with a targeted use of special forces, intelligence and bombing. This is not as dangerous as it sounds. As Chris Bellamy, The Independent's military expert, explains, "A nuclear weapon won't detonate if bombed. If it goes off accidentally, the worst that will happen is that the conventional explosives will go off. The chances of a nuclear explosion are negligible."

North Korea - if the regime doesn't implode - can then be invaded and liberated.
18/04/2003
Read the whole article at Hari's website.

To be fair, Hari has changed his mind, in an article on his website: "I do not believe in invasion: I simply propose that along with the food aid we offer, we should also try to undermine the regime by flooding the country (as some brave human rights activists currently do) with transistor radios and information" he wrote last December. But he still thinks that the sensible view (which he caricatures and attributes to the peace movement, and which we are coming back to, I promise) is wrong:

It is, I would have assumed if I had thought about it, impossible ? simply impossible ? to make this particular situation fit the [John] Pilger tune of Blame America. For once, they would be forced to admit, I would?ve thought, that ? sometimes, just sometimes ? there is an alternative source of wrong-doing to the United States in this world. Yet I underestimated the extent to which their world-view has calcified and hardened so that they cannot see beyond it even when the evidence is whacking 20 million North Koreans in the gut. So how do they contort themselves to say that America is responsible for a regime it has opposed for its entire existence?

?Ekk? [a contributor to a discussion on the Medialens site] makes the first claim: that despite publicly opposing the regime, offering funding to its enemies, maintaining a massive demilitarised zone to prevent the regime from expanding, actually the Americans wanted to keep Kim Jong-Il in place! ?If the USA did not have a very selfish interest in keeping the/those bad bogey men in power there then helpful economic/trade and cultural/humanitarian mutually beneficial links would long ago have been opened from the South,? he explains. ?But without having an excuse of a threat to keep the most massive US military force in place there, the American hold on that whole rapidly developing economically important region would be immediately severely weakened.?

At what point were these options of North/South co-operation quoshed by the US? Er, never. This is nonsense. Indeed, the US has worked to foster just those very links, and spent ages building a ?Sunshine Policy? peace process between the two countries, which only collapsed when it was clear that the North was not keeping its side of the bargain when it came to nuclear weapons. But ? hey ho! ? what do facts matter, when you have a pickled dogma to uphold?

A good question, since Hari seems to be happy to ignore the facts - and the scholarly consensus on their interpretation - in order to preserve his own views from change. One does not have to believe that the US administration sees keeping Kim Jong-Il in power as the best option to think that nonetheless, their actions have tended to prevent Korean unification and strengthened the hand of hardliners on both sides of the DeMilitarized Zone, and that those consequences suit them just fine. (Just as they wanted Saddam Hussein gone from power after 1991 but imposed sanctions that tended to strengthen his power over Iraq, preferring a coup with minimal regime change to a popular rebellion and the democratic government it might bring - and the example that it would be in a region where the US's best friends are dictators.)
I have previously quoted the US official in charge of negotiations with North Korea during the crucial period in the 90s admitting that the US had broken its obligations while North Korea had mostly or fully conformed to the treaty. Perhaps Hari isn't aware of what Robert Galluci has said. But you would think that before writing a piece in a national newspaper calling for the bombing and invasion of another country (war crimes by Nuremberg standards) he might have read some of the standard texts on that country. If he had, he would have encountered the sensible view in one form or another. So let's see what it is, taking it as it is advanced in Gavan McCormack's new book (as reviewed by Jeff Kingston in The Japan Times). The first point of consensus is that the US is pouring oil on the fire, quite unnecessarily:

"Target North Korea" argues that the threatening posture of the U.S. and demonization of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea has stoked suspicions and tensions in the region. Gavan McCormack believes that the DPRK "harbors no aggressive or fanatical threat to the region or the world and that its defiance masks an appeal to normalize relations and 'come in from the cold.' "

Another commonly agreed point is that:
"...the insistence on North Korean nuclear disarmament as a precondition for normalization is a recipe for deadlock."
Like other analysts of East Asia, McCormack is not happy about the current plight of the North Korean people, and like other analysts, he rejects violent solutions in favour of negotiation:

Clearly, McCormack is no fan of the DPRK and acknowledges its shortcomings in detail, but in his view, "to label North Korea 'terrorist' is neither to grasp the burden of the past, nor to offer any prescription for the present or future." He points out that "as the record in Afghanistan and Iraq shows, the attempt to resolve complex problems of violence and terror by counterviolence and counterterror offers no prospect of a lasting solution."

He sees more hope in the thickening web of negotiation and cooperation between South and North Korea and an alternative regional order that is not subservient to the "American imperium."

Many analysts, including McCormack, have suggested that the current situation is in some ways favourable to US hawks because it serves as an excuse to keep forces in the region containing and putting pressure on Japan.

"Paradoxically, Japan is easier to rein in as long as North Korea is a threat," McCormack points out. One reason that the Japanese government is resigned to dispatching Self-Defense Force troops to Iraq is its perceived need for U.S. protection from North Korea. In McCormack's view, though, this threat is actually elevated due to U.S. policies. The North Korean threat is especially useful to the U.S. in generating pressures on Japan to shed its Article 9 military allergies and become, in the words of U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, the "Britain of the Far East."

The reference to Armitage is to a speech he made last week in a 'private' capacity where he presented his personal opinion that Article 9, the clause in Japan's constitution rejecting aggression and projection of military force beyond its borders, made it impossible for Japan to play a full role in the international community, so that it would have to be renounced for Japan to join civilized nations as a permanent member of the UN Security Council.
Is there any hope for North Koreans and inhabitants of the region generally? Well, again, the consensus view is that there is hope since there is evidence that the North Korean regime is anxious to work towards better relations with Japan and the US and that Japan (along with China, Russia and South Korea) has been putting pressure on the US to back down and find a diplomatic solution, knowing that the alternative would be disastrous for the region:

McCormack argues that Kim Jong Il sought to advance normalization by taking the bold step of admitting that DPRK security forces had abducted Japanese nationals. ... [but] Kim's attempt to promote a thaw in relations ended with ties in the deep freeze, in no small part due to [Japanese] Foreign Ministry miscues.
Japan is playing a constructive role, urging the U.S. to negotiate, as it knows "all too well from its own experience what a desperate, isolated leader-worshipping and highly militarized regime will do if threatened by a blockade and the cutoff of vital resources."

Brinkmanship generates too many chances for miscalculation in a situation where the consequences could be catastrophic; this helps explain why the Bush administration sensibly flip-flopped on negotiating with the DPRK.

I would be less optimistic about the Bush administration's motives than Jeff Kingston seems to be. (I think the last comment is pure Kingston rather than Kingston paraphrasing McCormack.) I think that they have held back from launching attacks on North Korea partly, as I have said, under pressure from the other major forces in the region but largely to avoid military overstretch and because they have not prepared the US public for it with the kind of disinformation campaign we saw directed against Iraq. A strike against Korea will be a possibility if these factors can be overcome - by neo-cons or by the Democrat heirs of Clinton's close approach to military action in 1994.

Something beautiful for a change

2004-07-26T01:56:00.000+02:00

200 million yen lottery ticket given to Fukui flood victims

FUKUI (Kyodo) The winner of a 200 million yen [about ?2 million or $2 million] lottery prize has donated the lucky ticket to victims of the recent heavy rain in Fukui Prefecture [which has caused massive devastation and killed several people], Fukui Gov. Issei Nishikawa said Saturday.

The ticket for the grand prize in the June 15 Dream Jumbo lottery was received through the mail Friday at the Fukui Prefectural Government office with a note saying it is a donation, Nishikawa told a news conference. The letter was postmarked Thursday with a fictitious sender's name and address.

"I've learned of the damage from the Fukui heavy rain through newspapers and the (TV) news," the note read. "I hope this will prove of some help to those who have unfortunately incurred damages."

Nishikawa said, "I'd like to express my appreciation by publicizing this, because we can't confirm who made the donation."
(from the Japan Times)

Commercial whaling likely to be approved at IWC

2004-07-26T01:55:00.000+02:00

Two reasons: Japan has been buying the votes of small countries (Taiwanese-style diplomacy, lately practiced by China also...); secondly, the US has just given its support to Japan's proposal to reintroduce commercial whaling of minke whales according to the Japan Times.

Before that development, Alex Higgins of Bring on the Revolution had already written about the probable resumption of whaling in his most recent post. (I reproduce the whole item here because I can't link directly to it.)

Whales are once again under threat from rogue states – the states in question being Japan, Iceland and Norway who are set to defy international opinion and ram harpoons into some of the world’s most intelligent creatures to make products out of their body fat.
   Whales have been protected to an extent by an 18-year international moratorium on their slaughter by the International Whaling Commission – but it looks like this is about to change as the rogue states are set to get the votes they need to rev up the harpoons once more.

   For once, the US, Britain and Australia are on the right side of an international issue and their representatives have kept the ban in place, but the pattern of votes is changing. Originally the IWC had 30 members, now it has 57 and new countries such as the Pacific island nation of Tuvalu and the West African semi-state of the Ivory Coast are joining. Many of these smaller, poorer nations do not engage in whaling of any kind and have no intention of doing so, but they are voting to lift the moratorium. Something smells, and it’s not the dead whales.
   Rather, the Japanese government has been engaged in intensive efforts to persuade poorer countries to help break the international ban on whaling. They have done this with the same method the US used to get such countries to support the Gulf War - a mixture of bribery and blackmail. Poorer countries are often at the mercy of economic aid for the G8 states, and this is the Japanese government’s tool of choice to win them round on the whaling issue.

   In Japan, the right to kill marine wildlife has become a nationalist issue. The pro-whaling lobby is led by Masayuki Komatsu who regards whales in roughly the same way as Margaret Thatcher regards the Irish Republican Army. Komatsu is described in the London Independent (July 19th) as “an ultra-nationalist and career diplomat at the Ministry of Agriculture”. He once advised the captains of whaling ships that they should “blow Greenpeace boats out of the water” (as French intelligence once did).
   Mr. Komatsu argues not only that there are sufficient whales to hunt them, but that there are so many they are endangering fish, and that whales are “the cockroaches of the sea”. This view prevails within Japan’s Liberal Democrat Party (which is almost always in power).
   Japan currently kills around 500 whales each year in the Antarctic Ocean by using a legal loophole which permits the killing of whales for scientific research. Quite what research is being done by eating whales in restaurants is anyone’s guess – this is probably illegal but it’s what happens. The hunting looks set to extend into the North Pacific next year.
   It is curious to see the argument about eating fish come up again, as it did when the Canadian government went ahead with the Spring seal slaughter. Again, aside from the fact that many species of whale do no eat fish, it is people who are eating the fish, and furthermore doing so out of choice rather than necessity. Blaming whales for eating fish is discredited here.

   Whales are not cockroaches – they are among the most intelligent creatures on the planet. The means of hunting them – firing harpoons with explosives into a whale’s body – is, to say the least, outrageously cruel. They literally bomb the whale. And as Sir David Attenborough points out, “the hard, scientific, dispassionate evidence [shows] there is no humane way to kill a whale at sea.” In its 2002 hunt, Norway found that 1 in 5 whales failed to die instantaneously, while Japan found this to be the case for 60% of harpooned whales in 2002-3.

Don't bomb the whale!

   This is not just bad news for whales, as the International Fund for the Welfare of Animals says: "This isn’t just about whales. It’s about fighting for the right of smaller nations to make informed choices without being bullied."
So. it looks like we have to bring those Save the Whale T-shirts out again. Sigh… but then we might not have expected to have to argue against torture either – it’s a strange century. No rest for the wicked, as some say.

Excellent stuff from Alex as always. I want to add a few brief footnotes. First, the Liberal Democratic Party (Jiminto: 自民党) may soon be out of power, since Japan seems to be moving towards a two-party system like France, Germany, the US or the UK, with the rise of the DPJ (民主党, Minshuto), which is somewhat more liberal overall. I don't think it's going to help whales much, unfortunately, since Japanese elites seem set on pleasing nationalists by catching whales (this is the second point) despite reported lack of demand. Apparently not all of the whale-meat produced now can be sold. Perhaps (third point) it will be forced on children in their school dinners as it used to be before the moratorium on whaling. People I've met who experienced this were not generally very keen on repeating the experience: whale-meat is reportedly fatty and chewy, not a winning combination.

Hong Kong newspapers raided by government agency

2004-07-25T16:32:00.000+02:00

On the front pages of leading Hong Kong newspapers today: raids on their offices carried out on Friday by an arm of the Hong Kong government.

(AP) - Anti-graft officials raided six Hong Kong newspaper offices over news reports that identified a protected witness, and media on Sunday accused authorities of threatening press freedom.

The Independent Commission Against Corruption said in a statement that its officers searched several newspapers' offices, seized some documents and talked to newspaper employees on Saturday, in relation to the corruption probe of a listed company.

The ICAC didn't name the newspapers.

But the South China Morning Post, the Apple Daily, the Oriental Daily News, the Sun and the Sing Tao Daily splashed details of the raids on their newsrooms across their front pages Sunday.

The Ta Kung Pao said it was also raided in a story on its back page.

Some condemned the operation as a threat to press freedom.

The Post said the ICAC raided the offices in response to local media reports that named a woman who was under the commission's witness protection program.

Identifying a protected witness without ``lawful authority or reasonable excuse'' is illegal and punishable by up to 10 years in prison under Hong Kong law.

The named witness was involved in a probe that's led to the arrests of six people, the reports said.

The ICAC said the six - including two lawyers and the chairman of a listed company - were arrested for alleged conspiracy to pervert the course of public justice, perjury and violation of witness protection laws.

The Oriental Daily News said 10 ICAC officers on Saturday searched its court reporters' desks and computers, and seized some documents. It said that they later searched its sister publication, the Sun, and that the two raids together lasted more than five hours.

The Apple Daily said the ICAC searched its office and the home of one of its reporters. The Post said the officers interviewed some of its reporters at its office on Saturday, and later asked them to go to the ICAC office, where they answered questions until late at night.

Some of the newspapers accused ICAC of disrupting their operations.

``Hong Kong's shame: ICAC infringes on press freedom,'' read a headline in the Oriental Daily News.

The ICAC was ``engaged in a massive overreaction,'' the South China Morning Post quoted its Editor-in-Chief David Armstrong as saying.

Hong Kong Journalists Association Chairwoman Cheung Ping-ling said the raids were unnecessary and harmed press freedom.

``They could have just invited the reporters involved to aid their investigation,'' Cheung said in comments broadcast by Hong Kong network Cable TV.

ICAC spokeswoman Valentina Chan declined immediate comment on the accusations Sunday.

I have no idea if the raids really have anything to do with cracking down on corruption: they may well. Hong Kong, like all other East Asian countries, suffers from systemic gangsterism with connections inside government, the police and most major industries - at a similar level to southern Italy. So there's plenty of corruption to investigate.
But given recent events in Hong Kong, particularly the resignations of three talk-show hosts following threats and last month's arson attack on pro-democracy politician Emily Lau, it's natural to see the hand of the mainland Chinese government in these raids. They are doing everything they can to stifle the massive pro-democracy movement ahead of elections in September, following the huge march on July 1st this year, the first anniversary of an equally huge march.

Japan terrorism bill ignores non-citizens' rights

2004-07-25T15:08:00.000+02:00

A clause making protection of foreigners a legal duty during an emergency has been dropped from Japan's proposed new 'anti-terrorism' law. This Japan Times article makes the connection to the lack of constitutional rights non-citizens have in Japan owing to a similar, deliberate omission from the constitution and the continuing lack of a racial discrimination law.

Bill of rights
Military law ignores gaijin rights violation danger

(Platitudinous first paragraphs omitted...)

It's ... important to examine rights protection of Japan's foreign population in an emergency, at a time when government-sponsored crackdowns on immigration violators and police campaigns against foreign criminals have reached hysteric levels.

However, by not seriously considering the importance of including the foreign population in the terms of the new law, Japanese officialdom has once again signaled its desire to deny equal constitutional rights protection to the growing foreign population, even at a time when they are potentially most vulnerable to discrimination.

Last month, a package of seven security-related bills, or military emergency legislation, received final approval. One of these bills, the so-called "Citizens' Protection Law" ("Kokumin Hogo Hou") provides measures for citizens of Japan to be prepared for and to deal with any attack on Japan by giving statutory form to their rights and duties in an emergency.

The law also stipulates the roles of the central and local governments, the Self-Defense Forces and appointed public organs in organizing and aiding citizens.

However, foreigners cannot automatically be protected by this law in a time of heightened national security, since they are not included under its terms, or those of the Constitution.

This situation has its roots as far back as the drafting of the Constitution by the Allied Occupation Force in post-war Japan.

When the Allied force presented its draft of the Constitution to the Japanese government in February 1946, it included two quite visionary provisions.

Article XIII stipulated that "All natural persons are equal before the law. No discrimination shall be authorized or tolerated in political, economic or social relations on account of race, creed, sex, social status, caste or national origin."

The second, Article XVI, declared that "Aliens shall be entitled to the equal protection of law."

However, both provisions were revised by the Japanese government. It removed Article XVI and phrased the subject of the Constitution as "kokumin (Japanese citizens, or those of Japanese nationality)."

As a result, though Article 14 (I) of the Constitution stipulates that "All (kokumin) are equal under the law and there shall be no discrimination in political, economic or social relations because of race, creed, sex, social status or family origin," since the word "kokumin" does not include foreigners, the Constitution provides no legal basis for the protection of foreigners against discrimination.

The issue was dangerously reflected in the evolution of the new law which is also for "kokumin."

When the first draft of the bill was presented to governors in October 2002, it included "prohibition of unfair discrimination against foreigners" as a matter of importance.

However, when the government presented the second draft a month later, the provision was gone.

Assuming the provision was originally included because there was a fear that foreigners may face discrimination in an emergency situation, its removal means there is now no automatic guard in place to prevent discrimination.

"If the prohibition provision was taken out intentionally, two reasons could be thought of; first, there were people who wanted to exclude foreigners from the subject of this law; second, people who were talking about the law couldn't fully understand why foreigners would have to be protected," believes Makoto Teranaka, of Amnesty International, Japan.

When asked if foreigners were to be included in the terms of the new law, the government replied "No, but foreigners will be protected."

Though the term "kokumin" does not include foreigners, the government said, the protection of human rights stipulated in the Constitution has been interpreted to include the foreign population; this interpretation of the scope of rights protection is also applicable to the citizens protection bill.

But how these rights can be protected remains unclear.

There is currently no law on the Japanese statute books that prohibits racial discrimination indeed Japan is the only OECD country without one. The government's habit of relying on "interpretation" is not satisfactory in cases where abuses may occur.

Moreover, even though Japan ratified the U.N. International Convention on Eliminating Racial Discrimination in 1996, it has since been reprimanded by the New-York based body for its failure to adopt "specific legislation to outlaw racial discrimination."

And historical precedent suggests good reasons why foreigners would need to be protected in an emergency situation.

When a huge earthquake struck the Kanto region in 1923, rumors abounded of Koreans starting fires, rioting and poisoning wells.

The central government subsequently ordered local governments to "watch and control Koreans strictly." Furthermore, Japanese vigilantes were organized in each area, which led to the torturing and lynching of thousands of Koreans.

And in 1995, when the Hanshin earthquake struck, rumors of "Chinese looting" and "Asian laborers stealing," circulated. Foreigners also had difficulty obtaining housing after losing their homes.

On the other hand, there were some positive developments for foreigners. Volunteer groups were organized to offer foreigners medical assistance and information, and the Hyogo Prefectural Office came out and denied the rumors of foreigners looting and stealing.

The issue was raised again more recently when popular rightwing Tokyo Gov. Shintaro Ishihara warned that foreigners could be expected to riot in Tokyo in the event of a major disaster in the city.

"The Kanto earthquake is not just history," says Teranaka.

But lawmakers dismiss the idea that discrimination and targeting of foreigners may happen again.

"We have learned from the past," says Seiji Maehara, a member of the Lower House committee that discussed the military contingency legislation. "In making these laws, we considered that the rights of minorities in Japan would easily be threatened in a military contingency. When there was a disaster in the Kanto region back in 1923, the rights of minority people were violated. We are making these laws also to prevent this kind of thing happening again," says Maehara.

"Foreign residents in Japan will not be treated differently from Japanese because of their race or nationality. That situation should not be worried about in Japan."

However, recent official policies suggest otherwise.

"Considering the police and especially the Tokyo Metropolitan government's vilification of foreigners, even in peacetime, we cannot expect them to act fairly in a military contingency as Hyogo officials did," says Terenaka.

"Rather, they may even abuse the situation to control foreigners."

As both the police and the government foster the image of foreigners as a threat and the media propagates this message, it may be that at a time of heightened danger to Japan, foreigners will be viewed and treated not as victims, but as terrorist suspects, with no basis, other than vague legal "interpretation" to defend rely on.

The article doesn't explain who the vast majority of the 'foreign' population are: Japanese-born descendants of Koreans shipped to Japan in the colonial era, who hold Korean rather than Japanese nationality. There's an excellent summary of the situation on Japan Policy Research Institute page:

In a reverse flow of migration between 1910 and 1945, successive waves of migrants arrived in Japan from its imperial colonies, mostly from Korea, which had been annexed in 1910. As colonial subjects, all Koreans were granted Japanese nationality and were therefore able to move freely from Korea to Japan in search of jobs. What began as a trickle of colonial workers grew to a large influx in the 1920s as the expanding Japanese economy demanded more inexpensive, unskilled labor. By 1925, 150,000 Korean immigrants worked in jobs shunned by Japanese in such labor intensive and dangerous industries as mining, construction, and arms manufacturing. This number had risen dramatically to 800,000 by 1937, the year Japan initiated war with China. By this time Japan had instituted a policy of assimilating Koreans completely into Japanese culture, as a result of which Koreans were forced, beginning in 1938, to follow the Japanese school curriculum and, in 1940, to adopt Japanese names. At the height of the Pacific War (1942-45), Korean men and women, as Japanese nationals, became an important source of conscripted, and later forced, labor working under extremely harsh conditions. By the end of the war in 1945, the Korean population in Japan had grown to 2 million.

Japan?s surrender in 1945 liberated its Korean colonial subjects, the majority of whom soon returned to their homeland. One fourth of them (600,000), however, chose to remain in Japan for political, economic, and familial reasons. The looming threat of war in the Korean Peninsula further deterred their repatriation efforts. For six years, between 1945 and 1952, the Japanese state (then under allied occupation) regarded its former Korean born nationals as foreigners, excluding them from political participation and requiring them to register as foreign residents. In 1951, Japan signed the San Francisco Peace Treaty and the country was restored to full independence and reentered the international community. In April of the following year, when the treaty took effect, the Ministry of Justice issued a communication formally depriving the 600,000 resident Koreans of their Japanese nationality. In 1950, when the Nationality Law was revised, Japan had adopted the principle of jus sanguinis (law of blood) in defining Japanese citizenship. As a result, descendants of non-Japanese nationals, including Koreans, are to this day defined by law as foreigners no matter for how long or how many generations they have lived in Japan.

In 1965, the Japan-Korean Peace Treaty imposed South Korean nationality on most ethnic Koreans in Japan, but granted them permanent resident status in the country. Both the Japanese government and leading Korean organizations regarded Koreans in Japan as foreigners or sojourners despite the fact that their lives had already taken deep root in the country. By 1990, the Korean population had increased to 700,000, constituting Japan?s largest foreign population. The loss of Japanese citizenship had denied Koreans most of the benefits of public services to which Japanese citizens are entitled, including national health insurance and workers? pensions?this despite their obligation to pay taxes on their earnings. This institutional discrimination was eliminated only in 1981, when Japan ratified the United Nations Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees (hereafter the Refugee Convention), which required its signatories to grant equal treatment to foreign nationals in the areas of social services, social security, and welfare.

Because they were defined as foreigners, and despite their permanent resident status, Koreans were subject to surveillance under the Alien Registration Law which, until 1992, required finger printing as well as an alien registration card. Most private companies and public positions (such as school teachers and city and state officials) have continued to exclude Koreans on the basis of their nationality. As a result, they are mostly self-employed as small business owners and family business workers. In the mid-1980s, for example, in Kanagawa Prefecture, more than 40 percent of the Korean residents were self-employed, compared to 20 percent of Japanese residents. Today, most young Koreans have adopted the Japanese language and education, thus identifying themselves as culturally Japanese. Widespread discrimination and deep-seated prejudice also cause the majority of them to use Japanese names in order to ?pass? in ordinary social contacts. As a result, many report experiencing serious internal conflict between their Korean ancestry and Japanese upbringing.

I've been planning to write something about racist Tokyo governor Ishihara Shintaro (note- I have corrected this: I wrote 'mayor' previously) for some time. For now, I'll just say that he has a colourful past and is apparently intelligent enough to know exctly what effect will be generated by his racist comments and use of terminology associated with Japan's imperial period. It's an ongoing disgrace that a neo-fascist should be the political leader of one of the great world cities.

More Japanese WWII 'orphans' sue Japanese government

2004-07-25T15:04:00.000+02:00

Sometimes it seems that all the activism in Japan is focussed on suing the government or corporations for abuses of human rights and the environment. The cases all turn into epics, lasting years, and often decades, because of the glacial speed of the Japanese legal system, and it must take considerable dedication to get involved. So I salute the people who have kept on the agenda sex slavery organised by the Japanese government in the 1930s and 40s ('comfort women'), censorship of school textbooks by the government in recent years, and a bunch of other things that elites in Japan would rather no one mentioned.
Here's the latest example, from an article in the Japan Times. The case has been brought by people now in their 50s, 60s and 70s who allege that the Japanese government abandoned them after they were separated from their parents as the Japanese occupation of China ended in August 1945.

18 more war orphans sue for redress

Eighteen Japanese separated from their parents in China at the end of World War II filed a lawsuit Friday with the Kyoto District Court to seek compensation from the government for failing to help them come to Japan earlier and to properly support them after they resettled here.

They follow 90 other so-called war orphans who filed a similar suit with the Kyoto court last September. Additional suits have been filed at 11 other district courts nationwide.

The latest plaintiffs range in age from their 50s to 70s. Those actually born in Japan hail from Mie, Shiga, Kyoto, Nara and Osaka prefectures. The 18 are each seeking 33 million yen in compensation.

"We could not come to Japan for a long time because of the state's negligence, and we have not been able to receive its full support after coming to Japan," they said in the complaint.

The government defines war orphans as Japanese nationals who, at the ages of 13 or younger, were separated from their parents or guardians in China in the chaotic days in August 1945.

Documentary about effects of Japanese chemical weapons in China

2004-07-25T15:03:00.000+02:00

In my last post I mentioned brave people who take the Japanese government to court, often for offenses committed during the Japanese colonial period and invasion of China. I said that their cases typically drag on for many years. One reason is that whenever a court finds against the Japanese government it appeals to a higher court, which delays any compensation payment and brings the case in front of judges who are closer to the higher echelons of the Japanese elite and far less likely to rock the boat than a judge from a district court.
This is exactly what has happened in the case of Liu Min, Li Chen and eleven others who are suing for compensation for injury to their relatives from Japanese chemical weapons left in China after the Japanese retreated in 1945.
Now Japanese filmmaker Kana Tomoko has made a documentary about Chinese people injured this way, From the Land of Bitter Tears:

Kana said she decided to make the film after meeting 27-year-old Liu Min while touring China with friends last summer.

Liu, whose 40-year-old father was killed in 1995 when an abandoned artillery shell accidentally exploded in the city of Harbin, Heilongjiang Province, is one of 13 plaintiffs seeking compensation from Japan. Liu's father's limbs were blown off. He suffered massive burns and died 17 days after the blast.

Then a 19-year-old with hopes of becoming a schoolteacher, Liu has since been working at her relative's cafeteria without rest. And her family has little prospect of paying off her father's medical bills.

"I was shocked by the fact that a woman her age was suffering from the aftereffects of the war," Kana said. "While I initially had no intention to make a film on this issue, once I learned of her suffering, I had no choice."

Kana captured the emotional roller coaster Liu and three other victims from separate incidents has been on, including the scene of Liu giving a tearful hug to her mother while the mother burst into tears, confessing that it was she who pulled the plug on her husband.

The mother could not pay the medical bills and thus took him out of the hospital. He died the following day.

Kana's camera also caught Liu and fellow plaintiff Li Chen flying to Japan to take in the Sept. 29 ruling at the Tokyo District Court, and their excitement after the landmark decision to award the plaintiffs a combined 190 million yen in damages.

Their elation abruptly ended four days later when the government filed an appeal against the ruling.

Kana directed, shot and edited the documentary herself, paying most of the 4 million yen cost. Her filmmaking was zealously covered by Chinese media, and she was featured last month on a 30-minute prime time program by China Central Television, the national TV network in China.

The appeals court case by the 13 plaintiffs, including Liu and Li, is pending before the Tokyo High Court. A third session is set for Sept. 13.
Read the whole Japan Times article here.

The weapons left behind in China have received little attention in the Japanese press, but a lot in China. The court case may be one reason why the Japanese government has now finally paid for the chemical weapon sites in Heilongjiang (in north east China) to be cleaned up, as reported here by AFP and here by Xinhua.

US administration lies about the UN, abortions and China

2004-07-20T02:28:00.000+02:00

From the Daily Mislead, which will send you one email per day, meticulously researched, about the Bush administration's latest falsehoods:

POLITICS PUT OVER WOMEN AND CHILDREN'S HEALTH

For the third consecutive year the Bush administration has decided not to release $34 million appropriated by Congress to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). The administration claims that the funds are being withheld because "the fund indirectly supports Chinese government programs that force women to have abortions."[1] Although this explanation is popular with Bush's conservative base, it is wholly unsupported by the facts.

In 2002, Secretary of State Colin Powell dispatched a team to China to investigate whether the UNFPA was assisting the Chinese government's coercive practices. The investigators reported that there was "no evidence that the UNFPA has knowingly supported or participated in the management of a program of coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization."[2] The investigative team recommended "that funds allocated by Congress be released to UNFPA."[3]
Read the whole story...

"Citing Chinese Abortions, U.S. Refuses to Fund U.N. Program," Los Angeles Times, 7/17/04.

"US again denies money to population fund," Boston Globe, 7/17/04.

"UNFPA Regrets U. S. Administration's Decision Not to Restore Funding," UNFPA, 7/16/04.