I do read Japanese, but these days it’s fairly slow going, and I haven’t read any Nippon Kaigi stuff. It sounds like Adelstein is pretty off-base, though. Considering how obvious my source was to you, I’m willing to accept that you know that better than he does.
As far as the war crimes denials, that goes back a long way, specifically regarding comfort women. It had already started back when I lived in Japan, and it’s not just a fabrication of the foreign media.
「慰安婦」問題で「強制性を裏付ける証拠がなかったのは事実」
(Roughly: “There’s no evidence that any of the comfort women were forced into it.”)
From a Japanese politician, strikes me as a pretty unequivocal denial, especially given the weight of evidence, including the testimony of victims who were still alive at the time.
Thats honestly a deeper issue than we should go into here, especially since anything that doesnt meet the accepted narrative gets one branded all sorts of nasty things (facts be damned). I’m also not crazy about post facto declaration of war crimes (something specifically brought up in the IMTFE) even though this issue wasn’t part of the IMTFE in the first place. We quickly open up the “everyone ever was evil in some way”.
Anyhow, the link to the Japan Communist Party newspaper there, IIRC, Akahata was linked to the Asahi Newspaper scandal of faking news on this very subject. Neither Asahi nor Akahata came clean on that, it was reported in one of the weekly news magazines again IIRC. Just saying be careful with JCP as a single primary source.
And for those in the peanut gallery no I’m not apologizing for anything done during war by anyone ever. The day we beat swords into plowshares cant come soon enough for me.
