Because of an about-face by Japan’s government, 70 years after World War II, bitterness in Asia over Japan’s formal practice of sex enslavement is intense and growing. It’s well-documented that the first military brothel with conscripted women was opened in 1942 in Indonesia by a Japanese Navy lieutenant, Yasuhiro Nakasone, who went on to become prime minister of Japan from 1982-1987.

But even though the Japanese government essentially apologized for the wartime sex slavery in 1993, the current Japanese government has a new position. This is from a New York Times report in November 2014. Once conceded …

… the Japanese military’s involvement in comfort stations is [now] bitterly contested. The government of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is engaged in an all-out effort to portray the historical record as a tissue of lies designed to discredit the nation. Mr. Abe’s administration denies that imperial Japan ran a system of human trafficking and coerced prostitution, implying that comfort women were simply camp-following prostitutes.

 

The latest move came at the end of October when, with no intended irony, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party appointed Mr. Nakasone’s own son, former Foreign Minister Hirofumi Nakasone, to chair a commission established to “consider concrete measures to restore Japan’s honor with regard to the comfort women issue.”

Nationalism drives historical rewrite

The historical revisionism may be a matter of embarrassment to Japanese-based multinational conglomerates which have to do business around the world. But it is playing well in Japan, and there are no signs of a domestic blowback to Abe’s decision. Here’s more from the New York Times:

The official narrative in Japan is fast becoming detached from reality, as it seeks to cast the Japanese people — rather than the comfort women of the Asia-Pacific theater — as the victims of this story. The Abe administration sees this historical revision as integral to restoring Japan’s imperial wartime honor and modern-day national pride. But the broader effect of the campaign has been to cause Japan to back away from international efforts against human rights abuses and to weaken its desire to be seen as a responsible partner in prosecuting possible war crimes.

The Japanese government’s changed position hasn’t been much in the news in the U.S., but it has been controversial in Asia for years and has also drawn unflattering coverage from the BBC.

The San Francisco supervisors’ resolution could easily lead to this becoming a big issue in the U.S., especially if such prominent San Francisco politicians as Sen. Dianne Feinstein and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi weigh in.

Similar, though far less weighty, flap in Virgina

The parallels with a 2013-14 controversy in the state of Virgina are plain, although that case was much less inflammatory. Here’s a Reuters summary:

Legislation requiring that the Korean name for the Sea of Japan be included in new school textbooks has become law in the U.S. state of Virginia, a victory for Korean-American campaigners backed by the South Korean government.

 

Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe signed the law earlier in the week, a spokesman confirmed on Thursday. The law requires textbooks to add the name “East Sea,” as the body of water that separates Japan and Korea is known in Korea.

 

Passage of the legislation represents a significant victory for vocal campaigners among Virginia’s 82,000 Korean-Americans, who greatly outnumber the state’s 19,000 ethnic Japanese.

 

The issue attracted intense lobbying not only from Korean-Americans but the governments of South Korea and Japan more than 7,000 miles away, which have been squabbling for years over the name for the sea.

 

It is a source of intense bitterness for Koreans that the “Sea of Japan” was standardized worldwide while Korea was under Japanese colonial rule.

Students here also are protesting the proposed hike in tuition at the University of California advanced by President Janet Napolitano. Reported the Times:

In Berkeley, scores of students and community members marched through the city and continued to occupy Wheeler Hall. At UCLA, several dozen students rallied in front of Powell Library. And dozens of protesters at UC Irvine staged a sit-in at the dean of students office, demanding an audience with the university’s chancellor.

The tuition increases — up to 5% each year over the next five years — would raise costs next school year as much as $12,804 and as high as $15,564 by the 2019-20 school year. Protests began last week, when UC regents voted to raise tuition unless more state funding is provided.

Shades of the Sixties. The next thing you know, the Rolling Stones will throw another free concert at Altamont.

Then it was the draft Now it’s exorbitant tuition.

Except this time, the kids also have run up massive debt.

Let’s hope the kids push for reductions in the absurdly high levels of administration — now more than one administrator for each professor. That would cut costs and preclude the tuition hikes.

On the positive side, kids again are getting a hard lesson in the tyranny of governments, especially those that say they “help” us.

By Chriss Street

This is a crucial development for California, which recently slipped to fourth among the 50 states in oil production. Texas remains first, followed by North Dakota and its lucrative new Bakken formation, then Alaska in third place.

The United States is on track to achieve independence from imported Middle East oil within the next seven years due to the boom in domestic and North American energy development.  Consequently, the United States would have eventually ratcheted down our huge military presence in the Middle East defending oil imports.

But just like television scenes of the attack on the United States embassy during the 1968 TET Offensive destroyed public support for the Vietnam War, last week’s television images of protests against American embassies has devastated public support for a continuing military presence in the Middle East.  The American public will soon demand a crash program to exploit domestic energy resources to facilitate a Middle East withdrawal.

American Exceptionalism’s military and economic triumphs in the first half of the 20th Century were directly attributable to secure domestic access to immense amounts of oil. President Coolidge wrote in 1924 after WW I, “the supremacy of nations may be determined by the possession of available petroleum and its products.”

World War II

During World War II, the United States’ domestic gasoline output for the military grew 18 times and the production of aviation fuel jumped by 80 times.  Half the total weight of supplies shipped overseas to U.S. allies during the war consisted of petroleum products.

Following defeat of Germany’s Afrika Korps in 1943, Middle East oil resources were rapidly commercialized.  After the war, massive new volumes of cheap Middle East oil froze the world price of oil at between $2.77 and $3.60 a barrel from 1948 to 1972.  During that period, American domestic production withered and the bulk of U.S. oil refining capacity was relocated to coastal ports on the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

On December 2, 1970, just as oil prices were about to climb, Congress created the Environmental Protection Agency, which had a huge negative financial impact on the domestic oil industry.  The number operating oil refineries in the U.S. fell from 301 in 1970 to 134 today.  Land-based oil production fell from 9.6 million barrels a day in 1970 to only 5.1 million in 2005.

Even with new off-shore production in Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico, total U.S. domestic oil production fell from 10.8 million barrels a day in 1980 to 8.3 million barrels in 2005.  To cover the shortfall as demand continued to grow, imports rose from 1.3 million barrels a day in 1970, providing 12 percent of supply, to a peak of more than 12 million barrels in 2005, accounting for 63 percent of all U.S. oil supply. 

Fracking

But since 2008, fracking and other new drilling technologies have fostered a domestic 25 percwent surge in oil production and a 40 percent jump in natural gas production.  Demand for imported oil has fallen to less than 45 percent of supply, the lowest level since 1997.  Cheap new supplies from Canadian tar sands drove down imports of Middle East oil to less than 10 percent of U.S. supply.

Radical Islam’s coordinated attacks against American embassies across the Middle East have fractured the region’s respect for U.S. military power and emboldened our enemies.  Taliban forces this weekend brazenly penetrated the perimeter of a the joint U.S. and British air base in Afghanistan, blew up 6 Marine Harrier “jump jets” and killed one of the Marines’ highest decorated Air Squadron leaders.  After NATO forces suffered their 51st murder by Afghan government forces, the U.S. military suspended all operations patrolling with Afghan troops.

In 1968, President Lyndon Johnson claimed a military victory as American and South Vietnam forces slaughtered 10 times as many Viet Cong as Americans were lost in the TET Offensive.  But bloody television images of the battle at the U.S. embassy in Saigon convinced Americans that the Vietnamese could never be pacified.  Similar television images of anti-American violence in the Middle East has convinced the American public that the Middle East cannot be pacified.

The American public will soon politically coalesce around a major increase in domestic energy exploration and development in order to facilitate the elimination of reliance on imported Middle East oil.  Fortunately, America has the technology and resource potential to rapidly make this initiative a reality.

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By John Seiler

Free countries let their people leave at will.

Tyrannies don’t let people out without special permission. And if they let anyone leave, they first rob them.

A good contrast is North Korea, a tyranny that bans leaving; and South Korea, a free country that let’s anyone leave without restraint. I know many South Koreans who have made some money, emigrated to Calfornia and used their savings to start little businesses, such as laundries or computer stores.

Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-Pyongyang, just introduced legislation to rob people leaving America. He’s joined by Sen. Bob Casey, D-Havana.

They’re upset that Eduardo Saverin, one of the new Facebook billionares, renounced his citizenship last fall and took asylum in free Singapore. The combined U.S.-California top income tax rate currently is 48.3 percent. If Dear Leader Barack Obama’s national tax increase goes through, and Commissar Jerry Brown’s tax increase does so as well, come Jan. 1, the top income tax rate in California will be 52.9 percent.

By contrast, Singapore’s top income tax rate in just 20 percent.

For the capital gains tax, it’s even worse. Currently, the top U.S.+ California rate is 24.3 percent. On Jan. 1, it could rise to 29.3 percent. By contrast, Singapore has no capital gains tax at all. Singapore loves it when people come there and invest in creating jobs and businesses.

At a news conference, the senators branded Saverin’s escape from tyranny to freedom a “scheme” to “help him duck up to $67 million in taxes.”

Ex-PATRIOT Act

Their bill in the Supreme Soviet is called the “Ex-PATRIOT Act,” after the word expatriate. It stands for “Expatriation Prevention by Abolishing Tax-Related Incentives for Offshore Tenancy.” A typical Soviet bureaucratic mouthful.

It’s also a play on the so-called USA PATRIOT Act of 2001, which should be called the USA TREASON Act because it destroyed essential American liberties by, among other things, shredding the Fourth Amendment right to protection from “unreasonable searches and seizures.” It was a bipartisan, Republican-Democrat assault on America freedoms. Commissar Schumer, naturally, supported it. Casey wasn’t in the Senate then, but a year ago voted to extend its Gestapo assaults.

Among other things, the new act would rob 30 percent of the capital gains of anyone renouncing his U.S. citizenship. And it would ban the expats from ever setting foot again in the USSA.

In California, we also have hundreds of thosuands of Vietnamese. I know many of them. Unlike most South Korean immigrants, the Vietnamese mostly did not come here peacefully. After Saigon fell in 1975, the “Boat People” (pictured above) fled Vietnam with few possessions. The new Schumer-Casey-style regime in Hanoi, after conquering South Vietnam, seized the property of those leaving.

The Boat People also commonly were assaulted by pirates on the high seas. Every family has horror stories. But the Boat People arrived in a then-free American that welcomed them as exiles from tyranny and seekers of liberty.

Ironically, since then the Vietnamese government has become much more free, allowing the free movementy of peoples and welcomes investments. Tax rates in Vietnam are about the same as those in the United States today, but lower than the USA would be under the Obama-Brown tax increases.

And of course, Vietnam today has many fewer regulations than in the socialist USA, and the cost of living is cheaper.

Currently, about 1,700 Americans a year self-exile from the ex-Land of the Free, more than five times what it was around 2008. Should the Schumer-Casey tyranny be imposed, before it goes into effect expect that number to rise to tens of thousands fleeing socialism for freedom.