In the same week that a Japanese school district incorporated a contentious revisionist history textbook into its curriculum, activists established The Women’s Active Museum on War and Peace, which will be devoted to documenting the lives of the sex slaves who have been written out of the textbook.  

The first of its kind in Japan, the museum will open its doors in August to catalogue the narratives of the approximately 200,000 women who were consigned to sexual slavery by the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II.

Mimi Hanaoka

In a grim year for Sino-Japanese relations, the board of education in Otawara, Japan, has chosen to use a contentious history textbook that will widen the rift between the two nations. Some of the most notable editorial revisions to Japan’s wartime history include referring to the Nanjing Massacre, during which anywhere from 100,000 to 300,000 Chinese civilians were killed by Japanese troops between December of 1937 and March of 1938, as an “incident,” and neglecting to mention any numbers of civilians murdered during that massacre, and the textbook’s failure to thoroughly explain Japan’s use of Chinese and Korean women as sex slaves, or “comfort women.” All this in the same week that Japan and China have been snarling at each other across the East China Sea over oil drilling rights in a contested maritime region.

Although only 2,300 students will be using the textbooks, and although the publisher, the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform, has fallen well short of its goal of installing its books in 10 percent of the nation’s middle schools — at last count only 0.04 percent of middle schools used the first edition of the textbook — the move will escalate the nations’ recently frustrated relations.

Earlier this year Chinese protesters — about 10,000 in Beijing and 3,000 at the Japanese consulate in Guangzhou, which is located in the south — marched and chanted to protest the textbook.

Mimi Hanaoka

A scant 20 some-odd years since the last time someone was ushered to a prison cell for homosexual behavior, Spain follows the heels of the Netherlands and Belgium to be the third country in Europe to  sanction gay marriages, and now Carlos Baturin and Emilio Menéndez — who met during Franco’s reign when homosexual behavior was an invitation to jail — are Spain’s first gay married couple.

For those who are baffled by the hellish maze of technicalities that characterizes gay marriage and partnership rules around the globe, the BBC provides an easily digestible summary of various nations’ policies.

Mimi Hanaoka

As the death toll mounts and the grim personal accounts of the tragedy surface in the aftermath of the series of four synchronized bombings that tore through London Thursday, Muslims in Britain are now living in their own on sphere of dread under the constant threat of arbitrary assignments of blame; by Saturday The Muslim Council of Britain had received 30,000 doses of hate mail, several of which read: “It’s now war on Muslims throughout Britain.”

Mimi Hanaoka

Curbing a 10 billion-dollar-a-year business is a painfully ambitious goal, but TIPinAsia is determined to restrain the trade in human traffic. The recently launched website functions both as an educative tool — it outlines the laws regarding human trafficking in Cambodia, Thailand, and East Timor — and as a channel of communication that will link agencies that work on behalf of victims of human trafficking, with the ultimate goal of prosecuting traffickers in addition to raising awareness about the issue.  

With the United Nations’ assertion that human trafficking has been on the rise for the past decade, TIPinAsia will be helping to stem the flow of the ever-increasing tide of human traffic.

Mimi Hanaoka

“Europe is no longer Europe, it is ‘Eurabia,’ a colony of Islam, where the Islamic invasion does not proceed only in a physical sense, but also in a mental and cultural sense. Servility to the invaders has poisoned democracy, with obvious consequences for the freedom of thought, and for the concept itself of liberty,” is how Oriana Fallaci characterizes what she perceives as the decline of Europe into the grabby and presumably immigrant hands of Muslims encroaching on her continent.

It may be hard to believe that such immoderate and inflammatory rhetoric is in fact a defense of her recent book, The Force of Reason, which in turn is a defense of her previous book, The Rage and the Pride, which was written in response in the September 11th attacks, but Fallaci is hissing out her defense for all it’s worth. Fallaci now faces a trial and potential imprisonment for her diatribe in her native Italy on charges of vilifying Islam; ailing with cancer but still snarling in New York, Fallaci has stated that she refuses to attend her upcoming trial.

Mimi Hanaoka

“Before Allah punishes us with a second tsunami here in Jakarta, let us ask the police to disperse this event.”

— Soleh Mahmud, head of Indonesia’s Islamic Defenders’ Front (FPI) party, speaking as members of his faction stormed into a club in Jakarta that was hosting a transvestite beauty pageant.

Such a disruption is not unusual for the FPI, which has several thousand members and has previously conducted raids on bars and other venues that it considers to be flagrantly flouting Islamic values as codified in Sharia law. Unsurprisingly, the FPI materialized during dire economic times, as a result of the 1997 financial crisis in Indonesia, and the group advocates the implementation of Islamic law in Indonesia.  

Mimi Hanaoka

With 63 percent of church-going Americans voting Republican, it seems self-evident that the vocal and visible Christian right would enjoy a monopoly on political influence. Now Patrick Mrotek has decided to pit faith against faith and has founded what he hopes will be the voice of the Christian left — the Christian Alliance for Progress.

The Alliance’s goals are explicit and include exerting political influence and addressing issues that have a particularly strong resonance for religious groups and individuals, including the obviously contentious issues of stem cell research, abortion, and gay rights advocacy.  

Mimi Hanaoka

The most recent installment of the humanitarian travesty and farce that is occurring in the western Sudanese region of Darfur happened on Monday when Paul Foreman, head of the Dutch branch of Medecins San Frontieres, which translates as “doctors without borders,” was arrested for perpetrating crimes against the state of Sudan with his report about the rapes that are occurring in the genocide-ridden region of Darfur. The pro-government Janjaweed militias in Darfur have been charged with genocide and systematic rapes, and the Sudanese government has been implicated as complicit in the acts; the Sudanese government denies such charges. And now the Sudanese government has jailed the head of a medical charity for compiling a report about the mass rapes.

The Crushing Burden of Rape: Sexual Violence in Darfur catalogues the sexual mistreatment of 500 women who received treatment from Medecins San Frontieres over four and a half months in Darfur. Medecins San Frontieres insists that its report is accurate; the Sudanese government is livid about the report that highlights the grotesque abuse occurring in the region, and when Foreman refused to present the government with the evidence which led to the report — Foreman states that to do so would violate the confidential nature of the doctor-patient relationship — the government promptly arrested him. He has since been released on bail.

The Darfur region is located in western Sudan, and the Sudanese government stands accused of providing support and arms to the Arab Janjaweed militias that are engaged in a campaign of ethnic cleaning against Sudan’s black African population. Since February of 2003, the conflict has resulted in over 70,000 deaths and two million refugees.  

The recent arrest of Paul Foreman is merely the most recent travesty related to Darfur.  Earlier this year a United Nations report claimed, in a preposterously worded report and against all evidence, that genocide was not occurring in Darfur. The United Nations report, begun in October of 2004 at the behest of the U.N. Security Council, on whether genocide is taking place in Sudan, stated that “the commission found that (Sudan’s) government forces and militias conducted indiscriminate attacks,” including “killing of civilians, enforced disappearances, destruction of villages, rape and other forms of sexual violence, pillaging and forced displacement, throughout Darfur.”  Although some individuals might have perpetrated “acts with genocidal intent,” the government of Sudan “has not pursued a policy of genocide.”

The U.N. report — which contradicts the American declaration that genocide is currently occurring in Darfur — recommends that the International Criminal Court (ICC) located in The Hague try any specific cases of genocide and war crimes that may have occurred in the Sudan. Had the U.N. report concluded that genocide is occurring in Darfur, the U.N. would have been legally obligated to intervene to help end the conflict.

Mimi Hanaoka

“I might phrase my views a little differently, but fundamentally there is no change.”

— Siegfried Kampl, a 69-year-old Austrian politician who has recently made explicit his sympathy for the Nazis, and who has condemned what he claims was the “brutal persecution” of Austrian Nazis following the Second World War. He has also denounced as “assassins of battle comrades” the Austrians who deserted their posts in Nazi Germany’s military units.

While Kampl’s pro-Nazi sympathies inspired horror among his colleges, he did, unfortunately, inspire one of his peers; several days after Kampl’s outburst, John Gudenus, a right-wing politician, asserted that the existence of gas chambers employed by the Nazis in their concentration camps “remains to be proven.”

Mimi Hanaoka

“To our regret, during Vice-Premier Wu Yi’s stay in Japan, Japanese leaders repeatedly made remarks on visiting the Yasukuni shrine that go against the efforts to improve Sino-Japanese relations,” seethed Kong Quan, the spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, explaining Vice-Premier Wu Yi’s abrupt departure from Japan during her good will visit, which was intended to warm the frosty Sino-Japanese relationship.  

The shrine in question is Yasukuni Shrine, which is a perennial if symbolic thorn in Sino-Japanese relations. Founded in 1869, Yasukuni is dedicated to the souls of the approximately 2.5 million Japanese war dead, and the souls of innocent children and war criminals alike are venerated in the shrine. Hundreds of thousands of visitors flock to Yasukuni every year, and the shrine functions as a symbol of both respectful patriotism and militaristic nationalism. Japanese Prime Minister Koizumi is a frequent visitor, and he insists that he makes his visits in his capacity as a private citizen; his Chinese counterparts view his visits as persistent affronts to China and a tacit approval of Japan’s history of military aggression against its East Asian neighbors.  

Given the recent publication of a new Japanese history textbook that glosses over Japan’s wartime atrocities that occurred in the 1930s and 1940s — one of the most notable editorial revisions to Japan’s wartime history includes referring to the Nanjing Massacre, during which anywhere from 100,000 to 300,000 Chinese civilians were killed by Japanese troops between December of 1937 and March of 1938, as an “incident,” and neglecting to mention any numbers of civilians murdered during that massacre — and the ensuing violent protests that erupted in China, the nasty game of brinksmanship is consistently escalating.  

Mimi Hanaoka

After a 10-hour parliamentary session and 23 votes against the motion, the Kuwaiti parliament has finally voted to amend its electoral laws and grant women the right to vote and to run in local and parliamentary elections.

The motion had been previously opposed and successfully thwarted by tribal and Islamist members of the parliament when they formed a majority and insisted that, according to Islamic law, women were barred from such leadership positions.  The parliament was finally convinced otherwise, but female candidates and voters must, even with this amendment, abide by Islamic law.

Mimi Hanaoka