Anti-Japan

Sea Shepherd’s Idiotic Antics Cost Australian Taxpayers “Hundreds of Thousands of Dollars”

Here is a follow-up on the three animal rights activists who illegally boarded a Japanese whaling ship a few days ago. The Japanese have agreed to the Australian government’s request that the men be released, but an Australian customs vessel will have to come pick them up. Attorney-General Nicola Roxon is making it clear that Sea Shepherd’s antics are going to be expensive for Australian taxpayers:

The mission to retrieve the men would cost “hundreds of thousands of dollars” and bad weather could increase the taxpayers’ tab further, Ms Roxon said.

“I would very much like these three men to consider what contribution they would make, or the Sea Shepherd (environmental group) for that matter,” Ms Roxon said.

“I’m not going to be holding my breath. The truth is the taxpayer will foot the bill for this sort of action.”

Sea Shepherd has insisted that there is no need for an Australian ship, since they can accept the direct return of the men. The Japanese are, of course, will not hand over criminals to the organization directly responsible for their illegal act (especially since the organization has a history of ramming whaling ships).

Meanwhile, even Prime Minister Julia Gillard has expressed her lack of approval for Sea Shepherd’s activities:

“People might want to make their views heard, and they should, but people need to make sure they stay on the right side of the line and engage in legal activity.”

Update: The men who illegally boarded the Japanese ship are glad that Australian taxpayers will be paying for the costly rescue mission. The stunt, which did not save any whales, was “worth it.”

The Sydney Morning Herald has a printed a very good letter to the editor:

Although my wife and I have for many years been lovers of whales and avid supporters of measures to protect them, we strongly object to Australian taxpayers bearing the cost of thousands of dollars to assist the three Australians who committed stupid and illegal acts against a sovereign Japanese ship (”Whalers gain upper hand in protest boat chase”, January 11). We should never reward criminal behaviour.

The actions of these so-called ”activists” have damaged Australia’s international image and our efforts to protect whales. They and their supporters should be forced to pay for their release.

David Harris, Clifton Grove

Note to the people being directed to spamvote: Listen to Mr. Harris.

Note: I noticed a huge increase in racist and bigoted comment posts this morning, and found that Sea Shepherd twitter accounts have been calling on their loyal fanatics to spam this poll. Prior to calls from SS Twitter accounts to spamvote, the poll results overwhelmingly called on SS to pay back Australian taxpayers. The poll answers have been altered to reflect the spamming. You guys are welcome to spam the poll some more, but flooding an online poll with votes won’t change anything.

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Australian Activists Illegally Board Japanese Whaling Ship

Three members of the radical animal rights groups Sea Shepherd and Forest Rescue Australia have been detained after illegally boarding a Japanese whaling ship. The incident took place 40 kilometers offshore, outside Australian territorial waters.

Here is Sea Shepherd’s version of the story from the West Australian (one of the many media outlets that uncritically acts as a PR outlet for SS):

“Some of our crew members with experience in boarding the Japanese ships met them in two of our inflatable boats in waters off Bunbury,” Sea Shepherd leader Paul Watson said.

“We (The Steve Irwin) stopped, called in that we were having engine trouble and also posted that on our website, because we know the Japanese monitor our website.

“Our vessel was 12 miles away, and I think being boarded was the last thing the Japanese thought would happen.

“It was total darkness on that ship and they had to climb around razor wire, we also know they carry military equipment.”

Forest Rescue Australia spokeswoman Amy Flee said the three men were well aware of the risks involved when they volunteered.

“They knew full well that they would probably be arrested,” she said.

As the activists note, the people who did this were fully aware that they could be arrested. They were certainly aware of the case of Pete Bethune, who was arrested in 2010 after acting under the orders of Sea Shepherd and carrying out a similar “raid” on Japanese ships. Bethune was convicted, but released with a suspended sentence.

The men were carrying a note that said “Return us to shore in Australia and then remove yourself from our waters.” But, as Australian Attorney-General Nicola Roxon has admitted, the incident did not take place in Australian territory:

”If this vessel is close to Australian waters, you’d think there was a possibility that [they] would promptly have discussions with us about a safe and immediate return,” Ms Roxon said.

But Ms Roxon expressed no confidence this would happen, saying the government’s options were restricted because the incident happened outside territorial waters.

”It is likely that these three Australians may be taken back to Japan,” she said.

Sea Shepherd, which has a consistent record of outright dishonesty, has claimed that they boarded the vessel within Australian territorial waters. (Don’t take my word for it, just ask Pete Bethune, who says the organization is dishonest and morally bankrupt.)

This latest act of illegal boarding seems to show that Japan was being too lenient when it gave a suspended sentence to Bethune. The same organization has repeated the same crime, fully aware of its illegality, and probably thinks that its members will not face actual prison sentences.

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Firebomb Attack on Japanese Embassy in Seoul

South Korean police have detained a Chinese man who threw several Molotov cocktails at the Japanese embassy in Seoul:

The man from Guangzhou, who came to South Korea on a tourist visa on Dec. 26 via Japan, claimed he also set fire to Tokyo’s Yasukuni Shrine before leaving that country, Park said.

Before entering South Korea, Liu had stayed in Japan for two months since October as a volunteer to help victims of March’s massive earthquake and tsunami, the officer added.

“We discovered Liu is the one who claimed to have set fire to the door of Japan’s Yasukuni Shrine last month,” Park said.

Much like the fire set at the Yasukuni Shrine, no serious damage was inflicted and nobody was hurt.

The man told police that his grandmother had been a “comfort woman” during the war and he threw the firebombs “to protest Japan’s refusal to apologize for its war crimes.”

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Koreans Plaster Tokyo With Comfort Women Posters

Last week, South Korean nationalists bought a full page ad in the Wall Street Journal:

Singer Kim Jang-hoon and Sungshin Women’s University professor Seo Kyoung-duk used ad space in the Wall Street Journal on Thursday (Dec 29), requesting compensation or a public apology from the Japanese government on former sex slaves.

Headlined “Do You Hear?” the ad shows a photo of Korean elderly women who were “comfort women” forced to serve as sex slaves for Japanese soldiers during World War II and explains that they have been holding weekly meetings outside the Japanese Embassy in Seoul since 1992. It adds that the number of attendants to the gatherings has grown to about 1,000.

The poster is highly misleading. It falsely claims that the Japanese government never paid compensation to the victims . It also incorrectly states that there have been no official apologies (“The Japanese government….has never expressed any intention of compensation or public apology for its atrocities”).

A few days later, the Korean media reported that Japanese translations of the advertisement had been printed as posters and placed throughout Tokyo. Searchina has translated some of the information from the reports into Japanese.

The two nationalists called on Korean residents of Japan to put up the posters. Some South Korean students in Japan were apparently inspired by her message, and about 1,500 posters were put up around Tokyo. The students targeted areas that received a lot of pedestrian traffic (such as Shinjuku, Shibuya, and Harajuku).

There are plans to do the same thing in the Kansai region of Japan.

Given the inflammatory content of the posters, it is highly unlikely that they found over a thousand places that would willingly display them. As angry 2channelers have pointed out, the Koreans are probably illegally putting up posters without the permission of property owners.

[ Since some people who come across this story may only be familiar with the Korean nationalist spin on the comfort women issue, here is a repost of some background information I wrote for a previous post.]

Background Information on Japan’s Official Response to the Comfort Women Issue

The issue of war reparations was addressed during the negotiations of the 1965 Treaty on Basic Relations between Japan and the Republic of Korea. The South Korean government accepted a huge sum of money from Japan, stating that it would take care of the distribution of reparations to individual Korean victims of Japanese imperialism. The South Korean government agreed that its citizens would no longer have the legal right to demand compensation payments from the Japanese government.

Unfortunately for the victims, the South Korean government hid the reparations agreement from its citizens and used the money for other purposes. For decades, South Koreans believed that Japan had not properly paid reparations to their country. The South Korean government eventually admitted the truth in 2005:

In January 2005, the South Korean government disclosed 1,200 pages of diplomatic documents that recorded the proceeding of the treaty. The documents, kept secret for 40 years, recorded that South Korea agreed to demand no compensations, either at the government or individual level, after receiving $800 million in grants and soft loans from Japan as compensation for its 1910–45 colonial rule in the treaty.
The documents also recorded that the Korean government demanded a total of 364 million dollars in compensation for the 1.03 million Koreans conscripted into the workforce and the military during the colonial period, at a rate of 200 dollars per survivor, 1,650 dollars per death and 2,000 dollars per injured person.However, the South Korean government used most of the grants for economic development, failing to provide adequate compensation to victims by paying only 300,000 won per death in compensating victims of forced labor between 1975 and 1977. Instead, the government spent most of the money establishing social infrastructures, founding POSCO, building Gyeongbu Expressway and the Soyang Dam with the technology transfer from Japanese companies.

The documents also reveal that the South Korean government claimed that it would handle individual compensation to its citizens who suffered during Japan’s colonial rule while rejecting Japan’s proposal to directly compensate individual victims and receiving the whole amount of grants on the behalf of victims.(emphasis added)

Despite this evidence, many Koreans insist to this day that Japan never paid any form of compensation to their country. They have also dismissed or ignored the Japanese government’s numerous apologies to victims of imperialism.

When the comfort women issue gained international attention in the 1990′s, the Japanese government decided that it was a special case. Despite the fact that the previous treaty had legally settled the reparations issue and despite the fact that South Korea had paid compensation to the women, measures were taken to provide additional aid to former comfort women. Directly paying reparations would violate the 1965 agreement, so the Japanese government instead established the Asian Women’s Fund to raise funds and deliver compensation payments.

As noted on the Japanese Foreign Ministry’s homepage, the official response to the issue included apologies and the distribution of billions of yen in reparations to surviving comfort women:

Recognizing that the issue known as “comfort women” was a grave affront to the honor and dignity of a large number of women, the Government of Japan, together with the people of Japan, seriously discussed what could be done for expressing their sincere apologies and remorse to the former “comfort women.” As a result, the Asian Women’s Fund (AWF) was established on July 19, 1995 in order to extend atonement from Japanese people to the former “comfort women.” Having decided to provide necessary assistance for the AWF by a Cabinet decision in August 1995, the Government of Japan, with a view to fulfilling its moral responsibility, had been providing all possible assistance for the AWF, including bearing the total operational costs of the AWF, assisting its fund-raising and providing the necessary funds to implement its activities (approximately 4.8 billion yen from the AWF’s founding through fiscal year of 2005), in order for the AWF to attain its goals.

The AWF closed its doors in 2006, after having spent a decade searching for surviving comfort women and delivering compensation and apologies to those willing to accept them. Sadly, many former comfort women rejected the apologies and compensation. This was because Korean nationalists had convinced them that a foundation established and funded by the Japanese government was “unofficial,” and thus the AWF’s work did not amount to a “sincere” effort by Japan. The civic group that erected the bronze statue is made up of people who hold such a view of the AWF.

And finally, here are two frequently mentioned points that should probably be addressed.

• “Korea wasn’t a democratic country in 1965” – Apparently, some people think that the entire 1965 agreement should be scrapped because Park Chung-hee was not a democratically elected ruler. Unfortunately, that’s not how diplomacy works. Japan had no control over the form of government in South Korea, and it had to deal with the South Korea that existed at that time. Compensation payments were necessary to normalize relations, and Japan had to agree to pay that money to the South Korean government before the treaty could be signed. Waiting decades to see if South Korea would ever democratize was not a realistic option. And it isn’t fair to expect that Japan should repay that money because the South Korean government didn’t properly execute the domestic end of the agreement. [ It's also strange to think that Japan should be held accountable for the actions of its pre-1945 undemocratic regime, but that Korea should ignore the actions of its previous undemocratic regime.]
• “Why doesn’t Japan just make a direct payment of compensation to the women?” – Since the end of World War II, Japan has used bilateral agreements to settle reparations issues with all of the countries that suffered due to Japanese imperialism. Billions of yen were paid to the national governments of countries. The agreements made individual compensation a legal matter between the people of those countries and the governments of those countries. These kinds of state level agreements are widely recognized throughout the world, and are far more common than agreements that leave open the possibility of compensation lawsuits from individuals. If Japan were to void its agreement with South Korea by paying direct individual compensation to the former comfort women, it would in effect void all the other postwar reparations agreements. Reparations that were already legally settled and already paid at the state level would have to be re-paid at the individual level. The Asian Women’s Fund allowed Japan to avoid the legal mess of voiding treaties, while still being able to satisfying a desire to pay special compensation to the surviving comfort women. (To learn more about Japan’s state level compensation policy, check out Japan’s Contested War Memories by Philip Seaton and flip to page 59.)

This summary of the apology/compensation issue is not meant to belittle or insult the former comfort women. Their suffering was great, and they deserved compensation and apologies. This summary was meant to provide a calm and rational look at how the postwar Japanese government has already taken very real actions in response to the situation – including very real apologies and very real monetary compensation.

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Prime Minister Noda: Comfort Women Issue Already Resolved

South Korean President Lee Myung-Bak visited Japan today to meet with Prime Minister Noda. Unfortunately, this week’s placing of a comfort woman “peace” statue in front of the Japanese embassy Seoul meant that Lee had to use the meeting to pander to his country’s anti-Japanese nationalists:

Japan, which insists the issue was legally settled four decades ago, promised only that it would “think carefully” from a humanitarian standpoint, but stopped well short of offering a fresh apology, officials said.

“South Korea and Japan should become real partners for peace and stability in this region,” the visiting South Korean president told his opposite number.

“And for that to happen, we need to have the courage to resolve as a priority the issue of military comfort women, which has been a stumbling block between our countries,” Lee said.

Noda, on his part, correctly calmly pointed out that the issue had already been resolved. In 1965, South Korea accepted payments from Japan, agreeing that the matter of individual compensation would be settled. Despite the legal settlement, Japan offered extra compensation payments and apologies to surviving comfort women in the 1990′s. The Japanese government has also issued numerous apologies to Korea and the other nations it occupied prior to 1945.

Lee, who once declared that he would not seek further apologies from Japan, seems to recognize that Korea’s new demands for compensation have zero legal standing:

“This is a matter of national sentiment and emotion rather than laws,” Lee said, urging Noda to make a “political” decision based on “warm heart”, rather than technical judgement.
“If there is no sincere measure, there will be second or third monuments like this whenever each old lady passes away,” Lee said, referring to the statue.

For some Japanese, this will appear to be a matter of national sentiment – of a nation that does not honor agreements and will never be satisfied.

(See this post for information about how Japan has already apologized and paid hundreds of millions of dollars to South Korea.)

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Comfort Woman Statue Erected Outside of Japanese Embassy in Seoul

A South Korean civic group has erected a bronze statue of a comfort woman in front of the Japanese embassy in Seoul:

A civic group demanding that the Japanese government apologize to and compensate Korean “comfort women,” who were forced to provide sexual services to Japanese soldiers before and during World War II, erected a bronze monument symbolizing the victims in front of the Japanese Embassy here on Dec. 14.

The monument, referred to as a “peace statue,” was unveiled during an official ceremony on Dec. 14, a day that also marked the group’s 1,000th protest in front of the Japanese Embassy, held every Wednesday since January 1992.

The statue sits directly across the street from the gate to the Japanese embassy. There is an empty chair beside it, allowing tourist to have their picture taken with the comfort woman.

As you can see from the embedded news clip from Japanese TV, this has received a considerable amount of attention in Japan. In addition to clips of South Korean protesters demanding more compensation for surviving comfort women, it shows footage of Japanese people holding protests in Tokyo. Japanese police kept apart two groups of protesters: one in favor of more compensation for comfort women, and one opposing the statue.

When the Japanese news anchors discuss the issue at the end of the clip, they call on Prime Minister Noda bring up the issue of the statue during an upcoming meeting with South Korea’s President Lee Myung-bak. The statue could hurt Japan’s image and encourage an incorrect understanding of the comfort women issue.

The Japanese government has already officially objected to the statue, citing the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, a treaty that both Japan and Korea have signed. Article 22 of the Convention states that host countries must impair the “dignity” of foreign embassies:

2. The receiving State is under a special duty to take all appropriate steps to protect the premises of the mission against any intrusion or damage and to prevent any disturbance of the peace of the
mission or impairment of its dignity.

The South Korean government brushed aside official Japanese complaints about the plan to erect the statue, and now that it’s complete, it seems doubtful that they will change their minds.

Background Information on Japan’s Official Response to the Comfort Women Issue

The issue of war reparations was addressed during the negotiations of the 1965 Treaty on Basic Relations between Japan and the Republic of Korea. The South Korean government accepted a huge sum of money from Japan, stating that it would take care of the distribution of reparations to individual Korean victims of Japanese imperialism. The South Korean government agreed that its citizens would no longer have the legal right to demand compensation payments from the Japanese government.

Unfortunately for the victims, the South Korean government hid the reparations agreement from its citizens and used the money for other purposes. For decades, South Koreans believed that Japan had not properly paid reparations to their country. The South Korean government eventually admitted the truth in 2005:

In January 2005, the South Korean government disclosed 1,200 pages of diplomatic documents that recorded the proceeding of the treaty. The documents, kept secret for 40 years, recorded that South Korea agreed to demand no compensations, either at the government or individual level, after receiving $800 million in grants and soft loans from Japan as compensation for its 1910–45 colonial rule in the treaty.
The documents also recorded that the Korean government demanded a total of 364 million dollars in compensation for the 1.03 million Koreans conscripted into the workforce and the military during the colonial period, at a rate of 200 dollars per survivor, 1,650 dollars per death and 2,000 dollars per injured person.However, the South Korean government used most of the grants for economic development, failing to provide adequate compensation to victims by paying only 300,000 won per death in compensating victims of forced labor between 1975 and 1977. Instead, the government spent most of the money establishing social infrastructures, founding POSCO, building Gyeongbu Expressway and the Soyang Dam with the technology transfer from Japanese companies.

The documents also reveal that the South Korean government claimed that it would handle individual compensation to its citizens who suffered during Japan’s colonial rule while rejecting Japan’s proposal to directly compensate individual victims and receiving the whole amount of grants on the behalf of victims.(emphasis added)

Despite this evidence, many Koreans insist to this day that Japan never paid any form of compensation to their country. They have also dismissed or ignored the Japanese government’s numerous apologies to victims of imperialism.

When the comfort women issue gained international attention in the 1990′s, the Japanese government decided that it was a special case. Despite the fact that the previous treaty had legally settled the reparations issue, measures were taken to aid former comfort women. Directly paying reparations would violate the 1965 agreement, so the Japanese government instead established the Asian Women’s Fund to raise funds and deliver compensation payments.

As noted on the Japanese Foreign Ministry’s homepage, the official response to the issue included apologies and the distribution of billions of yen in reparations to surviving comfort women:

Recognizing that the issue known as “comfort women” was a grave affront to the honor and dignity of a large number of women, the Government of Japan, together with the people of Japan, seriously discussed what could be done for expressing their sincere apologies and remorse to the former “comfort women.” As a result, the Asian Women’s Fund (AWF) was established on July 19, 1995 in order to extend atonement from Japanese people to the former “comfort women.” Having decided to provide necessary assistance for the AWF by a Cabinet decision in August 1995, the Government of Japan, with a view to fulfilling its moral responsibility, had been providing all possible assistance for the AWF, including bearing the total operational costs of the AWF, assisting its fund-raising and providing the necessary funds to implement its activities (approximately 4.8 billion yen from the AWF’s founding through fiscal year of 2005), in order for the AWF to attain its goals.

The AWF closed its doors in 2006, after having spent a decade searching for surviving comfort women and delivering compensation and apologies to those willing to accept them. Sadly, many former comfort women rejected the apologies and compensation. This was because Korean nationalists had convinced them that a foundation established and funded by the Japanese government was “unofficial,” and thus the AWF’s work did not amount to a “sincere” effort by Japan. The civic group that erected the bronze statue is made up of people who hold such a view of the AWF.

Update: Here are two important points that should probably be addressed.

• “Korea wasn’t a democratic country in 1965” – Apparently, some people think that the entire 1965 agreement should be scrapped because Park Chung-hee was not a democratically elected ruler. Unfortunately, that’s not how diplomacy works. Japan had no control over the form of government in South Korea, and it had to deal with the South Korea that existed at that time. Compensation payments were necessary to normalize relations, and Japan had to agree to pay that money to the South Korean government before the treaty could be signed. Waiting decades to see if South Korea would ever democratize was not a realistic option. And it isn’t fair to expect that Japan should repay that money because the South Korean government didn’t properly execute the domestic end of the agreement. [ It's also strange to think that Japan should be held accountable for the actions of its pre-1945 undemocratic regime, but that Korea should ignore the actions of its previous undemocratic regime.]
• “Why doesn’t Japan just make a direct payment of compensation to the women?” – Since the end of World War II, Japan has used bilateral agreements to settle reparations issues with all of the countries that suffered due to Japanese imperialism. Billions of yen were paid to the national governments of countries. The agreements made individual compensation a legal matter between the people of those countries and the governments of those countries. These kinds of state level agreements are widely recognized throughout the world, and are far more common than agreements that leave open the possibility of compensation lawsuits from individuals. If Japan were to void its agreement with South Korea by paying direct individual compensation to the former comfort women, it would in effect void all the other postwar reparations agreements. Reparations that were already legally settled and already paid at the state level would have to be re-paid at the individual level. The Asian Women’s Fund allowed Japan to avoid the legal mess of voiding treaties, while still being able to satisfying a desire to pay special compensation to the surviving comfort women. (To learn more about Japan’s state level compensation policy, check out Japan’s Contested War Memories by Philip Seaton and flip to page 59.)

This summary of the apology/compensation issue is not meant to belittle or insult the former comfort women. Their suffering was great, and they deserve compensation and apologies. This post was meant to provide a calm and rational look at how the postwar Japanese government has already taken very real actions in response to the situation – including very real apologies and very real monetary compensation.

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