The Korea Times is reporting that the Korean Supreme Court has reached a landmark decision concerning the nation’s sexual harassment laws. . .

Squeezing a person’s nipple or hitting their genitals with the back of one’s hand does not constitute sexual harassment if the incident took place in military barracks, the Supreme Court recently ruled.

Glad they got that straightened out.

Via The Marmot’s Hole.

Japan’s defeat in World War II was a huge emotional blow to the country which is still felt today. Although more than sixty years have passed, the subject of the war is still in many ways “taboo,” and not discussed very often outside of certain specific situations. (Kind of reminds me of growing up in the 1970s and asking what that Vietnam War thing was all about…no one seemed to want to tell me.)

One interesting mechanism the Japanese have evolved to allow them to deal with the subject of war has been an unlikely one: animation. While the traditional image of a “soldier” used to be tied to black and white photographs from the historical Pacific War, this has changed somewhat after three decades of popular culture in which the idea of “war” was more likely to be defined in sci-fi terms, such as the One Year War of the original Mobile Suit Gundam series, in which spacenoids living in orbital colonies fight for independence from Earth.

While it’s not generally possible for Japanese to wax romantic about the real war, which they lost, you can probably find fans within a certain age range who could tell you about the First Battle of Jaburo between Char Aznable-lead Zeon forces and the Federation in great detail, or a Space Battleship Yamato fan who can get misty-eyed about the Battle of Saturn, when dozens of Andromeda-class battleships were destroyed by the Comet Empire.

If you asked Japanese who they considered the most respected “military heroes” of the country were, you might find some who would answer Amuro Rei or Bright Noah or Captain Okita/Captain Avatar, the legendary characters from these war-oriented anime series. It’s not unlike the original Star Trek, which was able to tell stories about race relations and other difficult topics that couldn’t be discussed in the 1960s unless they were disguised as science fiction tales far off into the future.

Reuters is reporting on the release of the Global Peace Index by the Economist Intelligence Unit.  The report is based on 24 indicators including U.N. deployments overseas, respect for human rights, levels of violent crime, and arms sales.

The Group of Eight economic powers ranked as follows: Japan (5th), Canada (11th), Germany (14th), Italy (28th), France (36th), Britain (49th), U.S. (97th), and Russia (131st), out of 140 ranked. 

Iceland ranked first.

The bottom 5 included Afghanistan, Sudan, Somalia, Israel, and Iraq.

In a Reuters article a few weeks back, I got a history lesson on four disputed islands north of Hokkaido.  The article discusses these sparsely populated islands and their history.  A few tidbits:

• 17,000 Japanese fled or were forced from the islands after the invasion in August, 1945 — just after Russia declared war on Japan and just a week before Japan surrendered.
• About 7,900 Japanese who once lived on the islands are alive today and their average age is 75.
• About 16,000 Russians live there now.

Remember the story of the U.S. Marine in Okinawa who was accused of raping a 14-year old girl that we reported on here, here, and here?

The Marine claimed he merely forced a kiss on the girl and charges were later dismissed by Japanese authorities when the girl dropped charges against him.

Though it looked like that would be that, the U.S. military apparently has decided, pressed charges or no, the Marine’s actions were serious infractions of the Uniform Code of Military Justice and must be punished.

U.S. military charges against Staff Sgt. Tyrone L. Hadnott include rape of a child under 16, abusive sexual conduct, making a false official statement, adultery and “kidnapping through inveigling,” or trickery.

No date was set for the court-martial. The charges were made Monday, but the military did not announce them until Friday.

Big thanks to RTN for sending this in.

The story of the murder of a Japanese taxi driver has been in the news since the March 19th crime.  This Washington Post article has more information on the murder and its alleged perpetrator who is a U.S. serviceman and intriguingly a Nigerian citizen.  The article also discusses the backstory about the U.S. military presence in Japan.  This whole episode brings up many issues.  A few weeks ago in his podcast (and in a follow-up) Edward discussed the alleged rape of a Japanese teenage schoolgirl by another U.S. Serviceman and the dropping of those charges and (correctly, I think) discussed how few incidents there really are considering how many military people there are here (50,000).  Nevertheless all incidents become high profile, as should be expected given the high level of anxiety the U.S. military seems to cause.  Should the U.S. still be in Japan 60 years after WWII?  Should Japan stop hysterical press coverage of crimes, especially those committed by foreigners (not that the U.S. press is any better)?  Why does the U.S. have a Nigerian (or any foreign nationals) in its ranks?

The New York Times has a quartet of articles related to Japan.

One article deals with a lawsuit regarding WWII forced suicides. I have not heard much about this issue before and it is quite interesting. The topic of revisionist history is a universal one. In this particular case an author wrote about these suicides and was sued for defamation but the lawsuit was just thrown out.

A Japanese court has rejected a defamation lawsuit against Kenzaburo Oe, the 1994 Nobel laureate in literature, agreeing with his depiction of deep involvement by the Japanese military in the mass suicides of civilians in Okinawa toward the end of World War II.

The defamation lawsuit, filed in 2005, was seized upon by right-wing scholars and politicians in Japan who want to delete references to the military’s coercion of civilians in the mass suicides from the country’s high school history textbooks. Last April, during the administration of Shinzo Abe, the prime minister at the time, the Ministry of Education announced that references to the military’s role would be deleted from textbooks.

Slate.com, one of my favorite websites, has an article on Hiroshima which I found disappointing.  It’s long (very long — whatever happened to being concise?), unfocused, and somewhat pointless.  Despite that, it does raise a few thought-provoking questions and makes a couple of interesting observations even while rehashing a lot of old material.  Points of note include the banality of much of modern day Hiroshima (Starbucks, KFC, McDonalds, etc.), comparisons to current issues of 9/11 commemoration, and why A-bomb victims deserve special recognition over other war dead.  You won’t miss much if you give this article a pass, but if Hiroshima and its place in history interests you, give it a quick read.

After weeks of Japanese indignation, editorials condemning out of control U.S. soldiers, images off U.S. military commanders bowing deeply in contrition before the governor of Okinawa, and even an apology by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice over the alleged rape of a 14-year-old Okinawa schoolgirl by a U.S. Marine. . . the girl has dropped her criminal complaint and the local district prosecutor has dropped all charges.

Japanese authorities are portraying the dropping of charges as being in consideration for the feelings of the young victim.

According to the prosecutors, the girl said to them, “That’s enough, leave me alone.”

“We must give maximum respect to the will of the victim,” Yaichiro Yamashiki, chief prosecutor at the prosecutors office, said at a press conference. “In keeping with legal procedure, we dealt with the case in this way [by not indicting him] because the accusation was retracted.”

“We’ve determined that it isn’t appropriate to indict the suspect by applying charges…out of consideration for the victim’s feelings,” Yamashiki added.

But with all of the furor generated by the incident, it is logical to assume that prosecutors would have pushed hard to have the Marine put behind bars if there had been any physical evidence at all to indicate that a sexual assault actually had taken place.

I wonder if the people of Okinawa plan to make a formal apology to the Marines.

Andy Young who runs Siberian Light – The Russian Blog, writes in to point us to his post about a long forgotten battle fought between Japan and the Soviet Union in the opening days of World War II. Forgotten, but so significant that it literall altered the course of history.

In August 1939, just weeks before Hitler invaded Poland, the Soviet Union and Japan fought a massive tank battle on the Mongolian border – the largest the world had ever seen.

Under the then unknown Georgy Zhukov, the Soviets won a crushing victory at the batte of Khalkhin-Gol (known in Japan as the Nomonhan Incident). Defeat persuaded the Japanese to expand into the Pacific, where they saw the United States as a weaker opponent than the Soviet Union. If the Japanese had not lost at Khalkhin Gol, they may never have attacked Pearl Harbor.

The Japanese decision to expand southwards also meant that the Soviet Eastern flank was secured for the duration of the war. Instead of having to fight on two fronts, the Soviets could mass their troops – under the newly promoted General Zhukov – against the threat of Nazi Germany in the West.

In terms of its strategic impact, the battle of Khalkhin Gol was one of the most decisive battles of the Second World War, but no-one has ever heard of it. Why?

Read the rest of the post here.