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Baronjutter
Dec 31, 2007

"Tiny Trains"

Listen, I might have made up some poo poo about a country, but the fact that I wanted to make poo poo up about them proves the country is pretty bad.

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sexpig by night
Sep 8, 2011

by Azathoth

Baronjutter posted:

Listen, I might have made up some poo poo about a country, but the fact that I wanted to make poo poo up about them proves the country is pretty bad.

I wouldn't be lying about a country trying to saber rattle for war if they weren't the bad guys, duh!

Also yea Kim Jong-nam was totally a CIA spook, did you hear Trump's hilarious 'uh well I never heard anything but if it was under me I'd never let that happen' dodge

Goatse James Bond
Mar 28, 2010

If you see me posting please remind me that I have Charlie Work in the reports forum to do instead

sexpig by night posted:

I wouldn't be lying about a country trying to saber rattle for war if they weren't the bad guys, duh!

Also yea Kim Jong-nam was totally a CIA spook, did you hear Trump's hilarious 'uh well I never heard anything but if it was under me I'd never let that happen' dodge

I'm not sure I'd describe an informant as a spook necessarily, but yeah.

I'm now worried the Trump administration got the only decent Kim killed. :(

Some Guy TT
Aug 30, 2011

The assassination happened a few weeks after Trump was sworn in. It's extremely unlikely that Trump approved of turning King Jong-nam into an asset or even knew that it had happened. It wasn't until quite some time after that information was publically released showing that he had been in contact with American intelligence. Up until that point the media had been running with the usual "oh those wacky North Koreans ordering assassinations over petty personal grudges" standard of reporting.

Fallen Hamprince
Nov 12, 2016


Enjoying a lecture in Ethics In Journalism from a guy who writes for the People's Daily.


https://twitter.com/AJENews/status/1144069533977718790?s=20

Anyway here's hoping that this kid comes back alive and with non-zero brain activity after his interaction with the incredibly fair and transparent judicial system of the People's Democratic Republic.

Fallen Hamprince fucked around with this message at 07:21 on Jun 27, 2019

mobby_6kl
Aug 9, 2009

by Fluffdaddy
Cool, cool.

quote:

North Korea reveals explosive HIV outbreak—after claiming to be disease-free

North Korea is experiencing an explosive outbreak of HIV amid limited access to diagnostic testing and treatments, according to an exclusive report by Science.

Independent researchers and government health officials tell the outlet that the isolated East Asian country confirmed its first HIV case in 1999 and has quietly watched infections balloon to over 8,300 cases in the last few years. The researchers and North Korean officials have submitted a report on the matter to the new medical preprint server medRxiv, which is scheduled to go live on Tuesday, June 25.

The case estimate stands in stark contrast to a celebration in Pyongyang last year on December 1—annual World AIDS Day—in which government officials declared that North Korea is an “AIDS-free zone” and that there is “not a single AIDS patient” in the country.

The truth of the matter came to light after an unusual collaboration formed. In 2013, North Korean health officials reached out to a US NGO called DoDaum for help tracking the infections. DoDaum already worked on health, education, and development programs in North Korea, and it built up a good rapport with officials. Together, the team worked on assessing the extent of disease spread, particularly in rural areas, as well as the factors driving it.

Blood donors and people who inject drugs appear to be the hardest hit by the outbreak. Efforts to halt the spread of infections have been difficult because there are only three labs in the country that use modern tests to screen for HIV infection. Additionally, international sanctions have made it difficult to import drug treatments, which are not produced domestically. DoDaum says it has helped 3,000 patients gain access to treatment.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/06/north-korea-reveals-explosive-hiv-outbreak-after-claiming-to-be-disease-free/

There are supposed to be exemptions for medicine but sanctions can still complicate the process of getting them in. Still at least they're admitting it now so that would be a first step to getting more treatment.

OhFunny
Jun 26, 2013

EXTREMELY PISSED AT THE DNC
https://twitter.com/Reuters/status/1153492265094066177?s=19

Huh. That's different.

BattleMaster
Aug 14, 2000

Russia does the "fly towards a country's airspace and turn back when warned" thing a lot to a lot of countries but actually entering their airspace and getting shot it as like a few orders of magnitude more serious :eyepop:

OhFunny
Jun 26, 2013

EXTREMELY PISSED AT THE DNC
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-...e-idUSKCN1UI072

Reuters reports it was one of three Russians to enter South Korean air space and that two Chinese planes also did so. I wonder if that's coincidence or coordination?

Lambert
Apr 15, 2018

by Fluffdaddy
Fallen Rib

BattleMaster posted:

Russia does the "fly towards a country's airspace and turn back when warned" thing a lot to a lot of countries but actually entering their airspace and getting shot it as like a few orders of magnitude more serious :eyepop:

I mean, the US just did it with Iran.

OhFunny
Jun 26, 2013

EXTREMELY PISSED AT THE DNC
https://twitter.com/business/status/1157101114560569345?s=19

South Korea is mulling ending its intelligence sharing agreement with Japan in response.

mystes
May 31, 2006

Japan announced the plan to do that like two weeks ago so I don't know if it's breaking news, but it's pretty dumb.

mystes fucked around with this message at 06:14 on Aug 2, 2019

mystes
May 31, 2006

Apparently South Korea is retaliating by doing the same thing and removing Japan from its own export restriction whitelist.

Grouchio
Aug 31, 2014

I see Abe's taking a page from Trump's trade war habits to have his own trade war with Seoul. Syncophant fool.

Raenir Salazar
Nov 5, 2010

College Slice
This is partly why I think some claims of South Korea being firmly in the US's camp and overplay up the idea of chinese encirclement. Stuff like this also helps China's relations with South Korea.

sexpig by night
Sep 8, 2011

by Azathoth
I don't even get what Abe's endgame here is. Like at least when Trump does his poo poo it's for pure profit, but isn't Japan already the stronger trade partner in that relationship? What is he getting other than generic 'I'M NOT AFRAID TO BE TOUGH' nonsense?

Rent-A-Cop
Oct 15, 2004

I posted my food for USPOL Thanksgiving!

sexpig by night posted:

I don't even get what Abe's endgame here is. Like at least when Trump does his poo poo it's for pure profit, but isn't Japan already the stronger trade partner in that relationship? What is he getting other than generic 'I'M NOT AFRAID TO BE TOUGH' nonsense?
Racism points?

Dokdo! Takeshima!

CAPS LOCK BROKEN
Feb 1, 2006

by Fluffdaddy

sexpig by night posted:

I don't even get what Abe's endgame here is. Like at least when Trump does his poo poo it's for pure profit, but isn't Japan already the stronger trade partner in that relationship? What is he getting other than generic 'I'M NOT AFRAID TO BE TOUGH' nonsense?

South Korea is antagonizing Japan again for not enough contrition shown for their occupation and WWII. It doesn't help that SK courts recently ruled that Japanese companies are liable for wartime damages.

sexpig by night
Sep 8, 2011

by Azathoth

CAPS LOCK BROKEN posted:

South Korea is antagonizing Japan again for not enough contrition shown for their occupation and WWII. It doesn't help that SK courts recently ruled that Japanese companies are liable for wartime damages.

ooooooh that's it then, Abe fuckin hates the idea of being held accountable for the whole 'violent occupation' thing.

tino
Jun 4, 2018

by Smythe

sexpig by night posted:

I don't even get what Abe's endgame here is. Like at least when Trump does his poo poo it's for pure profit, but isn't Japan already the stronger trade partner in that relationship? What is he getting other than generic 'I'M NOT AFRAID TO BE TOUGH' nonsense?

A lot of racist old Japanese men are still alive and won't die thanks to the long life expectancy.

sexpig by night
Sep 8, 2011

by Azathoth
it's kinda funny we're over here with a senile old freak trying to bilk other nations like he's running a shady construction deal and in Japan there's a dude trying to blow up the non-China economy of the region because guys who built rape camps may get fined or whatever

looks like we had more in common with the mysterious east than we ever knew

mystes
May 31, 2006

sexpig by night posted:

I don't even get what Abe's endgame here is. Like at least when Trump does his poo poo it's for pure profit, but isn't Japan already the stronger trade partner in that relationship? What is he getting other than generic 'I'M NOT AFRAID TO BE TOUGH' nonsense?
Basically, the right wingers who completely deny the comfort women and forced labor issues have managed to drown out other voices and win the debate in Japan, so I'm not sure Abe could really stop it without losing all of his credibility with the right even if he wanted to.

Most people now seem to believe that Japan needs to say no to Korea or things will only get worse.

I don't think anybody has really considered the endgame very well, though. The government seems much more focused on domestic politics than foreign relations and it seems to be making the mistake of thinking that Japan's position is so obviously correct that they don't even have to make an argument for it, with the result that they aren't even trying to convince other countries of their position.

Maybe with another administration the US would intervene somehow, but I don't think Trump cares, so this will probably just tank the economies of South Korea and Japan and ensure that China takes over everything.

When the plan to remove Korea from the white list was first announced, there were a bunch of talking heads on the radio/tv explaining why this move would hurt South Korea but actually be good for Japan because it could take back business (e.g. TVs) that had gone to to South Korea (lol, yeah right). I think they may have been dumb enough to think that South Korea would actually concede this issue to Japan which is completely insane? I guess the scary thing is that there's nobody with power who even understands South Korea's point of view in the slightest.

tino posted:

A lot of racist old Japanese men are still alive and won't die thanks to the long life expectancy.
It's a mistake to think the problem is just "racist old Japanese men." It's really the Japanese left that's growing old and dying, and the government's stance is very popular with younger people, the majority of whom probably aren't necessarily really racist or right wing, but have been convinced that the comfort women and forced labor issues are lies.

mystes fucked around with this message at 16:34 on Aug 2, 2019

CAPS LOCK BROKEN
Feb 1, 2006

by Fluffdaddy

mystes posted:

Basically, the right wingers who completely deny the comfort women and forced labor issues have managed to drown out other voices and win the debate in Japan, so I'm not sure Abe could really stop it without losing all of his credibility with the right even if he wanted to.


This is a historical whitewash. Much like the right wing in Korea, the Japanese right and far right received explicit support from the United States in crushing any left leaning politics.

quote:

One retired C.I.A. official involved in the payments said, "That is the heart of darkness and I'm not comfortable talking about it, because it worked." Others confirmed the covert support.

"We financed them," said Alfred C. Ulmer Jr., who ran the C.I.A.'s Far East operations from 1955 to 1958. "We depended on the L.D.P. for information." He said the C.I.A. had used the payments both to support the party and to recruit informers within it from its earliest days.

Kind of hard to say they won the debate when the United States was putting their thumb on the scale for the most critical phase of postwar rebuilding, isn't it?

Rent-A-Cop
Oct 15, 2004

I posted my food for USPOL Thanksgiving!

CAPS LOCK BROKEN posted:

Kind of hard to say they won the debate when the United States was putting their thumb on the scale for the most critical phase of postwar rebuilding, isn't it?
A gun is one way to win a debate.

mystes
May 31, 2006

CAPS LOCK BROKEN posted:

This is a historical whitewash. Much like the right wing in Korea, the Japanese right and far right received explicit support from the United States in crushing any left leaning politics.


Kind of hard to say they won the debate when the United States was putting their thumb on the scale for the most critical phase of postwar rebuilding, isn't it?
If you want to take a reductive view and blame everything on what happened in the 50s and 60s then go ahead, but it's sort of misleading because although that ensured a conservative government there were lots of liberal voices for decades after that. The victory of the right wing viewpoint on these ww2 issues has only really happened in the last 10 years, because of a concerted effort on the part of revisionists to spin the retracted Asahi Shimbun articles into a story where the comfort women issue was a complete fabrication.

This current situation is such a policy disaster (and Abe probably feels that acutely since the economy was supposed to be his main issue) that there's no way it would have happened if normal people weren't already calling for Japan so stick it to South Korea.

Edit: Also, pretty much anyone who's currently an adult is going to have been taught in school that the comfort women issue was real even if it was downplayed. The problem is that "Yes, you were probably taught that Japan had sex slavery during ww2 but the liberal Japan Teacher's Union lied to you," is starting to be a mainstream point of view on this issue, and that's really only happened within the last year or two, plus even people who believe that the issue is real have been persuaded that Japan has already done too much, so if Korea won't stop asking for more they need to put their foot down.

The other big problem is that 99% of reporting on this issue in Japan has said that Japan's treaty with South Korea was supposed to resolve this issue completely and extinguish individual claims against Japanese companies, even though IIRC the Japanese Supreme Court explicitly said that this was not the case in some decision.

mystes fucked around with this message at 17:03 on Aug 2, 2019

edogawa rando
Mar 20, 2007

sexpig by night posted:

ooooooh that's it then, Abe fuckin hates the idea of being held accountable for the whole 'violent occupation' thing.

'Violent occupation?' How can Japan be held accountable for something that never happened? If it did, it would be in the textbooks, wouldn't it?

sexpig by night
Sep 8, 2011

by Azathoth

apologies, I've clearly been tricked by the all reaching, mighty, Korean media agenda that reaches globally.

icantfindaname
Jul 1, 2008


sexpig by night posted:

I don't even get what Abe's endgame here is. Like at least when Trump does his poo poo it's for pure profit, but isn't Japan already the stronger trade partner in that relationship? What is he getting other than generic 'I'M NOT AFRAID TO BE TOUGH' nonsense?

https://twitter.com/AlastairGale/status/1157115622620184576

sexpig by night
Sep 8, 2011

by Azathoth

But...does it? Can't South Korea just go to China and say 'hey looks like Japan doesn't want our poo poo anymore' and have similar deals?

e: obviously it'd be a lot less good of a deal for korea but not like Japan is the only high consumption buyer within easy shipping distance.

mystes
May 31, 2006

I have never worked for a newspaper or stepped foot in Korea, and I basically have only read the Japanese media coverage of this whole issue and yet even I know that this take is completely loving insane. How is this person the "WSJ Japan editor"? And he was the WSJ Korea bureau chief from 2011-2016? Lol.

sexpig by night
Sep 8, 2011

by Azathoth
*shoots self in the foot, smugly leans back in chair*

And now we play...the waiting game...

icantfindaname
Jul 1, 2008


CAPS LOCK BROKEN posted:

Kind of hard to say they won the debate when the United States was putting their thumb on the scale for the most critical phase of postwar rebuilding, isn't it?

The idea that if the USA had just done things a little differently in 1948-1952 Japan would be Sweden or Canada is such a dumb take it's hard to believe it's made in good faith, and the fact that it's the liberal conventional wisdom is a sign of just how garbage Japan Discourse is. I guess America COULD have made Japan Marxist (not center-left liberal) during the occupation, but they were never ever going to do that in any conceivable alternative timeline. They didn't do that in Europe, and in fact they did the same thing there as they did in Japan. The chief legal counsel for the department that implemented the Holocaust was the second (or first) most powerful man in the West German government through the 1960s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Globke Gaullist France's government was crawling with far-right creeps. The reason the LDP stayed in power was because the JSP was a weird, ultra-left Marxist party that refused to participate under the guidelines of American geopolitical alignment and a mixed capitalist economy. Those were the same conditions as Europe, and there were social democratic governments there. The USA did nothing to prevent a center-left government within those lines from coming to power, one just never came into existence. The fact is that "center-left but pro-American and not meaningfully anticapitalist" was just genuinely not a very popular political position in postwar Japan, for internal reasons, and to the limited extent it did exist it got captured by the liberal wing of the LDP under people like Ikeda and his successors. South Korea is actually an interesting comparison, because someone like Moon is holding together a very bifurcated coalition between centrist or center-right pro-capitalists and an angry, radical nationalist left with not much in between, and that was pretty much the same in Japan

Cucek in this video concurs that after about 1960 the LDP was stable enough to stay in power on its own, and CIA dirty tricks didn't really matter

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puMDJOaJc0Q

See also Nick Kapur's book I linked earlier

https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674984424


mystes posted:

I have never worked for a newspaper or stepped foot in Korea, and I basically have only read the Japanese media coverage of this whole issue and yet even I know that this take is completely loving insane. How is this person the "WSJ Japan editor"? And he was the WSJ Korea bureau chief from 2011-2016? Lol.

I think the idea is that they'll give some sort of special permission to Korea to continue to import the stuff and can then threaten to revoke that permission in the future? I don't necessarily agree with it but it's sort of the only thing you could do if you absolutely refuse to let the companies just pay the fine/compensation and move on

Also this guy thinks that Japanese business is afraid the potential compensation will balloon if they give in at all, which seems more like bullshit to me, and could also have been avoided if Abe had just talked to Moon and made some deal where Abe made some complaining noise about it but let the companies pay a nominal sum if Moon agreed to keep the sums nominal

https://twitter.com/diefenbackerj/status/1157115330193514496

https://twitter.com/PaulJNadeau/status/1157116254936682497

icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 00:44 on Aug 3, 2019

mystes
May 31, 2006

icantfindaname posted:

I think the idea is that they'll give some sort of special permission to Korea to continue to import the stuff and can then threaten to revoke that permission in the future? I don't necessarily agree with it but it's sort of the only thing you could do if you absolutely refuse to let the companies just pay the fine/compensation and move on
IIRC being de-whitelisted just means that companies exporting the restricted materials have to apply on a case-by-case basis, I think for each individual South Korean company they're exporting to, and the application process takes like 30 days or so. But honestly in my opinion the actual export restrictions are pretty much totally irrelevant at this point and the damage is done, but I guess that hasn't become clear to everyone yet. On the Korean side I don't see the boycotting of Japanese products stopping unless Japan backs down and maybe issues a new apology, and I don't see Japan doing that any time soon.

quote:

Also this guy thinks that Japanese business is afraid the potential compensation will balloon if they give in at all, which seems more like bullshit to me, and could also have been avoided if Abe had just talked to Moon and made some deal where Abe made some complaining noise about it but let the companies pay a nominal sum if Moon agreed to keep the sums nominal
The number of people who could potentially sue is apparently pretty high so the number could balloon I guess and it might actually be hard to make a deal with Moon at this point, because it seems like people in Korea are pretty suspicious of the previous deals that have made with the Japanese government (even though the Korean government arguably is to blame for not properly compensating Korean citizens out of the money the Japanese government paid it before). It also seemed after the court decision that Moon didn't even want to touch this issue, so I don't know if he would want to make a deal. But honestly I have trouble believing the compensation that would have had to be paid would be worse than the consequences of the current situation so it might have been better to just pay up.

Also, I'm not sure people in Japan would even want a deal now either. I think if the government had made a deal really quickly when the focus was more on the economic effects of the court decision on Mitsubishi that might have worked, but I haven't even heard anyone discussing that aspect for several weeks now (to the extent money is being discussed it's more a general complaint like "Why does Korea keep asking for more money from Japan when the issue was already settled?"), so I don't think there would be that much interest in an settlement purely for the purpose of fixing things for the companies that were involved. The bigger problem is that people in Japan think that the issue was already supposed to be permanently resolved so they're probably going to feel like they're just repeating the same mistake that Japan made by giving Korea money before.

I think this has turned into a situation where neither side is going to be willing to back down. US intervention is probably the only thing that could stop it and the US government doesn't care right now.

Edit: I guess nobody posted that here? The boycott has apparently gotten so bad there were stories about gas stations in South Korea refusing to fill Japanese cars.

mystes fucked around with this message at 01:02 on Aug 3, 2019

Goatse James Bond
Mar 28, 2010

If you see me posting please remind me that I have Charlie Work in the reports forum to do instead

BattleMaster posted:

Russia does the "fly towards a country's airspace and turn back when warned" thing a lot to a lot of countries but actually entering their airspace and getting shot it as like a few orders of magnitude more serious :eyepop:

I'm Not Touching You is one of the favorite aerial and naval games, it just goes really wrong when it goes wrong

Some Guy TT
Aug 30, 2011

mystes posted:

It's a mistake to think the problem is just "racist old Japanese men." It's really the Japanese left that's growing old and dying, and the government's stance is very popular with younger people, the majority of whom probably aren't necessarily really racist or right wing, but have been convinced that the comfort women and forced labor issues are lies.

This isn't true. Most young Japanese people have no strong opinions on the comfort women issue at all because they just don't know much about it. But even in the context of right wing framing historical revisionists acknowledge that comfort women were real and that there was forced labor they mainly dispute the scale and culpability of those operations.

If you want an explanation of what the historical revisionist argument is and (entirely reasonably) don't want to crawl through the social media of white chuds who are trying and mostly failing to push this viewpoint in the United States, I strongly suggest you watch Shusenjo. If you're in Japan you can watch at the Theater Image Forum in Shibuya every day at 6:50 PM with English subs. Anyone else uh...files maybe? There doesn't seem to be much distribution of it in the English language world, which is weird, given that the director is Japanese-American.

sexpig by night posted:

I don't even get what Abe's endgame here is. Like at least when Trump does his poo poo it's for pure profit, but isn't Japan already the stronger trade partner in that relationship? What is he getting other than generic 'I'M NOT AFRAID TO BE TOUGH' nonsense?

Abe pushed the dispute to try and pump up the base for snap elections which have already happened. I think his original plan was to notch down the rhetoric and settle the issue quietly once the elections were over, figuring that the South Korean government would be happy to play along with his domestic scheming because they had done so before.

The problem is Abe massively misread the room. South Korean society is very different now compared to when Park Geun-hye was president. The left is energized and in a constant state of being pissed the gently caress off. Right wing leadership is a dumpster fire that's struggling to come up with a way to avoid getting superminoritied next election. The centrist parties are widely hated. Even if Moon Jae-in wanted to appease Japan, there's no physical mechanism by which he can just declare the forced labor court ruling null and void. But if he tried the party's base would eat him alive.

tino
Jun 4, 2018

by Smythe
This goes back to Japan incapable of letting the old generstion take the blame and carry the guilt so the whole society can move on to the better and diffetent future.

Look at Japan's geography. Pissing at every neighboring country especially SK is the worst foreign policy you can have. Japan doesn't have think tank to realize this. Surely that new friendship with India who doesn't manufacture anything and won't pay for your high speed rail can do you a lot of good.

mystes
May 31, 2006

Some Guy TT posted:

This isn't true. Most young Japanese people have no strong opinions on the comfort women issue at all because they just don't know much about it. But even in the context of right wing framing historical revisionists acknowledge that comfort women were real and that there was forced labor they mainly dispute the scale and culpability of those operations.
"The comfort women issue was a complete fabrication" doesn't mean "there were no such thing as comfort women" it means "the so-called comfort women were willing prostitutes, because there was no forced relocation, the idea of which was based on the retracted Asahi Shimbun articles." If you don't think this is the right wing perspective on the issue I don't know what to say because people are making this argument everywhere. (Maybe there are more nuanced revisionists somewhere trying to make more serious historical arguments but the normal right wing view is just an outright denial of the issue.)

"Revisionists acknowledge that... there was forced labor": This is wrong or out of date. Similar to the response to the comfort women issue, the current revisionist response to the South Korean court decision is to say "They weren't forced laborers (徴用工), they were volunteer laborers (応募工)". If you've never heard this claim just google 応募工 I guess? The entire word 応募工 is a denial of forced labor, so if you've heard the "応募工" phrasing I think you would have to agree that the people using this word are denying that there was forced labor?

I think you are underestimating how much traction these arguments have started to get. Younger people who literally pay no attention to the news and have no idea the South Korean court decision even happened may still have no opinion about these issues, but if they google them or talk about them with other people they're pretty much guaranteed to get the revisionist views now.

Edit: gently caress, this is wikipedia at the time I'm making this post for crying out loud:

I assume it's just vandalism but look at the last line. You think people aren't making the claim that there wasn't forced labor?!

mystes fucked around with this message at 12:42 on Aug 3, 2019

Some Guy TT
Aug 30, 2011

My apologies. When you made reference to people thinking the comfort women and forced labor issues were lies, I assumed you were using those words in the coherent way implied by the word choice and sentence structure. I should have realized that, contextually speaking, you were referring to overly convoluted way the Japanese right wing uses those terms.

This being, perhaps, the main reason why I have difficulty taking the brainwashing potential of this particular bit right wing propaganda seriously. They have to spend a ridiculous amount of energy just pushing back against their own nonintuitive and contradictory framing of the issue. And for what? To convince people that no, the Japanese government didn't use sex slaves, that they just built the world's largest prostitution ring?

mystes
May 31, 2006

Some Guy TT posted:

My apologies. When you made reference to people thinking the comfort women and forced labor issues were lies, I assumed you were using those words in the coherent way implied by the word choice and sentence structure. I should have realized that, contextually speaking, you were referring to overly convoluted way the Japanese right wing uses those terms.
Yeah I thought it was clear that I was specifically trying to explain how the issue has been framed by the right wing in Japan?

When I was using the word "comfort women" I meant it to mean "慰安婦" since that's what it's a translation of. The existence of comfort women is an incontrovertible matter of fact, but in Japanese the term "comfort women" doesn't automatically mean "sex slave." I realize that people other than the Japanese right don't necessarily care about this distinction in the first place, but it's important to note because there is sometimes confusion when people on the right make comments that acknowledge that "comfort women" existed during ww2 and this then gets translated as acknowledging that there were "sex slaves" causing an argument about what they said (I think this happened with something Toru Hashimoto said when he was still mayor of Osaka, for example) and then they can denounce the Western media as either mischaracterizing the issue based on the retracted Asahi Shimbun articles or being biased against Japan in general. (The right wing will denounce anything that acknowledges Japanese war crimes as being "anti-Japan" but obviously this is not necessarily persuasive to the mainstream.)

By the way, I assumed you were using this term in the same way because you said "even in the context of right wing framing historical revisionists acknowledge that comfort women were real and that there was forced labor they mainly dispute the scale and culpability of those operations," but if you were using "comfort women" to mean "women who were forced into prostitution" then you are probably not correct that "historical revisionists acknowledge that [women who were forced into prostitution] were real," because they like the argument that the comfort women were willing prostitutes.

quote:

This being, perhaps, the main reason why I have difficulty taking the brainwashing potential of this particular bit right wing propaganda seriously. They have to spend a ridiculous amount of energy just pushing back against their own nonintuitive and contradictory framing of the issue. And for what? To convince people that no, the Japanese government didn't use sex slaves, that they just built the world's largest prostitution ring?
I don't want to get too much into this argument since I'm just trying to explain what the right wing viewpoint is rather than argue for it or defend it, but in short, yes they see a big difference between sex slaves, which would be a war crime(*), and just using willing prostitutes, which they don't see as a war crime. Also, even if you see this as "nonintuitive and contradictory framing," it has been very effective in altering the debate in Japan, to a surprising degree it now seems to be accepted as common sense in Japan that the comfort women issue is not significant if there was no forced relocation of women by the military.

*: Actually technically they wouldn't say "war crime" because one of the right wing talking points is "Japan never fought a war against Korea."

mystes fucked around with this message at 17:14 on Aug 3, 2019

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Some Guy TT
Aug 30, 2011

mystes posted:

Yeah I thought it was clear that I was specifically trying to explain how the issue has been framed by the right wing in Japan?

Not really no. The reply to my post did though, as did this one. It's all loaded in semantic distinctions that can't be easily translated is the main problem. Like, if someone were to say "people have been convinced that the Holocaust and the Polish invasion issues are lies" the obvious assumption would be that we are talking about Nazis who think that Hitler did no wrong. Now technically someone who said that could actually be referring to how the Holocaust victims included more than just Jews or how the Soviet invasion of Poland was a response to Hitler rather than explicit collaboration with him.

But those are very pedantic distinctions that only make sense in very specific circumstances. Japanese right wingers use the rhetoric of David Irving while debating with the language of Jordan Peterson. It's been, in the context of their attempts to fight against comfort women statues in the United States at least, an awful tonal mishmash that just leads to city officials staring on in horror only to finally respond with shame on you, you loving monster. Because really, once you get to the part about how all Korean women are just lying whores, there's no way of walking back the impression that you're just a massive shithead.

I am assuming, possibly overly charitably, that this rhetoric is of similarly limited utility against normal Japanese people as well. Goodness knows that for as much money that the right wing has dumped into these pseudo intellectual projects the effects have been awfully limited. Besides that, at the end of day all is at stake is the honor of a Japanese government that was destroyed before the vast majority of people alive today were even born. That kind of thing might be very important to guys like Abe whose entire origin myth is wrapped up in the Japanese Empire being secretly good but I can't imagine that any normal person younger than thirty could possibly care.

mystes posted:

By the way, I assumed you were using this term in the same way because you said "even in the context of right wing framing historical revisionists acknowledge that comfort women were real and that there was forced labor they mainly dispute the scale and culpability of those operations," but if you were using "comfort women" to mean "women who were forced into prostitution" then you are probably not correct that "historical revisionists acknowledge that [women who were forced into prostitution] were real," because they like the argument that the comfort women were willing prostitutes.

I've seen revisionists blame outside recruiters for forcing women into prostitution fairly frequently. Arguing that literally not a single person in the entire Pacific theater of World War II was forced to do anything against their will is a patently insane position that can easily disproven by any number of random isolated cases. Hence why revisionists instead argue that these were random isolated cases, and not evidence of widespread rape camps, since there were rules against these sorts of things.

Hell, I've seen revisionists use the Indonesian comfort women camps staffed by Dutch women as an argument against the comfort woman issue. The logic being, that since the Japanese government clamped down really hard on this one camp that did a bunch of forcible rapes, that meant the official no raping rules in their textbooks were being taken very seriously.

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