|
Post by EXO on Mar 16, 2013 8:52:48 GMT 8
Japan PM dismisses WWII war crimes trials as 'victors' justice' By Julian Ryall, Tokyo 2:24PM GMT 14 Mar 2013 As published in The Telegraph Japan's nationalist prime minister has dismissed the Tokyo war crimes trials in the aftermath of World War II as nothing more than victors' justice.
Shinzo Abe, who was elected in a landslide general election victory in December, expressed beliefs that are likely to trigger anger in nations that were occupied by the forces of imperial Japan in the early decades of the last century and raise eyebrows in allied nations, primarily the United States.
"The view of that great war was not formed by the Japanese themselves, but rather by the victorious Allies, and it is by their judgement only that [Japanese] were condemned," Mr Abe told a meeting of the House of Representatives Budget Committee on Tuesday.
In his previous short-lived spell as prime minister, for 12 months from September 2006, Mr Abe said that the 28 Japanese military and political leaders charged with Class-A war crimes are "not war criminals under the laws of Japan."
More than 5,700 Japanese were charged with Class B and C war crimes before the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, which was convened on April 29, 1946. Initially, 984 individuals were sentenced to death and 475 received life sentences.
After the prolonged legal discussions, seven were executed in December 1948, including General Hideki Tojo, the commander of the Kwantung Army and later the prime minister, while the majority of the others sentenced to hang or life prison terms were paroled by the mid-1950s."Mr Abe is definitely to the right of other recent prime ministers and and I feel that this just shows that he deeply cares about these issues," said Jun Okumura, a political analyst with the Eurasia Group.
"For him, it is a matter of national honour, but as prime minister he should be saying that this is a matter of history," he added.
Given the Liberal Democratic Party's overwhelming majority in the lower house of the Japanese Diet, allied to rising public support rates ahead of elections in the summer that are expeted to grant Mr Abe a similar degree of control over the upper chamber, Mr Okumura suggested that Mr Abe's "unguarded comments" demonstrate an "element of over-confidence" in his power.
Since his election, Mr Abe has unveiled plans to dramatically revamp a national constitution based skewed heavily towards peace and self-defence, as well as lifting the ban on the sale of Japanese weapons systems overseas.
Another area of controversy has been the issue of "comfort women," the women forced to serve as sex slaves for the Japanese military during the war, with Mr Abe suggesting he may review the government's official position on whether the women were coerced into their roles.
|
|
|
Post by JohnEakin on Mar 16, 2013 9:57:20 GMT 8
I guess he can call it victors justice, just like I call his view revisionist history.
Perhaps he'd like to address some of the specific "non-crimes" his people were convicted of.
|
|
|
Post by fortune40 on Mar 16, 2013 17:14:38 GMT 8
I dreaded more if the victor will be them...despite the overwhelming evidences of what they did during that time still they would say those tried and sentenced war criminals were just the "victim"of victors's justice.Can they explain what happened in Pantingan river after the surrender of this elements of 1st,11th,71st,and 91stDivision? how about the more than 20,000 that perished in the death march and confinement at O'Donnell,Cabanatuan and Fort Santiago to name a few.i literally got tears in me just to see the names in granite wall of O'Donnell..I wonder what would happened to those lost youth had there was no Pearl Harbor..
|
|
|
Post by okla on Mar 16, 2013 21:03:43 GMT 8
Hey Fortune....What can you expect? ? I am told that modern day History texts in Japanese schools refer to Nanking as "an incident" No way, no how, has our former enemy taken real responsibility for these horrendous atrocities. The Germans have pretty well owned up to their misdeeds, but not so, for the most part, has this happened in the Far East.
|
|
|
Post by darthdract on Mar 17, 2013 1:57:32 GMT 8
This is really disturbing and Abe wants to re arm Japan. Its like some holocaust deniers. But this is worst. A lot of people to this day says that the Japanese have not paid enough like the Unit731 thing those people are not really prosecuted and now the PM is saying that the Trials are "Victors Justice".
|
|
|
Post by fortune40 on Mar 17, 2013 12:59:26 GMT 8
War is hell nobody ask them for it, they initiated it but when the outcome does not come in their favor still they would try to justify what...abusing the vanquished? If they have a pure heart this criminals, then who ordered to commit barbaric acts, who is to blame...looks like there was always a planning on everything in not giving the soldiers of Bataan some humanitary quarters after they gave up the fight...I'm not a historian but basing on the event in WW1 captured enemies in droves much larger than Bataan, captives were at least given just right treatment.If those dark events doesn't happened we would just be honoring everybody who have done services for their country..
|
|
|
Post by EXO on Mar 22, 2013 11:31:27 GMT 8
VIEW FROM ASIA MARCH 20, 2013, 2:19 AM 26 Comments
China and Japan Spar Over War Trials, More Than 6 Decades On
BEIJING – What would international reaction be if Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, were to publicly cast doubt on the fairness of the Nuremberg Trials, which condemned top Nazis at the end of World War II?
Something quite similar may have happened recently in Japan, where, according to media reports, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe cast doubt on the Tokyo Trials there (these found about two dozen prominent Japanese guilty of war crimes; seven were sentenced to death).
Here’s a headline from the Japan Daily Press: “PM Abe says WWII war crime trials were just ‘victors’ justice.’ ”
“In a meeting of the House of Representatives Budget Committee last Tuesday, Abe said that what the world now thinks of the outcome of World War II was dictated by the victorious Allied Forces and it is only under their judgement that the Japanese were condemned,” the Japan Daily Press article said, citing an article in The Telegraph.
World War II is still a sensitive topic not just in China but further afield in Asia, where memories of brutality by the invading Japanese Imperial Army linger and many believe that Japan, unlike Germany, has never entirely faced up to what it did. Memories may be bitterest in China, where millions died and where the government uses anti-Japanese sentiment to bolster nationalism.
This week there was a response in China to Abe’s comments, and it took an unusually scholarly form: The National Library of China announced it would for the first time publish what it said was its original historical documents and records of the trials, in which Chinese judges and prosecutors took part, to be called “Records of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East” (as the court was formally known). The collection will be published starting in June and will be in two parts; 80 volumes of trial records, to be followed by 50 additional volumes of archival materials and references, reported the China Culture News, a newspaper owned by the Ministry of Culture.
The report promised that the documents, which will be available to researchers and ordinary readers, would push back against “rightists” in Japan who deny the justice of the trials or other aspects of World War II history, long a complaint of China’s.
“On Mar. 3, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, at a parliamentary budget meeting, openly called into question the Tokyo Trials,” the China Culture News wrote, citing Gao Hong, a researcher at the library and head of document preservation from the Republican era (1911-1949). The new collection “will become a powerful tool for refuting the opinions of Japanese rightists and conservatives who distort or deny the historical truth about the invasion of China.”
Last year the library, together with Jiao Tong University in Shanghai, set up an institute to study the trials, called the Tokyo Trials Research Center, it said.
Yet if China accuses rightists in Japan of distorting the debate over the war, historians have said that China has done so too.
After the war, the Chinese Communist Party glossed over wartime atrocities, to “avoid engendering national hatred towards Japan that would have confused it with China’s true archenemies, the KMT,” or Kuomintang, the Chinese Nationalists, “and the United States,” wrote He Yinan in an essay in a book, “Japan’s Relations with China: Facing a Rising Power.”
“One thing it did was to suppress domestic truth-telling about Japanese war crimes and Chinese suffering,” Ms. He wrote.
The article in the China Culture News may have acknowledged that problem, if obliquely. “For a long time, because of various historical reasons, there has been a great deal of urgent work that has needed to be done to extend the accumulation, thorough research and international scholarly exchanges on the first-hand materials of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East,” it said.
|
|