Shinzo Abe Is Hell Bent On Rewriting Japan's History For World War II

With the 70 anniversary of the of World War II approaching the Japanese government under Prime Minister Shinzo Abe continues to lack the foresight and recognize the atrocities committed by the Japanese Imperial army.  In a vain effort to revise or rewrite history Abe's Liberal Democratic Party led government has sought changes in Japanese history textbooks  used in junior and senior high schools which reflect their beliefs.   These changes only help to keep the Japanese public in ignorance concerning the war crimes committed by Japanese forces in Asia prior to and through the Second World War.   The Abe government isn't content with the applying pressure on Japanese academics they have now crossed over to the land of the ridiculous in trying to pressure an American professor and a publishing house to change the historical record by asking to them to remove "untruthful" statements about the Imperial Armies  forced use of comfort women.    

 A group of American historians is issuing a call to their Japanese counterparts to remain steadfast in the face of pressure from Shinzo Abe's government to play down the army's use of "comfort women" during World War II.

The comfort women, many of whom were South Korean, have become a major source of contention between the Japanese and South Korean governments. 

"We stand with the many historians in Japan and elsewhere who have worked to bring to light the facts about this and other atrocities of World War II," says a letter signed by 19 academics from the American University as well as Princeton, Columbia and others, referring to the "comfort women" who were coerced into working in Japanese military brothels during the 1930s and 1940s.

McCraw-Hill is the publisher the Japanese government tried to pressure into removing several paragraphs about the use of comfort women by the Imperial Army.

Both governments have stepped up the volume in their efforts to sway international opinion, most recently with a Japanese attempt to get McGraw-Hill, the US publishing house, to remove two paragraphs about comfort women from a college textbook. The book, Traditions and Encounters: A Global Perspective on the Past, says the Japanese army "forcibly recruited, conscripted, and dragooned as many as 200,000 women aged 14 to 20 to serve in military brothels, called 'comfort houses'. "It also says that the Japanese imperial army "massacred large numbers of comfort women to cover up the operation".

Then there is Herbert Ziegler associate professor of history at the University of Hawaii who had a rather interesting encounter with two officials from the Japanese consulate in Hawaii and co-author of the history book in question.

Professor Ziegler said he received an email from an official in the Japanese consulate in Hawaii late last year, requesting a meeting to discuss the passages in the book. He declined. Then, Professor Ziegler said, two officials showed up in his university office during office hours, when the door was open, and "just came in and sat down and starting telling me how wrong I was. It's a very strange game that they're playing here," he said.