Anti-Japan Runs Wild
There is a surge in anti-Japan sentiment recently. This article attempts to trace the origin of this absurd political movement that has continually attacked helpless Japan.
People who subscribe to the politicized comfort women narrative propagated by the ROK and PRC governments that I usually encounter are either (i) a leftist, (ii) KPOP stan, (iii) neocon or internationalist, (iv) unintelligent (liberal) American or (v) a Chinese bot. It is usually like that and no one can deny that the continual political attack on Japan is one of the consequences of the process of consolidating the Wilsonian order after the War. Japan is one of the “enemy countries” that has never fully reformed and transformed itself into a full-blown Social Democratic state like Germany, thus, it should be noted that the existence of Japan, its people, its culture, and its history is, in the eyes of many leftists who joined hand in hand with the victors of the War, a great threat that should belong in the past…
The Left has been using Japan’s history and political outlook as weapons to further crystallize its grip on power since the end of the Second World War. Now, to get a deeper picture of this leftist crusade annoyance, we have to examine the circumstances that happened to Japan after the War. Beginning in 1946, the Americans occupied the country (basically a dictatorship state led by Gen. Douglas MacArthur) and began to round up everyone who worked for the Imperial Government with the goal of transforming the country into a Western-oriented democracy. Countless right-wing politicians were fired from their positions by the Americans unfairly. Although the Imperial Rule Assistance Association was composed predominantly of center-right Minseito and right-wing Seiyukai individuals, the first groups of people who introduced proto-liberal democracy to Japan, they were all viewed as either “fascist” or “imperialist” in the eyes of Eurocentric Americans. The Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (known widely among the Japanese as the GHQ — “General Headquarters”) acknowledged that the Japanese distrusted anyone other than their own race and they would just rise up against this gaijin-authority that has come to occupy their country. So, they came up with the idea of creating a false sense among the Japanese — in other words, to reduce the Japaneseness among the Japanese people while using a propaganda machine to keep them in check. They forced Japanese newspapers not to report anything about the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or the incendiary bombing of Tokyo. If they did, the Allies’ entire silly vision of bringing peace would totally fall apart; they would go further to arrest anyone who reported it. Moreover, rampant cases of Japanese women being raped by American soldiers in Okinawa were frequently reported to American military police, but the American authority in Okinawa turned a blind eye to it, just like nothing happened. Talking about human rights and such.
The War Guilt Information Program (WGIP), ran by the civilian section of the SCAP/GHQ with involvement from the predecessor of the CIA and later the CIA itself, was designed to “spread false information and instill in the Japanese people a view of history and politics in alignment with the needs of Washington.”1. This is where, I think, the origin of the anti-Japan movement started to appear on the international scene. In the meantime, the creation of the worker unions was encouraged by the SCAP/GHQ while the Japanese Communist Party was unsurprisingly unbanned because of “freedom of association”. Culminating with the psychological effects of the WGIP, one of the results was the birth of self-hate leftist Japanese that would go on to develop their nihilistic philosophy of eradicating Japan to end all sufferings in the 1960s to 1970s. Moreover, after the Chinese Communists took over mainland China, Japanese POWs were transferred to some facility in Fujian to be brainwashed. These POWs would go back to Japan and facilitated an anti-Japan sentiment and promoted the cancellation of Japan’s past.
At that time, the US was on good terms with Communist China since it had been supplying the Communists for almost a decade. The thing is the American Democrats would totally turn a blind eye to the atrocities committed by the Communists (e.g., the rape of Japanese women and children at the end of the war or the killing of Japanese people in Japanese-controlled areas in the early 1930s). Not to mention the fact that the FDR and Truman administrations were great friends to Stalin, which placed the US as the enemy (Communism/leftist internationalism) of Japan from the beginning. Thus, we are starting to see the overall picture. Perhaps the Americans fought the wrong enemy?
MacArthur’s plan of turning Japan into an American puppet/liberal democratic country was a flawed move from the beginning, as we all know from countless historical events. Although MacArthur did not expect a leftward shift in Japanese politics, he was not initially aware of the New Dealer subordinates who were responsible for infiltrating Leftism into post-war Japan. By the time MacArthur started to cultivate a right-wing crusade in the Japanese government, leftist policies and movements perpetrated by his subordinates were halfway finished. By the way, in Germany, it occurred in a more severe form, aka. denazification with support from members of the Frankfurt School. All German and Prussian cultural references were grouped under one sole umbrella of “Nazism”. The Frankfurt School was victorious in labeling all things of “Old Germany” as “Nazi”, which compared to Japan, was far more extreme and ultimately made Germany prone to being dominated by all sorts of leftist thinking and social dominant2. Now, if we think about it, while Japan under the Occupation was short (1946-1952), the Occupation itself nonetheless produced a great deal of influence on Japanese society and has impacted the Japanese mind since then. In spite of that, I still think that post-war Japan is much better than post-war Germany.
The absurd belief that the Japanese government has never apologized nor paid reparations to the countries that it had waged war against is ridiculous. The Japanese government paid reparations of $800 million worth to South Korea with the signing of the 1965 Agreement. Accordingly, it was agreed by both parties that “no more reparations or any other forms of amends should be demanded by South Korea” after that. Likewise, the controversy around the comfort women issue was already settled with the 1965 Agreement, which the South Korean government gladly accepted. The Japanese government under a center-left and center-right coalition in 1993 even allowed the South Korean government to write the notorious “Kono statement”. Some comfort women organization was accused of fraud a few years ago, whereas others are able to manipulate and politicize this issue endlessly further just because they claim to be former comfort women and they want more and more money to build useless “peace statues” in front of Japanese embassies; appealing to the international community that you were once the “victim” of “Japanese imperialism” requires no evidence except for a few drops of tears, then the entire clown world will sympathize with you. China received Japanese assets that were left behind in Manchuria and in other former Japanese territories. The ROC gladly accepted Japanese remedies during the late 1940s. Then, the Japanese government reached a formal agreement with the PRC in the 1970s. Millions of millions were poured into Southeast Asian countries in the form of reparation or investment. The SEA countries that received most of the reparations were British colonies. An equivalent condition was applied to Thailand too, in which the British demanded a great number of reparations from Thailand essentially because they wanted “to punish” the Thais for collaborating with the Japanese. Nowadays, no one in SEA would complain about Japan’s past since virtually all of them were assisted by the Japanese in liberating themselves from the Westerners. Vietnam, Burma, Cambodia, and Indonesia for example. If that is the case, then why do those South Koreans and Chinese still have resentment against Japan? Or is it really just resentment? And, what drives this resentment then?
South Korea began to discredit Japan internationally around the 1990s, and then it moved to the next stage of defamiliarizing and isolating Japan on the world stage in the early 2010s (the 2013 rising sun flag controversy to be precise). Back in 1999, an anti-Japan organization called the “Voluntary Agency Network of Korea” (VANK) was founded. Its founder stated that his goal was “to discredit Japan” whether Japan apologized or not (which it did). Tracing back this ridiculous form of South Korean nationalism living off the benefits of being the victim of Japanese imperialism and exploiting Japan’s past, we have to go back to the 1950s. There emerged this ethnonationalist/Great Korea historiography after President Syngman Rhee ascended to power in South Korea. Rhee’s anti-Japan policy inspired Korean historians to take an alternative approach to view their country. They began to write their own imaginary version of Korean history, for example, “Korea had been modernized by the Yi dynasty long before the Japanese came in” (which is ridiculously untrue). During the Park Chung-Hee era, nonetheless, South Korea became closer to Japan because Park himself was an officer in the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA), the fact that he embraced Japan as a savior of Korea from the backward Yi dynasty, and also included the fact that Japan had disbursed a lot of money for his country in the form of post-war reparations. This friendly relationship collapsed with the overthrow of the Chun Doo-Hwan government and the transition to democracy in 1987. The student movement was predominantly composed of the anti-Japan 386 Generation or the boomers/Gen X. They played an important role in shaping Korea after it became democratic. Among the intellectual Koreans, there have been countless numbers of left-wing progressive nationalist intellectuals shaping Korean historiography and how Koreans should perceive themselves. These 386 generation people would go on and become the most anti-Japan group of all. One of them became President in 1997 and since then the political crusade against Japan has persisted. Their children were born and raised to believe how evil Japan was and that “it is never enough for the Japanese to apologize and pay”. It persists to this day, with the establishment of the Korea Creative Content Agency (KOCCA) to promote its soft power abroad while using another notorious presidential-level organization to discredit Japan through political means34. VANK has likewise been funded by the South Korean government.
The comfort woman problem has been controversial for some time. As one begins to investigate deep into the problem, one will notice that several of the complaints about Japan for not “providing enough remedies for ‘former comfort women’” always come from South Korea5. Considering the fact that Koreans, especially South Koreans, have never had anything of their own to be proud of, being subjugated by both the Han Chinese and Manchurians as a tribute state for hundreds of years, then, was annexed by Japan in 1910. It makes sense for them to constantly attempt to promote themselves internationally and nationally as a nation that has the proudest culture, history, and unique characteristics. The problem is that this distinguishing sort of Korean nationalism was artificially created primarily by left-wing nationalists who longed for a Korea of their own without any legacy of Japanese modernization; hence, after the 1987 democratic transition 1987, anti-Japan rhetoric appeared regularly at the forefront of every South Korean political landscape. The comfort women issue itself, however, is complicated. We have to go back to the 1970s when a former Japanese soldier claimed that the IJA kidnapped around 200,000 Korean women, and made them “sex slaves”. The man told this “scandalous story” to the center-left newspaper Asahi Shimbun, and then it caused a stir. Politicians from the Opposition (mainly the Japanese Communist Party and Socialist Party) urged the conservative Liberal Democratic Party to examine the issue. The thing is no matter how hard they tried to find the evidence of “forcing 200,000 Korean to be sex slaves”, they could not find it. Significantly though, wartime military records reveal that the IJA did not initiate a policy of mass kidnapping of Korean women. Records from both the Allies (primarily Australian and Dutch) and the IJA furthermore reveal that the IJA subcontracted privately-owned brothels across Korea and Northern China to handle the sexual desires of its soldiers, some Korean women sold themselves or were sold by parents, and that more than half of the comfort women stationed in Northern China and Southeast Asia were Japanese6. The man who accused the former IJA of kidnapping Korean women gave testimony in a Diet session in 1999, apologizing to the Japanese public that he had lied and exaggerated the wartime military prostitute system. Asahi later then withdrew the story7.
Nonetheless, the coalition government of 1993/94 was pressured by the South Korean government into “finally resolving the issue”. The incompetent coalition gave in to the Korean demand and produced the Kono statement with directions from the South Korean government, acknowledging in an ambiguous manner that there were Korean women who were forced to “work” for the IJA and that the Japanese government was remorseful for it. However, no concrete evidence of coercive action was provided. The final draft of the statement was made ambiguous to make it lines up with the Korean narrative. South Korea was satisfied with the statement and did not demand any (further) remedies from Japan. It did not end well though as this event would set the stage for the subsequent humiliation of Japan in the international community. the Japanese government, under international pressure erroneously provided funding for the establishment of the feminist-globalist Asian Women's Fund, a prominent organization that would subsequently expand into an anti-Japan crusade with support from South Korean anti-Japan organizations, such as VANK. VANK initiated its strategies of humiliating Japan in the mid-2000s, culminating with the hijacked comfort women issue which began in Japan and the attempt to equivalencing the Rising Sun Flag with the Nazi Swastika, they achieved their goals of humiliating Japan in 2013 with the flying of the Rising Sun Flag by the JMSDF, and in 2015 when they installed a “peace statue” in front of the Japanese embassy in Seoul and lobbied Western governments, such as Germany and California into installing their statues in public areas. Ultimately, all of this comfort women issue is a work of the South Korean propaganda machine to attain leverage in the international community and to cancel the “Rightist Japan” like what the Frankfurt School did to Germany in the 1950s and 60s. In the meantime, the Koreans would not admit that most of the “sex workers” working for the IJA were Japanese8. Accordingly, If you see anti-Japan rhetoric or any “comfort women” issue on the mainstream news, look for an inconsistency that indicates that it is an invention of either VANK or the South Korean government itself. South Korea, though part of “modernized Japan”, tends to use the issue of the Japanese colonial past for its political, or even monetary benefits.
The People’s Republic of China, on the other hand, utilized the “war against the Japanese imperialists" narrative for its Communist Party consolidation and control after it took over mainland China. You can see that most young Chinese tend to talk about this issue particularly loudly and badmouth Japan on university campuses or on the Internet when they have the chance. Their children's textbooks are filled with "Japanese devils". Similarly, the rape of Nanking and Unit 731 were brought up by Iris Chang in the late 1990s, a Chinese American, who went crazy and killed herself after realizing how brutal war is (aw poor girl). Her narrative of the War continued to influence the Anti-Japan Chinese American organization in California, a nonsensical entity that is “anti-racist” but “anti-Japanese”, which has frequently lobbied California’s state government to denounce Japan regardless of any reason whatsoever. Moreover, in mainland China, they built the “Memorial Hall of the Victims of Nanjing Massacre by Japanese Invaders”, while believing that the Tiananmen Square massacre or the Cultural Revolution never took place. They also forget that there were millions of Chinese who collaborated with the Japanese either under the Nanking government or the monarchist government of Manchukuo or the fact that Japanese soldiers helped Chinese people to shelter when the Nationalist Government blew up the dam near Nanjing. Well, for the Chinese state, painting the issue as black and white, the problem is used to instill fear into the brains of its people and use Japan’s war crimes as an ideological justification to do whatever the Chinese state desires. With the riots in 2012 over the Senkaku Islands issue, it went wild though, because the State itself could not contain the abnormality it had produced. On the other hand, You cannot see this sort of “Japanese devils” talking point in Taiwan (Republic of China/ROC). There are even Japanese Shinto shrines across Taiwan, a legacy of the colonial period, been taken care of by the Taiwanese for decades without any thought of demolishing them. The Japanese viewed the indigenous Taiwanese people as comrades while seeing Han Chinese as not so dissimilar from the Westerners who treated the natives of Asia like dogs.
There is an English-language website run by some leftist nikkei and their friends containing a database of individuals who question the narrative. Be careful though if you begin to understand their operation, they will try to cancel and dox you any way they can.
Ignoring all crimes of all nations (and their own crimes) that had been committed since the dawn of humanity and focusing specifically on Japan is what these Allies-were-the-good-guy supporters are good at. Worse, no matter what, they, especially the Koreans, the Chinese, and certain elements within the West, will use Japan as a scapegoat for political rhetoric whenever they see fit. For the Koreans, it is because of their self-righteousness, unity among their people, and monetary gains. For the Chinese, it is because the Party aims to consolidate its control and undermine the US through its puppet — Japan. For the West, it is a Gramscian process of the New Left attempting relentlessly to finally bury the Old Past (i.e. the existence of Japan). It seems as if it is an everlasting original sin for the Japanese people to eternally atone for the recent War without having any opportunity to question the post-war narrative or defend themselves…
Morgan, Jason. “Book Review: War Guilt Information Program and History Wars”. Society for the Dissemination of Historical Fact.
Gottfried, Paul. Fascism: The Career of a Concept. DeKalb, Il: Northern Illinois University Press. February 8, 2016.
[One of the reasons why Japan completely lost its soft power projection in 2010 or so. Another reason is the stagnation of the Japanese economy.]
[I forget the name of the institution but you can try to search for it.]
[Considering the fact that the Juche state is rather good at creating propaganda, well, North Korea has not appeared to use this comfort women issue to indoctrinate its people as much as its Southern neighbor.]
Miyamoto, Archie. Wartime Military Records on Comfort Women: Information War against Korea, United States, and Japan. Independently published. February 20, 2018.
Hata, Ikuhiko. Comfort Women and Sex in the Battle Zone. Lanham, MD: Hamilton Books. August 15, 2018.
Ibid.