Asahi apologizes for erroneous Fukushima, comfort women reports

September 12, 2014, TOKYO —

The publisher of one of Japan’s leading newspapers apologized to readers Thursday for several serious errors in its reporting, retracting an article that claimed workers abandoned their posts during the Fukushima nuclear disaster.

Asahi’s publisher Tadakazu Kimura, speaking at a hastily arranged news conference on Thursday night, made the apology after a confidential government document cited in the daily’s report was finally released to the public with no mention of a mutiny by plant workers.

“I offer profound apologies to our readers and people at Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO),” the 60-year-old publisher said.

He said he would decide whether or not to resign after enacting “revival through sweeping reform.”

The article, published on May 20, said 90% of workers at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant had left the complex, disobeying the plant chief’s order to stay put in the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl in 1986.

TEPCO operates the plant. A massive earthquake and tsunami crippled its cooling systems and sent reactors into meltdown in March 2011.

The daily said about 650 employees, or 90% of the plant’s workforce, retreated to another seaside TEPCO nuclear plant (Fukushima Daini) 12 kilometers away when the nuclear crisis worsened a few days after the accident.

The official document released Thursday recounted the testimony of plant chief Masao Yoshida to a government investigative panel, with no trace of staff “disobeying Mr Yoshida’s order” as Asahi had claimed. Yoshida died of cancer in July last year.

Other dailies which also had access to the then confidential statement had already cast doubt on the article.

In the same news conference, Kimura also admitted a highly contentious report published 32 years ago on the topic of Japan’s wartime sexual enslavement of Korean women was also false.

That report cited a Japanese writer who claimed to have witnessed the kidnapping of women on the South Korean island of Jeju for the purposes of sex slavery, which has since been discredited by independent research by rival newspapers and academics.

Asahi admitted in early August that its 1982 article on the comfort women and follow-up reports were based on a “false” statement by the witness, but Kimura’s apology was the publication’s first in relation to it.

“I apologize to readers for publishing the erroneous articles and being too late in making the correction,” he said.

The admission of the mistake has boosted the country’s conservative forces, which have insisted there was no “sex slavery” at the frontline brothels and that many of the comfort women were highly paid prostitutes.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe told a radio talk show Thursday the comfort women report had “agonised many people and impaired Japan’s reputation in the international community.”

With few official records available, researchers have estimated up to 200,000 women, many from Korea but also from China, Indonesia, the Philippines and Taiwan, served Japanese soldiers in “comfort stations”.

Source: Japan Today

More than half of Chinese see war with Japan: poll

11 September, 2014, Tokyo - More than half of Chinese people think their country could go to war with Japan in the future, a new poll revealed Wednesday, after two years of intense diplomatic squabbles.

A survey conducted in both nations found that 53.4% of Chinese envisage a future conflict, with more than a fifth of those saying it would happen “within a few years”, while 29% of Japanese view military confrontation as a possibility.

The findings come ahead of the second anniversary Thursday of Japan’s nationalisation of disputed islands in the East China Sea that have formed the focus of tensions between the Asian giants.

Underlining the lingering row over the Tokyo-controlled Senkaku Islands, four Chinese coast guard vessels sailed into their territorial waters on Wednesday morning.

China regards them as its territory and calls them the Diaoyu Islands.

The survey was conducted by Japanese non-governmental organisation the Genron NPO and the China Daily, a Chinese state-run newspaper, in July and August.

It questioned 1,000 Japanese aged 18 or older and 1,539 Chinese of the same age range in five cities: Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu, Shenyang and Xian.

In the annual opinion poll which started in 2005, 93% of Japanese respondents said their impression of China was “unfavorable,” worsening from 90.1% last year and the highest level since the survey began.

The percentage of Chinese who have an unfavorable impression of Japan stood at 86.8 percent, an improvement on 92.8% last year.

“The most common reason for the unfavorable impression of China among the Japanese public was ‘China’s actions are incompatible with international rules’ at 55.1%,” Genron NPO and the China Daily said in a joint statement.

That was closely followed by “China’s actions to secure resources, energy and food look selfish” at 52.8%.

The third most commonly-given reason was “criticism of Japan over historical issues” at 52.2%, while “continuous confrontation over the Senkaku islands” came fourth place at 50.4%, it said.

“On the other hand, ‘The Diaoyu/Senkaku islands’ (64%) and ‘historical understanding’ (59.6%) were the two prominent reasons for the unfavorable impression of Japan among the Chinese public,” it said.

Despite a huge trade relationship and their deeply interwoven economies, relations between Tokyo and Beijing have seen several periods of deterioration over recent decades.

But ties have been particularly bad since late 2012 when Japan nationalised the Senkakus, a move it says was just an administrative change, but which China says was a provocation.

Beijing regularly insists that Japan has not atoned enough for its imperialist past, and lambasts nationalist Prime Minister Shinzo Abe for an “incorrect” understanding of history and what it describes as his intention to remilitarise.

For its part, Tokyo accuses Beijing of dwelling on the past for domestic political reasons and says that in the seven decades since World War II it has apologised repeatedly and trodden a pacifist path.

In an editorial, the China Daily described the poll as “worrying”, commenting that “these findings should be concerning” for leaders in both countries.

“There is a need for a meeting between the leaders of both countries to reverse the deteriorating relations,” the paper said, but added: “the ball is in Japan’s court.”

“Abe needs to show Chinese leaders with his actual deeds that he is sincere about improving relations.”

Abe has repeatedly said his door is open for dialogue and called for a summit with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, but has so far been rebuffed.

Source: Japan Today

Prof Kondapalli Discusses 'Three scenarios' how India and China could clash again

While a full-fledged war between the two nuclear and rising powers in Asia is highly unlikely due to the costs of war, yet a scenario of a quick land grab by China to humiliate India again cannot be rule out in future, says Prof. Srikanth Kondapalli.

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