Japan taking a stand against ABEIGNomics?

At long last, the Japanese people seems to be starting to realize where Shinzo Abe wants to lead their nation, and to grow uncomfortable with that prospect. The days of Abe's government are not yet counted, and Japan's political system is far from purging itself from Nippon Kaigi and its likes, but this nascent debate on core democratic issues is more than welcome.

Japanese moderates waking up! The Abe / Nippon Kaigi anti-democratic agenda exposed!

The best news is of course the fact that moderate voices are making themselves heard in the peninsula. 


Consider this: just weeks ago (see "Under Coverage"), only Shigeaki Koga dared stand up for press freedom, and now the pressure is on the ones who pledged to destroy it. The LDP even had to distance itself from the extremists who said out loud what was behind Abe's controversial state secrets laws. Their profiles speak volumes and typically, Minoru Kihara, who lost his job at the youth section, openly supports Nippon Kaigi, while Hideo Onishi, who got slammed for saying "we must punish some of the media organizations that are reporting about the security legislation and baselessly saying it would lead to war"*, openly supports the fundamentalist shinto lobby Sinseiren.

At last, people are starting to worry more about a success of ABEIGNomics than about a failure of ABEnomics. The support of post-war Japan's peaceful constitution has regained momentum: pro-peace demonstrations are drawing bigger crowds and wider media coverage, and recent polls show that two out of three refuse Abe's project of revising Article 9.

Before reviewing the constitution, the most revisionist Prime Minister may have to review his own copy.

Even as the Shinzo Abe fatigue grows, still no responsible leadership emerging home or abroad

If Abe remains relatively popular for a Japanese PM, he just received for the first time in his mandate more negative than positive opinions in a poll (Mainichi, by a close 43 to 42% margin). And if his ruling party LDP remains unlikely to lose national elections in any foreseeable future, criticisms are growing within its ranks. Abe himself is not always directly targeted, but more members of his extremist entourage are feeling more pressure every day.

Abe keeps playing the usual Abe game, focusing on his lifetime priority: the destruction of postwar Japan. But as he tries to convince an increasingly doubtful public to adopt his ironically dubbed "Legislation for Peace and Security", he's risking to lose support from his hardcore base. 

In order to get its controversial** industrial sites on UNESCO World Heritage List, Japan had to issue a statement mentioning the existence of forced labor, a concession very hard to swallow for Nippon Kaigi, but also for Abe and Aso themselves, both members of families directly involved in these human rights abuses. 

Of course, whether Japan will fulfill these promises remains to be seen, and South Korea and China will be watching closely. 

I wish they were more constructive, supportive of the peaceful Japan Abe and Nippon Kaigi pledged to destroy. We can't count on the self-proclaimed champion of democracy to help Japan proclaim its independence from Imperial Japan, since the US decided, suicidally, to unconditionally support Abe's revision of Article 9 (see ""History is harsh" and other sick jokes"). 


Hold your horses

Overall, I'm cautiously more optimistic than last year on the chances of seeing the Japanese people take a stand for their democracy, and/or the LDP starting to seek a sustainable future, with sounder leaders, and fewer rotten branches.  

And we could still ask the same questions as before last year's elections (see "It's the democracy, stupid"):
- are Abenomics at last meeting reality?
- can Abe's pseudo-diplomatic offensive pay?
- with or without Abe as PM, will Nippon Kaigi be confirmed as the de facto ruler of Japan?

And time keeps running short. 

Yesterday, Choi Geum-seon halmoni passed away. After Kim Youn-hee halmoni and the others who preceded her over the past few months. Now South Korea counts only 48 survivors of Imperial Japan sex slavery system. Again, standing for them is also standing not against Japan, but for its future ("'Comfort Women': No Resolution Without Resoluteness. From Everyone, Please.").

Sad to see our dear halmoni #KimYounhee die without closure from #Japan about #ImperialJapan #sexslavery http://youtu.be/9a3nF82i1Gw (20150625 - twitter.com/theseoulvillage/status/613912171907395584)

We must also stand for Japan's youth, bombarded with ultranationalist and xenophobic propaganda, following familiar patterns from history's most murderous century. 

Abe and co. fuel mutual hatred because they need tensions to justify their agenda. And it works. Outrageously violent pamphlets multiply across Japanese bookstores. They won't cause the kind of massacres that followed the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake, but they certainly don't bode well for the future of Japan and the region.

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* "Disciplined LDP lawmaker once again calls for punishing media" (Asahi Shimbun - 20150701)
** a long story, see for example "Hashima, Yawata Steel: enshrining slave labor in UNESCO World Heritage List?" (2013)

Hashima, Yawata Steel: enshrining slave labor in UNESCO World Heritage List?

This year again, Japanese revisionists are pushing the candidacies of highly controversial industrial sites to the UNESCO World Heritage Sites list: the island of Hashima (Nagasaki-ken) and Yahata Steel Works (aka Yawata Steel Works, Fukuoka-ken) are both intimately associated to forced labor under Imperial Japan rule.

'Nagasaki shipyard among old industrial sites named for World Heritage list' (The Japan Times 20130827)

This year, the provocation looks even more outrageous: the Prime Minister (Shinzo Abe) is the grandson of the war criminal in charge of forced labor in Hideki Tojo's cabinet (Nobosuke Kishi), and the Deputy Prime Minister (Taro Aso) and his family still have links to his father's company, Aso Mining company, then a massive 'consumer' of slaves.

My position hasn't changed since last October, when I mentioned the Hashima case under similar circumstances (see "Dokdo, Senkaku, Ieodo, Kuril,... Hashima?"): sites like Hashima cannot be listed, except as symbols of forced labor, for the world to remember past war crimes.

Again, that's not what people like Shinzo Abe or Taro Aso have in mind: they want to discreetly enshrine war crimes in the UNESCO World Heritage Sites list, the way their predecessors discreetly enshrined war criminals in Yasukuni Shrine or Mount Sangane Cemetery**.

I can't help but feel nauseous when I read the submission in the tentative list ("The Modern Industrial Heritage Sites in Kyûshû and Yamaguchi" - whc.unesco.org/en/tentativelists/5399): no, I don't consider forced labor to be the best model for "indigenous modernization" or "proactive importation of technology". And I don't think the UNESCO had in mind forced labor when it chose its first two criteria for selection: "1. to represent a masterpiece of human creative genius; 2. to exhibit an important interchange of human values".

Yet I do believe in a "Justification of Outstanding Universal Value" for Hashima, and I could even accept to see it listed among UNESCO World Heritage Sites... but only to to denounce forced labor and honor the slaves who suffered and died there.

Yes, Hashima could join sites like Auschwitz-Birkenau or the Island of Goree on the list.

But no, Hashima shouldn't be remembered as a "Modern Industrial Heritage Site". We've already read these "Arbeit Macht Frei" signs.


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** the latter by none other than Abe's grandfather: "The Elusive Independence Day - When will Japan officially proclaim its Independence from Imperial Japan?"

--- UPDATE 20130828 ---
Tentative list
Tweets about "#abeignomics"

 

Dokdo, Senkaku, Ieodo, Kuril,... Hashima?

Some day, Hasbro will make a fortune by releasing a Far East Islands Edition of its popular Risk board game. That would require anamorphic maps where islets no bigger than shrimp farts would outsize mainland China, so that each player could place all his armies and nuclear warheads.

Impossible to list all the hotspots, but they must involve at least two nations. To name some of the biggest stars
- Dokdo (Korean, claimed by Japan)*
- Senkaku (claimed by Japan and China)**
- Ieodo (claimed by Korea and China)***
- Kuril (claimed by Russia and Japan)
- Taiwan (claimed by China and... Taiwan)
- Gushiddink-do (claimed by the Netherlands and Korea... Gus kiddin'. Well barely, actually)
- ...

No one has lived on Hashima since the mid seventies, but no one contests the fact that this speck belongs to Japan. It's just that Korea has something to say about its submission to the list of UNESCO World Heritage sites.


"Do you remember?"
A poster similar to this ad
(published in the NYT last may) has just
been installed on Times Square. Koreans
ask Japanese politicians to officially
apologise, like Chancelor Willy Brandt
did when he knelt in front of the Warsaw
memorial for victims of the Holocaust

Hashima is truly an amazing and spectacular site. Mitsubishi used to own this island very rich in coal: the company built industrial facilities and dwellings over the mine, closed them in 1974, and eventually ceded everything to Nagasaki Prefecture ten years ago. I remember a beautifully scary documentary, a long time ago, about this islet fully covered with abandoned concrete structures on the verge of collapse.

On Thursday****, the Korean government announced that it refused to see Hashima join the UNESCO list in 2015, because that's a place where 800 Koreans were forced into dangerous and inhumane labor, sometimes tortured, or killed. It happened during WWII, and the lucky ones who survived the ordeal were sent to Nagasaki to help clean the mess after the nuclear bombing, adding radiation to insult and injury.

The claim is not new, but new research has been delivered by a governmental agency created in 2005, the Commission on Verification and Support for Victims of Forced Mobilization under Japanese Colonialism, which already revealed last summer that, of the 7.8 million Koreans mobilized under Japanese rule (1910-1945), over 226,000 have been registered as victims.

Lately, Korean authorities have been toying with Godwin's law, and the parallel between atrocities committed across Asia under Imperial Japanese rule, and the Holocaust perpetrated by their Nazi friends in Germany. Like that "Do you remember?" campaign in the US demanding official apologies for sex slavery / "Comfort Women". In the same vein, a UNESCO listing of Hashima as a simple "industrial site" would be equivalent to the listing of Auschwitz-Birkenau under the same category.

Outrageous? Yes, because the Shoah cannot be commoditized. But certainly less outrageous than the parallel between the victims of WWII bombings in Okinawa and the victims of the Pol Pot regime*****.

And certainly less outrageous than the revisionism institutionalized within Japan's political system. Again, Japan's failure to address its duty to remember lies at the root of too many problems. And again, the longer the task is postponed, the higher the risks of fueling anger across the region (particularly since that's the very aim of the game).

I suggest Hashima be listed only if it's with a clear and full mention of all sides of the coin. Visitors should not come out marvelling about the engineering wonder, but thinking about how deep humans can dig themselves into.

I'm not sure Mistubishi will support the motion.


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* see all posts related to Dokdo,
** see the recent focus "Japan politics? No to Comfort women, yes to Political whoring"
*** see "Ieodo: I smell a fish" and other posts related to Ieodo
****  see Korean press, including "Hashima ― forgotten island of tragedy" (Korea Herald 20121004)
** see "Ad Nauseam: about Dark Tourism, the Blind Spots of Memory, and Free Thrashing Agreements"

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UPDATE - typo title