'Japan is dishonoured by efforts to contort the truth', NYT editorial blasts

NYT Editorial

No Comfort

What part of "Japanese Army sex slaves" does Japan's prime minister, Shinzo Abe, have so much trouble understanding and apologizing for?

The underlying facts have long been beyond serious dispute. During World War II, Japan's Army set up sites where women rounded up from Japanese colonies like Korea were expected to deliver sexual services to Japan's soldiers.

These were not commercial brothels. Force, explicit and implicit, was used in recruiting these women. What went on in them was serial rape, not prostitution. The Japanese Army's involvement is documented in the government's own defense files. A senior Tokyo official more or less apologized for this horrific crime in 1993. The unofficial fund set up to compensate victims is set to close down this month.

And Abe wants the issue to end there. Last week, he claimed that there was no evidence that the victims had been coerced. Yesterday, he grudgingly acknowledged the 1993 quasi apology, but only as part of a pre-emptive declaration that his government would reject the call, now pending in the United States Congress, for an official apology. America isn't the only country interested in seeing Japan belatedly accept full responsibility. Korea and China are also infuriated by years of Japanese equivocations over the issue.

Abe seems less concerned with repairing Japan's sullied international reputation than with appealing to a large right-wing faction within his Liberal Democratic Party that insists that the whole shameful episode was a case of healthy private enterprise. One ruling party lawmaker, in his misplaced zeal to exculpate the Army, even suggested the offensive analogy of a college that outsourced its cafeteria to a private firm.

Japan is only dishonored by such efforts to contort the truth.

The 1993 statement needs to be expanded upon, not whittled down. Parliament should issue a frank apology and provide generous official compensation to the surviving victims. It is time for Japan's politicians — starting with Abe — to recognize that the first step toward overcoming a shameful past is acknowledging it.

Tags: NYT editorial, japan, war, wwii, history, comfort women, sex slaves, denial, war crimes, atrocities

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Excerpts of Japan emperor diary released

AP - Shortly after the Pearl Harbor attack, Emperor Hirohito told aides he hoped to visit the South Pacific after the war, when the entire region would be Japanese territory, according to a newly released journal. He also said, however, he did not want Japan to go to war with China.

Hirohito made the South Seas comment on Christmas Day 1941 -- just weeks after Japan's surprise attack on Pearl Harbor brought the United States into the Pacific War, according to the journal kept by his chamberlain. Excerpts of the journal were published in the monthly Bungeishunju magazine on Saturday.

An advance copy was obtained by The Associated Press on Friday.

"I'd like to see the South Sea after peace is restored," Hirohito was quoted as saying. "It won't be a problem because the area will be part of Japan's territory."

According to Bungeishunju, the 600-page journal was kept by Hirohito's main aide, Kuraji Ogura, and covered the period from May 1939 to June 1945.

The magazine has not commented on how it obtained Ogura's journal.

Hirohito's observations were often less sanguine.

In October 1940, he seemed angry over the situation on the Chinese front, saying Japan had underestimated China's strength. "I did not want to see this war with China begin," he said.

"China is stronger than expected. Everybody made mistakes in war projections," he said.

He was also quoted as warning that Japan must be cautious in entering into war but that once a war had begun, Japan "must fight it to the end."

On Sept. 2, 1945, almost a month after atomic bombs devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Hirohito told the nation on the radio for the first time that it was time to "bear the unbearable" and accept an unconditional surrender.

Across America, Europe and the Pacific, troops girding for an invasion of Japan cheered and wept for joy.

Hirohito died in 1989. His reign continues to be a sensitive subject in Japan.

Last year, the Bungeishunju magazine set off a political tempest by publishing private memorandums that suggested Hirohito was deeply upset over the decision to honor war criminals at a Tokyo war shrine.

Hirohito stopped visiting the Yasukuni shrine out of displeasure over its 1978 decision to begin honoring convicted war criminals.

The inclusion of war criminals among the millions of war dead honored at the shrine also outraged many across Asia, especially in China and the Koreas, and visits there by Japanese leaders still provoke angry reactions around the region.

Tags: japan, hirohito, emperor, war, wwii, pearl harbour, war crimes

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"Nanking" documentary lands U.S. distribution

REUTERS - Independent distributor ThinkFilm has acquired North American rights to "Nanking," a documentary chronicling Japan's infamous 1937 invasion of the Chinese city.

Between 150,000 and 300,000 civilians were murdered, while tens of thousands were raped. The film features interviews with Chinese survivors and Japanese soldiers, along with letters and diary entries read by actors portraying Westerners who helped save more than 200,000 Chinese refugees.

"Nanking" was directed by Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman, and narrated by Woody Harrelson, Stephen Dorff and Mariel Hemingway.

ThinkFilm plans to release the film at year's end, coinciding with the 70th anniversary of the attack known as the Nanking Massacre, or the Rape of Nanking -- also the name of the Iris Chang book that inspired the film.

"It's an event too often ignored or eclipsed by other 20th century genocides," said ThinkFilm theatrical head Mark Urman, who has been interested in the film since its premiere at January's Sundance Film Festival.

"Recent events in Asia have reminded us that what happened in Nanking 70 years ago this December remains an open wound between China and Japan," added the film's producer, AOL vice chairman Ted Leonsis, referring to recent remarks by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe that there was no proof of alleged sexual slavery of women by Japanese soldiers during World War II. Abe said Thursday that he would launch an investigation into the issue after an outcry over his remarks in the United States and several Asian countries.

The Nanking Massacre also inspired controversy in January when Japanese filmmakers announced plans to make a documentary titled "The Truth About Nanking" claiming that the massacre never happened.

Tags: nanking, rape of nanking, nanjing massacre, nanking massacre, war, wwii, atrocities, war crimes, japan, history, nanking the film

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Denial reopens wounds of Japan's ex-sex slaves

(caption: Among the victims of Japanese sexual slavery addressing a conference in Sydney were, top, from left, Wu Hsiu-mei of Taiwan; Jan Ruff O’Herne, an Australian formerly from Java; and bottom, Gil Won-ok, a South Korean; Tony Sernack for The New York Times)

hendersonvillenews - Wu Hsiu-mei said she was 23 and working as a maid in a hotel in 1940 when her Taiwanese boss handed her over to Japanese officers. She and some 15 other women were sent to Guangdong Province in southern China to become sex slaves.

Inside a hotel there was a so-called comfort station, managed by a Taiwanese but serving only the Japanese military, Wu said. Forced to have sex with more than 20 Japanese a day for almost a year, she said, she had multiple abortions and became sterile.

The long festering issue of Japan's war-era sex slaves gained new prominence last week when Prime Minister Shinzo Abe denied the military's role in coercing the women into servitude. The denial by Abe, Japan's first prime minister born after the war, drew official protests from China, Taiwan, South Korea and the Philippines, some of the countries from which the sex slaves were taken.

The furor highlighted yet again Japan's unresolved history in a region where it has been ceding influence to China. The controversy has also drawn in the United States, which has strongly resisted entering the history disputes that have roiled East Asia in recent years.

Wu told her story on Wednesday outside the Japanese Consulate here, where she and two others who had been sex slaves, known euphemistically as comfort women, were protesting Tokyo's refusal to admit responsibility for the abuse that historians say they and as many as 200,000 other women suffered.

All three — Wu, who is now 90; a 78-year-old South Korean from Seoul; and an 84-year-old Dutch-Australian from Adelaide — were participating in an international conference for Japan's former sex slaves here. Now, just days after Abe's remarks, the three were united in their fury.

"I was taken away by force by Japanese officers, and a Japanese military doctor forced me to undress to examine me before I was taken away," said Wu, who landed here in Sydney on Tuesday night after a daylong flight from Taipei. "How can Abe lie to the world like that?"

Abe, a nationalist who had built his career partly on playing down Japan's wartime past, made his comments in response to a confluence of events, beginning with the Democratic victory in the American Congressional elections last fall. That gave impetus to a proposed nonbinding resolution in the House that would call on Japan to unequivocally acknowledge and apologize for its brutal mistreatment of the women.

Even as Abe's closest allies pressed him to soften a 1993 government statement that acknowledged the military's role in forcing the women into sexual slavery, three former victims testified in Congress last month.

On Monday, Abe said he would preserve the 1993 statement but denied its central admission of the military's role, saying there had been no "coercion, like the authorities breaking into houses and kidnapping" women.

He said private dealers had coerced the women, adding that the House resolution was "not based on objective facts" and that Japan would not apologize even if it was passed.

The resolution calls for Japan to "formally acknowledge, apologize and accept historical responsibility in a clear and unequivocal manner for its Imperial Armed Forces' coercion of young women into sexual slavery."

"Prime Minister Abe is in effect saying that the women are lying," Representative Mike Honda, the California Democrat who is spearheading the legislation, said in a telephone interview. "I find it hard to believe that he is correct given the evidence uncovered by Japanese historians and the testimony of the comfort women."

Japanese historians, using the diaries and testimony of military officials as well as official documents from the United States and other countries, have been able to show that the military was directly or indirectly involved in coercing, deceiving, luring and sometimes kidnapping young women throughout Japan's Asian colonies and occupied territories.

They estimate that up to 200,000 women served in comfort stations that were often an intrinsic part of military operations.

Yet although Abe admitted coercion by private dealers, some of his closest allies in the governing Liberal Democratic Party have dismissed the women as prostitutes who volunteered to work in the comfort stations. They say no official Japanese government documents show the military's role in recruiting the women.

According to historians, the military established the stations to boost morale among its troops, but also to prevent rapes of local women and the spread of sexually transmitted diseases among soldiers.

Japan's deep fear of rampaging soldiers also led it to establish brothels with Japanese prostitutes across Japan for American soldiers during the first months of the postwar occupation, a fact that complicates American involvement in the current debate.

In 1995 a private fund was set up to compensate the women, but many refused to accept any money because they saw the measure as a way for the government to avoid taking direct responsibility. Only 285 women have accepted money from the fund, which will be terminated at the end of this month.

The most direct testimony of the military's role has come from the women themselves.

"An apology is the most important thing we want — an apology that comes from the government, not only a personal one — because this would give us back our dignity," said Jan Ruff O'Herne, 84, who testified to a Congressional panel last month.

Ruff was living with her family in Java, in what was then the Dutch East Indies, when Japan invaded in 1942. She spent the first two years in a prison camp, she said, but Japanese officers arrived one day in 1944. They forced single girls and women to line up and eventually picked 10 of them, including Ruff, who was 21.

"On the first night, it was a high-ranking officer," Ruff said. "It was so well organized. A military doctor came to our house regularly to examine us against venereal diseases, and I tell you, before I was examined the doctor raped me first. That's how well organized it was."

In Japan's colonies, historians say, the military worked closely with, or sometimes completely relied on, local people to obtain women.

In Pyongyang, now the capital of North Korea, Gil Won-ok said, she lined up outside a Japanese military base to look for work in her early teens. A Korean man, she said, approached her with the promise of factory work, but she eventually found herself in a comfort station in northeast China.

After she caught syphilis and developed tumors, Gil said, a Japanese military doctor removed her uterus.

"I've felt dead inside since I was 15," said Gil, who was 16 when the war ended.

Like many comfort women, Gil was unable to bear children and never married, though she did adopt a son. She now lives in a home with three other former comfort women in Seoul.

Wu married twice, each time hiding her background. Somehow the husbands found out, and the marriages ended unhappily. Her adopted daughter is now angry with Wu for having spoken in public about her past, she said.

As for Ruff, she returned to the prison camp in Java after her release from the comfort station. Her parents swore her to silence. A Roman Catholic priest told Ruff, who had thought of becoming a nun: "My dear child, under these circumstances it is wise that you do not become a nun."

It was at the camp that she met her future husband, Tom Ruff, one of the British soldiers who had been deployed to guard the camp after Japan's defeat. She told him her story once before they were married — long before they had two daughters and migrated to Australia.

"But I needed to talk about it," Ruff said, sitting at the kitchen table in her daughter Carol's home here. "I could never talk to my husband about it. I loved Tom and I wanted to marry and I wanted a house. I wanted a family, I wanted children, but I didn't want sex. He had to be very patient with me. He was a good husband. But because we couldn't talk about it, it made it all so hard."

"You could talk to Dad about it," said her daughter Carol, 55.

"No, this is what I keep saying," Ruff said. "I just told him the story once. It was never talked about again. For that generation the story was too big. My mum couldn't cope with it. My dad couldn't cope with it. Tom couldn't cope with it. They just shut it up. But nowadays you'll get counseling immediately."

"It's a wonderful thing," Carol said.

"You don't know how hard it was to carry this enormous burden inside you, that you would like to scream out to the world and yet you cannot," Ruff said. "But I remember telling Carol, 'One day I'm going to tell my story, and people will be interested.' "

Tags: japan, war, wwii, war crimes, atrocities, comfort women, sex slaves, history

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In Asia, the past divides and alienates

IHT - Imagine a world where Germany denied the Holocaust, the United States denied the slaughter of Native Americans and Europe denied organizing its immensely profitable and centuries-long trans-Atlantic trade in African slaves.

Why would they bother? Presumably because they thought cleaning up these dark blots on their past would boost their self-esteem, enhance patriotism and raise their stock in the world.

Close your eyes, spin on your toes three times and reopen them to behold a world where precisely this sort of thing goes on: today's East Asia.

In many respects, this region has been a guiding light for the rest of the world in the past three decades or so, building strong global economies, providing near-universal education for its people and lifting huge numbers of citizens out of poverty.

As we were reminded in the past week, however, a more honest and sophisticated attitude toward history has not been one of the bright spots.

For there was Japan's new prime minister, Shinzo Abe, insisting "there is no evidence to prove there was coercion" of the 200,000 or so Asian women who historians say were pressed into sexual servitude for Japan's imperial army.

Trying to explain how this might be, members of Abe's governing Liberal Democratic Party made what they thought was a helpful suggestion. "Some say it is useful to compare the brothels to college cafeterias run by private companies, who recruit their own staff, procure foodstuffs and set prices," said Nariaki Nakayama, leader of a group of 120 Japanese lawmakers who want to rescind a 1993 official declaration acknowledging the imperial army's exploitation of what are euphemistically called "comfort women."

"To say that women were forced by the Japanese military into service is off the mark," Nakayama continued. "The issue must be reconsidered, based on truth, for the sake of Japanese honor."

Honor and history, as we can see, make poor bedfellows, with the typical result that both end up suffering.

The comfort women comments emanating from the Japanese political class brought a rare rebuke from the country's closest ally, the United States, in the form of a statement by John Negroponte, the deputy secretary of state, who during a visit to Tokyo said "the forced mobilization of comfort women is the most deplorable act of the war."

Even North Korea managed to hitch a ride on the high road on this issue. Korean women constituted perhaps the largest group of wartime sex slaves, and Japanese obfuscations are particularly resented on the Korean Peninsula. A North Korean group that calls itself the Measure Committee for Demanding Compensation to "Comfort Women" denounced Abe as "the grandson of a Class A war criminal," which in fact he is, and said that as such, Abe is "obliged to more straightforwardly and sincerely reflect on the past crimes of Japan than anyone else, and settle them."

The response of the Chinese government, to its credit, has been carefully measured throughout this flap. China and Japan have been enjoying a tentative détente under Abe, following the bitterness of the Koizumi years, when the former Japanese prime minister made regular pilgrimages to Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, where Class A war criminals are honored, along with the souls of all of the other fallen soldiers from Japan's modern wars.

"History, in my view, is a strong progressive force," China's foreign minister, Li Zhaoxing, said at a news conference in Beijing on Tuesday. "It should not become a burden to the progression of peace."

Unfortunately, that is precisely what it has been doing in this part of the world, where the wounds and fissures of World War II and of the Cold War have been much slower to heal than they have been in the West.

The reasons for this are, of course, complex. Korea remains divided in two. China remains authoritarian, still ruled by a Leninist party, even as it becomes increasingly capitalist. And Japan, having failed to integrate Asia by force of arms, has remained largely alienated from its own continent, clinging out of misplaced pride to a distorted and self-defeating picture of the past.

People everywhere want to feel good about themselves, and for many countries an accretion of national myths, often laid down over centuries, helps make this possible. East Asia's two big powers, Japan and China, share more than either would care to acknowledge in this regard, taking this process one big step further, through the promotion of what each calls "patriotic education."

Abe arrived in power after a lengthy association with this current of nationalist politics. Though they would never admit it, what he and his allies have been striving for is something that has long existed in China, an airbrushed version of history that leaves little room for anything cruel or embarrassing.

Japan's nationalists long for a youth that is proud and patriotic. China already has one, and this has been achieved, in part, by carefully tailoring education, filling young people's heads with unrealistic and unreliable information about their country's past — so much so that it is almost impossible to resist a snicker whenever Chinese leaders lecture the Japanese about respecting "correct history."

Young Chinese tend to know next to nothing about their country's own conquests, or even about atrocities committed in living memory by their own government. What they are taught is what Japan's nationalists seek to teach: their own essential goodness.

The reason this all matters, though, has nothing to do with what might be called the tsk-tsk factor, and everything to do with the real world we live in. Limiting one's history to what is emotionally or ideologically satisfying is to limit a nation to the most parochial of destinies. And when countries with deeply intertwined pasts persist in doing this, new collisions can never be far off.

- Howard W. French

Tags: japan, china, korea, war, wwii, war crimes, atrocities, asian holocaust

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Scientists plan mainland, HK, Taiwan stem cell trial

Reuters - Scientists are preparing for a large clinical trial in 2008 which aims to use stem cells to help 400 patients with spinal cord injuries in Hong Kong, mainland China and Taiwan grow new cells and nerve fibres.

Stem cells from umbilical cord blood will be injected into the spinal cords of the participants, who will also be given lithium to help stimulate cell regeneration, said Wise Young, a leading neuroscientist and spinal cord injury researcher.

"What we'd like to do is study a broad range of patients, not just (those with) complete (spinal cord injuries)," said Young, professor at Rutgers' department of cellbiology and neuroscience. Rutgers is the state university in New Jersey in the US.

Researchers are now giving lithium to 20 patients in Hong Kong in the phase 1 safety and feasibility trial. Lithium is a chemical element that is believed to boost cell regeneration.

In preparation for the large 2008 trial, which will involve 400 patients in 14 mainland Chinese cities, Hong Kong and Taipei, doctors in all three places recently agreed on the method to deliver stem cells into spinal cords, said Young, who is also a visiting professor at the University of Hong Kong.

Stem cells extracted from matching umbilical cord blood taken from public blood banks will be injected into the spinal cords of the subjects, who will also be given lithium.

The procedure should hopefully help subjects grow new nerve fibres and "bridges" -- structures that allow the new fibres to reconnect with other parts of the spinal cord.

"Our main outcome measure will be neurological motor and sensory scores," Young said in an interview with selected media. "We want to see whether the patients recover sensation. It has three measures: touch, pain which is assessed by pin-prick, and the third is strength of 10 standardised muscles."

The trial, the biggest in the field in Asia, comes as China is devoting significant resources into stem cell research.

Its attitude and achievements have drawn US-based scientists like Young to conduct research there due to opposition to embryonic stem cell research in the United States.

Opponents of embryonic stem cell research, including US President George W. Bush, say it is unethical to experiment on human embryos, even those never destined to become a baby.

Stem cells are the body's master cells, found throughout the tissue and blood. Whether from the adult or from embryos, they may be used to find treatments and cures for serious diseases such as cancer and diabetes.

Embryonic stem cells are considered potentially the most powerful but are also the most controversial, and federal law greatly restricts the use of taxpayer money to pay for experiments using them.

"Scientists in the US are so upset at the stopping of (embryonic) stem cell research, but this would be a great opportunity for Asia, great opportunity for China ... because there are so many researchers working in this field," Young said, adding that Hong Kong had a special position in all of this.

"Hong Kong is in a special position for science because it has credibility. Many people don't trust what is going on inside China," he said, noting also that Hong Kong badly needed government support and funding.

Private donors are funding the US$26m spinal cord clinical trial.

Tags: stem cell, hong kong, taiwan, china

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Abe says LDP to conduct fresh investigation into comfort women

AP - Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said Thursday that ruling party lawmakers will conduct a fresh investigation into the Japanese military's use of brothels during World War II.

The government is ready to cooperate with the investigation, Abe told a group of reporters, amid calls for a review from conservatives who question many of the claims by victims and others who say the government kidnapped the women and force them into sex slavery.

"I was told the party will conduct an investigation or a study, so we will provide government documents and cooperate as necessary," he said.

Last week, Abe triggered outrage across Asia by saying there was no proof the women were coerced into prostitution. On Monday he said Japan will not apologize again for the Japanese military's "comfort stations."

Earlier Thursday, Japan's top government spokesman said that Japan's position on the coercion of women into sex slavery on the front-line during WWII has been misinterpreted and misrepresented by the U.S. media, and Tokyo will soon issue a rebuttal.

Abe's remarks came as the U.S. Congress was considering a resolution demanding a formal apology from Japan for its wartime use of the women.

Japanese leaders apologized in 1993 for the government's role, but the apology was not approved by the Diet. Japanese officials have said the government will not issue a fresh apology and that the issue has been blown up by the U.S. media.

"Our view is that the media reports are being made without an appropriate interpretation of the prime minister's remarks," chief Cabinet spokesman Yasuhisa Shiozaki said. "We are considering appropriate measures, such as putting out a rebuttal to reports or comments that are not based on facts or that are based on incorrect interpretations."

He did not cite any specific reports.

"My remarks have been twisted in a sense and reported overseas which further invites misunderstanding," Abe said. "This is an extremely unproductive situation," he said.

Historians say as many as 200,000 women -- mostly from Korea, China, Southeast Asia and Japan -- worked in the Japanese military brothels throughout Asia in the 1930s and '40s. Defense documents have shown that the military had a direct role in running the brothels, which the government had previously denied.

Abe said Thursday that he "basically stands by the 1993 apology." The apology, made by then-Chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono, acknowledged government involvement in the brothels, and that some women were coerced into sexual service.

But Abe's remarks appeared to step away from the government's previous position.

Defense documents uncovered in 1992 showed the military had a direct role in running the brothels, a charge the government had previously denied. Victims, witnesses and former soldiers have said women and girls were kidnapped to serve as prostitutes.

Abe's comments have incensed critics in China, North and South Korea, and the Philippines who have demanded Japan acknowledge its responsibility.

The fallout from the remarks continued to build.

The coercion of women into prostitution was "one of the key, serious crimes committed by Japanese imperial soldiers," Qin Gang, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman said Thursday.

"We hope that Japan can show courage, take a responsible attitude toward history," he said during a regular news briefing.

"This once again strips bare his true colors as a political charlatan," North Korea's official news agency said Wednesday.


Tags: japan, war, wwii, war crimes, comfort women, sex slaves, history, atrocities

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Philippine wartime sex slaves call Japanese prime minister 'liar' for denying evidence

AP - Nearly two dozen elderly Filipino women called Japan's prime minister "a liar" on Tuesday after he said there was no evidence that women were forced into front-line brothels by Japanese troops during World War II.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has angered many in Asia where historians say about 200,000 women were forced into prostitution by Japanese soldiers, claiming last week there was no proof women were coerced.

"We are the living victims and witnesses," said Virginia Villarma, 78. "How can we be prostitutes then when we were so young and innocent ... We are telling Abe that what he said was wrong. He is a liar."

The women, some carrying placards saying, "I was raped. PM Abe Liar!" picketed the Japanese Embassy in Manila along with about 20 relatives and supporters from Lila Pilipina, an organization of wartime sex slaves and women's rights activists.

Philippine Foreign Affairs Undersecretary Franklin Ebdalin urged Tokyo on Monday to adhere to the language and tone of both the 1993 apology made by then-Chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono regarding wartime sexual slavery, and a 2002 letter of apology sent by former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi to Filipina "comfort women."

Villarma is one of 120 women still alive among 174 who were documented by Lila Pilipina as Filipino "comfort women," the term used to refer to sex slaves provided to Japanese troops, who invaded the Philippines in 1941.

"Abe is denying the obvious," the group's executive director Rechilda Extremadura said in a statement.

Tokyo has generally refused to pay damages to individuals for the war, and says the issue was settled between governments in postwar treaties. Japanese courts have rejected a number of lawsuits brought by former sex slaves.

A private fund, set up by Japan in 1995 to compensate sex slaves, will expire this month.

More than 80 Filipino women, now mostly in their 80s and impoverished, have accepted money from the fund, but all still seek legislated compensation from the Japanese government.

Tags: japan, war, wwii, war crimes, atrocities, sex slaves, comfort women

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Vancouver jumps 9 ranks on world cost of living survey

The Economist magazine's 2007 Worldwide Cost of Living Survey

Rank (last year) City COUNTRY Index
1 (1) Oslo Norway 132
2 (4) Paris France 130
3 (6) Copenhagen Denmark 126
4 (7) London UK 125
5 (2) Tokyo Japan 124
6 (4) Osaka Kobe Japan 118
6 (3) Reykjavik Iceland 118
6 (8) Zurich Switzerland 118
9 (12) Frankfurt Germany 116
9 (10) Helsinki Finland 116
11 (13) Seoul South Korea 115
12 (9) Geneva Switzerland 112
12 (11) Vienna Austria 112
14 (16) Milan Italy 108
14 (24) Singapore Singapore 108
16 (14) Hong Kong Hong Kong 107
16 (14) Munich Germany 107
18 (19) Berlin Germany 106
18 (16) Sydney Australia 106
20 (21) Brussels Belgium 104
20 (16) Dublin Ireland 104
20 (n/a) Nouméa New Caledonia 104
20 (21) Stockholm Sweden 104
24 (19) Melbourne Australia 103
25 (24) Lyon France 102
26 (23) Amsterdam Netherlands 101
26 (29) Moscow Russia 101
28 (27) New York US 100
29 (27) Düsseldorf Germany 99
29 (26) Manchester UK 99
31 (35) Barcelona Spain 98
31 (31) Rome Italy 98
33 (35) Madrid Spain 97
34 (32) Hamburg Germany 96
34 (43) Vancouver Canada 96
36 (35) Chicago US 95
36 (40) Luxembourg Luxembourg 95
36 (43) Montreal Canada 95
39 (35) Los Angeles US 94
40 (35) Perth Australia 93
41 (32) Brisbane Australia 92
41 (40) San Francisco US 92
43 (47) Toronto Canada 90
44 (40) Abidjan Cote d’Ivoire 89
44 (52) St Petersburg Russia 89
44 (46) Washington, DC US 89
47 (45) Adelaide Australia 88
47 (48) Houston US 88
47 (52) Tel Aviv Israel 88
50 (29) Auckland New Zealand 87
51 (51) Shanghai China 86
51 (32) Wellington New Zealand 86
53 (48) Istanbul Turkey 85
53 (48) Taipei Taiwan 85
55 (54) Athens Greece 84
55 (54) Miami US 84
55 (54) Minneapolis US 84
55 (58) Prague Czech Rep 84
59 (63) Lagos Nigeria 83
59 (58) Lisbon Portugal 83
61 (58) Detroit US 82
61 (58) Seattle US 82
63 (58) Beijing China 80
63 (63) Boston US 80
63 (67) Guatemala City Guatemala 80
63 (63) Pittsburgh US 80
63 (63) Warsaw Poland 80
68 (67) Dakar Senegal 79
68 (71) Dalian China 79
68 (57) Mexico City Mexico 79
71 (69) Lexington US 78
72 (70) Amman Jordan 77
73 (100) Jakarta Indonesia 76
73 (91) Lusaka Zambia 76
75 (75) Shenzhen China 75
76 (71) Guangzhou China 74
77 (74) Cleveland US 73
77 (75) Honolulu US 73
79 (80) Casablanca Morocco 72
79 (71) Dubai UAE 72
79 (82) Kiev Ukraine 72
79 (87) Rio de Janeiro Brazil 72
79 (87) Sao Paulo Brazil 72
84 (81) Atlanta US 71
85 (82) Abu Dhabi UAE 70
85 (n/a) Suzhou China 70
87 (84) Bogota Columbia 69
88 (87) Doha Qatar 68
88 (95) Kuala Lumpur Malaysia 68
88 (93) Nairobi Kenya 68
88 (84) Santiago Chile 68
92 (107) Bangkok Thailand 67
92 (107) Belgrade Serbia & Montenegro 67
92 (77) Budapest Hungary 67
92 (91) Ho Chi Minh Vietnam 67
96 (84) Bahrain Manama Bahrain 66
96 (95) Bucharest Romania 66
98 (87) Riyadh Saudi Arabia 65
98 (95) Tianjin China 65
100 (77) Johannesburg South Africa 64
100 (77) Pretoria South Africa 64
100 (n/a) Qingdao China 64
103 (106) Bandar Seri Begawan Brunei 63
103 (95) Kuwait City Kuwait 63
103 (93) Muscat Oman 63
106 (104) Hanoi Vietnam 62
106 (100) Montevideo Uruguay 62
106 (100) Quito Ecuador 62
109 (100) Jeddah Saudi Arabia 61
109 (95) Panama City Panama 61
111 (104) Al Khobar Saudi Arabia 60
111 (117) Almaty Kazakhstan 60
111 (107) Lima Peru 60
111 (110) Sofia Bulgaria 60
115 (111) Phnom Penh Cambodia 59
116 (113) Cairo Egypt 58
116 (113) Colombo Sri Lanka 58
118 (112) Caracas Venezuela 57
118 (115) Damascus Syria 57
120 (117) Buenos Aires Argentina 54
120 (117) Tashkent Uzbekistan 54
122 (120) San Jose Costa Rica 53
123 (115) Algiers Algeria 52
124 (124) Asuncion Paraguay 51
125 (121) Dhaka Bangladesh 46
126 (n/a) Kathmandu Nepal 45
126 (122) New Delhi India 45
126 (122) Tripoli Libya 45
129 (126) Karachi Pakistan 44
129 (124) Mumbai India 44
131 (127) Manila Philippines 43
132 (128) Tehran Iran 34

Tags: The Economist magazine, Worldwide Cost of Living Survey, vancouver

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China demands Japan to face up to wartime sex crimes

AP - Japan must confront its past of coercing women into prostitution with Japanese troops in World War Two, China's foreign minister said on Tuesday, nonetheless stressing hopes of improved ties between the two Asian powers.

Chinese Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing said the use of so-called "comfort women" was "one of the serious crimes committed by the Japanese militarists during the second World War."

"This is a historical fact," Li Zhaoxing said at a press conference during China's annual legislative session. The Japanese government "should stand up to this part of history, take responsibility and seriously view and properly handle this issue," he said.


Li's remarks were the first official Chinese reaction to Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's disavowal last week of his country's responsibility for forcing Asian women into military brothels for Japanese troops during the war, saying there was "no evidence to prove there was coercion."

Prominent Japanese scholars and politicians routinely deny direct military involvement or the use of force in rounding up the women, blaming private contractors for any abuses.

Abe's statement triggered international outrage and contradicted evidence in Japanese documents unearthed in 1992 that historians said showed military authorities worked with contractors to procure about 200,000 women, mostly from Korea and China and Japan — in many cases, by force — for the brothels.

The remark also cast doubt on a 1993 Japanese government apology to the sex slaves issued by then-Chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono.

Kono's 1993 statement also acknowledged that many women were forced into prostitution, and that the military government was involved in some cases.

The government followed up in 1995 by setting up a fund to meet victims' compensation demands. But the fund, which is due to expire on March 31, is based on private donations and has been attacked as a government ruse to avoid owning up to the abuse.

Last month, U.S. lawmakers introduced a nonbinding resolution urging Japan to apologize formally. Japan objected to the resolution, and said its leaders have apologized repeatedly.

On Monday, Abe remained firm on his stance that Tokyo should not issue another apology, telling Japan's parliament that none of the testimony in hearings by the U.S. House of Representatives offered any solid proof of abuse.

"We will not apologize even if there's a resolution," Abe told lawmakers.

The latest development is likely to hinder efforts to smooth over relations between China and Japan, which had been improving following a fence-mending visit to Beijing in October by Abe — the first top-level summit between the two powers in five years.

The countries also have held strategic talks in Beijing aimed at warming relations and Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao is scheduled to visit Tokyo in April.

Li said Wen's visit to Japan was important as this year marks the 35th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic ties.

"Lasting friendship between the peoples of China and Japan is the path we should stay firmly on and no one can stop us from doing this," Li said.

Even so, tensions remain over festering territorial disputes and interpretations of wartime history.

"History, in my view, is a strong progressive force," Li said. "It should not become a burden to the progression of peace."

From China Daily:

Japan must face up to history and "earnestly and properly" handle the issue of "comfort women", Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing told a news conference in Beijing yesterday.

Li was speaking on the sidelines of the annual session of the National People's Congress (NPC), the top legislature.

"The forced use of so-called 'comfort women' was one of the most serious crimes committed by the Japanese militarists during World War II," Li said. "This is a historical fact."

"Comfort women" is a euphemism for wartime sex slaves. It is estimated that during World War II, some 200,000 women from Asian countries including China were forcibly drafted into the Japanese Imperial Army to serve as sex slaves.

Li's remarks came a day after Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said Japan would not offer any new apology over wartime sex slavery. Abe told reporters last week that "there is no evidence to prove there was coercion" exercised over the foreign women.

"I think facing up to history ought to be a powerful force of progress," Li said, adding "taking history as a mirror and looking into the future is the simplest and most realistic way of solving the problem."

But Li said he is confident the visit by Premier Wen Jiabao to Japan next month would be a success. Wen's visit, the first by a Chinese leader to the country in seven years, is of great importance to cooperation between the two sides, he added.

Li's confidence stems from his visit to Tokyo last month, where, he said, he received "a warm welcome".

"I read several Chinese words that mean 'no one can block the road of progress' at a temple on the outskirts of the beautiful ancient city Kyodo, which reminds me that generations of Chinese and Japanese people should be friends and no forces can block them," Li said.

He also said China would like to consult with Japan on East China Sea development, seeking methods acceptable to both sides and making it a sea of friendship, peace and cooperation.

This year marks the 35th anniversary of the normalization of diplomatic ties. The Japanese government should avail the opportunity to expand and deepen bilateral exchanges, Li said.

Tags: japan, korea, china, war, wwii, atrocities, comfort women, war crimes, shinzo abe

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Japan's amnesia

International Herald Tribune's editorial March 6, 2007

IHT - What part of "Japanese army sex slaves" does Japan's prime minister, Shinzo Abe, have so much trouble understanding and apologizing for?

The underlying facts have long been beyond serious dispute. During World War II, Japan's army set up sites where women rounded up from Japanese colonies like Korea were expected to deliver sexual services to Japanese soldiers.

These were not commercial brothels. Force, explicit and implicit, was used in recruiting these women. What went on in them was serial rape, not prostitution. The Japanese army's involvement is documented in the government's own defense files. A senior Tokyo official more or less apologized for this horrific crime in 1993. The unofficial fund set up to compensate victims is set to close down this month.

Abe wants the issue to end there. Last week, he claimed that there was no evidence that the victims had been coerced. On Monday, he grudgingly acknowledged the 1993 quasi apology, but only as part of a pre-emptive declaration that his government would reject the call, now pending in the U.S. Congress, for an official apology. America isn't the only country interested in seeing Japan belatedly accept full responsibility. Korea and China are also infuriated by years of Japanese equivocations over the issue.

Abe seems less concerned with repairing Japan's sullied international reputation than with appealing to a large right-wing faction within his Liberal Democratic Party that insists that the whole shameful episode was a case of healthy private enterprise. One ruling party lawmaker, in his misplaced zeal to exculpate the army, even suggested the offensive analogy of a college that outsourced its cafeteria to a private firm.

Japan is only dishonored by such efforts to contort the truth. The 1993 statement needs to be expanded upon, not whittled down.

Parliament should issue a frank apology and provide generous official compensation to the surviving victims. It is time for Japan's politicians — starting with Abe — to recognize that the first step toward overcoming a shameful past is acknowledging it.


Tags: japan, war, wwii, war crimes, atrocities, comfort women, sex slaves, china, korea

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Canada presses to deport accused Chinese banker

Reuters - The lawyer for a Chinese banker accused of siphoning millions of dollars from customer accounts said on Tuesday that Canada is abusing its own immigration review process in its attempt to deport his client.

Canada is trying to return Gao Shan and his family to China on the "pretext" that he failed to fully disclose his places of employment to immigration officials after arriving in Canada in 2004, lawyer Lorne Waldman said.

The former Bank of China manager faces arrest in China for alleged involvement in embezzling more than C$100m.

Gao, 42, his wife Li Xue, and their teenage daughter, Gao Shanxuellan, were arrested in Vancouver on February 16.

"I've seen people who have made much more serious misrepresentations where (Canadian) Immigration hasn't decided to take action against them," Waldman told reporters after a brief immigration hearing in Vancouver.

"They're really using misrepresentation as an excuse to try and deport Mr. Gao back to China to face the criminal charges," he said.

Waldman said China has not requested his extradition, and he questioned whether the Canadian government was acting at the behest of officials in Beijing in bringing the immigration charges.

"There's certain things that strongly lead me to believe all of this was initiated by the government of China," he said.

Last month, authorities in Vancouver arrested two Chinese brothers, Li Dongzhe, 40, and Li Donghu, 38, who are also accused by China of being involved in the bank fraud case.

Alannah Hatch, a lawyer for the Canada Border Services Agency, denied the government is misusing the immigration review process.

"It was not an abuse of process," Hatch said during the hearing on Tuesday.

Hatch said in addition to misrepresentation, she would argue Gao is ineligible to stay in Canada on the basis he committed a serious crime that, if committed in Canada, would be punishable by law.

Canada has come under fire because some critics say it has become a haven for international fugitives who face serious criminal charges in their home countries.

Fugitive Lai Changxing, the alleged kingpin of a massive smuggling scam in China, has avoided deportation from Canada for several years, a case that has added strain to Canada-China relations.

Gao's next immigration hearing is scheduled for March 21.

Tags: gao shan, fugitive, china, canada

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Raymond Chan blasts Abe for denying comfort women

Press release from Raymond Chan - It is a shock that the Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has publicly stated that Japan will not apologize for its Second World War military brothels.

It is very unfortunate that Prime Minister Abe has chosen to overshadow Japan's 1993 apology and admission of wrongdoing by denying the fact that Chinese and Korean women were forced to serve as prostitutes. The existence of these injustices has been substantiated by documents, archives and testimonies by the surviving sex slaves and former Japanese soldiers and is irrefutable. Even the former Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has apologized and expressed his sincere remorse over the 'comfort women's' "immeasurable and painful experiences."

I call upon the Government of Canada to denounce the Japanese Prime Minister's denial of the existence of wartime military brothels and the enslavement of women as sex workers. The Government of Canada must make a clear statement to the world that historical injustices must be acknowledged in order to begin the process of reconciliation, healing and understanding.

Tags: raymond chan, shinzo abe, japan, war crimes, war, wwii, comfort women, atrocities

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Why Germany and Japan handle history so differently?

This article was written in 1995. Though old, it sheds lights on *why* Germany and Japan are so different in treating war crimes. A good read.

International Herald Tribune - Since the 1930s, the histories of Japan and Germany have run in tandem. Their memories of those histories, however, are very different. When Germans remember the war, they speak of Auschwitz, but the Japanese seem to recall only Hiroshima.

In 1939, the Japanese and Germans were aggressors and allies; in 1945, they shared defeat and occupation. In the 1950s and 1960s, they adapted to the constitutions imposed on them and set about achieving their economic "miracles." In the 1970s and 1980s, they came to dominate their regions and wield global influence.

In the 1990s, both have begun to feel their way beyond constitutional constraints on sending forces abroad by dispatching peacekeeping missions to foreign countries. The yen and the Deutsche mark together have recently humbled the dollar, and both countries' governments are cautiously seeking permanent seats on the UN Security Council.

They are kindred people in deeper ways as well. For example, they share a weakness for theories of racial purity and superiority. To the Nazis, the Japanese were the Asian master race, and Hitler admired the way they had raised the cult of the leader to the level of religion. It is hard to say whether Nordic myth or Bushido — the Japanese code of chivalry valuing honor above life — is more obsessed with "the warrior's death," although Japanese soldiers seem to have sought it more avidly.

To the Japanese, the Prussians possessed the most admirable martial tradition in the West. Many Japanese schoolboys still wear 19th-century Prussian military uniforms.

The Germans, however, have come to terms with their past. While all but the skinhead fringe in Germany recognize the atrocities committed in the Nazi years, many Japanese deny that anything out of the ordinary in war happened in Nanking, in Singapore or in Manila. They are repeatedly stunned and doubtful when evidence surfaces about the brutal human experiments carried out by "Unit 731" in Manchuria or about germ warfare.

Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama on Tuesday made Japan's first unambiguous apology for its actions in Asia and the Pacific before and during World War II. But 50 years after the war's end, his coalition government remains deeply split on the issue, with conservatives and nationalists in the Liberal Democratic Party opposed to his contrition. They and other like-minded Japanese continue to speak of the war very much the way the Germans spoke in the 1930s of World War I — in terms of aggrieved victimization.

Today in Germany, Auschwitz is recognized as the Germans' crime against humanity. By contrast, Hiroshima is widely read inside Japan as humanity's crime against the Japanese. Auschwitz bears with it a burden of guilt. Hiroshima, by contrast, confers a halo of righteousness.

Germans are left sobered and cautious, still perplexed by their own capacity to do evil. By contrast, many Japanese remain defiant and resentful at any imputation of guilt or even responsibility. When the question of whether Japan ought to officially apologize for the suffering caused in the war was being debated in the Diet recently, 4.5 million people signed a petition against the resolution.

Why do the Japanese and Germans deal with the past so differently?

It may have to do with the distinction between Christian "guilt culture" and Confucian "shame culture," which Ruth Benedict made in her wartime book "The Chrysanthemum and the Sword." A guilty conscience is cleared by confession and contrition. Shame, on the other hand, is renewed, not relieved, by confession.

It may reflect the contrast between the wartime leaders and their fates. Hitler, at war's end, was seen as evil incarnate, a monster or, at best, a psychotic criminal. He had conveniently vanished at the climax of his crimes, burned on a squalid pyre, while in Japan, the emperor survived and reigned, a figure of affection, awe and worship. One could not reject the war without impugning the emperor.

It may be because acts of remembrance differ greatly. In Germany, there are scores of archives, memorials, museums, displays and study centers recounting in well-documented detail the crimes of the Third Reich. Japan is nearly devoid of war memorials.

In Tokyo, the Yasukuni Shrine is dedicated to the glorification of kamikaze fanaticism. In Hiroshima is a monument to victims and victimhood, cleansed of reference to the war that ended there.

Most importantly, there is the difference in the way that history is handled. In Germany, the Nazi genocide has been exhaustively studied and accurately portrayed in memoirs, essays, novels, poems, plays and film.

In Japan, there is a great appetite for rewriting history into fantasy — for mangas, or comic books, in which Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto survives his plane crash and comes back to destroy the American fleets; in which the Japanese liberate the Pacific from the colonial influence of the West, and in which grateful Asians thank Japan for their deliverance. The education system, the teaching of history and the textbooks that are used reflect this gloss.

No country is immune from self-deception, but Germany is far less given to false war memories than Japan.

Both countries are being called to play expanding parts on the global stage. But without a far-reaching change in the way it deals with its recent past, Japan is unlikely to achieve the trust and acceptance in Asia and elsewhere that it needs to fulfill its new role.

The writer, Stephen D. Wrage, who teaches at the U.S. Naval Academy and the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, was until recently a visiting Fulbright scholar in Singapore. He contributed this comment to the International Herald Tribune.

Tags: japan, germany, war, wwii, war crimes

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Paulson: China should not be made an enemy

AP - US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said that the United States should not make China an enemy, but that Beijing needs to step up reform of its currency to resolve short-term differences.

Paulson, who this week makes his third visit to China as treasury secretary, said it is essential that both countries manage disagreements to maintain strong economic ties.

"I would say that our relationship with China is multifaceted and it's a very important relationship for the US And I don't believe we need to make China an enemy," Paulson said. "If we manage the relationship -- the overall relationship with China properly, it's going to benefit both of our countries for a long time to come."

The former head of the investment company Goldman Sachs is seen as a rare China expert in an administration that is trying to strengthen its diplomatic focus on relations with the rising Asian power -- a fellow permanent member of the UN Security Council, a major trading partner and an important player on such diplomatic problems as North Korea, Iran and Sudan.

John Negroponte, newly installed as the State Department's No. 2 official, is expected to sharpen the administration's focus on the national security dimensions of the relationship. On Sunday, he was in Beijing and raised concern about the country's secrecy on its defense spending levels and rapid military modernization.

"We think it's important in our dialogue that we understand what China's plans and intentions are," he said.

Paulson has been resisting calls from some quarters for projectionist barriers as the trade deficit with China has risen to a record level of $232.5b, the highest trade gap ever recorded with a single country.

Paulson said it is "a top priority to get this long-term economic relationship right between our two countries and to deal with the most pressing short-term issues."

He said that he would continue to press for improving flexibility in the Chinese currency.

Tags: china, US, trade, paulson

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Abe says no apology on comfort women even pressed by US congress

Asahi Shumbun - Prime Minister Shinzo Abe made clear Monday he will not offer a fresh apology on the wartime "comfort women" issue even if Japan is urged to do so by a U.S. congressional resolution.

"The resolution contains mistakes of fact," Abe told the Upper House Budget Committee when asked about his intentions.

The non-binding resolution calls on Japan to offer a formal apology for the Imperial Japanese Army's role in forcing Korean women and women of other nationalities to provide sex to Japanese soldiers in battlefields leading up and during World War II.

"Even if it is passed, it does not mean we will apologize," Abe said.

He said he basically stands by a 1993 government statement that acknowledged the military's role in forcing the women to work in wartime brothels.

The statement, by then Chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono, admitted the women were recruited through "coercion."

The statement offered the government's "sincere apologies and remorse."

Abe on Monday went on to say that "there was no coercion in such ways as military authorities bursting into homes and taking women out" to brothels.

He noted "there were cases in which brokers serving as middlemen in effect coerced them.

"So I think there was coercion in a broad sense."

Abe's remark last week that "there was no evidence" to prove coercion stirred a sharp backlash in South Korea and elsewhere.

The U.S. media widely reported it in connection with the proposed resolution.

Abe said the resolution "is not based on objective facts."

"It does not take into consideration the steps taken by the Japanese government so far, either," Abe said.

He said the government is making efforts to seek understanding of Japan's position "in response to moves by some members of Congress."

The chamber's budget committee started deliberations of the fiscal 2007 budget Monday after the Lower House approved it early Saturday.

"I do not think having a lengthy debate like this in the Diet is productive," Abe said when Toshio Ogawa of the opposition Minshuto (Democratic Party of Japan) raised the question about comfort women.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Yasuhisa Shiozaki, meantime, Monday brushed aside concerns that Abe's remark last week indicated his intention to review the 1993 statement.

Some conservative forces are seeking a review.

Shiozaki took issue with those who said Abe's words were not consistent with the Kono statement.

"I think (the criticisms) were not based on appropriate understanding of the prime minister's words," he said.

Tags: japan, comfort women, war, wwii, atrocities, war crimes, shinzo abe, US congress

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Photo - Storm Aftermath

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China losing talents to Canada

The Province - Qiang Wei will graduate in two years with a PhD in computer engineering from the University of B.C.

He hopes what follows next will be a job in Vancouver.

It's a scenario that's invoking as much fear in the Chinese government as it is hope among the country's students in B.C.

China has been raising an alert of a severe brain drain, citing Canada among the top countries to which it's losing talent.

The talent war comes as B.C. universities are experiencing some of their highest enrolments of students from China and the provincial government is looking increasingly to international students and immigrants to help stem a projected labour crunch.

A report by the Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing says China is suffering the world's most severe brain drain.

Since 2002, more than 100,000 students have gone abroad to study annually, with only 20 to 30 per cent returning to China, the state-run newspaper, China Daily, reports.

The report lamented that China was losing its foreign-trained professionals to Canada, the U.S., the U.K. and Australia, and urged them to return home.

At the University of B.C., enrolment of Chinese nationals rose by 353 per cent over a decade to 1,029 students this school year.

At Simon Fraser University, enrolment of students from China has jumped more than two-fold in five years to 914 students this year, up from 356 students in 2002.

But both universities say the meteoric rise has not only slowed down but actually decreased in the last two years, due in part to China's campaign to keep students home and as well to increased competition from other countries.

"China has been making a real push to keep students at home," says Nello Angerilli, SFU's associate vice-president of students and international. "They have 16 million students in post-secondary right now. Their goal is to have 30 million by 2010."

Last year, undergraduate international students brought in $42.7 million for UBC, a quarter of which was revenue from Chinese students.

At SFU, international students pay the domestic fee plus $10,000 a year.

It's no surprise then that universities want more international students -- a move that would have no impact on domestic placement, due to standards set by Victoria.

For 30-year-old Wei, who hails from Beijing, Vancouver easily won out over other foreign cities.

"Always, Canada and the U.S. are the first choice," says Wei. "We decided to come to Canada because we heard UBC was very beautiful and you have many Chinese people here and a lot of Chinese restaurants."

Wei arrived in 2003 on a student visa, and Ottawa recently granted him landed-immigrant status.

"As long as you have work experience and a master's degree, they make it very easy," says Wei.

But in today's world at least, the Chinese brain drain seems counter-intuitive, given China's roaring economy.

"Why does it happen?" asks Kenny Zhang, a senior research analyst for the Asia Pacific Foundation.

"It's because the world we are living in now is knowledge-based, high-tech based, which requires more and more a high skill level from the labour force. Every country has a demand for these workers."

Zhang says while businessmen are drawn to China, professionals such as engineers are sought after everywhere and many are attracted to Vancouver's laid-back lifestyle.

This is welcome news for the B.C. government, which recently warned of a "demographic time bomb," characterized by an acute labour shortage as baby boomers sail off into retirement.

One of the coping strategies now being examined by Victoria is to make B.C.'s education system more accessible to international students, who may stay on to work after their schooling.

China, despite a population of 1.3 billion, is equally concerned about its skilled labour force in an increasingly global economy.

"They need to understand the outside world, so those foreign-trained students are highly valued," says Zhang. "They cannot be produced domestically."

While China urges its students to return home, undergraduate UBC student Sophie Li says for her, the future will depend largely on who makes the best job offer after graduation.

"I know a lot of my friends want to stay," she says. "But if there are jobs in China, I'm back there. But if there are good jobs here, I'll stay. So it depends."

Tags: canada, china, brain drain, foreign students, UBC, SFU

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Japan's top court poised to kill lawsuits by Chinese war victims

Japan Focus - By William Underwood and Kang Jian

At a moment when the "comfort women" controversy is dominating the growing global discussion about Japanese war responsibility, the Japan Supreme Court is set to permanently foreclose the possibility of redress for Chinese war victims within the Japanese court system. Japan’s top court will hold a special hearing on March 16 in a compensation lawsuit brought by Chinese forced labor survivors against Nishimatsu Construction Corp. and the Japanese government. If, as expected, the Supreme Court rules that the victims’ right to file the claim has been extinguished by state treaties, it will ensure final defeat for all lawsuits by Chinese victims filed in Japanese courts.

Compensation claims for forced labor have been the most common, and most successful, type of lawsuit within the wave of litigation by Chinese plaintiffs that began in 1995. District courts have issued compensation rulings on three occasions, while the Hiroshima High Court ordered Nishimatsu to pay plaintiffs in 2004. Most claims have been rejected due to state immunity and filing deadlines, even as courts have routinely found that the Japanese state and companies engaged in illegal forced labor. The key question of whether Chinese victims have standing in Japanese courts at all has been largely sidestepped—until now.

During a trip to Beijing last month, Japanese lawyers handling the forced labor lawsuits warned plaintiffs and the Chinese media to brace themselves. The Supreme Court will likely decide that the Joint Communique signed by China and Japan in 1972, or the Sino-Japanese Peace Treaty signed by Taiwan and Japan in 1952 (also called the Treaty of Taipei), or both, waived the right of Chinese individuals to seek redress from the Japanese government or corporations. Although Beijing has never officially interpreted the 1972 accord as allowing lawsuits against Japan, China’s foreign minister stated in 1995 that the Joint Communique waived only the Chinese government’s reparations claims against the Japanese government, while leaving the claim rights of private Chinese citizens intact.

Japanese lawyers, historians and citizen activists have vigorously supported the more than two dozen lawsuits filed by Chinese victims of biological warfare, abandoned chemical weapons, the Nanjing massacre, the Pingdingshan massacre, indiscriminate aerial bombing, military sexual slavery, and forced labor in Japan. Nearly all suits have failed, but many Japanese judges have engaged in historical "fact-finding" instead of rejecting claims without comment. This has produced an incontrovertible record of Japan’s war conduct where little or nothing existed before. For example, whereas the Japanese government today insists it knows nothing about the activities of Unit 731, a Tokyo court concluded that the unit killed many Chinese through biological warfare and human experimentation. And while Mitsubishi Materials Corp. describes Chinese at its wartime coals mines in Japan as well-treated voluntary workers, a Fukuoka court confirmed they were victims of brutal forced labor.

Japanese judges have occasionally even suggested that the government should proactively settle claims from Chinese war victims via national legislation and a compensation fund, the approach by which Germany and Austria have recently come to terms with Nazi-era forced labor. If the Japan Supreme Court does end the Japanese judicial phase of the Chinese reparations movement, a vital vehicle for educating the Japanese public about their nation’s inadequately understood past will be lost. An important source of potential pressure on the Japanese state and industry to sincerely address victims’ claims will be removed.

Yet the reparations campaign is sure to continue, and may even intensify, as the focus of efforts shifts to China. The Chinese government has recently allowed families of former forced laborers to form a support group for redress activities, and permitted establishment of the Non-Governmental Fund to Support Lawsuits by Victims of the Japanese Army’s War of Invasion. The fund was tapped last November to bring the largest-ever delegation of 86 forced labor survivors and supporters to Japan. In early 2006 the Chinese government announced via state-controlled media that, in an unprecedented step, it would soon allow former forced laborers to sue Japanese corporations in Chinese courts. A new group, the Non-Governmental Chinese Association for Claiming Compensation from Japan, was launched and the best-known advocate of the private compensation concept, Tong Zeng, was named as its head.

The first prospective plaintiff was also named by Chinese media last year, but Beijing authorities have so far failed to follow through on their promise of a domestic judicial arena for redress. A Chinese lawyer told the New York Times last fall that the Chinese government is waiting to see how the Japan Supreme Court rules. Compensation lawsuits in Chinese courts could produce a public relations disaster for Japanese companies, especially for firms inclined to deny the historical reality of forced labor even as they pursue contracts in China, although the Chinese state has previously made clear that it will not allow organized consumer boycotts.

The popular legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party depends in part on its taking a firm stand against rising Japanese nationalism and historical revisionism, and 2007 marks the seventieth anniversary of the start of the Sino-Japanese War and the Nanjing Massacre. This could lead to increased bottom-up pressure on the Chinese government to back reparations demands against Japan more actively, especially if (as the article below explains) Tokyo is seen to be challenging Chinese sovereignty over Taiwan. Without greater state-level support from Chinese leaders, the reparations claims are likely doomed to failure. That would make meaningful reconciliation between the two nations even more difficult, as the descendents of actual victims carry on the redress struggle and acrimony toward Japan becomes entrenched at the level of national identity.

Chinese attorney Kang Jian is known as the "window" between Chinese claimants and Japanese supporters advancing their legal efforts in Japan. Since becoming aware of the comfort women redress movement at the UN Beijing Conference on Women in 1995, Kang has been in the forefront of the All China Lawyers Association’s pursuit of compensation for forced labor and other Japanese war crimes. She has traveled around the Chinese countryside to help select the most effective plaintiffs for lawsuits in Japan and frequently testified in Japanese courtrooms. Kang’s article focuses on the Japan Supreme Court’s upcoming hearing and provides a map of the legal landscape involved, even as the reparations question is ultimately moral and political in nature. – William Underwood

============================================

The basis of the "Abandonment of the Right to Claim" argument and the reason for the Japan Supreme Court’s special March 16 hearing

By Kang Jian

Among the lawsuits filed by Chinese war victims in Japanese courts seeking compensation from the Japanese government and corporations, eight cases are now in the process of being decided by the Japan Supreme Court (excluding the lawsuits already decided by the Supreme Court). Of these eight cases, seven are appeals by Chinese victims who refused to accept judgments by Japanese high courts. The other case is the appeal by the Japanese government and Nishimatsu Construction Corp., which refused to accept the Hiroshima High Court decision requiring them to compensate the forced labor victims. Although we filed written requests to hold hearings long ago, the Supreme Court has not scheduled any hearings in the cases appealed by the Chinese victims. Instead, the court recently decided (on January 15, 2007) to hear the case appealed by Nishimatsu Construction Corp. and to hold a session for debating whether the Chinese government has, on behalf of Chinese citizens, given up the right of individuals to claim compensation.

We must pay close attention to why the Supreme Court has chosen to hear the appeal by Nishimatsu Construction, and why the special session will focus on whether the Chinese citizens’ right to claim has been abandoned.

A. Background to emergence of the defense argument, "abandonment of the right to claim"

1. Nullification defenses of "statutory time limitation" and "state immunity"

Since June 1995, Chinese war victims have filed lawsuits in Japanese courts in Tokyo, Sapporo, Kyoto, Nagano, Fukuoka, Niigata, Gunma, Yamagata, Miyazaki and Kanazawa, seeking compensation from the Japanese government and Japanese corporations. The lawsuits involve cases of massacre, indiscriminate bombing, abandoned chemical weapons and shells, Unit 731’s experiments using live human subjects and its deployment of germ bombs, "comfort women" and cases of forced labor. There have been 27 cases in total. Before 2002, the Japanese government, as perpetrators, avoided facing the truth and taking responsibility by using the pleas of "time limitation" and "state immunity" in its defense. The Japanese corporations involved adopted a similar approach. Before 2000, verdicts issued by Japanese courts simply followed the Japanese government’s assertions and ruled against the Chinese plaintiffs.

On July 12, 2001, the Tokyo District Court, using the basic legal principle of equity and justice, for the first time rejected the defense of "time limitation" put forward by the Japanese government and recognized the claim made by the Chinese forced labor victim Liu Lianren. This result was achieved through the efforts of Chinese and Japanese lawyers, scholars, Japanese citizen support groups and the plaintiffs. Thereafter, courts applied the basic legal principle of equity and justice and rejected the "time limitation" defense in the following cases: Chinese forced labor victims versus the Japanese government and Mitsui Mining Corp. in Fukuoka District Court (decided on April 26, 2002); Chinese forced labor victims versus the Japanese government and Rinko Corp. in Niigata District Court (decided on March 26, 2003); Chinese victims of abandoned chemical weapons and shells abandoned in China versus the Japanese government in Tokyo District Court (decided in September 2003); and Chinese forced labor victims versus Nishimatsu Construction in Hiroshima High Court (decided on July 9, 2004).

Also important was the case of Chinese forced labor victims versus the Japanese government and Nippon Yakin Kogyo Corp. (decided on January 15, 2003). Although Kyoto District Court did not support the claim by Chinese plaintiffs in that lawsuit, the decision rejected the defense of "state immunity" for the first time. In cases later decided by the Tokyo High Court, Fukuoka High Court and Niigata District Court, the Japanese government’s claim of "state immunity" was also rejected. Moreover, in all of the decisions reached by the Japanese courts, the facts of atrocities committed have been acknowledged as proven by the evidence given by the Chinese plaintiffs.

From the above mentioned facts, we can see that the lawsuits seeking compensation from Japan have been slowly making progress. The trend of acknowledging the plaintiffs’ claims has been gradually forming.

2. Emergence of the defense argument, "abandonment of the right to claim"

At the end of 2002, when the lawsuits launched by the Chinese victims had been under way for seven years, a new defense argument was used by the Japanese government. It was asserted that "the plaintiff’s right to claim for personal compensation has been abandoned as the result of treaties." This argument is called "abandonment of the right to claim."

1) Using the Sino-Japanese Peace Treaty as its basis, the Japanese government proposes that the Chinese people have abandoned the right to claim.

On April 28, 1952, the Japanese government signed the Sino-Japanese Peace Treaty with Taiwan. The treaty recognized the principles of the San Francisco Peace Treaty. Some people contend that the right to claim of individuals has been waived by the San Francisco Peace Treaty, but that treaty has no such written provisions.

2) The Japanese government holds that the Joint Communique of the Government of Japan and the Government of the People’s Republic of China was signed (on September 29, 1972) on the grounds that the Sino-Japanese Peace Treaty had already resolved the issue of war compensation, and that the issue of compensation should not be brought into discussion again. Therefore, Japan holds, the right to claim of the Chinese with regard to the war had long been abandoned with the signing of the Sino-Japanese Peace Treaty.


Former forced laborers and family members at the Beijing Fang Yuan Law Office
in 2000, prior to filing redress lawsuits in Fukuoka.

B. Rebuttal of the defense argument, "abandonment of the right to claim"

1) China has not signed the San Francisco Peace Treaty and is not a member of the treaty. The treaty has no binding effect on China.

2) Further, the San Francisco Peace Treaty has not altogether negated the right to claim of individuals.

During both the lawsuits involving Japanese detained in Siberia and atomic bomb victims, the Japanese government expressed its position had always been that what was abandoned (here referring to the San Francisco Peace Treaty) was not the individual right to claim, but the right to claim by the government on behalf of the individual, in seeking compensation from another nation (the right of diplomatic protection). But in similar lawsuits with Chinese as plaintiffs, the Japanese government offered a totally different interpretation. This practice of a double standard reveals the duplicity of the Japanese government in dealing with war responsibility.

3) The Sino-Japanese Peace Treaty was void, and even at the time when it was signed it was of limited application.

As defined in an official exchange document attached to the Sino-Japanese Peace Treaty, the treaty could only apply to territory actually controlled by the Republic of China then and in the future. Therefore the Sino-Japanese Peace Treaty is not applicable to the People’s Republic of China.

Moreover, in 1972 when China and Japan restored diplomatic relations, the precondition was that the Japanese government agreed there was only one China. It was under this precondition that diplomatic relations between the two countries were restored and the Joint Communique was signed. Article 2 of the Communique states, "The Government of Japan recognizes the Government of the People’s Republic of China as the only legitimate Government of China." Now the Japanese government is using the Sino-Japanese Peace Treaty it signed with Taiwan as its defense. This is an act that violates its position defined in the Joint Communique.

4) The Joint Communique has not abandoned the right to claim of the individual.

Article 5 of the Joint Communique signed by the Japanese and Chinese governments in 1972 states, "The Government of the People's Republic of China declares that in the interest of the friendship between the Chinese and the Japanese peoples, it renounces its demand for war reparation from Japan."

It is public knowledge that claimants arising from wars include states, groups and individuals. This is due to the characteristics of damages. Individual or group property cannot be substituted by state property. By the same token, the individual’s right cannot be unconditionally taken over by the state. Any abandonment of the right should be expressed clearly. In the Joint Communique the Chinese government did not declare that it abandons the right to claim for Chinese citizens on their behalf.

Therefore, as stated above with regard to lawsuits brought by Chinese plaintiffs, district and high court rulings before 2005 in places such as Tokyo, Fukuoka, Niigata, and Hiroshima did not support the Japanese government’s position of "abandonment of the right to claim."

C. The trend in Japanese courts

On March 18, 2005, Tokyo High Court supported for the first time the Japanese government’s position of "abandonment of the right to claim" in its ruling on the second batch of Chinese "comfort women" cases. The decision states that in 1952 when the Sino-Japanese Peace Treaty was signed, the government of the Republic of China was the "proper government" and the treaty it signed with Japan was valid. That is, in the court’s view, the provision on war compensation is applicable to all of China and not restricted to certain territories. It follows that the Sino-Japanese Peace Treaty is applicable to mainland China. This judgment by the Tokyo High Court clearly violated the law and is provocative. It provides the world a dangerous signal from Japanese judicial circles. It was in this context that the Japan Supreme Court proposed to debate the issue of "abandonment of the right to claim" on March 16.

D. Conclusion

As the party responsible for launching that brutal war of invasion, the Japanese government has never sincerely examined its role in the war, or accepted the unavoidable responsibilities for the war. Some Chinese war victims, with the support of conscientious Japanese lawyers and citizens, filed lawsuits in Japanese courts, hoping to solve through the legal process this important issue left by history. This, in fact, has provided an opportunity for the Japanese government and the Japanese corporations involved to correct past wrongs without losing face. Unfortunately, the Japanese government and corporations have not valued this opportunity. Instead they have employed all means and spared no effort to avoid shouldering responsibility. When their excuses have been refuted one after another, they proposed this new trick, "abandonment of the right to claim."

Some Japanese judges, in order to absolve the Japanese government and corporations of their responsibilities, have gone so far as to cause a diplomatic crisis by violating the position of "one China" as established in the Joint Communique, concluding that the Chinese plaintiffs’ right to claim has been abandoned through the signing of the Sino-Japanese Peace Treaty with the Taiwan government. If this excuse receives unjustifiable support from the Supreme Court of Japan, it will in effect put an end to all lawsuits filed by Chinese war victims.

William Underwood, a faculty member at Kurume Kogyo University and a Japan Focus coordinator, recently completed his doctoral dissertation at Kyushu University on the topic of Chinese forced labor redress. He can be reached at kyushubill@yahoo.com. Kang Jian is an attorney with the Beijing Fang Yuan Law Office and a member of the All China Lawyers Association’s Committee for Redress Claims against Japan. She provided this article for Japan Focus. Posted at Japan Focus on March 2, 2007.

Tags: japan, war crimes, war, wwii, war victims

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Abe's Violent Denial: Japan's Prime Minister and the 'Comfort Women'

Japan Focus - By Alexis Dudden and Kozo MIZOGUCHI

On March 1, 2007, Japan's Prime Minister Abe Shinzo denied the comfort women. Technically, Abe denied Japanese governmental responsibility for the forced coercion of women and girls into the system of sexual slavery that involved an estimated 80,000 to 200,000 victims from throughout Asia, particularly Korea and China. Looked at in starkest relief, the democratically elected leader of the world's second richest nation — one that currently aspires to international leadership in the UN Security Council — committed an act of open violence. He denied the few remaining survivors of a well-documented history the right to claim the dignity that has come as a result of telling their story since 1993 when the Government of Japan first publicly accepted responsibility.

Since last September, many have predicted that Abe would do something along these lines because of his track record prior to committing to the contours of the so-called "Kono Statement” which has provided the baseline terminology for Japan's official acceptance of this history throughout the last thirteen years. Over the coming weeks, pundits of all stripes will explain why Abe chose now to make his move. Is it because the U.S. Congress is currently deliberating a resolution calling on Japan to formally apologize for this history, thereby pushing Japan into the hands of the right? Is it because Abe is so personally committed to constitutional revision that, despite rapidly plummeting polls, he will do anything to stay in power through the July elections to secure this possibility? If he wants to emulate the actions of his grandfather, Prime Minister Kishi Nobusuke, in bringing about the 1960 Revised Security Treaty with the United States, then mollifyiing his party's sizeable revisionist wing was perhaps inevitable. Whatever deep-level motivations informed Abe's timing, he must have knowingly picked March 1st to make his pronouncement: Koreans commemorate the mass anti-Japanese protests on that day in 1919 during the colonial era.

If Abe has his way, what will be lost yet again, as it was in the half century of silence that followed the Pacific War, is the women themselves. Never mind how many times they have had to tell their deeply painful stories in public to gain credibility. Never mind how many times they have had to lift their shirts in public to show the scar of a breast lopped off by an angry Japanese soldier during a rape over half a century ago, or to show a gash across their stomach where an Army doctor cut out an unborn child. Never mind those who went to their grave in silence. Japan's leaders are clear: these women and their histories are disposable

The day after Abe' statement, even the usually pro-Japanese South Korean paper, The Chosun Ilbo, captured all this in its editorial cartoon below. Alexis Dudden



"There was no forced coercion of comfort women,” Japanese parliamentarians scream, "Hey!!!” and moon four former comfort women representing Korea, Asia, Australia, and the Netherlands who are holding a sign reading, "Japan Should
Apologize and Pay Reparations!”



Japan's Prime Minister Denies World War II Sex Slaves

By Kozo Mizoguchi

TOKYO - Japan's nationalist prime minister denied on March 1 that the country's military forced women into sexual slavery during World War II, casting doubt on a past government apology and jeopardizing a fragile detente with his Asian neighbors.

The comments by Abe Shinzo, a member of a group of lawmakers pushing to roll back a 1993 apology to the sex slaves, were his clearest statement as prime minister on military brothels known in Japan as "comfort stations."

Historians say some 200,000 women - mostly from Korea and China - served in the Japanese military brothels throughout Asia in the 1930s and 1940s. Many victims say they were kidnapped and forced into sexual slavery by Japanese troops.

But Abe, who since taking office in September has promoted patriotism in Japan's schools and a more assertive foreign policy, told reporters there was no proof the women were forced into prostitution.

"The fact is, there is no evidence to prove there was coercion," Abe said.

His remarks contradicted evidence in Japanese documents unearthed in 1992 that historians said showed military authorities had a direct role in working with contractors to forcibly procure women for the brothels.

The documents, which are backed up by accounts from soldiers and victims, said Japanese authorities set up the brothels in response to uncontrolled rape sprees by invading Japanese soldiers in East Asia.


Former comfort women in 2005 demonstration in Seoul

In 1993, then-Chief Cabinet Secretary Kono Yohei apologized to the victims of sex slavery, though the statement did not meet demands by former "comfort women" that it be approved by parliament. Two years later, the government set up a compensation fund for victims, but it was based on private donations - not government money - and has been criticized as a way for the government to avoid owning up to the abuse.

The mandate for the fund is to expire March 31.

Abe's comments were certain to rile South Korea and China, which accuse Tokyo of failing to fully atone for wartime atrocities. Abe's government has been recently working to repair relations with Seoul and Beijing.

The statement came just hours after South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun marked a national holiday honoring the anniversary of a 1919 uprising against Japanese colonial rule by urging Tokyo to come clean about its past.

Roh also referred to hearings held by the U.S. House of Representatives last month on a resolution urging Japan to "apologize for and acknowledge" the imperial army's use of sex slaves during the war.

"The testimony reiterated a message that no matter how hard the Japanese try to cover the whole sky with their hand, there is no way that the international community would condone the atrocities committed during Japanese colonial rule," Roh said.

Dozens of people also rallied outside the Japanese Embassy in Seoul to mark the anniversary, lining up dead dogs' heads on the ground with pieces of paper in their mouths listing names of Koreans who allegedly collaborated with the Japanese during its 1910-45 colonial rule. Protest organizers said the animals were slaughtered at a restaurant; dogs are regularly consumed as food in Korea.

Roh's office said late Thursday it did not immediately have a direct response to the Japanese leader's remarks. In Beijing, calls to the Chinese Foreign Ministry seeking comment on the remarks were not immediately returned.

State Department spokesman Sean McCormack would not comment on Abe's statement. "I'll let the Japanese political system deal with that," he said.

The sex slave question has been a cause celebre for nationalist politicians and scholars in Japan who claim the women were professional prostitutes and were not coerced into servitude by the military.

Before Abe spoke Thursday, a group of ruling Liberal Democratic Party lawmakers discussed their plans to push for an official revision of Kono's 1993 apology.

Nakayama Nariaki, chairman of the group of about 120 lawmakers, sought to play down the government's involvement in the brothels by saying it was similar to a school that hires a company to run its cafeteria.

"Some say it is useful to compare the brothels to college cafeterias run by private companies, who recruit their own staff, procure foodstuffs, and set prices," he said.

"Where there's demand, businesses crop up ... but to say women were forced by the Japanese military into service is off the mark," he said. "This issue must be reconsidered, based on truth ... for the sake of Japanese honor."

Sex slave victims, however, say they still suffer wounds - physical and psychological - from the war.

Lee Yong-soo, 78, a South Korean who was interviewed during a recent trip to Tokyo, said she was 14 when Japanese soldiers took her from her home in 1944 to work as a sex slave in Taiwan.


Lee Yong-soo

"The Japanese government must not run from its responsibilities," said Lee, who has long campaigned for Japanese compensation. ""I want them to apologize. To admit that they took me away, when I was a little girl, to be a sex slave. To admit that history."

AP writer Burt Herman contributed to this report from Seoul, South Korea.

Kozo Mizoguchi wrote this article for the Associated Press. It was published in The Guardian on March 1, 2007. Alexis Dudden, who wrote the introduction, is associate professor of history at Connecticut College and a Japan Focus associate. She is the author of Japan's Colonization of Korea: Discourse and Power. Posted at Japan Focus on March 2, 2007.

Tags: japan, china, korea, sex slaves, war crimes, comfort women, war denial, history, war, wwii, atrocities

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Christian right doesn't like preaching on climate change

The more I read about the thinking of the Christian Right, the more scared I am. How should I describe these people? Superstitious? Stubborn? Ignorant? Self-serving? Probably all of the above.

NYT - Leaders of several conservative Christian groups have sent a letter urging the National Association of Evangelicals to force its policy director in Washington to stop speaking out on global warming.

The conservative leaders say they are not convinced that global warming is human-induced or that human intervention can prevent it. And they accuse the director, the Rev. Richard Cizik, the association’s vice president for government affairs, of diverting the evangelical movement from what they deem more important issues, like abortion and homosexuality.

The letter underlines a struggle between established conservative Christian leaders, whose priority has long been sexual morality, and challengers who are pushing to expand the evangelical movement’s agenda to include issues like climate change and human rights.

"We have observed," the letter says, "that Cizik and others are using the global warming controversy to shift the emphasis away from the great moral issues of our time."

Those issues, the signers say, are a need to campaign against abortion and same-sex marriage and to promote "the teaching of sexual abstinence and morality to our children."

The letter, dated Thursday, is signed by leaders like James C. Dobson, chairman of Focus on the Family; Gary L. Bauer, once a Republican presidential candidate and now president of Coalitions for America; Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council; and Paul Weyrich, a longtime political strategist who is chairman of American Values.

They acknowledge in the letter that none of their groups belong to the National Association of Evangelicals, a broad coalition that represents 30 million Christians in hundreds of denominations, organizations and academic institutions. But, they say, if Cizik "cannot be trusted to articulate the views of American evangelicals," then he should be encouraged to resign.

Cizik (pronounced SIZE-ik) did not respond to requests for an interview yesterday, and the association’s chairman, L. Roy Taylor, was unavailable. But the Rev. Leith Anderson, president of the association, said, "We’re talking about somebody here who’s been in Washington for 25 years, has an amazing track record and is highly respected."

"I’m behind him," said Anderson, who was named president in November after the sudden resignation of the Rev. Ted Haggard, the Colorado pastor caught up in a scandal involving a gay prostitute.

Cizik, who is well known on Capitol Hill, has long served as one of the evangelical movement’s agenda-setters. He helped put foreign policy on the evangelical agenda in the late 1990s, focusing on the persecution of Christians in other countries.

He said in an interview last year that he experienced a profound "conversion" on the global warming issue in 2002 after listening to scientists at a retreat. Now an emblem for a new breed of evangelical environmentalists, he has been written about in Vanity Fair and Newsweek and has appeared in "The Great Warming," a documentary on climate change.

Evangelicals have recently become a significant voice in the chorus on global warming. Last year more than 100 prominent pastors, theologians and college presidents signed an "Evangelical Climate Initiative" calling for action on the issue. Among the signers were several board members of the National Association of Evangelicals; Anderson, who has since been named its president; and W. Todd Bassett, who was then national commander of the Salvation Army and was appointed executive director of the association in January.

Haggard, then the president, and Cizik did not sign, after criticism from some of the same leaders who have now sent the letter about Cizik.

In interviews, some signers of this latest letter said they were wary of the global warming issue because they associated it with leftists, limits on free enterprise and population control, which they oppose.

"We’re saying what is being done here," Perkins said, "is a concerted effort to shift the focus of evangelical Christians to these issues that draw warm and fuzzies from liberal crusaders."

Tags: climate change, environment, christian right, Evangelical, global warming

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German tradespeople eager to immigrate to Western Canada

CBC - Western Canadian companies are holding job fairs in central Germany to recruit hundreds of skilled labourers needed for the boom in the oil, mining and construction industries.

The job fairs are well-attended as Germany is struggling with high unemployment — with a national unemployment rate of 9.3% in February. The job fairs have been held for the past three years, but the Canadians found that the interest — and the number of companies wanting to recruit — has grown dramatically.

At one job fair in the city of Essen, where the unemployment rate is closer to 20 per cent, more than 1,000 German tradespeople crowded into a convention centre to talk to representatives of Canadian companies.

"It's terribly hard to find work here," Thomas Freiberg, a 42-year-old industrial electrician, said in German.

Freiburg said he was employed for the past 15 years until the factory where he worked closed last summer.

"I've submitted over 50 applications for various jobs. I've had a few interviews, but nothing positive, no job offers. So my family and I have decided to try and find something in Canada."

Freiburg said he knows it may be hard to move his family. His children, a 10-year-old son and a 13-year-old daughter, are worried about leaving school friends behind and having to speak English.

But he said his family could forge a new life in Canada.

"My wife and I visited last year as tourists and we were really impressed. The country is beautiful and we met friendly, nice people. It's a bit scary to think about leaving here, but Canada is our number one choice of places we'd like to live. The idea just works for us, right now."

Germany's economy has been slumping in part because the mining, manufacturing and steel-making sectors have fallen on hard times.

In presentations at the job fair, the unemployed workers, some with baby carriages, listened attentively to the virtues of Western Canada, its wide open spaces, its outdoor lifestyles, its proximity to nature.

Owners of the firms on the lookout for help said they hope to have workers from German on the job in six to eight weeks. The new employees will be given temporary work visas that are valid for up to two years.

Company representatives said they do not think the economic boom in Western Canada is going to fade any time soon.

Joe Bova, an owner of Man-Shield Construction in Winnipeg, said experienced tradespeople are in demand.

"If this was just a temporary offer of employment, we wouldn't be here," Bova said. "We are not interested in short-term employees. We are looking for people who are interested in immigrating to Canada and making a living for them and their families."

Bova himself immigrated to Canada from Italy in 1962. He was in Germany to hire bricklayers.

"These people want a chance, not just to feed their children, because I think they can do that very well in Germany, by the way, but to give their children a better life. And I think they see Canada as that kind of country. And I'm very moved by this, being an immigrant myself. I'm touched."

Bernd Reuscher, an Edmonton resident who works for the German government, said Canada has much to offer.

"Germans are active people. That's why they like Canada. Going to the Rockies, canoeing, hunting, fishing. We have only four people per kilometres in Canada in Alberta. Here, they have 1,000 persons per square kilometre."

Christa Klemm, a carpenter, said a job in Canada would mean a fresh start. She said she has visited Nova Scotia, where she spoke to general contractors who encouraged her to look for work in Alberta.

"I've heard women in Canada are able to work in jobs that are traditionally for men and there isn't much discrimination," she said in German.

"I've got the highest training you can get and I've worked on and off for years, but when I apply for full-time, they always hire a man, first."

Klemm exchanged phone numbers with a few companies at the job fair. She wants to improve her English first, though.

"Finding a way in definitely seems easier there because the companies badly need tradespeople right now. Here nobody is hiring. I can walk the streets with all of my experience, for years, and not find anything," she said.

"For me, going to Canada is the answer."

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Gao Shan: 'I want to live a normal life'

Ming Pao Vancouver - "I want to live a normal life."

Chinese fugitive Gao Shan pleads upon his release from detention, hoping the public could respect his privacy.

Gao was in a good mood and has maintained a bright smile most of the time when a reporter talked to him yesterday.

In a detention hearing on Thursday (March 1), a Canada Immigration and Refugee Board adjudicator agreed to release Gao Shan on the provision of a $150,000 bond put up by family friend Darla Chibi, mother of his daughter's best friend. He went home that afternoon.

When reached at his North Vancouver home yesterday, Gao Shan thanked Chibi for her generous help. "I would definitely not let her down."

Chibi told the adjudicator on the hearing that she trusted Gao Shan fully and was entirely convinced that he would not run away before the next immigration hearing.

Gao was arrested the day before the Chinese New Year's Eve on Feb 16. He had been in a jail at the North Fraser Pre-trial Centre for the last two weeks. Thursday's evening was Gao's first family reunion in the Year of the Pig.

Gao Shan was obviously having lunch when he answered the door yesterday. He was caught off guard that a reporter would ring the door bell. "How do you know I'm here?"

Though unwilling to express his feelings towards his release or the embezzlement accusations, Gao remains very polite. "I'm sorry but I really don't have anything to say."

After lunch, Gao took the sea bus to Downtown Vancouver where he met with his new lawyer Eric Gottardi. Gao has to appear in another hearing on March 6, which would determine if his permanent resident status should be revoked.

Immigration Canada alleged Gao for misrepresentation for he didn't indicate his job as a Bank of China manager on his immigration application form. If substantiated, Gao could be ordered to surrender his PR status and to be deported back to China.

"I only want to live a normal life," said Gao outside the lawyer's office. He politely indicated his wish that the media would leave him and his family alone.

The adjudicated has said Gao has been very low key in Canada and not leading a lavish life like his alleged co-conspirators Li Dongzhe and Li Donghu, who bought an extravagant house of $3m.


See also:
Li Dongzhe brothers remain in custody, given exclusion order
Gao Shan ordered release, again
BREAKING NEWS: Two more Chinese fugitives arrested in Vancouver
Two more Chinese fugitives arrested in Vancouver
Will Gao Shan be the first Chinese fugitive extradited by Canada?
Gao Shan remains in jail until source of money proved clean
Lai Changxing: Good luck to Gao Shan, the comrade fugitive
Fugitive Gao Shan says he's innocent; released
Another Chinese fugitive arrested in Vancouver
Five fugitives hiding in Canada, China says

Tags: gao shan, fugitive, chinese, china, canada, police, embezzlement, bank of china

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Sex slave denial angers S Korea

BBC - South Korea has criticised the Japanese prime minister for questioning whether women were forced to become sex slaves by Japan's army during World War II.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe sparked anger on Thursday by saying there was "no evidence to prove there was coercion".

South Korean Foreign Minister Song Min-soon said his remarks were "not helpful" and the truth must be faced.

Historians believe at least 200,000 women were forced to serve in Japanese army brothels during World War II.

A Japanese Cabinet spokesman appeared to play down Abe's comments by saying the prime minister stood by a 1993 government apology for the use of so-called "comfort women".

But Song said the Japanese leader's remarks were not helpful in efforts to build better relations between their two countries.

Revisionist moves

"There has been debate over the question of whether there was coercion," Abe told journalists on Thursday.

"But the fact is, there was no evidence to prove there was coercion as initially suggested."

The US Congress is currently considering a resolution calling on Tokyo to "formally acknowledge, apologise and accept historical responsibility" for the comfort women.

The draft text was debated by the House of Representatives last week, prompting criticism from Japan's foreign minister, who said it was "not based on objective facts".

Some Japanese conservative politicians have questioned the extent of the country's wartime atrocities.

A number are seeking to downgrade the government's 1993 acknowledgement that the Imperial Army set up and ran brothels for its troops during the war.

Compensation sought

The non-binding resolution before the US Congress seeks to reject the revisionists' moves.

Three former comfort women gave evidence at the US hearing, describing the rape and torture they endured at the hands of the Japanese soldiers.

Many former comfort women - most of whom were from Korea and China - are still seeking compensation from the Japanese government for their experiences.

Tokyo did set up a compensation fund in 1995, but it relies on private donations rather than government money.

Tags: japan, war, wwii, atrocities, war crimes, comfort women, sex slaves, china, korea, denial, history

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Comfort women denial aims to show independence from U.S.

Abe Shinzo's Right Turn
[Analysis] Comfort women denial aims to show independence from U.S.

OhMyNews - Japanese Prime Minister Abe Shinzo entered office vowing to improve Japan's relations with its neighbors, which had been damaged by his predecessor Koizumi Jintaro's annual visits to the controversial Yasukuni Shrine. Whatever progress he'd made in that area was permanently damaged on Thursday when he denied that the so-called "comfort women" had been coerced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military during World War II.

While the remarks will undoubtedly have repercussions on relations with South Korea and China, the real target of Abe's provocative comments was the non-binding resolution currently in consideration in the U.S. House of Representatives that, if passed, would demand a formal apology and compensation to the surviving victims by the Japanese government.

Congress has not been alone in pushing Japan to do a better job reconciling with its neighbours. The Bush administration came into office with the express desire to strengthen the U.S.-Japan alliance, which many Republicans felt had been neglected during the Clinton administration in favour of a "strategic partnership" with China. To this end, they focused on building up Japan as the "Britain of Asia," by strengthening its military role within the alliance and supporting its ambitions for regional leadership.

While Koizumi proved a willing and able partner in this endeavour, it became increasingly clear that Japan's own intransigence in settling historical disputes with South Korea and China was undermining the program. For this reason, in the past couple of years, the U.S. government has been quietly pushing Japan to resolve some of the outstanding issues.

But in fact, while Koizumi used the shrine visit to appease the right wing within his own Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), he was actually working to overturn the traditional Japanese political system.

"Koizumi favoured the international corporations while alienating the local bosses," says Mushakoji Kinshide, a former vice rector at United Nations University in Tokyo. "Abe is trying to bring the local bosses back on his side, which he does through appeals to patriotism, which means denying Japan's past wrongdoing."

According to Mushakoji, the results of the recent six-party talks is one of the major motivating factors for Abe to break with the United States on the comfort women issue. Abe had gained prominence as cabinet secretary for championing the cause of the Japanese citizens abducted by North Korea. Thus he needed to show that the Feb. 13 agreement in Beijing would not be forced down Tokyo's throat.

One probable result of Abe's statement will be the cancellation by North Korea of working group talks on the abductee issue. Pyongyang has always countered Japan's outrage over the 13 or so Japanese citizens abducted by North Korean agents by pointing to the abduction of tens of thousands of Koreans for sexual slavery or forced labor during the colonial period. By denying Japan's actions, Abe has done the nearly unthinkable -- ceded the moral high ground to North Korea.

But scuttling the abductee talks was likely part of Abe's plan. Not only does it save him from the possibility of making concessions that he would be loathe to agree to, it also shows the hardliners within the LDP that he's willing to stand up to Washington. In doing so, he revealed once again the strong anti-American streak that runs through the Japanese right.

Many Japanese conservatives -- epitomized by Tokyo Governor Ishihara Shintaro, author of The Japan That Can Say 'No' -- are deeply resentful of the country's dependence on the United States. Ironically, in supporting the strengthening of Japan's military role, Washington has bolstered the very faction that most wants to break away from the United States. Even worse, some in Washington have been pushing for Japan to acquire its own nuclear capacity, which is the ultimate goal of the anti-American group, as it would allow Tokyo to counter China without having to rely on the American nuclear umbrella.

Thus far, Abe has refused to join in with those members of his party, including Foreign Minister Aso Taro, who have been openly calling for Japan to re-examine its anti-nuclear stance. While there's no reason to expect him to change this position in the near future, he is clearly trying to shore up his right in anticipation of next month's elections.

In Japan, the process of reinvigorating the country's military role is called by its supporters "becoming a normal country." One might equally posit that a "normal country" is one whose politicians don't go out of their way to antagonize neighbouring nations over things that happened over 60 years ago. Ultimately, it will be up to the voters of Japan to decide just what kind of normalization they want.

Tags: japan, war, wwii, comfort women, war crimes, atrocities, korea, china, US, right wing

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Chinese-Canadians ask Ottawa to denounce Abe's comments

CP - Chinese-Canadian politicians and community leaders are calling on the government to publicly condemn the Japanese prime minister for denying his country's role in the enslavement thousands of Asian women during the Second World War.

"We should speak out and issue a condemnation," said New Democrat MP Olivia Chow.

During Japan's occupation of its neighbours, between 80,000 and 200,000 women were captured and forced to work as sex slaves for the military. As many as half were Chinese, though the exact numbers are still disputed.

Women from Korea, the Philippines, and Vietnam were also forced to work in military brothels.

The events are well-documented by scholars the world over, but Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has said that there's "no evidence to prove that there was coercion" of the women, who came to be known as "comfort women" in Japan.

Conservative MP Inky Mark said he was shocked when he read Abe's words and said he wants Prime Minister Stephen Harper to condemn the comments.

"It's along the same lines of denying the Holocaust. It was a war crime against humanity."

Chow has written a letter to the Japanese government pleading with them to stop appealing a court case in which the surviving sex slaves won damages.

"Tragic history may repeat itself if justice is not done and past wrongs are not acknowledged," wrote Chow.

There's a double standard when it comes to recognizing war crimes in the West, said Joseph Wong, the founding president of the Chinese Canadian National Council.

"We have heard how quick Western politicians are to condemn Holocaust deniers, which is good, because that has to be done," he said.

"But on the other hand, Western politicians are so silent when they encounter these denials from Japanese right-wing politicians who say the rape of Nanking was justified and these comfort women, these sexual slaves, were willing victims."

Wong said he's concerned the Canadian public won't understand how serious Abe's denials are because curriculums in Canada are too focused on European history.

"This goes beyond (teaching) multiculturalism," he said. "This is a gross violation of human rights that everyone should learn about."

Bev Oda, Canada's only MP of Japanese descent, declined to comment.

Tags: china, japan, korea, comfort women, war, wwii, war crimes, war denial, sex slaves, atrocities, asian holocaust, right wing, militarism, ultranationalism, chinese canadian

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Chinese, Koreans sold their daughters as sex slaves during war: Japanese right-winger

Horror denial a festering sore

Mizushima rejects all accusations of Japanese war crimes in Asia, including the sexual enslavement of 200,000 women and the forced employment of millions of Chinese and Korean labourers.

"Koreans and Chinese want to save face by saying that we enslaved them, but their own parents sold them into prostitution and slavery. They're crying like women about what happened to them."

New Zealand Herald - The photographs are sickening, a gallery of horrors from a gruesome war where the casualties were counted in the millions: Decapitated and disembowelled bodies, dead babies discarded in ditches, hollow-eyed skulls staring from a jumbled pile of human bones.

After five minutes, the mind starts to numb; 10 and the air in this converted warehouse feels still and heavy, like the weight of history is seeping through the doors.

The newly opened Chukiren Peace Museum nestles among swathes of identikit houses in a suburb north of Tokyo, watched over by a pensioner; a foot-soldier in what Czech writer Milan Kundera calls the struggle of memory against forgetting.

The 80-year-old curator, Fumiko Niki, has spent much of her life at war with Japan's conservatives.

"We are in a very dangerous period," she says. "Awareness of Japan's role in wartime is fading."

The core of the museum's collection is the testimony of 300 Japanese Imperial Army veterans who confessed while in custody in China to committing atrocities there, including rape, torture and infanticide.

Graphic video and photographic evidence showing some of the Army's most brutal crimes is held in the archives. Ultra-rightists have already threatened to burn the museum down and the elderly staff are studying the unfamiliar world of high-tech security.

"You won't find these things in school textbooks," says veteran Tsuyoshi Ebato, who helped compile this archive. The testimonies include an account of a sergeant-major who raped and killed a Chinese woman, then cannibalised her with his unit.

Ebato says he trained recruits to use captured Chinese for bayonet practice. "Terrible things like this happened all the time," he says.

"Now people are saying that they never happened. Japan wants to keep a lid on a stinking pot."

Across Tokyo is the office of the right-wing internet broadcaster Channel Sakura. There are no pictures of war atrocities here. Instead, swords and rising-sun flags decorate the walls along with portraits of the Emperor and poems to fallen Japanese soldiers.

Since it was set up two years ago, Sakura has pumped out nationalist programmes to its small audience. Now its president is planning to direct a big-budget documentary arguing the 1937 "Rape of Nanjing" - one of history's most notorious war crimes - was a hoax.

"Nanjing is a lie, it is as simple as that," says Satoru Mizushima. "It is Chinese propaganda, backed up by left-wingers in this country."

Mizushima says the photos in the peace museum are faked, that former Japanese soldiers like Ebato were "brainwashed" by "Chinese communists" while in captivity, and that the war crimes documented there never happened. "It is all perfectly clear and we're going to prove it."

Such views have long existed on the fringes of Japanese politics, but the movie is backed by at least a dozen lawmakers from the ruling Liberal Democratic (LDP) and opposition parties; Tokyo mayor, Shintaro Ishihara; and a panel of university lecturers. And in Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, the makers arguably have a leader who is closer to their world view than any Japanese premier in decades.

Abe has made no secret of his distaste for the way the history of the war in China has been recorded. Before becoming leader, he was one of a group of LDP politicians who strongly backed a history textbook downplaying or removing references to Japan's war crimes in Asia, including Nanjing.

The textbook refers to the rape of the city as "an incident" and rejects the higher casualty estimates. China claims 300,000 died; revisionist historians in Japan put the figure anywhere between zero and 40,000.

"Where did they dispose of all those bodies?" asks Mizushima, jabbing what he says are doctored photos from Iris Chang's 1997 bestseller The Rape of Nanking (Nanking is the English name for Nanjing).

"The Nazis had to build ovens to kill Jews. But we don't have the same ideology as the Nazis. We weren't trying to wipe out Nanjing or the Chinese."

Chang's book, criticised for its inaccuracies and use of doctored photos, called the rape and looting "the forgotten holocaust".

Nanjing continues to poison one of the world's most important bilateral relationships.

Over 80% of young Chinese in a recent survey cited the rape as the issue they associated most with Japan. Anti-Japanese sentiment, fuelled by nationalism and government propaganda, has grown steadily in China, culminating in a series of riots and boycotts, and prompting Beijing and Tokyo to set up a joint education panel in an attempt to lay the historical ghosts to rest.

But the 20 academics on both sides admit they are struggling. "It is very difficult indeed," says Professor Shinichi Kitaoka, who is part of the Japanese delegation. "But we have to find some way of narrowing the gap between us."

Talk of hoaxes incenses Beijing. Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu, said recently there was "ironclad" evidence that the massacre took place.

A new United States movie on the rape, featuring Woody Harrelson, is being released and at least another half-dozen more are in the pipeline to mark the 70th anniversary of Nanjing.

Beijing plans its own film, based on Chang's book, a move that prompted Japanese politicians to announce their own "study group" to counter what they say is a looming wave of anti-Japanese sentiment.

It was the prospect of these new projects that also spurred Mizushima into action. "We cannot let these distorted views of history spread throughout the world. We're not doing it because we're anti-Chinese; we simply want to tell the truth."

He rejects all accusations of Japanese war crimes in Asia, including the sexual enslavement of 200,000 women and the forced employment of millions of Chinese and Korean labourers.

"Koreans and Chinese want to save face by saying that we enslaved them, but their own parents sold them into prostitution and slavery. They're crying like women about what happened to them."

Tags: china, japan, korea, comfort women, war, wwii, war crimes, war denial, sex slaves, atrocities, asian holocaust, right wing, militarism, ultranationalism

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Birthday of Canadian hero proposed as China's Doctor Day

Xinhua - A political advisor has suggested that China should set March 4, the birthday of Canadian doctor Norman Bethune who treated Chinese soldiers fighting Japanese intruders and died from blood poisoning in 1939, as the nation's Doctor Day.

Feng Shiliang, a member of the Tenth National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), the country's top advisory body, said the proposed Doctor Day will help enhance the public respect and understanding on doctors and spur medical ethics.

Feng, head of the Liaoning Provincial Diabetes Treatment Center is here attending 12-day annual session of the CPPCC National Committee, which opened in the Great Hall of the People in downtown Beijing Saturday afternoon.

"As a Canadian communist, Dr. Bethune devoted his life to the care of Chinese and has been a hero and model of doctors in China, and late Chairman Mao Zedong sang his praises for Bethune's selfless work and service in an article that is familiar to almost everyone," said Feng.

Chinese medical personnel in general are admirable, Feng said. When SARS hit the country in 2003, 33 percent of the people who contracted the disease were medical personnel fighting the epidemic.

China has Teacher's Day, Nurse Day and Journalist Day at present and no such a national festival for doctors, while it exists in Vietnam, Russia, Ukraine and some other countries.

Dr. Bethune was born on March 4, 1890, in the small Ontario Town of Gravenhurst, Canada. He came to China in 1938 during China 's war of resistance against Japanese aggression and set up a front-line mobile hospital where he operated on wounded soldiers. He is credited with saving thousands of lives.

In 1991 China began to issue Bethune Medal as the highest prize for medical personnel of the country. A 20-episode television drama on Dr. Bethune was shown on China Central Television last year and was hailed "vivid and touching."

Tags: china, canada, canadian, doctor, doctor day, Norman Bethune

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Immigrants share equal sense of belonging to Canada

Ipsos Reid release – The Dominion Institute and Ipsos Reid have undertaken a unique national online survey that explores the levels of social engagement and attachment to Canada among English-speaking first and second generation Canadian immigrants, and compares these findings to a nationally representative sample of the Canadian population. Sense of belonging to Canada among first generation Canadian immigrants similar to the overall Canadian population.

This survey asked Canadians how strong their sense of belonging was to Canada. Second generation Canadians expressed a stronger sense of belonging to Canada (88% overall) than first generation Canadian immigrants (81%), and the general population (79%). 7-in-ten second generation Canadians expressed a "very strong" sense of belonging to Canada compared to 58% first generation immigrants.

"Canadian" reported as identity higher among second generation Canadians Second generation Canadians are also much more likely to self-identify as "Canadian" or "hyphenated" Canadian (e.g. Chinese-Canadian, German-Canadian) than first generation Canadian immigrants (22%). This difference is much more pronounced when second generation Canadians report themselves as Canadian only (17% vs. 3% first generation immigrants).

Importance of ethnic or cultural identity decreases slightly from first to second generation Overall, first generation Canadian immigrants are the most likely to say that their ethnic or cultural identity is important to them (64% vs. 57% second generation and 54% among Canadians in general). Second generation Canadians are the least likely to say it is "very important" (29%) vs. first generation and general population (both 36%).

Second generation Canadians report having more friends of a similar racial or cultural background When asked about how many friends were of the same racial or cultural background, 42% of second generation Canadians reported that "all" of "most of them" were of the same background, while 32% of first generation reported the same. The general population overall reported 58%.

Participation in groups and organizations similar among all English-speaking Canadians Overall, the survey shows that there is little inter-generational difference among Englishspeaking Canadians in their participation in groups or organizations: first generation Canadian immigrants (45%); second generation (43%). Their participation levels are similar to that of the general population (41%).

Tags: identity, sense of belonging, canadian, hyphenated canadian, second generation canadian, first generation canadian, canada

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Vancouver area Feb 2007 home prices jump 15% year-on-year

	BENCHMARK	1 yr change %	3 yr change %	5 yr change %
DETACHED
Gr. Vancouver	$666,983	11.4	48.3	86.3
Burnaby	$664,710	12.8	47.9	84.2
Coquitlam	$606,434	17.1	51.9	99.6
N. Vancouver	$792,890	9.1	37.6	85.8
Pt. Coquitlam	$477,534	12	38.3	86.8
Pt. Moody	$649,169	20.9	32.5	84
Richmond	$665,855	13.9	50.8	84.5
Vancouver E.	$611,890	11.1	54.4	97
Vancouver W.	$1,204,314	14.3	62.6	87.5
W. Vancouver	$1,177,646	-0.3	33.1	71.3
ATTACHED
Gr. Vancouver	$419,061	15.1	49.2	90.7
Burnaby	$406,140	12.9	49	90.6
Coquitlam	$387,401	13.3	53.2	97.3
N. Vancouver	$548,690	17.7	47.8	108
Pt. Coquitlam	$351,806	9.9	37.6	74.9
Pt. Moody	$369,313	17.6	55.8	102.2
Richmond	$405,887	14.6	44	79.6
Vancouver E.	$447,818	19.3	60.5	102.2
Vancouver W.	$625,604	17.7	51.1	103.4
APARTMENT
Gr. Vancouver	$342,705	15.3	57.5	108.2
Burnaby	$307,352	15.9	62	112.2
Coquitlam	$267,427	16.8	67.8	117.2
N. Vancouver	$356,297	15.1	56.9	116.4
Pt. Coquitlam	$234,565	20.6	82.2	145.1
Pt. Moody	$280,416	12.6	63	107.8
Richmond	$282,263	15.2	62.5	111.3
Vancouver E.	$278,997	18.2	67	116.9
Vancouver W.	$437,149	13.2	47.9	103
W. Vancouver	$467,277	10.1	57.6	56.2

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver release - REBGV reports that total residential sales for detached, attached and apartment properties reached 2,859 units in February 2007, a decrease of 2.8% when compared to the 2,941 units sold in February 2006 and a decrease of 6.8% when compared to the 3,068 sales in February 2005.

New listings for detached, attached and apartment properties decreased by 4.0% to 4,167 units compared to the 4,340 units listed in February 2006. The total number of active listings increased by 24% to 9,670 units when compared to February 2006’s 7,766 units.

The average days a property spent on market jumped to 49 days in February 2007
versus 58 days in January 2007. All signs are pointing towards a busy spring housing market.

According to Multiple Listings Service® (MLS®) data, sales of apartment properties increased by 4.7% to 1,269 sales in February 2007 compared to 1,212 sales in February 2006. The benchmark price of an apartment property in Greater Vancouver, calculated by the MLSLink® Housing Price Index, is $342,705, up 15.3% from one year ago.

Sales of attached properties decreased by 15.0% in February 2007 to 469 sales, compared to 552 sales in February 2006. The benchmark price of an attached unit is $419,061, up 15.1% from a year ago.

Sales of detached properties decreased by 4.8% in February 2007 to 1,121 sales, compared to 1,177 sales in February 2006. The benchmark price of a detached unit is $666,983, up 11.4% from last year.

Bright spots in Greater Vancouver in February 2007 compared to February 2006:
DETACHED:
North Vancouver up 11.5% ............... (97 units sold, up from 87)
Vancouver East up 7.0% ............... (169 units sold, up from 158)
Delta South up 34.8% ....................... (62 units sold, up from 46)
ATTACHED:
Vancouver East up 48.1% ................. (40 units sold, up from 27)
Whistler/Pemberton up 85.7% ............ (13 units sold, up from 7)
APARTMENTS:
Delta South up 88.9% ......................... (17 units sold, up from 9)
North Vancouver up 50.8% ............... (95 units sold, up from 63)
Port Moody/Belcarra up 45% ............ (29 units sold, up from 20)
Squamish up 900% ............................. (20 units sold, up from 2)
Vancouver West up 4.5% .............. (460 units sold, up from 440)
West Van/Howe Sound up 42.9% ..... (20 units sold, up from 14)

Tags: real estate, vancouver, housing market, house prices, home prices, surrey, richmond, coquitlam, port moody, port coquitlam, bc

[Read More....]

Li Dongzhe brothers remain in custody, given exclusion order

Fugitives Li Dongzhe (李東哲) and Li Donghu (李東虎) have been denied release today at an Immigration and Refugee Board detention hearing. The brothers have been issued exclusion order and will be remanded until their next hearing.

Canada Border Services Agency confirms that the Li's had applied and failed their refugee application. The only options left are 1) ask the federal court for a judicial review of the refugee claiming decision; 2) apply for a pre-removal risk assessment which would say they might face death penalty or torture if deported back to China.

Li Dongzhe (born Feb 7, 1967) and Li Donghu (born Feb 21, 1969) were arrested last Friday by Canadian Border Services Agency and the RCMP for failure to leave the country after their travel visas expired.

Media reports in China allege that Li Dongzhe was the kingpin behind the billion dollar theft happened at the Bank of China Harbin Branch, of which Gao Shan was branch manager.

The brothers plan to appeal to the federal court and enter the long judicial process like Lai Changxing. However, unlike Lai, Li Dongzhe and Li Donghu might not be qualified to claim refugee status.

The CIC lawyer produced the arrest warrants for the Li's at the detention hearing today, indicating they were wanted for fraud in China.

The Li's are Chinese citizens of Korean ethnicity.

Gao Shan, Li Dongzhe and Li Donghu all were issued "Red Notice" by the Interpol and the Chinese police.

According to the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, there are three types of removal orders: deportation order, departure order and exclusion order. Departure order and exclusion order are for less serious crime and the removed subjects can come to Canada after a certain period of time (departure order after 30 days; exclusion order after at least 1 year) while deportation order would ban the subject from entering Canada permanently.

In the detention hearing of Gao Shan last week, the IRB adjudicator indicated that Li Dongzhe is making extravagant spendings in Canada, such as having bought and sold a $3m house in Vancouver. The adjudicator also believed that Li Dongzhe was the principal player in the frauds allegedly committed by Gao and Li in China.

The RCMP maintain that Li Dongzhe, Li Donghu and Gao Shan are now believed to control the direct and indirect benefits of their crime in China, according to the evidence entered in the hearing.

There is also evidence showing Li Dongzhe and Li Donghu have some direct dealings with Li Xue, Gao Shan's wife.

See also:
Li Dongzhe brothers remain in custody, given exclusion order
Gao Shan ordered release, again
BREAKING NEWS: Two more Chinese fugitives arrested in Vancouver
Two more Chinese fugitives arrested in Vancouver
Will Gao Shan be the first Chinese fugitive extradited by Canada?
Gao Shan remains in jail until source of money proved clean
Lai Changxing: Good luck to Gao Shan, the comrade fugitive
Fugitive Gao Shan says he's innocent; released
Another Chinese fugitive arrested in Vancouver
Five fugitives hiding in Canada, China says

Tags: lai changxing, lai cheong sing, gao shan, li xue, gao shan xue lian, fugitive, bank of china

[Read More....]

Gao Shan ordered release, again

AP - A former Bank of China official accused by Beijing of embezzlement has again been ordered released by a Canadian court pending the start of immigration proceedings next month.

Gao Shan had been ordered released last week by a Canada Immigration and Refugee Board adjudicator. However, a Canada Border Services official overrode that decision, saying the C$300,000 (US$256,000) surety Gao was willing to post was the proceeds of crime.

As such, Gao had to reappear before an adjudicator on Thursday for a detention review.

Now, Gao has been released on the provision of a C$150,000 (US$128,000) bond put up by family friends.

China's Ministry of Public Security has asked Canada to extradite Gao for allegedly embezzling US$128 million from customers' accounts to Canada, the Beijing Daily said last week.

The scandal came to light Jan. 15 when the Shanghai-listed A-share company Northeast Expressway revealed that more than US$37 million of shareholders' funds deposited with the Bank of China branch in Harbin was missing.

Deposits by other companies, amounting to as much as US$90 million also reportedly vanished, according to official Chinese media.

Gao, who headed the bank branch in Harbin, in northeast Heilongjiang province, left China in 2005 and turned up in Canada later that year with his wife Li Xue and their teenage daughter. They were granted permanent resident status.

Canadian authorities are now seeking to revoke the permanent resident status on the grounds that Gao and his wife misrepresented themselves when they arrived in Canada. Border Services lawyer Allanah Hatch said the couple failed to declare all the funds they had available.

Gao, his wife and daughter face an immigration hearing on March 6 that will determine whether they can remain in Canada. Gao's lawyer Alex Ning said the proceedings could take a year and a half.

"It's likely Mr. Gao and Mrs. Gao and their daughter are going to be subject to a serious immigration proceeding," Ning said.

Gao was arrested by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police on Feb. 16 at a North Vancouver home. Police Staff Sgt. John Ward said the arrest was made on outstanding warrants from China. He said a criminal investigation into Gao's activities is ongoing.

Vancouver is also home to Lai Changxing, a Chinese national who has been battling for five years through the Canadian court system in a series of failed bids to be granted refugee status.

Chinese authorities have accused Lai of being the mastermind behind a Xiamen, China-based network responsible for smuggling as much as US$10 billion worth of goods into the country with protection from corrupt officials.

Fearing persecution or worse if he were returned to China, Lai has applied for refugee status in Canada.

Canada and China do not have an extradition treaty, primarily due to Canadian concerns about the human rights situation in China, including fears that suspects in crimes will be executed if returned to China. Canada has received a diplomatic note from Beijing that Lai will not be executed if returned.

See also:
Li Dongzhe brothers remain in custody, given exclusion order
Gao Shan ordered release, again
BREAKING NEWS: Two more Chinese fugitives arrested in Vancouver
Two more Chinese fugitives arrested in Vancouver
Will Gao Shan be the first Chinese fugitive extradited by Canada?
Gao Shan remains in jail until source of money proved clean
Lai Changxing: Good luck to Gao Shan, the comrade fugitive
Fugitive Gao Shan says he's innocent; released
Another Chinese fugitive arrested in Vancouver
Five fugitives hiding in Canada, China says

Tags: lai changxing, lai cheong sing, gao shan, li xue, gao shan xue lian, fugitive, bank of china

[Read More....]

Census 2006

Census 2006: BC population by select cities

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BREAKING NEWS: Two more Chinese fugitives arrested in Vancouver

The two alleged co-conspirators of Gao Shan have been arrested last Friday by the Canadian Border Services Agency, a police source who has to remain anonymous confirms. Similar to Gao, Li Dongzhe and Li Donghu were arrested on immigration violations.

Unlike Gao Shan, though, the Li's are not permanent residents. They arrived in Dec 2004 with travel visas but failed to leave Canada after the visas expired.

Media reports in China allege that Li Dongzhe was the kingpin behind the billion dollar theft happened at the Bank of China Harbin Branch, of which Gao Shan was branch manager.

According to Chinese media reports, accountants of Northeast Expressway, a Shanghai-listed A-share company, said on January 4, 2005, that more than 293m yuan had disappeared from the company's account at the Bank of China branch.

No one located the branch manager Gao Shan, who said he was travelling to Beijing for some medical treatment but never returned to Heilongjiang. Instead, Canadian evidence indicated that Gao left China on Dec 30, 2004, shortly before the disappearance of funds was exposed.

Several other customers also reported deposits of as much as 700m yuan missing from their BOC accounts. Gao and another suspect, Li Dongzhe, allegedly fled to Canada with large sums of money.

In the detention hearing of Gao Shan last week, the IRB adjudicator indicated that Li Dongzhe is making extravagant spendings in Canada, such as having bought and sold a $3m house in Vancouver. The adjudicator also believed that Li Dongzhe was the principal player in the frauds allegedly committed by Gao and Li in China.

The RCMP maintain that Li Dongzhe, Li Donghu and Gao Shan are now believed to control the direct and indirect benefits of their crime in China, according to the evidence entered in the hearing.

There is also evidence showing Li Dongzhe and Li Donghu have some direct dealings with Li Xue, Gao Shan's wife.

According to transcripts of the detention hearings of Gao Shan and his wife Li Xue, Gao, along with Li Dongzhe and Li Donghu, fabricated 19 deposit accounts, or deposit certificates, and defrauded Corporation Union -- Unit Savings in the amount of $170m yuan (That is what was known on March 7, 2005.) Gao Shan was alleged to have secretly forged the reserve's specimen seal to transfer deposits.

The RCMP submit that in 2002, four apartments were purchased in one building by the wife of one of the Li brothers. The total purchase price was $2.19m and were sold in 2005 for a total of $2.6m. One of the property titles was in the name of Li Xue.

Li Xue received a quarter of the sale proceeds of these properties, approximately at about $600,000.

Moreover, CIBC bank documents obtained by the police showed that Li Xue was making monthly strata payments for four apartments, assisting the two Li brothers as well. The evidence points that Li Xue has helped the Li brothers in their financial matters. Her account shows that she's receiving money from them.

For instance, the police discovered that one of the Li brothers once deposited $40,000 into Li Xue's CIBC account. Two weeks later, $28,000 was withdrawn just before the account was closed, at around the same time as the warrants were issued by the Chinese authority.

Hearing transcripts also reveal the link between Gao and the Li brothers.

Rather than honestly submitting his employment as a manager of a Bank of China branch, Gao Shan indicates in his immigration application that from 2000 to the present he has been with Harbinson Hai (phonetic) Automobile Industry Trade Company Limited.

Witness statements show that Harbinson, Harbinson Hai Automobile Industry was run by Li Dongzhe.

See also:
Li Dongzhe brothers remain in custody, given exclusion order
Gao Shan ordered release, again
BREAKING NEWS: Two more Chinese fugitives arrested in Vancouver
Two more Chinese fugitives arrested in Vancouver
Will Gao Shan be the first Chinese fugitive extradited by Canada?
Gao Shan remains in jail until source of money proved clean
Lai Changxing: Good luck to Gao Shan, the comrade fugitive
Fugitive Gao Shan says he's innocent; released
Another Chinese fugitive arrested in Vancouver
Five fugitives hiding in Canada, China says

Tags: lai changxing, lai cheong sing, gao shan, li xue, gao shan xue lian, fugitive, bank of china

[Read More....]

Roh says Japan should respect history

Shanghai Daily - South Korea President Roh Moo-hyun said today at an anti-Japanese colonization memorial ceremony that the Japanese government should respect the history to win back the trust of the international community.

Roh said at the ceremony that Japan should stop white-washing its history of aggression and should follow the example of other countries that have a similar history, to show its sincerity to solve the historic problem to win the respect and trust of the international community.

As well, representatives of South Korea's sex slaves during World War II participated in a hearing about the Japanese troops' sex slavery in World War II, which was held by the US House of Representatives several days ago.

Roh said it meant that the international community would never tolerate Japan's crimes in history.

Roh said South Korea is willing to develop relationships with Japan since the two countries have established close ties in economics and cultural exchanges. He said it is necessary to surpass the framework of the current bilateral relationship between the two countries and mutually make contributions to the peace and prosperity of Northeast Asia.

Roh urged Japan to carry out practical efforts on issues, including in its history textbooks, the sex slaves of World II and the worshipping of the Yasukuni War Shine, to promote their relationship.

The Korean peninsular was once ruled by Japan as a colony from 1910 to 1945. On March 1, 1919, a movement against Japan's colonization burst out. The March First Movement, or the Samil Movement, was one of the earliest displays of the Korean independence movement during the Japanese occupation.

Before the Japanese finally suppressed the movement 12 months later, approximately 2 million Koreans had participated in the more than 1,500 demonstrations.

The March 1 Movement was a catalyst for the establishment of the Provisional Government of the Republic of Korea in Shanghai in April 1919, and the day was later nominated by the South Korea government as a state memorial day.

See also:
Japan PM now says 'comfort women' not coerced
Now Playing: China and Japan's tragic history

Tags: china, japan, korea, history, war, wwii, right wing, nationalism, patriotism, ultranationalism, comfort women

[Read More....]

Now Playing: China and Japan's tragic history

Time - In the last years of her life, her mother remembers, author Iris Chang wanted to make a movie. Chang's 1997 best seller, The Rape of Nanking, had shone a spotlight on an infamous 1937 atrocity. This was the massacre of an estimated 260,000 people, and the rape of as many as 20,000 women, by Japanese troops occupying Nanjing (formerly Nanking), then the Chinese capital. The book spent 10 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list and made the 29-year-old a literary star. But Chang wanted to do more. "She firmly believed that a movie or a documentary film would get her message out more than the book," says Ying-Ying Chang. Sadly, her daughter never got the chance. Iris Chang committed suicide in 2004, at the age of 36. "We were interviewed at the time and asked, 'What was Iris' last wish?'" recalls her mother. "And we said, 'To have a movie made out of her book.'"

That wish is now coming true in spades. No fewer than six movies about the massacre—including one about Chang herself—are in the works. The first, a documentary called Nanking, premiered at Sundance in January and will be screened at the Hong Kong International Film Festival in late March. It tells the story of a handful of American and European expatriates who established a neutral safety zone to protect some 200,000 Nanjing residents during the conflict. The film is the brainchild of Ted Leonsis, vice chairman of AOL (which, like TIME, is owned by Time Warner), who had chanced upon Chang's obituary in a yellowing newspaper while on holiday in the Caribbean. "It shocked me, one, that I didn't know anything about this incident and, two, that there were these remarkable people whose stories had really never been told," he recalls.

Leonsis financed the project himself and convinced Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman, who made 2003's Oscar-winning 9/11 documentary Twin Towers, to direct. The movie comprises archive footage, interviews with survivors and eyewitnesses, and readings from the letters and diaries of some of the Westerners in Nanjing, performed by such Hollywood stars as Woody Harrelson and Mariel Hemingway. One benefit of this emphasis on primary sources, says Guttentag, is that it helped distance Nanking from the bitter controversy that has sprung up over different interpretations of the massacre. "This is not a film where we had historians commenting on the incident," he says. "That's someone else's film."

Regardless, Nanking is bound to cause deeply uneasy feelings in Japan, where many members of the extreme right either deny that the massacre occurred, or claim that the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal greatly exaggerated the death toll when it concluded that Japanese troops killed about 260,000 Chinese soldiers and civilians in Nanjing between 1937 and 1938. (Some also argue that photos of the atrocities were faked, including the beheading shown at left). At a news conference on Jan. 24, filmmaker Satoru Mizushima—who also runs a Japanese satellite-TV station—lashed out at Nanking, calling it "a setup by China" based on an "erroneous understanding of history." Flanked by politicians and journalists, he announced that he'd produce his own film, provisionally entitled The Truth about Nanking, to refute it. "There was a war, and thousands of Japanese soldiers and guerillas died. But an organized rape and massacre of civilians did not happen," Mizushima insisted to TIME. The subject also receives more than its share of official whitewash. In 2005, Japan's Ministry of Education sparked outrage in China by approving a high school textbook that referred to the massacre merely as an "incident."

This isn't to say that Japanese views on the massacre are monolithic. The right-wingers "aren't really reflective of public opinion," says Jeff Kingston, a professor of Japanese history at Temple University's Tokyo campus. "Public opinion does accept responsibility for the war and does feel Japan should do more to atone." Furthermore, "there's a huge community in Japan that's trying to stop the government from rewriting history," says director Nancy Tong, whose 1992 Nanjing documentary In the Name of the Emperor helped inspire Chang's book. Indeed, Japanese activists helped track down the former soldiers interviewed in Tong's movie and in Nanking, and provided some of the latter film's most disturbing footage: former members of the imperial army's Yamada Unit candidly discussing their detachment's execution of some 20,000 Chinese prisoners in Nanjing.

Over the next few months, the revisionist view will come under even more cinematic fire. The rights to Chang's book have been acquired by producer Gerald Green and director Simon West (Lara Croft: Tomb Raider), who will soon start filming a $38 million project. California-based writer and producer Kevin Kent is negotiating with Oliver Stone to direct a film based on his own novel, Nanking. Stanley Tong, the Hong Kong director of several Jackie Chan movies, has a Nanjing movie in development, and award-winning Chinese director Lu Chuan hopes to start shooting his own account of the massacre this month. Finally, Canadian filmmaker Bill Spahic is aiming to complete his documentary, The Woman Who Couldn't Forget: The Iris Chang Story, in time for the massacre's 70th anniversary in December.

That anniversary is partly why Nanjing is arousing such interest; as Guttentag says, it's "a round number that'll get everybody's attention." Creative competition is another factor. The completion of Nanking "pushes the other people to get their projects made," says Leonsis. And, of course, the issues involved in the story of Nanjing continue to resonate: as China's rise reshapes Asian geopolitics, tensions between it and Japan have greater global relevance. These days, "anything important to China and Japan axiomatically becomes important to the West," says Guttentag.

For sure, there are few subjects more important to the two countries than their painful history. The 2005 Japanese textbook controversy ignited long-smoldering resentment in China; that spring, tens of thousands of Chinese took to the streets as mobs burned Japanese flags, overturned Japanese-made cars and threw rocks at Japan's consulate in Shanghai. Part of that animosity can be attributed to historical myopia on the Chinese side: mainland textbooks omit anything that casts the Communist Party in a bad light, glossing over, for example, the horror of the Cultural Revolution. Japan's wartime atrocity thus stands out starkly as the great injustice of China's modern history. And with nationalist education increasing in the wake of the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, says Kingston, "younger Chinese know a lot more about their unhappy shared history with Japan than their elders."

Japan hasn't convinced China to forgive, either. Tokyo's repeated apologies for its militaristic past have never been remorseful enough for many Chinese. And Japan's former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi further fanned the flames by visiting the Yasukuni Shrine, which honors Japan's war dead—among them several class-A war criminals executed after the Tokyo trials, including the general in charge at Nanjing.

Mizushima, for one, won't be building any bridges between Japan and China. He says he has already raised half of the $2.5 million he needs for his film, which he vows will prove "the massacre did not happen." Few outside observers expect him to succeed. As Guttentag puts it: "There's an extraordinary amount of evidence that shows that it did. There's forensic evidence, there's photographic evidence, there's film evidence, there's eyewitness testimony. I mean, what else do you need?"

Mizushima's film may have one benefit, sparking enough controversy to get more people talking about the burdens of the past. Spahic, director of the documentary about Chang, expects all this cinematic interest to help "open a dialogue" on Nanjing's legacy. There are even signs that reconciliation might not be out of the question. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has taken pains to mend fences with China in his first months in office, and Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao is scheduled to visit Japan in April. As Kingston says, both sides are coming to the realization that "this relationship is far too important to hold hostage to history."

Tags: china, japan, rape of nanking, nanking massacre, nanjing massacre, war, wwii, war crimes, asian holocaust

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Japan PM now says 'comfort women' not coerced

I'm sure the Japanese are testing the Chinese government's limit to the extreme. They must know that the Chinese government has ordered that all commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the Nanjing Massacre be kept at a low profile, as China is eager to mend relations with Japan. However, there WILL be backlash from Chinese and Korean public around the world.

AP - Yasuji Kaneko, 87, still remembers the screams of the countless women he raped in China as a soldier in the Japanese imperial army in the Second World War.

Some were teenagers from Korea serving as sex slaves in military-run brothels. Others were women in villages he and his comrades pillaged in eastern China.

"They cried out, but it didn't matter to us whether the women lived or died," Kaneko said in an interview with The Associated Press at his Tokyo home. "We were the emperor's soldiers. Whether in military brothels or in the villages, we raped without reluctance."

Historians say some 200,000 women - mostly from Korea and China - served in the Japanese military brothels throughout Asia in the 1930s and 1940s. Many victims say they were kidnapped and forced into sexual slavery by Japanese troops, and the top government spokesman acknowledged the wrongdoing in 1993.

Now some in Japan's government are questioning whether the apology was needed.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Thursday denied women were forced into military brothels across Asia, boosting renewed efforts by right-wing politicians to push for an official revision of the apology.

"The fact is, there is no evidence to prove there was coercion," Abe said.

Abe's remarks contradicted evidence in Japanese documents unearthed in 1992 that historians said showed military authorities had a direct role in working with contractors to forcibly procure women for the brothels.

The comments were certain to rile South Korea and China, which accuse Tokyo of failing to fully atone for wartime atrocities. Abe's government has been recently working to repair relations with Seoul and Beijing.

The statement came just hours after South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun marked a national holiday honouring the anniversary of a 1919 uprising against Japanese colonial rule by urging Tokyo to come clean about its past.

Roh also referred to hearings held by the U.S. House of Representatives last month on a resolution urging Japan to "apologize for and acknowledge" the imperial army's use of sex slaves during the war.

"The testimony reiterated a message that no matter how hard the Japanese try to cover the whole sky with their hand, there is no way that the international community would condone the atrocities committed during Japanese colonial rule," Roh said.

Dozens of people rallied outside the Japanese Embassy in Seoul to mark the anniversary, lining up dead dogs' heads on the ground with pieces of paper in their mouths listing names of Koreans who allegedly collaborated with the Japanese during its 1910-45 colonial rule. Protest organizers said the animals were slaughtered at a restaurant; dogs are regularly consumed as food in Korea.

Roh's office said late Thursday it did not immediately have a direct response to the Japanese leader's remarks. In Beijing, calls to the Chinese Foreign Ministry seeking comment on the remarks were not immediately returned.

Abe's comments were a reversal from the government's previous stance. In 1993, then-Chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono apologized to the victims of sex slavery, though the statement did not meet demands by former "comfort women" that it be approved by parliament.

Two years later, the government set up a compensation fund for victims, but it was based on private donations - not government money - and has been criticized as a way for the government to avoid owning up to the abuse. The mandate is to expire March 31.

The sex slave question has been a cause celebre for nationalist politicians and scholars in Japan who claim the women were professional prostitutes and were not coerced into servitude by the military.

Before Abe spoke Thursday, a group of ruling Liberal Democratic party legislators discussed their plans for a proposal to urge the government to water down parts of the 1993 apology and deny direct military involvement.

Nariaki Nakayama, chairman of the group of about 120 legislators, sought to play down the government's involvement in the brothels by saying it was similar to a school that hires a company to run its cafeteria.

"Some say it is useful to compare the brothels to college cafeterias run by private companies, who recruit their own staff, procure foodstuffs, and set prices," he said.

"Where there's demand, businesses crop up . . . but to say women were forced by the Japanese military into service is off the mark," he said. "This issue must be reconsidered, based on truth . . . for the sake of Japanese honour."

Sex slave victims, however, say they still suffer wounds - physical and psychological - from the war.

Lee Yong-soo, 78, a South Korean who was interviewed during a recent trip to Tokyo, said she was 14 when Japanese soldiers took her from her home in 1944 to work as a sex slave in Taiwan.

"The Japanese government must not run from its responsibilities," said Lee, who has long campaigned for Japanese compensation. "I want them to apologize. To admit that they took me away, when I was a little girl, to be a sex slave. To admit that history."

"I was so young. I did not understand what had happened to me," she said. "My cries then still ring in my years. Even now, I can't sleep."

Tags: china, japan, korea, comfort women, sex slaves, wwii, war, war crimes, atrocities, asian holocaust

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Canadians, Americans disagree on foreign policy priorities

The Ottawa Citizen - A cross-border divide exists between what Canadian and U.S. foreign-policy scholars consider the top problems facing the world, says a new study.

In a survey of academics who counsel today's leaders and mould future policymakers, researchers at the College of William and Mary in Virginia found that terrorism is a key issue for U.S. and Canadian scholars.

Professors on both sides of the border also believe that infectious diseases pose a long-term threat to national security.

But that's where the similarities end.

Americans rank the Iraq war as the world's No. 1 problem, followed by terrorism and U.S. reliance on foreign oil. Meanwhile, Canadians list terrorism as the top issue, followed by United Nations reform, the global AIDS crisis and genocide in Sudan.

Over the next decade, U.S. academics predict terrorism will remain at the top of the world agenda, followed by the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and the rising power of China.

By contrast, Canadians predict global warming will become the top priority, followed by global poverty, pandemic disease and failed states.

The results are based on a survey of 1,112 U.S. international relations professors and 110 of their Canadian counterparts.

"What emerges from this study is a picture of a Canadian discipline in international relations that is very similar to its American cousin, but that is different in some important ways," said Susan Peterson, one of the study's authors.

"Because of differences in strategic positions, political culture and recent histories, we face the same issues differently."

The differences extend to what scholars perceive as the world's hotspots.

When asked to identify the region they consider to be of greatest strategic importance to the U.S., two-thirds of Americans surveyed name the Middle East and north Africa, with South Asia and Afghanistan trailing a distant second.

Only one in 10 points to Canada and Western Europe as regions of strategic interest.

By contrast, nine out of 10 Canadians surveyed name the U.S. as strategically vital to Canada and almost none consider the Middle East and South Asia an important region.

In 20 years, however, two-thirds of Americans surveyed predict East Asia and China will be a force to be reckoned with. Only 10 per cent feel the same about the Middle East, and even fewer believe Canada and Western Europe will be key to U.S. interests.

Among Canadian scholars, two-thirds of those surveyed believe the U.S. will continue to dominate the world stage in 20 years.

Peterson, a professor of government at William and Mary, said the differences reflect the way scholars in each country approach teaching and research.

Tags: canada, US, foreign policy, priorities

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Stock plunge shows China's ability to influece world market; but too young to be calling all the shots

FT - Shanghai's new status as a weathervane for global markets proved to be short-lived after the stock market in mainland China rallied strongly on Wednesday in spite of sharp falls in the rest of Asia and Europe.

The dramatic trading on Tuesday, when the mainland market plunged 9%, had raised the prospect that China was developing the capacity to spread global financial contagion. Halfway round the world, traders on Wall Street were blaming the Shanghai market for Tuesday's 3.5% drop in the S&P 500.

Indeed, there was some subdued pride among Chinese traders that the biggest one-day drop in a decade in Shanghai had also demonstrated the apparent importance of the country in global markets.

"This probably can be viewed as a drill for China's stock market to get more pricing power in international markets," said Zhang Yidong, analyst at Industrial Securities in Shanghai.

Brian Baker, head of Pimco Asia, added: "What happens in one part of the world, even in a relatively closed economy like China, can affect asset prices around the globe."

Yet, in China, there was also a lot of head-scratching – not just about what actually really happened in the mainland market on "black Tuesday", as it is now being called but also about why the rest of the world seemed to care so much. With no economic news coming out, analysts struggled to find a convincing explanation.

Some analysts suggested that, with the National People's Congress beginning in Beijing next week, investors feared new policies or comments designed to talk the market down.

At the weekend, the government had announced renewed measures against illegal stock-trading and rumours circulated about the introduction of a capital gains tax for equities, even though few analysts think such a policy likely. Investors were also discussing the possibility of a new interest rate rise to counteract the inflationary impact of higher food prices.

Steven Sun, of HSBC, added that $4.4b of shares that used to be non-tradeable will potentially come onto the market in March under a government reform plan.

Yet most of these concerns had been doing the rounds for several weeks. The most likely explanation, analysts said, was a bout of profit-taking.

The mainland market was up 130% in 2006 and broke the 3,000 point mark for the first time on Monday, which was a signal for many institutions to temporarily retreat.

"Tuesday's drop was the result of profit-taking," said Zhou Jintao at Changjiang Securities in Shanghai, "but it is only one backward step in an otherwise bull market."

Harder to explain was why a sharp fall in the Shanghai market should have such a big impact around the world.

The Chinese economy is vulnerable to weakness in the US, especially given the importance of the export sector, yet analysts say that the Shanghai market does not respond quickly to changes in US consumer sentiment. The big listed companies are largely inward-facing: 30% of the Shanghai Composite index is taken up by China Life, Bank of China and Industrial and Commercial Bank of China alone.

The stock market has proved to be a poor barometer for the Chinese economy. From 2001-2005, when GDP grew at around 9% a year, share prices fell by half.

On top of that, mainland stocks are relatively insulated from the cross-border capital flows that influence other markets. Chinese residents have few options if they want to take their savings offshore and foreign investors are restricted to buying around $10b of mainland shares.

Indeed, one reason why foreign investors have become so interested in the Chinese market over the last year is the perception that it provides a form of hedge because it is largely driven by domestic sentiment rather than Fed announcements or worries about the "carry trade" that affect so many other markets.

There are many ways China can rattle global markets. A sharp economic slowdown would likely end the commodities boom and if China were to stop using its reserves to purchase US Treasuries, bond markets would suffer. But of all the things investors need to keep their eye on at the moment, the Shanghai stock market is probably not one of them.

Tags: stocks, stock market, shanghai stocks, china

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What a show! Shanghai rallies again, jumps almost 4%

This story tells how different China's stock market is from the rest of the world. A little absurd too.

He says the Chinese stock market is a casino, or perhaps even a government-regulated slot machine. But you can still make money betting on the market here.

NYT - Seated before a row of computer terminals flickering with stock charts in a large brokerage house in this bustling city, Li Ruichang insists he is not too worried about Tuesday’s massive stock sell-off.

"Things like that happen," says Li, a 63-year-old engineer. "But I’m not worried about a crash. After a five-year-long bear market, the bull market shouldn’t end that fast."

Li is a speculator. He says the Chinese stock market is a casino, or perhaps even a government-regulated slot machine. But you can still make money betting on the market here.

And besides, he says, the Chinese government will not let anything terrible happen to the country’s gigantic slot machine of a market before August 2008, when the Olympic games will be held in Beijing.

Many other investors here agreed this afternoon. And so did the Shanghai stock market, which rallied Wednesday to gain a hefty 109 points, or 3.9% today.

No other Asian stock market did as well Wednesday, one day after the Shanghai’s dramatic sell off sent shock waves through the global financial markets, rattling share prices from Tokyo and London to New York.

Investors here say there is no good explanation for Tuesday’s stock plunge in Shanghai, or for that matter, today’s huge run-up in prices.

"Yesterday was very normal," said 50-year-old Wu Xiaowei, who calls himself a professional investor. "It’s a rule that in a bullish market the stock index always falls fast in an adjustment period."

Some investors, however, blamed Tuesday’s market nose dive on rumors about new government taxes; others called it "profit-taking"; and still others said many investors had celebrated the first day of trading after the Chinese New Year by bidding shares up to record highs on Monday. Tuesday, it was time to do some selling.

Wednesday, they said, was just another buying opportunity.

"I lost some money yesterday, but this morning I gained some," said Qin Changhai, a 37-year-old shoe salesmen turned day trader. "You see, this is what we go through every day. It’s just like I’m gambling with the government."

Few investors here at the Liaoning Securities brokerage house in Shanghai appeared rattled by the volatile price swings.

And why should they be. Tuesday’s market tumble sent the Shanghai Composite Index down 8.8%, to 2,771 — just about where it was on February 1, before a big rally sent shares to a record 3,040 on Monday.

When the market closed this afternoon, Shanghai’s benchmark index was headed back up again, closing at 2,881.07. The index is still up 121% from a year ago.

Indeed, the state-controlled newspapers in China reflect the country’s abounding optimism.

Shanghai Daily, the city’s English language daily, ran a huge front-page story today titled, "Wheat Scientist Wins Top Research Honors." The stock slide article was on page two.

On the front page of the paper’s business section was this: "Buying Stampede Greets Return of Mutual Funds," which reported that on Monday the introduction of the first new mutual funds in four months had led to a buying frenzy among investors.

Chinese investors are not the only optimists. Foreign investors are now clamoring to get into China’s stock market, which restricts the amount of foreign money that can be invested here.

The reason: everyone wants to invest ahead of the Chinese, who are yanking money out of their savings accounts, selling property and even taking out bank loans to get in on the stock buying frenzy.

The Chinese government is also a huge factor here. The government closely monitors the stock market. A large majority of listed companies are state-owned. The state also controls the brokerages and the biggest institutional investors. So naturally, the government has an incentive to prop up the market, and to prevent steep sell offs.

After shares collapsed in 1996, the government put in circuit breakers that restrict the market from falling more than 10% in a single session. Tuesday was a close call.

The government is, of course, worried about a stock market bubble. And recently, government officials have warned investors about "blind optimism" in the stock market.

"The government doesn’t want to see this go up or down too quickly," says Frank M. Song, director of the Centre for China Financial Research at Hong Kong University. "Their goal is to try to maintain stable growth."

Instability is the government’s biggest fear. Back in 1992, when the stock market plunged, there were riots in Shanghai and Shenzhen, home of the two major stock exchanges.

And two years ago, when stocks were mired in a protracted bear market, angry investors protested outside the offices of regulators.

There is also what investors call the Olympics factor. A major market downturn could lead to unrest, instability or a global embarrassment for the country’s leadership.

But even seasoned analysts were dismissing Tuesday’s sell off as a phantom collapse, or a temporary setback in an ongoing bull market.

In a report issued today, Stephen Green, a Shanghai-based senior economist at Standard Chartered Bank, wrote: "There was no macro news or corporate earnings news in China to trigger this, so the real economic effect on global growth is approximately zero. We expect the global markets to resume their bullish sentiment."

At the Liaoning Securities brokerage house in Shanghai today, there was no sense of gloom and doom.

Retirees were lounging around with their feet up on the tables, watching the market push higher on their computerized stock charts.

One driving force in Shanghai’s frenzied marketplace seems to be the expectations of investors. Asked how he did last year, Li, the speculator, said "pretty good," even though he later admitted to doubling his money.

Ji Manli, another investor watching her stocks on a computer screen here, also said she did "pretty good." Her return? 300%.

"But I still think I didn’t do well enough," says Ji, 67, a retired electrical engineer. "I wasn’t confident enough. When some stocks hit their highs I sold them. Other people did much better."

Tags: stocks, stock market, shanghai, china

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Will Gao Shan be the first Chinese fugitive extradited by Canada?

The CBSA's surprise denial of releasing Gao Shan based on claims that his bail money is illegally obtained could mean Canada is finally determined to deal with Chinese fugitives hiding in Canada, not hoping the drama of Lai Changxing to repeat.

While other countries such as the US has been cooperating with China in extraditing fugitives, Canada and China have never reached an agreement to extradite a single suspect of economic crimes, as indicated by David Matas, lawyer of Lai Changxing, in a recent hearing. Canada is thus deemed "fugitives' heaven" for harbouring these suspected criminals.

Canada-China relations have plummeted to all-time low as PM Stephen Harper insists to play the human right card and not to go after the "almighty dollar". The rhetoric sounds beautiful. However, the Tories are not stupid enough to ignore the importance of fostering economic ties with China. Otherwise, the Tories would lose a lot of business support that used to be right-leaning. And that's why we have international trade minister David Emerson playing the "good guy" role, saying all the "good things", "right things" while promoting trade in China in January.

However, even before all these, Canada and China relation have always been having some scuffle over the case of Lai Changxing, China's most wanted man. While Harper and Emerson all openly said China must understand that Canada has to abide by the laws, in reality, everyone knows Lai Changxing is a big obstacle in furthering bilateral relation.

Even hardliner like Harper would realize that Canada cannot afford to have another Lai Changxing case, which could mean a long stagnation in diplomatic development should Gao Shan be allowed to stay. It's obvious that the Canadian enforcement units have been working really hard on the Gao case and are willing to produce "creative" reasons to keep him in custody.

Gao Shan was arrested on an immigration violation which accused him of deliberately omitting his career as a Bank of China manager on his immigration application form. However, his representative Alex Ning also indicated that he was also alleged in other charges including having committed crimes in China and money laundering.

According to Ning, all the latter charges were said to be still "under police investigation". Ning argued that this should not be deemed as enough for charges. Well, he might be right. However, what if the police suddenly said they've completed their investigations?

Looks like the police are buying time to gathering enough evidence to lay criminal charges against Gao. Everything taken into consideration, it's clear that Canada is working hard to extradite Gao. In fact, a spokesperson with the department of foreign affairs made a slipped-of-tougue comment to Ming Pao that Gao Shan "is a deportation case being handled by the CBSA."

If the CBSA is able to remand Gao while the police drum up their investigation effort and lay criminal charges before Gao could fight off the immigration violation charges, it's very probable that Gao might be jailed until he is deported.

In other words, Gao Shan could become the first fugitive ever extradited.

Media reports in China have been saying that the Canadian police told the Chinese that extraditing Gao Shan "shouldn't be too difficult", because Gao is not in the same "class" of fugitives like Lai Changxing who might be eligible for claims as a political refugee.

Analysts also said Canada has less problem with extraditing Gao Shan because the crime he allegedly committed might not involve the death penalty. In addition, Gao Shan is said not to be the main figure behind the snapping of customers' savings. Instead, his friend Li Dongzhe has been reported to be the boss of the entire crime plan.

Moreover, China and Canada have less disparity over theft and money laundry, as allegedly committed by Gao Shan.

See also:
Li Dongzhe brothers remain in custody, given exclusion order
Gao Shan ordered release, again
BREAKING NEWS: Two more Chinese fugitives arrested in Vancouver
Two more Chinese fugitives arrested in Vancouver
Will Gao Shan be the first Chinese fugitive extradited by Canada?
Gao Shan remains in jail until source of money proved clean
Lai Changxing: Good luck to Gao Shan, the comrade fugitive
Fugitive Gao Shan says he's innocent; released
Another Chinese fugitive arrested in Vancouver
Five fugitives hiding in Canada, China says

Tags: lai changxing, lai cheong sing, gao shan, li xue, gao shan xue lian, fugitive, bank of china

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'China tsunami': analyses of stock market mayhem

NYT, TorStar - In China, stocks modestly recovered from their 9% plunge yesterday, the biggest drop in a decade. The Shanghai Composite Index was up 1.2% to 2,804.28.

No one could point to a single trigger, but possible reasons ranged from a rumoured move by the Chinese government to impose a capital gains tax on stocks, to comments by former Federal Reserve Board chair Alan Greenspan, speaking in Hong Kong, that the U.S. could slip into recession later this year, to simple profit taking.

Yesterday, the Shanghai market fell 8.8% just a day after hitting a record high. Markets in Europe and North America fell roughly 3%, and Mexico and Brazil 6%.

Certainly, rapid growth in China has played a big part in pushing up prices for energy and metals, while keeping a damper on wages, consumer goods and interest rates. It has become a bellwether for optimism.

Yet the shock waves set off when too many of China's speculators decided to take profits came as a surprise, said Martin Hubbes, chief investment officer at AGF Funds Inc.

"Most managers were not surprised by the sharp pullback in the Chinese market," he said. "What surprised us was the extent it took the rest of the markets with it."

Markets around the world have been riding high on the wings of rising profits and growing economies, but there have been signs of a slowdown in the important U.S. economy.

Jim Rogers, a veteran hedge fund manager who co-founded the Quantum fund with George Soros in the 1970s, said the plunge in China may have exposed the fact that problems are developing. "When you have major stock declines, they always start in the marginal countries, sectors and companies."

Every stock in Toronto's S&P/TSX composite index finished the day lower, with mining stocks down nearly 5% as a group and the market as a whole down 2.72%.

Economist Ted Carmichael at JP Morgan Chase Canada said, "you had a number of factors that were probably each and of themselves not enough to trigger a big sell-off."

Some Chinese investors were reacting to a rumour – denied today by the Chinese finance ministry – that the government plans to impose a 20% tax on capital gains. Chinese share prices have doubled in the past year, providing huge potential capital gains.

Other investors may have picked up on a comment from Greenspan that a recession in the U.S. is "possible" this year after five years of economic expansion, although Carmichael said it was clear Greenspan was not actually predicting one.

To many investors and analysts here, however, the huge sell-off was just the latest indication that share prices in China have been defying reality. Millions of everyday investors are rushing blindly into stocks, emptying out their savings account to "play the market," as many of them here say.

Perhaps the most remarkable sign of this irrational exuberance is that during the past year, when a company has announced bad news, its stock price has been shooting through the roof.

Early this year, for instance, when a group of 17 Chinese companies was cited by regulators for misappropriating corporate funds, their stock prices all skyrocketed. When the Tianjin Global Magnetic Card Co. failed to report quarterly earnings in April, its stock doubled.

With shares in Shanghai tumbling, stocks listed in Shenzhen also collapsed, falling 9.3%. In Hong Kong, the benchmark Hang Seng Index fell 1.76%, and in Japan, the Nikkei dropped about half a% to 18,119.92.

Major Latin American and European markets also closed sharply lower Tuesday.

But none of the world's major stock markets has been as volatile as in China, where people refer to the stock market as dubo ji, or the slot machine. The gyrations have become almost commonplace for a stock market that suffered through a five-year depression until 2006, when it rose more than 130%, the world's best performance.

Analysts say that at least in some cases, the stocks of tainted companies have risen because the companies were viewed as shedding old problems and starting anew.

Analysts also argue that the market has been rising because of stronger fundamentals, rising profits, improved regulations and oversight by officials and confidence in the market's long-term growth prospects.

But in this current run of market mania, even corruption appears to be a buy signal. That was the case for the Shanghai Bailian Group, which reported on Dec. 29 that its chairman was under investigation for fraud. The company's shares have climbed 45% since then.

"There's just too much liquidity out there, too much," says Chang Chun, a financial reform expert at the China Europe International Business School in Shanghai.

China's stock market system is relatively immature, and trustworthy information about a firm's performance is still hard to come by. So the average investor does little or no research.

Tags: stocks, stock market, china, shanghai stock, china tsunami

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Actress wins coveted lead role in major Canadian film about Iris Chang and The Rape of Nanking

CNW - IRIS CHANG is a feature length docudrama that tells the story of a courageous young American writer who delved into one of the darkest chapters of human history and uncovered the truth about the terrible events in Nanjing, China during the winter of 1937-38.

Japan's attempt to conquer China led to the assault and capture of its ancient capital, Nanjing. What followed was an eight-week frenzy of violence.

The Japanese Imperial Army slaughtered almost 300,000 POWs, men, women, children and the elderly, and raped tens of thousands of women. At the time newspaper accounts reported that the Yangtze River ran red with blood but then the horror faded from the pages of history until Iris Chang, the woman who couldn't forget, documented the truth in her landmark book "The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II." It was the first English language book on this long ignored subject and became a New York Times bestseller when it was published in 1997. The book awoke the western world to those terrible events and provoked an angry backlash in Japan by right wing nationalists.

Iris Chang took her own life in 2004.

The press is invited to meet the talented young Canadian actress who has won the coveted role of Iris Chang after a nationwide casting search. She had just finished shooting a film with Robert Duvall and Thomas Haden Church when she heard about this project and approached the director because Iris Chang's courage and determination had inspired her since she was a teenager.

IRIS CHANG is scheduled for worldwide release in late 2007 in order to commemorate both the 70th anniversary of this horrific event and the 10th anniversary of the publication of Iris Chang's book. The film is expected to have an audience of well over 100 million in China alone. The timing is also of significance because the massacre still haunts Sino-Japanese relations and is now making headlines again.

The film is unique among others on the Nanjing massacre because it reveals the history through the eyes of Iris Chang, a strong central character who drives the narrative. This project benefits from the exclusive cooperation and blessing of Iris Chang's parents Ying-Ying and Shau-Jin Chang, and many other people who knew her best.

Filming began in Nanjing in December 2006 and principal photography will continue in China, Japan, the U.S. and Canada this spring.

IRIS CHANG is a fully funded Canadian film being produced by Reel Iris Productions, a partnership of Real to Reel Productions and Canada ALPHA.

Canada ALPHA (Association for Learning and Preserving of the History of WWII in Asia) is a volunteer community organization formed in 1997 with three local chapters across Canada - B.C., Calgary and Toronto. The mandate is to foster humanity education and racial harmony with its mission to promote public awareness, learning and preserving of the history of WWII in Asia.

In addition to being a co-founder of Canada ALPHA, Dr. Joseph Wong, C.M., M.D., is a notable philanthropist in the Chinese Canadian community. In addition to his work with Canada ALPHA, he founded The Yee Hong Centre for Geriatric Care in 1987. He served as the chairman for the United Way of Greater Toronto from 1990 to 1992 and has been honorary chair since 1994. In 1986, Toronto Star named him its "Man of the Year" and he received the City of
Toronto's highest honour, the Award of Merits. He was awarded the Order of Canada in 1994. Dr. Wong is the winner of the 2005 Humanitarian of the Year award, presented to him by former Soviet Union President Mikhail Gorbachev and Canada's Governor General Adrienne Clarkson.

Real to Reel Productions Inc. is an award-winning independent production company producing factual programming. Founded in 1986 by Anne Pick and Bill Spahic, Real to Reel began by focusing on social issue documentaries on subjects including literacy, racism and gender discrimination. While issues of social justice remain a priority, the company has broadened its production slate to include entertaining pop culture docs, history, biography and social-political stories as well as factual series and docudramas. Anne is an award-winning producer, director and writer and one of the founders of the internationally acclaimed Hot Docs International Documentary Festival. Bill is an acclaimed Director and First Assistant Director in the feature film and dramatic television industry who has worked for most Canadian and American production companies over the past 20 years.

Tags: iris chang, rape of nanking, asian holocaust, nanking massacre, nanjing massacre, movie, china, japan, war, wwii, war crimes

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Canadian stocks may fall from record on China demand concern

Bloomberg - Canadian stocks may fall from a record, led by shares of resource producers, after the Chinese stock market plunged, raising concern that demand for commodities may slow in the world's fastest-growing major economy.

Alcan Inc. and EnCana Corp. may pace declines, as falling prices of crude oil and copper weigh on shares of raw-materials and energy companies, which account for more than two-fifths of the Standard & Poor's/TSX Composite Index.

The S&P/TSX yesterday climbed 60.93, or 0.5%, to a record 13,404.46 in Toronto. The benchmark is up 3.8% this year.

Chinese stocks tumbled the most in 10 years today after the State Council, the highest ruling body, approved a special task force to clamp down on illegal share offerings. The Shanghai and Shenzhen 300 Index dropped 9.2%, wiping $107.8 billion from a stock market that doubled in the past year.

China's economy, which in 2005 overtook the U.K. as the world's fourth biggest, has averaged annual growth of 9.6% in the past five years. China is the world's largest user of copper, and the second-biggest consumer of oil.

Commodities such as oil, gas and metals account for more than half of Canadian exports and about a 10th of the gross domestic product.

Alcan, the world's second-biggest maker of aluminum, may decline 64 cents to C$63.51. Teck Cominco Ltd., the second-largest zinc producer, may retreat C$1.01 to 84.50, bids indicated.

Copper fell for a second day in London on speculation that supply of the metal used in pipes and wires will beat demand this year. Copper for delivery in three months on the London Metal Exchange dropped 1.1% to $6,220 a ton.

Aluminum and zinc prices also fell in London, and gold declined in New York.

Shares of EnCana, Canada's largest natural-gas producer, may drop C$1.01 to C$56.29, based on bids already submitted on the Toronto Stock Exchange. Petro-Canada, the nation's third-biggest oil and gas company, may slip 32 cents to 44.62, bids indicated.

Crude oil for April delivery fell as much as 1.9% to $60.21 a barrel in electronic trading in New York, on diminishing concern that any new sanctions against Iran for developing nuclear energy will disrupt supplies. Oil was at $60.48, down 91 cents, as of 8:23 a.m.

U.S. stock-index futures dropped. S&P 500 futures expiring in March declined 121.60 to 1440.90 as of 8:53 a.m. in New York. Dow Jones Industrial Average futures slipped 84 to 12,570. Nasdaq-100 Index futures dropped 26 to 1811.75.

The following shares may have unusual price changes. Stock symbols are in parentheses.

Barrick Gold Corp. (ABX CN): The world's largest producer of bullion was raised to "neutral" from "underperform" at Credit Suisse, which said in a note that metal prices will remain strong on continued tight supplies amid re-accelerating global demand growth. The shares gained 37 cents, or 1%, to C$36.36.

CGI Group Inc. (GIB/A CN): Canada's biggest computer-services group was rated "buy" in new coverage by analyst Naser Iqbal at Salman Partners Inc. in Vancouver. The shares added 11 cents, or 1.1%, at C$10.01.

Fortis Inc. (FTS CN): The Canadian utility company, agreed to pay C$3.7 billion ($3.2 billion) for Kinder Morgan, Inc.'s retail utility business in British Columbia to nearly double in size and capitalize on the province's expanding economy.

Separately, Fortis said it has agreed to sell as many as 44.3m shares at C$26 apiece to raise as much as C$1.15 billion. The financing was priced at a 5% discount to Fortis's last trade of C$27.38, up 3 cents, or 0.1%, on the Toronto Stock Exchange, before trading was halted pending announcement of the purchase.

Linamar Corp. (LNR CN): The auto-parts maker offered to buy out remaining shareholders in its Hungarian unit for an estimated 10.7 billion forint ($55.6m), or 3,003 forint for each share of Linamar Hungary Nyrt., according to a statement to the Budapest Stock Exchange. Linamar Corp. currently holds 58.6% of its Hungarian unit and the public offer would be in cash. Linamar shares declined 5 cents, or 0.3%, to C$14.85.

Magna International Inc. (MG/A CN): Canada's largest auto- parts maker said fourth-quarter net income fell 65% to $29m, or 26 cents a share, from $83m, or 75 cents a share, as it closed plants and fired workers to cut costs. Sales increased 8.7% to $6.4 billion from $5.9 billion, Aurora, Ontario-based Magna said in statement. The shares slipped 25 cents, or 0.3%, to C$92.52.

ShawCor Ltd. (SCL/A CN): The developer of technology for petrochemical and industrial companies is set to release fourth- quarter earnings before markets open. The shares gained 53 cents, or 2.2%, to C$24.14.

Tags: stocks, stock market, china, canada, US

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Markets plunge on China meltdown; worst since 9/11

Globe and Mail - Stock markets around the world plunged Tuesday as a meltdown on China's overheated exchange and growing worries about the staying power of the North American economy sent investors scrambling for the exits.

In Canada, every sector of the market — from volatile commodity stocks to banks and utilities — was caught in the wave of selling, which sent the benchmark S&P/TSX composite index down 364.35 points or 2.7% to 13,040.11.

It was the biggest drop in nearly three years for the Canadian index and it underscored what some investors had been warning as markets scaled record heights this year: Stocks were due for a pullback.

"When markets have rallied as hard and as long as they have, then we see this sort of reaction," said Patricia Croft, chief economist at Phillips Hager & North Investment Management in Toronto.

Wall Street also took its share of lumps as the Dow Jones industrial average plummeted 416.02 points or 3.3% to 12,216.24.

But as bad as the rout was in North America, it paled next to the nearly 9-per-cent plunge in the Shanghai composite index. China's benchmark index fell the most in a decade Tuesday, with some analysts predicting the market has further to fall.

The decline underscored the growing importance China has to economic growth and financial markets. Canadian companies most reliant on China, such as gold and base metals miners, tumbled Tuesday amid fears that demand could buckle and commodity prices could fall.

The key will be whether Tuesday's plunge is a one-day affair, or the start of a prolonged downward trend, market strategists said. Chinese stocks have soared for the past 20 months, raising questions about whether the market was becoming an investment bubble.

"Domestic stocks were extremely overbought and even mildly bad news could trigger a meaningful shakeout," said analysts at BCA Research in Montreal in a note. They "would not be surprised" to see a 20 to 30-per-cent drop before the market stabilizes.

Emerging markets in Asia also fell, along with European stocks, as the plunge shook investor confidence.

"If it worsens in the days ahead, it could slow China's economy and that could, in turn, put downward pressure on commodities prices," hurting resources companies and possibly the Canadian dollar, said Sal Guatieri, senior economist at Bank of Montreal.

The move in China also may cause investors to have a second look at other investments that are perceived as risky, Guatieri said.

"It tends to shake confidence. If one market comes unglued, the market will look at other markets that are a bit frothy."

Tuesday's drop on the Chinese markets was triggered by profit-taking and speculation that new austerity measures from the government will slow the nation's sizzling economy. The rout wiped $107.8-billion (U.S.) in value from the market, Bloomberg reported.

The Shanghai composite index tumbled 8.8% to close at 2.771.79, its biggest decline since it fell 8.9% on Feb. 18, 1997, at the time of the death of Communist Party elder Deng Xiaoping. The index had gained 1.4% on Monday to a record 3,040.60.

The Shenzhen composite index on China's smaller exchange plummeted 8.54% Tuesday to 709.81.

Chinese share prices doubled last year as investors piled into the market following the completion of shareholding reforms that helped to reduce worries over a potential flood of shares entering the market.

But stocks have been extremely volatile this year, with Shanghai notching one-day drops of 4.9% and 3.7% already this year — before recovering to hit new records.

On Tuesday, market heavyweights plunged on heavy selling by institutional investors, which in turn spooked retail investors.

"The most important reason for today's decline was pressure for profit-taking," said Peng Yunliang, a senior analyst at Shanghai Securities.

"People viewed 3,000 as a psychological benchmark. It's understandable they might want to pull back after the market hit that peak," Peng added.

Tags: stocks, stock markets, china, shanghai stocks,

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China's stock markets experience biggest fall in 10 years

VOA - China's stock markets have dropped by about 9% as investors sold shares to cash in on record high share prices. The sharp slump is the biggest loss in 10 years and highlights the volatility of the Chinese stock markets. Daniel Schearf reports from Beijing.

China's Shanghai Composite Index fell Tuesday by 8.8%, while the smaller Shenzhen Composite Index sank by 8.5%.

The selloff, the biggest one-day fall in a decade, came as investors dumped shares for quick profit from Monday's record high, when the Shanghai index surpassed 3,000 points for the first time closing at 3,040.

The Shanghai index closed Tuesday at 2,771 points, down 269 points.

Tony Tong is an analyst at Everbright Research in Hong Kong. He says higher interest rates may also have encouraged investors to take money out of China's unpredictable stock markets and put it into safer investments in state-run banks.

The market is thinking that there may be another hike in the reserve ratio and even interest rates. So the credit-tightening issue would be a major concern," he said. " I would say in the coming few weeks the market will remain under pressure."

China's economy and the stock markets have boomed over the past few years, prompting fears that excess investment could lead to problems such as inflation or excess industrial and property capacity. Those problems could trigger a market collapse or a recession.

The government, hoping to gently cool down the economy, in the past year has repeatedly raised interest rates and restricted bank loans.

However, those measures appear to have had little deterrent effect on investors. China's stock markets doubled in value last year, leading to concerns of a market bubble that could collapse.

Stock markets around Asia Tuesday were down as well, with many investors concerned about a possible slowdown in the U.S. economy. Most indexes fell one to three%.

Indexes in South Korea, Australia and Singapore dropped from record highs. Hong Kong's Hang Seng Index of blue chip stocks fell 1.8% to a four-week low, partly in reaction to the mainland drop in stock value.

Tags: stocks, stock markets, stock plummet, china, shanghai stocks

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Gao Shan remains in jail until source of money proven clean

CIV files, Ming Pao, Globe and Mail - The Canadian Border Services Agency has made a rare move to refuse the release of Chinese fugitive Gao Shan by claiming that the fund he uses as his bond might have come from illegal means. Gao Shan remains in jail until he can prove to CBSA's satisfactory that his money isn't proceeds of crime.

In the detention hearing last Thursday, adjudicator Marc Tessler made a number of conditions on Gao's release: Gao must post an $300,000 bond; based on two North Vancouver properties he and his wife own; and report weekly to the Canada Border Services Agency. He was also ordered to turn in his Chinese passport.

The $300,000 bond is rare, given that the highest bond Lai Changxing and his wife Tsang Ming Na was only $80,000 each.

According to Gao's counsel Alex Ning, Gao was ready to be released after completing all the paper works and his wife Li Xue expected Gao to come home by last Friday. However, Ning was surprised to hear that the CBSA said the money Gao used to buy the two North Vancouver properties is illegally obtained through criminal activities committed in China. The CBSA thus refused to release Gao unless he could prove otherwise.

Janis Fergusson, a spokesperson with the CBSA, said the agency has a set of requirements for accepting bond release - whether it be a cash bond or performance bond. The CBSA does not necessarily accept whatever papers submitted for the release of a detainee.

Relevant enforcement guidelines stipulated in the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act allows an officer to deny bail of a detainee if the officer has "reasonable doubt" that the money for bail is obtained illegally.

Ning said he was surprised that the CBSA raised questions about where the money had come from to purchase the two family residences owned by Gao and Li, because the adjudicator had addressed the origins of the funds.

Li testified in the detention hearing last week that she purchased a downtown condominium in 2002 using $65,000 she had brought with her from China. The sale of that apartment was used to finance the first home the family purchased, a North Vancouver house now worth $545,000. A second apartment was bought in January and was intended as an investment or rental place to supplement the family's income, she said.

The family includes the couple's teenage daughter and were surviving in Canada solely on the $33,000 a year Li earns as a child-care worker. Tessler said there was no evidence that the family lived extravagantly and he was satisfied the properties were purchased from funds he could trace from the original sale of the downtown condo.

However, a check on the property sales information indicates Gao and Li made a profit of only $72,500 from the sale of the first apartment in downtown Vancouver in 2005. Li bought the current home in North Vancouver at $545,000 in Oct 2006.

Immigration lawyer Lawrence Wong said denying bail based on suspicion of the legality of money is rarely applied on immigration cases, though it's more common on criminal cases.

Wong said although the adjudicator agreed to free Gao, the CBSA also has all the legal grounds to keep him in jail. If no legal action is taken, it's very probable that Gao would continue to stay in custody.

For instance, Gao could apply for a judicial review from the federal court, which will be a painfully slow process; or he could ask the adjudicator who has freed him to revise the bail condition, such as using other conditions to replace the bond issue. Gao might also get the money from his friends - given that the money is clean or he can seek help from bond companies, Wong said.

See also:
Lai Changxing: Good luck to Gao Shan, the comrade fugitive
Fugitive Gao Shan says he's innocent; released
Another Chinese fugitive arrested in Vancouver
Five fugitives hiding in Canada, China says

Tags: lai changxing, lai cheong sing, gao shan, li xue, gao shan xue lian, fugitive, bank of china

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Letter writing campaign - Japanese corporation appeals to Japan's Supreme Court to deprive Chinese victims' right to claim compensation

This is from Canada ALPHA (Association for Learning and Preserving the History of WWII in Asia), action needed!

Japan tries to decline rights of Chinese victims for compensation at Supreme Court

I earnestly appeal to you and your organization to write a similar letter to the Supreme Court of Japan to support the long-overdue redress for the forced labour victims. Please also help to ask other human rights organizations, scholars, human right lawyers, elected politicians to write a similar letter as well. Feel free to adapt Canada ALPHA’s letter for your use and forward the attachments to those who you deem appropriate. As the Special Court hearing will be held on March 16, 2007. The letters need to arrive the Court before that date.

-----------------------
February 27, 2007
Hon. Ryoji Nakagawa, Presiding Judge
Hon. Niro Shimada, Judge
Hon. Osamu Tsuno, Judge
Hon. Yuki Furuta, Judge
Hon. Isao Imai, Judge
The Second Petty Bench
Supreme Court of Japan
4-2,Hayabusa-cho,Chiyoda
Tokyo, Japan


Dear Honorable Judges,

Re: Your January 15, 2007 decision to hold a special hearing regarding Chinese war victims’ right to claim against Nishimatsu Construction Co., Ltd.

As a Canadian human rights organization committed to supporting justice for victims of the Japanese government’s wartime measures during the Asia Pacific War, we are writing to raise our concern regarding the appropriate body to hear this case as well as the specific legal arguments related to the individual’s right to claim damages for war crimes.

For the past several years, we have been closely following the court cases of victims of atrocities committed by the Japanese imperial forces, including Chinese war victims seeking justice and compensation from the Japanese government and Japanese companies.

We were pleased that in the case of Chinese forced labour victims seeking compensation from Nishimatsu Construction Co., Ltd., the Hiroshima High Court upheld the basic legal principle of fairness and justice and ruled in favour of the war victims on July 9, 2004. Moreover, in the verdicts of this case handed down by both the district court and high court acknowledged the facts related to the atrocities based on evidence submitted by the Chinese plaintiffs.

To our disappointment, Nishimatsu Construction Co., Ltd then appealed to the Supreme Court of Japan. In response, your Petty Bench informed the appellants on January 15, 2007 that other than the issue of Chinese individual victims’ right to claim against Japan for compensation, no other appeal grounds would be considered. The special hearing debating this issue is set for March 16, 2007 at the Petty Bench. Is this the appropriate lieu? Would it not be more appropriate for such a debate to take place at the Grand Bench of the Supreme Court of Japan since this matter involves interpretation of international treaties, has the potential to provoke a diplomatic crisis between Japan and China and jeopardize the opportunity of building genuine trust and reconciliation between people of the two nations?

In any event, we would like to bring your attention to the fact that the Chinese victims’ right to claim for compensation has never been abandoned by any treaties between China and Japan. We urge the Supreme Court to consider the following in the special hearing:

1. China was not a signatory of the San Francisco Peace Treaty (1951) and was not even invited to join the negotiation of the Treaty. Thus, the Treaty has no binding effect on China. In any case, the San Francisco Peace Treaty does not waive the victims’ individual right to claim for compensation. During the treaty discussions themselves and in both the lawsuits of Japanese detained in Siberia and that of atomic bomb victims, the Japanese government has consistently expressed the view that what was abandoned in the San Francisco Peace Treaty was not the individual’s right to claim, but only the right to claim by the government on behalf of the individual from another nation (the right of diplomatic protection). But in similar lawsuits with Chinese as the plaintiffs, the Japanese government offered a totally different interpretation. In adopting such a double standard the Japanese government has effectively forfeited any credibility on this issue.

2. The Sino-Japanese Peace Treaty (1952) cannot be used as an excuse for the abandonment of the Chinese victims’ right to claim. The Sino-Japanese Peace Treaty was void after the signing of the Joint Communique of the Government of Japan and the Government of the People’s Republic of China in 1972. Even at the time when the Treaty was signed it was of limited application. As defined in an official exchange document attached to the Treaty, the Sino-Japanese Peace Treaty could only apply to territory actually controlled by Republic of China then and in the future. Therefore the Sino-Japanese Peace Treaty has established itself as not applicable to the People’s Republic of China.

3. It is public knowledge that claimants arising from wars include states, groups and individuals. This is due to the characteristics of damages. Individual or group property cannot be substituted with state property. By the same token, an individual’s right cannot be unconditionally taken over by the state. Any abandonment of the right should be openly and explicitly expressed. In the Joint Communique the Chinese government did not declare that it abandoned the right to claim of Chinese citizens on their behalf. It was based on this understanding that the first and second instance rulings by District Courts or High Courts in Tokyo, Fukuoka, Niigata, Hiroshima etc. did not support the Japanese government’s position of “the abandonment of the Chinese victims’ right to claim”. The only exception was the ruling of the Tokyo High Court on March 18, 2005, which supported for the first time the Japanese government’s position of “abandonment of Chinese victims’ right to claim” in the “comfort women” cases. This verdict by the Tokyo High Court violated legal precedent and was a provocative aberration.

4. The Joint Communique did not give up the Chinese nationals’ individual rights to claim for seeking compensation from Japan. What does exist is the speech by the Chinese Foreign Minister Qian Qichen in 1995, which clearly stated, “The Joint Communique abandoned the right to claim of the state, but the right to claim of the individuals has not been abandoned.”

Offering victims humanitarian consolation is an act of respect for basic human rights. Those who inflicted suffering and pain in violation of the rules of war should be held accountable for both their criminal responsibilities and civil liabilities. Only in this way can there be a deterrent effect on who seek to use military force to gain global hegemony. Hence the efforts of war victims seeking compensation from Japan are equivalent acts of defending world peace. It is only when the Japanese state is able to deal with Chinese war victims’ compensation demands on the basis of fairness and justice can there be meaningful restoration and development of trust and constructive relationship between the Chinese and Japanese peoples for many generations to come.

We expect the Supreme Court of Japan to uphold the basic legal principle of fairness and justice and grant the long-overdue redress to the victims by rejecting Nishimatsu Construction’s appeal on the ground of the so-called “abandonment of the Chinese victims’ right to claim”.

Any court decision discriminating against these Chinese plaintiffs’ right to claim would be utterly unacceptable and tarnish the integrity of the Supreme Court of Japan in the eyes of the international community.

I sincerely hope that the impartiality of your Court can withstand the political pressure of the Japanese government and corporations and will render a just verdict, as is the case with your counterparts in other developed states.

Respectfully submitted,

SIGNED

Thekla LIT

Co-chair of Canada ALPHA

c.c. 1. Support Group for Chinese Plaintiffs against Nishimatsu Construction

2. Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China


---------------------
Background

How did the argument “Abandonment of the Right to Claim” come about: The purpose of the Japanese Supreme Court to hold a special hearing debating this issue

Among the lawsuits filed by some Chinese war victims in Japanese courts seeking compensation from the Japanese government and some Japanese corporations, eight of them are currently in the process of being tried by the Supreme Court of Japan (not including the ones already ruled by the Supreme Court). Of these 8 cases, 7 are appeals by Chinese victims who refused to accept the second instance judgment by the Japanese high courts, the other one is the appeal by the Japanese government and Nishimatsu Construction Co., Ltd. (西松建设) refusing to accept the sentence by the high court in Hiroshima which requires them to compensate the Chinese forced labour victims. Although we have filed the written request to have a hearing long time ago, the Supreme Court has not arranged for any hearing of the cases appealed by the Chinese victims. Instead, it made a decision recently (on January 15, 2007) to hear the case appealed by the Nishimatsu Construction and to hold a session to debate whether the Chinese government has, on behalf of the Chinese citizens, given up the right of individuals to claim for compensation.

It becomes necessary for us to pay close attention to the reason why the Supreme Court choose to hear first the appeal case of Nishimatsu Construction , and why it will focus on the issue whether the Chinese citizens’ right to claim has been abandoned.

A. Background on the emergence of the defense argument “abandonment of the right to claim”

1. Nullify defenses of “statutory time limitation” and “state immunity”
   

Since June 1995, some of the Chinese victims have filed lawsuits in Japanese courts in Tokyo, Sapporo, Kyoto, Nagano, Fukuoka, Niigata, Gunma, Yamagata, Miyazaki and Kanazawa, seeking compensation from the Japanese government and Japanese corporations involved. The lawsuits involve cases of massacre, indiscriminate bombing, abandoned chemical weapons and shells, Unit 731’s experiments using live human subjects and its deployment of germ bombs, “comfort women” and cases of forced labour. There have been 27 cases in total. Before 2002, the Japanese government, as perpetrators had been avoiding to face the truth and not to take responsibilities by using ”time limitation” and “state immunity” as its ground of pleading. The Japanese corporations involved held the same attitude. Before 2000, the verdicts made by Japanese courts simply followed the Japanese government’s claims and ruled against the Chinese victims (plaintiffs).

On July 12, 2001 the Tokyo District Court, for the first time, using the basic legal principle of equity and justice, rejected the defense of “time limitation” put forward by the Japanese government and supported the claim made by the Chinese forced labour victim Liu Lianren. This result was achieved with the efforts by Chinese and Japanese lawyers, scholars, and the Japanese people’s support groups as well as the plaintiffs. Then, in lawsuits such as: Chinese forced labour victims seeking compensation from the Japanese government and Mitsui Mine (三井矿山) in Fukuoka District Court (ruled on April 26, 2002); the Chinese forced labour victims against the Japanese government and Rinko Corp in Niigata (新泻临港集团) in Niigata District Court (ruled on March 26, 2003); the case of some of the victims against the Japanese government for abandoning chemical weapons and shells in China in Tokyo District Court (ruled in September 2003), and the case of Chinese forced labour victims seeking compensation from Nishimatsu Construction Co., Ltd. (西松建设) in Hiroshima High Court (ruled July 9, 2004), all of the courts concerned applied the basic legal principle of equity and justice and rejected the defense of “time limitation” put forward by the Japanese government and Japanese corporations. Besides, on January 15, 2003, in the case of Chinese forced labour victims seeking compensation from the Japanese government and Nippon Yakin Kogyo Co Ltd (日本冶金工业株式会社), although Kyoto District Court did not support the claim by Chinese plaintiffs, the verdict nullified the defense of “state immunity” for the first time. Later, in cases tried in Tokyo High Court, Fukuoka High Court, and Niigata District Court, the claim of “state immunity” by the Japanese government were all rejected. Besides, in all the verdicts made by the Japanese courts, the facts of atrocities committed as proved by the evidence given by the Chinese (plaintiffs) had all been acknowledged.

From the above mentioned facts, we can see that the lawsuits seeking compensation from Japan is slowly making progress. The trend of acknowledging the plaintiff’s claims has been gradually forming.

2. The emergence of defense argument “abandonment of the right to claim”

At the end of 2002, when the lawsuits launched by the Chinese victims seeking compensation from Japan had been going on for 7 years, a new defense argument was used by the Japanese government, that is, “the plaintiff’s right to claim for personal compensation has been abandoned through the treaties.” This argument is called “abandonment of the right to claim.”

1. Using The Sino-Japanese Peace Treaty as the basis, the Japanese government proposes that the Chinese people have abandoned the right to claim.
   

On April 28, 1952, the Japanese government signed the Sino-Japanese Peace Treaty with Taiwan. The treaty recognized the principles of San Francisco Treaty. Some people regard that the right to claim of the individuals has been resolved in the San Francisco Treaty. But that treaty has no written provisions on this.

2. The Japanese government holds that the Joint Communique of the Government of Japan and the Government of the People’s Republic of China was signed on the ground that the Sino-Japan Peace Treaty had resolved the issue of war compensation and that the issue of compensation should not be brought into discussion again. Therefore, the right to claim of the Chinese with regard to the war had long been abandoned with the signing of the Sino-Japan Peace Treaty .
   

B. Rebuttal of the defense argument “abandonment of the right to claim”

1. China has not signed the San Francisco Treaty and is not a member of the Treaty. The Treaty has no binding effect on China.
   

2. San Francisco Peace Treaty has not altogether abandoned the right to claim of individuals.
   

During both the lawsuits of Japanese detained in Siberia and that of atomic bomb victims, the Japanese government expressed that the position of the Japanese government had always been that what was abandoned (here referring to San Francisco Peace Treaty) was not the individual right to claim, but the right to claim by the government on behalf of the individual to ask for compensation from another nation (the right of diplomatic protection). But in similar lawsuits with Chinese as the plaintiff, the Japanese government offered a totally different interpretation. This practice of double standard shows that the Japanese government is extremely dishonest when dealing with war responsibility.

3. The Sino-Japanese Peace Treaty was void and even at the time when it was signed it was of limited application.
   

As defined in an official exchange document attached to the Sino-Japanese Peace Treaty, the Sino-Japanese Peace Treaty could only apply to territory actually controlled by Republic of China then and in the future. Therefore the Sino-Japanese Peace Treaty has established itself as not applicable to the People’s Republic of China.

Moreover, in 1972 when China and Japan restore their diplomatic relations, the precondition was that Japanese government agreed there was only one China. It was under this precondition that the diplomatic relations of the two countries were restored and the Joint Communique signed. Article 2 of the Communique states, “The Government of Japan recognizes that Government of the People’s Republic of China as the only legitimate Government of China.” Now the Japanese government is using the Sino-Japanese Peace Treaty it signed with Taiwan as its defense. This is an act that violates its position defined in the Joint Communique.

4. The Joint Communique has not abandoned the right to claim of the individual.

Article 5 of The Joint Communique signed by the Japanese and Chinese governments in 1972 states, “The Government of the People's Republic of China declares that in the interest of the friendship between the Chinese and the Japanese peoples, it renounces its demand for war reparation from Japan.”

It is public knowledge that claimants arising from wars include states, groups and individuals. This is due to the characteristics of damages. The individual or group property cannot be substituted by the state property. By the same token, the individual’s right cannot be unconditionally taken over by the state. Any abandonment of the right should be expressed clearly. In the Joint Communique the Chinese government did not declare that it abandons the right to claim for Chinese citizens on their behalf.

Therefore, as stated above, before 2005, the first and second instance rulings in District Courts or High Courts in Tokyo, Fukuoka, Niigata, Hiroshima etc. did not support the position of “abandonment of the right to claim” by the Japanese government.

C. The trend of Japanese courts

On March 18, 2005, Tokyo High Court supported for the first time the Japanese government’s position of “abandonment of the right to claim” in its ruling on the second batch of Chinese “comfort women” cases. The verdict states that in 1952 when the Sino-Japanese Peace Treaty was signed, the government of Republic of China was the “proper government” and the treaty it signed with Japan was valid. The provision on war compensation is applicable to all China, not restricted to certain territories. It follows that the Sino-Japan Peace Treaty is applicable to all territories of China, including mainland China. This verdict by the Tokyo High Court clearly violated the law and is provocative. It shows the world a dangerous signal from Japanese judicial circle. It was in this context that the Supreme Court of Japan recently proposed to debate the issue of “abandonment of the right to claim.”

D. Conclusion

As the party responsible for launching that brutal and atrocious war of invasion, the Japanese government has never sincerely examined its role in the war, or borne the unavoidable responsibilities for the war. Some Chinese war victims, with the help of conscientious Japanese lawyers and citizens, filed lawsuits in Japanese courts, hoping to solve through legal process this important issue left by history. This in fact has provided an opportunity for the Japanese government and the Japanese corporations involved for correcting past wrongs without losing face. Unfortunately, the Japanese government and the Japanese corporations involved have not valued this opportunity at all. Instead they have been trying all the means and sparing no effort to avoid shouldering the responsibility. When their excuses have been refuted one after another, they proposed this new trick, “abandonment of the right to claim.” Some Japanese judges, in order to free the Japanese government and the Japanese corporations involved from taking responsibilities, have gone so far as to cause diplomatic crisis by violating the position of “one China” as established in The Joint Communique, concluding that the Chinese plaintiff’s right to claim have been abandoned through the signing of the Sino-Japanese Peace Treaty with the Taiwan government. If this excuse receives the unjustifiable support from the Supreme Court of Japan, it will offer the Japanese government a completely exculpatory result. It will in effect put on end to all lawsuits filed by the Chinese victims and free the Japanese government and the Japanese corporations involved from taking responsibilities for the war. It goes without saying that we should strongly condemn this act of blatant disregard of law.

Written by: KANG Jian, Attorney-at-law

January 29, 2007

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See also:
Donations to support forced Chinese labourers abducted by Japanese urged

Tags: japan, china, war, wwii, forced labour, war crimes, atrocities

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Photo - DOTS

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Photo - BUDS

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Housing starts in select Canadian cities, Jan 2007

	Detached			All others			Total
	2006	2007	%	2006	2007	%	2006	2007	%
Abbotsford	24	20	-17	148	175	18	172	195	13
Calgary	838	605	-28	248	195	-21	1,086	800	-26
Edmonton	699	611	-13	144	487	238	843	1,098	30
Montréal	338	245	-28	672	876	30	1,010	1,121	11
Ottawa	99	109	10	291	234	-20	390	343	-12
Toronto	956	1,169	22	1,704	1,305	-23	2,660	2,474	-7
Vancouver	366	234	-36	723	1,093	51	1,089	1,327	22
Victoria	57	42	-26	193	173	-10	250	215	-14
Winnipeg	114	155	36	8	249	##	122	404	231

SOURCE: CMHC



Note detached home starts drop 36% for Vancouver but housing starts for condo, townhouse etc rise 51%. We should expect dearer and dearer detached homes in Vancouver.

Tags: real estate, housing, housing prices, home prices, vancouver, toronto, montreal, abbotsford, calgary

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Housing prices in select Canadian cities, Jan 2007

		DECEMBER					JANUARY
		Units		Avg Price			Units		Avg Price
		2005	2006	2005	2006		2006	2007	2006	2007
Abbotsford		81	77	422,234	525,010		70	75	431,700	519,823
Calgary		694	528	341,973	358,660		631	510	345,724	367,107
Edmonton		676	598	262,289	307,069		678	591	265,170	313,410
Montréal		515	795	278,761	300,067		542	772	274,113	304,332
Ottawa		197	83	331,674	371,778		214	88	326,825	389,298
Toronto		462	407	563,945	650,666		417	624	537,754	541,964
Vancouver		559	803	634,563	801,613		564	823	649,334	778,339
Victoria		51	108	587,073	662,196		60	122	588,138	709,934
Winnipeg		186	203	262,090	298,248		158	198	265,135	295,422

SOURCE: CMHC



Tags: real estate, housing, housing prices, home prices, vancouver, toronto, montreal, abbotsford, calgary

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