As the world reacts to the astonishing news of the assassination of Shinzo Abe, we in CWJC take this opportunity to analyze what is really going on in Japan.
Mr. Abe is being portrayed as ushering Japan into a modern democracy, a statesman, and a peacemaker. In reality, he was a right-wing ultra-nationalist, his ideals and policies more in the mold of Donald Trump: deeply racist, misogynist, and an enemy of human rights. Indeed, in the words of Steve Bannon, Mr. Abe was “more Trump than Trump.”
Make no mistake, the legacy of Mr. Abe was the revival of the Japan of old: a fascist, imperial power grounded in national and racial pride as people descended directly from the Sun God, a feared player on the world stage. Mr. Abe had no shame in citing the “East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere” touted during WWII to justify Japanese imperial expansion throughout Asia, to “save” Asia from the White race. In reality, we know that meant forced assimilation, unchecked use of brute force and terror in order to reshape colonized subjects, thought to be racially inferior to the Japanese, as worthy of the Emperor’s acceptance and into the glorious Japanese Empire. To assist the soldiers on the frontlines to advance this sacred patriotic mission, the Imperial Army established the sexual enslavement system of hundreds of thousands of women and girls from all over Asia. They were euphemistically called “Comfort Women.” Clearly, Imperial Japan was no democracy.
In order to achieve his goals, Mr. Abe built up the military, instituted education on patriotism and national pride; and advocated to abolish the war-renouncing Article 9 of the constitution. Japan is now a key U.S. ally in its escalating tension with China, with the second largest navy in the world. They continue to raise the Imperial flag of the Rising Sun, which often flew side-by-side with Nazi Germany’s Swastika less than a century earlier.
Mr. Abe espoused a vision of a glorious, “beautiful Japan ” that could do no wrong. He was determined to pick up where his grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi (a Class A War Criminal and himself a post-war Prime Minister, hand-picked and installed by the U.S.) had left off. Flouting tradition, he even went so far as to visit the notorious Yasukuni Shrine, which honors known war criminals like his grandfather. Under Mr. Abe’s watch, a complete denial of its wartime atrocities, such as the Nanjing Massacre, and Japanese Military Sexual Slavery, became the official state position. At the same time, the Foreign Ministry deployed an arsenal of PR ammunition couched as “global diplomacy” to convince the rest of the world such allegations were nonsense, just a fabrication by resentful Koreans and other “Japan-haters.” Domestically, victim-blaming had already become the dominant response: to rape survivors, the increasing number of the working poor, and the sick. Then, Mr. Abe’s Japan took the “history war” onto the international stage, suppressing memorialization efforts by survivors of Japan’s unspeakable war crimes, and actively interfering with history education to whitewash the facts. Furthermore, it intimidated and punished scholars who illuminated aspects of its wartime conduct that were far from the “beautiful” that Japan the government portrays.
Japan made no secret of its disdain for the persistent voices of the victims of Japanese colonial-era atrocities, ranging from the “Comfort Women” to the Zainichi Koreans in Japan today. Mr. Abe professed that it was an act of patriotism to do so. When victims spoke up, he countered that they “refused to simply let bygones be bygones”. His heart ached for Japanese who, in an act of servile self-deprecation, were led to believe the false histories alleged by “Comfort Women” and others.
Under Mr. Abe’s watch, patriotism became a key criterion for textbooks and education. Japan now promotes a revisionist version of its own history that aims to forever eliminate the experiences and truths of the hundreds of thousands of victims from the world’s collective consciousness.
Fortunately, the “comfort women survivors” and their supporters and the descendants of the Nanjing massacre and Chinese and Korean forced laborers, will not let the world forget.
The “Grandmas,” “Lolas,” and “Nai-Nais,” as well as the women from all the countries that Japan occupied, continue to demand justice: an official apology from the Japanese government and measures for full restitution as defined in international law. As they age, their numbers dwindle, but they continue to fight. They continue to be an example to the millions who demand an end to racial colonial violence, and gender sexual violence in all its forms.
