Here in Asia, the baseball season is still not over. The fourth edition of the Asia Series, a club competition pitting the champions of the professional leagues in China, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, gets underway this Thursday at Tōkyō Dome 東京ドーム. The Nippon Professional Baseball 日本プロ野球 champion is the Saitama Seibu Lions 埼玉西武ライオンズ. From the Korea Baseball Organization comes the SK Wyverns, while the Uni-President 7-Eleven Lions 統一獅 will represent Taiwan's Chinese Professional Baseball League 中華職業棒球大聯盟. In the past three tournaments, an all-star team from the China Baseball League played in the series, but this time around, the Tianjin Lions will appear as the league champion. The Daily Yomiuri ザ・デイリー読売 has a preview of the Asia Series, focusing on Seibu manager Hisanobu Watanabe 渡辺久信, and his experiences playing in Taiwan ("Lions skipper savors Taiwanese ties"):
"When Hisanobu Watanabe leads his Japan champion Saitama Seibu Lions into the Asia Series 2008 this week, nostalgia will be in the air...Watanabe will be thinking about the old times. 'It's going to be fun...I was in Taiwan for three years. I learned a lot about the history, about the culture. It's really fascinating.' Although he said the experience enriched his life, his only goal for going to Taiwan in 1999 was work. 'I was just going to coach, to teach. It was a job,' said the first-year Seibu skipper, whose club wrapped up the Japan Series 日本選手権シリーズ title on Sunday. 'I doubt if I'll know anyone. It was a different league a different setup. So much has changed.' Although the Lions manager often speaks with right-handed reliever Hsu Ming-chieh 許銘傑 in Chinese, the skipper said his language skills are slipping. 'My Chinese is pretty bad now,' he said. 'In my lessons, I studied Mandarin. But when people in Taiwan heard me speak, they thought I sounded like a native Cantonese speaker with a heavy accent.'"
I don't have that problem. When people in Taiwan hear me speak, they can't understand what I'm saying at all!
The article also notes how the Asia Series has become more competitive in recent years:
"The Chiba Lotte Marines 千葉ロッテマリーンズ dominated the inaugural tourney in 2005 and the Hokkaidō Nippon Ham Fighters 北海道日本ハムファイターズ won in 2006. Last autumn, the Wyverns became the first club to beat the Japan champ, downing Chūnichi 6-3 in both clubs' opener--although the Chūnichi Dragons 中日ドラゴンズ bounced back to beat the South Korean club 6-5 in the final."
As for the Tianjin team, Watanabe notes:
"'The people in Taiwan must be happy the Chinese national team is not coming, after they beat Taiwan in the Olympics. You know they didn't take that well.'"
They didn't indeed!
In another Taiwan-related news item, the Japan Times ジャパンタイムズ has a story on how the Taiwanese legislature is jumping on the comfort women bandwagon ("Taipei demands redress, apology for sex slaves"):
"Taiwan's parliament on Tuesday adopted a resolution seeking an apology and compensation from Japan for forcing women into sexual slavery during the war. In a rare show of unity, the island's ruling and opposition parties passed by a unanimous vote the Taiwan Comfort Women Resolution, calling on Tōkyō to 'accept historical responsibility for its World War II sex slavery institution, and apologize to and compensate surviving victims.' The United States and European Union passed resolutions last year calling on Tōkyō to own up to its wartime military brothel program that forced thousands of women and girls to become prostitutes, euphemistically referred to as 'comfort women' in Japan...Taiwan's parliament, or Legislative Yuan 立法院, timed the resolution to roughly coincide with a similar resolution passed by South Korea's National Assembly last month...That resolution calls on Japan to compensate surviving comfort women in South Korea."
Unlike my Sinophile colleague Ivan, I'm not about to whitewash the darker aspects of the country I'm deeply interested in. Unlike Germany, Japan has done a poor job in coming to terms with the atrocities its troops committed in the years leading up to and during the Second World War, and that includes the comfort women issue. But why is that most articles on the subject fail to mention the Kono Statement 河野談話 or the Asia Women's Fund アジア女性基金?
The Kono Statement was issued by then-Chief Cabinet Secretary Yōhei Kōno 河野洋平 on August 4, 1993. It recognized that:
"'Comfort stations were operated in response to the request of the military of the day', that 'The Japanese military was directly or indirectly involved in the establishment and management of the comfort stations and the transfer of the women', 'The recruitment of the comfort women was conducted mainly by private recruiters who acted in response to the request of the military. (A) Government study has revealed that in many cases they were recruited against their own will through coaxing and coercion'. The government of Japan 'sincerely apologizes and [expresses its] remorse to all those, irrespective of place of origin, who suffered immeasurable pain and incurable psychological wounds'. In the statement, the government of Japan expressed its 'firm determination never to repeat the same mistake and that they would engrave such issue through the study and teaching of history'."
It may not be the blanket apology demanded by so many, but it is still an acknowledgment of the existence of comfort women and an expression of remorse, yet it is almost never mentioned by the supporters of the women pressed into prostitution. Neither is the Asia Women's Fund. According to the Wikipedia entry:
"In 1995 Japan set up an 'Asia Women's Fund' for atonement in the form of material compensation and to provide each surviving comfort woman with a signed apology from the then prime minister Tomiichi Murayama 村山富市, stating 'As Prime Minister of Japan 内閣総理大臣, I thus extend anew my most sincere apologies and remorse to all the women who underwent immeasurable and painful experiences and suffered incurable physical and psychological wounds as comfort women.' The fund is funded by private donations and not government money, and has been criticized as a way to avoid admitting government abuse. But because of the unofficial nature of the fund, many comfort women have rejected these payments and continue to seek an official apology and compensation."
If Murayama's statement is not an official expression of apology, then I don't know what is. As long as there is still no consensus on the war within Japanese society (as the recent furor over remarks by the now-sacked Air Self-Defense Force 航空自衛隊 Chief of Staff Gen. Toshio Tamogami 田母神俊雄 revealed), the comfort women are unlikely to ever receive what they are seeking from the Japanese government, and their sufferings will continue to be used by their representatives in government to score political points at home. One more sad fact that rarely gets mentioned is how the Chinese and Korean governments waived the rights of their citizens to get individual compensation from the Japanese government when relations between the countries were normalized (in 1972 and 1965, respectively). Yet they still encourage victims to file lawsuits in Japanese courts, even though such legal action rarely meets with success.
If anyone is interested, I recommend reading "The Wages of Guilt", by Ian Buruma. It's an excellent study of the memories of the war in both Germany and Japan, and goes a long way towards explaining why the Japanese still struggle today over what occurred all those years ago.
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