Bravo! JP Bravo! (never a more truthful statement made).

But there hardly can be any doubt that they are totally evil.

Thankfully,they are their own worst enemies.

John Eel - roast in hell.!!

or better yet:

http://www.asiamedia.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=50569

and are potentially capable of doing incalcuble evil.

They must be stopped - NOW.

*and if Abe wants to do a Chamberlain instead of (his hero) Churchill…well then more fool him.*

Kudan - “bad things were done to your people”

who ever said I was North Korean?

and did I ever say that kidnapping girls was “mature, rational, justifiable”? It’s a terrible thing to do. that pretty much goes without saying.

it also goes without saying that japan (or at least the Japanese gov’t, not every Japanese person agreed with them) “did” very bad things 60 years ago, on a scale that dwarfs the abudctions, we seem to all agree on that.

what koreans (north and south, btw, not to mention chinese) are so frustrated about is the one-sided attention on the abductees, without any attention to the larger context. the same people who are screaming about the abductions — which, to emphasize again, I am NOT justifying — are diverting your attention from a whole series of more serious (in terms of number of deaths) issues that are both historical and *currently ongoing*. Not the least of which is Japan’s participation in Iraq (100 deaths/day), Mitsubishi heavy industries being a prime mover in that area:

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/jan2004/japa-j26.shtml

So it is not surprising that these companies (Mitsubishi) and politicians (Abe, for example) are pushing *hard* to cover up past crimes:

http://www.economist.com/world/asia/displaystory.cfm?story_id=6748994

“Mitsubishi’s brazen defence broke new ground in such cases. It questioned whether Japan had even invaded China, preferring to leave that difficult question to future historians. It denied the company had used forced labour—even though Mitsubishi built and operated a notorious fleet of “hell ships” that brought victims in the cargo hold to Japan. And it asked the court to see through to the plaintiff’s political motives: to fall for these would be to produce a “mistaken burden of the soul” for future generations of Japanese.”

The Megumi story is a *great* way to pull much-needed attention away from the history of corporate war crimes, if you fall for that kind of stuff. It’s also a great way to keep the public eye away from current crimes. The very sad story is that the kidnapping of an innocent girl is being exploited for these aims.

Kudan: and what exactly are my “designs”?

You claim that “the kidnapping of Megumi Yokota has absolutely nothing at all to do with WWII, Mitsubishi, or anything else [I] have posted”. While Megumi personally certainly has nothing to with these things, the fact that the case was covered so extensively very much has to do with them.

First of all, to set the record straight that this is a very *current* issue, there is a very important researcher William Underwood who is investigating Japan’s wartime labour:

“In addition to the POW cash, most of [the war profits] is probably still sitting in Japan’s Postal Savings accounts, the total including unpaid money for the much larger contingent of Asian slave workers forcibly taken to Japan, could be worth today about $2 billion, he believes. That would include financial multipliers such as compound interest.

Yet Japanese corporations, government departments, and the Bank of Japan and Tokyo-Mitsubishi Bank, which are thought to be holding funds unpaid to the Asians, continue to pursue a “six-decade record of cover-up, dishonesty, and denial,” he says. “Can Japan realistically expect historical reconciliation as long as it evades honest accounting of past conduct?”"

http://www.counterpunch.org/reed06202006.html

So there is quite a lot of money involved. Aso Taro, the current Minister of Foreign Affairs in the Abe government, has been pushing very hard on the abductions issue. Yet the connection between his own family and business dealings and the korean slave workers issue is rarely commented on.

“[Aso] ran the Aso Cement Company, as the former Aso Coal Mines was then called, in Fukuoka prefecture in the southern island of Kyushu from 1973-79, when he entered politics. During that time never addressed its terrible corporate legacy of peonage labor. He remains connected to the company today. In 2001 it entered a joint venture with the French cement manufacturer, Lefarge, but remains under the management of his younger brother, Yutaka Aso.”

http://www.counterpunch.org/reed02022006.html

Aso, who is no small player in the political world, stands to lose a *lot* of money (and possibly his job) if media attention is diverted from Megumi and the abductions story to the millions of former slaves, none of whom have been given a penny from the Japanese government (not even compensation for the work they did). In all, it is estimated that the Japanese government has spent about 1% of the amount that Germany has spent on disbursements.

The issue is also very current because there remain many former slaves (Korean, Chinese and even American and Australian) who continue to fight to get backpay and compensation for the damage that was inflicted.

Kudan: What you call a “grade-school tantrum”, whatever you may think of it, was carefully researched and intended to shed some light on the issue. In this entire exchange, I have never put you down or tried to make fun of your arguments or statements.

Although you may find this hard to believe, I am not a North Korean propagandist, or anti-Japan, or anti-Megumi, or anti-you for that matter. You can hold whatever views you want. But you have still not shown that “The kidnapping of Megumi Yokota has nothing to do with anything” I have posted.

Your point about posting in an appropriate forum is reasonable; I didn’t intend to draw this out so long in this forum. I won’t push the issue, the articles posted above amply demonstrate my argument, unless you have something to add.

Sadie102: That seemed a bit out of the blue but well put.