Last month I
recounted how a top U.S. law firm had agreed to help shadowy Japanese interests
try to portray the so-called Comfort Women – the sex slaves grotesquely abused
by the Japanese Imperial Army in World War II – as no more than common
prostitutes. As I pointed out, the case is totally toxic and no respectable law firm should
have anything to do with it. The article
has generated nearly 90,000 clicks, 5,500 Facebook shares, and countless
supporting comments.
Now comes
news that the law firm at the center of the firestorm, Chicago-based Mayer
Brown, is withdrawing from the case. As reported in the Los Angeles Daily News,
pressure from outraged Forbes readers helped tip the balance. Mayer Brown was
probably also reacting to coruscating criticism from such well-informed legal experts
as Ken White, a prominent Los-Angeles-based criminal attorney, and Marc
Randazza, a First Amendment lawyer.
There is an
important lesson here: although early hopes that the Internet would prove a
powerful tool for good have been dashed, it still can be harnessed to further
the cause of truth. In particular it can still help the ordinary decent
American public win out at a time when many elite Americans have gone AWOL on
Japanese neo-fascism.
This is
where Caroline Kennedy comes in. The daughter of John F. Kennedy, she now
serves as President Barack Obama’s ambassador to Japan. Few Americans have ever
enjoyed a greater opportunity to address latter-day Japan’s Jekyll and Hyde
complex. Unfortunately she has evidently been persuaded – no doubt against her
better instincts – to show “mutual understanding” on various contentious
U.S.-Japan issues, not least recent outrageous suggestions that the Japanese
may “apologize” for Imperial Japan’s treatment of the Comfort Women. In plain
terms, she has been all but silent.
More about
Caroline Kennedy in a moment. First let’s complete the point about Mayer Brown.
The firm’s Los Angeles office was somehow persuaded to represent two
Japanese-Americans who contend that they will suffer “irreparable injury” from
“feelings of exclusion, discomfort, and anger” if a statue in a park in
Glendale, California is not removed. The statue was funded by Koreans and
memorializes the Comfort Women’s rather more acute pain. The Japanese-Americans
are joined in the suit by an organization called the Global Alliance for
Historical Truth-US.
Although it
is, of course, not unusual for even the most respectable of U.S. law firms to press bogus
lawsuits, two aspects of the Comfort Women suit have proved particularly
embarrassing for Mayer Brown:
The
involvement of the Global Alliance for Historical Truth-US. Incorporated as
recently as February 6, the alliance gives its address as a UPS office and is
little more than a legal
fiction. The really controversial
part is that its name has been evidently chosen so it would be confused with a
very different entity, the Global Alliance for Preserving the History of WWII
in Asia. This latter is a long-established, entirely respectable scholarly
group founded by Chinese-American professors that is on the other side of the
Comfort Women argument.
The toxic
wording of the lawsuit. The essence of the suit is that the Comfort Women were
common prostitutes. Here is the offending paragraph: “During World War II and
the decade leading up to it, an unknown number of women from Japan, Korea,
China, and a number of nations in Southeast Asia, were recruited, employed,
and/or otherwise acted as sexual partners for troops of the Japanese Empire in
various parts of the Pacific Theater of war. These women are often referred to
as comfort women, a loose translation of the Japanese word for prostitute.”
This paragraph makes no concession to the incontrovertible historical fact –
admitted even in a statement of apology by the Japanese government in 1993 – which
thousands of innocent women forced into sexual servitude. In the case of Dutch
women captured in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), a post-war court
operating on Western rules of evidence sentenced one Japanese army officer to
execution and eleven Japanese citizens
to imprisonment on Comfort Women allegations.
As for
Caroline Kennedy, in late February she was handed a perfect opportunity to
bring some intellectual honesty to the Comfort Women debate. This came when the
New York Times, in an article
headed “Japan to Revisit Apology to Wartime Sex Slaves,” reported that Prime
Minister Shinzo Abe’s government was considering cancelling the 1993 apology.
The report was published a week after Mayer Brown had filed the Glendale suit.
While it would not have been appropriate for Kennedy to have criticized Mayer
Brown directly, she could have announced that any move by Japan to
“unapologize” would be viewed with dismay in the United States. The implications
would have been hard for any decent person at Mayer Brown to overlook.
That said,
we should not be too hard on Caroline Kennedy. No matter how capable and wise
she may be (and no matter how many doors a famous name may open for her), she
can do little without the support of embassy officials in Tokyo. Unfortunately
most of her staff are, to put it politely, conscious apologists for the
Japanese establishment. Their job, as they see it, is to tamp down American
anger anytime anything provocative emerges from Japan. They reflexively oppose
any instinct by an ambassador to stand up for truth and decency, and it would
take a uniquely strong ambassador to ride roughshod over them.
This is not
to say that U.S. ambassadors have not occasionally tried to break free of their
minders. Indeed in a widely reported tweet in January, Kennedy protested
Japanese cruelty to dolphins. For anyone who knows the Tokyo diplomatic world,
however, Kennedy’s dolphin intervention is a case of “close but no cigar.” The
difference between dolphins and Comfort Women is that the former don’t have
relatives who might claim for massive compensation. In Tokyo money is what
matters, and the U.S. embassy has for generations connived with the Japanese
establishment in heading off all efforts by Imperial Japan’s victims and their
families to seek monetary redress for World War II atrocities. Apart from the
Comfort Women, other notable victims of this policy have been U.S. servicemen
who have never received more than derisory compensation for brutal treatment in
Japanese POW camps.
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