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Japan PM Abe wants to replace landmark war apology: paper
Japan's new Prime Minister Shinzo Abe inspects the tsunami-crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Fukushima Prefecture December 29, 2012.
Credit: Reuters/Itsuo Inouye/Pool
TOKYO |
TOKYO (Reuters) - Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe wants to replace a landmark 1995 apology for suffering caused in Asia during World War Two with an unspecified "forward-looking statement", a newspaper reported on Monday.
Abe, a hawkish conservative who is known to want to recast Japan's position on its wartime militarism in less apologetic tones, led his party to a landslide victory in a December 16 election.
He outlined his intention to restate Japan's position in an interview with the conservative Sankei newspaper, but he did not give details.
Any hint that Japan is back-tracking from the 1995 apology, issued by then Prime Minister Tomic Murayama, is likely to outrage neighbors, particularly China and North and South Korea, which endured years of brutal Japanese rule.
"The Murayama statement was a statement issued by Socialist Party Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama," Abe was quoted as saying in an interview with the conservative Sankei newspaper published on Monday.
"I want to issue a forward-looking statement that is appropriate for the 21st century," he said.
Abe said he would consult experts about the details and the timing of statement.
He has also said he wants to loosen the constraints of Japan's post-war pacifist constitution.
Abe hails from a wealthy political family that includes a grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi, who was a wartime cabinet minister who was imprisoned but never tried as a war criminal after the war. He went on to become prime minister from 1957 to 1960.
First elected to parliament in 1993 after the death of his father, a former foreign minister, Abe rose to national fame by adopting a tough stance toward North Korea in a dispute over Japanese citizens kidnapped by North Korea decades ago.
More recently, he has promised not to yield in a territorial row with China over tiny islands in the East China Sea - known as the Senkaku in Japan and the Diaoyu in China - and boost defense spending to counter China's growing influence.
During a first stint as prime minister, which began in September 2006 and lasted a year, Abe pushed through a parliamentary revision of an education law to "restore patriotism" in school curriculums.
(Reporting by James Topham; Editing by Robert Birsel)
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Obama and Congress should immediately condemn Japan’s neo-Nazism.
Short of that, Obama and Congress are actively promoting neo-Nazism, and guilty of using neo-Nazism to continually oppress all victims of arguably the most egregious crimes against humanity in the world’s history, and certainly war crimes that directly resulted in the world war I and world war II in Asia.
The Nobel Peace Committee should condemn Abe for reviving neo-Nazism, and cover up of crimes against humanity, and condemn Obama for supporting neo-Nazism whitewashing of Japanese crimes against humanity.
Abe is essentially saying that the invasion, organized rapes, and war crimes that his grandfather committed under official alliance the Adolf Hitler in Asia was not wrong, and doesn’t even deserve an apology.
The United States of America should declare Japan as unworthy to be part of the western alliance and not worthy to be American ally.
Scrap all the arms sales, by the way.
We need to end all wars.
Without Japan’s devious contribution to promote Communism by its starting of WWI and WWII, turning Asians against us and our allies, we would have saved all the lives of our American boys in Korea, and Vietnam and, needless to say, at Pearl Harbor, and at Iwo Jiima.
Obama: wake up. You are leading our country to a dangerously wrong direction, but refusing to stand with human rights of World War II war victims. War crimes are war crimes. You cannot declare that the crimes committed against them don’t count because after the crimes, the place they were living in, fell under the political rule of our enemies! NO legal system reasons like that. As as a constitutional lawyer, you know those violated criminal laws, and could only be explained by blatant racial discrimination against Asian victims, as opposed to the European victims, whom we not only provided fair trials, fair reparations, and subsidy to rebuild under the Marshall Plan to help prevent them from falling under Communist rule. The difference was based on racial discrimination.
for that unfortunate racial discrimination, so many American lives would have been saved by the avoidance of the several wars which we couldn’t win in Asia. The locals were against us because we looked the other way when their basic human rights were abused under Japanese militarism, under British imperialism. We only rewarded for voicing their human rights problem if it is politically convenient for us to further our ideology — that’s hypocritical, absolutely atrocious. Time for us to do the right thing, Obama.
Cut off the Japanese alliance and stop getting tempted by the Faustian rhetoric by Abe, baiting us to give them the best military technology with the pretense that they will fight our competitor. In truth, they are clearly stating that their philosophy is following Hitler’s devilishly clever track. Remember, Adolf won his democratic election in the early 1930s by arousing German nationalism about its previous defeat in WWI, and by demonizing the ethnic races he intended to conquer! Japan, just like Germany was recovering from the 1929 Wall Street crash, looked to cleverly disguised racist rhetoric to distract from its country’s economic failure.
Remember how all Europe was fooled by Adolf for a while. Adolf was even nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. It would serve more as a warning and deterrent of foolish, naive thinking if Adolf had won. But you, Obama, well versed in political history, should know about this history lesson any way. You have no excuse for the mess your Administration created in Asia, and your lame excuses about us always been a Pacific power! Duh, Teddy Roosevelt committed great crimes against human rights, as we now know, and we never apologized.
Obama: I expect you to make the tough decisions on race relations that nobody can! Biden is a hound dog, no more; his myopic views, so clearly manipulated by lack of knowledge of our history in Asia and political consequences — even though I do not doubt his sincerity — Biden’s viewpoint on Japanese militarism is like Neville Chamberlain’s on Hitler.
Don’t be blind, Obama Administration. The writing is on the wall!
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