Is Tamogami Toshio a millstone around Aso Taro's neck?The now former chief of staff of the Air Self-Defense Forces (ASDF) appeared before the House of Councillors foreign and defense affairs committee and continued his determined campaign to dispel the postwar consensus on Japan's wartime past.In his remarks, General Tamogami appeared to play dumb. Asked about …
Tag: Murayama apology
Japan’s revisionist problem
In my critique of Tamogami Toshio's essay, I asked, "Just how widespread are these views in the JSDF?"Jun Okumura quickly provided some sort of answer: more than fifty SDF members submitted essays in the contest won by General Tamogami. Sankei reports that the number of ASDF members who submitted essays is actually seventy-eight by the …
Murayama’s apology revisited
In this recent post, I mentioned that what Japan needs to do is stop issuing caveats about its wartime behavior, and make a clear, unambiguous apology.Of course, I neglected to mention that a Japanese prime minister has previously made such a statement: Prime Minister Murayama Tomiichi's 1995 remarks on the fiftieth anniversary of the end …
Tobias S. Harris 